Notes on the Mount Lyell District

On taking a casual glance at the geologically coloured map of Tasmania we are struck with its similarity in appearance to some huge concretion, for we see a nucleus of greenstone, which is surrounded more or less by a ring of the upper coal measures, and these again by rocks from other epochs. If instead of the geological map we take a topographical one we will observe the same onion -like structure. In the centre we find the Lake Plateau country, from which the river systems of Tasmania radiate. Encircling this are various ranges of mountains, and finally we have the sea coast, which has practically the same contour as the kernel, making due allowance for irregularities, which would be exaggerated by enlargements. Looking at the island as a whole, it is heart-shaped, and somewhat similar in outline to the continents, inasmuch as it is widest at the northern and narrowest at its southern end, its length being north and south. The geological and topographical features coinciding so closely, we are naturally led to the conclusion that they must in some way or other be intimately related. If we can further connect our ore deposits with the physical developments of the country we may gain something by our studies with which the strictest utilitarian cannot find fault

Who is the critical thinker in higher education? A feminist re-thinking

Higher education's policy demands and pedagogical practices often take as their ‘desirable’ subject an unspecified body, failing to interrogate who the student is (and is not) in relation to differentiated access to power, privilege, and opportunity structures. This paper offers a feminist critique of such decontextualised theorisations of students and their critical thinking. Observation, focus group and interview data were collected with undergraduate social-science students at a UK university. This data revealed how students experience critical thinking as embodied, contingent and specifically gendered – with 90% of students naming a male when asked to describe a critical thinker. Consequently, this paper argues that who occupies a desirable position as a student critical thinker is not neutral or given, but intersects with students’ embodied characteristics and the (increasingly divisive) socio-political context in which criticality is performed. Access to this key intellectual premium is therefore differentiated, raising questions around epistemic inclusion