Exploring diverse community discourses : reflections from a local perspective

This paper represents some of the diverse discourses in the social sciences that are not often known by, or considered relevant to, those people interested in community development. On the contrary, I argue that these discourses may in fact be vitally pertinent to understanding the divergent predicaments facing us in our present moment.
After working in the field for twenty years, I am in the final stages of a PhD case study on one of the Victorian 'Community Building Demonstration Projects', based in Melbourne's North. This discussion is therefore based on the intersections between working in a community, traditionally accepted discourses of community development, and 'alternative' discourses that often appear unrelated.
In particular there are seven taken-for-granted cultural stories I will examine: problem posing, holism, social research, post colonial studies, critical social theory, public policy, and eco philosophy, in the hope that these might provide an 'other' story for community and development. Given this broad canvas, I will necessarily be breif on each topic.

Transient teachers : mixed messages of schooling in regional Australia

This article explores the transience and mobility of teachers working in an isolated community: a secondary school in regional Australia. Drawing on parent, student, and teacher interviews, we ask: how should we understand these teacher commitments to schooling and how does this influence parents’ and students’ commitments and understandings of the “outside” value of their community? Responses to these questions are theorized utilizing the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu. Drawing on this work we argue that, even though teachers in this context are the bearers of highly prized capitals, they act more as gatekeepers than as their distributors and/or challengers. While we conclude that teachers may need to address their mobility and the messages this conveys in order to make a difference in such schools and communities, we also acknowledge that there are complexities related to staff residing in the community given its treatment of outsiders.

Lost in translation? Emotional intelligence, affective economies, leadership and organizational change

Not until the late 1990s did the rational/emotional binary embedded in mainstream literature on educational leadership and management come under challenge. Now the emotional dimensions of organisational change and leadership are widely recognised in the leadership, organisational change and school improvement literature. However, the dissolution of the binary did not draw from feminist social theory, critical organisational theory, the sociology of emotions or critical pedagogy. Instead, the strongest influence in educational leadership and administration has been from psychological theory, management theory and brain science, mobilised particularly through Goleman's notion of emotional intelligence. This article undertakes a feminist deconstruction of two texts: one from organisational theory by Goleman and the other on educational leadership and school improvement, in order to explore how ‘emotion’ has been translated into educational leadership. As a counterpoint, I identify the gaps and silences, appropriations and marginalisation identified from feminist perspectives. I argue that the emotional labour of teaching and leading cannot be individualised because emotion is both relational and contextual.

Understanding Marxism

Marxism as an intellectual movement has been one of the most important and fertile contributions to twentieth-century thought. No social theory or political philosophy today can be taken seriously unless it enters a dialogue, not just with the legacy of Marx, but also with the innovations and questions that spring from the movement that his work sparked, Marxism.

Marx provided a revolutionary set of ideas about freedom, politics and society. As social and political conditions changed and new intellectual challenges to Marx’s social philosophy arose, the Marxist theorists sought to update his social theory, rectify the sociological positions of historical materialism and respond to philosophical challenges with a Marxist reply. This book provides an accessible introduction to Marxism by explaining each of the key concepts of Marxist politics and social theory. The book is organized into three parts, which explore the successive waves of change within Marxist theory and places these in historical context, while the whole provides a clear and comprehensive account of Marxism as an intellectual system.

The performing frame

This project explores the ways that creative practices—improvised movement, choreographed dance, and digital video—produce new knowledge about the sociability of public space. In other words, it uses various theoretical concepts and practical strategies to document and analyse the ways people inhabit and sometimes subvert public spaces — such as plazas, malls and piazzas — as part of their everyday experience. Drawing on concepts developed within the fields of performance theory, spatial history, cultural geography and social theory, the project will build a methodological toolbox for understanding the relationships between the diverse groups that use public spaces in Melbourne, Australia. This ‘toolbox’ will subsequently be used to understand analogous public spaces in other parts of the world to generate comparative data about spatial sociability. The research will enable an innovative way of mapping social, civic and political relations in space through a series of creative interventions, and will reveal the politics of everyday movement while exposing tensions between the spaces of public culture — those framed and legitimated by state institutions — and what Michael Warner calls ‘Counter-Publics.’ That is, those oppositional groups who actively seek to use public space in subversive or unauthorised ways.

This project documents a series of performative interventions designed to harness the untapped potential of various forms of street performance genres to function as tools that can produce new ways of understanding the politics of movement in public space. These ‘interventions’ will be generated through a series of practical performance and movement workshops that will draw on street theatre techniques, contact improvisation, Laban movement analysis and contemporary dance choreography. The project will focus on a series of dyadic relationships: self and other, inside and outside, centre and periphery that are relevant to human interaction in public space.
Street performers — musicians, acrobats, jugglers, magicians, mimes and so on — seek public spaces with high volumes of pedestrian traffic in order to maximise their ability to draw an audience and make a living. These performers who create temporary performance zones alter the flow and intensity of movement around them, thereby transforming the plazas, piazzas, town squares and subways favoured by buskers. Some of these performers interact with their audience more than others, and are potentially capable of telling us something about the politics of space. The practice of ‘shadowing’ the movements of passers-by is an increasingly popular form of public entertainment around the world.

Keeping connected: a review of the research relationship

In this paper, some key findings of the Keeping Connected project are discussed in light of the methodological challenges of developing an analytical approach in a large-scale study, particularly in starting with open-ended, participant-selected, digital still visual images as part of 31 longitudinal case studies. The paper works to clarify the methodological and epistemological discussions of the visual data, an issue of great interest in qualitative research and visuality for researchers intent on developing understandings of participatory research methods in the field of youth studies.

The discursive practices of nurse practitioner legislation in Australia

Aim.  The aim of this paper was to examine the nurse practitioner legislative framework in Australia from a critical social theory perspective. Background.  National regulation for nurses and midwives has superseded all previous state legislation with effect from July 2010. The aim of this change was to streamline regulation processes across all health professionals requiring regulation, in order to eliminate diverse state-based regulatory policies that were identified as hindering transferability of the workforce across Australia. This paper explores the changes with reference to nurse practitioners. Since their introduction to Australia different legislative practices between states have presented difficult endorsement procedures which have affected employment. Data sources.  Information for the paper is drawn from a doctoral study which examined the politics of advancing nursing in Australia, with particular reference to the discourses of nurse practitioners. This is augmented by more recent legislative documents and policies, as well as media reports, to examine the process of change in legislation and the unfolding discourses on employment and practice. Implications to nursing.  Nurse practitioner endorsement may be more complicated, defeating the original premise of transferability of a skilled workforce across state jurisdictions. Conclusion.  This paper exposes the influence that powerful discourses can have on a major change to professional practice.

The positive criteria of legal norms: law between facts and norms

Whether an abstract jurisprudence of law can be developed such that law is neutral with respect topositive choices, or whether law is necessarily informed by social facts, values and assumptions, with reference to the work of Jurgden Habermas, countering that author's claim of neutrality.

Leadership in higher education : The normative project of the common good in conditions of globalization, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), and APEX in Malaysia

In this paper, the author discusses the reform agenda undertaken by UniversitiSains Malaysia (USM) to contextualise higher education reform within culturaland social theory. It is important to understand leadership in leading reformwithin a broader and more holistic fashion that takes into account localculture, politics and history. University Sains Malaysia is embarking on what isreferred to as the APEX agenda. The APEX strategy in Malaysia is an importantapproach towards achieving world-class status university institutions. The ApexUniversities will be the nation’s centres of academic distinction. Ensuring andbuilding upon the ethical authority that APEX gives USM, the challenge of leadership in USM is to engage in the forces of globalization and modernizationwhile at the same time take cognizance of the characteristics and demands ofMalaysian culture as central still to the successful mission of USM.

A critique of the political theology of Slavoj Zizek

This chapter critiques the political theology of Slavoj Zizek as beset by social theoretical and strategic political problems. Political theology here is a privileged intellectual terrain on which to simultaneously resolve questions about liberating forms of social cohesion in a post-revolutionary political community and about cultural strategy in the radical program. In connection with the Marxist critique of religious ideology, Zizek’s work represents an important contribution to the research program that emerged from the Althusserian approaches to social theory. But although Zizek has the conceptual resources to generate a dialectical theory of the connection between religious ideology and political strategy, he instead opts for a theory of radical rupture with existing forms of life. Detoured through the encounter with Carl Schmitt, Zizek’s doctrine of radical rupture quickly becomes an inverted Schmittianism, freighted with the problems of the militarisation of politics and the arbitrary designation of enemies that he diagnoses in Schmitt, but does not transcend in his own response. Zizek’s figure of the “religious suspension of the ethical” brings the politics of rupture to its most problematic (and baroque) formulations, revealing the fundamental problem of the ideological representation of political structures.

Simmel, the police form and the limits of democratic policing

© 2015 The Author. I argue that the social theory of Georg Simmel can be used to illustrate certain limitations to the potential of democratic policing. Simmel makes a number of claims about trust, secrecy and accountability that are shown to have immediate relevance to my empirical case study of police-public consultation forums in Edinburgh, Scotland. Two particular aspects of the 'form' of the police-public relationship-the police's command of non-negotiable force and inequality in the reciprocity of information-play a key role in limiting some of the principal aspirations of democratic policing theory. There are permanent barriers to improving the democratic credentials of the police I argue, yet positive and progressive change is still achievable.

Bourdieu and doing policy sociology in education

Despite Bourdieu having written nothing explicitly about education policy, the chapter argues the usefulness of his social theory to doing policy analysis in education within a policy sociology frame. The chapter draws on Bourdieu's 'thinking tools', including the concepts of habitus, capitals, fields and practice, which sit in a synergistic relationship with each other, and applies them to an approach for doing education policy analysis. It then considers the education policy field, logics of practice of different fields in relation to the policy cycle, policy habitus, and the emergent global education policy field.

Out of touch

In June 2016, an Australian on minimum wage earned $656.90 per week. That is $34,159 a year, before tax. According to the Australian Tax Office’s ‘simple tax calculator’, the tax owed would be $3030, leaving a take-home salary of $31,128. Let’s call it $600 a week.It’s fair to say that many of us would struggle to make ends meet on that income – $600 a week does not go very far in modern Australia.

Shaping and being shaped: extending the relationship between habitus and practice

This chapter extends understandings of the contributions of practice in re/forming the habitus. In Bourdieu’s account, an agent’s practices are thought to reflect his or her habitus: that system of dispositions operating at the level of pre-thought or un-thought and expressed in tendencies and inclinations to think and act in certain ways under certain conditions. Evidence of the habitus can be 'read' from practice. The shaping and re-shaping of the habitus involves practices of family and community (primary pedagogic work) and of social institutions (secondary pedagogic work), in any given field. However, Bourdieu also describes habitus as constantly evolving and the outcome of past practices. This raises questions about the conditions under which an agent’s field-specific practices might, in time, influence the shaping of their habitus, leading either to a feel-for or a rejection of the dominant game that defines the field. The chapter explores these issues within the context of formulaic approaches to research production in higher education. It asks whether the practices required of academics in order to comply with conditions of the field are merely a performative response or whether they might also have a deeper role in the reshaping of the individual and collective academic habitus?