ABSTRACT This article examines the persistently unresolved challenges of decolonising Australian cultural institutions through a case study of the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery (QVMAG) in Launceston, Tasmania. Despite growing scholarly advocacy for inclusivity, repatriation, and cultural sovereignty, museum decolonisation efforts remain uneven and fraught. Drawing on two years of community and staff perspectives (2020–2022), this study interrogates the socio-cultural tensions and institutional dynamics that complicate progress. It argues that decolonisation is not a linear trajectory, but an iterative process marked by friction, where genuine transformation depends on redistributing decision-making power and embracing inclusive, participatory practices. Bakhtin’s theoretical framework, Dialogic Imagination, offers critical insight into this process, revealing how institutional voices, silences and disruptions can serve as fertile sites for contested meaning-making, where alternative voices inevitably arise, and challenge dominant narratives and momentarily reconfigure power through messy, non-linear acts of cultural reckoning.

The issue of intertextuality is discussed M. Bakhtin’s work, particularly in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics and The Dialogic Imagination. Bakhtin claimed that “the functional text is a hybrid entity, not a single whole; it is a composite amalgamation of a variety of formulae” (76). The theory of intertextuality attained various dimensions and wider interfaces in the works of poststructuralist theorists such as Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva. These scholars viewed texts as networks of other texts stating that a writer’s strength lies in the ability to blend existing writings and emulate previously read and written gestures. Incorporating intertextuality theories into critical research on literary works provides a deeper comprehension of both intentional and hidden intertextual chains and allusions within the texts. This paper, utilizing critical and analytical frameworks, meticulously examines the intertextual references in Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street), exploring their function and significance. The paper argues that the author’s use of intertextuality and allusions from multiple sources in the trilogy broadens the narrative horizons and generates new interpretations. Additionally, the paper points out that the author utilizes intertextuality as a stylistic tool, infusing the texts with references to the Quran, local folklore, and popular culture for aesthetic and thematic purposes. The integration of a diversity of intertextual references and citations from other texts enhances the portrayal of the socio-cultural dynamics underpinning the patriarchal Egyptian society, criticized in the trilogy.

The medieval period in Indian literature was a time when a number of languages developed and so did the literatures in these languages. There was a break from the ancient epic tradition of Sanskrit as several new forms evolved. This break from Sanskritisation can be observed in the literature from the South including Tamil literature. One such piece of literature to break away from the epic tradition was Cilappatikaram or The Tale of an Anklet by Ilanko Atikal. Composed in the fifth century c.e. this long narrative poem consists the use of multiple genres using both prose and poetry to convey the story of Kovalan and Kannaki. The text explores the journey of Kannaki who is the text’s protagonist from the time she is married to Kovalan at the age of twelve to the point when she is apotheosised as Goddess Pattini in the end. The narrative poem not only subverts the great epic tradition of India by portraying a female protagonist but also contains a number of elements that place it closer to a novel. The paper uses the theories of novelisation propounded by Mikhail Bakhtin in his book The Dialogic Imagination and other modern theorists to bring out the novelistic elements in the text.

This paper aims to deepen the understanding of laylayan theology by examining its foundations in sacred scriptures and teachings of the Catholic Church. Among the myriad approaches in Asian theologizing, laylayan theology appropriates a Filipino cultural concept to articulate the lived religion of those on the peripheries. Through reflection on the scriptures, church teachings, and theological concepts concerning the marginalized, laylayan theology seeks to foster a dialogical imagination among the community of missionary disciples. It emphasizes the importance of attentively listening to and amplifying marginalized voices. In the spirit of synodality, all Christians, by their vocation, competence, and experiences, are on “mission on this earth” and called to bear witness to the Kingdom of God.

Mandla Langa’s debut novel, Tenderness of Blood, received no critical review compared with his later works of fiction. To close this gap, I will provide critical analysis focussing on Langa’s use of narrative devices that function to generate meaning focussed on specific issues, themes, and topics vilifying apartheid perpetrators, which has been interpreted as Langa’s chosen means of overthrowing apartheid. These devices will be drawn from Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse and Narrative Discourse Revisited along with Mikhail Bakhtin’s narrative theories of the Dialogic Imagination. This entails narrational strategies of the extradiegetic and intradiegetic, respectively, deployed by the anonymous third-person narrator and Mkhonto, the protagonist. These strategies render the text as a multi-voiced polyphonic narrative that aims to accentuate the plight of Mkhonto in his opposition to South Africa’s apartheid injustices from two different and complementary narrative perspectives. In addition to the narrational strategies, there is an employment of devices such as times of narration in simultaneous, subsequent, and interpolated narration, which enable the situating of the story in time of its ‘presentness’ and moments of the action.Contribution: This article highlights the plight of, and challenges experienced by the characters, and is helpful in generating sympathy for the events, especially for Mkhonto and his people in the struggle to overthrow apartheid.

This article argues that Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies combats monologic discourse by channeling what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the dialogic imagination. The first instalment in the Ibis trilogy, which explores the events leading up to and following the first opium war, the novel follows the overlapping trajectories of six characters who undergo significant transformations as they cross the Indian Ocean aboard the eponymous ship. While much scholarship on the novel has discussed how barriers of caste, race, gender, and class crumble aboard the Ibis, this essay contributes to a growing corpus that attends to the novel’s imbrication between language and politics. This essay contends that it is through its linguistic inventiveness, specifically its multilingual wordplay, that the novel undermines the grand monologic narratives of history. Insisting on the narrative’s inventiveness allows this essay to discuss how it provides access to the past otherwise than the mold of academic history.

In this article, I investigate Mandla Langa’s short story “The Dead Men Who Lost Their Bones” by applying Gérard Genette’s narrative discourse along with Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogic imagination to the text. By highlighting the way in which Langa employs narrational strategies to generate meaning in the story, I aim to correct the critical neglect of this aspect of his work. It is established that two narrational modes of the intradiegetic-homodiegetic and the intradiegetic-metadiegetic are employed by two central characters in the narrative. The first character narrator is Clementine, the daughter of the second narrator, Simeon Ngozi. This produces a heterodiegetic narrative, that is, a multiple narrative strategy. This multi-voiced polyphonic narrative accentuates the plight of the main characters and their struggles under oppressive and exploitative conditions in apartheid South Africa. It also generates sympathy for these events, as well as for Clementine and her father.

The article presents the results of the XVII International Bakhtin Conference held in Saransk (Russia) on July 5-10, 2021. The forum brought together over 100 participants from 22 countries and was held online. The 18 plenary lectures and more than 100 panels and online-discussions focused on the most important questions of the reception of Bakhtin’s heritage, and the influence of the thinker’s ideas on contemporary humanities. Presentations included works in the following areas: biography of Bakhtin, determining the place of his ideas in modern philology, philosophy and other social sciences, the theory and practice of education, and interdisciplinary research. This article analyses and contextualises the work of the conference against the background of the Bakhtin Forums of the 1980s and 2010s, which became an important part of the global Bakhtin Studies, as well as of the recent development of Bakhtin’s heritage in Russia and worldwide. The authors highlight the most important results of the last conference as supplementing and reconstructing Bakhtin’s biography, clarifying the details of the process of dialogical interaction of Bakhtin’s work with his contemporary ideas and the preceding traditions, defining the boundaries of Bakhtin’s influence on the humanities and the natural science, as well as the possibilities of integration of these disciplines under the “sign of Bakhtin”.

Collaborative writing is well established in the humanities, but with little focus on how the writing relationship comes into being, including the power and relational dynamics at play. This is especially pertinent both when Black and “white” (sic) authors collaborate in writing about race, and in the process of writing collaborative autoethnographies. In this article the authors narrate, or rather “enact”, the movements of their coming together in order to write about race in the context of early learning and childcare. Linking their collaboration to the Deleuzian theory of becoming and Bakhtin’s dialogic imagination, they present a manifesto for anti-racist inquiry which decentres colonial tropes of individuation in favour of ‘staying with the trouble’ of identity and race. Throughout, they connect the inception of their research relationship to the politics of childhood and early years education in Scotland today.

ABSTRACT This paper reviews the ongoing engagement of neoliberal ideology in Indonesian higher education institutions and in commodifying the global spread of English. With the growing number of faith-based higher education institutions in Indonesia, the neoliberal and English ideologies are contested and promulgated, creating ambivalent spaces. This complex entanglement of ideologies begs us to examine how they are appropriated by English teachers who are at the front line in translating the ideologies. In this respect, I argue that Bakhtin’s construct of ideological becoming (Bakhtin, 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Transalted by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press) has explanatory power that may help understand teachers’ ideological formation.

Uściński, Przemyslaw. <i>Parody, Scriblerian Wit and the Rise of the Novel: Parodic Textuality from Pope to Sterne</i>.

M. M. Bakhtin in the third essay of The Dialogic Imagination coined the term “chronotope” to denote the interaction and integration of time and space in novelistic narratives. Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope emphasizes that time and space coordinate with each other rather than insist on their individualities in narratives. The major chronotope of the novel usually determines its generic characteristics. The current study attempts to utilize Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope to anatomize the time-space structure of major Gothic novels in the eighteenth century, namely, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Ann Radcliffe’s Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), for the purpose of detecting and summarizing the common features of the Gothic genre. Manifold approaches and theories had been applied in this area, but it is the first time that Bakhtin’s chronotope was employed in the stylistic study of eighteenth-century Gothic novels written by Walpole and Radcliffe.

Child-led research has arisen in response to changed perspectives on children’s rights and capabilities. However, questions remain about the implications of children participating in ways and for purposes designed by adults. This paper examines a child-led research project through the heuristic of dialogism to identify the perspectives and motivations of adults and children – the many ‘voices’ of the situation. Ontological conceptualisations of childhood, adult critical self-reflection, accommodation of children’s priorities and openness towards unexpected or challenging outcomes are discussed.

ABSTRACT All of a sudden, the world has changed. The Coronavirus has been infecting humans and causing serious respiratory and other diseases, death, and fear of the unknown. Spatiotemporal coordinates have been altered at an unprecedented speed through fast digital communication by sharing images and stories, many of which recount death and traumatic experiences. Since January 2020, COVID-19 related photographs and narratives have been populating our social media, computer and TV screens, and everyday conversations. How have our lives, ways of speaking, communicating, and interacting changed through the fast, spatiotemporal movement of images and stories related to this invisible, yet devastating, enemy? This article examines COVID-19 related images, videos, and narratives and their effects on individuals living in Italy and in the United States. Drawing on the Bakhtinian notion of chronotope [Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press], I show how embodied understandings of dread and despair can travel a long way across time and space in pandemic times.

REVIEWS 339 What Deification in Russian Religious Thought ultimately points to, therefore, is not just the deification spectrum and narrative of late imperial Russia. It also gestures toward a decentred, open-ended contest over what is and what is not Russian Orthodox, an interpretative contest which captures historical actors, theologians, and scholars of Russian Orthodoxy, including the book’s author and this reviewer, in a hermeneutic circle to which we all belong and from which we cannot escape. Department of Religious Studies Patrick Lally Michelson Indiana University Spektor, Alexander. Reader as Accomplice: Narrative Ethics in Dostoevsky and Nabokov. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2020. xii + 243 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $120.00: $39.95. Nabokov’s dislike of Dostoevskii is well-known. And yet, Nabokov’s and Dostoevskii’s ethics and metaphysics have much in common. In Reader as Accomplice: Narrative Ethics in Dostoevsky and Nabokov, Alexander Spektor makes a persuasive case that the deepest link that connects Nabokov to Dostoevskii is a shared commitment to personal freedom and moral responsibility, and that this first principle of their philosophy becomes visible when viewed through the lens of narrative ethics. But how to represent personal freedom and nurture moral responsibility in a domain where characters have no freedom (Nabokov called them ‘galley slaves’) and readers have so much of it that authors cannot count on them to respond predictably to moral guidance? If we begin at the point where Spektor’s book ends, we might conclude that freedom is illusory and moral responsibility a mirage. Inspired by the ‘dark’ materialsinBakhtin’swartimenotebooks,Spektorseesnarrativerepresentation as an instrument of power that always tilts towards violence. Though the rest of Spektor’s book is significantly less dispiriting, the compact between narrative and violence remains a theoretical given. The main trajectory of Spektor’s book shows how Dostoevskii’s and Nabokov’s aesthetics (understood as the formal inventiveness of their fictions) enacts an ethics (understood as the distribution of power). Readers’ moral sense is said to become activated when they become aware of the violence that narrative enacts upon the self and others. According to Spektor, Dostoevskii’s and Nabokov’s formal innovations are designed to overcome the tyranny and violence intrinsic to linguistic representation. Spektor’s main claim is that Bakhtin’s influential work on Dostoevskii that preceded his ‘dark’ writings from the 1940s provides us with SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 340 the conceptual scaffolding for staging a non-coercive yet ethically charged encounter among the various stakeholders of fiction, which include characters, narrators, authors and — most significantly since Bakhtin did not concern himself with them — readers. The figure of the reader as ‘accomplice’ in the narrative allocation of power is the most original and important element of the book. To bring it off, Spektor offers a bracing reassessment of Bakhtin’s understanding of polyphony. Bakhtin used the term to describe what he saw as Dostoevskii’s resistance of the absolute power vested in the authorial voice. In Spektor’s reformulation of this Bakhtinian concept, Dostoevskii’s ‘dialogic imagination’ asserts itself most powerfully not in the author’s tolerance for his characters’ competing ideological positions, but in the struggle between speech and silence that he dramatizes in his fictions. Unlike discourse, which is always on the lookout to appropriate more power, silence becomes emblematic of the will’s freedom to perform moral actions. For Spektor, such self-sacrificing and compassionate acts are an integral part of Dostoevskii’s Christian faith and serve as a moral compass for his characters and readers in his post-Siberian work. By becoming aware of the coercive nature of discourse, Dostoevskii’s readers are incited to close off dialogue with the text and become moral actors in ‘real’ life (p. 42). As Spektor frequently reminds us, the analytical apparatus he establishes in his readings of ‘The Meek One’, The Idiot, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Bend Sinister can be fruitfully applied to other works by Dostoevskii and Nabokov. Still, it is surprising that Spektor does not apply it himself to the two texts that make complicity a central moral problematic and dramatize the perils of ‘bad’ reading with such compelling force...

ABSTRACT Intercultural pedagogies are increasingly seen as affording opportunities for students to share perspectives, understandings and knowledge. In the shift towards such pedagogies, ways that language is conceptualised and the interrelationship between language, culture and knowing are often underexplored. This paper reports on an auto-ethnographic study that explores our experience as teachers of extending intercultural pedagogies beyond the context of language learning in higher education. Drawing on Bakhtin’s (1981) The dialogic imagination: Four essays notion of dialogism and Derrida’s (1997) Of grammatology notion of translation, we describe and explain how our reflexive practice enables us to deepen our focus both on language, culture, and knowing as integral in creating and interpreting meaning, and the self.

ABSTRACT This paper analyses adolescent Ukrainian-Russian bilinguals’ stances towards polylanguaging as evidenced in their talk about and use of suržyk, a stigmatised polylingual practice that combines features from Ukrainian and Russian. Drawing from group interviews with 39 Ukrainian young people (aged 14–15), it uses Bakhtin’s (The dialogic imagination: Four essays (C. Emerson and M. Holquist, Trans). University of Texas Press; 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics (C. Emerson, Ed. and Trans). University of Minnesota Press) concept of voice and Agha’s (Voice, footing, and enregisterment, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15(1), 8–59) work on registers as social voices to explore the alignments that these young people take up vis-a-vis the ideologically-mediated voices that suržyk has traditionally indexed. Through a micro-level discourse analysis of both metadiscourses in which ideologies of linguistic boundary maintenance were explicitly articulated and intervieees’ crossing of these boundaries during the interviews, the analysis shows how these young people appropriated, resisted, or creatively exploited prevailing purist ideologies and considers implications for a possible re-evauation of suržyk as a normative practice.

The field of preK–12 computing education has, in recent years, often focused on teaching computational thinking, which “involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior, by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science” (Wing, 2006, p. 33). In short, there are specific habits of mind that are acquired when learning to program computers, and these habits of mind can benefit nonprogrammers as well (Denning, 2017). Some scholars have also argued that computational thinking as a framework is insufficient for understanding what learning to program entails and that, instead, we should be focused on teaching and studying computational making (Rode et al., 2015), computational participation (Kafai & Burke, 2013), or computational action (Tissenbaum, Sheldon, & Abelson, 2019). While some might consider this to be a purely academic argument, each phrase attends to different values, which in turn have profound implications for curriculum developers, teachers, and students. For example, this debate of what to teach in computing education has led to discussion of how to teach computing, and approaches to teaching computing can take a fairly technocentric view, with a focus on the technology itself without consideration of contextual elements within the learning environment (Brennan, 2015). This can look like focusing on building new programming environments as a way to improve learners’ experiences rather than taking a closer look at teachers’ professional learning needs and working conditions or the design of the accompanying curriculum for these programming environments.In Voicing Code in STEM: A Dialogical Imagination, Pratim Sengupta, Amanda Dickes, and Amy Voss Farris advocate for the need to push past technocentrism to reframe coding. They take a critical phenomenological turn to consider dialogic lenses and argue that we should “shift from viewing coding as production of computational artifacts to voicing computational utterances” (p. 24). In other words, instead of focusing on the learner, artifacts the learner has made, or the technology the learner used to create the artifact, the authors ask us to explore the conversational exchanges learners make with one another as well as with their teacher.In the first chapter, the authors draw from Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on language and dialogue (primarily from The Dialogic Imagination) to note that they “position computational utterances as elemental pieces of experience that are the sites at which the constancy, historicity, and systematicity enter into contact and struggle with unique, situated performance” (p. 26). This push toward a focus on utterances creates opportunities for inclusivity and computational heterogeneity, which can value multiple ways of learning, speaking about, and creating artifacts with code. Chapter 2 expands on their theoretical framework of Bakhtinian dialogical imagination in the context of code, while the following five chapters offer considerations of different aspects of their theory through examples drawn from different studies conducted by the authors in K–12 science, technology, engineering, and math contexts.Specifically, the authors focus on data collected from classrooms where students and teachers are interacting with LOGO-derived programming languages designed as introductory programming languages for children. In chapter 3, for example, they explore the experiences of two fifth-grade students learning to program a turtle to move on the screen through in-depth analysis of twenty-three minutes of collaboration with each other, examining the students’ perspectival shifts to highlight how a focus on students’ conversation, instead of the code they have worked on or the devices they have engaged with, can illuminate their learning processes. The final chapter offers a “radical reflection” (p. 191) on computational heterogeneity, ending with three lessons for avoiding technocentrism.Across Voicing Code in STEM, the relationship between the empirical work and the theoretical contribution is clear and compelling, and the authors offer a window into moments of student learning by sharing images, transcript snippets, and samples of student code. The book is well written, and the empirics are legible even for a generalist reader. Each of the main chapters offers helpful ways of thinking about code as voice, and even in these brief moments students’ voices are clearly heard. The focus on computational utterances foregrounds dialogue between students and their teachers, centering the people who are most deeply impacted by this work. The deep and thoughtful attention to the rich micro-interactions of learners creates opportunities for scholars to consider the pedagogical affordances of the learning environment, such as how the relationships among students and between students and teachers can inform and support their learning. I found myself reminded of the power of talking to students and learning more about their experiences. In chapter 7 we hear about the computational models that Shenice, a fifth grader, builds. While the models themselves appear to be fairly straightforward (a cross, drawn and rotated multiple times), it is through the rich description of Shenice’s learning experience that we learn about her close relationship to her local church, the authors noting that this phenomenological account “certainly can include analysis of her computational work, but should never be subsumed by it” (p. 179). I hope that these rich examples of attending to what students say as they work can inspire other researchers, educators, and learning designers to attend not only to learners’ artifacts but also to their experiences, particularly within their sociocultural contexts.But while the empirics are clear, the concluding “radical reflection” could have gone further in considering not only how computer code can be considered voice in STEM contexts but what it might mean for other disciplines. In the fields of cultural production and youth development, scholars have long highlighted youth voice in digital media production (Kafai & Peppler, 2011). How might we bridge the gap between understandings of cultural production in the arts and humanities with STEM?In addition, this argument is explicit in privileging more ephemeral forms of communication, such as utterances, over “device-level engagement.” While technocentric approaches often focus too much on the technology, or the devices, we might consider differences between paying attention to devices as opposed to the artifacts that learners are able to craft with the devices and the programming languages that they learn to use. I also wonder what the implications are for educators around what they should attend to in the classroom. And even as we think about the dialogical imagination, how do power and privilege impact whose voices are heard more?Voicing Code in STEM offers radical provocations that shifted my own thinking about what is important and meaningful as learners deepen their understandings of STEM concepts and practices, and I am excited to see how this is taken up by other researchers and educators, as well as how we can continue to center learners and what they produce in future work.

This article discusses Baublys – a nineteenth-century garden pavilion in Lithuania, Samogitia, established in the trunk of an oak tree by Lithuanian boyar and writer Dionizas Poška. Because of its ambiguity, Baublys has attracted considerable scholarly attention and, for the same reason, remains forgotten, generating a relatively small number of texts. Although interpretations vary, the place of Baublys in Lithuanian culture is still unclear. What is it? Is it a regional curiosity or a proto-museum? This article looks at Baublys through its function and aims at demonstrating that Baublys is not only a proto-museum, but also a prototype of today’s interactive museum, containing the analogues of modern practices of museology: interactivity, communicational features and performativity. My methodology is constructed invoking the conceptual metaphor of the mask and referring to the theories of Hans Belting and Mikhail Bakhtin. According to the Bakhtinian dialogic imagination and literary concepts of the epic and the novel, the analogy of the mask and the monument is used. The research question is what Baublys does as a mask during Poška’s lifetime and what it does as a monument today. How did its semantics and agency change after “becoming” a monument? The article shows that for Poška Baublys is a theatre of historical and personal memory, activated by structure, a set of finds, analogues (Sibile Temple, other garden pavilions) and performance. An empty Baublys is a monument – a reference to the past, which lacks the collection of the museum – Poška’s finds. Baublys is not only a museum, but might be perceived as a monument to museums, even a monument to the idea of a museum.

This essay explores the intertextual connections between Anne of Green Gables and several contemporary Canadian children’s novels that feature heroines who resemble the iconic Anne. Drawing on the theoretical work of Mikhail Bakhtin, it argues that Anne’s power as an intertextual figure lies in her "dialogic imagination" and the atypical artistry through which she expresses it.