Slithering snakes, angry men and out-group members : what and whom are we evolved to fear?

The preparedness theory of classical conditioning proposed by Seligman (1970, 1971) has been applied extensively over the past 40 years to explain the nature and "source" of human fear and phobias. In this review we examine the formative studies that tested the four defining characteristics of prepared learning with animal fear-relevant stimuli (typically snakes and spiders) and consider claims that fear of social stimuli, such as angry faces, or faces of racial out-group members, may also be acquired utilising the same preferential learning mechanism. Exposition of critical differences between fear learning to animal and social stimuli suggests that a single account cannot adequately explain fear learning with animal and social stimuli. We demonstrate that fear conditioned to social stimuli is less robust than fear conditioned to animal stimuli as it is susceptible to cognitive influence and propose that it may instead reflect on negative stereotypes and social norms. Thus, a theoretical model that can accommodate the influence of both biological and cultural factors is likely to have broader utility in the explanation of fear and avoidance responses than accounts based on a single mechanism.

Private health insurance status and utilisation of dental services in Australia

This article focuses on the relationship between private insurance status and dental service utilisation in Australia using data between 1995 and 2001. This article employs joint maximum likelihood to estimate models of time since last dental visit treating private ancillary health insurance (PAHI) as endogenous. The sensitivity of results to the choice between two different but related types of instrumental variables is examined. We find robust evidence in both 1995 and 2001 that individuals with a PAHI policy make significantly more frequent dental consultations relative to those without such coverage. A comparison of the 1995 and 2001 results, however, suggests that there has been an increasing role of PAHI in terms of the frequency of dental consultations over time. This seems intuitive given the trends in the price of unsubsidised private dental consultations. In terms of policy, our results suggest that while government measures to increase private health insurance coverage in Australia has been successful to a significant degree, it may have come at some cost in terms of socio-economic inequality as the privately insured are provided much better access to care and financial protection.

Disaster strikes, then what? Using evaluation in narrative driven (oral history & digital storytelling) community-based projects

In 2011 Queensland suffered both floods and cyclones, leaving residents without homes and their communities in ruins (2011). This paper presents how researchers from QUT, who are also members of the Oral History Association of Australia (OHAA) Queensland’s chapter, are using oral history, photographs, videography and digital storytelling to help heal and empower rural communities around the state and how evaluation has become a key element of our research. QUT researchers ran storytelling workshops in the capital city of Brisbane i early 2011, after the city suffered sever flooding. Cyclone Yasi then struck the town of Cardwell (in February 2011) destroying their historical museum and recording equipment. We delivered an 'emergency workshop', offering participants hands on use of the equipment, ethical and interviewing theory, so that the community could start to build a new collection. We included oral history workshops as well as sessions on how best to use a video camera, digital camera and creative writing sessions, so the community would also know how to make 'products' or exhibition pieces out of the interviews they were recording. We returned six months later to conduct follow-up workshops and the material produced by and with the community had been amazing. More funding has now been secured to replicate audio/visual/writing workshops in other remote rural Queensland communities including Townsville, Mackay and Cunnamulla and Toowoomba in 2012, highlighting the need for a multi media approach, to leverage the most out of OH interviews as a mechanism to restore and promote community resilience and pride.

Alternatives to the World Bank’s strategies for education and development

Over the past several decades, policy has become increasingly global. In economics, for example, policy has followed the so-called Washington Consensus of privatization, liberalization, and deregulation. In education, global policy has included the proliferation of strategies including standardized testing, paraprofessional teachers, user fees, and privatization. There are many problems with these neoliberal policies. Foremost among them, is the havoc they wreak on the lives of so many children and adults. Poverty, inequality, and myriad associated problems have reached new heights in this neoliberal era. Moreover, these policies have been adopted uncritically and alternative policies have been ignored, which leads to our focus here.

Suicidal ideation and behaviours among university students in Australia

Objective: The aim of the study was to investigate the prevalence and demographic correlates of suicidal ideation and behaviours among university students in Australia and the utilisation of mental health services by this population. Method: Suicidal ideation and behaviours and demographic variables were assessed in a population of 1,678 undergraduate students by use of a modified Suicide Ideation Scale (SIS) and questionnaire. Results: Sixty two percent of students surveyed showed some suicidal ideation and 6.6% reported one or more suicide attempts. Over half of the group who reported suicide attempts did not use any type of mental health services. Suicidal ideation was found to be highly correlated with previous use of mental health services, In examining the relationship between suicidal ideation (SI) end demographic variables, SI was not significantly different for gender or parental marital status but was related to living arrangements, racial groups, religious affiliation and father's education. Conclusions: The results suggest that a higher proportion of students reported suicidal ideation and behaviours than that documented in related studies undertaken in the USA. While these findings draw attention to a higher level of suicidal ideation in students who utilise mental health assistance, more than half of those who reported suicide attempts did not use any kind of mental health service. The study has particular implications for detecting and assisting young people with a high suicide risk within the university environment.

Speaking truth to power : sexism, outrage and the public consciousness

Alan Jones's now infamous comment that women are destroying the joint' sparked a flurry of observations and interpretations in the national and international media and in the blogosphere about the motivations and meanings of such a statement. The overriding tone of this commentary was outrage - how dare an influential figure like Jones state with such blatant and provocative hostility that women are at best unsuitable for leadership and at worst, damaging our public and private institutions? The answers, as we have seen, are likely to be complex, but an alternative question could also be posed. Why the outrage? Public male figures have, throughout history, made derogatory, demeaning and sexist remarks about women, and the material effects of gender inequality continue to be felt- consider the gender pay gap and glass ceiling phenomenon for starters. So why did this particular comment ignite such widespread indignation and anger?

Investigating homework as a social practice : a qualitative approach

This thesis examines the social practice of homework. It explores how homework is shaped by the discourses, policies and guidelines in circulation in a society at any given time with particular reference to one school district in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. This study investigates how contemporary homework reconstitutes the home as a pedagogical site where the power of the institution of schooling circulates regularly from school to home. It examines how the educational system shapes the organization of family life and how family experiences with homework may be different in different sites depending on the accessibility of various forms of cultural capital. This study employs a qualitative approach, incorporating multiple case studies, and is complemented by insights from institutional ethnography and critical discourse analysis. It draws on the theoretical concepts of Foucault including power and power relations, and governmentality and surveillance, as well as Bourdieu’s concepts of economic, social and cultural capital for analysis. It employs concepts from Bourdieu’s work as they have been expanded on by researchers including Reay (1998), Lareau (2000), and Griffith and Smith (2005). The studies of these researchers allowed for an examination of homework as it related to families and mothers’ work. Smith’s (1987; 1999) concepts of ruling relations, mothers’ unpaid labour, and the engine of inequality were also employed in the analysis. Family interviews with ten volunteer families, teacher focus group sessions with 15 teachers from six schools, homework artefacts, school newsletters, homework brochures, and publicly available assessment and evaluation policy documents from one school district were analyzed. From this analysis key themes emerged and the findings are documented throughout five data analysis chapters. This study shows a change in education in response to a system shaped by standards, accountability and testing. It documents an increased transference of educational responsibility from one educational stakeholder to another. This transference of responsibility shifts downward until it eventually reaches the family in the form of homework and educational activities. Texts in the form of brochures and newsletters, sent home from school, make available to parents specific subject positions that act as instruments of normalization. These subject positions promote a particular ‘ideal’ family that has access to certain types of cultural capital needed to meet the school’s expectations. However, the study shows that these resources are not equally available to all and some families struggle to obtain what is necessary to complete educational activities in the home. The increase in transference of educational work from the school to the home results in greater work for parents, particularly mothers. As well, consideration is given to mother’s role in homework and how, in turn, classroom instructional practices are sometimes dependent on the work completed at home with differential effects for children. This study confirms previous findings that it is mothers who assume the greatest role in the educational trajectory of their children. An important finding in this research is that it is not only middle-class mothers who dedicate extensive time working hard to ensure their children’s educational success; working-class mothers also make substantial contributions of time and resources to their children’s education. The assignments and educational activities distributed as homework require parents’ knowledge of technical school pedagogy to help their children. Much of the homework being sent home from schools is in the area of literacy, particularly reading, but requires parents to do more than read with children. A key finding is that the practices of parents are changing and being reconfigured by the expectations of schools in regard to reading. Parents are now being required to monitor and supervise children’s reading, as well as help children complete reading logs, written reading responses, and follow up questions. The reality of family life as discussed by the participants in this study does not match the ‘ideal’ as portrayed in the educational documents. Homework sessions often create frustrations and tensions between parents and children. Some of the greatest struggles for families were created by mathematical homework, homework for those enrolled in the French Immersion program, and the work required to complete Literature, Heritage and Science Fair projects. Even when institutionalized and objectified capital was readily available, many families still encountered struggles when trying to carry out the assigned educational tasks. This thesis argues that homework and education-related activities play out differently in different homes. Consideration of this significance may assist educators to better understand and appreciate the vast difference in families and the ways in which each family can contribute to their children’s educational trajectory.

Costly technology adoption, redistribution and growth

We study a political economy model which aims to understand the diversity in the growth and technology-adoption experiences in different economies. In this model the cost of technology adoption is endogenous and varies across heterogeneous agents. Agents in the model vote on the proportion of revenues allocated towards such expenditures. In the early stages of development, the political-economy outcome of the model ensures that a sub-optimal proportion of government revenue is used to finance adoption-cost reducing expenditures. This sub-optimality is due to the presence of inequality; agents at the lower end of the distribution favor a larger amount of revenue allocated towards redistribution in the form of lump-sum transfers. Eventually all individuals make the switch to the better technology and their incomes converge. The outcomes of the model therefore explain why public choice is more likely to be conservative in nature; it represents the majority choice given conflicting preferences among agents. Consequently, the transition path towards growth and technology adoption varies across countries depending on initial levels of inequality.

Communication and the casualisation of nursing : a critical ethnography

The contemporary working environment is being rapidly reshaped by technological, industrial and political forces. Increased global competitiveness and an emphasis on productivity have led to the appearance of alternative methods of employment, such as part-time, casual and itinerant work, allowing greater flexibility. This allows for the development of a core permanent staff and the simultaneous utilisation of casual staff according to business needs. Flexible workers across industries are generally referred to as the non-standard workforce and full-time permanent workers as the standard workforce. Even though labour flexibility favours the employer, increased opportunity for flexible work has been embraced by women for many reasons, including the gender struggle for greater economic independence and social equality. Consequently, the largely female nursing industry, both nationally and internationally, has been caught up in this wave of change. This ageing workforce has been at the forefront of the push for flexibility with recent figures showing almost half the nursing workforce is employed in non-standard capacity. In part, this has allowed women to fulfil caring roles outside their work, to ease off nearing retirement and to supplement the family income. More significantly, however, flexibility has developed as an economic management initiative, as a strategy for cost constraint. The result has been the development of a dual workforce and as suggested by Pocock, Buchanan and Campbell (2004), associated deep-seated resentment and the marginalisation of part-time and casual workers by their full-time colleagues and managers. Additionally, as nursing currently faces serious recruitment and retention problems there is urgent need to understand the factors which are underlying present discontent in the nursing profession. There is an identified gap in nursing knowledge surrounding the issues relating to recruitment and retention. Communication involves speaking, listening, reading and writing and is an interactive process which is central to the lives of humans. Workplace communication refers to human interaction, information technology, and multimedia and print. It is the means to relationship building between workers, management, and their external environment and is critical to organisational effectiveness. Communication and language are integral to nursing performance (Hall, 2005), in twenty-four hour service however increasing fragmentation due to part-time and casual work in the nursing industry means that effective communication management has become increasingly difficult. More broadly it is known that disruption to communication systems impacts negatively on consumer outcomes. Because of this gap in understanding how nurses view their contemporary nursing world, an interpretative ethnographic study which progressed to a critical ethnographic study, based on the conceptual framework of constructionism and interpretativism was used. The study site was a division within an acute health care facility, and the relationship between increasing casualisation of the nursing workforce and the experiences of communication of standard and non-standard nurses was explored. For this study, full-time standard nurses were those employed to work in a specific unit for forty hours per week. Non-standard nurses were those employed part-time in specific units or those nurses employed to work as relief pool nurses for shift short falls where needed. Nurses employed by external agencies, but required to fill in for shifts at the facility were excluded from this research. This study involved an analysis of observational, interview and focus group data of standard and non-standard nurses within this facility. Three analytical findings - the organisation of nursing work; constructing the casual nurse as other; and the function of space, situate communication within a broader discussion about non-standard work and organisational culture. The study results suggest that a significant culture of marginalisation exists for nurses who work in a non-standard capacity and that this affects communication for nurses and has implications for the quality of patient care. The discussion draws on the seven elements of marginalisation described by Hall, Stephen and Melius (1994). The arguments propose that these elements underpin a culture which supports remnants of the historically gendered stereotype "the good nurse" and these cultural values contribute to practices and behaviour which marginalise all nurses, particularly those who work less than full-time. Gender inequality is argued to be at the heart of marginalising practices because of long standing subordination of nurses by the powerful medical profession, paralleling historical subordination of women in society. This has denied nurses adequate representation and voice in decision making. The new knowledge emanating from this study extends current knowledge of factors surrounding recruitment and retention and as such contributes to an understanding of the current and complex nursing environment.

The role of human capital in economic growth revisited

Benhabib and Spiegel (1994) examine the role of human capital in the development process empirically using a theory-driven specification rather than the standard production function approach. While they find evidence of a positive impact of human capital on income growth, their result is not robust to the inclusion of inequality as an additional covariate. Using an alternate dataset and different measures of inequality, we find robust support for the hypothesis that human capital matters even when we account for the adverse effect of income inequality on growth.

Gay men, social media and self-presentation : managing identities in Gaydar, Facebook and beyond

This study analyses young gay men's identity management in social networking sites Gaydar and Facebook. It examines the expanded opportunities for identity management made available through the convergence of these spaces, as well as new privacy and safety concerns. Findings from this study are discussed in terms of their significance for gay men's digital culture, the approach to gay men's mental health taken by GLBT organisations and support groups, and within broader concerns around social networking sites and digital inequality.

The impact of 'doomed race' assumptions in the administration of Queensland's Indigenous population by the Chief Protectors of Aboriginals from 1897 to 1942

This thesis researched how the anthropological claims of the Aborigines as a 'doomed race' in the decades between 1850 and 1870 became embedded and manifested in pervasive ideologies forming the racist protectionist policies framed in Queensland's Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act - 1897. Administering the Act was the government appointed Chief Protector of Aboriginals. Conferred with extraordinary powers, Chief Protectors acted and made decisions on behalf of successive governments who displayed little interest in Aboriginal affairs. Amendments to the Act between 1897 and 1939 reflected personal agendas and attitudes towards Aborigines by respective Chief Protectors. Conclusively, the research outcomes show that the 'doomed race' theory became a subterfuge for governments to mask society's racial prejudice against Indigenous peoples and allowed governments to dispossess the Indigenous people of their traditional lands without question from white settlers.

It started with a KISS

This is the essay prepared for the exhibition titled 'Hot Chocolate' held at the SASA Gallery, Adelaide, South Australia, 24 October - 29 November, 2012. Below are the words that start the essay and which provide a glimpse of the artworks in the exhibition. By agreeing to work together in this exhibition, the artists in Hot Chocolate delivered across an eclectic assortment of academic enquiry: • the politics of identity • the politics of desire • fetishisation of racial and othered bodies • origin and place • the politics of skin • events, moments, and ephemerality • need We too, talked, laughed, cried and worked through these issues in relation to the artworks submitted, including Pamela’s work, and to the theory and literature we have read and utilised in our words with each other and communities. We begin this piece by reflecting on the writings of bell hooks, whose words kissed us awake and stirred us at the start of our respective formal research journeys. We align her words with some of our activism, advocacy, academic and community work. We will weave the magical lyrics from the 1970s iconic band Hot Chocolate throughout this essay.

Essays on technology adoption under uncertainty, globalization and economic growth

This thesis examines how the initial institutional and technological aspects of the economy and the reforms that alter these aspects influence long run growth and development. These issues are addressed in the framework of stochastic endogenous growth models and an empirical framework. The thesis is able to explain why developing nations exhibit diverse growth and inequality patterns. Consequently, the thesis raises a number of policy implications regarding how these nations can improve their economic outcomes.

Convergence in the gender wage gap in Australia over the 1980s : identifying the role of counteracting forces via the Juhn, Murphy and Pierce decomposition

The paper utilises the Juhn Murphy and Pierce (1991) decomposition to shed light on the pattern of slow male-female wage convergance in Australia over the 1980s. The analysis allows one to distinguish between the role of wage structure and genderspecific effects. The central question addressed is whether rising wage inequality counteracted the forces of increased female investment in labour market skills, i.e. education and experience. The conclusion is that in contrast to the US and the UK, Australian women do not appear to have been swimming against a tide of adverse wage structure changes.