Academic literature on the topic 'Voyeuristic discourse'

Tamil Nadu is an Indian state with different cultural trends in marriage, including endogamy, post-marital residence, spousal differences in age and education, and the extent of women’s say in the timing of marriage and choosing a partner, and disbursal of dowries. Even today, sex remains a topic of controversy, linked to immoral and voyeuristic values, especially in a patriarchal heteronormative society. With limited research available on the experiences of women watching porn, the researchers attempted to know and understand how the women of Coimbatore viewed pornography, simply from a voyeuristic perspective. In-depth interviews were conducted with 10 women (natives and residents of Coimbatore), from diversified backgrounds. Discussions related to porn consumption, meanings, risks, dangers, experiences, and pleasures associated with it were initiated. The findings of the study offered basic insights into the topics discussed, which may be helpful in normalizing women’s experiences, thus promoting a healthier and more open discourse about pornography consumption among Coimbatore women.

AbstractThis article juxtaposes representations of Indonesia’s tobacco control as temporally backwards with a counter-discourse defending its clove-laced cigarettes—called kretek—as a form of distinctive cultural heritage. These opposing discourses, which I characterize as public health evolutionism and commodity nationalism, structure clashes over Indonesian tobacco regulations. Public health evolutionism can take the form of voyeuristic, exoticizing, and Othering representations, but it can also be used to argue for more equitable access to global tobacco control knowledge and practices. Commodity nationalists insist that the kretek industry should be a source of pride rather than shame, depicting tobacco control as a neocolonial plot to destroy an indigenous industry that benefits small farmers, factory workers, and home industries. This subaltern emphasis obscures the fact that a few large companies dominate the industry, which is increasingly foreign-owned and mechanizing to increase production while reducing employment. The cigarette industry takes advantage of both discourses by marketing supposedly safer products to consumers alarmed by public health messaging, while also promoting the cigarettes-as-national-heritage narrative and undermining regulations. The stakes of these debates are high in the world’s second largest cigarette market, with over three hundred billion sticks smoked each year and more than two hundred thousand tobacco-related deaths.

The paper ponders the subject of utilizing human sexuality in the process of social discipline. The author perceives this process as a modern form to subjugate an individual primarily on the basis of symbolic coercion. Making reference to the classical works of Michel Foucault the author emphasizes the factors that allow sexuality to be used for social programming. Foucault was critical of the idea that we experience the repression of a natural sexual drive, at least in its traditional meaning. In his opinion, multiplied knowledge of sex should be noted in Western societies, which leads to the hyper-development of sexual discourse, theory and the science of sexuality. He questioned the stereotypical understanding of sexual repressiveness, which determines a way of thinking in terms of a simple retaliation taken for inappropriate sexual behavior. He suggested that less observable programming control be introduced instead, based on disciplining. The limits of discourse are established by the admissible sexual relations. Whatever goes beyond this discourse, whatever is not contained within it, becomes abnormal and, potentially, repressed. The objectives of programming control and the limits of discipline are decided not only by the church and state, but also by business and media concerns, which fill the discourse with certain subjects thus deciding what dimensions of sexuality are permissible. Confessions that used to be confined to confessionals and psychoanalysts’ surgeries have become media commodities used not only marginally by pornography, but formatted to excite, fill voyeuristic needs and experience vicarious sensations. Discourse is becoming an area of apparent freedom, whereas in fact it is a means to discipline society. This seeming expansion of discourse limits to a lesser degree concerns the realm of problems and to a greater degree – accessibility. What used to be an object of communicative interest reserved for the elite has been included in mass discourse because this is the requirement of modern democracy and a liberal economy.

Abstract In this paper, I apply a metapragmatics-based approach to visual communication, combined with adapted concepts of Social Semiotics (“visual modality”) and CDA-oriented visual analysis (“canons of use”), to reconstruct two visual registers of authenticity which are prevailing within a social media photo sample of recent Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz (Facebook, Instagram; total of 84 photos), posted during the parliamentary elections in 2017. Triangulated with the discourse analysis of the marketing manager’s metapragmatic reflections on this social media campaign, the study shows how the partly intertwined registers of (1) “professional sensorism” (as a blended register comprising emblems of sensory modality and balanced composition, thereby drawing on the conceptualization of authenticity as sensory and affective experience of “now”) and (2) “voyeuristic fictionalization” (comprising indexicals associated with fiction genre, and based on the notion of authenticity as arising via “unnoticed observing”) are conceptualized and implemented as a—superior—visual stylization, acting as a social positioning, in mediatized political communication.

Women were absent from the archives and rendered as invisible within the film business that was changing the urban landscape of Bombay city in the 1930s through talkies. Questions were raised about female sexuality and respectability primarily due to a morality discourse closely associated with women acting in films. Tension, moral panic and distress had emerged from the dominant stigma regarding films making industries being a heterosexual and hybrid workspace. Moreover, an economy that capitalizes on voyeuristic pleasures of its male audience by objectifying women’s bodies. So, even though it offered women higher salaries unlike other professions, it was deemed as “dangerous” for women. Therefore, “cultured women”, essentially from the upper class, were discouraged from being a part of the studio film industry situated in the cosmopolitan Bombay city. Taking forward Neepa Majumdar’s (2009) dialogue on the denial of agency to women in Indian cinema, this paper traces the incorporation of feminist agenda into film making. This paper is limited to studying the biographical, autobiographical details and picturization of three eminent actresses: Nargis, Kanan Devi and Durga Khote. Further, I would elaborate on the struggles undertaken by them and the roles they played in films in order to deconstruct the notion of female stardom and an “ideal Indian woman” picturized in Bollywood from the 1930s–1950s. This period holds relevance in film historiography due to the ideological construction of female stardom that had its pros and cons which I would be discussing in depth through the paper.

Writing on the Living conditions in Devon and Somerset in 1849, Alexander Mackay set out to discredit the often picturesque depiction of the homes of the poor:We are accustomed to associate with the idea of a country village, or with a cottage situated in a winding vale, or hanging upon the side of a rich and fertile slope, nothing but health, contentment and happiness. A rural dwelling of this class … makes such a nice pencil sketch, that we are naturally inclined to think it as neat and comfortable as it appears. But to know it aright, it must be turned inside out, and its realites exposed to the gaze of the observer. (qtd. in Lester 320)It was this turning “inside out” of working-class interiors to the voyeuristic gaze of their largely middle-class readers that Mackay and his fellow journalists on the Morning Chronicle set out to accomplish in a series of “letters” written in 1849 and 1850. But such depictions of working-class houses and their interiors had been a staple part of the discourse on the condition of the laboring population as early as 1832, when the Manchester physician and later Assistant Poor Law Commissioner James Kay published The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes, and they continued to appear throughout the 1830s, 40s, and early 50s in the work of Peter Gaskell, William Alison, Thomas Beames, Hector Gavin, Edwin Chadwick, Henry Mayhew, and others. This writing, as I will demonstrate, betrays similar discursive and ideological underpinnings as the workingclass interior becomes the focal point for the assertion of bourgeois value and the maintenance of class distinction.

Since 9/11, cries of self-implicating media failure within journalism have all but ceased in the digital, post-truth age. For some in the industry, the media failed to represent the 2001 terrorist attacks without sensationalizing the events. Then, in 2016 and among many left-leaning media, this discourse of failure persisted to condemn mass media for eschewing difficult questions and submitting to a celebrity obsession with now-President Donald Trump. However, on the political right, Trump himself moves to delegitimize most left-leaning or oppositional media outlet, claiming their reporting to be fake, thus popularizing his maxim “fake news” and linking the media’s failures to abstraction. Ironically, the president reveals the inherent fakeness of our most immediate mode of meaning-making and supplier of epistemological certainty, a revelation that beguiles the media yet proves productive for my paper. Within this mediasphere, I turn to Dan Gilroy’s film Nightcrawler (2014) as a self-reflexive and self-implicating critique of media fakeness by way of its preoccupation with digital media in our purportedly “post-truth” era. Nightcrawler, with its look toward the grotesque consequences of capitalism and the voyeuristic and amputative uses of the digital, explores contemporary anxieties toward mediation. That is, Gilroy’s film lays bare the material media, such as physical evidence, upon which the digital depends, thus grounding the digital during a moment of abstraction. In this way, Nightcrawler is an example of evil media, a term coined by Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey which reveals the apparently immaterial social relations upon which media, including both cinema and journalism, rely. Such a revelation underscores media’s repressed ontology of the fake, artificial, and abstract, while also calling for a reconsideration meaning-making through media. By looking back to Nightcrawler, I argue meaning-making should maintain a flexibility and openness in its mediation of truth in democracy.

Research has shown that Black students are not participating in study abroad at the same rates as their White peers. This participation gap is concerning given that study abroad is a high-impact experience with discernable benefits for students who participate; study abroad is linked to increased institutional engagement, self-esteem, student success, and higher starting salaries for students once they enter the workforce. While scholars have identified finances, family and faculty support, and program limitations as barriers to minority student participation in study abroad, research surrounding how Black students perceive and interpret study abroad marketing and recruitment was absent from the literature. This qualitative study explored how Black undergraduate students at predominantly White four-year higher education institutions described their experiences with study abroad marketing and recruitment. The study incorporated a document analysis of publicly available study abroad marketing materials alongside sixteen semi-structured interviews with self-identified Black undergraduate students. The results from the document analysis showed that institutions take a varied approach to study abroad marketing and that some institutions use imagery that could be described as colonialist, voyeuristic, or patronizing in nature. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Black student perceptions of and attitudes towards study abroad marketing varied based on the information and imagery in the materials. When institutions incorporated problematic imagery that portrayed the host culture in a paternalistic fashion, Black students described their experience with those materials negatively. In contrast, when marketing materials showed hosts in active positions of teaching and authority, Black students described their experience with the materials positively. Black students actively looked for representation in photos and materials and preferred materials that signaled inclusion through imagery and program design. Finally, when brochures seemed inauthentic (because they gave vague or inflated financial information, tokenized Black students and culture, or endorsed the program in a way that seemed overinflated), students were put-off. Overall, the study adds Black student narratives to the discourse of study abroad marketing and the findings provide valuable insight for higher education administrators seeking to improve inclusivity in study abroad. Abstract in Spanish Investigaciones anteriores han determinado que los estudiantes con ascendencia africana no están participando en programas de estudios extranjeros en las mismas cantidades que aquellos de raza caucásica. Esta discrepancia es preocupante, dado que el estudio en el extranjero es una experiencia importante con beneficios distinguibles para los participantes. Investigaciones anteriores demuestran que aquellos estudiantes que estudian en el extranjero participan más en el sistema de educación superior, tienen una autoestima más alta, y ganan salarios más altos cuando entran en la fuerza laboral. Se ha identificado que algunos obstáculos a los que los estudiantes de minoría se enfrentan en relación con la participación en estudios en el extranjero son la falta de recursos financieros, apoyo familiar y académico, y deficiencias en los propios programas. Sin embargo, estos análisis omiten una examinación de la manera en que los estudiantes con ascendencia africana perciben e interpretan la promoción de estos programas. El presente análisis cualitativo explora cómo estos estudiantes, sobre todo aquellos que cursan estudios en universidades de matrícula predominantemente blanca, describen sus experiencias con la promoción de programas de estudios en el extranjero. El presente estudio incorpora varios documentos públicos de promoción relacionada con el estudio en el extranjero junto a dieciséis entrevistas con estudiantes universitarios autoidentificados como afro-americanos. Los resultados demuestran la variedad de maneras que las instituciones de estudio superior utilizan para promocionar estos programas, algunas de las cuales, incluso, pudiendo ser consideradas como colonialistas, voyeristas, o condescendientes. La percepción de los estudiantes afro-americanos sobre los estudios en el extranjero demostró ser variada en base a la información y las imágenes usadas en la publicidad. Cuando las instituciones incorporaron imágenes problemáticas, que representaban a la cultura anfitriona de una manera paternalista, los estudiantes afro-americanos reportaron haber tenido una reacción adversa. Por contraste, cuando la publicidad presentó a los anfitriones en posiciones de autoridad, los estudiantes reaccionaron de una manera positiva. Los estudiantes afro-americanos buscaron y prefirieron materiales que representaban inclusión. Finalmente, cuando los folletos parecieron falsos o insinceros (porque presentaron información imprecisa o inflada sobre el tema de las finanzas o porque tokenizaron los estudiantes afro-americanos y su cultura) los estudiantes se sintieron desanimados. El presente estudio agrega narrativas de estudiantes afro-americanos al discurso.

Drawing from historical literary works and contemporary French literature, this study [1] explored the evolution of the meanings of ‘gourmandise’ as a concept, from its early characterisation as a cardinal sin to a contemporary notion merging with visual textualisation. Furthermore, it argues that the twentieth century paved the way for a transformation in the meaning of gourmandise: its definition now emphasises a visual refinement characteristic, while retaining the element of excess as part of its appeal, thus making ‘gourmandise’ symbolic, accessible and acceptable to the general public. Although the word ‘gourmandise’ appeared in written documents at the end of the Middle Ages, its history is much older since its use dates back to the early days of Christianity, to the first monastic communities of the third and fourth centuries. In addition, while the term still exists today, its significance has had many variations over the centuries. While contemporary lexicographers define it as “the aptitude to appreciate the quality and delicacy of dishes” and the “excessive taste for the pleasure of the table” [2], its meaning has varied over the centuries [3] and is still contested. Philosophical, spiritual and social debates exist over whether the word depicts excess or moderation. In Western society, gourmandise refers to three denotations roughly corresponding to three historical periods. The earliest meaning refers to the big eaters, the heavy drinkers, and all the excesses of the table. Strongly negative, the word ‘gourmandise’ qualifies a horrible vice, one of the seven deadly sins codified by the Christian Church. Gradually, gourmandise was enriched by a second, positive sense, which would triumph in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and introduce the word ‘gourmet’ into European languages. While still reprobated by the Christian Church and moralists, gourmandise became a respectable epithet characterising amateur appreciators of good food, good wines and good company. The eighteenth century brought about a redefinition of the notion of gourmandise, all the more so as the influence of the Christian Church declined considerably. The works of Grimod de la Reynière and, a few years later, Brillat-Savarin saw a semantic change in the meaning of gourmandise, which has been attributed to the transition of an economy of scarcity to one of abundance [4, 5]. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries brought a new era for gourmandise. With the advent of digital communication, people began to talk about their experiences more rapidly and to a wider audience. Eating out has become a social event, one which must be shared instantly. Gourmandise has become digital and focuses both on quality and quantity, retaining some of its original meaning but with a new visual dimension [5]. Gourmandise is now part of everyday and professional life. It still includes the implications of excess, sharing and exchange, but now denotes transference in an increasingly seductive and interactive way. This rediscovered gourmandise is now voyeuristic instead of the gourmandise of the stomach. The findings of this study suggest that, while the meaning of gourmandise has evolved over a period of two millennia, the aspect of excessive food consumption has been retained from its beginnings right through to the twenty-first century. Paralleling its growing prestige within popular culture and social media, the discourse on gourmandise is thriving. Amidst the ‘explosion’ of food-related blogs, vlogs, websites and television programmes, gourmandise has become an engaging form of entertainment, trying to satisfy the appetites of a contemporary ‘food-crazed’ culture. The original research on which this article is based is available here http://hdl.handle.net/10292/12964 Corresponding author Gilles Petit can be contacted at: gilles.petit@aut.ac.nz References (1) Petit, G. From Glutton to Gourmet: Is Gourmandise Still a Deadly Sin? Master’s Thesis, Auckland University of Technology, Jul 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/10292/12964 (accessed Apr 20, 2020). (2) Gourmandise. Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française [online], 9th ed. https://academie.atilf.fr/consulter/Gourmandise?page=1 (accessed May, 2018). (3) Bantreil-Voisin, N. Gourmandise: Histoire d'un péché capital [online]. La Cliothèque, Jan 3, 2011. http://clio-cr.clionautes.org/gourmandise-histoire-d-un-peche-capital.html (accessed May 1, 2016). (4) Meyzie, P., Ed. La gourmandise entre péché et plaisir. Lumières 2008, 11. https://www.fabula.org/actualites/lumieres-ndeg11-la-gourmandise-entre-peche-et-plaisir_28260.php (accessed April, 2018). (5) Greene, C. Gourmands & Gluttons: The Rhetoric of Food Excess; Peter Lang Publishing: New York, 2015.

Dans l'histoire de l'art occidental des 19 e et 20 e siècles, l'image de la femme comme modèle de la représentation artistique est restée marquée dans l'art masculin par les signes codés d'une tradition machiste post-renaissante ayant mis de l'avant, au plan du message culturel et artistique véhiculé sur la femme, une idée de passivité, de soumission et de disponibilité sexuelle de celle-ci pour l'œil voyeuriste et les désirs des hommes. Dans les marges de cette histoire, sous le modernisme, des femmes artistes de l'autre avant-garde ont résisté à ces discours dominants, comme l'a montré l'histoire de l'art féministe née dans le creuset du mouvement des femmes au tournant des années 1970, et elles ont réinvesti à leur façon les fondements iconographiques comme les orientations esthétiques et stylistiques des arts visuels. Enfin, dans les arts les plus actuels, au Québec et ailleurs dans le monde, des jeunes femmes artistes postmodernes sont engagées dans un mouvement de réappropriation des pratiques féminines et/ou féministes ainsi que de leurs propres êtres psychologiques, mutilés, sexués.

This thesis examines the cultural models and discourses that a group of aspiring, primary school teachers in South-East Queensland employed to explain their current world and describe the likely development of their own careers and lives. Thirteen males and fifty-seven females, aged between 15 and 25, were involved in the study. All participants had expressed an interest in preservice teacher training with 77 percent of the cohort currently enrolled in a teacher-training program in the South-East region of Queensland, Australia. This study adopted a multi-method approach to data collection and included informal interviews, scenario planning workshops, focus groups, and a telephone survey. Initial pilot studies, incorporating informal interviews, preceded scenario planning workshops. Four males and eleven females were involved in six scenario planning groups. The scenario planning format, based upon Schwartz (1991), followed a seven-step approach whereby participants formulated and evaluated four possible future scenarios for Australia. These formed the stimulus material for the second stage of the study where thirteen focus groups critically analysed the scenario planning data. Interpretation of the data was underpinned by a framework based on an amalgamation of Gee's (1999) theoretical concepts of acts of meaning, cultural models, and Discourses and Bernstein's (1996) theoretical concepts of classification, framing, and realisation and recognition rules. The respondents exhibited five pre-eminent Discourses. These were a Technologies Discourse, Educational Discourse, Success Discourse, Voyeuristic Discourse, and an Oppositional Discourse. The group's Technologies Discourse was pervasive and influenced their future predictions for Australian society, themselves, and education and was expressed in both positive and negative terms. The respondents spoke of their current and future relationship to technologies in positive terms while they spoke of society's future relationship to technologies in negative terms. Their reactions to technologies were appropriated from two specific cultural resources. In the first instance this appears to be from their personal positive interactions with technologies. In the second instance the group have drawn from Science Fiction Discourses to predict malevolent and controlling technologies of the future. The respondents' Technologies Discourse is also evident in their Educational Discourse. They predict that their future classrooms will be more technological and that they, as teaching professionals, will be technologically literate and proficient. Their past experiences with education and schooling systems has also influenced their Educational Discourse and led them to assume, paradoxically, that while the process of education is and will continue to be a force for change, schools will not evidence a great deal of change in the coming years. The respondents were optimistic and confident about themselves, their current interactions with technologies, their future lives, and their future careers. These dispositions formed part of their Success Discourse and manifested as heroism, idealism, and a belief in utopian personal futures. The respondents' Voyeuristic Discourse assumed limited social engagement and a limited ability to accept responsibility for the past, present, and future. The respondents had adopted an 'onlooker' approach to society. This aspect of their Discourse appeared to be mutable and showed signs of tempering as the respondents matured and became more involved in their teaching careers. Finally, the respondents' Oppositional Discourse clearly delineated between themselves and 'others'. They were users of technologies, teachers, good people, young, privileged, white, Australian, and urban dwelling while 'others' were controllers of technologies, learners, bad people, older or younger, non-privileged, non-Australian, and country dwelling. Current reforms introduced by Education Queensland have stressed the need for a new approach to new times, new economies, and new workplaces. This involves having a capacity to envisage new forms, new structures, and new relationships. 'New times' teaching professionals are change agents who are socially critical, socially responsible, risk takers, able to negotiate a constantly changing knowledge-rich society, flexible, creative, innovative, reflexive, and collaborative (Sachs, 2003). The respondents in this study did not appear to be change agents or future activist teaching professionals (Sachs, 2003). Rather, they were inclined towards reproducing historical, traditional, and conservative social and professional roles as well as practices, and maintaining a safe distance from social and environmental responsibility. Essentially, the group had responded to a period of rapid social and cultural change by placing themselves outside of change forces. Successful educational reform and implementation, such as that being proposed by Education Queensland (2000), demands that all interested stakeholders share a common vision (Fullan, 1993). The respondents' Discourses indicated that they did not exhibit a futures vision beyond their immediate selves. This limited vision was at odds with that being espoused by Education Queensland (2000). This body recognises the importance of being able to envisage, develop, and sustain preferable futures visions and have developed futures oriented curricula with this in mind. Such curricula are said to respond to the changing needs of today's and tomorrow's society by having problem solving and the concept of lifelong learning at the core. The future towards which the respondents aspire is one where lifelong learning and problem solving have little significance beyond their need to stay current with evolving technologies. In reflecting on the respondents' viewpoints and the range of Discourses that they draw upon to accommodate their changing world, I propose a number of recommendations for policy makers and educators. It is recommended that preservice teacher training institutions take up the challenge of equipping future teachers with the skills, knowledges, and dispositions needed to be responsible, reflective, and proactive educators who are able to envisage and work towards preferable visions of schooling and society. Ideally, this could occur through mandatory Futures Studies courses. Currently, Futures Studies courses are not seen as an essential area of study within education degrees and as such preservice teachers are given little opportunity to engage with futures concepts, knowledges, or skills. The success of the scenario planning approach in this thesis and the richness of the issues raised through interactive engagement in imagining possible futures, suggests that all citizens, but particularly teachers, need to enlighten their imaginations more often through such processes.

This thesis examines the cultural models and discourses that a group of aspiring, primary school teachers in South-East Queensland employed to explain their current world and describe the likely development of their own careers and lives. Thirteen males and fifty-seven females, aged between 15 and 25, were involved in the study. All participants had expressed an interest in preservice teacher training with 77 percent of the cohort currently enrolled in a teacher-training program in the South-East region of Queensland, Australia. This study adopted a multi-method approach to data collection and included informal interviews, scenario planning workshops, focus groups, and a telephone survey. Initial pilot studies, incorporating informal interviews, preceded scenario planning workshops. Four males and eleven females were involved in six scenario planning groups. The scenario planning format, based upon Schwartz (1991), followed a seven-step approach whereby participants formulated and evaluated four possible future scenarios for Australia. These formed the stimulus material for the second stage of the study where thirteen focus groups critically analysed the scenario planning data. Interpretation of the data was underpinned by a framework based on an amalgamation of Gee's (1999) theoretical concepts of acts of meaning, cultural models, and Discourses and Bernstein's (1996) theoretical concepts of classification, framing, and realisation and recognition rules. The respondents exhibited five pre-eminent Discourses. These were a Technologies Discourse, Educational Discourse, Success Discourse, Voyeuristic Discourse, and an Oppositional Discourse. The group's Technologies Discourse was pervasive and influenced their future predictions for Australian society, themselves, and education and was expressed in both positive and negative terms. The respondents spoke of their current and future relationship to technologies in positive terms while they spoke of society's future relationship to technologies in negative terms. Their reactions to technologies were appropriated from two specific cultural resources. In the first instance this appears to be from their personal positive interactions with technologies. In the second instance the group have drawn from Science Fiction Discourses to predict malevolent and controlling technologies of the future. The respondents' Technologies Discourse is also evident in their Educational Discourse. They predict that their future classrooms will be more technological and that they, as teaching professionals, will be technologically literate and proficient. Their past experiences with education and schooling systems has also influenced their Educational Discourse and led them to assume, paradoxically, that while the process of education is and will continue to be a force for change, schools will not evidence a great deal of change in the coming years. The respondents were optimistic and confident about themselves, their current interactions with technologies, their future lives, and their future careers. These dispositions formed part of their Success Discourse and manifested as heroism, idealism, and a belief in utopian personal futures. The respondents' Voyeuristic Discourse assumed limited social engagement and a limited ability to accept responsibility for the past, present, and future. The respondents had adopted an 'onlooker' approach to society. This aspect of their Discourse appeared to be mutable and showed signs of tempering as the respondents matured and became more involved in their teaching careers. Finally, the respondents' Oppositional Discourse clearly delineated between themselves and 'others'. They were users of technologies, teachers, good people, young, privileged, white, Australian, and urban dwelling while 'others' were controllers of technologies, learners, bad people, older or younger, non-privileged, non-Australian, and country dwelling. Current reforms introduced by Education Queensland have stressed the need for a new approach to new times, new economies, and new workplaces. This involves having a capacity to envisage new forms, new structures, and new relationships. 'New times' teaching professionals are change agents who are socially critical, socially responsible, risk takers, able to negotiate a constantly changing knowledge-rich society, flexible, creative, innovative, reflexive, and collaborative (Sachs, 2003). The respondents in this study did not appear to be change agents or future activist teaching professionals (Sachs, 2003). Rather, they were inclined towards reproducing historical, traditional, and conservative social and professional roles as well as practices, and maintaining a safe distance from social and environmental responsibility. Essentially, the group had responded to a period of rapid social and cultural change by placing themselves outside of change forces. Successful educational reform and implementation, such as that being proposed by Education Queensland (2000), demands that all interested stakeholders share a common vision (Fullan, 1993). The respondents' Discourses indicated that they did not exhibit a futures vision beyond their immediate selves. This limited vision was at odds with that being espoused by Education Queensland (2000). This body recognises the importance of being able to envisage, develop, and sustain preferable futures visions and have developed futures oriented curricula with this in mind. Such curricula are said to respond to the changing needs of today's and tomorrow's society by having problem solving and the concept of lifelong learning at the core. The future towards which the respondents aspire is one where lifelong learning and problem solving have little significance beyond their need to stay current with evolving technologies. In reflecting on the respondents' viewpoints and the range of Discourses that they draw upon to accommodate their changing world, I propose a number of recommendations for policy makers and educators. It is recommended that preservice teacher training institutions take up the challenge of equipping future teachers with the skills, knowledges, and dispositions needed to be responsible, reflective, and proactive educators who are able to envisage and work towards preferable visions of schooling and society. Ideally, this could occur through mandatory Futures Studies courses. Currently, Futures Studies courses are not seen as an essential area of study within education degrees and as such preservice teachers are given little opportunity to engage with futures concepts, knowledges, or skills. The success of the scenario planning approach in this thesis and the richness of the issues raised through interactive engagement in imagining possible futures, suggests that all citizens, but particularly teachers, need to enlighten their imaginations more often through such processes.
Thesis (PhD Doctorate)
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
School of Education and Professional Studies
Full Text