A situated approach to historical thinking in the Australian Curriculum : History

This paper focuses on the importance of foregrounding an emphasis on the development of historical thinking in the implementation of the Australian Curriculum: History as a way of making the study of history meaningful for their students. In doing so, it argues that teachers need to take up the opportunity to situate the study of Asia as a significant component of the curriculum’s ‘Australia in a world history approach’. In the discussion on the significance of historical thinking, the paper specifically addresses those seven historical concepts articulated in the new history curriculum by drawing from the international scholarship in the field of history education on the ways in which children and adolescents think about historical content and concepts.

Pre-sentence Report, Magisterial Discourse and Agency in Youth Courts in England

This article draws on interviews with Youth Court magistrates to examine if and how discourses, strategies and technologies of risk governance have affected Youth Court magistrates in England and Wales. The aim of the article is to detail the complex relationship between magisterial agency in decision making and youth justice policies which focus on risk control and management. The article demonstrates that, contrary to what might be assumed from the youth and risk governance theoretical literature, Youth Offending Team risk assessments form only one part of the information used by magistrates to explain young people’s presence in courts. This article concludes that magisterial decision making is framed not by formal, expert assessments of risk, but by magistrates’ claims that they are ‘knowing outsiders’, who through judicious use of information presented to them and their own life experiences are able to make objective judgements about both the risk assessments authored by Youth Offending Teams and the young lawbreakers before them.

Review : "A criminological imagination : essays on justice, punishment and discourse by Part Carlen"

There are four contributors to this review symposium. David Brown's review focuses on the questions of abolitionism that cut across much of Carlen's scholarship on punishment and prisons. Kerry Carrington's review attempts to articulate Pat Carlen's contributions to feminism, critque and crimnology, a selection of which is republished in the third scetion 'A criminological imgination'. Kelly Hannah-Moffat's review provides a succint but broad ranging analysis of Carlen's contributions to knowledge, politics and penal reform. Jo Phoenix takes Carlen's contributions to women, crim and scoial control as her main source of inspiration from this large body of work to review.

The creative cities discourse : production and/or consumption?

The already considerable debate about what constitutes a 'creative' city becomes ever more critical as the world urbanizes at a rapid pace. In this chapter the author argues that the key tensions in discussions over what makes cities more conducive to and supportive of creativity revolve around perspectives that are either production-centric or consumption-centric. Scholars are increasing prepared to claim priority for the city-region over the nation-state as an economic and cultural agent in the contemporary world, but are they ready to deal with major changes in the nature of cultural production and consumption themselves? A number of examples of new challenges for the creative cities 'discourse' rounds out the chapter.

Insights into historical drainage evolution based on the phylogeography of the chevron snakehead fish (Channa striata) in the Mekong Basin

1. The phylogeography of freshwater taxa is often integrally linked with landscape changes such as drainage re-alignments that may present the only avenue for historical dispersal for these taxa. Classical models of gene flow do not account for landscape changes and so are of little use in predicting phylogeography in geologically young freshwater landscapes. When the history of drainage formation is unknown, phylogeographical predictions can be based on current freshwater landscape structure, proposed historical drainage geomorphology, or from phylogeographical patterns of co-distributed taxa. 2. This study describes the population structure of a sedentary freshwater fish, the chevron snakehead (Channa striata), across two river drainages on the Indochinese Peninsula. The phylogeographical pattern recovered for C. striata was tested against seven hypotheses based on contemporary landscape structure, proposed history and phylogeographical patterns of codistributed taxa. 3. Consistent with the species ecology, analysis of mitochondrial and microsatellite loci revealed very high differentiation among all sampled sites. A strong signature of historical population subdivision was also revealed within the contemporary Mekong River Basin (MRB). Of the seven phylogeographical hypotheses tested, patterns of co-distributed taxa proved to be the most adequate for describing the phylogeography of C. striata. 4. Results shed new light on SE Asian drainage evolution, indicating that the Middle MRB probably evolved via amalgamation of at least three historically independent drainage sections and in particular that the Mekong River section centred around the northern Khorat Plateau in NE Thailand was probably isolated from the greater Mekong for an extensive period of evolutionary time. In contrast, C. striata populations in the Lower MRB do not show a phylogeographical signature of evolution in historically isolated drainage lines, suggesting drainage amalgamation has been less important for river landscape formation in this region.

Infertility in Australia circa 1980 : an historical population perspective on the uptake of fertility treatment by Australian women born in 1946-51

Objective: To estimate the prevalence of lifetime infertility in Australian women born in 1946-51 and examine their uptake of treatment. Methods: Participants in the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health born in 1946-51 (n=13,715) completed up to four mailed surveys from 1996 to 2004. The odds of infertility were estimated using logistic regression with adjustment for socio-demographic and reproductive factors. Results: Among participants, 92.1% had been pregnant. For women who had been pregnant (n=12738): 56.5% had at least one birth but no pregnancy loss (miscarriage and/or termination); 39.9% experienced both birth and loss; and 3.6% had a loss only. The lifetime prevalence of infertility was 11.0%. Among women who reported infertility (n=1511), 41.7% used treatment. Women had higher odds of infertility when they had reproductive histories of losses only (OR range 9.0-43.5) or had never been pregnant (OR=15.7, 95%CI 11.8-20.8); and higher odds for treatment: losses only (OR range 2.5-9.8); or never pregnant (1.96, 1.28-3.00). Women who delayed their first birth until aged 30+ years had higher odds of treatment (OR range 3.2-4.3). Conclusions: About one in ten women experienced infertility and almost half used some form of treatment, especially those attempting pregnancy after 1980. Older first time mothers had an increased uptake of treatment as assisted reproductive technologies (ART) developed. Implications: This study provided evidence of the early uptake of treatment prior to 1979 when the national register of invasive ART was developed and later uptake prior to 1998 when data on non-invasive ART were first collected.

The Committee on Public Information : a transmedia war propaganda campaign

This article summarises a PhD dissertation of the same name. It develops an understanding of how propaganda entered journalism and popular culture in the United States during World War I through an examination of materials created by the Committee on Public Information (CPI). Three CPI divisions were studied: The Division of News, the Four Minute Men, and the Division of Pictorial Publicity. The methodology of archival contextualisation was created, bringing together the methods of close reading, discourse-historical contextualisation, and Piercian semiotics. A summary of relevant literature is interspersed with thematic historical developments that impacted the relationship between propaganda, journalism and popular culture. This review outlines a gap in knowledge about the archival materials as well as the relationship between propaganda, journalism and popular culture from this period. A discussion about how the expectations of persuasion, truth and amusement relate to each other when mediated in culture, using Lotman’s concept of the semiosphere further develops an understanding of propaganda as a cultural system in relation to other cultural systems – in this case, journalism and popular culture. Findings from the study include that the CPI created a transmedia war propaganda campaign, which enabled propaganda to successfully draw entertainment value from popular culture and credibility from journalism in order to influence public opinion.

Towards an understanding of Australian genre cinema and entertainment : beyond the limitations of ‘Ozploitation’ discourse

While Australian cinema has produced popular movie genres since the 1970s, including action/adventure, road movies, crime, and horror movies, genre cinema has occupied a precarious position within a subsidised national cinema and has been largely written out of film history. In recent years the documentary Not Quite Hollywood (2008) has brought Australia’s genre movie heritage from the 1970s and 1980s back to the attention of cinephiles, critics and cult audiences worldwide. Since its release, the term ‘Ozploitation’ has become synonymous with Australian genre movies. In the absence of discussion about genre cinema within film studies, Ozploitation (and ‘paracinema’ as a theoretical lens) has emerged as a critical framework to fill this void as a de facto approach to genre and a conceptual framework for understanding Australian genres movies. However, although the Ozploitation brand has been extremely successful in raising the awareness of local genre flicks, Ozploitation discourse poses problems for film studies, and its utility is limited for the study of Australian genre movies. This paper argues that Ozploitation limits analysis of genre movies to the narrow confines of exploitation or trash cinema and obscures more important discussion of how Australian cinema engages with popular movies genres, the idea of Australian filmmaking as entertainment, and the dynamics of commercial filmmaking practises more generally.