Nicole Anderson

Apres Le Deluge: social media in learning and teaching

Abstract The increased visibility of social media in educational settings prompts discussion on the transformation it has on student communication, interaction and learning, but this is only one set of pedagogical dynamics needing consideration. Our roles as educators and how we respond to the deeper challenges to traditional pedagogy offered by a user-driven and convergent media environment also require attention. Whilst there is no doubt that social media renders the space between the social and the learning and teaching space fluid, integrating social media into pedagogical practice raises a series of questions about engaged students, knowledge production and the relationships between educators and students. Contributing to the growing body of research around social media and its role in the classroom, this article engages with existing literature in the field whilst drawing upon research conducted at Macquarie University. This research explored live social media practices in student learning and assessment, examining the challenges and opportunities in social media-based learning and teaching strategies. We contend, cautiously, that social media opens up new possibilities for engaging students in their own active learning. The extent to which it is able to do so, however, is dependent on how lecturers introduce new tools to their students and what pedagogical work they see these tools as enhancing.

Free-play? Fair-play! Defending Derrida

The aim of this paper is to defend Derrida against negative interpretations of nihilism and ethical irresponsibility by arguing that Derridas notion of différance, and deconstruction in general, is profoundly responsible. It is responsible because Derridas différance is a condition of ethical possibility and impossibility, which enables individuals to take responsibility for decision-making away from the dichotomous either/or choices characteristic of normative ethics, thereby opening a political and ethical space for difference.

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.

(Auto)Immunity : the deconstruction and politics of 'Bio-Art' and criticism

The term ‘bio-art’ serves to define an artistic practice that includes either biological materials, or techniques. Such art includes well-known work by individual bioartists such as Orlan, Stelarc, Eduardo Kac, Brandon Ballangée and Natalie Jeremijenko to bio-art collectives, such as the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), Art Catalyst, and SymbioticA. While these works differ in style and content what they have in common is an attempt to reconceptualise traditional notions of art, as well as human bodies and subjectivity, by representing and engaging in a range of complex political issues and cultural criticisms surrounding biotechnologies. For example, The Critical Art Ensemble argues that their particular aim is to produce and rethink ‘the intersections between art, critical theory, technology, and political activism’. In particular, bio-artists and collectives attempt to reconceptualise traditional art by adopting biological and scientific laboratory techniques, often working closely with scientists, in order to remove both art and science from their traditional, and culturally perceived, roles. For instance, many bio-artists attempt to challenge the traditional conception that art and aesthetics stands apart from science, and thus in the process, raise questions about the purpose of art. Consequently, many bio-art critics and writers argue that the main aim of bio-art is to challenge and attempt to break down the respective boundaries between nature (that is, biology) and art; science and art; function and aesthetics, humans and animals, animals and plants, and so on.

General Editors' Note

The aim of Derrida Today is to see Derrida’s work in its broadest possible context and to argue for its keen and enduring relevance to our present intellectual, cultural and political situations. Its aim is not to conceive of Derrida’s work as merely a major development in thinking about textuality, nor as simply belonging to the specific philosophical discussions in the name of which some philosophers have reclaimed it. Derrida Today attempts, therefore, to have the broadest possible reference, from the philosophical and theoretical through the most aesthetically innovative to the most urgently political. It seeks to consider work that is rigorous and provocative, exact and experimental. It will be prepared to consider any approach to the reading of Derrida’s work and the application of deconstruction, as long as it produces valuable and useful insights. It aims not to be narrowly pedantic about approach, topic or style, or to police the Derridean legacy for its orthodoxy or purported accuracy or fidelity to a specific set of conclusions. Given this, the journal is not only about what we as general editors decide it to be, it’s life and trajectory will also be determined, even perhaps, unpredictably, by the topics and styles contributors offer. In this sense, we hope the journal will promote the ethical commitment of deconstruction; to an openness to the ‘event to come’.

Auto (Immunity): Evolutions of Otherness

like all other words, acquires its value only from its inscription in a chain of possible substitutions, in what is too blithely called a ‘context’ [...] the word has interest only within a certain context, where it replaces and lets itself be determined by such other words as ‘écriture’, ‘trace’, ‘différance’, ‘supplement’, ‘hymen’, ‘pharmakon’, ‘marge’, ‘entame’, ‘parergon’, etc. By definition, the list can never be closed, and I have cited only names, which is inadequate and done only for reasons of economy.

Introduction: The Political Futures of Jacques Derrida

This special edition of Social Semiotics is based on the colloquium ‘‘The Political Futures of Jacques Derrida’’, held at Macquarie University, Sydney in February 2005. The colloquium grew from a suggestion of Nicole Anderson, as a way of marking Derrida’s death in late 2004, and was motivated by two factors. First we wanted to pay tribute to the work of Jacques Derrida; not as a sanctified oeuvre to admire with awe and supplication, but as the inspiration to important and telling provocations, interventions, complications and extrapolations in the political field of thought. Secondly, we wanted to respond to the cheap and disgraceful way that Derrida was represented in the media after his death. A kind of arrogant and mindless scepticism was deployed against Derrida’s work, here and overseas, by columnists unwilling largely to step outside of a kind of sentimental coffeeshop humanism, a kind of 1950s culturalism, unwilling and increasingly unable to meet the challenges of the last, perhaps now, two generations of inventive thought. This lagging wannabe intellectual culture recoils at the open-ended and difficult, as if somehow the problems we face, in a world that is chaotically and unthinkingly globalising with only a self-obsessed blind giant at the wheel, were somehow simple and could be dealt with by dimly recalled Enlightenment platitudes*/platitudes that have themselves abandoned any ethic of critical engagement that Kant, for example, might have recognised and encouraged. We heard Derrida lambasted for being obscurantist, when it was Derrida who had done so much to unearth how texts operated, and the kind of hidden assumptions they sought to dissimulate. Derrida was seen as nihilistic, when one after another his books laboured to re-invent ethics away from the kind of moral dogma and judgementalism that, following Nietzsche, he saw as the epitome of modern nihilism. Derrida was a relativist, when he had argued over and over again that his thought made any kind of complacent relativism impossible. He was the high priest of postmodernism when he had defended himself against criticisms of his Spectres of Marx by asking where had he ever celebrated the death of the grand narratives, or repudiated the discourse of liberation? Derrida was attacked for being anti-reason, when all he had ever wanted to do was apply the critical apparatus of reason to reason itself. He was lampooned as a traitor to the

Negotiations: interventions and interviews 1971-2001

Negotiations is a collection of interviews, essays and letters by Jacques Derrida, most of which appear for the first time in English, and some of which have not been published previously in any language. What distinguishes Negotiations from other previous collections, namely Points: Interviews, 1974 /1994 and Positions, is the focus on Derrida’s political and ethical ‘‘interventions’’ and ‘‘negotiations’’. The significant contribution this collection makes to the field is to reveal, first, the link between Derrida’s political and ethical interventions in what is generally perceived to be his ‘‘later’’ work on hospitality, responsibility and justice, and his ‘‘earlier’’ work on language, différance and ‘‘deconstruction’’. In Negotiations, Derrida comments that his ‘‘later’’ work is not some sort of ‘‘ethical turn’’ as many believe. Rather, ‘‘I am simply trying to pursue with some consequence the thinking that for years has been engaged with the same aporias’’ (p. 360). Secondly, this collection demonstrates how Derrida’s thought on politics and ethics in general, in both his earlier and later works, negotiates with everyday political, social and cultural events or situations. Examining the words ‘‘intervention’’ and ‘‘negotiation’’ (the key terms in the book’s title) will help to demonstrate the way some of his ‘‘earliest’’ deconstructive neologisms, such as différance, are significant for Derrida’s political and ethical thought. The Cambridge dictionary defines ‘‘intervention’’ as an ‘‘intention to become involved in a difficult situation in order to improve it or prevent it from getting worse’’. A thesaurus collocates ‘‘intervention’’ with interference, interposition or intrusion; insertion or insinuation; a mediation, intermission or obtrusion*/all of which further imply an interruption to the status quo or norm. The interviews, essays and letters in Negotiations reveal a number of ways in which Derrida intervenes. For instance, in the interview ‘‘Politics and Friendship’’, Derrida argues that he intervenes politically on a practical and everyday level: voting for the Socialist Party. But many of the interviews, articles and letters are also testament to Derrida’s ‘‘activities’’ as radical, not just practical, political interventions: in ‘‘Open Letter to Bill Clinton’’, Derrida intervenes directly in a politics that suppresses freedom of speech and thus undermines western notions of democracy. In ‘‘Letter to Jean Genet’’ Derrida deconstructs the racism in