Digital Commons Network^™

Locating Chinatown In The Global Village: Cultural Innovation In Taiwan's Multichannel Environment, S. C. Berggreen

Asia Pacific Media Educator

The availability of media technology in the mid-1980s in Taiwan has forever changed the landscape of its television industry. With the help of cable and satellite technologies, audiences in Taiwan today receive an average of 60 channels, 20 times the number available just a few years ago. Through focus group interviews, this study examines the possible cultural implications of such speedy changes for a society that is in the midst of political, cultural, social and economic transitions. The results indicate that Chinese cultural identity in Taiwan has come to another crossroad and stress the prospect of cultural innovation as a …

Taking A Problem-Based Learning Approach To Journalism Education, M. Meadows

Asia Pacific Media Educator

Debates over the most appropriate way in which journalism education might be delivered continues unabated in Australian journalism schools. Regular users of the Journalism Education Association's electronic discussion group, JEANET (jeanet@uow.edu.au) will be well aware of the tenor of the debate which has ranged from assertions about the evils of cultural studies - however it is defined - to claims as to which array of subjects should be part of every journalism program in Australia. This article describes a problem-based learning approach to journalism education being used over the past two years at Griffith University's Nathan Campus in Brisbane.

Critical Media Education In Malaysia: A Challenge To Vocational-Orientation, S. Balraj-Ambigapathy

Asia Pacific Media Educator

This article examines the pedagogic vacuum in media education in Malaysia where critical inquiry has been made subservient to the acquisition of technical skills. It suggests that vocational oriented communication courses should engage in constructing alternative representations, meaning and values so that what is experienced by the students and the community is a mutual educative process of participatory communication.

Constructing Hansonism: A Study Of Pauline Hanson's Persona In Australian Press, P. E. Louw, Eric Loo

Asia Pacific Media Educator

This article discerns the extent to which the presence of controversial Australian politician, Pauline Hanson, in the public sphere has been mocked and shaped by the media. Based on a textual analysis of a month's coverage of Hanson in the broadsheet metropolitan dailies, it suggests that the one-dimensionality in which Hanson was reported tells us more about Australian journalists and their practices than about Pauline Hanson herself Journalists allowed the elements of 'political correctness' to set the parameters of how they dealt with Hanson. It concludes that since journalists are the product of journalism training programs, some self-reflection on the …

Logging In: Perceptions Of E-Mail Usage By University Students In The Philippines, L. B. P. Somera

Asia Pacific Media Educator

This study identifies the factors that influence the patterns and perceptions of e-mail usage among students in a Philippine university. The results indicate that the medium appears to be used primarily for social, rather than academic, purposes. The age of e-mail accounts, frequency and length of log-ins were found to be significantly related to students' e-mail use. The analysis of perceptions of media appropriateness for various communication activities indicate some support for the hierarchy suggested by social presence and media richness theories. Email was highly ranked for exchanging information and for staying in touch. Novelty, access, and faculty issues related …

Electronic Student Newspaper: 'Uni Tavur' And Pedagogy Of Experience, D. Robie

Asia Pacific Media Educator

A 20 year-old South Pacific journalism education program has spawned the only training newspaper of its kind, Uni Tavur in the region. After being redesigned as a desktop publishing venture in 1993, two years later it was relaunched as a professional tabloid. Now, after the debut of the paper's Internet online edition and an email news service, this article makes a case for the pedagogy of experience -- integrated learning combining theory and skills in the newsroom.

Speciesism And Sexism, Emma Munro

Animal Issues

On a global scale the most exploited humans are women and in factory farming the most exploited animals are female. Women are severely exploited through the non-recognition of unpaid subsistence activities and home-maker services as ‘real work’. By ‘real work’ I mean a fiscally responsive operation, within current Western economic systems. Consequently, as Marilyn Waring argues, this 'hidden economy' means that women are under-counted in the labour forces and their contributions are not recognised in national accounts

Babe: The Tale Of The Speaking Meat - Part Ii, Val Plumwood

Animal Issues

Part II discusses the moral ambiguities of the human-animal contract, the conceptual traps of pet/meat and person /property dualism, and why we need a politics of animal justice.

Animal Issues - Complete Issue 1(1) 1997, Denise Russell

Animal Issues

Complete issue of Animal Issues volume 1, number 1, 1997.

The Politics Of Positionality And The Production Of Meaning: A Reading Of Hou Leong's "An Australian", E. Partridge

Law Text Culture

In first looking at Han Leong's photographs, the images brought an immediate smile to my face. Their cheeky tone and playful style appealed to me, and I appreciated their ironic refiguring of both 'white' and 'multicultural' versions of 'Australia' as it is popularly imagined. More than this, the images made me think, particularly about my own viewing position, and the process by which these images are made meaningful to me. This paper is partly a reading of Leong's work and partly a meditation on this process.

Public And Private - Feminist Legal Debates Edited By Margaret Thornton, E. Cowdery

Law Text Culture

Public and Private - Feminist Legal Debates traverses some well-trodden ground as well as exploring new connections between law, feminism and notions of public and private. Edited by Margaret Thornton, it is a collection of essays written by feminist scholars working in the areas of law and legal theory. It evolved out of an initiative by the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. The School invited feminist legal scholars from other institutions to participate, as visiting speakers, in its Feminism and Law series. The relationship between the public/private distinction, legality and women emerged as a common …

Speech And Respect. Richard Abel, A. Kenyon

Law Text Culture

Australia has seen wide ranging debates about the High Court's implied rights jurisprudence during the 1990s. The Constitution has been found to limit the legal control of political discussion. The doctrine survives, although apparently with less energy, after changes in the Court's composition during 1995 and decisions such as McGinty v Western Australia. Most commentators suggest the Court has stepped back from its previous activism. Two forthcoming decisions may even remove political discussion as an issue of constitutional doctrine, at least in relation to the law of civil defamation. Following the High Court cases, however, political discussion exists as a …

No Longer Mute: Law/Culture/White Lies, S. L. Schmutz

Law Text Culture

This paper presents a critique of the political nature of law from a particular viewpoint. A viewpoint articulated by people of various cultural backgrounds against a monomaniac legal standard. This viewpoint has been categorised as the Race Theory Movement and it confirms the thesis that, indeed, law is political. Because, when a critique is categorised as a single issue movement, a dual process begins: the viewpoint is subtly trivialised as limited (eg. according to gender only, or minority only), therefore it is considered to be unimportant to the society at large. At the same time, the dominant legal culture is …

Punish And Critique: Towards A Feminist Analysis Of Penality, A. Aungles

Law Text Culture

In Punish and Critique, Adrian Howe makes a major contribution both to the literature on penality and to postmodem penal politics. Howe reviews the range of critical perspectives, Marxist, post structuralist and feminist, that have proliferated in the field of penology over the past twenty five years. This exegesis, however, is a means to an end: the second half of the book reflects Howe's concern to alter the ground of the debate, to effect a paradigm shift that will move the study of punishment to a consideration of the 'gendered characteristics of disciplinary procedures'.

Performativity, Regulative Fictions, Huge Stabilities: Framing Battered Woman's Syndrome, T. Threadgold

Law Text Culture

I want in this paper to explore the stories that proliferate around the lived narrative realities of women who kill violent husbands. I will even tell some more stories but I do this in the knowledge that not just any stories will do. As Graycar (1996) has argued there are very real limits to the perfonnative power of feminist narratives if they fail to engage with the huge stabilities, legal discipline, categories doctrines and, I would add, practices, that they are attempting to change.

'Naming Whiteness': An Inquiry Into Lindy Chamberlain's Through My Eyes And Australian Nationalist Discourses, P. Saywer

Law Text Culture

On the day before Australia Day, in 1995, an article by Martin Flanagan (1995) entitled 'A Land Like No Other' appeared in The Age, Melbourne's well respected major daily newspaper, inquiring into Australian 'national identity' and questioning how Australian nationalism addresses issues of racial identity.

Who are we?' Flanagan asks, 'and how is our culture defined?' In his attempt to answer these questions, he identifies the figures who have contributed to Australia's cultural identity. The two female exceptions to his list of male contributors are Cathy Freeman and Lindy Chamberlain.

Margaret Thornton, Dissonance And Distrust: Women In The Legal Profession, E. Cowdery

Law Text Culture

In Dissonance and Distrust: Women in the Legal Profession, Margaret Thornton provides a compelling theoretical account of the continuing resistance to the participation of women as legal professionals, despite their increased presence in law schools and in some areas of legal practice. She suggests that women are still 'fringe-dwellers in the jurisprudential community' (Thornton 1996: 3-4) and will remain so until it is recognised that the issue is not simply one of women being 'let in' to the profession in equal numbers to men, but also involves posing fundamental questions about the character and constitution of law as it is …

Thinking Through The Body Of The Law. Pheng Cheah, David Fraser And Judith Grbich (Eds), Julia Quilter

Law Text Culture

Thinking Through the Body of the Law (1996) is a pathbreaking book which should presage further works of its kind. While the essays are more diverse than coherent, there is a general attempt to supplement Critical Legal Studies, Feminist Jurisprudence and Critical Race Theories' re-conceptualisation of the Law as something other than an isolated practice of objective and impartial rules. The authors question our understanding of ethics, embodiment, the social and law/justice. In doing so they present us with an inspiring range of trajectories which call for further research. In this respect, the title of the book sets an overly …

Contents, Editor's Introduction, Denise Russell

Animal Issues

During the 1990's in Western culture a range of animal issues have become important. Some old ones have taken on a new urgency and some new questions have emerged. The key philosophical question in relation to non-human animals has been how are they distinct from humans. The criteria of sentience, reason, tool-making, language, free will and culture have all had their philosophical supporters. Yet the recent studies of free ranging apes and monkeys challenge all these criteria. The research on captive bonobos2 dolphins3 and parrots4 has also raised questions about the uniqueness of language as a human trait. This has …

Hybrids, Rights And Their Proliferation, Lynda Birke, Mike Michael

Animal Issues

Working out the concept of rights is a complicated business, which at least keeps philosophers occupied. Not so long ago, one of us would have been denied the right to vote, on the grounds of her gender. Yet now, at the turn of the millennium, she is far from sure that we have come very far on the question of women's rights. And if women, or minorities, or anyone else who is human can sometimes be denied rights, then how much more likely that non-humans will be? Yet extending the concept of rights to non-human animals is increasingly being taken …

Animal Issues - Complete Issue 1(2) 1997, Denise Russell

Animal Issues

Complete issue, volume 1, number 1, 1997.

Babe: The Tale Of The Speaking Meat - Part I, Val Plumwood

Animal Issues

I would like somebody somewhere to endow an annual prize for a work of art which takes a group of the most oppressed subjects and makes an effective and transformative representation of their situation. The work would make its audience care about what happens to those oppressed subjects and to understand something of the audience's own role in maintaining their oppression. It would foster recognition of the subjectivity and creativity of the oppressed group and consciousness of the need for redistribution of respect and of cultural and material goods. Above all, it would help to support and protect them. If …

Science And Animals - Or, Why Cyril Won't Win The Nobel Prize, Lynda Birke

Animal Issues

There have always been animals in my life. I have long had a love affair with horses; dogs, too, feature strongly in my emotions and in my house. And not only companion animals, but also the wild creatures that surround us all. Even in London, in the postwar devastation I witnessed while growing up, I learned the joy of watching the birds in the trees. In what sometimes seems another life, I trained as a scientist. Ambivalent though I was about doing biology (surely I could not bear the thought of cutting up dead animals?), I ended up studying just …