Constructing the identities of `responsible mothers, invisible men` in child protection practice

Social constructionism offers valuable insights into the study of social problems for example, poverty, homelessness, crime and delinquency, including how social phenomena 'become' social problems, through social processes of interaction and interpretation. The social construction of child maltreatment has recently emerged as a site of scholarly inquiry and critique. This paper explores through three case studies how 'responsibility for child maltreatment' is constructed in child protection practice, with a specific focus on how 'responsibility' may also be gendered. In particular, how is gender associated with responsibility, such that the identity-pair, 'responsible mothers, invisible men', is a highly likely outcome as claimed in feminist literature? What other assumptions about 'identities of risk' or 'dangerousness' articulate with patriarchy and influence how responsibility is constructed? The case studies explore normally invisible processes by which social categories become 'fact', 'knowledge' and 'truth'. Furthermore, the social construction of 'responsibility for child maltreatment' is extended by a reflexive analysis of my own constructionist practices, as researcher/writer in claims making. The analysis offers an insight into the dynamic and dialectical relationship between professional and organisational knowledge and practice, allowing for a critique of knowledge itself, the basis for the claims made and possible alternative ways of knowing.

Postmodernist-feminism and education : a textual performance

This dissertation is performed as a self-reflexive postmodernist-feminist text that is rather like a work in progress. The relationship between feminismS and postmodernismS is investigated to reveal some of the possibilities that might result from their conjunction, whilst some critical disjunctions which may need to be bridged are recognised. Throughout this dissertation, I have explored how, as well as challenging traditional paradigms of gender, postmodernist-feminism acts to challenge traditional views of meaning, knowledge and text, and, further, how this challenge opens up possibilities for all those entrapped by the paradigms of power, whether outside or Inside. When 'reality' and 'knowledge' are revealed as constructions (not unlike fiction), new possibilities of/for postmodernist-feminist multilinearity emerge. This text practises, then, what I have nominated as three important areas of postmodernist-feminism: jouissance (pleasure and playfulness as in feminist poetics); bricolage (making the text work as a one-off); and deconstruction (an admission that the text is neither seamless nor AUTHORitative). In doing so, it emphasises the practice of what Roland Barthes calls 'writerly-reading', in which the reader is revealed as having power over the text according to the way(s) s/he enters it. In this praxis I suggest that the writer may also abdicate AUTHORity over the text by what I have called 'readerly-writing'. Taking up Gregory Ulmer's challenge to construct a 'mystory', it is my story of my journey as a woman, parent, writer mid teacher who is becoming a certified scholar. My lifelong practical interest in education thus reaches a theoretical self-understanding in this text, which is itself a praxis. Thus I introduce the practice of a non-seamless horizontality in which reflections and stories show themselves to be temporal and cultural constructions. The implications of this for school/educational experiences are central to this praxis.

Reading indigeneity : the ethics of interpretation and representation

The transmission of indigenous stories is a fraught enterprise. In contrast to Western practices of the free circulation of ideas, many indigenous cultures view their stories as sacred, and have strict rules about who may tell certain tales, and in what settings and with whom they may be shared. Indigenous storytellers and novelists who want to tell contemporary stories also face the minefields of a history of (mis)representation of their cultures' values and practices. Australian literary scholar Clare Bradford picks her way carefully through this minefield, identifying its perils and proposing a self-reflexive practice that enables scholars to approach these works with sensitivity; Abenaki children's author Joseph Bruchac adds his own impressions and frustrations as an author to Clare's frank assessment of the possibilities of criticism, cross-talk, and mutual understanding in the fìeld.

Reflections on conducting educational research projects in Papua New Guinea

This article discusses how work on an AusAID-funded impact study of major elementary school reforms influenced the research design of a subsequent Australian Development Research Award project investigating the development of sustainable professional learning communities for primary school teachers in remote places of PNG. The authors reflect on how their different backgrounds, roles, experiences and expertise influenced the design and conduct of the projects and, in particular, how the experiences of the action research and survey methods used on the first project shaped the design of the second. The participating elementary school teachers were encouraged, through action research approaches, to develop self reflexive attitudes to their professional work, and to engage in critical reflection of their roles and practices. Accordingly, this article adopts a self-reflexive position towards the authors’ work as academics and researchers as they endeavoured to produce methodologies that are academically rigorous, contextually suitable, and epistemologically appropriate for PNG.

Pieces of me : celebrity confessional carnality

In this article I explore the carnal nature of the celebrity confession. I argue that when the celebrity confesses they do so in, through, and with their revelatory bodies. The carnal celebrity confessional is very clearly a self-reflexive performance, often stage-managed and manipulative, and therefore designed to raise, redeem, or resurrect a profile, or for damage limitation. But it can also be, depending on the performative context, an “authentic” doorway into the crisis of the celebrity's living phenomenological self. The carnal confessional, then, can be an explicit, compliant or forced will to reveal all through the celebrity body that had guaranteed them fame in the first place, but which now fails them in some way. Or, it can be an unconscious, unthought, pre-semiotic sense-based revelation - a sensational leak - about some “truth” or damage that has/is being done to them as icons of desire. This phenomenological leak has the ability to make intimate the relationship between the celebrity confessor and the fans who receive it. I will conclude that celebrity confessional carnality can be read as a productive form of bio-power.

In this article the carnality of the celebrity confession will be read in terms of its relationship to Christianity and corporeal religiosity; to therapy discourse; to docility and active agency; and to affective intimacy. Britney Spears will be my central case study. I begin the article, however, with an overview of the embodied nature of the confessional, and its centrality to mediated life and individual self-worth, using Catholicism and the television therapy talkshow as my conjoining illustrative entry point.

Didaked : celebrity, privacy and player behaviour in the AFL

At the start of the 21st century elite male team sports assume a high profile presence in the commodified spaces of a globalised hyperreality. When games are sports entertainment businesses many elite performers are celebrities: they exist as brands whose every thought and action is commodified and consumed.
In these spaces the misbehaviours of a relatively small number of Australian Rules Football (AFL) players continue to make the news. A high profile recent incident involving Collingwood footballer Alan Didak is the subject of this paper. Given the levels of media attention devoted to such events we ask: Do AFL footballers have a right to privacy? We also question whether AFL players really understand what it means to be a sports celebrity.
The elevation of the sport star to the status of celebrity means that the idea that an elite performer has a private life and a public life that are separate is one that is problematic. Drawing on Foucault’s later work on the care of the self, our analysis will focus on a variety of processes which seek to develop and manage a professional identity for elite performers – and the risks that attach to these identities.

I'm the slice of pie that's ostracised.... : Foucault's technologies, and personal agency, in the voice of women who are homeless, Adelaide, South Australia

In contrast to the international research (particularly in the United Kingdom and North America), much of the Australian literature regarding homelessness to date omits the perspective of people who are homeless. In contributing to the fledgling Australian literature in the field, the following article adopts a secondary approach to the data analysis of original research. When analysed, the voices of homeless women from an agency in Adelaide, South Australia exhibit elements of both Foucault’s technologies of domination and the self. While the results show that the women do have a powerful sense of the broader external issues exerted on them (reflecting both technologies of domination and the self), the analysis also reveals ambiguities in their responses. Apparent in the voice of homeless women is a sense of personal agency which appears to be absent in Foucault’s technologies. By considering the viewpoints of homeless women, various policy implications can also be drawn. Indeed, this is one of the motivations of the article, namely to inject into policy debate and development the voices of the people most adversely affected by it. The policy implications of the women’s voices centre around the desire to be included rather than remain on the margins, the need for supportive relationships, the necessity to take small steps to independent living, and the need for more affordable, independent housing.

Hybrid perspectives : defining the relativity of culture and identity through migration experiences

This paper examines how culture and identity can be relatively defined through hybrid perspectives in relation to migration experiences. Addressing and portraying definitions of culture and identity is crucial in understanding how notions of such issues connect and initiate the migrant subject through new experiences, perspectives and ways of being. In enunciating the transitions from home to a new place, and elaborating on the rupture of an inherited culture and grounded identity, I refer to them through self-reflexive perspectives. The search for meaning through appraisals of cultural lineage and linguistic capital through a Diaspora, a post colonial history and lived life experiences from my home country, pre-empts the ambivalent and hybrid status in defining culture(s) and identit(ies). It is crucial to recognise how challenges for adaptation to new culture, language, societal norms, and differences in class, nationality, race and gender play specific roles in the migrant experience. My current experiences of migration to Australia are narrations of encountered difficulties, fears, inhibitions, new aspirations, perceptions and perspectives, which map an ‘identity crisis.’ From this narrative structure, I investigate through my ongoing PhD study, how my artistic expression and representations progress towards experiences, and themes that metaphorically reflect, inspire and enact the hybrid structures of culture(s) and identit(ies). Explored reflexively my representations suggest how the ‘liminal space’ or the ‘third space,’ (Bhabha, 1990) express transitions about the ‘self’ and my artistic expression, which enable further reflection and positions to emerge and extend to metaphorical expressions.

Will it be me? Identity, concern, and perspective

Self-reflexive or egocentric concern has been taken to present a serious problem for reductionist and eliminativist metaphysical accounts of personal identity. Philosophers have tended to respond in one of three ways: by continuing the search for a metaphysical account of identity that (prudentially if not morally) justifies egocentric concern; by accepting that egocentric concern can hold between persons who are not numerically identical; or by advocating the abandonment of egocentric concern altogether. All these approaches, however, distinguish between metaphysical ‘facts’ and affective responses to them. Exploring a well-known example from Bernard Williams, I argue that egocentric concern presents itself as irreducibly first-personal and as making its own set of numerical personal identity claims on the phenomenal level. Williams' example also points to the need to complicate the first/third person schema by factoring in a further distinction between present-tense and implicitly atemporal perspectives on the self. Once this move is made, we can see that the identity claims figured in first-person present-tense experience and those arrived at through metaphysical deliberation need to be distinguished. We should resist the temptation to privilege one perspective over the other in all instances, or to collapse them into a unitary account of selfhood.

‘A cataclysm of truth from the crisis of falsehood’: reading Habermas on Calvino

Interest in the possibility of a Habermasian approach to literary criticism has recently been sparked by several book-length contributions from scholars working in the field of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. This article seeks to clarify the conceptual stakes in the current debate, which concern whether literature makes truth claims or merely imaginatively discloses new perceptions with a truth potential, by returning to Habermas’s most extended encounter with a literary work since the 1970s. Against the background of the philosophical issues, I re-read to Calvino’s highly self-reflexive If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller to show that in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas has managed to get everything backwards. Literature here reads philosophy alright, but not in the sense of the ludic deconstruction of rational argumentation into rhetorical play that Habermas supposes. Using the notion of an ontological poetics of self-reflexive literature, and with some help from Lacanian psychoanalysis, I interpret Calvino’s novel as a sustained meditation on the connection between authentic literature and the desire to read. In this light, it not only looks like Habermas has missed his polemical target, but, also, and more significantly, it becomes clear that abandonment of the link between literature and truth is misguided.

O desafio constitucional da distribuição dos royalties de petróleo da bacia pré-sal para promoção de políticas públicas

The administrative model of the Brazilian State, based on regulation, strives, with the application of the efficiency principle and assessment of economical costs, to give a greater effectiveness to fundamental rights by implementing public policies.The objective of this work is to analyze the role of Oil royalties in the context of the Brazilian State, considering that, being an income gap, they might work as a device that promotes intra/intergenerational justice. By means of a correct and efficient distribution and application in the national region, the royalties constitute financial resources available for implementing public policies that intend to guarantee the fundamental rights; above all, with the discovery of the Pre-salt basin and the indisputable rise in the tax revenues arising from Oil exploration. In the making of this work, the theoretical-descriptive methodology is observed, grounded in a critical-reflexive analysis about Constitutional Law and Oil Law. This work analyzes the administrative model of the Brazilian State, the theory of costs of fundamental rights and the theoretical aspects about royalties, such as: the ethical and economical fundamentals, the distribution and destination of revenues, considering the oil exploration scenario before and after the discovery of the pre-salt basin. it is verified, with the present work, the importance of the creation of a new regulatory framework, and consequently the creation of a sovereign wealth fund, which arises to re-evaluate the application of the current norms of Oil revenue distribution. Still, it is imperative that the mechanisms for controlling the application of royalties are defined in detail, so that those can fully admit the objectives of intra/intergenerational justice. Furthermore, it is emphasized that this process should develop from the efficiency principle viewpoint, as well as the principle of reducing social and regional differences, given that the Oil revenues might be used to ensure fundamental social rights, by implementing public policies that are aligned with the development recommended by the Federal Constitution

Avaliação em saúde: reflexões inscritas no paradigma sanitário contemporâneo

O presente estudo apresenta uma análise reflexiva dos métodos de avaliação em saúde em uma perspectiva do cuidado pensado e praticado segundo as necessidades dos usuários. Várias são as formas e abordagens dos processos avaliativos na busca de uma melhor apreensão do objeto de avaliação; neste contexto, a satisfação do usuário surge como um indicador de qualidade dos serviços de saúde, ligada à maior adequação e promoção de reais mudanças nas práticas de saúde. Diante da inovadora proposta do Programa Saúde da Família (PSF), baseado nos princípios de integralidade, cuidado à saúde e humanização, a participação e a satisfação do usuário surgem como elementos-chave na formulação de suas ações, possibilitando mudanças no modelo assistencial hegemônico, a saber, positivista, assistencialista e curativista. A presença do usuário no processo avaliativo irá permitir uma peculiar atuação, remodelando as práticas de saúde - quiçá tornando-as mais humanas, acolhedoras e, conseqüentemente, mais resolutivas..

A vocação auto-reflexiva da antropologia no Brasil: um retrato de sua historiografia a partir da década de oitenta

Pós-graduação em Ciências Sociais - FFC

Viés egotímico: percepções de discentes do curso de pedagogia de uma universidade pública estadual de Mato Grosso e professores egressos em exercício

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Inovação na licenciatura: cartografando uma reforma curricular

Este estudo narrativo centra-se na formação de professores nos cursos de licenciatura, e parte dos elementos que caracterizam e significam o processo de reforma curricular do curso de licenciatura em Ciências Biológicas da Universidade Federal do Pará, ocorrido durante o ano de 2000, no bojo das reformas educativas em curso no cenário brasileiro. Busco, nesse contexto, pela análise reflexiva, investigar para compreender a construção de um conjunto de inovações curriculares na formação inicial de professores de ciências e biologia que atuarão na educação básica do sistema de ensino brasileiro e regional. Tais ações se consubstanciam na apresentação, na discussão e no debate de aspectos internos e externos do referido processo, da proposição e implementação do projeto da reforma para o curso em questão, a partir das vozes de um grupo de professoras que dele participaram, das representações dos alunos contemplados na reforma, e também de documentos pertinentes ao momento. Aponto, de modo particular, avanços significativos no que concerne às mudanças qualitativas empreendidas, as quais são observadas na construção de saberes docentes por parte dos alunos em processo de formação, sendo algo atingível na prática de professores formadores, no âmbito deste curso. Desse modo, o estudo guarda contribuições relevantes na investigação e na reflexão atual no campo da formação inicial de professores de ciências e biologia, de modo particular, e da formação de professores nas demais licenciaturas, de modo geral.