Stigma toward mental illness : a cross-cultural comparison of Taiwanese, Chinese immigrants to Australia and Anglo-Australians

This study investigated the relationship between culture and attitudes toward mental illness. In total, 196 men and 347 women were recruited from Australia and Taiwan. All participants completed a questionnaire assessing their attitudes toward mental illness. Australian-born Chinese and Chinese immigrants to Australia also completed a questionnaire assessing cultural values. Chinese immigrants to Australia and Taiwanese held more stigmatizing attitudes than Australian-born Chinese and Anglo-Australians. Australian-born Chinese adopted Australian cultural practices more than Chinese immigrants, but these groups did not differ in terms of adherence to Chinese cultural practices. The adoption of Australian cultural practices was significantly associated with lower stigmatizing attitudes. These findings reveal the influence of culture and acculturation processes on stigmatizing attitudes toward the mentally ill.

Establishing Competitive Domination Cycles for Peer-to-peer Game Combat

Games require balance to be fair and enjoyable. In two player combat settings balance can be achieved by ensuring that both units are equally capable. The possibility of alliances changes the nature of balance when additional players are introduced. One approach to achieving balance is to use a domination loop between agents in a rock, scissors, paper style approach. This paper investigates whether such loops exist within the existing rules of game combat. Search processes within the attribute space of the game units are used to identify loops within an existing game architecture. A dominance metric is used to identify cycles where the victory is achieved by a clear threshold. Cycles with up to 5 players are demonstrated, although larger cycles require more effort to find. Use of models of game play and attribute space search are recommended as a mechanism for balancing games of this format.

Indigenous subjectivities. How young women prisoners subvert domination representations to maintain their sense of intrinsic worth

This chapter describes how young women prisoners draw on NZ Maori spiritual values to resist limiting and limited identity constructions in language use within the prison.

Mixed feelings: Anglo-Indians and the distribution of the sensible in Indian cinema

Hollywood, and various regional cinemas in India typically represent Mixed-Race Anglo-Indians as a degenerate community marked by lax morals, alcoholism, and indolence. These stereotypical tropes typically generate indignant protests from members of this miniscule Indian community, and debates about the representation of Anglo-Indians focus on the injustices propagated by such stereotypes. This paper rethinks Anglo-Indian representation in cinema by drawing on Jacques Rancière’s concept of ‘the distribution of the sensible,’ which provides a cartography for understanding how one’s various identity assignations structure sensory experience. In other words those who are marginalized have ways of seeing and hearing from those occupy normative or dominant subject positions, and these differences are best approached in terms of neo-Kantian aesthetic judgment. It also argues, with Rancière, that ‘inequality’ is built into the distribution of the sensible. Drawing on a number of Indian and Hollywood films — including Aparna Sen’s 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981) Anjan Dutt’s Bada Din (1998) Ismail Merchant’s Cotton Mary (2000), Bow Barracks Forever (2004) and Harry McClure’s Going Away (2013) — the paper contends that Rancière’s ‘distribution of the sensible’ allows us to think through a politics that is connected to ‘aesthetic judgement’ as well as a politics of differentiation that informs our understanding of the function of minoritarian characters in narrative cinema.

Book review: Anglo-Australian relations and the 'Turn to Europe': 1961-1972

The seminal decisions made by British governments in the 1960s to withdraw from a military role east of Suez and to apply to enter the European Economic Community effectively ended the British Empire. For Australian governments and their officials these decisions caused a seismic shift in Australia’s place in the world. Andrea Benvenuti’s Anglo-Australian Relations and the ‘Turn to Europe’: 19611972 tells the story of how successive Australian governments struggled against the United Kingdom’s decisions to withdraw from its worldwide imperial role to a strategic and economic future based in Europe. Benvenuti demonstrates how the actions of Coalition governments of the 1960s varied from active and sometimes angry diplomacy to reverse the direction of British policy to passive and sullen acceptance of a new world order in which the British Empire was no more. This fine book skilfully analyses the end of empire from the official perspectives of both Canberra and London.