Ben McCann

Being First in Family: Motivations and Metaphors.

ABSTRACT First in Family (FiF) is an under-recognised equity grouping which may encompass low-SES, mature-aged, regional and remote, and Indigenous students. FiF tertiary students are more likely to be in a position of educational disadvantage over students who have other family members available to share the experience of university life and discuss aspirations. Building on previous research, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 18 FiF university students from a range of disciplines across three South Australian institutions. We analysed the interview data based on themes derived through readings of FiF literature, adding new ones as they emerged as part of the process of analysis. In this paper, we specifically focus on the interview responses which included metaphors or analogies. Metaphors provide a conceptual framework for thinking about a particular problem and drawing comparisons between unlike situations. Our experience as educators told us that students often subtly and unintentionally utilise metaphors when articulating lived experiences. We both specifically asked the FiF students to identify a metaphor that reflected their experience of being at university and also considered their use of metaphors in response to other questions. In exploring these metaphors, we have gained insight into students’ day-to-day experience of attending university and have gained information about their motivations and their struggles. When considered by university staff and policy-makers, this information could be used to guide the development of strategies that may help future FiF students.

‘Ici, une immense usine perfectionnée; là, une chambre meublée de faubourg’: Julien Duvivier, mobility and migration

This article focuses on a specific instance of migration and mobility in French film director Julien Duvivier’s career, namely his first brief stint in Hollywood in 1938. He was invited to film The Great Waltz, an expensive costume drama, for MGM, a studio renowned for its lavish attention to mise en scène. Unlike other French directors who had spent, or would subsequently spend, time in America, Duvivier succeeded in inculcating his own particular formal and visual touches into the film, while simultaneously negotiating the tricky terrain of producer interference and suspicion of a foreigner’s working methods. Duvivier’s professional leap from one cinema ecosystem to another paved the way for his enforced migration to Hollywood in 1940, when he escaped from Occupied France to work again in the studio system. For Duvivier, Hollywood did not disable his talent, but rather enabled it, revitalising his praxis and leading him towards increasingly ambitious projects back in France.

Colleen Kennedy-Karpat, Rogues, Romance, and Exoticism in French Cinema of the 1930s, Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013, 215pp,

Gardey, who has moved to a chair in Geneva, perhaps speaks for many of her colleagues as she bemoans the resistance of the academy to take gender history seriously, on the grounds that it undermines some imagined unity of the historian’s territory: ‘Mon projet n’est pas de refonder l’histoire, et encore moins de rééduquer les collègues, il serait plutôt de laisser proliférer les espaces épistémiquement et politiquement créatifs.’ Let us wish this generation well with their mission.