The Indigenous languages of Australia have been undergoing a renaissance over recent decades. Many languages that had long ceased to be heard in public and consequently deemed 'dead' or 'extinct', have begun to emerge. Geographically and linguistically isolated, revitalisers of Indigenous Australian languages have often struggled to find guidance for their circumstances, unaware of the others walking a similar path. In this context Re-awakening Languages seeks to provide the first comprehensive snapshot of the actions and aspirations of Indigenous people and their supporters for the revitalisation of Australian languages in the 21st century. The contributions to this volume describe the satisfactions and tensions of this ongoing struggle. They also draw attention to the need for effective planning and strong advocacy at the highest political and administrative levels, if language revitalisation in Australia is to be successful and people's efforts are to have longevity.

Over the past two decades, theatre practitioners across the West have turned to documentary modes of performance-making to confront new socio-political realities. The essays in this book place this work in context, exploring historical and contemporary examples of documentary and 'verbatim' theatre, and applying a range of critical perspectives.

Original research articles show the range of activities, issues, and solutions undertaken by contemporary managers of heritage sites around the world.

At a time when inequalities are growing globally, when the pace of socio-economic transitions is rapid, and when traditional ties of community are under threat of dissolving, 'soul' offers a new way of thinking imaginatively about how people might respond both individually and collectively in social change work. In exploring ideas such as soul, soulful, 'soul of the world' and soul-force, Peter Westoby invites readers to disrupt their taken-for-granted assumptions about community practice and to foreground ethics, quality, being and the aesthetic. Drawing on work of people such as James Hillman, Thomas Moore and 'Bifo' Beradi, he insists on the need to bring more depth into practice, eschewing contemporary trends of soulless analysis, measuring, and technique. Written in dialogue with eight practitioner-scholars from around the world, the book suggests a fresh terrain for community work and social change theorising. Illustrated by images of Australian cartoonist-prophet Michael Leunig, the book also promises to unlock new imaginative spaces for dreaming. A soul perspective will resonate with people searching for both a robust socio-political response to the world and an imaginative, poetic and mindful centring of self, 'other' and the planet to their practice.

Social work research is concerned with complex social issues closely connected to communities of people who are marginalized and oppressed. This volume develops critical and creative research methodologies that place questions of social justice at their centre and take innovative approaches to collecting, analysing, interpreting and presenting research data. The first section of the book examines textual data produced from an array of methodologies focused on the spoken and/or written word. These approaches allow those who are often silenced to speak by providing space and time to capture memory and meanings that may not come to light in a time driven structured research method like an interview or a questionnaire. The second section of the book discusses visual methods, including an examination of historical artefacts like, photographs and objects, and participant engagement with art, specifically clay sculpture and drawings. Both sets of methods examine the concept of ’time’, that is, how we understand time, as in our past memories, how we develop relationships and knowledge over time. These creative and critical methods provide new insights into ways of undertaking social research in social work which captures the complexity of social experiences, problems and meanings that are, more often than not, embedded in time and place.

Citizen artists successfully rebuild the social infrastructure in six communities devastated by war, repression and dislocation. Author William Cleveland tells remarkable stories from Northern Ireland, Cambodia, South Africa, United States (Watts, Los Angeles), aboriginal Australia, and Serbia, about artists who resolve conflict, heal unspeakable trauma, give voice to the forgotten and disappeared, and restitch the cultural fabric of their communities. Art can be a powerful agent of personal, institutional and community change. The stories in this book have valuable implications for artists, academics, educators, human service providers, philanthropists, and community leaders throughout the world. The artists documented in the book have generated new technologies for advocacy, organizing, peacemaking, healing trauma and the rebuilding of community. Creativity is our most powerful capacity, and it can mitigate and heal our most destructive tendencies.

After Aboriginal author Alexis Wright’s novel, Carpentaria, won the Miles Franklin Award in 2007, it rapidly achieved the status of a classic. The novel is widely read and studied in Australia, and overseas, and valued for its imaginative power, its epic reach, and its remarkable use of language. Indigenous Transnationalism brings together eight essays by critics from seven different countries, each analysing Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria from a distinct national perspective. Taken together, these diverse voices highlight themes from the novel that resonate across cultures and continents: the primacy of the land; the battles that indigenous peoples fight for their language, culture and sovereignty; a concern with the environment and the effects of pollution. At the same time, by comparing the Aboriginal experience to that of other indigenous peoples, they demonstrate the means by which a transnational approach can highlight resistance to, or subversion of, national prejudices.

This book brings to life initiatives among scholars of the south and north to understand better the intelligences and pluralities of multilingualisms in southern communities and spaces of decoloniality. Chapters follow a longue durée perspective of human co-existence with communal presents, pasts, and futures; attachments to place; and insights into how multilingualisms emerge, circulate, and alter over time. Each chapter, informed by the authors’ experiences living and working among southern communities, illustrates nuances in ideas of south and southern, tracing (dis-/inter-) connected discourses in vastly different geopolitical contexts. Authors reflect on the roots, routes and ecologies of linguistic and epistemic heterogeneity while remembering the sociolinguistic knowledge and practices of those who have gone before. The book re-examines the appropriacy of how theories, policies, and methodologies ‘for multilingual contexts’ are transported across different settings and underscores the ethics of research practice and reversal of centre and periphery perspectives through careful listening and conversation. Highlighting the potential of a southern sociolinguistics to articulate a new humanity and more ethical world in registers of care, hope, and love, this volume contributes to new directions in critical and decolonial studies of multilingualism, and to re-imagining sociolinguistics, cultural studies, and applied linguistics more broadly.