Still in the LEGO (LEGOS) room : female teachers designing curriculum around girls’ popular culture for the coeducational classroom in Australia

While the issue of boys’ dominance of the curriculum has a long history, the article examines this phenomenon in a contemporary context, through an empirical study with female teachers designing English curriculum around girls’ media in a coeducational secondary school in Victoria, Australia. In this space, teachers, and the researcher, produce and perform both individual gendered identities and plans for the identities of future student subjects, while negotiating subject positions made available to girls and women in broader social contexts. In this instance, negotiations that take place during the development of a unit of work on Mattel's Barbie website form the basis of feminist discourse analysis, enabling us to ‘take stock’ in thinking about what curriculum design is, about where the past is situated in relation to the present, and to question why, within a discursive feminist/postfeminist entanglement, the heritage of feminist intellectual thought in this area seems absent.

A differentially private algorithm for location data release

The rise of mobile technologies in recent years has led to large volumes of location information, which are valuable resources for knowledge discovery such as travel patterns mining and traffic analysis. However, location dataset has been confronted with serious privacy concerns because adversaries may re-identify a user and his/her sensitivity information from these datasets with only a little background knowledge. Recently, several privacy-preserving techniques have been proposed to address the problem, but most of them lack a strict privacy notion and can hardly resist the number of possible attacks. This paper proposes a private release algorithm to randomize location dataset in a strict privacy notion, differential privacy, with the goal of preserving users’ identities and sensitive information. The algorithm aims to mask the exact locations of each user as well as the frequency that the user visits the locations with a given privacy budget. It includes three privacy-preserving operations: private location clustering shrinks the randomized domain and cluster weight perturbation hides the weights of locations, while private location selection hides the exact locations of a user. Theoretical analysis on privacy and utility confirms an improved trade-off between privacy and utility of released location data. Extensive experiments have been carried out on four real-world datasets, GeoLife, Flickr, Div400 and Instagram. The experimental results further suggest that this private release algorithm can successfully retain the utility of the datasets while preserving users’ privacy.

Detecting stepping stones by abnormal causality probability

Locating the real source of the Internet attacks has long been an important but difficult problem to be addressed. In the real world, attackers can easily hide their identities and evade punishment by relaying their attacks through a series of compromised systems or devices called stepping stones. Currently, researchers mainly use similar features from the network traffic, such as packet timestamps and frequencies, to detect stepping stones. However, these features can be easily destroyed by attackers using evasive techniques. In addition, it is also difficult to implement an appropriate threshold of similarity that can help justify the stepping stones. In order to counter these problems, in this paper, we introduce the consistent causality probability to detect the stepping stones. We formulate the ranges of abnormal causality probabilities according to the different network conditions, and on the basis of it, we further implement to self-adaptive methods to capture stepping stones. To evaluate our proposed detection methods, we adopt theoretic analysis and empirical studies, which demonstrate accuracy of the abnormal causality probability. Moreover, we compare our proposed methods with previous works. The result shows that our methods in this paper significantly outperform previous works in the accuracy of detection malicious stepping stones, even when evasive techniques are adopted by attackers.

An analysis of the use of autobiographical narrative for teachers’ intercultural learning

The currency of intercultural education has risen worldwide in response to increased diversity within societies resulting from migration and global lows of populations. As intercultural education becomes a core responsibility of schooling, critical, detailed analysis of pedagogies for teachers’ own intercultural learning is largely absent in education research, in contrast to attention to developing students’ intercultural capabilities and theoretical and policy analyses. In beginning to address this limitation, this article offers a critical, reflexive analysis of our use and the efficacy of using autobiographical narrative for teachers’ intercultural learning. Framing theories include interculturality, autobiographical narratives for teachers’ professional learning, reflexivity, and the effects of silence and silencing in relation to diversity and intercultural relations in schools. Three instances of teacher autobiographical narrative elicited as part of a large-scale, longitudinal study of intercultural education in Australian schools are deconstructed to elucidate their explicit and hidden meanings and effects. The analysis reveals that while autobiographical narrative has productive potential as a strategy for stimulating teacher reflexivity about cultural identities and intercultural relations, it also contains hidden dangers and traps that caution against viewing it as a pedagogical cure-all in the development of teachers’ intercultural knowledge and skills.

Theorizing agency in post-girlpower times

Post-structuralist youth studies theorists have argued for nuanced perspectives on agency that are not reliant on an assumption of subjects as rational and internally coherent individuals, and understand subjectivity and social structure as produced in concert. These are important theoretical developments that have shaped recent scholarship on girls' identities and cultures. In this paper, we seek to give them some further sociological grounding by thinking through their resonance for the specific debate about young women and what feminist agency consists of, or looks like today. What we wish to further flesh out is how more familiar, modernist ideas about girls' agency have started to reach their limits not merely because of the post-structuralist turn, but because of the socio-cultural conditions of neoliberalism, post-feminism and post-girlpower. We unpack some recent shifts and complexities around three concepts: choice, empowerment and voice. These are the terms by which the possibility of girls' and young women's agency has traditionally been understood in feminist scholarship and much work in girls' studies. However, when we interrogate these concepts within the specific neoliberal, post-feminist, post-girlpower context, their usefulness for either understanding or enabling feminist agency is thrown into question.

Development amidst communal conflict: case study of a Christian FBO in a Buddhist–Muslim conflict region in Myanmar

Faith can be a powerful force for positive development and social change, but as James (2011) notes, it is a highly flammable fuel that can also easily result in negative outcomes. The pervasive influence of religion in the lives of many gives it a unique ability to shape both individual and communal identities (perceptions of self and others). While religious identities can be an extremely positive force, they can also be used as a source for exclusive and intolerant attitudes, with a potential to feed nationalisms that become motivators or justifications for conflict. This is particularly true in tense multi-religious contexts where competing ethnoreligious nationalistic identities and historical claims are forced to coexist – especially for faith-based development agencies that relate to one of those identities.This chapter explores the work of a small local Christian faith-based organisation (FBO) working in Buddhist communities in a region of significant Buddhist–Muslim tension and recent violent communal conflict, as a case study of development across complex faith boundaries. Local FBO Bethel works in partnership with the international FBO GraceWorks Myanmar (GWM). Making this case particularly interesting, Bethel has evolved out of a related religious organisation that still maintains a mandate for preaching a contextual Christian message to Buddhists, and most of the local workers are converts from Buddhism. Given the most inflammatory religious sparks for worsening conflicts are widely regarded to be discriminatory practices and proselytism – or perceptions of proselytism (e.g. Clarke and Jennings 2008; Flanigan 2010) – this case study is interesting for the way these issues are handled. This chapter includes new research examining whether and how this FBO has been able to avoid inflaming tensions and has been broadly granted a social mandate to operate in Buddhist communities, even though it constitutes a third religious actor in a context of vitriolic interreligious conflict.

Constructing meanings and identities in child protection practice

Examines a contemporary and contentious social problem, child maltreatment, and the policy and practice in response to it, child protection.

Corners, squares and urban identities: perceptions, attitudes and values

In February 2000, the new Victorian Labor Government announced that they were removing the western shard from Lab Architecture Studio's winning Melbourne Federation Square design. then under construction. The specific 'contested terrain' at the intersection of Flinders Street and Swanston Street Walk. Melbourne, allows the exploration of the politics of place construction over time, through an examination of Young and Jackson's Hotel [1861]. St Paul's Cathedral [1886). Flinders Street Station [1912]. the Westin Hotel [1999) and Federation Square. This site brings together architectural and social history, questions public space and identity, and looks at Melburnian's perceptions, attitudes and values. It further demonstrates that the fragmentation of the professions, and fragmentary histories. lead to the preservation of 'bits' of architecture and the destruction of the urban/landscape context, jeopardizing the Identity of place.

Speaking of race and ethnic identities : exploring multicultural curricula

New demographic patterns as well as new communication and information technologies and administrative and marketing practices have irrevocably altered schools in Australia's large cities. This study examines the ways that teachers and parents in one urban school speak about race and ethnicity in the midst of these changes. Beneath the ironic relationship between difference and sameness which underpins multicultural debate are different understandings that determine ways some belong and some do not belong within the school community. This paradoxical relationship persists, despite increasingly post-modern definitions of identity that underpin the field of this debate. I conclude that the examination of multicultural curricula must include the normalized ways of knowing and 'being' identity, which underpin conversations about race and identity.

Principal selection: homosocialibility, the search for security and the production of normalized principal identities

Researchers investigating the decline of potential applicants for principalships have demonstrated that teachers perceive there to be a significant problem in current selection procedures. This article reports an investigation in two Australian states into principal selection. Drawing on a corpus of interviews, two case studies and administrative guidelines, we highlight five key problems in the interview process: (1) the dependence of selection panels on a written application; (2) the dilemma of experience versus potential; (3) the covert rule about the appointment of preferred applicants; (4) the quandary of panel competency; and (5) the evidence of inconsistency of decisions. We argue that the selection process amounts to a reproductive technology which, in the quest for certainty and safety, results in particular kinds of people being successful. This amounts we suggest, whether the selection process is managed by progressive or conservative personnel, to a form of homosociability the tendency to select people just like oneself.

Troubling identities : teacher education students' constructions of class and ethnicity

This paper reports on a research project that explored how student teachers understand ethnic and classed difference as it relates to themselves and their students. Discourses of schooling can shape students ethnic and classed identities, frequently positioning non-mainstream students as 'other' and marginalizing them. Significant numbers of our teacher education students have limited experience of diverse educational settings, having mainly attended white middle-class schools as students and as student teachers. Working with diverse student populations productively depends on teachers recognising and valuing difference. The ways in which they engage with students whose ethnic and classed identities are different from their own is important in creating learning environments that build on and engage with diversity.

In a preliminary stage of the research we asked eight third-year teacher education students to explore their own ethnic and classed identities. The complexities of identity are foregrounded in both the assumptions we made in selecting particular students for the project and in the ways they did (not) think about themselves as having ethnic or classed identities.

In this paper we draw on these findings to interrogate how categories of identity are fluid, shifting and ongoing processes of negotiation: troubling and complex. We also consider the implications for teacher education.