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Events


In 2008 HRISS is pleased to continue its Intersections seminar series, which promotes cross-disciplinary conversations, and its Directions series, which promotes academic research and innovation, policy change and research career development. We also have a 2008 Professorial Lecture Series.

Events presented by research concentrations

Research Education Support Activities (RESA) at the University of South Australia support higher degree by research students and supervisors to achieve timely and successful completion of the research degree.


July


Improving literacy on a system-wide basis

Prof Ben Levin, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto
Presented by HRISS and the Department of Education and Children's Services

Wednesday 9 July, 2–4 pm
Room H2-08, Amy Wheaton Building, Magill Campus

This session looks at the requirements to improve literacy outcomes across a large number of schools. Effective change requires not only clear goals and a clear sense of priorities; it also requires a carefully developed infrastructure of support, capacity building at all levels, strong leadership teams and carefully targeted resources. Using the examples of England (1997–2003) and Ontario (2004–2008), Ben will examine what is required to create real, sustainable improvement in student outcomes across an entire education system

Prof Levin is a Professor and Canada Research Chair in Education Leadership and Policy. He has just completed two and a half years as Deputy Minister of Education for the Province of Ontario. He is a native of the City of Winnipeg who holds a BA (Honours) from the University of Manitoba, an EdM from Harvard University and a PhD from OISE.

Ben's career in education extends over many years, starting with his efforts while in high school to organise a city-wide high school students' union and his election as a school trustee in Seven Oaks School Division at the age of 19. Since then, he has worked with private research organisations, school divisions, provincial governments, and national and international agencies, as well as building an academic and research career, all in connection with education. He has held leadership positions in a wide variety of organisations in the public and non-profit sectors.

From 1999 until September 2002, he was deputy Minister of Advanced Education and Deputy Minister of Education, Training and Youth for Manitoba, with responsibility for public policy in all areas of education and training. Ben is widely known for his work in educational reform, educational change, educational policy and politics. His work has been international in scope. His writings examine broad areas of education policy.

RSVP essential as places are limited.
Please email Sarah Rose: sarah.rose@unisa.edu.au or phone 8302 4215


Women in Zimbabwe and the work–life interface: western concept, African women – a marriage of (in)convenience?

Dr Virginia Mapedzahama
Centre For Work + Life Seminar

Friday 25 July, 3.30–4.30pm
Centre for Work + Life, Building A level 2, Magill Campus (via Lorne Ave, near bookshop)

The increased workforce participation of women while maintaining traditional (unpaid) caring roles is a global phenomenon that has led to growing interest in the interface of paid work and family. Much of the research into work–family linkages has, however, been undertaken predominantly in the affluent countries of the west, and has been based primarily on studies conducted with white (oftentimes middle-class) workers. It remains a neglected subject of research in the less developed world, particularly in the African context. Despite the plethora of research on African women’s working lives, little is known about how mothers in the 'failing economies' of Africa experience and make individual paid work and family 'choices' and negotiations in the face of constraining socioeconomic and cultural circumstances. This paper addresses this gap in research by analysing how mothers in an economy in crisis in Zimbabwe experience and negotiate the two 'worlds' of paid work and family. The analyses in this paper will affirm the complex nature of the work and family interface for women in Zimbabwe and, in so doing, not only challenge the common (mis)conception that paid work and family linkages are unproblematic for them but also illustrate the relevance of such research. Specifically, this paper is based on the analysis of interviews with women in Harare (Zimbabwe) who engage in informal sector trade to supplement income from formal sector paid work (what I have termed multiple economic activities for survival [MEAS]), to illustrate that the difficult socioeconomic situation in a failing economy in Zimbabwe introduces new challenges for working mothers that impact on their work–life realities. By demonstrating that the women negotiate the boundaries between paid work and family in ways that are challenging and difficult, the paper concludes that work and family linkages are as much an issue for women in Zimbabwe as they are for women in the west where significant research into women's work–family linkages has been undertaken; what differs is the 'magnitude of burden'.

Virginia Mapedzahama has recently completed her doctoral studies at the University of South Australia, and has been employed as a lecturer in Sociology in the School of International Studies. She has recently joined the Hawke Research Institute of Sustainable Societies as a Research Assistant in the Research Centre for Gender Studies. Her research interests are African feminisms, black feminisms, African women diaspora, women and work, and work–life interaction.

Drinks and nibbles provided
RSVP by 24 July to Jen Manning on 8302 4175 or jen.manning@unisa.edu.au


August


Bittersweet: being young in an older person's world

Mark Cully, General Manager, National Centre for Vocational Education Research
Centre for Work + Life seminar

Friday 22 August 2008, 4–5 pm
Centre for Work + Life, Building A, level 2, Magill Campus (via Lorne Ave, near bookshop)

A decade ago youth unemployment loomed large in the national consciousness, but the policy and popular focus is now at the opposite end of the age spectrum, on older workers. I argue that this change in the national consciousness is misplaced. While there is sound evidence that the position of young people in the labour market has improved since the early 1990s, it remains weak relative to both prime age and older workers – and has, if anything, worsened relative to older workers. Moreover, there are emerging vulnerabilities for young people. The flow of young people into high-skilled full-time jobs appears to be occurring at a lower rate than for older age groups, despite the very substantial growth in high-skilled jobs over the period and despite the higher educational attainment of young people. The presentation will conclude with some conjectures that might form the basis of a future research program.

Mark is General Manager at the National Centre for Vocational Education Research where he oversees a national program of government-funded research aimed at improving policy and practice in Australia's vocational education and training sector. Prior to joining the centre in 2003, Mark was a Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Director at the National Institute of Labour Studies. Between 1995 and 1999 he headed up research and evaluation on employment relations for the UK government, where he ran the 1998 Workplace Employment Relations Survey, the results of which were published as Britain at work (Routledge, 1999).

Mark has a Masters degree in Industrial Relations from Warwick University and an Honours degree in Economics from Adelaide University. He has published two books and many articles on employment, work, and education and training, and is an occasional contributor to literary magazines. He was Chair of the world-renowned Adelaide Festival of Ideas from 2004 to 2007.

Drink and nibbles provided.
RSVP by 21 August: Jen Manning, ph 8302 4175


Professorial Lecture

Literacy practices in a participatory culture

Prof Victoria Carrington, UniSA Research Chair and Professor in the HRISS Centre for Studies in Literacy, Policy and Learning Cultures

Friday 22 August, 5–7 pm
Bradley Forum, level 5, Hawke Building, City West Campus

Register for this lecture here.

This lecture will examine the link between literacy, identity and culture. Using a range of texts produced and used both online and offline, it will examine the implications of the shift towards what Henry Jenkins (2006) calls a 'participatory culture'. The 'hidden curriculum' of this emerging cultural frame values particular skills sets, knowledges and practices around a range of media. This lecture will suggest that the out-of-school literacy practices – those practices that involve the use of technologies to produce texts of various textures within a social context – of many young people reflect the contours and requirements of this participatory culture rather than those rewarded by school-based curricula. Interestingly, many of these new practices and skills are somewhat different from those inculcated via traditional print-based literacy socialisation. Thus, a move in the direction of new forms of participation has implications for the ways in which young people construct identity around their use of media, text and literacy, but importantly, it also has implications for the ways in which we, as educators, conceptualise the literacy curriculum and the pedagogies we deploy.

Victoria Carrington's research interests include new literacies and literate practice, digital technologies, and youth and participatory cultures. Until joining HRISS in 2007, she was Associate Dean (Research and Innovation) in the Faculty of Education, University of Plymouth (UK) and a Unit of Assessment Coordinator for the upcoming 2008 Research Assessment Exercise; she has also worked with universities in Queensland and Tasmania. Victoria writes extensively in the fields of sociology of literacy and education and has a particular interest in the impact of new digital media on literacy practices both in and out of school. Recent publications include 'Txting: The end of civilization (again)', Cambridge Journal of Education, 35(2), 2005; 'The uncanny, digital texts and literacy', Language and Education, 2006; and the monograph Rethinking middle years: early adolescents, schooling and digital cultures (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2006).
 

October


Professorial Lecture

The lie of history and the poetics of human habitats

Prof Alan Mayne, Research SA Chair and Professor of Social History and Public Policy, HRISS

Friday 24 October, 5–7 pm
Bradley Forum, level 5, Hawke Building, City West Campus

Register for this lecture here.

There are ambiguities in this lecture's title, and deliberately so, because innovative and effective historical interpretation begins with ambiguities. And, building upon those ambiguities, it is sustained by its 'situated' character: by its focus on specific temporal, spatial and imaginary worlds. Thus it uncovers fresh clues – surviving within the idioms of folk memory, for example, or the vernacular inscriptions of people in a landscape – about a widening range of places in the past and the lives that were played out within them. It exposes the pretence of many historians to understand the past unambiguously as it 'really was'. However, good history's deep poetics are situated not only in the knowledge of the past that can be gleaned using these temporal, spatial and imaginary planes; its interpretations must also attempt to influence progressive policy making in the present. In most human habitats in the early twenty-first century life choices are circumscribed by extreme and entrenched social disadvantage. Some 40 percent of the world's population now live below the World Bank's poverty measuring stick of $US2 a day. This must surely shape the poetics of history in 2008.

Alan Mayne is particularly interested in the historical echoes (for example The imagined slum, University of Leicester Press, 1993) and archaeological tracings (for example The archaeology of urban landscapes, Cambridge University Press, 2001) of urban disadvantage, and in the cultural attachments (for example Hill End: an historic Australian goldfields landscape, Melbourne University Press, 2003) of people to place.

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Research concentration events

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