ERA Arts Peer Reviewed Papers and Journal Articles

Introducing the Navigator, the Juggler, and the Analyst: A Q Profile of Undergraduate Psychology Students within an Australian University

Dawn Darlaston-Jones — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:59:23 PST

Much of the existing literature investigating non-completion in the university sector focuses on the demographic characteristics of the students while failing to adequately apply the same degree of scrutiny to the institution itself. In this paper we present the findings from the final stage of a three phase investigation into retention in a Western Australian university that utilises Q Method to understand the subjective interpretation and meaning of the student experience and how this relates to retention. The sample of 45 undergraduates was drawn from each of the four years of the psychology programme at Edith Cowan University and so provides an opportunity to examine how the student experience might change over time. This approach also offers some insight into the experience of the contemporary student in relation to the diversity of the student population, and the multiplicity of demands he or she might manage in the course of completing an undergraduate degree. Findings from this research identify three distinct profiles among the cohort: The Navigator, The Juggler, and The Analyst. Each of these profiles describes a different type of student in relation to the external demands he or she might face in addition to the role of student, and the strategies they develop to assist them in achieving their goal(s). Identifying these profiles provides the school of Psychology with the opportunity to tailor their student support systems more closely to the needs of their specific students and therefore increase overall retention rates within the programme. The findings also offer the opportunity to other schools and departments to engage in similar domain specific research in order to identify and remove potential barriers to retention within their own learning contexts.

Love’s Reverberations

Deborah J. Pike — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 19:59:24 PDT

Ideas of romantic love are continually reproduced in art, literature, and media, forming part of our larger cultural imagination. In romantic love we enter the world of fantasy, and in a sense, take flight from reality. Entering into this fantasy, this play of romantic love, has all kinds of personal and social consequences. One might ask: is romantic love a desirable deception? Sociologist Mary Evans thinks not. In Love: An Unromantic Discussion, she urges us—women in particular—to abandon romantic love. It is individualistic. Its expectations are too high. It is demanding. It’s commodified love. It is a myth. It’s bound to fail. For women, it is a trap.

'Love's Reverberations' is a Review Essay of:

Mary Evans, Love: An Unromantic Discussion, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2003.

ISBN: 0-7456-2073-6

Hitting Home: (Mis)re/presenting Canada Abroad

Gerry Turcotte — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:55:08 PDT

As a French Canadian (and now an Australian) who has travelled through some forty countries, and who has had the opportunity of teaching in a small number of these, I find that I have spent much of my life thinking about identity and re/presentation. That I don't have better conclusions to offer after this rather grandiose journey says more about my limitations as a thinker than about the passion of my struggles. Moreover, as a creative writer, who has spent a fair bit of effort writing about the untranslatability of experience-about the incommensurability of languages, cultures, landscapes-you would think that I would have pretty much made up my mind about where I stand. The problem is, however, that the more we think about these issues, the more tenuous the ground we stand on becomes. The more we push towards certainties, the more inconclusive we appear.

This Article is published by the Institute of Correspondence Courses, University of Kerala, Kariavattom, Trivandrum, as a Special Number on Canadian Literature in Littcrit

Perfect Chastity: Celibacy and Virgin Marriage in Tractarian Poetry

Duc Dau — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:37:50 PDT

In Lyra Apostolica (1836), a collection of devotional verse by a group of founding and early Tractarians, the poem "Awe" ends thus:

And so albeit His woe is our release, Thought of that woe aye dims our earthly peace; The Life is hidden in a Fount of Blood!-- And this is tidings good, But in the Angel's reckoning, and to those Who Angel-wise have chose And kept, like Paul, a virgin course, content To go where Jesus went; But for the many laden with the spot And earthly taint of sin, 'tis written, 'Touch Me not.' (ll. 9-18)

The composer of the poem was John Henry Newman, the main contributor to the volume. He holds that there are two discrete groups: the virgins and the non-virgins. The first is composed of the "Angel-wise," the chaste ones who have "kept, like Paul, a virgin course." The second is comprised of "the many," the ones who have been smeared with "the spot / And earthly taint of sin." Sinners, according to the poem, are denied the atoning blood of Christ. They are instead met with the words, "'Touch Me not,'" the phrase which the resurrected Christ had once uttered to Mary Magdalen. "Awe" therefore concludes with an account of the unbridgeable difference -- and distance -- between Christ and the sinner.

Ghosts of the Great South Land

Gerry Turcotte — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:21:11 PDT

This essay attempts to trace a “hauntology” of deeds and discourse that underwrites Australian nationalism, as well as the concept of Australia as the “Great South Land.” The essay invokes the traces of “ghosts”—more specifically traces of subaltern histories and peoples— that haunt the official discourses of national sovereignty. It goes on to argue for a new reading of a global South that would allow for a “communing” with its historical and ontological ghosts, as part of a larger project of accountability, reconciliation, and resolution with the subaltern that haunts the nation.

Canadian Literature and the Post Colonial Gothic

Cynthia Sugars et al. — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:23:42 PDT

For some time, postcolonial and gothic discourses have been paired in critical invocations of the inherently "unhomely" legacy of imperialism. This legacy, in the form of unresolved memory traces left by the experience of colonial oppression, diasporic migration, or national consolidation, is readily figured in the form of ghosts or monsters that "haunt" the nation/subject from without and within. Homi Bhabha is perhaps the most well-known postcolonial theorist to invoke the Freudian "uncanny" as a way of articulating the ambivalence of colonial power structures, though Franz Fanon, years before, had similarly invoked Freud to elucidate the "psychology" of colonialism. In the context of Canadian literary and cultural studies, such critics as Himani Bannerji, Diana Brydon, Justin Edwards, Terry Goldie, Marlene Goldman,Sneja Gunew, Jonathon Kertzer, Alan Lawson, Eva Mackey, Roy Miki, Joanne Saul, Stephen Slemon, Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte have made use of the notion of "unhomely" unsettlement to describe various engagements with and subjections to the "postcolonial" Canadian nation-state.