O princípio da Integralidade e o SAMU

A partir de 2002 o Estado assume o esforço de normatizar a atenção às urgências com edição de Portarias e documentos. O SAMU foi o primeiro componente da política implantado. Ele opera com ambulâncias com ou sem médico e com recursos tecnológicos diversos. Este estudo teve como objetivo analisar o potencial de prática de integralidade no SAMU. Para tal, foram realizadas três etapas de trabalho. Analisou-se a política de urgência a partir dos documentos e Portarias que a compõem. No trabalho de campo foram entrevistados seis gestores dos três níveis de governo e avaliadas as práticas de regulação nos SAMU do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. A metodologia utilizou o referencial da análise da conduta estratégica da Teoria da Estruturação de Giddens (1984) relacionando as capacidades cognitivas dos agentes e suas estratégias de ação, com as dimensões estruturais. Para o campo, além da teoria de Giddens, busquei no referencial da avaliação, indicadores (incluindo os da política), dialogando com a análise d situação do serviço. A Política de Urgência tece como marcos os financiamento federal, a regionalização, a capacitação dos profissionais, a função do SAMU de observatório da rede; e a gestão por comitês de urgência. A integralidade é proposta como valor, na indicação de utilizar o conceito ampliado de urgência, através da regionalização e da comunicação entre os serviços. A capacitação não foi instituída no estado e os vínculos empregatícios eram precários. Foi constatada a inoperância do Comitê Gestor Nacional de Urgências e a ausência do Comitê Estadual. Não há assistência integrada tendo entre as causas a insuficiência estrutural da rede, representada pela ausência da atenção básica e pela precariedade nos hospitais de referência. Não há produção e utilização de informação e o SAMU não cumpre a função de observatório de saúde. Os três SAMUs têm estruturas diferenciadas. Foram analisados 206 atendimentos e sua categirazação destacou: o SAMU bem sucedido, com práticas de integralidade no seu componente individual e de acesso aos serviços; sua função de observatório de rede, que refletiu o vazio assistencial do PSF e média complexidade e a restrição do acesso hospitalar; a insuficiência de recursos, com uso inadequado de ambulâncias; e demandas não reconhecidas, onde casos de urgência não reconhecida foram recusados. Destaca-se a prevalência da urgência clínica. Conclusão: a legitimação da regulação esteve presente na atitude dos entrevistados e de alguns profissionais nos casos do SAMU bem sucedido. A densidade das propostas documentais foi a vertente facilitadora do recurso estrutural. A mobilização de recursos autoritativos e alocativos mostrou fragilidades. Não houve mudança significativa nas práticas tipicamente excludentes do SUS, mas acreditamos no efeito cumulativo dos pequenos desvios que têm na ética e na solidariedade a base da aplicação do conhecimento técnico.

ID scanning, the media and the politics of urban surveillance in an Australian regional city

Computerised ID scanning technologies have permeated many urban night-time economies in Australia, the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. This paper documents how one media organisation’s overt and tacit approval of ID scanners helped to normalise this form of surveillance as a precondition of entry into most licensed venues in the Australian city of Geelong. After outlining how processes of governance “from above” and “from below” interweave to generate distinct political and media demands for strategies to prevent localised crime problems, a chronological reconstruction of media reports over a three-and-a half year period demonstrates how ID scanning became the centrepiece of a holistic reform strategy to combat alcohol-related violence in this nightclub precinct. Several discursive techniques helped to normalise this “technological fix”, while suppressing critical discussion of viable concerns over information privacy, data security and system networking. These
included pairing reports of an initial “signal crime” with examples of “virtual victimhood” to stress the urgency of a radical surveillance-based response, which was supported by anecdotal statements from key “primary definers” highlighting the success of this initiative in targeting a wider population of antisocial “others”. The implications of these reporting practices are discussed in light of the media’s central role in reforming the Geelong night-time economy and broader trends in using novel surveillance technologies to combat urban crime problems at the expense of alternative measures that protect individual liberty.

Affect and the politics of testimony in Holocaust museums

In 2010, the Jewish Holocaust Centre (JHC) in Melbourne unveiled its new permanent exhibition, replacing one that had remained, mostly unchanged, for the past twenty years since a major redevelopment in 1990. The former exhibition had received many plaudits from visitors and reviewers for its homespun, intimate aesthetics and display techniques, largely based on photographs (Light, 2002). Central to the JHC’s role as a site of mourning and education, the exhibition included the use of personal testimony from Melbourne’s Holocaust survivors, both in the exhibition displays and through the survivors who ran the museum and shared their stories with individuals and groups. A continuing anxiety over the thirty-year history of the JHC has been the passing of Holocaust survivors. These survivor guides were central to the discourse of a “living museum,” seen as giving the organization its uniqueness compared to other Holocaust institutions as well as other museums generally. Oral survivor testimony was perceived as a key aspect of the museum’s pedagogic potential: The affective encounter with survivors telling their stories while the visitor was viewing the exhibition was identified as having a transformative function, particularly for school-age students who comprised the majority of the visitors. The exhibition redevelopment in 2010 was, in part, a manifestation of that anxiety, with the urgency to incorporate survivor video-testimony increasing as the survivors aged and their memories faded. However, replacing a much-loved exhibition was fraught with difficulties, as the survivors were still very much part of the museum decision-making process. As the JHC had gradually moved from a survivor-volunteer based place of mourning to a professionally run museum with paid employees, there was a need to preserve the voices of the survivors who had been guides at the museum since its opening. Approaching a time when the survivors are not bodily present to share their stories, how might their testimonies still have transformative potential and inform interpretive techniques?

Gesturing elsewhere: the identity politics of the Balinese death/thrash metal scene

This essay explores the political significance of Balinese death/thrash fandom. In the early 1990s, the emergence of a death/thrash scene in Bali paralleled growing criticism of accelerated tourism development on the island. Specifically, locals protested the increasing ubiquity of Jakarta, 'the centre', cast as threatening to an authentically 'low', peripheral Balinese culture. Similarly, death/thrash enthusiasts also gravitated toward certain fringes, although they rejected dominant notions of Balinese-ness by gesturing elsewhere, toward a global scene. The essay explores the ways in which death/thrash enthusiasts engaged with local discourses by coveting their marginality, and aims to demonstrate how their articulations of 'alien-ness' contributed in important ways to a broader regionalism.

Journalism, History and the Politics of Popular Culture

I argue that a divergence between popular culture as “object” and “subject” of journalism emerged during the nineteenth century in Britain. It accounts not only for different practices of journalism, but also for differences in the study of journalism, as manifested in journalism studies and cultural studies respectively. The chapter offers an historical account to show that popular culture was the source of the first mass circulation journalism, via the pauper press, but that it was later incorporated into the mechanisms of modern government for a very different purpose, the theorist of which was Walter Bagehot. Journalism’s polarity was reversed – it turned from “subjective” to “objective.” The paper concludes with a discussion of YouTube and the resurgence of self-made representation, using the resources of popular culture, in current election campaigns. Are we witnessing a further reversal of polarity, where popular culture and self-representation once again becomes the “subject” of journalism?

21st Century politics : new faces/new spaces

Politics has been described as a man’s game and a man’s place. Further, the design of houses of politics also embeds this dominant masculine ethos. Traditional Chambers have been large with only limited seating arrangements ensuring that only privileged elite can participate and both officials and the public are located at some distance and separate from the elected officials. Such a Chamber ensures that Members need to face each other and the dominant interaction is adversarial. Within this system however, women have been able to carve out new spaces, or use existing ones in different ways, to become more involved with the mechanisms of parliament and provide alternative routes to leadership. In doing so, they have introduced elements of the private domain (nurturing, dialogue and inclusion) to the public domain. The way in which space is used is fundamental and its treatment has consequences for individuals, organizations and societies (Clegg and Kornberger 2006). Dale’s (2005) work emphasises the social character of architecture which recognises the impact which it has on the behaviours of individuals and nowhere is this more pertinent than the way the Australian Parliament House operates. This paper draws on the experiences of Australian parliamentarians to examine the way in which the new Australian Parliament House shapes the way in which the Australian political cultural norms and practices are shaped and maintained. It also seeks to explore the way the Members of Parliament (MPs) experience these spaces and how some MPs have been able to bring new ways of utilising the space to ensure it is more accommodating to the men and women who inhabit this building at the apex of Australia’s political life. In doing so, such MPs are seeking to ensure that the practices and processes of Australia’s political system are reflective of the men and women who inhabit this national institution in the beginning of the 21st century.

Politicizing mathematics education : has politics gone too far? Or not far enough?

In this chapter we tackle increasingly sensitive questions in mathematics education, those that have polarized the community into distinct schools of thought as well as impacted reform efforts.

Literacy and religion : the textual politics and practice of Seventh-day Adventism

This book explores the interrelation of literacy and religion as practiced by Western Christians in, first, historical contexts and, second, in one contemporary church setting. Using both a case study and a Foucauldian theoretical framework, the book provides a sustained analysis of the reciprocal discursive construction of literacy, religiosity and identity in one Seventh-day Adventist Church community of Northern Australia. Critical linguistic and discourse analytic theory is used to disclose processes of theological (church), familial (home) and educational (school) normalisation of community members into regulated ways of hearing and speaking, reading and writing, being and believing. Detailed analyses of spoken and written texts taken from institutional and local community settings show how textual religion is an exemplary technology of the self, a politics constituted by canonical texts, interpretive norms, textual practices, ritualised events and sociopolitical protocols that, ultimately, are turned in upon the self. The purpose of these analyses is to show how, across denominational difference in belief (tradition) and practice, particular versions of self and society are constructed through economies of truth from text, enabling and constraining what can and cannot be spoken and enacted by believers.