Urban food futures : ICTs and opportunities

Food is a vital foundation of all human life. It is essential to a myriad of political, socio-cultural, economic and environmental practices throughout history. However, those practices of food production, consumption, and distribution have the potential to now go through immensely transformative shifts as network technologies become increasingly embedded in every domain of contemporary life. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are one of the key foundations of global functionality and sustenance today and undoubtedly will continue to present new challenges and opportunities for the future. As such, this Symposium will bring together leading scholars across disciplines to address challenges and opportunities at the intersection of food and ICTs in everyday urban environment. In particular, the discussion will revolve around the question: What are the key roles that network technologies play in re-shaping the food systems at micro- to macroscopic level? The symposium will contribute a unique perspective on urban food futures through the lens of network society paradigm where ICTs enable innovations in production, organisation, and communication within society. Some of the topics addressed will include encouraging transparency in food commodity chains; value of cultural understanding and communication in global food sustainability; and technologies to social inclusion; all of which evoke and examine the question surrounding networked individuals as changes catalysts for urban food futures. The event will provide an avenue for new discussions and speculations on key issues surrounding urban food futures in the network era, with a particular focus on bottom-up micro actions that challenge the existing food systems towards a broader sociocultural, political, technological, and environmental transformations. One central area of concern is that current systems of food production, distribution, and consumption do not ensure food security for the future, but rather seriously threaten it. With the recent unprecedented scale of urban growth and rise of middle-class, the problem continues to intensify. This situation requires extensive distribution networks to feed urban residents, and therefore poses significant infrastructural challenges to both the public and private sectors. The symposium will also address the transferability of citizen empowerment that network technologies enable as demonstrated in various significant global political transformations from the bottom-up, such as the recent Egyptian Youth Revolution. Another key theme of the discussion will be the role of ICTs (and the practices that they mediate) in fostering transparency in commodity chains. The symposium will ask what differences these technologies can make on the practices of food consumption and production. After discussions, we will initiate an international network of food-thinkers and actors that will function as a platform for knowledge sharing and collaborations. The participants will be invited to engage in planning for the on-going future development of the network.

Sourdough & other stories : a story told in parts (a mosaic novel and exegesis)

The mosaic novel - with its independent 'story-tiles' linking together to form a complete narrative - has the potential to act as a reflection on the periodic resurfacing of unconscious memories in the conscious lives of fictional characters. This project is an exploration of the mosaic text as a fictional analogue of involuntary memory. These concepts are investigated as they appear in traditional fairy tales and engaged with in this thesis's creative component, Sourdough and Other Stories (approximately 80,000 words), a mosaic novel comprising sixteen interconnected 'story-tiles'. Traditional fairy tales are non-reflective and conducive to forgetting (i.e. anti-memory); fairy tale characters are frequently portrayed as psychologically two-dimensional, in that there is no examination of the mental and emotional distress caused when children are stolen/ abandoned/ lost and when adults are exiled. Sourdough and Other Stories is a creative examination of, and attempted to remedy, this lack of psychological depth. This creative work is at once something more than a short story collection, and something that is not a traditional novel, but instead a culmination of two modes of writing. It employs the fairy tale form to explore James' 'thorns in the spirit' (1898, p.199) in fiction; the anxiety caused by separation from familial and community groups. The exegesis, A Story Told in Parts - Sourdough and Other Stories is a critical essay (approximately 20,000 words in length), a companion piece to the mosaic novel, which analyses how my research question proceeded from my creative work, and considers the theoretical underpinnings of the creative work and how it enacts the research question: 'Can a writer use the structural possibilities of the mosaic text to create a fictional work that is an analogue of an involuntary memory?' The cumulative effect of the creative and exegetical works should be that of a dialogue between the two components - each text informing the other and providing alternate but complementary lenses with which to view the research question.

Whe' yu' from?

"Whe' yu' from?" The question was put to me as I wandered, camera in hand, in the old square of Spanish Town, Jamaica's former capital. The local man, lounging in the shade of one of the colonial Georgian buildings that enclose the square, was mildly curious about what he took to be a typical white tourish photgraphing the sights of the decayed historic town. At that time, my home was in Kingston where i lived with my wife and baby son. I was then working in the Jamaican Government Town Planning Department in a job that took me all over the island. Turning to my questioner, I replied, "Kingston". There was a brief pause, and then the man spoke again: "No Man! Whe' yu' really from?" I still have difficulties when asked this question. Where am I from? What does this question mean? Does it refer to where I was born, where I spent my previous life or where I live now? Does it have a broader meaning, an enquiry about my origins in terms of background and previous experience? The following chapters are my attempt to answer these questions for my own satisfaction and, I hope, for the amusement of others who may be interested in the life of an ordinary English boy whose dream to travel and see the world was realized in ways he could not possibly have imagined. Finding an appropriate title for this book was difficult. Thursday's Child, North and South and War and Peace all came to mind but, unfortunately for me, those titles had been appropriated by other writers. Thursdays's Child is quite a popular book title, presumably because people who were born on that day and, in the words of the nursery rhyme, had 'far to go', are especially likely to have travellers' tales to tell or life stories of the rags-to-riches variety. Born on a Thursday, I have travelled a lot and I suppose that I have gone far in life. Coming from a working class family, I 'got on' by 'getting a good education' and a 'good job'. I decided against adding to the list of Thursday's Children. North and South would have reflected my life in Britain, spent in both the North and South of England, and my later years, divided between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres of the globe, as well as in countries commonly referred to as the 'advanced' North and the 'underdeveloped' South. North and South has already been appropriated by Mrs Gaskell, something that did not deter one popular American writer from using the title for a book of his. My memories of World War Two and the years afterwards made War and Peace a possible candidate, but readers expectnig an epic tale of Tolstoyan proportions may have been disappointed. To my knowledge, no other book has the title "Whe' Yu' From?". I am grateful to the Jamaican man whose question lingered in my memory and provided the title of this memoir, written decades later. This book is a word picture. It is, in a sense, a self-portrait, and like all portraits, it captures something of the character, it attempts to tell the truth, but it is not the whole truth. This is because it is not my intention to write my entire life story; rather I wish to tell about some of the things in my experience of life that have seemed important or interesting to me. Unlike a painted portrait, the picture I have created is intended to suggest the passage of time. While, for most of us in Western society, time is linear and unidirectional, like the flight of an arrov or the trajectory of a bullet, memory rearranges things, calling up images of the past in no particular order, making connections that may link events in various patterns, circular, web-like, superimposed. The stream of consciousness is very unlike that of streams we encounter in the physical world. Connections are made in all directions; thoughts hop back and forth in time and space, from topic to topic. My book is a composition drawn from periods, events and thoughts as I remember them. Like life itself, it is made up of patches, some good, some bad, but in my experience, always fascinating. In recording my memories, I have been as accurate as possible. Little of what I have written is about spectacular sights and strange customs. Much of it focuses on my more modest explorations includng observations of everyday things that have attracted my attention. Reading through the chapters, I am struck by my childhood freedom to roam and engage in 'dangerous' activities like climbing trees and playing beside streams, things that many children today are no longer allowed to enjoy. Also noticeable is the survival of traditions and superstitions from the distant past. Obvious too, is my preoccupation with place names, both official ones that appear on maps and sign boards and those used by locals and children, names rarely seen in print. If there is any uniting theme to be found in what I have written, it must be my education in the fields, woods and streets of my English homeland, in the various other countries in which I have lived and travelled, as well as more formally from books and in classrooms. Much of my book is concerned with people and places. Many of the people I mention are among those who have been, and often have remained, important and close to me. Others I remember from only the briefest of encounters, but they remain in my memory because of some specific incident or circumstance that fixed a lasting image in my mind. Some of my closest friends and relatives, however, appear nowhere in these pages or they receive only the slightest mention. This is not because they played an unimportant roles in my life. It is because this book is not the whole story. Among those whe receive little or no mention are some who are especially close to me, with whom I have shared happy and sad times and who have shown me and my family much kindness, giving support when this was needed. Some I have known since childhood and have popped up at various times in my life, often in different parts of the world. Although years may pass without me seeing them, in an important sense they are always with me. These people know who they are. I hope that they know how much I love and appreciate them. When writing my memoir, I consulted a few of the people mentioned in this book, but in the main, I have relied on my own memory, asided by daiary and notebook entries and old correspondence. In the preparation of this manuscript, I benefited greatly from the expert advice and encouragement of Neil Marr of BeWrite Books. My wife Anne, inspiration for this book, also contributed in the valuable role of critic. She has my undying gratitude.

Interviewing elites in criminological research: Negotiating power and access and being called 'kid'

Qualitative Criminology: Stories from the Field brings to life the stories behind the research of both emerging and established scholars in Australian criminology. The book’s contributors provided honest, reflective, and decidedly unsanitised accounts of their qualitative research journeys - the lively tales of what really happens when conducting research of this nature, the stories that often make for parenthetical asides in conference papers but tend to be excised from journal articles. This book considers the gap between research methods and the realities of qualitative research. As such, it aims to help researchers and students who conduct qualitative criminological research reflect upon their role as researchers, and the practical, ideological and ethical issues which may arise in the course of their research. It is also a call to criminologists to make public the ‘failures’ and missteps of their research endeavours so that we can learn from one another and become better informed and more reflexive qualitative criminologists.

Creating fashion professionals for the 21st century : a tale of pedagogical tensions and emerging challenges

The ‘Fashion Tales’ Conference identifies three fashion discourses: that of making, that of media, and that of scholarship. We propose a fourth, which provides a foundational base for the others: the discourse of fashion pedagogy. We begin with the argument that to thrive in any of these discourses, all fashion graduates require the ability to navigate the complexities of the 21st century fashion industry. Fashion graduates emerge into a professional world which demands a range of high level capabilities above and beyond those traditionally acknowledged by the discipline. Professional education in fashion must transform itself to accommodate these imperatives. In this paper, we document a tale of fashion learning, teaching and scholarship – the tale of a highly successful future-orientated boutique university-based undergraduate fashion course in Queensland, Australia. The Discipline consistently maintains the highest student satisfaction and lowest attrition of any course in the university, achieves extremely competitive student satisfaction scores when compared with other courses nationally and internationally, and reports outstanding graduate employment outcomes. The core of the article addresses how the course effectively balances five key pedagogical tensions identified from the findings of in-depth focus groups with graduating students, and interviews with teaching staff. The pedagogical tensions are: high concept/ authenticity; high disciplinarity/ interdisciplinarity; high rigour/ play; high autonomy/ scaffolding; and high individuality/ community, where community can be further divided into high challenge and high support. We discuss each of these tensions and how they are characterised within the course, using rich descriptions given by the students. We also draw upon the wider andragogical and learning futures literatures to link the tensions with what is already known about excellence in 21st century higher and further education curriculum and pedagogic practice. We ask: as the fashion industry becomes truly globalised, virtualised, and diversified, and as initial professional training for the industry becomes increasingly massified and performatised, what are the best teaching approaches to produce autonomous, professionally capable, enterprising and responsible graduates into the future? Can the pedagogical balances described in this case study be maintained in the light of these powerful external forces, and if so, how?

Spinning a sustainable yarn: assessing the claims of Australian companies’ eco-initiatives

In Australia, few fashion brands have intervened in the design of their products or the systems around their product to tackle environmental pollution and waste. Instead, support of charities (whether social or environmental) has become conflated with sustainability in the eyes of the public.However, three established Australian brands recently put forward initiatives which explicitly tackle the pre-consumer or post-consumer waste associated with their products. In 2011, Billabong, one of the largest surfwear companies in the world, developed a collection of board shorts made from recycled bottles that are also recyclable at end of life. The initiative has been promoted in partnership with Bob Marley’s son Rohan Marley, and the graphics of the board shorts reference the Rastafarian colours and make use of Marley’s song lyrics. In this way, the company has tapped into an aspect of surf culture linked to environmental activism, in which the natural world is venerated. Two mid-market initiatives, by Metalicus and Country Road, each have a social outcome that arguably aligns to the values of their middle-class consumer base. Metalicus is spear-heading a campaign for Australian garment manufacturers to donate their pre consumer waste – fabric off-cuts – to charity Open Family Australia to be manufactured into quilts for the homeless. Country Road has partnered with the Australian Red Cross to implement a recycling scheme in which consumers donate their old Country Road garments in exchange for a Country Road gift voucher. Both strategies, while tackling waste, tell an altruistic story in which the disadvantaged can benefit from the consumption habits of the middle-class. To varying degrees, the initiative chosen by each company feeds into the stories they tell about themselves and about the consumers who purchase their clothing. However, how can we assess the impact of these schemes on waste management in real terms, or indeed the worth of each scheme in the wider context of the fashion system? This paper will assess the claims made by the companies and analyse their efficacy, suggesting that a more nuanced assessment of green claims is required, in which ‘green’ comes in many tonal variations.

Thinking Critically in the Land of Princesses and Giants : The Affordances and Challenges of Critical Approaches in the Early Years

During the last four decades, educators have created a range of critical literacy approaches for different contexts, including compulsory schooling (Luke & Woods, 2009) and second language education (Luke & Dooley, 2011). Despite inspirational examples of critical work with young students (e.g., O’Brien, 1994; Vasquez, 1994), Comber (2012) laments the persistent myth that critical literacy is not viable in the early years. Assumptions about childhood innocence and the priorities of the back-to-basics movement seem to limit the possibilities for early years literacy teaching and learning. Yet, teachers of young students need not face an either/or choice between the basic and critical dimensions of literacy. Systematic ways of treating literacy in all its complexity exist. We argue that the integrative imperative is especially important in schools that are under pressure to improve technical literacy outcomes. In this chapter, we document how critical literacy was addressed in a fairytales unit taught to 4.5 - 5.5 year olds in a high diversity, high poverty Australian school. We analyze the affordances and challenges of different approaches to critical literacy, concluding they are complementary rather than competing sources of possibility. Furthermore, we make the case for turning familiar classroom activities to critical ends.

Detection of banana bunchy top virus in virus-infected plants using polymerase chain reaction

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was developed for the detection of Banana bunchy top virus (BBTV) at maximum after 210 min and at minimum after 90 min using Pc-1 and Pc-2, respectively. PCR detection of BBTV in crude sap indicated that the freezing of banana tissue in liquid nitrogen (LN2) before extraction was more effective than using sand as the extraction technique. BBTV was also detected using PCR assay in 69 healthy and diseased plants using Na-PO4 buffer containing 1 % SDS. PCR detection of BBTV in nucleic acid extracts using seven different extraction buffers to adapt the use of PCR in routine detection in the field was studied. Results proved that BBTV was detected with high sensitivity in nucleic acid extracts more than in infectious sap. The results also suggested the common aetiology for the BBTV by the PCR reactions of BBTV in nucleic acid extracts from Australia, Burundi, Egypt, France, Gabon, Philippines and Taiwan. Results also proved a positive relation between the Egyptian-BBTV isolate and abaca bunchy top isolate from the Philippines, but there no relation was found with the Cucumber mosaic cucumovirus (CMV) isolates from Egypt and Philippines and Banana bract mosaic virus (BBMV) were found.

The story behind the stories: Qualitative criminology research in Australia

Qualitative Criminology: Stories from the Field brings to life the stories behind the research of both emerging and established scholars in Australian criminology. The book’s contributors provided honest, reflective, and decidedly unsanitised accounts of their qualitative research journeys - the lively tales of what really happens when conducting research of this nature, the stories that often make for parenthetical asides in conference papers but tend to be excised from journal articles. This book considers the gap between research methods and the realities of qualitative research. As such, it aims to help researchers and students who conduct qualitative criminological research reflect upon their role as researchers, and the practical, ideological and ethical issues which may arise in the course of their research. It is also a call to criminologists to make public the ‘failures’ and missteps of their research endeavours so that we can learn from one another and become better informed and more reflexive qualitative criminologists.

Qualitative criminology : Stories from the field

Qualitative researchers in the discipline of criminology perform a wide range of challenging tasks. They interview prisoners, police officers, magistrates and judges. They speak with survivors of domestic violence, and drink tea with the mothers of murdered children. They observe courts and communities, investigate the decision-making processes of juries and immerse themselves in the data they collect. They ask ‘big’ questions – ‘how do we criminalise the producers of toxic toys?’ – as well as ‘little’ questions – ‘what should I wear to conduct this interview?’ Qualitative Criminology: Stories from the Field brings to life the stories behind the research of both emerging and established scholars in Australian criminology. The book’s contributors provided honest, reflective, and decidedly unsanitised accounts of their qualitative research journeys - the lively tales of what really happens when conducting research of this nature, the stories that often make for parenthetical asides in conference papers but tend to be excised from journal articles. This book considers the gap between research methods and the realities of qualitative research. As such, it aims to help researchers and students who conduct qualitative criminological research reflect upon their role as researchers, and the practical, ideological and ethical issues which may arise in the course of their research. It is also a call to criminologists to make public the ‘failures’ and missteps of their research endeavours so that we can learn from one another and become better informed and more reflexive qualitative criminologists.

Panem et circenses : law, law and power in The Hunger Games

Like many cautionary tales, The Hunger Games takes as its major premise an observation about contemporary society, measuring its ballistic arc in order to present graphically its logical conclusions. The Hunger Games gazes back to the panem et circenses of Ancient Rome, staring equally cynically forward, following the trajectory of reality television to its unbearably barbaric end point – a sadistic voyeurism for an effete elite of consumers. At each end of the historical spectrum (and in the present), the prevailing social form is Arendt’s animal laborans. Consumer or consumed, Panem’s population is (with the exception of the inner circle) either deprived of the possibility of, or distracted from, political action. Within the confines of the Games themselves, Law is abandoned or de‐realised: Law – an elided Other in the pseudo‐Hobbesian nightmare that is the Arena. The Games are played out, as were gladiatorial combats and other diversions of the Roman Empire, against a background resonant of Juvenal’s concern for his contemporaries’ attachment to short term gratification at the expense the civic virtues of justice and caring which are (or would be) constitutive of a contemporary form of Arendt’s homo politicus. While the Games are, on their face, ‘reality’ they are (like the realities presented in contemporary reality television) a simulated reality, de‐realised in a Foucauldian set design constructed as a distraction for Capitol, and for the residents of the Districts, a constant reminder of their subservience to Capitol. Yet contemporary Western culture, for which manipulative reality TV is but a symptom of an underlying malaise, is inscribed at least as an incipient Panem, Its public/political space is diminished by the effective slavery of the poor, the pre‐occupation with and distractions of materiality and modern media, and the increasing concentration of power/wealth into a smaller proportion of the population.

Publishing, postage, and prizes : classic Australian children’s literature in the public eye

2012 saw the publication of competing and complementary lines of Australian “classics”: “A&R Australian Classics” (HarperCollins) and “Text Classics” (Text Publishing). While Angus and Robertson were key in establishing a canon of Australian children’s classics in the twentieth century, it was the Text Classics line which included a selection of young people’s titles in their 2013. In turn, Penguin Australia launched a selection of “Australian Children’s Classics”. In so doing, these publishers were drawing on particular literary and visual cultural traditions in Australian children’s literature. Public assertions of a particular selection of children’s books reveals not only contemporary assumptions about desirable childhood experiences but about the operation of nostalgia therein. In encouraging Australian adults to judge books by their covers, such gestures imply that Australian children may be similarly understood. Importantly, the illusion of unity, sameness, and legibility which is promised by circumscribed canons of “classic” children’s literature may well imply a desire for similarly illusory, unified, legible, “classic” childhood. This paper attends to public attempts to materialise (and legitimise) a canon of classic Australian children’s literature. In particular, it considers the ways in which publishing, postage stamps, and book awards make visible a range of children’s books, but do so in order to either fix or efface the content or meaning of the books themselves. Moving between assertions of the best books for children from the 1980s to today, and of the social values circulated within those books, this paper considers the possibilities and problematics of an Australian children’s canon.

Artists and their worlds

A catalogue essay written for 'Tall Tales and Other Adventures: a University of Southern Queensland, Dogwood Crossing, Miles and Flying Arts research project.'

The day that changed Grantham

"'Within two minutes it went from being no water out in the street to being waist deep inside the shop.' When Queensland went under water in January this year the tiny town of Grantham suffered the greatest loss of life: 12 people died. The locals clung to fences, floated on top of cars and supported each other to survive the unexpected and sudden wall of muddy water and debris that inundated their town. You'll hear tales of fear, bravery and loss in this moving radio feature."

The fantastic in the family sagas : implications for saga authorship

There is increasing acceptance that characterisation in the family sagas is complex enough to include the subtle incorporation of protagonists’ inner lives. Thus, despite saga authors’ apparent desire to pass on traditional stories, saga characterization brings with it the possibility of a connection between the medieval author and the early Icelandic community represented in the sagas, a break in the saga code of objective narration that adds further weight to recent arguments that saga authorship was conceived in broader terms than merely the preservation of oral tales. One such break in objectivity occurs in the range of responses to the fantastic, when characters are forced to interpret the supernatural or strange events in their lives. At such times, the author allows glimpses of the inner lives of characters, focussing our attention on the way in which characters perceived and dealt with extraordinary occurrences, but also highlighting and thematising the distinctive social context of the early Icelandic community.