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Drawing on ethnographic interview analysis of Aboriginal participants in Australia, this study seeks to expand the critical discussions in Applied Linguistics by understanding the concept of translanguaging in relation to its "mundanity" (or ordinariness). Our data shows that rather than perceiving translanguaging as extraordinary, for Aboriginal speakers it is more likely to be considered normal, unremarkable, mundane, and as a long-existing phenomenon. The concept of the mundanity of translanguaging is thereby expanded through three main discussions in this article: 1) negotiating identity and resisting racism, where the Aboriginal speakers choose to translanguage using their full linguistic repertoires, but with appropriate communicative adjustments made for their interlocutor; 2) a display of respect towards their land, heritage and language; and 3) as an inherent and mundane everyday practice where they constantly negotiate between heritage languages, English, Kriol, and Aboriginal English varieties. The significance of this study lies in the normalisation of translanguaging as a mundane disinvention strategy, as this urges us to perceive linguistic separateness as a colonial ideological construct that is used to exhibit control over diverse peoples and to maintain uniformity and stability of nation-states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on insights gained from incorporating dance improvisation into a broader early years environmental education ethnographic research project. Findings are reported from a two-day workshop where a dancer was invited to work with young children to attune to the weather through their bodies. In these workshops, the practice of dance improvisation was used as a deliberate interference to disrupt the disconnected and disembodied ways in which weather is often taught to young children. The paper argues that when children attune with weather through the embodied and relational practice of dance improvisation, this challenges the common practice of learning about weather as a separate phenomenon happening outside the classroom. Dance, as an intervention, helps to de-stabilise binary human-nature relations and reveals how children might come to understand their (human) selves as also weather bodies. New ways to understand humans' entanglements with current weather events are also articulated, offering educators and researchers strategies for considering how the practice of dance improvisation might be integrated into early years education as an innovative approach to environmental learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pigdogging is a popular pastime in Australia, a form of recreational hunting whereby people collaborate with dogs to chase and catch wild pigs. This paper analyses the hunt as an interspecies event that unfolds through the sensual and sensory entanglements of human and nonhuman, with a particular focus on the perspectives of the hunters. The concept of 'atmosphere' will be employed to frame an ethnographic analysis of two facets of pigdogging. First, by hunting with a dog, humans augment their capacity to identify the presence of pigs through the canine's extraordinary sense of scent. Through this relationship, the world of scent is revealed as having atmospheric properties: an enveloping phenomenon which is known through the dog, yet also escapes the hunter's perceptual apprehension. Second, this paper will illustrate examples of how atmosphere develops through the sensual relations between human and nonhuman bodies during the hunt. An affectively charged interspecies encounter is composed and participated in by the hunter through this recreational practice, and affords the enactment of subjectivities central to an aesthetics of pigdogging. Hunting atmospheres in this paper emerge at the juncture of human and more‐than‐human bodies, perspectives and worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: A methodology that combined ethnographies, including the ethnography of performance with narrative inquiry was used in a research project investigating the assessment of senior secondary Drama performance in Australia. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach: After a temporal change in the research approach, it was decided that the research method needed to capture the Drama performance assessment phenomenon as it was lived and experienced. Findings: As a result, methodological choices shifted from procedural documentation and document analysis to ethnographic observations that were able to capture the more nuanced aspects of the relationship between Drama performance and assessment, embracing tacit learning, agendas, cultures, experiences and understandings. Originality/value: This paper reflects on the methodological dilemmas and choices made when studying artistic and aesthetic texts in the classroom, and poses considerations for future researchers conducting inquiries in aesthetically rich learning environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the disjunctures that exist between the temporalities of legal status and those of migrants' lived experiences, and explores the relationship between precarity and temporality. Ethnographic research conducted among recent migrants from China living in Perth, Western Australia with a focus on migrants who have been sponsored by employers to work and remain in Australia, demonstrates that while migrants may hold temporary or permanent visas, their migration objectives and settlement processes do not necessarily accord with their formal status. Many individuals who arrived in Australia with the intention of quickly attaining permanent residency find their plans are stymied by shifting circumstances and changes to migration legislation. They instead continue to experience the precarious employment, liminality and family disruption that come with a prolonged and indeterminate temporariness. Meanwhile others have become permanent residents despite arriving as self-imagined sojourners, employment in Australia very often only the next step in a series of temporary labour migrations. Even after many years of permanent status, however, these migrants commonly experience a limited sense of belonging and imagine futures that entail circular patterns of on-migration. The case studies presented disrupt the sense of permanence that is implied in secure legal statuses, and provide evidence of the lasting impact of precarious temporalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Caste among South Asian migrants remains under-researched. Some past studies of caste among indentured Indians in the former British colonies show that it, by and large, failed to revive abroad. Researchers of post-World War II free migrants in the West have remarked, albeit tangentially, that caste has remained salient. There is a need to further explore the problem of caste for a better understanding of migrant living. An unprecedented movement of overseas Indian Dalits in Britain, demanding caste legislation, also proves the significance of the issue. In this ethnographic research into Nepalese migration and settlement in Australia, I seek to understand how Nepal's caste hierarchy has shaped the process of migration, as well as the family and communal life of migrants on the continent. I outline some of the specific areas - domestic, ritual, religious, marriage, transnational politics - where caste has retained its saliency abroad. My analysis shows that a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of caste overseas is essential to minimise the controversies and promote research into this potentially sensitive but crucial topic. I demonstrate that caste has found a new lease of life overseas due to, inter alia, the growing use of the Internet and smartphones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses ethnography being used in marketing research in Australia. The Australian Market and Social Research Society's Internet directory listed 17 of 324 research suppliers as offering ethnographic techniques for research which means that only 5% of Australian research suppliers are using ethnography.

Part One of Tunnel Vision discussed the limited scope of ethnographic attention in Australia in the late 20th century, and the discipline's reluctance to take up post‐colonial ideas that were influential elsewhere. In Part Two I examine the challenges faced by apolitical classicism since the 1970s, and the continuing resistance of historical and political perspectives in Indigenist anthropology, despite some individual attempts to blaze new trails. Demands for specialised work related to land rights and native title has meant the survival of anthropological classicism and a failure to explore basic questions concerning Indigenous conditions in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologists have long attempted to come to grips with Indigenous Australian sorcery beliefs and especially with the idea that acts with no understandable efficacy bring about illness and death. In this ethnographic interpretation of sorcery beliefs in the remote community of Numbulwar, I follow those few who have attempted to find a link between these apparently harmless acts and real physiological consequences, arguing that the fear of sorcery that pervades Numbulwar contributes directly to the stress of daily life and indirectly to the premature morbidity and mortality of too many lives. Belief is posited as the mechanism whereby the human stress response is activated to a harmful extent, a process in which the projection of envious feelings may often be critical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recovery approach is now among the most influential paradigms shaping mental health policy and practice across the English-speaking world. While recovery is normally presented as a deeply personal process, critics have challenged the individualism underpinning this view. A growing literature on "family recovery" explores the ways in which people, especially parents with mental ill health, can find it impossible to separate their own recovery experiences from the processes of family life. While sympathetic to this literature, we argue that it remains limited by its anthropocentricity, and therefore struggles to account for the varied human and nonhuman entities and forces involved in the creation and maintenance of family life. The current analysis is based on an ethnographic study conducted in Australia, which focused on families in which the father experiences mental ill health. We employ the emerging concept of the "family assemblage" to explore how the material, social, discursive and affective components of family life enabled and impeded these fathers' recovery trajectories. Viewing families as heterogeneous assemblages allows for novel insights into some of the most basic aspects of recovery, challenging existing conceptions of the roles and significance of emotion, identity and agency in the family recovery process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the intersections between migrant experiences, multilingual practices, and the creation of space. It does so by focusing on Italians who migrated to Tasmania, a group that has long been isolated from the rest of the Italian diaspora. Using an ethnographic approach within a constructivist framework, this research shows that when experiences of movement are recounted in interaction they bring about spaces of speech that are possible thanks to the articulation of local and transnational ‘centres’, which in turn are intertwined with a rich set of linguistic resources. These resources include code-choice, codeswitching, and intentional exposure of phonological variation, and are variously combined to allow the emergence of spaces for people to move through. Spaces of speech are thus situated interactional spaces where acts of (re)telling are related to centres as spatial resources through which not only social meaning is created but also location and locution are mutually constitutive. (Spaces of speech, centres, cultural presence, Italian, Tasmania)* [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Māori living in Āotearoa New Zealand are strongly connected to their communities, through woven threads of genealogy [whakapapa], spirituality [wairua], language regeneration [Te Kōhanga Reo, and Kura Kaupapa Māori movements] and a distinctive Treaty of Waitangi [Te Tiriti ō Waitangi] legacy that informs relationships, expectations and guidance from past and future generations. These are part of a holistic orientation towards the force of communities and family [whānau] being able to sustain individuals-within-community. For example, utilizing whakapapa (connected layering) is about engaging in the narrative of what it means to be Māori; a stabilizing cultural identity that many non-Māori [Pākehā] find challenging to understand. Abroad, Māori are still a ‘minority culture’ as they are in NZ, and they often find themselves dispersed from the major forces of the above connectedness and unique epistemological tradition. There are touchstones to place and Indigeneity that become even more significant as they provide a means to resist the bifurcation of the self from the environment, and the individual construct from the collective. They become a crucial part of countering the diasporic anomie of being ‘away from home’. Being a member of the Māori diaspora living in Australia, I use an auto-ethnographic lens to undertake a profound decolonizing methodology in naming stories from the present and privileging stories from the past, in order to deliberately reclaim heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Critical thinking is at the heart of tertiary education, and is also a key focus of university preparation courses. In particular, developing the ability to read − and to read critically – is vital for aspiring university students. Courses in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) generally include some attention to critical reading, but how this is conceived and realised varies considerably. This paper reports on the findings of an ethnographic study of three EAP teaching-learning contexts in Australia and relates the pedagogy of these classrooms to theories of critical thinking identified by Davies and Barnett (2015) . All three EAP contexts focused to some extent on cognitive skills such as identifying main ideas, but teachers differed in their approach to criticality and attention to critical pedagogy. In some classes, students appeared to take a performative role (simply ‘doing’ the task); however, in other classes students demonstrated a more intense engagement with the content of their reading – an indication of a developing critical disposition which could serve them well at university and beyond. The paper argues that critical reading pedagogy can be realised in different ways, but that nurturing students’ critical dispositions, in particular, requires delicate scaffolding to support their development as critical meaning-makers. Such scaffolding pushes students to develop deeper skills and criticality, yet enables them to feel secure in the transcultural contact zones in which they are participating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines issues of diversity and inclusion in Australian public relations from the perspective of a female migrant academic. Using an autoethnographic approach, I draw from a postcolonial feminist perspective and recount my experience of public relations in Australia. This article incorporates self with the social, particularly expressing a voice often unheard of in the public relations discipline. In expressing my 'voice', I use memory texts that have triggered dialogues within myself and with others in my environment. I argue that Australian public relations education is a product of the country's struggles with its identity. To move forward, the public relations discipline requires more culturally aware faculty and practitioners who can develop and champion a curriculum that embraces multiple and inter-cultural perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a range of archival and published sources including field notes, photographs and drawings, this paper investigates the social relationships formed between Ngaanyatjarra families and a small group of scientists in the presence of cameras during a 3-week ethnographic research expedition to the Warburton Range in 1935. The impression left by the ethno-historical record is that, despite disparate norms around looking behaviours, a degree of familiarity was quickly established that enabled intimate acts of filming and photography. And yet the inter-subjectivity that facilitated such photography was deliberately obscured when the images produced were subsequently disseminated to outside audiences, in effect reinstating social distance and turning Aboriginal familiars back into strangers. Recent reconsiderations of the figure of 'the stranger' (Simmel 1999; Marotta 2012) and an extensive literature on the relationship between anthropological knowledge and photography (Edwards 1992, 2001) help to unpack what this sociality reveals about belonging, identity and the representative reach of photographic mediums. A series of crayon drawings by the expedition's young Aboriginal guide points to the limits of the social categories assumed for Ngaanyatjarra people by these scientists. In their place is found complex contemporary Aboriginal identities that were simultaneously modern and traditional, embedded in evolving intergenerational social frameworks that have endured until today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tackles what is arguably one of the most pressing and intractable educational issues confronting western democracies – the disengagement and disconnection from schooling of alarming numbers of young people. The paper looks at the policy response in Victoria, Australia, and through ethnographic interviews with a small number of young people; it finds a significant mismatch between the policy intent of re-engagement programmes, and the experiences of young people themselves. It seems that this is an instance of what might be termed policy deafness, a situation that will likely produce devastating consequences unless corrected. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper traces insights into the challenges and dilemmas experienced whilst researching students' interpretations and understandings of the Behaviour Management in Schools policy in Western Australia. Journal records, supported by student transcripts, are woven together in a reflexive ethnographic journey – from the beginning phase of searching formal approval; gaining access to the participants; and finally the challenge of ‘letting go’ of student voices. It is the reflexive process itself that illustrates and provides understanding, thereby creating spaces to not only confront but also work through to resolve research dilemmas. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to provide experiential insight and understanding of ethical deliberations when engaging in reflexivity that allow one to move forward in this form of research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper seeks to animate discussion around how social class operates with adolescent girls from low socio-economic status backgrounds to shape and inform their decisions about participation in physical activity (PA) inside and outside of school. Examining the instance of girls in a single secondary school in an Australian regional town, the paper questions the impact of class and how the girls experience the obstacles, impediments and interferences to participation in PA. These girls are portrayed as living multiple, complex and embodied subjectivities that shape and are informed by the relational geographies in which they are located, as they interact ‘with’, ‘to’ and ‘between’ the social, emotional and classed hierarchies that require them to access familial and other resources in making decisions about participation in PA. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Men and boys with intellectual disability represent a unique group who have hitherto been overlooked by researchers and theorists exploring men and masculinities. Qualitative data from an Australian ethnographic study focused on the sexual health needs of men and adolescent boys with moderate to profound intellectual disability. Findings suggest that masculinity for this group of men is more a biopsychosocial phenomenon than a social construct organised around heteronormative ideals. Theconditional masculinityof the men participating in the study was based instead on a number of intrinsic and external factors, which are described in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the potential relationship between surveillance techniques, the enactment of security measures, and patient violence in mental health wards. The paper draws upon data from an ethnographic study conducted in a purpose-built mental health unit containing two wards (one locked and one open) in South Australia, and argues that acts of violence observed in the unit were typically preceded by an incident within the unit that was related to the implementation of security measures aimed at controlling non-compliant behaviours. The paper argues that if a relationship between security measures and violence does exist in mental health wards, then close attention must be paid to the ways in which forms of surveillance may arguably exacerbate, rather than prevent, the need for security measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates a suite of policies that comprise the National Partnership Agreement between federal, state and territory governments in Australia that are ostensibly aimed at improving the educational attainment levels of young Australians. It specifically explores the policy terrain of educational targets that have been arrived at by Australian governments and associated policies, using a critical policy ethnography approach. It first traces out the historical development of populist policies such as this, demonstrating how attainment targets affect the lives of young people from the most challenging backgrounds. The second, ethnographic component of this paper provides some powerful insights into what is missing from the policy although of central importance to the existential lives of the young Australians targeted by such policy reform initiatives. This paper reveals how both school and societal circumstances create barriers to the capacity of these young people to meet policy demands. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Use in criminological research of observation, semi-structured interviewing, and analysis of personal documents has been commonplace for more than a century. These research techniques can be employed to develop and test theoretical explanations and to examine the process of policy implementation. This paper briefly explicates how they were used in studies of the decision making and criminal careers of street-level thieves and hustlers, to test theoretical notions about the delegitimantion effects of white-collar crime, and to examine the implementation of a crackdown campaign by Australian tax authorities direct at crash transactions in the small building and construction industry. Investigations may profit, however, from awareness of recurrent challenges in the use of ethnographic methods before launching research of this type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnographic research concerning Aboriginal social life in the earlier settled areas of the continent has formed a minor strand within the body of Australian anthropological research. Yet these studies speak directly to the current national discourse concerning distressing conditions in many Aboriginal communities in the north. The kind of anthropology generated in South East Australia has always sought to do more than simply depict particular collective worlds-it also addresses how they are made, particularly in conditions of upheaval, relocation and engagement with state institutions and the nation's ideologies. By drawing attention to one kind of border, that between cultural/social worlds we hope to overcome another boundary, that between ethnographies of the north and the south. To this end, we draw attention to the process of boundary making that has been a crucial dynamic within the changing historical and social configurations that have shaped Aboriginal experiences of the social world. Thus, instead of reporting on the significance of cultural characteristics, this collection shifts attention to relationships with others, with the state and the encompassing society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For thousands of years spinifex grasses were utilized by Indigenous Australians, most commonly for the production of resin that was then used as a hafting adhesive. While varying levels of knowledge about this particular use are retained in Indigenous communities, museum collections serve as a valuable repository of little known information about a multitude of other uses of spinifex including ornamental, medicinal, structural and ceremonial functions. In this paper we describe the range of uses of spinifex, based on examinations of objects and photographs held in various museum collections, coupled with reviews of the ethnographic and ethnohistoric literature. This study (1) brings together disparate sources of knowledge about Indigenous uses of spinifex that are not well known among the scientific community and (2) demonstrates the value of museum collections for Indigenous communities seeking to 'reconnect' with aspects of socalled 'lost traditional culture'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the individual music research projects the authors were working on in Borroloola, Northern Territory of Australia, and the ways in which the lived and inter-subjective concepts of sisterhood and friendship strengthened the authors' shared experiences in the field and became the foundations of their method. Design/methodology/approach – Through an auto-ethnographic and inter-subjective narrative approach, the authors consider how the intertwined notions of relationship as research and "friendship as method", underpinned what was being researched, how the research was enacted, and finally how the authors came to further appreciate and understand the role that music-making plays in facilitating this process. Findings – The authors' independent and shared experiences during this research were stark reminders that it is indeed the quality of field relationships and friendships, rather than clever theoretical ideas or fancy methodological frameworks, which ultimately determine the quality and depth of their musicological and ethnographic research. Originality/value – This paper presents original, feminist-based research which places concepts of sisterhood, friendship and relationships at the centre of music research practice in Australia. More specifically, this research highlights the complexities of such research practice across the boundaries of race, with and in collaboration with, Indigenous Australian women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This ethnographic study captures the processes that led to change in an Australian public education system. The changes were driven by strong neo-liberal discourses which resulted in a shift from a shared understanding about leading educational change in schools by knowledge transfer to managing educational change as a process, in other words, allowing the schools to decide how to change. Inside an Australian state education bureaucracy at a time when the organisation was restructured and services decentralised, this study helps show some of the disturbing trends resulting from the further entrenchment of neo-liberal strategies. Although control was re-centralised by legitimising performance mechanisms, in the form of national testing, there are indications that the focus on national tests may have alarming consequences for the content and context of education. I argue that the complexities of learning and fundamental pedagogies are being lost in preference for an over-reliance on data systems that are based on a shallow and narrow set of standardised measures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Australia has had a long and entangled history of engagement with Papua New Guinea and its peoples from the time of the earliest British and Australian explorations in the nineteenth century, through the period of colonial administration from 1902 to 1975, and continuing into the present day. One lasting outcome from the early period of these colonial engagements are the collections of ethnographic objects made by explorers, miners, traders, missionaries and government administrators in the course of their interactions with indigenous Papuans. The collections housed in Australian museums provide a different sort of narrative to that found in written documents. In contrast, they are a material archive that records in its physical properties and composition, traces of the kinds of cross-cultural interactions that occurred in the early days of the colony. They form a tangible legacy which documents how Papuans and Westerners alike used the exchange of objects to negotiate and create social relationships in a time of flux and uncertainty. The collections, the objects and their materialities not only inform us about what shaped Western collecting desires but also about how Papuan artefact producers and traders responded strategically and creatively to new opportunities for trade and exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If students are to be equipped with skills necessary to meet the challenging and diverse demands of different forms of communication brought about by the introduction of new technologies, then a broader definition of literacy is required. A pedagogy of multiliteracies recognises that there are multiple modes of representation that communicate meaning beyond language alone. As debate on information and communication technology (ICT) integration and literacy definition intensifies, early childhood teachers contemplate how they will accommodate these changes. How will early childhood education facilitate young children's use of ICT to support multiliteracies learning? This study investigated how two Western Australian teachers integrated ICT to support multiliteracies learning in early childhood classrooms. Two case studies, constructed over a nine-month period and employing ethnographic methodology, illustrated how different curricular, pedagogical, and classroom designs impact on children's early literacy experiences. An analysis across the two cases illuminated how different pedagogy, definitions, support, resources and curriculum shaped the dialogic intersection of ICT and multiliteracies in early childhood education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article draws upon a small-scale ethnographic study of children entering Australia with their parents under the Australian Government's skilled migration scheme. It illustrates how tacit conceptions of childhood underpin the way in which children's 'best interests' are understood in parental decision-making. In addition, the article highlights the ways in which different configurations of child-adult relations result in children's active participation in or, conversely, exclusion from, the decision-making process, and identifies ways in which children assert their opinions and actively seek to influence this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the culture of petrol sniffing and consequences of automobility in several parts of Australia. It offers a brief ethnographic review of petrol sniffing among Aboriginal Australians in Cobourg Peninsula. The author relates the story of a young woman from Arnhem Land who was influenced by her brother and started sniffing in 1983.

The global significance of Latin American popular music is well documented in contemporary research. Less is known about Latin American music and musicians in Australia and New Zealand (collectively termed ‘Australasia’): nations that have historically hosted waves of migrants from the Americas, and which are also strongly influenced by globalised US popular music culture. This article presents an overview of Latin American music in Australasia, drawing on ethnographic research, with the aim of providing a historical framework for the understanding of this music in the Australasian context. It begins with an explanation of the early 20th-century conceptualisation of ‘Latin’ in Australasia, and an investigation into how this abstract cultural construction affected performance opportunities for Latino/a migrants who began to arrive en masse from the 1970s onwards. It then discusses the performance practices that were most successfully recreated by Latin American musicians in Australia and New Zealand, especially ‘Andean’ folkloric music, and ‘tropical’ dance music. With reference to prominent individuals and ensembles, this article demonstrates how Andean and tropical performance practices have developed over the course of the last 30 years, and articulates the enduring importance of Latin American music and musicians within Australasian popular music culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Beginning in the 1970s, the efforts of the Australian settler state to help its Indigenous minority shifted away from 'assimilation' and embraced the principles of 'self-determination'. According to the rhetoric of the self-determination era - explored in this article as the 'liberal fantasy space' - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians should be in control of efforts to improve their lives, ultimately making state intervention redundant. A by-product of this shift was to radically change the role of non-Indigenous people who sought to participate in Indigenous development. No longer in charge of Indigenous advancement, they were now cast as partners and supporters. This article explores some of the complexities of White anti-racist subjectivities in the self-determination era. It draws on ethnographic research with a group of progressive Whites who work in Indigenous health in northern Australia. A striking feature of contemporary White anti-racist discourse is a reluctance to claim any agency in the process of Indigenous improvement. I argue that applying the concept of stigma to White privilege is a novel and productive approach to understanding this desire for self-effacement. White stigma works in a parallel fashion to the case of liberal Germans who believe the German collective identity is irrevocably tainted by the Holocaust. In the Australian case, the negative characteristics associated with Whiteness act as a barrier to the broader goal of constructing ethical White subjectivities fit for the 'liberal fantasy space' of post-colonial justice. In their attempts to overcome this barrier and transcend White stigma, White anti-racists mobilise the identity tropes of missionary, mother, and child. Ultimately, these efforts at self-fashioning point to the ultimate fantasy of decolonisation: the desire of White anti-racists to disappear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young children learn about safety from a variety of sources, including formal lessons and informal activities provided through early childhood education and care (ECEC) services. For many ECEC centres in Australia, scheduled visits from police and fire departments are a highlight of safety education activities. Such visits offer children the opportunity to see and touch safety equipment, to meet police and fire department personnel, and to discuss and ask questions about safety issues. This article analyses ethnographic data generated in a multiracial, multiethnic ECEC setting in the outer western suburbs of Sydney, Australia in 2006. Part of a larger, ongoing study concerning childhood and popular culture, this article analyses the cultural politics of safety education visits from police and fire department personnel in one research site. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of power-knowledge, together with critical race theories, the article argues that children's knowledge of fire and police services is culturally situated, and impacts significantly on the effectiveness of such visits as a means of communicating lessons in personal safety. In particular, the article considers how the children's responses to safety lessons are shaped by gendered and racialised relations of biopolitical power and state-sanctioned violence that produce discursive norms between individuals, communities and state institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an account of, and reflection on, the author's six-month ethnographic study of a residential care home for severely traumatised and abused children in Australia. During the stay she designed and offered a short six-day course for the care staff and foster carers in the use of play for emotional and therapeutic support. Prior to this, the dominant orientation of the staff was to a behaviourist model and the opportunity they had to learn about therapeutic play was positive. Fieldwork of deep cultural immersion took place with the principle method of participant observation. In addition an in-depth interview with a key education staff member and shadow tutor was conducted to further explore the value of a short training course for care staff and foster carers in providing emotional and therapeutic support for children through play. Main findings suggest that raising awareness of play and its therapeutic value was beneficial to carers and children. The unexpected main finding was that spontaneous group play observed and recounted by the shadow tutor revealed to her an in-depth understanding by the young children of the prevailing culture within the setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been little discussion on urban Indigenous identity in post-settler societies. However, in the scarce works which exist on this issue there are some remarkably common traits. For most Indigenous people, identity has primarily involved kinship ties associated with their perceived place of origin. In the city, Indigenous people encounter other Indigenous people who cannot be identified through kinship ties; in this situation, organizations dealing with Indigenous issues provide ways of connecting nonrelated Indigenous people, in line with a notion of 'pan-Indigeneity'. This pan-Indigeneity is not only based on their experience in the city, but also is influenced by the 'antique' image of Indigenous people created through contact with European settlers as well as the common cultural mores and traits which Indigenous people share. With these different kinds of identities, urban Indigenous identity has been described as 'fluid' or 'ambiguous'. The relationship between these identities has not been much examined. This paper explores the ambiguous and dynamic nature of Aboriginal identity in southwestern Sydney. Even though they are not related, Aboriginal people can usually recognize each other as `Aboriginal' through certain cultural mores and traits. However, there are some who, although claiming to be Aboriginal, who do not share these cultural mores and traits. Their presence gives rise to tension and conflict revolving around the concept of Aboriginality. Through an ethnographical examination of the process of accommodating nonrelated Aboriginal people, this paper reveals how different kinds of identities are related to each other in urban situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims To show how the inclusion of agent-based modelling improved the integration of ethno-epidemiological data in a study of psychostimulant use and related harms among young Australians. Methods Agent-based modelling, ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews and epidemiological surveys. Setting Melbourne, Perth and Sydney, Australia. Participants Club drug users in Melbourne, recreational drug users in Perth and street-based injecting drug users in Sydney. Participants were aged 18–30 years and reported monthly or more frequent psychostimulant use. Findings Agent-based modelling provided a specific focus for structured discussion about integrating ethnographic and epidemiological methods and data. The modelling process was underpinned by collective and incremental design principles, and produced ‘SimAmph’, a data-driven model of social and environmental agents and the relationships between them. Using SimAmph, we were able to test the probable impact of ecstasy pill-testing on the prevalence of harms—a potentially important tool for policy development. The study also navigated a range of challenges, including the need to manage epistemological differences, changes in the collective design process and modelling focus, the differences between injecting and non-injecting samples and concerns over the dissemination of modelling outcomes. Conclusions Agent-based modelling was used to integrate ethno-epidemiological data on psychostimulant use, and to test the probable impact of a specific intervention on the prevalence of drug-related harms. It also established a framework for collaboration between research disciplines that emphasizes the synthesis of diverse data types in order to generate new knowledge relevant to the reduction of drug-related harms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communal ceremonial sites and social groups often share mutually reinforcing and structuring properties. As a result of this dynamic relationship, ceremonial sites and social groups exhibit ever-emergent properties as long-term works-in-progress. Ceremonial kodsites featuring shrines of trumpet shells and dugong bones were central to the communal ritual life of Torres Strait Islanders. Continuously formed over the generations by ritual additions, these shrines were linked to ongoing maintenance, legitimization and cohesion of totemic clans and moieties that formed the structural basis of island communities. As such, understanding the history of kodsites provides an opportunity to investigate the historical emergence of ethnographically-known social groups in Torres Strait. This mutual emergence is investigated archaeologically at the kodon Pulu islet which is owned and operated by the Goemulgal people of nearby Mabuyag island. Multiple radiocarbon dates from shell and bone shrines and an underlying village midden indicate that the kod, and by association the Goemulgal and their totemic clan and moiety system, emerged over the past 400 years. Aided by local oral history and ethnography, it is argued further that establishment of the kodsaw the status of Pulu change from a residential to a ceremonial and sacred place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper explores the gatekeeping practices used by operating room nurses to control information flow in their everyday clinical practice. In nursing, gatekeeping appears only sporadically in the literature and usually emerges as a secondary concept rather than being the primary focus of studies. As gatekeeping is a communication practice that has the potential to impact directly on patient safety, a more in-depth exploration of its pervasiveness and effect needs to be undertaken. Accordingly, in this paper we aim to provide an in-depth understanding about gatekeeping practices in operating room nursing by drawing on a ‘network’ model of gatekeeping to highlight the power relationships between stakeholders and how information is controlled. To illustrate our points, we provide four different examples of gatekeeping at an interpersonal level of interaction. Data are drawn from an ethnographic study in Australia that explored nurse–nurse and nurse–doctor communication at three different operating room departments. We explore the impact of gatekeeping on social and professional relationships as well as how it has practical and ethical ramifications for patient care and the organisation of clinical work. The findings show that nurses are selective in their use of gatekeeping, depending on the perceived impact on patient care and the benefit that is accrued to nurses themselves. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Reviewing archaeological research in the Willandra Lakes area over the past forty years shows a number of methodological and conceptual problems. One of these is the use of ethnographic models of Aboriginal behaviour to organise the archaeological data. Such models privilege spatial over temporal relationships and minimise the extent of archaeological changes over time. Of research to date, it is Bowler's correlations of archaeological and hydrographic changes since the Late Pleistocene which best match the limited archaeological data available. A comparison of the Pleistocene archaeology from the Willandra Lakes and Tasmania reveals time-averaged records that are amenable to the analysis of patterns of mobility and material use, but not of functionally defined sites nor of typologically defined artefact assemblages. The periodicity and intensity of human occupation of the Willandra Lakes can be studied using large samples of stone artefacts drawn from wide areas, allied with a strategy of dating of land units based on multiple C14 and Optical dates. Such a strategy requires the reconsideration of the relationships between behaviour, function, space and time and a reformulation of much of our existing knowledge of the archaeology of Pleistocene Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores and examines the interesting and important phenomenon of Hajj from a marketing strategy and ethnographic perspective. There has been little academic qualitative research from a marketing strategy perspective on Hajj (once a year Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca), examining the perceptions of Muslims going on this significant spiritual journey. This paper also attempts to contribute to the theory on spiritual tourism and journeys and the marketing of spiritual tourism, by focusing on Hajj as both an outstanding spiritual journey and a product/service. This paper is part of a wider research project conducted to study marketing strategies in spiritual tourism, and focuses on the outbound markets of Australia and Pakistan. The paper presents a qualitative study of the perceptions and attitudes of Muslims towards their journey of Hajj; the investigation is carried out from the perspective of two different and parallel cultures, i.e. Muslim Australians and Muslim Pakistanis. In order to gain a comparative perspective, this study concentrates on the attitudes of Pakistani Muslims residing in Pakistan and in Australia. The social surrounds of the two populations are further described within the contexts of East/West, individualism/collectivism, and free criticism/authority acceptance. The findings of the research were further dissected and analysed to segment the customers of Hajj and to propose more effective marketing strategies for Hajj in Australia and Pakistan. It was found that the use of modern marketing concepts and tools was very helpful in giving a better perspective of the enormous business aspects of Hajj. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Background: Pleasure and its pursuit provide the key explanatory frame in this ethnographic analysis of temazepam injection among a set of drug injectors who enthusiastically embrace high-risk practices. The foregrounding of pleasure challenges key assumptions of harm reduction: namely, the ‘rational’ subject and the privileging of health as a universal good. In this paper I problematise the concepts of pleasure and conventional understandings of rationality. Interrogating these concepts through the actions and accounts of temazepam injectors, I argue that the model of the subject implicit in harm reduction does not sufficiently account for their everyday social practices. Methods: The paper draws on ethnographic research among heroin user/sellers of Vietnamese ethnicity in a local Australian heroin marketplace. Results: Temazepam was used in combination with heroin to enhance the experience of intoxication. Intense intoxication was desired for the pleasurable bodily sensations and emotional feelings it produced. The transgressive and dangerous nature of the practice added to its pleasure. Injection of temazepam capsules was also one of the practices constituting as well as expressing central social and cultural processes of heroin use in this particular social field. Conclusion: Despite embodied awareness of the harms associated with temazepam injection, these people were prepared to sacrifice ‘health’ for the pleasures they perceived to be afforded by injecting the gel capsules. My ethnographic analysis suggests that if harm reduction is to respond to high-risk practices such as these, then attention needs to be paid to the pleasures people derive from their practices, and to the social and cultural values these constitute and express. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

AIM: This paper is a report of a study to identify how nurse clinicians learn with and from each other in the workplace. BACKGROUND: Clinicians' everyday practices and interactions with each other have recently been targeted as areas of research, because it is there that quality of care and patient safety are achieved. Orientation of new nurses and doctors into a specialty unit often results in stress. METHOD: An ethnographic approach was used, including a 12-month period of fieldwork observations involving participation and in-depth interviews with nurse, doctor and allied health clinicians in their workplace. The data were collected in 2005-2006 in a paediatric teaching hospital in Australia. FINDINGS: The findings were grouped into four dimensions: orientation of nurses, orientation of medical registrars, preceptoring and decision-making. The orientation of new staff (nursing and medical) is a complex and multi-layered process which accommodates multiple kinds of learning, in addition to formal learning. Workplace learning also can be informal, incidental, interpersonal and interactive. Interactive and interpersonal learning and the transfer of knowledge include codified and tacit knowledge as well as intuitive understandings of 'how we do things here'. CONCLUSION: Research into how nurses learn is crucial for illuminating learning that is non-formal and less recognized than more formal kinds. To provide a safe practice environment built on a foundation of knowledge and best practice, there needs to be an allocation of time in the busy workday for learning and reflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I argue that the move towards devolved modes of educational governance provides significant opportunities for feminist and pro-feminist constructionist research to impact on the types of “gender work” used by schools. Research-based understandings of gender in schools have been on the defensive in Australia and elsewhere for a decade, as demands for performative social justice policies coalesce with popular and governmental attention on the educational problems of boys. However, feminist and pro-feminist researchers can re-attain legitimacy in the policy field by marketing localized understandings of gender micro-narratives as improvements on the negative “failing boy” meta-narratives pursued by mainstream gender equity policy interventionists. While the popular, media-driven understanding frames gender as a constraint on educational access and participation, constructionist research identifies masculinity and femininity as changing constructs that produce highly specific and localized power relations. In the final part of the paper I consider the positioning of constructionist gender research in the federal government commissioned report Meeting the challenge:Final report on the boys’ lighthouse project, which demonstrated that feminist and pro-feminist readings of gender can attain legitimacy at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the contribution of Western Australian Museum (WAM) curator and archaeologist, Charlie Dortch, in Australian archaeology. It mentions the archaeological and excavation research conducted by Dortch on surface artifacts, stone tools, and human remains. Also discussed is the use ethnographic context and historical sources of Dortch to understand the Aboriginal lifeways.

The article presents an ethnographic study based on the views of young males in Australia related to masculinity in comparison with academic discourses, popular writings and Australian researches. The article also compares the views of young adults and mid-life males regarding the process of becoming man and analyzes the difference between the attitudes. Most of the mid-life men who were surveyed recalled a personal situation related to the process of masculinity. But, both the groups struggled to define their personal views on the process of becoming man.