Muslim - Christian relations and the third crusade : medievalist imaginings

This article takes as its starting-point the responsiveness of children's literature to socio-political events, considering how contemporary anxieties about relationships between Muslim and Christian individuals and cultures inform three historical novels set in the period of the Third Crusade (1189-92): Karleen Bradford's Lionheart's Scribe (1999), K. M. Grant's Blood Red Horse (2004), and Elizabeth Laird's Crusade (2008). In these novels, encounters between young Christian and Muslim protagonists are represented through language and representational modes which owe a good deal to the habits of thought and expression which typify orientalist discourses in Western fiction. In effect, the novels produce two versions of medievalism: a Muslim medieval world which is irretrievably pre-modern, locked into rigid pracices and beliefs against which individuals are powerless; and a Christian medieval world which offers individuals the possibility of progressing to an enhanced state of personal fulfilment. The article argues that the narratives of all three novels incorporate particularly telling moments when Christian protagonists return to England, regretfully leaving Muslim friends. The impossibility of  enduring friendships between Muslims and Christians is based on the novels' assumptions about the incommensurability of cultures and religions; specifically, that there exists
an unbridgeable gulf between Islam and Christianity.

Public relations campaigns

Designed to guide current and aspiring Public Relations professionals through the campaign development and implementation process. It illustrates the application of planning theory to real life scenarios to provide a practical approach for planning a successful campaign. M. Sheehan, Deakin University; R. Xavier, QUT.

Language, power and ruling relations in vocational education and training

This thesis uses institutional ethnography to explore the text-based regulatory framework of the Australian Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector. Training Packages are national competency standards used to assess local workplace practice. The Australian Quality Training Framework (AQTF) is a national compliance framework used to audit local learning and assessment practice. These texts operate in a ‘symbiotic relationship’ to achieve a policy goal of national consistency. The researcher explicates the social relations of VET starting from her disquiet as a practitioner. The thesis argues that Training Packages and the AQTF socially organise the content and delivery of local learning and assessment activities. VET practitioners struggle to use these texts to support good practice, and their hidden work maintains an unstable VET system. Yet the extralocal mode of ruling offers no room to challenge VET policy. The thesis explicates three themes. Interview data is used to explore the contrast between the institutional language of Training Packages and the vernacular of workplaces in which these texts are activated. Many practitioners and participants simply do not understand Training Package competency standards. Using these texts to judge employee performance shifts the policing of workplace practice from local sites to external VET authorities. A second theme emerges as the analysis explores why VET practitioners use this excluding language in their work with participants. Interview data reveals that local training organisations achieve different readings as they engage with ruling VET texts. Some organisations use the national texts as broad frameworks, allowing practitioners to create spaces for meaningful learning. Other organisations adopt a narrow and rule-bound reading of national texts, displacing practitioners’ authority over their own practice. A third theme is explored through examination of a sequence of VET texts. The review and redevelopment of the mandatory qualifications for VET practitioners identified the language of the competency standards as a significant accessibility issue. These concerns were reshaped and subsumed in an official response that established the use of this language as a compulsory assessable requirement and a language and literacy benchmark. The thesis presents a new understanding of VET as a regulatory framework established through multiple levels of ruling texts that connect local sites to national government agendas. While some individual practitioners are able to navigate through this system, there is an urgent need for practitioners as a profession to challenge national hegemony.

Public relations & the media : a new influence in "agenda-setting" and content

Not available

Study in Roman-Maccabaean relations

[No Abstract]

The original bailout of US corporations : the public relations bailout

More than a trillion of taxpayer dollars are currently being used to bail out the US banking, mortgage and car industries. This invokes an interesting connection to public relations the last time drastic US government involvement with corporations was contemplated. This pre-First World War crisis of the free enterprise system involved a deficit not of money but of favourable public opinion. The requirement was for vast amounts of public opinion and public policy work by a reported at least 1200 – what were at that time called – press agents. This was the period when public relations emerged as a fundamental plank of US and ultimately of global culture. The thesis of this article is that many aspects of the world we live in cannot be properly understood without a better analysis of the first bailout of US corporations—the public relations bailout.

Sophistic 3.0 and the end of media relations

This paper looks at Web 2.0 as a new form of discursive art which may be changing human subjectivity - which may be producing new kinds of people. It casts the Web 2.0 era as the 'Third Sophistic' in comparison to the two other sophistics: (1) the period from the Ancient Greek Enlightenment when grammar, rhetoric and dialectic were invented by the original pre-Socratic sophists up until the times of Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates; and (2) the Second Sophistic in the early centuries of the Common Era when 'epideictic,' that is subtle, artistic rhetoric was perfected. These sophistics marked alterations in the possibilities for human cultural expression and conception. Are we experiencing a 'Sophistic 3.0'? If so what are the likely consequences for contemporary discourse and its media?

Better use of rhetorical theory in public relations

Some of the most important reflections on rhetorical theory associated with public relations appear in: L’Etang (1996); Toth (1999); and various Robert Heath contributions. This paper will reflect on the importance of that work by briefly scouring the origin of rhetoric among the ancient founders of persuasive communication: the pre-Socratic sophists. The paper will then relate the approaches of the above theorists, as well as Kevin Moloney and James Grunig, to the original meaning of sophistry. The last part of the paper will discuss the confluence of rhetorical and semiotic approaches. The rhetoricsemiotics link has been present since the semiotics of St Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE). Augustine was a professor of rhetoric in his earlier career. The last part of the paper summarises how rhetorical theory, Peircean semiotics and post modern approaches can avoid accusations of relativism and infinite semiosis when they are fitted into a theory of public relations.

Invisible labour : home–school relations and the front office

When school front offices are mentioned in research on schools and their relations with the community, it is often to describe how parents/carers and the public are treated officiously and/or inappropriately. In professional development materials, schools are urged to improve communication, and occasionally directed to consider the practices of the front office staff. Yet when schools send out information to parents/carers, the school office is usually the place to which all queries are directed. However, there is almost no detailed research that looks at what actually happens in this place. In this paper we draw on a small-scale commissioned research project which began to fill this gap. In seeking to reread our data and push further on analysis, we have come to realize that those who work in school front offices are women whose physical and emotional labour is not only rendered largely invisible in a wide range of literatures relating to home-school relations but is also inadequately recognized through recruitment practices, professional development and remuneration. We suggest that there needs to be further research into the high energy, multitasking, nurturing work that goes on in school front offices.