Book Review : Bellanta, Melissa (2012) Larrikins : A History. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press.

This book has been painstakingly researched by a scholar whose intellectual competencies span several disciplines: history, sociology, criminology, culture, drama and film studies. It is theoretically sophisticated and yet not dense as it reads like a novel with an abundance of interesting complex characters.

Book review of Wang, Y., & Pizam, A. (Eds). 2011. Destination Marketing and Management – Theories and Applications.

A contentious issue in the field of destination marketing has been the recent tendency by some authors to refer to destination marketing organisations (DMOs) as destination management organisations. This nomenclature infers control over destination resources, a level of influence that is in reality held by few DMOs. This issue of a lack of control over the destination ‘amalgam’ is acknowledged by a number of the contributors, including the editors and the discussion on destination competitiveness by J.R. Brent Ritchie and Geoffrey Crouch, and is perhaps best summed up by Alan Fyall in the concluding chapter: “...unless all elements are owned by the same body, then the ability to control and influence the direction, quality and development of the destination pose very real challenges’ (p. 343). The title of the text acknowledges both marketing and management, in relation to theories and applications. While there are insightful propositions about ideals of destination management, readers will find there is a lack of coverage of destination management in practise by DMOs. This represents fertile ground for future research.

A picture is worth a thousand words : an approach to learning about visuals

Students in the middle years encounter an increasing range of unfamiliar visuals. Visual literacy, the ability to encode and decode visuals and to think visually, is an expectation of all middle years curriculum areas and an expectation of NAPLAN literacy and numeracy tests. This article presents a multidisciplinary approach to teaching visual literacy that links the content of all learning areas and encourages students to transfer skills from familiar to unfamiliar contexts. It proposes a classification of visuals in six parts: one-dimensional; two-dimensional; map; shape; connection; and picture, based on the properties, rather than the purpose, of the visual. By placing a visual in one of these six categories, students learn to transfer the skills used to decode familiar visuals to unfamiliar cases in the same category. The article also discusses a range of other teaching strategies that can be used to complement this multi-disciplinary approach.

Contract Law Case Book [2nd ed.]

This case book contains the essential sections of the most significant cases in Australian contract law. Ready access to this collection of cases enables students to experience the law through the judges’ own words, and to develop the skills of interpreting and analysing cases in order to refine their understanding of the law. Excerpts from important statutes and writings are also included.

Paranoid prizing : mapping Australia’s Eve Pownall Award for information books, 2001-2010

Each year, the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) administers a number of Book of the Year Awards, including the Eve Pownall Award for Information Books. The books chosen by the CBCA constitute a contemporary canon of Australian children’s literature, and serve to both shape and reflect current educational policies and practices as well as young Australians’ sense of themselves and their nation. This paper reads a selection of award-winning Australian non-fiction children’s literature in the context of colonialism, curriculum, military myths, and Aboriginal perspectives on national history and identity.

The Cambridge companion to creative writing [Edited book]

Creative writing has become a highly professionalised academic discipline, with popular courses and prestigious degree programmes worldwide. This book is a must for all students and teachers of creative writing, indeed for anyone who aspires to be a published writer. It engages with a complex art in an accessible manner, addressing concepts important to the rapidly growing field of creative writing, while maintaining a strong craft emphasis, analysing exemplary models of writing and providing related writing exercises. Written by professional writers and teachers of writing, the chapters deal with specific genres or forms – ranging from the novel to new media – or with significant topics that explore the cutting edge state of creative writing internationally (including creative writing and science, contemporary publishing and new workshop approaches).

Are we keeping the bastards honest? Perceptions of corruption, integrity and influence on politics

The words of the late Don Chipp, the founder of the Australian Democrats, have a perennial relevance to politics. When Chipp talked about ‘keeping the bastards honest’, it related to a minor political party playing a role of keeping the major political parties true to their word (Warhurst 1997). Yet it is also a democratic role that citizens play on an ongoing basis, particularly through the mechanism of elections. At the ballot box, governments that are widely perceived to have acted with a lack of integrity are roundly punished. This chapter explores public opinion on issues of integrity, corruption, influence and trust in politics and politicians in Australia. The evidence paints a differentiated picture of a public which sees little sign of overtly corrupt political practices but on the other hand does not feel terribly influential and is not always confident of fair treatment from public officials...

Book review : Olivier Corten, The Law Against War

Olivier Corten’s The Law Against War is a comprehensive, meticulously-researched study of contemporary international law governing the use of armed force in international relations. As a translated and updated version of a 2008 book published in French, it offers valuable insights into the positivist methodology that underpins much of the European scholarship of international law. Corten undertakes a rigorous analysis of state practice from 1945 onwards, with a view to clarifying the current meaning and scope of international law’s prohibition on the use of force. His central argument is that the majority of states remain attached to a strict interpretation of this rule. For Corten, state practice indicates that the doctrines of anticipatory self-defence, pre-emptive force and humanitarian intervention have no basis in contemporary international law. His overall position accords with a traditional, restrictive view of the circumstances in which states are permitted to use force...

"You help me improve my English, I'll teach you Physics!" Cuban teachers overseas

Lending teachers for two-year periods is one of the ways in which Cuba has been able to collaborate with other countries in their efforts to improve educational planning and practice. My field research in 2001 in Jamaica (March and November) and in Namibia (December) enabled me to obtain information about how Cuban teachers are being utilized, and about the educational implications of this project. In Jamaica, I interviewed 15 Cuban teachers in several schools and one in the vocational institute, as well as the Cuban project supervisor in charge of the 51 Cuban teachers. I also talked with officials at the Jamaican Ministry of Education to obtain an idea of the developmental needs in the various subjects that the Cubans had been asked to teach. In Namibia I interviewed personnel in the National Sports Directorate and the Cuban manager in charge of the sports education project. The chapter draws on these interviews to build a picture of how the program of collaboration is organized, and considers its postcolonial significance, in theory and in practice, as an example of South-South collaboration. The chapter contributes to a multilevel style of comparative education analysis based on microlevel qualitative fieldwork within a framework that compares cross-cultural issues and national policies. The discussion of the educational situation of the host countries suggests why Cuban teachers can contribute to meeting curricular needs, particularly in the areas of the sciences, mathematics, Spanish, and sports. The friendly and joking remark of one of the Cuban teachers to school students in Jamaica: “You help me improve my English, I’ll teach you Physics!” highlights the reciprocal potential of these cooperation projects, discussed in several chapters of this book.

Early stage start-ups : evidence from the Comprehensive Australian Study of Entrepreneurial Emergence (CAUSEE)

In this chapter, the picture of Australian small business is supplemented by using data from the Comprehensive Australian Study of Entrepreneurial Emergence (CAUSEE) . This data tracks large numbers of on-going business start-ups over time. The Australian Centre of Entrepreneurship Research at Queensland University of Technology collected data in four annual waves. (Wave 1 to Wave 4) from 2007 to 2011. CAUSEE allows the analysis of entrepreneurial entrants at two stages of development, i.e. nascent and young firms. Nascent firms are defined as firms in the process of being created, but not yet established in the market, and young firms are defined as having been operational for up to four years. An analysis of nascent firms provides unique insights, as no other known Australian database captures and follows the development of business start-ups at the pre-operational stage. In addition, the project captured judgment over samples of high-potential start-ups.

A picture is worth a thousand words : a cross-curricular approach to learning about visuals in STEM

Visuals are a central feature of STEM in all levels of education and many areas of employment. The wide variety of visuals that students are expected to master in STEM prevents an approach that aims to teach students about every type of visual that they may encounter. This paper proposes a pedagogy that can be applied across year levels and learning areas, allowing a school-wide, cross-curricular, approach to teaching about visual, that enhances learning in STEM and all other learning areas. Visuals are classified into six categories based on their properties, unlike traditional methods that classify visuals according to purpose. As visuals in the same category share common properties, students are able to transfer their knowledge from the familiar to unfamiliar in each category. The paper details the classification and proposes some strategies that can be can be incorporated into existing methods of teaching students about visuals in all learning areas. The approach may also assist students to see the connections between the different learning areas within and outside STEM.

Book Review : "The Psychology of Eating : From Healthy to Disordered Behaviour"

WHEN JANE Ogden embarked on writing a book about the psychology of eating I wonder whether she realized the enormity of the task given the breadth of research literature in this field. Through a series of 12 closely related chapters on eating, health, food choice, dieting, obesity, body image, eating disorders and others, an extensive range of areas of the psychology of eating is covered. As well as these areas, included within each chapter is a discussion of the significance of historical, cultural, social and familial factors, theoretical approaches and empirical data in the understanding of the multifaceted problems related to eating. At the end of each chapter there is a box entitled ‘Towards an integrated model of diet’ that links the content with that of the following chapters...

Book review : Reply to Holmes’s review of the "Social Construction of Anorexia Nervosa"

It is always difficult to know what reviewers such as Colin Holmes (2001) want from a book. While he knows something of the claims that Gull was thought by some to be Jack the Ripper – an historical digression deliberately omitted from the book – Holmes has, it would seem, little understanding of the practice implications of Foucauldian analysis...

Book review: "Ideologies of Breast Cancer : Feminist Perspectives" Edited by Laura K. Potts. New York: St. Martin’s Press

Laura K. Potts’s edited collection of research on the meanings of breast cancer includes authors from the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada whose perspectives draw on literary criticism, sociology, psychology, and cultural studies among others. The research employs various methodological approaches—for example, media analysis (Saywell et al.), autobiographical narratives (Potts), and analysis of social activism (Fishman)—to elucidate the multiple dimensions and diversity of breast cancer experiences. The first of two parts, “Meanings of Breast Cancer,” presents the problematical relationship between biomedicine and women’s constructions of breast cancer knowledge, the sexualized and maternalized breast in the print media about breast cancer, environmental risks to women’s health in the Bay Area of San Francisco, and women’s narratives of breast cancer and situating the self. In part 2, “Discourses of Risk and Breast Cancer,” examination of the discourses of prevention and risks to health are taken up in relation to breast cancer screening, the problem of prophylactic mastectomy for hereditary breast cancer, and environmental activism...

Book review: "Qualitative Health Psychology. Theories and Methods" Michael Murray and Kerry Chamberlain (Eds.)

Qualitative Health Psychology aims to contribute to the debate about the nature of psychology and of science through ‘an examination of the role of qualitative research within health psychology’ (p. 3). The editors, in bringing together contributors from the UK, Ireland, Canada, Brazil, New Zealand and Australia, have compiled a text that reflects different uses of qualitative health research in diverse social and cultural contexts. Structured into three parts, the book encompasses key theoretical and methodological issues in qualitative research in its attempt to encourage broad epistemological debate within health psychology.