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This paper aims to investigate how embedding accounting techniques of cost and budgeting within the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) potentially perpetuates colonial practices for Australian First Nations people living in remote areas. Further, the paper aims to explore how accounting might help to integrate the unique modes of accountability First Nations people have over disability care into the NDIS funding system. Ultimately, the aim is to discern whether accounting practices can be mobilised as a means to decolonising the NDIS framework.

This study uses a qualitative methodology to analyse public hearings from the Australian Disability Royal Commission. Drawing on Bhabha's (1994) concept of the “third space”, this study investigates how accounting techniques can be used to potentially decolonise the NDIS. This study also borrows Bhabha's (1994) concept of the third space to explore the potential for decolonising the NDIS through accounting techniques.

Findings show that the accounting techniques pertaining to funding and costs embedded within the NDIS contribute to displacing and disconnecting First Nations people from their cultural practices and ways of life. Further, the analysis reveals that the NDIS funding system could help to decolonise the NDIS space if it were modified to incorporate First Nations' perspectives on accountability for disability care.

The case of the NDIS exposes glimpses of colonisation in contemporary Australia, where Western institutional and economic systems dominate over the structure and authority of the practice. In this paper, this study demonstrates that the accounting system used by the NDIS plays a role in marginalising First Nations people. However, accounting, as a technology of negotiation, could also be mobilised to enhance accountability for disability care outcomes and pave the way for decolonising public policies.

This study aims to broaches several endemic challenges for academics who support doctoral writing: writers are emotionally protective of their own writing; writing a thesis in English as a second language is a challenging, complex task; and advising across cultures is delicate. Giving constructive feedback kindly, but with the rigour needed to raise writing quality can seem daunting. Addressing those issues, the authors offer a novel way of working with writing feedback across cultures.

The case study research team of two candidates and one supervisor stumbled onto an effective way of working across cultural and institutional difference. What began as advisory feedback on doctoral writing became an effective collaborative analysis of prose meaning-making. The authors reflected separately and collectively on how this happened, analysed reflections and this narrative inquiry approach led to theories of use to writing feedback practice.

The authors cross between theory and praxis, showing that advisors and supervisors can create Bhabha’s post-colonial third space (a promising social space that sits between cultures, beyond hierarchies, where new ways of thinking can be collaboratively generated) as a working environment for international doctoral writing feedback. Within this zone, Brechtian alienation, a theory from theatre practice, is applied to prompt emotional detachment that enables focus on writing clearly in academic English.

Arguably the writing feedback session the authors described remains bound by the generic expectations of a western education system. The study is exegetical, humanities reading of practice, rather than a social science gathering of empirical data. Yet the humanities approach suits the point that a change of language, attitude and theory can give positive leverage with doctoral writing feedback.

The authors provide a novel practical method of supporting international doctoral candidates’ writing with feedback across cultures. It entails attracting the writers’ interest in theory and persuading them, via theory, to look objectively and freshly at their own writing. Also backed by theory, a theoretical cross-cultural space allows for discussion about differences and similarities. Detachment from proprietorial emotions and cross-cultural openness enables productive work amongst the mechanics of clear academic English text.

Underpinned by sociocultural and metacognitive approaches to learning, reflection from student and supervisor perspectives (the data), and oriented by theory, the authors propose another strategy for supporting doctoral writing across cultures. The authors demonstrate a third space approach for writing feedback across cultures, showing how to operationalise theory.

The early childhood education classroom space is intrinsic to developing localized youth culture. Through a four-month-long qualitative research project in a space that focused on meeting the most rudimentary child needs due to staffing and fund restrictions, young children’s creativity through the arts was stunted. In a classroom setting focused on structure and strict routine at the forefront, children’s creative expression was observed through independent action and creative twists on order, instead of through activities deliberately designed to nurture creativity and expression. Since the children at the site did not seem to regularly participate in any kind of art making, or unstructured creative expression, my focus instead became the fundamentals of creativity and how young children in the classroom demonstrated choice making and agency. The objective of this study was how to understand the space from a child-centered approach to better project how to include art making, creative education, and creative expression within early childhood education sites that do not currently employ it in their curriculum. This chapter aims to situate how young children created a culture of creative expression within the boundaries of a structured early education classroom when top-down teacher interaction was at a minimum, and open-ended, non-directive materials were provided.

The purpose of this paper is to explore perceptions and lived experiences of Sierra Leonean chartered and aspiring accountants, vis-à-vis their professional identity with a particular focus on two elements of postcolonial theory, hybridity and diaspora.

A qualitative methodological framework was employed. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 18 participants about their perceptions of their professional identity and their professional experiences both within and outside Sierra Leone.

The current professionalisation process is conceptualised as a postcolonial third space where hybrid professional accountants are constructed. Professional hybridity blurs the local/global praxis being positioned as both local and global accountants. Participants experience difficulty “fitting into” the local accountancy context as a consequence of their hybridisation. As such, a diaspora effect is induced which often culminates in emigration to advanced countries. The paper concludes that although the current model engenders emancipatory social movements for individuals through hybridity and diaspora, it is nonetheless counterproductive for Sierra Leone’s economic development and the local profession in particular.

This study has significant implications for understanding how the intervention of global professional bodies in developing countries shapes the professionalisation process as well as perceptions and lived experiences of chartered and aspiring accountants in these countries.

While extant literature implicates the legacies of colonialism/imperialism on the institutional development of accountancy (represented by recognised professional bodies), this paper employs the critical lens of postcolonial theory to conceptualise the lived experiences of individuals who are directly impacted by such institutional arrangements.

The purpose of this paper is to provide comparative perspectives on how educators teach issues that affect two countries with a history of governmental tensions. The investigation examines how teachers in Cuban classrooms engage in discourses on the recent developments in Cuban and US relations, including the teaching of historical and territorial issues. This research considers border pedagogy, critical border dialogism and critical border praxis as approaches for those who educate on the effects of US international policies. Ultimately, pragmatic hope offers the possibilities for an emergent third space for Cuban and US relations, including educational exchanges.

The research took place in Cuba during an educational exchange to Cuban secondary and university educational sites. Cuban educators of pedagogy and social education engaged in dialogue and shared information on how they address US international policies during their classroom discussions. The researcher employed methodologies that followed Stake’s (2000) model for a substantive case study. Impressions, data, records and salient elements at the observed site were recorded. Transcriptions were documented for face-to-face interviews and hour-long focus group sessions. Participants also logged responses to written survey questions. The study focused on how Cuban educators taught, discussed and addressed the US international policies in classrooms.

Heteroglossia, meliorism, critical cosmopolitanism, nepantla, dialogic feminism and pragmatic hope were components of the data analysis. Heteroglossia was an essential consideration throughout the study as multiple interpretations of Cuban and US interconnectedness emerged. Meliorism factored into Cuban educators’ commitments to their professions. Critical cosmopolitanism developed as educators put forth different conceptualizations of human rights and democracy. Nepantla emerged as a key aspect as indigenous and self-determined viewpoints emerged. Dialogic feminism was preeminent as patriarchy continues to exist, despite a new awareness of gender roles and gender violence. Pragmatic hope offers possibilities for a transnational community of inquiry and collaboration.

The most obvious limitation to this study is, as a case study, the limited scope of perception.

If future relations between Cuban and the US are deemed uncertain, critical border praxis has an essential role in addressing new sets of uncertainties. This study recommends that educational communities engage in discourses addressing ongoing issues facing the dynamic, fluid border environs. Critical border praxis provides conditions in which we, as educators and members of diverse communities of learners, become cross-borders and broaden the possibilities to achieve what had been considered the unattainable. Resources need to be prioritized and redirected toward educational efforts on national, state and local levels so critical border praxis becomes a reality.

Through transnational and transborder engagements, such as educational exchanges, both US and Cuban educators are provided opportunities to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of their own educational systems. The role of education, formal and informal, then serves to transform perceptions one-by-one, school-by-school, community-by-community and to influence policy makers to reconstruct education country-by-country as part of pragmatic hope for an enduring Pax Universalis. Pax Universalis serves as a third space where transborder students and educators alike are positioned as co-creators of knowledge and agents of change.

This study proposes a new emergent third space resulting from critical border dialogism that utilizes border pedagogy and critical pedagogies of place to seek new zones of mutual respect and cooperation among educators. Common educational understandings are the key starting point for a critical border praxis that facilitates ongoing dialogue between the two countries and offers pragmatic hope for the futures of both nations and opportunities to ameliorate relationships. An emergent third space is possible through sustained critical border praxis, a praxis that seeks to address points of contention and the bridges that need crossing between the two neighboring countries.

In this chapter, we argue that through relational research experiences with colleagues and participants, researchers are in a shared process of curriculum making and identity-making. Through reflections on a key shared experience, we demonstrate that in the liminal space of our work together, we have begun to shape our community identity-making to tell a story of ourselves as researchers within that community. In our work together, we have come to understand the ways that research contexts shape the ways we engage in research and the identities we compose as researchers. We suggest that as researchers, we meet in borderlands to engage in relational inquiry with participants and our colleagues. Similarly to Anzaldua, we understand the borderlands as liminal spaces between our respective worlds of research where we come together to compose new stories about ourselves as researchers and the research in which we engage. We attend to the places of tension as they emerge as opportunities to understand more deeply ourselves as researchers and as co-participants in a relational research experience. In doing so, we attend also to our shared responsibilities to each other in an ongoing research relationship. In the borderlands, we meet to tell a new story about who we are and who we are becoming in all our complexity. In this examination of the research community, we have grown into together, we define parameters and processes that resonate with our individual identities as researchers as well as our communal identities within a supportive research community.

The subject of leadership in Africa is an increasingly pertinent one that has been approached from various stand-points. Mainstream theoretical perspectives have shaped contemporary learning interventions on the continent, but are increasingly challenged by African renaissance views that critique this approach as a form of western ideological hegemony and an extension of the colonial project. However, alongside this debate, the issue of how to effectively address the issue of leadership “under-development” in African organisations remains salient. Moving beyond renaissance criticisms of western hegemonic thought formations, the purpose of this paper is to broaden the discourse by exploring several relevant options for a more pragmatic approach to leadership capacity building in contemporary African organisations.

This is a conceptual paper that takes a critical look at the existing debate on leadership development in Africa. In this, it examines two separate existing knowledge frameworks and considers the implications of each of these for praxis in context. The analysis presented here focuses on means of navigating between these thought formations in a much more circumspect and critical manner that leaders can learn from.

This paper highlights the important relationship between context, mainstream theory and indigenous knowledge. Its critical analyses suggest that engaging carefully with indigeneity in an experimental hybrid space may enable creative adaptation and appropriation through contextualisation, leading to more reflexive organisational practice. It subsequently proposes a conceptual model for constructive engagement with leadership development in practice.

The paper makes an important conceptual contribution to the debate by moving a step beyond the important theoretical criticisms and counter-criticisms that have so far shaped the discourse and more crucially, focusing on the salient practical question of “where we go from here” with respect to leadership capacity building in African organisations.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how accountability practices are affected and potentially transformed when mediated by translation. Adopting a postcolonial lens, the authors consider the ways in which translation functions and how intermediaries act as cultural translators in the context of microfinance.

The authors take a qualitative approach to a case study of a microfinance organization based in South Africa. Fieldwork allowed for the collection of data by means of direct observations, interviews, documents and a fieldwork diary.

The study demonstrates the presence of spaces of hybridity that co-exist within the same organizational context (Bhabha, 1994). Two spaces of hybridity are highlighted, in which translation processes were possible because of the proximity between borrowers and fieldworkers. The first space of hybridity was found locally and here translation shaped an accountability that aimed at leveraging local cultures and favoring cultural framing. The second space of hybridity was characterized by the interaction between oral and written cultures and the translation of responsibilities and expectations was predominantly unidirectional, prioritizing accountability practices consistent with organizational requirements.

This research offers in-depth insights into the links between intermediation, translation and accountability practices. It differs from prior research in considering intermediaries as active translators of accountability practices who act in-between cultures. The authors contend that the translation process reinscribes culture allowing dominant accountability practices to prevail and local cultural traditions to merely contextualize accountability practices.

This chapter provides a critical analysis of the literature on individuals in cultural transitions in higher education, namely, international students in culturally unfamiliar contexts; teachers of international students and culturally more diverse classrooms; and local students in increasingly culturally diverse classes. All these individuals are actors exposed to new and shifting cultural experiences expected to impact their motivation and engagement. Two broad perspectives emerging from the literature were used to organize the chapter: a perspective of adaptation representing research grounded in unilateral, bilateral or reciprocal conceptualizations, and a perspective of transformation, capturing experiential learning research leading to personal and academic development. The analysis highlights how motivation is a critical, yet under-examined construct. This leads to numerous suggestions for future research including: addressing the neglected role of agency in research on international students' sociocultural adaptation and the lack of research on successful processes of adaptation; examining the confounding issue of socialization into new cultural-educational environments and level of proficiency in the medium of instruction, which impacts on engagement; and scrutinizing the posited link between deep-level motivated engagement in cultural transitions and the emergence of transformative experiences. A case is made for research on individuals' engagement and motivation in cultural transitions to be conceptually and methodologically stronger and broader, moving from studies of single groups of individuals in need of adaptation, to investigations of the co-regulated, reciprocal adaptations of actors and agents operating in complex sociocultural contexts where power dynamics related to knowledge and language affect participation and engagement with cultural 'others'.