James Arvanitakis

Are Universities Redundant

Modern higher education is faced with a common problem regardless of location and developmental contexts: How do we educate students in a time of disruption?

Transracial adoption, white cosmopolitanism and the fantasy of the global family

This article takes at its point of the departure the practice of transracial adoption of children and adults. During the colonial period, it was not only non-white native children or adults who were adopted by white colonisers and settlers; the opposite also occurred. The existence of these ‘inverted’ transracial adoptions is well-documented in literary and autobiographical texts and historical documents, as well as in art and visual culture. At that time, the white transracial adoptee who had been transformed into the Other was stigmatised and even demonised as something of an ethno-racial monster transgressing the boundaries between Europeans and non-Europeans. This article aims to re-conceptualise transracial adoption within the framework of the fundamental inability of Europeans to attach to the lands and peoples outside Europe by making use of the concepts of indigenisation and autochtonisation.

Civics and citizenship education: What have we learned and what does it mean for the future of Australian democracy?

The ambitious project to nationalise the Australian Curriculum has prompted great interest among policymakers, academics and civics teachers in Australian schools. The government-led citizenship education initiative Discovering Democracy (1997–2007) comprehensively failed to meet its objectives, most prominently the stated goal of developing active citizens. This article has twin objectives: to explore the ways in which government-directed civics education programmes have fallen short; and to argue for a shift in our approaches to civics education, in terms of both content and delivery, drawing on the surplus model, which credits students with unique ideas, knowledge and experiences. We draw upon Justice Citizens, an alternative approach to Civics Education that foregrounds students’ own interests and abilities as central to their development into active citizens as an example of the educational practices that can promote and strengthen active citizenship among school students. From this programme and other research, we discuss four student-centred themes that should inform further civics education curriculum development.

The Citizen Scholar: The Academy at the University of Western Sydney

In 2013, the University of Western Sydney (UWS) – now Western Sydney University – developed a new programme with two broad aims. Confronted with a changing higher education environment in which the sector is increasingly directed to be ‘competitive’, the university that had traditionally lacked the prestige of Australia’s ‘sandstone’ institutions moved to differentiate itself. Secondly, and more importantly, a collection of administrators and academics used this changing environment as an impetus to reflect on the purpose of the contemporary university.

Staging Maralinga and looking for community (or why we must desire community before we can find it)

The concept of ‘community’ is often presented as a way of overcoming exclusion and this dominates many community cultural development projects including those drawing on the tradition of ‘applied theatre’. Drawing on personal experience of staging an applied theatre project, Maralinga, which details the exposure of veterans to nuclear fallout, this paper problematises the concept of community based on some ‘natural’ affiliation or recognition. It argues that a more complex analysis is needed to understand how communities come together and expand based on reciprocated desire. Community based on desire, rather than recognition, allows people from vastly divergent experiences to come together and connect despite differences. The paper concludes by reflecting on the implications for applied theatre practitioners.

The Commodification and Re-Claiming of Trust

The commodification tendencies of neoliberalism continue to enter new realms. From the environmental world, throughout communal institutions and into our bodies, neoliberalism is in the process of commodifying the final frontier of our subjectivities and relationships – our hopes and who we trust. What may have once been considered as ‘spaces’ outside the sphere of commodification, images of a better world and cooperation crossed the personal and communal frontiers and included visions of peace, safety and trust. These are none other dimensions of what may be defined as ‘societal sense of trust’. Trust operates both on the societal and personal level. However, this sense of trust has now been enclosed, commodified and transformed into individualised ‘self interest’. That is, rather than believing that we can trust those around us, we feel a constant sense of scarcity and competition. We refuse to trust those around us because we feel there is not enough to ‘go around’. This sense of scarcity often dominates our subjectivity and has become a defining feature of both the political and personal spheres. This may provide insights into why nations such as Australia are experiencing record levels of growth but turning their backs on refugees and other dispossessed persons. Despite this, new spaces of trust continually emerge,breaking down the commodifying logic of neoliberalism. This rupturing takes many forms including the creation of noncommodified spaces of cooperation and hope. Such non-commodified spaces depend on an open and mutual distribution of trust that does not exclude, but rather expands as it is shared. Consequently, these spaces of trust can be described as social or ‘cultural commons’.

Citizenship and the Thinking University: Toward the Citizen Scholar

The present chapter considers what constitutes a thinking university of the future. We argue that universities as centres of thought need to consider the relationship between knowledge and citizenship. How knowledge is produced and transmitted matters as this is truly what is transformational to both the students encountered and the communities engaged. But the role of the contemporary university is not only to produce and transmit knowledge but also to foster individual and community empowerment. In this sense a thinking university also promotes active citizenship. Combining the philosophical postulation of Martin Heidegger’s (Heidegger M (1927) Being and time, (Trans: Macquarrie J and Robinson E 1967), Harper & Row, New York) ‘threshold’ and Paolo Friere’s (1972) liberation pedagogy, our position is that universities can create an environment where students can be empowered through knowledge and the development of a set of tools to employ that knowledge. To do this, we propose that a thinking university actively embodies and promotes the idea of the citizen scholar (Arvanitakis J (2014) Massification and the large lecture theatre: from panic to excitement. High Educ 67:735–745).

The Citizen Scholar in Developing Global Perspectives

The citizen scholar encapsulates the idea that the role of universities is to promote scholarship as well as active and engaged citizens—both national and global. That is, beyond the disciplinary knowledge students develop during their studies, universities must inculcate a set of skills and cultural practices that prepare students for a turbulent and constantly changing world. We argue that at the core of the citizen scholar is a set of graduate proficiencies that promote internationalization, which includes interdisciplinarity learning environments, cross-cultural understanding, a series of new literacies, internationalization, and inclusivity. These proficiencies are underscored by the frame of “cultural humility”; that is, a lifelong commitment of both self-evaluation and self-critique as one seeks to engage and understand the many complex cultures we interact with.