Perpetuating Racism: Legal Education, Race and Social Justice

By presenting the results of a content analysis of Australian undergraduate legal education, this paper examines the extent to which issues of race, ethnicity, discrimination, and multiculturalism feature within this component of the moral, ethical, and professional development of legal professionals. It will demonstrate that instead of encouraging a deep, critical and contextual understanding of such issues, legal education provides a relatively superficial one, which has important implications for the role that legal professionals play in overcoming injustices such as institutional racism, and the kinds of social reform that they are likely to undertake.

Attention and memory bias for body image and health related information using an Emotional Stroop task in a non-clinical sample

It has been proposed that body image disturbance is a form of cognitive bias wherein schemas for self-relevant information guide the selective processing of appearancerelated information in the environment. This threatening information receives disproportionately more attention and memory, as measured by an Emotional Stroop and incidental recall task. The aim of this thesis was to expand the literature on cognitive processing biases in non-clinical males and females by incorporating a number of significant methodological refinements. To achieve this aim, three phases of research were conducted. The initial two phases of research provided preliminary data to inform the development of the main study. Phase One was a qualitative exploration of body image concerns amongst males and females recruited through the general community and from a university. Seventeen participants (eight male; nine female) provided information on their body image and what factors they saw as positively and negatively impacting on their self evaluations. The importance of self esteem, mood, health and fitness, and recognition of the social ideal were identified as key themes. These themes were incorporated as psycho-social measures and Stroop word stimuli in subsequent phases of the research. Phase Two involved the selection and testing of stimuli to be used in the Emotional Stroop task. Six experimental categories of words were developed that reflected a broad range of health and body image concerns for males and females. These categories were high and low calorie food words, positive and negative appearance words, negative emotion words, and physical activity words. Phase Three addressed the central aim of the project by examining cognitive biases for body image information in empirically defined sub-groups. A National sample of males (N = 55) and females (N = 144), recruited from the general community and universities, completed an Emotional Stroop task, incidental memory test, and a collection of psycho-social questionnaires. Sub-groups of body image disturbance were sought using a cluster analysis, which identified three sub-groups in males (Normal, Dissatisfied, and Athletic) and four sub-groups in females (Normal, Health Conscious, Dissatisfied, and Symptomatic). No differences were noted between the groups in selective attention, although time taken to colour name the words was associated with some of the psycho-social variables. Memory biases found across the whole sample for negative emotion, low calorie food, and negative appearance words were interpreted as reflecting the current focus on health and stigma against being unattractive. Collectively these results have expanded our understanding of processing biases in the general community by demonstrating that the processing biases are found within non-clinical samples and that not all processing biases are associated with negative functionality

Race and equity in higher education : A harder path for Indigenous academics

Our experiences as Indigenous academics within universities often reflects the experiences we have as Indigenous people in broader society, yet I am still surprised and angered when it is others working in higher education who espouse notions of justice and equity with whom we experience tension and conflict in asserting our rights, values and cultural values. At times it is a constant struggle even when universities have Reconciliation Statements as most of them do now, Indigenous recruitment or employment strategies and university wide anti-racism and anti-discrimination policies and procedures.

Whiteness, Epistemology and Indigenous representation

With its focus on Australia, Whitening Race engages with relations between migration, Indigenous dispossession and whiteness. It creates a new intellectual space that investigates the nature of racialised conditions and their role in reproducing colonising relations in Australia.

The failure of Australian legislation on indirect discrimination to detect the systemic racism which prevents Aboriginal people from fully participating in the workforce

Government figures put the current indigenous unemployment rate at around 23%, 3 times the unemployment rate for other Australians. This thesis aims to assess whether Australian indirect discrimination legislation can provide a remedy for one of the causes of indigenous unemployment - the systemic discrimination which can result from the mere operation of established procedures of recruitment and hiring. The impact of those practices on indigenous people is examined in the context of an analysis of anti-discrimination legislation and cases from all Australian jurisdictions from the time of the passing of the Racial Discrimination Act by the Commonwealth in 1975 to the present. The thesis finds a number of reasons why the legislation fails to provide equality of opportunity for indigenous people seeking to enter the workforce. In nearly all jurisdictions it is obscurely drafted, used mainly by educated middle class white women, and provides remedies which tend to be compensatory damages rather than change to recruitment policy. White dominance of the legal process has produced legislative and judicial definitions of "race" and "Aboriginality" which focus on biology rather than cultural difference. In the commissions and tribunals complaints of racial discrimination are often rejected on the grounds of being "vexatious" or "frivolous", not reaching the required standard of proof, or not showing a causal connection between race and the conduct complained of. In all jurisdictions the cornerstone of liability is whether a particular employment term, condition or practice is reasonable. The thesis evaluates the approaches taken by appellate courts, including the High Court, and concludes that there is a trend towards an interpretation of reasonableness which favours employer arguments such as economic rationalism, the maintenance of good industrial relations, managerial prerogative to hire and fire, and the protection of majority rights. The thesis recommends that separate, clearly drafted legislation should be passed to address indigenous disadvantage and that indigenous people should be involved in all stages of the process.

Fingerprint analysis of eucommia bark by LC-DAD and LC-MS with the aid of chemometrics

Chromatographic fingerprints of 46 Eucommia Bark samples were obtained by liquid chromatography-diode array detector (LC-DAD). These samples were collected from eight provinces in China, with different geographical locations, and climates. Seven common LC peaks that could be used for fingerprinting this common popular traditional Chinese medicine were found, and six were identified as substituted resinols (4 compounds), geniposidic acid and chlorogenic acid by LC-MS. Principal components analysis (PCA) indicated that samples from the Sichuan, Hubei, Shanxi and Anhui—the SHSA provinces, clustered together. The other objects from the four provinces, Guizhou, Jiangxi, Gansu and Henan, were discriminated and widely scattered on the biplot in four province clusters. The SHSA provinces are geographically close together while the others are spread out. Thus, such results suggested that the composition of the Eucommia Bark samples was dependent on their geographic location and environment. In general, the basis for discrimination on the PCA biplot from the original 46 objects× 7 variables data matrix was the same as that for the SHSA subset (36 × 7 matrix). The seven marker compound loading vectors grouped into three sets: (1) three closely correlating substituted resinol compounds and chlorogenic acid; (2) the fourth resinol compound identified by the OCH3 substituent in the R4 position, and an unknown compound; and (3) the geniposidic acid, which was independent of the set 1 variables, and which negatively correlated with the set 2 ones above. These observations from the PCA biplot were supported by hierarchical cluster analysis, and indicated that Eucommia Bark preparations may be successfully compared with the use of the HPLC responses from the seven marker compounds and chemometric methods such as PCA and the complementary hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA).

'Homophobia' in the university classroom : law and justice students' conceptualizations of queer identity

Heteronormative discourses provide the most common lens through which sexuality is understood within university curricula. This means that sexuality is discussed in terms of categories of identity, with heterosexuality accorded primacy and all ‘others’ indeed ‘othered.’ This paper reports on research carried out by the authors in a core first year university justice class, in which students of law and/or justice were required to engage with, discuss, and reflect on discourses on sexuality. It uses a poststructural framework to identify how students understand non-heterosexualities and how they personally relate to queer identities, in the sense that it asks questions about gender and sexual identity, and the discourses surrounding them. It was found that strongly negative attitudes to non-heterosexualities are quite resistant to challenge, and that some students express being confronted with queerness as a deep-seated fear of being drawn into otherness against their will. The result was that, while many students were able to unpack their attitudes towards queerness and engage in critical reflection and re-evaluation of their attitudes, students with strongly negative views towards non-heterosexualities conversely refused to engage at all, typically perceiving even the engagement itself as a threat to their core heterosexual identity. However, the authors caution against relying on the idea that students are simply “homophobic” to explain this reluctance, as this term does not necessarily account for the complexity of the discourses that inform students’ reactions in this context. This “homophobia” may simply be related to a way of performing gender and sexual identity as opposed to overt discrimination and fear.

Book Review: Larissa Behrendt, Chris Cuneen and Terri Libesman, Indigenous Legal Relations in Australia (Oxford University Press, Melbourne 2009) 376pp

Indigenous Legal Relations in Australia is a welcome and refreshing addition to the current literature on Indigenous legal issues. Written by a team of highly qualified Indigenous and non-Indigenous academics who share a long term commitment to Indigenous legal and social justice issues, this book provides a clearly written and accessible introductory text for tertiary students and general readers alike who are seeking to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between Indigenous Australians and the Anglo-Australian legal system.

Statistical analysis and reduction of multiple access interference in MC-CDMA systems

Multicarrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) is a very promising candidate for the multiple access scheme in fourth generation wireless communi- cation systems. During asynchronous transmission, multiple access interference (MAI) is a major challenge for MC-CDMA systems and significantly affects their performance. The main objectives of this thesis are to analyze the MAI in asyn- chronous MC-CDMA, and to develop robust techniques to reduce the MAI effect. Focus is first on the statistical analysis of MAI in asynchronous MC-CDMA. A new statistical model of MAI is developed. In the new model, the derivation of MAI can be applied to different distributions of timing offset, and the MAI power is modelled as a Gamma distributed random variable. By applying the new statistical model of MAI, a new computer simulation model is proposed. This model is based on the modelling of a multiuser system as a single user system followed by an additive noise component representing the MAI, which enables the new simulation model to significantly reduce the computation load during computer simulations. MAI reduction using slow frequency hopping (SFH) technique is the topic of the second part of the thesis. Two subsystems are considered. The first sub- system involves subcarrier frequency hopping as a group, which is referred to as GSFH/MC-CDMA. In the second subsystem, the condition of group hopping is dropped, resulting in a more general system, namely individual subcarrier frequency hopping MC-CDMA (ISFH/MC-CDMA). This research found that with the introduction of SFH, both of GSFH/MC-CDMA and ISFH/MC-CDMA sys- tems generate less MAI power than the basic MC-CDMA system during asyn- chronous transmission. Because of this, both SFH systems are shown to outper- form MC-CDMA in terms of BER. This improvement, however, is at the expense of spectral widening. In the third part of this thesis, base station polarization diversity, as another MAI reduction technique, is introduced to asynchronous MC-CDMA. The com- bined system is referred to as Pol/MC-CDMA. In this part a new optimum com- bining technique namely maximal signal-to-MAI ratio combining (MSMAIRC) is proposed to combine the signals in two base station antennas. With the applica- tion of MSMAIRC and in the absents of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), the resulting signal-to-MAI ratio (SMAIR) is not only maximized but also in- dependent of cross polarization discrimination (XPD) and antenna angle. In the case when AWGN is present, the performance of MSMAIRC is still affected by the XPD and antenna angle, but to a much lesser degree than the traditional maximal ratio combining (MRC). Furthermore, this research found that the BER performance for Pol/MC-CDMA can be further improved by changing the angle between the two receiving antennas. Hence the optimum antenna angles for both MSMAIRC and MRC are derived and their effects on the BER performance are compared. With the derived optimum antenna angle, the Pol/MC-CDMA system is able to obtain the lowest BER for a given XPD.

Disrupting the new orthodoxy : emergency intervention and Indigenous social policy

This article develops a critical analysis of the ideological framework that informed the Australian Federal government’s 2007 intervention into Northern Territory Indigenous communities (ostensibly to address the problem of child sexual abuse). Continued by recently elected Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, the NT ‘emergency response’ has aroused considerable public debate and scholarly inquiry. In addressing what amounts to a broad bi-partisan approach to Indigenous issues we highlight the way in which Indigenous communities are problematised and therefore subject to interventionist regimes that override differentiated Indigenous voices and intensify an internalised sense of rage occasioned by disempowering interventionist projects. We further argue that in rushing through the emergency legislation and suspending parts of the Racial Discrimination Act, the Howard and Rudd governments have in various ways perpetuated racialised and neo-colonial forms of intervention that override the rights of Indigenous people. Such policy approaches require critical understanding on the part of professions involved most directly in community practice, particularly when it comes to mounting effective opposition campaigns. The article offers a contribution to this end.

Men's intimate partner abuse and control : reconciling paradoxical masculinities and social contradictions

Intimate partner abuse and control is one of the most common forms of violence against women, and is considered an international problem of social, political, legal and human rights significance. Yet few studies have attempted to understand this problem from the perspective of male perpetrators. This gap is addressed by conducting in-depth interviews with 16 able-bodied men of white European ancestry born and educated in New Zealand or Australia, who have been physically violent and/or emotionally, intellectually, sexually or financially controlling of a live-in female partner. This thesis extends and deepens the dominant ways of thinking about men’s intimate partner abuse by utilising a new theoretical framework compatible with contemporary feminist scholarship. A synthesis of Connell’s theory of masculinities and Bourdieu’s field theory is utilised for the purpose of exploring more nuanced, complex understandings of manliness and men’s relationships with men, women and social structures. Through such an analysis, this thesis finds that men’s perpetration of power and control over women is driven by a need to avoid the stigma of appearing weak. As a consequence, their desire and ability to show love, care and empathy is suppressed in favour of a presumed honourable manliness, and their female partners are used as weapons in the pursuit of symbolic capital in the form of recognition, prestige and acceptance from real and/or imagined men. This research also uncovers the complex interplay between masculine practices and particular social contexts. For example, the norms of practice encountered from those in authority, such as teachers, sports coaches, police, court judges and workplace management, influences the decision making of the men in this study, to use, or not to use, physical violence, psychological abuse and structural control. The principal conclusion is that there is a repertoire of paradoxical masculinities and contradictory social messages available to the men in this study. But gender policing by other men, complicit women and those in authority provides little room for legitimate complexity in masculine practices. Perpetrators in this study reconcile these conflicts of interest by generally avoiding subordinated masculinity and possible ostracism, and instead practicing more heroic hegemonic masculinities by abusing and controlling women and particular other men. This thesis concludes that for intimate partner abuse and control to cease, changes in power structures have to occur at all levels of society.

Listening to late discovery adoption and donor offspring stories : adoption, ethics and implications for contemporary donor insemination practices

For most of the 20th Century a ‘closed’ system of adoption was practised throughout Australia and other modern Western societies. This ‘closed’ system was characterised by sealed records; amended birth certificates to conceal the adoption, and prohibited contact with all biological family. Despite claims that these measures protected these children from the taint of illegitimacy the central motivations were far more complex, involving a desire to protect couples from the stigma of infertility and to provide a socially acceptable family structure (Triseliotis, Feast, & Kyle, 2005; Marshall & McDonald, 2001). From the 1960s significant evidence began to emerge that many adopted children and adults were experiencing higher incidences of psychological difficulties, characterised by problems with psychological adjustment, building self-esteem and forming a secure personal identity. These difficulties became grouped under the term ‘genealogical bewilderment’. As a result, new policies and practices were introduced to try to place the best interests of the child at the forefront. These changes reflected new understandings of adoption; as not only an individual process but also as a social and relational process that continues throughout life. Secrecy and the withholding of birth information are now prohibited in the overwhelming majority of all domestic adoptions processed in Australia (Marshall & McDonald, 2001). One little known consequence of this ‘closed’ system of adoption was the significant number of children who were never told of their adoptive status. As a consequence, some have discovered or had this information disclosed to them, as adults. The first study that looked at the late discovery of genetic origins experiences was conducted by the Post Adoption Resource Centre in New South Wales in 1999. This report found that the participants in their study expressed feelings of disbelief, confusion, anger, sorrow and loss. Further, the majority of participants continued to struggle with issues arising from this intentional concealment of their genetic origins (Perl & Markham, 1999). A second and more recent study (Passmore, Feeney & Foulstone, 2007) looked at the issue of secrecy in adoptive families as part of a broader study of 144 adult adoptees. This study found that secrecy and/or lies or misinformation on the part of adoptive parents had negative effects on both personal identity and relationships with others. The authors noted that those adoptees who found out about their adoption as adults were ‘especially likely to feel a sense of betrayal’ (p.4). Over recent years, stories of secrecy and late discovery have also started to emerge from sperm donor conceived adults (Spencer, 2007; Turner & Coyle, 2000). Current research evidence shows that although a majority of couples during the donor assisted conception process indicate that they intend to tell the offspring about their origins, as many as two-thirds or more of couples continue to withhold this information from their children (Akker, 2006; Gottlieb, A. McWhinnie, 2001; Salter-Ling, Hunter, & Glover, 2001). Why do they keep this secret? Infertility involves a range of complex factors that are often left unresolved or poorly understood by those choosing insemination by donor as a form of family building (Schaffer, J. A., & Diamond, R., 1993). These factors may only impact after the child is born, when resemblance talk becomes most pronounced. Resemblance talk is an accepted form of public discourse and a social convention that legitimises the child as part of the family and is part of the process of constructing the child’s identity within the family. Couples tend to become focused on resemblance as this is where they feel most vulnerable, and the lack of resemblance to the parenting father may trigger his sense of loss (Becker, Butler, & Nachtigall, 2005).

Community engagement : exploring a relational approach to consultation and collaborative practice in Australia

Community engagement is increasingly being employed by Australian organizations as a key strategy to incorporate representative community opinions into decision-making. This trend is reflected by Australian local and state governments legislating for community consultation in major infrastructure projects and the increasing role of public relations practitioners to manage these programs. This study explores community engagement founded on relational theory and proposed a typology of engagement employing a relational framework. An exploratory study of 20 Australian infrastructure projects with a mandatory consultation component is analyzed applying this framework. Results indicate little discrimination between the terms engagement, consultation, and participation; however, a range of tactics supported both collaborative and advocacy approaches. The implications for adopting a relational framework for community engagement programs are discussed.

Longing to belong : social inclusion and wellbeing among youth with refugee backgrounds in the first three years in Melbourne, Australia

For young people with refugee backgrounds, establishing a sense of belonging to their family and community, and to their country of resettlement is essential for wellbeing. This paper describes the psychosocial factors associated with subjective health and wellbeing outcomes among a cohort of 97 refugee youth (aged 11-19) during their first three years in Melbourne, Australia. The findings reported here are drawn from the Good Starts Study, a longitudinal investigation of settlement and wellbeing among refugee youth conducted between 2004 and 2008. The overall aim of Good Starts was to identify the psychosocial factors that assist youth with refugee backgrounds in making a good start in their new country. A particular focus was on key transitions: from pre-arrival to Australia, from the language school to mainstream school, and from mainstream school to higher education or to the workforce. Good Starts used a mix of both method and theory from anthropology and social epidemiology. Using standardized measures of wellbeing and generalised estimating equations to model the predictors of wellbeing over time, this paper reports that key factors strongly associated with wellbeing outcomes are those that can be described as indicators of belonging e the most important being subjective social status in the broader Australian community, perceived discrimination and bullying. We argue that settlement specific policies and programs can ultimately be effective if embedded within a broader socially inclusive society - one that offers real opportunities for youth with refugee backgrounds to flourish.