Books by Jane Wilkinson

This book is one of the first of its kind to examine the aspirations of refugee background students and accompanies them as they journey through the on-shore stage of settlement, enrolment and participation in the Australian education system.

This book explores the interplay between global and local influences in theatre festivals in the German-speaking border region around Lake Constance. Whilst opening up a fascinating yet under-researched theatre region to academic study, it also provides much-needed empirical grounding for often vague theories of place, globalisation and culture. Do we really live in a ¿shrinking world¿ dominated by a homogenising global culture industry, or are we experiencing the revival of ¿local particularism¿? To what extent is an apparently place-dependent cultural form such as theatre affected by the processes of cultural globalisation? Through detailed analysis of theatrical case studies from Lake Constance and the application of an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, this book begins to answer such important questions. The empirical focus is on the defining features of the Lake Constance region: the beautiful and often romanticised natural landscape of lake and mountains, and the presence of the nation-state borders which make this the crossroads of the German-speaking world. The author thus examines both open-air summer theatre festivals, such as the internationally renowned Bregenzer Festspiele, and politically focused cross-border theatre festivals, such as the youth festival TRIANGEL.

Arguing that transforming education requires more than professional development of teachers, this study shows how changing education for the better also requires complementary systemic transformations in cultural, resourcing, and political frameworks.