Geographic contributions to institutional curriculum reform in Australia: the challenge of embedding field-based learning

Abstract

In the context of continuing pressures from managerialist and neoliberal drivers of university reform in Australia, Macquarie University’s recent undergraduate curriculum innovation, based on “People,” “Planet,” and “Participation,” has resulted in the embedding and integration of experiential learning in its curriculum and institutional framework. Such an approach challenges academic and administrative staff, students, and partners in industry, the community and public sector settings, to engage and collaborate across significant boundaries. This article outlines the scope and nature of the curriculum reform, then considers the way geographers have both shaped and responded to the opportunities it created. In so doing, it proposes a number of challenges and recommendations for geographers who might seek to extend their longstanding commitment to field-based learning through similar reforms. In this regard, the discipline of geography and its tendency to engage with the “field” can offer much in fostering deeply transformative learning.     

Local history as productive nostalgia? Change,continuity and sense of place in rural England

Local history groups are often negatively associated with a tendency to indulge in nostalgic practices that yearn for a romanticized past and propagate resistance to change. Their role in local politics and power networks (particularly in relation to planning and development processes) has also been critiqued as exacerbating issues of social inequality and exclusion. While not contesting the realities of such arguments, this paper adds nuance to such debates using the notion of ‘productive’ or ‘mobile’ nostalgia to explore possibilities for more positive renderings of local history and heritage activities. Empirical evidence from qualitative research in a rural village in Norfolk, England, is drawn on to demonstrate the role of these practices in providing a sense of continuity amid a continuously changing locale through the reassertion of place identities and attachments. Although by no means apolitical, this process need not necessarily be one of preservationism and resistance to change, but can be a mechanism through which residents are able to accept, or even welcome, changes to the social and physical constitution of their village. The paper also critically considers the value of productive nostalgia as a concept through which to explore local history practices and wider heritage movements.     

Bureaucracies of Blood and Belonging: Documents,HIV‐positive Youth and the State in South Africa

In response to its constitutional commitments and social welfare provisions in the era of democracy, the post‐apartheid South African state is increasingly called upon to provide for the lives and livelihoods of its citizens. These demands have intensified amid escalating joblessness and the highest numbers of people living with HIV worldwide. Over the past decade, antiretroviral treatment (ART) has been incorporated into an ever‐expanding welfare bureaucracy, in which access to state assistance is mediated by the collection and monitoring of biometric, bureaucratic data. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research in the Eastern Cape, this article explores how state documents bring young people on ART into an ambiguous relationship with the state — one that is at once subordinating and enabling. While social research on ART addresses both the empowering and coercive aspects of treatment taking, less attention has been given to how these modes of participation might be mutually constitutive. In this article, the authors examine how the same technologies that discipline youth on ART might also support and protect them; how welfare dependencies entail paradoxical forms of agency; and how the state's ability to control and to ‘care for’ citizens might be reciprocally dependent.     

Fire and Memory: Transforming Place using Fire at Henge Monuments

Henges — Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age earthwork monuments — often have long life-histories of reuse and rebuilding over generations. At some sites, fire-lighting and the deposition of fire-altered materials played a significant role in certain phases of the use of the henge. This article reviews the evidence for fire in the life-histories of four henges in Scotland, and interprets the various ways in which fire was employed at different times and at different sites. It argues that fire had a transformational effect, not only upon monuments and materials, but it also characterized and transformed people’s experiences and memories of particular sites, thus creating links between monumental sites and quotidian experience during the Neolithic and Bronze Age in Scotland.     

Skeletal health and patterns of animal food consumption at S3W1:33 (Tlajinga 33), Teotihuacan

Food at Teotihuacan was more likely affected by social inequality than by availability. The skeletons from Tlajinga 33 have high prevalence of skeletal indicators of morbidity. Since this was a lower-status compound of artisans, this could be due to poor diet, as well as an unhygienic environment. Analysis of faunal remains suggests that animal remains were an important and plentiful component of the diet. However, most consist of insects, small fish, reptiles, avian eggs, and small mammals. Of particular importance is the size and nutritional value of these dietary items, as many would be considered vermin which were available solely because of attraction to stored foods. It is important to employ proper recovery techniques to eliminate bias in size of animal remains to obtain an accurate understanding of the total diet. We demonstrate that there was adequate animal protein in the Tlajinga 33 diet, but it was very different than what is usually considered “animal protein.” Thus, the residents had access to a nutritious and balanced diet, and this information eliminates protein deficiency as cause of the morbidity. Instead, the focus is on the urban environment and any status disadvantages faced by residents dependent on market exchange for staple foods.     

Eight Byzantine Shipwrecks from the Theodosian Harbour Excavations at Yenikapı in Istanbul,Turkey: an introduction

Excavations at Yenikap? in Istanbul, Turkey, related to the Marmaray Project, have unearthed remains of Constantinople's Theodosian Harbour, including 37 Byzantine shipwrecks of 5th‐ to 11th‐century date. Eight of these shipwrecks, six round ships and two of the first long ships, or galleys, to be excavated from the Byzantine period, were studied by archaeologists from the Institute of Nautical Archaeology. These well‐preserved shipwrecks are an important new source of information on the maritime commerce of Constantinople and the gradual shift from shell‐based to skeleton‐based shipbuilding in the Mediterranean during the second half of the first millennium AD.