Digital Commons Network^™

Maria Susanna Cummins' London Letters: April 1860, Heidi Lm Jacobs

Heidi LM Jacobs

Within scholarship on Maria Susanna Cummins (1827-1866), there are two recurrent phrases: "author of the best-selling novel The Lamplighter" and "little is known about her life." Despite the early contextualization of Cummins by various scholars, most of the recent critical work on Cummins has centered on her first and best-known novel, The Lamplighter (1854). Very little critical attention has been paid to Cummins's life, her career as a publishing author, her lesser known novels, her periodical publications, and her archived letters. Written in the weeks preceding the publication in the United States and Britain of her third novel, El …

Open Adoption And The Politics Of Transnational Feminist Human Rights, Karen Sotiropoulos

Karen Sotiropolous

An essay on open adoption and the politics of transnational feminist human rights is presented. The author comments that she favored open adoption because its insistence meshed well with her commitment to social justice. In this essay, she highlights adoption scholarship and suggests that the developing field of adoption studies can make the process a more ethical practice.

Introduction: Teaching A Gendered World, Karen Sotiropoulos

Karen Sotiropoulos

Introduces some essays about infusing gender and women's history in teaching world history.

Introduction: Teaching A Gendered World, Karen Sotiropoulos

Karen Sotiropoulos

Introduces some essays about infusing gender and women's history in teaching world history.

Open Adoption And The Politics Of Transnational Feminist Human Rights, Karen Sotiropoulos

Karen Sotiropoulos

An essay on open adoption and the politics of transnational feminist human rights is presented. The author comments that she favored open adoption because its insistence meshed well with her commitment to social justice. In this essay, she highlights adoption scholarship and suggests that the developing field of adoption studies can make the process a more ethical practice.

A Meiji Christian Socialist Becomes A Spokesperson For Japan: Kawakami Kiyoshi’S “Pilgrimage In The Sacred Land Of Liberty”, Masako Gavin

Masako Gavin

This paper studies the life and thought of Kawakami Kiyoshi (1873–1949), a Meiji Christian socialist and prominent journalist in late 1890s Japan for the popular newspaper Yorozu chōhō (Complete morning report). Kawakami was one of the six founding members of Japan’s first but short-lived Social Democratic Party (Shakai minshutō, 1901). After the party was forced to dissolve under the Public Peace Police Law (Chian keisatsuhō, 1900) on 16 July 1901, Kawakami left for the USA to take up a postgraduate scholarship at the University of Iowa. While in the USA, he continued his career in the press, establishing himself as …

Arclight, Chris Knapp, Andrew Kudless, Jonathan Nelson

Chris Knapp

Arclight is a lighting installation put on display as part of the Sydney Vivid festival in 2015. This spatial and atmospheric project brings the quality of architectural inhabitation and visceral experience to an urban festival through a biomimetic proposition emulating dense bundled systems found in the natural environment, such as Australian mangroves or Strangler Fig trees, using parametric tools and digital fabrication processes. The installation serves as a register of the nonhuman environment. Embedded LEDs parse an environmentally driven data set, which provides a dynamic ambient interaction rather than the direct sensing of human actions. The result is an experience …

Ordered Eating: Food And Social Structures, Bobbi Sutherland

Bobbi Sutherland

Article is a review essay of Medieval Tastes: Food, Cooking, and the Table by Massimo Montanari and Food and Identity in England, 1540-1640: Eating to Impress by Paul S. Lloyd.

In the last few decades, food history has gone from being an unusual side-study viewed as outside the realm of academic history proper to one of the most popular sub-fields of social, economic, and cultural history – if not a field in its own right. Pre-modern historians have welcomed this development as one that expands our limited sources by opening new ones to us and providing us another method for …

Giving Voice To Values: An Undergraduate Nursing Curriculum Initiative, Sandra Lynch, Bethne L. Hart, Catherine Costa

Bethne Hart

No abstract provided.

Partition, Haimanti Roy

Haimanti Roy

The Partition of India in 1947 is one of the most significant events in South Asian history. It refers to the political division of the Indian subcontinent that marked the end of British colonial rule in the region. There were three partitions in 1947—of British India and of the provinces of Bengal and Punjab—that created the new nation-states of India and a spatially fragmented West and East Pakistan. While the end of the Second World War, political outcomes of the provincial elections in 1946 and contingency were factors, long-term organizing efforts of communal organizations, both Hindu and Muslim, were also …

Anarchist Motherhood: Toward The Making Of A Revolutionary Proletariat In Illinois’ Coal Towns, Caroline Waldron Merithew

Caroline Merithew

In the winter of 1900, several months before Leon Czolgosz assassinated U.S. President William McKinley for the cause of anarchy and for the love of Emma Goldman, a group of French-speaking and Italian women residing in northern Illinois’s coal-mining communities formed a club, Il Gruppo Femminile Luisa Michel, and began to put egalitarian theory into practice.

One of the women’s first acts of rebellion was a challenge to the all-male Prosperity Club – an anarchist saloon and a key venue of radical culture and activism in the region. With the help of some sympathetic members, Luisa Michel planned an assault …

Northwest Art Now Exhibition, Lily Lee

Lily Martina Lee

Listening For Policy Change: How The Voices Of Disabled People Shaped Australia’S National Disability Insurance Scheme, Cate Thill

Cate Thill

Voice has become an important yet ambivalent tool for the recognition of disability. The transformative potential of voice is dependent on a political commitment to listening to disabled people. To focus on listening redirects accountability for social change from disabled people to the ableist norms, institutions and practices that structure which voices can be heard in policy debates. In this paper, I use disability theory on voice and political theory on listening to examine policy documents for the National Disability Insurance Scheme in light of claims made by the disability movement. Although my study finds some evidence of openness in …

'Four Religions Of Foreign Policy: Modelling Political Interactions Between Secular And Religious Interests', John Rees

John A Rees

The paper addresses whether, and how, ‘religion’ can be a strategic category employed in the making of foreign policy. Three arguments are presented: firstly, the sustained discourse on religion in IR, and several notable foreign policy initiatives by states, suggest that religion should be a regular rather than an occasional category employed in foreign policy thinking; second, the strategic judgements of policy makers toward religion require a working knowledge of the complex interplay between secular and sacral interests occurring in world politics; third, foreign policy development that is guided by a nuanced approach toward religion can inform the strategic behaviour …

Teaching Kant To Undergraduates: Some Notes, Kurt Mosser

Kurt Mosser

No abstract provided.

The Noise Of Battle: Talking Philosophy On The Internet, Kurt Mosser

Kurt Mosser

Although the Internet is often used to talk with those with whom one agrees, this paper presents an "agonistic" strategy designed to help students find discussion partners with whom they disagree. This "agonistic" strategy has a number of advantages, specifically helping students' skills in writing, reading, logic, and rhetoric, as well as helping them recognizes the values of these skills and the importance of being well-informed when one enters a debate. As a further benefit, this approach has improved classroom discussion and improved the substance and form of those discussions. In contrast with those who fear that the Internet has …

The Philosophical Sins Of Stephen Pinker, Kurt Mosser

Kurt Mosser

No abstract provided.

Kant's General Logic And Aristotle, Kurt Mosser

Kurt Mosser

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant uses the term “logic” in a bewildering variety of ways, at times making it close to impossible to determine whether he is referring to (among others) general logic, transcendental logic, transcendental analytic, a "special" logic relative to a specific science, a "natural" logic, a logic intended for the "learned" (Gelehrter), some hybrid of these logics, or even some still-more abstract notion that ranges over all of these uses. This paper seeks to come to grips with Kant's complex use of "logic."

Kant is standardly regarded as saying that since Aristotle, there need be …

Development, Ethics And The Ethics Of Nationalism, Messay Kebede

Messay Kebede

In a world which exhibits so much power and yet does so little to drive back underdevelopment, it is not to be wondered if the thinking endeavour is shrouded with the impression of being confronted with the greatest enigma, with the most disconcerting sphinx of all times. However, concerning this most pressing and controversial issue of underdevelopment, of all the disciplines which study man, philosophy is the one which until now said the least. Is this due to simple insensitiveness, or to pure neglect, or to the feeling of not being directly concerned? Whatever the reasons may be, the simple …

Bellum Iustum: Hagiography And Venetian Imperialism In The Later Middle Ages, Karen Mccluskey

Karen McCluskey

The presence of the relics of Mark the Evangelist in Venice, and the myth of his providential link to the city, gave rise to Venetian assertions of religious and moral superiority throughout the Middle Ages. Considering their city an apostolic foundation and God’s pre-eminent locus sanctus, Venetian mythology perpetuated this view by suggesting the city had a special calling to spread the word of God. Their perceived vocation was articulated at the end of Mark’s gospel, where Christ commands the apostles to “Go to all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.” [Mark 15: 16] Girded by …

Making Monsters: Bio-Engineering And Visual Arts Practice, Elizabeth Stephens

Associate Professor Elizabeth Stephens

No abstract provided.

Action Without Regeneration: The Deracination Of The American Action Hero In Michael Mann's Heat, Ari M. Mattes

Ari Mattes

Michael Mann is one of the most respected auteurs operating in commercial Hollywood cinema, and it is no surprise that his films continue to be the subject of scholarly investigation. This article approaches Mann’s Heat (1995) in the context of broader American mythical impulses, in relation to Richard Slotkin’s “regeneration through violence” paradigm. “Regeneration through violence” has been used by both Lisa Purse, and, especially, Eric Lichtenfeld, as a conceptual framework for investigating commercial Hollywood action films. However, Slotkin’s paradigm fails to account for the fundamentally pessimistic end game of numerous action films such as Heat. Mann’s mapping of Los …

Vampires And Werewolves: Rewriting Religious And Racial Stereotyping In Stephenie Meyer’S Twilight Series, Georgina Ledvinka

Georgina Ledvinka

Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005–8) demonstrates a strong connection with the theology, cultural practices and history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), of which Meyer is an active member. One of the strongest ways in which this connection is demonstrated is through characterisation: specifically, by featuring vampires and werewolves as prominent supernatural characters in the text. Twilight employs vampires as a metaphor for the LDS Church. By eschewing literature’s traditional association of vampires with subversive acts, especially subversive sexuality, and rewriting them as clean-cut pillars of the community, Twilight not only charts but promotes the progression …

Dsm-5 And Evidence-Based Family Therapy?, Tom Strong, Robbie Busch

Robbie Busch

The publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, (DSM-5) extends a profession and practice-defining direction for family therapy. Warranting and expediting this medicalised direction has been a scientific and administrative coupling of diagnosed symptomatic conditions with evidence-based treatments for addressing those conditions. For systemically or poststructurally oriented family therapists tensions can follow from this direction which we elaborate upon in this article. Specifically, we examine the premises behind this medicalised direction for family therapy, juxtaposing these premises with systemic and post-structural premises of practice. We relate these juxtapositions to tensions family therapists may need …

Png Provincial Hospital Boards' Compliance With Statutory Financial Reporting Obligations, Mignon Shardlow, Alistair Brown

Mignon Shardlow

This article employs textual analysis to examine the financial statement reporting by provincial hospital boards in Papua New Guinea(‘PNG’) as they attempt to comply with mandatory financial statement reporting. Hospital boards in PNG are established under the Public Hospital Act 1994 (PNG), which requires the boards to satisfy the accounting, financial management and reporting requirements indicated under the Public Finances (Management) Act 1995 (PNG). The existing literature on hospital board reporting compliance has previously focused on developed countries with sound governance systems and developed infrastructures. In contrast, this paper provides an examination of hospital boards that operate in troublesome governance …

Celebrating Kate: The Criminal-Celebrity Of Sydney Underworld Figure, Kate Leigh, Leigh Straw

Leigh Straw

Combining historical study with cultural criminology, this paper analyses the criminal-celebrity of Sydney underworld figure Kate Leigh. It seeks to demonstrate how the three main factors of public resonance—crime type, context and image—created the celebrated criminality of Leigh. Without public resonance, Leigh would have simply remained another criminal within society. An important element of Leigh’s celebrated criminality was her ability to manage a public image that was accepted within the impoverished, working-class communities of eastern Sydney. Leigh became a criminal icon through an entrepreneurial style based on the anti-authoritarian and egalitarian values of working-class life in eastern Sydney. Criminal-celebrity theory …

Aboriginal Australian And Canadian First Nations Children's Literature, Angeline O'Neill

Angeline O'Neill

In her article "Aboriginal Australian and Canadian First Nations Children's Literature" Angeline O'Neill discusses Canadian First Nations and Australian Aboriginal children's picture books and their appeal to a dual readership. Inuit traditional storyteller and writer Michael Kusugak, Nyoongar traditional storyteller and writer Lorna Little, and Wunambal elder Daisy Utemorrah are cases in point. Each appeals to Indigenous and non-Indigenous, child and adult readerships, thus challenging two assumptions in Western scholarship on literature that 1) the picture book genre is necessarily the domain of children and 2) that traditional Indigenous stories are, similarly, best suited to children. O'Neill considers the ways …

Accountability And Control: The Politics Of Privatisation In Wa, Martin Drum, Daniel Baldino

Daniel Baldino

The virtues of privatizing security in Western Australia have been brought into question by the much publicized death of an Indigenous elder in Kalgoorlie at the beginning of 2008. Since that time, there have been a range of instances in WA (and nationally) where the management of prisoner security has been the subject of intense public debate. In this paper, we examine how a government has difficulty in maintaining control of a private company service when contracting it out, yet retains the ongoing responsibility for its success or failure and the exercise of due diligence. In the area of protecting …

Critical Insights: Film-Casablanca, James Plath

James Plath

From Salem Press:

Considered one of the greatest films of the twentieth century, Casablanca earned three Academy Awards (including Best Picture) and instant critical and commercial success following its release in 1942. Directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, this romantic drama is still hailed for its all-star cast, exceptional screenwriting, and memorable soundtrack, and continues to be ranked as one of the greatest motion pictures ever made.

Accountability And Control: The Politics Of Privatisation In Wa, Martin Drum, Daniel Baldino

Martin Drum

The virtues of privatizing security in Western Australia have been brought into question by the much publicized death of an Indigenous elder in Kalgoorlie at the beginning of 2008. Since that time, there have been a range of instances in WA (and nationally) where the management of prisoner security has been the subject of intense public debate. In this paper, we examine how a government has difficulty in maintaining control of a private company service when contracting it out, yet retains the ongoing responsibility for its success or failure and the exercise of due diligence. In the area of protecting …