Search

The rewriting of a first-year university sociology course provided the opportunity to introduce the use of digital narratives into the classroom. This technological change in course delivery led the authors to consider the ramifications of the "digital native" debate in teaching university-level youth studies. The focus of this article is students' responses to and uptake of the process of applying digital technologies in the production of a higher-order digital project.

This first novel of Mexican film director, scriptwriter, poet, multi-award-winning playwright, journalist, and political activist, Sabina Berman, appeared in English translation in 2012. Berman's autistic narrator, Karen Nieto, uses notebooks and diaries to produce a memoir-style narrative that undercuts Cartesian understandings of rational human(ist) subjectivity; Nieto is embodied, and embedded in the world, then she attributes meaning. This paper argues that Berman repositions readers in relation to standard human subjectivity and values by consistently calling attention to differences between (an assumed) neurotypical reader and the representation of a neurodivergent narrator. Taking a Disability Rights perspective, Berman refuses to subsume the narrator's neurodivergence to a neurotypical plot by representing her as an autistic savant or allowing her life story to be reduced to pain and suffering through social or medicalized deficits. An enactive reading of this autistic narrative highlights differences between neurotypical and neurodivergent positions without favoring the former as a point of origin or destination thereby facilitating a revaluation of what it means to be human. It highlights embodiment and embeddedness in environment. The paper also examines stylistic features of the text's materiality that engage with echolalia and alexithymia to analyze how they enable defamiliarization to reposition readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Janette Turner Hospital's novels do not engage with any singular feminist agenda. Indeed, Laurel Bergmann suggests that Turner Hospital's commitment to feminism is 'constant' but 'shifting', (1) and she links [...]

In the Anthropocene, social identities have become globally technologized, mediatized, and medicalized more than ever before, so “ordinary” people become complicit in forms of becoming detrimental to their well-being, but profitable for a few. In this article, I argue that Posthumanist narratives use various discursive strategies to generate shifts in readers that form, or bring to consciousness, a sense ofalready beingPosthuman. Part one locates the novel in relation to critical posthumanism, and part two explicates the narrative devices that facilitate critical posthuman consciousness. Part three offers brief thoughts about how to more fully explore critical posthumanist narrative because this article is but a step toward thinking about what may be relevant to Posthumanist narrative practices. Indeed, it is arguably appropriate for Posthumanism to remain “dynamic and shifting” (Ferrando, “Posthumanism, Transhumanism” 17) as it seeks to retain an openness and receptivity to many ways of becoming and many ways of “doing.” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a close reading of Australian local newspapersThe Queenslander, The Week, andThe Logan Witness. It argues that by representing triumph over local challenges these newspapers also constituted a late-nineteenth-century civilizing process. They played a vital role in generating community cohesion. Stability and civilization were represented to the target audience of families and entrepreneurs as ‘natural’ and appropriately embodied by colonizers. Embedding a sense of belonging established a ‘civilising (sic) goodness’ through disavowal of the displacement of indigenous peoples as familiar community practices were enacted. In this highly literate population newspapers, rather than books, provided local Australian content. A case study of the Lahey family, who arrived as South East Queensland became available for serious settlement in the early 1870s, personalizes the settlement ideology produced by local newspapers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on Augusto Boal's revolutionary deconstruction of the aesthetic space of theatre in preference for social action theatre existing beyond the proscenium, the article focuses on the concepts of performativity, emotion and embodiment as they occur in experimental forms of improvised performance and explores the relationship of affect to agency. It suggests that the symbiosis of affect and performance marks the shift to performativity, recognising performativity as a tool of agency. Integral to the argument is the recognition that, again drawing on Boal, people have a capacity to see themselves seeing themselves, prompting deeper understandings of self in relation to the social. Accordingly, the paper espouses an awareness of how improvised, community theatre projects shift participant understandings of emerging and liminal identities and argues that in order for the performance to become performative, there must be the taking up and nurturing of a contingent, discursively produced agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an overview of the novel "The Last Magician," by Janette Turner Hospital. The author gives a short orientation to the book and analyzes the way in which Hospital enables the readers to become more aware of how the subjects are constructed. The author of this article argues on how Hospital encourages her readers to criticize the process of identity acquisition by going beyond the dichotomy of inclusion in order to examine the suffering that it constitutes.

Presents the short story "Dreamtime," by Sue Lovell.