Integrating Poverty and Gender into Health Programmes : a Source Book for Health Professionals : Module on Curricular Integration

Over the past two to three decades, our understanding of poverty has broadened from a narrow focus on income and consumption to a multidimensional notion of education, health, social and political 1 participation, personal security and freedom and environmental quality. Thus, it encompasses not just low income, but lack of access to services, resources and skills; vulnerability; insecurity; and voicelessness and powerlessness. Multidimensional poverty is a determinant of health risks, health seeking behaviour, health care access and health outcomes. As analysis of health outcomes becomes more refined, it is increasingly apparent that the impressive gains in health experienced over recent decades are unevenly distributed. Aggregate indicators, whether at the global, regional or national level, often tend to mask striking variations in health outcomes between men and women, rich and poor, both across and within countries...

Review: "Context : A framework for its Influence on Evaluation Practice (New Directions for Evaluation No. 135)" edited by Rog, D. J.; Fitzpatrick, J. L. and Conner, R. F.

This book offers a framework for the influence of context on evaluation practice and is applied to three case studies: environmental context; indigenous context and political context; and finishes with a process for implementation.

Welfare surveillance, income management and new paternalism in Australia

This article discusses the situation of income support claimants in Australia, constructed as faulty citizens and flawed welfare subjects. Many are on the receiving end of complex, multi-layered forms of surveillance aimed at securing socially responsible and compliant behaviours. In Australia, as in other Western countries, neoliberal economic regimes with their harsh and often repressive treatment of welfare recipients operate in tandem with a burgeoning and costly arsenal of CCTV and other surveillance and governance assemblages. Through a program of ‘Income Management’, initially targeting (mainly) Indigenous welfare recipients in Australia’s Northern Territory, the BasicsCard (administered by Centrelink, on behalf of the Australian Federal Government’s Department of Human Services) is one example of this welfare surveillance. The scheme operates by ‘quarantining’ a percentage of a claimant’s welfare entitlements to be spent by way of the BasicsCard on ‘approved’ items only. The BasicsCard scheme raises significant questions about whether it is possible to encourage people to take responsibility for themselves if they no longer have real control over the most important aspects of their lives. Some Indigenous communities have resisted the BasicsCard, criticising it because the imposition of income management leads to a loss of trust, dignity, and individual agency. Further, income management of individuals by the welfare state contradicts the purported aim that they become less ‘welfare dependent’ and more ‘self-reliant’. In highlighting issues around compulsory income management this paper makes a contribution to the largely under discussed area of income management and welfare surveillance, with its propensity for function creep, garnering large volumes of data on BasicsCard user’s approved (and declined) purchasing decisions, complete with dates, amounts, times and locations.

Corporate ownership, corporate governance reform and timeliness of earnings : Malaysian evidence

This paper provides the first evidence showing that ownership concentration and the identity of the largest shareholder matter to the timeliness of corporate earnings, measured by a stock price-based timeliness metric and the reporting lag. Using panel data of 1276 Malaysian firms from 1996 to 2009, we find a non-linear relationship between concentrated ownership, measured by the largest shareholding in a firm, and the reporting lag but not the timeliness of price discovery. Although firms with government as the largest shareholder and political connections have a significantly shorter reporting lag, only the former are timelier in price discovery. Firms with family and foreigners as the largest shareholder however are less timely in price discovery. While the reporting lag is shorter in the period after the integration of the Malaysian Code of Corporate Governance (MCCG) into Bursa listing rules, its impact on the timeliness of price discovery is mostly immaterial.

Aboriginality and the Northern Territory intervention

This thesis examines the construction of Aboriginality in recent public policy reasoning through identifying representations deployed by architects and supporters of the Commonwealth’s 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Response (the intervention). Debate about the Northern Territory intervention was explicitly situated in relation to a range of ideas about appropriate Government policy towards Indigenous people, and particularly about the nature, role, status, value and future of Aboriginality and of Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders. This project involves analysis of constructions of Aboriginality deployed in texts created and circulated to explain and justify the policy program. The aim of the project is to identify the ideas about Aboriginality deployed by the intervention’s architects and supporters, and to examine the effects and implications of these discourses for political relationships between Indigenous people and settlers in Australia. This thesis will argue that advocates of the Northern Territory intervention construct Aboriginality in a range of important ways that reassert and reinforce the legitimacy of the settler colonial order and the project of Australian nationhood, and operate to limit Aboriginal claims. Specifically, it is argued that in linking Aboriginality to the abuse of Aboriginal children, the intervention’s advocates and supporters establish a political debate about the nature and future of Aboriginality within a discursive terrain in which the authority and perspectives of Indigenous people are problematised. Aboriginality is constructed in this process as both temporally and spatially separated from settler society, and in need of coercive integration into mainstream economic and political arrangements. Aboriginality is depicted by settler advocates of intervention as an anachronism, with Aboriginal people and cultures understood as primitive and/or savage precursors to settlers who are represented as modern and civilised. As such, the communities seen as the authentic home or location of Aboriginality represent a threat to Aboriginal children as well as to settlers. These constructions function to obscure the violence of the settler order, provide justification or moral rehabilitation for the colonising project, and reassert the sovereignty of the settler state. The resolution offered by the intervention’s advocates is a performance or enactment of settler sovereignty, representing a claim over and through both the territory of Aboriginal people and the discursive terrain of nationhood.

Weibo, framing, and media practices in China

This study uses frames analysis to investigate online discourses and processes of political deliberation on China’s weibo (microblog) service. It offers a comparative analysis of competing discourses surrounding the case of Wang Yue, a toddler who was ran over by two motor vehicles in Foshan, following which eighteen people passed by and ignored her plight. The study aims to understand how weibo facilitate its users to express their differences and deliberate disagreements with each other. The study found that Internet users are rational in the sense that they do not simply lean towards a dichotomised choice of ‘pro-’ or ‘anti-’ official discourse, but they are able to negotiate their moral choices by considering a wide range of social and political factors in such an emotional and morally controversial incident.

Prisoners, rights and citizenship

The denial of civil rights to convicts has a long history. Its origins lie in the idea of ‘civil death’. Convicts who were not punished by execution would instead suffer civil death which stripped them of inheritance, family and political rights (Davidson, 2004). In Australia and internationally the removal of prisoners’ voting rights has been a controversial topic which has been a subject of much debate and a number of legislation changes (Davidson, 2004). This article argues that even though the latest amendment to the Australian Electoral legislation is, on the face of it, democratic and inclusive, it is in fact a denial of prisoners’ civil rights, which has its roots in the concept of civil death. My argument is in keeping with the themes of the Crime and Governance thematic group and focuses on my research interests in sociology of deviance, social reactions to crime, and socio-legal topics.

Populism, law and order and the crimes of the 1%

The article examines the evidence of endemic financial crime in the global financial crisis (GFC), the legal impunity surrounding these crimes and the popular revolt against these abuses in the financial, political and legal systems. This is set against a consideration of the development since the 1970s of a conservative politics championing de-regulation, unfettered markets, welfare cuts and harsh law and order policies. On the one hand, this led to massively increased inequality and concentrations of wealth and political power in the hands of the super-rich, effectively placing them above the law, as the GFC revealed. On the other, a greatly enlarged, more punitive criminal justice system was directed at poor and minority communities. Explanations in terms of the rise of penal populism are helpful in explaining these developments, but it is argued they adopt a limited and reductionist view of populism, failing to see the prospects for a progressive populist politics to re-direct political attention to issues of inequality and corporate and white collar criminality.

Constructing subjects and making experts : reading the politics of the psychotherapy novel

This paper examines the ideological and political basis of the practice of psychotherapy in contemporary culture. Psychotherapy is argued to be both inherently political and intimately concerned with the construction of subjectivity. These arguments are examined through interrogating the representation of psychotherapy in the works of Lindner ( The Fifty-Minute Hour , Bantam, New York, 1955) and particularly in Yalom's fictional text Lying on the Couch (HarperPerennial, New York, 1996). The implications within psychotherapy for representing normality, negotiating power, and locating and constructing subjectivity are highlighted through the critical treatment of these texts.

Motivations and Intentions : A Case Study of Design-Led Activism

With a focus on intention and motivation, this paper describes a study involving three organisational communities and their collective effort to develop and provide more inclusive housing for people with disabilities and their families. While many studies, such as that by Rocha & Miles (2009), focus on commercial organisations, and sustainability from an economic perspective, this study involves a not-for-profit organisation (the accommodation and service provider) as well as a research organisation and a design action group volunteering their services free of charge. From this pro-bono context, the paper describes a case study that explores the nature of the collective as a basis for creative practice and political activism and the theoretical implications and wider application in terms of emerging research in the area of collaborative entrepreneurship and design activism.

Continuity, Rupture, or just more of the 'Volatile and Contradictory': Glimpses of New South Wales' Penal Practice behind and through the Discursive

Throughout much of the western world more and more people are being sent to prison, one of a number of changes inspired by a 'new punitiveness' in penal and political affairs. This book seeks to understand these developments, bringing together leading authorities in the field to provide a wide-ranging analysis of new penal trends, compare the development of differing patterns of punishment across different types of societies, and to provide a range of theoretical analyses and commentaries to help understand their significance. As well as increases in imprisonment this book is also concerned to address a number of other aspects of 'the new punitiveness': firstly, the return of a number of forms of punishment previously thought extinct or inappropriate, such as the return of shaming punishments and chain gangs (in parts of the USA); and secondly, the increasing public involvement in penal affairs and penal development, for example in relation to length of sentences and the California Three Strikes Law, and a growing accreditation of the rights of victims. The book will be essential reading for students seeking to understand trends and theories of punishment on law, criminology, penology and other courses.

A discussion of “Estimating the historical and future probabilities of large terrorist events'' by Aaron Clauset and Ryan Woodard

The terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001 appeared to be a harbinger of increased terrorism and violence in the 21st century, bringing terrorism and political violence to the forefront of public discussion. Questions about these events abound, and “Estimating the Historical and Future Probabilities of Large Scale Terrorist Event” [Clauset and Woodard (2013)] asks specifically, “how rare are large scale terrorist events?” and, in general, encourages discussion on the role of quantitative methods in terrorism research and policy and decision-making. Answering the primary question raises two challenges. The first is identify- ing terrorist events. The second is finding a simple yet robust model for rare events that has good explanatory and predictive capabilities. The challenges of identifying terrorist events is acknowledged and addressed by reviewing and using data from two well-known and reputable sources: the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism-RAND database (MIPT-RAND) [Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism] and the Global Terror- ism Database (GTD) [National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) (2012), LaFree and Dugan (2007)]. Clauset and Woodard (2013) provide a detailed discussion of the limitations of the data and the models used, in the context of the larger issues surrounding terrorism and policy.

Teaching teachers for the future : how, what, why, and what next?

This paper contextualises the Teaching Teachers of the Future (TTF) Project and acts as a preamble for the TTF stream of papers at ACEC2012. It discusses the aims and objectives of the project, its genesis in a changing educational and political landscape, the use of TPACK as a theoretical scaffold, and briefly report on the operations of the various components and partners. Further, it will discuss the research opportunities afforded by the project including a national survey of all pre-service teachers in Australia gauging their TPACK confidence and the use of the Most Significant Change (MSC) methodology. Finally the paper will discuss the outcomes of the project and its future.

Everything you do : young adult fiction and surveillance in an age of security

Espionage, surveillance and clandestine operations by secret agencies and governments were something of an East–West obsession in the second half of the twentieth century, a fact reflected in literature and film. In the twenty-first century, concerns of the Cold War and the threat of Communism have been rearticulated in the wake of 9/11. Under the rubric of ‘terror’ attacks, the discourses of security and surveillance are now framed within an increasingly global context. As this article illustrates, surveillance fiction written for young people engages with the cultural and political tropes that reflect a new social order that is different from the Cold War era, with its emphasis on spies, counter espionage, brainwashing and psychological warfare. While these tropes are still evident in much recent literature, advances in technology have transformed the means of tracking, profiling and accumulating data on individuals’ daily activities. Little Brother, The Hunger Games and Article 5 reflect the complex relationship between the real and the imaginary in the world of surveillance and, as this paper discusses, raise moral and ethical issues that are important questions for young people in our age of security.

Social media and e-democracy in Fiji, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu

This paper examines the extent social media is enabling e-democracy in Fiji, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. The study conducts an interpretative case study approach interviewing active social media users, political actors, civil servants, civilians, civil society actors and tertiary students. The study also conducts a content analysis of popular “political social media” Facebook pages in these three countries. The findings of the study suggest that social media is playing a role in facilitating citizen engagement with governments, making governments accountable and providing a means for citizens to be informed, to discuss and share views on political matters. However, social media usage is evolving quite differently in these three countries and factors such as high levels of militarism (Fiji), high levels of corruption (Solomon Islands) and also rapid ICT development (Vanuatu) have contributed towards shaping the potential of social media as a democratic enabler and political tool in these countries.