Swell : a feature-length screenplay set in the world of Australian surfing, and an accompanying exegesis on three-act structure

Despite many arguments to the contrary, the three-act story structure, as propounded and refined by Hollywood continues to dominate the blockbuster and independent film markets. Recent successes in post-modern cinema could indicate new directions and opportunities for low-budget national cinemas.

Removing barriers to protection at the exported border : visas, carrier sanctions, and international obligation

Asylum is being gradually denuded of the national institutional mechanisms (judicial, legislative and administrative) that provide the framework for a fair and effective asylum hearing. In this sense, there is an ongoing ‘denationalization’ or ‘deformalization’ of the asylum process. This chapter critically examines one of the linchpins of this trend: the erection of pre-entry measures at ports of embarkation in order to prevent asylum seekers from physically accessing the territory of the state. Pre-entry measures comprise the core requirement that foreigners possess an entry visa granting permission to enter the state of destination. Visa requirements are increasingly implemented by immigration officials posted abroad or by officials of transit countries pursuant to bilateral agreements (so-called ‘juxtaposed’ immigration controls). Private carriers, which are subject to sanctions if they bring persons to a country who do not have permission to enter, also engage in a form of de facto immigration control on behalf of states. These measures constitute a type of ‘externalized’ or ‘exported’ border that pushes the immigration boundaries of the state as far from its physical boundaries as possible. Pre-entry measures have a crippling impact on the ability of asylum seekers to access the territory of states to claim asylum. In effect, states have ‘externalized’ asylum by replacing the legal obligation on states to protect refugees arriving at ports of entry with what are perceived to be no more than moral obligations towards asylum seekers arriving at the external border of the state.

Legal ethics in a post-Westphalian world : building the international rule of law and otehr tasks

The emergence of strong sovereign states after the Treaty of Westphalia turned two of the most cosmopolitan professions (law and arms) into two of the least cosmopolitan. Sovereign states determined the content of the law within their borders – including which, if any, ecclesiastical law was to be applied; what form of economic regulation was adopted; and what, if any, international law applied. Similarly, states sought to ensure that all military force was at their disposal in national armies. The erosion of sovereignty in a post-Westphalian world may significantly reverse these processes. The erosion of sovereignty is likely to have profound consequences for the legal profession and the ethics of how, and for what ends, it is practised. Lawyers have played a major role in the civilization of sovereign states through the articulation and institutionalisation of key governance values – starting with the rule of law. An increasingly global profession must take on similar tasks. The same could be said of the military. This essay will review the concept of an international rule of law and its relationship to domestic conceptions and outline the task of building the international rule of law and the role that lawyers can and should play in it.

Biomashups: the new world of exploratory bioinformatics?

Bioinformatics is dominated by online databases and sophisticated web-accessible tools. As such, it is ideally placed to benefit from the rapid, purpose specific combination of services achievable via web mashups. The recent introduction of a number of sophisticated frameworks has greatly simplified the mashup creation process, making them accessible to scientists with limited programming expertise. In this paper we investigate the feasibility of mashups as a new approach to bioinformatic experimentation, focusing on an exploratory niche between interactive web usage and robust workflows, and attempting to identify the range of computations for which mashups may be employed. While we treat each of the major frameworks, we illustrate the ideas with a series of examples developed under the Popfly framework

Re-imagining static Utopias : unraveling the bat/human problem

The making of the modern world has long been fuelled by utopian images that are blind to ecological reality. Botanical gardens are but one example – who typically portray themselves as miniature, isolated 'edens on earth'. Whilst respected, heritage-laden institutions such as the Royal Botanical Gardens in Sydney, Australia promote such an idealised image they are now self-evidently also the vital ‘lungs’ of a crowded city as well as a critical habitats for threatened biodiversity (in this case notably flying foxes). In 2010 the 'Remnant Emergency Artlab' set out to alleviate this utopian hangover through a creative provocation called the 'Botanical Gardens ‘X-Tension’ - an imagined city-wide, distributed, network of 'ecological gardens' - in order to ask, what now needs to be better understood, connected and therefore ultimately conserved?

The media and parliament

For decades, indeed centuries, the Scottish media have been a source of national pride. Alongside the education system, the Church of Scotland and the legal apparatus the media have been rightly viewed as a distinctive Scottish cultural institution, a key part of what makes Scotland a nation rather than a region. Scotland has long sustained, per capita, one of the richest and most diverse media systems in the world, encapsulating a heady mix of local newspapers such as the West Highland Free Press, national [i.e., Scotland-wide] newspapers and broadcast outlets such as BBC Scotland and the Scotsman, and UK-based media with Scottish editions such as the Sun and the Mail. These media have reflected and fuelled what is in turn a distinctive Scottish political identity separate from, though connected with that of the United Kingdom as a whole. There has, for example, been no major paper with a pro-Tory editorial line north of the border for longer than most of us can remember, reflecting (and perhaps contributing to) the Conservative Party’s poor showing in successive Scottish elections.

Building support for learning within a Doctor of Education programme

Professional doctorates were introduced in the 1990s for practitioners to research ‘real-world’ problems relevant to their respective workplace communities and contexts. An array of difficulties faces professional doctoral students as they transition from professionals to practitioner researchers. This study sought to understand the learning journey of a cohort of students at an Australian university and to assess whether the cohort approach provided the necessary support for students to reach their scholarly destinations. Throughout the first 18 months of the programme, focus group interviews and surveys were conducted to gauge students’ experiences and to evaluate developments for support within the programme. Utilising a socio-cultural perspective helped identify and explain the importance of shared practice in fostering learning, the development of academic and researcher identities, and the role of communities of practice. Challenges of managing time and overcoming the professional and academe divide were facilitated by the evolving developments of the programme.

A sociolinguistic approach to applied epistemology : examining technocratic values in global 'Knowledge' policy

This special issue presents an excellent opportunity to study applied epistemology in public policy. This is an important task because the arena of public policy is the social domain in which macro conditions for ‘knowledge work’ and ‘knowledge industries’ are defined and created. We argue that knowledge-related public policy has become overly concerned with creating the politico-economic parameters for the commodification of knowledge. Our policy scope is broader than that of Fuller (1988), who emphasizes the need for a social epistemology of science policy. We extend our focus to a range of policy documents that include communications, science, education and innovation policy (collectively called knowledge-related public policy in acknowledgement of the fact that there is no defined policy silo called ‘knowledge policy’), all of which are central to policy concerned with the ‘knowledge economy’ (Rooney and Mandeville, 1998). However, what we will show here is that, as Fuller (1995) argues, ‘knowledge societies’ are not industrial societies permeated by knowledge, but that knowledge societies are permeated by industrial values. Our analysis is informed by an autopoietic perspective. Methodologically, we approach it from a sociolinguistic position that acknowledges the centrality of language to human societies (Graham, 2000). Here, what we call ‘knowledge’ is posited as a social and cognitive relationship between persons operating on and within multiple social and non-social (or, crudely, ‘physical’) environments. Moreover, knowing, we argue, is a sociolinguistically constituted process. Further, we emphasize that the evaluative dimension of language is most salient for analysing contemporary policy discourses about the commercialization of epistemology (Graham, in press). Finally, we provide a discourse analysis of a sample of exemplary texts drawn from a 1.3 million-word corpus of knowledge-related public policy documents that we compiled from local, state, national and supranational legislatures throughout the industrialized world. Our analysis exemplifies a propensity in policy for resorting to technocratic, instrumentalist and anti-intellectual views of knowledge in policy. We argue that what underpins these patterns is a commodity-based conceptualization of knowledge, which is underpinned by an axiology of narrowly economic imperatives at odds with the very nature of knowledge. The commodity view of knowledge, therefore, is flawed in its ignorance of the social systemic properties of knowing’.

The digital Dark Ages : a retro-speculative history of possible futures

The Dark Ages are generally held to be a time of technological and intellectual stagnation in western development. But that is not necessarily the case. Indeed, from a certain perspective, nothing could be further from the truth. In this paper we draw historical comparisons, focusing especially on the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, between the technological and intellectual ruptures in Europe during the Dark Ages, and those of our current period. Our analysis is framed in part by Harold Innis’s2 notion of "knowledge monopolies". We give an overview of how these were affected by new media, new power struggles, and new intellectual debates that emerged in thirteenth and fourteenth century Europe. The historical salience of our focus may seem elusive. Our world has changed so much, and history seems to be an increasingly far-from-favoured method for understanding our own period and its future potentials. Yet our seemingly distant historical focus provides some surprising insights into the social dynamics that are at work today: the fracturing of established knowledge and power bases; the democratisation of certain "sacred" forms of communication and knowledge, and, conversely, the "sacrosanct" appropriation of certain vernacular forms; challenges and innovations in social and scientific method and thought; the emergence of social world-shattering media practices; struggles over control of vast networks of media and knowledge monopolies; and the enclosure of public discursive and social spaces for singular, manipulative purposes. The period between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries in Europe prefigured what we now call the Enlightenment, perhaps moreso than any other period before or after; it shaped what the Enlightenment was to become. We claim no knowledge of the future here. But in the "post-everything" society, where history is as much up for sale as it is for argument, we argue that our historical perspective provides a useful analogy for grasping the wider trends in the political economy of media, and for recognising clear and actual threats to the future of the public sphere in supposedly democratic societies.

World Ethic Forum Conference Proceedings

World Ethics Forum conference proceedings : the joint conference of The International Institute for Public Ethics (IIPE) and The World Bank : leadership, ethics and integrity in public life : 9-11 April 2006, Keble College, University of Oxford UK /

Offending Youth : Crime, Sex and Justice

Rates of female delinquency, especially for violent crimes, are increasing in most common law countries. At the same time the growth in cyber-bullying, especially among girls, appears to be a related global phenomenon. While the gender gap in delinquency is narrowing in Australia, United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, boys continue to dominate the youth who commit crime and have a virtual monopoly over sexually violent crimes. Indigenous youth continue to be vastly over-represented in the juvenile justice system in every Australian jurisdiction. The Indigenisation of delinquency is a persistent problem in other countries such as Canada and New Zealand. Young people who gather in public places are susceptible to being perceived as somehow threatening or riotous, attracting more than their share of public order policing. Professional football has been marred by repeated scandals involving sexual assault, violence and drunkenness. Given the cultural significance of footballers as role models to thousands, if not millions, of young men around the world, it is vitally important to address this problem. Offending Youth explores these key contemporary patterns of delinquency, the response to these by the juvenile justice agencies and moreover what can be done to address these problems. The book also analyses the major policy and legislative changes from the nineteenth to twenty first centuries, chiefly the shift the penal welfarism to diversion and restorative justice. Using original cases studied by Carrington twenty years ago, Offending Youth illustrates how penal welfarism criminalised young people from socially marginal backgrounds, especially Aboriginal children, children from single parent families, family-less children, state wards and young people living in poverty or in housing commission estates. A number of inquiries in Australia and the United Kingdom have since established that children committed to these institutions, supposedly for their own good, experienced systemic physical, sexual and psychological abuse during their institutionalisation. The book is dedicated to the survivors of these institutions who only now are receiving official recognition of the injustices they suffered. The underlying philosophy of juvenile justice has fundamentally shifted away from penal welfarism to embrace positive policy responses to juvenile crime, such as youth conferencing, cautions, warnings, restorative justice, circle sentencing and diversion examined in the concluding chapter. Offending Youth is aimed at a broad readership including policy makers, juvenile justice professionals, youth workers, families, teachers, politicians as well as students and academics in criminology, policing, gender studies, masculinity studies, Indigenous studies, justice studies, youth studies and the sociology of youth and deviance more generally.-- [from publisher website]

'Being-in-the-world-of-care' : the lived experiences of older people receiving community aged care packages in Queensland

It has been recognised in current literature that, in general, Australia’s population is ageing and that older people are increasingly choosing to continue to live in the community in their own homes for as long as possible. Such factors of social change are expected to lead to larger numbers of older people requiring community care services for longer periods. Despite this, there is little information available in the literature on the perceptions and experiences of older people regarding community-based care and support. This study explores the lived experience of a small group of older people living in South East Queensland who were receiving a level of care consistent with the Community Aged Care Package (CACP). It also sought to examine the impact and meaning of that care on the older person’s overall lifestyle, autonomy, and personal satisfaction. In-depth interviews were undertaken with these older people, and were analysed using Heidegger’s interpretive hermeneutical phenomenological approach. Shared narratives were then explored using Ricoeur’s narrative analysis framework. In order to sensitise the researcher to the unconscious or symbolic aspects of the care experience, Wolfensberger’s social role valorization theory (SRV) was also utilised during a third phase of analysis. Methodological rigour was strengthened within this study through the use of reflexivity and an in-depth member check discussion that was conducted with each participant. The interviews revealed there were significant differences in expectations, understanding, and perceptions between older people and their carers or service providers. The older person perceived care primarily in relational terms, and clearly preferred active participation in their care and a consistent relationship with a primary carer. Older people also sought to maintain their sense of autonomy, lifestyle, home environment, routines, and relationships, as closely as possible to those that existed prior to their requiring assistance. However, these expectations were not always supported by the care model. On the whole, service providers did not always understand what older people perceived was important within the care context. Carers seldom looked beyond the provision of assistance with specific daily tasks to consider the real impact of care on the older person. The study identified that older people reported a range of experiences when receiving care in their own homes. While some developed healthy and supportive connections with their carers, others experienced ageism, abuse, and exploitation. Unsatisfactory interactions at times resulted in a loss, to varying degrees, of their independence, their possessions, and their connectedness with others. There is therefore a need for service providers to pay more attention to the perceptions and self-perceived needs of older people, to avoid unintended or unnecessary negative impacts occurring within care provision. The study provides valuable information regarding the older person’s experience that will assist in supporting the further development and improvement of this model of care. It is proposed that these insights will enable CACPs to cater more closely to the actual needs and preferences of older people, and to avoid causing preventable harm to care recipients.