Donna Hancox

Excursions into New Territory: Fictocriticism and Undergraduate Writing

Fictocriticism as a form of writing continues to make a home in the academy, particularly as an exciting and challenging form for scholars, writers and increasingly post-graduate students in Creative Writing, Literary Studies and Cultural Studies. However, it has struggled to find traction in the undergraduate classroom, especially when one considers the proliferation of Creative Writing Programs throughout Australian Universities. This paper examines the potential of fictocriticism for undergraduate students through the case study of a Literary Studies unit that offered a fictocritical piece of assessment.

From subject to collaborator: Transmedia storytelling and social research

New media technologies and the narrative turn in qualitative research have expanded the methods through which we gather and share the stories of groups who have traditionally been written about by others rather than telling their own stories to reveal the complexities of their experiences. There is a long tradition in community arts, community development and social activism that posits personal narratives as the building blocks for public understanding of complex social issues. In the fields of community storytelling, documentary and social activism, it is possible to see an emerging intersection between the affordances of digital technologies and the recognition of the stories of marginalized people. This article is particularly interested in the ways storytellers have repurposed the accepted conventions of transmedia storytelling to create projects that are able to offer a multiplicity of voices and to create stories that can represent complex issues without privileging a particular point of view or story form.

The role of the internet in testimony: the case of the ‘Forgotten Australians’

This article examines the case of the Forgotten Australians as an opportunity to examine the role of the internet in the presentation of testimony. ‘Forgotten Australians’ are a group who suffered abuse and neglect after being removed from their parents – either in Australia or in the UK – and placed in Church- and State-run institutions in Australia between 1930 and 1970. The campaign by this profoundly marginalized group coincided with the decade in which the opportunities of Web 2.0 were seen to be diffusing throughout different social groups, and were considered a tool for social inclusion. We outline a conceptual framework that positions the role of the internet as an environment in which the difficult relationships between painful past experiences and contemporary injunctions to remember them, are negotiated. We then apply this framework to the analysis of case examples of posts and interaction on websites with web 2.0 functionality: YouTube and the National Museum of Australia. The analysis points to commonalities and differences in the agency of the internet in these two contexts, arguing that in both cases the websites provided support for the development of a testimony-like narrative and the claiming, sharing and acknowledgement of loss.