Rate My Professor Joanne Faulkner

Dr. Joanne Faulkner is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications in the School of Communication, Society and Culture within the Faculty of Arts at Macquarie University. She earned her PhD in Philosophy from La Trobe University in 2006, with a thesis titled 'Interpreting (and being interpellated) by Nietzsche,' for which she received the Outstanding Thesis Award. Prior to this, she completed a Master of Arts (research) in Philosophy from the Australian National University in 1999, focused on 'Voices from the Depths: Irigaray Encountering Nietzsche.' Faulkner's research centers on representations of childhood in Australian culture as mechanisms to address anxieties surrounding national identity and history. Her specializations include critical child studies, cultural studies, critical race theory, feminist theory and philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, media representations, settler colonial studies, and Nietzsche studies. She is a centre member of the Ethics and Agency Research Centre and the Global Indigenous Futures Research Centre, and has contributed to initiatives such as the Children and Young People’s Rights, Participation and Protection research stream and the Macquarie University Centre for Agency Values and Ethics.

Faulkner has published several key books that have shaped discourse in her fields, including Representing Aboriginal Childhood: The Politics of Memory and Forgetting in Australia (Routledge, 2023), Young and Free: [post]colonial ontologies of childhood, memory, and history in Australia (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016), and The Importance of Being Innocent: Why we worry about children (Cambridge University Press, 2011). She co-edited Critical Childhood Studies and the Practice of Interdisciplinarity: Disciplining the Child (Lexington Books, 2015) with Associate Professor Magdalena Zolkos. Notable articles include 'Innocents and oracles: The child as a figure of knowledge and critique in the middle-class philosophical imagination' (Critical Horizons, 2011), 'The vulnerability of "virtual" subjects: childhood, memory, and the crisis in the cultural value of innocence' (Sub-Stance, 2013), and 'The innocence of victimhood versus the "innocence of Becoming": Nietzsche, 9/11, and the "Falling Man"' (Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 2008). She held an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship from 2018 to 2021 for her project on the significances of 'childhood' in postcolonial Australia. Her scholarship has garnered over 700 citations, influencing critical discussions on settler colonialism, childhood, and cultural memory.