Multiple identification and risks : examination of peer factors across multiracial and single-race youth

Multiracial youth are thought to be more vulnerable to peer-related risk factors than are single-race youth. However, there have been surprisingly few well-designed studies on this topic. This study empirically investigated the extent to which multiracial youth are at higher risk for peer influenced problem behavior. Data are from a representative and longitudinal sample of youth from Washington State (N = 1,760, mean age = 14.13, 50.9% girls). Of those in the sample, 225 youth self-identified as multiracial (12.8%), 1,259 as White (71.5%), 152 as Latino (8.6%), and 124 as Asian American (7.1%). Results show that multiracial youth have higher rates of violence and alcohol use than Whites and more marijuana use than Asian Americans. Higher levels of socioeconomic disadvantage and single-parent family status partly explained the higher rates of problem behaviors among multiracial youth. Peer risk factors of substance-using or antisocial friends were higher for multiracial youth than Whites, even after socioeconomic variables were accounted for, demonstrating a higher rate of peer risks among multiracial youth. The number of substance-using friends was the most consistently significant correlate and predictor of problems and was highest among multiracial youth. However, interaction tests did not provide consistent evidence of a stronger influence of peer risks among multiracial youth. Findings underscore the importance of a differentiated understanding of vulnerability in order to better target prevention and intervention efforts as well as the need for further research that can help identify and explain the unique experiences and vulnerabilities of multiracial youth.

Catalogue notes for black noise

Where the speed-up of technology led Marshall McLuhan into the realm of ‘pattern-recognition’ the game has now been ratcheted up a further notch. Technologies themselves are being creatively re-designed and reconfigured to hunt down the Snark (see Lewis Carrol, 1898), a game in which the skill of identifying gaps, ruptures, of cracking the surface, remains critical. In this situation a New Minimalism has taken shape in which narrative and content have not been erased exactly but have retreated, to be resident in the architecture and flow of the apparatus itself. For Marcia Jane this is where the story now sits, to be laid bare on the Gallery floor.

Racialized urban America and Holocaust film : negotiating the limits of representation

Sidney Lumet’s influential film The Pawnbroker (1964) is one of the earliest films to consider the encounter between Holocaust narratives and low-income, urban American racial minorities. As much concerned with contemporary ‘race relations’ in the United States as it is with the Nazis’ persecution of Europe’s Jews, the film intertwines the story of Holocaust survivor Sol Nazerman with the social tensions of 1960s America, represented in his relationship with the young Puerto Rican shop assistant Jesus Oritz. The film stylistically juxtaposes raw footage of concentration camp existence with dismal images of New York slum life. Against these backdrops, the protagonist’s climactic ‘silent scream’ emblematically merges the repressed trauma of the survivor with the filmmaker’s interest in race relations, a theme that has undergone various transformations in a number of films since. One film that contemporizes this encounter is Richard LaGravenese’s Freedom Writers (2007). As opposed to the tragic outcome of the pawnbroker’s induction into urban America, here the Holocaust is a redemptive tool that permits inner-city Black and Latino youth to contextualize their own suffering. After reading The Diary of Anne Frank, this group of ‘at-risk’ sophomores to inspired to collaborate on an ultimately successful effort to bring Miep Geis, the woman who sheltered Anne Frank, to speak at their high school. Foregrounded by the 1992 Los Angeles riots, gentiles teacher Erin Gruwell and savior Miep Geis transform the Holocaust from an amplified parallel of American slums into an event that permits the children of American postcoloniality to triumph in spite of their socio-economic circumstances. Underlining the tension between the Jewish specificity and unprecedented nature of the Holocaust, and the need to generate Holocaust narratives that intersect with intrinsically racialized American narratives, such films have significant implications for how collective memories of suffering are constructed and contested.

Black Caviar

A painting created for the conference Celebrity Aura, hosted by The Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University at Burwood. Exhibited at the Phoenix Gallery as part of this conference.

Race to the White House

Welcome to part four of our Race to the White House podcast series.

Each week we’ll be talking to Australia’s top US experts on the ins and outs of the 2012 US presidential campaign.

This week, Binoy Kampmark and Geoff Robinson discuss Syria, drones, and Mitt Romney’s flagging campaign.

Catastrophic loss and the law : a comparison between 2009 Victorian Black Saturday fires and 2011 Queensland floods and Cyclone Yasi

This article explores insurability relating to loss occasioned by catastrophic events in Australia in the context of the current legal regulatory regime. The analysis includes two case studies, in which we juxtapose the Victorian Black Saturday fires in February 2--9 with the Queensland flooding and Cyclone Yasi (December 2010 - February 2011). We argue that the different responses to, and economic losses stemming from, these events illustrate the urgent need for a national regulatory and insurance regime for the prevention and alleviation of disasters and the management of their consequences.

Boom and bust in Australian screen policy: 10BA, the Film Finance Corporation, and Hollywood's 'race to the bottom'.

In recent years, a narrative has emerged in the Australian popular media about the box office 'unpopularity' of Australian feature films and the 'failure' of the domestic screen industry. This article explores the recent history of Australian screen policy with particular reference to the '10BA' tax incentive of the 1980s; the Film Finance Corporation of Australia (FFC), a government screen agency established in 1988 to bring investment bank-style portfolio management to Australia's screen industry; and local production incentive policies pursed by Australian state governments in a chase for Hollywood's runaway production.

We argue the 10BA incentive catalysed an unsustainable bubble in Australian production, while its policy successor, the FFC, fundamentally failed in its stated mission of 'commercial' screen financing (over its 20-year lifespan, the FFC invested 1.345 billion Australian dollars for 274.2 million Australian dollars recouped - a cumulative return of negative 80 percent). For their part, private investors in Australian films discovered that the screen production process involved high levels of risk.

Foreign-financed production also proved highly volatile, due to the vagaries of trade exposure, currency fluctuations and tax arbitrage. The result of these macro and micro-economic factors often structural and cross-border in nature was that Australia's screen industry failed to develop the local investment infrastructure required to finance a sustainable, non-subsidised local sector.

'Catastrophic failure' theories and disaster journalism : evaluating media explanations of the Black Saturday bushfires

 In recent decades, academic researchers of natural disasters and emergency management have developed a canonical literature on ‘catastrophe failure’ theories such as disaster responses from US emergency management services (Drabek, 2010; Quarantelli, 1998) and the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant (Perrow, 1999). This article examines six influential theories from this field in an attempt to explore why Victoria’s disaster and emergency management response systems failed during Australia’s Black Saturday bushfires. How well, if at all, are these theories understood by journalists, disaster and emergency management planners, and policy-makers? In examining the Country Fire Authority’s response to the fires, as well as the media’s reportage of them, we use the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires as a theory-testing case study of failures in emergency management, preparation and planning. We conclude that journalists can learn important lessons from academics’ specialist knowledge about disaster and emergency management responses.