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Curriculum, as a policy and way of moving through educational experience, is entwined with an ongoing history of invasion in Australia and similar invader‐colonial contexts. As a result of this, the conceptual foundations of curriculum in Australia reproduce colonial epistemologies as normative modes of knowing and consideration. One way of seeing how this is possible and easily reproduced is through a consideration of how renderings and representations of "place" – the complex entanglements of lands, histories, and identit(y/ies) – mediate both how (a) invasion can be normalised as a historical, geographic, and political "placial" reality, and (b) students and teachers might experience education in and of place. Indeed, "place" is a central guiding concept in official curriculum policy just as much as place is an experienced curriculum both within the school and in the broader world. In this respect, this paper looks to unpack how the concept of place is represented in curriculum policy and the attendant assumptions and implicit discourses that this (re)produces about the experiences of people in/of invaded place. Through a look at the coming revision to the Humanities and Social Science's learning area of the Australian Curriculum, I look to how the curriculum as policy frames place as synonymous with invader place epistemically and how this mediates what students can know and themselves feel about the embodied experience of learning about/in/of place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropological accounts of sexual and gendered difference often serve the role of footnotes that buttress and even expand the reach of Euro‐American concepts. In contrast to this contained role for anthropology, queer footnotes can push the discipline toward more capacious and experimental engagements with powerful knowledge. In 2020, governments around the world introduced lockdowns and border‐control measures in response to the COVID‐19 pandemic. This was the case in Australia, where I undertook fieldwork with trans‐ and queer Indonesians living in Melbourne. In Australia, COVID‐19 public health measures paralleled and exacerbated migration restrictions on people living with HIV and the criminalization of sex work. Asian, queer, trans‐, and sex worker bodies were addressed as a moral and physiological contagion. Queer anthropology is good for maintaining a critical ethnographic focus on how the state governs through a racial biopolitics of containment, and generates concepts for public health that shift the focus from security to care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses articles within the issue on topics including issues relating to everyday nursing, changes in nursing education and practice in Australia, and differences in nursing thought inherent in internationalization.

In this article, we contribute to understanding of the mechanisms through which students' socio‐economic family background can translate into academic performance by focusing on the concept of student engagement. Drawing on theoretical perspectives from disciplines across the social sciences, and a major nationally representative dataset from Australia, which links survey responses with administrative records on school performance, we conduct a series of multiple regression models to investigate the mediating role of student engagement on the relationship between students' socio‐economic status (SES) and academic achievement. We find that, first, low‐SES students show lower levels of engagement than other students, particularly in terms of behavioural and cognitive aspects; they also have lower achievement levels as measured by standardised test scores. We further find that lower engagement is associated with lower achievement levels, and that the effects of SES on achievement are partially mediated through student engagement. Although there are clearly other mechanisms in place that operate at the same time, it is important to focus on student engagement since it can be directly influenced by teachers and school leaders, as well as curriculum choices and school resources. This makes it a ripe target for government policies aimed at improving educational outcomes for students from low‐SES families, compared with approaches targeting the influences of family environment or peer groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of indicators and metrics for research evaluation purposes is well‐documented; however, less is known about their use by individual scholars. With a focus on the social sciences, this article contributes to the existing literature on indicators and metrics use in fields with diverse publication practices. Scholars in Australia and Sweden were asked about their use and reasons for using metrics. A total of 581 completed surveys were analyzed to generate descriptive statistics, with textual analysis performed on comments provided to open questions. While just under half of the participant group had used metrics, the Australians reported use in twice the proportion of their Swedish peers. Institutional policies and processes were frequently associated with use, and the scholars' comments suggest a high level of awareness of some metrics as well as strategic behavior in demonstrating research performance. There is also evidence of tensions between scholars' research evaluation environment and their disciplinary values and publication practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents addiction-related news briefs on topics such as the establishment of the President's Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis in the U.S., and it previews several conferences and events such as the 9th International AIDS Society (IAS) Conference on HIV Science in Paris, France on July 23-26, 2017. The legalisation of electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) in New Zealand is examined, along with a cigarette tax increase in California.

This paper examines the evolution of asylum policy under the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd governments between 2008 and 2013 and evaluates its impact on irregular maritime arrivals and deaths at sea. In addition to providing an account of asylum policy during this political epoch - and the dramatic rise in irregular maritime arrivals and deaths at seas - we also evaluate these policies in an effort to distil some broader public policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim Anthropogenic introductions of Australian Acacia spp. that become classed as alien invasive species have consequences besides the physical, spatial and ecological: there are also cultural, ethical and political considerations that demand attention from scholars in the humanities and social sciences. As practitioners in these disciplines, our aim is to reflect upon some of the social and conceptual ideas and attitudes relating to the spread of Australian Acacia spp. around the world. We therefore provide a longer-term historical and philosophical perspective using South Africa as a key example. We explain some of the cultural aspects of Australian acacias, relating them to history, philosophy and societal ideas that were once, or indeed remain, important, either regarding their exportation from Australia or their importation into other countries. Focussing principally on South Africa and Australia but including brief references to other locations, we augment the literature by making connections between acacia introductions and environmental ethics and aesthetics, national and environmental history and symbolic and other discourses. We evaluate a number of the cultural and philosophical dimensions of invasion biology as a societal response and explicate the interesting contradiction of Australian acacia introductions as simultaneously economically valuable and environmentally transformative in South Africa. Location South Africa, Australia, with references to other parts of the world. Methods This paper has been written by an interdisciplinary team (two historians, two geographers, a philosopher and an ecologist) and is conceptual and historical, conforming in language and structure to the humanities style. It relies on published and unpublished literature from this disciplinary domain and the critical evaluation of these sources. Results Many Acacia spp. from Australia have been introduced around the world, generally guided in different eras by a variety of overarching mindsets, including the colonial ethos of 'improvement' (1800s to mid 1900s), an economically driven mindset of 'national development' (1900s), by a people-centred frame combining concerns of environment and livelihood in 'sustainable development' (1980s onwards), and an aesthetic ethos of ornamental planting that surfaces in all periods. The newest ethos of controlling or managing alien invasive species, a normative attitude deriving from the burgeoning of invasion biology, has more recently shaped the ideology of these plant exchanges and sharpened the focus on species that may be simultaneously both weeds and commercially valuable crops. Our perspective from the humanities and social sciences calls for a more transparent approach that clearly acknowledges such contradictions. Main conclusions We conclude that the global experiment of human-mediated Australian acacia introductions raises a number of issues that reflect changing societal concerns and demand attention from scholars in disciplines apart from the natural sciences. Here we highlight the impact of historical context in plant exchanges, the history and philosophy of science as it relates to invasion biology, and changing - sometimes divisive - societal priorities in terms of aesthetic, economic and conservation values. In particular, the case of Acacia spp. in South Africa highlights the contradictory aspects of introductions in that some species are both commercially important and environment-altering invasive plants. We argue that the contribution of disciplines beyond ecology to the debates about the invasive status of acacias enlarges our understanding and provides useful insights for botanists, foresters, managers and policy makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 1980s, “linguistic” and “cultural” influences have shaped the study of history and the broader social sciences worldwide. In Australia these influences have developed more slowly than in comparable countries such as Great Britain or the United States. Yet the colourful language and “culture wars” of Australian politics have long been key ingredients of political history's appeal in and outside of the academy. Many practitioners perceive that the so-called “turns” constitute a threat to the study of political history. This article contends that, on the contrary, they have enlivened historiographical concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present study we explore how annual variation in climate (late wet-season rainfall) affects population demography in a gape-limited obligate piscivorous predator, the Arafura filesnake Acrochordus arafurae in the Australian tropics. These aquatic snakes display extreme sexual dimorphism, with body sizes and relative head sizes of females much larger than those of males. Two consecutive years with low rainfall during the late wet season reduced the abundance of small but not large sized fish. Although snake residual body mass (RBM, calculated from a general linear regression of ln-transformed mass to ln-SVL) decreased after the first year with low prey availability, it was not until the second year that reduced prey abundance caused a dramatic decline in filesnake survival, and hence in population numbers. Thus, our results suggest that most snakes survived the first year of reduced prey abundance, but a successive year with low prey availability proved fatal for many animals. However, the effects of prey scarcity on RBM and survival fell disproportionately on some size classes of snakes. Medium-sized animals (large males and intermediate-sized females) were affected more dramatically than were small or large snakes. We attribute the higher survival of small snakes to their lower energy needs compared to medium-sized individuals, and the higher survival of large snakes to the continued abundance of large prey (mainly large catfish). Two successive years with low abundance of smaller sized prey thus massively modified the size-structure of the filesnake population, virtually eliminating large males and intermediate-sized females. Our field data provide a clear demonstration of the ways in which stochastic variation in climatic conditions can have dramatic effects on predator population demography, mediated via effects on prey availability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of the Institute of Australian Geographers' Millennium Project, this article examines the shift of behavioural geography from a cutting edge sub-discipline to a branch of enquiry that is now much less prominent in mainstream human geography, especially in Australia. Through an exploration of the rationale for behavioural geography, a brief outline of the nature of the work that was done, and a consideration of the critiques of behavioural geography, the paper argues that behavioural geography enriched the discipline in several ways: it was instrumental in encouraging geographers to consider the epistemological foundations of the discipline; it fostered consideration of a variety of philosophical and methodological positions; and it highlighted the need to consider interrelationships between individuals, groups, society and environment thereby bringing into prominence the ways in which shared environmental meanings are contested and negotiated. Behavioural geography might be a term that is used much less than it once was and behaviourally-orientated research might increasingly find expression in interdisciplinary outlets rather than in mainstream geography journals but contemporary geography is heir to the endeavours of behavioural geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on some of van Gigch's (2003) critiques in regard to quantification in the social sciences, this paper explores the notion of ‘98% British’ that has underpinned analysis of migration and ethnicity in Australia. Historical data are used to suggest some alternate pictures and understandings of Australia in the 20th and 21st centuries. These alternate understandings belie the dominant frameworks of policy and analysis to date but begin to suggest alternatives such as the seeking out of peaceable histories in the presence of diversity rather than the predominant focus on conflict. In conclusion the ethical framework developed by C. West Churchman and elaborated on by van Gigch (2006) are employed as tools to consider the moral ramifications of the lack of critique of the ‘98% British’ mythology. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the Australian and New Zealand Society of Jungian Analysts'(ANZSJA) 2006 model of training. It describes the procedure and philosophy behind ANZSJA's latest amendment of training. It infers that the influences on the advances of analytical psychology and analytic training in ANZSJA to continue to train Jungian analysts by exploring new ways of conceptualizing training.

There is a growing belief that young children should be involved in decisions that affect them. This belief has its foundations in a new model of the young child, in a new concern with young children's rights as citizens and in new knowledge about the significance of young children's early experiences. This article examines the increasing interest in involving young children in policy-making and its rationale. It then presents two case studies from Australia of consulting young children in policy-making, to show what consulting young children can offer children, policy-makers and the wider community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A substantial empirical literature exists on ranking the published research output of individual academic economists and individual university Economics departments, including Australian work in Economics. However, very little corresponding effort has been directed at examining trends in the nature of published articles, and this embryonic literature is exclusively focused on a handful of top-ranked journals to the exclusion of Australian Economics journals. This note seeks to fill this gap by adopting the methodology developed by Coelho et al. (2005) in their analysis of the decline in critical commentary and applying it to Australian Economics journals for the period 1962 to 2005. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I explore an anthropologically underresearched topic, boredom, utilizing ethnographic data from the Australian Aboriginal settlement of Yuendumu and situating that research in a comparative perspective. I examine the concept's genesis and meaning at Yuendumu using the social-constructivist approach to boredom as proposed in literature studies, sociology, and philosophy. That approach provides an account of how the emergence of boredom in 18th-century Europe is linked to processes of modernity. That perspective, however, has led to claims that boredom is a Western phenomenon and that its existence elsewhere is because of "Westernization." In this article, I argue against that perspective by linking instances of boredom at Yuendumu to perceptions of personhood and to conceptualizations of being in time-particularly socioculturally specific ways of perceiving time and postcolonial temporalities as generating the emergence of boredom. This boredom is a historically and socioculturally specific phenomenon, arising out of distinct sociocultural engagements with locally particular processes of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study ranks Australian economics departments according to their average research productivity during 1998–2002. The highest ranked departments are those at ANU, JCU, Melbourne, Tasmania and UWA. We also rank departments according to the variability of research productivity among their members, the assumption being that, other things being equal, the less variable is productivity within a department, the better. Research productivity is found to be highly skewed within all departments. However, in general, research productivity is more (less) evenly distributed within those departments that have relatively high (low) average research productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community engagement has come to the fore as a policy and programme approach that seeks to connect citizens both with each other and with government in order to deliver improved social and economic opportunities and outcomes. This model has become a key aspect of the intervention approach within Indigenous communities and is seen to have particular application in addressing community justice issues. This article examines a suite of community justice initiatives being used in Indigenous communities in Australia with a view to ascertaining how the principles of community engagement are operationalized. The article draws on this information and argues that community engagement is only one aspect of a number of community-oriented justice initiatives currently being applied. These initiatives range from concepts of community as a location, community as an interest group, and the leveraging of community capital so as to tap into and build better and stronger relationships. In so doing, the latter attempts to increase the social infrastructure, resources and capacity of communities. However, despite government attention in this area, there is a lack of a policy and programmatic framework to guide a coherent and apposite approach to issues of community in specific policy settings. The article contributes to the development of a framework that begins the process of differentiating and assessing justice administration interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the current and future role of the periodical "Australian Economic History Review" as of July 2004. Institutional decline of economic history discipline in Australia and New Zealand; Absence of growth in number of subscribers; Plans to continue interdisciplinary scope of the periodical.

Looks at the patterns and directions in Australian politics over the past fifty years, as of June 2004. Characterization of the 2004 Australian politics; Features of the Australian politics that have disappeared; Changes to the shape and character of party politics.

This article offers information on the Australian Social Science Data Archive (ASSDA). The data sets held by ASSDA contain a wealth of information on the social and economic experience in Australia and other countries in the region. ASSDA is attached to the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. It was established in 1981 with a brief to collect and preserve computer-readable data relating to social, political and economic affairs, and to make the data available for further analysis. ASSDA collects data files from all parts of Australia and the region, and from different organizations, including universities, market research companies, government departments and research bureaus. Data stored in ASSDA are usually made available for secondary analysis by other researchers, subject to any restrictions on access to the data that may have been imposed by the depositors. The catalogue of holdings is available online, together with instructions for accessing data sets in the collection. The role of ASSDA is to provide an alternative for research data in every field of social research. Data sets are documented carefully, preserved indefinitely, and made available to other researchers. Preservation is necessary so other researchers can use the data to replicate the original results, perhaps as a first step in extending the original analysis, or to challenge or confirm the original findings, or to test the robustness of these findings by applying different analytical methods.

In this era of reflexive sociology it is commonplace that subjectivity is of great sociological concern, and that the comprehension by social researchers of their own subject position is essential. Still, old habits die hard. Focusing on selected texts in the sociology of the Australian family, this paper traces the effects of failing to focus the sociological gaze on subjectivity and its variation across society. Highlighted are some patterns of analytic misconstruction of subjectivity, especially the substitution of measurement for a theory of practice, and the projection by sociologists of their own class-specific subjectivity onto society at large. Ultimately, this misconstruction turns works like those discussed in this paper into a powerful denial of alternative subjectivities, and a reinforcement of the socially dominant perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory essay takes `anthropology at home' to refer to the conduct of fieldwork and other kinds of anthropological research in or about communities which Australian anthropologists regard as culturally familiar. In that sense, anthropology at home raises two interrelated questions: 1) `What is an appropriate anthropological object?' and 2) `What are the appropriate methods for studying that object?' I argue that anthropology remains overdetermined by its colonial heritage and that it is still overly concerned with the study of `the other' through long-term fieldwork. My feeling is that we should displace the idea of `the other' in favour of an anthropological object construed in terms of self-other relationships. This not only implies that anthropology at home should cease to appear as an oxymoron, but also suggests that a more comprehensive employment of various study methods should displace long-term fieldwork as metonymic of the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on processes of agrifood restructuring in Australia and New Zealand. The author analyzes the roles and relationships of the agrifood industries in the Australasia region during a period of major change. The researchers were drawn from a wide range of disciplines, but shared a common interest in the analysis of agricultural change and the impacts of current transformations at a number of levels, global, regional, and local. Unlike the United States, with its land grant colleges and freestanding departments of rural sociology, Australia and New Zealand have put only limited resources into rural-based sociological research, concentrating instead on extension and agricultural economics. The former has gone through a crisis of identity and is much reduced force in an increasingly privatized, "user-pays" environment, while the latter is generally an extremely conservative disciple, marked by theoretical rigidity, which continues to leave people and social relations out of its mathematical models.

The series of International Social Science Surveys Australia (IsssA) provides a rich source of information on many variables of interest to labour market economists, public policy analysts, political scientists, and sociologists. The IsssA regularly collects extensive and detailed survey data on large, representative national samples of Australians, beginning in 1984 and repeated most years since then. The IsssA is an omnibus survey that provides a vehicle for the public-use data described in the article, for academic research projects, and for sponsored research.

This paper uses Australian cross-sectional data to examine the determinants of individual union membership. It analyses the separate effect of three groups of variables on the probability of unionisation: personal attributes, occupational and industry-related characteristics, and social and attitudinal factors. While the personal attributes of an employee were found to have little effect on union status, the other two groups of variables added significantly to the explained variance in union membership. An important finding of the study was that certain attitudes, ideologies and social values were clearly associated with variations in union status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article features a discussion on Australia's social wage. Australian academics in the social sciences have long lamented the dearth of good Australian materials from which to teach and to which to refer students. National politics is more oriented to universalist policies, and as Gough Whitlam tried to move the allocative system from focusing on the needy to all Australians, resources were stretched, and much of the electorate was alienated. Clearly greater resources were thrown into bolstering the social wage while the Whitlam government was in power. During those three years the consumer price index rose 41%, average weekly earnings rose 56%, while social security pensions and benefits rose 80%.

The article assesses the importance of policy formulation in accordance with the political, economic and social agenda of the government in Australia. The author cited that giving advice about policy can contribute to a good management culture that includes competent top management and leadership, effective communication of objectives and priorities by the executive to all staff, and integrity of ethical standards. Policy formulation allows the country to balance and evaluate its resources in terms of financial and economic stability.

The newcomers' situation necessarily involves change and a variety of adjustment processes, in this situation the self may come into question and become an object of conscious reflection and definition. This paper focuses on the processes of change and continuity in the newcomer's self concept during the first year after moving to a new locale. Data are drawn from a broader longitudinal study of 30 newcomer families in an Australian city and are interpreted from a symbolic interactionist perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares the social structure of house owning and renting in Australia and Sweden. While there is an extensive literature within urban sociology on housing in general, the sociology of tenure -- and in particular of the factors influencing the balance of predominant forms of tenure in different societies -- has been almost entirely neglected. This neglect is all the more surprising considering the importance of different types of tenure for life-styles, notably spending patterns and residential mobility. Homeownership, for example, is a form of tenure which involves certain fundamental commitments on the part of the householder which have far-reaching consequences not only for the householder but also for the structure of the urban environment and the wider society. It should be noted that social values concerning the desirability of home-ownership as a form of tenure occupy a peculiarly important place in a number of societies, and most notably in Australia. Characteristic of the failure to consider the social implications of different tenure forms is the acceptance of economic arguments which set out to demonstrate that owning is considerably cheaper that renting in the long run, the implication being that the only thing which prevents everyone from owning is the inability of a proportion of the population to afford the cost of home-purchase. From a sociological perspective, however, narrow financial explanations are at best questionable. The complexity of social factors which are likely to come into play during the entire family cycle, together with major costs which cannot be predicted, severely limit economic arguments. These include such factors as the alternative use of the deposit foregone, the open-ended commitment to repairs and maintenance, the cost of moving, which one U.S. estimate calculates as adding no less than 16 per cent to the housing costs of residentially more mobile households.

This article focuses on MOST being at national level. Some countries with MOST Liaison Committees are: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Benin, Burundi, Canada, Columbia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Iceland, India, Iran and Italy. The Indian Government has designated the Indian Council of Social Science Research as the nodal agency for the MOST programme. The Council has constituted a group to formulate a project for participation under the MOST programme. The French MOST National Liaison Group met in early December 1994 to discuss the possibility of hosting an international thematic development meeting on the third MOST theme of Coping Locally and Regionally with Economic, Technological and Environmental Phenomena. Plans are in the making to host this meeting in autumn 1995 in Paris.

The article focuses on Singapore's health care system as a model for Australia as described by William Haseltine, a U.S. medical researcher and founder of the biopharmaceutical company Human Genome Sciences, on his book in terms of how it works, its financing, its history and its future directions.

The article reports on developments related to economics. Professor Ken Wallis retired from the editorial board of "The Economic Record" effective in the December 2005 issue of the periodical. The prize for the best paper was awarded at the Australian Conference of Economists in Melbourne. The Economic Society of Australia is inviting participants to the 35th Australian Conference of Economists at Curtin University of Technology. There will be keynote lectures, special sessions with invited speakers and contributed paper sessions.