Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Exploring The Placelessness Of Reading Among Older Teens In A Rural Municipality, Paulette Rothbauer

Paulette Rothbauer

Gouverner: Détecter Et Prévenir!, Antoinette Rouvroy

Antoinette Rouvroy

No abstract provided.

The Myths We Are Taught About Schools, Anthony Ashbolt

Anthony Ashbolt

Certain mythologies pervade the assault upon public education. One of these is that Labor's education policy at the 2004 election damaged the party electorally. I will explore this next week. First, however, I will address a more recent intervention in the schooling debate which has received much attention. Emeritus Professor Brian Caldwell, publicizing his book published by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), has pointed repeatedly to an AC Nielsen survey conducted for the ACER showing that a significant number of public school parents would send their children to private schools if they could. The survey, from July 2004, …

A Market Model Of Education?, Anthony Ashbolt

Anthony Ashbolt

Milton Friedman introduced the concept of vouchers in education over fifty years ago. Thankfully the world ignored him. Nonetheless, the various victories of neoliberal doctrine from the early 1970s on in the USA, England and Australia placed vouchers on the agenda but not as a central platform. It is one of those policy ideas that is embraced with enthusiasm periodically only to retreat into the recesses of think tanks whose priorities are tax relief for the wealthy and real or imagined wars. When the governments of choice for these tanks are replaced by ones with a thin veneer of progressive …

Digital Audio In The Library, Richard Griscom

Richard Griscom

An incomplete draft of a book intended to serve as a guide and reference for librarians who are responsible for implementing digital audio services in their libraries. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1, "Digital Audio Technology," covers the fundamentals of recorded sound and digital audio, including a description of digital audio formats, how digital audio is delivered to the listener, and how digital audio is created. Part 2, "Digital Audio in the Library," covers digitizing local collections, providing streaming audio reserves, and using digital audio to preserve analog recordings.

September 11th, John Maynard Keynes, Kenneth J. Arrow, And Me: The Nexus, David Randall Jenkins

David Randall Jenkins, Ph.D.

What's Good About Feeling Bad Handout For Aacc World Conference 2009, John C. Thomas

John C. Thomas

Based upon the book "What's good about feeling bad: Finding purpose and a path through pain" by Drs. John C. Thomas and Gary Habermas. The presentation covers the benefits that God can bring from suffering

De Revolución En Revolución, Guillermo Arosemena

Guillermo Arosemena

No abstract provided.

"Applying Carl Schmitt To Global Puzzles: Identity, Conflict And The Friend/Enemy Antithesis,", Emma R. Norman

Emma R. Norman

This paper demonstrates the broad appeal and usefulness of the political and legal thought of Carl Schmitt to scholars of international relations by applying his seminal friend-enemy antithesis to current global problems as well as to current IR theories used to negotiate them. I argue that Schmitt’s contemporary appeal lies, first, in his insistence that collective identity is necessarily formed through conflict (enmity); and second, that identity lies at the very base of what motivates behavior on the international stage (at the sub-national, national and transnational levels). By implication, Schmitt’s theories offer some fresh insights into the sources and nature …

“'Roots Run Deep Here': The Construction Of Black New Orleans In Post-Katrina Tourism Narratives", Lynnell L. Thomas

Lynnell Thomas

This article explores the emergent post-Katrina tourism narrative and its ambivalent racialization of the city. Tourism officials are compelled to acknowledge a New Orleans outside the traditional tourist boundaries – primarily black, often poor, and still largely neglected by the city and national governments. On the other hand, tourism promoters do not relinquish (and do not allow tourists to relinquish) the myths of racial exoticism and white supremacist desire for a construction of blacks as artistically talented but socially inferior.

¿Demasiada Expectativa En Los Brics?, Guillermo Arosemena

Guillermo Arosemena

No abstract provided.

Word Of The Day: Harrowing!, Sharon Lomurno

Sharon L Lomurno

Word of the day-Harrowing

So, we all start getting up and shaking off the chill from the night. The sun slowly begins to make it’s presence known. Breakfasts are made, hikes to the creek for one last look-see.

We break camp and load everything into the rental Santa Fe and people pile into Bobo’s truck to head up the mountain. Great, we are getting an early start!

Bobo sped up a little so he wouldn’t dust us out. The sun is getting warmer.

We were traveling a little ways behind Bobo and I was taking video of the crazy ride …

Law, Economics, And Religion, Vikas Kumar

Vikas Kumar

No abstract provided.

Death, Decline Or Atrophy? The Necessity Of Politics, Anthony Ashbolt

Anthony Ashbolt

While thinking about the contemporary state of politics, it is very difficult to shake off a recurring image from the brilliant television series A Very Peculiar Practice. In that show, a wonderful aging character was writing a book about the parlous state of higher education in Great Britain. 'Death of the University' muttered Jock into a portable tape recorder, between swigs of Scotch, as he wandered around campus despairing at the shattered values and distorted priorities of the new university. Jock spoke for all of us who care about education. I hope to be speaking to all of us who …

Public Education And Democracy, Anthony Ashbolt

Anthony Ashbolt

As a political system, democracy depends upon a vibrant public sphere. Democracy in liberal democratic societies is sometimes confused with doctrines upholding individual rights. Thus it is that matters of individual choice come to be perceived as inalienable democratic rights when they are nothing of the sort. Private choices and desires fit neatly into a concept of social good defined essentially by the market. They are things to' be bought and sold, their value adjusted to the vicissitudes of market forces. If we begin to think of education in this way, we have begun also to sacrifice democracy at the …

The Student And New Left Movements, Anthony Ashbolt

Anthony Ashbolt

For some years now, the 1960s have been contested terrain. Many-commentators have rushed to specious judgements about the radical politics of the era, while others have struggled valiantly to keep memories alive. Much of the politics of the contemporary epoch is being played out through the lens of the sixties. This seems like a grand and perhaps foolish claim but it needs to be understood that the neo-liberal and/or neoconservative agenda (and I will include hawkish foreign policy in this) is substantially directed at burying the sixties, the radical sixties. The gains of the various social movements, in particular the …

Love And Hate In European Eyes: Emma Goldman And Alexander Berkman On America, Anthony Ashbolt

Anthony Ashbolt

In the wake of September 11, a classic European disdain for American sentiment became apparent. Even American intellectuals, like Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal, issued pronouncements that reflected a profoundly European sensibility, one embedded in notions of tradition and memory. Yet within the contemporary European critiques of America there frequently lurks a distinct affection. Note the ambivalence of many commentators (not, to be sure, just Europeans) in Granta 77: What We Think of America. This paradoxical embrace and withdrawal is hardly new and, in a sense, arises from the essential unknowability of America remarked upon by both John Gray and …

Private Schooling As A Way Of Life, Anthony Ashbolt

Anthony Ashbolt

Warning become self-fulfilling prophecies in the hands of a mass media trained in the art of disguising publicity as news. For many years, news about public or private schools or both, has often signalled doom, on the one hand, and infinite variety and riches, on the other. The story is familiar, so familiar as to be tiresome. Lazy journalists, ever at the ready for a slightly new angle, beef up the latest statistics and, quelle surprise, another front page news item emerges. Thus the Sydney Morning Herald educational writers tell us once again of the drift towards private schools.

Rescue Public Schools Not Corporate Profiteers, Anthony Ashbolt

Anthony Ashbolt

Kevin Rudd's vigorous attack upon “extreme capitalism” revealed he does not understand the nature of the current crisis. This is not a meltdown caused purely and simply by rogue traders, bizarre mortgage lending, gross corporate salaries and payouts and, in general, the politics of greed. All those are symptoms of a much more systemic disease. That disease is the ideology of privatisation and deregulation, an ideology Rudd has shown no inclination to buck. This Government's persistent embrace of neoliberal ideology and practice is highlighted by its school funding policy and also its market-driven approach to schooling policy in general.

Hegemony And The Sixties: Observations, Polemics, Meanderings, Anthony Ashbolt

Anthony Ashbolt

The concept of cultural hegemony and the 1960s are interconnected in important ways. First, it was in the 1960s that a keen interest in the concept developed. Second, the battle for cultural hegemony today takes place in the shadow of the sixties. The neoconservative agenda has been developed with reference to Vietnam and the liberation movements of the 1960s. The neoconservatives certainly saw sixties radicalism as a challenge to power and privilege. Ironically, some on the Left now beg to disagree and see the radical sixties, in particular the counterculture, as paving the way for a new phase of consumer …

'Go Ask Alice': Remembering The Summer Of Love Forty Years On, Anthony Ashbolt

Anthony Ashbolt

In 1960s historiography today, the expression ‘Summer of Love’ is used in three senses. It refers generally to the explosion of psychedelic sounds, images and lifestyles in that decade. It is also code for the overall phenomenon of Haight-Ashbury between 1965 and 1968. Specifically, and more accurately, it applies to the summer of 1967 in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. While the multiple meanings all carry weight, too often that first general sense of the Summer of Love shields a dialectic of hope and despair behind a banner of optimism and dreams. To put it more bluntly, the hippie …

Long Tan: The Politics Of Forgetting, Anthony Ashbolt

Anthony Ashbolt

The 40th anniversary commemorations of the Battle of Long Tan have been both excessive and tendentious. The rehabilitation of Vietnam veterans now serves to reinforce amnesia about Vietnam itself. Such amnesia serves the interests of policy makers in Canberra. Far from the immoral imperialist venture that it was, the American war in Vietnam now functions as a salutary reminder of Australian heroism. The noble warrior is recreated before our eyes: spurned and trashed by the anti-war movement and the Government, labelled a baby-killer by people in the street or the pub, thrown in the gutter to fester and die of …

Public Education In The Universe Of Closed Discourse, Anthony Ashbolt

Anthony Ashbolt

IN HIS CLASSIC ANALYSIS of consumer capitalist society, One Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse pinpointed the crucial role of language in fashioning conformist thinking. A one-dimensional framework of thought prevailed and alternative ways of thinking were cast out, characterised as propaganda or absorbed into the dominant discourse and thus suitably domesticated: "The unification of opposites which characterises the commercial and political style is one of the many ways in which discourse and communication make themselves immune against the expression of protest and refusal . . . In exhibiting its contradictions as the token of its truth, this universe of discourse closes …

Private Desires, Public Pleasures: Community And Identity In A Postmodern World, Anthony Ashbolt

Anthony Ashbolt

As George Orwell, Herbert Marcuse and, more recently John Ralston Saul have argued, language can be a key mechanism whereby social reality is blurred, camouflaged or distorted (Orwell 1957: 143-57; MarcuseI972: 78-103; Saul 1997: 41-75). Slogans, buzzwords and words blatantly misused permeate contemporary discourse. Just as the advertising industry can take a word like 'freedom' and render it a commodity, so too politicians and journalists can take a word like 'reform; and strip it of meaning. We are told, for example, of the reforms of the Kennett government in Victoria. Closing hospitals and schools and wrecking the industrial relations system …

Remembrance Of Things That Last, Anthony Ashbolt

Anthony Ashbolt

For some years now, the 1960s have been contested terrain. Many commentators have rushed to specious judgements about the radical politics of the era, while others have struggled valiantly to keep memories alive. Much of the politics of the contemporary epoch is being played out through the lens of the Sixties. This seems like a grand and foolish claim but it needs to be understood that the so-called neo-liberal and/or neoconservative agenda (and I will include hawkish foreign policy in this) is substantially directed at burying the Sixties. The gains of the various social movements, in particular the anti-war and …

Quality Education For All: State Aid Is Still The Issue, Anthony Ashbolt

Anthony Ashbolt

The fundamental measure of education in all spheres is its contribution to a democratic society. To ensure that the Australian education system creates what Benjamin Barber calls ‘an aristocracy of everyone', we need grand spending plans. We also need to embark on a mission to rescue the public education system, which has been sidelined during our years of transferring funds to private schools. The public realm and the importance of education within it was a critical foundation stone of the fledgling Australian state. The same is also true of the USA, where even someone with residual monarchist tendencies like John …

Wollongong The Brave, Anthony Ashbolt

Anthony Ashbolt

Two months ago, Illawarra ABC Radio presenter Peter Hand was stood down for alleged bias after a complaint from a Liberal Senator. Anthony Ashbolt examines this extraordinary case of ABC capitulation to Government pressure 'Farewell Aunty Jack' may have been a signal of things to come. That bitter-sweet conclusion to an ABC show that placed Wollongong on the television map in the 1970s, captured a sense that the certainties of the past were fading away and a brave new world was soon to commence. More than 30 years later, Wollongong the Brave has become a little known frontline in the …

Arthur Cousins 1866-1960, Michael K. Organ

Michael Organ

He was that "rara avis" in Australian historiography, the devoted local historian who has a realisation of the broader implications of regional development. So wrote Sydney University Archivist D.S. Macmillan in an obituary notice published in the October 1960 number of the Union Recorder, commemorating the death of Arthur Cousins on Wednesday, 17 August, at his Cremone residence, aged 94 years. Though having known him for only a brief period at the end of a long life, Macmillan had developed a degree of admiration and respect for this elderly gentleman, who, along with G.E. Hall and others, had worked towards …

Early Land Settlement In Illawarra 1804-1861, Benjamin Lindsay, Michael K. Organ, A. P. Doyle

Michael Organ

The writer of this story was born in Illawarra over 76 years ago [c1857], and during his childhood and youth he shared in the experiences and struggles of the pioneer settlers in that rich and beautiful portion of the State. In this story he has attempted to give a detailed account of the manner in which the Crown Lands of Illawarra were disposed of, for the information of all who are interested in matters pertaining to Illawarra, and, more particularly, the large body of farmers now occupying those lands, many of whom are descendants of the pioneers who came from …

Religion, Longevity, And Cooperation: The Case Of The Craft Guild, Gary Richardson

Gary Richardson

Whenthe mortality rate is high, repeated interaction alonemaynot sustain cooperation, and religion may play an important role in shaping economic institutions. This insight explains why during the fourteenth century, when plagues decimated populations and the church promoted the doctrine of purgatory, guilds that bundled together religious and occupational activities dominated manufacturing and commerce. During the sixteenth century, the disease environment eased, and the Reformation dispelled the doctrine of purgatory, necessitating the development of new methods of organizing industry. The logic underlying this conclusion has implications for the study of institutions, economics, and religion throughout history and in the developing world …