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This is a research report on a mixed-methods study (financed by an UniSA EASS Uripa seedfunding and montoring grant) undertaken to investigate the wellbeing of undergraduate international students, via interviews and a survey.

Despite the commercial success of Black Panther (Coogler 2018) and its ostensible achievement of making Hollywood more representative of black people and “their” narratives, the film is limited in terms of the progress on inclusion it can achieve. This is because, as a Hollywood superhero film, its success is predicated upon perpetuating the colonisation of the imagination of its (still largely white) spectators and it does not represent black people on their own terms. A close focus on form exposes the film as retaining the spectacular and action-orientated visual language of Hollywood that engenders cinema as fundamentally voyeuristic and imperial. In this way, a close examination of Black Panther supports the examination of limits of what the commercial structure of an industry established upon the colonial gaze of spectacle is currently able to produce. This paper goes further and also argues that decolonisation in cinema should involve a more radical confrontation of Hollywood aesthetics and the formal language of Hollywood’s gaze itself, so that the embodied visual languages of global cinema and New Black cinema may be more widely employed to reveal the world of those colonised by Hollywood as materially different, on their own terms. It is only by going beyond the success of films like Black Panther in the box office and through a radical investigation of form and haptic visuality that the considerably unequal structure of the Hollywood boardroom − which produces such films in the first place − may be transformed.

Key findings, analysis and recommendations that have emerged from a research project, ‘Using Human Language Technology to enhance academic integrity, inclusivity, knowledge exchange, student diversity and retention’ at the University of South Australia conducted in 2019 are discussed in this article. The primary purpose of the project was to address some of the challenges and opportunities afforded by increasing student and teacher diversity at a predominantly English-medium Australian university through newly enhanced human language translation technology (HLT) also known as machine translation (MT). This technology is frequently used for the translation of human language, and it falls under the umbrella of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. From the institution’s perspective, key aims of the project were to contribute to the university’s Digital Learning Strategy priorities and core values embedded in a structural transformation of the university. These include integrity, accountability, diversity, social justice, engagement and collaboration. The researchers’ objectives focussed on multilingual pedagogies using HLT to support knowledge exchange (transknowledging), and translanguaging for all students. These disrupt inequitable hierarchies, and position bi-/multilingual students as valuable resources for monolingual staff and students.

The Greenlandic oral story-telling tradition, Oqaluttuaq, meaning “history,” “legend,” and “narrative,” is recognized as an important entry point into Arctic collective memory. The graphic artist Nuka K. Godtfredsen and his literary and scientific collaborators have used the term as the title of graphic narratives published from 2009 to 2018, and focused on four moments or ‘snippets’ from Greenland’s history (from the periods of Saqqaq, late Dorset, Norse settlement, and European colonization). Adopting a fragmentary and episodic approach to historical narrativization, the texts frame the modern European presence in Greenland as one of multiple migrations to and settlements in the Artic, rather than its central axis. We argue that, in consequence, the Oqaluttuaq narratives not only “provincialize” the tradition of hyperborean colonial memories, but also provide a postcolonial mnemonic construction of Greenland as a place of multiple histories, plural peoples, and heterogenous temporalities. As such, the books also narrativize loss and disappearance—of people, cultures, and environments—as a distinctive melancholic strand in Greenlandic history. Informed by approaches in the field of cultural memory and in the study memorial objects, Marks’ haptic visuality and Keenan and Weizman’s forensic aesthetics, we analyze the graphic narratives of Oqaluttuaq in regard to their aesthetic dimensions, as well as investigate the role of material objects and artifacts, which work as narrative “props” for multiple stories of encounter and survival in the Arctic. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This book focuses on non-fictional, visual narratives (including comics; graphic narratives; animated documentaries and online, interactive documentaries) that attempt to represent violent experiences, primarily in the Levant. In doing so it explores, from a philosophical perspective, the problem of representing trauma when language seems inadequate to describe our experiences and how the visual narrative form may help us with this. The book uses the concept of the ineffable to expand the notion of representation beyond the confines of a western, individualist notion of trauma as event based. In so doing, it engages a postcolonial perspective of trauma, which treats violence as ongoing and connected to several incidents of violence across time and space. This book demonstrates how the formal qualities of visual, non-fiction may help close the gap between representation and experience through the process of ‘dark’ writing.

Some aspects of violent experiences seem difficult to express. Furthermore, directly describing what one knows about these experiences seems to be of limited value in enhancing one’s understanding of them. Thus, merely representing what one already knows about violence and conflict seems inadequate. To overcome this, this paper proposes the accommodation of the ineffable in representations of violence and trauma to destabilise reductive, binary representations of violence and trauma common within colonial discourse. It argues that one fruitful area in which to engage the ineffable without explaining it away, is through examining aesthetic representations of violence and trauma. Furthermore, such aesthetic representations, because they are affective and facilitate both reflective and performative truth also support political engagement and may thus be effective in combatting epistemic erasure of marginal positions in a way that helps to open up spaces to hear the ‘Other’ on his/her own terms. This argument is applied to an analysis of Okeowo’s (2017) novel, A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa and Axe and Hamilton’s graphic narrative Army of God: Joseph Kony’s War in Africa, which both deal with conflict in and around the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1997–2003). The close consideration of alternative representations of violence that brings the ineffable into the frame is crucial to moving beyond the impasse presented by the legacy of prejudice inherent in the West’s interpretations of Africa, where the ‘Other’ is still too often written out of an ongoing colonial discourse. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Thesis (PhD(International Studies))--University of South Australia, 2016. Includes bibliographical references (pages 208-214) The violence and trauma of war and conflict are often represented in a non-fictional form in an effort to pursue historical accuracy. As a result, there are many representations of war that show graphic details of experiences of suffering. However, documented cases of traumatic memory loss suggest that some experiences are too traumatic to represent. It thus seems as if something about the experience of violence falls through the cracks of representation. The thesis responds to this problem by examining whether the ineffable – that which is indescribable – might be accommodated in the representation of violence.

In disallowing the inaccuracies of memory to infiltrate stories of war, one condemns oneself to remain forever blinded by the obvious, shielded from the invisible violence that often lurks beneath the visible. Following Žižek, this article posits that invisible violence should be glimpsed indirectly, through aesthetic representations often excluded from the annals of the official history of war. The argument is made through a close reading of Joe Sacco's representation of the 1956 Khan Younis massacre as depicted in Footnotes in Gaza. In this text, Sacco himself and Omm Nafez – one of the protagonists of his story – express, in detail, their memories of the massacre, despite the initial reluctance of the media and publishing houses to publish their accounts. The position of Sacco and Omm Nafez is described as being that of ‘productive myopia’ because the inaccuracies and confusions that their accounts accommodate – instead of being limiting – are considered an avenue through which they may approach what has hitherto been invisible in other accounts of this massacre. Nora's validation of memory as way of producing knowledge and Žižek's notion of invisible/objective violence as an important driver of the visible/subjective cycle of violence are used to show how these memories may be inserted into the realm of history by embracing their shadows and complexities rather than disallowing them. It is conjectured that doing this may allow one to glimpse aspects of violence that have remained hitherto unseen. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

How to represent extreme, traumatic experience has long been a predicament in social science and literary criticism. This quandary is sometimes dealt with by claiming that such experiences are forgotten or leave their victims claiming they have had experiences that are too horrific to represent. This explanation leads to the position that representation is distinctly different from experience, and indeed insufficient by comparison. Waltz with Bashir (Folman 2008) is a recent text (at once a feature-length animated documentary film and a graphic novel) that deliberately employs a riotous combination of languages of representation to probe the apparent inadequacies of language for representing extreme, traumatic experience. The aim of this article is to utilise Folman's text to challenge this apparently rigid distinction between experience and representation, and demonstrate the possibility of representation standing in for or becoming experience. Profoundly blurring the boundary between experience and representation in this way facilitates a richer explanation of the case of memory loss due to trauma and allows the recouping of some experiences that have previously been thought of as too horrific to represent. As a representation of an experience that he cannot remember, Folman's text, constituted largely through others representations of the same events, becomes a substitute for his own lost experience. This text becomes both Folman's experience and his representation of events that were too traumatic for him to integrate at the time of their occurrence (the Lebanese War of 1982). Žižek's insistence on representation as a necessary part of the experience of violence and the experience of violence as needing to be indirect and inclusive of distance are drawn upon to enrich the explanation of what happens in memory loss. Here memory loss after unrepresentable, horrifying experiences is referred to, where access to experience is usually thought of as hindered by the inadequacies of representation. As such, the representational techniques used in Waltz with Bashir combine to form a lavish literary trace-somewhere between experience and representation. This enables the construction of an inaccurate and fractured, yet intense and authentic version of well-known traumatic events that can be utilised in seeking a meaningful account of these occurrences. Refereed/Peer-reviewed