The role of the libero in volleyball as a paradoxical influence on the game: logical debate and the proposal for a rule change

The purpose of this paper is to bring into focus philosophical and logical concerns relating to specific rules that govern the role of the libero in volleyball. The authors contest that the introduction of the position of the libero in volleyball may have actually undermined the continuing logic of the rules of the game. In addressing these questions the authors offer theoretically based rule-change proposals for the sport of volleyball that could be used to inform future training methods or development programmes at both the participatory and elite levels. Discussion may also inform the development of new tools of analysis (e.g. computer software) or the creation of a new breadth of match simulation resources to enhance athlete performance. These tools and devices could then be presented to volleyball coaches in an effort to resolve the issues that have come to light and further inform the philosophical and logical debates about the role of the libero in volleyball.

Digital business reporting standards: mapping the battle in France

Government agencies use information technology extensively to collect business data for regulatory purposes. Data communication standards form part of the infrastructure with which businesses must conform to survive. We examine the development of, and emerging competition between, two open business reporting data standards adopted by government bodies in France; Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce and Transport (EDIFACT) (incumbent) and eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) (challenger). The research explores whether an incumbent may be displaced in a setting in which the contest is unresolved. Latour's translation map is applied to trace the enrollments and detours in the battle. We find that regulators play an important role as allies in the development of the standards. The antecedent networks in which the standards are located embed strong beliefs that become barriers to collaboration and fuel the battle. One of the key differentiating attitudes is whether speed is more important than legitimacy. The failure of collaboration encourages competition. The newness of XBRL's technology just as regulators need to respond to an economic crisis and its adoption by French regulators not using EDIFACT create an opportunity for the challenger to make significant network gains over the longer term. ANT also highlights the importance of the preservation of key components of EDIFACT in ebXML.

Duplicity of meaning

This article considers the ‘duplicitous’ functions of the word ‘wild’ in the arguments over the Queensland’s Wild Rivers Act 2005. Certain traditional owners, environmentalist and state groups have deployed the term pragmatically, simultaneously endorsing its usage (through repetition) and disavowing its colonial associations (through explanation) against protestations by Indigenous and non-Indigenous stakeholders. In a sense, this ambivalent ‘duplicity’ is entirely consistent with relations between the settler-colonial nation state and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander polities – relations aptly characterised by Povinelli as shaped by ‘the cunning of recognition’ – which stratify relations between groups through the endorsing of ‘tradition’. Thus ‘the Indigenous’ can be posited both as one political minority amidst a multicultural polity and as a pre-modern and endemic precursor of the settler-colonial nation, constitutively conservationist ‘first Australians’. Arguably, in the legislation’s ‘recognition’ of the ‘wild’ past, Indigenous peoples – who were known in nineteenth century Queensland as ‘wild blacks’ or ‘myalls’ (meaning those who resisted leaving their lands – and ‘could be shot with impunity’) are recouped as the nation’s first caretakers of ‘pristine’ waterways. However, this article regards the current use of this ambivalent word as also potentially authorising those recognised through this mythic form, providing a limited and uncertain opportunity for traditional owners to ground a form of sovereign right in lands and waterways. Against totalising settler-colonial critiques of hegemony, this article argues that the Wild Rivers legislation does not forget indigeneity, but rather relies on indigeneity. While much research concerning ‘natural’ ideologies such as ‘the noble savage’ has worked to show that faith in a belated era of historical fullness or presence can serve to evacuate the present of material details, it may also be that the ‘wild’ can also offer Indigenous peoples a valuable political authority to, in the words of Courtney Jung, ‘contest the exclusions through which it has been constituted’.

Are the kids alright? Relating to representations of youth

Initiatives aimed at promoting young people's well-being potentially conflict with more traditional modes of adult/youth relationship privileging adult authority. For example, teaching practice has shifted from teacher to student-centred, a move that can be attributed at least in part to the acknowledged importance of empathetic teacher-student relationship to the well-being of students. This discussion considers an area of sociocultural practice with the potential to inform understandings of youth and their relationships with adults: How youth have been discursively represented in a sample of popular music spanning the five decades from the 1960s to the 2000s. The analysis, in the first instance, demonstrates how popular culture supports and maintains discernible social relationships, sustaining what is identified here as a normative control-contest binary. A direct challenge to commonplace notions of authority and well-being follows, offering opportunities to theorise a different kind of psychosocial action.

Entre contestation et résignation : l’expérience de profilage racial de jeunes racisés ayant reçu des constats d’infraction dans le cadre du contrôle de l’occupation de l’espace public montréalais

Ce mémoire explore le vécu et la construction de l’expérience de jeunes racisés ayant reçu des constats d’infraction dans le cadre de leur occupation de l’espace public montréalais. Il s’agit spécifiquement d’appréhender, à partir de la sociologie de l’expérience de Dubet (1994), le profil et les conditions de vie, la présence dans l’espace public, les raisons et la nature des constats d’infraction, les stratégies mises en œuvre face au profilage racial ainsi que les conséquences du profilage racial sur les jeunes racisés. Se situant dans une perspective qualitative, la méthodologie de recherche a reposé sur le recueil de dix entrevues semi-dirigées, soit neuf jeunes hommes et une jeune fille entre 18 et 30 ans ayant eu des contacts avec la police dans le cadre du contrôle de l’espace public à Montréal. Basée essentiellement sur l’approche mixte de Miles et Huberman (2003), l’analyse du corpus a permis de rendre compte de l’hétérogénéité de l’expérience des jeunes racisés et profilés interrogés et de dégager deux types d’expérience de profilage racial : les contestataires et les résignés. Si les interactions avec les forces de l’ordre engendrent des traitements perçus comme discriminatoires, l’expérience se construit en fonction de la nature des interactions, du niveau de maturité et de la tranche d’âge des jeunes et elle se décline en une logique de soumission et une logique de lutte pour la contestation des constats d’infraction. Les résultats de la recherche démontrent par ailleurs la pertinence de l’accompagnement du jeune au niveau de la prise de conscience de ses droits et de la contestation des tickets reçus.

The Amplifier - v. 14, no. 5

In this issue...Shutterbug Contest, Ski Club, Mountaineering Club, Photography, Math, Northwest Mining Association, Public Lands, Anaconda, Montana

The Amplifier - v. 14, no. 6

In this issue...Truss contest, Ski Club, dial Soap, January Feature Girl, Columbia Riding Club, Night Courses, Basketball, WICHE, New York Times, Tech Tunnels

The Amplifier - v. 15, no. 4

In this issue...Pintlar Peaks, SUB, Bridge Building Contest, Senator Mike Mansfield, Montana Mining Law, Mathematics, Theta Tau, Marcus Daly, Coeds

The Amplifier - v. 15, no. 6

In this issue...Football, Coach Bob Riley, Financial Aid, Handi Wrap, Gless Peak, Antarctic, Vietnam, Crowd Control, Climbing Club, Beard Growing Contest, Kopper Kadets

The Amplifier - v. 16, no. 3

In this issue...Library, Registration, Ugly Man Contest, Don Heater, Miners Bank, Copper Bowl, Abortion Legalization, AWS Convention, Student Council, Copper Lounge

The Amplifier - v. 16, no. 5

In this issue...Sweetheart Dance, Butte Symphony, Mineral Report, Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology, Noon Lecture Series, Poetry Contest, History of Tech, Library Fund

The Amplifier - v. 16, no. 6

In this issue...College Days, Honor Roll, Gun Club, Coach Bob Riley, Book Review, Library, Pork Chop John's, Tech Pride, Bridge Breaking Contest, Film Night

Book review: Laurel Kamada, Hybrid Identities and Adolescent Girls: Being Half in Japan. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2010

Arguably, the catalyst for the best research studies using social analysis of discourse is personal ‘lived’ experience. This is certainly the case for Kamada, who, as a white American woman with a Japanese spouse, had to deal first hand with the racialization of her son. Like many other mixed-ethnic parents, she experienced the shock and disap-pointment of finding her child being racialized as ‘Chinese’ in America through peer group taunts, and constituted as gaijin (a foreigner) in his own homeland of Japan. As a member of an e-list of the (Japan) Bilingualism Special Interest Group (BSIG), Kamada learnt that other parents from the English-speaking foreign community in Japan had similar disturbing stories to tell of their mixed-ethnic children who, upon entering the Japanese school system, were mocked, bullied and marginalized by their peers. She men-tions a pervasive Japanese proverb which warns of diversity or difference getting squashed: ‘The nail that sticks up gets hammered down’. This imperative to conform to Japanese behavioural and discursive norms prompted Kamada’s quest to investigate the impact of ‘otherization’ on the identities of children of mixed parentage. In this fascinat-ing book, she shows that this pressure to conform is balanced by a corresponding cele-bration of ‘hybrid’ or mixed identities. The children in her study are also able to negotiate their identities positively as they come to terms with contradictory discursive notions of ‘Japaneseness’, ‘whiteness’ and ‘halfness/doubleness’.The discursive construction of identity has become a central concern amongst researchers across a wide range of academic disciplines within the humanities and the social sciences, and most existing work either concentrates on a specific identity cate-gory, such as gender, sexuality or national identity, or else offers a broader discussion of how identity is theorized. Kamada’s book is refreshing because it crosses the usual boundaries and offers divergent insights on identity in a number of ways. First, using the term ‘ethno-gendering’, she examines the ways in which six mixed-ethnic girls living in Japan accomplish and manage the relationship between their gender and ethnic ‘differ-ences’ from age 12 to 15. She analyses in close detail how their actions or displays within certain situated interactions might come into conflict with how they are seen or constituted by others. Second, Kamada’s study builds on contemporary writing on the benefits of hybridity where identities are fluid, flexible and indeterminate, and which contest the usual monolithic distinctions of gender, ethnicity, class, etc. Here, Kamada carves out an original space for her findings. While scholars have often investigated changing identities and language practices of young people who have been geographi-cally displaced and are newcomers to the local language, Kamada’s participants were all born and brought up in Japan, were fluent in Japanese and were relatively proficient in English. Third, the author refuses to conceptualize or theorize identity from a single given viewpoint in preference to others, but in postmodernist spirit draws upon multiple perspectives and frameworks of discourse analysis in order to create different forms of knowledge and understandings of her subject. Drawing on this ‘multi-perspectival’ approach, Kamada examines grammatical, lexical, rhetorical and interactional features from six extensive conversations, to show how her participants position their diverse identities in relation to their friends, to the researcher and to the outside world. Kamada’s study is driven by three clear aims. The first is to find out ‘whether there are any tensions and dilemmas in the ways adolescent girls of Japanese and “white” mixed parentage in Japan identify themselves in terms of ethnicity’. In Chapter 4, she shows how the girls indeed felt that they stood out as different and consequently experienced isolation, marginalization and bullying at school – although they were able to make better sense of this as they grew older, repositioning the bullies as pitiable. The second aim is to ask how, if at all, her participants celebrate their ethnicity, and furthermore, what kind of symbolic, linguistic and social capital they were able to claim for themselves on the basis of their hybrid identities. In Chapter 5, Kamada shows how the girls over time were able to constitute themselves as insiders while constituting ‘the Japanese’ as outsiders, and their network of mixed-ethnic friends was a key means to achieve this. In Chapter 6, the author develops this potential celebration of the girls’ mixed ethnicity by investigating the privileges they perceived it afforded them – for example, having the advantage of pos-sessing English proficiency and intercultural ‘savvy’ in a globalized world. Kamada’s third aim is to ask how her participants positioned themselves and performed their hybrid identities on the basis of their constituted appearance: that is, how the girls saw them-selves based on how they looked to others. In Chapter 7, the author shows that, while there are competing discourses at work, the girls are able to take up empowering positions within a discourse of ‘foreigner attractiveness’ or ‘a white-Western female beauty’ discourse, which provides them with a certain cachet among their Japanese peers. Throughout the book, Kamada adopts a highly self-reflexive perspective of her own position as author. For example, she interrogates the fact that she may have changed the lived reality of her six participants during the course of her research study. As the six girls, who were ‘best friends’, lived in different parts of the Morita region of Japan, she had to be proactive in organizing six separate ‘get-togethers’ through the course of her three-year study. She acknowledges that she did not collect ‘naturally occurring data’ but rather co-constructed opportunities for the girls to meet and talk on a regular basis. At these meetings, she encouraged the girls to discuss matters of identity, prompted by open-ended interview questions, by stimulus materials such as photos, articles and pic-tures, and by individual tasks such as drawing self-portraits. By giving her participants a platform in this way, Kamada not only elicited some very rich spoken data but also ‘helped in some way to shape the attitudes and self-images of the girls positively, in ways that might not have developed had these get-togethers not occurred’ (p. 221). While the data she gathers are indeed rich, it may well be asked whether there is a mismatch between the girls’ frank and engaging accounts of personal experience, and the social constructionist academic register in which these are later re-articulated. When Kamada writes, ‘Rina related how within the more narrow range of discourses that she had to draw on in her past, she was disempowered and marginalized’ (p. 118), we know that Rina’s actual words were very different. Would she really recognize, understand and agree with the reported speech of the researcher? This small omission of self-reflexivity apart – an omission which is true of most lin-guistic ethnography conducted today – Kamada has written a unique, engaging and thought-provoking book which offers a model to future discourse analysts investigating hybrid identities. The idea that speakers can draw upon competing discourses or reper-toires to constitute their identities in contrasting, creative and positive ways provides linguistic researchers with a clear orientation by which to analyse the contradictions of identity construction as they occur across time in different discursive contexts

Entre contestation et résignation : l’expérience de profilage racial de jeunes racisés ayant reçu des constats d’infraction dans le cadre du contrôle de l’occupation de l’espace public montréalais

Ce mémoire explore le vécu et la construction de l’expérience de jeunes racisés ayant reçu des constats d’infraction dans le cadre de leur occupation de l’espace public montréalais. Il s’agit spécifiquement d’appréhender, à partir de la sociologie de l’expérience de Dubet (1994), le profil et les conditions de vie, la présence dans l’espace public, les raisons et la nature des constats d’infraction, les stratégies mises en œuvre face au profilage racial ainsi que les conséquences du profilage racial sur les jeunes racisés. Se situant dans une perspective qualitative, la méthodologie de recherche a reposé sur le recueil de dix entrevues semi-dirigées, soit neuf jeunes hommes et une jeune fille entre 18 et 30 ans ayant eu des contacts avec la police dans le cadre du contrôle de l’espace public à Montréal. Basée essentiellement sur l’approche mixte de Miles et Huberman (2003), l’analyse du corpus a permis de rendre compte de l’hétérogénéité de l’expérience des jeunes racisés et profilés interrogés et de dégager deux types d’expérience de profilage racial : les contestataires et les résignés. Si les interactions avec les forces de l’ordre engendrent des traitements perçus comme discriminatoires, l’expérience se construit en fonction de la nature des interactions, du niveau de maturité et de la tranche d’âge des jeunes et elle se décline en une logique de soumission et une logique de lutte pour la contestation des constats d’infraction. Les résultats de la recherche démontrent par ailleurs la pertinence de l’accompagnement du jeune au niveau de la prise de conscience de ses droits et de la contestation des tickets reçus.

Queer penalities: the criminal justice paradigm in lesbian and gay anti-violence politics

Building upon the renewed attention to the ways in which criminology may be ‘queered’ (or not), this article explores how a criminal justice paradigm has influenced lesbian and gay politics through an investigation of anti-homophobic research and lobbying focused on violence and harassment. It asks: What place does criminal justice occupy within sexual politics? Using the Australian state of Victoria as a case study, the article examines how the lesbian and gay anti-violence movement has utilized criminal justice theories, methodologies and approaches to explain and attempt to remedy ‘homophobic hate’. It provides three inter-connected examples of the permeation of criminal justice logics: (1) the victimization survey method, (2) the focus on police reform, and (3) elements of a punitive public discourse surrounding homophobic hate crime. These examples are nevertheless complicated by the persistence of institutionalized violence and state failure to ‘protect’ lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) lives. These discursive practices contribute to ‘queer penalities’, a term used to describe the ways in which lesbian and gay movements shape and contest the social meaning of terms such as ‘crime’, victimization and punishment.