Peter Bishop

OFF-ROAD -- FOUR-WHEEL DRIVE AND THE SENSE OF PLACE /

In this paper I argue that the popularity of four-wheel drive vehicles has important consequences for contemporary notions of place and should he considered in the context of the upsurge in high-tech, especially communication, systems. Four-wheel drive culture encompasses both a literal mobility and a fantasy relationship between urban or suburban regions and those of the great outdoors, especially wilderness. By using the Australian experience as a case study I show that four-wheel drive culture plays a crucial part in the construction of what could be called the deep outback and the deep suburbs. It thereby plays a significant role in a renegotiation of the iconography of national identity.

Gathering the Land: The Alice Springs to Darwin Rail Corridor

This paper discusses the proposed Alice Springs to Darwin rail, a project that will complete a transcontinental railway linking the southern coast of Australia to the north. It is argued that the railway will constitute a specific kind of place, a corridor, involved in a complex, paradoxical, and, at times, highly contentious gathering, one that embraces both the macrolevel of regional and Federal politics, as well as the microlevel of local concerns and individual experiences. In addition to developing the phenomenology of ‘corridors’, I show that the rail project is deeply implicated in an ongoing resignification of several technologies and their associated cultural regimes. It is also argued that locating the rail proposal within specific historical and social contexts allows numerous crucial inflections and meanings to be understood. In particular, it is suggested that the rail proposal is located at the heart of a contemporary unease and unsettling of Australian national identity and its relationship to the land, an uncertainty that runs hand in hand with a new confidence and, at times, triumphal, rhetoric.

Surveying “The Waiting Room”

While generally considered to be a waste of time and experienced as frustrating, waiting can also be unbearable in critical situations. However, waiting has sometimes been evaluated as an opportunity, whether for tactical purposes or for more existential reasons. This paper draws on a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives, as well as using literature, in particular W. G. Sebalds novel, Austerlitz, in order to develop the beginnings of a critical phenomenology of the “waiting room” as a spatial, metaphorical, and experiential reality. It is argued that waiting should be considered a ubiquitous, multifaceted, spatial–temporal activity that potentially occurs throughout daily life. All waiting, whether formally structured or spontaneous and ephemeral, involves the transformation of space/place. However, while specifically designed waiting zones or “waiting rooms” can be viewed as technologies attempting to impose spacial-temporal control over daily rhythms, it is suggested that waiting can also provide political, creative, and existential opportunities.

Reconciliation and pedagogy

Reconciliation is one of the most significant contemporary challenges in the world today. In this innovative new volume, educational academics and practitioners across a range of cultural and political contexts examine the links between reconciliation and critical pedagogy, putting forward the notion that reconciliation projects should be regarded as public pedagogical interventions, with much to offer to wider theories of learning. While ideas about reconciliation are proliferating, few scholarly accounts have focused on its pedagogies. This book seeks to develop a generative theory that properly maps reconciliation processes and works out the pedagogical dimensions of new modes of narrating and listening, and effecting social change. The contributors build conceptual bridges between the scholarship of reconciliation studies and existing education and pedagogical literature, bringing together the concepts of reconciliation and pedagogy into a dialogical encounter and evaluating how each might be of mutual benefit to the other, theoretically and practically. This study covers a broad range of territory including ethnographic accounts of reconciliation efforts, practical implications of reconciliation matters for curricula and pedagogy in schools and universities and theoretical and philosophical considerations of reconciliation/pedagogy. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of peace and reconciliation studies, educational studies and international relations.

Eating in the contact zone: Singapore foodscape and cosmopolitan timespace

This paper focuses on an area just off the less fashionable end of Singapores premier high street, Orchard Road. As a foodscape this neighbourhood is typical of many in Singapore, embracing as it does a heterogeneity of food outlets (from basic hawker stalls to Westernized fast food cafes, from gourmet restaurant to fusion bistros) and ethnic origins of food. There are also major variations in the social class, age, ethnicity, and national origins of the customers (local shopper, local worker or student, tourist, or ‘guest worker’). In particular the heterogeneity is embodied and defined by spatial/temporal architectures and rhythms of everyday practices. The paper discusses attempts to orchestrate these rhythms, particularly around food. Multiple uses, identities, and relationships are played out through complex micro-regions of time and place. Typical of many such sites in global cities, it is in a state of transformation from the local to cosmopolitan. It is suggested that such complex areas can be understood as contact zones where struggles, negotiations, exclusions, and denials around convivial cosmopolitanism are enacted.

The Shadow of Hope: Reconciliation and Imaginal Pedagogies

By exploring the extreme demands that a reconciliation agenda places upon the imagination, this chapter maps and evaluates the possibilities for mythopoetic pedagogies. Such a move aims to work as a provocation for teachers in formal education systems and for cultural workers. Various calls to imagination within the literature of reconciliation are highlighted: the challenges faced in a double process of acknowledgement and forgiveness; the complexities of different ways of knowing/valuing and imagining in intercultural dialogue; the struggle over memory and how to imagine responsibility, shame, and grief; imagination’s role in a reconciliation pedagogy; and re-imagining identity in postcolonial contexts. Mythopoetic pedagogies that lie outside the post-Enlightenment paradigm are introduced alongside dominant western critical theories of pedagogy and imagination. This is crucial due to the devaluation and marginalization of mythopoetics within the philosophies and pedagogies of modernity and postmodernity. The chapter includes a brief reflection upon some personal experiences in the practice and organization of a mythopoetic pedagogy, in order to develop an understanding of its limitations and possibilities when applied to a reconciliation agenda.

Residence On Earth: Anima Mundi and a Sense of Geographical 'Belonging'

The main title of this article is taken from a series of poems by the Chilean, Pablo Neruda, entitled Residencia en la tierra. For Neruda, to be resident on the Earth is to be poetically involved with places, landscapes, peoples and things, with death, struggle, celebration and loss. Above all it means to be ’a passionate witness’ to the pain of the world.’ He writes: ’I fall into the shadows, to the core of shattered things’ and by so doing, he begins to see poetically, to experience the imaginal reanimation of the world. Such a reanimation is beautifully expressed in his sensual, Odas elementales: to the tomato, the chestnut, the watermelon, or even to his socks. The term ’Earth’ in Neruda’s verse is particularly apt, for it expresses a subtle dialectic between the extreme metaphorical grounds of soil, place and planet. Following on in the same spirit as Neruda, I want to introduce and develop some of C. G. Jung’s ideas in conjunction with those from that area of post-Jungian studies known as archetypal psychology. These, I believe, facilitate the poetic understanding of the human experience of being resident on Earth. I try to demonstrate that the

Book Reviews : Cosmos and hearth. By Yi-Fu Tuan. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. 1996. x + 208 pp.

fortably in the book. From the outset Taylor explained that he would not attempt ’to account for change between or within [the three time periods of the book]’ instead choosing to present ’a collection, a non-developmental overview’ (p. 6). Consequently there is no concluding chapter. This leaves questions unanswered and connections unexplored, and does an injustice to the book. Overall, Taylor has taken on a task of (in his words) ’forbidding complexity’ with limited success.