The 'nature' of environmental education research from a feminist poststructuralist viewpoint

For a generation or more, environmental education discourses have been constructed around persistent Cartesian dualisms of modernist thought that divide an "othered" category of being from that of a constituted homogeneous human identity. During the same period, both feminist and poststructuralist theorizing has acted to destabilize the constitution of identities, revealing knowledge, including environmental knowledge, to be multiple, subjective, contingent, and intimately tied in with embodied experiences of place. We explore some of the contingencies of environmental knowledge as revealed through a poststructuralist feminist research methodology and the place for such understandings within an early twenty-first century vision for environmental education research and practice.

Would the 'real' girl gamer please stand up? Gender, LAN cafes and the reformulation of the 'girl' gamer.

In this paper we consider the significance of cyber 'LAN' cafeacutes as sites where on and off-line practices meet in way that complicates binary notions of the gendered gamer. Existing research into computer games culture suggests a male dominated environment and points to girls' lower levels of competence and participation in games. Building on recent studies interested in the constitution of gender through engagement with online technologies, we draw on Judith Butler's politics of performative resignification, and conceptualise digital culture as a resource through which 'girl' gamers are mobilised and potentially reformulated, experiencing their gaming identities in contradictory ways, and fragmenting the category 'girl' in the very act of articulating their place in a male dominated gaming culture. It is argued that through the meeting of on and off-line practices, LAN cafeacutes operate as a location that is particularly amenable to reformulative work in relation to gendered gaming identities.

Real or imagined women? Staff representations of international women postgraduate students

In Australia's globalising universities many support staff and teaching staff now work with international women postgraduate students. But are they aware of the issues facing these women, and is their understanding of them adequate? Indeed, how do they represent them? In this paper we draw on a small-scale pilot study involving key university personnel. We argue that the ways in which such staff represent this group of students is problematic. Focusing primarily on academic issues and on the literature on learning styles, we analyse these staff members' representations of international women postgraduate students from a postcolonial perspective. We explore the extent to which such representations, and the learning styles literature that reflects and informs them, are what Edward Said calls 'Orientalist'. In so doing, we point to both the constitution of the international woman student as postcolonial female subject and show how this situates her in relation to the prevalent learning styles discourse. Further we argue that such representations of the students differ in crucial ways from the students' self-representations, suggesting that in certain subtle ways such staff members are engaging with 'imagined' rather than 'real' women.

Practising gender : the production of identity by school children

The thesis utilises ‘practice theory’ to argue that the self is not only an effect of social practices but also a technique for action and develops an alternative way of explicating and conceptualising the constitution of the self within the micro-practices of routine, everyday life. This is in contrast to a general tendency within ‘practice theory’, ‘constructionist’ and ‘discursive’ approaches towards a determinist conception of the self. The thesis explores this conceptual framework in fieldwork focussed on formation and production of gender-identity among young school children and offers a new perspective of gender-identity in the classroom. The thesis provides a fourfold contribution: (1) It provides insights into how in the classroom, children take up (conventional) gender differentiated conduct and dispositions in order to forge both their identity and the establishment of a social order based on gender. This gender order is not simply imposed on them by teachers but is actively constructed by the children. The thesis provides insights into how the children in the classroom seize and appropriate the practices of gender for their own ends. These ends, I argue, are the construction of their gender-identity, and the establishment and maintenance of a ‘matrix of intelligibility’. (2) It offers a close-up illustration of how gender construction is negotiated and contested between girls and boys. This is characterised as largely a struggle for enablement — the power to be and to do — rather than as a struggle of one gender over another. (3) It develops an analysis of classrooms as productive sites, as ‘complex strategical situations’ in which the participating agents — the teachers and students—deploy and utilise available resources in their ongoing construction of the world. This suggests that that the social world is not as unitary and totalising as ‘constraint perspectives’ within practice theory often imply. (4) It proposes methodological perspectives and strategies for researching empirically the day-to-day production of gender and for capturing that complex and often elusive process ‘in flight’. It shows the value of an ‘ascending analysis’, one that does not foreclose findings on the basis of a pre-existing theoretical position, and the rich potential of ‘flashpoints’ as a way of illuminating ongoing and often ‘unremarkable’ and therefore unnoticed practices of gender production. The theoretical terrain explored a range of theorists on the self not usually brought together, including Butler, Rose, Foucault, Giddens and Garfinkel and Schatzki. These theorists share in common the perspective that social practices rather than the agent or social totality are the ontological basis of the social world. It is argued that the self is constituted in its enactment and the thesis pursues Foucault’s (2002) question of how the self participates in its own subjectification. The empirical focus of the thesis examined the activities of children at school for insights into how they participated in the making of their gender-identity. The research addressed the questions: (1) To what extent do children construct their gender-identity and what kinds of encouragement do they receive for this? (2) To what extent did the children seem to be appropriating gender practices and inciting the making of gender-identity in the classroom? (3) To what extent can the classroom be viewed as a site of gender contestation and borderwork? Using the concept of ‘flashpoints’, — significant or poignant moments in the classroom — classroom activities were observed to catch gender-identity production ‘in flight’ and to describe how the children seize upon moments to make gender salient. Year Three children in five classrooms in two Victorian schools were observed during English communication and literacy lessons. Individual interviews with teachers in the participating schools and group interviews with the children from the classrooms were undertaken to amplify the observations. Much of the children’s behaviour can be interpreted as their efforts to make gender salient in social interactions. Gender-identity production and gender ‘border work’ (Thorne, 1993) and contestation appeared to be a major activity and preoccupation of the children, even in the face of teacher’s attempts to encourage a gender-neutral environment The children were often more active than the teachers in imposing the ‘gender agenda’ identified by Evans (1988). Overall, this thesis contributes to the development of the theory of subjectivity and identity formation. Social practices are not imposed and individuals seize upon social practices to further their own ends. It is through these routine, everyday activities that social practices are reproduced. The study provides an avenue for understanding the actions of children and the operation of gender power and border work within the classroom.

Second person : a point of view? The function of the second person pronoun in narrative prose fiction

This thesis looks at the functions and effects of the ‘second-person’ pronoun in narrative prose fiction, with particular focus on the fluidity and ambiguity of the mode that I will call Protean-'you.' It is a mode in which it is unclear whether the ‘you’ is a character, the narrator, a reader/narratee, or no-one in particular—or a combination of these—so that readers find ‘second-person’ utterances at once familiar and deeply strange. I regard the ‘second person’ as a special case of narrative ‘person’ that, at its most fluid, can produce an experience of reading quite unlike that of reading traditional ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ narrative. Essentially, this unique experience comes about because Protean-‘you’ neglects to constitute the stable modes of subjectivity that readers expect to find within narrative textuality. These stable modes of subjectivity, modelled on what I will refer to as Cartesianism’s hegemonic notion of the self, have been thoroughly formalised and naturalised within the practices of ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ narrative. The Protean-‘you’ form of ‘second-person’ narrative, conversely, is a mode of narrative discourse that puts readers in a place of doubt and uncertainty, its unsettling equivocations forcefully disrupting accustomed, mimetic explanations of narrative and denying us access to the foundational, authorising subject of classical Cartesian thought. Rather than founding a notion of ‘second-person’ narrative and narrative ‘person’ generally on Cartesianism's ‘self-ish’ logic of unified, privatised identity, I turn to C.S, Peirce's notion of the semiotic self and to developments in post-structuralist thought. Essentially, the conception of subjectivity underpinning my arguments is Peirce's proposition that the self is to be conceived of not as a cogito, but as a sign by which the conscious entity knows itself. It is a sign, moreover, that is constantly being re-read, reinterpreted, so that identity is never self-complete. This reconception of subjectivity is necessary because 1 will argue that the effects of Protean-‘you’ arise in some part from a tension between Cartesianism's hegemony and what philosophical pragmatism and post-structuralism glimpse as the actual condition of the human subject—the subject as dispersed and contingent rather than unified and authoritative. Most discussions of ‘second-person’ narrative conceive of the mode in terms of implicit communicative relations, in some measure instituting Cartesianism's notion of the intentionalist self at the centre of literary meaning. I contrast the paradigmatic address model that arises from this conception against a model that approaches the analysis of ‘second-person’ narrative modality in terms of a referential function, that is, in terms of the object or objects referred to deictically by the ‘second-person’ pronoun. Two principal functions of ‘second-person’ textuality are identified and discussed at length. The first is generalisation, which is rarely dissipated altogether, a situation that contributes to the ambiguities of the pronoun's reference in much ‘second-person’ fiction. The second principal function is that of address, that is, the allocutionary function. Clearly, although stories that continually refer to a ‘you’ can seem quite baffling and unnatural, not all ‘second-person’ narratives unsettle the reader. In order to make the ‘second person's’ outlandish narratives knowable and stable, we bring to bear on them in our habits of reading whatever hermeneutic frames, whatever interpretive keys, come to hand, including a large number of unexceptional forms of literary and ‘natural’ discourse that employ the ‘second-person’ pronoun. These forms include letter writing and internal dialogue (i.e., talking to one's self), the language of the courtroom, the travelogue, the maxim, and so on. In looking at the ways in which the radicalising potentials of ‘second-person’ discourse are contained or recuperated, I focus on issues of vraisemblance and mimesis. Vraisemblance can be described as the ‘system of conventions and expectations which rests on/reinforces that more general system of ‘mutual knowledge’ produced within a community for the realisation and maintenance of a whole social world’. All of the forms of the vraisemblable are already instituted within social, cultural relations, so that what vraisemblance describes is the way we fit the inscriptions we read-that is, the way in which we naturalise what we read-into those given cultural and social forms. I also look at the conventionalising and naturalising work done by notions of mimesis in explaining relations between the world, our being in it, and texts, proposing that mimesis provides a principle buttress by which the good standing of the metaphor of ‘person’ is preserved in traditional and pre-critical modes of analysis. Indeed, the critic’s recourse to ‘person’ is in some measure always an engagement with mimesis. Any discussion that maintains that mimesis is in some way productive of meaning-which this thesis in fact does-must identify mimesis as a merely conventional category within practices of reading and semiosis more generally, and at the very least remove that term from its traditional position of transparent primacy and authority. Some of the most interesting and insightful arguments about ‘second-person’ narrative propose that the ‘second person’s’ most striking effects derive from the constitution of an ‘intersubjective’ experience of reading in which the subject positions of the ‘you’-protagonist, reader-narratee and narrator are combined into a fluid and indeterminate multiple subjectivity. Notions of intersubjectivity frequently position themselves as liberating the reader from Cartesianism's fixed, authoritative modes of subjectivity, Frequently, however, they tend implicitly to reinstate Cartesianism's notion of the self at the centre of textual practice and subjectivity. I look at Daniel Gunn's novel ‘Almost You’, at length in this context, illustrating the constant overdetermination of the ‘you’ and the novel's narrating voice, and demonstrating that this overdetermination leaves the origin of the narrative discourse, the identity of the narrator, and the ontological nature of both principal protagonists utterly ambiguous. The fluidity and ambiguity of Protean-‘you’ in ‘Almost You’ is discussed in terms of ‘second-person’ intersubjectivity, but with a view to demonstrating the indebtedness by the notion of intersubjectivity to Cartesianism's hegemony of ‘person’. I then turn to a discussion of what might be a more ‘old fashioned’ if perhaps ultimately more far-reaching approach to the ‘second person’s’ often startling ambiguities. This is Keats's notion of negative capability, a capacity or quality in which a person ‘is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ I suggest that Protean-‘you’ texts will license all of the readings of ambiguity and fluidity proposed in my discussion of ‘Almost You’, but conclude that the instances of indeterminacy illustrate no more than that: the fluidity and deep ambiguity, and thus, finally, the lack of coherence, of Protean-‘you’ discourse. This has particular implications for how we are to consider readers’ experiences of narrative texts. More fundamentally, it has implications for how we are to consider readers as subjects. I suggest that unstable, ambiguous instances of ‘second-person’ narrative can tear the complex and systematic embroidery of ideological suture that unifies Cretinism’s experience or sense of subjectivity, leaving the reader in a condition of epistemological and ontological havoc. I go on to argue that much of the deeply unsettling effect of Protean-‘you’ discourse anises because its utterances explicitly gesture towards Cretinism’s notion of self. Protean-‘you’ involves a sense of address that is much more pronounced than we are accustomed to facing when reading literary narrative, alerting us to the presence of inscribed anthropomorphic subjects. At the very same time, protean-‘you’ leaves its inscribed subjects indeterminate, ambiguous. This conflict generates a tension between the anticipation of the emergence of speaking and listening selves and our inability to find them. I go on to propose that Protean-‘you’ narrative's lack of coherence is also to be understood as the condition of narrative actuality generally, but a condition that is vigorously mediated against by dominant practices of reading and writing, hocusing my discussion in this respect on the issue of narrative ‘person,’ I argue that narrative ‘person’ is constituted within texts as an apparent unity, but that it is in fact, produced as unitary solely within the practice of making sense, that is, Within our habits of reading, and so is never finally unified. I propose that this is the case for ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ modes no less than for the ‘second.’ Where ‘second-person’ narrative at its most radical and Protean differs from conventional ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ narratives is the degree to which each has been circumscribed by practices of tantalization, containment and limit, and, in particular, Cretinism’s hegemony of ‘person.’ It may be that the most significant insights ‘second-person’ narrative has to offer are to be found within its capacity to reveal to the engaged reader the underlying condition of narrative discourse, and more generally, its capacity to reveal the actual condition of the human subject-a condition in which, exactly like its textual corollary of narrative ‘person,’ the self is glimpsed as thoroughly dispersed and contingent.

The construction of the racially different indigenous offender

The over‐representation and increased growth of Indigenous offenders in all Western criminal justice systems is longstanding and undeniable. In 2006 Victoria’s Koori offenders were 12 times more likely to be sentenced to a custodial or community sanction than non‐Koori people. Similarly, in New Zealand, Maori men account for 50 percent of the prison population but only 12.5 percent of the general population. Yet, it was not until the 1990s that the issues of Indigenous over‐representation or expanding Indigenous offender populations began to be presented as a problem within the correctional literature. This paper will explore the parameters of these ‘problems’, and present the following three arguments: (1) the issues of over‐representation was constructed within the correctional literature as a symptom of the different nature of Indigenous offending; (2) the different nature of Indigenous offending was in turn constructed as a problem of race; and (3) this construction of Indigenous offending is consistent with the contemporary constitution of mainstream offending behaviour. In concluding, this paper will discuss the implications of the emergence and sustained production of this figure of the Indigenous offender in relation to the capacity of criminologists to reconceptualise Indigenous offending.

A Steinian approach to an empathic understanding of hope among patients and clinicians in the culture of palliative care

Aim. This article presents a discussion of empathy in the context of human person, reason and hopes in the clinical setting.

Background. Empathy was introduced to nursing as part of an ethical and philosophical foundation for caring. It helped to solve the tension and meet the demands that empathy placed upon nursing practice.

Data sources. This article is based on two studies undertaken between 2008 and 2010 to understand the concept of hope and empathy among people with terminal cancer and doctors who care for them. Doctoral dissertations and theses of Edith Stein (1916–1917), Marianne Sawicki [Body, Text and Science. The Literary of Investigative Practices and the Phenomenology of Edith Stein (1997) Kluwer Academic Publisher, Dordrecht], and Sister M. Judith Parsons (2005) have been used to examine: ‘the essence of acts of empathy’, ‘the constitution of the psycho-physical individual’ and ‘empathy as understanding of intellectual persons’. CINAHL, MEDLINE and PROQUEST have provided further supporting data.

Discussion. Steinian empathy requires that we use affective resonance, cognitive understanding and distance, as we grasp another person’s emotional and situational reality while in the caring role as nurses.

Implications for current nursing. Steinian empathy is about recognizing a lived experience and standing side-by-side with that person. Nurses can transmit this knowledge to enable and support courage and wisdom to reduce feelings of helplessness when caring for people with terminal illness.

Conclusion. Not only is empathy a safe and permissible emotion, it is the linchpin to a caring patient–nurse relationship and we must embrace this.

Research subjects/research subjections : exploring the ethics and politics of critical research

I use this paper to reflect upon the ethics and politics of Critical Management Studies (CMS) research. I highlight a potential for problematic power relations in CMS and, drawing upon Foucault’s (1976) ‘five methodological precautions’ for analysing power, I explore these power relations as an effect of the micro-constitution of ‘subordinate’ and ‘superior’ subject positions within the research process. Through detailed analysis of a research interview transcript I illustrate how the researched’s ‘subordinate’ and researcher’s ‘superior’ subject positions may be constructed as an outcome of normal and well-intentioned CMS research.

Change of the century - free software and the positive possibility

The much touted ‘freedoms’ of FLOSS are coming under increasing scrutiny as they are applied to contexts beyond their original formation. Is ‘freedom as in speech’ enough or are there other freedoms upon which the construction of the commons depends? Martin Hardie has worked extensively on an archeology of how the GNU/Linux operating system was developed, exposing the myths that are at its foundation. Here, he asks how the licensing of FLOSS operates within the constitution of Empire and locates in the new forms of ‘producing in common’ the means to reverse the proliferation of alternative law and instead affirm a true alternative to law.

Age- and gender-specific rate of fractures in Australia : a population-based study

There is little population-based data concerning fracture rates in Australia. We ascertained all fractures occurring during 2 years in adults aged 35 years and over residing within a defined region (population 218 000), representative of the Australian population. The major strength of this study is the comprehensive ascertainment of fractures, which was ensured by regular searches of the only two radiologic providers in the Geelong Osteoporosis Study region. Nevertheless, vertebral fractures are likely to be underestimated since our ascertainment relied on a clinical indication for a medical imaging procedure. Among those aged 35 – 55 years, the fracture rate (persons per 10 000/year) in men was about double the rate in women (65 vs 35). The fracture rate was almost 7 times higher in women over 60 years versus women less than 55 years of age. In contrast, the fracture rate in men over 60 years was only 50% higher than in men less than 55 years of age (72 vs 104). Fracture rates in women and men were highest at the hip (28 and 10 respectively), spine (21 and 7), distal forearm (Colles’) (18 and 4) and humerus (11 and 3), and were 3–4 times higher in women than men. These fractures accounted for 63% of all fractures in women and 32% in men. By contrast, the rate of lower leg and ankle fractures was less than 10 per 10 000 in both women and men and did not increase to the same extent with age. Hip fracture rates appear high, particularly among the older age strata, compared with retrospective ascertainment in other populations. In Australia, as in many other countries, there is an increasing longevity of the population. The number of women aged 90 years and over increased by 32% and the number of men of this age increased by 48% in the 5 years between the Australian national census of 1991 and 1996. Given stable fracture rates, the substantial health burden imposed by age-related fractures, particularly hip fractures, will continue to escalate in both women and men.

Ex vivo expansion of haematopoietic stem/progenitor cells from human umbilical cord blood on acellular scaffolds prepared from MS-5 stromal cell line

Lineage-specific expansion of haematopoietic stem/progenitor cells (HSPCs) from human umbilical cord blood (UCB) is desirable because of their several applications in translational medicine, e.g. treatment of cancer, bonemarrowfailure and immunodeficiencies. The currentmethods forHSPC expansion use either cellular feeder layers and/or soluble growth factors and selected matrix components coated on different surfaces. The use of cell-free extracellular matrices from bone marrow cells for this purpose has not previously been reported. We have prepared insoluble, cell- free matrices from a murine bone marrow stromal cell line (MS-5) grown under four different conditions, i.e. in presence or absence of osteogenic medium, each incubated under 5% and 20% O2 tensions. These acellularmatrices were used as biological scaffolds for the lineage-specific expansion of magnetically sorted CD34+ cells and the results were evaluated by flow cytometry and colony-forming assays. We could get up to 80-fold expansion of some HSPCs on one of the matrices and our results indicated that oxygen tension played a significant role in determining the expansion capacity of the matrices. A comparative proteomic analysis of the matrices indicated differential expression of proteins, such as aldehyde dehydrogenase and gelsolin, which have previously been identified as playing a role in HSPC maintenance and expansion. Our approach may be of value in identifying factors relevant to tissue engineering-based ex vivo HSPC expansion, and itmay also provide insights into the constitution of the niche in which these cells reside in the bone marrow.

An entrenched bill of rights : a protection for the rights of minorities

This paper is concerned with the question of whether Australia would be better served by the inclusion of an entrenched Bill of Rights in the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia. In particular, attention will focus on the abuses of minorities that are all but certain to arise in any society that is based on majoritarian rule. This paper will also examine the question of whether an entrenched Bill of Rights would serve as an effective safeguard against such abuses, especially where the rights of unpopular minorities are involved. The analysis to follow is undertaken against the backdrop of the efficacy, or the lack thereof, of the Constitution of the United States in preventing such abuses, and particularly that portion of the American Constitution that is known as the Bill of Rights.