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This article tackles specific issues that arise in teaching human rights in a Western academic institution. As critical human rights scholars, we are concerned with a pedagogy of human rights that gives respect to cultural diversity and the cross-cultural applicability of concepts and social issues in ways that are not antithetical to the purpose of human rights itself. In the Australian context where we are located both as human rights educators and immigrants, our approach depends on giving critical attention to questions of colonialism and its aftermath; to how contemporary human rights are understood across diverse cultures and subjectivities; and how to enable decolonizing methodologies to ensure an ethical exchange and negotiation of human rights learning and teaching in a higher education context. This approach is significant since contemporary Australia is an immigrant nation, a settler colonial society that is located in the South and yet problematically dominated by ontological and epistemological orientations towards the North. We argue that a critical pedagogy of human rights involves a robust non-colonizing and ethical engagement that is both self-reflexive and aware of complicit power relations. We seek to interrogate power as understood through the relationship between lived experience, knowledge and education. In our article we examine, through examples in our own teaching practice, how we seek to create and enable a critical pedagogical space that allows such an ethical engagement to take place. [Note: The title on the website is "Enabling a Critical Pedagogy of Human Rights in Higher Education through De-Colonising Methodologies."]

This article introduces the special issue of 'In Queer Minds' by discussing the conceptual impact of queer in formal educational institutions and the importance of developing and sustaining the queer pedagogical encounter. The introduction provides a brief philosophical and cultural study of queer as critical to the understanding of what it means to be human. It argues that universities and other educational contexts must make queer a common cause for the betterment of self, society and the world. The various articles in the special issue are also briefly introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors reflect on the significant role of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (CSAA) and Cultural Studies as an academic discipline in Australia in celebration of the organization's 30th anniversary. Topics discussed include the growth of the CSAA, the commitment of the CSAA to its community of scholars, and the importance of attending the CSAA conference.

In response to Australian policies that impose punitive barriers to resettlement on many people seeking asylum, a range of civil society groups have initiated acts of welcome and inclusion, including some within universities. Denied permanent protection even when found to be a refugee, people who arrived from 13 August 2012 are forced to remain in limbo and many are effectively excluded from accessing higher education. A collective of people seeking asylum, academics, students and community members in Perth, Western Australia, has responded by working together on higher education projects that seek to open up the university to people seeking asylum. In this article, members of the collective critically reflect on these projects and their involvement. Its key aim is to demonstrate the importance of lived experience and collaboration in developing and enabling higher education possibilities for refugees and asylum seekers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tackles specific issues that arise in teaching human rights in a Western academic institution. As critical human rights scholars, we are concerned with a pedagogy of human rights that gives respect to cultural diversity and the cross-cultural applicability of concepts and social issues in ways that are not antithetical to the purpose of human rights itself. In the Australian context where we are located both as human rights educators and immigrants, our approach depends on giving critical attention to questions of colonialism and its aftermath; to how contemporary human rights are understood across diverse cultures and subjectivities; and how to enable decolonizing methodologies to ensure an ethical exchange and negotiation of human rights learning and teaching in a higher education context. This approach is significant since contemporary Australia is an immigrant nation, a settler colonial society that is located in the South and yet problematically dominated by ontological and epistemological orientations towards the North. We argue that a critical pedagogy of human rights involves a robust non-colonizing and ethical engagement that is both self-reflexive and aware of complicit power relations. We seek to interrogate power as understood through the relationship between lived experience, knowledge and education. In our article we examine, through examples in our own teaching practice, how we seek to create and enable a critical pedagogical space that allows such an ethical engagement to take place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the dusk of the twentieth century the confluence of sexuality and the multicultural subject offers a deep interrogation into identity. On the edge of the world, Australia is experiencing a poignant moment of identity crisis. For someone who is from a multicultural, multisexual background, identity is fragmented. Law and society demand unambiguous subjects, fixed by socio-political-cultural mores and expectations. To be unfixed presents difficulties in negotiating systems of knowledge and power which are fundamentally homeostatic. In the end it is all a matter of being unfixed but connected to 'others,' aware of the substance beyond identity and labels. This is being unfixed in a fixated world, challenging gravity, resisting definition and compromise.