Pedagogy, police training, D/discourses – “truth” and situated identities and meanings

Qualitative and quantitative methods were used in this research to distinguish the prevailing D/discourses (words, tools, beliefs, thinking styles) in police training and to analyse the ‘discourse-practice’ (Cherryholmes 1988, p.1) framework of policing in a training environment. The manifestations, functions and consequences of the D/discourses raise concerns about the efficacy of training (its doctrinal intent and value versus its educative intent and value) and its implications for individuals’ identity, subjectivity, agency, learning, and “membership” within the policing community. The literature revealed that police training acts as a formally sanctioned vehicle for police culture, subcultures, and D/discourses. This is complicated by (a) the predominance of pedagogical training practices that support a trainer-centred approach and standardised lecture format for training, (b) police training focusing predominantly on law enforcement at the cost of higher-order conceptual skills, and (c) Australian and international studies of police management education which reveal a subculture resistant to theoretical analysis and critical reflection, and a set of unconscious and unchallengeable assumptions regarding police work, conduct, and leadership. A backdrop to this research and findings is the agenda of Australian and New Zealand police services for police to become a profession.

The brain in the jar : troubling the truths of discourses of adolescent brain development

Ideas about adolescent brains and their development increasingly function as powerful truths in making sense of young people. And it is the knowledge practices of the neurosciences and evolutionary and developmental psychology that are deemed capable of producing what we have come to understand as the evidence on which policy, interventions and education should be built. In effect these discourses reduce young people to little more than a brain in a jar. The paper examines how the evidence about adolescent brains - their volume, and the functioning and activity of different regions - from neuroscience and evolutionary and developmental psychology works as truth. What knowledge practices are used to produce this evidence, or are deemed capable of producing this evidence? What truth claims are able to attach to this evidence? What makes it true and why is it imagined as evidence of something that is true in policy, public and other research settings that are often far removed from where it was produced? I argue that the discourses of adolescent brain development disembody, reduce and simplify the complexities of these figures we know as adolescents. In effect they render the adolescent as a brain in a jar.

`I feel enlightened now, but...`: the limits to the pedagogic translation of critical social discourses in physical education

The emancipatory goal that underpins critical theories of teaching and learning is built on a theory of rational self-determination. In the context of physical education, critical educators believe that through a process of enlightenment teachers can recognize and transform elements of injustice and inequality that exist, albeit unwittingly, in their practice. However, despite the broad appeal of this orientation there are relatively few empirical accounts of how theories of enlightenment manifest themselves in the practice of emancipation. Propelled by the lacuna that clearly exists between critical theory and critical practice, this paper reports on the introduction of critical social discourses to a preservice PE program. It uses a case study methodology to report on two student-teachers' engagement with a range of critical social discourses during a year-long PE unit. The paper discusses some of the ways these students engaged with the theory and practice of a critical orientation for teaching and learning in physical education. Aspects of their experiences are then interpreted through Fay's (1987) critical but postmodern "limits to change" thesis. The paper concludes with tempered optimism about the potential for critical social discourses to guide preservice teachers in practical ways.

Tensions and dilemmas in community development: new discourses, new Trojans?

This paper begins by noting the range of contradictions and dilemmas facing those involved in community development today. It then draws on research into the operating frameworks that set the stage for much current community development activity. It discusses four key operating frameworks and how each framework can affect community development practice. The final section deals with the ways in which the frameworks, and the discourses associated with them, come together.

Discourses of deception: cheating in professional running

Cheating, it is claimed, is anathema to sport. But is this the case? In this paper it is argued that cheating is integral to modern sport, that the model of sport as 'fair play' is simply an ideological guise of amateurism. The paper focuses on the sport of professional running which, since its origins in the eighteenth century, has been a gambling sport. Strategies involving cheating to manipulate wins, or losses, have featured in this sport as ways of increasing the probability of striking successful wagers. Such strategies are an accepted part of professional running: participants anticipate and expect others to be playing it in this way. However, a distinction is made between what is referred to in the paper as 'clean' cheating and 'dirty' cheating. The former is an accepted way of the sport, the latter occurs but is deprecated. The paper explores these different forms of cheating and the athletes' responses to them. Through a focus on the discourses of success in capitalist society, a model of cheating is developed to interpret such practices. Within the context of professional running, a working class sport, it is argued that, given the habitus of its practitioners, 'success' may be measured in terms of monetary gains and the 'kick-on' in life that these might provide. Cheating practices may serve to enhance the probability of success and social mobility. Given the relatively short career spans of sports people and the costs involved in developing the requisite skills, cheating may promote success and establish a financial base for post-sport careers. The paper concludes that cheating in sport can be anticipated as a feature of an acquisitive capitalist society.

Who is `us`? Students negotiating discourses of racism and national identification in Australia

This article explores the political beliefs and the forms of reasoning about racism, national identity and Other developed by young Australian women and men from different ethnic and class backgrounds. The interviews on which the discussion is based are drawn from a larger longitudinal study of Australian secondary school students which examines how young people develop their sense of self and social values over time. The present article has two overall purposes: to add to understandings of how the cultural logic of racism functions in one national setting, and to consider political reasoning about race and ethnicity in relation to processes of young people's identity positioning. Three main lines of argument are developed. The first concerns students' positioning of themselves vis-a `-vis the current 'race debate' in Australia, and in relation to us as researchers, including their negotiation of the protocols for speaking about 'race' and racism. This includes consider ation of the methodological and political effects of white Anglo women asking questions about racism and ethnicity to ethnic minority students who are routinely constituted as 'Other': what blindnesses and silences continue to operate when posing questions about racism directly? A second and related focus is the range of emotional responses evoked by asking questions about racism and about an Australian politician (Pauline Hanson), who has been prominent in race debates. Third, the authors examine young people's construction of 'us and them' binaries and hierarchies of Otherness and whiteness. They argue throughout that reasoning about race, national identity and Others, and the taking up of 'political positions', is intimately linked to identity formation and to how we imagine ourselves in the present, the past and the future.

Art, pain, children: utopian and dystopian discourses in picture books

It is often assumed that picture books are intended for young children and that they are therefore mainly concerned with safe and reassuring stories, say, about home and family, friends and starting school. There are many picture books which fit within this category, but the form itself, a 32-page format which developed during the 1960s from illustrated books, has always been peculiarly open to experimentation and has enlarged its audience to include older children and adults. Unlike the novel, the picture book is not weighed down by the practices and conventions of the past; and the combination of verbal and visual texts makes for a particularly complex genre as it constructs ideas through dialogical relations between words and pictures.

Fateful moments and the discourses of grief

This paper is concerned with the ways in which language functions in our making sense of death and loss, not only with the use of euphemisms for death, but also the wider discourses which frame meanings and understandings. Many bystanders and commentators on September 11, 2001, for example, likened the impact of the planes on the towers, and their subsequent collapse as “just like a movie ... I couldn’t believe it was happening”. From a culture whose primary experience of death and violence is mediated by film and television, the issue of how these experiences are communicated and understood – by the families of those who died, by the rescue workers and police, by the politicians and the military, and also importantly, by the media and their audiences – is crucial in understanding the ways in which what seem like natural responses are socially and culturally constructed.

Disinterested truth: legitimation of the doctrine of tenure post-Mabo

This article argues that it is time for the complete abolition of feudal tenure in Australian land law and its replacement with an allodial model better able to promote proprietary independence, equality and cultural neutrality. The article considers the questionable constitutional legitimacy of adopting strict feudal tenets in a territory already inhabited by indigenous occupants. It goes on to examine the various legitimation devices that the courts have utilised to sustain the feudal construct and the effect that Mabo has had upon feudal orthodoxy. In particular, the article outlines why post-Mabo tenure is incapable of embracing a pluralist land system; it is suggested that the Eurocentric character of feudal tenure and the structural impediments associated with the acceptance of a non-Crown title prevent it from ever being able to effectively integrate native title into the structure of property law. In light of this, the article argues that post-Mabo tenure lacks both legal and social legitimacy and the 'disinterested' perpetuation of this system must be brought to an end. The article argues that the time has well and truly come to replace feudal tenure with an allodial model based broadly on the system that has developed in the United States but with particularised adaptations. The removal of the Crown and its associated cultural assumptions from the land framework would, it is argued, allow land interests to develop according to their individual cultural origins. This would create a more responsive and balanced system better equipped to embrace the developments of contemporary common law jurisprudence.

Doubles or nothing : the problem of binding truth to being in the work of Alain Badiou

In this article, I discuss how things go with the "Nothing" in the work of Alain Badiou, a topic which is evidently central to his thought, and which has received a great deal of attention in the commentary to date. As this problem is inaccessible outside of Badiou’s deployment of mathematics, I will suggest how accounts of Badiou’s work remain flawed insofar as they evade his mathematical demonstrations, and I attempt to clarify how mathematics operates in his system. I then examine the consequences that such a use of mathematics has for Badiou’s doctrine of the nothing. I conclude with a discussion of some of the difficulties that the nothing continues to pose to Badiou, which have not (yet) been satisfactorily resolved. These difficulties devolve from the problematic of the incessantly doubling void.