The position of academic language and learning (ALL) staff varies widely throughout the higher education sector, with some working within academic areas and others working in the professional space. As a result of this variation, the role of ALL staff is often confused and misunderstood within universities, which leads to devaluation of the role's legitimacy. As third space professionals, it is imperative for ALL staff to work with research-led best practice in order to effectively communicate their role to the sector. Professional development can play a key part in this process. However, ALL staff frequently face a dilemma of how to resource professional development in a sector where the fiscal environment is restrictive. This chapter presents a series of case studies on professional development options and strategies for ALL staff at an Australian university. These include

In a scene from Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's 2006 film Babel, one afternoon a deaf-mute Japanese girl, Chieko, gossips in sign language with a school friend via her mobile phone's web cam. The scene's linguistically estranged nature encapsulates how language in itself is a technology, a system which reaches across borders of silence to allow understanding. We are only able to interpret language through shared knowledge of its systems and, in many cases, through the aid of devices which collapse the barriers of proximity in time, space, and in this case, vision. It is indicative of the contemporary paradigm of network society that this scene occurs within a film which explores worldwide repercussions of (mis)communication, and that Babel belongs within a genre which in recent years has frequently thematised systems of interconnection, exploiting digital narrative technologies and in effect practicing Fredric Jameson's concept "cognitive mapping" (Jameson 54). However, while they may appear to value difference and diversity, in many cases these films use cognitive mapping as a tool for totalisation, divulging narratives of smoothed-out differences and equalised circumstances. Within this emergent paradigm of interconnectedness continues the problem of how to relay the postmodern promise of endless complexity, without subordinating difference to a simplified reduction of totality.

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Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown and the multi-director Paris, je t’aime belong (the latter at least in part) to a recently emerged cinematic form described as the network form, which represents changing spaces and plural perspectives in multicultural societies. Reflecting Rosalind Galt’s concept of “anti-anti-Eurocentrism”, they represent discursive and referential spaces of Parisian society. Through a comparative analysis of how they frame space with regard to borders and transnational relationships, it becomes apparent that some of the approaches these films take to representing Europe are problematic. In contrast, others encapsulate key concerns surrounding the constantly changing relationships between Europe and its others. While Code Unknown challenges discourses of identity, home and belonging, Paris, je t'aime tends to reinstate and validate divisive social hierarchies despite its appearances of pluralism.

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