Popular culture/sacredness

A huge billboard faces me as I crawl down Punt Road Melbourne, its wild purple and yellow-daubed sports fan (male) leering over the northbound traffic. Its message: 'Sport is a Religion, so pray for Yamaha Stadium Sound'  Canny advertising, hooking into aussie culture, selecting an aussie take on religion/ sport (fun, serious, primitive, fanatic, central). Next, there's the Next fashion ad, with its larger than life-sized photograph of a gorgeously dressed young female eying off the pope's long white robe, comparing outfits. Fashion as religion, or better than, really, is the inference-she looks mildly
amused, and he looks a little nonplussed. And then there are the many Qantas advertisments for 'Spirit of. Australia' featuring Aboriginal figures, with backdrops of Dlum and the red desert. As cultural tour businesses know, there's money to be made in taking urban, nonIndigenous tourists to visit their 'spiritual other', the Aboriginal.1 Or there's the multicultural, children's version of the ad, with all the little global travellers of the future featured in wonderful locations. Spirit of Australia.

School principals and racism: responding to Aveling

This study responds to Nado Aveling's call in ‘Anti-racism in Schools: A question of leadership?’ (Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 2007, 28(1), 69–85) for further investigation into racism in Australian schools. Aveling's interview study concluded that an overwhelming number of school principals denied the presence of racism in their schools, and that there were no discernible differences in how principals in different schools constructed racism. In contrast, our research found that school principals' constructions of cultural racism are strongly influenced by their school contexts. We elucidate these differences examining the various intersections between race, class and religion deployed by principals in different sites, and argue for the utility of examining and theorising cultural racism using an intersectional approach. By bringing context into our analysis we provide a more nuanced insight into the different ways in which racism is constituted and understood by Australian school principals.

Discovering latent affective dynamics among individuals in online mental health-related communities

Discovering dynamics of emotion and mood changes for individuals has the potential to enhance the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. In this paper we study affective transitions and dynamics among individuals in online mental health communities. Using social media as form of 'sensor', we crawl a large dataset of blogs posted by online communities whose descriptions declared to be associated with affective disorder conditions such as depression, anxiety, or autism. We then apply nonnegative matrix factorization model to extract the common and individual factors of affective transitions across groups of individuals in different levels of affective disorders. We examine the latent patterns of emotional transitions and investigate the effects of emotional transitions across the cohorts. Our framework is novel as it utilizes social media as an online sensing platform of mood and emotional dynamics. Hence, our work has implication in constructing systems to screen individuals and communities at high risks of mental health problems in online settings.