Jane Mills

Situating the ‘beyond’: adventure-learning and Indigenous cultural competence

In 2010, an Indigenous Elder from the Wiradjuri nation and a group of academics from Charles Sturt University travelled to Menindee, a small locality on the edge of the Australian outback. They were embarked upon an ‘adventure-learning’ research journey to study ways of learning by creating a community of practice with an Elder from the Ngyampa/Barkandji nation. This article first explores the implications of this innovative approach to transformative learning for professional development and for teaching and learning practice. It then reflects on the significance of location for pedagogic approaches aimed at closing the education gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians in universities.

Popular Screen Culture and Digital Communication Technology in Literacy Learning: Toward a New Pedagogy of Cosmopolitanism

Abstract This article discusses a trial project to explore the role of popular screen culture in student engagement levels, the capabilities of the smartphone camera for screen literacy learning, and the potential of digital communication technology for cultural participation and global citizenship. It asks if screen literacy learning so framed could point to a new pedagogy of cosmopolitanism.

Hollywood: Bad cinema's bad ‘other’

Paracinema is widely defined in terms of its binary opposition to Hollywood cinema, making it Hollywoods ‘bad other’. This proposes Hollywood as the opposite of bad, and therefore good. Underlying this conceptualization is a Hollywoodcentric approach to studying film in which the globally dominant cinema sets the standard by which all other cinemas are judged – and often to be found lacking. Paradoxically, cinemas seen to oppose Hollywood often tend to be valorized at the expense of the globally dominant cinema which is denigrated. Thus good becomes bad and bad is perceived as good. Hollywood, however, is seen to be doubly bad: not only is it accused of ‘ruining all the cinemas in Europe’, it is the ‘significant bad other’ from which all other cinemas need to be protected. In this scenario, cinemas are imagined to possess rigid and impermeable boundaries preserving distinctions of taste. These borders supposedly keep Hollywood conservative and immune from the ideas, images and sounds of bad cinema while those erected around bad cinema are thought to keep Hollywood out and protect paracinemas essence and ‘otherness’. This article proposes replacing the notion of fixed cinematic borders within a Hollywoodcentric screenscape with that of a chaotic, fluid screenscape in which global cultural flows carry ‘badness’ between cinemas in a transnational imaginary. In challenging the common perception of Hollywoods relationship to its ‘bad other’, it asks whether a cinema commonly perceived to abhor the excess, low production values and sleaze of bad cinema is widely imagined to be bad itself. But just how bad is bad, what value can we place on badness, and do two bads make a good?

Representations and Hybridizations in First Nation Cinema: Change and Newness by Fusion

This chapter explores the cultural exchanges and hybridising processes between Australian First Nation cinema and American cinema. To provide the historical context for what would become a vibrant and diverse Indigenous cinema, I discuss how Indigenous peoples have been represented by non-Indigenous filmmakers, in particular in the Bushranger film genre, a hybridised Australian version of the Hollywood western. I explore the confluences and cultural flows between First Nation films and a number of American cinemas, in particular Hollywood genre cinema. To illustrate the range of film genres and styles with which First Nation films have entered into dialogue with American cinema, my focus is on two very different Aboriginal filmmakers, Tracey Moffatt and Ivan Sen, whose films demonstrate processes of intercultural exchange and fusion with Hollywood cinema.