Arts Conference Papers

Sherlockology: Teaching Sherlock Holmes

Camilla Nelson — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 18:11:04 PST

Every act of adaptation represents a dynamic interaction between a culturally inscribed text and a culturally inscribed reader, and each of these interactions is structured by the material historical — social, cultural, ideological and institutional — relationships which locate them. This rich and unstable series of relationships is what makes adaptation an ideal vehicle for teaching and learning in the humanities classroom. It requires students to explore the dynamic or living history of the text and its continual reworking, providing the specific challenge of grappling with the cultural specificity of each textual interaction. The paper draws on a module on Sherlock Holmes within a wider interdisciplinary course on adaptation. It explores the difficulty of teaching trans media texts — including novels, films, television, digital works, and fan fiction — and the possibilities of enhancing students’ critical and analytical skills by anchoring critical work in practical understanding, specifically by requiring students to produce their own critical/creative adaptations of scenes from the texts it presents.

Beyond the Pink Ribbon: Using creative arts to explore the experience of self-compassion in women with breast cancer

Helen Wilson — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 22:12:17 PST

This presentation will address how the use of Expressive Therapies was employed to promote awareness of self compassion in participants in a current research project with 15 Western Australian women who have had breast cancer.

‘What about the rights of our kids to a future?’ Community instigated alcohol restrictions in the Kimberley and why they are working

Stephen Kinnane et al. — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 19:15:57 PST

Community initiated alcohol restrictions have been in place in the Kimberley for three years (Fitzroy Crossing) and two years (Halls Creek). Nationally, alcohol restrictions are regarded by many commentators and health professionals as an ineffective tool in dealing with systemic alcohol abuse afflicting regional communities. Yet, for two Kimberley towns two year qualitative and quantitative evaluations completed by the Nulungu Centre for Indigenous Studies for the Drug and Alcohol Office (WA) have revealed significant overall health and social benefits as well as the creation of windows of opportunity for social reconstruction of communities suffering the effects of excessive alcohol consumption, due to restrictions. This paper will reveal the findings of these two year studies and compare and contrast the results between the town of Fitzroy Crossing (the Fitzroy Valley) and Halls Creek (the central eastern Kimberley). The rights of old people and young people, in particular, to a safe and secure community environment will be examined against the often stated ‘right’ to drink of young and middle aged adults. Within a breakdown of social norms, collective community instigated interventions can work when instigated by community leaders, regardless of whether they receive the wider support of the community. The role of leadership in addressing controversial and conflicting issues within the value of collective responsibility will be examined.

Alcohol restrictions in the Kimberley: Findings of two year evaluations of alcohol restrictions in Fitzroy Crossing and Halls Creek – Why Kimberley restrictions have been largely successful

Stephen Kinnane — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 18:49:35 PST

Community initiated alcohol restrictions have been in place in the Kimberley for four years (Fitzroy Crossing) and three years (Halls Creek). Nationally, alcohol restrictions are regarded by many commentators and health professionals as an ineffective tool in dealing with systemic alcohol abuse afflicting regional communities. Yet, for two Kimberley towns two year qualitative and quantitative evaluations completed by the Nulungu Research Institute for the Drug and Alcohol Office (WA) have revealed significant overall health and social benefits as well as the creation of windows of opportunity for social reconstruction of communities suffering the effects of excessive alcohol consumption, due largely to these restrictions. This paper will reveal the findings of these two year studies and compare and contrast the results between the town of Fitzroy Crossing (the Fitzroy Valley) and Halls Creek (the central eastern Kimberley).

What implications for psychologists lie in the stories of Indigenous adults, who as children, left their home communities to attend school?

Suzanne Jenkins — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 18:09:22 PDT

Access to a ‘good’ education is often argued as deserving of the highest priority. The available research pertaining to the educational experience of Australian Indigenous students, however, too often reflects a picture of profound disadvantage, particularly in relation to their non-Indigenous counterparts. In 2008, Prime Minister Rudd announced $20 million of Federal Government funding for 2000 boarding schools places over 20 years, to address chronic levels of academic underachievement and to prepare Indigenous students to become “workplace P platers” in an attempt to close the education gap between black and white Australians. Education in Australia, however, is tied to white culture, the industrial economy and the means through which white culture survives, so accepting these places may also have a shadow side, in relation to multiple levels of loss and possible cultural alienation. This paper reports on the research results of a qualitative study, investigating the ‘lived experience’ of eight Indigenous adults, who as children, left home communities to attend school. Their experience spans five decades. A phenomenological method was adopted, using an unstructured interview as the data-gathering instrument and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) as the preferred data analysis system. Analysis of participant stories identified one super-ordinate theme, “living between two worlds’, which was represented as a never-ending ‘journey’ involving both ‘loss and gain’, highlighting the need for a loss/gain audit to be maintained as many of the positive and negative experiences were felt in the moment, while others had life-long repercussions. Eleven subordinate themes emerged which were clustered under three ordinate themes: recognition, living environment and realism. The desired outcome of this research is to enhance the ability of psychologists to develop interventions to strengthen the social, psychological health and educational attainment of current and future Indigenous students. Through linking the themes emerging from participant’s stories with the literature, an optimal approach and foundation is offered designed to enhance the capacity for Indigenous students to experience living within two worlds rather than between two worlds.

Miraculous visions: Apparitio in the Vitae of Mediaeval Venetian saints and beati

Karen McCluskey — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 21:59:55 PDT

Miraculous visions have played a critical role in reinforcing Venice’s self-perceived identity as God’s favoured locus sanctus from as early as the 10^th century. Divine appearances from a cast of hallowed individuals characterises the earliest foundational legends of the city. Indeed, accounts of Mark the Evangelist’s association with Venice are replete with visions from on high, most famously his own apparitio, the miraculous reappearance of his lost relics, dated to June 25, 1094. Thereafter, accounts of apparitio figure prominently in the pictorial narratives of St. Mark’s life in the basilica of San Marco, they pepper the Venetian liturgical calendar, they feature in chronicles recounting Venice’s political conquests, especially that written by Andrea Dandolo in the mid-14^th century, and they appear often in the Vitae of Venice’s saints and beati. Although saintly apparitio are not unique to Venice, the prominence of the motif there deserves attention. This paper will specifically focus on the apparitio motif as it is expressed in the written and visual narratives of Venice’s local contingent of saints and beati. Firstly, the paper argues that apparitio visions were consistently used in the Venetian Vitae to confirm the city’s status as God’s pre-eminent locus sanctus. Secondly, it suggests that the documentary-style reporting used in both visual and written texts heightened the tangibility of the ritually-charged spaces associated with apparitions, lending credence to the ‘fact’ of the events and placing the stories firmly within the communal memory. Lastly, it proposes that the vision-motif was replicated often in the Lives of local holy men and women in order to boost the reputation and authenticity of less-distinguished local cults while presenting them within the carefully-prescribed parameters of Mark’s dominant cult. More generally, the paper reflects on the way Venetians interpreted and reinterpreted their local religious cults through the mythogenesis of Mark.

The Scent of Cordite: Sydney’s Gangland Wars of the 1960s

Camilla Nelson — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 19:24:33 PDT

On Sunday June 26, 1967, the well-known Sydney baccarat operator Richard Reilly stepped out of his mistress’s flat in Manning Road, Double Bay. He adjusted his fedora, loosened his silk tie, and flicked a wrinkle from his bespoke tailored suit. He stood there, silhouetted in the streetlight, as a spray let off from a sawn-off shotgun cracked the night air, cutting a swathe through his chest and shoulder, the stray pellets shattering into the brickwork behind. Reilly was the latest victim in a gangland war that had engulfed the Sydney underworld for almost four years. But he was more than just another prosperous racketeer. He was the most feared gambling boss in the city with more than a dozen murders committed at his instigation. Reilly had proven ties to the Labour Party that had ruled NSW for decades. He had worked as a ‘chucker-outer’ for Eddie Ward, at political rallies around the inner city, and had demonstrable ties to Jack Mannix, a former State Minister for Justice, who had taken an interest in Reilly’s case since his release from jail for wartime racketeering. In 1965, the NSW government changed hands in a cliffhanger election that brought one of the State’s most notorious premiers to power, Robin Askin — and it seemed that the changeover in Macquarie Street was having peculiar reverberations in the underworld that would remain a puzzle several Royal Commissions and half a century later.

Extended ‘Stop and Search’ Powers in Australia: A challenge for relations between police officers and citizens

Daniel Baldino et al. — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 00:01:52 PDT

This paper will provide an investigation, both theoretical and empirical, into the use of ‘stop and search’ powers in Australia. It will provide a detailed analysis of the legislation, its impact and the implications surrounding ‘stop and search’ powers in Western Australia and, in part, Victoria and the United Kingdom. The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (Perth, October 2011) has also provided a unique opportunity to study a range of special policing laws and potential problems.

Creativity, Fragments of the History of an Idea

Camilla Nelson — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 01:00:21 PDT

It is frequently maintained that creativity is a desirable and wholly positive attribute — implicit in such a claim is the idea that creativity is also an ideologically neutral attribute. Creativity is regularly understood to exist beyond ideology and politics, and more significantly, perhaps, beyond history. For this reason, cultural histories of the creative idea commonly take a substantialist approach to their object of study — in that they take as their starting point an idea of creativity as a fixed or substantial reality that exists outside and beyond the historical field. The manifold possibilities of history are therefore reduced to a narrative about approaches to, or departures from, this fixed constant, and the task of the historian is reduced to one of identifying and describing pure and unadulterated forms of the creative idea, or unmasking corrupt and alienated versions. Hence, for example, in Raymond Williams’ influential histories of the creative idea, successive historical figures come ‘very near to’ (1961/2001: 37) apprehending creativity for what it really is, or else depart from this extra-historical constant in ways that Williams’ judges to be ‘confusing and at times seriously misleading’ (Williams 1976/1983: 84).

Indigenous Secondary Education: Domination, assimilation or liberation? How can we develop anti-racist diversity in our classrooms?

Suzanne Jenkins — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 18:07:04 PDT

Access to a ‘good’ education is often argued as deserving of the highest priority. The available research pertaining to the educational experience of Australian Indigenous students, however, too often reflects a picture of profound disadvantage, particularly in relation to their non-Indigenous counterparts. In 2008, Prime Minister Rudd announced $20 million of Federal Government funding for 2000 boarding school places over 20 years, to address chronic levels of underachievement and to prepare Indigenous students to become “workplace P-platers” in an attempt to close the education gap between black and white Australians. Education in Australia, however, is tied to white culture, the industrial economy and the means through which white culture survives, so accepting these places may also have a shadow side in relation to multiple levels of loss and possible cultural alienation. This paper reports on the presenter’s doctoral research which involved a qualitative study of the self-report of an adult sample of Indigenous participants who, as children, left their home communities to attend school. Their experience spans five decades. Despite a high level of diversity regarding culture, location in country and time period, their stories shared many common themes of gain and loss. Some experiences were felt in the moment while others had life-long repercussions, highlighting the need for a loss/gain assessment to be considered across the life span. This paper identifies a number of interventions which may enhance the social, psychological and educational attainment of current and future Indigenous students through developing anti-racist diversity in our classrooms.

A Qualitative Study of Counsellors interpretation of Personal Growth

Martin Philpott — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 22:17:30 PDT

An examination of the meaning and personal significance of the small group experience for a purposefully selected group of mature age graduate counsellors following three years of Counsellor training.

The Scent of Cordite: Sydney’s Gangland Wars of the 1960s

Camilla Nelson — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 20:22:42 PDT

On the Genealogy of Creativity

Camilla Nelson — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 18:51:43 PDT

There are few English nouns that have generated such relentlessly good publicity as the word ‘creativity’. It is increasingly found scattered across the literature of the arts and sciences, industry, business management, information technology, education and government. It has been called the key to economic growth, the ‘decisive source of competitive advantage’, and the ‘very heart’ of ‘wealth creation and social renewal’. It is also a burgeoning object of study in the humanities, where it is increasingly applied across spheres and disciplines, most notably in the new interdisciplinary schools of Creative Industries, as well as in the mainstream of the traditional humanities in the rhetoric of the ‘new’ humanities.

This paper investigates the cultural construction of creativity in the context of the history of ideas. It understands creativity not as a given human attribute or ability, but as an idea that emerges out of specific historical moments, shaped by the discourses of politics, science, commerce, and nation. It shifts the ground of analysis away from the naturalised models that have traditionally dominated the field of creativity research, in order to highlight the historicity of a concept that is more commonly deemed to be without history.

‘There is no Original Creative Power in the Place’:* Creativity and Colonial Anxiety

Camilla Nelson — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 18:40:53 PDT

‘The Englishman possesses eminently the deductive and comparative faculty, and the organ of creativity,’ wrote the British academic turned colonial politician C.H. Pearson in 1859, in one of the earliest appearances of the abstract English noun ‘creativity’ in a published work. This paper investigates the concept of creativity as it was deployed in the cultural and economic fields of the nineteenth century, with particular attention to the relationship between the British metropolis and Australian colony. It examines the mobilisation of the term in diverse fields, including education, commerce and empire-building, by capitalists and workers, colonizers and colonized, in their strategic manuoevrings across the social structures of the time. It takes inspiration from Bourdieu by seeking to understand the ways in which the term functions as both a claim to symbolic power and as a source of mystification that is generally — though not always — used to give distinction to the experience, perspectives and material productions of the privileged.

The paper is part of a larger project that challenges the traditional historical narrative that locates the origins of the discourse of creativity in the art of the Renaissance and/or Romantic eras by exposing the specifically modern preconditions for the emergence of the new term.

* South Australian Register, 30 December 1869

Rewriting Eve: Reinserting Ideology in Young Adult Fiction

Georgina Ledvinka — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 19:26:52 PDT

Literature for older children and young adults (YA fiction) has long been identified as having a didactic tendency to moralise and instruct readers (see, for example, the work of John Stephens, Robyn McCallum, Peter Hollindale and others). Although the didactic tenor of YA fiction has softened in the last several decades, in line with a general decrease in literary didacticism from the second half of the twentieth century onwards, one way that writers of YA fiction can still pack an ‘ideological punch’ in their literary productions is to include a character that rewrites Eve, the first woman according to Judeo-Christian religious traditions. Eve symbolism in Western culture is rife; in areas such as art, literature, television and advertising we are constantly bombarded with imagery that emphasises Eve’s nature as supposedly weak, prone to temptation and as a sexual temptress. Because of Eve’s tremendous symbolic power, feminist theologians (for example Deborah Sawyer, Lisa Isherwood and Dorothea McEwan) observe that Eve has come to be regarded as representative of women generally in Western culture.

The implications for YA fiction are significant: if writers of YA fiction (a type of literature that already has strong didactic associations) include a representation of Eve in their work, it magnifies the potential for encoding deeply ideological messages about women. This paper examines representations of Eve in two recent YA fiction series, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (1995-2000) and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga (2005-08), and considers whether the series use their Eve symbolism to promote a progressive view of women or whether they simply reproduce the age-old story of Eve/woman as weak, prone to temptation and as a sexual temptress.

Making Sense of Epistemological Conflict in the Evaluation of Narrative Therapy and Evidence-Based Psychotherapy

Robbie Busch et al. — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 18:58:42 PDT

This paper outlines the epistemological and theoretical formation of narrative therapy and implications for its evaluation. Two authoritative paradigms of psychotherapy evaluation have emerged in psychology since the mid- 1990s. The Clinical Division of the American Psychological Association established the empirically supported treatment (EST) movement. A more inclusive but medically emulative model of evidence based practice in psychology (EBPP) then emerged. Some therapies such as narrative therapy do not share the theoretical commitments of these paradigms. Narrative therapy is an approach that values a non-expert based, collaborative, political and contextual stance to practice that is critical of normalising practices of medical objectification and reductionism. Post-positivist theoretical influences constitute narrative therapy as a practice that values the social production and multiplicity of meaning. This paper problematises a conflictual relationship (a differend) between the evaluation of narrative therapy and evidence based psychotherapy. Firstly, it briefly outlines the EST and EBPP paradigms and their epistemology. This paper then provides an overview of some of the key epistemological and theoretical underpinnings of narrative therapy and concludes with some cautionary notes on its evaluation.

Multiple intelligences, eclecticism and the therapeutic alliance: New possibilities in integrative counsellor education

Mark Pearson — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 19:09:52 PDT

In the wake of the movement in the field of counselling towards integrative and eclectic practice the search for unifying theories continues. Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences (MI), only recently applied to the field of counselling, has a contribution to make in evolving a framework for eclecticism. MI theory may also have a particular contribution to make towards helping counsellors strengthen the therapeutic alliance and enhance flexibility in responding to clients' needs. Gaining an understanding of clients' preferred cognitive and communication styles, or 'intelligences', enhances an ability to tailor treatment. This presentation argues that increases in the therapeutic alliance and foundations for eclecticism could emerge from using MI theory and practice, and holds new possibilities for counsellor education.

“Sovereignty and the Work of Death”: Writing from Zimbabwe

Deborah Pike — Thu, 10 May 2012 17:53:58 PDT

This paper discusses the Zimbabwe situation through a study of contemporary writing from that country. Using the philosophy of sovereignty that has been passed down from Hegel to Bataille, I examine how contemporary African subjectivity is formed in conditions of political violence and economic flux. Following on from this, I make use of Agamben’s work on biopolitics, to suggest ways in which the wounded body can be approached and appraised through the written word.

Colette and Katherine Mansfield on Love and Independence

Deborah Pike — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 18:46:12 PDT

This paper examines the influence of French novelist, journalist and critic, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, upon the writings of Katherine Mansfield. Both women began publishing their work just after the turn of the Twentieth Century: Colette in 1900 and Mansfield in 1911. Each writer straddled the transition from the Belle Époque or Edwardian eras into the early twentieth-century world of modernist experiment and subjective uncertainty. Mansfield was reading Colette’s novels La Vagabonde and L’Entrave in 1910 and 1913 – novels dealing with conflict for women between love and independence, also strong themes in Mansfield’s life and works. Despite their different backgrounds, there are a number of parallels in the lives of these two women. Both Colette and Mansfield grew up in small downs which they left at a young age for a larger cultural capital, and both had chosen a life of independence or ‘vagabondage’ over stability. Both women had husbands who were accomplished literary editors, and each were connected with Noumean-born French author, Francis Carco. John Middleton Murry very quickly saw the connections between the two women, calling Mansfield ‘the eternal woman … the wonderful type… Colette Vagabond and you Katherine above all Moderns.’

Mansfield had long been interested in and influenced by the French tradition. As a child she read the books of Balzac, Merimée and Flaubert which she borrowed from Parliament House Library in Wellington. Her contiguity with the French Symbolist and Decadent movements has been well documented, and so too, the influences of the short story tradition in France, in particular, the works of Maupassant. Colette, however, with her impressionistic depictions of travelling heroines who renounce love and security and reclaim their suffering and solitude, offered Mansfield a particular model for writing about and for women. Like Colette, Mansfield was interested in conveying a new mode of expression, one which could accommodate complex characters, shifting points of view, symbols and lyricism – in a sense, a modern female subjectivity. Both writers addressed the darker aspects of married life. For Colette, the ultimate emancipation for women was not through heterosexual marriage, but through the pursuit of creativity, solitude, bliss or, as she wrote in Le Pur et L’Impur, a certain ‘mental hermaphroditism.’ The ultimate love, for Colette becomes, not love towards an object or man, but an objectless love – a certain kind of bliss – which one gives to the world. Simone de Beauvoir refers to these moments as revelations in which women discover their accord with a self-sufficient reality: a nouvelle instant, a moment of perception and illumination. So too, for Katherine Mansfield, the short story is an ideal form to explore such epiphanies.

Childhood Depression and the Picture Book: Shaun Tan’s The Red Tree

Deborah Pike — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 18:34:08 PDT

This paper examines how award-winning author, Sean Tan uses the vividness and complexity of the picture book form in The Red Tree (2001) to offer readers a space in which to meditate upon the darker aspects of childhood subjectivity and emotional life. It then reflects upon each spread in Tan’s book, looking at the various ways in which Tan uses spatial and architectural metaphors to chart interior states of melancholy, alienation, disconnection and self-estrangement creating a dystopic imaginary which includes nightmarish and uncanny urban vistas. The bleak mood of the protagonist is inextricably linked to her environment. The environments in which she finds herself act as both projections of and catalysts for her mood. As Tan’s young girl is faced with the ‘rapid change in external stimuli’ in a progressively mutating landscape, her subjectivity and sense of self is overwhelmed and eroded. The Red Tree, however, is not a story of despair. While the narrative charts the journey from alienation to integration, its central thematic is hope. The red leaf, which appears on each page, becomes the transcendent symbol of optimism and disalienation which eventually restores a sense of self.