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This paper explores the qualitative dimensions of stigma related to substance use for a sample of women experiencing homelessness in Brisbane, Australia. A secondary thematic analysis of ethnographic research data identified four key themes: (1) "Intersecting stigmas," including experiencing homelessness, mental and physical illness, as well as being a woman who uses drugs; (2) "Perceived stigma" examines the association between homelessness and substance use; (3) Women's experiences of multiple forms of "enacted stigma" related to substance use and homelessness, including violence, predation and victimization, discrimination, and police harassment; and (4) "Negotiating stigma" outlines techniques participants used to manage the stigma attached to substance use and homelessness, such as avoiding substance use themselves, avoiding other people who used drugs, and engaging with other social networks and activities. The paper argues that the framework of "intersectional stigma" can provide insight into the multiple stigmas negotiated by women experiencing homelessness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Truancy in adolescence is related to detrimental developmental outcomes over the life-course, including a greater risk for delinquency during adolescence and offending in adulthood. This paper presents results from the Ability School Engagement Program (ASEP): a Third Party Policing partnership between schools and police that sought to disrupt the relationship between truancy and delinquency by communicating, in a procedurally fair dialogue, the legal responsibilities of parents to ensure their children attend school. This paper examines the impact of ASEP on antisocial behavior and the modifying effects of ASEP on the relationship between willingness to go to school and antisocial behavior. Methods: ASEP was evaluated under randomized field trial conditions, where 102 truanting young people from a highly disadvantaged urban area in Brisbane, Australia, were randomly assigned to either the ASEP intervention or the business-as-usual condition. Results: Utilizing four waves of survey data collected over a 2-year time period, we found evidence that ASEP was related to decreases in self-reported antisocial behavior throughout the 2 years study. We also find that ASEP lessened the negative relationship between willingness to go to school and self-reported antisocial behavior for those in the experimental condition up to 1 year post random allocation. Conclusions: Partnerships between schools and police that communicate, in a procedurally fair way, parental legal responsibilities for their children to attend school holds promise for increasing a truanting young person's willingness to go to school and reducing their self-reported antisocial behaviour, at least in the short run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a growing evidence of transmigrants' political activism, empirical research is still in its infancy. This paper examined how migrants' political agency was constructed by their emotions, identities and transnational contexts. Data were collected from in-depth interviews with 11 Korean migrants who were residing in Brisbane, the third largest city of Australia, and engaging in home-country politics through self-organized activities. The study found that participants developed a human rights frame to suit their identities and contexts and in turn, the frame shaped their identities and political agency around human rights. The concepts of 'framing' and 'small group development' assisted in understanding interview participants' experiences of negotiating differences in conceptualization and strategization of social issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Cross-sectional studies consistently find that neighborhoods with higher levels of collective efficacy experience fewer social problems. Particularly robust is the relationship between collective efficacy and violent crime, which holds regardless of the socio-structural conditions of neighborhoods. Yet due to the limited availability of neighborhood panel data, the temporal relationship between neighborhood structure, collective efficacy and crime is less well understood. Methods: In this paper, we provide an empirical test of the collective efficacy-crime association over time by bringing together multiple waves of survey and census data and counts of violent crime incident data collected across 148 neighborhoods in Brisbane, Australia. Utilizing three different longitudinal models that make different assumptions about the temporal nature of these relationships, we examine the reciprocal relationships between neighborhood features and collective efficacy with violent crime. We also consider the spatial embeddedness of these neighborhood characteristics and their association with collective efficacy and the concentration of violence longitudinally. Results: Notably, our findings reveal no direct relationship between collective efficacy and violent crime over time. However, we find a strong reciprocal relationship between collective efficacy and disadvantage and between disadvantage and violence, indicating an indirect relationship between collective efficacy and violence. Conclusions: The null direct effects for collective efficacy on crime in a longitudinal design suggest that this relationship may not be as straightforward as presumed in the literature. More longitudinal research is needed to understand the dynamics of disadvantage, collective efficacy, and violence in neighborhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper was delivered as the Ulf Ulmsten Memorial Lecture in Brisbane, QLD, Australia, in 2012. It emphasises how urogynaecology as a young specialty needs to learn some lessons from its forebears as to how new knowledge should be analysed and incorporated into practice. The paper highlights the value of mentorship and teamwork and the need to be aware of increasing patient expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accessible and efficient service are vital features of well-utilized public transit systems. Modeling approaches to support the evaluation of transit operations for management and planning are essential for continued improvement. A hybrid coverage model is developed in this paper for simultaneously expanding service access and increasing accessibility. This paper discusses the use and integration of this model in a geographic information system environment for strategic planning. Analysis is presented for public transit service in Brisbane, Australia. The structured model provides flexibility in developing viable policies for addressing system improvements and service expansion, all of which are likely to promote increased utilization of public transit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of archaeological site formation processes, although routinely undertaken for prehistoric sites, is only carried out in historical archaeology in a limited way. Understanding the processes which formed the archaeological record of a site is an important first step towards developing justifiable inferences about past behavior and past societies regardless of the age of the site. This paper identifies and examines the cultural and non-cultural processes that formed the archaeological record at the Commissariat Store, Brisbane. The history of the site, from its construction in 1829 as part of the Moreton Bay penal settlement to the present, is examined and the expected impacts and processes on the archaeological record are identified. Archaeological evidence from the salvage excavation of the site undertaken in 1978 and 1979 is analyzed to identify the cultural and non-cultural site formation processes. This study identifies the presence of cultural formation processes including discard, loss, abandonment and re-use from an examination of the historical and archaeological evidence. Non-cultural formation processes at work in the site include faunalturbation, floralturbation, flooding, and aquaturbation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines whether there was an excess of deaths and the relative role of temperature and ozone in a heatwave during 7–26 February 2004 in Brisbane, Australia, a subtropical city accustomed to warm weather. The data on daily counts of deaths from cardiovascular disease and non-external causes, meteorological conditions, and air pollution in Brisbane from 1 January 2001 to 31 October 2004 were supplied by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australian Bureau of Meteorology, and Queensland Environmental Protection Agency, respectively. The relationship between temperature and mortality was analysed using a Poisson time series regression model with smoothing splines to control for nonlinear effects of confounding factors. The highest temperature recorded in the 2004 heatwave was 42°C compared with the highest recorded temperature of 34°C during the same periods of 2001–2003. There was a significant relationship between exposure to heat and excess deaths in the 2004 heatwave [estimated increase in non-external deaths: 75 ([95% confidence interval, CI: 11–138; cardiovascular deaths: 41 (95% CI: −2 to 84)]. There was no apparent evidence of substantial short-term mortality displacement. The excess deaths were mainly attributed to temperature but exposure to ozone also contributed to these deaths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universities now have a lot to say about tertiary teaching. University policy, teaching units, and promotion criteria have a very specific understanding of good teaching within the academy. This case study of Queensland University of Technology (QUT) found that good teaching has two central features: it is necessarily student centred, and it is `innovative', a characteristic that, at QUT at least, is increasingly equated with the use of technology. This paper – based upon interviews with twenty-four QUT academics across three faculties (Education, Science, and Law), an analysis of QUT's teaching and learning policies, and some additional historical research – will suggest four things. First, that the concept of student centred learning, based on ideals of progressive education, is neither an historical inevitability nor theoretically unproblematic. Second, that irrespective of discipline, all lecturers espouse an underpinning `progressive' teaching philosophy, even though, in practice, teaching style appears to be determined primarily by subject-matter. Third, given that, in practice, the progressive model seems to suit some faculties and subject areas better than others (i.e. Education, as opposed to Science and Law) this has significant professional implications for the lecturers concerned. Finally, that rather than promoting a `progressive' pedagogy, the use of technology in teaching actually appears to reinforce traditional teaching techniques. Consequently, it is suggested that monolithic understandings of good teaching, when applied across the academy irrespective of context, are often inappropriate, ineffective and inequitous, and that universities need to think through their teaching policies and programmes more thoroughly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the methods and findings of the Student Focus Project, a sixmonth study of student perceptions of service at a large university in Brisbane, Australia. The study paneled 24 focus groups of undergraduate students to assess their beliefs about a pretested set of questions concerning positive and negative aspects of university life, successes and frustrations with university service, attempts to overcome the obstacles of university life, and what students expect from their relationship to the university. Of the themes identified in the Student Focus study, it was found that “malignant bureaucracy” and the “balkanization of Information” are systemic factors that negatively influence student perceptions of the quality of university service. It was also found that student strategies for service recovery can contribute to the overall confusion and poor performance of university services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]