Power-knowledge in Australian legal education: Corporatism's reign

How and why corporatism exists and persists within Australian law schools - as a form of knowledge, corporatism's success is attributable to the convergence of a range of historical, social and political contingencies.

Moving and dancing towards decolonisation in education: An example from an Indigenous Australian performance classroom

This paper explores the special type of thinking, moving and dancing place which is opened up for decolonisaton when students engage in an embodied pedagogical practice in Indigenous education. The author examines what decolonisation means in this context by describing the ways in which the curriculum, the students and teacher, and more generally the discipline of ethnomusicology itself, undergo a process to question, critique, and move aside the pedagogical script of colonialism in order to allow Indigenous ways of understanding music and dance to be presented, privileged and empowered. Key questions are: What is the relationship between embodiment and disembodiment and decolonisation and colonisation? In what ways is embodiment more than, or other than, the presence of moving bodies? In what ways is performativity an aspect of power/knowledge/subject formations? How can it be theorised? What could the pedagogical scripts of decolonisation look like?

Foretelling pathology: The poetics of prognosis

This paper examines a number of French middle-brow novels, usually called at the time romans de murs, from the period 1880-1910. It shows how, in these stories, doctors are shown to foretell the course of narrative through the diagnosis of certain pathologies, especially psychosexual ones. These pathologies are thus represented as implacable narrative programmes. In effect, most of these novels renounce the standard fictional resources of intrigue and suspense in favour of the relentless working out of their initial prognosis. The authority of medical discourse is therefore not just confirmed and disseminated: it is elaborated as fatality in the very terms of the novel. Copyright © SAGE Publications.

Are Sri Lankan entrepreneurs motivated by the need for achievement?

The entrepreneurship models in existence in Sri Lanka are often based on the assumptions of n-Ach and personality trait theory. In this paper we describe empirical research into entrepreneurial motivations in Sri Lanka that addresses the neglect of socio-cultural factors. Our findings suggest that entrepreneurial motivation in Sri Lanka is rooted not in a need for individual achievement, but in the conscious or unconscious need to satisfy a sense of social intimacy. The emphasis on social power, social relations and collectivism create a setting for entrepreneurial motivation in Sri Lanka that drives almost directly counter to western ideologies of entrepreneurial motivation (from paper).

Relations between high and low power groups: The importance of legitimacy

Using a social identity perspective, two experiments examined the effects of power and the legitimacy of power differentials on intergroup bias. In Experiment 1, 125 math-science students were led to believe that they had high or low representation in a university decision-making body relative to social-science students and that this power position was either legitimate or illegitimate. Power did not have an independent effect on bias; rather, members of both high and low power groups showed more bias when the power hierarchy was illegitimate than when it was legitimate. This effect was replicated in Experiment 2 (N =105). In addition, Experiment 2 showed that groups located within an unfair power hierarchy expected the superordinate power body to be more discriminatory than did those who had legitimately high or low power. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for group relations.

Research, knowledge and design

The discussion about relations between research and design has a number of strands, and presumably motivations. Putting aside the question whether or not design or “creative endeavour” should be counted as research, for reasons to do with institutional recognition or reward, the question remains how, if at all, is design research? This question is unlikely to have attracted much interest but for matters external to Architecture within the modern university. But Architecture as a discipline now needs to understand research much better than in the past when ‘research’ was whatever went on in building science, history or people/environment studies. In this paper, I begin with some common assumptions about design, considered in relation to research, and suggest how the former can constitute or be a mode of the latter. Central to this consideration is an understanding of research as the production of publicly available knowledge. The method is that of conceptual analysis which is much more fruitful than is usually appreciated. This work is part of a larger project in philosophy of design, in roughly the analytical tradition.

MHCWeb: Converting a WWW database into a knowledge-based collaborative environment

The World Wide Web (WWW) is useful for distributing scientific data. Most existing web data resources organize their information either in structured flat files or relational databases with basic retrieval capabilities. For databases with one or a few simple relations, these approaches are successful, but they can be cumbersome when there is a data model involving multiple relations between complex data. We believe that knowledge-based resources offer a solution in these cases. Knowledge bases have explicit declarations of the concepts in the domain, along with the relations between them. They are usually organized hierarchically, and provide a global data model with a controlled vocabulary, We have created the OWEB architecture for building online scientific data resources using knowledge bases. OWEB provides a shell for structuring data, providing secure and shared access, and creating computational modules for processing and displaying data. In this paper, we describe the translation of the online immunological database MHCPEP into an OWEB system called MHCWeb. This effort involved building a conceptual model for the data, creating a controlled terminology for the legal values for different types of data, and then translating the original data into the new structure. The 0 WEB environment allows for flexible access to the data by both users and computer programs.

An Economic Analysis of the Legal Concept of Trustees' Power of Investment

Authorised trustee status is a legal concept which has economic implications; one of the major implications is that it assists in the direction of investment funds into particular securities and areas of the economy. The concept of authorised trustee status, while attempting to achieve specific outcomes for the beneficiaries of trusts cannot be relied upon to secure these results. Economic analysis of the role of the trustee maintains that this role is one of portfolio manager; a role which is complex but which is explicable in terms of definable procedures and practices. The role of trustee as portfolio manager is one which requires greater financial knowledge than can be assumed is possessed by all trustees. The trustee as portfolio manager is required to maintain a review of decisions make under powers to invest trust assets. A solution to the problem of authorised trustee status is proposed. The solution takes two parts: the first is the adoption of the prudent person approach but with the codification of duties of the trustee and the explicit listing of the factors that a trustee should consider in using the investment powers. The second part of the proposed solution is to link the investment powers of trustees to the best practice features of securities advisers who are now licensed by a regulatory body, the Australian Securities and Investment Commission.