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This paper addresses the ways in which humour is used by university academics to shape teaching personas. Based upon the work of Mauss and Foucault, and employing semi-structured, in-depth interviews with a range of university teachers, this research suggests that most tertiary teachers deliberately fashion various kinds of teaching persona, which they then perform in lectures and tutorials. The use of humour is widely seen as an important component within this form of self-shaping, as it fits within dominant frameworks of expectation regarding contemporary models of "edutainment". This research demonstrates that a wide range of practices of the self--including physical, verbal, and relational elements--are employed by academics as part of shaping various humorous teaching personas. Some boundaries exist limiting the use of these pedagogic characters; for example, arguments about natural ability with humour prefigure who is most likely to deploy humour as a practice of professional self-formation. Also, professional concerns regarding seniority and job security are also factored into decision-making regarding those humorous personas likely to be considered appropriate within particular tertiary teaching contexts.

The purpose of this article is to extend previous discussion of the relationship between coronial verdicts of suicide and suicide statistics, through a detailed examination of coronial decision-making during 130 inquests in Queensland, Australia between 2004 and 2018. This research suggests that the official category of suicide does not have the same meaning for different coroners, and it is unlikely that coroners follow the same rules in assigning particular cases to given categories. This is complicated by several factors: the feedback loops between researchers and coroners, where researchers rely on coronial data and coroners rely on research findings; beliefs about 'suicide prone' populations; and the role of coroners in offering closure for families and meaning for society. Suicide is a social fact, and how it is counted depends upon the norms, protocols and concepts operating within any given coroner's court. We conclude that administrative options beyond the binary of suicide/not suicide would have the most impact on enabling suicide findings to be more consistent and defensible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study looked at the curricular resource potential of refugee-themed picture books for embedding an ethics of responsibility for linguistic diversity into the subject of English studied by all students in English-dominant western societies. Selected picture books were analysed in terms of a Levinasean ethics of responsibility for alterity in order to probe the possibilities of a supplement or alternative to the ethics of empathy long established in the literary component of English. The analyses looked at the books as multimodal artefacts, understanding the linguistic modes of the texts from a translingual perspective. This perspective construes language as mobile semiotic resources that are rendered meaningful through the performances of interlocutors in a given communicative situation. From the analyses, findings were produced about (1) representations of the monolingual sameness of everyday life in Australia as an English-dominant society and (2) the translingual dispositions called forth when language variation enters into the linguistic text. It is concluded that the ethics of responsibility for alterity holds out promise for tapping the curricular resource potential of refugee-themed picture books for embedding ethics into the language awareness component sometimes incorporated into English.