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Curriculum, as a policy and way of moving through educational experience, is entwined with an ongoing history of invasion in Australia and similar invader‐colonial contexts. As a result of this, the conceptual foundations of curriculum in Australia reproduce colonial epistemologies as normative modes of knowing and consideration. One way of seeing how this is possible and easily reproduced is through a consideration of how renderings and representations of "place" – the complex entanglements of lands, histories, and identit(y/ies) – mediate both how (a) invasion can be normalised as a historical, geographic, and political "placial" reality, and (b) students and teachers might experience education in and of place. Indeed, "place" is a central guiding concept in official curriculum policy just as much as place is an experienced curriculum both within the school and in the broader world. In this respect, this paper looks to unpack how the concept of place is represented in curriculum policy and the attendant assumptions and implicit discourses that this (re)produces about the experiences of people in/of invaded place. Through a look at the coming revision to the Humanities and Social Science's learning area of the Australian Curriculum, I look to how the curriculum as policy frames place as synonymous with invader place epistemically and how this mediates what students can know and themselves feel about the embodied experience of learning about/in/of place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers Australian receptions of C. P. Snow's The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), and of the controversy over the literary critic F. R. Leavis's combative 1962 response to it. Taking a lead from conceptual insights in global histories of science and the history of knowledge, the paper considers the ways knowledge claims iterate differently in different geographic and cultural contexts. Elements of the Snow–Leavis dispute resonated among Australian scientists, cultural critics, journalists and poets, while others did not. Snow's diagnosis of a disciplinary antagonism between the humanities and the sciences was central to Australian receptions of the controversy, but wider political issues, emphasised in much of the more sophisticated historiography of the 'two cultures' as a British-American controversy, were largely ignored. This reception reflected the post-war expansion of Australian higher education, and the shifting relations within it between the humanities and the sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his practice of intellectual history Ian Hunter has highlighted the productivity of a contextual approach to the institutions and discourses of philosophy, religion, law, and government. Deploying such an approach, his essay for this journal on the humanities in post-1960s Australia invites us to reconsider the terms in which the contemporary humanities have accounted for the world around us and in us. In drawing attention to some other examples of the way in which Hunter has applied this method, this paper explores the implications of a contextualisation of legal judgements that express ethical preferences which efface their historical conditioning. The paper suggests that such an approach might be productively applied in the work of understanding other kinds of legal judgements and policy settings that are commonly marked by a high degree of political agitation, such as contemporary immigration policy and border controls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the attitudes and perceptions of three cohorts of Australian humanities and social science undergraduate students towards peer assessment. It seeks to gain a deeper understanding of local dissatisfaction with peer assessment through an in‐depth analysis of students’ contributions to focus group discussions. Responding to education theorists’ claims that peer and other forms of innovative assessment empower students, the paper concentrates on themes of power evident within students’ narratives. The interpretive framework coheres around four interrelated conceptions of power: sovereign, epistemological, disciplinary and structural. Students were found to support the notion of peer assessment as a formative exercise, yet were highly critical of it as a summative practice. Significantly, some of the students’ dissatisfaction stemmed from broader changes across the higher education sector more generally. The paper draws attention to the need for this to be taken into account when considering assessment as a technology of power and empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws from the ARC Discovery project called Moving Ideas: Mobile Policies, Researchers and Connections in the Social Sciences and Humanities - Australia in the Global Context (2006-2009). This project explored the ways that ideas travel and how knowledge transforms through travel. One aspect of the study was the critical examination of various research policies around the world that are associated with moving ideas and moving researchers. These are often coupled with notions of 'brain drain-gain/mobility' and diaspora. A second focus was on the mobility biographies of globally mobile intellectuals with various links to Australia and on the implications of their mobility for their ideas, politics and national and trans-national identifications. It is our view that the actual experiences and insights of such people have the potential to enhance researcher (academic) mobility policies. A third concern has been to address the question of what it means to globalise the research imagination. In addressing this question we have drawn on leading researchers from around the globe who undertake research on globalisation itself. The paper to follow draws from selected publications associated with this project. The book from the project, to be completed in 2010, is titled Moving Ideas and Mobile Intellectuals. It should be noted at the outset that our focus in the project and in this discussion paper is on researchers in the social sciences and humanities including but not exclusively educational researchers. We begin by asking what it means to globalise research and how is this related to the nation-state'? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy conceptualizations of the global knowledge economy have led to the channelling of much Higher Education and Research and Development funding into the priority areas of science and technology. Among other things, this diversion of funding calls into question the future of traditional humanities and creative arts faculties. How these faculties, and the disciplines within them, might reconfigure themselves for the knowledge economy is, therefore, a question of great importance, although one that as yet has not been adequately answered. This paper explores some of the reasons for this by looking at how innovation in the knowledge economy is typically theorized. It takes one policy trajectory informing Australia's key innovation statement as an example. It argues that, insofar as the formation of this knowledge economy policy has been informed by a techno-economic paradigm, it works to preclude many humanities and creative arts disciplines. This paper, therefore, looks at how an alternative theorization of the knowledge economy might offer a more robust framework from within which to develop humanities and creative arts Higher Education and Research policy in the knowledge economy, both in Australia and internationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wildlife roadkill is a tragic blind spot in public perception, both internationally and in Australia. Despite an increasing body of data documenting the frequency and distribution of roadkill, and its consequences for specific animal populations, scientists and engineers alone have been unable to develop solutions that challenge the prevailing indifference to the problem. This points to an urgent need to develop approaches to roadkill which engage the general public, and which draw from the insights of a range of scholarly communities. This paper contends that a broader response to the problem, and to the conceptual basis of its solution, is required if we are to effect substantial change. The author, an ecologist, has attempted to draw on the work of humanities scholars on the subject of roadkill in order to demonstrate the value of their ideas for enriching our understanding of the problem. This essay also aims to develop a deeper understanding of the significance of roadkill by exploring the different ways it is understood by specific groups, such as those interested in its consumption, its artistic portrayal, and educational potential. The diverse perspectives from the humanities, combined with the quantitative and species-specific approach of research scientists, promises to overcome the current impasse and build a more robust and wide-ranging public discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is increasing pressure for university researchers to secure 'end-user' support for their research projects. Yet the ways in which this imperative affects humanities researchers, operating in a science-centric funding environment, have not yet been fully explored. This paper presents the findings of an empirical study into the experiences of humanities researchers in securing competitive national funding for research involving collaborations with the private and public sector. It also provides quantitative data as to the funding behaviour of one of Australia's peak research funding bodies, the Australian Research Council (ARC). The findings clearly show that humanities researchers struggle to secure support for their research. There is also evidence to suggest that, despite rhetorical support from the ARC that it values research which provides cultural benefit, it too particularly prioritises research that promises economic advantages for both the project's partners and wider community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses one of the weaknesses of many rankings - the exclusion of the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS) from university and discipline cluster ranking systems and examines some ways in which this situation can be corrected. In particular, it traces the development of indicators such as 'target expanded' citation analysis and tiering or ranking of outlets, including books and conferences as well as journals. It draws on experience in Australia, especially with the attempt to construct consensually derived tiered outlets for numerous disciplines including those in HASS in the context of the introduction of a new Research Quality Framework along the lines of similar exercises in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I want to ask whether there is anything to be gained by taking seriously a posthumanist analysis of the relationship between humanity and the natural world, one that in fact extinguishes the dualism and produces only ‘naturecultures’. I will examine this question through a new analysis of the relationship between gum trees and Australia. Most humanist accounts, such as those developed in ‘traditional’ social anthropology and sociology, privilege the activity, agency, and representations of humans, and in so doing render the natural world and its individual species as passive and of interest only insofar as they provide a palette of meanings for essentially human symbolism, dreamings, and imaginaries. Such an approach has an impeccable track record from Emile Durkheim to Mary Douglas and it is not one I want to challenge here per Se. What I do want to challenge is the implicit assumption that this is all there is to, or all we can say about, the relationship between nature and humanity. Rather than (only) ask what nature (or gum trees in this case) means, I want to ask (also) what nature does, and, importantly, what implications those actions have for the world, nature, humans, and ‘the social’. I argue that this approach takes us considerably further towards a more mature sociology of nature in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the divergent theoretical developments in the UK and US disability studies and posits some explanations for these differing trajectories. History, politics, space, place and the search for identity have all played important roles. These emergent and hotly debated developments add a wealth of material to the epistemological project. The recent collections by Barnes et al. (2002) Disability studies today, and Snyder et al. (2002) Disability studies: enabling the humanities, wall be used as pivotal works. However, the question remains as to what explanatory power discourses developed within western metropolitan national cultures have for exploring the experience of disability in cultures on the peripheries. This analysis is being undertaken by an English bom academic, who has been living in Australia for over 20 years and has been keenly watching and participating in the transatlantic battles over the past decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]