Andrew Hickey

Pedagogies of Self: Conscientising the Personal to the Social

Abstract This paper considers the catalytic potential for autoethnography, one of the “new ethnographies” (Goodall, 2000), to provoke emancipatory consciousness raising activity. Autoethnography opens possibilities for the development of a critical reflexivity wherein senses of Self and agency might come to be understood in terms of the social processes that mediate lived experience and the material realities of individuals. It is on this basis that autoethnography offers opportunity for the enactment of a genuinely critical pedagogy. By means of exploring the Self as a social construct, possibilities for exposing the mediating role that social structures play in the construction of identities become apparent and open to deep critique and change.

Writing race: making meaning of white racial identity in initial teacher education

Abstract Race has become one of the key defining features of contemporary society, and a considerable body of work has recently emerged in the area of white dominant racial identity and identification. This paper reports on images, experiences and understandings of white racial identity elicited from initial teacher education students by use of a process of critical autoethnographic interrogations of Self. Emphasis is placed upon the description and analysis of a particular form of critical self-reflection and (re)presentations of autoethnographically-derived understandings of racialised identities. These representations provide an insight into nascent processes of conscientisation engaged in by initial teacher education students. The paper explores possible implications for the development of racially aware teachers, and broader connections with transformative pedagogical practices. The data comprising the basis of this project were derived from a combination of learning conversations and narrative inquiry, both of which are discussed in this paper.

Understanding community to engage community: the use of qualitative research techniques in local government community engagement

Local government departments charged with the responsibility of engaging with their communities require a codified evidence base for designing and delivering engagement initiatives. This is vital if the engagement initiative is to take effective account of the often multifarious and divergent needs that present within the community. This was the case for the Community Development and Facilities Branch of the Toowoomba Regional Council in Queensland, which in partnership with social researchers based in an Australian regional university set about developing a sequenced professional development programme that up‐skilled council staff in field‐based qualitative research approaches. This article addresses findings from this collaboration, as well as detailing more broadly the role qualitative social research might play in local government community engagement practice. Core concerns are how the views, perceptions, beliefs and attitudes of a community might be gathered through qualitative social research and the ways in which this might inform engagement initiatives.

Child-Led Tours of Brisbane's Fortitude Valley as Public Pedagogy

Abstract Contemporary social policy and practices pertaining to children have seen a trend towards increasing surveillance under the premise of child protection. Growing from the awareness of this social trend and the limitations imposed on children’s demonstration of active citizenship in public spaces, the arts project Walking Neighbourhood: Hosted by children was developed by artists from the community cultural development organisation Contact Inc. The project operated in the urban public space of Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley (a place known for being child-unfriendly) in order to problematise and expose issues pertaining to child safety and active citizenship by engaging with children as collaborators and facilitators in the production of live art. Amongst the outcomes of the Walking Neighbourhood were child-provoked urban geographies and demonstrations of active citizenship mediated by walking as an arts experience. Drawing from the findings of a research project that accompanied the Walking Neighbourhood this paper will explore the nature of the child-led tours as public pedagogy, and the dynamics of inter-generational interaction between adults and children as sites of civic learning.

Halcyon Daze: cultural studies’ crisis narratives and the imagined ends of a discipline

ABSTRACT Using Frank Kermode’s (1967. The sense of an ending: studies in the theory of fiction with a new epilogue. Oxford: OUP) formulation of ‘the End’ as its conceptual marker, this paper takes aim at pronouncements of cultural studies’ demise. In recent years, it has become fashionable to declare cultural studies as in decline, if not irretrievably lost. In drawing on this conceptualization of ‘the End’ to define the current status of cultural studies, attention will be given to how narratives of demise and decline claim a position of speaking-for the discipline whilst reifying selective moments of cultural studies’ past as markers of a ‘high point’, a halcyon moment from which the current malaise is contrasted. Arguing that this is a troubling dynamic, this paper works through the formulations that selected crisis narrative present to outline how these narratives gain dimension. The argument then moves to problematize the positioning of selective originary points within cultural studies’ past to propose that a far more speculative appraisal of these halcyon moments might be drawn upon. Such ‘speculative recognition’ of the past does not seek to dismiss cultural studies’ histories, nor position these within simplistic generational divisions, but does seek to question the significance selective originary moments hold in defining prescriptions for the discipline’s future.

Testimonio and the Idios Kosmos of the Contemporary Academic

This past decade has seen an increasing focus on the effects of academic bullying, workplace harassment, incivility and other disruptive workplace behaviours within the university (Fogg, 2008). Yet despite this growing awareness and charting of the costs of these behaviours – both to the individual and organization – it is evident that flawed and ineffective responses to incivility and the maintenance of organizational structures that encourage negative interpersonal behaviours remain entrenched in the academy (Chatterjee & Maira, 2014; Giroux 2014).

The constraints of youth: young people, active citizenship and the experience of marginalisation

ABSTRACT This paper charts the experiences of a group of young people and their involvement in a local government initiative to engage young people in public decision-making. Activated through a youth leaders’ council that sought to influence and inform local government decision-making, the participating young people were given responsibility for enacting focus projects in collaboration with local government personnel. However, this method of simply bringing young people together with local government decision-makers did not automatically alter the way that decisions came to be made and ironically resulted in interactions that went some way to further reinforce existing perceptions of young people as incapable in situations of public administration. This paper reports on a case example detailing an interaction between the youth leaders and local government councillors, and will suggest that the experience of the young people involved in the youth leaders’ council can be understood against a dynamic of ‘constraint’.

Discerning the air: locating local government community engagement practice – reflections on selected Australian experience

The structures and locations of communities have been reconfigured by the arrival of digital technologies. “Smart” devices, such as portable tablet computers, smart phones, and associated applications (apps), raise questions about how communities connect, understand and experience each other in the context of a disaggregated model of the social. Much has been written about changed practices in public administration in view of new digital capabilities, but little exists in the form of critical reflections about engagement practice itself amid the current wave of digital experiences of place and the social. Accordingly, this article discusses what can be brought to local government community engagement practice through the presence of digital devices, inviting engagement practitioners to reconsider how communities are configured through extended understandings of the local. In highlighting selected dialogue with community engagement practitioners, the discussion articulates the internal structure of engagement practice beyond a notion of consultation, or the survey of community views, toward more effective understandings of engagement which arise from the proliferation of potential locations inspired by digital concepts. In this sense, it addresses questions of regionality in local governance, thus reviewing ongoing issues of place and place-making in the 21st century.