Who is publishing in the Journal of Sociology? an analysis of author trends 1965–2008

This paper presents the author characteristics of papers published in The Australian Sociological Association (TASA) journal, the Journal of Sociology (formerly the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology) between 1965 and 2008. The aim of the paper is empirically to identify trends in authorship. The review examines all articles published in the period (excluding book reviews). The rationale of the study is to reveal trends in who publishes in the journal in terms of authors’ academic rank, gender, institution, and country. A table of those who have published the greatest number of papers is also presented. Findings show that over time the gap between the proportion of males and females publishing has closed; more PhD students and research fellows are publishing in the journal in recent decades; the highest proportion of authors consistently come from the Australian National University and The University of Queensland; and most authors are located in Australia. Information such as this can inform editorial practices and serve to inform the membership and readership on the nature of the journal.

Rethinking the notion of culture in the national history curriculum

Major global changes are placing new demands on the Australian education system. Recent statements by the Prime Minister, together with current education policy and national curriculum documents available in the public domain, look to education’s role in promoting economic prosperity and social cohesion. Collectively, they emphasise the need to equip young Australians with the knowledge, understandings and skills required to compete in the global economy and participate as engaged citizens in a culturally diverse world. However, the decision to prioritise discipline-based learning in the forthcoming Australian history curriculum without specifically encompassing culture as a referent, raises the following question. How will students acquire the cultural knowledge, understandings and skills necessary for this process? This paper addresses this question by situating the current push for a national history curriculum, with specific reference to the study of Indigenous history and the study of Asia in Australia.

Contradictions : Genre, causal layered analysis and analysis of institutional change

In what follows, I put forward an argument for an analytical method for social science that operates at the level of genre. I argue that generic convergence, generic hybridity, and generic instability provide us with a powerful perspectives on changes in political, cultural, and economic relationships, most specifically at the level of institutions. Such a perspective can help us identify the transitional elements, relationships, and trajectories that define the place of our current system in history, thereby grounding our understanding of possible futures.1 In historically contextualising our present with this method, my concern is to indicate possibilities for the future. Systemic contradictions indicate possibility spaces within which systemic change must and will emerge. We live in a system currently dominated by many fully-expressed contradictions, and so in the presence of many possible futures. The contradictions of the current age are expressed most overtly in the public genres of power politics. Contemporary public policy—indeed politics in general-is an excellent focus for any investigation of possible futures, precisely because of its future-oriented function. It is overtly hortatory; it is designed ‘to get people to do things’ (Muntigl in press: 147). There is no point in trying to get people to do things in the past. Consequently, policy discourse is inherently oriented towards creating some future state of affairs (Graham in press), along with concomitant ways of being, knowing, representing, and acting (Fairclough 2000).

Modern Times : The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia

Richly illustrated and beautifully designed, Modern Times - The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia reveals how modernism transformed all aspects of Australian culture across five tumultuous decades from 1917 to 1967. The influence of modernism was far-reaching. "Modern Times" looks at all things modern and as diverse as art, advertising, photography, film, fashion, the body, architecture, interiors, recreational sites such as the new swimming pools and fountains, milk bars and auto culture.Modernism embodied the utopian possibilities of the twentieth century. It transformed Australian cities into complex metropolises and offered access to new cosmopolitan cultures. This is the first time that such diverse material has been brought together in one volume.

Laughs and legends, or the furniture that glows? : television as history.

John Hartley uses the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne to discuss the notions of a history of TV and TV History and concludes that the internet offers entirely new possibilities for TV as History.

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.

"Men at play : masculinities in Australian theater since the 1950s" -- By Jonathan Bollen, Adrian Kiernander and Bruce Parr

Adopting a thematic rather than chronological arrangement, this co-authored book surveys representations of men and masculinity in post-war Australian theater. Its searching and sophisticated analyses draw upon playscripts, critical records and archival material, including screen versions of stage productions. The study is organized around two distinct periods of Australian theater history: the 1950s to 1970, during which time a national theatremovement flourished, and the mid-1980s onward.Whilst some attention is given to different genres, discussion centers primarily on realist works from the mainstream. Several plays usually omitted from orthodox theater histories, such as Barry Pree’s A Fox in the Night (1959), are given detailed treatments.

Queer

The word “queer” is a slippery one; its etymology is uncertain, and academic and popular usage attributes conflicting meanings to the word. By the mid-nineteenth century, “queer” was used as a pejorative term for a (male) homosexual. This negative connotation continues when it becomes a term for homophobic abuse. In recent years, “queer” has taken on additional uses: as an all encompassing term for culturally marginalised sexualities – gay, lesbian, trans, bi, and intersex (“GLBTI”) – and as a theoretical strategy which deconstructs binary oppositions that govern identity formation. Tracing its history, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that the earliest references to “queer” may have appeared in the sixteenth century. These early examples of queer carried negative connotations such as “vulgar,” “bad,” “worthless,” “strange,” or “odd” and such associations continued until the mid-twentieth century. The early nineteenth century, and perhaps earlier, employed “queer” as a verb, meaning to “to put out of order,” “to spoil”, “to interfere with”. The adjectival form also began to emerge during this time to refer to a person’s condition as being “not normal,” “out of sorts” or to cause a person “to feel queer” meaning “to disconcert, perturb, unsettle.” According to Eve Sedgwick (1993), “the word ‘queer’ itself means across – it comes from the Indo-European root – twerkw, which also yields the German quer (traverse), Latin torquere (to twist), English athwart . . . it is relational and strange.” Despite the gaps in the lineage and changes in usage, meaning and grammatical form, “queer” as a political and theoretical strategy has benefited from its diverse origins. It refuses to settle comfortably into a single classification, preferring instead to traverse several categories that would otherwise attempt to stabilise notions of chromosomal sex, gender and sexuality.

La Boite The Story of an Australian Theatre Company

Since its genesis in 1925, La Boite has never been afraid of change. Despite controversies, crises and crippling set-backs that should have closed its stage doors many times, La Boite - which began life as the Brisbane Repertory Theatre Society - has proved itself an extraordinary survivor. When the opportunity came to build its own theatre, its inspired choice of theatre-in-the-round gave Brisbane an iconic performance space that attracted a whole new generation of actors, directors and designers and placed La Boite at the forefront of contemporary theatre practice. The place, in Katharine Brisbane’s words, “to see the red meat of theatre”. Always enterprising, with gritty determination it became a professional theatre company of national significance; and early in the new millennium triumphantly re-located to its new home at The Roundhouse Theatre. La Boite –The Story of an Australian Theatre Company both interrogates and celebrates the history of Queensland’s oldest theatre company. Highlighting the roles key people played in its evolution – particularly four remarkable women – Christine Comans explores La Boite’s colourful past, its cultural significance to Brisbane, and its vibrant and enduring role in the nation’s theatrical history.

From Sydney and Shanghai : Australian and Chinese women writing modernism

In the 1930s and 1940s, Australian women writers published novels, poems, and short stories that pushed the boundaries of their national literary culture. From their position in the Pacific, they entered into a dialogue with a European modernism that they reworked to invigorate their own writing and to make cross-continental connections. My interest in the work of Australian women prose writers of this period stems from an appreciation of the extent of their engagement with interwar modernism (an engagement that is generally under-acknowledged) and the realization that there are commonalities of approach with the ways in which contemporaneous Chinese authors negotiated this transnational cultural traffic. China and Australia, it has been argued, share an imaginative and literal association of many centuries, and this psychic history produces a situation in which ‘Australians feel drawn towards China: they cannot leave it alone.’1 Equally, Chinese exploration of the great southern land began in the fifteenth century, prior to European contact. In recent times, the intensity of Australia’s cultural and commercial connections with Asia has led to a repositioning of the Australian sense of regionalism in general and, in particular, has activated yet another stage in the history of its relationship with China. In this context, the association of Australian and Chinese writing is instructive because the commonalities of approach and areas of interest between certain authors indicate that Australian writers were not alone in either the content or style of their response to European modernism. This recognition, in turn, advances discussions of modernism in Australia and reveals an alternative way of looking at the world from the Pacific Rim through literature. The intent is to examine selective Australian and Chinese authors who are part of this continuous history and whose writing demonstrates common thematic and stylistic features via the vector of modernism. I focus on the 1930s and 1940s because these are the decades in which Australia and China experienced wideranging conflict in the Pacific, and it is significant that war, both forthcoming and actual, features as an ominous soundtrack in the writing of Chinese and Australian women. I argue that, given the immensity of cultural difference between Australia and China, there is an especially interesting juncture in the ways in which the authors interrogate modernist practices and the challenge of modernism. The process in which writing from the Pacific Rim jointly negotiates the twin desires of engaging with European literary form and representing one’s own culture may be seen as what Jessica Berman identifies as a geomodernism, one of the ‘new possible geographies’ of modernism.2 My discussion centres on the work of the Australian women, to which the Chinese material serves as a point of reference, albeit a critical one. The Chinese writing examined here is restricted to authors who wrote at least some material in English and whose work is available in translation.

Associations among body size dissatisfaction, perceived dietary control, and diet history in African American and European American women

European American (EA) women report greater body dissatisfaction and less dietary control than do African American (AA) women. This study investigated whether ethnic differences in dieting history contributed to differences in body dissatisfaction and dietary control, or to differential changes that may occur during weight loss and regain. Eighty-nine EA and AA women underwent dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry to measure body composition and completed questionnaires to assess body dissatisfaction and dietary control before, after, and one year following, a controlled weight-loss intervention. While EA women reported a more extensive dieting history than AA women, this difference did not contribute to ethnic differences in body dissatisfaction and perceived dietary control. During weight loss, body satisfaction improved more for AA women, and during weight regain, dietary self-efficacy worsened to a greater degree for EA women. Ethnic differences in dieting history did not contribute significantly to these differential changes. Although ethnic differences in body image and dietary control are evident prior to weight loss, and some change differentially by ethnic group during weight loss and regain, differences in dieting history do not contribute significantly to ethnic differences in body image and dietary control.

What is early childhood education for sustainability?

Julie Davis canvasses the literature to explain why sustainability issues are important for young children and why early childhood educators should become engaged with EfS. She outlines the short history of ECEfS in Australasia and internationally, emphasising its marginalised and fragile early phase that is now beginning to coalesce into a robust international movement. She then highlights two recent studies undertaken in child care centres that illustrate the learning and actions that are possible when education for sustainability is incorporated into early childhood curriculum and pedagogy. Julie ends the chapter by identifying the qualities that might characterise early childhood education for sustainability, stressing its requirement to be transformative education that builds the capabilities of young children as agents of change for sustainability. In so doing, she draws together theoretical strands from both early childhood education and EfS, beginning the process of constructing a theoretical framework for ECEfS.