Research Directions 2016 by Education and Arts at UON

FACULTY OF EDUCATION AND ARTS

RESEARCH DIRECTIONS 2016

ISSUE 5

RESEARCH DIRECTIONS 2016 8

Welcome to Research Directions

At a glance

News & achievements

Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen delves into the world of war and psychiatry

Kate Ariotti is uncovering the WWI prisoner of war experience

Nisha Thapliyal explores education, democracy, and social justice

Adam Lloyd is working toward better outcomes for kids

Narelle Eather is providing kids with a firm foundation for fitness

Erica Southgate is levelling the playing field in education

Rachel Buchanan is ensuring safe use of the internet for the next generation

Rachael Unicomb is pioneering the treatment of co-occurring communication disorders

Milena Heinsch is bringing together social work and gastroenterology

The Centre for Social Research and Regional Futures is informing the future of regional Australia

Hedda Askland is shining a light on displaced communities in our own backyards

David Farrugia is supporting the development of strong regional communities

Julia Coffey is advancing our sociological understanding of body image and health

Janet Fulton is uncovering issues of privacy and security in the digital age

Andrew Howells is illustrating the importance of cross-disciplinary research

Jane Shadbolt is handcrafting the future of animation techniques

Sean Lowry is taking art research to the next level

Emmett Stinson looks at the future of Australian literary production

Recent Books

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WELCOME

TO RESEARCH DIRECTIONS Welcome to Research Directions, a showcase of research highlights from the Faculty of Education and Arts (FEDUA) at the University of Newcastle. This issue has a special focus on researchers in the early stages of their careers. Our profiles of these young scholars reveal they are addressing the big questions about our society, culture, and individual identity; highlighting the progress this new generation of researchers are making towards crafting innovative solutions. Historian Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen (p5) and sociologist David Farrugia (p16) have been awarded highly competitive early career researcher fellowships by the Australian Research Council. They join two other FEDUA researchers from earlier rounds, making a cohort of high-performing young full-time researchers in the Faculty. The ways in which research contributes to innovation and prosperity through solving real-world problems are of growing interest to governments across the globe. Michael Askew (p14) and Hedda Askland (p15), from our Centre for Social Research and Regional Futures, are an example of how our researchers are making an obvious social impact. They are collaborating with

communities and government to tackle issues of contested land use to discover fair and sustainable ways to resolve them. Narelle Eather (p9), from the University’s Priority Research Centre for Physical Activity and Nutrition, displays the impact of her research into children’s attitudes toward physical activity, with the implementation of curriculum programs targeted at primary school children. While Adam Lloyd (p8), from the University’s Teachers and Teaching Research Centre, is working towards better educational outcomes for school children with several high impact projects, including two funded by the Australian Government Department of Education and Training. The creation of the Faculty’s new School of Creative Industries brings together the disciplines of Design, Communication, Natural History Illustration, Fine Art, Music, and Creative and Performing Arts. In this issue we feature four early career researchers from the newly formed School: Janet Fulton in communication (p18), Jane Shadbolt in animation (p20), Andrew Howells in natural history illustration (p19), and fine art researcher Sean Lowry (p21). Sean’s ‘Project Anywhere’, for instance, is a remarkable international collaboration providing exhibitions that combine peer review and gallery curation – but not in galleries.

The centrality of digital communication in our lives is reflected in the work of Janet Fulton (p18), who studies ways of making careers in the online world; Erica Southgate (p11), a National Centre for Equity in Higher Education Fellow who is engaging students in higher education through entertaining education apps; and Rachel Buchanan (p10), who is tracking young people’s knowledge and use of social media. The talented scholars featured in this issue in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Education and the Creative Industries are contributing to the global sum of knowledge that provides the tools for understanding and evaluating our changing world. I’m sure you will be as inspired by their ideas and passion as I am. Professor John Germov Pro Vice-Chancellor Faculty of Education and Arts UON Convenor (Strategic Planning)

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FACULTY OF EDUCATION AND ARTS RESEARCH

AT A GLANCE

Hallmarks of Research Excellence The rankings of the University of Newcastle and the Faculty of Education and Arts (FEDUA) reflect an international reputation for quality. The Faculty’s goal is to be in the top 10 nationally and top 200 globally in the Creative Industries, Education, and Humanities and Social Science disciplines. Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) 2015: • 90 percent of the Faculty’s fields of research achieved a rating of world standard or above. • Five Faculty fields of research are rated 4, meaning ‘Above world standard’: Historical Studies, Literary Studies, Religion and Religious Studies, Social Work and Sociology. QS World University Rankings by Subject 2016: • Education and Sociology are ranked within the top 150 in the world. • Linguistics and English Language and Literature are ranked with the top 200 in the world Research income growth Faculty research income between 2009 and 2016 was $18.7 million – of which $11.5 million (62%) was nationally competitive grant income. • In total, the Faculty has been awarded over $9.6 million dollars of nationally competitive funding for 2014-2016. Research degree completions • Between 2011 and 2015, the Faculty had 230 Research degree completions.

Our research excellence is also reflected in the number of externally funded fellowships and chairs held by Faculty staff in 2016 • ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), Dr Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen • ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), Dr David Farrugia • ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), Associate Professor Bronwyn Hemsley • ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), Dr Caragh Brosnan • ARC Future Fellow, Professor David Lubans • ARC Future Fellow, Associate Professor Hans-Lukas Kieser • BHP Billiton Chair of Sociology and FiDiPro, Professor Lisa Adkins • ELDP Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Dr Michael Franjieh • Equity Fellow, National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education (NCSEHE), Dr Cathy Stone • Equity Fellow, National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education (NCSEHE), Dr Erica Southgate • NHMRC Senior Research Fellow, Professor Ron Plotnikoff

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NEWS & ACHIEVEMENTS

Professor David Lubans and Ms Kristen Cohen

Professor Jenny Gore

Professor Catharine Coleborne

$1.3M NHMRC Partnership Grant

Education researcher appointed to prestigious journal

Faculty welcomes new Head of Humanities and Social Science

Professor Jenny Gore has been appointed Chief Editor of the prestigious Teaching and Teacher Education journal.

After 16 years at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, Professor Catharine Coleborne returned to Australia this year to take up a new appointment as Head of School in the School of Humanities and Social Science.

Professor David Lubans from the Priority Research Centre for Physical Activity and Nutrition in collaboration with Associate Professor Chris Lonsdale from the Institute for Positive Psychology & Education at the Australian Catholic University have been awarded a $1.3M National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) partnership grant, titled Evidence-Based Physical Activity in Primary Schools: Improving Children’s Health Through Sustainable Partnerships. This NHMRC grant includes partnership funding from the NSW Department of Education to deliver a multi-component professional learning intervention targeting primary school teachers in NSW. The project, known as iPLAY, aims to promote children’s physical activity in up to 200 schools across NSW over the next five years. FEDUA Fellows Congratulations to our 2016 FEDUA Fellows: Dr Tamara Blakemore, Dr Debra Donnelly and Dr Narelle Eather. The FEDUA (Faculty of Education and Arts) Fellowship Scheme is an important element of the Faculty’s Research and Innovation Action Plan that seeks to accelerate the research capacity of the Faculty through the professional development of its staff and support for their research. Our 2016 Fellows join previous recipients of the FEDUA Fellowship: Dr Sally Hewat, Dr Philip Matthias and Dr Kylie Shaw (2015); Dr Brooke Collins-Gearing, Associate Professor Alistair Rolls, Dr Steven Threadgold, Dr Christine Hatton (2014); Dr Gillian Arrighi and Associate Professor Marguerite Johnson (2013); Associate Professor Tom Griffiths, Dr Jo Ailwood (2012); and Professor Philip Morgan (2011).

This highly regarded international journal is ranked 2nd in the world among journals in teacher education and 26th of 230 journals in education. Gore has been on the Editorial Board of the journal since 1998 and served as Associate Editor for many years. Taking over as joint Chief Editor with colleagues Professor Max Smith and Dr Kathryn Holmes (WSU), the Faculty are delighted that this prestigious Elsevier journal is now based in Australia at the University of Newcastle. The journal's disciplinary and methodological breadth means that editorial work is at once challenging and stimulating and is a measure of the international esteem for the editors, the Teachers and Teaching Research Centre and the School of Education. 2016 Radford Lecture Since 1978, the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) annual conference has chosen a distinguished figure in educational research to give the Radford Lecture. Professor Jenny Gore, Director of the Teachers and Teaching Research Centre, has been asked to present the Radford Lecture at the AARE Conference in November 2016. To date, Professor Gore has been awarded more than AUD$5.1 million in research funding including nine grants from the Australian Research Council – seven as lead investigator.

Professor Coleborne is an internationally recognised historian of health and medicine with an extensive portfolio of research, teaching, administration and academic leadership. Her research and publishing in the histories of mental health, families, illness, colonial worlds and medical institutions, as well as in law and history has attracted world-wide attention. ARC Linkage-Project to assist Australian music industry Music researcher Professor Richard Vella has been awarded an Australian Research Council Linkage-Project for the first methodical study on how Australian performing artists are developed internationally through government and industry programs. This interdisciplinary project includes Professor Stephen Chen from Newcastle Business School, music policy researcher Associate Professor Shane Homan from Monash University, and Ms Millie Millgate Executive Producer at the Australasian Performing Rights Association (APRA).

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ELIZABETH ROBERTS-PEDERSEN DELVES INTO THE WORLD OF WAR AND PSYCHIATRY

Historian Dr Elizabeth RobertsPedersen is developing the first comprehensive account of the consequences of World War Two for psychiatric theory and practice. There has been a lot written about the impact of World War One on the history of psychiatry – especially shell shock and the emergence of post-traumatic stress disorder. However, there is surprisingly little on the impact of World War Two on the practice of psychiatry – particularly the sort of patients it brought into view. During her three-year project funded by a 2016 Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, Elizabeth will delve into the historical documentation of patients such as combatants, POWs, survivors of the holocaust and children separated from their parents during World War Two to uncover the conflict’s effect on modern day psychiatry. The theory and practice of psychiatry changed dramatically across the course of the 20th century. In this period the profession moved from being a marginal specialty centred on the asylum to become a central fixture of contemporary life, intertwined with state structures and popular culture.

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“It’s interesting that over time symptoms are not only interpreted differently, but can also appear to present in greater or lesser degrees in different conflicts, and have different meanings for both patients and clinicians. The ‘flashbacks’ of post-traumatic stress disorder do not appear in the literature on shell shock, for example."

This project will generate the historical context for World War Two’s seminal role in the influence of psychiatry in the post-war world as well for contemporary concerns about war trauma and the prevalence of posttraumatic stress disorder more broadly. The idea for the project, titled, ‘Unquiet Minds: Psychiatry in World War Two and its aftermaths’, has been percolating in Elizabeth’s mind since her PhD nine years ago. “My PhD was on British volunteers in a series of wars in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries – one of these was the Spanish Civil War and there was this passing remark by an American Commissar to the effect that, ‘Our men are not going to get shell shock in this war because they are committed to the cause and they are motivated,’” she recalls. “That comment lodged in the back of my mind, because it changed my perception of combat stress syndromes as timeless and unchanging. In fact culture and circumstance play a large role in how symptoms are perceived, described and understood. “It’s interesting that over time symptoms are not only interpreted differently, but can also appear to present in greater or lesser degrees in different conflicts, and have different meanings for both patients and clinicians. The ‘flashbacks’ of post-traumatic stress disorder do not appear in the literature on shell shock, for example."

“One thing I am hoping to do in this project is investigate how the interactions between psychiatrists and certain cohorts of patients can generate a kind of feedback loop, with clinical encounters producing a certain kind of literature in medical journals, which then informs subsequent clinical encounters and popular understandings of wartime syndromes.” Over the next three years, Elizabeth will combine archival research into official and personal papers with a close reading of medical periodicals, major metropolitan newspapers and existing scholarship on the case studies available. As part of this, she will travel to archives in the UK, the US, and Canberra and Melbourne in Australia. The project will culminate with a monograph, a series of journal articles, and a conference planned for the end of the project to bring together those interested in war and psychiatry. Elizabeth is also the newest member of the University of Newcastle’s Centre for the History of Violence – which has attracted over $2.5 million of ARC funding since 2012, including a 2014 ARC Discovery Project (DP) on ‘Violence on the Australian Colonial Frontier’; a 2014 Future Fellowship investigating ‘War, Violence, and Apocalyptic-Millenarianism in the Middle East’; and a 2015 ARC DP on ‘Intimacy and Violence in Anglo Pacific Rim Colonial Societies 1830-1930’.

“I’m really excited to be part of the Centre for the History of Violence. I think it’s great that the University has been able to bring together scholars working on the impact of violence in various contexts and I’m really are interested in similar issues. In some ways, we are all working on the lived experience of warfare and violence, but in different time periods – so we can see continuities as well as the differences.” Visit www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/ elizabeth-roberts-pedersen

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KATE ARIOTTI IS UNCOVERING THE WWI PRISONER OF WAR EXPERIENCE Digging into the past and turning up surprising – and sometimes uncomfortable – truths, Dr Kate Ariotti is seeking to put names, faces and facts to the First World War prisoner of war (POW) experience. “I specifically study the 200-odd Australians who were held captive by the Turks,” she clarified. “Nearly half were light horsemen taken in Sinai and Palestine. Others were soldiers, submariners and airmen captured during the Gallipoli campaign and in Mesopotamia.” Born out of an intense interest in the stories of those held captive by the Japanese during the Second World War, Kate believes her research into the Australian prisoners of the Turks highlights the importance of learning how people cope with less-than-ideal circumstances. She has spent years gathering and analysing the POWs’ personal tales, ambitiously looking to recount their experiences from the battlefield to back home. “I’ve collated material from family members, governments, military authorities and charity organisations,” she said. “I wanted to figure out how all involved were affected by this experience of captivity, but particularly how the POWs felt about their imprisonment and whether they suffered any ongoing physical or psychological issues as a result.” Kate first started examining this hidden history during her PhD candidature. The fouryear project sought to shed light on a topic most knew very little about. “I managed to track down the names of all the Australians who had been taken prisoner by the Turks, as well as multiple accounts of how they had fared in such a foreign environment,” she reveals.

“From there, I was able to trace many of their family histories and repatriation histories.” “I also read newspapers from the time to see what was being said about them and how their captivity was reported to Australians at home.” In discovering the methods by which the POWs, their families, aid agencies and government and military authorities coped with the experience, Kate went on to correct a common perception about wartime captivity. “It wasn’t a passive experience by any means. People actively responded to the many challenges of living in captivity in Turkey.” “Families of the POWs worked to overcome the lack of communication with their loved ones in the various prison camps throughout the Ottoman Empire.” “Letters from the POW camps took a long time to reach home, if at all, and they were often subject to censorship, so they weren’t necessarily true reflections of how prisoners were going.” “The families of the prisoners formed a strong community network, relying on the Australian Red Cross Society and on other POW families, friends and each other for information and emotional support.” Kate continued investigating the First World War after receiving her PhD in 2014, employed as an historian at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra before joining the University of Newcastle in 2015. Recently awarded the prestigious CEW Bean Prize for Military History from the Australian Army History Unit for her PhD and a 2016 Australian Academy of the Humanities Travelling Fellowship, Kate is simultaneously focused on getting her thesis published as a book and completing an edited collection that internationalises the Australian experience of the First World War.

“UON historian Dr James Bennett and I are hoping to put the Australian experience of the First World War into a global context,” Kate explained. “My chapter is about the Turkish POW camps and the cultural melting pots that they appear to have been. Our soldiers lived alongside prisoners from other countries, such as Britain, France and Russia. “They were some of the first Australians to experience such a multinational environment, and their responses to these cultural encounters are very interesting.” In 2016 Kate is also planning to explore the difficulties associated with reintegrating into normal life and how individuals coped with the muddied transition from soldier to civilian. “I want to look at how people who have been taught to be violent or to overcome their natural tendencies not to be violent, are able to switch that part of themselves off once the war is over,” she explained. “Maybe some aren’t able to.” Exploring this niche firstly from an Australian perspective, Kate will be considering the role and capabilities of military authorities as well. “I would like to know how they helped prepare the servicemen for life after war,” Kate said. “I’m anticipating to find a fair bit of material in official army documents, newspapers and police reports, particularly about those who have come back and had issues with violence, drug and alcohol abuse, self-harm and other risky behaviours.” Visit www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/ kate-ariotti

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NISHA THAPLIYAL EXPLORES EDUCATION, DEMOCRACY, AND SOCIAL JUSTICE Dr Nisha Thapliyal believes that students, parents and communities should have the power to participate in public education reform and redress inequalities in educational opportunity and quality. Moving to comparative and international education from a background in social work and psychology, Nisha’s work examines and questions pedagogy, curriculum, and education policy using a theoretical framework informed by critical, antiracist, feminist, and queer theories of education. “I am interested in questioning our fundamental beliefs that formal mass education is always beneficial, that formal education is always empowering, and that schooling in and of itself is inherently democratic because it has to do with sharing knowledge,” Nisha states. “In reality, history tells us that educational systems and processes have not always been inclusive, equitable or democratic. “Instead, the history of mass education indicates that formal education systems tend to inadvertently or deliberately privilege particular kinds of knowledge. Therefore, students who are adept at demonstrating mastery of skills, dispositions, and values associated with these preferred forms of knowledge have an advantage over those who don’t.” Nisha has a specific interest in how community-based activism and social movements can contribute to

strengthening public education systems and the democratisation of education policy making. She documents and analyses collective struggles for public education and public services through the frames of human rights, social justice, peace and sustainable development. It was during her childhood in India that Nisha first became aware of inequity. “I lived on the second floor in an apartment building and I saw a whole family grow up on the pavement opposite me,” Nisha recounts. “I always had questions about why some people have to work so hard just to get by.” Nisha completed both a Master of Social Work and a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Psychology in India, with research focused on the discrimination and challenges negotiated by institutionalised children. Her studies led her to the conclusion that both fields tended to be reactive rather than proactive in terms of offering too little too late to the children in these institutions who were disproportionately from marginalised groups such as cultural/ethnic minorities, rural poor, and so forth. Her reading of education thinkers such as Paulo Freire and Mahatma Gandhi led her to question the role played by formal educational institutions in reproducing inequality and exclusion. A crosscutting theme was the absence of equitable and culturally responsive education in the experiences of institutionalised and therefore ‘invisible’ children, including those with disabilities, orphans, street children, indigenous children, those in the juvenile justice system, or isolated by geography.

“These children are great survivors and I learned a lot from them,” Nisha said. “Essentially they made me question what it is we are trying to do in schools and universities, and whether it is working and for whom. I realised I had to continually question the status quo in education, to problematise assumptions about what is ‘normal’ and the way ‘things have always been done’.” Moving to the US for postdoctoral studies, Nisha began to investigate ways that educational practice could be shaped by input from students, parents, and teachers to ensure more inclusive and democratic pedagogical practice. Nisha currently works with education social movements in India, Brazil, South Africa, and the United States. She is studying the ways in which education activists use different kinds of media technologies to mobilise the public and shape public policy debates. Her analysis of the relationship between education, media and democracy is shaped by intersectional feminist, queer and postcolonial theories of education and development, which provide insights into the workings of power and agency. This body of scholarship also informs her pedagogy and approach to teaching in the university classroom. “As an educator, and particularly as a teacher of teachers, it was from feminist, queer and critical pedagogies that my classroom tool box emerged,” Nisha explained. Visit www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/ nisha-thapliyal

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ADAM LLOYD IS WORKING TOWARD BETTER OUTCOMES FOR KIDS A former engineer at BHP’s Newcastle Steelworks, Adam set off to teach snowboarding in the US after the Steelworks closed in 1999. It was here he realised he wanted to be a teacher. “I was in Vail, Colorado snowboarding with a group of students and I had this light bulb moment of – I really enjoy this interaction with kids. I want to be a teacher,” he recalls. After completing a diploma of education, Adam worked as a teacher at Scotch College Melbourne and also began his Master of Education at The University of Melbourne. “At Scotch, I taught maths and science and was heavily involved in co-curricular activities. I recall in my third year being given a class of students who were underperforming and had been for some time. Despite the resources, amazing facilities and available support they were still not achieving. These were students who had never really tasted any sort of success in the standard maths classroom,” Adam said. “That particular class at Scotch challenged me to really think about my approach to teaching, and also to try and better understand the different influences that affect student outcomes.” After his tenure at Scotch, Adam spent time teaching in the UK, and working in the corporate sector before embarking on his PhD with Professors Philip Morgan, David Lubans and Ron Plotnikoff from UON’s Priority Research Centre for Physical Activity and Nutrition. “My PhD was part of the Healthy Dads Healthy Kids program and focused on the impact of the program on fathers’ parenting practices and subsequently their kids’ lifestyle behaviours. I was really interested in what goes on in the home environment and how that impacts on kids,” he explained. Now, as a member of the Teachers and Teaching Research Centre under the guidance of Professor Jenny Gore, Adam is working two significant Australian Government Department of Education and Training Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program (HEPPP) funded projects.

Dr Adam Lloyd is using his diverse background in engineering, maths teaching, and physical activity and nutrition research to investigate education outcomes for children and improve equity and excellence in education.

The first HEPPP project is titled ‘Unlocking Capacity and Empowering Choices: Indigenous Students’ Aspirations for Higher Education’. It aims to shape targeted university outreach initiatives that resonate with and build on the ways in which Indigenous students talk about what interests them when thinking about their educational and occupational futures. This project builds on a preliminary study from 2015 funded by UON’s Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education where a team of researchers (including Adam) was able to explore data from over 10,000 surveys to show the aspirations of Indigenous students are just as diverse as non-Indigenous students. “Indigenous students are aspiring to similar careers as non-Indigenous students, but when you look at how many are actually going on to university something changes. These students aren’t lacking aspirations – it’s other factors keeping them back from higher education.” The second HEPPP project is titled ‘Guiding Futures: The role of teachers in the formation of students’ aspirations for higher education’. The aim of this project is to investigate the impact of teachers on students’ aspirations for higher education.

Many studies have addressed factors impacting on the under-representation of students from low SES and other disadvantaged backgrounds in universities in general, and in high status universities and degrees more specifically. However, the role of teachers in shaping and supporting students’ intentions to pursue university education has largely been overlooked. This project will provide insight into the explicit and implicit messages students glean from their teachers about their aspirations for higher education and ways of getting there. “It’s still very early days for both of these HEPPP projects, however preliminary analysis suggests many students don’t really understand the differences between TAFE and University and/or don’t really understand what university is about. How do students aspire to something if they don’t really understand what it is?” Visit www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/ adam-lloyd

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NARELLE EATHER IS PROVIDING KIDS WITH A FIRM FOUNDATION FOR FITNESS Despite pessimistic talk of a generation of computer-obsessed kids doomed to grow up unfit and unhealthy, Narelle is encouraged by the results of a physical activity intervention program she delivered to primary school students during her PhD.

“During the study, I found that attitudes towards physical activity participation had changed greatly and fitness had improved significantly in just eight weeks. This suggests to me that small but specific changes in the school and home environment can lead to very important positive health outcomes for children.”

The physical education lecturer, current Australian OzTag representative, former national league netball player and mother of two young girls, completed her PhD project aligned with the Faculty of Education and Arts’ Priority Research Centre in Physical Activity and Nutrition (PAN) in 2014.

Narelle also recognised that primary school teachers were often ill-equipped to deliver quality physical activity programs, either because of a lack of pre-service training in this area, confidence to deliver such programs or the absence of relevant teaching aids. Consequently, one of the aims of her project was to build a resource that can be used by any classroom teacher.

Titled 'Fit 4 Fun', Narelle was prompted to create the program during her time as a secondary school teacher when she observed her students’ lack of confidence and competence in physical skills. The curriculum program is targeted at primary school children in years five and six and is designed to improve their skills, knowledge and attitudes towards physical activity – and boost their fitness levels. “With a lot of the children I was teaching, I found that fundamental movement skills were poor and fitness levels were low. This not only impacted their physical abilities but also their confidence, and their social and emotional health. This was largely because of inadequate sport and physical education programs in primary schools,” explained Narelle. “Meaning, the children were not developing the skills and attitudes necessary for a lifelong commitment to good health.” “Studies have shown that attitudes and behaviour developed in primary school carry through to adolescence and adulthood, which is why I decided to target my program at younger children – so we are affecting change before those attitudes are cemented.

Dr Narelle Eather believes encouraging children to be more active is easier than people think – it’s all about giving them the right tools.

Since 2009, Narelle not only focused on completing her PhD part-time, she was also Lead Investigator on the Cross Fit Teens Program: Improving health-related fitness in adolescents, and is Chief Investigator on several research projects currently running through PAN. These include: Stand Up for Healthy Minds study: Evaluation of a multi-component intervention to reduce screen-time in adolescents; HIIT: The impact of high intensity interval training on physical and psycho-social outcomes in adolescents; and Dads And Daughters Exercising and Empowered (DADEE): Engaging fathers to improve physical activity levels and socialemotional well-being in their daughters.

Supported by the Port Waratah Coal Services Community Investment and Partnership Program, DADEE is aimed at engaging fathers and daughters to help instil primary school aged girls with the skills needed for a healthy and productive life. Research shows that more than 80 percent of girls fail to meet physical activity recommendations and fewer than 10 percent can adequately perform fundamental movement skills such as kicking and throwing – results that are significantly worse than for boys of the same age. Conceived by Professor Philip Morgan, DADEE was rolled out in 2015 by a team that included Professor David Lubans, Ms Alyce Barnes and Narelle. “The DADEE program has created a fantastic opportunity to investigate and highlight the important and pivotal role that fathers play in the lives of their daughters – a role that is often overlooked or dismissed in today’s hectic world,” said Narelle. “Watching how much joy the young girls express when they interact with their fathers in the program is just one of many of the benefits of being involved in this fantastic initiative.” Visit www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/ narelle-eather

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ERICA SOUTHGATE IS LEVELLING THE PLAYING FIELD IN EDUCATION Education researcher Dr Erica Southgate believes that everyone has the potential to succeed, and is using technology to level the playing field of privilege. In 2016, Erica was awarded a prestigious Equity Fellowship by the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education (NCSEHE) – a testament to her enduring commitment to promoting social justice for those facing disadvantage and marginalisation. As part of the Fellowship she has been invited to spend a period of time working in the Commonwealth Government Department of Education and Training, facilitating mutually beneficial engagement between the Department and the higher education sector.

Apostrophe Power, a game requiring students to help a mouse wearing a jet pack jump across a series of sea stacks and reach a block of cheese, improves students’ knowledge of correct apostrophe usage. Sentence Hero employs a similar playful design to enable students to work their way through different types of punctuation – full stops, commas, colons and semicolons – helping them identify run-on sentences and sentence fragments. Apostrophe Power and Sentence Hero are available for free download via iTunes and the Google Play store, and can be integrated into tertiary preparation and undergraduate courses.

Erica is also involved in several other interdisciplinary projects that seek to assess and address equity issues in higher education.

Erica was also a main driver behind the development of the Uni Tune In app, a free study skills toolkit for students.

To help young adult and adult learners improve their writing skills, Erica along with software engineering researcher Dr Shamus Smith, has developed two apps to engage learners in a convenient way.

“Higher education can be a bit overwhelming for people who are the first in their family to go to university. You can be super smart, have great academic potential, and be highly motivated but not adequately prepared in certain ways of thinking, learning, writing and engaging with ideas,” she explained.

“Education systems struggle to engage people, to improve their literacy, regardless of their age,” Erica said. “The apps are like Angry Birds for literacy. You can play a game to improve aspects of literacy on your smart phone or iPad – at home, or on the bus or wherever you are. “People can play in their own time and at their own pace and the private nature of playing games for improvement alleviates some of the shame and stigma attached to having poor literacy.”

“The Uni Tune In app puts the skills needed for effective university study in the palm of a student’s hand. Education is not always a level playing field, but we are giving people the digital tools to catch up and succeed.” As co-founder of the DICE network, Erica is interested in digital identity, curation of online presence, and serious games for learning. Through the network, she is involved in the Best Footprint Forward project with fellow

education researcher Dr Rachel Buchanan, exploring how school and university students understand their digital footprint and its impact on their future. In addition, she is collaborating with public health researcher Professor Brian Kelly and health sociologist Dr Caragh Brosnan to identify ways to address the underrepresentation of students from first in family backgrounds in medical degrees, nationally and internationally. “If you bring together people from different disciplines, methodological, professional and community backgrounds, they combine perspectives to come up with genuinely innovative solutions that have real utility and meaning for people.” Erica credits a non-traditional academic trajectory and varied employment history for the life experience that allows her to work so constructively with a range of communities and colleagues. After completing a PhD in education, she was employed by a national health research centre where she worked with marginalised groups such as injecting drug users, sex workers, and the gay community. “I think we need to genuinely learn from the communities that we are engaged with, instead of just expecting them to learn from us,” she said. “That’s my ethos – it informs both my teaching and my research, and my collaboration with communities and colleagues.” Visit www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/ erica-southgate

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RACHEL BUCHANAN IS ENSURING SAFE USE OF THE INTERNET FOR THE NEXT GENERATION Are young people digital natives, more at home in the terrain of cyberspace than any other generation? Through three research projects investigating the online footprint of primary, secondary and tertiary students, Dr Rachel Buchanan is questioning this assumption. Australian children are among the youngest and most prolific users of the internet in the world. They are, on average, under eight years old when they begin using the internet and most children and teenagers go online daily. Beacuse internet and social media usage generates a digital footprint that can have serious future social and professional consequences for children, it is essential to know how to best manage this digital footprint. Rachel, along with fellow University of Newcastle (UON) researchers Dr Jill Scevak, Dr Shamus Smith and Dr Erica Southgate, has been awarded funding from the Australian Government’s Department of Education and Training for the project, Digital Footprint and University Students: Educating for Opportunity. Using focus groups and online surveys, the project will investigate how universities educate students about their digital footprints and examine university students’ knowledge, attitudes and behaviours regarding their online footprints. “We’ll look at what students are doing online, but also how they recognise and understand notions of digital identity,” Rachel explains. “Most importantly, we’ll look at how institutions can address an uneven playing field regarding knowledge around digital literacy. No one should be disadvantaged by not knowing the rules.”

Rachel acknowledges that the best way to ensure university students understand the complexities of curating a positive digital identity is to teach them before they enrol. To this end, a mirror investigation has begun with much younger students. The Best Footprint Forward project, for which Rachel, Southgate and Smith received a grant from .au Domain Administration Ltd (auDA), aims to audit the digital footprint awareness of primary school students, their educators, and their parents. Similarly to the university-based digital footprint study, the Best Footprint Forward project will investigate child, parent/carer, and teacher awareness and attitudes towards digital footprints and strategies used to manage these. “Some parents/carers educate their children on safe internet participation. But many other children face potential disadvantage as digital footprints are increasingly used to vet applicants for jobs and other life opportunities,” Rachel said. “The concept of digital footprints is understood negatively and children are encouraged to minimise theirs. Yet, the lack of a digital footprint can be as disadvantageous as a badly managed one.” The project is the first step in curriculum development in this area and will generate a robust evidence base for the creation of positive digital footprint resources to empower children and their parent/carers. “Our Best Footprint Forward project will contribute to the use of the internet in ways that will enhance children’s future life chances and opportunities,” Rachel said.

Rachel, Smith and Southgate have also been supported by a grant from the Faculty of Education and Arts at UON to supplement the primary and tertiary footprint studies with a similar study involving secondary students, thus capturing the full gamut of the digital awareness of students. The data collected will inform the creation of age appropriate resources and curriculum content that will address knowledge deficits and standardise the teaching material across educational institutes. “Cyber sense must not be secret knowledge. If we make the guidelines explicit, everyone is capable of curating a positive online presence,” Rachel said. “If we can make all students aware that there are different contexts, different rules and different ways of communicating online, we make the playing field a bit more level. And our university students will have an even better chance of succeeding if they know it all before they arrive at a tertiary level.” Rachel is a member of two research groups focused on innovation, education, and technology: the recently initiated Digital Identity, Curation & Education (DICE) network, and NuLearn, a group of UON educators focused on 21st century learning and assessments in schools. Visit www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/ rachel-buchanan

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RACHAEL UNICOMB IS PIONEERING THE TREATMENT OF CO-OCCURRING COMMUNICATION DISORDERS Stuttering can have a long term impact on many aspects of an individual’s life. The true cause of stuttering remains unknown, although many studies indicate that this mysterious condition is most likely related to neural speech processing.

study (Early Language in Victoria Study), where they have prospectively followed a community cohort of almost 1,700 children from infancy who are now heading into adolescence. So it will be great to use some of this data – some prospective data – to look at the figures on co-occurrence.”

Stuttering affects approximately 12 percent of children up to the age of four years. In 30 to 40 percent of cases, stuttering is reported to co-occur with speech sound disorders.

Rachael is also working on another project in speech sound disorders with Ms Joanne Walters, a fellow lecturer and researcher in speech pathology at the University of Newcastle, looking at the sounds “k” and “g”.

Most children will make some mistakes with their sounds as they are learning to talk. A speech sound disorder occurs when these mistakes continue past a certain age. In an earlier study, Rachael found that many Australian speech pathologists will typically treat these two co-occurring disorders separately – often stuttering first then the speech sound disorder.

“Working clinically we see a number of children who are in Kindergarten and Year One who still may not have mastered those sounds – but the normative data, which is what informs our profession and what we use to base our decision-making on when we’re doing an assessment and considering treatment, says the sounds should be

produced correctly at around three to threeand-a-half years of age,” she explained. “It’s important because if a child comes in at four years of age and they haven’t acquired or mastered “k” and “g” the clinician might choose to work on that with the child, which could be costly to the service provider and caregiver, in terms of finance and time, particularly if perhaps the normative data, which is varied and dated, is perhaps underestimating the age of mastery for these sounds.” Rachael hopes a preliminary study to further investigate speech pathologists’ perceptions on the acquisition of these sounds, will inform and lead to the development of a larger project to gather updated normative data for these consonants. Visit www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/ rachael-unicomb

Rachael, a speech pathologist with a background working in early childhood intervention, finished her PhD in 2015 and says she has always been fascinated by speech sound disorders. “It’s always been a clinical area of interest for me – why speech sound disorders occur and the clinical decision making around how we treat them,” she said. Until now there has been doubt about the effectiveness of treating both disorders concurrently. For this reason, the study was conducted cautiously with a small number of children – single case studies – with very tight ethical protocols in place. “We monitored the children’s progress very closely from week to week to ensure we weren’t making one or the other disorder worse by treating them both at the same time. As it turns out, we had successful outcomes treating this way for the majority of our participants.” Rachael is interested in delving deeper into the research that has looked at the rate of co-occurrence to date. “Rates of co-occurrence are reported to be as high as between 30 to 40 percent, but that is largely based on a lot of retrospective file audit data and clinician feedback, so we need some stronger data to actually confirm these reports,” she explained. “I am currently working with teams from the University of Melbourne and the Murdoch Children’s Institute on this project. They have a project and data set called the ELVS

Dr Rachael Unicomb has created preliminary guidelines for treating co-occurring stuttering and speech sound disorders at the same time. These guidelines are the first of this kind in almost 25 years. She is now looking to expand her study to a larger population.

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MILENA HEINSCH IS BRINGING TOGETHER SOCIAL WORK AND GASTROENTEROLOGY Social Work researcher Dr Milena Heinsch is working to improve quality of life for young people with functional gastrointestinal disorders (FGID) through a cross-discipinary research project with Paediatric Gastroenterologist Dr Scott Nightingale at the John Hunter Children’s Hospital (JHCH).

Milena’s latest work aims to evaluate whether a reproducible, internet-based therapeutic intervention, in combination with standard medical therapy, improves quality of life, pain and functional outcomes for young people with a FGID. FGIDs are among the most frequently occurring pain syndromes in childhood. They are a recognised class of disorders of the digestive system, in which symptoms (like persistent pain and nausea) cannot be explained by a physical cause. FGIDs can have a significant impact on children’s quality of life, making it difficult to attend school and socialise with friends. Children with these conditions often experience comorbidities, like back pain, chronic fatigue, depression and anxiety. If left untreated, FGIDs can go on for years and lead to long-term pain and psychological distress that persists into adulthood. This is the first Australian study to examine the impact of an internet-based therapeutic intervention on quality of life, pain and functional outcomes for young people with FGID. Previously employed as the Paediatric Gastroenterology Social Worker at the JHCH, Milena was guided by a passion for forging stronger links between research and practice, and undertook a PhD in 2010: A three-year study to explore researchers’ perceptions of moving research into practice. “I wanted to know whether collaboration between researchers and practitioners facilitates the uptake of research in practice. Ultimately, I discovered that research use is a socially engaged and relational process, and identified four forms of collaboration which have the potential to enhance this process,” Milena explained. “For me, collaborating with practice is of key importance for the development of relevant, socially accountable research. The value of research lies in its potential to influence and inform practice and policy at every level.”

During her candidature, Milena was employed part-time at the JHCH feeling it important to ‘embody the philosophy’ that sits behind her work of linking the research and practice communities. “Through my work with the JHCH, I developed a strong desire to support children with chronic illness, and chronic pain, and their families.” After receiving her doctorate in 2013, Milena sought to maintain her relationships with health and medical professionals, and began her project with Dr Nightingale on an internetbased therapeutic intervention for young people with FGID. “We surveyed paediatricians in Australia who commonly diagnose children with FGID to explore their understanding of these conditions and existing strategies for diagnosis and treatment,” Milena explained. “Our preliminary investigations found that respondents often felt unsure how to diagnose and treat some FGIDs. Many were not familiar with the accepted diagnostic criteria for these conditions, and therefore conducted lengthy and sometimes unnecessary testing to exclude alternative causes.

“Despite recognising a link between psychological factors and FGIDs, many respondents chose not to recommend psychological therapies to children. One possible reason is that few services offer these therapies, making it difficult for children to access them.” Pointing to the longer-term mental and physical consequences of a lack of treatment, Milena, together with Dr Nightingale, is seeking to create an app, which children with FGID and their families can use in their homes to complement and/or replace ongoing therapies. Milena is eager to see this project come to fruition and will apply for further funding in 2016 from the Hunter Medical Research Institute. “In my experience, exciting outcomes can be achieved when medical and social professionals take an integrated and collaborative approach to research and service provision for children and their families. I am excited by the possibilities of building strong research and practice connections between medicine and social work.” Visit www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/ milena-heinsch

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THE CENTRE FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH AND REGIONAL FUTURES IS INFORMING THE FUTURE OF REGIONAL AUSTRALIA

Across Australia, economic, social and environmental developments have meant people are looking for answers to what the future holds for our regional and rural areas. With changes to traditional land uses, industry, community and ecological structures, will our regions continue to grow and thrive?

From left: CSRRF members Ms Jessica O’Neil, Dr Michael Askew, Dr Hedda Askland and Dr Jo Hanley at Morpeth, NSW

The University of Newcastle’s (UON) newly formed Centre for Social Research and Regional Futures (CSRRF) is working directly with government, industry and community partners to answer such questions through an innovative service model that provides not only methodologicallysound social research, but also community engagement, professional development training, and policy and planning services.

In addition, CSRRF is part of the International Centre for Balanced Land Use – a joint initiative between the NSW Government and the University through the Newcastle Institute for Energy and Resources (NIER) – and works collaboratively with the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies in UON’s School of Environmental and Life Sciences. “It is essential to look at the full picture of what is happening in these regional areas, particularly when it comes to land use change and structural adjustment,” Michael said.

Project Director of CSRRF, Dr Michael Askew, explained that previously, government or industry would approach a researcher in one niche area who would provide them with assistance through a PhD student or Research Assistant. CSRRF takes a different approach by providing a professional, systematic and academically rigorous service to government and industry.

“You have to base policy and planning on solid evidence. This requires research into land use, economic and social change to understand people’s relationship to what’s happening around them. What will the economy look like? How will we keep young people in these areas and sustain growth? How do we maintain a sense of place and wellbeing?”

“Our researchers work at the ground level, conducting in-depth interviews and longitudinal studies of people living in these areas to provide evidence of how government, industry and communities can find better ways forward for everyone “Most people are still involved.” working

This is a fact that government and industry seem well aware of, as CSRRF is already undertaking projects for the NSW Department of Primary Industries (DPI) and is in the process of securing a number of other major projects with government and industry partners.

on the assumption that you go The Centre acts as a hub for research activities across sciences and to school, youthe gosocial through some education – connecting a diversity of UON sort of tertiary education and researchers withagovernment and industry. then you get job and that’s the end of the transition.”

The Centre is currently working with the DPI on the Narrabri Project – a pilot project that will be the first site of a possible state-wide exploration of changing attitudes to land use in rural and regional areas.

“Many towns in NSW and elsewhere have been experiencing rapid land use changes as governments globally seek to ensure food and energy security,” Michael said. CSRRF’s Small Holdings Project was also commissioned by the DPI to explore the situation of small holdings with dwelling entitlements in two case study areas of NSW: the Tweed and Cabonne Shires. “To better understand the current use of small holdings and how they form part of agricultural practice further evidence on the role they play in regional areas is needed to inform local communities, Councils and the State Government,” Michael said. CSRRF researchers are working with partners from State and Federal governments to expand both the Narrabri and Small Holdings Projects and to develop new research into planning decision making and ageing in rural communities. They also hope to work with a range of partners in the thoroughbred breeding industry to develop research into the future contribution of the industry to the Hunter Region. Michael predicts a bright and connected future for the Centre: “CSRRF is engaged in research that will help to shape regional futures, and that is exciting for our researchers and our study partners.” Visit www.newcastle.edu.au/researchand-innovation/centre/csrrf/about-us

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HEDDA ASKLAND IS SHINING A LIGHT ON DISPLACED COMMUNITIES IN OUR OWN BACKYARDS Dr Hedda Askland, an anthropologist and member of the University of Newcastle’s Centre for Social Research and Regional Futures, examines the deep-rooted forces behind home, identity and belonging amongst people experiencing significant social, political and environmental change. Through her research with exile and refugee communities, as well as communities exposed to large-scale development projects, she has found we don’t have to look past our own backyards to find people suffering experiences of displacement. “In contrast to my previous work with East Timorese living in Australia during a time of political upheaval, I currently work with local, long-established communities in Australia that co-exist with large scale industry. This project looks at people we don’t normally think of as refugees or migrants because they don’t travel across borders – some of them don’t even leave their house,” Hedda said. Hedda is currently conducting an ethnographic study in the Upper Hunter and Mid-Western regions of NSW, Australia, in which she explores people’s connection to place, their lived experiences of environmental and social change in the context of development, and the possibilities of environmentally-induced relief through movement and migration. At the moment she is working on a case study in the village of Wollar – a historic village on the edge of the Great Dividing Range that is surrounded by three open-cut coalmines. Prior to the mining boom, Wollar was a community of about 400 people. There was a shop that sold everything from food to farming supplies, two churches, a local bushfire

brigade, a mechanic, a nursery and a school. Today, only about 10 percent of the population remain, the nursery is relocating, there are only eight children left in the school and the shop is owned by mining company Peabody Energy – selling only expensive essentials. The closest town, Mudgee, is 50km away and Hedda estimates the average age of residents is approximately 60 years old. “When I speak with people in Wollar, they exhibit a real sense of distress that is connected to the future, especially in relation to the planned expansion of the mine, which will move the mine boundary to only 1.5km from the village,” Hedda said. “This is when I realised we needed to expand the current concepts we have for explaining displacement to something that is about people’s lived experiences and incorporates their imagined futures.” As a result Hedda is developing a concept she has termed ‘eritalgia’, which will assist in better understanding the role the future plays in the lived experiences of social and environmental change. “The concept adds to the existing concepts of ‘nostalgia’, which describes people’s connection to place in the past, and ‘solastalgia’, a term developed by Professor Glenn Albrecht to describe place-based melancholia, trauma or distress in the present. In contrast to these concepts, ‘eritalgia’ points to the embodied sense of displacement that may occur when there is a rupture between lived realities and imagined self,” Hedda explains. “I believe our understanding of place-based stress and relief must be expanded to incorporate people’s imagined futures, and that by creating a triadic concept –

such as nostalgia, solastalgia and eritalgia – we can better understand displacement as an existential condition of loss, as it manifests in relation to the past, the present and the future”. “By unpacking displacement in the context of what is happening in regional New South Wales, I will challenge conventional ways of understanding and speaking about displacement and relocation. Looking at the loss of community, questions of social cohesion, and individual sense of self as it is happening in Wollar, I am able to explore the question of home as it relates to place and mobility,” Hedda explains. “Not home as a physical place but home as a space in which our sense of self, physical landscape and social landscape are in harmony.” “When this is aligned, people articulate a sense of home. This project will expand how we understand emplaced and existential loss, and connect it to both spatial and temporal dimensions. It will create an evidence base and theoretical framework for showing the significance of this issue, add to our understanding of the impacts development projects may have on communities and individuals, and show how mobility and migration might both cause and relieve environmentally-induced stress.” “I hope that through this research I am able to initiate a public debate and awareness about how displacement as an experiential condition is not restricted to refugees and other migrants, but in fact can occur in our own backyard.” Visit www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/ hedda-askland

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DAVID FARRUGIA IS SUPPORTING THE DEVELOPMENT OF STRONG REGIONAL COMMUNITIES Dr David Farrugia, a member of the Newcastle Youth Studies Group, was awarded a 2016 Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. His three-year project will provide an innovative evidence base for the design of welfare interventions and social policies that support marginalised young people to build fulfilling employment futures. The project, titled ‘The Formation of Young Workers: A Multi Sited Study on the Periphery’, has two components. The first part focuses on key social changes connected with the geographical distribution of work. David says an important example of this is the shift in Australia from an economy that’s based primarily on manufacturing and primary industries to an economy that is based on services. Anything from accountants at one end to the people that make those accountants coffee in the morning. “This shift has taken place differently in different areas. In the big cities we have seen the explosion of a service sector. But in the regions you have places that were dependant on one or two industries and the absence of those industries creates a really unique situation in the labour market,” he said. The second part of the project focuses on changes in the relationship between young people and work, which are related to changes to the labour market. “Because of where young people today tend to work, there has been a breakdown in any kind of meaningful distinction between the person you are in general, the skills that you have to go to work, and the actual practice of doing your job,” David explains.

“They are expected not just to get jobs but to invest themselves in work and to have work be fundamental to who they are. For example, young people are disproportionately working in jobs that involve face-to-face interaction with people – anything from working in a café to a hotel. These types of businesses value ‘youthfulness’. If you can present an appropriately youthful disposition this is seen as a ‘nice encounter’ that the customer will enjoy. “This kind of service work encourages young people to believe: What I do in my work is I perform my personality. So, what’s happening is the distinction between your life, your personality and your work is breaking down. There are now an increasing number of jobs where your job is your personality, and the interaction is the work.” While government policy is often aimed at strengthening service labour markets in big cities, David says little has been done to examine regional and outer-urban areas which are seen as irrelevant to policy makers. “These are young people who are seen, in a sense, as uninteresting and unimportant. Not only that but they are encouraged to think that if you can’t get a job, move, go to where there is work,” David said. “This ignores the fact that young people form identities as workers in the context of a local place to which they are often really attached and which has provided the only resources they had for navigating the labour market.” A longitudinal study and in-depth interviews with a group of about 90 young people will focus on regions where there has been a particular pattern of industrial restructuring and change to the labour market in general and, particularly, the youth labour market.

However, while the project is set in regional Australia, David says these areas are important focal points of broader social and economic changes that reflect the dynamics of globalisation. “These regions are hotspots of very rapid changes in the labour market – changes that are emblematic of broader changes in the global organisation of work that have seen countries like Australia shift to increasingly urban-centric service economies.” “Regional areas teach us not just about the regions, they teach us about the Australian labour force, the Australian labour market and Australia’s position within the dynamics of globalisation – and that is why they need to be studied. That is why they need to be included in government policy,” David concludes. Visit www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/ david-m-farrugia

Sociologist Dr David Farrugia is supporting the development of strong regional communities through his study of how youth in regional areas are responding to conditions of high unemployment and industrial restructuring.

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“While their body work ranged from the mundane to the extreme, what was common in both genders was that young people felt these practices were important in order to maintain their identity – and that stopping them would entail a loss of self,” Julia explained. “Body image is one of the top three concerns of young people in Australia, for both young women and men. But people negotiate body image at a range of different levels. “By understanding how bodies are thought of and lived by young people, we can better understand the pressures that are leading to this increasing anxiety, in both genders, about the body.” Her post-doctoral work has involved a range of research projects related to the health and wellbeing of young people, including the Learning Partnerships Project, an education project using high school students to role play issues around help seeking to train student teachers and doctors. The project has been highly successful in promoting student wellbeing in Melbourne and it’s hoped it will be developed into a national resource.

JULIA COFFEY IS ADVANCING OUR SOCIOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING OF BODY IMAGE AND HEALTH Body image is a persistent and intensifying concern for young people and new approaches are urgently needed to address this significant health and wellbeing issue. By listening to young people’s ways of tackling problems, Dr Julia Coffey is advancing our sociological understanding of body image and health.

Julia’s research examines how young people’s body image is formed against the backdrop of increasingly intense social and cultural pressures regarding bodily appearance. Julia, a member of the Newcastle Youth Studies Group, has contributed significantly to the sociology of youth and health by advancing our understanding of how young bodies are produced in relation to sociocultural contexts. These issues are the focus of her recently published book, Learning Bodies: The Body in Youth and Childhood Studies, co-edited with University of Birmingham’s Shelley Budgeon and University of Melbourne’s Helen Cahill. Through her research she aims to uncover how young people negotiate their identities and the world to find ways of supporting their health and wellbeing. “I believe that young people are experts in their own issues and wellbeing,” Julia said.

“I am trying to change the perspective that people often have of young people. They have a lot of knowledge and expertise around how to address the problems they face, and this research can inform policy that will make a real difference to their health.” Julia has applied her expertise to issues relating to youth, the body and gender to inform understandings of steroid use, cosmetic surgery, exercise and diet, health, and appearance pressure for young women and men. Her 2012 PhD at the University of Melbourne explored ‘body work’ practices in young people – how they change their appearance in ways ranging from diet and exercise to surgery and taking steroids in order to influence how they are perceived in the world. These themes are the focus of her research monograph titled Body Work: Youth, Gender and Health in Routledge’s Youth and Young Adulthood Series.

In addition, Julia has worked on a UNESCO curriculum and training program that targets key populations vulnerable to HIV in South Asia and the Pacific by training young people to deliver information to their own groups. In 2015, Julia was awarded the University of Newcastle Vice Chancellor’s Early Career Researcher of the Year Award. She also secured an International Visiting Fellowship to host Professor Jessica Ringrose, from University College London, UK. This is a significant collaboration with an internationally renowned researcher in gender and education including issues such as ‘sexting’ and cyberbullying. Ringrose is a member of the Institute of Education, London; the world’s leading centre for education and applied social sciences currently ranked number one for education worldwide. In collaboration with Helen Cahill and researchers from the Youth Research Centre, University of Melbourne, Julia and Ringrose are working to refine new participatory arts-based research methods for investigating young people’s perceptions of the influences on their gender identity, body image and body work practices. “Poor body image is debilitating and can significantly impact on an individual’s capacity to participate fully in society,” Julia said. “My research will be useful in producing strategies to promote the wellbeing and full engagement of Australian youth in society – in education as well as employment.” Visit www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/ julia-coffey

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JANET FULTON IS UNCOVERING ISSUES OF PRIVACY AND SECURITY IN THE DIGITAL AGE “… there is a lot of research that uses Facebook as a case study but young people are also huge users of social media platforms such as Instagram and SnapChat and these platforms are used differently and give different experiences.

Communication researcher Dr Janet Fulton is focussed on the dynamic landscape of information dissemination and exchange in the digital age. An expert in cultural production and working in the online environment, Janet’s current areas of focus include journalism, social media, new media entrepreneurship, international media, and the future of journalism in the digital age. In a recent collaboration with University of Newcastle (UON) Film, Media and Cultural Studies researcher Associate Professor Marj Kibby, she undertook a pilot project titled, Social Media, Millennials, and Surveillance. This project explored how 18 to 34 year olds (the millennial generation) use the social media site Facebook and their understanding of surveillance and privacy in the social media space. “The results revealed that while this group is concerned at some level about privacy for their personal information, they are unsure how to fully protect their security, and to an extent they feel they must accept a loss of privacy as a condition of their technology use,” Janet said. The pilot project has led to a recent bid for a 2017 Discovery Project with the Australian Research Council titled, Australian Millennials on Social Media: Managing Privacy and Security, which includes both Janet and Marj as Chief Investigators. This three-year project would be the first large-scale investigation of millennial Australians’ social media practices.

Through their research Janet and Marj plan to create a body of knowledge on the security risks imposed by the terms of service and privacy policies of major social media platforms. Establishing this knowledge base will assist in facilitating the review and ongoing development of government, educational and social protections that mesh with existing social media practices. Janet and Marj have found that, while there is a significant body of research on social media use and privacy and security, much of it is focused on the US. There is very little research exploring usage in regions such as Australia, even though reportedly 50 percent of Australians use social media every day, and there are indications that Australian usepatterns do not parallel those in the US. Janet’s research also crosses into creativity and cultural production. She recently co-edited a book with UON’s Associate Professor Phillip McIntyre and Dr Elizabeth Paton titled The Creative System in Action: Understanding Cultural Production and Practice, which questions whether traditional journalism is becoming redundant in the face of a growing digital monopoly. Despite the highly publicised shedding of positions by large mainstream media organisations, Janet emphasises that her research shows that opportunities for multiskilled graduates are constantly appearing.

“There are lots of new players coming into the field, publications like Huffington Post and Guardian Australia and The New Daily,” she explained. “At the moment, community newspapers are still faring relatively well; and there are people out there earning income from selfadministered online news sites, or blogs.” “I am currently also working on a project researching new media entrepreneurship,” Janet said. “These entrepreneurs make money out of advertising, sponsored posts, conferences, training, and writing books. So, while they may not have a wage as such, they are earning money differently to how it happened before.” For the project, Janet examined alternative paths for media producers. She interviewed media producers in the digital space, including bloggers, online magazine producers, broadcasters and website producers. Her purpose was to discover what skills are required to work in a digital space, what business models are successful and what technologies are being employed. “I’m absolutely fascinated to see what is going to happen in the next five or ten years. I can’t wait to see what comes next and I intend to stick around to research it, and teach in it.” Visit www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/ janet-fulton

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ANDREW HOWELLS IS ILLUSTRATING THE IMPORTANCE OF CROSS-DISCIPLINARY RESEARCH Dr Andrew Howells has created a series of 60 illustrations that assist scientists to visually assess the health of captive Asian elephants. Now he is looking to expand this work to other species in captivity.

After years working in animation, graphic design and later as a freelance illustrator, it was a conversation with a veterinary science friend that sparked Andrew’s interest in completing a PhD in Natural History Illustration. “My friend, Dr Roy McClements, was a very tall man and he was researching penguins. So I thought it would be a great composition for a portrait. I did a life size portrait of him for a portrait competition, and while he was sitting for it we were talking about his research,” Andrew recalls. “I said, ‘what’s next’ and he said, ‘elephants’. “He and his colleagues had identified nine different conditions that an elephant could be categorised, from emaciated through to obese, so they thought they would collate a whole collection of photographs describing those different conditions. “However, as I pointed out to him, then you are going to have nine different animals with nine different body conditions in nine different environments with nine different photographers. There are all these variables, which means it is going to be hard to see the difference between them. You might have an emaciated animal that is heavily dappled in pigmentation behind a tree in a jungle, and you might have an obese animal that is photographed in a zoo that is completely lit against a clean background.” This led Andrew to complete a Research Masters and, later, a PhD in Natural History Illustration at the University of Newcastle. The discipline of Natural History Illustration has been around for a long time, and the relationship between scientist and natural history illustrator is historically founded. However, Newcastle currently has the only degree program in Natural History Illustration in Australia, and is one of only a few internationally. For the elephant project, Andrew spent four years working from information provided by scientists and photographs, as well as observing the elephants at Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia, and at the Fort Worth Zoo in Texas, US. During the four years of his project there were three elephant calves born at Taronga – a unique experience that led Andrew to work with one of Taronga’s head veterinarians on illustrations of the different carrying position of a pregnant elephant.

“They ultrasound elephants like they do humans, but it’s obviously a lot harder on such a big animal so it’s difficult to tell exactly what’s going on. The vets at Taronga did an ultrasound for Pathi Harn, the second calf that was born during my PhD, and all they could see was the front feet. If the toe nails were facing a certain direction they knew the calf was breech. In this particular case, what they could see told them the mother had lost the calf. They made a media announcement and everything – then suddenly in the early hours of the morning the calf arrived,” Andrew said.

While Andrew’s project was focused on creating a resource specifically for elephant research, he also developed a process that could be applied to any species.

“That’s why the role of the illustrator is so important. We can take what is unseeable and make it ‘seeable’. It is a really descriptive role that is all based on being accurate in representing and contextualising factual information. This is in contrast to the role of design or more creative arts, which are about proposing something new or about expression.”

“The head of conservation research at Taronga has been very supportive of my work and I am looking forward to working on new projects with them in the future.”

“If you know their internal structure and how the skeleton works, and you know what you’re seeing on the outside, you can create variables to show the animal gaining and losing weight,” Andrew explained. “I would like to create resources across a range of species that are an active part of research in the conservation space.

Visit www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/ andrew-howells

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JANE SHADBOLT IS HANDCRAFTING THE FUTURE OF ANIMATION TECHNIQUES Ms Jane Shadbolt is a designer and animator who uses traditional animation techniques while making the most of today’s technology to explore practicalities for – and effects on – stop-motion animation. In 1927 German cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan refined and popularised a special effects technique, now known as the Schüfftan process. Similarly to modern day green screen, the effect was used as a set extension – a way of combining live action actors into miniature sets using mirrors and actual objects. Today, Jane is using this process to look deeper into what type of effects these old techniques create. “I am exploring why special effects work, how special effects work and how stopmotion animation as a special effect works,” she explained. Jane, who is a lecturer in the School of Creative Industries at the University of Newcastle, will complete her PhD in 2017, which is titled, The impossible qualities of illusionary spaces: stop-motion animation, visual effects and metalepsis. “There is a whole school of thought that talks about frames and spaces in-between frames, and I am talking about the space inside frames and in-between layers, and how we are sort of fooled and not fooled by special effects all at the same time,” Jane said. “My research is very visually based: How does a look contribute to your understanding of what’s going on? How does the look contribute to the story? And it does. It’s a very wordless narrative. It’s something that the viewer isn’t necessarily aware of; they don’t notice it and they are not supposed to. I want to look closer at some of those techniques the viewer doesn’t notice in film but the artist can use to their advantage.” Jane’s PhD is realised through an art installation recreating a modern Schüfftan process. “The installation is a great big room full of mirrors with animations projected into them and you are the camera. You line yourself up and see five shots – so it’s a kind of abstract five-shot film about animation composited together by all these two sided mirrors,” Jane explained. In the future it is hoped film practitioners and researchers could use Jane’s work to look deeper into what type of effect these techniques create.

“My area is stop-motion animation and I have often wondered why stop motion animation is so creepy and what makes it so creepy? How these mismatched things all fit together and why they are so right and so wrong all at the same time,” she said. Jane’s work in stop-motion animation is indeed creepy, but also so right – winning Australian Production Designer Guild Awards and being screened at numerous international festivals. Her award-winning 2011 short animation film, The Cartographer, uses puppets and stop-motion animation to tell the story of a girl adrift in a storm in a sea of letters, and features Australian film star Joel Edgerton as the voice of the Envoy. “I am really into how technology can enable handmade things. So all my puppet work is handmade and a bit kooky, but the thing that underpins it and makes it all possible is digital technology,” Jane said. Jane also brings her focus on traditional techniques and modern filmmaking to her classroom, where she teaches animation design to students who aren’t necessarily illustrators. “My students come with any type of skill at all and we can work out an animation that suits them. They choose the type of animation that works for them – they can use cut out bits of paper or draw or make puppets, and I can show them how to use technology to enable their handmade creations,” she said. Her 2015 project with her class, in which each student animated a number of frames for a music video, was a huge success in and out

of the class. Their remake of the Taylor Swift Shake it Off video garnered 1.3 million views on YouTube before being removed by Taylor Swift’s record company. Following the success of the Taylor Swift animation, Daniel Johns accepted the offer to film a video for his song: Going on 16, which competition entrants could animate as part of the 2015 Newcastle International Animation Festival. The music video, which compiles 43 individually animated segments, has over 173,000 views on YouTube and Facebook as well as featuring on Rage. “These projects have students look at frames, which is something students don’t do anymore with digital film,” Jane said. “There is a lot of value in the old techniques and what they can bring.” Jane is also the organiser of the annual Newcastle International Amination Festival, which she originally brought from Melbourne to Newcastle in 2015. “It’s so important to bring international events to Newcastle. It’s important for my students to see all types of animation. I don’t think I would I have had the results from my class that I did last year if I hadn’t been showing them contemporary, independent animation and saying: ‘You can do this. There are other types of animation besides Disney or Pixar, which seem completely out of reach, here are some other creative ideas that you can do yourself,” she said. Visit www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/ jane-shadbolt

RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

SEAN LOWRY IS TAKING ART RESEARCH TO THE NEXT LEVEL For 25 years art schools have existed within academic institutions. It’s not a new idea, but from the perspective of Dr Sean Lowry, arts researchers are still considered outsiders. The idea that art might be used as an effective vehicle with which to create or disseminate new knowledge still has relatively little traction within the broader academic community. Moreover, it is even a contested idea within creative arts.

Sean’s international peer-reviewed space for art, Project Anywhere, is creating a new world for arts researchers. One in which he hopes creative outputs will one day be seen as a legitimate research outcome potentially commensurate with an academic journal. In 2012, Sean saw a clear gap in what was available to arts researchers to disseminate their research and began the pilot of Project Anywhere. Since it began, the project has become an international collaboration, partnering with Parsons School of Design (US), NSCAD University (Canada), Anonymous (Australia), University of Lincoln (UK), University of Melbourne (Australia), and Auckland University of Technology (New Zealand). Project Anywhere accepts proposals from artists and researchers working anywhere in the world. It is designed to suit artist academics seeking independent peervalidation and international dissemination for their research. “People want to argue about the relative weight of creative or artistic research versus traditional research. All I can say is that considered together they provide more,” Sean said. In his own work as an art researcher, Sean finds it particularly interesting when art is almost not art. He explains that in doing so it reveals something about the fuzzy borders of how we define and understand fictional or cultural constructions. “To my mind art is a fiction – it’s a social construction. But it is a useful one, precisely because we know that it is fictional, it gives us an effective vehicle for meaningfully reflecting upon the nature of other cultural fictions that make up our understanding of the world,” he said.

“Like other fictional constructions that we all take for granted, such as nations, art only exists to the extent that people agree that it does.” “If there is any truth in art – it is simply that it is a lie that shines a light on other lies.” “So although art research is a contested field, I would argue that to meaningfully engage in the creation of new knowledge, and to not do it through the language and lens of art is, I believe, to not seriously engage with art.” Project Anywhere focuses on art at the outermost limits of location-specificity. To date, it has received proposals for projects in the Kalahari Desert, the Black Sea, online – even for a project in inner Earth orbit on a space station. “I was very excited to receive our first proposal for a project in space but our peer reviewers rejected it,” Sean said. Even though he jokingly lists one of his goals for the project as putting the first Chinese artist in space, Sean is at pains to say he has no direct input into what is hosted on the site, other than providing the mechanism for it to be hosted. Project Anywhere receives approximately 30 legitimate proposals from all over the world each year. Proposals go out to four different blind peer reviewers, who write comments and feedback and rank the proposals. The top three to five projects are hosted on the Project Anywhere website each year. The decision as to how many projects are accepted is left to an editorial committee of internationally renowned artist academics from various institutions. “I must say that first and foremost I am driven by my interest in art and being an artist. Even though I find the research culture in universities a very problematic place for art researchers, it is a space in which I am driven to test, refine and push my ideas.”

“Perhaps, most importantly, Project Anywhere is a way of accounting in an institutional sense for the proliferation of art practice and research that takes place outside of conventional spaces, places and duration.” Sean not only hopes that Project Anywhere is the beginning of an artistic research culture commensurate with traditional research outcomes (such as the journalbased paradigm), he also sees it as a way of bypassing the figure of the curator as a cultural gatekeeper. “The curator is often standing between the artist researcher and the public exhibition deciding what passes through and what doesn’t. By introducing a blind peer-reviewed system, we can bypass the relatively undemocratic figure of the curator.” So far Project Anywhere has hosted 18 projects and held its first biannual conference hosted by Parsons School of Design in New York in 2014. The next Project Anywhere conference will be held in November 2016 at Parsons School of Design in New York and Sean will launch the project’s first biennial publication: ANYWHERE v1 in early 2016. You can find out more about Project Anywhere at projectanywhere.net Visit www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/ sean-lowry

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RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

EMMETT STINSON LOOKS AT THE FUTURE OF AUSTRALIAN LITERARY PRODUCTION

With the publishing industry facing unprecedented challenges from digital technologies and global competition, what does the future hold for contemporary Australian literary publishing? Dr Emmett Stinson is an author, literary critic and lecturer whose years of experience in the publishing industry in Australia and the United States inform his research into literary production. “My current research suggests that the publication of literary works is increasingly undertaken by small, independent publishers rather than large, multinational publishing houses,” Emmett said. Emmett explained that, in the past, large publishing companies produced many literary works, not because they made money, but because literary publishing was viewed as a mark of excellence. As many scholars have demonstrated, however, publishers’ practices changed in the 1990s. Due to the pressures of global competition and the availability of better customer purchasing data, large publishers increasingly focus on profitable, popular genres. “There are all kinds of potential problems with having literary works mediated in this way,” Emmett explained. “The obvious effect is average sales for mid-list literary novels have halved. Because small publishers have limited distribution networks, they generally don’t get their books

into shops like Target and Kmart, for example, which are 30 percent of the market. “A novel from a small publisher is doing well to sell 3,000 to 4,000 copies, and this means that they will pay authors lower advances. Potential readerships are also more limited, but not because smaller publishers are bad. They just don’t have access to the large networks for dissemination.” He argues that these material changes to literary production have not been reflected in important literary institutions, such as prizes. “Even though most works are published by small publishers, awards like the Miles Franklin Award overwhelmingly favour books produced by the large publishers. Since the year 2000, works by small publishers have accounted for only 19 percent of Miles Franklin shortlisted titles and only 17 percent of winning novels.” Moreover, recent changes to government funding models – such as the Catalyst initiative –have tended to privilege large arts organisations over smaller ones. Emmett said this presents a serious threat to Australian literature, which overwhelmingly relies on the efforts of a handful of smaller publishers, many of whom depend on modest government subsidies. “Literary works have never sold very well in Australia, but traditionally people have bought into the importance of national culture and wanted to support literary works even if they didn’t read them. But since the 1990s, the publishing industry has decided all that really matters is book sales,” he said.

“Literature’s importance cannot be captured by commercial measures. Most countries around the globe believe that literature has inherent value, and that it is an enriching form that requires funding and support. Why don’t we value it? “Australia is a small country. If we want our culture to compete internationally, then we need our Government to fund authors and publishers properly through grants.” Emmett has previously served as an advocate for Australian small publishers. In 2007 he cofounded the Small Press Network, which was formed to promote independent publishing and support the principle of diversity within the publishing industry as a vital component of Australian literary culture. It currently represents more than 100 small, independent publishers across Australia. From 2011 to 2013, Emmett served on the Federal Book Industry Strategy Group instigated by Australian Senator Kim Carr. This initiative was set-up to investigate how the Federal Government could renew the sector. Emmett’s essays, fiction and poetry have appeared in various literary journals and his book of short stories, Known Unknowns, was shortlisted for the Steele Rudd Award in 2011. Visit www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/ emmett-stinson

RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

RECENT BOOKS

The Post-Fordist Sexual Contract: Working and Living in Contingency

Youth Homelessness in Late Modernity: Reflexive Identities and Moral Worth

Edited by Lisa Adkins and Maryanne Dever

David Farrugia

The Fitzgerald Brothers’ Circus: Spectacle, Identity, and Nationhood at the Australian Circus

Palgrave Macmillan (2016)

Springer (2016)

Gillian Arrighi

This book identifies how the contingent contracting of post-Fordism is shaping new regulatory ideals for women including excessive attachments to work, intensive mothering, entrepreneurship and an investor subjectivity.

This book explores the identities, embodied experiences, and personal relationships of young people experiencing homelessness, and analyses these in relation to the material and symbolic position that youth homelessness occupies in modern societies.

Lisa Adkins, Maryanne Dever and their fellow authors map these often unattainable ideals as they operate across a range of working and living arrangements and in their classed and raced dimensions.

Drawing on empirical research conducted in both urban and rural areas, the book situates young people’s experiences of homelessness within a theoretical framework that connects embodied identities and relationships with processes of social change.

Australian Scholarly Publishing (2015)

Contributors examine how these ideals unfold and take shape in the demands of employability and work readiness, in the subcontracting and outsourcing of labour, in the demands of affective labour, in the contours of home-based work and in the indebtedness that contingent working so often demands. “This fascinating and provocative collection of essays will prove invaluable to all interested in the intersection of gender relations and economic transformation in the cold new world of post-Fordism.” Linda McDowell, Professor of Human Geography, University of Oxford. “This important collection explores the gendered experience of workers and wouldbe workers in the contemporary context of post-Fordist capitalism. It provides significant insights into the problems confronted by women today in all aspects of their lives. I recommend it to gender scholars across the social sciences.” Stephanie Taylor, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, The Open University.

The book theorises a ‘symbolic economy of youth homelessness’ that encompasses the subjective, aesthetic, and relational dimensions of homelessness. This theory shows the personal, interpersonal and affective suffering that is caused by the relations of power and privilege that produce contemporary youth homelessness. The book is unique in the way in which it places youth homelessness within the wider contexts of inequality, and social change. Whilst contemporary discussions of youth homelessness understand the topic as a discrete ‘social problem’, this book demonstrates the position that youth homelessness occupies within wider social processes, inequalities, and theoretical debates, addressing theories of social change in late modernity and their relationship to the cultural construction of youth. These theoretical debates are made concrete by means of an exploration of an important form of contemporary inequality: youth homelessness.

The Fitzgerald Brothers’ Circus, the biggest in Australia and New in the late 19th century, was enormously popular. In its colourful way, it helped shape the general public’s ideas of Australian nationhood. Gillian Arrighi brings this to life in a vivid account of the Circus’ tent shows, orchestrated performances and personalities. Through explorations of their tent shows, the personalities driving the circus organisation, and the circus’ orchestrated ‘performances’ in the broader sphere of public life, this book presents fresh insights into the significance of the circus in Australasia at the turn of the 20th century, and in particular, brings to light the unique contribution of the Fitzgerald Brothers’ Circus to shaping popular ideas about Australian nationhood. “This is an outstanding contribution to the history of popular culture in Australia, providing new insights into a long forgotten era of circus entertainment, innovation and entrepreneurship.” Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK. “This book is important reading for anyone interested in circus and its specialised history, and those interested in narratives of Australian national identity. The history of the Fitzgerald Brothers’ Circus offers a fascinating case study of the Australian circus business and how it developed within an international context. Arrighi’s new book unquestionably contributes to the reinvigorated understanding of circus within cultural studies.” Professor Peter Tait, La Trobe University.

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RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

RECENT BOOKS

The Sacred Economy of Ancient Israel

I'm Buffy and You're History

Roland Boer

Patricia Pender

Ovid on Cosmetics: Medicamina Faciei Femineae and Related Texts

Westminster John Knox Press (2015)

I.B.Tauris (2016)

Marguerite Johnson

The Sacred Economy of Ancient Israel offers a new reconstruction of the economic context of the Bible and of ancient Israel. It argues that the key to ancient economies is with those who worked on the land rather than in intermittent and relatively weak kingdoms and empires.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer gave contemporary TV viewers an exhilarating alternative to the tired cultural trope of a hapless, attractive blonde woman victimized by a murderous male villain. With its strong, capable heroine, witty dialogue, and a creator (Joss Whedon) who identifies himself as a feminist, the cult show became one of the most widely analysed texts in contemporary popular culture.

Bloomsbury (2016)

Scholars will come away with a clear understanding of the dynamics of the economy of ancient Israel. “This is a remarkable book. It is a brilliant analysis of ancient Israel in its broader historical context. Boer has a more profound and extensive knowledge of the ancient economy than any other scholar working on the ancient world.” Richard A. Horsley, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Liberal Arts and the Study of Religion, University of Massachusetts. “Boer’s growing corpus of critical work has not received nearly the attention that it merits. With this book Boer establishes himself as a frontline critical scholar whose work will be an inescapable reference point for future work. Boer’s patient attention to detail, his mastery of a huge critical literature, and the daring of his interpretive capacity combine to make this book a must for any who want to probe the economic substructure of biblical faith and the culture that was its environment.” Walter Brueggemann, William Marcellus McPheeters Professor Emeritus of Old Testament, Columbia Theological Seminary.

The last episode, broadcast in 2002, did not herald the passing of a fleeting phenomenon: Buffy is a media presence still, active on DVD and the internet, alive in the career of Joss Whedon and studied internationally. I'm Buffy and You're History puts the entire series under the microscope, investigating its gender and feminist politics. In this book, Patricia Pender argues that Buffy includes diverse elements of feminism and reconfigures – and sometimes revises – the ideals of American second wave feminism for a wide third wave audience. She also explores the ways in which the final season's vision of collective feminist activism negotiates racial and class boundaries. Exploring the Slayer's postmodern politics, her position as a third wave feminist icon, her placing of masculinity in extremis, and her fandom and legacy in popular culture, this is a fresh and challenging contribution to the growing literature on the pitfalls and pleasures of a great cult TV show.

The Medicamina Faciei Femineae is a didactic elegy that showcases an early example of Ovid’s trademark combination of poetic instruction and trivial subject matter. The first full study in English devoted to this little-researched but multi-faceted poem, Ovid on Cosmetics includes an introduction that situates the poem within its literary heritage of didactic and elegiac poetry, its place in Ovid’s oeuvre and its relevance to social values, personal aesthetics and attitudes to female beauty in Roman society. Ovid on Cosmetics presents and explicates this witty, subversive yet significant poem. Its attention to the technicalities of cosmeceuticals and cosmetics, including detailed analyses of individual ingredients and the effects of specific creams and makeup, make this work a significant contribution to the beauty industry in antiquity. “Johnson walks us splendidly through the details of hair, cosmetics and cosmeceuticals, jewellery, and clothing in Roman antiquity, and adds some modern resources into the mix as well. A fascinating, wide-ranging, and readable book.” Kelly Olson, Associate Professor of Classics, Western University, Ontario, Canada. “This fascinating volume, with helpful illustrations, will interest all students of women, sex and gender in classical antiquity, as well as historians of botany, medicine and science.” Alison Keith, Professor of Classics, University of Toronto, Canada.

Research Directions 2016 Editorial Director Catherine Oddie Editor Jessie Reid Writer Jessie Reid Sub-editors Jenny Noble Jarrod Skene Design Bounce Design Photography Murray McKean Photography Photo Wrangler Linda Hutchinson Faculty of Education and Arts newcastle.edu.au/faculty/education-arts The University of Newcastle Callaghan NSW 2308 Australia Faculty Research Unit Assistant Dean Research and Research Training Associate Professor Ros Smith Ros.Smith@newcastle.edu.au Faculty Research Development Manager Catherine Oddie Catherine.Oddie@newcastle.edu.au Research Officers Linda Hutchinson Linda.Hutchinson@newcastle.edu.au Kristy Atkins Kristy.Atkins@newcastle.edu.au Research & Research Training Officer Amanda Hall-Griffin Amanda.Hall@newcastle.edu.au Research Communication Coordinator Jessie Reid Jessie.Reid@newcastle.edu.au Research Communication and Data Officer Jarrod Skene Jarrod.Skene@newcastle.edu.au A digital version of this publication is available at newcastle.edu.au/faculty/education-arts/ research-directions. CRICOS Provider 00109J

UoN 2016/B11130

Cover: Dr Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen photographed by Nick May Photography at the Anzac Memorial, Hyde Park, Sydney