Bøker av Joanne Faulkner

Engaging with representations in literature, film, governmental discourse, and news and infotainment media, this book investigates the ways in which Aboriginal children figure in Australia's cultural life, to mediate Australians' ambivalence about the colonial origins of the nation, as well as its possible post-colonial future.

Engaging with representations in literature, film, governmental discourse, and news and infotainment media, this book investigates the ways in which Aboriginal children figure in Australia's cultural life, to mediate Australians' ambivalence about the colonial origins of the nation, as well as its possible post-colonial future.

Presents an introduction to the key concepts and developments in psychoanalysis and its impact on modern thought. Charting pivotal moments in the theorization and reception of psychoanalysis, this book provides an account of the concerns and development of Freud's work, as well as his prominent successors, Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan.

Tracing the complex yet intimate relationship between a present-day national obsession with childhood and a colonial past with which Australia as a nation has not adequately come to terms, Young and Free draws on philosophy, literature, film and testimony. The result is a demonstration of how anxiety about childhood has become a screen for more fundamental and intractable issues that vex Australian social and political life. Joanne Faulkner argues that by interpreting these anxieties in their relation to settler-colonial Australia's unresolved conflict with Aboriginal people, new ways of conceiving of Australian community may be opened. The book engages with philosophical and literary characterizations of childhood, from Locke and Rousseau, to Freud, Bergson, Benjamin Agamben, Lacan, Ranciere and Halbwachs. The author's psychoanalytic approach is supplemented by an engagement with contemporary political philosophy that informs Faulkner's critique of the concepts of the subject, sovereignty and knowledge, resulting in a speculative postcolonial model of the subject.Cover artist credit: Lyndsay Bird MpetyaneArtwork title: Ahakeye (Bush Plum)

The Importance of Being Innocent addresses the current debate in Australia and internationally regarding the sexualisation of children, predation on them by pedophiles and the risks apparently posed to their 'innate innocence' by perceived problems and threats in contemporary society. Joanne Faulkner argues that, contrary to popular opinion, social issues have been sensationally expounded in moral panics about children who are often presented as alternatively obese, binge-drinking and drug-using, self-harming, neglected, abused, medicated and driven to anti-social behavior by TV and computers. This erudite and thought-provoking book instead suggests that modern western society has reacted to problems plaguing the adult world by fetishizing children as innocents, who must be protected from social realities. Taking a philosophical and sociological perspective, it outlines the various historical trends, emotional investments and social tensions that shape contemporary ideas about what childhood represents, and our responsibilities in regard to children.