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EDITORIAL ISSUE 2
Get PDFWhen entities are placed into adjacency, it’s often unsurprising that curious resonances are set up, begin to hum, and create new relationalities not foreseen or even curated in advance. For each issue of c i n d e r—a scholarly journal that seeks to provide a forum for emerging scholars in creative writing and related areas (that is: current Higher Degree students, Honours students, and early career researchers, up to two years beyond submission)—we delight in approaching a creative writer for a piece of work of their choice as a feature piece. In this issue, we have the gobsmacking, and (deceptively) modestly-titled ‘A Feather’, by Debra Dank. Lulling the reader with its almost crooning and quasi-nostalgic use of second person, this piece—as c i n d e r co-editor Sue Joseph remarked upon reading—‘is haunting and quite beautiful, and awful, all at the same time. I felt like I was holding my breath...
NARRATIVE SOVEREIGNTY, EMOTIONS AND INTERSPECIES RELATIONSHIPS
Get PDFThis article engages the claim that narrative is crucial to humans’ capacity to imagine and to know other animals. It brings together the concept of political sovereignty from Derrida, with an evaluation of emotion to analyse narratives about interspecies relationships. I begin by mapping Derrida’s critique of the relationship between violence and scientific knowledge about animals (Derrida 2009: 276–304) onto recent research into relationships between people and dingoes on K’gari (Fraser Island), to delineate how violent epistemologies may underpin humans’ ways of knowing other animals. I then explore the politics of the public education about dingoes on K’gari as they relate to government policies and the way the state exercises power; such state-sanctioned narratives set the discursive tone for the way people know and interact with (this) other species, and disallow other epistemologies. In contrast, creative nonfiction narrators Barry Lopez (Of Wolves and Men, 2004) and Helen Macdonald (H Is for Hawk, 2014) perform their own critiques of inaccurate and controlling narratives about, respectively, wolves and goshawks. I argue that the techniques they use—acknowledging emotion; observing animals’ perceptions, relationships and agency; respecting animals’ ability to resist human-imposed meanings; recognising the limits of human knowledge; and incorporating other voices—provide a framework for how creative writers may narrate other animals more ethically and more accurately
Daughters of The Handmaid’s Tale: Reproductive Rights in YA Dystopian Fiction
Get PDFThe election of President Trump in the US has reignited discussions regarding reproductive rights and renewed interest in Margaret Atwood’s 1984 dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, which depicts a future society in which women are stripped of these rights. However, the novel does not explore how threats to reproductive rights might affect teenage girls. The gap left in Atwood’s novel has been filled by authors of dystopias for young adults who foreground the double threat to teenage girls because of their sex and age. This paper discusses the way in which these novels show teenage girls resisting against societies that seek to dictate how they use their bodies, with Megan McCafferty’s Bumped and Thumped having a particularly strong political edge. Through the insights of feminist critic Drucilla Cornell, this paper shows that the challenges to characters’ reproductive rights in these texts may encourage readers to consider themselves as sexual subjects and take responsibility for that sexual subject, even if it requires political action
Enacting Self and Scientific Personas: Models for Women Health Professionals in Dr. S. Josephine Baker’s Fighting for Life
Get PDFIn this essay, I call on scientific persona and autobiographical discourse theory to examine Dr. Sara Josephine Baker’s 1939 autobiography Fighting for Life. Through this framework, I consider how Baker and other U.S. women health professionals conceived of individual identity and collective persona during the early twentieth century. Baker helped to revolutionise well-baby and well-child care in the U.S., and in Fighting for Life, she relates the genesis and evolution of her ground-breaking work. Like her contemporaries, Baker was engaged in the research, practice, teaching, and administration of medicine and public health. Presently, scientific persona has been theorized as a conglomerate of dispositions, practices, and characteristics that are associated with scholar-practitioners of the human and natural sciences; it therefore offers a novel lens for the individual and collective fashioning of women health professionals like Baker whose work traversed disciplines and institutions. By considering how Fighting for Life, as autobiography, facilitates Baker’s conception of self and persona, I show that Baker adopts prevailing personas for women health professionals as well as women working in other fields. At the same time, Baker in her autobiography also emphasizes why and how these models transform in actual practice. Thus, scientific personas tend to emerge as subtle variations of previous forms, while Baker’s autobiography also bears witness to the rise of new personas for women health professionals, as demonstrated by her radical reconfiguration of expert knowledge and scientific motherhood
Moral Rights: Exploring the Myths, Meanings and Misunderstandings in Australian Copyright Law
Get PDFThis article examines how moral rights are treated in Australian publishing contracts, and whether this approach is consistent with the expectations of authors, journalists and academics. Although, in theory, moral rights cannot be sold or assigned in Australia, the apparent wide scope for exceptions raises questions of whether there is any real protection afforded to creators under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), notably in circumstances that relate to pressure on creators to accept contractual terms in order to get published. Additionally, Australian case law reflects some uncertainty about the traditionally accepted non-economic nature of moral rights. The article examines recent case law in this field, found in Meskenas, Perez and Corby, and considers the literature associated with development of moral rights in Australia. It then presents the findings of a two-part study of moral rights in Australia; first through the results of interviews with 176 Australian authors, journalists and academics, followed by an analysis of 20 publishing contracts. It concludes that — in some, but not all, instances — a combination of the exceptions allowed under the Act and practical exigencies have diluted the unique character of authors’ moral rights and have created an environment of uncertainty
Listening to Learners’ Voices
Get PDFThis 2018 issue was initially intended as unthemed, but in fact a theme does emerge from the three papers – that of language learners’ voices, reminding us as educators of how much we need to listen – and the kinds of things we need to listen to more reflexively. Anna Filipi’s paper points to the frequent absence of the voices of international students in investigations, giving an account of their identities through a critical examination of English language learner categorisation. Suma Sumithran then asks how EAL/D teachers speak about their adult students’ language learning experiences, indicating that sometimes students’ voices are not heard in crucial ways, resulting in a perpetuation of cultural stereotyping, even if their teachers engage with them with the best of intentions. In an Australia characterised by cultural and linguistic diversity, an examination of the hybrid and fluid identities of its peoples reveal that ‘othering’ based on geographical nation-state boundaries is highly problematic. Finally, Nicholas Carr and Michiko Weinmann look at written corrective feedback from a sociocultural angle to give an account of how the voices of adult English language learners in Japan reveal their experiences of processing teacher feedback through collaboration, both with peers and with the language teacher
THE CLASS: LIVING AND LEARNING IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Get PDFThe Class: Living And Learning In The Digital AgeLivingstone, S. & Sefton-Green, J. New York: New York University Press, 201
THE EVOLUTION OF GENRE IN THE WRITING PROCESS
Get PDFCategorising works by genre can be controversial in literature. Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro are two examples of writers who have been vocal in denouncing the genre their works have been boxed into. Yet genre is an essential part of the writing process, because specific language, styles and structures are used within different social contexts to communicate purpose. This paper is a practice-led study that analyses the evolution in genre of what became a memoir, to illustrate how experimenting with different genres shaped the final form, structure and genre of the piece. While genre did not dictate the writing process from the first time I sat down to write, communicating my purpose the way I intended depended on finding the right genre. I worked on the memoir over a few years, and in that time the text began as a short story and then morphed to poetry, an essay, and finally, to a memoir. Once a completed work is published, the labelling of that work is then out of the writer’s hands. Yet separate to the role genre plays in selling books, genre is key in text construction and a tool that writers have at their disposal during the writing process to enrich their work
Roadmap to localization
Get PDFSince world humanitarian summit, many organizations are now gearing up the strategies to make changes in organizational policy on "Localization". It's a way that ensures efficient, effective and sustainable process of delivering assistance, acknowledging and prioritising locally-led humanitarian responses. It endorses "Saving life", "Dignity to people", "Equity" and "redistribution of wealth".The concept of Localization visualizes greater ownership, improved community engagement, response on time and judicious use of resources. It helps to address the appropriateness of the response. One of the most significant contribution of localization would be "easy and quick coordination mechanism"
Chewing Demosthenes’ Pebbles: Embodied Experience Making the Scientist’s Persona, ca.1830-1910
Get PDFThis paper argues for an embodied approach to the scientist’s persona, using ‘experience’ as its focal point. Rather than noting that embodied experiences influenced scientists’ practices and identities amidst (or despite) ideals of objectivity, I want to draw attention to the ways in which personal, embodied experiences were celebrated in nineteenth century science, and presented as primordial for the practice of competent research.I am focusing on those scientists involved in the study of the voice in order to do so. Because the physical workings of the voice are largely hidden inside the body, fields such as laryngology and phoniatry developed a number of touch-based, experiential scientific practices before and alongside tools of visual observation. These non-visual practices were very closely connected to researchers’ sensations of their own bodies, and connected to their identity (as a middle-class amateur singer, a hoarse professor, a stammerer, etc.). As scientific disciplines studying the voice developed over the century, personal ‘experience’ (understood both as particular practices and notions of personal background and identity) was increasingly brought forward as a unique source of understanding and expertise. This resulted in a highly diverse field of experts on the voice, in which otherwise non-elite researchers could participate and even rise to fame. They did so because, and not despite, their physical and social impediments. Studying the experiential practices and memories brought forward by this network of experts allows me to look at the construction of their scientific personae from an intersectional perspective. A focus on the nineteenth century notion of ‘experience’ and its inclusion in scientific discourse allows us an insight into the various constituent elements of a ‘persona’ built within the context of a particular field, and drawing liberally on aspects of identification that do not always fit the classic categories of gender, class, age, health, etc