Lost and found in Beirut

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.Beirut is a city, a memory of a place, a place in memory, stories told and untold. Beirut is a slippery idea, a concrete reality, a liability, an abstraction. This project begins by asking what Beirut might be other than the name of a populous city on the eastern Mediterranean and how, by what means, in what shape, it has arrived in Sydney and in other cities in the world. It is not the sociological or demographic dimensions of these questions that matter most, but the possibility that asking these questions might enable certain as yet undefined processes to unravel, allowing Beirut to invent its own concepts and tell us something about the life of the city and the memory of place. The project is not only about being lost and found in Beirut, it is also about losing and finding Beirut’s trajectories on global maps of knowledge. In the aftermath of Edward Said’s landmark Orientalism, it is time to mark the space between Beirut as an object of knowledge and an Orientalist construction, and Beirut as a city and a lived space. It is necessary to approach the city from a perspective that does not enclose it in a discursive formation that would be at once a historical past and a spatial void. The question of writing about the city and of inhabiting the everyday spaces of the city is no doubt inextricably entwined with the question of knowing the city and of constructing knowledge about the city. The project takes this doubling as a cue by unfolding from the space between these two ways of knowing and writing. In writing the city, Beirut emerges as a knowing subject and as an imaginary that is embedded spatially and historically in knowledge itself. The project is constructed as a series of seven ‘plateaus’ in reference to Beirut’s seven ancient gates. The term ‘plateau’ is borrowed from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. A plateau is at once an area of intensity and a formation that is loosely connected to other intensities. In forming these intensities, each chapter explores a particular theoretical concept in relation to Beirut’s cultural, historical, spatial and political dimensions. The seven central concepts examined by the thesis are narrative, distance, aspect, tactility, memory, knowledge and place. Beirut is at once the subject of the work and the method through which these concepts in cultural theory are opened up and examined. The plateau structure unravels a contingent landscape in which it is possible to see Beirut without allowing the work - the text itself, to become an image that could replace Beirut. The text follows Beirut’s trajectory on the maps of knowledge, or rather takes Beirut as a guide. We could say that the result is a journey and not a map since the journey is a spatio-temporal contingency and not a fixed object that could ever fill in for the city or replace it. Yet, there are multiple ways of mapping a journey, and this text is one such experiment

How much is this number worth? Representations of academic casualisation in Australian universities

Casualisation of the academic workforce in Australia has increasingly become a pointed issue of contestation between university managements and the union, the National Tertiary Education Union, during enterprise bargaining negotiations over the last decade. The Union has been concerned with the industrial injustice for long term insecurely employed academics, and its implications for the future academic workforce. Universities, on the other hand, had for a long time maintained that casualisation levels were not at a level detrimental to the sector and that casual employment brought benefits to both the incumbents and the university. However, by 2012, the rapid expansion of the sector, particularly in undergraduate enrolments, had meant the universities could no longer rely on expanding its casual academic workforce to meet its teaching needs. In the most recently completed rounds of enterprise bargaining around Australia, most university managements came to accept that something had to change in the composition of the teaching workforce of the university. The Union capitalised on this to negotiate a new entry level teaching focussed category of continuing academic positions in many of its branches. Ironically, throughout all these negotiations, a reliable estimate of the rate of casualisation of academic work was not available. This paper presents the authors’ detective work in the pursuit of a reliable estimate of academic casualisation in the Australian university sector, and discusses the implications for policy

Scholarly Teaching Fellows as a new category of employment in Australian universities: impacts and prospects for teaching and learning'

In recent years a new type of teaching-focused academic position has emerged in the university system, the ‘Scholarly Teaching Fellow’ (STF). These continuing positions are designed to replace casual teachers, and to enable a more ‘sustained’ engagement with scholarship as required under Commonwealth higher education standards. There has been agrowing reliance on casual academics to deliver university courses, and the rise of the ‘gig’ academic has undermined scholarship as well as job security. In 2012 the sector’s lead trade union, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), proposed a novel approach to extend teaching capacity and provide job security for a portion of the estimated 50,000 casual university teaching staff. By creating a career path for the casual academics who currently perform the bulk of face-to-face teaching in Australian universities, it was envisaged that not only would casual academics benefit from enhanced job security, but that the employment ofmore continuing staff would improve teaching and learning and enhance the student experience. Between 2012 and 2015, industrial agreements negotiated between the NTEU and the majority of the sector’s universities led to a commitment to create 850 positions for a new type of academic role: the Scholarly Teaching Fellow (STF). Around 800 of these positions had been created by August 2018. This research, funded as a ‘Strategic Project’ by the former Office of Learning and Teaching, examined the introduction of STFs into the Australian university system between 2013and 2016. The project explored the impact of this new category of employment in Australian universities on the organisation and future prospects of academic work

Neoliberalism in World Perspective: Southern Origins and Southern Dynamics

Across seven key sections, the handbook explores the different ways in which neoliberalism has been understood and the key questions about the nature of neoliberalism: Part 1: Perspectives Part 2: Sources Part 3: Variations and Diffusions ..

Scholarly Teaching: The Changing Composition of Work and Identity in Higher Education

By February 2018, almost 700 positions for a new type of academic, the ‘Scholarly Teaching Fellow’ (STF), had been created (NTEU 2018). The creation of STFs reflects a shift in priorities, both for universities and for staff as represented through the sector’s lead trade union, the NTEU. There is growing pressure from universities to promote teaching-intensive academic careers, mainly to strengthen teaching capacity in the context of rising enrolments. There is also new recognition from the NTEU that continuing teaching-intensive positions can offer a means of reducing academic casualization. The resulting convergence in priorities has led to the creation of this new category of employment in the academic workforce. Drawing from in-depth interviews conducted for an Office of Learning and Teaching Project about STFs, this paper reflects on the implementation and experience of these positions from the perspective of academics and managers. A collective narrative analysis of the purpose of the positions and the varied experience of academics in the roles will be used to draw out the impact of these changes on workloads, job security, professional identity and personal life