Breath and the truths of youth at risk : allegory and the social scientific imagination

The ways that we have invented for knowing young people are governmentalised. This governmentalisation produces powerful incentives to conform to the rule-bound and institutionalised knowledge practices that institutions, government departments, corporations, and NGOs understand as being capable of telling truths about young people and about risk. I argue that knowledge practices in the social sciences should trouble what counts as truth, as evidence, and the ways in which these truths can be produced.<br /><br />These interests will be examined through a discussion of the ways in which Tim Winton's novel Breath can be read as an allegorical tale about the terror of being ordinary: and of the teenage years as being a time in a life in which the fear of being ordinary compels Winton's key characters to seek out, sometimes stumble upon that which promises to make their's a life less ordinary. Here risk is something that breathes energy and purpose into lifeworlds that are dominated by the institutionalised ordinariness of family, school, and work. As an allegorical tale told from the vantage point of hindsight, Breath unsettles what it is that the social sciences can tell us about youth (as becoming) and risk (as mitigated by prudential foresight).

Socio-scientific issues in education : innovative practices and contending epistemologies

In the past decade, we have seen the well-established discourse of environmental education (EE) supplanted by that of education for sustainability (EfS). In some ways this change in terminology has been no more than a slogan change, with the actual educational practices associated with EfS little changed from those qualified by EE (Campbell and Robottom 2008). Environment-related education activities under both terms frequently focus on socio-scientific issues &ndash; which serve as the chief organising principle for a range of related curriculum activities &ndash; and are shaped by the particular characteristics of these issues. Socio-scientific issues are essentially constituted of questions that are philosophical as well as empirical in nature. Socio-scientific issues consist in contests among dissenting social, economic and environmental perspectives that rarely all align, giving rise to debates whose resolution is not amenable to solely scientific approaches. Socio-scientific issues, then, exist at the intersection of differing human interests, values and motivations and are therefore necessarily socially-constructed. An adequate educational exploration of these issues requires a recognition of their constructedness within particular communities of interest and of the limitation of purely applied science perspectives, and, in turn, requires the adoption of curricular and pedagogical approaches that are in fundamental ways informed by constructivist educational assumptions &ndash; at least to the extent that community constructions of socio-scientific issues are recognised as being shaped by human interests and social and environmental context. This article considers these matters within the context of examples of environment-related practice drawn from two geographical regions. The article will argue that a serious scientific element is both necessary and insufficient for a rigorous educational exploration of socio-scientific issues within either the EE or EfS discourses, and will consider some implications for professional development and research in this field.

Journalism ethics : arguments and cases

Journalism Ethics : Arguments and Cases provides a framework for students of journalism and media studies to examine the role that ethical dilemmas play in determining editorial content. Ethical practice is discussed in relation to newsroom operations, the economics of the news industry, and society's expectations of the news media<br />

Journalism ethics : arguments and cases

Situating modern ethical dilemmas in a social and historical context, this text encourages students to think critically about the theory and practice of journalism ethics. It has been fully updated in every chapter with new examples and cases taken from 'yesterday's headlines'. <br />