Subculture : reassessing the meanings of style ; a theoretical base for the study of subcultures in the 21st century

Re-examines the body of subcultural theory originally set in place by Birmingham University's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1970s. This was achieved through extensive ethnographic interviewing, and through utilisation of postmodern theoretical perspectives including pastiche (a kind of eclecticism) and hyperreality. The thesis emphasises the importance of grounding theory in practice.

Creating spaces in higher education for marginalised Australians : principles for socially inclusive pedagogies

The Bradley Review of Australian Higher Education provided a timely reminder of the dismal performance of the nation and its higher education system in terms of the proportional representation of certain groups of Australians within the university student population. While the Australian Government has taken on the challenge of creating more university places for people from low socioeconomic status backgrounds, this article makes the case for creating spaces in higher education for marginalised Australians. Specifically, we argue that the most strategic place to begin this is with the pedagogic work of higher education, because of its positioning as a central message system in education. And it is from the centre that the greatest pedagogic authority is derived. In this paper we conceive of the pedagogic work involved in terms of belief, design and action. From these constitutive elements are derived three principles on which to build a socially inclusive pedagogy and to open up spaces for currently marginalised groups.  

Merah and Breivik: a mirror effect of a European identity crisis

While the cases of Anders Behring Breivik and Mohamed Merah clearly demonstrate the impact of social networks and the role of the Internet and prison on the radicalization process, the killings in Norway and France in fact expose larger issues that exist within contemporary Europe, including profound identity crises manifesting as Islamist extremism in some quarters and far-right extremism in others. This article discusses the individual pathways towards extremism of Merah and Breivik, the interconnectivity of two extremisms and how these can be understood as mirrored manifestations of an identity crisis in Europe.

Book review:. The most dangerous book: The battle for James Joyce's Ulysses

Birmingham, a literary historian from Harvard, tells, in much greater detail than ever before, the story of the banning of what is arguably the most important and transformative literary text ever. For it to be in our hands and read openly is for it to have changed the conditions under which reading occurs in the western world, changed definitions of obscenity, and challenged the secrecy which was the stock-in-trade of the purity-snoopers, both vigilante and state-sanctioned. Joyce’s fiction was burned, guillotined, confiscated, had printer’s plates wrecked and whole editions pulped, was smuggled across borders, carried in corsets, was extensively and ‘legally’ pirated in the US. The story of its surveillance is a gripping one, and the book a page-turner, and moreover to tell the story is to explain how literary modernism became mainstream, and not the just preserve of marginalised avant-garde bohemians.