This essay begins by outlining Emmanuel Levinas's radical conception of ethics. Levinas invokes/declares an absolute and primary obligation of responsibility to the human Other, whom he figures hyperbolically as invoked by the epiphany of the encounter with "the face of the Other." This encounter with alterity founds not only ethics, but…

This essay seeks to unpack some of the issues concerning representation when performing refugee stories using playback theatre. It questions the reductive influence of narrative structure and, using the framework of "artist as ethnographer," it argues that strong aesthetic production is required to overcome the dampening effect of empathy when…

This paper focuses on issues of embodiment specific to the experiences of an asylum seeker represented in the play "Refugitive" (2003). The play was written and performed by Shahin Shafaei, an Iranian asylum seeker who spent a period of 22 months in an Australian detention centre. The narrative of the play emerges through a conversation between…

This essay enquires how certain performative mechanisms deployed in the practice-as-research project "Homing Place" might be conceived as "homing devices", mechanisms that create relational and dialogic interspaces of orientation, dwelling, and emplacement and methods of bodily attunement to places. How might they be a "homing place" or "homing…

Theatre is a dangerous witness, challenged with multiple responsibilities of integrity, imagination, inspiration and craft. I explore the relationship between failure, witnessing, and displacement in a class grappling with their own backgrounds, migrations and interrogations of the idea of place and home. We approach performing testimony as an…

Testimony typically privileges singular subjectivity; as a means of representing psychological trauma, it is thought to bear witness to an individual's unique experience. This essay interrogates the question of singular subjectivity, arguing that a community can be the nexus around which witnesses "gather" the human and historiographical…

In the early nineteenth century, there were three stage illusions in which a magician could cause a person to disappear. In one of these, the Proteus Cabinet, participants would enter a box, and simply vanish. As the designers of the Proteus Cabinet said of them, they were "Here, but not Here." My essay explores this concept in relation to…

This essay examines Michael Winterbottom's 2002 film "In This World," which follows the journey of two Afghan migrants from Peshawar to London. Winterbottom's preparation involved travelling from London to Peshawar and then in reverse overland as far as Istanbul; he then returned to Peshawar and filmed the same journey using two non-professional…

This essay analyses "Through the Wire", an Australian verbatim play by and about asylum seekers, in order to investigate both the figure of the performing witness and the function of performing witness in and through theatre. It suggests that while the characters, actors and spectators involved in the play are all "performing witness(es)", how…

Focusing on "The Sheep and the Whale" ("Le mouton et la baleine," 2001) by Moroccan-Canadian playwright Ahmed Ghazali, this essay examines political and ethical issues concerning human migration from Africa to Europe. The play's representation of human rights abuses in the Strait of Gibraltar and the dilemmas facing illegal migrants, refugees and…

A lack of congruency between the teaching and learning of science and the student's personal worlds has long been recognised by the international science education community as an issue deserving space in the research agenda. The purpose of this study was to explore the diversity of student reactions when subcultures such as family, community…

Inquiry is seen as an integral part of science education in the USA; however, few American science programs explicitly focus on the higher order thinking skills that are the precursors to inquiry. In this paper, Australian researchers report the result of using a version of the Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE) program in a…

The paper reports on part of a large-scale study aimed at examining students' perceptions of teacher-student interactions. This paper will report on a study utilising mixed methodology in 12 Queensland primary classrooms. After the students' perceptions were established, the teachers, through a consultative process, developed strategies to change…

This paper reports part of a larger study which was designed to investigate current practices in initial teacher education programs in Australia. The main data collection was by telephone interviews, which were carried out with science education specialists and program coordinators at all institutions which offer primary teacher education or…

This study investigates the effect of cooperative learning (jigsaw) versus individual learning methods on students' understanding of chemical equilibrium in a first-year general chemistry course. This study was carried out in two different classes in the department of primary science education during the 2005-2006 academic year. One of the classes…