Making modern lives: subjectivity, schooling and social change

Making Modern Lives looks at how young people shape their lives as they move through their secondary school years and into the world beyond. It explores how they develop dispositions, attitudes, identities, and orientations in modern society. Based on an eight-year study consisting of more the 350 in-depth interviews with young Australians from diverse backgrounds, the book reveals the effects of schooling and of local school cultures on young people's choices, future plans, political values, friendships, and attitudes toward school, work, and sense of self. Making Modern Lives uncovers who young people are today, what type of identities and inequalities are being formed and reformed, and what processes and politics are at work in relation to gender, class, race, and the framing of vocational futures.

"Roll Up and Spend Your Last Dime". The Merry-go-round of Children`s Extra-curricular Activities in Modern Society.

"Step up and play" begins the famous hit song 'Penny Arcade'. And so it
was for thousands of Australian families, as their eldest child began school
this year, and the associated endless merry-go-round of extra-curricular
activities also began. But how many of those families realise that the song ends "Roll up and spend your last dime!"? While the perceived benefits of
children's involvement in extracurricular activities are many and are widely accepted, there are also costs, not only in terms of money but also in terms
of time. Evidence from a study conducted in Melbourne highlights the fact that, for many families such as those on low incomes and those headed by a single parent, both the time and the money costs may be prohibitive. This article highlights parents' perceptions of the benefits·and costs of children's extra-curricular activities, and explores the implications of changing family and household structures for families' capacity to sustain such activities.

`Modern` learning methods : rhetoric and reality - further to Sadler-Smith et al

Working in the UK, Sadler-Smith, Down and Lean, in their article “‘Modern’ learning methods: rhetoric and reality”, Personnel Review, Vol. 29 No. 4, 2000, pp. 474-90, have shown that distance learning methods are neither favoured nor perceived as effective by enterprises pursuing training that yields a competitive edge. They have suggested that these methods need to be integrated with other more conventional on-job training methods. This paper, based on Australian research, shows a tension between the requirements of flexible training methods based on distance learning methods, and the characteristics that typify learners and their workplaces. That identified tension is used to suggest how an integration of training methods may be effected in workplaces.

The making of modern scientific personae: the scientist as a moral person? Emil Du Bois-Reymond and his friends

This article examines the notion of the 'scientist as a moral person' in the light of the early stages of the commodification of science and the transformation of research into a big enterprise, operating on the principle of the division of labour. These processes were set in train at the end of the 19th century. The article focuses on the concomitant changes in the public persona and the habitus of scientific entrepreneurs. I begin by showing the significance of the professional networks that were built up and maintained to further a group's research ideas and the careers of its members, thus demonstrating one condition on which depended their practice of science and their ability to earn a living. This leads to a characterization of the changing styles of work, thought and life, and to a consideration of public perceptions and of the ways in which a new self-image of scholarship and science was fashioned. A critical discussion of the public role of these mandarin scientists follows in order to highlight the strains created by the commodification of science at a time of international tensions and conflicts, when shared beliefs in scholarly cosmopolitanism were subverted by appeals to science and scholarship to work in the service of one's own nation as its 'courtiers'. Various considerations of peculiar analogies between national styles of research and the style of social organization are then noted. In the final section, the article queries the long-term impact of these developments on the ideal of the scientist as a 'moral person'. Taking a cue from Max Weber and pursuing reflections by Zygmunt Bauman on 'science moralized', I argue that the emergence of a type of 'specialists without spirit' was an unintended but fatal consequence of the changes in research practices promoted by scientific entrepreneurs such as Du Bois-Reymond. I conclude that the temptation to sever the ties to a general ethos of civil virtues lay in the rationalization, specialization and potential de-humanization of the objectifying scientific outlook once advocated for its efficiency.

The presence of an-other: the prescience of racism in post-modern times

In this paper, I explore conversations with teachers and parents at one Melbourne secondary school, as the modern definition of identity,defined at the end of the 1980s, took on the fluidity of post-modern definition a decade later. Even as identification seemed contingent and negotiated, and difference seemed to disappear, teachers and parents continued to understand their identity in relation to the ambivalent definition of others. This became increasingly frightening as notions of otherness, and therefore of self, became increasingly fluid and unclear. That which seemed other and outside, now appears as part-of-us and inside-us-all. Even as descriptions of difference, and thereforeidentity, become more fluid, conceptions of otherness – and therefore – self, do not disappear. Prescient manifestations of exclusion and racism are contiguous with, yet in juxtaposition to, older forms.

An IT Bachelor degree using modern technologies to illustrate core concepts and principles and building generic skills

Information Technology (IT) changes very quickly and influences business, industry and the public in an enormous manner. Outsourcing of IT jobs to cheaper overseas labor and globalization of IT companies become a common practice. Graduates of IT university courses must be well prepared to address the needs and expectations of business, industry and every day life. Many factors in an Information Technology curriculum influence graduates’ professional preparation and image. The most important of them is to reflect technology change, the current state of knowledge of computing, business and industry demands and students’ expectations. The aim of our project was to develop a new Bachelor of IT curriculum that satisfies these requirements. In this report we concentrate our attention on two critical aspects of IT curriculum content, the modern technologies to be used to illustrate basic concepts and principles of computing, and the generic skills that each graduate is expected to acquire to get a job in Australia.

Browsing the modern kitchen - a feast of gender, place and culture (part 1)

Assembling 10 essays from around the globe which engage variously with the space in which food preparation occurs—the kitchen—revealed stunning diversity but also commonalities. In this first of two sets of theme papers on this vital but often unexamined domestic space, the discourse of modernity unites the look and use of twentieth-century kitchens in Australia, Britain and Finland. Imbued with notions of scientific management, the modern kitchen had some common designs which prescribed women's place within it—first as the main occupant and then as the family overseer. The construction of this semi-private space also involved particular domestic technologies which, as the new century dawns, now literally connect the kitchen to the world beyond via the internet fridge. This Introduction begins the two-part feast of gender, place and culture—with an overview of Australia and sketch of subsequent essays—Supski on mid-century migrant Australia, Saarikangas on Finland, Bennett on rural Britain and Watkins on the fridge.

Modern dance, domestic life and civil society

In her book The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (2000) Seyla Benhabib uses the concept of an ‘alternative genealogy of modernity’ to help her both to understand Arendt’s political philosophy and to rethink the potential for civil society to become a progressive political force at the beginning of the twenty first century. The idea of an alternative genealogy of modernity refers to a heterogeneity of social and political forms, spaces and acts that might be used to remap and redefine a modernity whose dominant topology has been shaped by the binary division between so-called public and private spheres. Alternative modernities have already been elaborated and explored from a range of different perspectives including feminist and postcolonial ones: for example, in Rita Felski’s Gender of Modernity (1995) and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincialising Europe (2000). In this paper I want to elaborate upon the idea of an alternative genealogy of modernity from my perspective as a dancer. Thinking through the sociality of art and, more specifically, of some historical dance-making practices can make visible alternative spaces and processes of the (potentially) political. In the West, the modes of art-making form part of an as yet not fully explored arena of the social and of social practices. Modernist and Romantic ideologies have tended to preclude attention to the specific sociabilities of art-making. On the one hand Modernist ideology and art discourses have promoted the idea of an art work’s ‘autonomy’: its radical separation from the social relationships, the bodies and the conditions of its making. On the other hand Romantic ideology, still pervasive in popular conceptions of art practices, construes creation as interiority and individualistic expression. Socialist feminist and Marxist discussions of art have emphasized the social conditions of art-making but these have tended to be concerned with the social inequalities instituted within the public/private split rather than seeking to destabilize that division itself by posing questions of differences within the social. In my discussion below I draw on aspects of early modern dance practice and creation in taking up Benhabib’s concern to mobilise an alternative genealogy of modernity towards a renewal and reactivation of civic life. This project involves unsettling clear distinctions between the so-called ‘public’ and ‘private’ but, at the same time, as Benhabib cautions ‘the binarity of public and private spheres must be reconstructed and not merely rejected’. (2000:2006)

Patellar tendinopathy: pathomechanics and a modern approach to treatment

Patellar tendinopathy, a common condition in sport, can be recurrent and resistant to treatment, Risk factors include the level of training, biomechanics, and genetic factors. This review discusses several programs based on eccentric exercise and suggests principles for nonoperative treatment including improving shock absorption, load modification, and adaptation of the tendon to sporting stress. The level of pain that patients are asked to tolerate during tendon-exercise programs varies among programs, and it is unclear what level is optimal to stimulate tendon recovery. Rehabilitation presents several challenges: It can take a long time (3-12 months), exercise prescription in an athlete who is continuing to compete is not straightforward, and guidelines for treatment progression are poor, Nonoperative treatment can fail because of inappropriate exercise prescription and poor athlete compliance. If this occurs and surgical intervention is required, the athlete might still have an unpredictable outcome. Solutions to these problems require additional clinical research.

Public relations and ontology: rhetorical approaches in post-modern times

Rhetorical theory's contemporary involvement with semiotics is overlooked in much current public relations scholarship. This paper aims to 'make a difference' in this respect. There is a need for this change of perspective in view of a call for a new direction in public relations theory. This call came in the final Public Relations Division session at the July, 2003 International Communication Association Convention in San Diego. That panel discussion was titled: 'What Should be the Focus of Public Relations?' The session concluded that a turn towards 'rhetorical theory' was needed. This paper argues that such a turn would pose interesting theoretical and political challenges for a field which has not fully caught up with post-modern ideas. It points out how involvement with the contemporary 'rhetorical turn' paradigm and this paradigm's link to semiotics, would take public relations studies into interesting conceptual and political regions.