A first update on mapping the human genetic architecture of COVID-19

peer reviewe

'I have understanding as well as you' : supporting the language and learning needs of students from low socio-economic status backgrounds

The Australian Federal Government’s recent commitment to increasing the numbers of students from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds in higher education will have a particular impact on the academic language and learning professional, who is at the front line in providing learning support for such students. The presence of working-class students at the university can be a powerful challenge to the unspoken assumptions that surround academic discourse, and raises a number of pressing ethical as well as practical issues. This paper reviews some of the literature on the specific needs of students from low SES backgrounds, with a focus on language and learning support. It presents a range of strategies for working with thesel earners to achieve the specific literacies associated with academic discourse, while recognising and drawing on the knowledge and understandings they bring to the academy

Between sanctity and liberation : the lives and loves of Gwen Harwood

This essay draws on a range of biographical and autobiographical material to argue that the widely accepted public image of Gwen Harwood as a traditional wife and mother is based on only one dimension of a personal identity that was far more complex and radical than this image allows

"Colour and crazy love" Gwen Harwood and Vera Cottew /

This essay argues that Gwen Harwood's friend Vera Cottew, an artist and teacher, was a critical influence on Harwood's poetry, and played a key role in initiating Harwood into the role of artist

A different quality : hypertext, postmodernism and disequilibrium

The World Wide Web is almost a paradigm case of the way postmodern knowledge works. Among the many congruences between hypertext and postmodernity are the idea of text as "nonlinear, or, more properly as multilinear or multisequential", the conception of "textual openness, intertextuality, and the irrelevance of distinctions between inside and outside a particular text", and the cultivation of multivocality, in that "hypertext does not permit a tyrannical, univocal voice" (Landow, 1992, pp.4, 8 & 11). However, many approaches to online learning severely curtail these potentially anarchic elements of hypertext. Drawing on constructivism, which also converges in interesting ways with postmodernism, this paper argues that the capacity of the Web to produce disequilibrium in learners should be exploited rather than curtailed, particularly in the disciplines associated with the humanities. It describes the development of an online learning module that sought to maximise students' confusion as a way of introducing them to the connection between hypertext and postmodernism. The results were rather startling—only by throwing away the rule book in relation to both multimedia design and, to an extent, instructional design could the design objectives of the course be achieved, and the learning objectives of the students be facilitated. The resulting course module could not be evaluated in any traditional way, which suggests that measures of quality for online learning will need to be very flexible in a postmodern environment

Dialoguing at a distance how do we communicate with external students? /

For many, the ideal model for academic skills advising is a dialogical one. The learning adviser, working one-on-one with the student, engages them in a critical conversation about their work, helping them to discover what they are trying to do and develop the skills they need to do it. But how does this model work when the adviser is not in the same room as the student? The number of students who do not physically attend a university campus is growing steadily, and these students – often known as distance, external or flexible – have the same need for support, guidance and academic initiation as their on-campus counterparts. At one regional campus of Central Queensland University, 45% of the students who use the learning support centre are distance students. They submit drafts of their assignments to a learning adviser online, who reads and comments on the work and returns it to the student by email. This paper uses three case studies to explore the strengths, weaknesses and possibilities of communicating with students at a distance through email. It concludes that it is possible to engage in a modified form of dialogue with external students from which both the adviser and the student can benefit. But it also argues that other well-established models from the face-to-face environment can be equally effective online

'I am you' : medieval love mysticism as a post-modern theology of relation

This paper argues that while many forms of Christian theology are "triumphalist, monarchical, [and] patriarchal", the texts of medieval love mysticism tend to subvert such forms, creating instead a theology that is relational. In this, it is closer to a number of post-modern feminist theological approaches than to medieval and contemporary patriarchal theologies

Great writers, great loves : the reinvention of love in the twentieth century

This book looks at the role of romantic love in the lives and works of eight twentieth-century writers: Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, D.H. Lawrence, Charmian Clift, Katherine Mansfield, Dylan Thomas and Frank O'Hara. It argues that these key figures helped to shape modern understandings of love

Between being and nothingness : the "astonishing precipice" of Virginia Woolf's Night and Day

There are two worlds in Night and Day: the everyday world of social life and interaction, and a shadowy other realm in which the everyday world simply ceases to exist. For Katharine Hilbery, who straddles these worlds, the first is a place of constraint, the second of liberation. She repeatedly manifests the desire to leave not only society but also identity itself behind — to become nothing. This can be understood not as a desire for death but as an expression of extreme discontent with the models of identity that are open to her within her society. In her trance states, she seeks to throw off all of the trappings of identity and experience herself in an entirely different way. But there is literally no way for her to articulate this desire: it cannot be described, represented in words, without being appropriated by the conventional models of identity which language itself underwrites. So she takes refuge in words that are merely placeholders for something entirely other — words like nothingness and emptiness. Katharine's strange other realm can be seen, then, as an attempt to re-create identity in ways that are not circumscribed by any existing models — particularly those prescribed by patriarchy, whose constructions of femininity she fi nds so constraining. In this, Night and Day can be seen as a precursor to the experiments with identity Woolf would go on to make in her later novels, particularly Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves.1 In Night and Day, however, Katharine's fantasy of another mode of identity is re-appropriated by patriarchy through the discourse of romantic love — a discourse that seems at first to enable her to create the fluid, unconfined, reciprocal self she longs for but which turns out to be simply an expert means of returning that self to the service of patriarchy. Nevertheless, Night and Day is an important transitional text in that it depicts in strikingly literal terms the struggle between conventional society (and the conventional narrative tools available to write about that society) and what Woolf would later call, in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” the “vision to which I cling” (p. 82).2 Once Woolf abandoned those conventional narrative tools which were “death” to her (p. 80), she was able to begin to articulate that “vision.