Port Arthur Project: Noel Frankham

Noel Frankham is co-curator of the Port Arthur Project. He discusses the series of commissioned site specific installations that engage with Port Arthur's history and culture

A poetic approach to documentary : discomfort of form, rhetorical strategies and aesthetic experience

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.Working in the borderlands between art and document, a poetic approach to documentary disrupts commonsense understandings of what documentary can be. However, it is frequently viewed as marginal to the main body of documentary practice for its foregrounding of aesthetic choices around form and materiality. Pushing to the extremes of what is recognisable as documentary, a poetic approach to documentary highlights the rhetorical impact of aesthetic choices within the broader field of practice. Experiential ways of knowing are emphasised so that the work is conceived of as an experience in itself rather than a replication of reality. Moving beyond realist representations of evidence, a poetic approach can make use of techniques of defamiliarisation as a strategy to renew perception and enable a reimagining of preconceived connections. In diverging from established pathways unexpected combinations can occur, allowing complex and changeful conceptions to emerge. Utilising a methodology of practice based research to produce a 28 minute single channel documentary and the close examination of pertinent creative works, this thesis argues that a critically engaged poetic approach to documentary can work to encourage thoughtful contemplation as part of an ongoing conversation in the process of knowing

Moving beyond evidence: Participatory online documentary practice within the poetic framework of cowbird

The growth of user contribution as a form of interaction within online documentary projects is causing a shift in the way screen-based documentary is conceived. Viewers become participants, taking on greater agency in forming the experience of the work as they engage by contributing personal responses to the exploration of a subject. Rather than being fixed works with definite beginnings and endings, these online collaborative documentaries operate as portals, encouraging communities to gather around themes, events or areas of interest. While the diversity of contributions promises rich conceptual renderings, a significant challenge lies in the question of how to create a coherent media entity out of aggregated content that may be contradictory, complex and constantly changing. The online storytelling platform Cowbird establishes a social media space that engages a range of aesthetic, structural and organisational techniques to facilitate the sequenciation of diverse sources into multi-vocal chronicles of experience. Cowbird initiatives, such as the Pine Ridge Community Storytelling Project, where individual accounts of life on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota were published as a mosaic collection alongside a feature article about the reservation in National Geographic magazine, suggest alternative modes of exchange between old and new media. This article examines the visual, structural and interaction design of Cowbird to explore how this complex and changeful format works to stimulate poetic and affective webs of connection. It is my contention that the system of multilinear engagement employed on Cowbird enables an emergent approach to documentary that can accommodate a nuanced and shifting range of individual responses

Much Ado About Something: The effects of the National Student Survey on Higher Education

This report describes how the National Student Survey (NSS) is currently impacting on the environment into which it was introduced a decade ago. It is based on interviews with thirty-four academics working in the humanities in the North West of England, and these data are used here to develop a narrative account of the NSS. The report describe academics’ working lives in respect of the NSS and foregrounds some of the contradictions, tensions and consequences of the survey. Volunteers to be interviewed included heads of department, programme leaders, module leaders and staff with responsibility (at different levels) for overseeing the NSS. The report begins with a section ‘Through a glass darkly’ in which I summarise academics’ perceptions of how students respond to the survey. The section describes the relative disinterest academics perceive students have in the survey and its consequences. This is followed by a section ‘Through the looking glass’ in which I describe the effects of the NSS on academics’ working lives. The survey – which appears relatively insignificant to students – is described as hugely significant when viewed through the lens of academic workload and experience. ‘Illuminations’ focuses on the issues that the NSS brings to the surface and that academics are responding to, as a consequence. The term ‘illuminations’ is employed in order to underline the sometimes distorting effects that shining a light on something can have. ‘Mirror, Mirror on the wall’ describes how the NSS has encouraged the adoption of other surveys and feedback mechanisms throughout undergraduate degree programmes and the effects of this proliferation. The report ends with ‘People in glass houses not throwing stones’. This section considers how continuing use of the survey may diminish educational possibilities. The use of this series of metaphors associated with glass and mirrors is a response to the claim that the NSS increases ‘transparency’ in terms of the accountability of public services. The report problematises such a notion

Employability and higher education: the follies of the ‘Productivity Challenge’ in the Teaching Excellence Framework

This article considers questions of ‘employability’, a notion foregrounded in the Green and White Papers on the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). The paper first questions government imperatives concerning employability and suggests a series of mismatches that are evident in the rhetorics in this area. This summary opens up elements of what I am calling the first ‘folly’ in the field. The second section of the paper considers recent research with individual academics engaged in employability activity. This research suggests another series of mismatches in the aims and outcomes of ‘employability initiatives’ and opens up a further series of ‘follies’ in the day-to-day practices of academics and students’ responses to them. The third section of the paper turns to academics’ reports of student behaviour in relation to the outcomes of their degree. This section develops an argument that relates to the final ‘folly’ associated with the current focus on employability. I argue that students’ focus on outcomes (which at face value suggests they have internalized the importance of employment) is contributing to the production of graduates who do not have the dispositions that employers – when interviewed – say that they want. The highly performative culture of higher education, encouraged by the same metrics that will be extended through the TEF, is implicated then in not preparing students for the workplace. © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Grou

'Fundamental British Values': What's fundamental? What's value? And what's (now) British?

We hope to give shallow answers to that first ‘deep’ question; to slight the question of ‘value’ as mainly ‘interested commodities’, and to throw darkness rather than light on the now increasingly troubled question of ‘British’ identity. Our approach is not to define ‘fundamental British values’ (as we will show, that proved impossible) but to represent the multiplicity of contradictory contents that invest its form. In such a ‘performative agonistics’ (Blyth, Chapman, Stronach, 2016; Toscano, 2016; Frankham and Tracy, 2012), we anticipate a dissemination rather than an insemination of meaning, in contrast with the ongoing neoliberal ‘rage for certainty’ (MacLure, 2005; Badiou, 2013). ‘Fundamental British Values’ in Badiou’s terms, is a polysemous ‘event’, whose performances and contexts should be regarded within a series of theatrical metaphors – an ‘amphitheatre’ of meanings, perhaps, in a ‘post-truth’ world (Trapido, 2016: 57). Thus these deconstructions should be seen as part of a more generic critique of neoliberal enclosures that seek for definitions, essences, identities and quantifications (Zuboff, 2019)

Diet induced weight loss accelerates onset of negative alliesthesia in obese women

BACKGROUND: The physiological and behavioral responses to hypocaloric diet are to increase energy intake to defend a steady body weight. We utilized the method of "negative alliesthesia" for measuring the hedonic reponse to sweet stimulus before (Initial session) and 3 months after entering a weight loss program. The negative alliesthesia test is known by physiologists but few clinical data exist. It is based on the observation that repeated pleasant gustatory stimuli turn into unpleasantness in the process of alliesthesia. At first visit participants repeatedly ingested sweet stimuli until they found them unpleasant and rated quantitatively on a linear analogue scale their hedonic experience. This procedure was repeated every 3 min until participants felt displeasure to end the session. The same protocol was followed after three months of following a weight loss diet. Dieting energy intake was from 1400 – 2000 kcal/d for 8 wk. Energy composition was 50% carb:25% prot: 25% lipid. After 8 wk caloric intake increased by 50 kcal/wk, to reach daily intake of 1800 – 2400 kcal/d. Energy composition was 50% carb:22% prot: 27% lipid. We report results on the effect of slow weight loss on negative alliesthesia in ten obese female participants enrolled in a commercial diet program based on Canada's Food Guide (Mincavi(®)). RESULTS: Results showed that diet lowered the mean BMI (Initial session 36.8 +/- 1.8 vs. 3 mo 34.9 +/- 1.8 kg/m(2)). At 3 mo the onset of negative alliesthesia, time to abandon experimental session, was shortened (Initial session 33 vs. 3 mo 24 min). The same trend was observed in the time to reach indifference (Initial session 21.9 +/- 3.8 vs. 3 mo 16.2 +/-2.4 min). There was no observed difference in maximum (Initial session +79.5 +/- 11.7; 3 mo +94.5 +/- 9.9 mm) and minimum (Initial session -90.0 +/- 14.4; 3 mo -106 +/- 11.1 mm) hedonic rating. CONCLUSION: Earlier onset of negative alliesthesia, as seen in our participants, is not consistent with previous hedonic studies that showed delayed or absent negative alliesthesia in participants when below their initial body weight. Therefore, it is hypothesized that the accelerated onset of negative alliesthesia observed in our obese participants after weight loss is suggestive of a lowered body weight set-point. Factors inherent to the weight loss diet studied here, such as mild energetic restriction, lowered palatability, and diet composition, may have played a role in this experimental outcome

Northern Steamship Company: The depreciation problem in the nineteenth century

In 1889 a New Zealand company had to write down its paid-up capital by 27 percent, because, the Chairman stated, previous management had failed to allow for depreciation as an expense. An investigation was conducted to see if this capital reduction could have been avoided had the company followed modern depreciation policy. This revealed that the failure to depreciate adequately was not the main cause of the capital reduction, other firms followed the same practice and contemporary English legislation did not permit depreciation as a tax deductible item, while United States courts were rejecting depreciation as a valid expense