Colleen McGloin

Considering the work of Martin Nakata's "Cultural Interface": a reflection on Theory and Practice by a Non-Indigenous Academic

This is a reflective paper that explores Martin Nakatas work as a basis for understanding the possibilities and restrictions of non-Indigenous academics working in Indigenous studies. The paper engages with Nakatas work at the level of praxis. It contends that Nakatas work provides non-Indigenous teachers of Indigenous studies a framework for understanding their role, their potential, and limitations within the power relations that comprise the “cultural interface”. The paper also engages with Nakatas approach to Indigenous research through his “Indigenous standpoint theory”. This work emerges from the experiential and conceptual, and from a commitment to teaching and learning in Indigenous studies. It is a reflection of how non-Indigenous academics working in Indigenous studies can contribute to the development and application of the discipline.

‘Looks good on your CV’: The sociology of voluntourism recruitment in higher education

The recruitment for what has become known as ‘voluntourism’ takes place on campuses at many universities in Australia. Under the banner of ‘making a difference’ students are solicited to travel to developing countries to aid poor communities, to enjoy the sights and tastes of the distant and exotic ‘other’, the ‘experience’ touted as a useful addition to the curriculum vitae (CV). This article addresses the discursive terrain of voluntourism by providing an analysis of the ways in which students are invited to participate in such cultural practices while recruiters give little or no information about the lived realities of people in poor nations. We argue that voluntourism reinforces the dominant paradigm that the poor of developing countries require the help of affluent westerners to induce development. We contend that the recruitment of students by voluntourism organisations is an example of public pedagogy that reinforces a hegemonic discourse of need.

Reviving Eva in Tim Winton’s Breath

Breath by Tim Winton is an Australian surfing narrative. As a postcolonial novel, the novel’s absence of indigenous representation and its portrayal of the central female character, Eva Sanderson, solicit a reading that attempts to make sense of the intersections between gender and race central to many such texts. In this paper, I explore the representation of Eva and provide a feminist reading of the novel that re-considers its racialized, gendered, and nationalist dimensions. It is Eva, I suggest, who provides the potential for reconfiguring white surfing masculinities, but whose over-determined masculinization and often misogynistic representation within the patriarchal logic that structures the work, hinder attempts to realize this potential. This attempt is further restricted by the text’s erasure of indigenous people from the landscape.

Critical Allies and Feminist Praxis: Rethinking Dis-Ease.

ABSTRACT In Australian universities, non-Indigenous educators teaching Indigenous studies and/or Indigenous content must engage critically with anti-colonialism, not simply as lip service to syllabus content, but also, as an ethical consideration whereby consultation and collaboration with Indigenous scholars must necessarily direct praxis. Such an engagement might be referred to as a ‘critical alliance’: an engagement with Others about whom we are speaking that forms the basis for an ethical relationship. A ‘critical alliance’ with Others seeks always to undermine the colonial relations of power that discursively position both Indigenous and non-Indigenous subjects. This paper explores what such an alliance might ‘look like’ as a feminist practice, what will sustain it or give it substance so it can be a productive contribution to a more socially just pedagogy that gives emphasis to Indigenous struggles and Indigenous knowledge.

Corporate Speak and “Collateral Recruitment”: Surfing the Student Body

‘‘Corporate speak,’’ the language of neoliberalism, has for so long been integrated into higher education institutions that many academics greet new terms wanly with the tedium of overkill; academic practice is scrutinized and regulated through terms such as performance indicators, benchmarking, service providers, and clients. As part of a discursive field where ideological shifts continue to apply marketized frames of reference as neoliberalism tightens its grip, new terms and phrases are commonplace. They acquire new and different meanings through appropriation, expropriation, or the recycling of terms whose originary, or other, prior sets of meanings refer to other contexts, events, or histories. Recontextualizing language suits the agenda of neoliberalism. In fact, it is central to its success. Ready-made terms and phrases with echoes of ‘‘problematic’’ significations or contexts can be adopted and adapted for re-use; like old songs they undergo a remix giving them a new ‘‘sound’’ so that often, recognition of previous tones disappear as they are excised from any former, less harmonious connotations or denotations. The genesis of this article is a solicitation to the writer to be ‘‘profiled’’ in a faculty humanities brochure as part of ‘‘recruitment collateral.’’ The request was made on the basis of previous research undertaken by the writer on surfing and beach culture in Australia. Despite the political scholarship of that work and its contestation of hegemonic symbols of nation, the terms surfing and beach were noted as potentially attractive subject matter for attracting seventeen-year-olds into the humanities, and specifically, the discipline I teach, Indigenous Studies. Militaristic usage is common to neoliberal parlance, but on this occasion, I confess to being quite startled by the resemanticizing of a term whose other military metaphors in recent and ongoing histories are still within purview, and whose remix can be so effortlessly incorporated into the business of student attraction to humanities study. Interpellation into the fold of ‘‘recruitment collateral’’ invoked thought as to how seamlessly we are witnessing the recycling The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 37:345–358, 2015 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1071-4413 print=1556-3022 online DOI: 10.1080/10714413.2015.1065621