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NEW IN DECEMBER |
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‘Don’t
retreat, reload’: The Character and Career of Sarah
Palin Dennis Phillips
In September 2008, when Republican
presidential candidate John McCain named Alaska Governor Sarah
Palin as his vice-presidential running mate, some Australians
likened the self-described ‘maverick’ Palin to
Australia’s own political maverick, Pauline Hanson.
Both women are attractive, energetic, conservative, populist,
blunt and—how to put this tactfully—lacking in
philosophical sophistication. But Palin has had much more
political impact than Hanson on her nation’s politics
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On Be(com)ing
a Good Doctor Annette Braunack-Mayer
Medical students meet users of health
services in clinical settings—the hospital or surgery—and
so see them through eyes attuned to clinical and individual
solutions, not to the broader social determinants of health,
illness and modes of medical practice. Students are often
resistant to thinking in new and different ways about the
problems patients bring to them, but need to learn how, if
medical care is to be genuinely caring.
Post-GFC Fantasies
Martijn Konings
A paradoxical logic shapes debate among
critics of capitalism after the GFC: awareness that markets
cannot solve social problems has generated a range of fantasies
about markets’ as yet untapped potential. Even financial
institutions are routinely ascribed capacities for egalitarian
inclusiveness that the crisis seems decisively to have demonstrated
they lack. Social scientists need to do better. |
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The Dark Side of the Internet
Katharine Gelber (Nov 2011)
The Internet—home to ‘cyber mobs’,
liars, aggressive misogynists and purveyors of hate, who distribute
their views with impunity. Meanwhile, their targets suffer the consequences
of this predominantly unregulated arena for speech. The ubiquity
of the Internet, the permanence of posts, and the search engines
that dredge sludge for you, mean that material that makes its way
online affects people’s lives over the long term and in profound
ways. Can this dark side of the Internet be regulated?
Stand Up, and be Counted and
Challenged Charlotte Baines (Nov 2011)
Since World War II, globalisation and mass
migration have exposed Australians, city and country dwellers alike,
to new religions from around the world. Religious people and groups
can respond in different ways to increasing diversity, and a new
book explores the challenges and opportunities they face.
Talking About Genocide
Andrew Markus (Oct 2011)
In Australia, the attempt to apply the concept
of genocide has produced two separate conversations, two divergent
discourses with little indication of mutual engagement. It has not,
as some might have hoped it would, fostered a wide-ranging reappraisal
of Australian history. This problem is not unique to Australia.
Indeed, beyond the addition of a significant chapter to the sociology
of group relations, the genocide concept has failed to generate
understanding at depth.
What is it About Women Doctors
Jo Wainer (Oct 2011)
The changed sex ratio of doctors is a worldwide
phenomenon attracting the interest of policy makers at the highest
level. That we even need to think at a policy level about how women
are included in the practice of medicine is a result of the systematic
exclusion of women from licensed practice as healers when modern
medicine was being established in Europe from the 15th–19th
centuries.
Motherhood in the
21st Century Susan Goodwin and Kate Huppatz (Sep
2011)
Unimaginable a decade or two ago: interracial
surrogacy, raising transgender children, queer parenting, mothers’
chatrooms on the Internet, ‘tradie’ mothers, executive
mothers, yummy mummies, and mothers subjected to mutual obligation.
Yet with all these new ways of being a mother and doing motherhood,
even in the 21st century motherhood continues to be an arena of
conflict for women. How are we to make sense of mothering today?
Theorising China’s International
Relations Mark Chou (Sep 2011)
Since the first Chinese international relations
theory conference was held in Shanghai in 1987, proposals for a
Chinese school of international relations, or at the least a theory
of international relations with Chinese characteristics, have been
continuously mooted. What can philosophers from China’s prehistory
offer this project?
Intimacy, Memory and the
Oral Historian’s Project Jan Gothard (Sep
2011)
All historians have an obligation not to
misuse or falsify their sources and to treat them with respect.
For oral historians the obligation is also a personal and ethical
one, which sometimes predisposes them to infinite introspection
on their role in the co-creation of their interview sources. A new
history of migration to Australia pushes the boundary of how much
introspection is too much …
Scandals and Policy Making:
Failure and Success in Child Protection Reform Karen Healy (Aug
2011)
Few issues capture media attention and spark
public outrage as much as the abuse or, worse, the murder of children
at the hands of their caregivers. Media and therefore public interest
in such tragedies may typically be short-lived. But child welfare
scandals have lasting, and often destructive, impact on child welfare
policy, as politicians keen to cover their own hides make hasty
and ill-conceived reforms. Meanwhile the real causes of child abuse
and neglect—social and economic exclusion of vulnerable families,
and poor working conditions in child welfare agencies—remain
unaddressed.
On Leadership Haig Patapan
(Aug 2011)
Loved or hated, leaders seem to demand we
pay attention to them. Whether we are thinking of top political
leaders, CEOs of global corporations, chairs of NGOs or neighbourhood
committees, leadership matters because it seems to promise a solution
to our most intractable problems. There is nothing, it seems, that
we hope cannot be solved by the actions or example of a strong and
decisive leader.
A War on the Middle Class?
Middle Class Welfare and the 2011–12 Budget Adam Stebbing
(Jun 2011)
The Coalition argues that the cuts to middle
class welfare that appeared in the 2011–12 Budget amounted
to an attempt by Labor to ‘fan class welfare’. The Gillard
Government contended that its first Budget took tough decisions
to increase support for those who need it most and curb the benefits
received by the well off. But did the 2011–12 Budget really
do more than close a few loopholes that skirt at the surface of
the burgeoning system of middle class welfare?
‘My School’ and Others:
Segregation and White Flight Christina Ho (May
2011)
Ethnic concentration and ‘white flight’
from public schools surface sporadically in Australian public debate,
often focused particularly on public schools in rural areas and
those in disadvantaged suburbs, which, it is argued, are being abandoned
by Whites. The recent release of the official My School 2.0
website provides the most comprehensive data ever on the cultural
diversity levels of all schools in Australia. What these data show
is alarming …
Biofuels in the Global South:
Opportunity or Disaster? Matthew Dornan (Apr
2011)
A lot of different actors support biofuels
production for a lot of different reasons. Farmers in developed
countries see increased demand for existing crops while those in
developing countries see income from new markets. Environmentalists
see a way to reduce GHG emissions while car manufacturers see a
way to maintain demand for cars. But they have been blamed for the
recent spike in food prices—and called a ‘crime against
humanity’. How can we make sense of the possibilities and
pitfalls of this technology?
Old Problems, New Media?
Dennis Phillips (Apr 2011)
What is happening to the news? It is a timely
and vexed question. News reporting, production and consumption are
undergoing unprecedented change. Traditional forms of news distribution,
such as the established and once revered daily newspaper, are in
trouble. Welcome to the information explosion and the ‘new
media’. But are these the only threats to objective reporting
on matters of substance?
Labor’s Bad Year
Shaun Wilson (Mar 2011)
Reviewing books written about the 2010 election
campaign might have been an impossible task in the final stretches
of last year, after Julia Gillard formed her unlikely government.
Events were too traumatic, too disappointing or too inconclusive
to retrace so soon. The task is marginally easier in 2011 as the
government settles into place even if its immediate, let alone long-term,
future is hard to see …
Who Put the Freud into Schadenfreude?
Rodney Tiffen (Mar 2011)
Outrageous revenge plots when love between
astronauts or a puritanical judge and his siren-like sister-in-law
went wrong. The public humiliation of a bit player in the Clinton
impeachment circus. A lurid misery memoir exposed as fiction. Do
we gain anything from reading narratives of these personal unravellings
apart from (guilty) pleasure at the pain of others? We might, but
not by reading this new book on scandals …
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