Regime change in Australian maternity hospitals

Contemporary attempts to ‘organise’ risk and manage uncertainty are remaking many ‘industrial-era’ institutions – including maternity hospitals. Health policies are encouraging a shift away from hierarchical, medically dominated structures towards new governance systems and ‘women-centred’ care, often led by midwives. To understand the resulting contestation, in this article we argue for a wider conceptual frame than a focus on neo-liberal state regulation of the professions. We utilise theories of the ‘second modernity’, in particular those concerning socio-cultural changes associated with shifts in risk regimes, to interpret findings from qualitative research studies undertaken in Australian maternity hospitals. Whereas analysis confined to macro or institutional levels emphasises stability and hegemony, we demonstrate that when cultural and interactional levels are examined, considerable fluidity and uncertainty in the identification and negotiation of risk is evident, resulting in new work practices with inevitable shifts in professional identities and allegiances.

The indelible ink of the special stamp: an insider’s research essay on imprints and erasures

The medical profession ascribes otherness to people with disabilities through diagnosis and expertism, which sets in motion discursive powers that oversee their exclusion through schooling and beyond. In this paper, I present a narrative pieced together from personal experiences of ducking and weaving the deficit discourse in ‘inclusive’ education, when seeking employment and in day-to-day family interaction as a person with severely impaired vision. This work builds on previous qualitative research I conducted in Queensland, Australia with a group of young people with impaired vision who attended an inclusive secondary school. I frame this discussion using Foucault’s conception of normalising judgement against the hegemony of normalcy, and consider that inclusion for people with disabilities is reminiscent of a haunting. Through this analysis, I demonstrate how my ideology is formed, and how it in turn shapes a research agenda geared toward seeking greater inclusion for young people with disabilities in schools.

Epistemological pluralism in research synthesis methods

The purpose of research synthesis is to produce new knowledge by making explicit connections and tensions between individual study reports that were not visible before. Every effort of synthesizing research is inevitably premised on certain epistemological assumptions. It is crucial that research synthesists reflect critically on how their epistemological positioning enables them to pursue certain purposes while preventing them from pursuing other purposes. The literature on research synthesis methods is dominated by publications premised on positivist assumptions. The rhetoric of systematic reviews, best-evidence synthesis and What Works Clearinghouse privileges syntheses with positivist orientations. Contesting the hegemony of positivist research syntheses, this paper makes a case for research syntheses that are informed by diverse epistemological orientations. It illuminates how research syntheses with distinct epistemological orientations can serve complementary, equally worthwhile, purposes.

China's "South-South" trade with Southeast Asia: unequal exchange and combined and uneven development

China’s unprecedented emergence as an economic and political power has created a new geopolitical economy for semi-industrialised and developing economies in Southeast Asia. This paper examines China’s trade relationships with Thailand and Indonesia using the concepts of uneven and combined development (UCD) and unequal exchange. The mass of surplus value obtained through China’s trade with the developed economies has flowed into the considerable expansion in China’s imports from developing countries since 2000. China has maintained a consistent trade deficit with the latter. While the developing countries concerned have benefitted from this set of relationships, the extent to which they have done so has been determined by national strategies. In countries like Thailand – where manufacturing capital and a significant working class has emerged – exports expanded on the basis of mutually advantageous technologically and skills intensive goods. These are produced with a similar organic composition of capital as in China. The result has been a further consolidation of the hegemony of manufacturing capital. Indonesia, however, has a political system and economy long dominated by resource exploitation linked fractions of capital. The result has been a surge in primary goods exports. The current commodity price cycle has meant these goods exchange at prices above their value. The current looming price correction, however, may have negative repercussions. In the meantime, the concentration in raw materials exports is helping to prevent the emergence of a circuit of productive capital in manufacturing. The evidence from these contrasting cases suggests that the degree to which developing economies can benefit from China’s own historically unparalleled combined development remains highly contingent on the strength of the combined development possibilities and efforts within these other national social formations. Above all, there is the degree to which manufacturing sectors of capital can obtain hegemony.

Killing the father, Parmenides: on Lacan’s anti-philosophy

This paper examines the historical claims about philosophy, dating back to Parmenides, that we argue underlie Jacques Lacan’s polemical provocations in the mid-1970s that his position was an “anti-philosophie”. Following an introduction surveying the existing literature on the subject, in part ii, we systematically present the account of classical philosophy Lacan has in mind when he declares psychoanalysis to be an antiphilosophy after 1975, assembling his claims about the history of ideas in Seminars XVII and XX in ways earlier contributions of this subject have not systematically done. In part iii, focusing upon Lacan’s remarkable reading of Descartes’ break with premodern philosophy—but touching on Lacan’s readings of Hegel and (in a remarkable confirmation of Lacan’s “Parmenidean” conception of philosophy) the early Wittgenstein—we examine Lacan’s positioning of psychoanalysis as a legatee of the Cartesian moment in the history of western ideas, nearly-contemporary with Galileo’s mathematization of physics and carried forwards by Kant’s critical philosophy and account of the substanceless subject of apperception. In different terms than Slavoj Žižek, we propose that it is Lacan’s famous avowal that the subject of the psychoanalysis is the subject first essayed by Descartes in The Meditations on First Philosophy as confronting an other capable of deceit (as against mere illusion or falsity) that decisively measures the distance between Lacan’s unique “antiphilosophy” and the forms of later modern linguistic and cultural relativism whose hegemony Alain Badiou has decried, at the same time as it sets Lacan’s antiphilosophy apart from the Parmenidean legacy for which thinking and being could be the same.

The whiteness of David Bowie

During the 1980s, in particular, Bowie embodied particular notions of white masculinity that were on the one hand supportive of its idealized hegemony, and on the other subverted its normative power. I will take 1983 as the year when his whiteness is particularly visible and unstable. Bowie, as either the blonde dandy from Let’s Dance; the enigmatic character, Maj. Jack 'Strafer' Celliers from Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983); or the simmering vampire, John Blaylock from The Hunger (1983), crystlised the pure qualities of white masculinity while demonstrating its violent, queer and subversive nature. The chapter will suggest that Bowie has constantly operated along a white continuum, self-consciously embodying it, granting it carnal and ideological power, while drawing attention to its death-like instinct, its anti-reproductive progeny, its implicit queerness.I have chosen to read Bowie’s whiteness through this shortened window of temporality to enable me to draw into the analysis the historical and cultural issues of the period in question. 1983 registers as the year in which whiteness is acutely imagined to be under threat from the Asian tiger and transforming geo-political realities, its own languid anti-corporeality, the AIDS ‘epidemic’, and from the rise of racism in Europe and elsewhere - realities which require it to re-position its power relations with the sexual, and ethnic Other. The whiteness in/of David Bowie speaks particularly eloquently to this historical moment.

Locating the past in its silence: history and marketing theory in India

The paper aims to argue, while examining the history of marketing theory in India, that the discipline is a historical, serves large business interests and is shaped by hegemonic Western knowledge.

Development NGOs, semiclientelism, and the state in the Philippines: from “crossover” to double-crossed

Civil-society participation continues to be a considerable focus of debate surrounding politics and public-policy making at international and national scales, especially in the developing world. Important examples of such processes have occurred in the Philippines. The Philippine polity is widely regarded as embodying a culture of clan-based politics entailing considerable relationships of clientelism and semiclientelism. Yet there is also considerable evidence of widespread civil-society activism. This paper examines how politically left-of-center development nongovernment organizations (NGOs) and people’s organizations (POs) have attempted to “cross over” to state positions in order to implement social and economic reforms. Select engagement by key personnel from the NGO sphere has often been premised on the notion that it was aimed at transforming these features of Philippine politics. Engagement with two recent and (claimed to be) reforming governments has not led to positive outcomes. The Philippine experience, for the most part, is an expression of the problematic assumptions that have tended to inform the debate over civil society and state interaction in many developing-country contexts. Such conceptions have been inserted into an all-encompassing notion of democratic transition, whereby political and economic liberalization are supposed to emerge in synergy, with civil society acting as a form of “stabilizer” compensating for and complementing the role of the state. Given the predominance of such weak states as the Philippines in the developing world, it is important to consider what the impacts of development NGOs participation may be. Most important, what may be the impacts of such forms of participation in a society and polity characterized by entrenched clientelist relationships? Contrasting a Gramscian analysis with Putnam-inspired conceptions of civil society that underpin the transition model, the paper argues that far from being a conditioning force on the state, civil society is itself a sphere where clientelism and semiclientelism predominate. So powerful are these forces, that arguably well-intentioned NGO personnel who previously adopted a critical stance toward neo-clientelism ultimately become absorbed by these relationships.

Meet the phallic teacher: curriculum design and identity in a neoliberal imaginary

This paper introduces the concept of the phallic teacher, a spectral figure that needs to be negotiated in teachers’ everyday work and in school-based disciplinary communities of practice. Reporting the findings of a three year doctoral study completed in 2014, the paper looks closely at how English teachers design both curriculum and identity in an environment where feminist and poststructuralist work of the late 20th century seems to have lost traction.These observations are based on empirical research in a Victorian school, combined with autoethnographic writing and other materials connecting teachers’ and researchers’ lives to the broader cultural postfeminist debate. The paper makes room for an absent subject, the teacher, marginalised in neoliberal discourses of curriculum and critiques the masculinist hegemony of outcomes and standards-based education. This provides us with new ways to challenge increasingly dominant current paradigms and to conceptualise a different future in which the standpoints of teachers are privileged in curriculum theory and curricular innovation.

Meet the phallic teacher: designing curriculum and identity in a neoliberal imaginary

This paper introduces the concept of the phallic teacher, a spectral figure negotiated in teachers’ everyday work and in school-based disciplinary communities of practice. Reporting the findings of a three year Australian doctoral study completed in 2014, the paper looks closely at how English teachers design both curriculum and identity in an environment where feminist and poststructuralist work of the late 20th century seems to have lost traction. These observations made here are based on empirical research in a Victorian school, combined with autoethnographic writing and other materials connecting teachers’ and researchers’ lives to the broader cultural postfeminist debate. The paper makes room for an absent subject, the teacher, marginalised in neoliberal discourses of curriculum and critiques the masculinist hegemony of outcomes and standards-based education. This provides us with new ways to challenge increasingly dominant current paradigms and to conceptualise a different future in which the standpoints of teachers are privileged in curriculum theory and curricular innovation.

Duplicity of meaning

This article considers the ‘duplicitous’ functions of the word ‘wild’ in the arguments over the Queensland’s Wild Rivers Act 2005. Certain traditional owners, environmentalist and state groups have deployed the term pragmatically, simultaneously endorsing its usage (through repetition) and disavowing its colonial associations (through explanation) against protestations by Indigenous and non-Indigenous stakeholders. In a sense, this ambivalent ‘duplicity’ is entirely consistent with relations between the settler-colonial nation state and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander polities – relations aptly characterised by Povinelli as shaped by ‘the cunning of recognition’ – which stratify relations between groups through the endorsing of ‘tradition’. Thus ‘the Indigenous’ can be posited both as one political minority amidst a multicultural polity and as a pre-modern and endemic precursor of the settler-colonial nation, constitutively conservationist ‘first Australians’. Arguably, in the legislation’s ‘recognition’ of the ‘wild’ past, Indigenous peoples – who were known in nineteenth century Queensland as ‘wild blacks’ or ‘myalls’ (meaning those who resisted leaving their lands – and ‘could be shot with impunity’) are recouped as the nation’s first caretakers of ‘pristine’ waterways. However, this article regards the current use of this ambivalent word as also potentially authorising those recognised through this mythic form, providing a limited and uncertain opportunity for traditional owners to ground a form of sovereign right in lands and waterways. Against totalising settler-colonial critiques of hegemony, this article argues that the Wild Rivers legislation does not forget indigeneity, but rather relies on indigeneity. While much research concerning ‘natural’ ideologies such as ‘the noble savage’ has worked to show that faith in a belated era of historical fullness or presence can serve to evacuate the present of material details, it may also be that the ‘wild’ can also offer Indigenous peoples a valuable political authority to, in the words of Courtney Jung, ‘contest the exclusions through which it has been constituted’.

Post: 9/11: hidden pedagogy: the positional forces of pedagogy in Victoria, Australia

This qualitative study charts the lived narratives of twelve participants, six teachers and six students from urban and rural Victoria, Australia. The study examines in detail the question ‘How do teachers teach, post 9/11?’. 9/11 has become accepted shorthand for September 11th 2001, in which terrorist attacks took place in the United States of America. The attacks heralded a ‘post- 9/11 world, [in which] threats are defined more by the fault lines within societies than by the territorial boundaries between them’ (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, 2011, p. 361). The study is embedded in the values that have come to the fore in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the ideological shifts that have occurred globally. These values and ideologies are reflected via issues of culture and consumption. In education this is particularly visible through pedagogy. The research employs a multimethodological (Esteban-Guitart, 2012) form of inquiry through the use of bricolage (Kincheloe & Berry, 2004) which is comprised at the intersectional points of critical pedagogy (Kincheloe, 2008b), public pedagogy (Sandlin, Schultz, & Burdick, 2010b) and cultural studies (Hall, Hobson, Lowe, & Willis, 1992). This study adopts a critical ontological perspective, and is grounded in qualitative research approaches (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013). The methods of photo elicitation, artefact analysis, video observation and semi-structured interviews are used to critically examine the ways in which teacher and student identities are shaped by the pedagogies of contemporary schooling, and how they form common sense understandings of the world and themselves, charting possibilities between accepted common sense beliefs and 21st century neoliberal capitalism. The research is presented through a prototypical form of literary journalism and intertextuality which examines the interrelationship between teaching and social worlds exposing the hidden influence of enculturation and addressing the question ‘How do teachers teach, post 9/11?’