Making sense of Australia's war memorials

War memorials are an important part of the Australian landscape and culture. This essay suggests five possible explanations for this: a) imperial loyalty, at least initially; b) the warrior cult; c) guilt at the loss of so many young people in a seemingly senseless fashion; d) the demise of formal religion, and; e) the insecure nature of Australian nationalism.

Spaces of hybridity : creating a sense of belonging through spatial awareness

When the colonisers first came to Australia there was an urgent desire to map, name and settle. This desire, in part, stemmed from a fear of the unknown. Once these tasks were completed it was thought that a sense of identity and belonging would automatically come. In Anglo-Australian geography the map of Australia was always perceived in relationship to the larger map of Europe and Britain. The quicker Australia could be mapped the quicker its connection with the ‘civilised’ world could be established. Official maps could be taken up in official history books and a detailed monumental history could begin. Australians would feel secure in where they were placed in the world. However, this was not the case and anxieties about identity and belonging remained. One of the biggest hurdles was the fear of the open spaces and not knowing how to move across the land. Attempts to transpose colonisers’ use of space onto the Australian landscape did not work and led to confusion. Using authors who are often perceived as writers of national fictions (Henry Lawson, Barbara Baynton, Patrick White, David Malouf and Peter Carey) I will reveal how writing about space becomes a way to create a sense of belonging. It is through spatial knowledge and its application that we begin to gain a sense of closeness and identity. I will also look at how one of the greatest fears for the colonisers was the Aboriginal spatial command of the country. Aborigines already had a strongly developed awareness of spatial belonging and their stories reveal this authority (seen in the work of Lorna Little, Mick McLean) Colonisers attempted to discredit this knowledge but the stories and the land continue to recognise its legitimacy. From its beginning Australian spaces have been spaces of hybridity and the more the colonisers attempted to force predetermined structures onto these spaces the more hybrid they became.

Making sense of mass education

Making Sense of Mass Education provides a comprehensive analysis of the field of mass education. The book presents new assessment of traditional issues associated with education – class, race, gender, discrimination and equity –to dispel myths and assumptions about the classroom. It examines the complex relationship between the media, popular culture and schooling, and places the expectations surrounding the modern teacher within ethical, legal and historical contexts. The book blurs some of the disciplinary boundaries within the field of education, drawing upon sociology, cultural studies, history, philosophy, ethics and jurisprudence to provide stronger analyses. The book reframes the sociology of education as a complex mosaic of cultural practices, forces and innovations. Engaging and contemporary, it is an invaluable resource for teacher education students, and anyone interested in a better understanding of mass education.

Making Sense of Mass Education, 2nd Edition

Making Sense of Mass Education provides an engaging and accessible analysis of traditional issues associated with mass education. The book challenges preconceptions about social class, gender and ethnicity discrimination; highlights the interplay between technology, media, popular culture and schooling; and inspects the relevance of ethics and philosophy in the modern classroom. This new edition has been comprehensively updated to provide current information regarding literature, statistics and legal policies, and significantly expands on the previous edition's structure of derailing traditional myths about education as a point of discussion. It also features two new chapters on Big Data and Globalisation and what they mean for the Australian classroom. Written for students, practising teachers and academics alike, Making Sense of Mass Education summarises the current educational landscape in Australia and looks at fundamental issues in society as they relate to education.

Sense of Community in Web Environment

The study of social phenomena in the World Wide Web has been rather fragmentary, andthere is no coherent, reseach-based theory about sense of community in Web environment. Sense of community means part of one's self-concept that has to do with perceiving oneself belonging to, and feeling affinity to a certain social grouping. The present study aimed to find evidence for sense of community in Web environment, and specifically find out what the most critical psychological factors of sense of community would be. Based on known characteristics of real life communities and sense of community, and few occational studies of Web-communities, it was hypothesized that the following factors would be the most critical ones and that they could be grouped as prerequisites, facilitators and consequences of sense of community: awareness and social presence (prerequisites), criteria for membership and borders, common purpose, social interaction and reciprocity, norms and conformity, common history (facilitators), trust and accountability (consequences). In addition to critical factors, the present study aimed to find out if this kind of grouping would be valid. Furthermore, the effect of Web-community members' background variables to sense of community was of interest. In order to answer the questions, an online-questionnaire was created and tested. It included propositions that reflect factors that precede, facilitate and follow the sense of community in Web environment. A factor analysis was calculated to find out the critical factors and analyses of variance were calculated to see if the grouping to prerequisites, facilitators and consequences was right and how the background variables would affect the sense of community in Web environment. The results indicated that the psychological structure of sense of community in Web environment could not be presented with critical variables grouped as prerequisites, facilitators and consequences. Most factors did facilitate the sense of community, but based on this data it could not be argued that some of the factors chronologically precedesense of community and some follow it. Instead, the factor analysis revealed that the most critical factors in sense of community in Web environment are 1) reciprocal involvement, 2) basic trust for others, 3) similarity and common purpose of members, and 4) shared history of members. The most influencing background variables were the member's own participation activity (indicated with reading and writing messages) and the phase in membership lifecycle (from visitor to leader). The more the member participated and the further in membership life cycle he was, the more he felt sense of community. There are many descreptions of sense of community, but the present study was one of the first to actually measure the phenomenon in Web environment, and that gained well documented, valid results based on large data, proving that sense of community in Web environment is possible, and clarifying its psychological structure, thus enhancing the understanding of sense of community in Web environment. Keywords: sense of community, Web-community, psychology of the Internet

Making sense of a transnational merger: Media texts and the (re)construction of power relations

In this study of symbolic power relations in a transnational merger, we suggest that the popular media can provide a significant arena for (re)constructing national identities and power in this kind of dramatic industrial restructuring, and are an under-utilized source of empirical data in research studies. Focusing on the press coverage of a recent Swedish-Finnish merger, we specify and illustrate a particular feature of discursive (re)construction of asymmetric power relations; superior (Swedish) and inferior (Finnish) national identities, which, we argue, are embedded in the history of colonization and domination between the two nations. The findings of the present study lead us to suggest that a lens taken from post-colonial theory is particularly useful in understanding the wider symbolic power implications of international industrial restructuring.

The Enlightenment Idea of History as a Legitimation Tool of Kemalism in Turkey

The study analyzes the effort to build political legitimacy in the Republic of Turkey by ex-ploring a group of influential texts produced by Kemalist writers. The study explores how the Kemalist regime reproduced certain long-lasting enlightenment meta-narrative in its effort to build political legitimacy. Central in this process was a hegemonic representation of history, namely the interpretation of the Anatolian Resistance Struggle of 1919 1922 as a Turkish Revolution executing the enlightenment in the Turkish nation-state. The method employed in the study is contextualizing narratological analysis. The Kemalist texts are analyzed with a repertoire of concepts originally developed in the theory of narra-tive. By bringing these concepts together with epistemological foundations of historical sciences, the study creates a theoretical frame inside of which it is possible to highlight how initially very controversial historical representations in the end manage to construct long-lasting, emotionally and intellectually convincing bases of national identity for the secular middle classes in Turkey. The two most important explanatory concepts in this sense are di-egesis and implied reader. The diegesis refers to the ability of narrative representation to create an inherently credible story-world that works as the basis of national community. The implied reader refers to the process where a certain hegemonic narrative creates a formula of identification and a position through which any individual real-world reader of a story can step inside the narrative story-world and identify oneself as one of us of the national narra-tive. The study demonstrates that the Kemalist enlightenment meta-narrative created a group of narrative accruals which enabled generations of secular middle classes to internalize Kemalist ideology. In this sense, the narrative in question has not only worked as a tool utilized by the so-called Kemalist state-elite to justify its leadership, but has been internalized by various groups in Turkey, working as their genuine world-view. It is shown in the study that secular-ism must be seen as the core ingredient of these groups national identity. The study proposes that the enlightenment narrative reproduced in the Kemalist ideology had its origin in a simi-lar totalizing cultural narrative created in and for Europe. Currently this enlightenment project is challenged in Turkey by those who are in an attempt to give religion a greater role in Turkish society. The study argues that the enduring practice of legitimizing political power through the enlightenment meta-narrative has not only become a major factor contributing to social polarization in Turkey, but has also, in contradiction to the very real potentials for crit-ical approaches inherent in the Enlightenment tradition, crucially restricted the development of critical and rational modes of thinking in the Republic of Turkey.

Sense and sensibility: The role of business incubator client advisors in assisting high-technology entrepreneurs to make sense of investment readiness status

For high-technology entrepreneurs, attaining an appropriate level of investment to support new ventures is challenging as substantial investment is usually required prior to revenue generation. Consequently, entrepreneurs must present their firms as investment ready in the context of an uncertain market response and an absence of any trading history. Gaining tenancy within a business incubator can be advantageous to this process given that placement enhances entrepreneurial contact with potential investors whilst professional client advisors (CAs) use their expertise to assist in the development of a credible business plan. However, for the investment proposal to be successful, it must make sense to fund managers despite their lack of technological expertise and product knowledge. Thus, this article explores how incubator CAs and entrepreneurs act in concert to mould innovative ideas into plausible business plans that make sense to venture fund investors. To illustrate this process, we draw upon empirical evidence which suggests that CAs act as sense makers between venture fund managers (VFMs) and high-technology entrepreneurs, yet their role and influence appears undervalued. These findings have implications for entrepreneurial access to much needed funding and also for the identification of investment opportunities for VFMs. © 2011 Taylor & Francis.

Healing the wounds of war: memories of violence and the making of history in Zimbabwe's most recent past.

How does a society less than two decades after a liberation war which involved large sections of the population come to terms with the memories of violence and war — a war in which there was no clear distinction between insurgent and counter‐insurgent, liberator and oppressor and in which the majority of the casualties can be found among the rural civilian population? This was a predicament not exclusive to Zimbabwe, but one which also applies to Mozambique, South Africa and, more recently, to Rwanda. Since its independence Zimbabwe has been a prime example of successful reconciliation. Ranger has argued that spiritual healing has contributed importantly to coming to terms with the trauma of war through turning violence into history. Here it will be argued that an analysis of the intersections between memories of violence, healing, and history reveals a twofold process. Social healing is made possible by a shift from conviction and compensation to revealing without convicting. At the same time healing provides an arena for communities in which competing and contesting memories of violence are renegotiated. Through these processes sense is being made of the past; history is being made.