As we look at the essays collected together for this issue, we reflect on the ways in which the term ‘interdisciplinarity’ is often used in the academy, but the practice of true interdisciplinarity can be a difficult one in a context of universities divided into departments and schools, research centres and potentially limiting agendas. Some of humanity's most prolific intellectuals pre-date the modern university systems and in their pursuits and endeavours one glimpses an intellectual and scholarly practice capable of drawing on a variety of systems of thought and knowledge. I am particularly reminded here of the Arabo-Islamic intellectuals of the medieval period, al -Jaheth, al-Kindi and an endless list of others so perfectly capable of integrating scientific methodology with critical analysis, medicine with history, geography with ethnographic enquiry. To these scholars, the practice of scholarship was a means to an end of advancing their knowledge of their environs. From its outset, Nebula sought to offer not only an interdisciplinary approach to academic publication, but a multidisciplinary one. As we look at the essays assembled in this issue, we are proud to see that it encompasses a wealth of disciplines, as well as those works that sit in the liminal spaces between such categories. It is our greatest pleasure to present to you the final issue of 2009 and look forward to 2010.
Rebecca Beirne & Samar Habib Editors Australian Nebula Collective
Michael M. Ogbeidi. “Non-Governmental Organisation and the Promotion of American Education in Nigeria, 1941 – 1953.” 1-18.
Joseph Benjamin Afful. “Advanced Academic Literacy and the Role of Academic Editors in Research Writing.” 19-39.
Shayne Pepper. “Invisible Children and the Cyberactivist Spectator.” 40-55.
Kate Limond. “‘A solid metaphoric extension of his Self’: thing theory and collecting in A. S. Byatt’s fiction.” 56-77.
Oswald Yuan-Chin Chang. “A Question of Identity: The Proto-Giulio Characters in Michael Mirolla’s Formal Logic of Emotion and Their Relationship to Future Giulios.” 78-93. Yasmin Ibrahim. “Holocaust as the Visual Subject: The Problematics of Memory Making through Visual Culture.” 94-113. Adedayo Emmanuel Afe & Ibitayo Oluwasola Adubuola. “The Travails of Kingship Institution in Yorubaland: a Case Study of Isinkan in Akureland.” 114-132. Gerry Coutler. “The Place of Marx in Contemporary Thought: The Case of Jean Baudrillard.” 133-141. Dvir Abramovich. “Images of the Mother Figure in the Amos Oz Canon.” 142-161. Catherine M. Lord. “Angels with Nanotech Wings: Magic, Medicine and Technology in Aronofsky’s The Fountain, Gibson’s The Neuromancer and Slonczewski’s Brain Plague.” 162-174. Larson Powell. “A Modern Outside Modernism: J. C. Powys.” 175-194. Venessa Paech. “A method for the times: a meditation on virtual ethnography faults and fortitudes.” 195-215.