Indigenous peoples are not multicultural minorities : cultural diversity, heritage and indigenous human rights in Australia

This theoretically innovative anthology investigates the problematic linkages between conserving cultural heritage, maintaining cultural diversity, defining and establishing cultural citizenship, and enforcing human rights.

It is the first publication to address the notions of cultural diversity, cultural heritage and human rights in one volume. Heritage provides the basis of humanity’s rich cultural diversity. While there is a considerable literature dealing separately with cultural diversity, cultural heritage and human rights, this book is distinctive and has contemporary relevance in focusing on the intersection between the three concepts. Cultural Diversity, Heritage and Human Rights establishes a fresh approach that will interest students and practitioners alike and on which future work in the heritage field might proceed.

Centring the subject in order to educate

It is important for educators to recognise that the various calls to decentre the subject—or self—should not be interpreted as necessarily requiring the removal of the subject altogether. Through the individualism of the Enlightenment the self was centred. This highly individualistic notion of the sovereign self has now been decentred especially through post-structuralist literature. It is contended here however, that this tendency to decentre the subject has been taken to an extreme at times, especially by some designers of school frameworks and curricula, who have eliminated the subject altogether. Such elimination is argued to contribute to the numbers of youth who are dropping out of school. By adopting an existential perspective and by drawing mainly upon Kierkegaard's subjective truth and Dewey's notion of centeredness, the case is made that for education the subject should not only be included but should actually be centred—at least momentarily.

Succession and Indigenous Australians : addressing Indigenous customary law notions of 'property' and 'kinship' in a succession law context

The purpose of this article is to critically evaluate the existing capacity of Indigenous people to exercise succession rights against their estate. This article begins with a discussion of the sources of the general succession laws in Australia, noting that they have derived from UK law, where the common law notions of property, property rights and family, including the expectational right to succeed to property, are all important factors. These common law notions do not easily fit within the spectrum of Indigenous customary law. Generally, many Indigenous Australians will die without executing a valid will (ie, they die intestate) and it is here that this article undertakes an examination of the general intestacy laws in all Australian jurisdictions noting the inadequacy of the provisions to recognise Indigenous persons’ spiritual and cultural obligations to property, land or otherwise, together with a failure to distinguish extended Indigenous kinship relationships under Indigenous customary law. It is argued that Indigenous people who die intestate should be supported by a flexible and adaptive intestacy framework, responsive to the full customary and cultural responsibilities of the deceased, thus promoting an organic and developmental approach to succession entitlements.

An investigation of issues in the teaching and management of large classes

In a quest for a more efficient education system, many organizations have opted to increase class size. It is a common perception that large subjects are economical to run and small subjects are not. Many in the tertiary education system have had concerns with issues involved in the teaching of large classes, including teaching quality and whether there are effective learning outcomes for students. As with any complex issue, there are several approaches that could be utilized to assess whether the needs of stakeholders are being met. Stakeholders include the institution, the teaching staff, the community and the students. This study aims to assess whether universities are satisfying the needs of students as class size is increased. The study focuses on satisfaction with large classes and includes an assessment of the satisfaction of students' psychological needs. These constructs are measured in small, medium and large classes to identify the change in the level of satisfaction. The study used a multi-method approach consisting of a literature review, a qualitative phase involving in-depth interviews, focus groups, and a quantitative survey. The results show that while customer satisfaction is being met, the satisfaction of students' psychological needs are not being fully realised. It was also found that there were notable variations between individual students, the subjects being studied and degree streams of students taking the same subject. The implications of these findings and suggestions for further investigation are discussed in this paper.

Preserving the environment and traditional communities : a land use change modeling approach

Human populations can cause serious damage to the natural environment. This, however, depends on the type of society and its size. Many traditional communities have a balanced relation with the environment, using practices for managing the soil, water and natural resources in order to satisfy their needs that are compatible to the general goals of environmental preservation.

The most usual approach to environmental conservation in the world sees human beings as intruders, potentially destroyers of the nature and, as a consequence, generally requires local population to be expelled from the protected regions. This situation has generated social conflicts because many protected areas, particularly in developing countries, are inhabited by indigenous or other traditional communities.

The disagreement about expelling or maintaining traditional communities in environmental conservation areas is strengthened by the lack of diagnostics on which changes are produced or suffered by communities in the region where they live. This paper presents a methodology developed to analyse land use dynamics in region with environmental conservation and traditional communities. We seek a better understanding of the way traditional communities use their space, the spatial pattern of land uses, which factors drive land use change, which impacts can be seen in those regions and identify the effects of conservation policies on land use dynamics.

The application of the method to the National Park of Superagui, Brazil, has successfully performed characterisation, analysis and simulation of land use dynamics in a region of environmental importance. Testing different scenarios has suggested that the adoption of a less restrictive policy for environmental conservation would have resulted in less social conflict with the same environmental efficiency than the established current policy.

Research subjects/research subjections : exploring the ethics and politics of critical research

I use this paper to reflect upon the ethics and politics of Critical Management Studies (CMS) research. I highlight a potential for problematic power relations in CMS and, drawing upon Foucault’s (1976) ‘five methodological precautions’ for analysing power, I explore these power relations as an effect of the micro-constitution of ‘subordinate’ and ‘superior’ subject positions within the research process. Through detailed analysis of a research interview transcript I illustrate how the researched’s ‘subordinate’ and researcher’s ‘superior’ subject positions may be constructed as an outcome of normal and well-intentioned CMS research.

Competition : the heart and soul of sport management

Understanding competition is central to the task of strategy formulation and implementation and it is the link between competition and strategy that was explored in the 2011 Dr. Earle F. Zeigler Lecture. It was argued that strategy, given its centrality to organizational phenomena, and strategy research in particular, provides rich and diverse competitive contexts with the potential to reveal some of the unique properties of sport management. To ascertain the prevalence of sport-related strategy research, three sport management journals were subject to content analysis to identify published manuscripts related to strategy. Before presenting the results, the Lecture considered competition on and off the field, the origins of competitive behavior in sport management and a brief review of the major research themes in the generic strategic management literature. Results revealed that 20 (2.5%) of the 805 manuscripts published in the three journals were strategy focused. Research themes and contexts were presented as well as a bibliometric analysis of the reference lists of the 20 identified strategy manuscripts. This analysis highlighted the journals that are influencing published sport management strategy-related research. It was concluded that strategy research specific to sport management has been sparse to date, yet the role of strategy formulation is central to the role of management and should also be central to sport management scholarship.

Spare the rod and spoil the child : should the abolition of corporal punishment be reversed?

The classic English case of Williams v Eady (1893) had, for over a century, supported a teacher acting in loco parentis when inflicting punishment on a child, so long as the punishment was reasonable and given in good faith. But in response to the European Convention on Human Rights, which calls for all to respect a child’s right not to be “subject to torture or to inhumane or degrading treatment” (Article 3), many countries have banned the practice of using corporal punishment in schools. This might even include the use of reasonable force to prevent a student from injuring others or causing damage to property if it is seen as a form of discipline or punishment. Schools, therefore, have a difficult task of striking a balance between providing a safe environment for the whole school community and a child’s individual rights. This paper gives an overview of the trends in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, England, Canada and Singapore concerning corporal punishment, and then discusses the implications for employing or banning corporal punishment as a disciplinary strategy. The discussion takes on a brief jurisprudential analysis of this issue: that is, whether, corporal punishment, if carried out reasonably, is seen as a proper form of discipline, ensuring a safe and disciplined environment in which the school community, as a whole, might operate. Is the teaching profession over regulated in the area of physical discipline? If so, would the continuation or reintroduction of corporal punishment make sense, or would it make education an even riskier business?

Managing the optics of Indigenous policy

This monograph reports the findings of the Australian Research Council Discovery Project 'Australian news media and indigenous policymaking 1988-2008'

Reciprocity and Indigenous knowledge in research

This book reports the findings of the Australian news media and indigenous policymaking 1988-2008 ARC Discovery Project.

Contemporary planning education and Indigenous cultural competency agendas : erasing terra nullius, respect and responsibility

As noted in Universities Australia’s (2011a, 2011b) investigations into Indigenous Cultural Competency, most universities have struggled with successfully devising and achieving a translation of Indigenous protocols into their curricula. Walliss & Grant (2000: 65) have also concluded that, given the nature of the built environment disciplines, including planning, and their professional practice activities, there is a “need for specific cultural awareness education” to service these disciplines and not just attempts to insert Indigenous perspectives into their curricula. Bradley’s policy initiative at the University of South Australia (1997-2007), “has not achieved its goal of incorporation of Indigenous perspectives into all its undergraduate programs by 2010, it has achieved an incorporation rate of 61%” (Universities Australia 2011a: 9; http://www.unisa.edu.au/ducier/icup/default.asp).

Contextually, Bradley’s strategic educational aim at University of South Australia led a social reformist agenda, which has been continued in Universities Australia’s release of Indigenous Cultural Competency (2011a; 2011b) reports that has attracted mixed media criticism (Trounson 2012a: 5, 2012b: 5) and concerns that it represents “social engineering” rather than enhancing “criticism as a pedagogical tool ... as a means of advancing knowledge” (Melleuish 2012: 10). While the Planning Institute of Australia’s (PIA) Indigenous Planning Policy Working Party has observed that fundamental changes are needed to the way Australian planning education addresses Indigenous perspectives and interests, it has concluded that planners “! perceptual limitations of their own discipline and the particular discourse of our own craft” were hindering enhanced learning outcomes (Wensing 2007: 2). Gurran (PIA 2007) has noted that the core curriculum in planning includes an expectation of “knowledge of ! Indigenous Australian cultures, including relationships between their physical environment and associated social and economic systems” but that it has not been addressed. This paper critiques these discourses and offers an Indigenous perspective of the debate.

Wurdi Youang : re-thinking myths about landscape and Indigenous science

Despite recent political attempts to re-write the terra nullius myth for Australia, additional Indigenous sub-myth layers about landscape stewardship and cultural knowledge have been substantially overlooked. Pre-contact Indigenous scientific knowledge, landscape architecture strategies, and land stewardship histories and practices have received little legitimate credibility or academic discourse in this rewriting. One sub-myth is that Indigenous Australians have no astronomical scientific expertise and knowledge and that there is no physical evidence of this expertise. Thus, Indigenous Australians possess no ability to translate Dreaming story to astrological configuration, nor explore astronomy. Such is increasingly becoming a myth as it belies a suite of landscape architectural installations and cosmological narratives now being documented and researched. This paper addresses this myth by bringing forth a review of Indigenous cosmological knowledge for south-eastern Australia, with a substantive discussion about archaeo-astronomical evidence. The paper explains the cultural importance of the Wurdi Youang landscape installation for the Wathaurong community, and its role in Australian landscape architectural histories and practice.

Mutually assured destruction or co-dependence? The G20 and the UN

The G20 forum has acted to crystallise important changes in the architecture of global governance emerging since the 1970s. This has seen the locus of power shift away from the United Nations (UN) System as smaller and poorer states become increasingly adept at exercising their power within UN structures. Yet it is too simple to set the G20 against the UN, for example as minilateralism versus multilateralism. While the UN seems increasingly constrained and less relevant, it is not about to disappear. Moreover, we argue there are two significant obstacles to the G20 claiming the mantle of dominant global governance institution. First, that minilateralism is still a form of multilateralism, and ultimately subject to the same problems with the generation of consensus if extended, as in the G20, to include sufficiently diverse state members for a claim of legitimacy. Second, its emergence from the Global Financial Crisis and historical focus on financial governance means its agenda is excessively narrow at a time when food and environmental crises command similar global political significance. We conclude by considering some of the different elements of the emerging G20/UN dynamic, and whether this emerging dialectic can enhance prospects for wide ranging reforms to global trade, finance and economic structures that are currently incapable of functioning sustainably or preventing wide scale famine.

Introduction : The complex and contested history of democracy

Democracy has never been more popular. It is successfully practiced today in a myriad of different ways by people across virtually every cultural, religious or socio-economic context. The forty-five essays collected in this companion suggest that the global popularity of democracy derives in part from its breadth and depth in the common history of human civilization. The chapters include exceptional accounts of democracy in ancient Greece and Rome, modern Europe and America, among peoples’ movements and national revolutions, and its triumph since the end of the Cold War. However, this book also includes alternative accounts of democracy’s history: its origins in prehistoric societies and early city-states, under-acknowledged contributions from China, Africa and the Islamic world, its familiarity to various Indigenous Australians and Native Americans, the various challenges it faces today in South America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia, the latest democratic developments in light of globalization and new technologies, and potential future pathways to a more democratic world. Understanding where democracy comes from, where its greatest successes and most dismal failures lie, is central to democracy’s project of inventing ways to address the need of people everywhere to live in peace, freedom and with a say in the decisions that affect their lives.