Description:
To a large extent, the romanticist image of the Witch and the accompanying mythology of the ‘Burning Times’ maintains a particular poignancy as a model of the persecution of women due to its utilization as an archetypal model of irrational and vicious persecution in enlightenment discourse.
Description:
To a large extent, the romanticist image of the Witch and the accompanying mythology of the ‘Burning Times’ maintains a particular poignancy as a model of the persecution of women due to its utilization as an archetypal model of irrational and vicious persecution in enlightenment discourse.
Description:
Modern worldviews must accept the conditions of post-metaphysical thought tothe extent that they recognize that they are competing with other interpretations of the world within the same universe of validity claims. This reflective knowledge concerning the competition between equally warring "gods and demons" creates an awareness of their fallibility and shatters the naiveté of dogmatic modes of belief founded on absolute truth claims (Habermas, 2001: 94).
Description:
The discussion within Australia of events of the last five years, such as 9/11, the Bali Bombing, the Tampa and the Children Overboard affair, Cronulla Riots, as well as the numbers of refugees approaching Australian shores, has typically fallen into a binarized form with public discourses coalescing around calls for either 'protectivism' or 'humanitarianism' (Mummary & Road, 2003). This discursive framework has in turn instantiated an ongoing debate concerning the issue of what it means to be Australian, and who is or should be included or excluded from this national identity, questions which have been particularly contentious in recent years. This project, however, aims to unpack and analyse just one manifestatation of this debate, that carried out in letters to the editor published between 22 January and 28 February 2002 in both The Australian (Australia's national daily broadsheet) and The West Australian (Western Australia's daily broadsheet). The period chosen for this analysis is important for several reasons.
Description:
The discussion within Australia of events of the last five years, such as 9/11, the Bali Bombing, the Tampa and the Children Overboard affair, Cronulla Riots, as well as the numbers of refugees approaching Australian shores, has typically fallen into a binarized form with public discourses coalescing around calls for either 'protectivism' or 'humanitarianism' (Mummary & Road, 2003). This discursive framework has in turn instantiated an ongoing debate concerning the issue of what it means to be Australian, and who is or should be included or excluded from this national identity, questions which have been particularly contentious in recent years. This project, however, aims to unpack and analyse just one manifestatation of this debate, that carried out in letters to the editor published between 22 January and 28 February 2002 in both The Australian (Australia's national daily broadsheet) and The West Australian (Western Australia's daily broadsheet). The period chosen for this analysis is important for several reasons.
Description:
This article examines how the St Trinian’s films (1954–1980) engage with shifts in the social organization of gender and class, while celebrating the defiance of social constraints on women. Focusing on the films’ depiction of unruly female behaviour, the article addresses the historical and social dimensions of the films in relation to carnival, adolescence and education. The films express public responses to the increasing public significance of female youth, and celebrate the predominantly female environment of the girls’ school.
Description:
This article examines how the St Trinian’s films (1954–1980) engage with shifts in the social organization of gender and class, while celebrating the defiance of social constraints on women. Focusing on the films’ depiction of unruly female behaviour, the article addresses the historical and social dimensions of the films in relation to carnival, adolescence and education. The films express public responses to the increasing public significance of female youth, and celebrate the predominantly female environment of the girls’ school.
Description:
States of exception cannot be understood in the terms of any otherwise prevailing rules or discourses. They are, after all, exceptional. They mark, by definition, special cases, anomalies, irregularities. And, because of this special status, we may of course take exception to them. Now this is not a new insight, we can all think of exceptional people for whom the rules just do not seem to apply, and exceptional situations where the normal rules just do not seem able to help.
Description:
This paper outlines the rise of women in management worldwide, and considers why so few women achieve senior or executive management positions. This slow advance of women into senior roles is unexpected given that the changes in organisations today are believed to require more ‘feminine leadership’. A decrease in the emphasis on masculine characteristics for managers is reported, and a requirement that more ‘feminine leadership’ needs to be adopted by organisations in order to ensure their survival in the future (Powell, Butterfield & Parent, 2002, p.189). Recent empirical research reports that there are differences in leadership style between male and female managers, and the findings suggest that women exhibit more transformational leadership than their male counterparts, with this style being strongly equated with effective leadership (Eagly, Johannesen-Schmidt, van Engen, 2003). However, these findings are based on western research, and it may be that cross cultural research will yield a different picture (House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004). Leadership and leadership styles may be conceptualised differently in a more paternalistic society. To explore this possibility, a cross cultural study was conducted in Malaysia and Australia. It is hypothesised that countries that are paternalistic in cultural values will exhibit a stronger constraint on women in management roles, which may impact on workplace attitudes, aspirations for promotion and style of leadership exhibited. Therefore, it is possible that the career advancement of women may be more problematic for Malaysian managerial women than their Australian counterparts. Results from an initial pilot study in Malaysia and Australia are outlined, and highlight some interesting similarities and differences to what are reported in the western literature.
Description:
This paper outlines the rise of women in management worldwide, and considers why so few women achieve senior or executive management positions. This slow advance of women into senior roles is unexpected given that the changes in organisations today are believed to require more ‘feminine leadership’. A decrease in the emphasis on masculine characteristics for managers is reported, and a requirement that more ‘feminine leadership’ needs to be adopted by organisations in order to ensure their survival in the future (Powell, Butterfield & Parent, 2002, p.189). Recent empirical research reports that there are differences in leadership style between male and female managers, and the findings suggest that women exhibit more transformational leadership than their male counterparts, with this style being strongly equated with effective leadership (Eagly, Johannesen-Schmidt, van Engen, 2003). However, these findings are based on western research, and it may be that cross cultural research will yield a different picture (House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004). Leadership and leadership styles may be conceptualised differently in a more paternalistic society. To explore this possibility, a cross cultural study was conducted in Malaysia and Australia. It is hypothesised that countries that are paternalistic in cultural values will exhibit a stronger constraint on women in management roles, which may impact on workplace attitudes, aspirations for promotion and style of leadership exhibited. Therefore, it is possible that the career advancement of women may be more problematic for Malaysian managerial women than their Australian counterparts. Results from an initial pilot study in Malaysia and Australia are outlined, and highlight some interesting similarities and differences to what are reported in the western literature.
Description:
This paper discusses the value of clan name research as a means of uncovering Aboriginal place names. It argues that clan names are able to provide a layer of place names that in some instances is the only source of information available to researchers of indigenous toponymy. They are an important data set that is useful in the mapping of Aboriginal spatial organization.
Description:
This paper discusses the value of clan name research as a means of uncovering Aboriginal place names. It argues that clan names are able to provide a layer of place names that in some instances is the only source of information available to researchers of indigenous toponymy. They are an important data set that is useful in the mapping of Aboriginal spatial organization.
Description:
Reviews three books on Japan. "Japan and its Others: Globalization, Difference and the Critique of Modernity"; "Globalization and Social Change in Contemporary Japan"; "Foreign Migrants in Contemporary Japan".
Description:
Reviews three books on Japan. "Japan and its Others: Globalization, Difference and the Critique of Modernity"; "Globalization and Social Change in Contemporary Japan"; "Foreign Migrants in Contemporary Japan".
Description:
Migrant Women Act shows the creativity and ingenuity of migrant women in shaping their own destinies during resettlement. It also shows the vital role of public services in enabling these competencies to flower. Olga Bursian documents the stories of thirty migrant women from the former USSR, Vietnam, Lebanon, the Philippines and the Horn of Africa, by exploring their socialisation into non-Western understandings of the human being, of normal society and what is worth doing in life. The women speak about how they acted through displacement and resettlement overturning popular stereotypes about their cultures. The stories reveal their generosity, resilience and audacity in the face of multiple layers of unequal social relations and negative representations. The book includes a review of the role of public services in successful resettlement, even for the most resilient women. Open entitlement to these services for new citizens was the hallmark of multiculturalism prior to the reversals begun by the Howard Government in the mid 1990s. Olga Bursian uses wide ranging sources to back a rigorous policy and program analysis, pitched at professionals and decision makers. She has lived and worked across diverse cultures and was inspired to document the unbounded resilience of migrant women.
Description:
This paper uses a post-structuralist perspective to articulate the conceptual limits of the discourse of ‘coming of age’ as a means of examining concerns about the representation of young female sexuality in the media. Through analysis of the content and production contexts of the films Lolita (1997) and Thirteen (2003), it argues that the discourse of ‘coming of age’ is grounded in a contradictory logic that produces conflicting aims: a desire to preserve the innocence of youth and a simultaneous expectation that they ‘grow up’. Using techniques of Derridean deconstruction, the paper examines the effects that this logic produces in terms of how key aspects of ‘coming of age’ contradict what the discourse sets out to determine and how this contributes to perceptions of youth sexuality as problematic. It will be shown that these conceptual contradictions remain unseen in attempts to make sense of the controversial aspects of the two films: the issue of pedophilia in Lolita and the problem of teenage rebellion in Thirteen. Importantly, the deconstructive reading suggests that it is the paradoxical underpinnings of this approach to youth identity that enables the discourse to be thought at all. By working to recognise this, it is possible to move beyond the limits of the discourse and think differently about youth in response to the perceived threat posed to young people by media representations of adolescent sex and sexuality
Description:
This paper uses a post-structuralist perspective to articulate the conceptual limits of the discourse of ‘coming of age’ as a means of examining concerns about the representation of young female sexuality in the media. Through analysis of the content and production contexts of the films Lolita (1997) and Thirteen (2003), it argues that the discourse of ‘coming of age’ is grounded in a contradictory logic that produces conflicting aims: a desire to preserve the innocence of youth and a simultaneous expectation that they ‘grow up’. Using techniques of Derridean deconstruction, the paper examines the effects that this logic produces in terms of how key aspects of ‘coming of age’ contradict what the discourse sets out to determine and how this contributes to perceptions of youth sexuality as problematic. It will be shown that these conceptual contradictions remain unseen in attempts to make sense of the controversial aspects of the two films: the issue of pedophilia in Lolita and the problem of teenage rebellion in Thirteen. Importantly, the deconstructive reading suggests that it is the paradoxical underpinnings of this approach to youth identity that enables the discourse to be thought at all. By working to recognise this, it is possible to move beyond the limits of the discourse and think differently about youth in response to the perceived threat posed to young people by media representations of adolescent sex and sexuality
Description:
This article outlines a recent pilot project in Bendigo that collected baseline data in order to develop a preliminary understanding of regional migration experiences. The literature indicated that migrant experiences in Australian regional communities are under-researched. Sixty participants from South East Asia, who have migrated to Bendigo, Victoria within the last five years, completed a mixed-methods survey. The key findings reported upon are socio-structural factors, social connectedness and psychosocial well-being. Crucial factors such as culture, spirituality and non-English-language, link to the more complex issues of personal, social and cultural identity. These findings are significant in adding to the limited data and discussion about newly arrived migrants in rural and regional communities. There are sociological implications from this preliminary data concerning social capital and psychosocial well-being. There are also implications for policy development and professional practice for migration to rural and regional communities.
Description:
The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) opens with a series of long takes of a car winding steadily down a road in the Iranian countryside. In other words, it opens with a sequence which, to anybody who knows Kiarostami's work, will be immediately recognizable as typical of it: Life and Nothing More (1992) returns repeatedly to such sequences, and ends with one; such sequences turn up in Through the Olive Trees (1994) and Taste of Cherry (1997); the protagonist of Where is the Friend's Home? (1987) is too young to drive, but we see him from a distance meandering in a similar pattern on more than one occasion (and sequences of the same type return in Certified Copy (2010)). As with the other sequences, the opening of The Wind Will Carry Us is beautiful, intriguing and, with its muted semi-screwball feel, kind of funny. By the time of the film's release, however, the car on screen was bringing this cinematic history with it. Thus there is something self-aware or even self-effacing about these opening images: Kiarostami is referring here, both seriously and playfully, not only to his previous works but also perhaps to himself, and to the by-then internationally recognizable figure called "Kiarostami." So if Jean-Luc Nancy is right to say that such long aerial takes are Kiarostami's "signature" ( Evidence of Film, 10)âthat "a person or a car's zigzagging path on the background of an unchanging landscape traverses, like a single trajectory, five movies [...] and turns into an emblematic summary of all the films" (24)âthen this is complicated here by a certain irony. Indeed it would be possible to read the reflexivity of these images as playfully mocking Kiarostami's own signature, and thus perhaps as problematizing the very notion: Kiarostami doesn't let us forget that we are watching one of his films, and pokes fun at us, and at himself, in reminding that fact. This is to say that in the opening sequence of the film Kiarostami cites his own signature, with all the epistemological and metaphysical complications that such a gesture entails. Yet this self-effacing gesture is not simply ironic, and it is not in spite but also partly because of its extreme reflexivity that the opening sequence of this film in particular is so beautiful, intriguing, and gently funny. After all, gestures of self effacementâironic nods to the mediality of cinemaâare perhaps as typical of Kiarostami's films as are long aerial takes of meandering cars. If Kiarostami is citing his own signature, then that is also his signature. Thus I want to disagree with Nancy when he writes that "there is no room for reflexivity" (18) in Kiarostami's cinema. Yet I also want to agree with the intuition that appears to be guiding Nancy's statement. For what's remarkable about Kiarostami's films is how his relentless problematization of the real, his dogged insistence on the mediality of the image, does not leave us in some Baudrillardian hall of mirrors, or quasi-Derridean free play of significations: if the opening sequence of this film is an example of "intertextuality," it is not because Kiarostami is spruiking some pop postmodernism. Rather, in problematizating the category of representation in this way, Kiarostami has been able to raise the question of the real in a new and profoundly affecting manner. His repeated attempts at turning our attention to the medium itself, to the very fact of film, do not produce a Verfremdungseffekt. Or if they do, this distancing is bound up with the powers of the films themselves. Note that this is not really paradoxical: my argument is that what Kiarostami shows is how the real can be evokedâ or "evidenced," to use Nancy's termâ precisely by undermining our attachments to the philosophical picture and cinematic frame of representation.
Description:
Fort Scratchley has many layers of history. The fort site was part of the lore of the Awabakal people & the site of Newcastles early convict-dug coal mines. It was a major coastal defence installation until its decommissioning in 1972. - See more at:
Description:
We argue that a closer attention to the everyday visceral experiences of hearing and listening offers new insights into geographies of home and practices of sustainability. We suggest that this approach is significant to understanding how sound helps to assemble and reassemble the relationships that comprise home. We concentrate on a group of 10 amenity-led migrants in their ‘new coastal home’ in Bermagui, New South Wales, Australia. Each participant recorded a sound diary composed of their everyday sounds. Our interpretation explores the visceral connections in the processes of making bodies feel ‘at home’. First, we discuss how the rhythmic affordances of both human and non-human sounds help configure and reconfigure the spatiality and temporality of home. Second, our interpretation explores how sound is bound up with sustainability politics of homemaking. We investigate experiential practices and performativities of listening and hearing that may help constitute and reconstitute ‘a’ subject. This approach extends current thinking that encourages engagement with the corporeal, affective and emotional dimensions of home.