Imaging Australian Spaces

This subject has the following teaching availabilities in 2008:

For the purposes of considering request for Reasonable Adjustments under the Disability Standards for Education (Cwth 2005), and Student Support and Engagement Policy, academic requirements for this subject are articulated in the Subject Overview, Learning Outcomes, Assessment and Generic Skills sections of this entry.

It is University policy to take all reasonable steps to minimise the impact of disability upon academic study, and reasonable adjustments will be made to enhance a student's participation in the University's programs. Students who feel their disability may impact on meeting the requirements of this subject are encouraged to discuss this matter with a Faculty Student Adviser and Student Equity and Disability Support: http://services.unimelb.edu.au/disability

This subject allows students to examine the ways in which Australian space has been represented in a variety of cultural forms. The subject explores how these spaces - conceived in a visual, literary and physical sense - have developed, and how these have been represented and promoted in various contexts. Through a series of case studies, the subject examines topics and issues such as national space, spaces of silence and emptiness, legacies of colonial inscription on landscape, badlands and 'trauma-scapes', public space, the intersections of globality and locality, spatial entitlement and exclusion, spaces of belonging and the imaging of home, community space, power and the built and environment, and ruins and terrain vague. Key and recurring themes will be the spaces that 'haunt' the Australian imagination: cross-cultural, migrant and racialised spaces; anxieties about spaces and places and belonging; transnational understandings of Australia's place in the region and world; and how all these are shaped and affected by cultural memories of the past and the cultural politics of the present.

This subject is not available as a breadth subject.

• be able to demonstrate that they can take responsibility for their own learning and academic endeavour; be able to think in theoretical and / or have strong foundation for empirical research

• be able to demonstrate the time-management skills required for conducting a sustained and developmental piece of independent study;

• be able to demonstrate skills of information retrieval, management of ideas, and orchestration of diverse sources in the process of research construction and presentation;

• be able to situate the significance of their research in the context of broader social, ethical and cultural contexts;

• be able to communicate their research findings in a clear and intelligible manner.