German playwright Bertolt Brecht writes and was later quoted by Cuban Nueva Trova musician Silvio Rodríguez in the opening to his song Sueño con serpientes: “There are men1 who struggle for a day and they are good. There are men who struggle for a year and they are better. There are men who struggle many years, and they are better still. But there are those who struggle all their lives: these are the indispensable ones.” Those that struggle all their lives, to borrow Brecht’s phrasing, occupy modes of resistance that largely occur clandestinely in relation to dominant discourse. They do not necessarily fit within dominant understandings of what it means to take publicaction, initiate interventions or call for social change. Creating sites of resistance means to interrogate the usual markers of resistance in relation to social-structural change. ...

This paper focuses on doctoral research which explored relationships and interpersonal learning through group dramatherapy and creative interviewing with adolescents in special education. A constructivist grounded theory study, positioning adolescents with intellectual/developmental disabilities as experts of their own relational experiences, revealed a tendency to “copy others.” The final grounded theory presented “copying” as a tool which participants consciously employed “to play with,” “learn from,” and “join in with” others. Commonly experiencing social ostracism, participants reflected awareness of their tendency to “copy others” being underpinned by a need to belong. Belonging was therefore expressed as the ultimate therapeutic experience participants wished to have. Participant responses which link dramatic imitation to a self-identified tendency “to copy,” are discussed with regard to how imitation provides an accessible point of dramatic entry from which adolescents in special education begin to explore new ways of being and inter-relating. Recommendations for how dramatherapists might centralize imitative aspects of the dramatic process to achieve therapeutic intent when working alongside adolescents in special education are discussed with specific focus on creating a space of belonging.

Tasked with creating a work through disembodied and disconcerting means, this piece became focussed on illuminating dancing that emanates from often imperceptible spaces, and the volume of the body’s interior. As each dancer engaged with their own “unseen” movement capacities, more of their individually embodied dancing was revealed. The practice of revealing and concealing according to context weaves the dancers’ individual lineages into the work, questioning perceptions of what it is that is “seen” and how this is authenticated…individually, communally and societally.

OBJECTIVE: High concentrations of circulating glucose are believed to contribute to defective insulin secretion and beta-cell function in diabetes and at least some of this effect appears to be caused by glucose-induced beta-cell apoptosis. In mammalian cells, apoptotic cell death is controlled by the interplay of proapoptotic and antiapoptotic members of the Bcl-2 family. We investigated the apoptotic pathway induced in mouse pancreatic islet cells after exposure to high concentrations of the reducing sugars ribose and glucose as a model of beta-cell death due to long-term metabolic stress. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: Islets isolated from mice lacking molecules implicated in cell death pathways were exposed to high concentrations of glucose or ribose. Apoptosis was measured by analysis of DNA fragmentation and release of mitochondrial cytochrome c. RESULTS: Deficiency of interleukin-1 receptors or Fas did not diminish apoptosis, making involvement of inflammatory cytokine receptor or death receptor signaling in glucose-induced apoptosis unlikely. In contrast, overexpression of the prosurvival protein Bcl-2 or deficiency of the apoptosis initiating BH3-only proteins Bim or Puma, or the downstream apoptosis effector Bax, markedly reduced glucose- or ribose-induced killing of islets. Loss of other BH3-only proteins Bid or Noxa, or the Bax-related effector Bak, had no impact on glucose-induced apoptosis. CONCLUSIONS: These results implicate the Bcl-2 regulated apoptotic pathway in glucose-induced islet cell killing and indicate points in the pathway at which interventional strategies can be designed.

Digital technologies and pre/peri-natal apps are transforming maternity care as women use consumer-oriented communications technologies to obtain information and support. These technologies have introduced a new set of politics into health communication, as information asymmetries embedded into apps and their platforms disrupt traditional concepts of health literacy and consumer participation that have been key concepts in community health advocacy. The development of cultural safety and cultural competence has been one impetus for health professionals to adapt their models of care to address information and support gaps for service users from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds, by asking clinicians to address the operations of power at work in their cultural norms of practice. However, consumer apps appropriate the cultural interface that has historically been managed by clinicians, raising questions about how participatory these technologies can be for women from marginalised groups. Given the black-boxed nature of many health technologies that by design do not enable adequate description by end users, new modes of research are necessary to both stimulate dialogue on health literacy and health participation as a part of a discovery process around CALD women’s experiences and perceptions.

Artistic research has sought to gain academic legitimacy through adapting to scientific methods, while also retaining the mandate of the humanities in the reproduction of culture. In both cases, Western epistemologies have structured what constitutes knowledge and how it is circulated and shared. The contemporary university is far more connected to its local environment, bringing the potential of engaging broad publics in the life of the institution. Innovation and experimentation with local artistic forms is one way that artistic research can powerfully animate the 21st century university mission in the Asia Pacific.

Maenad is an aleatoric musical composition, written in the form of instructions for an improvisation. It imaginatively follows the trajectory of Sylvia Plath’s seven-part “Poem for a Birthday” (1959), which, in its mystical density and complexity, prefigures the narrative of alchemical self-transformation that propels the later Ariel. Maenad is composed in seven episodes, each of which is named, in sequence, after one of the parts of Plath’s “Poem for a Birthday,” and each of which seeks freely to unknot and unravel one or more element in Plath’s extraordinarily rich weave of imagery and associative meaning. The title of the improvisation as a whole—Maenad—takes its name from the third poem in Plath’s sequence, which the female speaker is instructed to declaim in its entirety. Maenad is conceived with the members of Melbourne-based new music ensemble Forest Collective in mind.

The term ‘artistic research’ shadowed the growth of graduate study in studio arts in the late twentieth century, including the integration of many art schools and polytechnics into a tightly integrated and networked higher education sector, and an accompanying interest in art’s relationship to traditional academic disciplines. As the art education sector grew, the key debates were concerned with what the future of artistic research should look like as it expands. However, given the impact of neoliberal austerity measures and funding cuts that have resulted in programme closures and declining enrolments, we now consider the likelihood of artistic research contracting. What if artistic research is now approaching the end of its university life, a fate shared by the humanities and critical social sciences? This essay considers the potential ways artistic research may end.

Colonisation, industrialisation and new policies have brought massive changes to the lives and languages of Indigenous peoples in the west Pilbara region through the twentieth century. Solo-performed songs, composed and performed by Ngarluma, Yindjibarndi, Palyku, Martuthunira, Kurrama, Nyiyaparli, Banyjima, Yinhawangka, Kariyarra, Nyamal and Ngarla speakers, provide a window into these histories of change, upheaval and innovation. This paper presents a preliminary account of the thematic content and musical style of Tabi songs that were composed and/or performed by Robert Churnside (Dowding’s maternal grandfather) in the 1950s and 60s. Transcribed by linguist Carl Georg von Brandenstein (Brandenstein 1975), the song lyrics composed by Churnside and his associates record experiences of the emerging industries, new forms of transportation and travel, infrastructure and people in his and neighbouring countries, and present an intriguing insight into a region and period of musical innovation. The paper considers the ways in which Tabi songs, and legacy records of them, are used as tools to manage environmental change.

In this chapter, based on interview with performer Ross Anderson-Doherty, the authors examine the ways in which the panto form might be queered – an especially charged project in the particular locality of Belfast, North of Ireland.4 The chapter focuses on how Anderson-Doherty works to queer panto, largely in the role of the dame, through casting, rehearsal processes and in performance. In the Cabaret Supper Club and in panto, Anderson-Doherty is performing to largely heterosexual audiences, and he highlights some of the challenges he has faced, but also the sorts of queer interventions he has been able to make through performance. His approach to gender and his lived experience, coupled with the range of his work, have often clashed with the culture he works within, leading him to identify and adopt a set of strategies we might see as queering the spaces and artforms he engages with.