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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? (Contains 4 endnotes.)

Elite schools around the world aspire to produce perfect students and yet there are always obstacles to this perfection being achieved. In this paper, we suggest that this process of perfectionism and obstruction can best be understood using a methodology that looks to the creative arts, rather than the usual social science orthodoxies. Our focus in this paper is therefore not on methodology as a technique, but rather methodology as a resource for thought. Using Lars Von Trier's film "The Five Obstructions" as a point of departure, we suggest that the quest for perfect students, or indeed perfect humans, is one that ignores the inherent obstacles that block pathways to perceived perfection. Our research draws on ethnographic fieldwork from six elite secondary schools in Argentina, Australia, Barbados, England, Hong Kong, and South Africa. We posit a creative methodology permits a coming to terms with the abstractions required when analyzing and interpreting large amounts of data from a multi-sited ethnographic study. This approach makes it feasible to draw some conclusions about a common characteristic--perfectionism--among elite schools around the globe.

Privileged benefaction in elite schools and the moral dilemmas, contradictions and power politics involved are the focus of this paper. The notion of "the gift" provides our analytical lens. We concentrate on two girls' schools--one in South Africa and one in England. These were both built, in various ways, on the British model of public schooling. These schools pride themselves on their gifting practices. We offer a broad overview of the different local and global manifestations of and justifications for these practices as they occur in these schools and in the transnational organisations of which the schools are members.

How are elite schools caught up in the changing processes of globalisation? Is globalisation a new phenomenon for them? This paper focuses on the globalising practices that selected elite schools adopt. It also explores how globalisation is impacting on the social purposes of elite schools, which conventionally have been to serve privileged social groups. It seeks to begin a conversation about whether such schools are involved in securing advantage for social grouping that exists beyond the nation state on the global stage. It draws from a multisited global ethnography of elite schools in globalising circumstances.

Constructions of femininity and attendant notions of feminism are being produced in different ways in different places around the world. This is a complicated global process that cannot be reduced to analyses that take place in nation states. This paper seeks to respond to and enhance Angela McRobbie's compelling argument about understandings of contemporary girlhood, primarily in the UK context, by drawing into the fold Aihwa Ong's powerful thinking around theories of transnationality. Rather than repeating arguments about constructions of femininity that are invariably articulated within national confines, the discussion demonstrates the transnational nature of these subjective constructions by referring to recent ethnographic research undertaken in two elite schools in England and India, and focusing particularly on in-depth interviews and focus groups conducted with some of the young women who attend these schools.

This paper joins a barely begun conversation about multi-sited and global ethnography in educational research; a conversation that is likely to intensify along with growing interest in the links between education, globalisation, internationalisation and transnationalism. Drawing on an ongoing multi-sited global ethnography of elite schools and globalisation, this paper explores the role of travel in multi-sited global ethnography and offers a feminist engagement with it. It considers the idea of fieldwork as a travel practice through three different travel registers; the traveller's tale, critical travel studies and travel as exile. In so doing, it illustrates the reflexive affordances each register offers with regard to the directions of our feminist inquiries into elite schools and our feminist ethnographic practices. (Contains 8 notes.)

In order to enhance understandings of the international mobility of researchers and the implications of their mobility for knowledge production and circulation, we need to develop more sophisticated conceptual resources. Here we draw on and seek to develop ideas generated from literary theory and geography in order to highlight the links between internationally mobile researchers, knowledge, geography and power. In particular, we develop three interrelated concepts: "geographies of power/knowledge", "empires of knowledge", and "edges of empires". We also turn to Edward Said's notion of the "exilic intellectual" because it speaks to the manner in which some mobile individuals navigate this terrain, as well as to issues of their links to place, positionality and the academy. The paper puts these concepts to work as we ask "What do they look like through the lens of an individual's intellectual biography?" and "How can a biography add nuance to the concepts?" Overall we adopt what Said calls a "worldly" perspective that involves considering the time and place of ideas. (Contains 13 notes.)

We seek to contribute to political and policy analyses of globalisation by attending to global flows of emotions and by developing the concept global emoscapes. In so doing we build on Arjun Appadurai's theorisation of the disjunctive scapes of the global cultural economy. As a way of illustrating the benefits of our approach, we deploy it to analyse the scapes associated with the global financial crisis. We show how emoscapes are entangled with financescapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes in the broader context of the global capitalist economy, particularly its most recent manifestation in the form of "financialisation". Our overall implication is that attention to emoscapes helps to enrich critical analyses of policy and politics. We hope that this paper inspires others to build on our approach to conduct research on education policy. (Contains 2 notes.)

Through selected theories of melancholia, this paper seeks to shed some fresh interpretive light on the reproduction and disruption of gender, violence and family turmoil across generations of mothers and daughters. The originality of the paper lies in its exploratory deployment of theories of melancholia to consider issues of women, violence and generation. It addresses these matters through a discussion of the intergenerational emotional archives accumulated by two mother-daughter pairs in relation to their different experiences of sexual and other violence. It shares the mothers' experiences of violence in their childhood and shows how these help to shape the ways in which they raise their daughters and address the troubles that their daughters experience. Different theories of melancholia assist us to explain the dissimilar emotional dynamics between these mother and daughter pairs. But equally their stories suggest the analytical potential of different theories of melancholia for understanding women's and girls' diverse responses to violence. Freud's, Irigaray's and Silverman's constructions of melancholia, which are to some extent based on notions of emptiness, lack and insufficiency, are deployed alongside Eng and Kazanjian's interpretation of a melancholic state of being which focuses on the creative potential of animating the remains of loss; an interpretation that invokes an agential relationship to the losses that violence provokes. The former help to explain what Eng and Kazanjian might see as the "hopeless politics" associated with certain melancholic responses to violence and the latter help to explain what they might consider more "hopeful politics" associated with responses that mobilise a more agential relationship to loss. Although not subscribing to such a stark binary interpretation, we nonetheless argue for an analysis that acknowledges the different ways that the remains of loss are animated. The paper arises from a wider cross-generational study in Australia of the lives of educationally, economically and culturally marginalised young women and their mothers. (Contains 9 notes.)

This paper focuses on the shifting terrain of mobile researchers beginning with an overview of research and research policy on "brain mobility", and then discussing what we call their optical illusions/delusions. Subsequently, our main purpose is to elaborate on a line of inquiry that offers richer notions of researcher mobility, connectivity and globalisation than those employed in current policies and their usual research base. Indeed we seek to conceptually enrich the field of research on "brain mobility" by bringing it into dialogue with anthropological discussions of cultural globalisation. We argue that global ethnography offers considerable potential as an alternative methodology particularly when accompanied by the notion of global assemblage. We unpack these concepts showing how we are deploying them in a current project of ours which is exploring the contemporary configurations of knowledge, culture and connection that come about through researchers movements, and which seeks to contribute to socio-cultural studies of contemporary knowledge flows and of global research governance.

The knowledge economy is a dominant force in today's world, and innovation policy and national systems of innovation are central to it. In this article, we draw on different sociological and economic theories of risk to engage critically with innovation policy and national systems of innovation. Beck's understanding of a risk society, Schumpeter's innovation thesis, and Perez's techno-economic paradigm are used to consider the risk economy, and the broader risk implications of knowledge economy policies and their associated innovation systems. Derrida's theory of haunting provides the methodological framework for our discussion. We use his notion of "hauntology" to conceptualize the risk economy as a ghost that haunts knowledge economy policies and systems. The spectral risk economy draws attention to the inherent instability of the knowledge economy, and challenges the certainty of its economic dogma by offering an alternative perspective. The risk economy problematizes knowledge economy policies and systems by revealing the uncertain and "undecidable" future of social, political and cultural hazards ignored in the interest of commercial gain. (Contains 8 notes.)