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‘People like us’: School Choice, Multiculturalism and Segregation in Sydney Christina Ho (Aug 2015)
Daily encounters with cultural difference help establish an organic multiculturalism that becomes an ordinary part of people’s lives. People learn to deal with each other in an everyday fashion, and their differences are not a barrier to engagement and sometimes friendship. In schools where students from different backgrounds are thrown together, their negotiations across cultural difference are a unique opportunity to forge intercultural understanding. So how are Australian schools doing in fostering this kind of everyday multiculturalism?
The Making – and Almost Breaking – of Obamacare Lesley M. Russell (Aug 2015)
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA, colloquially called Obamacare) is an historic piece of legislation that improves the health and healthcare of every American. But what will surely come to be seen as President Barack Obama’s key legacy is also one of the most divisive laws enacted in the United States in recent memory. So what is all the division about, and what general lessons can be drawn from the Obamacare story?
Dusting off the Archives Robert Aldrich (Aug 2015)
In the discipline of history, every published article or book, every lecture or conference presentation, has a backstory of how it was researched and written, and in most of these stories, archives play a key role. But the archives that historians work in are themselves historical—they evolve and are subject to the whims of nature and the authorities who provide curatorship, funds and buildings for them. That is as may be: there remains something timeless about the encounter between the researcher and the primary documents archives hold, the scraps of information that can be pieced together into a satisfying patchwork, the sense of literally reaching out to another time and place, and to the people who lived there.
Linking Government Support and What We Value: The Case of Environmentally-Harmful Subsidies Karen Hussey (Jul 2015)
Governments are in the business of promoting desirable economic and social outcomes and undertaking this business sometimes involves financial aid or subsidies. Subsidies should, of course, be well-designed, such that their benefits exceed their costs. Many are not. Yet even when they are, problems arise: there are, inevitably, both winners and losers when governments decide which outcomes should be supported and to what extent. Moreover, the tension between short-term economic and political goals and environmental harm plagues this policy field.
Fred Nile A.D. 2015 Timothy Lynch (Jul 2015)
Surprising many commentators, morals campaigner and veteran politician the Reverend Fred Nile contested—and was re-elected—to the New South Wales Legislative Council in March 2015. His campaign stressed his ongoing commitment to ‘traditional moral values’, and his concern about the latest in a long line of malign, indeed diabolical, foreign interests threatening Australia’s ‘national heritage and freedoms’, this time from Islam. Yet society has largely abandoned the values Nile champions and his political activity is now essentially symbolic. How is his persistence to be understood?
Combatting Hate in Cyberspace Katharine Gelber (Jun 2015)
With Web 2.0, platforms and usage have become dynamic, the lines between creator and user have become blurred, and social media facilitates networking and collaboration. These developments raise questions about whether this medium actually enhances freedom by enabling expression, or facilitates harms in new and more damaging ways. Certainly, the Internet has become a medium of choice for the dissemination of hate speech, which is viewed by most countries around the world as sufficiently harmful to warrant regulation. But what of other forms of harmful speech online?
Asian Business Systems, National Cultures, and the Problem of Gender F. Ben Tipton (May 2015)
Some influential management researchers have worked to understand how firms relate to their surrounding societies. They argue that, despite the obvious pressures of globalisation on both governments and firms, national ‘business systems’ show little tendency to converge to a standard pattern. Yet gender relations are absent from their accounts of ‘society’ and ‘culture’; indeed women and gender are missing from most authoritative texts in management. What has gone wrong?
Tipped out of the Cradle: The Academic Fortunes of Political Studies Stuart Mcintyre (Apr 2015)
By any reckoning, the Department of Government at the University of Sydney was foundational to the development of political science in this country. It was among the first to teach the subject, generated a text which marked out the development of the discipline in successive editions from the 1960s, was caught up in the ferment of the New Left, pursued the democratisation of institutional procedures with particular fervour, and nursed the talent that populated other universities here and overseas with notable practitioners. None of this saved it from the changes that overtook higher education in Australia in the closing years of the last century …
Waiting for the Fallout: Australia and Return of the Patrimonial Society John Quiggin (Apr 2015)
In 2014, French economist Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, documented an upsurge in inequality of income and wealth, most notably in the United States and the United Kingdom. Other English-speaking countries have followed this trend—with the possible exception of Australia. So is Australia immune to the emergence of a patrimonial society?
Life in the Gayborhood: Safety, Difference and Change in the Urban Gay Neighbourhood Scott McKinnon (Apr 2015)
Queer spaces have shaped modern gay identities, but they have not been without contradiction and complexity. As ‘safe’ spaces for homosexual people, they have also been places in which lesbians and gay men have been the targets of homophobic abuse and violence. As spaces in which difference is celebrated, they have also been rejected by gay people who don’t see themselves as different at all. As spaces over which gays and lesbians can claim some ongoing ownership, that ownership is always challenged and the meanings of these spaces are also always changing.
Milk Money: Should Donating Mothers be Compensated for Their Milk? Katherine Carroll (Mar 2015)
Donated breast milk is a scarce resource. It is not uncommon for human milk banks to turn away requests for milk, to ensure that the little available goes to the hospitalised preterm infants who need it most. It is also not uncommon for lactating women to feel too burdened by new motherhood and their family and career responsibilities to pursue milk donation. Would payment to mothers make more milk available? If so, would that milk be less safe? The production and distribution of human body products raises these and other thorny ethical and practical questions.
One Day in the Life of David Hicks D.N. Byrne (Feb 2015)
David Hicks has just been cleared of the charges he faced in a US Military Commission, while imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. His counsel, Michael Mori, has told the story of Hicks’ case: the problematic constitutionality of the military commissions and the charges laid under their authority; how Hicks was treated—and abused—by the military authorities; and the apparent indifference of the Howard Government to Hicks’ predicament. It’s a story that reveals and warns in equal measure …
Has the Death of Public Protest Been Exaggerated? Dennis Phillips (Feb 2015)
Managing public protest has become an important feature of the neoliberal strategy. Reducing the capacity of unions and protest movements to organise and demonstrate, expanding police powers and increasing the authority of technocrats to manage the economy are all part of the repertoire. Ironically, neoliberals who prided themselves in the free market and limited government have been happy to use the instruments of government to quell dissent. Have they succeeded?
Are Australian Trade Unions Part of the Solution, or Part of the Problem? David Peetz (Feb 2015)
The failure of the modern economy to deliver widespread benefits for all is now widely recognised. Ordinary workers—those in the middle and lower parts of the income distribution—have limited access to resources and even more limited effective say. It was not ever thus, and the decline of unions is intimately connected with the rise of inequality. Can unions rise again? What would they need to do—and be?
Can Mandatory Disclosure Work? Gail Pearson (Dec 2014)
Daily life in rich countries is full of complex decisions: about borrowing, saving, buying, accepting medical treatment, allowing access to personal information, choosing foods and so on. One response has been mandatory disclosure of information about all aspects of the transaction, but this solution is itself problematic. So what would help us make good decisions—less, but more appropriate information? More education? Expert advice?
Politics, Newspapers and Witch-Hunts: The Tragic Case of Baby P Karen Healy (Nov 2014)
On 3 August 2007, Peter Connelly died of injuries sustained at his family home in London aged just seventeen months. In the aftermath of Peter’s death, politicians rode high on outrage and Rebekah Brooks, the then editor of The Sun newspaper, led what she termed ‘a campaign for justice’ for Baby P that lasted years. Thanks to the Leveson Inquiry, many of the main actors in this tale—and the relationships between them—are visible in a way that they might never have been. The sight is unedifying, to say the least.
Morality, Law and the Addictive Business of Gambling Fiona Nicoll (Nov 2014)
Death in a casino: negligence, assault, manslaughter? Or business as usual? A searching account of a case at Melbourne’s Crown tries to clarify the distinction between ‘what is legal’ and ‘what is moral’. Although it may be impossible to specify, this distinction creates room for gambling industries to thrive—in an ambiguous space that is neither quite above nor altogether within the law.
Living with George Eliot Moira Gatens (Nov 2014)
George Eliot’s fictional experiments were designed to provoke the reader to reflect on the ways in which political institutions and social and sexual mores help to determine the shape of human life. Yet Rebecca Mead’s popular recent reading of Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch, barely mentions social and political institutions and their differential effects on the capacities of individuals to realise their ambitions. Has Mead fallen prey to the egoism that Middlemarch so forensically—and compassionately—lays bare?
If You Are the One: Dating Shows, Reality TV, and the Politics of the
Personal in Urban China Wanning Sun (Oct 2014)
Dating shows and other lifestyle television programs have become the stock in trade on
Chinese television, following the commercialisation of China’s media and the
globalisation of television formats. But it is Jiangsu Satellite Television’s If You
Are the One, started in 2010, that has proven to be most popular across the
nation—and around the world. Why does the Chinese government wish this program
didn’t exist?
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