House Arrest: Domestic Space in Christina Stead's Fiction

The paper offers some speculations about the way gender and power, particularly economic power, are interrelated through Stead's recreation of domestic space in The Man Who Loved Children

Virtual tutor support using SMARTHINKING: Preliminary findings

The University of New England (UNE) has been using a virtual tutoring service called SMARTHINKING since 2007. UNE explored the use of a "virtual tutor service" to support distance education students in their academic development; to reduce attrition; and to provide academic support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to all students with access to a computer irrespective of geographical location. A cascading selection of units across different disciplinary areas and cohorts of students were targeted for the virtual tutorial support service over 6 semesters to provide rich data. A survey consisting of 20 questions was developed and implemented at the end of each teaching period. Preliminary analysis of data indicates that SMARTHINKING appears to be making a difference to student learning outcomes. However, while uptake tends to be low in all cohorts but where students select to use the service they are positive about its effects. Keywords: SMARTHINKING, student feedback, virtual feedback Introduction Tertiary institutions have been continuously making use of new technologies to enhance student learning and to improve student competition and retention rates ___________________________________________________________________________________ Proceedings ascilite Sydney 2010: Full paper: McDonell, Parkes & Tynan 596 Since the first pilot in 2008 an evaluation cycle has investigated the use of the virtual tutor support for students called SMARTHINKING. The investigation and evaluation cycle will conclude in 2010. The preliminary findings presented here describe the methodology for the evaluation and an example of the findings at this stage. The research team were interested in how SMARTHINKING is used by students and staff; sentiment towards the use of SMARTHINKING; identification of the reasons for any hesitancy towards the use of SMARTHINKING; best practices examples and evidence of impact for learning; costs and benefits; and any lessons learned. The research will provide recommendations on the investigation of use of tools within about the further use of SMARTHINKING and evaluate use for blockers, issues, and best practices that could be re-used by other groups

Relationship between molecular pathogen detection and clinical disease in febrile children across Europe: a multicentre, prospective observational study

BackgroundThe PERFORM study aimed to understand causes of febrile childhood illness by comparing molecular pathogen detection with current clinical practice.MethodsFebrile children and controls were recruited on presentation to hospital in 9 European countries 2016-2020. Each child was assigned a standardized diagnostic category based on retrospective review of local clinical and microbiological data. Subsequently, centralised molecular tests (CMTs) for 19 respiratory and 27 blood pathogens were performed.FindingsOf 4611 febrile children, 643 (14%) were classified as definite bacterial infection (DB), 491 (11%) as definite viral infection (DV), and 3477 (75%) had uncertain aetiology. 1061 controls without infection were recruited. CMTs detected blood bacteria more frequently in DB than DV cases for N. meningitidis (OR: 3.37, 95% CI: 1.92-5.99), S. pneumoniae (OR: 3.89, 95% CI: 2.07-7.59), Group A streptococcus (OR 2.73, 95% CI 1.13-6.09) and E. coli (OR 2.7, 95% CI 1.02-6.71). Respiratory viruses were more common in febrile children than controls, but only influenza A (OR 0.24, 95% CI 0.11-0.46), influenza B (OR 0.12, 95% CI 0.02-0.37) and RSV (OR 0.16, 95% CI: 0.06-0.36) were less common in DB than DV cases. Of 16 blood viruses, enterovirus (OR 0.43, 95% CI 0.23-0.72) and EBV (OR 0.71, 95% CI 0.56-0.90) were detected less often in DB than DV cases. Combined local diagnostics and CMTs respectively detected blood viruses and respiratory viruses in 360 (56%) and 161 (25%) of DB cases, and virus detection ruled-out bacterial infection poorly, with predictive values of 0.64 and 0.68 respectively.InterpretationMost febrile children cannot be conclusively defined as having bacterial or viral infection when molecular tests supplement conventional approaches. Viruses are detected in most patients with bacterial infections, and the clinical value of individual pathogen detection in determining treatment is low. New approaches are needed to help determine which febrile children require antibiotics.FundingEU Horizon 2020 grant 668303

Virtual tutor support using SMARTHINKING: preliminary findings

The University of New England (UNE) has been using a virtual tutoring service called SMARTHINKING since 2007. UNE explored the use of a 'virtual tutor service' to support distance education students in their academic development; to reduce attrition; and to provide academic support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to all students with access to a computer irrespective of geographical location. A cascading selection of units across different disciplinary areas and cohorts of students were targeted for the virtual tutorial support service over 6 semesters to provide rich data. A survey consisting of 20 questions was developed and implemented at the end of each teaching period. Preliminary analysis of data indicates that SMARTHINKING appears to be making a difference to student learning outcomes. However, while uptake tends to be low in all cohorts but where students select to use the service they are positive about its effects

Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children

When Christina Stead writes in memory of her father in her essay "A Waker and Dreamer" (1972) she characteristically tells a story. She offers here a variation of a familiar parable of a man of pristine faith who, as if waking from a charmed slumber sees things somewhat simplictically, as the following strikingly clear-cut comments indicate. "David was an Adam: Australia was his prolific and innocent garden", or again; "He believed he was safe because he was Good; and from the word Good we get the word God, he said and from the word Evil, we invented the Devil"

'This You'll Call Sentimental, Perhaps': Animal Death and the Propriety of Mourning

In recent decades literary historians, particularly in the field of American studies, have argued that sentimental texts are atypically self-conscious about their ambition to radically reconceive civil relationships and collective obligations by disclosing the voices and interests of marginalized social subjects (Menely 246; Tompkins xi; see also Dillon 495-523, as well as extended discussions in Cohen and Berlant). This argument can be extended by examining several situated accounts of the way in which the expression, analysis and experience of intense attachment, love, gratitude, disappointment, grief and despair over the loss of pet dogs reinforces and disrupts the cultural work attributed to sentimentality and sentimental texts. The writings of Jane Carlyle, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Michael Field suggest that the loss of pet animals was a profoundly conflicting experience for the authors. Yet these experiences were not only routinely dismissed by their contemporaries as sentimental, but were also perceived to be a threat to 'legitimate' emotional, ethical, and political attachments, that is to say, to family, God and other human animals. While it is commonplace to dismiss loving animals, especially pets, as inherently sentimental, this essay is premised on the argument that in this era of the Anthropocene the question of grieving for animal deaths is a political act because, as Judith Butler points out, it is about which lives get to count as life. Butler's recent work has insisted that questions about who is entitled to mourn, and who is mournable, are at the heart of social intelligibility. To deny the right to mourn, or to make a human unmournable, is to deny them social tangibility. Butler's argument is that disavowing the life of another and being unable to mourn always disavows the life as such - it does not just cede the one you care for into social unintelligibility, but also cedes part of yourself into the same social unintelligibility (Stanescu 568). This important insight can be brought to bear on animal lives and the way in which an uncritical discourse of sentimentality has functioned to disavow mourning for animals: the beloved pet, a subject deemed to lead a trivial life, is definitionally considered less mournable than that of a human animal

Representing animals in the literature of Victorian Britain

This chapter provides an overview of significant developments and preoccupations in Animal Studies in so far as these have influenced research in Victorian literature, and suggests some possible future directions the field may take. It shows that understanding Victorian perceptions of animals is inseparable from understanding human self-conception in the same period, and that the impact of animals on Victorian Britain's imagination and artistic practices has significant implications for an understanding of its social and cultural life, and vice versa. The chapter deals with two iconic images of the Victorian era. The first is a photograph of Queen Victoria with one of her favourite border collies, Sharp, who is seated on a gothic chair resembling a throne and leaning into his dour mistress's breast. The second is of the celebrity elephant Jumbo, who tragically died after being hit by a freight locomotive, a death that is all too neatly emblematic of nineteenth-century industrialisation

Browning's Curiosities: 'The Ring and the Book' and the 'Democracy of Things'

Browning's modernity, G.K. Chesterton once observed, is recognisable by an unparalleled interest in small things. In the 'turbulent democracy of things' that is 'The Ring and the Book', he goes on to say, a human face and the pattern on the wall behind it, a porcelain vase or a cabbage lay equal claim to the poet's attention: 'There was sometimes no background and no middle distance in his mind.' Henry James attempted to get at the cluttered materiality of 'The Ring and the Book' in a different way when he compared the poem’s structure to a vast gothic cathedral, noting the poet's habit of looking at his subject from the point of view of a 'curiosity'. Chesterton's and James's insights about the material 'muchness' of the poetry raises questions about how we might understand the collocation in Browning's poetry of a messy embeddedness of things and the porousness of the boundaries between categories such as art, commodities, oddities and rejects with his smart understanding of the ethics and feelings associated with collecting and connoisseurship. Could it be that Browning understood the rules of taste and discrimination so well - in the sense Bourdieu explicates in his influential analysis of the way in which cultural capital, 'habitus' and field interrelate to create judgements of taste and discrimination and to legitimate social difference - that he refused the constraints of conventional good taste to talk about anything in any terms without losing caste, and in a way that allowed him to explore areas of human experience that had hitherto been denied to poetry

Ladies Pets and the Politics of Affect: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Flush

On the death of her beloved dog, Nero, Jane Welsh Carlyle wrote to her friend, Lady Louisa Ashburton, that her famous husband, Thomas Carlyle was 'quite unexpectedly and distractedly tom to pieces'. She says that 'to some people' this may have seemed 'a fall from his philosophical heights', but for herself 'I liked him for it more than for all the philosophy than ever came out of his head'. Jane Carlyle draws attention to the gendered expectations surrounding affective relations with companion species, implying that Thomas shedding tears for a 'sentimental' pet may not be perceived by his friends and admirers to be behaviour befitting a man of reason. She was not alone among Victorian women in her assertion of the primacy of feeling with respect to dogs. The epistolary writing of Elizabeth Barrett Browning provides a valuable historical record of intense affective caninelhuman relationships in the nature-culture borderlands of the intimate domestic sphere, where dogs occupied a precarious and ambiguous status at best. This essay contends that Barrett Browning's writing about her dog, Flush, complicates dominant theories of pet keeping, revealing that positive as well as negative affect is an important mechanism by which the boundaries that organise the species divide are questioned and transgressed. Central to this investigation is a reconsideration of Victorian constructions of sentiment and sentimentality, the pejorative connotations of which have ensured that both pet keeping, and women's relationships to pets, have been downplayed in scholarly discussion

Thomas Hardy and Animals by Anna West, and: Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect and Animals in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture by Keridiana W. Chez

The ubiquity of animals across all Victorian literary genres is traceable in part to the visibility of a wide range of animal species - especially domestic animals - in everyday lives of the Vicrorians: as raw material, sources of labor and transport, food, clothing, entertainment, companionship, and sciencific knowledge, produced through animal observation and experimentation