Breath and the truths of youth at risk : allegory and the social scientific imagination

The ways that we have invented for knowing young people are governmentalised. This governmentalisation produces powerful incentives to conform to the rule-bound and institutionalised knowledge practices that institutions, government departments, corporations, and NGOs understand as being capable of telling truths about young people and about risk. I argue that knowledge practices in the social sciences should trouble what counts as truth, as evidence, and the ways in which these truths can be produced.

These interests will be examined through a discussion of the ways in which Tim Winton's novel Breath can be read as an allegorical tale about the terror of being ordinary: and of the teenage years as being a time in a life in which the fear of being ordinary compels Winton's key characters to seek out, sometimes stumble upon that which promises to make their's a life less ordinary. Here risk is something that breathes energy and purpose into lifeworlds that are dominated by the institutionalised ordinariness of family, school, and work. As an allegorical tale told from the vantage point of hindsight, Breath unsettles what it is that the social sciences can tell us about youth (as becoming) and risk (as mitigated by prudential foresight).

Envisioning Indochina : the spatial and social ordering and imagining of a French colony

The emergence of Indochina in the French imagination was articulated in both representational and institutional modes. Representation involves the transmission of colonial ideals through more obtuse means; that is, through literary texts, travelogues, exhibitions, film and advertising. However, these textual sites feed from and invest in a material situation, which was the institutional arm of colonialism. Indochina was institutionally articulated in cartographic maps and surveys, in the new social spaces of cities and towns, in architectural and technological forms, through social technologies of discipline and welfare and in cultural and religious organisations. The aim of this thesis is to analyse, across a number of textual sites, the representation and institutionalisation of Otherness through the politics of space in the French colony of Indochina, Indochine in this sense becomes a spatial discourse. The French constructed a mental and physical space for Indochina by blanketing and suffocating the original cultural landscape, which in fact had to be ignored for this process to occur. What actually became manifest as a result of this projection stemmed from the French imagination. Just as the French manipulated space, language also underwent the same process of reduction. The Vietnamese script was latinised to make it more 'useable' and ‘accessible’. Through christening the union of Indochina; initiating a comprehensive writing reform; and renaming the streets in the colonial cities, the French used language us another tool for 'making transparent'. Furthermore, the colonial powers established a communication and transport network throughout the colony in an attempt to materialise their fictive (artificial) vision of a unified French Indochinese space. The accessibility and design of these different modes of transport reflected the gendered, racial and class divisions inherent in the colonial establishment. At the heart of representing and institutionalising Indochina was the desire to control and contain. This characterised French imperial ordering of space in the city and the rural areas. In rural areas land was divided into small parcels and alienated to individuals or worked into precise grids for the rubber plantation. In urban centres the native quarter was clearly demarcated from the European quarter which functioned as its modern, progressive Other. The rationale behind this segregation was premised on European, nineteenth century discourses of race, class, gender and hygiene. Influenced by Darwinian and neo-Lamarkian theories of race, this biological discourse identified the 'working class', 'women' and 'the native' as not only biologically but also culturally inferior. They were perceived as a potential, degenerative threat to the biological, cultural and industrial development of the nation. In the colonial context, space was thus ordered and domesticated to control the native population. Coextensively, the literature which springs from such a structure will be tainted by the same ideas, and thus the spaces it formulates within the readers mind feed on and reinforce this foundation. Examples of gender and indigenous narratives which contest this imaginative, transparent topography are analysed throughout this thesis. They provide instances of struggle and resistance which undermine the ideal/stereotypical level of architectural and planned space and delineate an alternative insight into colonial spatial and social relations. The fictional accounts of European women and indigenous writers both challenge and reaffirm the fixity of some of these idealised colonial boundaries. In various literary, historical, political, architectural and cinematic discourses Indochina has been und continues to be depicted as a modern city and exotic Utopia. Informed by the mood of nostalgia, exotic images of Indochina have resurfaced in contemporary French culture. France's continued desire to create, control and maintain an Indochinese space in the French public imagination reinforces the multi-layered, interconnected and persistent nature of colonial discourse.

Social capital and public policy – the current challenge facing the Victorian Government

Social capital, since Putnam’s 1993 work, has captured the imagination of policy-makers the world over, and Australia is no exception. In 2005 the Department of Victorian Communities launched its Actions for Community Strengthening policy statement, which draws heavily on social capital theory. This article explores the theoretical underpinnings of the government’s policy and critiques its failure to deal adequately with the causal relationship between social capital and its supposed community benefits. The article then seeks to isolate the missing factors through a look at recent research on volunteerism and argues that the institution of collaborative/interactive governance needs to be underpinned by sound socio-economic reform.

Widening and expanding participation in Australian higher education: in the absence of sociological imagination

Social inclusion in Australian higher education was high on the agenda of the recent Rudd/Gillard Australian Government. This paper offers an assessment of that agenda, particularly the extent to which it worked in favour of under-represented groups. It argues that the Government’s widening and expansion policies and its equity and aspiration strategies lacked sociological imagination, projecting deficits onto individuals who refused to be taken in by its ambitions for higher education participation. The paper concludes that in the absence of a sociological imagination in government policy, the freedoms of disadvantaged groups continued to be curtailed: not just to choose futures in keeping with their goals but also the freedom to formulate choices.