That<i>Bastard</i>of A Learning Region …

Abstract

The word ‘bastard’ has a richly ambiguous resonance in the Australian meaning-making tradition. It is a term that is variously affectionate, neutral, deleterious and corrosive. This is an ambiguity whose clarification relies almost entirely on the communicational context where its utterance is implaced. Right across the globe the idea of the ‘learning region’ has been taking hold. This is an idea that has developed out of the discourse of the new regionalism. As critics of the new regionalism have pointed out, though, almost all of its rhetoric is at the service of free market economics. The learning region is just one small element in a broader redistribution of knowledge and power among global, national, regional, local and rural spaces. ‘That Bastard of a Learning Region …’, then, examines how ‘bastard reasoning’ (an idea arising out of chora’s regionally implaced ‘logic’ from Plato’s Timaeus) works itself in and out of both un- and official forms of learning and teaching, and is particularly pertinent given the transformations facing tertiary education in (rural/regional) Australia.