Rethinking ethics review as institutional discourse

In this article, the authors trace the emergence of an institutional discourse of ethical research and interrogate its effects in constituting what ethical research is taken to be and how ethical researchers are configured. They illuminate the dissonance between this regime of truth and research practice and the implications for the injunction to respect others, illustrating their case with instances from their interview study with anorexic teenage girls. The authors propose that conceptualising the regulation of research ethics as an institutional discourse opens up the possibility for asserting counterdiscourses that place relational ethics at the center of moral decision making in research.

Homicide law reform in Victoria, Australia from provocation to defensive homicide and beyond

Homicide law reform surrounding the partial defences to murder currently animates legal stakeholders in Australia and the United Kingdom, particularly in relation to cases of lethal intimate partner violence. In 2005, the Victorian Government implemented a series of homicide law reforms, central to which was the abolition of the partial defence of provocation and the instatement of an offence of defensive homicide. This article, based on a larger qualitative research study with British, Victorian and New South Wales legal stakeholders, explores experiences and perceptions of reforms in Victoria. An analysis of the impact of homicide law reform, using Hudson's principles of discursiveness and reflectiveness as a framework for analysis, reveals some dissonance between the intent and outcomes of these legal reforms. This study concludes that reforms crafted to counter gender bias in the operation of homicide law have produced mixed results for female victims of intimate partner homicide and related case law.

Research mentoring on the edge : early career researchers and academic fringe-dwelling

Discourses of research leadership define not only what quality research leadership can and should be, but also identify those who speak and act with authority. Similarly, these discourses construct particular professional identities and idealised ‘ways of being’. They provide possibilities for research leaders as well as those categorised as 'Early Career Researchers' (ECRs) to create alternative identities and representations of themselves. This study reports the views of 32 academics across 16 Australian universities in four States about research mentoring and leadership for ECRs. The primary interest was to explore how research leadership is conceptualised, implemented and negotiated in the disciplinary fields of business, nursing and education. Whilst a number of ECRs viewed formal research mentoring as taking a ‘tick the box’ approach that they believed of limited value, a number of research leaders had different views. Most senior research leaders viewed the systemic provision of assistance their universities offered in a positive light. The dissonance in views centred on the subject positioning of academics in research. The dissatisfaction expressed by ECRs, a number of whom positioned themselves as fringe-dwellers ‘on the edge’ of their institutional research culture, raises questions about research sustainability and succession planning in Australian tertiary
institutions.

Competition or collaboration: policies and practices in international higher education

Universities in the twenty-first century experience numerous competing drivers that shape their sense of purpose and role in society, their perspectives of knowledge and its production and their overall sense of being in the world. One major force is marketplace discourse, in particular neo-liberalism and competition, which is discordant with the discourse of academic collaboration and collegial sharing. This review essay examines what it means to ‘be’ a university in light of these overarching discourses and what is envisioned for universities of the future.

The emotional labour of the aspirant leader: traversing school politics

The emotions of the aspirant leader are underexplored. In this chapter, we detail how aspirants experience the transition from teacher to leader and report on the kinds of emotional labour associated with the transition. This was examined during events of high emotional arousal for 130 school aspirants: when they felt professionally wounded, either by colleagues, leaders, parents or students. During a time of wounding, emotional work and emotional labour hinged on the dissonance between 'display rules' of the school and what aspirants' actually felt. Exploring the wounding stories revealed common display rules, which were often broken. Breaking these rules always had consequences and emotional correlates. The most prevalent form of emotional labour was surface acting. The.final discovery was the resilience of the aspirants as they recovered. Invariably, aspirants progressed through an emotion cycle of Regrouping, Recovery and Resolution. The quality of collegial relationships was the key to resolving the woundings.

How the concept of agency aids in teaching about sustainability

Sustainability education is becoming an integral part of education for all students.The paper revisits startling results from large scale international studies that show the dissonance between young people’s sustainability knowledge and the resistance of young people to put into practice. The reluctance to enact sustainability knowledge necessitates a review of current teaching practices as these raise important issues about current models of education and how sustainability is captured within education. Education about sustainability seeks to future proof our society through the teaching and learning of actions that ensure our collective long term future. For this reason teaching about sustainability incorporates a focus on social responsibility as well as individual responsibility. 

Something like an emergency

‘Something like an emergency’, a sonic poem recorded on CD, investigates the hunger of writing as a desire, not for a return of the dead, but for a breakthrough of impasses in language, both in love and in the writer’s (frustrated) translation of vision. Proceeding from Bachelard’s phenomenological observation that the poetic image puts language in a state of emergence, this work argues, instead, that poetry puts language in a state of emergency. Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of music as a deterriorialization of the refrain; a rhythmic pattern which marks out a territory, is invoked in both the music performance and in the words. The writing uses a ‘matting’ (rhizomatic) effect in its verse fragments which echo and refract others. Reverberation is also explored in the piano and its sonic processing which provides elements of dissonance and consonance, refracting dialogues in the text. Voice and music sometimes argue, sometimes agree, and sometimes are indistinguishable. However, this dialectic is further disturbed: at times the piano and voice seem to pay no attention to each other, taking off on their own ‘lines of flight’, in subversion of ‘collaboration’. In its use of recorded improvisational techniques this work also challenges the ‘superiority’ of live improvisation.
It was first performed at Double Dialogues conference, ‘The Hunger Artist: Food and the Arts’, Toronto, 2010. The text and accompanying discursive article form a book chapter in 2012 Food and Appetites: The Hunger Artist and the Arts, Ann McCulloch and Pavlina Radia(eds). It has been broadcast on RRR, 3CR radios and is released on CD and Youtube. By invitation it was performed at the Midsumma Festival, 2014.

Grounded theory and leadership research: a critical realist perspective

The methodology of grounded theory has great potential to contribute to our understanding of leadership within particular substantive contexts. However, our notions of good science might constrain these contributions. We argue that for grounded theorists a tension might exist between a desire to create a contextualised theory of leadership and a desire for scientifically justified issues of validity and generalizable theory. We also explore how the outcome of grounded theory research can create a dissonance between theories that resonate with the reality they are designed to explore, and the theories that resonate with a particular yet dominant 'scientific' approach in the field of leadership studies - the philosophy of science commonly known as positivism. We examine the opportunities provided by an alternative philosophy of science, that of critical realism. We explore how conducting grounded theory research informed by critical realism might strengthen researchers' confidence to place emphasis on an understanding and explanation of contextualised leadership as a scientific goal, rather than the scientific goal of generalization through empirical replication. Two published accounts of grounded theory are critiqued candidly to help emphasise our arguments. We conclude by suggesting how critical realism can help shape and enhance grounded theory research into the phenomenon of leadership. © 2010.

Experiences of racism, racial/ethnic attitudes, motivated fairness and mental health outcomes among primary and secondary school students

While studies investigating the health effects of racial discrimination for children and youth have examined a range of effect modifiers, to date, relationships between experiences of racial discrimination, student attitudes, and health outcomes remain unexplored. This study uniquely demonstrates the moderating effects of vicarious racism and motivated fairness on the association between direct experiences of racism and mental health outcomes, specifically depressive symptoms and loneliness, among primary and secondary school students. Across seven schools, 263 students (54.4% female), ranging from 8 to 17 years old (M = 11.2, SD = 2.2) reported attitudes about other racial/ethnic groups and experiences of racism. Students from minority ethnic groups (determined by country of birth) reported higher levels of loneliness and more racist experiences relative to the majority group students. Students from the majority racial/ethnic group reported higher levels of loneliness and depressive symptoms if they had more friends from different racial/ethnic groups, whereas the number of friends from different groups had no effect on minority students' loneliness or depressive symptoms. Direct experiences of racism were robustly related to higher loneliness and depressive symptoms in multivariate regression models. However, the association with depressive symptoms was reduced to marginal significance when students reported low motivated fairness. Elaborating on the negative health effects of racism in primary and secondary school students provides an impetus for future research and the development of appropriate interventions.

What about us? We have careers too! The career experiences of Australian sport scientists

 he professionalisation of sport has provided career opportunities for athletes, coaches and sport scientists alike. The career development literature for athletes is well established and the empirical career literature for coaches is growing, but little is known about the careers of sport scientists. The purpose of this investigation was to explore and examine the career experiences of Australian sport scientists. In-depth interviews were conducted with six practicing Australian sport scientists at different career stages. Several themes emerged from the data on careers of sport scientists that are unique to sport. Sport scientists identify strongly with their role in sport success and yet they receive little recognition for what they do. All participants experienced career dissonance as they transitioned from practitioner to another career such as academia or sport management. Feelings of loss were identified by participants as their applied work diminished when they moved away from their early career service roles. All six participants believed that in order to advance their career in sport their options were moving overseas, working in academia, or retraining for a career in sports management. It is recommended that sport scientists be provided with better career education and more structured professional development.

Heritage diplomacy

This paper explores the concept of heritage diplomacy. To date much of the analysis regarding the politics of heritage has focused on contestation, dissonance and conflict. Heritage diplomacy seeks to address this imbalance by critically examining themes such as cooperation, cultural aid and hard power, and the ascendency of intergovernmental and non-governmental actors as mediators of the dance between nationalism and internationalism. The paper situates heritage diplomacy within broader histories of international governance and diplomacy itself. These are offered to interpret the interplay between the shifting forces and structures, which, together, have shaped the production, governance and international mobilisation of heritage in the modern era. A distinction between heritage as diplomacy and in diplomacy is outlined in order to reframe some of the ways in which heritage has acted as a constituent of cultural nationalisms, international relations and globalisation. In mapping out directions for further enquiry, I argue the complexities of the international ordering of heritage governance have yet to be teased out. A framework of heritage diplomacy is thus offered in the hope that it can do some important analytical work in the field of critical heritage theory, opening up some important but under theorised aspects of heritage analysis.

Material culture and contested heritage in tourism

SummaryContestation is a central element of heritage tourism. This chapter examines issues of contestation in relation to material cultural heritage with special attention given to the built environment, and archaeological and architectural sites. The relationship between tourism and material heritage is characterised by contestation in multiple ways and different scales and includes concerns over values, over space, over materials, over meanings, and over ownership. Using examples drawn from emerging economies as well as more developed destinations the chapter emphasizes the need to pursue these issues through a number of analytical lenses that draw upon different conceptual understandings of heritage and tourism and pursue a range of methodological strategies capable of unearthing the complexities of the contested relationship between tourism and material culture.

Persona - an old public relations problem?

This essay uses the neologism citizen public relations to express a view of the phenomena examined by persona studies implying that public relations studies might be regarded as an antecedent discipline to the former. It goes on to suggest potentially intriguing differences and similarities to do with political and epistemological problematics. The central theme is that the term identity is simultaneously the key link and the key contrast between the two disciplines. This is because the term identity is usually deployed at the internal, psychological, subjective level by scholars of persona while it is usually applied to external, material objects and events by the public relations industry and its academia. The essay also makes the point that both areas of study can be unified as different species of the genera rhetoric in the traditional sense of that still older field. This coincidence and dissonance may invoke a debate which can lead to theory development in all three fields. The fields are not comprehensively surveyed – a process which would be lengthy and might bring up many contrasting perspectives. Instead the work of representative leading authors is presented to make a prima facie case.