Program & Abstracts

Dr Chloé Diskin-Holdaway

Language and identity among migrants to Australia

Almost 30% of people in Australia are born overseas and over 22% of people (30% in capital cities) speak a language other than English at home (ABS 2021). In this multilingual and ‘superdiverse’ country, there is vast potential for the creation and redefinition of multicultural, transnational, and cosmopolitan identities. In this paper, I will discuss identity through the prism of language, as migrants in Australia navigate issues of ethnicity, race, and culture in their everyday lives. 

I will present findings from the ‘Superdiversity’ project, launched in 2017, which investigates language practices and identity among Irish and Chinese migrants who have recently moved to Melbourne. Taking a discourse analytic approach, I draw on interviews to examine their changing perceptions of ‘home’ with a particular focus on their narratives. I also examine the competing pressures on migrants to fit in and ‘sound local’, while at the same time not sacrificing their core linguistic identities. This is linked to an analysis of their attitudes to Australian English and what kinds of social meanings it invokes. Finally, I consider how migrants draw on different kinds of social types or personae (Eckert 2008), such as the ‘Irish backpacker’ or the ‘migrant professional’, as anchor points in the trajectories of their dynamic linguistic repertoires. The findings have implications for how we understand linguistic integration and migrant identity in contemporary societies.

Dr Jennifer Strauss

Life in the Humanities

The absence of an article –definite or indefinite—in my title is deliberate. It licenses me to talk about my own experience of a life in the humanities as a female academic and to use that life to trace shifting currents, both internal and external to the humanities disciplines; changes that over time have affected not only their nature, but also their status –their very life--within academia and in a wider social context that recently has smacked too much of Gradgrindery (aka utilitarianism).  Perhaps a change of government is leading to a shift in the external political-economic evaluation of the humanities, but within the academy one wonders if there is some deeper malaise embedded in the notion of an essentialist division between the Humanities and the Sciences (what C.P. Snow formalised as the Two Cultures some 80 years ago)? I would argue that the conflict is not inherently between the two, but in the involvement of the universities within capitalism’s competitive struggle for funds. Externally funded Research has proved to be the icing on a rather meagre funding cake, and this is money that flows more easily to research in the sciences, putting pressure on Humanities Faculties to adapt to seeing funded research as more important than teaching or that somewhat “vague” concept of scholarship.  The sciences have their own problems defending their integrity and commitment to discovery in such a situation, but for the humanities one does have to ask whether they are being driven to sell their soul to have a life. How do we fight to keep our soul?

Soyeon Kim

Family Language Policy Unveiled: Korean-English Families' Language Journey in Australia and South Korea

In response to the increasing prevalence of cross-cultural families worldwide, the field of Family Language Policy (FLP), which pertains to language planning within households among family members, has gained prominence and scholarly attention in select regions. Within this emerging domain, this thesis is dedicated to a specific investigation of cross-cultural families comprising Korean and English L1 parents, along with their children residing in both South Korea and Australia. This particular amalgamation of national backgrounds has not been extensively explored, making it a focal point of this study.

The study seeks to discern the intricate relationship between language usage and a myriad of internal and external factors influencing these families. Employing a mixed-methods research approach, the researcher gathered data from a total of 25 couples, conducting 50 interviews in both South Korea and Australia as part of the study. Data analysis delves into the intricate interplay of various variables within these families, illuminating the development of FLP within the Interdisciplinary Framework of FLP, as proposed by Curdt-Christianses in 2018.

The research findings unveil that, despite their chosen family language policy, cross-cultural families comprising Korean and English speakers in Australia and Korea prioritise English in their communication practices. Furthermore, the study highlights the significant role played by English, a language highly esteemed in society, in shaping the language practices of parents, regardless of their country of residence. This study aspires to contribute valuable insights to the field of FLP by examining cross-cultural families residing in two distinct nations.

Ying Zhang

The Cardinality of zuò ‘sit’, zhàn ‘stand’, and tǎng in Mandarin Posture Verbs

Posture verbs have attracted considerable interest within Cognitive Linguistics. This study continues this line of research by investigating usage-based patterns associated with Mandarin posture verbs, focusing on the literal use of such verbs to refer to human postures. The overarching goal of this study is to find the most primary posture verbs in Mandarin corpus reflecting as full range of use as possible. Guided by this principle, the data for the study is sourced from the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese, the CALLHOME Mandarin Corpus and the ChangPN corpus (a corpus of Mandarin-speaking children). Collectively, these corpora offer a harmonious blend, encompassing a balanced written corpus, transcriptions of authentic spoken language, and the verbal utterances of children. The research delves into the frequencies and distributions of 20 distinct posture verbs. Among these, 14 verbs yield at least one occurrence across the examined corpora. The findings reveal that the verbs 坐 (zuò) meaning ‘sit,’站 (zhàn) meaning ‘stand,’ and 躺 (tǎng) meaning ‘lie’ stand out as the three preeminent posture verbs in Mandarin. This result is compared directly with the results from a similar study of English posture verbs in Newman and Rice (2001, 2004). 

Aidan Solla

Endoclisis and the Old Irish Verb 

Endoclisis has been the subject of some debate in linguistic theory with a number of linguists questioning whether such forms are even possible. This endoclisis skepticism is rooted in long-standing theoretical assumptions about the way language is structured. And yet, there is evidence for this phenomenon from a handful of languages across different language families.

This talk is an exploration of the phenomenon of endoclisis through the case study of Old Irish. I will trace the diachronic development of bound object pronouns and verbal morphology in Old Irish, and the phenomenon of endoclisis that resulted from the interaction between these two grammatical systems. I will then consider the problem of endoclisis more broadly and suggest a few ways to reconcile the phenomenon and theory.

William Giang

Japanese Adjectives: What even are they?

It has long been noted that language-specific word classes do not lend themselves well to being defined by semantics alone. Thus, in the study of English and other languages, many have turned to morphosyntactic answers to the question of 'What are adjectives?', and same can be said in the case of Japanese. However, rather than a clear-cut word class, the morphosyntactic approach has yielded different opinions regarding the grouping and classification of so-called 'Japanese Adjectives'. Thus, whether Japanese Adjectives constitute one large word class with many formal subclasses or are split into several core lexical classes is a contentious matter. Which, if any, of these two opinions stand up to scrutiny? Upon investigation, the answer is, perhaps, neither.

Isabella Mead

GLAM Institutions and Ekphrastic Poetry: Co-Creation and Collaboration in the Digital Age

"Modern-day ekphrasis is typically understood as writing that describes or responds to visual art: “the verbal representation of visual representation” (Heffernan, 1993). Prior to the mass digitisation of cultural artefacts, ekphrasis often involved the writer viewing the analogue artwork first-hand in a museum or gallery setting, or in a print reproduction of the artwork. My research explores how the process of writing ekphrastic poetry is transformed in a digital environment. 

Digitised collections provide an aesthetic and sensory experience that differs significantly from that provided by their physical counterparts. Digital images have unique properties: they may be transient and/or their display is subject to opaque search-engine algorithms. In the act of sourcing and examining digitised collections, ekphrastic writers engage with complexly layered entities, including the artwork or artefact, the artist, the institution that houses the artist’s work, and the digital infrastructure and networks that allow the viewing to take place. 

Consequently, there are several ways in which digital ekphrasis diverges from its analogue counterpart, particularly relating to access, place, meaning-making and digital co-creation. This paper examines ekphrasis in the digital age, elaborating on one element of my larger thesis project (“Writing Ekphrastic Poetry in Response to the Digital Image”). My key interest is the under-appreciated role of the gallery, library, archive or museum (GLAM) as co-creator or collaborator in ekphrasis. 

Anna Pane

A Golden Friendship? The Iterative Depiction of Female Friendship in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962)

This paper considers the depiction of female friendship in Doris Lessing’s 1962 novel, The Golden Notebook. It considers how the friendship between Anna and Molly in this text is constructed, how Lessing characterises female friendship and finally, the ways in which the friendship is influenced by patriarchal structures. I will argue that in The Golden Notebook Lessing’s characterisation of female friendship is complex and changeable. This lack of stability or fixedness throughout the depiction of the friendship can be described, using a word Elena Ferrante has coined in this context, as exhibiting a “disorderliness”. In The Golden Notebook, the protagonist, Anna, portrays the friendship between herself and her friend Molly, three times. She does so through personal diaries and two different fictionalised re-imaginings. Each version, or iteration, as I will call them over the course of this paper, depicts the friendship with slight, and sometimes major, differences. It is only through reading these iterations together that the complexity of the friendship between Anna and Molly can be fully understood.

Anriena Zen

Gendering Orientalism in Vathek and Zofloya

An examination into how the masculinized female complicates gendered dynamics in the gothic oriental novel. In particular, how Charlotte Dacre's Victoria de Loredani in Zofloya is the masculinized female protagonist (and in part the antagonist), whilst Zofloya himself serves as a secondary character, complicating the discussion of whether a character is rendered irredeemable because they are Oriental figures, by integrating the degree of irredeemability through its gendering. Contrarily, William Beckford's Vathek has Caliph Vathek as the protagonist, whilst his mother Carathis is a secondary character, though not to disregard her consistent presence throughout the text. However, I contend that Carathis both directs the narrative and Vathek, through her masculinization—ambition—and occasionally feminine manipulation. That is to say, this presentation explores if and how the extent to which the Orient is inherently effeminate, thereby prompting the question; does the gothic woman become masculinized because of this underlying notion?

Julia Ngoc-Huong Faragher

Girls' School Stories in Contemporary Australian Young Adult Literature

Contemporary Australian young adult school stories focus on outsider protagonists discovering their individual identity through a search for a sense of belonging, rejecting the older model of a school story from 1885-1970 driven by protagonists who learn to find their place in a positive school environment. I will discuss three novels in my presentation: Feeling Sorry for Celia (2000) by Jaclyn Moriarty, Laurinda (2014) by Alice Pung and Triple Threat (2022) by Katy Warner. Each of these novels is a work of Australian young adult fiction, written by an Australian author, published in the twenty-first century, features a teenage girl protagonist and takes place in a realist school setting. These novels demonstrate how contemporary Australian young adult school stories feature protagonists who remain connected to the rest of the world while at school and experience negative feelings towards their schools, but still are able to find a sense of belonging somewhere within the school community.

Laura Lorcane Deriu

Lesbian discourses in Australia, 1980s: The Lesbian/Feminist ‘Sex Wars’, the case of Wicked Women magazine

This presentation introduces concepts of how lesbian spectators are positioned by discursive representations of same-sex attracted women in multimodal print media at the height of the Lesbian/Feminist ‘Sex Wars’ in the 1980s. I examine the linguistic and semiotic resources that index lesbian ways of looking and making meaning about their identities and communities during this highly contested transnational debate about diverse lesbian sexual expressions. Lesbian socio-subcultures will be illustrated through an examination of text and images from the iconic Australian lesbian multimodal print magazine, Wicked Women (1988-1996). This presentation explores the discursive construction of lesbian identity and community in Australia of the 1980s during the ‘Sex Wars’ through referencing Critical, Historical and Multimodal Discourse Analysis frameworks.

Xiaoli Li

Exploring the Multilingual Self: Language Portraits of Adult Chinese Learners

Language portraits have become a prominent tool in multilingualism research in recent years. Within the realm of language learning motivation studies, these portraits offer significant potential, enabling researchers to delve into how language learners depict their multilingual selves through their drawings and reflective insights. This presentation highlights a segment of my PhD project: a narrative inquiry involving 14 post-tertiary adult Chinese learners in Australia. I will introduce the adoption of the language portrait as a research method, discussing aspects of data collection, coding, analysis, results, and findings. Moreover, I will present two individual learners' cases to illustrate the detailed application of this method. The primary objective is to stimulate a broader discussion on the incorporation of this captivating method into comprehensive studies of adult language learners.

Zongling (Jack) Mao

Comparing motivation between beginner-level Chinese and Japanese: Initial findings regarding Japanese beginners

Motivation for learning foreign languages have been intensively studied in the past examining EFL learners. Thus, it is becoming more important to draw comparisons between different languages to investigate the influences on possible theoretical and pedagogical implication for language learning motivation. In addition, few existing studies have emphasised on assessing motivation for beginner learners. Therefore, this research project will investigate foreign language learning motivation for tertiary students enrolled in the first semester of beginner-level language units. Specifically, two groups of students: students enrolled in Chinese and students enrolled Japanese. Students’ motivation and any changes during the semester will be assessed, and comparisons will be drawn within each language group and also between Chinese and Japanese groups. Data is collected using multiple semi-structured interviews scheduled throughout the semester and the university semester break. In this presentation, the focus will be on the initial findings regarding the students enrolled in beginner-level Japanese. Students enrol in Japanese mostly due to their inherent interest in the language and its popular culture, and are often quite motivated to begin learning the language. However, their motivation to engage in language learning and studying decreases through the semester, often due to the workload from their other subjects. Hopefully, the results from this research project can provide practical implications for improving language learning and teaching for students starting their language learning journey during their tertiary studies.

Janice Keynton

Students of Chinese in Australian universities: why do they continue?

This project investigates the profiles of students of Chinese in Australian universities and their motivations for studying Chinese, including changes over time. In particular, the thesis seeks links between students’ language experience and their motivations for different enrolment behaviours. This will provide an overview of student motivation for learning Chinese at tertiary level at different points during and after their enrolment. 

I collected data over three years from 2019 to 2021. 269 students from 14 universities across Australia participated – one as many as twelve times over three years, including online surveys during and after study, and four interviews. Participants give a detailed picture of their motivation and enrolment behaviours over time. 

This presentation is the “first draft” of my Final Review presentation, due in October.

It concentrates on Chapter 7, which looks student motivation to continue. The research question addressed is:

What Reasons do students give for continuing their enrolment, and how do these change over time?

196 continuing survey responses including free responses to the question “What is the main reason you decided to continue studying Mandarin at university this semester?” are supplemented by additional observations from 14 continuer interviews with 11 interviewees.

The presentation outlines the main themes of motivation to continue.

Rima Febriani

The Sense and the Sensibility: Tracing the Indonesian Ars Erotica

This presentation aims to make sense of pornography in Indonesian literary scene. Despite the abundant circulation of pornographic materials since the colonial era, the Indonesians have been less serious about assembling and cataloguing them. The challenges include rejections to acknowledge the existence and significance of the readings, the ambiguous lines of obscenity, and the scattered bibliography. Through an unsystematic reading of erotic literature and debates since 1950, I attempt to map Indonesian literature of the obscene in order to understand how this scene also contributes to the sexual knowledge production.

Matt Skidmore

Re-locating Korean-ness

Korean culture has experienced a surge in popularity in recent years, with music, TV shows, movies, food, and drink from the peninsula being appreciated around the world. But what happens when the ‘language’ of culture is translated from one place to another, with a different audience, and different contexts for interpretation? This study addresses some of these questions by looking at the ‘cultural language’ of South Korea as expressed through re-located artefacts, and how they speak to the people experiencing them in the city of Melbourne, Australia. Using the concept of ‘assemblages’ (Kroskrity, 2021; Pennycook, 2017, 2021) and the semiotic repertoires of people and culture from the body of work of translinguistics (Canagarajah, 2013; García & Wei, 2014; Li, 2022), this auto-ethnographic study finds that objects of ‘Korean-ness’ interact with the time and space they are re-located in to create layered meanings that are open to interpretation by the people who encounter them (Blommaert, 2013, 2015; Scollon & Scollon, 2003). This study concludes with the idea that if cultural authenticity is to be de-essentialised, then it must be considered as contingent upon local ‘language’ practices (Pennycook, 2010).

Laura Nicole Garland

Trauma-informed human rights lawyering: cultivating sustainability and resilience in UN fieldwork

One of the only studies to survey human rights field workers found that 71.6% of those exposed to trauma presented with symptoms of PTSD and depression. Conducting interviews and witnessing human rights violations are the two highest frequencies and types of trauma exposure reported in human rights advocates. Drawing on fifteen years of lived experience as a human rights lawyer specialising in indigenous peoples’ rights, this paper hypothesises that compassionate witnessing is a key protective factor for those bearing witness and an essential step in creating an empathic, safe space for those being witnessed. This hypothesis is tested through the development of a training program on compassionate witnessing for UN human rights field workers, as well as through reflections and research on collective healing in a work of creative non-fiction. These reflections include insights gained from understanding the feelings of passivity experienced by lawyers in these witnessing roles and their increased vulnerability in these moments. In the context of taking both individual and collective testimonies from indigenous peoples, this paper draws on lessons learned from these communities on what provides a healing opportunity and what leads to re-traumatization. Through the witnessing of these diverse voices, both the process and outcome of this practice-based research leads to the conclusion that compassionate witnessing is at the heart of collective healing.

Uma Muthia

(Re)securing the “West” through British and American newspaper framing of the 2018 U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal

The construction of a homogenous West against Other(s) in news media overlooks how intra-Western Othering can rupture this naturalised civilizational idea. News framing of Western relations with Iran and within the West during the 2018 American withdrawal from the Iran nuclear accord illuminates how this identity is discursively (re)secured in times of internal conflict. The American withdrawal from the nuclear accord encapsulates the imagining of Self and Other(s) in times of internal turmoil – in particular, the Brexit referendum and then-US President Donald Trump’s presidency – by members who imagine themselves as foundational to the West: the United States and the United Kingdom. Iran is represented in Western news coverage as divergent from these members, particularly through the ongoing perceived threat of Iran’s nuclear program that mutually constitutes the Western Self. This cross-national project exposes the West-Other binary by synthesising interdisciplinary theories in social psychology, international relations, and media and journalism studies. Attempts to resecure an idea of ‘Western’ identity linked to liberal values and global leadership in newspaper articles published by The Times and the New York Times highlights how news language maintains conceptions of an imagined West through Othering.