Theorising a framework for contemporary health literacies in schools

While schools are mandated to teach health education, there is considerable disjunction between government and community expectations, definitions of health literacy, and what schools are currently teaching. Health literacy in the health sector tends to be dominated by a pathogenic approach, where the health of a person is generally referenced against states of illness. In this paper we argue for a salutogenic approach to health literacies. Further, we utilise mainstream literacy theories and models to propose a robust framework for health literacy in schools that accounts for the complexity of health and well being in contemporary society.

Performance evaluation of eight contemporary passive solar homes in subtropical Australia

Subtropical south-east Queensland’s expanding population is expected to lead to a demand for an additional 754,000 dwellings by 2031. A legacy of poor housing design, minimal building regulations, an absence of building performance evaluation and various social and market factors has lead to a high and growing penetration of, and reliance on, air conditioners to provide comfort in this relatively benign climate. This reliance impacts on policy goals to adapt to and mitigate against global warming, electricity infrastructure investment and household resilience. Based on the concept of bioclimatic design, this field study scrutinizes eight non-air conditioned homes to develop a deeper understanding of the role of contemporary passive solar architecture in the delivery of thermally comfortable and resilient homes in the subtropics. These homes were found to provide inhabitants with an acceptable level of thermal comfort (18-28oC) for 77 – 97% of the year. Family expectations and experiences of comfort, and the various design strategies utilized were compared against the measured performance outcomes. This comparison revealed issues that limited quantification and implementation of design intent and highlighted factors that constrained system optimisation.

Restrung new chamber festival : an exploration of contemporary string practice

The Restrung New Chamber Festival was a practice-led research project which explored the intricacies of musical relationships. Specifically, it investigated the nature of contemporary string practice, with "New music" at its core. For the purposes of this project, "New music" will be defined in terms of representing a "global sonorous space" (Nancy 2007:12), which Hulse describes as "a spectacular comingling of styles and an unprecedented explosion of creative possibilities" (Hulse n.d.:2). Approaches to staging such an event are contextualised through a comparative analysis with relevant Australian and European festivals. The Restrung model derived inspiration from both art music and popular music festival models, in several aspects. One strategy was to engage audiences through combinations of musical, visual and spatial features. Another strategy was to encourage interaction by audiences with installations, workshops and forums. Restrung represents a new and distinctive model which presented art music within an immersive environment. This exegesis presents an evaluation framework which investigates the relationship between curatorial input and the experiential qualities of the festival. The context of an overview of trends in arts festival curation informs the discussion, as well as approaches to identifying new and receptive audiences. It is expected that the evaluation framework will provide a useful and practical guide for curators working in contemporary string practice, hybrid arts, experimental and cross-art form festival design.

Sherlockian adolescence for the twenty-first century : Conan Doyle’s ‘six dirty little scoundrels’ and contemporary children’s literature

Young adult literature is a socialising genre that encourages young readers to take up very particular ways of relating to historical or cultural materials. Recent years have seen a boom in Sherlockian YA fiction inviting reader identification either with the Baker Street Irregulars or an adolescent Holmes. In works by Anthony Read, Andrew Lane, Tracy Mack & Michael Citrin, and Tony Lee, the Sherlock canon provides a vocabulary for neo-Victorian young adult fiction to simultaneously invoke and defer a range of competing visions of working childhood as both at-risk and autonomous; of education as both oppression and emancipation; and of literary-cultural history as both populist and elitist. Such tensions can be traced in Conan Doyle’s own constructions of working children, and in the circulation of the Sherlock stories as popular or literary fictions. Drawing both on the Sherlock canon and its revisions, this paper reads current YA fiction’s deployment of Conan Doyle’s fictional universe as a tool for negotiating contemporary anxieties of adolescence.

Do you see what I mean? charting changing representations and receptions of the disabled body in contemporary and pop cultural performance

The meaning of the body emerges through acts of seeing, looking and staring in daily and dramatic performances. Acts that are, as Maike Bleeker argues1, bound up with the scopic rules, regimes and narratives that apply in specific cultures at specific times. In Western culture, the disabled body has been seen as a sign of defect, deficiency, fear, shame or stigma. Disabled artists – Mat Fraser, Bill Shannon, Aaron Williamson, Katherine Araniello, Liz Crow and Ju Gosling – have attempted, via performances that co-opt conventional images of the disabled body, to challenge dominant ways of representing and responding such bodies from within. In this paper, I consider what happens when non-disabled artists co-opt images of the disabled body to draw attention to, affirm, and even exoticise, eroticise or beautify, other modalities of or desires for difference. As Carrie Sandahl has noted2, the signs, symbols and somatic idiosyncrasies of the disabled body are, today, transported or translated into theatre, film and television as a metaphor or "master trope" for every body’s experience of difference. This happens in performance art (Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s use of a wheelchair in Chamber of Confessions), performance (Marie Chouinard's use of crutches, canes and walkers to represent dancers’ experience of becoming different or mutant during training in bODY rEMIX /gOLDBERG vARIATIONS), and pop culture (characters in wheelchairs in Glee or Oz). In this paper, I chart changing representations and receptions of the disabled body in such contexts. I use analysis of this cultural shift as a starting point for a re-consideration of questions about whether a face-toface encounter with a disabled body is in fact a privileged site for the emergence of a politics, and whether co-opting disability as a metaphor for a range of difference differences reduces its currency as a category around which a specific group might mobilise a politics.

Something rotten in the state of Minnesota: or the morality of backwoodsmen: 'A Simple Plan'

'A Simple Plan' is a deceptively complex and multilayered film, combining elements of Celtic mythology with the morality play and the windfall fantasy gone disastrously wrong. Despite its blending of realism and heavyhanded symbolism, and its abundant trans-textual gestures, 'A Simple Plan' is in many ways defiantly not a 90s movie: its leading characters are fashionably flawed, but they are neither sensitive, nor honourable, nor heroic; there are no startling special effects or intricate timeshifts; and it desperately gives the impression of depth, of being emphatically more than mere superficial excess. At a stretch it almost appears to be a throwback to the 1930s Production Code emphasis on the role of cinema in moral instruction; while good hardly triumphs over evil, venality is painfully and emphatically punished. But in other ways it is a quintessential late 90s film: an American/British/Japanese/German/French co-production, 'A Simple Plan' acts most palpably as a commentary on the moral, economic and social condition of the United States at the end of the American century.

Practical physical activity measurement in youth : a review of contemporary approaches

Background: The accurate evaluation of physical activity levels amongst youth is critical for quantifying physical activity behaviors and evaluating the effect of physical activity interventions. The purpose of this review is to evaluate contemporary approaches to physical activity evaluation amongst youth. Data sources: The literature from a range of sources was reviewed and synthesized to provide an overview of contemporary approaches for measuring youth physical activity. Results: Five broad categories are described: self-report, instrumental movement detection, biological approaches, direct observation, and combined methods. Emerging technologies and priorities for future research are also identified. Conclusions: There will always be a trade-off between accuracy and available resources when choosing the best approach for measuring physical activity amongst youth. Unfortunately, cost and logistical challenges may prohibit the use of "gold standard" physical activity measurement approaches such as doubly labelled water. Other objective methods such as heart rate monitoring, accelerometry, pedometry, indirect calorimetry, or a combination of measures have the potential to better capture the duration and intensity of physical activity, while self-reported measures are useful for capturing the type and context of activity.

Contemporary Critical Criminology

The concept of critical criminology – that crime and the present day processes of criminalization are rooted in the core structures of society – is of more relevance today than it has been at any other time. Written by an internationally renowned scholar, Contemporary Critical Criminology introduces the most up-to-date empirical, theoretical, and political contributions made by critical criminologists around the world. In its exploration of this material, the book also challenges the erroneous but widely held notion that the critical criminological project is restricted to mechanically applying theories to substantive topics, or to simple calling for radical political, economic, cultural, and social transformations. This book is an essential source of reference for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of Criminology, Criminal Theory, Social Policy, Research Methodology, and Penology.

Contemporary State Terrorism: Theory and Practice

This volume aims to 'bring the state back into terrorism studies' and fill the notable gap that currently exists in our understanding of the ways in which states employ terrorism as a political strategy of internal governance or foreign policy. Within this broader context, the volume has a number of specific aims. First, it aims to make the argument that state terrorism is a valid and analytically useful concept which can do much to illuminate our understanding of state repression and governance, and illustrate the varieties of actors, modalities, aims, forms, and outcomes of this form of contemporary political violence. Secondly, by discussing a rich and diverse set of empirical case studies of contemporary state terrorism this volume explores and tests theoretical notions, generates new questions and provides a resource for further research. Thirdly, it contributes to a critical-normative approach to the study of terrorism more broadly and challenges dominant approaches and perspectives which assume that states, particularly Western states, are primarily victims and not perpetrators of terrorism. Given the scarceness of current and past research on state terrorism, this volume will make a genuine contribution to the wider field, particularly in terms of ongoing efforts to generate more critical approaches to the study of political terrorism. This book will be of much interest to students of critical terrorism studies, critical security studies, terrorism and political violence and political theory in general.

A silver bullet for Australian cinema? Genre movies and the audience debate

There has been a renaissance in Australian genre cinema in recent years. Indeed, not since the 1980s have Australian genre movies across action, adventure, horror, and science-fiction among others, experienced such prominence within production, policy discourse, and industry debate. Genre movies, typically associated with commercial filmmaking and entertainment, have been identified as a strategy to improve the box-office performance of Australian feature films and to attract larger audiences. Much of this conversation has revolved around the question of whether or not genre can deliver on these high expectations and transform the unpredictable local film industry into a popular and profitable commercial production sector. However, this debate for the most part has been disconnected from analysis of Australia’s genre movie heritage in terms of their position within Australian cinema and their reception with domestic audiences, and how this correlates to contemporary trends. As this chapter argues, genre production is not a silver bullet which will single handedly improve the Australian feature film industry’s commercial performance. Genre movies have occupied, and continue to occupy, a difficult position within Australian cinema and face numerous challenges in terms of reception with national audiences, limited production scale and enterprise structures, and ongoing tensions between culture and commerce.