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This article examines the relationships between the embodiment of dramatic characters, gender, and identity. It draws on ethnographic data based on observations and interviews with 24 drama teachers and senior secondary drama students in Western Australia. We explore how student becomings in year 12 drama classrooms are mediated and constituted through socially overcoded gender binaries in a dominant neoliberal culture of competitive performativity. We ask the questions: What constructions of femininity and masculinity are students embodying from popular dramatic texts in the drama classroom at a critical time in their social and emotional development? Are these constructions empowering? Or disempowering? What factors are influencing teachers' choices of texts for their predominantly female students? Our research shows that what is delimiting about this potentiality in a time of identity exploration and formation are the constraining gender-binary roles available to young women particularly, and the performative pressures teachers are experiencing.

This article explores the effects of neoliberalism and performative educational cultures on secondary school drama classrooms. We consider the ways Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis and Butler's concept of gender performance enable us to chart the embodied, relational, spatial and affective energies that inhabit the often neoliberal and heterosexually striated space of the drama classroom. These post-humanist analyses are useful methodological tools for mapping the complexities of student becomings in the space context of the secondary school. We also show how Foucault's governmentality and Ball's theory of competitive performativity are particularly salient in the context of immanent capitalism that shapes the desires of its subjects. These frameworks, when combined, can be useful in critiquing neoliberal educational assemblages and in indicating emerging deterritorializations and lines of flight in teachers and students.

This article reports findings from 39 interviews from two Hong Kong universities and offers a critique of the RAE system. Respondents stated that the main emphasis in counting research productivity was on articles in prestigious international journals. There were many negative comments about this as the main quality indicator. Some respondents mentioned that international journal articles benefited natural and physical scientists more than social scientists and devalued local research and local journals, resulting in a bias towards the West. The more positive comments accepted the RAE, feeling that there was an emphasis on quality not just quantity. In terms of the impact of the RAEs, many participants expressed that the exercises encouraged a great deal more publishing and that academics could fast track their careers by publishing more. However, the negative responses indicated that the RAEs encouraged a glut of publications that were more mediocre with little substance or originality. (Contains 6 footnotes and 1 table.)

This article introduces the issue of articles on research assessments and rankings. It focuses on the British Research Assessment Exercises (RAEs) and New Zealand's Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF). It contrasts these with systems that are not tied to funding formulas and emphasise quality enhancement rather than quality assurance. It indicates the negative consequences for individuals, institutions and the professional ethos of universities. It does not deny that there are also benefits gained by institutions that win additional funding through these mechanisms. Research managers benefit by being able to concentrate the efforts of researchers and gain more control over the research enterprise. However, scholarship and creativity are the likely losers in these exercises.

This paper explores Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis in relation to student and teacher becomings and the way these are actualised within the neoliberal and heterosexually striated spaces of the secondary school assemblage. Deleuze and Guattari considered a narrow approach to education problematic and called for creativity as a site of "resistance". Drama is one subject rich with potentiality for students to strengthen their creativity and "speak back" against the neoliberal project. What our research revealed is how the drama classroom is an open, dynamic space where students can embody different identities at a critical time in their adolescent development. What is delimiting about this potentiality is the proclivity of teachers and students, as desiring machines, to conform to the dominant neoliberal culture of competitive performativity. The paper proposes that schizoanalysis offers new insights for mapping complex desire-flows and embodied identities through and against the dominant performative and heterosexist culture.

In recent years, the much touted "difficult economic times" has resulted in a drastic reduction in arts and education funding in western capitalist nations (Fowles 2014; Henwood and Featherstone 2013; Murray and Erridge 2012; Smith 2013). Combined with this "age of austerity," schools have been subjected to decades of neoliberal education reform policies and programs such as the No Child Left Behind Act and the Race-to-the-Top funding in the United States and The Academies Act in the United Kingdom. These and other education "reforms" promote high-stakes testing, accountability, and competitive markets (Hursch 2007; Loh and Hu 2014). How does this zeitgeist of austerity and reform affect arts education at the local level where practice is enacted? Many curriculum changes have been made as a result of these reforms. Consequently schools are primarily judged on the grades students achieve for English, mathematics, science and sometimes languages. This often means that subjects such as art, dance, drama, and music are among the first to be cut from the curriculum resulting in fewer options for students, as schools direct students to focus on so-called "academic" courses in order to attain the requisite data to be ranked as a "good" school. By way of example, Appleton (2014) reports that in the UK, 23% of schools have dropped drama in favor of "academic subjects." To acquire additional information about this trend, the authors performed an ethnographic research project based on semi-structured interviews with 15 drama teachers and 11 of their ex-students in Western Australia across government, Catholic, and independent school systems. Their findings showed that these responses are not isolated to one or two countries. For example, in two of the 15 schools represented in the study, dance as a subject had been dropped despite a strong desire for it by students. Speculating on a reason for this change, one student noted, "I think with subjects like dance they look at other countries like Asia and say, 'They do all science and all maths and they don't focus on the arts. They're smarter so we need to compete with that'" (Elizabeth, student, independent school). Interestingly, this desire by students themselves to do more in the arts is consistent internationally (Palmer Wolf 2014). Students also report that effects of the "reforms" go beyond curriculum choice to include the use of space--physical space such as theater, space on the timetable/curriculum, and emotionally safe space for teachers and students to express themselves freely. These forms of space are forms of capital and are impacted by the dominant neoliberal culture of competitive performativity.

Studies worldwide have found that women's pay lags behind men's in academia. This article describes pay equity policies in Australia and overseas and the use of a pay equity audit as a strategic tool to reduce gender inequities at The University of Western Australia (UWA). As a research-intensive university, UWA resembles similar universities globally and, like them, is vertically segregated with power and advantage in the hands of males. Based on the average annual salaries in 2008, UWA's pay equity audit found a gender pay gap of 15% for academics and 12% for professionals. Discretionary allowances revealed additional pay differences with academic men, on average, receiving $8,744 more than academic women and professional men receiving $1,987 more than professional women. This article concludes with the micropolitics of how key players reacted to these findings and how the university may act to reduce gender differences in allowances.

Since the late 1980s, research on post-industrialized economies shows that the boundary between work and family is increasingly becoming blurred. The continuing evolution of e-technology allows work for some to be done anywhere, anytime. This article examines the degree to which e-technology has transferred work into the home lives of academics and how this has affected their work/life balance. Drawing on a study in an Australian university of academics with young children, we utilise the terms "work extensification" and "work intensification" to explore whether these new technologies are a blessing or a curse in their work lives. At the same time we describe the deteriorating working conditions for Australian academics whose work has intensified and extended into their private lives with longer working hours in a speeded up environment. Our findings revealed the use of metaphors such as invasion and intrusion of e-technologies into academics' homes and their need to establish boundaries to separate work and family life. Most felt that having e-technologies at home was of benefit to their work but they came at a cost to their family life--delivering a blessing and a curse.

The adoption of more corporate models of governance is a contemporary trend in higher education. In the early 2000s, the Australian Government legislated national governance protocols for universities, using the policy lever of financial sanctions. These more corporate-style governance protocols followed similar changes in the UK, consistent with a historical pattern of Australia borrowing policy "on trust" from its former colonial ruler. However, the Australian approach represented much tighter government regulation than in the UK. This article employs a conceptual lens of trust to analyse changing policy on governance in Australian higher education. Analysis reveals that national governance protocols contributed to a culture of mistrust across the sector, although the dynamics of trust-mistrust relationships were complex and included apparent trust "settlements" between particular stakeholder groups. This analysis offers another step in nascent investigations into trust and the governance of higher education.

Assistive technologies are often promoted to schools, parents and educators as tools to assist students with special needs by providing a compensatory value, to remediate learning problems and to promote personal independence. These technologies range from simple spellcheckers to more complex speech recognition systems and educational software. Many research projects have examined the effectiveness of these assistive technologies--primarily in terms of their remediation and assistive functions. This paper describes the results of a systematic search of research-based studies published in the last six years that examined the effectiveness of assistive technologies that have reading, writing, spelling and speech as their focus. After a rigorous process, 15 empirical research articles were selected based on the following criteria: empirical studies involved students who identified as having special needs; the assistive technologies had a literacy and speech focus; participants were in years K-12; and a clear skill or academic improvement was shown. Findings revealed that while some programs saw no improvement in spelling, reading or writing as a result of using the assistive technology, the majority of studies found consistently improved outcomes. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

Singapore and Hong Kong are vying to be the principal educational hub for the Asia-Pacific region and have begun to compete with Australia, Britain, Canada and the USA in providing cross-border education. Although these four Anglo-American countries still dominate cross-border education, Singapore and Hong Kong hope to make inroads into this export market and compete on the global stage. To create "world-class" universities, Singapore and Hong Kong have introduced quality assurance mechanisms, diversified funding sources, and restructured their university governance systems. This article compares the accountability measures introduced into Hong Kong and Singapore universities, and the responses of academics and administrators to these measures. The results indicate that both countries introduced greater autonomy as they augmented accountability for their universities, and the term "decentralised centralism" describes the kind of government control exerted in these Asian universities in the twenty-first century. (Contains 2 tables and 7 notes.)

A former British colony, Hong Kong was reunited with the People's Republic of China in 1997 under the "one country two systems" model. The Hong Kong Basic Law contains detailed provisions for academic freedom, ensuring that local academics enjoy far greater freedom than their counterparts in mainland China. Hong Kong academics and the broader community have also publicly supported academic freedom when they perceived it to be under threat. The authors argue, however, that the recent restructuring of Hong Kong's universities may ultimately pose a greater threat than any explicit interference from the local or national governments. (Contains 1 note.)

In China, the central government has released a series of key policy initiatives over the last twenty years to foster decentralisation of control over higher education, giving prominence to discourses of increased autonomy for both universities and academics. This article reports findings of an empirical study of changing autonomy in Chinese higher education and it focuses on the effects of these key policy developments in two case study universities. This research was part of a larger study of new power relationships emerging from changing policies on accountability and autonomy in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Singapore, located within a broader context of the impact of globalisation on higher education. The focus on the three regions was selected to begin to redress a Western hegemony in such research. The larger study is premised on the principle that globalisation is characterised by ongoing tensions between global commonalities and context-specific differences, and that it is important not to gloss over the complex and often contradictory national and local mediations of "global" policy trends.

This paper focuses on changing accountability policies/practices in higher education as China rapidly "opens up" to the global knowledge economy. It reports empirical findings from two case study universities, using respondents' voices, and then raises issues for critical reflection. Increasingly prescriptive and punitive neo-liberal accountabilities have come to prevail in Chinese higher education, although "new" accountability mechanisms have not simply replaced the "old" but, arguably, they have coalesced into a potentially unstable hybrid of accountability relationships. We argue the need to dislodge the hegemony of neo-liberal accountabilities, and to continually--and critically--navigate "local" needs within "global" contexts, as policies evolve. (Contains 1 note.)

This article describes the development of Murdoch's academic council (which resembles a faculty senate) from its creation to 2003, charting how it gained and later lost its legitimacy, and then rediscovered it. It draws on documentation, such as council minutes and legislation, as well as on interviews with twelve present and former council members (academics and administrators) who served at a time when the university was adopting the new organizational tenets and styles of management often called "managerialism." This history shows how collegiality can persist if a leader believes in shared governance and gains the trust of the university community. Correspondingly, it highlights the need for academics to be active participants in governance.

This article discusses the impact of accountabiity on higher education policies in Europe and the United States. We describe how the accountability movement relates to other policy trends in higher education, providing empirical data on how accountability was implemented and how academics and managers in four universities perceived these policies. We close the article with a reflection on the observed shift from professional to political accountability that uses "soft" mechanisms that seem to offer little change in the quality of education in these countries.

Interviewed staff in two Australian universities about sacrifices they had to make to do their jobs, using the greedy institution concept to describe the hold the universities had over their staff. Overall, there was a certain uniformity of response across sites, gender, and occupational status, which is the product of a masculinist discourse used by powerful people within the institutions. (SM)

The Australian Federal Government's policy of increasing the participation of school leavers in tertiary studies and the possible effect this may have on access to tertiary studies for mature age students are discussed. A study that addresses the social composition of tertiary students is described. (MLW)

Explores responses of 54 academics and 11 senior managers at an Australian university about the attributes of success. The ways in which gender constructs patterns of academic and managerial success within universities are discussed. It is argued that production is privileged over reproduction, and output over process, in a profoundly gendered way. (SLD)

A study conducted on the women of Sri Lanka shows that religious and cultural practices have played a dominant role in discriminating against them economically and socially, relegating them to a subordinate status. Religious and cultural norms are to be attacked vigorously if women are to be liberated fully. The position of women has improved socially, economically and politically due to pressure from feminist groups who questioned the authority of religious tradition and social injustice.