Jacqueline Z. Wilson

Retaining a Foothold on the Slippery Paths of Academia: University Women, Indirect Discrimination, and the Academic Marketplace.

This paper examines indirect discrimination in Australian universities that tends to obstruct and delay women’s academic careers. The topic is defined and contextualised via a 1998 speech by the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner, juxtaposed with a brief contemporaneous exemplar. The paper discusses the prevalence of women among casual and fixed‐term academic workers, and the contrasting low numbers of women in senior academic positions. It is argued that the neo‐liberal ‘marketisation’ of higher education, which still prevails, has fostered a number of indirectly discriminatory practices and conditions that substantially disadvantage women. A selection of studies of the problem are critiqued. It is argued that a broad statistical methodology is inadequate due to its tendency to ‘homogenise’ the academy and its component individuals, in the process giving scope for unjustified optimism among university policy‐makers. A particulate approach is advocated, acknowledging the wide variation between and within universities, and the range of hidden difficulties individual women academics can face. It is concluded that despite apparent reforms over the past decade, the situation of women has improved little in practical terms.

Pecking orders Power relationships and gender in Australian prison graffiti

The article examines male and female inmate graffiti in a decommissioned Australian jail, a holding facility attached to the former Melbourne Magistrates Court. While male graffitists were preoccupied chiefly with personal identity, power and vengeance, the women used graffiti to build networks and alliances in order to cope with life inside. Their social structure, as expressed in the graffiti, is unusual in that, unlike the men, virtually all female inmates expected to be sent to one prison upon conviction; they thus treated the jail as a staging-ground for their arrival and continued survival in the main prison. Further aspects of the general condition of female inmates in the late 20th-century prison system are discussed. The article begins with observations on the political implications of attempting such research, and consequent tendencies for vulnerable historical voices to be silenced through regimes of de facto censorship.

Transgressive decor: Narrative glimpses in Australian prisons, 1970s--1990s

This article presents a number of examples of prison inmate graffiti photographed by the author in Australian decommissioned prisons. The images are examined with regard to aspects of the sociology and social psychology of the prison environment. Abiding themes of prison life are identified and discerned as factors contributing to the content of the graffiti. These include especially power relationships, sexuality, revenge, violence, boredom and the simple desire for some form of entertainment, however fleeting.

Contested Memories: Caring about the Past — or Past Caring?

This chapter examines the range and form of narratives that give voice to approximately 500,000 ‘Forgotten Australians’ who experienced out-of-home ‘care’ as children under the auspices of state government departments and/or non-government charitable organizations. These narratives are derived from the work of stakeholder support groups, official inquiries and academic historians. Among those working in this field, the authors have the unusual advantage of being both stakeholders and academics. They experienced out-of-home care as children and therefore qualify as Forgotten Australians, and are among the small number of care-leavers to have established academic careers. The few academics who come from care-leaver backgrounds attest to the manifold life-obstacles care-leavers encounter and the enduring ‘headwinds’ they must face in pursuing relatively unremarkable goals and aspirations, long after leaving care. It is this abiding personal burden that makes the task of restoring to them their voices, through the collection and propagation of their narratives, both necessary and urgent.

In search of academic legitimacy : The current state of scholarship on graffiti and street art

Abstract Much has changed since the 1960s when the first scholarship on contemporary graffiti appeared. The current paper is an attempt to outline and contextualize a number of recurrent challenges facing researchers of graffiti and street art, as well as developments that have taken place in this scholarly field. The aim of creating this outline is to assist in increasing the amount, and improving the quality, of future scholarship on graffiti and street art. We recognize, however, that although many of the challenges have at one time seemed insurmountable, over time they have lessened as graffiti and street art have grown as art movements, and because a small cadre of tenacious scholars focusing on graffiti and street art has published and taught in this area. An increasing, though limited, number of academic venues focused on graffiti and street art scholarship has slowly emerged. We also recognize that with increased scholarship that has laid the foundation, new avenues to explore graffiti and street art have become apparent.

Muddling Upwards: The Unexpected, Unpredictable and Strange on the Path from Care to High Achievement in Victoria, Australia

Education is a key avenue to personal, social and economic success; and its lack can lead to lifelong deprivation and social exclusion. The chapter focuses on the specific educational challenges that confront children in out-of-home care (OHC), and those who have been discharged from Care as young adults. A very small percentage of care leavers complete education, and some of the core reasons for this are discussed. The two authors, themselves care leavers, provide emblematic case studies by recounting their own experiences. They conclude that many of the obstacles they had to surmount were, and are, common to care leavers of their generations and also those currently in OHC. The chapter closes with a brief summary of policy reforms necessary to ensure educational equity for care leavers.

Hope Street: From Voice to Agency for Care-Leavers in Higher Education

ABSTRACT In the early 1980s, one of the authors became an adolescent ward of the State of Victoria, Australia, and went into out-of-home care. While in care, repeated encounters with researchers, journalists and policy-makers left her disillusioned as to the efficacy and relevance of their activities, in that although she was sporadically provided with a ‘voice’, this did little to bridge the divide between their world of privilege and the non-privileged world of the subject of their attentions. The article argues that this divide is perpetuated long after people leave care as adults, and that a mere ‘voice’ is not enough – what is needed is agency, in the design and execution of research. This can be achieved through extended education, depending in turn on an inclusive culture shift within institutions of higher learning. The article utilises the authors personal experience as a brief case study.

The tacit semantics of ‘Loud Fences’: tracing the connections between activism, heritage and new histories

Abstract In 2015, in response to harrowing accounts of child sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic clergy in the town of Ballarat, a campaign of public support was launched in the form of coloured ribbons attached to the fences of institutions where the abuse had occurred. The “Loud Fence” campaign has become a global form of protest and commemoration. Institutions’ reactions were varied; some removed the ribbons, to find them promptly replaced, with attendant publicity. Thus was established a silent dialogue that encapsulated the contested nature of the ribbons’ symbolism, and exemplified, too, the campaign’s disparate implied audiences. The paper discusses the meanings of the Loud Fences in relation to divided community sensibilities and intangible heritage, as a performative mode of activism and of heritage-making. It considers ways in which the campaign challenges institutional cultures that stand as extant remnants of colonialism and as edifices of iconic institutional power. The Loud Fences campaign is characterised as a grass-roots quest, initially intended to show solidarity with disenfranchised victims of abuse, that has come to be seen as giving them a symbolic “voice” in the face of institutional denial. The paper touches upon the ways in which such campaigns, based on visual symbols and contested, yet unspoken, “dialogue”, can be historicised.

Inclusive archives and recordkeeping: towards a critical manifesto

Abstract Archival practices must now reflect both advances in information technology, and the ethos of inclusivity that assures that the subjects of records have full opportunity to participate in the memory-making process, and to ‘own’ the resulting records. This themed section presents four articles demonstrating various ways in which this is being done or could potentially be done, and why it is needed. The articles model new and innovative modes of archiving, closely collaborative approaches to ensuring that the ‘personal’ is included in the record, and ways in which the norms of historical practice, heritage and social memory can be transformed by new ways of thinking about and defining archival practices.

Introduction: Prison Tourism in Context

The advent of a Handbook of Prison Tourism, and one of such depth and scope as this volume, is testimony to the extraordinary rise in scholarly interest in a field that barely a decade ago supported only a handful of researchers. It is testimony too, not only to the global ubiquity of former sites of imprisonment as tourist attractions, but also to the centrality of prisons, and the concept of incarceration as a dominant mode of administering justice that spans cultures and nations. In modern liberal democracies based on and notionally wedded to principles of individual liberty as core legal and societal precepts, it is unsurprising that imprisonment is regarded by many as a fair and just response to individuals’ transgression against society. In an age when many believe in the principle that “the punishment should fit the crime,” the imposition of a prison sentence for a variety of offenses rarely raises questions.