AustLit

'In this article, I survey eight Australian picture books that seek to redress a seeming absence of care in Australian politics in relation to refugees and asylum seekers: My Two Blankets (2014), Suri's Wall (2015), Ride, Ricardo, Ride! (2015), Mate and Me (2015), Teacup (2015), Flight (2015), Out (2016), and I'm Australian Too (2017). These books depict a healthy community founded upon an ethics of care, and/or a depleted community when care is absent. Although none of these books invokes structural change, all of them demonstrate how relational well-being forms a foundation for civic virtue.'

'The title of my paper and the quotation by Martha Nussbaum from which it draws both invoke the double meaning of the word disturbing. In my title, disturbing functions simultaneously as an adjective that modifies the noun thoughts and as a verb that signifies a dismantling of those thoughts. The epigraph comes from Nussbaum's discussion of compassion, which serves as the core theoretical concept that informs this essay. In an Australian context, discussions of compassion arguably circulate most overtly and publicly in relation to the Australian federal government's position on asylum seekers. Over the past ten years, no issue has divided public opinion in Australia as much as the debate concerning the treatment of asylum seekers in Australia. Two picture books entitled The Island, one written and illustrated by Armin Greder and the other written by John Heffernan and illustrated by Peter Sheehan, engage with national issues concerning the arrival of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers while also functioning as allegories for any situation in which a community mistreats an outsider.'  (Introduction)

'When critics consider young people’s practices within cyberspace, the focus is often on negative aspects, namely cyber-bullying, obsessive behaviour, and the lack of a balanced life. Such analyses, however, may miss the agency and empowerment young people experience not only to make decisions but to have some degree of control over their lives through their engagement with and use of technology, which often includes sharing it with others in cyberspace. This was a finding of research conducted by Nicola Johnson, which also informs the two novels considered in this article, Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother and Brian Falkner’s Brainjack. The article draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of acts of resistance (Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of our Time, 1998) to demonstrate how these fictional representations of hacker heroes make a direct address to their readers to use their technological expertise to achieve social justice. Rather than hacking primarily to “see if they can do it,” the protagonists of these novels acknowledge the moral ambiguity of hacking and encourage its responsible use.'

Debra Dudek critiques two novels by Morris Gleitzman, Girl Underground (2004) and Boy Overboard (2002), analysing the representation of ethical relationships between detainees and Australian citizens. In relation to children's multicultural fictions and non-fictions, Dudek suggests that in terms of cultural citizenship, Australia needs to move from 'an ethics of compassion to an ethics of responsibility' in order to understand tolerance as 'a way of respecting absolute differences' (20-21).

Dudek explains how an ethics of responsibility requires the citizens of Australia to actively participate in the dismantling of mandatory detention as an enactment of justice that works towards realizing the meaning of a 'fulfilling social life' (20-21). For Dudek (and others) this begins with the recognition of difference rather than its effacement.