FEDUA Research Directions 2015

FACULTY OF EDUCATION AND ARTS

RESEARCH DIRECTIONS 2015

RESEARCH DIRECTIONS 2015 9

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Welcome to Research Directions

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FEDUA at a glance

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News & achievements

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David Lubans thinks no-one should be picked last for team sports

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Jenny Gore is revolutionising teacher professional development

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Geoff Whitty advocates for equal access to university

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Elena Prieto-Rodriguez re-energises maths education

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Kylie Shaw is demystifying the doctoral learning process

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Christine Hatton brings drama to 21st century learning

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HERMES examines random encounters with history

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Julie McIntyre sees a whole world swirling in a glass of Hunter Valley wine

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The Radical Newcastle Collective unearths our radical history

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Nancy Cushing dissects the meaty matter of eating kangaroo

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Steven Threadgold looks beyond the moral panics about youth

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Catherine Grant is an activist for endangered music

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Mark Harvey sees the connection between language and landscape

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The Torres Strait Islander Network is cultivating community through music

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Hans-Lukas Kieser is inspiring a new perspective of war

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Kit Messham-Muir delves into the psychological dimensions of visualising warfare

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Matthew Lewis explores violent pathways across continents

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The Disability Research Network is making society more equitable and accessible

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Sally Hewat is bringing speech therapy to Vietnam

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David Musgrave feels the joy of satire

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Recent books

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Professor John Germov, Pro Vice-Chancellor of the Faculty of Education and Arts, in the Hunter Valley, NSW

WELCOME

TO RESEARCH DIRECTIONS Welcome to the fourth edition of Research Directions which showcases a year of achievement for researchers in the Faculty of Education and Arts (FEDUA) at the University of Newcastle – one of the most comprehensive faculties of its kind in Australia.

Our researchers in the humanities, social sciences, education, and the creative arts contribute to understanding and critically evaluating the human experience, from individuals to entire cultures, engaging in the discovery, interpretation, preservation and communication of the past and present to enable a deeper understanding of contemporary society.

The focus in this issue is research impact – in other words – on those who benefit from the scholarship we undertake. I am proud to say that our scholars and their postgraduate students are making a tangible difference in the Hunter and Central Coast region by working with secondary school students and teachers, youth networks, not-for-profit organisations, local government, allied health workers, cultural organisations, creative entrepreneurs, and people living with a disability.

Whether it is about innovative ways to approach maths education in schools, bringing historical perspectives on violence to bear on contemporary social problems, or finding new ways to revitalise traditional forms of music; by engaging communities with our research we share our knowledge, expertise and skills.

On page 16 you can read about Dr Mark Harvey’s work in documenting and theorising Australian Indigenous languages which adds not just to the international scholarship on theories of language, but creates a precious record for the language community and future generations. Likewise on page 17 we describe the work of Dr Philip Matthias and colleagues who are collaborating with Torres Strait Islander communities to collect their rich, though endangered musical heritage, and share it through live performance with a wider audience.

By drawing on insights from researchers in education, sociology, anthropology and religious studies, our research deepens the understanding of policy makers about the complex social, political and cultural changes created by the growth of the global market.

A great example of this is on page 14 with a story on the sociological research being undertaken by members of the Newcastle Youth Studies Network with young people in regional areas, to learn more about their ideas and experiences of employment and unemployment. On page 6, our Global Innovation Chair, Professor Geoff Whitty, talks about how he and colleagues are developing a world-first measure of assessing equitable access to higher education. Then on page 21, Associate Professor Bronwyn Hemsley explains the multidisciplinary approach being applied to help improve services for people with a disability in the Hunter region.

I am inspired by the work of our scholars and I trust you will enjoy reading about the impactful research being conducted in the Faculty of Education and Arts at the University of Newcastle.

Professor John Germov Pro Vice-Chancellor Faculty of Education and Arts

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FACULTY OF EDUCATION AND ARTS RESEARCH

AT A GLANCE

The Faculty’s critical mass of research excellence centres around its Priority Research Centre and five Research Programs:

127th in the world

TEACHERS & TEACHING

education*

RESEARCH TRAINING & TRANSFORMATIONAL KNOWLEDGE

SOCIAL WORK

Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) 2012:  78 per cent of the Faculty’s fields of research achieved a rating of world standard.  Social Work is rated as 5, meaning ‘Well above world standard’, which makes it the highest rated research in Australia.

QS World University Rankings by Subject 2014/2015:  Linguistics entered the world’s Top 100, increasing its ranking by 21 places up to 88th in the world.  Education is ranking within the Top 150 at 127th in the world.  Sociology stands well within the top 200 at 179th.

ERA5 well above

world standard**

PRIORITY RESEARCH CENTRE FOR PHYSICAL ACTIVITY & NUTRITION

ENDANGERED LANGUAGES DOCUMENTATION, THEORY & APPLICATION

Hallmarks of Research Excellence The rankings of the University of Newcastle and the Faculty of Education and Arts (FEDUA) reflect an international reputation for quality. The Faculty’s goal is to be in the top 10 nationally and top 200 globally in the Creative Arts, Education, and Humanities and Social Science disciplines.

88th

world's top 100: linguistics*

CENTRE FOR THE HISTORY OF VIOLENCE *QS World University Subject rankings **Australian Research Council Excellence in Research Australia ratings

Externally funded fellowships and chairs  ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA ), Associate Professor Bronwyn Hemsley  ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA ), Dr Caragh Brosnan  ARC Future Fellow, Professor David Lubans  ARC Future Fellow, Associate Professor Hans-Lukas Kieser  BHP Billiton Chair of Sociology and FiDiPro, Professor Lisa Adkins  ELDP Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Michael Franjieh  NHMRC Senior Research Fellow, Professor Ron Plotnikoff Research income growth Total Faculty research income between 2009-2015 was over $16 million – of which $10 million (64%) was nationally competitive grant income. In this time, Faculty research grant income has experienced a 16-fold increase.

Research degree completions  Between 2010 and 2014, the Faculty had 201 Research degree completions.

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From left: Professor Lisa Adkins, Academy of Finland FiDiPro Distinguished Professor, meeting with Mr Pasi Patokallio, Ambassador of Finland in Australia.

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From left: Professor Caroline McMillen and Dr Christina Petterson at 2014 Vice-Chancellor’s Awards

NEWS & ACHIEVEMENTS Finland Distinguished Professor Program appointment Renowned sociologist Professor Lisa Adkins has been named as one of only nine academics in the world to be awarded an appointment to the Finland Distinguished Professor Program (FiDiPro).

BHP Billiton Chair of Sociology, Adkins’ research engages social theory, feminist studies and economics. Most recently, she has focused on financial crises and unemployment as permanent features of late capitalism.

UON Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Innovation), Professor Kevin Hall, said Adkins’ prestigious appointment was testament to the University’s growing reputation as a global leader in the field of social science research.

Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities Professor Hugh Craig from the Faculty’s Centre for Linguistic and Literary Computing has been elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA).

The appointment is one of the highest honours in humanities available in Australia. The academy elected 19 new Fellows at its annual general meeting on 22 November 2014.

Craig is a world leader in the development and application of quantitative, statistical and linguistic computing to early modern English literary studies.

Australian Research Council appointment Associate Professor Ros Smith has been appointed to the Australian Research Council College of Experts on the Humanities and Creative Arts panel. A prestigious appointment, college members are experts of international standing drawn from the Australian research community.

Deutscher Memorial Prize

International visitors

Professor Roland Boer has been awarded the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize for his book, In the Vale of Tears: on Marxism and Theology V, and for his entire series, Criticism of Heaven and Earth.

The Faculty welcomed a number of international visiting academics in 2014:

Every year, this prize is awarded for a book which exemplifies the best and most innovative new writing in or about the Marxist tradition.

Research Excellence Award Each year, UON celebrates the remarkable achievements of its staff through the ViceChancellor’s Awards. In 2014, theologian Dr Christina Petterson was acknowledge as an outstanding early career researcher with a Research Excellence Award.

Best Australian Community Engagement Collaboration Professor Phil Morgan’s Innovative education program Healthy Dads, Healthy Kids (HDHK) has been recognised with a 2014 national award for Best Community Engagement Collaboration.

The accolade comes from the Business/ Higher Education Round Table and follows closely on the National Excellence in Obesity Prevention Award (2014) by the World Health Organisation Collaboration on Obesity Prevention.

Isabelle Bril, Lacito, CNRS, France Hosted by the Endangered Languages Documentation, Theory and Application Research Program.

Dr Chen Guo, Fudan University, Shanghai Hosted by the Religion, Marxism and Secularism Group.

Boghos Zanazanian, McGill University, Canada Hosted by the Historical Experience, Representation, Media, Education and Society Group.

Professor Kerry Courneya, University of Alberta, Canada Hosted by the Priority Research Centre for Physical Activity and Nutrition.

Dr Janice Murray, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK Hosted by the Disability Research Network.

Professor Pieter Spierenburg, Erasmus University, Rotterdam Hosted by Centre for the History of Violence.

Professor Antonia Darder, Loyola Marymont University, US Hosted by the Comparative and International Education Group.

Endeavour Fellowship Ethnomusicologist Dr Catherine Grant received a 2014 Endeavour Fellowship to continue her work on endangered musical traditions in Cambodia.

She was also awarded a national 2014 Future Justice Prize, which is given to Australian individuals or organisations for leadership and initiative in the advancement of future justice.

FIND OUT MORE Find out more of the latest news from the Faculty at newcastle.edu.au/newsroom/ faculty-of-education-and-arts

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“…there would be kids and adults who are still scarred from the experience of being picked last for teams in their PE lessons.”

FOSTERING LIFELONG PHYSICAL ACTIVITY THROUGH EDUCATION Professor David Lubans at Hunter Street Mall, Newcastle

Professor David Lubans is an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow who is delivering a range of innovative school programs designed to upskill teachers in physical education and re-engage teens.

“Approximately a quarter to a third of young people in Australia report moderate to high levels of psychological distress at some point in their adolescence. That’s just the ones who get detected,” Lubans said.

“There’s no question that our society has changed and that young people are more engaged in screen-based recreation, they are doing less physical activity, and they are more likely to be overweight or obese – three times more likely than previous generations.

“If you put all those things together, it isn’t surprising that the mental health of a large percentage of young people isn’t optimal.

Physical activity represents such a great opportunity; if provided in the right context, it can help reduce stress, provide an opportunity for social interaction and enhance self-concept.”

the Department of Education & Communities School Sport Unit.

“I would like to think we have a role to play in giving everyone a chance to feel good in the physical domain,” Lubans said. “If adolescents only ever think of PE as competitive team sports and don’t get an opportunity to experience success – they make the decision that: ‘I’m not a sporty kid, I can’t do that,’ and they drop out of activities altogether.

“Giving teens the opportunity to succeed in the physical domain can impact on their physical self-concept, which can influence their overall wellbeing.”

Non-traditional school activities will be introduced into schools, including resistance training, yoga and Pilates.

However, the program doesn’t just give teachers information about what to teach, it provides guidance on how to teach.

Lubans’ ARC Future Fellowship project will provide schools with teacher training and equipment that will impact on their ability and capacity to deliver programs that foster lifelong physical activity.

“In a lot of poorly designed PE lessons, the focus is on competition and peer comparison.

Using poor teaching strategies thwarts needs satisfaction rather than making students feel good. An example would be having two captains picking their team mates – there would be kids and adults who are still scarred from the experience of being picked last for teams in their PE lessons,” Lubans said.

The first phase of his fellowship will involve an evaluation of the programs using a randomised controlled trial. Importantly, the second phase of the project will involve the dissemination of the programs throughout NSW secondary schools in collaboration with

“Our professional learning program will encourage teachers to be more autonomy supportive by applying teaching principles guided by self-determination theory, which can lead to improved student outcomes and wellbeing.”

While a major part of Lubans Future Fellowship is about disseminating programs to make a difference on a large scale, it’s also about building evidence around physical activity and wellbeing.

“I would like to build more of an evidence base around the role of physical activity in promoting wellbeing. Focusing on the consequences of inactivity may not be the best way to go,” Lubans said. “Maybe we are going to get more value and bigger impact when we stress the wellbeing implications of increased physical activity.”

Lubans – a researcher in the Faculty of Education and Arts and the Priority Research Centre for Physical Activity and Nutrition (PAN) – is also focussed on building research capacity by working with PhD scholars and Early Career Researchers (ECR).

Three of his PhD students will graduate and take up positions with the Priority Research Centre in 2015: Jordan Smith, Kristen Cohen and Narelle Eather.

“As part of its support for the Future Fellowship, the School of Education has funded an ECR to work with me and the School. So one of my PhD students, Jordan Smith – who is very talented – is going to be able to bring a lot of energy and new ideas to our research,” Lubans said.

“All three have outstanding PhDs, and really high-quality publications that are internationally relevant. They are going to have a huge impact on physical education programs and their dissemination in Australian schools.”

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REVOLUTIONISING TEACHER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT Professor Jenny Gore and Ms Julie Bowe, from the University of Newcastle’s (UON) Teachers and Teaching Research Program, are set to transform the quality of teaching in NSW with an innovative approach to professional development for teachers.

Quality Teaching Rounds, the brainchild of Gore and Bowe, enables teachers to draw on their own strengths and the advice of their peers to find creative ways of improving their practice.

Using an evidence-based model whereby small groups of colleagues watch a lesson in progress and assess performance, each teacher takes a turn to host a round – similar to medical rounds used to teach junior doctors in hospitals.

The lesson is coded and discussed by the teacher and the observers against the dimensions of quality teaching identified in the Quality Teaching model, which was developed by Gore and Associate Professor James Ladwig. Breaking down teaching into its key elements enables teachers to notice and analyse exactly what’s happening in the lesson.

“Although the coding process is central to achieving depth and specificity in the analysis, teachers quickly realise it’s not about the numbers, it’s about the professional conversations they have in the experience,” Gore said.

Unlike most professional development for teachers – where they might attend a workshop but then never have the opportunity

to apply what they’ve learned – this model enables teachers to use a combination of their own professional judgement and evidence generated through a researchinformed framework to work out how to improve their practice.

Dr Nicole Mockler, is now mid-way through a scientific trial in a randomly selected group of public schools in NSW – which will provide the academic rigour necessary for Quality Teaching Rounds to be rolled out more broadly.

“We’re finding teachers are really excited about this way of working and the opportunity it creates for them to analyse in detail what they are doing and collectively work on ways to improve teaching practice,” Gore said.

Modelled on clinical trials used to test medical treatments, the trial involves 24 schools which are divided into two intervention groups and one control group.

Observers are ‘blinded’ as to which group has received which intervention (the control group will receive their intervention next year). The research team has been swamped by interest from schools, with nearly 250 applying to take part in the trial.

“Because the focus is very much on teaching rather than the individual teacher, it really ensures people don’t feel personally judged but instead feel supported, and often affirmed.

“It’s enabling teachers to feel really positive about themselves and their work. And it’s having demonstrable impact on student learning overall and on equity outcomes.”

The Quality Teaching model is already used in more than 2,300 government, 300 Catholic and 30 independent schools throughout Australia. It has been shown to make lessons more intellectually engaging and challenging, improve the learning environment, and increase the significance of what is learned.

“It puts a focus on the things that should and will matter to students in terms of enhancing their life at school and building a commitment to lifelong learning,” Professor Max Smith said – a researcher who is helping to test this model.

The research team, which includes Gore, Bowe, Smith, Professor David Lubans and

Earlier analysis of Quality Teaching Rounds has suggested it produces significantly higher quality teaching and thus benefits students, for example by raising NAPLAN scores in the classes of teachers who have participated.

On the basis of earlier research conducted

by Gore and Bowe, the NSW Government has written the Quality Teaching model and Quality Teaching Rounds (Great Teaching Inspired Learning) into its current policy for all NSW Schools. The team is currently planning with the NSW Department of Education & Communities and hopes to eventually introduce it across all public schools in the State.

“This is impactful research embedded in policy with the potential to change the preferred model of teaching and teacher development in schools across the state,” Smith said.

“It’s enabling teachers to feel really positive about themselves and their work. And it’s having demonstrable impact on student learning overall and on equity outcomes.”

Professor Jenny Gore, Director of the Teachers and Teaching Research Program

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PROMOTING EQUAL ACCESS TO UNIVERSITY Professor Geoff Whitty, Global Innovation Chair Equity in Higher Education, in the Hunter Building at University of Newcastle Callaghan campus

International league tables in tertiary education provide useful comparisons about rankings and research outputs – but how do universities perform when it comes to providing equal access?

The University of Newcastle’s (UON) Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education (CEEHE) plans to find an answer through the creation of a world-first global equity index to show how access to post-secondary education compares across the world.

Led by Professor Geoff Whitty, a worldrenowned scholar in education equity, the Global Access Map will be based on a survey of 50 countries to determine how access is measured and who is marginalised according to their socioeconomic status, ethnicity, religion or gender.

The project is supported by multinational publishing and education company Pearson PLC and the Global Access to PostSecondary Education (GAPS) Initiative. The first stage will be a feasibility study, which is due to report next year, and the ultimate aim is to have an equity measure included in existing league tables.

“Access to post-secondary education is one of the defining characteristics of economic and social prosperity in the 21st century,” Whitty said, who in March took up a position as Global Innovation Chair for Equity in Higher Education at UON. “Education is one of the most effective ways for a nation to enhance social mobility, cultural cohesion, and economic productivity.”

A former high school history and sociology teacher, Whitty has been interested in improving access to education for marginalised groups since he volunteered to teach immigrant children in London in the 1960s.

His career has spanned academic and senior management posts in higher education, and for more than 10 years he ran the worldrenowned Institute of Education at the University of London. As a leading scholar and policy advisor on equity in education, he has evaluated major interventions to tackle educational disadvantage and for more than 30 years has been involved in an ongoing longitudinal study of the educational and career trajectories of academically able children from different schools and social backgrounds.

Whitty now spends part of the year in Newcastle where he is advising on CEEHE’s strategic direction.

He says providing the evidence base on equal access to higher education is particularly important in the current political climate, as Australia enters “uncharted waters” by proposing to remove the fee cap.

“Newcastle is an unusual university in that it combines a very strong commitment to research excellence with a very strong commitment to social inclusion – and this is something we should be protecting,” Whitty said.

“The Go8 universities recruit fewer than 10 per cent of students overall from low

socioeconomic backgrounds, while Newcastle recruits 24 per cent. There is a danger that universities that are low charging and high equity will have problems under the new regime and therefore there ought to be some national mechanism to help maintain the social inclusiveness of universities.”

Whitty believes a key priority in closing the participation gap is to improve education in schools for socially disadvantaged children, and to recognise that school achievement is not the only indicator of success at university.

His landmark research in the United Kingdom has shown that children from low socioeconomic backgrounds who show promise perform as least as well at university as children from private schools, even if their school results are not as high.

CEEHE will advise the government and disseminate research evidence and good practice around equity in education throughout Australia and internationally. Its research themes include culture and equity, access and student experience, community wellbeing and education policy.

“There is a danger that universities that are low charging and high equity will have problems under the new regime… there ought to be some national mechanism to help maintain the social inclusiveness of universities.”

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Dr Elena Prieto-Rodriguez with students at Tighes Hill Public School

RE-ENERGISING MATHS EDUCATION There has been a massive drop in the number of advanced mathematics students in the last decade, accompanied by poor results across all school years. Dr Elena Prieto-Rodriguez believes this has significant implications for Australia’s ability to produce the next generation of engineers, physicists, chemists and software engineers – the innovators we need to skill Australia into the future.

An expert in theoretical computer science and mathematics education from the University of Newcastle’s School of Education, Prieto-Rodriguez is on a mission to shape the next generation of mathematics teachers so they can re-energise Australia’s mathematics education.

“Mathematics is essential in engineering and science degrees, and we know there is a shortage of students taking these subjects in Australia,” PrietoRodriguez said.

“The other issue is that maths is very difficult, so we need teachers who are really proficient, not just at a secondary level but also in primary,” Prieto-Rodriguez said.

Having recently developed a suite of online courses for maths teachers, which enable better interaction with online instructors, her research has found that blended teaching is more successful if it offers discussion forums.

“Somehow we have to convey the relevance of maths to students, to show them how important this is if you want to be an innovator.”

Prieto-Rodriguez’s interest in maths education started during her undergraduate years, and she spent 18 months training maths teachers in a bullet-marked university in El Salvador before moving to Canada to commence a postgraduate degree in computer science.

She is currently engaged in the Inspiring Mathematics and Science in Teacher Education (IMSITE) project. This crossinstitutional study involves six Australian universities that are looking at the training of pre-service maths teachers in a bid to engage more students to continue in their mathematics education.

Being an expert in theoretical computer science as well as mathematics education has huge advantages. She is able to understand and impart the value of computational thinking in modern teaching.

Prieto-Rodriguez believes computer science is about much more than programming – it’s about imagination and innovation.

The hope is that these teachers will be able to convey to students not only the beauty of mathematics, but its relevance to other subjects and future career paths.

“Every time you Google or use your smartphone, you run algorithms that were designed using computational thinking, which is a particular way of thinking about

how to implement ideas with hardware or software,” Prieto-Rodriguez said.

“Many people don’t understand the work behind the internet, and we’re trying to introduce this into the curriculum at a primary and secondary level all over the world.”

Her expertise in computational thinking has led to several projects, which are partly funded by Google, to engage school teachers and students and fill gaps in Australia’s skill base.

For example, she ran a series of professional development workshops for teachers that aimed to promote computer science and provide the skills and resources necessary to teach it. A major sticking point, she found, was that most teachers did not fully understand what computational thinking was – believing it to be solely about programming.

She has also worked with two local schools in Newcastle to take part in Code.org, an international not-for-profit initiative involving 45 million students worldwide that aims to introduce computer science into schools.

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DEMYSTIFYING THE DOCTORAL PROCESS Dr Kylie Shaw, a member of Newcastle’s Research Training and Transformational Knowledge Research Program and the Centre for the Study of Research Training and Innovation (SORTI), demystifies the PhD process by tracking students’ journeys across disciplines.

“Approximately 40 per cent of doctoral students drop out. Attrition is still a mystery; there are all sorts of reasons why, but sometimes those are invisible,” Shaw said.

“We found loneliness is an issue. When undertaking a PhD, one of the outcomes is you produce new knowledge, and of course there is no one in the world who has produced the knowledge you are producing – so you can feel quite lonely within that.”

“Understanding that for your particular area it’s new, but knowing other people have been through this same process helps students feel as if they are going through a developmental process rather than having reached the ceiling of their intelligence.

So this work is about demystifying the doctoral process,” she explained.

While still a PhD student herself, Shaw’s work on the research journey was acknowledged as contributing to the development of a journey tracking method employed in the successful Australian Research Council (ARC) grant on doctoral metacognition by fellow researchers Professor Allyson Holbrook, Emeritus Professor Sid Bourke, Dr Jill Scevak and Dr Robert Cantwell. At the completion of the doctoral metacognition grant, Shaw was invited to work with this team in further developing the journey method as a learning tool.

“I found through the research I did with Honours students, the process of students actually looking through the highs and lows of their journey helped them to identify their strengths and weaknesses,” Shaw said. “So, we took the notion of the journey and translated it into a tool where students tracked their journey in real time throughout their PhD.” After securing a 2015 ARC Discovery Projects grant along with University of Newcastle colleagues Bourke, Holbrook and Scevak, as well as Professor Dennis McInerney from the Hong Kong Institute

Dr Kylie Shaw in the Auchmuty Library, University of Newcastle Callaghan campus

“We found loneliness is an issue. When undertaking a PhD, one of the outcomes is you produce new knowledge, and of course there is no one in the world who has produced the knowledge you are producing – so you can feel quite lonely within that.”

of Education, Shaw will develop an online program and consultancy package, so they can assist more students in their doctoral journey in Australia and internationally.

“The other aspect is looking at it in a professional sense – so not just doctoral learners but looking at people who are doing doctoral-level learning in the workplace. So we hope to connect with industry in this way,” Shaw said.

A second and growing strand of Shaw’s work aims to better understand innovative teaching and learning and its impact on learners, especially transference into their own innovation.

This growing expertise is recognised through her recent work as a Chief Investigator on an Innovative Teaching and Learning Grant funded by the NSW Department of Education

& Communities. In this role, Shaw has worked with researchers from the Stanford Research Institute International and collaborated with global research partners from Mexico, Russia, Senegal, Finland, UK, USA and Indonesia.

She also coordinated the qualitative data collection and analysis in Australia, working directly with secondary schools.

This both draws on and informs her work with doctoral students, particularly as higher education moves increasingly towards new ways of learning and use of online platforms.

“The intersection in my work is innovation,” Shaw said. “I look at increasingly innovative ways of learning in the doctorate, which is an area that has not been explored greatly – looking at different collaborative models of supervision online and focusing on evaluation and quality.”

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DRAMA: A DYNAMIC DRIVER OF 21ST CENTURY LEARNING Dr Christine Hatton, an education researcher with a background in drama and theatre, explores the possibilities of how digital technologies alter and expand the lived experience of drama learning processes through an innovative international project.

A lost culture of frozen people is discovered underwater in the Pacific Ocean. They were frozen in time on the edge of a catastrophic environmental disaster, a crisis that scientists and archaeologists of the future grapple to fully understand. The history of these people had been erased. Who were they, these people of Ardus Unda? What happened to them? Can they be restored to life? Can we learn from their past to inform the present and the future?

This was the fictional context faced by drama students and teachers from schools across the world who worked together to co-construct a story as part of an innovative creative project exploring the possibilities of using digital technologies in drama education.

The project connected students and teachers in a shared drama learning experience, entitled The Water Reckoning Project. It used a combination of live drama workshops and digital postings from sites in Sydney, Noosa, Athens, Seattle and Singapore.

Hatton, a lecturer in the School of Education, led the Sydney project and research study with co-researchers from the University of Western Sydney (UWS) and Macquarie University. The study focused on drama, technology and sustainability education.

The Water Reckoning Project drew on the work of pioneering drama practitioner Dorothy Heathcote and reinterpreted her strategy of ‘Rolling Role’ for the 21st century classroom context. This strategy, where students work across subject areas on a shared dramatic narrative, lent itself well to adaptations with technologies and digital platforms.

The project was part of an international push to reconsider the innovative practice and strategies of Heathcote. Each group of students interpreted the Ardus Unda story through drama in relation to their own locations and imaginations, and in doing so, made important local connections between the real and the fictional contexts. It also enabled students to interact with other sites and the creative content made by students from across the world.

“This project contributes to the field of drama education in terms of the possibilities and limitations it highlights when working interactively with technologies across different sites and time zones,” Hatton said.

“It has led us as researchers to consider the nature of a mediated creative learning experience and how digital technologies alter and expand the lived experience of drama learning processes. This kind of work allows new collaborations and audiences for classroom drama work, which is exciting for teachers, students and researchers alike.”

on transformative learning and teaching in drama. She is interested in the way research can capture and allow analysis of the nuances of what drama teachers do, what works and what makes a difference to students’ lives in complex times and contexts.

“Teaching drama is unlike teaching any other school subject; it is experiential learning involving each of the senses, body language and emotion and is often a way of engaging students who have been otherwise alienated by the rest of the curriculum,” Hatton explained.

“Drama gives students a whole range of skills and experiences. In a performing art like drama you have to be really present, it relies on complex forms of collaboration and aesthetic awareness and students have to grapple with multiple things all at once in the moment of doing it.”

Hatton is also leading a major three-year Arts NSW/ Department of Education & Communities research study, Evaluating the impacts of the Fresh AIR Initiative 2014 2016, conducted with her co-investigator Associate Professor Mary Mooney from UWS. This study analyses the nature and impact factors of sustained artists in residence projects in six schools across Sydney.

Hatton has a longstanding interest in the nature of teaching and learning in drama and the arts – drawn from her PhD study

“Teaching drama is unlike teaching any other school subject; it is experiential learning involving each of the senses, body language and emotion and is often a way of engaging students who have been otherwise alienated by the rest of the curriculum.”

Dr Christine Hatton in Civic Theatre Newcastle

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“There is a view that social cohesion is produced by everyone sharing the same narrative, but I believe it’s about one’s ability to hop in and out of different narratives and see the world from different perspectives.”

Dr Robert Parkes (far left) with the Historical Experience, Representation, Media, Education and Society (HERMES) Research Group at Fort Scratchley Historic Site, Newcastle

RANDOM ENCOUNTERS WITH HISTORY Everyday life is full of random encounters with history – from branding that advertises a company’s historical credentials, to representations of the past in the media and television drama, and the accounts that children are taught at school.

Dr Robert Parkes, a senior lecturer in the School of Education, calls these encounters our ‘historical culture’. They go beyond a simple recording of past events; they help form the narratives that shape our national identity.

“The sense of our history matters in broader society because it provides people with a source of identity – we often find ourselves in various narratives of the past,” Parkes said.

It’s been an exciting time for Australian historians since competing perspectives of history were proposed by former Prime Ministers Paul Keating and John Howard.

Acknowledging the importance of research into our historical culture, the interdisciplinary research network – Historical Experience, Representation, Media, Education and Society (HERMES) – has emerged at the University of Newcastle with a mission to investigate who we think we are.

Concentrated in the School of Education, HERMES brings together history education researchers, public historians and social science researchers. Their central aim is to gain new understandings about

the interaction of historical experience, representation, media, education and society in the production of our historical culture and its impact on our historical consciousness.

The group has formed extensive international collaborations and has launched the first biannual international journal of historical consciousness, Historical Encounters, with an eminent editorial board comprising leading experts from Australia, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, and Asia.

One of HERMES’ specific research contributions is in the area of curriculum history. They are currently investigating the history of scientific literacy in the curriculum, and also representations of historical events, such as Gallipoli in Australian and Turkish textbooks. The research has highlighted interesting discrepancies between public discourse and what is taught in schools.

The group is also interested in how historical narratives differ within a society; how different ways of understanding and representing the past shape our current interactions.

For example, HERMES asked 105 pre-service history teachers from the University to tell the history of Australia in their own words, enabling researchers to compare their differing accounts of the past.

Using these unique narratives, the group is researching how future teachers view Captain

Cook, Australia’s colonial past, Gallipoli and Kokoda, and how they navigate competing historical perspectives.

This project is now being incorporated into the international Comparing our Pasts pilot study, which will explore representations of Indigenous histories in the narratives of primary and secondary pre-service teachers in Australia, Canada, Sweden and New Zealand.

HERMES researchers have also recently received an Anzac Centenary Grant, which will see pre-service mentors working with school children to make short documentaries on iPads or iPhones on what the Anzac legend means to them or their community.

This community outreach project will conclude by analysing the narratives in parallel with the WWI centenary celebrations, 2014 to 2018.

“I think having multiple narratives is useful in terms of how we get on with each other,” Parkes said.

“There is a view that social cohesion is produced by everyone sharing the same narrative, but I believe it’s about one’s ability to hop in and out of different narratives and see the world from different perspectives.”

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THE HUNTER VALLEY: DRIVING OUR TASTE FOR WINE For Dr Julie McIntyre, wine represents history in a glass. “It’s a way of being able to travel in time. Each glass of wine is a fascinating and very complex encapsulation of the climate, land and work of people at particular points in time,” McIntyre said.

Australian wine has driven the contemporary wave of wine globalisation that began in the 1990s. As an Australian historian focusing on wine, McIntyre is interested in documenting how this particular drink has become a crucial part of Australian culture in the last 50 years and in international wine markets over the last two decades.

More than other forms of alcohol, there is a sense of meaning and identity around drinking wine, and that has been influenced over the generations by the wine producers themselves. Today, the making, selling and drinking of other alcoholic drinks, tea, coffee and many foods is closely linked to place of origin and production communities.

Therefore, much can be gained from close attention to Australia’s oldest wine region, the Hunter Valley.

“This focus is important in an age of greater global focus on the consequences and security of food and drink production coupled with consumer awareness driven by questions of food and drink provenance and taste,” McIntyre said.

McIntyre’s fascinating research forms part of Vines, Wine and Identity: The Hunter Valley NSW and Changing Australian Taste, an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Project that includes Faculty of Education and Arts Pro Vice-Chancellor and sociologist Professor John Germov; historian Dr David Dunstan (Monash University); and two partner investigators: Brian McGuigan from Hunter Valley Wine & Tourism Association and Julie Baird from Newcastle Museum.

The project aims to study the Hunter Valley’s history and heritage and understand how Hunter Valley producers have driven changes in taste and drinking habits in Australia and internationally.

Newcastle is the only Australian university undertaking interdisciplinary wine studies research in humanities and social science, with collaboration between researchers from history, social science, business and tourism. While, internationally, wine researchers focus on trade and consumption, Newcastle’s attention is on the underresearched historical and sociological areas of production and its relationship with trade and consumption.

As an historian, McIntyre’s sources for her contribution to Vines, Wine and Identity include archival material held in local, state and national archives and libraries, private correspondence between industry producers in the colonial period, official statistics, royal

commissions on alcohol consumption, and oral histories from the wine producers of the Hunter Valley.

The starting point for the ARC project is to paint a picture of the rich history of the Hunter, so McIntyre has begun touring the valley with leading wine producers Brian McGuigan and Jay Tulloch, using a GPS to map the areas where vineyards historically grew. She will go on to match these sites with stories from oral history interviews and archival material.

In addition to the standard scholarly journal articles, the project will also generate material aimed at a broader audience, including a book and an exhibition at Newcastle Museum in 2017. It will also add value to Australia’s $5.5 billion wine industry.

“A key reason for the Hunter region’s resilience as a wine region is its long history of family farming, including wine growing,” McIntyre said.

“As shown in the declaration of 2014 as United Nations International Year of Family Farming, there is increasing emphasis on the connection between family enterprises and the future of global farming. And, because family farms need markets, our project asks why consumers drink wine from certain places, particularly vineyards with long histories of family production.”

“A key reason for the Hunter region’s resilience as a wine region is its long history of family farming, including wine growing.”

From left: wine producers Jay Tulloch and Brian McGuigan with Dr Julie McIntyre in Pokolbin

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“The whole radical side of Newcastle’s past really needs to be excavated, needs to be unearthed…”

The Radical Newcastle Collective at Nobbys Lighthouse, Newcastle

UNEARTHING THE RADICAL Historians Dr James Bennett and Dr Nancy Cushing from the University of Newcastle (UON), along with Professor Erik Eklund from Federation University, Victoria, bring together a selection of essays about Newcastle’s radical past, and consider its impact on the present and future.

Newcastle’s most notorious riot lives on in the lyrics of Cold Chisel’s 1980 song Star Hotel, grainy YouTube videos and Novocastrian mythology. But beneath the still compelling images of surging crowds, hurled beer cans and flaming police cars was a radical intent that has been all but forgotten.

To understand the whole story of the Star Hotel riot, it should be seen in the context of other moments of resistance such as the 1890 Maritime Strike, the Rothbury riot during the miners’ lockout in 1929 and the recent battle for the Laman Street fig trees.

As Australia’s first industrial city, Newcastle is a natural home of radicalism but until now, the stories which reveal its breadth and impact have remained untold.

In 2010, Bennett founded the Radical Newcastle project – which aims to recover the radical and often submerged dimensions of Newcastle’s past and present.

By bringing together community activists, freelance writers, local historians and academics from the fields of human geography, creative arts, media, communications, anthropology, history and politics – the Radical Newcastle Colloquium in 2011 and Radical Newcastle Symposium in

2012 fostered awareness of the contributions each could make to understanding Newcastle’s radical past and its impact on the present and future.

As a result of the project, the Radical Newcastle book was published by NewSouth Publishing in March 2015. This collection of essays by leading scholars, local historians and present day radicals documents both the iconic events of the region’s radical past, and less well-known actions seeking social justice for workers, women, Aboriginal people and the environment.

All approach their topics from a point of deep engagement, whether as scholars, participants, relatives of activists or all three.

The topics engage with the key issues: unionism, conscription during World War I, the status of women and Indigenous people, environmental activism and the role of religion in public life. In doing so, they add a new dimension to existing national interpretations of these topics and in some cases challenge them.

“From an historian’s perspective, there is so little written on the history of Newcastle,” Bennett said. “The whole radical side of Newcastle’s past really needs to be excavated, needs to be unearthed – and that’s actually in the subtitle of the book: Unearthing the radical past and present of Newcastle and the Hunter Region.”

“So in one sense, I think it is a suppressed narrative that needs to come to the surface.

From another perspective, perhaps a more general one, it’s about locating Newcastle in the context of a post-industrial city.

“Geelong, for example, with the demise of the automotive industry, quite often what comes up in discussion is Newcastle. How did Newcastle deal with this deindustrialisation, what did they do? I think Newcastle is still in a period of transition post BHP. It’s still reinventing itself, still looking at new pathways.”

“Think of everything that has been happening in terms of local government – proposed changes to the train line and so on; there are big changes regarding the future of Newcastle. So now is a really good moment to think about the past and how it impacts on our present and future choices.”

Radical Newcastle will be launched in 2015 at the Newcastle Writers’ Festival (20 to 22 March), coinciding with UON’s 50th anniversary celebration events. References to the University and its staff in many of the chapters point to the role the institution has had in inspiring and supporting community activity over its first 50 years.

“I hope that local people will be interested in picking up the book and thumbing through pages, because they can gain a new perspective on some of the big local issues that have been in the news over the last few years, such as 2013 Gold Walkley award winner and UON alumnus Joanne McCarthy recounting her experience of exposing institutional child sexual abuse, the Laman Street fig fiasco and the current resistance to the remaking of the CBD,” Bennett said.

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“If I can influence the debate around modern meat eating choices, even a very small amount, I would like to try and do that – to bring up the possibility of eating more kangaroo.”

MEATY MATTERS Dr Nancy Cushing is an environmental historian who is examining the underlying beliefs and aims that led, by the end of the colonial period, to a typical Australian diet based around the heavy consumption of beef and mutton.

“One of the selling points of coming to Australia during the colonial period to people in Britain was having meat three times a day,” Cushing explained. “Australians in that period ate more meat than almost any other country on earth per capita.”

Cushing says being a vegetarian and an environmentalist made her consider the choices made around eating meat – which has an impact on our fellow animals, and uses enormous amounts of land and crops that could be used for direct consumption and water.

“I also read about the kangaroo cull – the hunting of kangaroos in Australia is the largest hunt of land-based mammals in the world. Every year, millions of kangaroos are killed,” Cushing said.

“In Victoria, there is currently a two-year trial of selling the culled kangaroos as pet food. Until this year, the legislation said that the dead animals had to be buried. In other parts of mainland Australia, it is sold as pet food. Some is consumed by people – but it’s extremely low amounts.

“A lot of the kangaroo meat is exported. So it’s acceptable in other markets, in some cases as a cheap filler meat for sausages, in others as a gourmet game meat.

“One of my aims for this project is to go back to the past, and say: ‘Was there a time when Australian’s quite happily ate kangaroo and how did that play out? Who was eating it, how were they preparing it, what did people think of it, and – as it faded away – when and why?’

“There are lots of accounts from the colonial period of how much people enjoyed kangaroo meat. The question is then: when we have beef in feed lots, emitting methane as they digest their food and requiring huge amounts of water, why are we not eating the

Dr Nancy Cushing in the Wildlife Illustration Laboratory, University of Newcastle Callaghan campus

meat we have here and reducing our environmental footprint?”

a more diverse diet could be healthier for individuals and the planet.

Cushing is looking to test her idea that an anti-kangaroo push developed during the colonial period, because there were vested interests in establishing sheep and cattle.

“If I can influence the debate around modern meat eating choices, even a very small amount, I would like to try to do that – to bring up the possibility of eating more kangaroo,” she said.

“The supply of provisions within the colony was the first industry that was established here; the first thing that created wealth and power,” Cushing said.

“I think, potentially, there was a campaign against eating kangaroo, and we can see that in Tasmania, for example, where the government regulated the ownership of kangaroo hunting dogs.

“As long as people can live outside of the cash economy – eating bush meat and gathering and so on – they’re independent of the state and of the whole economic system.”

Cushing’s project, which is supported by a Merewether Scholarship from the State Library of New South Wales, is the first step in a larger undertaking, in which she hopes to extend her research up to the present, looking at Australians’ preference for a narrow range of meats and suggesting that

“There are people in Australia who are ‘kangatarian’ – who will only eat kangaroo meat, because it’s not farmed. They haven’t been bred, they haven’t been kept in captivity, it’s just one shot and that’s their only interaction with people – so they see eating kangaroo as an ethical choice.

“However, the conditions under which kangaroos are killed are debated as inhumane, that the way the meat is handled may be unhealthy, and that they may have parasites.

“So I’m not saying that this is a perfect solution, but I think it’s something we should think about as part of a bigger picture; about how we are interacting with other animals.”

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LOOKING BEYOND THE MORAL PANICS ABOUT YOUTH “Most people are still working on the assumption that you go to school, you go through some sort of tertiary education and then you get a job and that’s the end of the transition.”

From left: Dr David Farrugia, Dr Hedda Askland, Dr Steven Threadgold, Professor Andy Furlong, Professor Pam Nilan and Dr Julia Coffey at Honeysuckle precinct, Newcastle

Drugs, violence and laziness – if you believe everything you hear in the media, young people have a lot to answer for. However, Newcastle Youth Studies Group co-convenor, Dr Steven Threadgold, is ardent about uncovering the entire picture and contributing to a better understanding of the next generation.

“Newcastle Youth Studies Group has come together to do research with and about young people – and the ‘with’ part is really important. So they’re not treated as objects, they’re actually participants,” Threadgold said.

Through his work, Threadgold aims to inform government, youth workers and educators with a more nuanced picture of the social forces that are producing issues, such as unemployment and underemployment, for young people.

“A lot of the ways that young people are spoken about and treated, particularly in media representations of them, are really just stereotypes. They are often scapegoated for a whole lot of social problems that they have absolutely no control over and often those social problems are pathologised as individual issues.”

“Take the youth labour market as an example “Most people are still working – around 15 per centthat unemployment onit’sthe assumption you go and it’s massivelyyou casualised.

However, if you’re a to school, go through some young person who education doesn’t haveand a job it’s your sort of tertiary fault, lazy aand you don’t have the right thenyou’re you get job and that’s qualifications – which is a distortion of reality.” the end of the transition.”

Threadgold’s particular area of interest is youth inequality and class. “My previous

research has been about how inequality affects young people’s life chances and their attitudes to the future.”

He is currently working on two interrelated projects. The first, Do it Yourself Careers, looks at young people involved in DIY cultures around music – particularly punk and noise styles.

“There are three outcomes – they end up being hobbyists, or they earn a little bit of money on the side of their real job or they make it into their real job,” he said, referring to the young musicians. “I’m doing work around the blurriness of those categories, how these people think of themselves and what kind of strategies they put in place to try and get some kind of income.

“Connected to this is who’s in and who’s out.

So my second project is a media analysis of the notions of hipster and bogan and the way these are class categories without talking about class.”

His book on these issues: Youth, Culture and Class, which will be published by Routledge, is due to be released in 2016.

Threadgold hopes his work will inform more realistic policy, rather than policy that doesn’t deal with the reality young people face in an ever increasing precarious labour market.

“Most people are still working on the assumption that you go to school, you go through some sort of tertiary education and then you get a job and that’s the end of the transition,” Threadgold said.

“I would like to create a package of information for educationalists and youth workers – so they can get a proper grasp of how the labour market really works today.”

After starting at the University of Newcastle in 2010, Threadgold began to gain international interest for his work in youth sociology. Along with fellow Newcastle researcher and renowned youth sociologist, Professor Pam Nilan, Threadgold was invited to present his findings at a number of conferences and symposiums.

On the back of this activity, Threadgold and Nilan brought together colleagues Dr David Farrugia; Dr Julia Coffey; Dr Hedda Askland; Dr Lena Rodriguez; and Conjoint Professor Andy Furlong, from the University of Glasgow, to form Newcastle Youth Studies Group.

“We all complement each other in the theoretical stuff that we do and in our methodologies, but there is also quite a variety in there as well so we work really well as a team,” Threadgold said.

Through collaborative work, Newcastle Youth Studies Group has established research expertise in issues, such as: young people and social change; identity and belonging; health and wellbeing; geographical and spatial inequalities; intergenerational issues; displacement and movement; and, education and work.

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“The threat to intangible cultural heritage is something that we should all be concerned about, in a way, like the environmental crisis…”

WORKING WITH COMMUNITIES TO KEEP MUSIC STRONG Dr Catherine Grant in the Birabahn building, University of Newcastle Callaghan campus

Music endangerment is not just a research field for Dr Catherine Grant; she is an activist and interventionist for communities that are suffering the cultural loss of their music traditions.

Grant is an ethnomusicologist in the School of Creative Arts whose focus is endangered music in Indigenous and minority communities. Her work is important to the revitalisation of traditional music, which assists in social cohesion, and a sense of individual and collective identity; in turn, this has benefits for the health and wellbeing of community members.

“Music contains knowledge of ancestors, kinship relations, the land, environment, food systems, and medicinal systems. This traditionally links with survival, but it also has the implications for the rest of us,” Grant said. “These songs tell history, give historical evidence and contain knowledge of potential importance. They also contribute to cultural diversity and intercultural relations.

“The threat to intangible cultural heritage is something that we should all be concerned about, in a way, like the environmental crisis.

It doesn’t pose a threat to the very existence of humanity but it certainly poses a risk to how we relate to each other as people.”

A classical pianist, who trained at the Queensland Conservatorium, and spent time overseas teaching English as a second language, Grant says during her PhD she was struck by the fact that, unlike for languages, no one had developed a

systematic way to gauge the strength of a music genre.

As a result, her research focus has been looking at the tools linguists use to assess the vitality of language and adapting them to music. After developing her own set of factors for judging a music genre’s vitality, which she has titled the Music Vitality and Endangerment Framework or MVEF, she has presented the methodology in a book – Music Endangerment: How Language Maintenance Can Help (2014).

Now, Grant is holding this framework up to 100 genres from across the world and collaborating with ethnomusicologists, music researchers, communities, and musicians to build a map of the vitality of the genres.

In 2003, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) adopted its Convention for the Urgent Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

“If this turns out to be a useful tool, it could be carried further into something like the UNESCO map of endangered languages,” Grant said.

However, Grant is not satisfied with what she calls “intellectual fun”; she is passionate about the communities and looks forward to more fieldwork.

In a 2014 interview with the Boston Globe, Grant stated that she objects to being called a ‘preservationist’. “I’m more interested in

working collaboratively with the communities to find the best ways for them to keep their cultural practices strong, if that’s what they wish.”

She has been personally involved in the revitalisation of music within communities. In 2013, she raised money via a crowd funding campaign to supply traditional instruments to a village in Cambodia.

During the devastation of the Pol Pot regime in the 1970s, Cambodia is one place where the people experienced an almost complete loss of intangible cultural heritage; not only the practice but the transmission to younger people.

“In Cambodia, quite often the artists spoke to me about identity – the ‘soul’ of Cambodia. Culture is the soul of a country and if you don’t have the arts then a country doesn’t thrive,” Grant said.

“My research is progressing to the stage where it’s time for me to look at what can be done about music endangerment; to move into the areas of music maintenance and revitalisation.

“I would like to look at the initiatives that are going on around the world to revitalise music traditions, and their successes and failures – because there are many. There is just no overarching framework yet that could help indicate what might work in any one situation.”

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“Indigenous communities are concerned that cultural and linguistic knowledge is not being successfully transmitted within Indigenous communities and to the general Australian community.”

CONNECTING LANGUAGE AND LANDSCAPE Dr Mark Harvey at University of Newcastle Callaghan campus

When it comes to language, how well do we actually understand the structure of syllables and words?

Dr Mark Harvey’s 2015 Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project aims to determine this through the documentation of a severely endangered Indigenous language.

“We will focus on the Kaytetye language because of its unusual structure. We believe this work will show that current models of syllable and word structure may require significant revision,” Harvey said.

Harvey, who is a member of the Faculty of Education and Arts’ Endangered Language Documentation, Theory and Application (ELDTA) research group, will consider the implications of Kaytetye sound structure for general theories of phonology, and more importantly, for ideas about universals in language. The project will also preserve Indigenous heritage through the extensive documentation of Kaytetye – which is a severely endangered language.

Field work for the project will be undertaken with the Kaytetye community in Neutral Junction Station (Artarre) in the Northern Territory. Here, the Kaytetye language is not being acquired by children, and there are no fluent speakers younger than 30.

“Indigenous communities are concerned that cultural and linguistic knowledge is not being successfully transmitted within Indigenous communities and to the general Australian community,” Harvey said.

“Recent studies have shown that engaging with traditional language and culture improves health and wellbeing for Aboriginal

and Torres Strait Islander people. For these reasons, the successful maintenance of Indigenous cultural identities is a priority target for both Indigenous communities and all levels of Australian government.”

Harvey is also working on a 2014 ARC Discovery Project, titled, Reconstructing Australia’s linguistic past: Are all Australian languages related to one another?

As the title suggests, the project focuses on whether all Australian languages are, in fact, derived from a common source language or what is better known in scientific circles as proto-Australian.

This will be determined through an analysis of the endangered Aboriginal language Yanyuwa. Harvey will look at implications of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ responses to a series of questions relating to Australia’s pre-history and general queries of human pre-history. It also involves the extensive documentation of the language, which is spoken by the Yanyuwa people around the settlement of Borroloola (Yanyuwa burrulula) in the Northern Territory of Australia.

“This research will provide a descriptive grammar of Yanyuwa, a book evaluating the proto-Australian hypothesis, and articles discussing the significance of the success or failure of the hypothesis for theories of the general human past,” Harvey said.

Over the past 30 years of his career, Harvey has also focused much of his research on Aboriginal social organisation.

“I differ from other analysts and propose that the clan and kinship system are not internally consistent, but should be analysed as on-going and variable compromises

between other more consistently maintained and sometimes conflicting patterns,” Harvey explained.

“The most consistently maintained system in Aboriginal social organisation is not clans or kinship systems but rather constructions of the landscape. My investigations are based on extensive site mapping work with Aboriginal people. I have detailed the specific ways in which these constructions anchor discussions of land ownership (clans, tribes) and kinship, particularly marriage.”

A third ARC-funded project sees Harvey working closely with the University of Ballarat to develop a clear understanding of Indigenous spatial knowledge to support the Australian tourism industry. This investigation involves discerning the Indigenous meanings of places, animals and plants; a study known as ethnobiology, which examines the dynamic relationships among peoples, biota and environments throughout the history of time.

This information will then be shared in a range of accessible and educational materials designed for tourists and visitors.

“Research on the construction of the landscape is accorded great significance both by Aboriginal people and the research community. It is of particular concern that information collected should be archived in an easily retrievable manner, subject to culturally appropriate monitoring. This is, to date, an essentially un-investigated area of research,” Harvey said.

“It is my hope that this research will help our tourism industry to grow by sharing what is a very significant part of our history.”

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CULTIVATING COMMUNITY THROUGH MUSIC REVITALISATION For the Torres Strait Islander (TSI) community, music helps to articulate the concepts and embodied experiences of their lives. Despite its significance to the culture, there is a fragmented and under-developed approach to the documentation and cultivation of music.

“Our songs play a big part in overcoming the hurt of oppression and dispossession,” TSI community member Mr Toby Whaleboat said.

“The lyrics in many of the TSI worship songs are about finding hope, freedom, strength, love and especially forgiveness. All of these values aid in strengthening the family and community faith that one day there will be justice and equality.”

In 2014, the Faculty of Education and Arts funded a new Strategic Network, titled, Torres Strait Islander sacred music: protection, cultivation and revitalisation.

Along with Whaleboat, members of the Network include Dr Philip Matthias, Dr Jocelyn McKinnon, Dr Catherine Grant, and Dr Karl Neuenfeldt (Central Queensland University). They will work to protect, cultivate and revitalise TSI music and musical practices in close collaboration with representatives from the TSI community.

“One thing I’ve learned about music is that it can reconcile and bring people together,” Whaleboat said. “Indigenous music is our history. It’s where we come from and gives us a sense of belonging to country; a sense of who we are as an identity – an Australian identity.”

Along with research into performance practices, cultural contexts, and history, one of the Network’s projects includes the analysis and transcription of sacred TSI music recordings held digitally in Canberra at the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies archives.

During 2014, Network members were involved in a number of workshops with people from the TSI community, and Matthias has begun transcribing TSI songs that have previously never been written down.

From left: Dr Jocelyn McKinnon, Dr Ray Kelly and Associate Professor Maree Gruppetta from UON’s Wollotuka Institute, Dr Philip Matthias, and Dr Catherine Grant in the Birabhan building, University of Newcastle Callaghan campus

“I handwrite all the music, and we constantly make changes as we sing it with different people and at different events. Once all the recording and transcribing is done, this resource will be available to the community,” Matthias said.

“Many churches today sing songs in English, so to keep our language alive we sing at home where we hold family gatherings. We sing these songs so our sons and daughters will remember and pass them on to their children,” Whaleboat said.

“One of our aims is to look at the history of the songs. We would like to look at where and what this music comes from; what are the roots underpinning these songs.”

Matthias believes we should look to New Zealand as an example of a more integrated music culture.

During 2015, the Network will develop several existing pilot projects to their next stages, in relation to documentation, performance, education, and community engagement.

“We will run a number of workshops in Newcastle and Townsville with young people, both TSI and non-Indigenous, to teach them these songs, so they get to express themselves in similar ways about their own culture,” Matthias said.

“In New Zealand, it’s very common to have Maori text in songs, especially in church music, but we don’t do that in Australia,” Matthias said. “There is currently no line between who we are and where we are living.”

There will also be a symposium during 2015 where members of the Network, guest scholars and members of the TSI community will come together in Newcastle.

This is part of a larger emerging research focus in the School of Creative Arts on Australian Indigenous music and culture, Matthias and Whaleboat will also work “Indigenous music is our history. It’s where we which over the last 24 months has seen towards the publication of traditional and come from and gives us a sense of belonging to Creative Arts staff and students become contemporary sacred TSI texts and music, country; a sense of who we are as an identity – increasingly active in learning and teaching, including new works that will incorporate both an Australian identity.” and research and performance in areas of English language and the native TSI Meriam Aboriginal and TSI music and culture.

Mir language.

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“Students and wider society know the high impact that contemporary Middle East has had on international politics… and it’s critical that people are historically informed.

Knowledge, well-researched new perspectives and prudent questions improve the level of public and political discussion.

This is what I hope to inspire.”

INSPIRING A NEW PERSPECTIVE OF WAR

Associate Professor Hans-Lukas Kieser, Australian Research Council Future Fellow

Australian Research Council Future Fellow and member of the Centre for the History of Violence, Associate Professor Hans-Lukas Kieser looks to humanity’s violent past for answers to a peaceful future.

Kieser’s exploration into the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the First World War began when he was a young student of history in Basel, Switzerland. It was here that he encountered refugees from crisis-ridden Turkey after the violent military coup of 1980.

An historian, Kieser’s research focuses on the demise of the Ottoman Empire, marked by the First World War. His work is essential to a better understanding of the present day conflicts in the Middle East – which he believes are directly related to unresolved questions of the past.

“I realised that there were a lot of open questions with regard to Turkey’s history, but at the same time, a striking lack of research.

The approaches and concepts appeared inadequate to me for an understanding of what was going on,” he said.

“My research combines a history of violence with a history of interactions – including typically modern religious factors, such as apocalyptic perspectives in all three monotheistic religions and the radical devotion to Islam,” Kieser said.

His ardent belief in matters of truth makes him determined to discuss sensitive questions beyond the clichés to expose the realities of conflict.

“Students and wider society know the high impact that contemporary Middle East has had on international politics…. and it is critical that people are historically informed. Knowledge, well-researched new perspectives and prudent questions improve the level of public and political discussion.

This is what I hope to inspire.”

His resulting PhD thesis was later picked up by prestigious Turkish publisher, Iletişim – who also publish Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk.

Titled, The squandered peace: Missionaries, ethnicity and the state in the eastern provinces of Turkey 1839–1938, the book is now in its 4th edition.

“This volume has become particularly important for a new generation of historians, for human rights groups, and also for many Armenians, Alevis and Kurds because it emphasises failed, nevertheless valid, quests for peace before the end of the Ottoman Empire,” Kieser said.

“A year and a half before Armenian journalist and community leader Hrant Dink was murdered in 2007; he thanked me cordially for this work during a meeting in Istanbul.”

In 2013, Kieser was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship grant to support his project: War, Violence, and Apocalyptic-Millenarianism in the Middle East: Talat Pasha and the Foundation of Modern Turkey, 1874-1921. For this project, Kieser will consider the demise of the Ottoman Empire in a broad international context, and analyse the relationship between state formation, political violence and genocide.

“This project will provide a significant contribution not only to the history of the Ottoman world and present day Turkey, but also to an understanding of contemporary Middle East,” Kieser said.

Fieldwork for the project involves travel all over the world, including to the Middle East itself.

“Together with research assistants, I will collect rich documentation in many languages that will form, together with secondary literature, the basis for the historical analysis.”

As he continues with his quest to uncover answers to the modern-day conflict in the Middle East and beyond, it is truth that drives Kieser on.

“Humbly and sceptically, I believe that good historiography is driven by a love of truth. It has to use all conceptual, methodological and material possibilities to live this love.”

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ART, THEORY AND WARFARE Dr Kit Messham-Muir is an art theorist and museologist whose focus is the psychological and emotional dimensions of visualising war.

“We get lots of images of war from overseas, which is primarily the domain of the media.

We get to know war through embedded journalists in war zones who are after particularly impactful sound bite versions of the situation – because that’s what news is,” Messham-Muir explained.

“When an artist goes into war they look at it differently.”

His soon-to-be-released book, Double War: Shaun Gladwell, visual culture and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, looks at the work of official war artist Shaun Gladwell in relation to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“The artist’s mission is not to simply record, but to consider in a subjective way, over a long timeframe, and respond,” Messham-Muir said.

It is this, Messham-Muir believes, that provides the public with an all-important different view of war.

Drawing from many hours of interviews between Gladwell and Messham-Muir, Double War explores Gladwell’s Afghanistan work, placing it within the context of the visual culture, technology and politics of contemporary war.

Messham-Muir plans to follow-up this work on the use of images during the war on terror

by looking at the ongoing use of imagery in warfare and terror.

he is also passionate about encouraging people to connect with art.

“I will be looking at where contemporary images of terror originate, and will deal with some horrific imagery – I actually recoil from those kinds of images on a personal level, but as an academic, I’m also fascinated by why that might be.”

“I came from Wrexham, a very working class town in North Wales. When I was growing up there, art wasn’t very highly valued. But, I had an excellent teacher who opened art up for me and helped me understand that it isn’t this middle-class rarefied thing. It is actually dealing with ideas; it’s a different way of thinking. Ever since, I have felt motivated to find ways for other people to also see similar value in art.”

“We can actually trace the western world’s fear of images of beheadings back to European orientalist paintings – like Henri Régnault’s Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Granada, from 1870 – which hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris,” Messham-Muir said.

“The painting is of a middle-eastern man wiping blood off his sword with a decapitated head on the floor in front of him. However, it is painted by a European for a European audience. It’s a western construction of the middle east for consumption by the west.”

“The ongoing history of images of the middle east as a place to be feared is played-out in contemporary warfare – like the current conflict with ISIS. We’re seeing them take on board how the west’s historical fear of the middle east is articulated through imagery and using it to maximum effect to shock.”

This work links Messham-Muir’s research with Newcastle’s Centre for the History of Violence – of which he is a member.

While Messham-Muir’s research is primarily concerned with affect and interpretation,

In August 2014, Messham-Muir wrote a piece for online media outlet The Conversation titled: Three questions not to ask about art – and four to ask instead.

Over 80,000 people read the article, and it will be included in The Conversation’s year book, to be released in 2015.

“The readership of the article proved the very thing that motivated me to write it in the first place; that the vast majority of people feel a sense of alienation and disconnection from art, but they’re still curious. They still want to find a way in, to understand it.” Messham-Muir said.

“Art is just another way of visually or materially articulating ideas that doesn’t have to follow strictly scientific or systematic ways of thinking,” he explained.

“I think that’s one of the most amazing things about art – it validates a very subjective way of thinking.”

Dr Kit Messham-Muir at Newcastle Art Gallery

“Art is just another way of visually or materially articulating ideas that doesn’t have to follow strictly scientific or systematic ways of thinking”

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“Some historians have argued that the First World War brutalized belligerent societies – those who fought, the public at large, governments – and that this had a profound impact on the post-war world.”

Dr Matthew Lewis at Fort Scratchley Historical Site, Newcastle

VIOLENT PATHWAYS In today’s globalised world, with the increasing movement of people across borders and continents, could violent practices and mentalities move with them? Dr Matthew Lewis, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Centre for the History of Violence, sheds light on this issue in his comparative study of British policing in Ireland and Palestine after the First World War. “My new project looks at British paramilitary police who served in Ireland during the war of independence, and who then went to Palestine to police the conflict between the Arab and Jewish communities,” Lewis said.

“They were mostly veterans of the First World War. They got a bad reputation in Ireland for their involvement in reprisals and extrajudicial killings, and the assumption has been that they brought these same rough methods with them to Palestine.”

Lewis’ study offers a new perspective on the causes and dynamics of colonial violence in contrasting situations of imperial decline and acquisition, and examines the extent to which violent methods and mentalities were transmitted from one conflict situation to another.

“Some historians have argued that the First World War brutalised belligerent societies – those who fought, the public at large, governments – and that this had a profound impact on the post-war world,” Lewis said.

“This idea has informed debates about British paramilitaries in Ireland. But it has been challenged in recent times, and my project is in a unique position to test the competing ideas that have emerged around that debate.”

After completing his doctorate in History at Queen’s University, Belfast, in 2011, Lewis joined the Centre for War Studies at University College, Dublin. Here, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the European Research Council funded project The Limits of Demobilization: Paramilitary Violence in Europe and the Wider World, 1917-1923.

Now, as a Postdoctoral Fellow with the University of Newcastle’s Centre for the History of Violence, Lewis will contribute significantly to producing research with relevance and appeal beyond the academic world.

The Centre for the History of Violence explores every aspect of the history of violence, including concepts of violence, representations of violence, questions of interpersonal violence and issues of political and cultural violence.

The themes of Lewis’ work have compelling contemporary relevance. He addresses three aspects of the history of violence: government responses to insurgency and ethnic conflict; the practical challenges imposed by such campaigns; and the difficulties of maintaining order in times of transition. By considering these issues in a well-documented historical setting, this

research has the potential to positively inform the analysis of contemporary circumstances.

Along with his work on this project, Lewis released his first book in 2014 – Frank Aiken’s War: The Irish Revolution, 19161923. Based on research for his 2011 doctoral thesis, it explores the controversial revolutionary past of one of independent Ireland’s most prominent politicians and international statesmen, and the broader context of republican politics and violence in the borderlands of south-east Ulster amid the upheavals of revolution, partition and civil war.

During 2015, he will co-convene The First World War: Local, Global and Imperial Perspectives conference, which is hosted by the Centre for the History of Violence.

This event will seek to refocus discussion of the First World War and promote a greater appreciation of the conflict’s often omitted local, global and imperial contexts.

Lewis is also on the organisation committee for the 2015 Australasian Association for European History (AAEH) XXIV Biennial Conference: War, Violence, Aftermaths: Europe and the Wider World, which will be held at the University of Newcastle for the first time.

RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

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EVERYONE COMMUNICATES Providing services to people with disabilities is about more than the individual or their condition; it’s about how they experience education, employment, accommodation and relationships – and making society more equitable and accessible.

Improving services for people with a disability demands a multi-disciplinary approach. With unprecedented activity surrounding the introduction of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), for which the Hunter is a launch site, researchers at the University of Newcastle established the Disability Research Network in 2012.

The Network brings together researchers whose work has relevance to people with any type of disability and provides a forum that links them with any other interested parties in the region.

The Disability Research Network’s activity has already been translated into practical benefits for people with disability, through feedback on the draft legislation and rules regarding eligibility for the NDIS. Co-Convenor Associate Professor Bronwyn Hemsley, a speech pathologist, conducts research on how people with severe communication difficulties can better navigate the healthcare system.

People who cannot communicate using speech, either due to conditions like cerebral palsy and intellectual disability or due to an acquired injury like a stroke, are estimated to make up about 15 per cent of patients in hospital at any time.

Unfortunately, they face three times the risk of an adverse safety event in hospital, like a fall or a medication error. Since they cannot communicate their preferences around treatment, they may be excluded from decisions about their care.

Despite traditional communication aids such as alphabet boards or the popular mobile technology communication apps, Hemsley’s research has shown that communication is still compromised because of health workers’ attitudes to these patients.

“If society’s attitude is that this person can’t take part in communication, or if people don’t know how to adapt their communication, even if technology is available it doesn’t necessarily help,” Hemsley said.

The work of her research group has shown that people with severe communication difficulties need extra support from a carer when they go to hospital – not to take the place of the patient in communication, but to support the patient’s communication with health staff.

The rules of the NDIS now allow people with severe communication impairments to allocate their NDIS funds to carer communication support while in hospital.

“As our research shows that carers have an important role in protecting patients with communication difficulties in hospital, so these changes to the NDIS might mean a cost savings to the Government if those patients experience fewer safety incidents,” Hemsley said.

An important part of the work of the Disability Research Network is to listen to people who live with a disability.

“Rather than seeing a person with a disability in a passive way, we acknowledge that they have much to contribute as experts in their own right. Including people with severe communication disabilities as members of the research team, expert reference groups, and participants, means our research can be relevant and makes it easier to translate the findings to the real world where we can make a difference,” Hemsley said.

“If society’s attitude is that this person can’t take part in communication, or if people don’t know how to adapt their communication, even if technology is available it doesn’t necessarily help.”

University of Newcastle Disability Research Network at Hunter Medical Research Institute (HMRI) building, Newcastle

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BRINGING SPEECH THERAPY TO VIETNAM Dr Sally Hewat, a University of Newcastle (UON) speech pathologist who specialises in the treatment of stuttering, is working to establish speech therapy in Vietnam – where, as a profession, it doesn’t exist.

In collaboration with the Trinh Foundation Australia and the University of Pham Ngoc Thach (UPNT), Hewat has been working to develop a two-year postgraduate speech pathology program in Vietnam. This is the first ever speech therapy course in Vietnam and approximately 80 per cent of the lectures are provided by experts from Australian universities.

Two years ago the first cohort of the training program graduated. They were a combination of already trained health or allied health professionals in Vietnam. Mostly nurses, physio therapists, a couple of doctors, and an ears, nose and throat surgeon.

“All of them will go back to their existing jobs; they won’t be employed as speech therapists but they will do speech therapy work. So it’s an emerging profession – it’s not officially recognised yet,” Hewat explained.

“During the two-year program in Vietnam, I delivered a course in managing stuttering.

As part of the course the students and I developed a stuttering treatment program for adults in Vietnam. At the end of the course, we delivered the treatment program to

members of a self-help group for stuttering in Vietnam.

“This treatment program for adults in Vietnam is obviously very different to what we do in Australia. We can’t assume that what we do here will work over there. So we developed the program within that context and then taught the students research methodologies to evaluate it.

“I like the process of collaborating and supporting others to capacity build. Not to have outside influences come in and say we’ll do it for you; it is more capacity building from the ground up.”

In 2014, Hewat received the Medal from the People’s Committee of Ho Chi Minh City – a prestigious honour not usually received by foreigners, which is awarded by the Mayor of the city. She also received a certificate and gift from UPNT. “In Vietnam, when you get an award like that, you know how valuable it is, because those sorts of awards don’t go to foreigners, ever.

This, again, was recognition of why we need to continue to support it; because that’s the only way it’s going to develop,” Hewat said.

“The benefits of our international collaboration have been felt both in Vietnam and here in Newcastle.

“The Vietnamese students and community now have access and exposure to experts in the speech pathology field from Australia and have the opportunity to learn within a discipline that previously did not exist in Vietnam.”

This collaboration also provides UON students enrolled in the Bachelor of Speech Pathology (honours) the opportunity to complete a clinical placement and project work in Vietnam.

“We recently had eight students return from three weeks in Vietnam, and their responses to the experience were overwhelming.

They get to be hands-on and work with levels of complexity that they wouldn’t get to in Australia – working with children and professionals who speak a totally different language,” Hewat said.

“Most importantly, the community now has the opportunity to access speech pathology services in hospitals throughout Ho Chi Minh City that were not previously available.”

However, there is still much to be done in Vietnam for those who are in need of speech therapy. Hewat believes the majority of her career will be spent developing the speech therapy profession in Vietnam and the surrounding countries.

“Even though interventions for younger children who stutter are where we should focus some attention, this is way down the track. We need to have professionals on the ground who can deliver this service,” Hewat explained.

“It’s really tricky; in Australia we would focus on community education and early intervention but in Vietnam, I can talk about early intervention and the optimal time to treat stuttering – that is, before they start school – however the fact of the matter is there is no one to treat it over there, bar a proportion of the 32 speech therapists we have now trained.

“Every person has the right to communicate.

Through the development of speech therapy as a profession in Vietnam, this may eventually be possible.”

Dr Sally Hewat in the International Office, University of Newcastle Callaghan campus

“Every person has the right to communicate. Through the development of speech therapy as a profession in Vietnam, this may eventually be possible.”

RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

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POETRY IN MOTION “…there is something fundamentally human about someone coming up against a system of knowledge and blowing a raspberry at it.”

Dr David Musgrave in the Press Book House Cafe, Newcastle

With a recent revival in Australia’s poetry scene, acclaimed Australian poet Dr David Musgrave is paving the way for others to follow his path to success.

As a nationally significant poet and novelist, researcher, lecturer, critic and publisher, Musgrave has a deep familiarity with all aspects of the thriving contemporary Australian poetry scene.

He has authored five books of poetry: To Thalia (2004), On Reflection (2005), Phantom Limb (2010), Glissando: A Melodrama (2010) and Concrete Tuesday (2011). His work has won or been shortlisted for a swathe of awards, including the Henry Lawson, Broadway, Bruce Dawe, Somerset, Sidney Nolan Gallery, Grace Leven, Josephine Ulrick, John Shaw Neilson, Alec Bolton, SA Festival and WA Premier’s and Newcastle Poetry Prizes.

As a lecturer in the University of Newcastle’s highly successful and rapidly growing creative writing department, his research is closely aligned with his teaching of creative writing in contemporary Australian poetry.

He is also one of Australia’s leading critics and publishers of quality writing.

“It’s a very exciting time to be working in this area. There’s so much being produced at the moment and people’s ability to research and criticise seriously doesn’t keep up,” Musgrave said.

However, he also knows the downsides of trying to earn a living as a working poet.

In 1997, having completed his PhD on Menippean satire at the University of Sydney and his first novel, he was unable to find a publisher.

The only way Musgrave could earn a living was to take a job in IT for a health insurance company. He stayed there for nine years, writing creatively for several hours early every morning before going to the office as Chief Information Officer.

Musgrave is now considered to be among the foremost of his generation of contemporary Australian poets and, with the publication of his work in the United States and Britain, is gaining international acclaim.

“IT and poetry are not that different,” Musgrave said. “Poetry is about solving a problem, a need to express something, create something or say something, and the creative process is continuing to solve problems until you arrive at that point.”

A key theme of his work is the continuity throughout English literature of satire, a sceptical and playful critical attitude toward knowledge itself. While there is also a thread of satirical humour through his work, it is at the same time serious.

As well as continuing his creative writing during this period, Musgrave built a reputation as a critic and researcher, specialising in satire and the grotesque in English and Australian literature.

“I have a joy of satire, of being in it and part of it, of making fun of it. It seems to me there is something fundamentally human about someone coming up against a system of knowledge and blowing a raspberry at it,” Musgrave said.

While toying with the idea of publishing others’ poetry, he was approached by a friend whose publisher had backed out of a book project. Musgrave used his own literary prize money to publish the book.

His independent publishing house Puncher & Wattmann was born in 2005 and has become Australia’s leading publisher of Australian poetry, with 85 titles on its list by some of the country’s major poets, novelists and biographers.

“Poetry offers people a way of discovering new ideas, of giving expression to things that otherwise can’t be expressed,” Musgrave said.

“If our understanding of the world consisted entirely of science and popular culture, it doesn’t seem to me we would necessarily be able to think of new ways to perceive things or do things in non-rational ways. And most people would admit that, without that aspect, they would feel impoverished.”

Musgrave's current research interests include the rise of free verse in Australian poetry; the so-called Generation of ‘68 and the introduction of postmodernism into Australian poetry, and the ensuing conflict between conservative and avant garde camps; and the anti-pastoral tradition in Australian poetry.

He is also exploring the synergies between his own creative work and his research, focusing on the contemporary avant garde and their influences and in particular poetic theories of ‘voice’ and ‘voicedness’ in poetry. His booklength poem Anatomy of Voice, which investigates these issues, was published in 2014.

He is also continuing to write poems for a new collection, Fabulae, and to work on his next novel, The Obituary Collector.

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RECENT BOOKS

The Missionary, the Catechist and the Hunter: Foucault, Protestantism and Colonialism Christina Petterson Brill (2014) The Missionary, the Catechist and the Hunter examines the role of Protestantism in the Danish colonisation of Greenland. By focusing on role of Lutheran ideology and its inherent inequality in terms of class, race and gender, the study shows how this ideology undergirded the colonial project, and provided it with a mode of subjectification where the identity of the indigenous population was transformed.

One of the results of this process was the emergence of a Greenlandic intelligentsia, who were primarily Greenlandic men born to Danish fathers. They were integrated into the colonial apparatus and educated with the aim to convert their fellow Greenlanders. As part of their education, the men learned to express themselves in writing, which as a technique of abstraction and objectification profoundly affected the way in which they viewed the world and their fellow Greenlanders.

A central figure of this recasting is the hunter, commonly regarded as quintessential Inuit figure. This figure is traced back to the efforts of the emerging Greenlandic intelligentsia to distance themselves from the hunting lifestyle by producing an abstract hunter identity in Greenlandic literature.

This book will be of importance to anyone with an interest in colonial history. However, those who enjoy theoretical analyses will also find the ideology and power of representation thought-provoking.

In the Vale of Tears: On Marxism and Theology V

Frank Aiken’s War: The Irish Revolution, 1916-1923

Roland Boer

Matthew Lewis

Brill (2014)

UCD Press (2014)

In the Vale of Tears is the conclusion to Roland Boer’s five-volume series, The Criticism of Heaven and Earth.

Frank Aiken's War is a comprehensive study that provides the first in-depth look at Aiken's role in Ireland's turbulent revolutionary period, 1916-23. From an adolescent farmer to a local Sinn Fein activist and provincial guerrilla leader, and eventually to chief-of-staff of the IRA, Frank Aiken has an early, hidden history.

Awarded the 2014 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize, this book also stands alone as a distinct intervention in some burning issues of our time.

The book brings to a culmination the project for a renewed and enlivened debate over the interaction between Marxism and religion.

It does so by offering the author's own response to that tradition.

It simultaneously draws upon the rich insights of a significant number of Western Marxists and strikes out on its own. Thus, it argues for the crucial role of political myth on the Left; explores the political ambivalence at the heart of Christianity; challenges the bent among many on the Left to favour the unexpected rupture of kairós as a key to revolution; is highly suspicious of the ideological and class alignments of ethics; offers a thorough reassessment of the role of fetishism in the Marxist tradition; and broaches the question of death, unavoidable for any Marxist engagement with religion.

In a career spanning 50 years he served in numerous high-profile ministerial roles and earned widespread recognition for his work as Ireland's representative to the United Nations. Yet these later successes masked a controversial past.

Dr Lewis creates a detailed map of Aiken's formative years, exploring the early movements of the man that would place him at the forefront of Irish and international Free State politics. Drawing on a wide variety of original archival sources, this book blends elements of biography and local study to offer both the first exhaustive account of Aiken's role in the conflict, and the first in-depth study of the broader context of republican politics and violence in Ulster in which he played such a pivotal role. “[Frank Aiken’s] role in the revolutionary period is subject to close examination by Matthew Lewis in a book that shows its academic origins in the detail presented, but which succeeds in fleshing out the life of an individual who was formative in the birth and development of the state.” Evening Echo, newspaper, Ireland

Fantasy and the Real World in British Children’s Literature: The Power of Story Caroline Webb Routledge (2014) Fantasy and the Real World in British Children’s Literature examines the children’s books of three extraordinary British writers – J.K. Rowling, Diana Wynne Jones, and Terry Pratchett –and investigates their sophisticated use of narrative strategies not only to engage children in reading, but to educate them into becoming mature readers and indeed individuals.

The book demonstrates how in quite different ways these writers establish reader expectations by drawing on conventions in existing genres only to subvert those expectations. Their strategies lead young readers to evaluate for themselves both the power of story to shape our understanding of the world and to develop a sense of identity and agency.

UoN 2015/B9730

Rowling, Jones, and Pratchett provide their readers with fantasies that are pleasurable and imaginative, but far from encouraging escape from reality, they convey important lessons about the complexities and challenges of the real world – and how these may be faced and solved. All three writers deploy the tropes and imaginative possibilities of fantasy to disturb, challenge, and enlarge the world of their readers.

Entertaining Children: The Participation of Youth in the Entertainment Industry

Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing

Edited by Gillian Arrighi and Victor Emeljanow

Edited by Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith

Palgrave Macmillan (2014)

Palgrave Macmillan (2014)

Part of the Palgrave McMillan series: Studies in Theatre and Performance History, this book offers a fascinating scholarly investigations into the employment and participation of children in the entertainment industry with examples drawn from historical and contemporary contexts.

This collection examines the diverse material cultures through which early modern women’s writing was produced, transmitted, and received, focusing on the ways it was originally packaged and promoted, how it circulated in its contemporary contexts, and how it was read and received in its original publication and in later revisions and redactions. In doing so, Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing offers an account of the ways in which cultural mediation shapes our interpretations of early modern women’s texts.

Children have been exploited as performers and wooed energetically as consumers throughout history.

These thrusts have brought managers and parents into conflict with legislators who have attempted to control such exploitation, often the result of preconceived ideas about the role of children and childhood in their cultural contexts.

In addition to British and North American perspectives, the contributors encompass practices in Australasia, Italy, India, Indonesia, Taiwan, and mainland China, spanning from the eighteenth century to the interwar years and contemporary twenty-first century practices.

This thought-provoking read will offer fresh insights into the utilisation of children as performers and theatre workers across many cultures.

“This excellent collection of essays should inspire more theatre historians and cultural critics to pay attention to the centrality of children as makers and consumers of entertainment.” Marah Gubar, Director, Children’s Literature Program, University of Pittsburgh, USA

The collection draws upon recent concepts of publication as ‘event’ – multiple, choral and occurring across different modes and times – in order to expand our conception of who early modern women writers were, how they wrote and circulated their texts, and how the reception of their work over time determines who and what is read now.

Collectively, the essays in this book challenge not only how we read, analyse and value early modern women’s writing, but also our understanding of the production, transmission, and reception of early modern literature more broadly.

Research Directions 2015 Editorial Director Catherine Oddie Editor Jessie Reid Writers Jessie Reid, Helen Signy (Write Media) Design Bounce Design Photography Murray McKean Photography Photo Wrangler Linda Hutchinson A digital version of this publication is available at newcastle.edu.au/faculty/education-arts/ research-directions.

Faculty of Education and Arts newcastle.edu.au/faculty/education-arts The University of Newcastle Callaghan NSW 2308 Australia Faculty Research Unit Deputy Head of Faculty Professor Hugh Craig Hugh.Craig@newcastle.edu.au Assistant Dean, Research Training Associate Professor Ros Smith Ros.Smith@newcastle.edu.au Faculty Research Development Manager Catherine Oddie Catherine.Oddie@newcastle.edu.au Research Officers Linda Hutchinson Linda.Hutchinson@newcastle.edu.au Kristy Atkins Kristy.Atkins@newcastle.edu.au Research & Research Training Officer Amanda Hall-Griffin Amanda.Hall@newcastle.edu.au Research Unit Administrative Officer Kristy Jackson Kristy.Jackson@newcastle.edu.au Digital Communication Officer Jessie Reid Jessie.Reid@newcastle.edu.au Priority Research Centre in Physical Activity and Nutrition Director Professor Ron Plotnikoff Ron.Plotnikoff@newcastle.edu.au Centre Coordinator Wayne Durand Wayne.Durand@newcastle.edu.au newcastle.edu.au/research-centre/pan/ CRICOS Provider 00109J