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This chapter explores a mentoring intervention for a group of higher degree research students at an Australian university designed to develop their academic and reflective writing through skills-based instruction and the development of a student-driven community of practice. To analyse and evaluate this initiative, the chapter provides a detailed description and unpacking of the program's motivations, objectives, and outcomes using 16 mentoring design elements. The program is also evaluated using an extended application of the 3P presage, process, product model. Three data sets were used to evaluate the success of the program: doctoral participants' evaluations at the time of the workshops and 12 months after the workshop and the reflections of the mentor and educator expert response for the program. The chapter concludes by identifying key learnings and potential for further application of a revised model for delivering holistic and co-designed learning experiences for future leaders such as doctoral students.

Developing students' global competence has become increasingly important in the face of social, economic, and environmental threats, natural disasters, and climate change. Educators who aspire to help students become globally competent change agents must first develop these attributes before fostering them in their students. This can be pedagogically challenging, and educators may lack the confidence to integrate global competence into disciplinary contexts or engage in classroom discussions about contested sustainability and social justice issues. In this chapter, the authors engage in pedagogical reflection to explore the challenges and opportunities presented by critical global citizenship education in higher education. The diverse cases draw from experiences of ethics and citizenship education at Australian universities in business schools and in enabling programs, outward mobility programs involving social work students from Australia engaging in study tours to Cambodia, and the development of a transnational global citizenship education program in Vietnam.

Contrary to the feminist research based on exclusively gendered processes of inequality in organisations, intersectionality theorists propose an intersectional approach to understanding the inequalities and subordination experienced by Global South women factory workers representing different social hierarchies and experiencing diverse social realities. This paper contributes to the literature by bringing empirical evidence from the Sri Lankan apparel industry to inform the inequality and subordination of women in Global South factory floors from an intersectional perspective. A qualitative methodology using data generated through interviews with women shop floor-level apparel workers who work in export processing zones (EPZs) and village areas was adopted to explore the interplay between multiple social categories (gender, poverty, and rurality) influenced by broader power structures (patriarchy and capitalism) as well as political inequalities in determining the inequalities and subordination of women workers in globalised apparel factories. Further, we consider how gendered and class-based factory processes produce and reproduce the inequalities and subordination of these women at work. The analysis identifies that workers' rural origins, poverty, and traditionally defined gendered roles have worked interactively in favour of capitalist industrialists by pushing these women workers to lower-paid manual jobs in the apparel industry. The factories utilise cheap, material-based incentives and recruitment systems for rewarding and recruiting shop floor workers, capitalising on their poverty, rurality and gender-based requirements as a source of exploitation. In addition, factory managers' behaviours create certain beliefs in these women workers, favouring the factories, resulting in the further subordination of these women through perceived cohesiveness or compliance. Finally, this paper concludes that capitalism, together with patriarchy, creates unequal and subordinated positions for poor, rural women through their collective agendas of wealth maximisation. Keywords: Inequality, Intersectionality, Sri Lankan apparel industry, Subordination, Women workers

Tokenism and the exclusion of marginalized individuals can inhibit the development of new ideas and innovation in organizations. Using social justice theory to explore the case of female entrepreneurs, this chapter outlines the benefits to be realized via their inclusion in the workplace and presents a framework for fostering a climate that supports their full participation. This framework foregrounds the contribution of organizational characteristics as well as individual and behavioral factors which can work together to deliver more inclusive leadership and practices to advance women. The chapter concludes by considering the challenges and opportunities presented by the practical application of this approach.

PurposeUniversity-affiliated mentors serve as liaisons between schools and pre-service teachers during practicum placements, offering academic, administrative and relational support. In the context of academic workload intensification, increasing student numbers and the need to respond to issues as they occur in time-pressured environments, the wellbeing of mentors can become compromised. Mentor wellbeing is explored, highlighting corollary impacts of threats to pre-service teacher wellbeing on those who support them.Design/methodology/approachA descriptive single case-study explored mentor lived experiences of wellbeing during the pre-service teacher practicum placement and mentoring process. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with mentors supervising pre-service teacher professional experience placements. Adopting a shadowed data approach, mentors shared their own experiences and reflected on the experiences of others. Data was analysed using thematic content analysis.FindingsMentor and pre-service teacher wellbeing experiences exhibited similar wellbeing indicators, including personal and professional stress, workload strains and ethical dilemmas. Many mentors felt invisible in terms of supports for their own self-care as the focus was on meeting practicum stakeholder and student support needs rather than their own wellbeing.Originality/valueChanges to professional experience practices must consider potential impacts on pre-service teachers, in-school supervisors and the university-affiliated mentors as the wellbeing of each is potentially impacted the wellbeing of others in this professional experience triad. Increasing emphasis on work-integrated learning experiences across multiple disciplines invites future comparison and contrast of wellbeing experiences.

The concept of eudaemonia originates from neo-Aristotelian philosophy and is associated with human flourishing. Self-determination theory, a means to attain eudaemonia, is examined here as a foundational approach to drive Eudaemonic Design--a novel design strategy that aims to achieve holistic physical, mental, and social health, or eudaemonic well-being. This chapter advances Eudaemonic Design as an architectural and organizational approach to create healthful work environments that support employee and business flourishing. The authors argue that the importance of adopting Eudaemonic Design has grown in need and complexity as work is (re)shaped by the constraints and opportunities presented by the pandemic. By contrasting dominant pre-COVID-19 Work from Office expectations against the post-COVID-19 Work from Anywhere model, this chapter explores the application of Eudaemonic Design to deliver holistic workplace well-being, rather than single variable health and wellness alone, now and into the post-COVID-19 future of work.

Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) are expected to revolutionise transport worldwide and transform urban life. However, there are many unknowns concerning the impacts of these technologies in terms of sustainability, justice, and safety. It has been suggested that CAVs may exacerbate inequities and safety disparities concerning the interaction of vulnerable road users (VRUs) with motorised transport. This paper investigates the justice issues that CAVs policy needs to address concerning VRUs. Our approach to studying CAVs’ capabilities and their potential perverse outcomes uses transport justice as an evaluative framework. The justice-related outcomes discussed include: traffic injuries, impact on sharing road responsibilities, loss of on-street space, access to technology, inclusion for disabled and older adults, CAV technological development, and impact of congestion and air pollution. The paper proposes a future research agenda emphasising areas where CAVs may positively impact VRUs.

Qualitative comparative analysis allows for the breadth of analysis associated with quantitative data and the depth of case knowledge provided by qualitative analysis. In particular, fuzzy-set qualitative analysis (fsQCA) provides a nuanced analysis of data and offers actionable insights. Despite this, fsQCA has been underutilized in the social sciences. This chapter explores the application of fsQCA in the social sciences. The authors advance an argument for its wider adoption due to fsQCA's ability to disentangle the causal complexity involved in person- and policy-based contexts by applying a set-theoretic understanding of causation. The chapter provides an introduction to fsQCA for readers unfamiliar with the approach and advocates for its suitability within a broad range of social science studies.

There is growing recognition that methods that elicit the perspectives of vulnerable and marginalized people are essential in understanding the needs and aspirations of this group and therefore necessary when developing impactful policies, services, and environments that support them. Creative elicitation methods, which privilege participant voice, can be useful for conducting research with such populations. This chapter explores how research informed by care ethics, appreciative inquiry, and communicative methodology can support participant self-determination through the achievement of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. By advancing deliberate, iterative, and care-full research design that emphasizes belonging, dignity, and justice, cultural probes provide practical potential and ethical utility as a research method. The effectiveness of this care-full cultural probe approach is demonstrated and examined through a case study of a co-design research project concerned with designing for health and well-being at home with and for older adults.

The neoliberal agenda in higher education has led to expectations and targets of market-likeness in student enrolment and completion demographics through the widening participation agenda. However, the reality is that disadvantaged groups such as students with a disability and Indigenous students are still underrepresented, particularly in advanced research degrees. This disadvantage is compounded by the temporal disciplining imposed by bureaucratically-defined completion deadlines. Taking Australia as a paradigmatic case, this chapter explores the temporal disciplining of doctoral research in the broader context of neoTaylorism and the projectification of research. It argues that a care-inspired slowness is needed to counterbalance the harms created by the managerialist push for ‘timely' completion.

There is a strong link between student engagement and successful educational outcomes which is driven by the actions of and interactions with educators. In the context of pandemic pedagogies, many educators have taken on additional responsibility for the wellbeing and engagement of their students. The performance of this emotion work is strongly connected to an educator's professional and philosophical stance about the role of caring in teaching and learning. Building on the principles of care ethics with autoethnographic reflection of emergency remote teaching, this chapter presents a model of student engagement which reflects the additional needs and demands of care-based education on both educators and students. This model outlines for the enactment of deliberate, sustainable, and care-ful engagement based on an assessment of learner needs as well as educator investment and contributes insights for shaping (post pandemic) pedagogical practices.

This chapter explores in-depth interviewing, a widely used method in qualitative research aimed at building a depth of understanding, rather than factual or abstract information. We give a brief account of structured interviews, but these have more in common with surveys and questionnaires than in-depth interviewing. Semi-structured interviews are interviews that follow a set of questions, allowing some flexibility in how questions are asked, and provide the researcher with the opportunity to ask clarifying and follow-up questions. Unstructured interviews are more flexible and open-ended. As such, they can be quite unpredictable and varied and are well suited to exploratory research and other research interested in meaning and experiences. There is a range of ethical considerations when using this method, including confidentiality establishing clear and reasonable expectations and offering appropriate reciprocity to research participants, and the potential of this method to cause harm, to both researcher and participants. In-depth interviewing is a powerful but demanding method for urban research; it is resource intensive and requires a lot of skills on the part of the researcher to design effective and ethical protocols and to generate meaning from complex, often messy, data.

The widespread adoption of learning management systems (LMS) in higher education has been promoted as a means of modernizing learning material, improving learning outcomes, and enhancing student engagement, but has often fallen short of these goals. It has been suggested that investment in visual design has the potential to ensure the promise of LMS can be realized. Through the reflections of instructors, a learning designer, and students, this chapter explores the relationship between LMS aesthetics and usability and student engagement. It proposes visual design principles and practices which highlight the combined contribution of functional utility, visual identity, aesthetic appeal, and transactional access to enhancing student engagement and user experience in a virtual learning environment.

This chapter draws from Australian studies to explore policies associated with behavioral interventions for environmental stewardship. Each case focuses on attempts to influence the eco-behaviors of recreational users of aquatic environments and the division of eco-responsibility between individuals, communities, and government. The first case considers coercive policy approaches to effect change in recreational boaters' sewage disposal practices to reduce vessel-sourced marine pollution. The second case considers suasive policy approaches to encourage recreational fishers to voluntarily engage in positive eco-behaviors associated with the restoration and rehabilitation of fisheries habitats. In each case, ascriptions of causal responsibility for environmental degradation and responsibility to act are identified, and how these shape responses to eco-behavioral expectations are discussed. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the potential utility of a complex model of behavior change which pays specific attention to context in the development of the behavioral intervention policy mix.

Traditional energy sources, such as oil, coal and gas are subject to supply shortages and have significant environmental impacts. A range of renewable energy sources, including solar photovoltaic, geothermal, hydroelectric and wind power, have been posited as more sustainable alternatives to meet current and future energy demands. Despite its potential to deliver affordable and clean energy, the adoption of renewable energy has experienced a varied rate of support in governmental policy and uptake in electricity markets. Community renewable energy has emerged as a grassroots approach to redress this general policy failure to adopt renewable energy as a major contributor to energy supplies and to advance the transition to low-carbon energy. It represents an important shift toward an affordable, reliable, sustainable, decentralized and clean energy supply. Using an illustrative example of global good practice and innovation, this chapter critically explores the potential for community renewable energy projects to positively respond to Sustainable Development Goals #7 (affordable and clean energy), #13 (climate action) and #17 (partnerships for the goals). Australia’s Hepburn Wind project is highlighted as a paradigmatic case to draw attention to the complexities and promise of introducing and scaling up community renewable energy projects.

A central feature of work and workplace transformations globally has been the rapid expansion of internships and educationally focused work experience. Such experiences are now widely considered foundational in facilitating ‘employability’ and as a pathway into a reconfigured paid labour market. The practice of unpaid work and internships is therefore a crucial, yet under-recognised dimension of debates about the future of work and employment relations. This chapter addresses three streams of research that have advanced knowledge of trends in relation to the future of (unpaid) work experience, providing a critical summary of debates in the field. These themes comprise: (1) modes and types of unpaid work; (2) the expansion and prevalence of unpaid work; and (3) the impacts of unpaid work on participants and other workers. The final section of the chapter canvasses a forward agenda for future research and practice.

Governments have historically offered their workforce a public service bargain founded on stable pay and conditions and job security. However, while the Westminster system aims for public service employment to be protected from the whims of government, public servants are nonetheless affected by the political environment in which they operate and changes to this bargain can occur with a new government. This paper focuses on a Queensland public service change process that resulted in large-scale forced redundancies, non-renewal of temporary contracts and legislative changes that nullified the provisions in job security, organisational change and redundancy policies. Using communication as a lens through which to understand leadership, it examines how the government communicated with the public service about this organisational change, immediately before and after the 2012 election. In particular, through analysis of public and media commentary, speeches and Hansard records, it examines Premier Newman’s change leadership and communication by contrasting pre-election messages to the public service with post-election messages about the public service and the justifications for change during this period of downsizing. This analysis is used to reflect on political leadership, communication, fair treatment, and trust in public service change.

Cycling is often promoted as a low cost, accessible and virtuous strategy for solving many urban problems, including air pollution, congestion, climate change and the ‘obesity epidemic’. Yet the status of cycling as a quick and easy transport solution available to all is rarely problematised in policy documents. Focussing on cycling policy documents in sub-tropical Brisbane (Australia) we apply interpretive policy analysis to identify the ways policy representations of cycling and cyclists may work to exacerbate the marginality of certain groups by excluding them from representation. Through analysis of these policy documents, and reference to international research on cycling and the right to the city, this article sketches out the figure of the ‘Cycling Citizen’ constructed within them. The Cycling Citizen is characterised in these policy documents by a combination of actions (such as demonstrations of speed and skill), personal attributes (such as body-type, clothes and gender) and attitudes (particularly around virtue). We argue that the dominance of representations of MAMIL (middle-aged men in lycra) cyclists in the policy documents analysed may work to make cycling less accessible to those less likely to identify as MAMIL such as women, people of colour, people with lower incomes, and fat people, and this may effectively exclude them from cycling policy decisions, and negatively shape personal choices about cycling. We further argue that policy representations of cycling and cyclists matter because they have the potential to influence infrastructure and funding decisions which may have material consequences with respect to cycling mode share, equity and safety.

The practicum (or professional experience) is an entrenched feature of initial teacher education programs. In recent years, there has been an emphasis on improving the quality of practicum experiences in both academic research (e.g. Grudnoff & Williams, 2010; Lawson, Cakmak, Gunduz & Busher, 2015) and in teacher education policy (e.g. TEMAG, 2014). However, while the practicum is generally considered by participants to be one of the most influential experiences in their preservice teacher education (Busher, Gunduz, Cakmak, & Lawson, 2015) it is also recognised as being one of the most stressful (Gardner, 2010). As a result, there is an increasing tendency in recent work to explore the practicum through the eyes and experiences of participants (Buckworth, 2017; Grant-Smith & Gillett-Swan, 2017). However, despite increasing recognition of the personal factors that can influence experiences of practicum, and the impact that of practicum participation can exert on other life domains and commitments, these ideas are rarely centred in discussions of practicum (Grant-Smith, Gillett-Swan & Chapman, 2016). It could, however, be argued that in the pressurised environment of the practicum, these considerations are especially influential and of growing importance as a result of the increased participation of non-traditional students in teacher education programs...

At all levels of governance from international convention to local policy, the regulation of pollution from boats and ships has been steeped in conflict and subject to resistance. Recreational boaters, in particular, are often highly resistant to attempts to regulate their boating activity, particularly on environmental grounds. Such ongoing resistance poses a significant policy compliance challenge. This paper seeks to shed light on this complex, ongoing and broader field of opposition to environmental management by way of a case study analysis of resistance to on-board sewage regulations on the part of recreational boaters in Queensland, Australia. This resistance on the part of ‘everyday’ citizens is examined through the lens of heterotopia. In consequence, the paper can contribute to understandings more broadly of problems beleaguering environmental policy while also attending to the deeply implicated social roles of recreational boating spaces; namely as heterotopias of compensation and/or illusion. It also highlights how these heterotopic positionings are intensified by the scatological orientation of the policy under study.

Functionings an intergenerational repository of cultural meaning, built heritage artefacts form an important part of the cultural history of settlements (Al-hagla, 2010 and Tweed and Sutherland, 2007) and act as ‘dispensers of cultural identity’ (Bianca, 2010, 28) for modern urban areas around them by providing a tangible connection to the past. Conserving built heritage can thus promote intergenerational equity by preserving cultural capital for the benefit of future generations (Taylor, 2013). However, just as historic urban areas shape society, they are also subject to change and reshaping to satisfy society's evolving needs and values (Nepravishta, 2015). Although urban ensembles now constitute the largest category within the UNESCO World Heritage List (UNESCO, 2011), the conservation of urban heritage has been recognised as a ‘daunting task’ (van Oers, 2010, 7).

Frustrated with the lack of a meaningful global response to the inequities wrought by climate change, ordinary citizens and advocacy groups are increasingly turning to legal recourse. They are petitioning the courts to defend their rights, to hold governments and fossil fuel corporations accountable for failure to protect their health, safety and welfare interests from foreseeable natural disasters, and to provide energy security. This chapter discusses the international movement using litigation to redress injustices caused by governments and large companies putting economic benefits in conflict with social, environmental and moral obligations to humanity. As courts become the arena where people look to rectify breaches of climate justice, nations and businesses may ultimately bear a duty of care to reduce carbon emissions with compensation and renewable power sources.

Research focusing on young people's career trajectories has emphasised 'graduate employability' with much less attention being afforded to the employability strategies used by disadvantaged youth, including the social, political and labour market contexts in which these emerge. This study explores how young people enrolled in entry-level, vocational training courses in Australia attempt to enhance their employability. Interviews explored perceptions of individual employability, the strategies utilised to improve employability, and the economic, personal and employment consequences of these strategies. Three main employability strategies were identified: gaining qualifications to meet employment expectations; securing work experience in a competitive labour market; and addressing economic and social challenges to secure and sustain employment. The study reveals how the dominant narratives of employability in education and employment policy are misaligned with the economic, social and labour market challenges faced by disadvantaged job-seekers with respect to notions of career and 'fit' between the individual and the labour market. Policy responses need to take account of the diverse 'bottom up' experiences and circumstances of different cohorts of young people.

Between 1977 and 1982, the Royal Australian Planning Institute (RAPI) Journal, the forebear of Australian Planner, featured a column dedicated to women and planning. The column, entitled Marion, sought to raise awareness, exchange information and stimulate discussion about issues relating to women and planning. The column highlighted discriminatory employment and planning practices including the absence of women in senior planning positions. It also considered issues associated with planning for women and the impact of planning on women’s lives, particularly from an intersectional and international perspective. A clear link was made between the need for women in planning at all levels to undertake planning for and with women. Grounded in the gains made by the feminist movement, the column championed the unique needs of women in urban design and planning but situated these within the broader social challenges experienced by women around their lack of access to power, resources, education and decision-making. In this article, we use Virginia Woolf’s feminist text, A Room of One’s Own, as a hermeneutical device for reviewing the Marion column, reflecting on the place of women in the pages of the journal of the RAPI Journal and in the planning profession, and documenting its legacy.

This paper serves as an epilogue to the Women in Planning special issue of Australian Planner reflecting on the potential for women’s activism and scholarship to promote social and spatial change around what have often been dismissed as irrelevant private or personal matters. This paper highlights the energy and willingness among women planners and those sympathetic to their goals towards seeking and creative positive and transformative change and engagement with issues of gender in planning. It specifically reports on the Women in Planning Symposium, held in Brisbane in 2016, and based on the principles of Appreciative Inquiry. Through this case we do not set out to ‘prove’ the impact of feminist approaches to planning or Appreciative Inquiry as applied in this workshop, rather, our goal here is to conclude this special issue by advancing an agenda for women in planning which is transformative, generative and pro-feminist and which has the potential to highlight and address gendered concerns in a productive way. We will reflect on both the findings that Appreciative Inquiry yielded, and on the process itself as a tool for participation and engagement, particularly in a feminist/emancipatory context.

This article draws on a large qualitative study ( N = 123) to develop an understanding of young people’s financial lives as constituted through experiences of time and temporality. Extending recent accounts of temporality as experienced and lived through our embedded location in the life course, we develop the concept of financial timescapes as a means of focusing on the ways that individual and personal financial capacities are situated in broader economic and cultural topographies of youth. The findings focus on the acquisition, deployment and consequences of financial lives as temporally situated and experienced by 16–26-year-old Australians. By doing so, we draw attention to how financial timescapes influence the constitution, navigation and cohering of young people’s financial lives. Understanding the significance of financial timescapes to young people’s experiences and socially embedded capacities thus helps to inform a sociological understanding of monetary decision making, financial behaviours and financial trajectories across the life course.

Women face particular travel challenges when combining commuting with broader caring responsibilities. This policy note considers the issues associated with meeting the transport needs of working women as they navigate their daily ‘mobilities of care’. We extend the concept of ‘mobilities of care’ by combining an intersectional understanding of the transport task with the principles embodied in the child-friendly cities agenda. These are discussed with respect to the provision of public transport services and infrastructure in Australia to illuminate the ways that such an approach could deliver transport benefits to those commuting with young children in their care, most often mothers. We also argue that transport policy, planning and provision must make an explicit connection between intersectional factors such as disability, class, as well as gender, and the substantive impact they can have on women and children’s mobilities and modal choices.

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples of Australia are culturally diverse and have had varied experiences of colonisation. However, policy and planning processes often treat Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples as a homogenised bloc, erasing internal differences of opinion, values, and politics, universalising their experiences, and avoiding analysis of internal power structures and dynamics that may exist within a given group. There is also a tendency for non-Indigenous people and policymakers to conflate ‘Indigenous’ interests and values with ‘environmental’ interests and values. As such, despite what may be good intentions, consultation and engagement processes with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples generally fail to adopt an intersectional approach, and in turn not only often fail in their stated goal of inclusivity, but may also exacerbate existing points of conflicts within a particular group, and unintentionally reproduce inequities. In this chapter, we outline an understanding of intersectionality as informed by Aboriginal women, and bring together insights from two Australian case studies to explore some of the problems that emerge from a failure to adopt an intersectional lens when engaging with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples. We consider multiple and co-constituting axes of power with a focus on the relationships between colonisation, kyriarchy, and the lived experiences of Indigenous Peoples, and outline considerations for operationalising intersectionality when engaging with Indigenous Peoples, particularly in the context of Native Title.

Although health care systems throughout the world recognise the need to co-ordinate health and social care, collaborative efforts tend to be based more on faith than evidence, with ad hoc and voluntary arrangements often failing to meet expressed aims or observed needs. The result has been a shift towards more mandated forms of collaboration with a view to forcing better inter-agency working, reducing costs and improving outcomes through more co-ordinated participative processes. However, the belief that wicked issues such as fragmented care, unmet needs, blocked beds and raising costs can be dealt with more effectively by the forcing of inter-organisational relations is not without its problems, particularly where national directives fail to account for local complexities and politics. Taking the UK as an example, this chapter considers the latest in a long line of attempts to improve the co-ordination of health and social care. Specifically, it analyses the creation of Health and Wellbeing Boards and their explicit mandate to drive the integration of local health and social care systems by forcing politicians, social care professionals and health professionals to collaborate at a local level. In what follows, I show how, despite new structures and good intentions, there is an unexplored dark side to intra and inter-organisational relations where referent authority and competing perspectives forestall collaborative efforts in a way that directly impacts collaborative processes and policy outcomes. The paper considers how this occurs and why narrow prescriptions for joint working fail to account for the complexities of organisational functioning.

Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islander people have experienced significant marginalization as a result of the British invasion of Australia and the manner of continued colonization. Despite numerous government programs and policies designed to remediate what is referred to as Indigenous disadvantage, Australia’s First peoples continue to experience disproportionately negative life outcomes relative to non-Indigenous Australians in areas such as education, health, justice and employment. Following an historical overview of Indigenous social outcomes post colonization, this chapter examines the deficit discourse constituting ‘Indigenous disadvantage’ and informing Australian Indigenous Affairs policy development and implementation. It does so by examining key policy initiatives and reports between the 1890s and 2017.

In the context of an increasingly precarious and competitive graduate labour market, exposure to pre-graduation professional work experience is becoming an increasingly critical feature of graduate employability. Outside the creative professions the contours of this shift have received comparatively little empirical attention. This study provides evidence of increasing participation in unpaid work beyond the creative industries where it is well established as a common practice. This study examines the complex patterns of opportunities and challenges that are created for and by Australian urban planning students in gaining relevant exposure to professional work, with a particular emphasis on participation in unpaid work experience. Through the lens of employability and the voices of early career professionals, this study explores the complexity of decisions to engage in unpaid work and identifies the potential personal and professional implications of these decisions. Focussing on the ways decisions around unpaid work are shaped by a range of factors including labour market conditions and disciplinary norms the findings yield new knowledge of how unpaid work is practised and shaped as a principal means through which employment-related advantage and enhanced employability in education to employment transitions is sought by participants and the potential implications of this.

Using an online survey, this study explored the impact of participation in unpaid clinical placements on the financial wellbeing of 160 nursing students attending an Australian university. The research found that the majority of respondents struggle financially during clinical placements, yet are financially adequate or secure outside of semester or during normal periods of study. Increased transport costs and loss of income are the most significant financial stressors during this time, with additional meals, work-appropriate clothing, purchasing additional resources and materials, and childcare costs other causes of financial stress. Most students used savings, budgeting, borrowing, and changed expenditure patterns to cope with the financial impact of unpaid placement. These findings have important implications for the ability of students to successfully complete their nursing degree and draw into question the equity of unpaid clinical placements as a formal degree requirement. However, while participation in unpaid clinical placements can impact financial well-being in the short term, participation does have the potential to increase the financial resilience of students over time, as students learn and grow from these experiences. To achieve this, however, greater attention must be placed on the financial support and personal finance education available for nursing students.

The expansion of participation in unpaid work such as internships, volunteering and educationally focused work placements may constitute evidence of deleterious changes to labour markets increasingly characterized by competition, precarious work and prolonged transitions to secure employment. Unpaid work, although under-researched, is increasingly relevant in times of ubiquitous unpaid internships and the use of volunteers in roles that would have been previously paid. Yet there remains a lack of clarity in terminology and focus across studies of unpaid work. This review article addresses this concern through two primary aims. First, we review the available literature around unpaid work setting out five themes: characterizations of unpaid work; the prevalence and underlying drivers of unpaid work; the apparent benefits of participation; the costs of participation; and regulatory and structural responses to unpaid work. Together, these themes set out a holistic interpretation of the accumulated state of knowledge in this area of inquiry including the implications for organizations, employers, higher education institutions, policy makers and unpaid workers. The second aim is to synthesise the current and emerging insights arising from the review as a matrix which delineates four distinct forms of unpaid work along two dimensions – purpose of participation and level of participatory discretion. The review and resulting matrix provides conceptual clarity around unpaid work practices that informs future research. It also raises pragmatic implications for institutional and managerial decision-making which is cognisant of the range of risks, costs, benefits and ethical issues associated with unpaid work.

The idea of ‘wicked’ problems has made a valuable contribution to recognising the complexity and challenges of contemporary planning. However, some wicked policy problems are further complicated by a significant moral, psychological, religious or cultural dimension. This is particularly the case for problems that possess strong elements of abjection and symbolic pollution and high degrees of psychosocial sensitivity. Because this affects the way these problems are framed and discussed they are also characterised by high levels of verbal proscription. As a result, they are not discussed in the rational and emotion-free way that conventional planning demands and can become obscured or inadequately acknowledged in planning processes. This further contributes to their wickedness and intractability. Through paradigmatic urban planning examples, we argue that placing their unspeakable nature at the forefront of enquiry will enable planners to advocate for a more contextually and culturally situated approach to planning, which accommodates both emotional and embodied talk alongside more technical policy contributions. Re-imagining wicked problems in this way has the potential to enhance policy and plan-making and to disrupt norms, expose their contingency, and open new ways of planning for both the unspeakable and the merely wicked.

Young workers are over-represented in workplace injury statistics and there is growing interest in addressing their vulnerability and safety exposure. Such concerns have been raised within a broader discursive framework of responsibilisation which has seen a transfer of responsibility for workplace safety from employer to worker. This article examines the potential for self-advocacy as a strategy for improving the safety of young workers through the provision of resources to articulate and act on workplace rights. The study utilises data derived from 48 group interviews involving 216 high school students (13–16 years of age) at 19 high schools in Queensland, Australia, who were asked to discuss their knowledge and experience of workplace rights and responsibilities. The limitations of the safety self-advocacy approach are explored, including the social, developmental and organisational issues that might affect the ability or willingness of school-aged workers to self-advocate. The findings reveal that the notion of self-advocacy is internalised by young people before they even enter the formal labour market but that in practice, attempts by young people to enact rights to safety are often dismissed or undermined.

Professional experience, or practicum placements, is an important component in the education of pre-service teachers and preparing them for their own classrooms after graduation. However, while the pedagogical and personal development benefits of participation are well documented, the personal costs of participation have been less comprehensively explored. This chapter identifies the perceived costs and benefits of participation in practicum from the perspective of undergraduate and postgraduate pre-service teachers attending an Australia university. The research study reported in this chapter reveals that the practicum experience is, on the whole, associated with positive feelings and the opportunity to gain practical ‘real-world’ experience and professional development. However, the financial hardship that can be created or magnified as a consequence of participation in practicum can negatively impact the practicum experience and the well-being of a pre-service teacher. The chapter concludes by reflecting on approaches that universities and accrediting bodies may consider to manage the financial and other impacts of practicum participation on pre-service teachers without decreasing their educational and experiential value.

This chapter explores the impact of deficit discourses on the developing occupational identity of young workers and how this shapes assessments of their capacity to be a ‘good’ worker. Drawing from studies of young workers’ experiences of paid and unpaid work, we explore the ways that employers characterise the employability and work performance of young workers and find that employers characterise young workers as deficient in terms of their skills profile, work ethic and personal attributes. Although young workers often do not challenge these characterisations of themselves, these framings shape young workers’ understanding of their value as a worker.

While there has been progress on a range of issues influencing gender equity in the workforce, getting to and from work can be a fundamental barrier to participation and equity. Issues such as: Access to transportation, the routes taken, modes used, distance travelled, and time and money spent in transit are often shaped by gender. In this chapter we adopt an intersectional feminist lens to explore the structural inequities in transport accessibility and workplace mobilities and consider ways to begin to redress or mitigate their impact. We describe a cross-section of organizational and public policy responses to the broader societal challenge of gendered transport disadvantage primarily from an Australian perspective. We consider its impacts on equal workforce participation within the formal economy, including the mainstreaming and normalization of flexible working and transport policies. We identify a mix of transport and non-transport initiatives from selected OECD nations aimed at reducing barriers to workforce participation and contributing to improved workplace equity through improved accessibility and mobility, particularly for women.

Planning employment in Australia is undergoing significant change. The importance of planning as a profession is increasing, the number of planners employed in Australia more than doubled between 2000 and 2013, and vacant planning positions are filled with relative ease and attract large numbers of qualified applicants. While this is good news for planning as a profession, it means that employment prospects for graduating planners have weakened in recent years as the labor market has tightened. This chapter explores the changing planning education and employment landscape and what it means to “be” a planner and to “do” planning work in Australia.