Ellen J. Greenham (PhD. FHEA)

While teaching a data analytics unit situated within the HASS-STEM nexus, a shifting praxis uncovered an emerging apex priority of better assessment design to ‘AI-proof’ and therefore ‘cheat-proof’ what students do. Addressing the warp-speed evolution of AI must be more than a tokenistic box-ticking exercise or bolt-on to curriculum; and it must certainly be more than a reactionary practice that holds the practitioner to ransom under the insidious notion that every student is now guilty until proven innocent. Our responsibility in teaching is surely to equip students with the values, the knowledge and the tools they can use to foster a genuine sense of agency and social responsibility in the world. Our challenge in teaching is not in knowing what we need to prevent within the complexity of an emerging ontological framework that is unlike any other in human history, our challenge is knowing how we can best prepare our students to become responsible and humane planetary citizens. In considering the implicit presence and problematics of an unauthorised use of AI by students to complete work for assessment, and the corresponding systems-wide absence of ‘sure-fire’ mechanisms of detection, this paper is asking how we might do better for students than simply police the borders and presume guilt by default.

When unrestrained by the conventional ethics or normative values of the broader society in which they are embedded, does a woman’s response to the world become a gateway to liberation, a curse reflecting back, or just something ‘other than’ what it previously was? Does such a woman confront a corresponding compulsion to exult in the consequences of their actions or pay dearly in penance? Bodily transformations that are born from an unleashing of female power in American Horror Story’s third season, Coven, not only change subjective bodies, but they also activate corresponding change within that body’s continuing ability to communicate its newly formed sense of self and meaning in the world. Rewritten, reinscribed, and linguistically mapped to new articulations, the decoupling of language from the transformed body of men, such as we encounter for the characters Kyle Spencer and Bastien, is very different to the coherent and constant voice that becomes nearly all that is left of the transformed body of Delphine LaLaurie. If horror is proposed as a natural idiomatic terrain of female expression, then what can we make of that terrain and a human interfacing with it when embodiment is transformed and the subject’s ‘first-born’ articulations are re-mapped?

Murdoch University’s Career Learning Spine is a scaffolded program of study within non-professional undergraduate degrees, designed to support students in developing employability skills and career readiness. Within this program the unit, Real World Learning, requires students to organise and undertake a real world learning experience through engagement with either service learning or an approved student program. When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in 2020, cascading changes within volunteering workplaces, domestic and international travel, and the closure of domestic borders with lockdowns soon after, significantly disrupted students’ organised opportunities and in doing so, jeopardised their ability to successfully complete this important unit of study. The flexibility inherent in Murdoch’s Real World Learning unit, coupled with University supports put in place around unit delivery and assessment requirements, resulted in a significant minimisation of the loss of opportunity for successful completion of this unit over 2020 and triggered an expansion of learning opportunities in 2021. In addition, international students unable to return to Australia due to ongoing border closures throughout 2021, have not been disadvantaged by their inability to return to campus in Perth, nor have they been unable to complete work-based learning in a real world context. This presentation outlines what we have done to support student learning in a work-based context and posits thought around how we can build upon this in meaningful ways as part of a globally mobile higher education delivery.

One of the challenges many students face when considering the integration of real world or work-based learning in their degrees, is that work integrated learning (WIL) placements and internships often carry prerequisites requiring specific disciplinary achievement or a minimum GPA. For many students capable of thriving in the WIL context, their opportunity to do so is undercut by an academic record that excludes them. Embedded in all non-vocational degrees, Murdoch University’s Career Learning Spine (CLS) is a suite of units designed to work in complement to, but not replacement of, more traditional real world learning frameworks such as WIL placements and internships. Through the delivery of the unit MSP201 Real World Learning, the CLS offers all students an opportunity to engage with workplace and professional contexts. Moreover, the offering of this unit in both standard semester-based and non-standard teaching periods, further supports students by offering greater flexibility for structuring their course of study to accommodate diverse learning and life needs. Built around principles of practice-based learning and developing ongoing reflexive praxis, Murdoch’s Real World Learning unit offers all students after their first year of study the opportunity to engage with professional environments, support local communities onshore and offshore through volunteering, undertake entrepreneurial development and competition, attend local and global conferences, engage with service learning, and partner with academics. The evidence from student reflection in formal assessment points towards real world learning as an efficacious methodology for professional and personal development; affirms that the corporeality of learning and embodied practice are pivotal to skills development; and supports all students’ opportunity and access to gain real world experience and develop preparedness for the world of work after they graduate.

“So, my love, have you understood my sadness? Pass it on to the people, though I might not be around by then. They’ll find me in the earth. Under the roots.” (Zinaida Yevdokimovna Kovalenka, returnee) The explosion and subsequent melt-down of reactor 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 initiated a forced diaspora of Soviet citizens from the town of Pripyat and surrounding villages within the 30km exclusion zone. This paper considers the real-world return of citizens to the Chernobyl zone of alienation alongside the return of disenfranchised citizens to the zone in GSC Gameworld’s first person shooter series S.T.A.L.K.E.R., as iterations of exile and return that transect borders of safety. Two worlds – the digital and the physical – divided by their apparent realities and united by their radiation. In these Chernobyl presents an aberrant kind of mirroring that seems to have unintentionally collided in expressions of a return to spaces of belonging. If Chernobyl is, as Svetlana Alexievich writes, ‘the beginning of a new history’ 1. then speculative extrapolation of this history to reimagine the world of the Chernobyl zone must surely be that history’s corollary. After the nuclear diaspora, what reconfigurations emerge to correlate a citizen’s understanding of belonging with a standard in the order of things that makes sense to the rest of the world. 1. Svetlana Alexievich. 2013. Chernobyl Prayer. (trans. 2016). London: Penguin, 24.

What real-world threats transect the visceral borders of our embodied existence? What figurations of life does science fiction offer to help us navigate the uncertainties of our world? Postmodernity can be read as framing our habitation of space-time as one of precarity, a habitation of acute ontological instability in which not even the individual enclosures of our own bodies guarantee our safety. When Ebola erupted across West Africa in 2014, it marked the beginning of the largest and most complex epidemic since the virus was discovered in 1976. An uninvited guest onboard mobile homes, this indiscriminate invader reminds us that the enemy without-turned-enemy-within lies submerged in the dance of genetic mutation and change, a dance to which our bodies have transported us like lovers on a Saturday night. In such times what value, indeed what relevance, might considerations of apex invaders such as the titular entities of the iconic Alien series offer to us? This paper examines the relationship between the precarity of the visceral body in which we live, and speculations in science fiction that inform the articulation of the home we cannot escape.

What figurations of embodied experience does science fiction offer that might help us navigate the uncertainties of our world? This paper will examine the relationship between being human within a sphere of increasingly precarious existence, and the speculations of science fiction that inform the articulation of our naked humanity in response to the threat of an ‘enemy from within’. These are the days, and weeks, and months – let us hope not years – of Ebola. What might science fiction in its ruminations of the universe illuminate, that we can in some way better understand how we respond to real-life, real-world threats that transect the visceral borders of our embodied existence?

In constructing cosmological models, the human creature assembles a sense of significance that is bound by morals and ethics, and produces an image of the universe as a stable and cohesive creation. This sense of universal order is fortified by the endeavour to isolate the body as an object separate from the landscape in which it moves. But this is an illusion; this is a belief in a foundation of order that simply does not exist.] For the early twentieth century philosopher and writer, H.P. Lovecraft, the universe is an indifferent mechanism without purpose or direction, and the human creature within this mechanism is rendered insignificant. There is neither emotion nor ethic of any human parameter to be found beyond that creature’s own minuscule sphere, and the universe manifests as a hostile adversary of polarized oppositions. According to Lovecraft, the ordered body on which the human creature has thought it can rely, is perpetually subject to the threat of engulfment in the universe and to plunging irretrievably into madness or death. What hope for significance can the human creature hold in such a universe as this? For Lovecraft’s cosmicism, the human response to the universe of chaos is to inscribe that universe as an adversary to be feared; but for neocosmicism, the universe is an entity of chaos and life is the mask that the universe symbiotically wears. It is a moving, breathing chaos and the human creature is breathing with it.

Discoveries are disclosures. They are the uncovering of hidden things, the manifestation of unseen qualities, the unravelling of an ascribed order. The universe that the human creature once thought it inhabits, does not exist. That creature, in its search for what it means to be human in the universe where the invisible is made visible, is vitalised not by the safe enclosure of Edenic comfort, but by the apocalypse of what the French urbanist Paul Virilio calls the integral accident. It is the accident that directs the universe. It is the accident that reveals the ubiquity of beginnings and endings. It is the accident that uncovers the universe as manifest not by design but by chaos. And it is the human creature engulfed, sublimated and scoured clean, that emerges reinscribed. That creature is a predator in the proving ground, a lover embraced by the universe. This paper is a meditation on the idea of accident and will ask, as Virilio suggests, if it is possible for the human creature to live in a world inscribed by chaos?

The universe that the human creature once thought it inhabits does not exist. The elusive but nonetheless sought after utopia of some neatly ordered Edenic paradise dissolves within the apocalypse of what the French urbanist Paul Virilio calls the integral accident. It is the accident that directs the universe. It is the accident’s consequential landscape that sharpens dulled senses and shifts the human creature’s visual field from an introspective and incarcerating cosmological familiarity, to the open terrain of a universe that does not deal in human emotions. The universe is manifest not by design but by chance and change, it operates by the chaos of the random and the unexpected, and it inspires vitality in the human creature not through safety and comfort, but through testing that creature’s capacities. Participation in the universe is the revelation of opposites in simultaneous and equivocal play where the indeterminacy of the grey is the ubiquitous horizon of the universe and black and white no longer demarcate boundaries. In its search for what it means to be human in the universe, in the post-apocalyptic landscape wherein the invisible is made visible, that the human creature meets its test. The universe of the accident is a proving ground with only one rule: engage with it or die. Virilio, P. (2009). Grey Ecology (D. Burk, Trans.). New York: Atropos Press.