By Monique Rooney and Russell Smith
© all rights reserved. AHR is published in PDF and Print-on-Demand format by ANU E Press
Welcome to the new-look Australian Humanities Review now co-published with ANU E Press in PDF and Print-on-Demand formats: please visit the ANU E Press website if you wish to order an attractive bound copy of AHR at the unbeatable price of $14.95. Also, with the move to the new web address, the online version of AHR is now published under the auspices of ASAL, the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, and we wish here to thank the ASAL Board for their support.
AHR Issue 45 leads with Guy Redden‘s essay ‘From RAE to ERA: research evaluation at work in the corporate university’ which takes a comparative look at performance-based assessment of research in Australian and British universities. We are keen to publish short responses (500-1000 words) to this or other essays in the ’emuse’ section of AHR. Please email your response to [email protected].
This issue also includes two themed sections, the first on the theme of ‘Rural Cultural Studies’. David Carter, Kate Darian-Smith and Andrew Gorman-Murray‘s Introduction contextualises these four essays in terms of the ‘cultural turn’ in rural studies and the ‘rural turn’ in cultural studies. Andrew Gorman-Murray, Kate Darian-Smith and Chris Gibson‘s ‘Scaling the Rural: Reflections on Rural Cultural Studies’ discusses the use of ideas of scale in developing a cultural studies approach to rural studies; Kate Bowles‘s ‘Rural Cultural Research: Notes from a Small Country Town’ engages with the pitfalls and rewards of conducting research in small-town NSW; in ‘Country Week: Bringing the City to the Country?’, Phil McManus and John Connell identify some of the factors stimulating new migration flows from the city to rural areas; and in ‘Drought, Endurance and “The Way Things Were”: The Lived Experience of Climate and Climate Change in the Mallee’, Deb Anderson draws on oral history to look at changing attitudes to drought and climate change in rural Australia.
Olivia Khoo introduces our second themed section on ‘Marketing Asian-Australianness’. This section includes three individual reflections on the experience of writing and publishing Asian-Australian literature: Tom Cho‘s ‘”No One Puts Baby In A Corner”: Inserting My Self Into The Text’, Simone Lazaroo‘s ‘Not Just Another Migrant Story’ and Merlinda Bobis‘s ‘”Voice-Niche-Brand”: Marketing Asian-Australianness’.
In our book reviews section, Aidan Davison assesses the polemical environmentalism of William Lines’ Patriots, Caroline Hamilton reflects on Richard Freadman’s This Crazy Thing A Life: Australian Jewish Autobiography, Melissa Harper reviews Catriona Elder’s Being Australian: Narratives of National Identity, while Fiona Jenkins presents a detailed assessment of Vicky Kirby’s book on Judith Butler in Continuum’s Live Theory series.
From this year on AHR will appear twice-yearly, in May and November. We are always keen to receive proposals for papers, initially in the form of a 250-word abstract, and we also welcome readers’ responses to any of our published articles: please email the editors at [email protected].