Holly Randell-Moon

“Inspired and assisted”, or “berated and destroyed”? Research leadership, management and performativity in troubled times

Research leadership in Australian universities takes place against a backdrop of policy reforms concerned with measurement and comparison of institutional research performance. In particular, the Excellence in Research in Australian initiative undertaken by the Australian Research Council sets out to evaluate research quality in Australian universities, using a combination of expert review process, and assessment of performance against ‘quality indicators’. Benchmarking exercises of this sort continue to shape institutional policy and practice, with inevitable effects on the ways in which research leadership, mentoring and practice are played out within university faculties and departments. In an exploratory study that interviewed 32 Australian academics in universities in four Australian states, we asked participants, occupying formal or informal research leadership roles, to comment on their perceptions of research leadership as envisioned and enacted in their particular workplaces. We found a pervasive concern amongst participants that coalesced around binaries characterized in metaphoric terms of ‘carrots and whips’. Research leadership was seen by many as managerial in nature, and as such, largely tethered to instrumentalist notions of productivity and performativity, while research cultures were seen as languishing under the demoralizing weight of reward and punishment systems. Here, we consider what is at stake for the future of the academic workforce under such conditions, arguing that new models of visionary research leadership are urgently needed in the ‘troubled times’ of techno-bureaucratic university reforms.

Students in Space: Student Practices in Non-Traditional Classrooms

The discourse of the non-traditional classroom has found itself fundamentally intertwined with the rationalities of creating learning relevant for the future-orientated twenty-first century. In such an imaginary the idea of the conventional classroom – with its four walls, blackboard, ‘closed’ door, teacher-centred pedagogy and student learning conceptualised through the logics of the industrial era – is being renegotiated. This article focuses on an empirical examination of some of the changes to student classroom practice enabled by the material conditions of non-traditional learning spaces. In particular, it highlights the ways in which non-traditional learning spaces have become complex settings through which students negotiate increased learner autonomy, co-operative learning, acceptable classroom behaviour and fluid relations with teachers and peers. The article presents a discussion of the discourse of ‘twenty-first-century learning’ and focuses on non-traditional classrooms as an example of a localised expression of this discourse, supported by ethnographic data generated from field visits to three primary schools in Sydney, Australia to explore student practices enabled by such spaces.

The secular contract: sovereignty, secularism and law in Australia

What does it mean to say that a nation-state is secular? Secular law typically begins when a state has no religious competitor for authority. For this reason, it can be said that the Australian state is secular because its authority is derived from its own laws. What makes Australian law sovereign, the highest authority within the state, is its secularity. However, given Australias colonial heritage, it is not just the absence of religious authority, such as a state religion, that gives the state its secularity. The laws foundations in colonial violence and the extinguishment of Indigenous sovereignty as a competing authority are also a crucial way in which secular Australian law can continue to operate as the sovereign authority within the state. Using the work of Charles W. Mills, I will critically interrogate how legal and political characterisations of the law as secular work to disavow the states racialised foundations in colonial violence in the form of a “secular contract”. In developing this notion of a “secular contract” I hope to show that secularism be must re-thought of as not simply the operation of law without religion, but also, as complicit with the ways indigenous sovereignties in (post)colonial states are negated.

“I'm Nobody”

Television and film writer Joss Whedon has produced a number of popular culture works which explore representations of what female bodies are seen to be capable of and how these representations affect what female bodies can do. Texts such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), Serenity (2005), and Dollhouse (2009–2010) are as much celebrated for subverting gender and genre conventions as they are criticized for reinforcing sexualized images of women and violence. Instead of approaching Whedons texts in terms of their representations of gender, and how feminist or otherwise these representations are, this paper explores the ways in which Whedons texts suggest that subjectivity is textually and discursively constructed. In particular, I will stage a reading of his latest television program, Dollhouse, as a representation of the somatechnical construction of bodies and identity. Somatechnics refers to the inextricable connection between the soma, the material corporeality of bodies, and the techne or techniques and technologies through which bodily being is produced and lived. By making visible the somatechnics of bodily being and the ways gender and embodiment are experienced through and produced by cultural and discursive technologies, Dollhouse emphasizes the role of power in the construction of embodied identity rather than something which always or inevitably oppresses and constrains bodies gendered as female.

Managing the risky humanity of academic workers : Risk and reciprocity in university work-life balance policies

University work–life balance policies increasingly offer academic workers a range of possible options for managing the competing demands of work, family, and community obligations. Flexible work arrangements, family-friendly hours and campus facilities, physical well-being and mental health programs typify strategies for formally acknowledging the need for employees to balance work with other needs and commitments. This paper draws on examples from Australian university work–life balance policies to consider how the incalculable humanity of academic workers is constructed as posing institutional risks because of the potential ill-effects of an imbalance between work and life. We consider how work–life balance policies anticipate and attempt to manage perceived risks to the institution as a consequence of workers’ utilization of such policies for their own benefit. Informed by poststructuralist theoretical and cultural analyses of risk, affect, and governmentality, we argue that work–life balance policies stage a double maneuver. They offer heavily qualified workplace conditions, benefits, and supports predicated on notions of risk and reciprocity, while simultaneously extending the reach of institutional power to include the bodies, minds, families, and lives of academic workers.

Best foot forward, watching your step, jumping in with both feet, or sticking your foot in it?: The politics of researching academic viewpoints

This article presents our experiences of conducting research interviews with Australian academics, in order to reflect on the politics of researcher and participant positionality. In particular, we are interested in the ways that academic networks, hierarchies and cultures, together with mobility in the higher education sector, contribute to a complex discursive terrain in which researchers and participants alike must maintain vigilance about where they ‘put their feet’ in research interviews. We consider the implications for higher education research, arguing that the positionality of researchers and participants pervades and exceeds these specialised research situations.

Imaging religion and spirituality: An introduction

At the scholarly nexus of religion and screen culture resides an insistent and age-old question that shapes the examination of both content and practice in image making: ‘Is seeing believing?’ In The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice, David Morgan (2005) argues that the two are inseparable. Certainly one might say, as Morgan does, that spirituality, and more specifically, ‘religious belief’ is mediated, which facilitates the critical imperative ‘to know how religious belief takes shape in the history of visual media’:

Journal editing and ethical research practice: perspectives of journal editors

This article offers perspectives from academics with recent journal editing experience on a range of ethical issues and dilemmas that regularly pose challenges for those in editorial roles. Each contributing author has provided commentary and reflection on a select topic that was identified in the research literature concerning academic publishing and journal editing. Topics discussed include the ethical responsibilities of working with international and early career contributors to develop work for publication, balancing influence and responsibility to a journals disciplinary field while maintaining the integrity of editorial and review processes, and the challenges of promoting scholarly research that pushes epistemological, methodological, and political boundaries in an increasingly competitive publishing climate. This article aims to stimulate discussion concerning the roles, responsibilities, and ethical challenges faced by journal editors, and the implications of these for ethical practices in academic publishing today.

The politics of gamification: Education, neoliberalism and the knowledge economy

Gamification, a strategy whereby video game logics are applied to real world tasks, is rapidly gaining traction in education discourses, policies, and practices. Gamification advocates are frequently and prominently declaring the practice “the future of education” or education for the 21st century (Deardorff 2015; Frith 2017; Oxford Analytica 2016). Others are more skeptical of the power and effectiveness of the approach (Bogost 2011; Robertson 2010). Yet for all the celebration, critique, and debate around gamification, the question of the political logics underpinning gamification as pedagogy is rarely discussed. This article will explore those politics. We will challenge the assumption that gamification is a politically neutral practice and argue that it must be understood as a product, and embodiment, of a very specific set of cultural and political circumstances and values surrounding the knowledge economy. In staging this argument, we hope to demonstrate how and why the debate around gamification needs to be expanded from a discussion of its efficacy and terminology, to incorporate a political reading of its ideological effects. Gamification can be understood as the extension of the principles and mechanics of game-play: rules, points, rewards, leaderboards, and so on into “real-world tasks.” At its most basic, gamification has been described as “the use of game design elements in non-game contexts” (Deterding et al. 2011, 10). It has been heavily adopted as an organizational and managerial tactic, ostensibly as a motivating strategy. Used to encourage employee activity, and/or customer engagement and loyalty, it has been widely mobilized in fields as varied as human resources, advertising, fitness, and health, and of course education. Gamification is increasingly popular with large corporations and government bodies. Google, for example, famously uses “Goobles,” a kind of intraworkplace currency designed for betting on predictive markets (Schawbel 2013). The National Security Agency deployed gamification to incentivize analysts by awarding them “skilz” points that allowed them to “unlock achievements” and complete work tasks (Chen 2013). The Swedish National Society for Road Safety implemented a “speed camera lottery” in Stockholm, where drivers who drive under the speed limit are entered into a lottery with the chance to

Thieves like us: the British monarchy, celebrity, and settler colonialism

ABSTRACT This article considers how the treatment of the British Royal Family as celebrities simultaneously maintains and displaces the white diasporic ties between Commonwealth settler nations. The media production and consumption of the House of Windsor in terms of celebrity culture is a crucial way in which the British monarchy is legitimised as an important part of civil and public life in settler countries such as Australia and New Zealand. This article focuses on print news reporting of two state visits by Prince William to Australia and New Zealand in 2010 and 2011. As part of this reporting, I examine the mediation of protocols of sovereign welcome and recognition by and for the Royal Family and Gadigal and Māori peoples in terms of their contribution to a civic polity that normalises settler durability. Although Royal visits are enabled by white diasporic links between settler countries and the United Kingdom, I argue that media tropes of celebrity aura and divine charisma function to ex-nominate whiteness and race from media reporting on the British Royal Family. The celebritisation of constitutional monarchy has the effect of obscuring the racial and religious power that authorises constitutional monarchy as well as these states’ settler colonial histories.