Identity and marginality among Slavic Baptists in Victoria

Analyses the ethnic and religious identity of an immigrant community in the light of Professor Hans Mol's social-scientific theory of religion. Argues that the Baptist religious beliefs facilitate the identification process of Slavic Baptists within the Australian host society.

Sociology of religion in Australia

The sociology of religion has been a moderately strong theme in Australian sociology. Most Australian sociologists of religion have been trained in Australia with a smattering of those trained in the USA, the UK or elsewhere. While Christian churches once maintained research offices including sociologists and some seminaries once included the sociology of religion in their offerings, this is no longer so. Other religious groups have not yet grown to such strength that the support of their own research sections has been possible, but several have actively funded research-including Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Scientology. The Christian Research Association, founded in the mid-198os, is the only independent research organization in Australia devoted to the sociology of religion. While largely funded by church organizations, it also receives government grants and has maintained its independence of religious organisations.The National Church Life Survey group, which also commenced work in the mid-198os, conducts a nation-wide survey of church attenders every five years at the time of the Australian census (e.g. Kaldor et al. 1994, 1999 ). Their time series data on Australian Catholics are excellent, being gathered according to random selection techniques. The NCLS also provides five-yearly reports on Protestants and Anglicans and other studies of congregational life in Australia. There are no systematic data sources on the Orthodox, who comprise three percent of the national population and six percent of the population in Melbourne.

What are we scared of? The absence of sociology in current debates about drug treatments and policies

The official public policy related to recreational drug use and abuse in Australia is harm minimization or harm reduction. Definitions of harm minimization vary but a general statement is that harm minimization is a policy or programme intended to decrease adverse health, social and economic consequences of drug use, even though the user may continue to use psychoactive drugs. This type of definition is most often compared to a zero-tolerance policy that aims to eliminate all recreational drug abuse by legal and other means. Sociologists have historically scoffed at this latter policy. Unfortunately, what this has meant is that harm minimization in all its forms has not been the object of analytical work on the part of sociologists.

Photography and christian mission: George Brown`s images of the New Britain mission 1875-80

In 1875, Methodist George Brown arrived in the Bismarck Archipelago to establish the New Britain Mission. Based in the Duke of York Islands, Brown's territory covered New Ireland and the Gazelle Peninsula of New Britain. The mission was one of the first to be photographed from its inception. The Australian Museum holds 96 plates from the first five years of the mission. Brown's photographs are a visual record of conditions and peoples of the time. Analysed in relation to Brown's writings they are indicative of the relationships and bonds established through photography both in the mission field and across wider scientific and church audiences. The methodology employed here also challenges the kinds of interpretations of photographs that can arise from visual analyses relying solely on the caption and the posing of the subject.

Urban sociology and the stranger

The paper investigates the extent to which urban sociology has neglected the analytical potential of the stranger and puts forward an interpretative model that can broaden and deepen our understanding of the relationship between urbanity and difference. The interpretative model adopts a typology of the stranger consisting of three types of strangers: pre-modern, modern and post-modern. These three types of strangers are abstract descriptions constructed by accentuating certain features of real individuals. They are ‘ideal types’ and not intended as a reflection of urban realities but as a way of interpreting them. In addition, they are not mutually exclusive and may in some cases overlap, interconnect and complement each other. Finally, this typology is neither comprehensive nor definitive; rather, through an analysis of the modern city, the post-modern city I and post-modern city II, the paper demonstrates its exploratory power.

Bourdieu`s reflexive sociology and `spaces of points of view`: whose reflexivity, which perspective?

This paper considers Bourdieu's concepts of perspectivism and reflexivity, looking particularly at how he develops arguments about these in his recent work, The Weight of the World (1999) and Pascalian Meditations (2000b). We explicate Bourdieu's distinctive purposes and deployment of these terms and approaches, and discuss how this compares with related methodological and theoretical approaches currently found in social and feminist theory. We begin by considering three main ways in which 'reflexivity' is deployed in current sociological writing, distinguishing between reflexive sociology and a sociology of reflexivity. This is followed by a discussion of the main aspects of Bourdieu's approach to 'reflexive sociology' and its relation to his concepts of social field, perspectivism and spaces of point of view. He argues that we need to interrogate the idea of a single 'perspective' and account especially for the particularity and influence of the 'scholastic' point of view. He characterizes this latter point of view as unaware of its own historicity and as largely concerned with contemplation and with treating ideas primarily as abstractions (Bourdieu, 2000b). Bourdieu's intervention is to argue, as he has throughout his work, for a more reflexive account of one's location and habitus, and for sustained engagement with ideas and social issues as practical problems. Bourdieu exhorts researchers to work with 'multiple perspectives' (Bourdieu et al., 1999, p. 3), the various competing 'spaces of points of view', without collapsing into subjectivism or relativism. We then consider recent feminist engagements with and critiques of Bourdieu's notion of reflexivity and chart some of the main points of contention regarding its relevance and conceptual potential for theorizing gender identities and transformations in current times. We conclude with a brief outline of how we are working with a reflexive sociological approach in a cross-generational study of young women in difficult circumstances, 'on the margins' of education and work.

Sociology : Australian connections

Sociology offers a way of understanding our lives, from individual experience to public affairs. This third edition of a widely used textbook introduces the major figures in sociological thought and examines key aspects of society.