Who, and what, is odd here? De-naturalizing students' experiences of 'the other'

This paper reviews a teaching process that aimed to prepare final year social work students for critical practice with diverse and marginalized populations. Alongside lecture input, in small group discussions and in the two sequenced written assignments students were encouraged to personalize questions of bias and stigma by recalling both their experiences of being ‘other-ed’ as well as their participation in practices that ‘other-ed’, such as racist and homophobic imaging and acting. Feedback to the unit's first iteration in 2004 was generally positive yet a significant minority of students were clearly dissatisfied. Whilst retaining the same formal content in 2005, greater attention was devoted to generating a supportive group process and a positive environment for ‘negative’ self-disclosure. This milieu acted to contain and normalize the students' struggle with internalized stereotypes, a stage associated with their greater preparedness to identify and challenge their own personal, cultural and ideological locations. Within the context of the unit remaining explicit about its value stance, by adopting an approach to the teaching/learning process that neither collided nor colluded we believe the 2005 revision better achieved the units aims. First, the unit received broader positive appraisal from students and, second, it appeared that the unit more firmly promoted the prospects for students carrying forward a capacity for critical self review post graduation.

Interacting with adults with congenital deafblindness : the experiences of disability support workers

Background This study aimed to gain greater insight into the perspectives of staff on their interactions with adults with congenital deafblindness in light of the research literature reporting these interactions to be lacking in quality and quantity.

Method Data from interviews with 8 disability support workers were analysed using the approach described by Charmaz (2006).

Results Three key themes emerged from the interview data, which support and elaborate on fi ndings of previous studies. These were (1) the construction of client happiness, (2) the rationalisation of client disengagement, and (3) imperatives of the staff role. These fi ndings elucidate the reasons for staff behaviour in their interactions with adults with congenital deafblindness.

Conclusion The fi ndings suggest the need for staff policy and procedural documents to be explicit about the importance of social interaction between staff and clients.

Girls back off mathematics again : the views and experiences of girls in computer based mathematics

The views and experiences of girls in two co-educational mathematics classrooms in which computers were regularly used were researched. Data were collected by observation and videotaping of lessons, questionnaire, and interviews of students and the teachers. In this paper case studies of six girls are presented. Their ‘stories’ reveal a diversity of experiences and views and multiple gender identities. High achieving girls persisted as “outsiders within,” other girls “backed off”, and exceptional girls challenged gender stereotypes. Implications for social justice in mathematics in the age of the super highway are discussed.

Experiences of Australian professional female tennis players returning to competition from injury

Background: This study examined the experiences of professional female tennis players returning to competition from injury.

Methods: In a study commissioned by Tennis Australia, 55 Australian professional female tennis players responded anonymously to a questionnaire developed for the purposes of this study. The questionnaire consisted of open and closed questions that assessed a player’s attribution style, the occurrence and effect of minor and major injuries, frequency and type of treatment sought, attitudinal chances following injury and preventative injury factors.

Results: The quantitative and qualitative analyses of participants’ responses revealed players generally displayed an internal attribution style with the majority of minor injuries involving lower limb injuries (attributed to playing on hard surfaces). Players reported these injuries were addressed in a variety of ways including self-treatment. The majority of severe injuries were upper limb/shoulder and these were generally treated at tournament sites with some requiring surgery.

Conclusions: Players adopted a range of measures to assist recovery from severe injury including the services of health professionals. In further findings, a player’s attribution style was not a predictive variable, except in terms of the number of tournaments missed for minor injuries. Implications of the study’s results and future research directions for cross-cultural studies are highlighted.

Magical realism and experiences of extremity

Examining magical realist texts including Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato (1991), and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated (2002) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2006), this paper discusses how magical realism examines the extremities of trauma and fear, proposing that magical realist narratives afford a unique ability to represent trauma in a way that is not open to the stylistics of literary realism. Blending the real or believable with the fantastically outrageous, magical realist narratives typically destabilise and disorder privileged centres of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’, demonstrating the constructedness of knowledge and history. Accordingly, magical realist strategies are frequently used in interventionist or counter narratives that refuse to adhere to privileged versions of truth or history and insist upon a multiplicity of experience. The majority of magical realist scholarship explores how the genre undermines hegemonic perspectives of history to clear a space for marginal representations of the past. However, as this paper argues, magical realist narratives also provide a unique space for writing about experiences of extremity. Examining the role of fantasy in representations of violence and trauma, this paper proposes that rupturing a realist narrative with the magical or un-real accommodates representations of extremity by conveying the ‘felt’ experience of trauma.

Being 'fat' in today's world : a qualitative study of the lived experiences of people with obesity in Australia

Objective  To develop an in-depth picture of both lived experience of obesity and the impact of socio-cultural factors on people living with obesity.

Design  Qualitative methodology, utilizing in-depth semi-structured interviews with a community sample of obese adults (body mass index ≥30). Community sampling methods were supplemented with purposive sampling techniques to ensure a diverse range of individuals were included.

Results  Seventy-six individuals (aged 16–72) were interviewed. Most had struggled with their weight for most of their lives (n = 45). Almost all had experienced stigma and discrimination in childhood (n = 36), as adolescents (n = 41) or as adults (n = 72). About half stated that they had been humiliated by health professionals because of their weight. Participants felt an individual responsibility to lose weight, and many tried extreme forms of dieting to do so. Participants described an increasing culture of ‘blame’ against people living with obesity perpetuated by media and public health messages. Eighty percent said that they hated or disliked the word obesity and would rather be called fat or overweight.

Discussion and Conclusion  There are four key conclusions: (i) the experiences of obesity are diverse, but there are common themes, (ii) people living with obesity have heard the messages but find it difficult to act upon them, (iii) interventions should be tailored to address both individual and community needs and (iv) we need to rethink how to approach obesity interventions to ensure that avoid recapitulating damaging social stereotypes and exacerbating social inequalities.

Effects of time since fire on birds : how informative are generalized fire response curves for conservation management?

Fire is both a widespread natural disturbance that affects the distribution of species and a tool that can be used to manage habitats for species. Knowledge of temporal changes in the occurrence of species after fire is essential for conservation management in fire-prone environments. Two key issues are: whether postfire responses of species are idiosyncratic or if multiple species show a limited number of similar responses; and whether such responses to time since fire can predict the occurrence of species across broad spatial scales. We examined the response of bird species to time since fire in semiarid shrubland in southeastern Australia using data from surveys at 499 sites representing a 100-year chronosequence. We used nonlinear regression to model the probability of occurrence of 30 species with time since fire in two vegetation types, and compared species' responses with generalized response shapes from the literature. The occurrence of 16 species was significantly influenced by time since fire: they displayed six main responses consistent with generalized response shapes. Of these 16 species, 15 occurred more frequently in mid- or later-successional vegetation (>20 years since fire), and only one species occurred more often in early succession (<5 years since fire). The models had reasonable predictive ability for eight species, some predictive ability for seven species, and were little better than random for one species. Bird species displayed a limited range of responses to time since fire; thus a small set of fire ages should allow the provision of habitat for most species. Postfire successional changes extend for decades and management of the age class distribution of vegetation will need to reflect this timescale. Response curves revealed important seral stages for species and highlighted the importance of mid- to late-successional vegetation (>20 years). Although time since fire clearly influences the distribution of numerous bird species, predictive models of the spatial distribution of species in fire-prone landscapes need to incorporate other factors in addition to time since fire.

Global positioning systems in the AFL : worthwhile or waste of time?

Global Positioning Systems (GPS) in the Australian Football League (AFL) are the big-ticket item that sees clubs trying to gain any competitive advantage over their opposition that they can. This paper explores whether the current application of GPS by clubs is worthwhile or a waste of time from three core perspectives: technical, organisational and personal. Issues include poor data storage and analysis, inaccurate units, lack of appropriate business processes in place, and resistance to use. Although many of these issues can be addressed through improved technology, resolving the organisational and personal issues will require a change in mindset to ensure the use of GPS in the AFL is a worthwhile endeavour. The paper concludes that the current use of GPS devices in the AFL is a waste of time.

Incorporating differences in marginal utilities of time across activities in a time allocation model

Most existing activity time allocation models assume that individuals allocate their time to different activities over a period in such a way that the marginal utilities of time across activities are equal. Their argument is that, if not equal, an individual is free to allocate more time to those activities whose marginal utilities of time are higher and, finally allocates the optimal time to each activity with equal marginal utility. However, such an ideal situation may not always prevail in reality, especially when an individual is under income constraint and/or under intense time pressure. In order to incorporate such differences in marginal utilities of time across activities, we enrich the traditional activity time allocation model by explicitly including income constraint and by adding marginal extension activity choice model. As an application, the developed integrated model is used to estimate the value of activity time during weekends in Tokyo. The results are encouraging in that they forecast the individual time allocation more accurately and estimate realistically the value of activity time for each activity in a set of different activities than do by existing traditional models.

Everyone’s life is so different : the experiences of young Australian adults who return home

The article focuses on the experiences of young Australian adults who return to their parent's homes. It cites several factors that lead young people to return home such as unemployment, divorce and parenthood. It uses qualitative interviews of 22- to 30-year-olds as basis of young adults' experiences. It argues that the decision of returning home is not a failure, but a positive choice in living arrangement.

Observer-based controller design of time-delay systems with an interval time-varying delay

This paper considers the problem of designing an observer-based output feedback controller to exponentially stabilize a class of linear systems with an interval time-varying delay in the state vector. The delay is assumed to vary within an interval with known lower and upper bounds. The time-varying delay is not required to be differentiable, nor should its lower bound be zero. By constructing a set of Lyapunov–Krasovskii functionals and utilizing the Newton–Leibniz formula, a delay-dependent stabilizability condition which is expressed in terms of Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs) is derived to ensure the closed-loop system is exponentially stable with a prescribed α-convergence rate. The design of an observerbased output feedback controller can be carried out in a systematic and computationally efficient manner via the use of an LMI-based algorithm. A numerical example is given to illustrate the design procedure.