Chromodynamics: Science and Colonialism in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy

Deal table in the middle, plain chairs all round the walls, on one end a large shining map, marked with all the colours of a rainbow. There was a vast amount of red-good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce lot of blue, a little green .... Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars, the hefty volumes making up Kim Stanley Robinson's epic Mars trilogy, are only three of numerous recent publications, including novels, popularizations, and occasionally combinations of both, dealing with the planet Mars.' The following excerpts are taken from two such publications

Tracking our country in settler literature

This is a narrative paper that tracks a story of Aboriginal representation and the concept of nation across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries through some important Australian texts. I read this assemblage of settler literature through the cultural metaphor of tracking, because tracking is as much about anticipation as it is following. Tracking is about reading: reading land and people before and after whitefellas. It is about entering into the consciousness of the person or people of interest. Tracking is not just about reading the physical signs; it is about reading the mind. It is not just about seeing and hearing what is there; it is as much about what is not there. Tony Morrisson wrote of mapping ‘the critical geography’ (3) of the white literary imagination in her work on Africanist presence in American Literature, Playing in the Dark. This paper tracks the settler imagination on Aboriginal presence in Australian literature in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.Copyright Information: © The Autho

Caring for the Celtic cubs: Discursive constructions of mothers and mothering in the Irish childcare debate

Drawing on an understanding of the public sphere as a multiplicity of communicative and discursive spaces this paper examines the constructions of mothers, mothering and motherhood which emerged in recent debates about childcare in Ireland. Preliminary analysis of these discursive constructions suggest that they are often based on rhetoric, informed by stereotypical assumptions and rooted in frames of reference which mitigate against the emergence of alternative ways of understanding the issues of mothering and childcare. It will be argued that the reductionist and divisive nature of the childcare debate which ensued prior to the 2005 budget, stymied childcare policy development at a time when its unprecedented prominence on the political agenda and the strength of public finances could have underpinned a shift in policy approach. The paper concludes with an exploration of the ways in which feminist scholarship can challenge the Irish model of childcare policy, which continues to be premised on an understanding of childcare and the reconciliation of work and family life as the privatised responsibility of individual women