I employ a conceptual synthesis that bridges Western and First Nations sciences in pursuit of a broader understanding of cultural burning as a multispecies practice in Australia. The concept of ‘re-storying’ diminishes nature/culture dualisms and creates space for the role of culture in understanding and shaping ecologies; the concept of ‘niche construction’ fosters attention to the ways in which humans co-construct landscapes with other organisms in ways that affect the communities doing the co-constructing. With this conceptual toolkit, I draw attention to the species that play important roles in cultural burning practices through story, ceremony, and their actions upon the landscape. Animals such as bandicoots, brush turkeys, and raptors have pronounced effects on landscapes, and these in turn alter and affect the ways in which First Nations peoples apply fire. These stories demonstrate the complex, relational, and multispecies nature of cultural burning and the need for broader, more nuanced approaches that allow people to burn for, and with, animals.

The global expansion of authoritarianism as a political system has fuelled debate on the role of major authoritarian powers in promoting authoritarianism beyond their borders. China is widely regarded as a significant player in promoting authoritarianism and disrupting democracy abroad. This study explores this assumption by examining China’s policy towards Myanmar across economic, military, political and diplomatic sectors. Covering three decades in bilateral relations, this study traces continuity and change in China’s relation vis-à-vis changes in Myanmar’s political orientation. Over these three decades, China’s policy—spanning Myanmar’s transition from military rule to democracy and subsequent return to military rule—reveals remarkable continuity that remains unaffected by the type of political regime in Myanmar. This finding challenges the dominant assumption—pervasive in the literature that informs policymaking in Western capitals—that views China as a leading actor in promoting autocracy. This study reveals a pragmatic strategy in Beijing focused on securing China’s security and economic interests, where ideological considerations do not occupy the assumed prime of place.

This paper examines the importance of decolonisation to counter the ongoing harms of state-sanctioned child removal policies that disproportionately affect First Nations families and communities in Victoria, Australia. Ongoing legacies of structural disadvantage, including drug abuse, mental ill-health, limited and conditional income support, and housing insecurity, are governed through a selective biopolitical vision that has informed child protection policies since colonisation. Family separation is assumed to protect both vulnerable children and the general community. We argue this logic reinforces structural inequalities that place unreasonable burdens on First Nations mothers to engage in ‘desirable’ and responsible parenting. We present current statistics on the over-representation of First Nations children in the Victorian child protection system, then describe how Western notions of biopolitics view family separation as central to protecting children. This approach now invokes neoliberal modes of governing through risk management, rather than supporting vulnerable families. We then briefly describe Victoria’s child protection system, and critically examine key factual and procedural issues emerging from the application of the ‘best interests’ principle in four case studies documenting legal appeals instigated by First Nations families. We conclude by proposing decolonisation as a counterpoint to a governmental rationality that endorses the protection of children through state-sanctioned family separation.

The mass destruction of heritage sites by Islamic State (IS) led to significant advances in the legal and normative frameworks governing global responses to heritage destruction in conflict. However, despite the scale and intensity of these efforts, the overwhelming majority of mandates and resolutions on heritage destruction are gender-blind. By applying a feminist International Relations perspective, we seek to answer the following research questions: how, and to what extent, do gender and heritage destruction intersect in conflict, and what explains the omission of gender in multilateral responses to heritage destruction? To answer these questions, we analyse the responses of key global agencies to the destruction carried out by IS and juxtapose them against results from in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted with a diverse group of Syrian and Iraqi women, all of whom were directly affected by attacks on their heritage. In doing so, we demonstrate the complex ways that women experience heritage destruction in conflict, thereby highlighting the systemic failures of the international community to grasp the gendered implications of such destruction. We also demonstrate how the absence of gender in institutionalized responses to heritage destruction is indicative of the relegation of feminized identities and experiences in contemporary accounts of war.

This paper explores intergenerational dynamics affecting second-generation migrant youth transcultural identities within a global context of increasing mobility, diversity and interconnectedness. Drawing on in-depth interviews of first and second-generation migrant youth across three research sites, this paper explores how migrant families in Melbourne (Australia), Toronto (Canada) and Birmingham (UK) maintain and transmit their heritage culture and associated values, skills and knowledge – a critical component of transcultural capital – to the next generation. The young adults’ narratives illustrate the socio-cultural processes that enable opportunities for inter-generational relating and cross-cultural belonging. The ensuing critical awareness, cross-cultural knowledge, and social engagement with one’s own culture(s) enhance intercultural openness, an important orientation in today’s hyper-connected and super-diverse world. Importantly, within this ethno-culturally pluralist framing, migrant youth act less as passive recipients of culture(s) and more as agentic drivers of multi-dimensional cultural adaptation. In mobilising selectively and agentically transcultural capital, migrant youth are then able to negotiate and critically engage with aspects of their heritage culture. This forms enabling strategies conducive to individually driven social empowerment and intercultural engagement.

The association between childhood maltreatment and juvenile offending has been well-established, with a significant proportion of justice-involved young people being found to have child protection service histories. However, it is unclear what psychological factors contribute to this complex relationship. This study aimed to compare levels of impulsivity, impulsive aggression, psychopathology, and a sensitivity to anger, as well as gender and ethnocultural background, across justice-involved youth with and without a child protection history. The study sample comprised 215 young people detained in juvenile detention centers across two sites in Victoria, Australia between July 2011 and June 2012. Measures of impulsivity, impulsive aggression, internalizing and externalizing behaviors, and sensitivity to anger were administered and compared amongst those who had previously been the subject of a child protection order and those without such histories. Results of logistic regression analyses indicated that impulsivity and impulsive aggression were independently associated with having a child protection history in justice-involved youth. Ethnocultural background was also significantly associated with having a child protection history. Implications for clinical practice and future research are discussed.

African party systems vary considerably in their patterns of stability and change over time. This article examines how economic growth has been shaped by such party system fluidity—in particular, the frequency, scope and variety of change—while taking account of the constitutional regime (i.e., level of democracy) within which these party system dynamics occur. To do so, we use Arellano-Bond generalized method of moments models to test the impact of party system fluidity and the level of democracy on economic growth in Africa during the post-independence period (1970–2018). We find, consistent with previous research, that democracy has an uncertain effect on growth. However, party system fluidity is reliably and positively correlated with growth. Its effects are particularly strong whenever an unstable party system coexists with an autocratic regime, which suggests that this specific political context—which has often been associated with democratization—is especially conducive to economic growth.

This paper explores the role of cultural heritage in shaping competing civilisational identities amid the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict. As its case studies, it focuses on the relatively recent restorations of two significant mosques, the Blue Mosque in Yerevan (capital of Armenia) and the Govhar Agha Mosque in Shusha (capital of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan), respectively. Referring to primary references in Persian, Azerbaijani, Turkish, Armenian, and Russian, the paper elaborates historical, cultural, and political narratives surrounding these edifices and their restorations. This situates heritage conservation within the South Caucasus’s intricate historical and geopolitical landscape. Within this context, the function of heritage extends beyond national cultural symbolism. Responding to a transnational dimension, heritage functions as an instrument in geopolitical manoeuvring by both Armenia and Azerbaijan and in relation to rising and influential regional powers, Iran, and Turkey. Here the distinct function of heritage is shaping civilisational identities: it projects scales beyond the nation-state and is integral to various other forms of bilateral and multilateral agreements, including military and economic. As such, disputes over these two heritage sites and others like them, echo broader geopolitical and civilisational tensions at regional scales. Thus, heritage is at once the battleground for national-territorial and civilisational claims.

Australia’s remote health sector has chronic understaffing issues and serves an isolated, culturally diverse population with a high burden of disease. Workplace health and safety (WHS) impacts the wellbeing and sustainability of the remote health workforce. Additionally, poor WHS contributes to burnout, high turnover of staff and reduced quality of care. The issue of poor WHS in Australian very remote primary health clinics was highlighted by the murder of remote area nurse (RAN) Gayle Woodford in 2016. Following her death, a national call for change led by peak bodies and Gayle’s family resulted in the development of many WHS recommendations and strategies for the remote health sector. However, it is unclear whether they have been implemented. The aim of this study is to identify which WHS recommendations have been implemented, from the perspective of RANs.

This Special Issue interrogates the limitations and possibilities of truth within global efforts to address historical injustice. Over the past 30 years truth commissions have become ubiquitous in response to authoritarian regimes and colonial legacies. However, their ability to facilitate meaningful transformation is increasingly contested. In this editorial we explore what a decolonial reckoning, rather than reconciliation, with the past and colonial logics of power, might mean. In doing so, we argue that the liberal, modernist imaginary of justice on which many truth processes have been premised, is constraining our imagination of more radical ‘fugitive’ forms justice. Drawing from contributions from Australia and other global contexts this special issue investigates these limitations and the transformative potential of truth as a decolonial, sovereign, embodied and relational praxis. Contributors engage with the pluriversality of truth in ways that trouble the nation-state and centre the sovereignty and onto-epistemology of racialised and First Nations peoples, often excluded from transitional justice processes, thus offering pathways for radical resistance, resurgence and prefigurative transformation.

The COVID-19 ‘hard lockdowns’ in Melbourne, Australia in 2020 targeted public housing estates thus trading on perceptions of risk associated with public housing as some of the most stigmatised sites in post-industrial cities. This article draws on interviews with Melbourne public housing tenants on their experience of COVID-19 lockdowns to analyse the place of stigma in residents’ accounts. Pairing Wacquant et al’s (2014) concept of ‘territorial stigma’ with sociological work on the biopolitics of stigma we consider the dynamics of stigma, tracing how it functions to delimit community boundaries and justify pandemic containment measures. Residents navigate multiple layers of stigma, including stereotypes of public housing, normative judgements of neighbouring residents, and a broader public housing system riven with structural issues. Members of these communities are both the targets of stigma and seek to distance themselves from those seen as vectors of stigma. Our participants report mobilising social distancing strategies couched in normative assessments of perceived risk based on physical appearance, presumed drug use and past conduct. We explore the implications of these enactments of territorial stigma and trace the logics of abjection that construct public housing as deprived urban zones, home to abject ‘Others’ perceived as threatening the health of the community.

This article presents a longitudinal analysis of COVID-19 infection and vaccination coverage in Melbourne metropolitan local government areas (LGAs) during the 2021 Delta wave.

The intricate relationship between public service media (PSM) and social media platforms has emerged as a critical factor significantly impacting the legitimacy of the PSM institution. This study adopts a discursive institutionalism lens to examine how six PSM organizations across Europe, Australia and Canada communicate their relationship and ideas about social media platforms via their annual reports over a 10-year period (2013–2022). Annual reports provide valuable insight into PSM organizations’ discursive processes that are aimed at generating (and justifying) public and political support. The analysis uncovers a complex and at times contradictory set of discourses revolving around audience attention and interaction, editorial integrity, and digital safety. While building platform presence is portrayed as crucial for sustained reach and relevance, PSM organizations also position themselves as counterweights to negative platform influences within the national media ecology. We observe a shift towards increasingly risk-oriented platform narratives over time, particularly concerning Facebook, resulting in a more deliberate social media strategy among some PSM organizations, and even disengagement with the platform.

The insistence on knowledge accumulation in modern educational discourses has led to the formation of exclusive dichotomies in various forms, most tangibly observable in the division of people into ‘knowledgeable’ and ‘unknowledgeable’. What underlies this dichotomy is a conception of rationality based on which knowledge is seen as an ‘instrument’ which must necessarily result in a usable, profitable product. From a Levinasian perspective, the latter situation inevitably, if not purposefully, leads to the formation of the Other being located at the side of irrationality, hence an unnecessary entity within the knowledge economy. Analysing Werner Herzog’s film, The Enigma of Kasper Hauser’s (1974), this paper aims to show how irrationality, contrary to the belief of dominant educational/pedagogical discourses, can act as a source for creative thinking. The paper argues that by accepting the Other as the unknowable, we allow them to resort to their singularity as a source for imaginative thinking.

In this paper I return to Hubert Dreyfus’ old but influential critique of artificial intelligence, redirecting it towards contemporary predictive processing models of the mind (PP). I focus on Dreyfus’ arguments about the “frame problem” for artificial cognitive systems, and his contrasting account of embodied human skills and expertise. The frame problem presents as a prima facie problem for practical work in AI and robotics, but also for computational views of the mind in general, including for PP. Indeed, some of the issues it presents seem more acute for PP, insofar as it seeks to unify all cognition and intelligence, and aims to do so without admitting any cognitive processes or mechanisms outside of the scope of the theory. I contend, however, that there is an unresolved problem for PP concerning whether it can both explain all cognition and intelligent behavior as minimizing prediction error with just the core formal elements of the PP toolbox, and also adequately comprehend (or explain away) some of the apparent cognitive differences between biological and prediction-based artificial intelligence, notably in regard to establishing relevance and flexible context-switching, precisely the features of interest to Dreyfus’ work on embodied indexicality, habits/skills, and abductive inference. I address several influential philosophical versions of PP, including the work of Jakob Hohwy and Andy Clark, as well as more enactive-oriented interpretations of active inference coming from a broadly Fristonian perspective.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people are highly overrepresented within the Australian justice system. Despite an increase in research and policies, it is still unclear which interventions, programs and policies are most effective. The aim of the current study was to investigate the relationship between the Social and Emotional Wellbeing (SEWB) of Aboriginal young people and justice system non-involvement from a strengths-based perspective. The sample consisted of 725 Aboriginal adolescents aged 10–15 years who completed The Next Generation Project’s Youth Well-Being Study survey. Logistic regression was conducted to assess the SEWB factors associated with justice system non-involvement. It was found that self-rated good health, positive scores on the Prosocial Scale of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire and younger age were significant predictors of justice system non-involvement. Policies and programs focusing on systems level approaches to support wellbeing in young Aboriginal people are likely to be beneficial.

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are a key international conservation strategy to regulate human pressures on marine environments and are central to marine management in Australia. Public support is considered crucial to the success of MPAs in achieving the long-term conservation of nature, yet how the broader Australian public understands and values MPAs is not well understood. Previous research has explored attitudes of direct and proximate stakeholder groups or focused on specific regions. Human connections to marine environments, however, are not limited to direct use nor confined to single geographies. We surveyed a nationally representative sample of Australian adults (n = 1049) to explore how the broader public understand, connect to, and value Australia’s marine environments and MPAs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate general attitudes to Australia’s total MPA system and interconnected marine environments with a nationally representative sample to provide an aggregated overview of Australian public attitudes. Most Australians (53%) acknowledge that they have a knowledge gap regarding the restrictions, requirements, and protections of MPAs as they apply in the Australian context, while 37% incorrectly believe that all MPAs offer uniform protections that, for example, prohibit the extraction of natural resources. Australians want to see an expansion of MPA coverage to represent 73% of Australian waters. Australians value the intrinsic biospheric characteristics of marine environments and want to see marine life as the focus when designing MPAs, above instrumental dimensions including industry and recreation. This study provides important insights for policymakers and managers in meeting broader public expectations in the expansion of Australia’s marine protections.

Dark Tourism is a term associated with pilgrimages to places associated with the famous dead. ‘Dark Poetry’ attempts to imagine, explore, or reanimate a dark event. Using Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust poetry and Mariko Nagai’s collection, Irradiated Cities (2017) as examples, we discuss dark poetry’s use of an anti-elegiac mode, which focuses on historical particularities in refashioning and problematizing dark events while employing numerous gaps and fragmentations. This poetry, often written by second-generation and non-survivor poets, approaches notions of the ineffable while providing an important bridge between incomprehensible events and the human imagination, and challenging language’s capacity to comprehend the ‘unspeakable.’

Background: Long-acting injectable depot buprenorphine has become an important treatment option for the management of opioid dependence. However, little is known about patients’ experiences of depot buprenorphine and its embodied effects. This qualitative study aims to explore patients’ experiences of depot buprenorphine treatment, including how it feels within the body, experiences of dosing cycles across time, and how this form of treatment relies on wider ecologies of care beyond the clinical encounter.

The commercial determinants of health is a rapidly expanding field of research; however Indigenous perspectives remain notably underrepresented. For Indigenous peoples the intersection of globalisation, colonialism and capitalism may amplify commercially-driven health inequities. This study aimed to explore the perspectives of Aboriginal leaders regarding the influence of commercial activities on Aboriginal health and wellbeing in Victoria, Australia.

The twenty-first century has seen near constant crises and conflicts across the Middle East, many of which have had a devastating impact on the region’s rich cultural heritage. Confronted by this reality, UNESCO – the world’s foremost body designed to promote the protection of heritage – has struggled to meaningfully address site destruction and has been hamstrung by its own institutional inertia. The vacuum created by UNESCO’s failures has given rise to a hybrid heritage landscape of multilateral agencies, INGOs, state bodies and local organisations which seek to emulate, improve on or radically re-imagine the work that UNESCO was designed to lead. In turn, this has created burgeoning business opportunities and a thriving consultancy culture for INGOs, often with little public oversight, accountability or effective monitoring. This paper critically examines the rise of these heritage INGOs and their efforts in the Middle East, bringing into question their efficacy and legitimacy by drawing on results from original surveys conducted in both Mosul and Aleppo. The results indicate that these heritage INGOs largely fail to adequately engage locals in their programmes to protect and restore heritage and that respondents would prefer to see domestic control over the future of their past.

The destruction of heritage in conflict has emerged as a key challenge to global security and the prospects of peace. In response, the international community has undertaken several large-scale heritage reconstruction projects on the assumption that they would foster development and promote cohesion. However, to date very little is understood about how local populations value their heritage, how they perceive its destruction, whether they view reconstruction as a priority, and the extent to which they support foreign efforts to rebuild. This article addresses this lacuna by focusing on the case study of Aleppo and documenting the results of an original public opinion survey of 1600 residents. The results hold several implications for heritage projects in Aleppo, namely that locals prefer that heritage reconstruction: not be privileged over security, development and peace; includes the rebuilding of their local religious sites as much as significant non-religious sites; transforms sites into more useful structures for the community; and they want domestic control and agency over the future of their heritage. The article concludes by noting that such findings hold important implications for heritage projects in other (post-)conflict contexts where mass heritage destruction has taken place.

Across disciplines, qualitative researchers have documented epistemological and practical tensions in the ethical review of community-based and participatory research, with many arguing that ethics committees’ decisions perpetuate the exclusion of marginalised communities from research engagement. In the existing literature, the research team and the ethics committee are often characterised as staunch opponents. Conversely, in our recent qualitative research addressing communication about sexuality with young people with cerebral palsy who use communication methods other than speech (augmentative and alternative communication), we found that constructive collaboration between researchers and committee members yielded novel insights. Co-authored by a multi-disciplinary research team and the former chair of a Human Research Ethics Committee, this reflexive case study identified three key tensions which arose in the ethical review of research involving this purportedly marginalised population, which reflected the wider importance of trust. We propose a series of practical recommendations to support productive collaboration in the pursuit of safe, inclusive and community-driven research.

Long-acting injectable depot buprenorphine has become an important treatment option for the management of opioid dependence. However, little is known about patients’ experiences of depot buprenorphine and its embodied effects. This qualitative study aims to explore patients’ experiences of depot buprenorphine treatment, including how it feels within the body, experiences of dosing cycles across time, and how this form of treatment relies on wider ecologies of care beyond the clinical encounter.

Holocaust museums around the world are distinctive in their emphasis on educational missions premised on the idea of “never again”, a deep belief that increasing public awareness of the history and contemporary significance of the Holocaust – the mass murder of six million European Jews by the Nazi regime during World War Two – can prevent the future recurrence of such events. In the Australian context, tens of thousands of school students visit Holocaust museums every year to participate in learning programs designed to impart powerful historical and moral lessons about the Holocaust, its antecedent conditions, and its ongoing relevance. The aspirations attached to these programs and the scale at which they are delivered stand in stark contrast to the lack of empirical evidence to support their efficacy. This research protocol describes an extensive four-year research study designed to evaluate the presumed linear relationship between Holocaust education programs and ethical, moral, and affective learning that leads to durable attitudinal and behavioural change. Funded through the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Projects scheme, the study will assess the impact of Holocaust museums’ education programs on high school students from diverse demographics, including the extent to which participation influences the views and actions of young people in relation to racial and identity-based discrimination. The research design is longitudinal and transdisciplinary, integrating qualitative, quantitative, and participatory techniques across three case studies. By strategically employing rapid ethnographic assessment procedures, archival research, analysis of museum representational practices, surveys, and visual research methods, we will examine both the educational intent behind Holocaust education programs and their actual impacts on a large sample of Australian Year 10 students. We expect the results of the research to be used by our project partners to develop Holocaust education programs that effectively engage students on cognitive and affective levels.

This Introduction outlines the rationale for the symposium by providing an overview of the main information pathologies that are increasingly affecting liberal democratic polities, including misinformation, disinformation, fake news, rumours, and conspiracism. It then zooms in on Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum’s (2019) book A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy, from which this symposium takes inspiration and outlines its key argument. Finally, the Introduction provides a brief summary of the articles in the symposium, explaining their contribution to debates on conspiracism and on other key areas of research in contemporary political theory and political science.

Race formation, canon formation, and the writing of linguistic history can all be understood as processes of standardisation that differentiate through inclusion and exclusion of selected characteristics (of a human group, language use, or literary work) in synchronic moments and artificially link those moments to create diachronic histories that can span millennia. As we will show in this essay, Thomas Warton’s The History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh to the commencement of the Eighteenth Century (1775–1778) enacts all three processes simultaneously in ways that are inextricably entangled, and structured by an ideology of standardisation.

In the 1970s, a shift took place in the dress practices of attendees at the Melbourne Cup, marking out the period from the conservative formality of the decade before. Evident in the public areas of Flemington Racecourse, this new trend saw boisterous young racegoers dress in satiric, comedic or raunchy attire. Commenting on this trend in the late seventies, the journalist Keith Dunstan decided that unruly young people engaging in these madcap dress practices had turned the Cup into a “Bacchanalian Mardi Gras”. In this article, we use Dunstan’s commentary and an extensive archive of images taken at Flemington by the photographer Rennie Ellis to argue that the culture of mocking and ludicrous dress emerging at the Cup in the 1970s was a form of carnivalesque disorder that appealed not only to boorish, beer-swilling ocker men, but also young female revellers determined to contest convention and members of countercultures who creatively pushed sartorial boundaries. We also argue that the best way to understand the rise of carnivalesque dress at the Cup is to see it as part of a wider suite of practices that had the cumulative effect of changing approaches to sexual, gender and social decorum across the seventies.

Diagnoses of infectious diseases are being transformed as mass self-testing using rapid antigen tests (RATs) is increasingly integrated into public health. Widely used during the COVID-19 pandemic, RATs are claimed to have many advantages over ‘gold-standard’ polymerase chain reaction tests, especially their ease of use and production of quick results. Yet, while laboratory studies indicate the value of RATs in detecting the SARS-CoV-2 virus antigen, uncertainty surrounds their deployment and ultimate effectiveness in stemming infections. This article applies the analytic lens of biological citizenship (or bio-citizenship) to explore Australia’s experience of implementing a RAT-based mass self-testing strategy to manage COVID-19. Drawing on Annemarie Mol’s (1999, The Sociological Review, 47(1), 74-89) concept of ontological politics and analysing government statements, scientific articles and news media reporting published during a critical juncture of the strategy’s implementation, we explore the kind of bio-citizenship implied by this strategy. Our analysis suggests the emergence of what we call liminal bio-citizenship, whereby citizens are made responsible for self-managing infection risk without the diagnostic certitude this demands. We discuss how the different realities of mass self-testing interact to reinforce this liminal citizenship and consider the implications for the sociology of diagnosis.

Many local newsrooms across the globe have been forced to re-assess (and re-assert) their value and function during a period of intense digital disruption. “Innovate or die” has become an accepted mantra as governments, policymakers, and academics focus on shifting, for example, traditional newspapers into the digital era to maintain their perceived relevance. This article argues the need to understand and learn from the experiences of traditional commercial local news providers who have been encouraged to consider innovative solutions for their businesses. The article adopts a pooled case comparison approach, drawing on data from two separate studies examining media innovation in Norway and Australia. We outline three specific themes that appear to shape localized innovation practices: there is ambivalence or challenge to innovation discourse; introduced innovations are done so incrementally and re-contextualised to adapt to a local setting; and there is an authentic approach to innovation that prioritizes change aligning with local journalism’s social and community values.

We explore the contentious life of a metric used to assess a country’s progress in relation to global disease elimination targets. Our topic is hepatitis C elimination, and our context is Australia. A fundamental metric in the calculation of progress toward hepatitis C elimination targets, as set by the WHO, is the population prevalence of people living with hepatitis C. In Australia, this modelled estimate has generated some controversy, largely through its repeated downsizing as an effect of calculus. The 2015 baseline population estimate in Australia, from which measures of current elimination progress are assessed, has reduced, over time, by around 30%. Informed by a social study of science approach, we used qualitative interviews with 32 experts to explore the knowledge controversy. The controversy is narrated through the core concerns of ‘scale’ and ‘care’, with narratives aligning differently to imaginaries of ‘science’ and ‘community’. We trace how constitutions of ‘estimate’ and ‘number’ circulate in relation to ‘population’ and ‘people’, and as affective values. We show how enactments of estimates and numbers materialise hepatitis elimination in different ways, with policy implications. The event of the knowledge controversy opens up the social and political life of enumerations-for science and community-inviting deliberation on how to make ‘good numbers’ in the race to eliminate hepatitis C.

While the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic upon higher education institutions has been well documented, less is known about how academics themselves responded to these rapid changes. This paper analyses the experiences of teacher education academics from Australia and New Zealand (n = 13) who were interviewed during lengthy pandemic lockdowns. Whilst rarely using the language of resistance, participants revealed multiple ways they navigated these seemingly totalising forces of neoliberalism through working to maintain quality education, collegiality, criticality and care. Using theory to help inform our understandings of resistance, our study identified three forms of resistance that were underpinned by feminist, post-structural and critical pedagogy theories. In the face of likely ongoing uncertainty into the future, paying attention to how academics navigated the pandemic provides valuable insights into forms of emergent resistance in moments of extreme precarity in higher education, and the importance of these for continuity and hope.

The environmental movement has brought attention to the reality that we are not only connected to the natural world, but the ways in which we transform nature have a significant impact on our well-being. This important sense of connectedness between humans and the more-than-human world has led to more expansive models of health, such as One Health, Social Determinants of Health (SDoH), and the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD). These overlapping but distinct models show how health and disease states are not merely predicated on the internal (dys)functioning of an organism but also integrates environmental (e.g. pollution, climate change, etc) and social (e.g. low income, housing, food access, etc.) conditions. These expansive models of health make visible how unhealthy environments lead to important health disparities, and thus, environmental injustices can no longer escape being evaluated also from a bioethical standpoint.

he environmental movement has brought attention to the reality that we are not only connected to the natural world, but the ways in which we transform nature have a significant impact on our well-being. This important sense of connectedness between humans and the more-than-human world has led to more expansive models of health, such as One Health, Social Determinants of Health (SDoH), and the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD). These overlapping but distinct models show how health and disease states are not merely predicated on the internal (dys)functioning of an organism but also integrates environmental (e.g. pollution, climate change, etc) and social (e.g. low income, housing, food access, etc.) conditions. These expansive models of health make visible how unhealthy environments lead to important health disparities, and thus, environmental injustices can no longer escape being evaluated also from a bioethical standpoint.

This article takes up the idea of language as a home and dwelling, and reconsiders what this might mean in the context of diasporic bilingualism – where as a ‘heritage speaker’ of a minority language, the ‘mother tongue’ may be experienced as both deeply familiar yet also alien or alienating. Drawing on a range of philosophical and literary accounts (Cassin, Arendt, Anzaldúa, Vuong, among others), this article explores how the so-called ‘mother tongue’ is experienced by heritage speakers in an English-dominant world. From navigating one’s being in-between language-worlds, to the experience of language loss and efforts of reconnection, I argue that bilingual dwelling involves many complex layers often overlooked by philosophical accounts of language that do not attend to the lived world of the migrant and racialised outsider. By turning to the example of bilingual parenting, I then examine how such an undertaking, while labour-intensive, offers opportunities to refresh and co-create language-worlds anew.

The cleanliness, mobility and quality of urban air has regained political legibility in debates on post-pandemic cities. To contextualize the political and epistemological significance of air in urban contexts, we suggest looking at the under-researched experience of premodern cities and bodies, how they developed a complex ecological imagination and solutions guided by findings from Hippocratic-Galenic medicine. While we do not romanticize these efforts, we argue that they represent an overlooked archive through which the post-Enlightenment mechanization, securitization and abstraction of air can be challenged. Turning to recent findings from both more-than-human thinking and microbiology as applied to air (aerobiome), we acknowledge that microbiome science is a result of laboratory science; however, we argue that findings from microbiome science point to a reanimation of air as something that cannot be fully instrumentalized or securitized as in modernistic programs of biopolitical control. By drawing on the on the experience of the Hippocratic tradition as a catalyst and a proxy for wider ontologies of flows and corporeal porosity across the Eurasian landmass, we suggest arriving at an affirmative reconceptualization of human-environment entanglement based on notions of permeability and a non-binary ontology of flows. This more-than-human approach may not only complicate the alleged simplistic view of the “West” as a dualistic monolith but act also as bridge and companion to Indigenous and Southern ontologies and experiences of life, non-life, matter and nature.

As digital photography proliferates in the contemporary world, theorists and creative writers continue to debate what photographs signify and how the poetic ekphrasis of photographs should be understood. This has become a pressing issue in an age when new technologies allow the easy manipulation of digital images – which, depending on the context in which they are viewed, are increasingly being characterised as creative, imaginative, unreliable or deceptive. Yet nineteenth- and early to mid-twentieth-century theorists tended to assume that photographs had a direct, if complex, relationship to observable, external reality, something reiterated by Susan Sontag as late as 1977. This paper discusses how ekphrastic poems by Thomas Hardy and Philip Larkin enshrine assumptions about photography that are now shifting, and how contemporary ekphrastic poems about photographs increasingly challenge, sometimes subversively, photography’s link to the ‘real’. Such poetry continues to emphasise the way photographs connote a ‘chasm’ or ‘thickening’ of time but are more troubled than earlier authors by the idea that photographs may not represent anything clear or knowable. Eve Joseph’s and Leslie Scalapino’s poetry demonstrates ways in which photographs tend to juxtapose a sense of transience with a new sense of photography’s sometimes obdurate problematics.

Young people who have both child protection and youth justice contact have been termed ‘dual system youth’. Dual system youth have been found to engage in more frequent and serious offending than justice-involved youth without child protection histories. It is unclear which psychological factors contribute to offending amongst dual-system youth. This study aimed to examine associations between child protection involvement, psychological/behavioural factors, and justice system involvement. The sample comprised 192 young people detained in juvenile correctional centres across two sites in Victoria, Australia between July 2011 and June 2012. Instruments were administered to gauge psychopathology and behaviour, while information regarding demographic details, child protection history, and offence data were obtained from client files. Results indicated that having a child protection history was associated with having both a violent index offence and a higher number of previous orders. Sensitivity to anger was also associated with having a violent index offence, while being male and aged 17–18 were associated with a higher number of previous orders. Child protection history moderated the relationship between Indigenous status and the number of prior orders, and between externalising symptoms and prior orders. Implications for clinical practice and future research are discussed.

Digital adaptation is often considered the panacea to the local journalism crisis in Australia. As a result, this digital first agenda has perpetuated ‘death and doom’ narratives about some traditional strategies and practices, especially in regards to the future of printed local newspapers. This paper draws on interviews and focus groups with local news owners, journalists, editors, advertising staff and managers who work for small independently owned titles in rural and regional Australia to suggest there are three key myths which are deeply interwoven and impact perceptions of local news media realities: that print is dead, the traditional advertising model has collapsed and there are no jobs in journalism. We suggest these myths can cloud discussions around the targeted and systemic solutions needed to secure local news futures.

This study evaluated a research project that provided employment in an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community-based setting and supported participants to identify and achieve their goals and aspirations. The evaluation examined changes in personal, relationship, community and cultural strengths and resources and explored empowerment and resilience, in terms of promoting wellbeing.

The changing social, cultural and physical characteristics and uses of public spaces by migrants are of longstanding interest to social scientists. Often embedded in uses of public spaces are splinters, resonances and connections to home and migration. This paper examines the religious spaces that Sri Lankan migrants engage with in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia. To untangle the complexities associated with these spaces, we integrate a framework of belonging that encompasses rituals, relationships and restrictions. A multilayered dataset, which includes interviews with the Sri Lankan diaspora, (auto)ethnography, field observations and photography, revealed that within the Sri Lankan diaspora, individuals often used religious spaces to maintain rituals and identities. The data uncovered that some participants in the diaspora used religious spaces to gather and socialise with other diaspora members while others had dynamic relationships with these spaces – that is, the meanings attributed to religious spaces were at times fraught with tensions and hostilities towards religious practice and feelings of welcome. In this paper, we offer a snapshot of a growing diaspora in Australia and their negotiations to belong (or not).

Over recent decades, there have been increased public debates about rising level of ethnic and religious diversity and their implications for social cohesion and intercultural relations. These contestations are often situated within a diversity governance continuum with two opposing and often extreme poles both in the policy arena as well as the academic literature. The first pole sees diversity as potentially contributing to social fissures and intercultural discord. The second pole highlights the benefits of an acceptance of diversity for cross-cultural awareness and social peace. Using empirical evidence from a multi-year project, this article assesses the key assumptions underlying these oppositional approaches through a study of the provision of social services to multicultural communities and its association with civic engagement and national belonging. Study findings show that access to multicultural services is significantly associated with higher levels of civic engagement among migrants, rather than social exclusion and urban segregation.

In their 2010 book, Lorna Weir and Eric Mykhalovskiy conceptualised the role of vigilance in unknown and emerging infectious disease threats. Theirs is a macro-level account which draws on empirical data to describe vigilance as a set of technical and political arrangements that govern collection, analysis, interpretation and communication of data as it pertains to unknown threats. In this paper we expand their work to detail a conceptual analysis of the role of vigilance at the micro-level during periods of high infectious disease threat. Our data are daily press conferences and associated non-discursive tools in New South Wales (NSW), Australia during times of heightened COVID-19 risk. This paper is a conceptual analysis that draws on theories of vigilance and related concepts to show how a key aspect of vigilance is making previously unseen threats visible or present. Communications formulated and encouraged three types of vigilance as a set of governing relations: institutional or authority-based; individual outward-facing; and individual inward-facing. We also describe the relationship between vigilance and related concepts that are used in response to anticipated public threats. Authority based vigilance involved contact tracing and policing of movement and behaviours. In individual outward facing vigilance people were asked to be alert to, analyse, and react to risk in their immediate environment. Inward facing vigilance required people to gather and react to information about their own behaviours and within their own bodies. There was a relationship between different types of vigilance; as risk increased and authority-based vigilance was less successful in containing the spread of infection, individual vigilance had a stronger role to play. This extension of vigilance at the micro-level sees some of the same unintended consequences as Weir and Mykhalovskiy describe at the global level, particularly in how burdens are inequitably distributed and experienced.

Colonisation, genocide, ecocide, and climate derangement are ongoing, unfurling, global tragedies. In so-called Australia, spiritual practitioners can respond to these crises by deepening their engagement with Aboriginal perspectives/practices. This paper contends that some Eurocentric habitual categorisations subtly misinterpret Aboriginal experiences of the sacred, such as identifying creation myths as beliefs comparable to post-Enlightenment representations of the sacred and identifying the performance of sacred activity with similar characteristics to separateness and priesthood. This leads to erroneous characterisations of Aboriginal ritual practices as being based on a strong hierarchy, distinctive castes, and esotericism. We argue that an embodied and practice-based sense of sacredness guides Aboriginal spirituality. As a living culture, Aboriginal ongoing care for Country provides an enfleshed, real, palpable enactment of human spirituality. We argue that Aboriginal spirituality has been fetishised to the neglect of a call to care for Country in the most ‘mundane’ sense of tending to food, water, air, etc., as embodied religious experiences. Delving into dadirri and death, we elucidate contemporary cases of practical care for Country that illustrate how being on, in, and with Country can be a contemplative experience. We conclude by outlining how caring for Country ‘layers’ the various expressions of Aboriginal religious experience socially, psychologically, interpersonally, and ritually.

Through a combined ecofeminist, and critical disability philosophical analysis of the commodification of female farmed animal reproduction, the paper conceptualizes ability as a socio-capitalist construct that can carry the potential for harm. Patriarchal farmed animal capitalism relies upon the idea of naturalized ability of farmed females to be hyper-reproductive/hyper-ovulatory/hyper-lactative. This paper frames the introduced condition of hyper-ovulation in “egg” hens, or the amplification of their ability to lay through selective breeding, as reproductive impairment, and an act of violent patriarchal commodification and capitalization of female reproduction. Impairment, then, functions not just as disability, but also as ability. Focusing on our rescued chickens, the paper argues that such intentionally bred hyper-fertility manifests for individual hens in its least harmful form as chronic illness with the likelihood of everyday pain and inflammation, anxiety, and metabolic hunger; and in its most harmful form as a life-threatening condition. It then examines the subversive ecofeminist politics of using contraception for chickens in a fraught attempt to restore a closer pace of avian ovulation cycles that existed prior to their selective breeding. In allowing infertility to be restored to hen bodies, chicken contraception highlights the disappearance of intentionally introduced reproductive impairment to materialize the patriarchal-capitalist ableist construct of hens who naturally ovulate daily. Ideas of normal and natural can also thus operate in the service of ability. Ultimately, the paper positions the infertile hen as central to a fuller feminist resistance to the governance and control of the female reproductive body.

Federations present difficulties for prevailing theories of constituent power, which usually attribute ultimate constitution-making authority to a singular people. This article examines how a ‘pluralized’ constituent power functions in federal systems. It argues that the operation of plural constituent power in federations reflects a distinctive model of constitutional formation according to which a ‘polity of polities’ is established and sustained through the maintenance of a tension between plurality and unity.

How do women in the Iranian diaspora contribute to change in their homeland? Drawing on narrative accounts from activists and advocates, this paper offers insight into whether and how change occurs in relation to diasporic initiatives. The results highlight women’s perceived success in public education and awareness-raising activities that focus on procedural, discursive and legislative change. At the same time, despite enjoying freedom in the diaspora, diasporic women continue to face operational constraints like those in the homeland and must minimise risk. The findings are timely given the feminist uprisings that have engulfed Iran in 2022–2023, the coherence of which rests upon the patient and persistent work of those that have come before. This research holds significance for practitioners in diasporic communities, and researchers interested in agents and drivers of change in repressive operating environments.

The COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to diverse manifestations of racism in Australia, from everyday attacks against Asian Australians to discriminatory policies towards temporary migrants. Since the start of the pandemic, considerable knowledge on pandemic-related racism has been produced. This knowledge has yet to be consolidated, leaving questions about the nature, forms, impacts and trajectories of racism during the pandemic. This paper presents a systematic review and synthesis of research on racism during the pandemic, with an emphasis on pandemic-specific racism. We searched the databases Scopus, MEDLINE and PsycINFO for research published between January 2020 and July 2022. Eighteen research studies were included in the review, along with reports of routine data collection by five organisations. The research reviewed collected data mainly around the pandemic’s ‘second wave’ in Australia (June-October 2020), focusing largely on Asian Australians and temporary migrants nationally and in Victoria. Widely studied forms of COVID-racism were verbal abuse, physical attacks, exclusion and Othering, and institutional racism involving governments, media and employers. We examined the pandemic’s health and socio-economic impacts, and variations in experiences of racism over time between ethnic groups. As Australia emerges from the pandemic, we consider the review’s implications for pandemic response, anti-racism practice and policy, and future research.

As researchers, we are trained to publish the most polished versions of our core findings. Yet, what is hidden away when we do so are the raw and sometimes messy accounts of what we see, feel, hear, and experience during fieldwork. Integrating fieldwork challenges into research outputs is still uncommon in human geography. In this paper, I present an excerpt of field notes from research that examined the (re)creations of home by Sri Lankan refugees resettling in Sydney, Australia that were made using the ‘Voice Memos’ application on a smartphone. I reflect on the process of capturing voice field notes using a smartphone, the emotional aspects of fieldwork, and the benefits of documenting fieldwork experiences and challenges at different times and places. This paper champions digital technologies as useful tools to capture immediate emotions felt during fieldwork.

Numerous qualitative studies report South Asian migrants use police as a last resort for family violence (FV), however no quantitative evidence exists in Australia. This study examines police-reported FV recorded by Victorian police between September 2019 and February 2020 (N = 32,450) and compares reports made by South Asian-born (SAB) Australians to Australian-born (AB) Australians. Demographics, incidence and revictimisation rates, severity, frequency of risk and vulnerability factors (e.g. isolation & visa dependency) reported by the two groups were examined. More females were affected family members (AFMs) for both groups; however, SAB males were more likely to report non-partner FV. SAB AFMs reported a lower incidence rate and occurrence of revictimisation than AB AFMs. There were no significant differences in the level of severity (based on charges at time of incident); however, significantly higher number of risk factors were present for SABs reporting intimate partner violence. Mixed results emerged in the frequency of factors.

The use of philosophical phenomenology for conceptual debates in psychiatric nosology and psychopathology is beginning to be recognized. In this paper, we extend this trajectory to include Tourette syndrome (TS), focusing on so-called premonitory urges (PU) preceding Tourettic tics. We clarify some inconsistencies around typology in both phenomenological description and medical classification (i.e., in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition, Text Revision, International Classification of Diseases, 10th edition [World Health Organization, 2004], and the scales that elicit PU). We show how a less typological approach might be usefully deployed in the field, that being the dimensional approach developed by Fernandez (2019a; 2019b). We test both the typological and dimensional approaches in relation to the experience and etiological role of PU in Tourette syndrome. Based on our synthesis of existing studies and new information garnered through phenomenological interviews (using an approach associated with “micro-phenomenology”), we argue that the role of PU in nosology challenges both the current “operational” criteria favored by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition, Text Revision, that are focused on behaviorally observed symptoms, as well as essential and prototypical phenomenological descriptions about a given “type” of experience. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)

Using case law, the aims of this study were to document the methods for trafficking of performance and image-enhancing drugs (PIED) into Australia, and the characteristics of individuals and groups involved. Data was collected from judges’ sentencing comments. Searches were conducted using the Australasian Legal Information Institute database across all states in Australia, for the period of January 2010 to December 2021. After removing duplicates and cases which did not meet the inclusion criteria, 31 cases were included in the analysis.

Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is a significant public health concern in Africa. While the associations between modifiable risk factors and T2DM are likely to be Africa-specific, their overall estimations have not been published. This study aimed to use systematic and meta-analytic methods to examine the strength of associations between modifiable risk factors and T2DM in Africa.

This paper surveys the state of knowledge regarding development and humanitarian non-government organisation (NGO) responses to preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE). As well as delineating the nexus and shared objectives between P/CVE and development/humanitarian NGO frameworks, it outlines a reframing of the concept of VE into violent and hateful extremism (VHE), as a shift to a more nuanced understanding which addresses inherent complexities and entanglements more deeply. The Special Issue that this paper introduces is the product of a roundtable symposium held on this topic, with conceptual and empirical papers submitted by practitioners and academics who were invited to contribute due to their expertise in this area. The diversity of case studies, datasets, and author perspectives serves to advance knowledge on this topic and provide useful evidence and insights to inform policy and practice.

This paper explores the challenges of repatriating poorly documented Aboriginal sacred religious objects from Central Australia. The authors present an overview of historical endeavours to repatriate these objects from Australian domestic museums and the progress of recent returns from international collections. Detailed documentation, including reference to an object’s specific relationship to places, people or ancestral stories is critical to ensuring that rightful contemporary Central Australian Aboriginal people can assume care and responsibility for any repatriated objects. The absence of provenance data and any other related collection documentation can therefore greatly inhibit the return of these objects to present-day custodians. Exploring the prospect of returning large numbers of poorly provenanced sacred objects back to Australia, this paper argues that aside from the potential logistical or infrastructure requirements of repatriating these items, the development of Indigenous cultural frameworks and innovations will be critical to any meaningful repatriation outcomes.

We aimed to explore the acceptability of delivering a child-focused disaster preparedness program in primary schools in a high disaster-risk area and assess community perspectives of young people’s application of preparedness skills during a large-scale bushfire in Australia. Fifteen adult community members participated in individual key-informant interviews online and in-person. Interviews were conducted one year following a major bushfire event in the community. Reflexive thematic analysis was conducted to determine community perceptions of the preparedness program’s acceptability, applicability and impact. Findings indicated that parents and school staff valued the age-appropriate content and delivery of the preparedness program and viewed it as highly relevant, engaging and applicable for primary school children. Many reported that the program supported child-led decision making in evacuation preparedness, heightened a sense of agency, and enhanced social connectedness. Interviewees described multiple instances of children who had completed the preparedness program later enacting the key response strategies during bushfires. The findings complement calls for child preparedness education and highlight the long-term positive impacts of engaging children in disaster resilience. Accordingly, disaster risk reduction measures should incorporate child-focused strategies to foster whole-of-community resilience in high-risk areas.

Shortened version of lecture given at Pondicherry Central University, September 2020, to the Existentialism and Literature E-Lecture series. The paper first addresses Camus’ criticisms of existentialism, which he reads as a form of secularized Christianity, but without grace. Secondly, it makes the claim that, beyond the captivating drama of “absurd creation” in Myth of Sisyphus, there are at least three other, intersecting models for understanding literary and artistic creation in Camus’ work. These culminate in the calling of ‘witnessing’ we see in the Nobel Prize Banquet Speech.

The use of statistical learning methods has recently increased within the risk assessment literature. They have primarily been used to increase accuracy and the area under the curve (AUC, i.e., discrimination). Processing approaches applied to statistical learning methods have also emerged to increase cross-cultural fairness. However, these approaches are rarely trialed in the forensic psychology discipline nor have they been trialed as an approach to increase fairness in Australia. The study included 380 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander males assessed with the Level of Service/Risk Needs Responsivity (LS/RNR). Discrimination was assessed through the AUC, and fairness was assessed through the cross area under the curve (xAUC), error rate balance, calibration, predictive parity, and statistical parity. Logistic regression, penalized logistic regression, random forest, stochastic gradient boosting, and support vector machine algorithms using the LS/RNR risk factors were used to compare performance against the LS/RNR total risk score. The algorithms were then subjected to pre- and postprocessing approaches to see if fairness could be improved. Statistical learning methods were found to produce comparable or marginally improved AUC values. Processing approaches increased several fairness definitions (namely xAUC, error rate balance, and statistical parity) between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and non-Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. The findings demonstrate that statistical learning methods may be a useful approach to increasing the discrimination and cross-cultural fairness of risk assessment instruments. However, both fairness and the use of statistical learning methods encompass significant trade-offs that need to be considered. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

This article analyzes comments responding to @XianziAndHerFriends (@弦子与她的朋友们) in the censorship-rich environment of Weibo via BERTopic and examines how emojis may evade surveillance from censors—and algorithmic analysis. A total of 89,597 comments were computed to 38 overlapping topics of conversation that were further interpreted through thematic coding to 6 clusters of discourse and 3 themes. Data reveal how this Weibo account, microblogging a sexual assault case, grew to be a popular civic space for feminist discussion in China on varied topics despite censorship. Emoji analysis offers nuances to how this was enacted. The article expands on the methods available to understand dissent in the shadow of censorship and discusses how the patchwork censorship of Weibo has refracted nationalist and patriarchal tendencies of autocracy in China rubbing against platform prerogatives and feminist expression. It argues the “ambivalent governance” of the space is not defined through vernacular or institution, free speech, or autocracy, but instead all of the above in complex relationships in the platformization of censorship and (anti)nationalist patriarchy.

The control of various introduced species brings to the fore questions around how species are categorised as ‘native’ or ‘invasive’, belonging or not belonging. In far north Queensland, Australia, the Cape York region is a complex mixture of land tenures, including pastoral leases, National Parks and Aboriginal land, and overlapping management agreements. Weed control comprises much of the work that land managers in Cape York do. However, different land managers target different introduced species for control, and the ways in which certain species are understood as more or less problematic indicate how land managers understand and seek to order landscapes. Through investigating the various positions that introduced species occupy, I will explore how Cape York emerges as a ‘hybrid landscape’ that is produced in contested, overlapping and ambiguous ways, and is rife with ‘feral dynamics’.

Scholars across the globe have focused intently on mapping news deserts and gaps where public interest journalism is lacking or in peril. However, little attention is paid to understanding the impacts and changing media-related practices of people who live in communities that lose a designated news service—notably a local newspaper. This article draws on a focused ethnographic study of a small outback mining town, Lightning Ridge (population 2,284), in central New South Wales, Australia. The research was conducted over a two-month period and involved participant observation, 31 interviews with residents and relevant stakeholders, and examination of several media platforms relevant to the town. The article begins with an overview of Australian policy interventions to address the decline of public interest journalism. It then discusses the impact of a local newspaper’s closure via three themes—social, civic, and political. This is important because much of the policy focus in Australia is on the threat “news gaps” present to democracy. However, it is also necessary to understand the nuances of local media’s role in shaping everyday social connections and ritualistic practices and elevating issues to local networks of power. The article concludes by considering how current policy interventions can learn from failed attempts to fill the news gap in Lightning Ridge.

Scholars across the globe have focused intently on mapping news deserts and gaps where public interest journalism is lacking or in peril. However, little attention is paid to understanding the impacts and changing media-related practices of people who live in communities that lose a designated news service—notably a local newspaper. This article draws on a focused ethnographic study of a small outback mining town, Lightning Ridge (population 2,284), in central New South Wales, Australia. The research was conducted over a two-month period and involved participant observation, 31 interviews with residents and relevant stakeholders, and examination of several media platforms relevant to the town. The article begins with an overview of Australian policy interventions to address the decline of public interest journalism. It then discusses the impact of a local newspaper’s closure via three themes—social, civic, and political. This is important because much of the policy focus in Australia is on the threat “news gaps” present to democracy. However, it is also necessary to understand the nuances of local media’s role in shaping everyday social connections and ritualistic practices and elevating issues to local networks of power. The article concludes by considering how current policy interventions can learn from failed attempts to fill the news gap in Lightning Ridge.

COVID-19 has resulted in dramatic and widespread social network interventions across the globe, with public health measures such as distancing and isolation key epidemiological responses to minimize transmission. Because these measures affect social interactions between people, the networked structure of daily lives is changed. Such largescale changes to social structures, present simultaneously across many different societies and touching many different people, give renewed significance to the conceptualization of social network interventions. As social network researchers, we need a framework for understanding and describing network interventions consistent with the COVID-19 experience, one that builds on past work but able to cast interventions across a broad societal framework. In this theoretical paper, we extend the conceptualization of social network interventions in these directions. We follow Valente (2012) with a tripartite categorization of interventions but add a multilevel dimension to capture hierarchical aspects that are a key feature of any society and implicit in any network. This multilevel dimension distinguishes goals, actions, and outcomes at different levels, from individuals to the whole of the society. We illustrate this extended taxonomy with a range of COVID-19 public health measures of different types and at multiple levels, and then show how past network intervention research in other domains can also be framed in this way. We discuss what counts as an effective network, an effective intervention, plausible causality, and careful selection and evaluation, as central to a full theory of network interventions.

Using case law, the aims of this study were to document the methods for trafficking of performance and image-enhancing drugs (PIED) into Australia, and the characteristics of individuals and groups involved.

Data was collected from judges’ sentencing comments. Searches were conducted using the Australasian Legal Information Institute database across all states in Australia, for the period of January 2010 to December 2021. After removing duplicates and cases which did not meet the inclusion criteria, 31 cases were included in the analysis.

The attention to and concerns about conspiracy theories have increased in recent years, fuelled by a surge in conspiratorial discourse during the Donald Trump presidency in the United States. Responding to this development, the scholarship on how democracies should deal with conspiracy theories has focused on what new regulations and institutions ought to be introduced to tackle its threats to democracy. In this article, I consider this practical question from a different angle by exploring the discursive strategies that are available to political elites when they encounter a conspiracy theory. I flesh out three general strategies – ignore, rebut and embrace – and identify the circumstances that shape when each strategy should be used in order to maximize the effects of discourse as an anti-conspiracy mechanism. This perspective thereby aims to reveal the elements of skill and nuance that are required of a politician who seeks to engage a conspiracy theory in a way that advances democratic values.

In this paper, we examine the use of intangible cultural heritage as a vehicle for soft power in the service of geostrategic competitions between Iran and Turkey, two regional powers in West Asia. We focus on two significant trans-regional instances of intangible cultural heritage relevant to both countries: the mystic poet Rumi and the New Year’s celebration of Nowruz. We draw on theories in political science and cultrual heritage as well as a host of sources in Persian, Turkish, and Azerbaijani, to demonstrate how heritage is mobilised concurrently as a nation-building device and a tool for soft power in international relations. We conclude by suggesting that, despite strong grounds for its claims, Iran’s response in this competition has been reactive rather than proactive. Overall, the paper contributes to the scholarship on soft power and heritage diplomacy by presenting the first comparative analysis of cases of shared intangible heritage in West Asia.

In the dialogue, Professor Wanning Sun, an internationally renowned scholar on media and communication in the Chinese diaspora, first introduces her new book co-authored with Professor Haiqing Yu titled Digital Transnationalism: Chinese-language Media in Australia (Brill, 2023). Professor Sun then responds to a few misconceptions that have been dominant in public discourses in the global West on the diasporic Chinese media. She argues that diasporic Chinese people’s transnational citizenship practices will become increasingly bound up with geopolitics that has significantly impacted the operation, regulation and use of Chinese social media platforms in the West. She points out that future research in ‘digital transnationalism’ of the Chinese diaspora could further explore the changing relations between Chinese digital/social media and the formation of a new kind of transnational Chinese subjectivities with a comparative approach.

There is evidence of emerging silos separating research and practices in heritage. Creating spaces where researchers and practitioners collaborate and learn from their exchanges is therefore needed. This premise was the foundation of the pilot phase for the World Heritage Leadership Heritage Place Lab that allowed eight teams from different geocultural contexts to come together to develop research agendas. This paper provides observations about how these agendas relate to key strands in critical heritage research globally. It complements the other papers in this Special Issue that describe the case studies in detail.

In this piece we reflect on the tensions and complexities of drug use that narcofeminism has prompted us to grapple with in producing this collection. Narcofeminist approaches challenge us to move beyond simplistic, moralistic frameworks that pathologise and stigmatise those who use drugs, and instead seek more nuanced understandings of the social, cultural and political forces through which drug use materialises. By foregrounding the experiences of women and other marginalised groups who use drugs, narcofeminism highlights the ways in which drug consumption is always already gendered, racialised and classed. Narcofeminist approaches insist on a double vision attuned to violence and suffering as well as the possibility of alternative realities. This dual vision recognises a historical and contemporary context of dehumanisation while embracing and reclaiming new forms of humanness that challenge the figure of Enlightenment Man; it insists on the complexities of drug use that are all too often elided by singular stories of pain/pleasure and benefit/harm. Ultimately, narcofeminism challenges us to rethink our assumptions about drug use, and to recognise the voices and subjectivities of people who consume drugs, even in the face of intense hostility and oppression. By doing so, narcofeminist approaches have the potential to enrich and expand the sociological study of drug use and to contribute to drug policies that prioritise care and community over punishment and control.

Diagnoses of infectious diseases are being transformed as mass self-testing using rapid antigen tests (RATs) is increasingly integrated into public health. Widely used during the COVID-19 pandemic, RATs are claimed to have many advantages over ‘gold-standard’ polymerase chain reaction tests, especially their ease of use and production of quick results. Yet, while laboratory studies indicate the value of RATs in detecting the SARS-CoV-2 virus antigen, uncertainty surrounds their deployment and ultimate effectiveness in stemming infections. This article applies the analytic lens of biological citizenship (or bio-citizenship) to explore Australia’s experience of implementing a RAT-based mass self-testing strategy to manage COVID-19. Drawing on Annemarie Mol’s (1999, The Sociological Review, 47(1), 74–89) concept of ontological politics and analysing government statements, scientific articles and news media reporting published during a critical juncture of the strategy’s implementation, we explore the kind of bio-citizenship implied by this strategy. Our analysis suggests the emergence of what we call liminal bio-citizenship, whereby citizens are made responsible for self-managing infection risk without the diagnostic certitude this demands. We discuss how the different realities of mass self-testing interact to reinforce this liminal citizenship and consider the implications for the sociology of diagnosis.

On 25 November 2021, the editors of this monograph had the honour and pleasure of talking to five founding members of the narcofeminist activist movement from Eastern Europe and Central Asia. They discuss the history and vision of the movement, the issues confronting women and gender minorities who use drugs, and the significance of the political context of drug prohibition in shaping their experiences. This article documents this conversation as simultaneously interpreted by Lyu Azbel.

Sociology has a long-standing interest in the consumption of licit and illicit drugs, particularly as a feminist concern with scholars highlighting the ways in which drugs are used as regulatory technologies to control the conduct and subjectivities of women and other marginalised groups. This monograph flips the focus from a feminist sociological concern with drugs as a means of confining minoritised peoples, to explore what they can do as a feminist practice. Employing the drug-user activist concept of ‘narcofeminism’, it aims to rethink how drugs are conceived in sociology and chart their role in shaping selves and worlds. This article introduces the guiding philosophy of the narcofeminist movement as articulated in an interview we conducted with founding narcofeminist activists from Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Threaded through the interview are vivid examples of the ingrained and overlapping hostilities that differentially constitute drug consumption practices for women and gender minorities, and the brave acts of resistance they perform in response. In introducing the collection, we foreground a key aim that has guided its development: thinking with the insights of narcofeminism, we have sought to address the complexities of drug use and to hold in focus its potentialities both in terms of its harms and benefits, risks and rewards and, importantly, to reflect on how people navigate these counterposing forces in their situated practices of drug use. We also discuss how the collection advances the sociology of drugs by bridging disciplinary divides and disrupting binary distinctions between licit and illicit drugs, volition and compulsion, pleasure and pain, and discourse and practice, among others. This article provides an overview of the contributions that comprise the monograph, highlighting how they grapple with the ethico-political commitments of narcofeminism to rethink drug consumption as a mode of living, capable of transforming social worlds.

Drawing on cultural historian Saidiya Hartman’s (2019) book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, this essay reads one woman’s life with drugs and resistance to drug treatment as a feminist act of refusal, a ‘wayward life’ in Hartman’s terms. Wayward lives are those that refuse dominant forms of servitude and push open alternative ways of being. Although living in a different time and location to the young black women in Hartman’s book struggling to survive after emancipation in the United States, we see the woman (Kim) in our study in contemporary London, United Kingdom, employing similar acts of cramped resistance in a world that treats her as ‘pathological’ and ‘criminal’. We explore the ways in which Kim resists the law, the tropes of pathology that profess to know her, and the abstinence-based treatment systems that seek to change her. Importantly in following Hartman, we are not dismissing her struggles or romanticising her drug use, but rather looking to assemble a picture of her life that captures its admixture of daily trials and challenges, fleeting triumphs, pleasures and acts of resistance. Here we are making room for the kind of embodied and intimate political work that often gets left out of discussions of more formal anti-prohibitionist activism and organisation.

Over the past 15 years, international climate policy and governance practice have shifted from a linear model of carbon emissions management to a circular model. Whereas the former primarily focused on reducing absolute emissions, the latter focuses on balancing emissions sources and sinks. Australia, a major global exporter of ‘old’ carbon resources such as coal, has actively embraced circular carbon policies and their related ‘new’ carbon resources such as carbon credits. Focusing on Australia’s Northern Territory as a site of old and new carbon economies, where government administrators have actively sought to host carbon circulations and loops, this paper examines three interlinked cases to illustrate the interdependencies generated through circular carbon policies. Identifying how sources, sinks, and the mediation of relations between them all constitute key contemporary carbon frontiers, we conclude by calling for a research agenda that analyses ‘old’ and ‘new’ carbon economies as a co-produced assemblage rather than as isolated zones.

The historically unequal grazing industry in Cape York Peninsula, far northeast Queensland, gave rise to intercultural relationships between Aboriginal stock workers and settler-descended graziers. However, in recent decades, Aboriginal employment on cattle stations has fallen. Nowadays, many younger Aboriginal people work in government-funded jobs which settler-descended graziers frame as ‘hand-out style’ work. Settler-descended graziers have come to value an ethic of hard work related to both the Protestant work ethic and aspects of pioneer mythology which are entwined with graziers’ senses of belonging. Contemporary Aboriginal people are positioned by settler-descended graziers as having a ‘different’ relationship to work and lacking the valuation of hard work that graziers deem a moral good. In their discussions of Aboriginal people as lacking a valuation for ‘hard work’, graziers seek to critique what they perceive as government overreach in the form of land rights and government-funded jobs.

In 1964, Australian writer Donald Horne observed that ‘whatever differences there are between the Australian cities are differences within a range of similarity’. He proposed that Australia had 11 major cities and yet, in general, there existed a singular national urban culture, a one-city Australia. Unpacking the story of Australian urban history, its national trends and local nuances, has been an ongoing project ever since. What follows is an analysis of the field, which suggests how historians might begin to unpack Horne’s assertion. The final section of the article explores the contribution of Australian urban history in the national and global contexts.

This review draws on the work of critical animal geographers to elicit the notion of environmental anthropocentrism through critiques of progress as human development that adversely incorporates or displaces animal bodies in the service of (green) capitalism and sustainability. It reflects on how ideas of “progress” in environmental geography become reshaped through a critical animal geographic approach that politicizes animal–nature relations in all their diversity, and centers the experiences of animals as individuals and species in development-induced ecological crises. To this end, it advances three principles for an anti-anthropocentric analytic of progress as multispecies liberatory futures: animating humans toward a shared (but not universal) animality; differentiating species for nonhierarchy beyond capitalism; and instituting anti-anthropocentrism in addressing difficult ethics and incommensurability in liberatory futures.

Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is a significant public health concern in Africa. While the associations between modifiable risk factors and T2DM are likely to be Africa-specific, their overall estimations have not been published. This study aimed to use systematic and meta-analytic methods to examine the strength of associations between modifiable risk factors and T2DM in Africa.

Aboriginal material culture of the Sydney region has been analysed extensively by Australian archaeologists, notably Vincent Megaw and Val Attenbrow, yet many new insights can be obtained through the examination of hitherto unidentified and unexamined museum objects and dispersed archival documentation in Britain and Ireland. Close engagement with these sources permits a more informed explication of the variety of objects in use in colonial Sydney and its greater affiliated coastal zone. Focussing on the period 1788–1870, this article examines three related object types, termed variously in English ‘swords’, ‘boomerangs’ and ‘clubs’, to investigate their nature, current and former distribution, and histories of collection. Discussions with members of the La Perouse Aboriginal Community in Sydney indicate a great interest in collaborative research to improve understanding of such objects, because few of these collected and removed objects have been documented to a precise place of origin. Stylistic comparison of actual objects with historic images of similar types therefore remains a basic first step. This fundamental work is necessary to engage the appropriate community research partners but raises questions as to methodologies for community engagement with unprovenanced objects, or those known only to be from a large regional area, which may encompass many groups. Ascertaining places of origin is thus critical to ensuring the accuracy and validity of any repatriation or restitution efforts, and in making sure that the ‘right’ objects return to relevant Aboriginal communities.

Oceans in the colonial Anthropocene are haunted by the brutal racial logics of slavery, indenture, plunder, violence, death, and multispecies extinction. This brutality manifested through uneven burdens of climate extremes, global warming, ocean acidification, sea level rise, pollution, and threats from offshore energy extraction, chokes the “life force” of oceans that sustain planetary belongings and futures. Global agreements on climate change, biodiversity conventions, sustainable goals, and laws of the sea increasingly attempt to transform dystopic planetary futures through openness to Indigenous and local knowledges. But these overlooked Indigenous, Black, Brown, and southern intellectual traditions of belonging and responsibility in settler colonial, postcolonial, and post-apartheid societies have always existed alongside white, western Euro-American ontologies of the ocean. As subaltern southern and Indigenous scholars, our privileging of ontologies of the ocean amid the racial, colonial, and capitalist logics that continues to suffocate people and the planet, seeks to do more than enrich white, western, English-speaking Euro-American institutions. We, therefore, face ethical dilemmas as we assemble and prioritize strands of literature in our decolonial, polyphonic place-based ocean storytelling that seeks to advance new directions in Environmental Geography.

The health and wellbeing impacts of commercial activity on Indigenous populations is an emerging field of research. The alcohol industry is a key driver of health and social harms within Australia. In 2016 Woolworths, the largest food and beverage retailer in Australia, proposed to build a Dan Murphy’s alcohol megastore in Darwin, near three ‘dry’ Aboriginal communities. This study examines the tactics used by Woolworths to advance the Dan Murphy’s proposal and understand how civil society action can overcome powerful commercial interests to protect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health and wellbeing.

The health and wellbeing impacts of commercial activity on Indigenous populations is an emerging field of research. The alcohol industry is a key driver of health and social harms within Australia. In 2016 Woolworths, the largest food and beverage retailer in Australia, proposed to build a Dan Murphy’s alcohol megastore in Darwin, near three ‘dry’ Aboriginal communities. This study examines the tactics used by Woolworths to advance the Dan Murphy’s proposal and understand how civil society action can overcome powerful commercial interests to protect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health and wellbeing.

Racism in the workplace occurs at both the interpersonal and institutional level in terms of prejudiced attitudes and behaviours and avoidable and unfair differences in hiring, retention and opportunities for training and promotion. Many organisations have stated commitments to workforce diversity; however, work-related racism remains the most common forms of reported discrimination. Rather, efforts to increase workforce diversity will fail in the absence of measures to address discriminatory attitudes, behaviours, practices and cultures. Current approaches also lack strategic development, including knowledge of how to implement workforce diversity and anti-racism strategies at multiple organisational levels. Specifically, there is less understanding of measures to support structural level change. This article aims to advance both theoretical and empirical understanding of racism and anti-discrimination in the workplace. We do this by presenting a multi-level framework for understanding and addressing workplace racism. We also study the implementation of a meso-level workplace diversity and anti-discrimination assessment within two local government organisations in Australia. Findings revealed the importance of implementing strategies across multiple organisational levels and establishing accountability for commitments to diversity and anti-racism practice. Despite its structural and universal drives, we argue that racism can be disrupted through the presence of diversity in the workplace and anti-racism intervention.

Following the devastation of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul by the Islamic State, various foreign actors launched initiatives to reconstruct the heritage sites of the city. However, such efforts are underpinned by assumptions about how local people value their heritage, how they perceive its destruction, whether they view reconstruction as a priority and the extent to which they support foreign-led efforts to rebuild their heritage. This article holds these assumptions up to empirical scrutiny via an original survey of 1600 Mosul residents and their attitudes towards heritage. The results hold four key implications for current and future heritage projects in Mosul, namely that while residents want to see heritage sites reconstructed, they prefer that heritage reconstruction not be privileged over humanitarian aid, development and peace building; includes the rebuilding of their local religious sites as much as iconic and/or non-religious sites and transforms sites into new and more useful structures to the community, and while they acknowledge the work of foreign actors, they want agency and control over the future of their heritage. The article concludes by noting that such findings hold important implications for future foreign-led heritage projects in (post-)conflict environments where mass human suffering and heritage destruction has taken place.

This paper delves into the intricate relationship between religious populism and the legitimization of digital authoritarianism in Turkey. Specifically, it investigates how the ruling party, AKP, has strategically linked Islamist values to state policies as a means of justifying its repressive control over digital technology. Through an examination of internet governance at multiple levels—full network-level governance, sub-network or website-level governance, proxy or corporation-level governance, and network–node or individual-level governance—the study reveals the instrumentalization of religious populism to consolidate support and validate the government’s autocratic agenda. Furthermore, it sheds light on the role of state-controlled religious institutions, traditional media, social media outlets, as well as religious leaders and organizations in shaping public opinion, enabling the government to exert greater control over the dissemination of information. By dissecting the religious populist justification of digital authoritarianism in Turkey, this research provides valuable insights into the complex dynamics at play in the realm of online governance.

Drawing on original oral history interviews, along with memoirs, articles, and documentary sources, with more than fifty U.S. veterans who returned to Vietnam after the war, this article historicizes veterans’ healing journeys, examining how and why concepts of trauma and healing were deployed by different groups of veterans. Where Do, Hagopian, and Bleakney focus on a handful of veterans who returned prior to normalization, this article examines a broader period and draws on rich oral history interviews: from the first returns in 1981 to fiftieth-anniversary tour groups in the mid-2010s. Combining oral history interviews and media coverage of veterans’ returns allows for both in-depth explorations of veterans’ experiences and a survey of broad trends in the healing journeys.

The new religion of Spiritualism emerged in the mid-19th century. Through mediumship, Spiritualists contacted the dead, believing them to have “passed over” to another plane of existence. It spread from America to Great Britain before arriving in Australia in the 1850s. This article charts the history of the world’s oldest continuously running Spiritualist organisation, the Victorian Spiritualists’ Union (VSU, est. 1870), exploring the unexpected survival of the movement in Australia. It challenges the common idea that Spiritualism enjoyed only a brief revival in the interwar period and has maintained a tenuous status ever since. Rather, I argue that Spiritualism has experienced several peaks and troughs since its emergence in Australia, including a widespread revival in the 1970s, spearheaded by the VSU. Spiritualism in Australia survives due to the development of a church movement, the advocacy of groups such as the VSU, the generous volunteer efforts of individual Spiritualists, the acquisition of church buildings, and its geographic mobility, all of which have allowed Spiritualist churches to be responsive to changing social and cultural conditions for more than a century. It is one of Australia’s largest and most resilient alternative religious movements, not simply a Victorian-era curio.

Education has often acted as a social microcosm that reflects the growing levels of religious and cultural diversity in Australia, with educators facing the daily task of responding pedagogically and interculturally to the challenges this evolving context brings. This paper engages critically with intercultural initiatives and policies and their role in fostering inclusivity and cross-cultural understanding in education practice across Australia. It explores the discourses, policies, and curricula developments that attempt to address growing levels of diversity both within and beyond educational settings. The paper argues that policy statements and educational policies alone are not sufficient to ensure broader uptake of an intercultural pedagogic ethos. Rather, such initiatives need to be augmented by broader institutional leadership, adequate resourcing, and context-sensitive enabling strategies. This argument is corroborated by current evidence indicating that principled approaches to introducing intercultural perspectives in education require certain conditions before they can disrupt long-standing racist attitudes and exclusionary discourse. The implementation of systematic and transformative intercultural approaches in schools can create more inclusive pedagogic practices and respectful intercultural relations that transcend the boundaries of the schoolyard and extend into broader society. Targeted, long-term intercultural understanding trainings can also engender more constructive discourse within and beyond schools.

First Nations peoples are revitalising diverse cultural fire practices and knowledge. Institutional and societal recognition of these practices is growing. Yet there has been little academic research on these fire practices in south-east Australia, let alone research led by Aboriginal people. We are a group of Indigenous and settler academics, practitioners, and experts focused on cultural fire management in the Victorian Loddon Mallee region. Using interviews and workshops, we facilitated knowledge sharing and discussion. In this paper, we describe three practice-oriented principles to develop and maintain collaborations across Aboriginal groups, researchers, and government in the Indigenous-led revitalisation of fire on Country: relationships (creating reciprocity and trust), Country (working with place and people), and power (acknowledging structures and values). Collaborations based on these principles will be unique to each temporal, social, cultural, and geographic context. Considering our findings, we acknowledge the challenges that exist and the opportunities that emerge to constructively hold space to grow genuinely collaborative research that creates change. We suggest that the principles we identify can be applied by anyone wanting to form genuine collaborations around the world as the need for social–ecological justice grows.

Fire management is a right and responsibility shared by all land managers in Cape York Peninsula, far north Australia, bringing together Aboriginal traditional owners, Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service rangers and settler-descended cattle graziers. The landscape of Northern Australia has been socialised by fire over millennia, resulting in a fire-adapted and fire-dependent landscape. While fire knowledge originated with Aboriginal traditional owners, decades of engagement in the multi-ethnic pastoral industry have resulted in contemporary burning practices that have been interculturally mediated. The Australian government’s carbon sequestration scheme has further transformed local burning practices, precipitating new forms of burning and new forms of critique. Through examining the burning practices and perspectives of Aboriginal traditional owners, Park rangers, and – in particular – cattle graziers, the ideological underpinnings of different fire regimes emerge. These insights disrupt some of the accepted wisdom around fire management and cultural burning in Australia.

As the name ‘talk therapy’ suggests, a key aim of alcohol and other drug counselling, psychotherapy and other talk therapies is to discuss issues, concerns and feelings with a health professional. Implicit here is the therapeutic value of talking through issues with a trained professional. But as with all interactions, therapeutic encounters involve silences and pauses as key aspects of the communicative process. Despite their ubiquity in the therapeutic encounter, research tends to either dismiss silences as inconsequential or as having undesirable effects, such as generating awkwardness or even disengagement from treatment. Drawing on Latour’s (2002) concept of ‘affordance’ and a qualitative study of an Australian alcohol and other drug counselling service, we explore the varied functions of silences in online text-based counselling sessions. For clients, these include the role of silence in affording opportunities to engage in other everyday practices, such as socialising, caregiving or working – practices that can generate comfort and reduce distress, which in turn may support the therapeutic encounter. Similarly, for counsellors, temporal silences provide opportunities to confer with other counsellors and provide tailored care. However, protracted silences can raise concerns about the safety and wellbeing of clients who do not respond promptly or who exit encounters unexpectedly. Similarly, the sudden cessation of online care encounters (often associated with technical difficulties) can leave clients feeling frustrated and confused. In tracking these diverse affordances of silence, we draw attention to its generative potential in care encounters. We conclude by exploring the implications of our analysis for conceptions of care that underpin alcohol and other drug treatment.

This article examines the use of religion by an authoritarian ruling party to delegitimize political opposition through securitization. The case study presented is the ruling AKP in Turkey, which initially promised to desecuritize the Kurdish issue to co-opt the Kurdish opposition but eventually resorted to the demonization narratives and repressive policies of the secular Turkish state; however, in addition to labeling the Kurdish opposition as terrorists, the AKP deployed religion to legitimize its repressive policies on religious grounds. The Turkish case shows that not in legitimizing (via desecuritization), but in delegitimizing opposition (via securitization) religion has been the main tool deployed by the ruling party. This finding needs to be tested in other contexts and cases. Additionally, since this paper only focuses on the narrative of the AKP’s religious delegitimization, further research is needed to measure its efficacy and impact.

This article offers a new reading of Aby Warburg’s seminal lecture on “Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara” in which he deciphered some of the obscure iconography as referring to astrological decans of Egyptian and Indian provenance. The article argues that Warburg recovered the ancient discourse of “astral theology,” of neo-Pythagorean and Platonic provenance, in order to bolster his more general and systematic accounts of the role played by astrological images to bridge myth and science in the Italian Renaissance. Warburg showed that the “survival of antiquity” in early modernity was crucially dependent on the previous “wanderings” of astrological images and cosmological speculations from West to East and back again. My hypothesis is that Warburg understood the Renaissance reception of these “wandering” astrological images as being motivated by a desire to recover astral theology and its attendant astral politics.

This article offers a new reading of Aby Warburg’s seminal lecture on “Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara” in which he deciphered some of the obscure iconography as referring to astrological decans of Egyptian and Indian provenance. The article argues that Warburg recovered the ancient discourse of “astral theology,” of neo-Pythagorean and Platonic provenance, in order to bolster his more general and systematic accounts of the role played by astrological images to bridge myth and science in the Italian Renaissance. Warburg showed that the “survival of antiquity” in early modernity was crucially dependent on the previous “wanderings” of astrological images and cosmological speculations from West to East and back again. My hypothesis is that Warburg understood the Renaissance reception of these “wandering” astrological images as being motivated by a desire to recover astral theology and its attendant astral politics.

Risk assessment instruments are used to estimate risk of recidivism and aid in decision-making and treatment planning. However, many of these instruments, including the Level of Service/Risk, Need, Responsivity (LS/RNR), are validated on predominantly Western populations, and research has questioned whether the factors included in the LS/RNR adequately capture the experiences and needs of non-Western communities, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. The current study aimed to canvas the opinions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community justice workers as to the suitability of the LS/RNR for use with this population. A general qualitative methodology was adopted to gain in-depth information through the facilitation of a focus group, and data were analysed thematically. Whilst participants agreed that the LS/RNR risk factors are relevant to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander offenders, they reported that the instrument did not adequately capture relevant culturally specific considerations and made suggestions to improve the LS/RNR.

Podcasts are an increasingly popular medium, however, their potential for political listening remains largely unexplored. This article examines the opportunities and challenges that podcasts provide in literally hearing voices. It analyses the globally influential Joe Rogan Experience podcast to consider its acoustic impact on audiences. It finds that audiences are highly attuned to the aural nature of this platform and can listen with a critical ear. This technology holds the capacity for challenging power in its production processes outside the state and market, its shift to informal speech and its intimate nature. Ultimately, this article argues that paying attention to sound through podcasts can extend our understanding of political listening and the media.

This article focuses on the Islamic State’s (IS) attacks on Shia communities and their holy sites across Iraq and Syria and explores the responses of key Shia religious and political leaders. It demonstrates how these Shia elites utilised sophisticated mobilisation frames to admonish their followers to take up arms against the IS. To do so, these Shia elites drew on Shia religious symbols and historical events that emphasise Shia suffering at the hands of Sunni forces and highlighted the urgent need to protect Shia communities and their holy sites. The article also demonstrates how these mobilisation frames were malleable in the hands of different Shia elites and were instrumentalized to advance both national (defend the country) and transnational goals (defend Shia Islam). The article concludes by noting that this study of the complex motives underpinning Shia mobilisation has implications beyond the case of contemporary Iraq and Syria.

Animals are instrumentalised as symbols, objects, and commodities in the construction of diverse subaltern and elite human identities and identity politics in India, through their imposed identification with various human groups, with enduring implications for animal and human (in)justice and wellbeing. Species, as itself as an axis of social difference, and therefore of identity, however, has hitherto rarely been considered as a core facet of identity politics in Indian political life, despite its central role in shaping the inclusions and exclusions that characterise society. This Theme Issue aims to open the space for animal identities to become political, allowing for a critical multispecies politics of identity. To this end, it asks: In what ways can animals be centred as a core part of democratic political life? What are the consequences of doing so? In other words, what opportunities or concerns emerge with the institutionalization of species difference as an identity category? And last, in what ways does a multispecies approach to identity politics impact the analysis of (in)justice in its varied forms in contemporary India and beyond?

Geelong’s economic resilience has been evident for decades as it transitioned from a manufacturing to a service centre. This transformation largely unfolded during Australian governments’ embrace of neo-liberal policies which are usually associated with the State’s withdrawal from active economic intervention. A close examination of the Geelong experience, however, shows the State as a key actor, intervening through direct employment, targeted industry support, economic restructuring and decentralisation policies. Our analysis suggests a need to recentre the role of the interventionist State in conceptualisations of economic and social resilience while adding a nuanced regional dimension understandings of neo-liberalism in Australia.

Geelong’s economic resilience has been evident for decades as it transitioned from a manufacturing to a service centre. This transformation largely unfolded during Australian governments’ embrace of neo-liberal policies which are usually associated with the State’s withdrawal from active economic intervention. A close examination of the Geelong experience, however, shows the State as a key actor, intervening through direct employment, targeted industry support, economic restructuring and decentralisation policies. Our analysis suggests a need to recentre the role of the interventionist State in conceptualisations of economic and social resilience while adding a nuanced regional dimension understandings of neo-liberalism in Australia.

This article offers a new reading of Aby Warburg’s seminal lecture on “Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara” in which he deciphered some of the obscure iconography as referring to astrological decans of Egyptian and Indian provenance. The article argues that Warburg recovered the ancient discourse of “astral theology,” of neo-Pythagorean and Platonic provenance, in order to bolster his more general and systematic accounts of the role played by astrological images to bridge myth and science in the Italian Renaissance. Warburg showed that the “survival of antiquity” in early modernity was crucially dependent on the previous “wanderings” of astrological images and cosmological speculations from West to East and back again. My hypothesis is that Warburg understood the Renaissance reception of these “wandering” astrological images as being motivated by a desire to recover astral theology and its attendant astral politics.

Books are a recognized but insufficiently researched means for dissemination of ideologies, including by far-right violent extremists. Considering that the far-right are early and effective adopters of new communication technology, this article explores how digital publication and circulation of books can both enable and direct a known potential pathway to radicalization to extremism: the ‘intellectual quest’. This article explores the publication history and commercial circulation of novels by self-identified American neo-Nazis William L. Pierce and Harold A. Covington, which have been linked to planning and acts of violence both in the U.S.A. and elsewhere, and how commercial algorithms direct potential purchasers to ideologically adjacent material. We argue that digital book publishing and circulation have particular affordances for articulating, amplifying and normalizing violent extremist ideologies.

This paper demonstrates how biometric features can be extracted from people in child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and examined using social network analysis to reveal important patterns across seized media files. Using an automated software system previously developed by the research team (the Biometric Analyser and Network Extractor), we extract, match and plot multiple biometric attributes (face and voice) from a database of CSAM videos compiled by law enforcement. We apply a series of network measures to illustrate how the biometric match data can be used to rapidly pinpoint key media files associated with an investigation, without the need for an investigator to manually review and catalogue all files. Future directions for this research are also discussed.

In terms of their political and ideological success, Pakistani Islamists have had several ups and downs since Pakistan became the Islamic Republic in 1956. Islamists strive to safeguard the Islamic state’s status quo while simultaneously expanding the reach of Sharia. Despite insignificant electoral victories, Islamists have largely been able to dictate national identity policies to civilian and military governments. A major hurdle to the promotion of pluralism in Pakistan is noticeable through persistent opposition to secularism by major political actors. Despite different political ideologies, major political parties refrain from promoting secularism in Pakistan; however, such views are more rigid in the case of Islamists. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to examine and compare the discourses of Islamists and other political parties in relation to Pakistan’s identity, reforms and anti-Westernism, religious minorities, and secularism. Based on the analysis, this paper argues that the views of Islamists and non-religious political parties are very similar regarding Islam and Pakistan’s identity, secularism, and minority rights in Pakistan.

This study examines the association between the perception of water scarcity and support for alternative water sources in general, and specifically desalination and recycled water. It also examines the mediating role that perception of climate change has on the aforementioned association. A 46-item survey (n = 588) was conducted in the Geelong region of Australia. Logistic regression was used to determine the independent association between perceived water scarcity and socio-demographic factors, with support for alternative water sources, desalination and recycled water. 82% of respondents supported undefined ‘alternative water sources’. However, support for specific alternatives was lower (desalination: 65%; recycled water: 40.3%). Perception of water scarcity was significantly associated with increased odds of support for alternative water sources (OR 1.94, 95% CI: 1.25–3.00) and support for recycled water (OR 2.32, 95% CI: 1.68–3.31). There was no significant relationship between perception of water scarcity and support for desalination (OR 0.959 95% CI: 0.677–1.358). Climate change was found to mediate perceived water scarcity and support for alternative sources (OR 1.360, 95% CI: 0.841–2.198). The mediation of the relationship between perceived water scarcity and support for recycled water by climate change was not strong. These results facilitate enhanced community engagement strategies.

This study examines the association between the perception of water scarcity and support for alternative water sources in general, and specifically desalination and recycled water. It also examines the mediating role that perception of climate change has on the aforementioned association. A 46-item survey (n = 588) was conducted in the Geelong region of Australia. Logistic regression was used to determine the independent association between perceived water scarcity and socio-demographic factors, with support for alternative water sources, desalination and recycled water. 82% of respondents supported undefined ‘alternative water sources’. However, support for specific alternatives was lower (desalination: 65%; recycled water: 40.3%). Perception of water scarcity was significantly associated with increased odds of support for alternative water sources (OR 1.94, 95% CI: 1.25–3.00) and support for recycled water (OR 2.32, 95% CI: 1.68–3.31). There was no significant relationship between perception of water scarcity and support for desalination (OR 0.959 95% CI: 0.677–1.358). Climate change was found to mediate perceived water scarcity and support for alternative sources (OR 1.360, 95% CI: 0.841–2.198). The mediation of the relationship between perceived water scarcity and support for recycled water by climate change was not strong. These results facilitate enhanced community engagement strategies.

Post-industrial cities often find themselves at a crossroads as to whether to find a new identity or embrace their industrial past. In late 2017, after the closure of major manufacturing plants in the region, the Australian city of Geelong was designated a UNESCO City of Design and embraced a “Clever and Creative” strategy which acknowledged Geelong’s industrial and design past in responding to contemporary technological, demographic, and economic challenges. However, questions remain as to which versions of the past are valued by the local community and how these stories can be shared. To better understand the social value of design and manufacturing heritage in Geelong as well as to get initial feedback on how to interpret this type of heritage through novel immersive extended reality (XR) experiences, the researchers took a community-led approach. This paper reports on the results of the initial online community surveys (N = 55–137) and in-person stakeholder interviews (N = 5) with carefully selected representatives of the local government, education, heritage, tourism, and engineering sectors. The study’s outcome demonstrates the importance of design and manufacturing heritage for the local community’s identity. Moreover, this type of heritage provides a source of inspiration, learning opportunities for future creative problem-solvers, and economic opportunities through tourism. By engaging with the social value of design and manufacturing heritage, this paper argues that more effective and targeted storytelling, game-like applications, and other digital immersive experiences such as extended reality (XR) can be used to better engage with audiences.

In addition to resilience and resistance, collective and personal experiences of trauma are commonly cited within the context of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and other Indigenous First People’s experiences of colonisation. This study investigated whether a range of risk and protective factors, including cultural determinants of social and emotional wellbeing, were associated with posttraumatic stress outcomes among 81 Aboriginal help-seeking clients from an Aboriginal community-controlled counselling service in Melbourne, Australia. The study explored potential relationships between trauma exposure, child removal from natural family, experiences of racism, gender, and trauma symptom severity. The study also investigated whether personal, relationship, community and cultural strengths and determinants of wellbeing, as detailed in the Aboriginal Resilience and Recovery Questionnaire, moderated the relationship between trauma exposure and posttraumatic stress symptom severity. Participants commonly endorsed symptoms of distress consistent with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and cultural idioms of distress as documented in the Aboriginal Australian Version of the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire. Two generations of child removal from one’s natural family, experiences of racism, stressful life events experienced during the past 12 months, being male, and not having access to funds for basic living expenses were all associated with greater trauma symptom severity. Conversely, participants self-reported access to personal, relationship, community and cultural strengths was associated with lower trauma symptom severity. Regression analysis revealed that trauma exposure, stressful life events, access to basic living expenses, and personal, relationship, community, and cultural strengths were all important predictors of posttraumatic stress symptom severity. Participant access to strength and resources that included connections to community and culture, moderated the relationship between trauma exposure and trauma symptom severity.

Has racism become a wicked problem, or it persists because of deficient anti-racism and/or unintentional or wilful neglect? This article examines neglect and denial as cognitive and functional features embedded in structural racial inequities. Denial and neglect, often analysed in socio-political discourse, are related yet distinct concepts, while neglect remains an underexplored feature of racism. I argue that denial and neglect embody key epistemic omissions enabling new racism to thrive unimpeded. Drawing on colourblind, White ignorance, and racial apathy literature, I conceptualize “racism as neglect” to draw attention to persistent yet insidious, often discounted racial inequities permeating the Global North. Understanding neglect and denial, and how they operate through minimization, ignorance, silence, or indifference, is crucial in tackling racism occurring in ideas, behaviours, and policies, and in omissions of anti-racist actions. Combating racism requires producing evidence of racism and pressing society to abandon evasion of responsibility and take effective actions against structural racism.

The prolific and increasing number of academic studies concerned with spiritual tourism echoes humans’ enduring quest for spirituality through travel and the entanglement of many destinations in this unique form of social activity. Yet, what we know about spiritual tourism remains equivocal and unsynthesized. This critical review, followed by a thematic analysis offers a comprehensive and rigorous overview of the nexus between spirituality and tourism. It codifies how contemporary researchers understand, theorize and study this social phenomenon, allowing us to provide an in-depth comprehension and synthesis of spiritual tourism. The significance of this study rests in its scope and capacity to inform tourism scholars working in the fields of sociology, management, psychology, and theology.

This paper draws on theories of history and interculturality to explore how a ‘timeline’ and its visual language as a ‘crystallised text’ constructs the linear transmission of ‘whiteness’. When the concept of interculturality or associated term of Intercultural Understanding (ICU) is related to history education, it carries connotations of disruption to dominant narratives. The absence of difference, diversity, and the stories of ‘other’, are explicated in critical inclusions and exclusions of historical content knowledge and the way it is organised within key pedagogies such as ‘chronology’. In addition to focus group interviews with history teachers, the study conducted a textual analysis of a ‘timeline’ used at Year 9 (students aged 13-15) defined here as a ‘Western Drama’, underpinned by linear progress as a basic theme. It was analysed through the lens of a ‘crystal prism’ which conceptually draws on the foundational work of educationalist Jörn Rüsen to explore intersections between history, interculturality and discourse.

Pan-Islamism had resonated strongly with Muslim political leaders of the Indian sub-continent, including those inspired by Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī, credited with coining the term. These political leaders included prominent members of the All-India Muslim League, who were at the forefront of the Indian Muslims’ struggle for a separate homeland that led to the creation of Pakistan in 1947. It is therefore no surprise that Islam and pan-Islamism became key features of the new state of Pakistan; however, domestic and geopolitical realities demanded a different approach to addressing the country’s key national interests, i.e., security through economic development. This article analyzes Pakistan’s policy on the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to understand how far Islamabad has advanced its national interests through the OIC. Based on the interviews of elites and key opinionmakers in Islamabad, this paper argues that pan-Islamist ideals in Pakistan’s foreign policy were confronted by reality soon after Pakistan’s creation. The geopolitical realities of India have kept security concerns paramount and all-consuming. Consequently, pan-Islamism has been pragmatically used by Pakistan, especially within the OIC, for not just ideological reasons but also for material and diplomatic gains.

Women’s “performance and image-enhancing drug consumption” is a growing phenomenon yet remains an under-studied area of research. This essay reviews the existing literature on women’s consumption and draws on Fraser’s concept of ontopolitically-oriented research to develop an agenda for future research. Ontopolitically-oriented research applies insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS) to consider the ontological politics of research practices, that is, the realities they enact and foreclose. We argue that the current focus in the existing literature on a limited set of methods and issues risks obscuring the diverse meanings and practices of women’s substance consumption for fitness and strength-training, and genders agency in ways that further entrench assumptions of women’s vulnerability and passivity. We consider issues pertaining to the nomenclature of performance and image-enhancing drugs, the gendering of agency in formulations of “health” risks and initiation experiences, and the need to understand women’s consumption practices in relation to broader cultural changes in health optimization and digital fitness cultures. We argue that ontopolitically-oriented research into women’s substance consumption for fitness and strength-training requires greater methodological diversity and attention to the politics of data generation. It should aim to constitute women’s experiences through terms, connections and coalitions that expand our understandings of women’s agency, and the gendered and social contexts of enhancement practices.

When it comes to understanding news audiences in rural areas, scholars often focus on declining readership and the challenge of how to encourage existing audiences to pay for content. There too has been burgeoning interest in news avoidance more broadly in digital spaces, with an emphasis on studying those who actively or intentionally resist or reject the news. This paper explores a gap in the research by seeking to understand the conditions and circumstances in which people who do not engage with their local news in print or digital format might be activated to do so. The paper presents the findings of an Australian survey of Facebook users who live in rural and regional areas and identify as people who do not engage with their local news. Findings highlight the need to conceptualise a subsection of the audience who express a desire to engage with their local news but perceive barriers to doing so. These barriers include cost, accessibility and perceived quality of content. We introduce the term ‘latent’ audience – potential news consumers who remain hidden from industry and scholarly view until changing conditions and circumstances lead to their manifestation.

This paper unpacks our efforts as external evaluators to work toward decolonizing our evaluation practice. Undertaking this writing exercise as a form of reflective practice demonstrated that decolonization is much more complex than simply translating materials, organizing locals to collect data, and building participants’ capacity around Western modalities. While this complexity is clear in the decolonization literature, practice-based examples that depict barriers and thought processes are rarely presented. Through this paper, we deconstruct our deeply held beliefs around what constitutes good evaluation to assess the effectiveness of our decolonizing approach. Through sharing our critical consciousness-raising dialoguing, this paper reports our progress thus far and provides information and provocations to support others attempting to decolonize their practice.

COVID-19 responses have cast a spotlight on the uneven impacts of public health policy with particular populations or sites targeted for intervention. Perhaps the starkest example in Australia was the ‘hard’ lockdown of nine public housing complexes in inner-city Melbourne from 4 to 18 July 2020, where residents were fully confined to their homes. These complexes are home to diverse migrant communities and the lockdown drew public criticism for unfairly stigmatising ethnic minorities. This article draws on media articles published during the lockdown and the Victorian Ombudsman’s subsequent investigation to explore the implications of broad, top-down public health measures for culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities. Drawing on Lea’s (2020) conceptualisation of policy ecology, we analyse the lockdown measures and community responses to explore the normative assumptions underpinning health policy mechanisms, constituting ‘target populations’ in narrow, exclusionary terms. We argue that the lockdown measures and use of police as compliance officers positioned tower residents as risky subjects in risky places. Tracing how such subject positions are produced, and resisted at the grassroots level, we highlight how policy instruments are not neutral interventions, but rather instantiate classed and racialised patterns of exclusion, reinforcing pervasive social inequalities in the name of public health.

Racism and anti-racism have received widespread attention in academic debates and public discourse. Having universal features, racism manifests differently nationally and locally, and has been met with diverse anti-racism efforts. Despite historical achievements of struggles against racial oppression, racism endures, and continues to evolve and adapt, posing challenges to racial justice and equity. Parallel to this, anti-racism scholarship and action have evolved over the past decade, targeting an increasing number of arenas of everyday life. However, the place of anti-racism within organisations remains overwhelmingly peripheral and often tokenistic. This article draws attention to this and argues for re-imagining anti-racism as a core organisational value. We critically evaluate current anti-racism practices, and call for broader, holistic, committed and well-funded anti-racism approaches within organisations. We then argue why establishing anti-racism as a core organisational value may help in addressing systemic/structural racism.

Racism and anti-racism have received widespread attention in academic debates and public discourse. Having universal features, racism manifests differently nationally and locally, and has been met with diverse anti-racism efforts. Despite historical achievements of struggles against racial oppression, racism endures, and continues to evolve and adapt, posing challenges to racial justice and equity. Parallel to this, anti-racism scholarship and action have evolved over the past decade, targeting an increasing number of arenas of everyday life. However, the place of anti-racism within organisations remains overwhelmingly peripheral and often tokenistic. This article draws attention to this and argues for re-imagining anti-racism as a core organisational value. We critically evaluate current anti-racism practices, and call for broader, holistic, committed and well-funded anti-racism approaches within organisations. We then argue why establishing anti-racism as a core organisational value may help in addressing systemic/structural racism.

Prejudice reduction messages have been shown to be effective through changing norms. Previous research suggests that Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) moderates the reaction to these messages, but it is unclear whether individuals high in RWA are more or less sensitive to prejudice-reduction campaigns. This research used the social identity approach to investigate the role of RWA in moderating the reactions to messages that look to reduce support for prejudicial policies and associated prejudice against an ethnoreligious group (Muslims). Americans (N = 388) were presented with statements on a real, proposed ban on Muslim immigration into the US from an in-group member (i.e., an American freight worker who disapproves of the Muslim ban), outgroup member (an Iraqi refugee who is in favour if the Muslim ban), or both, or control message. Those high in RWA showed consistently high levels of prejudice against Muslims in all conditions, but those low in RWA showed lower prejudice when presented with the anti-prejudice message from an in-group member (compared to control). This suggests that anti-prejudice messages primarily affect those with low RWA, clarifying that RWA likely leads to resistance to anti-prejudice messages regardless of the source. Future research aiming to reduce prejudice should examine how messages can be tailored to reduce prejudice in those with high RWA.

Authoritarian regimes do not only target and oppress their opponents at home, they also try to repress dissident diaspora members abroad. The literature on transnational (extraterritorial) repression has shown that authoritarian regimes normally use transnational organs of the state such as intelligence services as part of their usual transnational repression activities. However, since they do not have sovereignty in the countries, their transnational repression has limits. This article argues that loyal diaspora supporters help these regimes as additional repression and violence apparatuses by trying to repress diaspora members from the same country of origin. However, the discursive mechanism behind this phenomenon has not been studied. This study aims to address this gap. Based on the competitive authoritarian Turkish case, it introduces the concept of “transnational securitization” to securitization theory. The article argues that what makes this type of securitization different is that the audience (pro-government Turkish and non-Turkish Muslim diaspora groups) is not only convinced by the securitization narrative that legitimates the use of extraordinary means that are normally undertaken by the state, but takes it upon themselves to carry on the anti-dissident repressive and violent actions. The article contributes to both transnational repression and securitization literatures.

The Kokoda Track, which spans Papua New Guinea’s Oro and Central Provinces, has become a site of profound Australian national feeling. Each year, thousands of Australian trekkers travel to Papua New Guinea to “do” the 96-km hiking trail, in remembrance of the battle waged along it during the Second World War. For Oro Province people, meanwhile, Kokoda—denoting both the track and the place where the track commences—is also a site of intense feeling, albeit in ways that are both less mythologized and less amenable to mythologization. Attending to these divergent affective experiences highlights affect as a domain of postcolonial encounter. Affect works to reproduce colonial relations and animate ongoing regimes of territorialization. It does so while deflecting Australians’ attention away from the very colonial contexts within which affect is implicated. At the same time, uneven geographies of affect index complexities of Papua New Guinean feeling that exceed those sanctioned within the confines of the trekking industry itself.

Community engagement strategies intended to build trust and legitimacy are used widely by police agencies. Available research on the utility of these strategies shows mixed results and police have been criticised for adopting a ‘one-size fits all’ mentality when employing these strategies across minority groups. Yet, community engagement strategies remain a preferred tool for police seeking to improve their relations with minority groups. This article unpacks police–community engagement as a tool for promoting trust and legitimacy among African Australians. The first half of the article provides an overview of community engagement strategies and presents an engagement typology that is used to assesses critically the strengths and limitations of key strategies used by police vis-à-vis trust and legitimacy. The second half of the article canvasses the relationship between African Australian communities and the police, and draws attention to sociocultural factors that must be considered by police when developing and implementing engagement initiatives. The article concludes with several recommendations for police including the need to prioritise the needs of the community over intelligence gathering by embedding employment and education services into engagement initiatives.

With a focus on contemporary religion, this article considers Catholic youth in Muslim-majority Indonesia who are active in the public sphere and committed to the cause of nationalist unity. A current push by Islamist extremists threatens and excludes those of other faiths. Young Catholics are sometimes made to feel as though they do not belong in the modern imaginings of caliphate and enforced Shari’a law. They find the marginalisation deeply disturbing since they feel strong loyalty to the nation. Some turn inward, focusing on Catholic orthopraxy and service to the diocese. Others direct their energies to interfaith dialogue and alliance, seeking political influence through solidarity with moderate Muslims. A lived religion approach based on the work of Ammerman (2014) and Laksana and Wood (2019) allows us to understand the imbrication of Catholic and nationalist identities through the analysis of interview data.

Once voted into office, populist governments have often found undemocratic means to prolong their stay. The literature on populists in power is evolving and expanding. However, it has mainly focused on how the populists in power attack institutions such as the judiciary, rule erosion, and dirty institutionalism. How populists make use of the law and the judiciary to prolong their authoritarian rule remains an area that is under-researched. The populists’ use of informal institutions such as the unofficial law when in power has not been studied either. This paper addresses these gaps in the populism literature by studying Turkey’s Islamist populist ruling party’s use of informal law in prolonging its authoritarian rule. The paper argues that the Islamist civilisational populist AKP has been using informal Islamist law for both the legitimation of its rule and the repression of the opposition. It shows how the AKP officials, the state’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), the pro-AKP Sharia scholars, and other informal religious authorities employ the civilisational populist Islamist legal narrative to argue that according to Sharia it is obligatory to choose the side of the God that is represented by the AKP and to vote against the infidel opposition that is an existential danger to the pure Muslim people of Turkey and their religion. The paper combines and contributes to two theoretical strands. The first is civilisational populism, and the second is the informal institutions, with a focus on informal law and legal pluralism.

Mitigating climate change requires us to constrain combustion in a double sense: decreasing both the use of fossil fuels and the flammability of the biosphere. Fire management by Indigenous peoples in Australia’s northern savannas has been presented as a solution to offset the former and assist with the latter, leading to the foundation of a regional economy of projects generating ‘premium’ carbon credits on Indigenous lands. This article attends to the translational zone – predominantly made up of non-Indigenous white professionals – that functions to configure the ‘right story’ of these credits across diverse epistemes and contexts. Following such commodities’ interscalar connections, I suggest, helps illustrate the contingencies and contradictions produced by tradeable carbon, as individuals and organizations seek to maintain a niche within a changing climate and shifting global atmospheric relations.

This provocation presents a critical reflection on the role of cultural studies in examining the consequences of an increasingly global and digital society. More specifically, I extend and situate the inquiry within the new mobilities paradigm, underlining how everyday personal, familial and social interactions have been shaped by the widespread uptake of digital technologies among migrants and their distant networks. Here I centre the transnational and networked home as a critical site of performing, embodying and negotiating linkages beyond borders. Importantly, reflecting on situating cultural studies within the context of the global South, I underscore the paradox of everyday, intimate and transnational practices as symptomatic of the operations of a neo-colonial and global economy. In doing so, this approach sheds light on advancing cultural studies as an intellectual and political inquiry on rethinking mobility justice in a globalising and networked society.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the global horticultural sector’s reliance on migrant workers. Within Australia, public attention was focused particularly on Pacific Islanders employed through the Seasonal Worker Programme (SWP) guestworker scheme. With national border closures resulting in significant labour shortages for the horticultural industry, special-purpose exemptions allowing limited groups of SWP workers to enter the country were celebrated as a source of reprieve for struggling farmers. For Pacific Islander workers and communities, however, the prospect of leaving Pacific countries (many of whom had at the time no, or very few, recorded cases of COVID-19) to labour for unspecified periods in a country experiencing much higher rates of infection, was fraught. In this paper, we examine the use of social media by Pacific Islanders to negotiate the costs and benefits of temporary labour migration amid the pandemic. For ni-Vanuatu workers, we argue, Facebook groups facilitated depictions and negotiations of guestwork that were significantly more complex and nuanced than the reductive and bifurcated terms of mainstream media discourse about the SWP scheme. We conclude by highlighting the necessity of foregrounding migrant workers’ voices in evaluating guestworker schemes, and the value of social media as a dynamic space within which this might be done.

This paper considers the limits of adaptation as a concept in global environmental governance and advocacy by examining the climate change policy of the populist Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte. By focusing on heterogenous state responses to the 2018–2019 El Niño drought, I demonstrate how the Duterte administration has worked to achieve a violent vision of climate adaptation through a jarring combination of practices: exhorting the devastating reality of climate change; denigrating multilateral mitigation efforts as colonial injustices; subverting indigenous peoples’ land rights; and fostering the extrajudicial assassination of activists. Though Duterte’s wider climate change policies are often viewed as a strategic distraction or the isolated product of an erratic populist, I argue that these recent responses to climate change in the Philippines, which fuse decolonial and nationalist sensibilities to confrontational forms of illiberalism, should be examined as part of the larger unfurling of illiberal adaptation politics across Philippine history and the Global South. These politics, and their considerable (though far from total) local resonance, challenge both universalist Western political rationalities and new directions in climate justice movement calling for ontological inclusivity. I highlight the need for a closer examination of the origins, practices and implications of violent adaptions.

Health inequity within Indigenous populations is widespread and underpinned by colonialism, dispossession and oppression. Social and cultural determinants of Indigenous health and well-being are well described. Despite emerging literature on the commercial determinants of health, the health and well-being impacts of commercial activities for Indigenous populations is not well understood. We aimed to identify, map and synthesise the available evidence on the commercial determinants of Indigenous health and well-being.

The disproportionate burden of mental illness experienced by Indigenous adolescents is well established. Therefore, this review focused on how the well-being of Indigenous adolescents can be better promoted. The review identified studies that examined the relationship between cultural engagement and psychological well-being among Indigenous adolescents. To achieve this, a systematic search of published literature across seven online databases including Medline and EMBASE was conducted between October and November 2020. To meet the inclusion criteria, studies were required to include a sample of Indigenous adolescents and measure the relationship between psychological well-being and cultural engagement. Twenty-five studies met the inclusion criteria, yielding a total sample size of 19,231 participants. Eighteen studies (72%) reported a significant positive relationship between cultural engagement and psychological well-being, four studies (16%) reported a nonsignificant relationship, and three studies (12%) reported mixed findings. Despite measuring different domains of culture across the 25 studies, these findings demonstrate relatively strong evidence of a positive association between cultural engagement and psychological well-being. They highlight the importance of culture for young Indigenous Peoples in developing a positive well-being. In the future, researchers should focus on specifying how intervention factors contribute to cultural engagement effects and establish further contributors to well-being and positive development among Indigenous adolescents. The findings of this review advance our understanding of how Indigenous Peoples interpret culture and their engagement with this culture. This has implications for policy, programs, and interventions intended to enhance well-being outcomes for Indigenous communities.

The challenges to designing and implementing ethically and politically meaningful eating policies are many and complex. This article provides a brief overview of Anne Barnhill and Matteo Bonotti’s Healthy Eating Policy and Political Philosophy: A Public Reason Approach while also critically engaging with the place of racial justice, global interconnectedness, and debates over science in thinking about ethics and politics of public health nutrition and policy. I do not aim to burden Barnhill and Bonotti with the responsibility to fully address these issues, but considering the interconnection of these issues and the ever pressing effects of climate change on local and global food systems, we collectively need to turn to these difficult and pressing questions about what a just food system looks like, what concerns are centred, and who is left out. I group these engagements with Barnhill and Bonotti under three headings: racial liberalism, global food system, and contested nutrition science. I conclude with some remarks about locality.

This article explores Iran’s soft power appeal in Azerbaijan following Azerbaijan’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. It first reviews the state of the field and situates Iran’s overall soft power strategies in relation to that context and then focuses on the relationship between Iran and post-independence Azerbaijan. Drawing on a rich array of material, including the latest publications in Persian, the article explores Tehran’s exercise of soft power in Azerbaijan in three key spheres: education, culture, and religion. The article argues that although Iran has invested significant resources in the promotion of its soft power in Azerbaijan, it has encountered significant hurdles in exercising that influence. These hurdles are the result of the history between the two countries as well as their divergent state ideologies in the present. Azerbaijan resists such influence and, at times, pursues certain anti-Iranian policies including, at times, supporting separatist groups. Thus, the divide between the two countries, despite all historical and cultural commonalities remains firmly in place.

When it comes to examining innovation and small-town newspapers, audience expectations and perspectives have received less focus than newsroom practices and processes. This article presents the findings of Australia’s most comprehensive national survey of local newspaper audiences (n = 4116), which engaged with readers of more than 170 independently owned, small-town newspapers across the nation. The survey was underpinned by a ‘geo-social’ methodology, which provides a multidimensional framework for understanding the ‘place’ of newspapers in the digital age within their specific geographic context, in this case rural Australia. It used ordinal, nominal and qualitative questions to explore respondents’ experiences, histories, expectations and perspectives related to their local newspaper. Respondents were asked about their preferences for reading and receiving local news, what their newspaper can do better, and the policy debates and interventions shaping the sector. Results indicate a continued desire for the printed product, a passion for localness in terms of both production and content, and a greater say for local news audiences on the policies shaping the future of news in non-metropolitan settings.

Outlaw motorcycle gangs (OMCGs) have become synonymous with organised crime through engagement in criminal activities including illicit drug production and distribution, firearms trafficking, and serious violent crime. These crimes contribute significant social and economic harms in countries that feature a presence from these groups. The current paper uses network analytics to analyse the extent of co-offending within and across established clubs in Australia, including the relative involvement of senior, or office bearing, members. The majority of affiliates in this sample co-offended with another OMCG affiliate within the sample period, with office bearers, members, nominees and associates represented proportionally among co-offending networks to in the sample at large. However, within these clubs, criminal activities were conducted in small cliques or components of affiliates. This research supports the role of OMCGs as important facilitators of crime, and the role of co-offending in the criminal offending of affiliates. The findings hold important implications for understanding how offending is organised among OMCGs, differences between groups, differing levels of engagement from the club hierarchy.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth has played a prominent role in the treatment of hepatitis C. As part of a qualitative study on the accessibility and effectiveness of telehealth for hepatitis C treatment during this period in Australia, this article considers how health-care practitioners and patients experience and manage their proximity to each other in telehealth encounters of care. Comparisons between telehealth and in-person health-care tend to focus on measures of patient satisfaction rather than qualitative changes in treatment relationships. Media scholar Silverstone (Digital media revisited: Theoretical and conceptual innovations in digital domains, MIT Press, 2003) uses the term ‘proper distance’ to theorise how ethical relationships are mediated by technology. Drawing on this concept, we explore how patients and health-care practitioners understand telehealth as affecting distance and proximity. We find that both groups express some ambivalence about the impact of telehealth on relationships, on the one hand expecting and privileging simple, transactional relationships, and on the other hand, expressing concerns about the loss of more intimate relationships in health care and about ‘missing something’ while providing health care. Given that proximity is important to the development of ethical relationships in health care, we conclude with some considerations for establishing and sustaining attentive and responsive relationships in telehealth.

The willingness of friends or family to share concerns about an ‘intimate’ preparing to perpetrate public, mass violence, such as violent extremism or targeted violence, is considered a possible part of preventative strategies. To understand what is needed to help intimate bystanders share information on potential acts of violent extremism or targeted violence, we conducted 25 semi-structured qualitative interviews with experts in intimate bystander reporting, including law enforcement, social service and mental health providers, faith-based leaders, staff in school threat assessment programs, and community practitioners in California and Illinois. Results showed reporting was impeded by multiple factors, including lack of knowledge about violent extremism and reporting processes, fear of being incorrect, difficulty distinguishing between violent extremism and mental illness, low trust in law enforcement, and lack of standardized reporting processes. Practitioners said reporting could be improved by several interventions, including increasing awareness about reporting processes, improving reporting methods and policies, training community members who can take reports, and increasing trust between community members and law enforcement. Improving bystander reporting for targeted violence and violent extremism in the U.S. requires collaboratively strengthening law enforcement and community capacities based on sound theory, best practices, and monitoring and evaluation.

This research insight paper considers how augmented reality (AR) can be used in climate change communication from an organizational perspective. Its reported case study finds AR media helped configure a novel advocacy position for the commissioning organization in situ, as well as providing opportunity to make data meaningful and tangible for audiences. It reflects on how AR localizes and spatializes data in new ways by drawing on current literatures and commercial examples of AR climate communications and investigating the organizational imperatives and learnings from using AR for public advocacy messaging. Our conclusions suggest AR mediates new relations between the physical environment and computational data – making climate change visible and knowable in ways that were previously inaccessible to the public and policy actors.

In Australia, COVID-19 has accelerated the reliance on resiliency as a tool of post-pandemic urban recovery. We draw on critical literature on resilience to examine its use in proposals for urban agriculture in cities after COVID-19. Crucially, we situate the pandemic in a longer history of settler-colonialism, and in the role of agriculture in the dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. We argue that the pandemic conditions which urban agriculture is currently operating within risks perpetuating urban colonial governmentality. This paper calls for a rethinking of urban agriculture for future cities by radically disrupting the foundational colonial logics of urban spatiality.

“Rural Australia” has long been a special site of political contestation. Staking the terms of public depictions of “the rural”, “the bush”, or “country life” is a constitutive thread running through Australian settler colonial identity and a cornerstone of national electoral politics. This paper analyses major News Corporation media outlets’ presentation of an evolving political campaign, comparing contesting representations of farming and rural Australia deployed by the Morrison Coalition government and advocacy group Farmers for Climate Action, in the period between the government’s re-election in May 2019 and July 2021. The paper steps through the key tactical discursive moves made by these contesting parties. It argues that in their depictions of rural Australia there are two important features that these perspectives share. Both embrace a discourse of increased agricultural productivity inspired by high-tech innovation, and both are silent on the related social and economic transformations that undergird the “crisis” of the rural. Consequently, public political contestation over rural policy unfolds without engaging transforming structural arrangements that fundamentally organise work and life on the land.

Jacques Lacan devoted one of the sessions of his important Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s classic work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Despite Lacan’s and Wittgenstein’s huge influence across academic disciplines (and the analytic–continental divide in philosophy), there has been no scholarly attempt to examine Lacan’s claims concerning Wittgenstein in this seminar. This paper sets out to redress this gap in the literature. Specifically, we look at the context of the engagement; Lacan’s reconstruction of Wittgenstein’s arguments; their differing conceptions of truth, knowledge and the subject; and the issue of Wittgenstein’s seemingly “psychotic” position.

Datasets of offender attributes, both pre-custody and in-custody, were provided by the Correctional Service of Canada with the goal of exploring whether Security Threat Group (STG) offenders (informally, gang members of various kinds) differ in any systematic way from other offenders. For pre-custody attributes, we show that the entire offender population varies along two almost independent axes, one associated with affinity for violence, and the other with affinity for substance abuse. Within this structure, STG offenders are characteristically less extreme, in either direction, than the general offender population. For approximately two dozen attributes, STG offenders, as a group, tend to have higher values; for a few, they tend to have lower values. For in-custody attributes, the entire offender population forms a triangular structure whose vertices represent: passivity; violence and troublemaking; and involvement in programs leading to partial release. The differences between the STG offender population and the general offender population are small. An offender who is placed at the high end of the propensity for violence axis and/or the high end of the substance abuse axis based on pre-custody attributes is much more likely to be involved in incidents, grievances, and violence while in custody. This may have implications for risk stratification of incoming offenders.

On our blue planet, oceans have long shaped human histories. Generations have crossed the seas, fished their depths, and navigated their currents, encountering new peoples and places on the waves and on the shores. In this roundtable discussion, edited by Ruth Morgan and Laura Rademaker, we reflect on just how oceans have shaped deep human pasts and how we can recover ocean histories from the deep.

(1) Background: Albeit the main focus remains largely on mothers, in recent years Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) scientists, including epigeneticists, have started to examine how a father’s environment affects disease risk in children and argued that more attention needs to be given to father’s health-related behaviors for their influence on offspring at preconception (i.e., sperm health) as well as paternal lifestyle influences over the first 1000 days. This research ushers in a new paternal origins of health and disease (POHaD) paradigm and is considered a welcome equalization to the overemphasis on maternal influences. Epigeneticists are excited by the possibilities of the POHaD paradigm but are also cautious about how to interpret data and avoid biased impression of socio-biological reality. (2) Methods: We review sociological and historical literatures on the intersection of gender, food and diet across different social and historical contexts to enrich our understanding of the father; (3) Results: Sociological and historical research on family food practices and diet show that there are no “fathers” in the abstract or vacuum, but they are differently classed, racialized and exist in socially stratified situations where choices may be constrained or unavailable. This confirms that epigeneticists researching POHaD need to be cautious in interpreting paternal and maternal dietary influences on offspring health; (4) Conclusions: We suggest that interdisciplinary approach to this new paradigm, which draws on sociology, history and public health, can help provide the social and historical context for interpreting and critically understanding paternal lifestyles and influences on offspring health.

Blame avoidance has been one of the most applied strategies by policy makers in both democratic and non-democratic regimes to avoid responsibility and accountability in cases of failure and tragic events. It is also known that politicians have used religion for Machiavellian purposes, as exactly advised by Machiavelli. However, a systematic empirical analysis of how religion is used for blame avoidance by politicians has not been conducted. In this article, we aim to address this gap by examining the empirical data derived from the weekly Friday sermon texts produced by Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs and delivered in more than 90 thousand mosques every week to a large segment of the population in Turkey, where the majority claims to be religious. Starting with its violent response to the peaceful Gezi protests in 2013, the ruling AKP has opened up a new phase in Turkish political history by resorting to civilizational populism: it blamed the Western world for financing and masterminding the protests, using the protestors as internal pawns to attack Turkey and the Muslim World, suppressed the protests brutally and entered into a populist authoritarian regime. Our paper shows, following this turn, how the Diyanet sermons started using religion to help with the AKP’s blame avoidance. The Diyanet either parroted the AKP’s conspiratorial narrative or tried to convince the citizens that all negativities are works of God and with these humans are being tested by God. The AKP’s use of religion to avoid blame is a text-book case of how both a religious institution and religious discourse can be used to help the incumbent avoid responsibility. Whenever, there was a problem that would the AKP votes, the Diyanet’s sermons tried to shift the blame to either God or citizens or conspiratorial enemies.

Indonesia boasts a lively influencer scene. These influencers promote various products and messages, including political messages, to their followers for commercial gain, and have been particularly active during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Influencers in Indonesia are potentially subject to state regulation, particularly via the controversial Electronic Transactions and Information Law (ITE Law) which criminalizes digital communications that “breach morality,” defame the good name of another, or spread misleading information resulting in consumer losses. In addition, influencers face a risk of community-led regulation, via an online backlash, should they transgress perceived moral boundaries. In this article, we present and analyze a series of case studies where influencer behavior has attracted regulatory responses. These cases illustrate the interactions among regulatory actors and also where and how the lines for acceptable influencer moral standards of behavior are being drawn.

In 2017, the Uluru Statement calling for Voice, Treaty and Truth was released by Australia’s Referendum Council. The Uluru Statement calls for a Makarrata Commission to oversee a process of ‘agreement-making’ and ‘truth-telling’. I argue that it was in the regional dialogues held by the Referendum Council prior to the release of the Uluru Statement that this demand for truth-telling was substantively articulated by dialogue participants. This article explores this grassroots invocation of truth-telling within the context of the desire for political transformation, most recently expressed in the Uluru Statement. I argue that truth-telling is conceptualized by regional dialogue participants as an opportunity for First Nations and non-Indigenous Australians to participate as equals in a process of place-based dialogic engagement about the ‘truths’ of colonial history that may or may not lead to local reconciliation. This type of ‘agonistic’ political encounter, therefore, does not assume an outcome of national or even local reconciliation. I contend that these types of encounters may have the potential to create local decolonizing spaces in which more equal terms of association are negotiated. However, they could also be appropriated to pursue ideological forms of consensus that undermine this possibility, as occurred in previous periods of Australian history.

Using the governance of social eating (chibo) influencers as a case study, this article demonstrates the policies, practices, discourses, and politics of China’s state‐centric model of influencer governance. We argue that influencers in China are in a relatively precarious position due to various regulations and restrictions imposed upon them by the state, platforms, and industry associations. They are frequently targeted in China’s internet governance campaigns “for a more sanitary internet” and coerced to participate in social governance “for the creation of a better socialist society.” They are therefore vulnerable within China’s state‐controlled digital economy, caught between risks and opportunities this governance affords. Their position in this governance regime has consequently enabled their creativity, flexibility, and resilience to “play on the edge” of recurring platform crackdowns and capricious government policies to survive in the ever‐changing influencer industry. The coevolution of regulatory policies and focuses, and the shifting performativity of influencers, also makes China’s influencer culture fast evolving and the governance itself more complex than elsewhere.

The founders of the secular Turkish Republic, the Kemalists used secular nationalist education to build a secular Turkish nation and to create their own version of modern pro-Western secular Turkish citizens. This paper argues that Turkey’s current ruling party, the AKP (Justice and Development Party) has been using the same system of education to create its own desired citizens with Islamist Populist ideals. This has been done without changing the secular principles of the constitution and laws on national education since there are several constraints that would prevent AKP to have open and declared pro-Sharia changes to the law. Thus, unlike many other Islamists in the other parts of the world, the paper shows that the AKP has chosen to undermine the secularity of the system, constitution, and law in an ad hoc, gradual and undeclared fashion. The paper concludes by noting that no matter the change in political actors and their ideologies, education is monopolized by the state for political purposes.

Most of the literature on religion’s relationship with populism is Eurocentric and has so far focused on European populist party discourses and, to a degree, on the United States, in particular, on the Christian identity populism of the Tea Party and the Trump movement within the Republican Party. However, across the Asia-Pacific region, religion has become an important component of populist discourses. It has been instrumentalised by populists in many nations in the region, including some of the most populous countries in the world, India, Indonesia, and Pakistan. Moreover, the relationship between religions other than Christianity and populism has all too rarely been studied, except for Turkey. This paper therefore surveys the Asia-Pacific region to comprehend how populists in the region incorporate religion into their discourses and the impact religious populism has on Asia-Pacific societies. It asks two questions: “What role does religion play in populist discourses?” and “How has religion’s incorporation into populist discourse impacted society?” To answer these questions, the paper examines four nations which have recently been ruled by governments espousing, to different degrees and in different ways, religious populism: India, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka. By choosing these nations, we can examine the relationship between populism and Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, and between religion and populism within a variety of religious, ethnic, and political contexts. The paper argues that religion is instrumentalised in populist discourses across the Asia-Pacific region in a variety of ways. First, religion is used to construct ingroups and outgroups, which serve a populist narrative in which the religion of the ingroup is superior yet threatened by the religion(s) of the outgroup(s). Second, religion is used to empower religious authorities, which support populist parties and movements. Third, religion is instrumentalised by populists in order to frame themselves, and in particular their leader, as a sacred or holy figure. The paper also argues that religion’s incorporation into populist discourse has impacted society by legitimising authoritarianism, increasing religious divisions, and justifying the oppression of religious minorities. The paper concludes by noting some differences between populists in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.

This paper assesses the transferability of the concept of everyday peace, developed in the conflict and peace studies literature, to practices utilised by people experiencing intimate partner violence (IPV). The relevance of everyday peace to IPV is assessed by mapping typologies of the concept against behaviour that victims implement to manage and survive abusive relationships. To collect these data, experienced family violence practitioners were asked to recount practice-based information about everyday strategies that victims use to avoid triggering or to de-escalate a perpetrator, thereby minimising immediate harm coming to themselves or others. Theming these behaviours against typologies of everyday peace demonstrated the significant relevance of this theory to IPV. As such, we suggest that everyday peace is a useful conceptual framework to apply to family violence. Our analysis finds that the everyday peace framework is particularly helpful for exploring victim agency in these contexts, reframing mundane and everyday strategies as agentic. In addition, everyday peace offers a means for better understanding victims’ actions, which could help develop more effective service responses supporting choice and agency in IPV situations.

Globally, there is a recognised need that all populations should be able to access the benefits of genomics and precision medicine. However, achieving this remains constrained by a paucity of data that quantifies access to clinical genomics, particularly amongst Indigenous populations. Using administrative data from clinical genetic health services across three Australian jurisdictions (states/territories), we investigate disparities in the scheduling and attendance of appointments among Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people, compared to non-Indigenous people. For 14,870 appointments scheduled between 2014–2018, adjusted Multivariate Poisson Regression models revealed that Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people were scheduled fewer appointments (IRR 0.73 [0.68–0.80], <0.001) and attended at lower rates (IRR 0.85 [0.78–0.93], <0.001). Within this population, adults, females, remote residents, and those presenting in relation to cancer or prenatal indications experienced the greatest disparity in access. These results provide important baseline data related to disparities in access to clinical genomics in Australia.

The COVID-19 pandemic has reconfigured every social, political, economic and cultural aspect of modern society. Millions of people have been stuck in lockdown within and across borders, national and regional terrains, in their homes and worse places. At this time of unprecedented change and ‘stuckedness’, digital communication technologies have served as a lifeline to forge and nurture communication, intimate ties and a sense of continuity and belongingness. But being stuck and simultaneously virtually mobile has brought many difficulties, tensions and paradoxes. In this paper we discuss first insights from a study with 15 members of the older Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) population in Victoria, Australia to explore experiences of being physically stuck and virtually mobile. We find practices of translocal care – ways of caring for distant others through digital technologies, has been made more complex by the pandemic and shaped by two dynamics: networked collective ‘existential mobility’, and a quantification of feeling that we call ‘intimacy 5.0’.

This paper examines the labour experiences of Pacific Islander people living in the Greater Shepparton Region in south-eastern Australia, and the forms of both intergenerational belonging and exclusion that are produced at the intersection of racialised labour and place-making in the settler-colonial state. Shepparton’s Pacific Islander community, which has been resident in the area for over thirty years, is heavily involved in seasonal horticultural labour, forming part of an industry workforce that also includes workers from other settled migrant-background communities, refugees and asylum seekers, as well as large number of temporary migrant workers. Nevertheless, Pacific Islanders in the region often feel themselves, and their labour, unrecognised within the context of established narratives that discursively construct localness as white. Here, we pay particular attention to the experiences of Pasifika youth who, in reflecting on the labour of their parents, offer potent perspectives on the kinds of precarious belonging this labour produces. These contrast sharply with the celebrated forms of intergenerational belonging and claims to place that adhere to the labour of white farmers, and that have their origins in the colonial dispossessions on which the region’s industry is founded. Still, Pasifika people in the region do make place for themselves and for their youth, both through the waged labour they perform as well as through diverse forms of community labour that also situate them in relation to, and with, Indigenous community. Attention to these diverse forms of labour expands the terms through which the work and labour experiences of migrant and other non-white people are usually figured, and highlights the complex, intergenerational entwining of colonialism and racialisation in white-majority rural places.

This paper examines how white rural identities have been historically produced and transformed over time as a result of colonial migration regimes, the racialisation of labour, intra-distinctions of classed whiteness and projects of social mobility. White identities in settler Australia’s ethnically diverse rural towns and cities are commonly depicted as reified, homogenous and fixed-in-place. In rural-focused sociological research, any recognition of whiteness is typically in response to classed stigma around “failed” whiteness, or in discussions of a white-centred “rural cosmopolitanism”. Yet critical Indigenous studies and critical rural studies scholars have long shown that the very ubiquitous construction of whiteness acts as a framing device in the imagining of Australian “rurality”, one which obscures ongoing legacies of power and structures of rural inequality. In this paper I further this agenda by examining how whiteness has been historically produced in one rural, inland city of south-eastern Australia. First, I discuss the colonial projects of race-making and class mobility which were embedded in the region’s rural irrigation schemes of the late nineteenth century. Second, I examine how Australia’s post-war migration programs, the racialisation of labour and intra-distinctions of class all redefined the boundaries of whiteness over the twentieth century, and consider how this contributed to shaping rural social geographies. Drawing on a range of historical and contemporary sources, I show how white rural identities in settler Australia, rather than being reified and immutable, have been historically created under specific social, political and economic conditions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted countries all over the world, not only in relation to public health responses, but on multiple other societal levels. The pandemic has uncovered structural inequalities within and across societies and highlighted how race remains a powerful lens through which public policy responses are constructed and pursued. This paper examines (im)mobilities in Australia in the context of Asian, and more specifically Chinese-Australian citizens and residents, and how these have been framed in racialized discourses that justified exclusionary practices reminiscent of the White Australia ideology. The paper focuses on how Chinese Australians’ mobilities have been (mis)represented and attacked in public and political discourse with particular attention to the situation of Chinese international students’ (im)mobilities. Our conceptual attention in this paper, however, is not only on the racialization of mobilities but also immobilities, underpinned by an understanding of the relationality between Othered ‘migrants’ and hosts, as well as between mobility and immobility. We conclude by discussing future patterns of mobility, how these will impact prospective migrants including international students, and what future forms of mobilities might mean for Australia as a country highly dependent on migrants for its economic, social and cultural development.

In nations where colonialism persists such as Australia, scholars have identified the hegemony of a morally infused white farming imaginary. While this construction has traditionally been invested in heteropatriarchal ideologies our aim in this paper is to demonstrate how, in recent years, white middle-class farming women have been woven into this narrative through settler colonial logics. We take up this contention in the Australian context examining 100 posts to two major institutional Instagram accounts that feature farming women: @invisfarmer and @agrifuturesau. Using the lens of settler colonialism, and a visual and textual analysis, we identify how the “white middle-class woman farmer” is framed by discourses of white feminism and invisibility/visibility. We reveal the emergence of a narrow farming woman aesthetic which is bolstered by narratives which celebrate the “successful female farmer” and the “successful female farm leader”. In concluding the paper, we discuss the implications of the gendering of the white farming imaginary, and make a call for gender and rural studies scholars to de-centre and disaggregate the “white middle-class settler farming woman” subject position, through attending to settler colonialism and Indigenous scholarship in understandings of Australian rurality.

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The article opens a conversation around what constitutes a ‘migration experience’ by identifying and examining various analytical frameworks that constitute an ‘experience’ as migration. Unlike previous approaches to describing young people’s ‘migrant experiences’, I do not take the notion as self-explanatory; rather, what we come to know as the ‘migrant experience’ hides various epistemological and political processes. I begin with an analysis of different conceptualisations of experience such as mediated, unmediated and experience as strangeness. The discussion then moves onto how these inform the spatial/temporal, critical and phenomenological accounts of an event known as the migration experience. The second part of the article demonstrates what empirical analysis may entail when we examine the idea of the migration experience as an analytical category. By drawing on my students’ self-reflective papers on their migration experience, specifically their stories on being Othered in the host and ‘home’ country and their experience of hybrid identities, we open an analytical space that reveals constructive tensions and synergies among the analytical frameworks. In so doing, the article illuminates and contributes to conceptualising the ‘migrant experience’ as both a category of analysis and practice.

This article examines young Muslim Australians’ attitudes toward implementing Sharia in Australia using 64 semi-structured interviews conducted in Melbourne and Geelong, Australia. We found that although the attitudes can be grouped under the main typologies of Legal Pluralist and Muslim Secularist, there were a variety of responses within each category. While Legal Pluralist A wants Sharia to be officially implemented for Muslims in Australia, Legal Pluralist B thinks Sharia would be beneficial for everyone in Australia. The majority of our respondents (Muslim Secularist) think that Sharia is not suited for Australian state, legal system and politics. Muslim Secularist A does not think that Sharia offer any benefit to modern societies in any part of the world. Muslim Secularist B thinks that Sharia cannot be applied in Australia that has to remain secular because of the religious diversity of the population and Sharia is more useful for Muslim-majority countries. Religiosity does not predict any of these typologies in our participant group since, with few exceptions, all identified themselves as religious Muslims.

Despite a significant body of scholarship exploring the impact of securitisation and racism upon Australian Muslims, comparatively little work has been undertaken exploring the specific socio-economic challenges facing Muslim communities and resultant impacts upon citizenship. Even less research has looked at this in the context of the ‘9/11 generation’ of young Western Muslims born at or just prior to the turn of the century. Drawing upon Nancy Fraser’s social justice framework, this article argues that Muslim citizenship is not only affected by a persistent lack of recognition, but also by ongoing socio-economic disadvantage. Drawing on specially tabulated census data, this research article explores the socio-economic status and trajectories of Australian Muslims, paying particular attention to the situation of those born in Australia. It concludes with a call to pay more attention to the way in which the interplay between (often intergenerational) material marginalisation and persistent stigmatisation and misrecognition affects Australian Muslims’ civic and political activism.

The COVID-19 pandemic unleashed not only a life-threatening virus globally but also the spread of conspiracy theories about its origins and impacts. This dis/misinformation circulated within many societies and subcultures, and, notably, among wellness influencers and holistic spiritual communities.

Conspirituality—the merger of conspiracy theories and spirituality—has attracted significant global media and scholarly attention during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article expands upon the ‘two core’ conspiritual convictions proposed by Ward and Voas that ‘1) a secret group covertly controls, or is trying to control, the political and social order, and 2) humanity is undergoing a “paradigm shift” in consciousness’. We identify an additional ten key convictions central to (con)spirituality, including those that result in vaccine hesitancy and/or refusal. We chose to bracket the ‘con’ to problematize the term, and to encompass a wider spectrum of spiritual beliefs and practices, including those that are non-controversial, those that may be deceptive cons, and/or those that draw on conspiracy theories. The article presents an analysis of these twelve (con)spiritual convictions, focusing on a sample of ‘Aussie Warriors’ selling (con)spirituality, and also on influencers attempting to counter the spread of dis/misinformation within wellness circles. In so doing, the article provides a more nuanced understanding of (con) spirituality and vaccine hesitancy, and a greater knowledge of the benefits and risks of spiritual practices and ideas during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

Practitioners of alternative medicine and spirituality often highlight narratives of healing as evidence for the superiority of their modalities over Western biomedicine. We argue that this form of establishing and defending truth has a long history, and base this analysis on the historical and anthropological study of two periods: the late nineteenth century, when alternative theories about relations of mind, body and spirit flourished against a backdrop of political and religious transformation; and late modernity, when increased self-reflexivity and mistrust of secular institutions such as biomedicine prompted growth in alternative medical systems. Foregrounding the voices of practitioners and ‘clients’, this article outlines how recurring narratives of the healed body position the individual as a person in control of their physical and spiritual journey. In our present time, scrutinizing the healed body as an archive of truth deepens understanding of why denialist beliefs about vaccination and COVID-19 can prove so intractable.

This review essay responds critically to the English translation of Domenico Losurdo’s monumental Friedrich Nietzsche: Aristocratic Rebel. It sets out to clearly identify and examine Losurdo’s two tasks in Nietzsche: firstly, his reconstruction of Nietzsche’s intellectual itinerary, from his earliest works until his descent into madness, in the context of later nineteenth-century social, political, philosophical, and eugenic sources; and secondly, to “interpret the interpretations”, and understand how Nietzsche’s avowed “aristocratic radicalism” could have informed thinkers from across the political spectrum, at the same time as Losurdo contests the cogency of “progressive” readings of Nietzsche as based upon a selective “hermeneutics of innocence” which involves suppressing the recurrent, darker registers of his texts. The essay also unpacks Losurdo’s two hermeneutic strategies in this magnum opus. Firstly, we examine his “unifying” claim that Nietzsche, as a great thinker, had a coherent but evolving vision, from Birth of Tragedy through to his final works, unified by his metapolitical intention to overcome democratic, liberal and socialist modern egalitarianisms, by tracking them back to their roots in the Old Testament and classical antiquity. Secondly, we critique his contextualizing methodology which resituates the author of the “untimely meditations” within the debates of his day concerning modernity, slavery, liberalism, socialism, massification, Darwinism, and eugenics. To close, I proffer some brief comments concerning the significance of Losurdo’s work in the present moment, as the Far Right globally reasserts itself.

A strange thing confronts the critical reader of Michel Foucault’s famous interviews on the “aesthetics of existence” he finds in the classical Greek ethicists. On the one hand, Foucault disavows any nostalgia for a past age, or narrative of some “fall” from a pristine beginning into the forms of modern disciplinary and biopower his 1970s works had examined (294-5)0F1: “no, I am not looking for an alternative” (256). He does not find the classical Greeks exemplary (259). The ethical practices of “care of the self” which he examines in the History of Sexuality volumes were, first of all, the province of a tiny male elite. “The Greek ethics of pleasure is linked to a virile society, to dissymmetry, exclusion of the other, an obsession with penetration, and a kind of threat of being dispossessed of you own energy, and so on. All that is quite disgusting!” (258) This was an ethics governed by the imperative “not to be a slave” (285). As such, it was political all the way up, or down. “The relation with politics is obvious” (293): tied to a deeply inegalitarian social order, one in which slaves and women were considered passive and incapable of a fully ethical life (285), and configured on the basis of a self-politicizing internalization of external relations of domination (one must master one’s pleasures and drives, so as not to be enslaved by them). “Freedom for the Greeks signifies non-slavery …. The problem is already entirely political” (285). If this was an “aesthetics” of self-beautification, Foucault avows, it was also “both aesthetic and political, which were directly linked … political power, glory, immortality, and beauty are all linked at a certain moment. That’s the mode d’assujettissement…” (265). But this is bad, seemingly, in some moments in the interviews: “why couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art?”, Foucault for instance asks in an egalitarian voice (261).

This paper considers the relationship between authoritarian populism and extractivism by examining the violence against ‘environmental defenders’ in the Philippines. Since 2016, President Rodrigo Duterte’s populist mandates have facilitated violence against opponents of the regime’s agendas. We examine the relationship between violence and ‘extractive enclosures’ on Mindanao and Palawan – two resource-rich islands with contrasting histories of commodity booms and land struggles. We show how the routine assassinations of environmental defenders is entangled with expanding extractivism. We argue that Duterte’s counterinsurgency tactics have intensified violence against opponents of palm oil and mining just as ‘protective enclosures’ are rezoned to facilitate extractivism.

Over time, a constitution may become suboptimal for the political system that it is meant to support and yet remain in place, largely unchanged. Thus, we might ask how a constitution might be designed to remain ideal for a democracy as it evolves, and indeed whether this is even possible. This practical dilemma has not been rigorously analyzed in the literature on constitutional design, however, because this research agenda has tended to downplay the potential for democracies to transform over time. To remedy this gap, this article sketches an explicitly temporal approach to design, which takes account of a wide range of political system dynamics. The framework contributes insights into the various ways that constitutional structures can be designed to operate over time; the alignment between these setups and different political system dynamics; and the means by which a constitutional design process might be reconfigured to give more weight to the prospect of fundamental political change.

People of culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) background face significant barriers in accessing effective health services in multicultural countries such as the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia. To address these barriers, government and nongovernment organisations globally have taken the approach of creating ethno-specific services, which cater to the specific needs of CALD clients. These services are often complementary to mainstream services, which cater to the general population including CALD communities.

It is increasingly common for domestic and family violence to have an element of technology-facilitated abuse (TFA). As a result, technology-based responses have emerged to address TFA. Using observations from several empirical research projects into TFA, it will be shown that technology-based responses are necessary without being sufficient, and that they have persistent limitations that need to be recognized. Relatedly, it will be argued that there should be an ongoing emphasis on the development of human resources as a support for those experiencing TFA, particularly the use of professional DV support workers.

Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is becoming one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide, including among Africans. Knowledge of the association between traditional risk factors and both diabetes and pre-diabetes, and whether these differ by age and sex, is important for designing targeted interventions. However, little is known about these associations for African populations.

Climate activists and environmental communicators stress that addressing the climate crisis requires both global and local advocacy for transformational change-making. While journalists in small, rural communities are known to actively advocate on issues for the common good, there has been little investigation of local media advocacy on climate change in rural Australia: a region at the forefront of global heating. This paper analyses the accounts of local journalists of their media coverage of the School Strikes 4 Climate in rural and regional Australia, as an empirical entry point for a conceptual discussion of local media advocacy in reporting climate change. We find that normative ideas about journalism coupled with polarised community views on climate change hindered these journalists from taking an advocacy stance. We explore and critique the tacit ‘quiet advocacy’ practices used by these journalists reporting on climate in rural and regional Australia.

This study suggests that terrorism concerns can hinder the effect of prejudice reduction interventions based on education and outgroup knowledge. There is accordance in the literature that individuals who possess more knowledge about Muslim people and Islam are less likely to have anti-Muslim prejudice. We conducted secondary analyses of data from a representative sample of Australians (N = 1,267), and we found that terrorism concerns moderate the relationship between anti-Muslim prejudice and knowledge of Islam, wherein individuals with higher levels of terrorism concern have high anti-Muslim attitudes regardless of their levels of knowledge. In an experimental study manipulating terrorism concerns, a national sample of 502 Australians was randomly allocated to watch a news video about ISIS or a video portraying Muslims positively. Individuals who watched the ISIS video had significantly higher anti-Muslim attitudes and were significantly more likely to retain negatively framed information about Muslims than those who watched the positive video. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article’s Community and Social Impact Statement.

Governments, businesses, private citizens and even organised crime are increasingly investing in cyber security, with the cyber security industry growing in size and relevance. This paper demonstrates that markets for the buying and selling of cyber security should be subject to many of the same critical inquiries typically targeted at the private security industry. Using a number of illustrative examples of emerging trends in the commodification of cyber security it will be highlighted how these markets create significant social impacts and present similar dilemmas of democracy, justice, sovereignty, and deleterious side-effects for wider society. Key conceptual differences between cyber security commodities and ‘conventional’ security commodities will also be considered before arguing for an inter-disciplinary research agenda into the considerable social implications of the buying and selling of cyber security commodities.

Despite there being a highly regulated firearms market, Australian criminals continue to have significant access to illicit firearms. This paper focuses specifically on the role of brokers in the illicit firearms market. It draws from 75 in-depth interviews with prisoners convicted of serious gun-related crimes in Australia. We note how these actors occupy the margins of our interview data yet are seemingly central to the supply and circulation of firearms. Six main means of illicit firearm acquisition are identified, ranging from supply through family members to being vouched for by a known person who provides a bridge to the appropriate supplier (or ‘guy’). The role of straw purchasers, theft, and/or manufacturing in the illicit firearm trade are also explored. We conclude with a provisional profile of the ‘middleman’ and comment on the resilience of the underworld code and its protection of key actors in gun crime milieux as well as implications for prevention and law enforcement.

Historical accounts of American presidential nominating contests suggest that candidates jockey over ideology and policy in ways that shape the outcomes of these races. Yet this aspect of competition has been difficult to analyze with the formal and statistical methods that dominate this research agenda. To address this gap, this article presents a computational agent-based model (ABM) of candidates’ ideological maneuvering during the invisible primary. We extend the framework developed by Michael Laver to study dynamic party competition in Europe, but recast it for the different context and to enable model fit to be more rigorously determined. Our analysis of data from the 2012 Republican invisible primary suggests the importance of ideological jockeying in this contest. Moreover, its dynamics can be well-explained by a basic version of the ABM in which candidates select between three strategies (aggregator, hunter or sticker) and then maintain that strategy over time. The fit of this model, particularly in the short run, can be improved by introducing a “momentum effect” that allows the candidates’ standing in the race to rise or fall without any accompanying ideological change.

In this article, we examine the rise of contact-tracing apps during the first 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic as a new form of technological solutionism – a technological or techno-social fix that can be deployed at national scale in response to an urgent, supranational problem. A dystopian view saw the rapid development and proliferation of COVID-19 contact-tracing apps as a vanguard technology for surveillance. Expediently deployed as a technological fix to the pandemic, contact-tracing was seen to threaten to transform a state of emergency into a state of exception, under which accepted or constitutional laws and norms might be suspended. Here, we extend early critiques of the contact-tracing app as a ‘technofix’ to argue the growing intervention of global technology corporations in digital governance and affairs of national sovereignty throughout the COVID-19 pandemic represents a new frontier of state–industrial surveillance that exploits people’s pre-investment in and dependence on technology corporations. We exemplify this with the ‘technofix’ of the Google–Apple Exposure Notification (GAEN) framework and critically examine the notion of a decentralised and privacy-preserving Bluetooth-based contact-tracing framework proposed by global technology corporations that may threaten state sovereignty when determining public health responses to current or future crises.

Why may the supposed victims of racism and discrimination downplay these phenomena? This paper examines experiences of and responses to racism and discrimination among highly educated Eritrean migrants in Australia. Contrary to research findings on experiences of discrimination among migrant groups as widely reported and impactful, most of my interlocutors seldom reported such experiences, despite acknowledging that discrimination existed generally and vicariously. I discuss participants’ direct and indirect experiences with racism and discrimination, and identify five key reasons for downplaying and not reporting them, including limitations to perceiving and recognizing these phenomena; undermining racism in Australia in comparison to other racisms; gratitude to Australians and to Australia as “the lucky country”; harbouring strong meritocratic values that contrasted with viewing discrimination as impactful; and dissociation from narratives of victimhood and powerlessness. Finally, I discuss how participants’ perspectives pose challenges for anti-racism scholarship and practice more broadly.

The rapid advance of the ‘Islamic State’ (IS) across Syria and Iraq from 2013 had devastating consequences for the myriad peoples and heritage sites of the region. However, few studies have documented how those most affected perceive the destruction of their heritage, its complex relationship to their persecution and displacement, and the role they see for reconstruction in fostering peace. This paper addresses this lacuna by analysing interviews with Syrian and Iraqi Christians along three specific but inter-connected axes. First, in terms of genocide and belonging, respondents reported experiencing the destruction as a key component of the broader persecution, leading to a profound rupture of their sense of communal identity. Second, the axis of displacement and return reveals that the destruction was a key catalyst in their decision to flee, shaped their experiences of exile and attitudes to return. And finally, along the axis of reconstruction and reconciliation respondents held complex and divergent views on the extent to which rebuilding could play a role in fostering peace. The article concludes by noting that the insights gleaned from this case advances studies of heritage in conflict and that being sensitive to local sentiment could enhance projects to reconstruct heritage in conflict.

The concept of constituent power — with its connotations of revolutionary political change — does not appear to be a natural fit with the Australian constitutional tradition. Recent discussions of constituent power, however, define it in broad terms as the power to create or fundamentally alter a constitution. This wide definition suggests that any constitutional settlement, inclusive of the Commonwealth Constitution, would involve both initial and potentially ongoing exercises of constituent power.

Researchers studying media innovation and local news tend to emphasise the ‘here and now’, focusing on digital advances as the pathway towards more efficient journalism and viable businesses. This paper argues for the importance of examining media practices that have been preserved and valued over time. It advocates for a temporal reflexivity lens to help inform media innovation strategies and policies for the local news sector in the future. We conduct a fine-grained exploration of one of Australia’s oldest family-owned local newspapers, The Buloke Times in the state of Victoria, identifying three main areas of the business that have stood the test of time: respect for tradition and reputations, ‘embeddedness’ in place, and fostering company loyalty and collaboration. Ultimately, we suggest that an appreciation of tradition and continuation may play an important role in understanding the future of digital news in small-town communities.

Focused ethnography is a pragmatic form of ethnography, which is focused on a specific phenomenon and conducts short, intensive fieldwork. In this article, I contribute to the development of focused ethnography as an innovative, efficient, and effective qualitative methodology. In addition to augmenting general definitions and understandings of focused ethnography, I evaluate the appropriateness of this methodology for research on community development non-profit organisations. As such, I unpack the advantages and disadvantages of focused ethnography regarding its convergence with or divergence from community development practice principles including bottom-up programming, active participation, locally led action, inclusion of marginalised groups and local wisdom, devolved decision-making, and social justice agenda. Additionally, I outline which types of research projects situated in community development settings may be suited or unsuitable to a focused ethnographic approach, and provide strategies for enhancing the methodology’s alignment with organisational principles.

This paper is based on ethnographic research of Australian and South Korean primary school students’ experiences of on-line synchronous intercultural exchanges as part of a school partnership. Starting with an embodied understanding of learning, I discuss the applicability of body pedagogies to the on-line context in a classroom setting by analysing how the institutional dimension (‘situated epistemic relations’) informed how the children were taught to engage during on-line intercultural exchanges in relation to the children’s embodied experiences of the exchanges (‘practical epistemological analysis’). Through a more holistic approach that includes the body as integral to the students’ digitally-mediated interactions, this paper provides a deeper understanding of the students’ intercultural learning that is not limited to a cognitive focus on language learning and skill acquisition. I conclude with thoughts on future research directions including how children’s embodied experiences of intercultural exchanges may contribute to the longer-term development of an ‘intercultural habitus’.

The destruction of heritage in conflict has emerged as a key challenge to global security and the prospects of peace. In response to the deliberate targeting of heritage sites by the Islamic State (IS) and other actors in recent years, the international community has launched a number of initiatives designed to protect and reconstruct key heritage sites in complex (post-)conflict contexts. However, this article demonstrates that such initiatives are often underpinned by the norm that the protection of heritage in conflict can serve to enhance the prospects of reconciliation, stability and peace. This article problematizes this norm by focussing on the case study of Shia responses to the targeting of their religious heritage sites by the IS in Iraq from mid-2014. It documents the ways that key Shia leaders instrumentalized the case of protecting heritage not to advance peace and security, but to create entirely new militias, to recruit thousands of Shia faithful, to mobilize them to fight against the IS, and to engage in violence and human rights abuses. This raises significant concerns about whether the promotion of heritage as a pathway to peace could inadvertently exacerbate conflict and lead to renewed waves of violence and heritage destruction.

Neoliberal pandemic management strategies during the 2019–2022 COVID-19 virus pandemic rendered vulnerable to the disease, people in precarious work, with underlying health issues, and experiencing other forms of social discrimination and disadvantage. Herd immunity strategies designed to address the economic growth imperatives of neoliberal societies were often contrary to scientific advice, leading to high infection rates and the mass death of, in particular, essential workers in manufacturing, healthcare, and service provision. At times, health policies and political rhetoric scapegoated marginalised communities for the spread of the disease, subjecting them to the pandemic’s more harmful social and economic effects. These ideological-political environments also provided context for accelerationist and conspiratorial narratives about COVID-19 communicated among wider political networks, within economically-driven environments of counterfactual mass news and social media. Responding to this situation, this paper examines how certain pandemic responses from government and non-government actors collectively contributed toward racialised, classist social discrimination in responses to COVID-19, such that they might be said to constitute an intra-pandemic far-right ‘social turn’.

Throughout the last thirty years bushfires or wildfires have increased globally with devastating impacts on ecosystems, human habitats and greenhouse gas emissions. The recording of unprecedented temperatures coupled with the warming of international oceans, and the melting of polar icecaps from anthropocentric climate change are major contributors to the increase of global wildfires that are forecasted to worsen unless urgent political intervention reduces greenhouse gas emissions. The state and corporate actors that enable widespread toxic emissions have been referred to as ‘climate criminals’ within discourses of ecocide and green criminology. This article adopts a green criminological lens to the emerging concept of ‘ecocide’ to examine political leaders and their mismanagement of devastating bushfires. Through a detailed interrogation of Australia’s Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements it traces the devastating Summer events of 2019/2020 and concludes that political inaction underpinned by fossil fuel economic priorities were instrumental in creating the contexts for a preventable environmental and human catastrophe.

This paper aims to investigate how emotions guide and shape diasporic communities’ interpretation/perception of socio-political developments in their place of origin. Based on our study of members of the Armenian diaspora who are originally from Turkey and who now live in Melbourne, Australia, we argue that these Armenians have formed their views on political issues under the influence of their emotional experiences, stemming from direct or indirect victimhood. The paper finds that several key emotions – fear, hate (and lack of hate), anticipation, and pessimism, inform and shape the Australian Armenian diaspora’s making sense of political developments in their place of origin, Turkey. The paper’s contribution to the relevant scholarship is twofold. First, it contributes to the studies on emotions in diasporas by examining how emotions shape individual members of a diaspora make sense of political developments in their place of origin. Second, it contributes to the literature on modern Turkey by studying Armenians from Turkey and their emotions on socio-political phenomena.

This article examines state-society relations and inter-communal dynamics in conflict, focusing on the case study of non-Muslim minorities in Iraq. It draws on interview data to analyse the lived experiences of Iraq’s Yazidis and Christians before, during and after Islamic State (IS) rule. It finds that the attacks by the IS on Iraq’s Yazidi and Christian communities not only caused considerable suffering but also led to a renewed crisis of faith in the Iraqi state and a further breakdown in relations with other groups, especially Sunni Arabs. However, Iraq’s Yazidis and Christian have also demonstrated remarkable resilience in terms of returning to their ancient homelands and rebuilding their fractured communities. Together, these findings raise further questions about the legitimacy of the Iraqi state in the eyes of its non-Muslim minorities and the prospects of a peaceful multicultural future for Iraq.

Ubiquitous mobile communication technologies have played an integral role in the way people navigated forced physical immobilities produced through restrictive measures during a pandemic. This paper critically investigates how 15 ageing people from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) backgrounds in Victoria, Australia used a range of digital communication technologies and online platforms to cope during the 2020 lockdown. The study deploys the mobilities lens (Urry, 2007) in analysing a data set based on conducting remote and in-depth interviewing. It foregrounds how everyday and multi-scalar digital behaviours afford cultural and social connectedness, reflecting diverse forms of care practices. However, forced immobile practices emerged as shaped by disproportionate network capital. In sum, this study puts forward a nuanced perspective in understanding the scales and textures of (im)mobile practices of ageing migrants during a lockdown in Australia.

This paper critically examines how elderly people from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse(CALD) backgrounds in Victoria, Australia use visual-based platforms in navigating the lockdown in Melbourne, Australia. Based on conducting remote interviews among 15 participants in 2020, the findings show digital practices as integral to forge and maintain cultural identities and social connectedness. Using the mobilities perspective to interrogate digital behaviours, I coin the term ‘(im)mobile intimacy’ to articulate a sense of closeness enabled, felt and negotiated through modes of movements and stasis in and with online platforms. I contend that differential mediated mobilities and immobilities are informed by social, contextual, and technological factors, revealing the textures of affective and relational dimensions of enacting mobile intimacy. In sum, by locating both movements and stasis in digital environments, this paper sheds light on the (re)production of exclusion during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper critically examines how elderly people from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse(CALD) backgrounds in Victoria, Australia use visual-based platforms in navigating the lockdown in Melbourne, Australia. Based on conducting remote interviews among 15 participants in 2020, the findings show digital practices as integral to forge and maintain cultural identities and social connectedness. Using the mobilities perspective to interrogate digital behaviours, I coin the term ‘(im)mobile intimacy’ to articulate a sense of closeness enabled, felt and negotiated through modes of movements and stasis in and with online platforms. I contend that differential mediated mobilities and immobilities are informed by social, contextual, and technological factors, revealing the textures of affective and relational dimensions of enacting mobile intimacy. In sum, by locating both movements and stasis in digital environments, this paper sheds light on the (re)production of exclusion during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Affect and creativity are proposed as offering an important lens for examining the politics of belonging in the everyday lives of migrants and refugees. Mobile emotions are circulated, intensified, and transformed in creative ways through digital media, demanding attention to new opportunities for challenging hierarchies, creating belonging, transforming gendered structures, and reinforcing the foundations of inequality and exclusion.

The overall aim of the review is to map the definitions and measurement tools used to capture the whole spectrum of hate motivated behaviors, including hate crime, hate speech and hate incidents. This will benefit the field of hate studies by providing a baseline that can inform the building of cumulative knowledge and comparative research. The first review objective is to map definitions of hate crime, hate incidents, hate speech, and surrogate terms. Specific research questions underpinning this objective are: (a) How are hate crimes, hate speech and hate incidents defined in the academic, legal, policy, and programming literature?; (b) What are the concepts, parameters and criteria that qualify a behavior as being hate crime, hate incident or hate speech?; and (c) What are the most common concepts, parameters and criteria found across definitions? What are the differences between definitions and the elements they contain? The second review objective is to map the tools used to measure the prevalence of hate crime, hate incidents, hate speech, and surrogate terms. Specific research questions underpinning this objective are: (a) How are definitions operationalised to measure hate crimes, hate speech, and hate incidents?; and (b) How valid and reliable are these measures?

Human rights discourse has become central to the global debates about treatment of and solutions for refugees and displaced persons. Following the expansion of rights-oriented terminology generally, advocates for displacees have increasingly framed their arguments in human rights terms. Many believe that human rights discourse can help mobilize humanitarian solutions for people fleeing violence and persecution. However, we argue that the backlash against human rights institutions and organizations within some communities may render this strategy ineffective and even reinforce exclusionary attitudes among host communities. Based on socio-legal analysis of the refugee label and human rights discourse within Israeli society, we demonstrate how the strategic use of this terminology by pro-refugee NGOs portrays displacees as a security and identity threat to local communities. We suggest alternative framings that might better achieve advocates’ goal of protection.

Engagement with family stories, religious and community practices can change a teacher’s conception of thought. We propose teaching as thinking-with the world and teaching as thinking-with others. These terms draw on the philosophy of new materialist thinkers in expressing the ontological impacts of context and materiality. We explore the relationship between teaching and thinking as a distributed and engaged practice by investigating family stories as an avenue for teachers to pedagogically engage with student’s lived experiences. We work with students as valued contributors to the learning environment, irrespective of academic achievements. We argue that engaging with family and faith stories as constitutional of thinking about, and doing, pedagogy can challenge the persistent racism. We are interested in experiential ways of knowing and modes of paying attention to the social and emotional learning that takes place as part of a pedagogic culture of care.

This paper provides an evidence base for practice in Australia from an integrative literature review of research on co-designing housing with people with an intellectual disability. The study asks: what methods and outcomes have been reported from including people with an intellectual disability in the co-design of their housing?

Previous studies on the impacts of racism on adolescent development have largely overlooked Indigenous youth. We conducted a scoping review of the empirical literature on racism against Indigenous adolescents to determine the nature and scope of this research and to establish associations with developmental outcomes. Our literature search resulted in 32 studies with samples from the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Studies were limited to self-reported experiences of racism and thus primarily focused on perceived discrimination. Quantitative studies found small to moderate effects of perceived discrimination on adolescent psychopathology and academic outcomes. Qualitative studies provided insight into structural forms of racism. We offer recommendations for future investigations into the impacts of overt and covert racism on Indigenous adolescents.

The Banned Drinker Register (BDR) was reintroduced in the Northern Territory (NT) in September 2017. The BDR is a supply reduction measure and involves placing people who consume alcohol at harmful levels on a register prohibiting the purchase, possession and consumption of alcohol. The current study aims to evaluate the impacts of the reintroduction of the BDR, in the context of other major alcohol policy initiatives introduced across the NT such as Police Auxiliary Liquor Inspectors and a minimum unit price for alcohol of US$1.30 per standard drink.

Social science analysis of diversity, and religious diversity in particular, has long struggled to move beyond simple binaries of religious-secular, religious-spiritual, traditional-modern, global north-global south, and so on. Twenty-first century realities test existing terms and find them wanting. While concepts such as the postsecular, multiple modernities, multiple secularities, and non-religion point to new lines of analysis, each still refers to binary and thereby limiting terms. This article reviews research on religious diversity, delineating some of the major challenges posed. Building on useful frameworks of superdiversity, multiple pluralities, and religious complexity, we argue that the more widely encompassing concept of worldview complexity might represent a better way forward. It has the advantage of acknowledging the intersecting diversity of diversities in multiple, differing contexts, and abiding similarities in what is occurring ‘beneath religion’.

The Colombian peace process with the insurgent group FARC-EP has been characterized by a lack of compliance and the politicization of peace and memory including the work of sites of memory and peace. Through complicating the European-focused concept of difficult heritage, this article presents the interventions of three museum curators and/or directors of the country’s key centralized memory and peace institutions: the Memory House Museum in Medellin, the Memory Centre for Peace and Reconciliation in Bogotá and the National Centre for Historical Memory in Bogotá. Based on interviews undertaken between late 2019 and early 2020, this article reveals how those in charge of these institutions negotiate the lines between the politicization of memory and the ‘alive memories’ of civil society, due to the ongoing conflict. Bringing together key debates on difficult heritage and Latin American memory studies, this article seeks to contribute to Southern understandings of critical heritage and museum studies.

The Colombian peace process with the insurgent group FARC-EP has been characterized by a lack of compliance and the politicization of peace and memory including the work of sites of memory and peace. Through complicating the European-focused concept of difficult heritage, this article presents the interventions of three museum curators and/or directors of the country’s key centralized memory and peace institutions: the Memory House Museum in Medellin, the Memory Centre for Peace and Reconciliation in Bogotá and the National Centre for Historical Memory in Bogotá. Based on interviews undertaken between late 2019 and early 2020, this article reveals how those in charge of these institutions negotiate the lines between the politicization of memory and the ‘alive memories’ of civil society, due to the ongoing conflict. Bringing together key debates on difficult heritage and Latin American memory studies, this article seeks to contribute to Southern understandings of critical heritage and museum studies.

Seen presently during the global COVID-19 global health crisis are the ways government agencies are enabled by digital data collection through the development of contact tracing technologies (CTT) and mobile-based tracking in their effort to limit the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus. While recent research has focused on contact tracing and privacy (Simko et al. 2020. Contact tracing and privacy: studying opinion and preferences), contact tracing and data protection (Abeler et al. 2020. JMIR mHealth uHealth 8(4): e19359) contact tracing system and information security considerations (Gvili, 2020. Security analysis of the Covid-19 contact tracing specifications by Apple inc. and Google inc), CTT and the data collected and curated have not been framed to date via their intersections with health-datafication and the research participant. As this article outlines, each is strongly linked to public health, healthcare industries and to modalities of capturing and producing knowledge that is expected to help in addressing public health concerns. Where different countries and regions are implementing a range of social distancing and/or social isolation recommendations, some have introduced contact tracing and quick response (QR) barcodes on mobile device apps. To additionally explore access, uptake and use that accompany such technologies, the International Responses to COVID-19 Contact Tracing: COVID-19 APP Uptake and Use Survey was developed and used with participants living in Singapore, Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. The article concludes that in the process and counter to the common good or public interest objective that all are kept safe, new forms of risk and exposure are being produced.

The literature on ‘middling transnationals’ is growing, although studies on Asian middling migrants are still relatively lacking. Current understandings of middling migrants are also frequently fixed on migrants’ mid-level skills and their middle-class status. Drawing on interviews with Nepali migrants living in Melbourne, Australia and mainland Chinese migrants living in Singapore respectively, this article considers how their middling visa status and imaginaries interact with anxious desires. The article argues, first, that migrants from the Global South experience heightened anxious desires due to imaginaries oscillating between the Global North and South. Second, and relatedly, the article argues that migration regimes keep migrants compliant through managing their anxious desires. By detailing the experiences of different groups of Asian migrants in separate migration regimes, the article aims to highlight the heterogeneous experiences among migrants originating from the Global South, and the techniques used by different states to produce temporary and compliant migrants.

Racism has been identified as a major source of injustice and a health burden in Australia and across the world. Despite the surge in Australian quantitative research on the topic, and the increasing recognition of the prevalence and impact of racism in Australian society, the collective evidence base has yet to be comprehensively reviewed or meta-analysed. This protocol describes the first systematic review and meta-analysis of racism in Australia at the national level, focussing on quantitative studies. The current study will considerably improve our understanding of racism, including its manifestations and fluctuation over time, variation across settings and between groups, and associations with health and socio-economic outcomes.

This article explores philanthropic interactions between ‘Big Tech’ and digital rights civil society organizations (DRCSOs) to enhance understanding of the alignment and misalignment of interests between these groups. ‘Big Tech’ wields political influence by distributing cash to research and policy organizations. Academic research supporting ‘Big Tech’ business practices is marshalled to support their political lobbying efforts, while civil society policy work shapes the narrative what dimensions of these businesses should be regulated (or not). While academic work is typically presented as a cool analysis of the relevant issues, DRCSOs purport to represent the interests of individuals and groups negatively affected by those business practices. Through empirical tracking of direct financial flows, as well as an analysis of cash distributions via class action litigation settlements, we show that certain DRCSOs have long-term financial relationships with ‘Big Tech’ that trouble our understanding of the alignments or misalignments of their interests. Through that analysis, we question where and how civil society fits into automated and algorithmic cultural production and perpetuation, and the way that Big Tech uses and guards the economic capital generated through its dominance over ‘automated culture’.

The paper presents a methodology to understand WeChat Official Accounts (WOAs) from their backend to their frontend, and from tracing the platform’s history to its present. Our ‘Backend-in method’ proposes to study platform governance in the meso – between macro political economic concerns and the micro (and usually mobile) user-interface mediation. It shows how including backend platform media practices deepen ethnographic understandings of platform use. The ‘Traceback method’ uses researcher-informant collaboration to document and reflect on the shifts of platform affordances that have reconfigured media practices, organisational structures, and economic incentives over time. We show how these methods proved useful in mapping Chinese-Australian media organisations’ deployment of WOAs for news production. Together these methods contribute ways to understand previously hidden aspects of media practice and platform governance in a novel methodological design, which may have wider application for future research.

Gender discrepancies persist in Buddhist societies and institutions, linked to cultural and religious beliefs and practices that allocate a lower status to women. In some Buddhist traditions, nuns cannot ordain to the same level as monks, most Buddhist archetypes of enlightenment remain male, and men hold positions of power and privilege within the majority of Buddhist organisations. This article focuses on recent controversy surrounding bhikkhuni ordination in the Thai Forest Tradition in Australia and the role of the Internet in these debates. The authors draw on data collected in interviews with key figures in Buddhism in Australia, including Venerable Chi Kwang Sunim, Ayya Nirodha, Ajahn Brahmavamso Mahathera, and Bhante Sujato, recorded as part of the “Buddhist Life Stories of Australia” research project. We argue that the international Buddhist women’s movement and its allies are creating and using digital counter-publics to advance gender parity in contemporary Buddhism. Online activism has not only accelerated the pace of progressive social change, but it has also been used by more conservative actors to try to thwart these changes and maintain their authority, although less successfully.

Even after decades of critical scholarship on religion and the Internet, a rapidly changing field and a febrile global political climate demand renewed questions about the relationships between online spaces and gender-related activism. This is particularly the case, in the post-#MeToo era, in relation to women and religion. While digital activism both promotes and challenges gender inequalities, reflecting prejudices apparent in the offline world, women and men continue to create and adapt online spaces that question received wisdom about their roles in religious traditions. We argue that using Nancy Fraser’s concept of the ‘subaltern counter-public’, adapted by Marc Lamont-Hill as the ‘digital counter-public’, allows us to explore the extent to which digital spaces enable traditional religious authority structures to be challenged in ways that might not be possible in the offline environment. The aim of this Special Issue Section is to provide four detailed case study examples, drawn from Sikhism, Wicca, Hinduism, and Buddhism, across varied geographical and political contexts, in order to examine how women have engaged the digital to create spaces that challenge mainstream narratives about their religious attainment and belonging, raising key questions for the ongoing study of religion online.

In this article, we argue that romantic partnerships forged across class difference offer important insights into how class, privilege and inequality are experienced in Australia. We draw on new research into cross-class relationships to attend to the role that deeply enculturated class-based orientations play in the everyday lives of couples from different class backgrounds, while also exploring their entanglement with race, migration, gender and sexuality. We contend that documenting and understanding people’s negotiations of such relationships through the lens of class difference has the potential to enhance broader understandings of what class is and means in contemporary Australia, a society long invested in egalitarianism as cultural mythology. In this article, we map the first stage of this interview-based research. We outline its scholarly basis and genesis before discussing two key sites of difference and negotiation within cross-class relationships—approaches to spending and saving money, and orientations to holidays, leisure and the use of time more broadly. At this early stage of the research, we describe ourselves as invited into explicit and richly complex conversations about class that have already begun for these couples, as a result of friction, affinities, earnest interest, amusement or desire.

Recent studies demonstrating epigenetic and developmental sensitivity to early environments, as exemplified by fields like the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) and environmental epigenetics, are bringing new data and models to bear on debates about race, genetics, and society. Here, we first survey the historical prominence of models of environmental determinism in early formulations of racial thinking to illustrate how notions of direct environmental effects on bodies have been used to naturalize racial hierarchy and inequalities in the past. Next, we conduct a scoping review of postgenomic work in environmental epigenetics and DOHaD that looks at the role of race/ethnicity in human health (2000–2021). Although there is substantial heterogeneity in how race is conceptualized and interpreted across studies, we observe practices that may unwittingly encourage typological thinking, including: using DNA methylation as a novel marker of racial classification; neglect of variation and reversibility within supposedly homogenous racial groups; and a tendency to label and reify whole groups as pathologized or impaired. Even in the very different politico-economic and epistemic context of contemporary postgenomic science, these trends echo deeply held beliefs in Western thinking which claimed that different environments shape different bodies and then used this logic to argue for essential differences between Europeans and non-Europeans. We conclude with a series of suggestions on interpreting and reporting findings in these fields that we feel will help researchers harness this work to benefit disadvantaged groups while avoiding the inadvertent dissemination of new and old forms of stigma or prejudice.

Germline genome sequencing (GS) holds great promise for cancer prevention by identifying cancer risk and guiding prevention strategies, however research evidence is mixed regarding patient preferences for receiving GS results. The aim of this study was to discern preferences for return of results by cancer patients who have actually undergone GS. We conducted a mixed methods study with a cohort of cancer probands (n = 335) and their genetic relatives (n = 199) undergoing GS in a research setting. Both groups completed surveys when giving consent. A subset of participants (n = 40) completed semi-structured interviews. A significantly higher percentage of probands thought people would like to be informed about genetic conditions for which there is prevention or treatment that can change cancer risk compared to conditions for which there is no prevention or treatment (93% [311] versus 65% [216]; p < 0.001). Similar results were obtained for relatives (91% [180] versus 61% [121]; p < 0.001). Themes identified in the analysis of interviews were: (1) Recognised benefits of GS, (2) Balancing benefits with risks, (3) Uncertain results are perceived as unhelpful and (4) Competing obligations. While utility was an important discriminator in what was seen as valuable for this cohort, there was a variety of responses. In view of varied participant preferences regarding return of results, it is important to ensure patient understanding of test validity and identify individual choices at the time of consent to GS. The nature and value of the information, and a contextual understanding of researcher obligations should guide result return.

The Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan has brought both opportunities and challenges for Pakistan. As Islamabad is relieved by India’s exit from Afghanistan, it continues to worry more about the spill-over of the situation in Afghanistan into Pakistan. Among key non-traditional security challenges are extremism, terrorism, refugees and drug trafficking and Islamabad continues to express serious concerns on how the new development in Afghanistan can pose a serious threat to Pakistan’s peace and security. With a friendly regime in Kabul, however, Pakistan has an opportunity to handle these challenges through a mix of bilateral and multilateral options. By examining historical and contemporary dynamics, this article assesses the seriousness of non-traditional security threats vis-à-vis Afghanistan for Pakistan. Islamabad’s immediate non-traditional security concerns focus on how the new developments in Afghanistan will possibly influence religious extremism and terrorism at home. Finally, the article outlines policy recommendations for Pakistan’s engagement in the Taliban-led Afghanistan.

Foucault’s argument that a major break occurred in the nature of power in the European Eighteenth century—an unprecedented socialization of medicine and concern for the health of bodies and populations, the birth of biopolitics—has become since the 1990s a dominant narrative among sociologists but is rarely if ever scrutinized in its premises. This article problematizes Foucault’s periodization about the politics of health and the way its story has been solidified into an uncritical account. Building on novel historiographic work, it challenges the modernist bias of histories of biopolitics and public health and considers an earlier and more plural history of collective practices of health of which the story told by Foucault is just one important episode. Finally, it discusses the implications of this revised model for wider sociological debates on the link between modernity, health and the body.

In this paper, we provide an analysis of the main dynamics behind the patterns of friendship between Muslim youth and the Anglo-Australian majority in Australia, from the perspectives of young Muslim Australians. In particular, we focus on the extent to which race and religiosity play a role in shaping these friendship patterns. We use qualitative data obtained from 64 face-to-face, semi-structured interviews with young Muslims between the ages of 18 and 24. Building upon the existing notions of religious homophily, we show that our respondents separate public acquaintances from close friendships and confine their acquaintances with the Anglo-Australians to the public sphere. Young Muslim Australians perceive the drinking culture of Anglo-Australians as a major barrier to socialisation in private spaces.

The article examines the motivation and role of the insider activism that resulted in the preservation of a major historical site of female incarceration, the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct, in suburban Sydney. For much of the 20th century the site was a “Girls’ Home,” in which children who had committed no offense were incarcerated under child welfare regulations and literally treated like criminals. Life in the institution was characterized by routine extreme maltreatment of children, many of whom have carried the psychological legacy of their time there throughout their lives. A group of survivors, moved to preserve and reclaim the space, spent many years contending with obdurate and indifferent bureaucracies before successfully having the site Heritage-listed, and it is now a member of the international Sites of Conscience. The Precinct’s significance as a site of feminist carceral history is discussed, and its place in today’s cultural landscape examined.

This monograph argues that “much of what members of the publics know about vaccines pivots on epistemic trust”; that is, vaccine hesitancy is better understood about as a “crisis of trust” than as a “war on science”. It is, at its core, an argument with positive ramifications. It provides a framework for a sympathetic under-standing of vaccine hesitancy and a firm foundation for optimism: a crisis of trust is more amenable to action than the intractable problems presented by a war on science.

Digital citizenship and cyber safety are often used interchangeably in the context of young people’s internet use, depicting the young person as passive, vulnerable and in need of adult intervention to navigate an unsafe online environment and perpetuating reductive and deterministic initiatives that rarely respond to young people’s own online perspectives and experiences. This discussion maps recent definitions and debates about digital citizenship and cyber safety. It draws from 41 stories of young Australians aged 12–18 to think about young people’s digital citizenship within the wider context of their lived citizenship. Reflecting the deeply relational nature of young people’s experiences as digital actors and how they creatively perform their citizenship online, it suggests that young people’s accounts provide an opportunity to consider how citizenship is understood through digital lives and to direct educational responses that encompass emergent civic cultures emerging from young people’s performance as digital citizens.

The current study aims to expand the geographic breadth of co-offending research by providing one of the first examinations of co-offending within Australia. We find co-offending was more common for some crimes than others. Individuals arrested for homicide had some of the highest co-offending rates and were more frequently observed in the core of the co-offending network. Females had higher rates of co-offending than males, and differences between sexes were most pronounced for sexual assault. However, females were underrepresented in the core of the network as compared to males. Lastly, co-offending declined with age, with the exception of drug offences for which co-offending was slightly more common among older age groups. Despite declines in co-offending overall, all age groups were equally represented in the network’s core. Results emphasise the importance of disaggregating co-offending by crime type and examining co-offending across international contexts to better inform theory and policy.

Attachment security priming has important theoretical and practical implications. We review security priming theory and research and the recent concerns raised regarding priming. We then report the results of a meta-analysis of 120 studies (N = 18,949) across 97 published and unpublished articles (initial pool was 1,642 articles) investigating the affective, cognitive, and behavioral effects of security priming. A large overall positive effect size (d = .51, p < .001) was found across all affective, cognitive, and behavioral domains. The largest effect was found for affect-related outcomes (d =.62, p < .001), followed by behavioral (d = .44, p < .001), and cognitive (d = .45, p < .001). Trait attachment anxiety and avoidance moderated the effects of subliminal security priming for behavioral outcomes—security priming effects were larger among people higher on attachment anxiety and avoidance. Assessment of publication bias revealed mixed evidence for the possible presence of asymmetry.

Some Indigenous Australians have embraced developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD) and epigenetic discourses to highlight the legacies of slow violence in a settler colonial context. Despite important differences between Indigenous and scientific knowledges, some Indigenous scholars are positioning DOHaD and epigenetics as a resource to benefit their communities. This article argues that time plays a crucial role of brokering disparate knowledge spaces in Indigenous discourses of postgenomics, with both Indigenous cosmological frames and DOHaD/epigenetics centring a circular temporal model. Drawing on interview data with scientists who work in Indigenous health, and broader ethnographic work in Indigenous Australian contexts where epigenetics is deployed, this article explores how different circularities of space and time become entangled to co-produce narratives of historical trauma. We use the concept of biocircularity to understand the complex ways that Indigenous and postgenomic temporalities are separated and connected, circling each other to produce a postcolonial articulation of postgenomics as a model of collective embodiment and distributed responsibility.

This article explores the mechanisms behind the demobilization of the Feminist School, the self-proclaimed ‘intellectual wing’ of the Iranian women’s movement, which was established as an online forum in 2008. For a short time, the Feminist School was at the forefront of framing the Iranian women’s movement and provided the conceptual tools for its strategy setting. In the years following the disputed presidential election of 2009, however, many of the School’s founding members were forced to leave Iran. Although they attempted to continue their work in diaspora, by 2015 the School was in decline. This article analyses the demobilization of the Feminist School using data collected in interviews with some of its founding members. The authors argue that despite the dedication of activists in the diaspora, and their willingness to continue their efforts to fight for gender justice at the grassroots, their capacity to do so was compromised by extreme top-down tensions between Iran and ‘the West’. Those tensions caused serious security concerns and gave rise to an ever-widening conceptual and affectual gap between domestic and diasporic activists/advocates. This empirical study adds to scholarship on the demobilization of transnational and diasporic movements that seek to influence the policies and politics of highly repressive homelands.

The expansive growth of consumer internet of things (IoT) has created a range of concerns around privacy, security, and their broader societal impacts. This article reports on findings from interviews with 32 key stakeholders from the fields of information security, policy and regulation, the IoT industry, consumer and privacy law, and academia in Australia. It details a broad variety of issues and concerns that go beyond the well-recognised issue of privacy or the technical standards of information security, to encompass a wider set of issues regarding the implications for vulnerable communities, the environment and industrial standards of IoT production. Most key stakeholders expressed the view that more robust regulation is required in Australia, but no clear regulatory priority or strategy was identified by our sample. The implications of these findings for further regulation of consumer IoT and future regulatory strategies are considered.

This study documents evaluation of the Her Tribe and His Tribe Aboriginal-designed empowerment pilot programs. The programs were designed to support Victorian Aboriginal people to strengthen mental health, social and emotional wellbeing, community connection, and to reduce psychological distress. A second aim was to explore participants’ experiences of the programs, including the feasibility and acceptability of the evaluation component. Her Tribe ran for 16 weeks and His Tribe for 12 weeks. In total, 43 women and 26 men completed assessments at pre- and post-program completion, and 17 and 10, respectively, participated in yarning circles at the 6-month follow up. For both programs, there were significant increases in participants’ access to personal strengths and resources, relationship–community–cultural strengths and resources, and decreases in psychological distress. These changes were associated with small to moderate effects that were maintained at the 6-month follow up. There was a significant increase in aerobic fitness for female but not male participants, and no significant changes in weight for either group. Participants described a range of benefits from the programs, including positive elements and areas for improvement. They also viewed the evaluation as feasible and acceptable, and the findings of value. The outcomes from both pilot programs provide evidence that Aboriginal-designed programs, with a focus on physical and cultural activities, can help to strengthen mental health and wellbeing, community connection, and reduce psychological distress in Victorian Aboriginal communities.

This paper probes the process of heritage production in documentary films with a specific focus on the documentary film Taq Kasra Wonder of Architecture (Akbarzadeh, Pejman. 2018. Taq Kasra Wonder of Architecture. Amsterdam: Persian Dutch Network. www.taqkasra.com.), which tells the story of the pre-Islamic Persian/Iranian historical site of Taq Kasra (the Arch of Ctesiphon), presently located in Iraq. The paper situates the film within a broader context of documentaries about Persian edifices in the region and draws on primary interview material with the documentary maker Pejman Akbarzadeh. Through its analyses, the paper shows how, especially in the Iranian setting, a documentary film can engage and (re)produce heritage, and how, when compared to that setting, Taq Kasra exposes persistent aspects of cultural politics within the Islamic Republic since its establishment after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and Saddam Hussein’s policies. In doing so, it is argued that the film provides a mode of critical enquiry into heritage in current historical and political circumstances in Iran. The paper addresses a lacuna in both critical heritage and film studies, namely, the analysis and interpretation of the making of heritage in film and as film.

This article examines the emergence of bioethics at Monash University and Australia during the late-1970s and early-1980s. Unlike bioethics in the USA, which was born a decade earlier during policy debates over human experimentation and withdrawal of treatment, bioethics in Australia initially emerged in the university context via interactions among research scientists working at the forefront of reproductive medicine and philosophers seeking to address issues of public concern. These interactions occurred in a rapidly changing university sector that was moving towards research translation and a new global knowledge economy. Drawing on oral histories with philosophers and medical scientists involved in these events, as well as archival materials, this article uses a co-productionist analytic lens to critically examine how changing institutional norms encouraged mutually beneficial interactions between philosophers and scientists, which shaped the emergence of a new and distinctive field of bioethics in Australia.

This article focuses on the three natures (_trisvabhāva_) or three characters (_trilakṣaṇa_) doctrine as described in Indian Yogācāra treatises. This concept is fundamental to Yogācāra epistemology and soteriology, but terminology employed by contemporary buddhologists misconstrues and misrepresents some of its most important features, particularly with regard to the ‘ultimately real nature’ (_pariniṣpanna-svabhāva_), which is equated with terms that connote ultimate reality like ultimate truth (_paramārtha_), emptiness (_śūnyatā_), and reality limit (_bhūta-koṭi_), and which is described as a ‘purifying object of observation’ (_viśuddhālambana_) that facilitates insight when properly understood by meditators. The article discusses how it is described in a range of Yogācāra treatises and compares this with how it has been conceived in academic studies of Indic Yogācāra literature.

Humanitarian events are increasing globally, both in number and intensity. In response, the international community spends approximately US$30 billion annually to alleviate both the immediate consequences of these climatic, geographic, and human-induced events but also to support mitigation and recovery. Over the past two decades, the humanitarian sector has increasingly professionalised. One under-studied aspect of this professionalisation is an increase in postgraduate studies in humanitarian action over the last 20 years. Despite this increase, there is no agreement on core curriculum or pedagogy across humanitarian studies courses. How do current Masters of Humanitarian Assistance (MHA) offerings converge and differ, and how can such courses further their contribution to the humanitarian endeavour? This paper surveys 26 anglophone courses offered in the United States, Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia, India, and Nigeria, exploring key characteristics of course entry requirements, flexibility, research, practical components, and academic foci. It does not recommend what a core curriculum for humanitarian courses should be, but does argue that core curriculum for humanitarian courses should be identified by relevant and diverse stakeholders such as affected communities, humanitarian agencies, disaster management bodies, and governments, to ensure that courses in this field provide appropriate learning outcomes. The paper suggests how such a ‘charter’ may be developed.

Several themes treated in chapter 3 of Difference and Repetition are addressed at greater length in The Logic of Sense, published one year later. In particular, Deleuze’s critique of ‘the privilege of designation’ and ‘the modality of solutions’, along with his positive claims about the relation between sense and problems, arguably summarise a number of analyses found in The Logic of Sense. However, despite the convergence between Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense as regards the sense–problem relation, The Logic of Sense does not explicitly address the other aspects of thought that Difference and Repetition considers inseparable from the sense–problem relation.

The transformation of governance in Westminster democracies is well documented. However, one aspect of their change that has not received much attention is the creation and publication of cabinet rulebooks. The few studies of cabinet rulebooks have focused on their potential constitutional implications, leaving unclear how their emergence fits within the broader development of Westminster governance. We address this gap in the literature by examining cabinet rulebooks in five Westminster democracies: Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. We analyze their features and emergence, and then set out a framework to analyze their potential effects on cabinet dynamics. We find that the appearance of cabinet rulebooks can be tied to several forces of change in Westminster systems, but most especially the growth of government. Furthermore, we find that these rulebooks project an account of prime ministerial power that is favorable to the prime minister.

The global public health community has been slow to acknowledge the important role of discrimination in health inequality. Existing evidence on discrimination is largely based on studies of specific subpopulations and specific forms of discrimination, with limited evidence from general population samples. We assessed the individual and combined effects of ethnicity, sexuality, disability and obesity on the likelihood of discrimination among a general population sample of Australian males.

We used data from The Australian Longitudinal Study on Male Health (n=15 988, with response rate of 35%) to estimate the prevalence of self-perceived discrimination within the preceding 2 years and we used binary logistic regression models to assess the individual and combined effects of ethnicity, sexuality, disability and obesity on discrimination.

The concept of everyday peace largely draws on research that, to date, has sought more to explain observed social practices than inform peace interventions. This paper presents a case study of an attempt to operationalise the concept into local non-governmental organisation (NGO) programming, seeking to strengthen the formation of everyday peace between Rohingya and Rakhine communities in Myanmar after recent ethnic cleansing. This is believed to be the first attempt to operationalise everyday peace into NGO practice. The programme incorporates everyday peace components into an existing bottom-up development programme based around Freirian conscientisation, seeking to raise critical awareness of eight social practices seen to constitute everyday peace practice: avoidance, watching/reading, ambiguity, shielding, civility, reciprocity, solidarity and compromise. The paper presents and analyses new field data collected two years into implementation, comprising interviews with 15 local NGO staff/facilitators, and 12 focus groups (gender-segregated) with 84 participants from both Rohingya and Rakhine villages. The paper finds evidence of increased utilisation of these social practices and improved inter-village relations, even in the absence of macro-level peace efforts. While no panacea, and not as yet addressing the deep inequalities, injustices and vulnerabilities between Rohingya and Rakhine communities, this paper finds the approach has contributed to peace formation in this context.

Despite widespread acceptance that their emissions accelerate climate change and its disastrous ecological effects, new fossil fuel extraction projects continue apace, further entrenching fossil fuel dependence, and thereby enacting particular climate futures. In this article, we examine how this is occurring in the case of a proposed onshore shale gas “fracking” industry in the remote Northern Territory of Australia, drawing on policy and legal documents and interviews with an enunciatory community of scientists, lawyers, activists, and policy makers to illustrate what we call “divisible governance.” Divisible governance—enacted through technical maneuvers of temporal and jurisdictional risk fragmentation—not only facilitates the piecemeal entrenchment of unsustainable extraction but also sustains ignorance on the part of this enunciatory community and the wider public about the impacts of such extraction and the manner in which it is both facilitated and regulated. Such governance regimes, we suggest, create felicitous conditions for governments to defer, forestall, or eliminate their accountability while regulating their way further and further into catastrophic climate change. Countering divisible governance begins, we suggest, by mapping the connections that it fragments.

Lack of access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is a key determinant of disadvantage among rural and remote communities in the developed and developing world that can limit economic development and obstruct digital forms of social and political participation. In this paper, we discuss how the ability – or inability – to access ICTs affects everyday life in Indigenous communities in remote Sarawak, Malaysia. We focus on social connectedness and on the role of relationships and networks as motivating factors for ICT uptake, for enabling new livelihood strategies and in supporting the maintenance of social networks. The paper is based on data collected between 2015 and 2017 in 20 villages located in the north-east of the state. Methods of data collections included semi-structured interviews, group discussions and participant observations carried out during multiple visits to these villages over a two-year period.

This article examines Iran’s ‘forward-defence’ strategy, in particular its deployment of proxy forces in the Syrian conflict. Iran’s expanded presence in regional conflicts is regarded by its adversaries as indication of hegemonic intent, while Tehran posits its regional posture as a defensive response to security threats. We argue that Iran’s ‘forward-defence’ strategy offers practical benefits, shaping strategic realities, and performative benefits, allowing Tehran to propagate a discourse of military fortitude. On balance, however, the strategy has fed suspicions of Iran’s intentions and increased hostility towards the Iranian leadership, thus is likely to be counterproductive.

The everyday practices and socio-cultural identities of migrant youth have become a focal point of contemporary sociological research in Western countries of immigration. This article engages with the concept of transcultural capital to frame the possibilities and opportunities embodied in young migrants’ multi-layered identities and cross-cultural competencies in the context of an increasingly interconnected and diverse world. By re-conceptualising diversity and difference as agentic, transformational capitals to be valued, fostered and mobilised, this transcultural approach brings to the fore the multitude of skills, networks and knowledge that migrant youth access and develop through multiple cultural repertoires. Drawing on the narratives of migrant youth in Melbourne (Australia), this article argues that access to different – and not necessarily oppositional – cultural systems opens up a space for understanding the ability of migrant youth to instigate, negotiate and maintain valuable socio-cultural connections in ways that recognise, disrupt and transform social hierarchies.

Critical phenomenology is a rapidly flourishing field of research within philosophical phenomenology. This article undertakes a genealogy of the critical philosophical enterprise, drawing out its key commitments, motivations, tensions, and productive potential. In the second half of this article, I explore the promise of critical phenomenology, by examining how a critical phenomenological approach to questions of racism and racialised embodiment can help extend our understanding of white supremacy, opening up new possibilities for thinking its banality and ubiquity in contemporary social and political life.

The article examines the vlogging practices of Chinese international students during the COVID-19 pandemic and their positive roles in coping with the double bind. By doing thematic analysis of the content of vlog videos generated by Chinese international students on both Chinese and English audio-visual platforms, we identify three overarching themes of their vlogging stories: ‘everyday personal experience sharing’, ‘vlogger-generated citizen journalism’ and ‘producing counternarratives’. We argue that Chinese international students creatively practice ‘actualizing digital citizenship’ through dual vlogging. Their vlogging implies a strong sense of civic engagement, connectivity and empowerment, and is conducive to the self-resilience of the affected group as well as their identity and solidarity building in the crisis. Our research advocates for a shift of digital citizenship studies to recognize the flexible, individualized and loosely networked ‘actualizing digital citizenship’ practice. We also call attention to take the everyday digital practices of the international students seriously to understand their concerns, needs and resilience in the uncertain and difficult times in order to better support this vulnerable cohort.

This work was supported by ARC Centre of Excellence on Automated Decision-Making & Society [Grant Number CE200100005] Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, Workshop Program Grant 2021.

Diagnosis is pivotal to medicine’s epistemic system: it serves to explain individual symptoms, classify them into recognizable conditions and determine their prognosis and treatment. Medical tests, or investigative procedures for detecting and monitoring disease, play a central role in diagnosis. While testing promises diagnostic certainty or a definitive risk assessment, it often produces uncertainties and new questions which call for yet further tests. In short, testing, regardless of its specific application, is imbued with meaning and emotionally fraught. In this article, we explore individuals’ ambivalent experiences of testing as they search for diagnostic certainty, and the anxieties and frustrations of those for whom it remains elusive. Combining insights from sociological work on ambivalence and the biopolitics of health, and drawing on qualitative interviews with Australian healthcare recipients who have undergone testing in the context of clinical practice, we argue that these experiences are explicable in light of the contradictory impulses and tensions associated with what we term ‘bio-subjectification’. We consider the implications of our analysis in light of the development of new tests that produce ever finer delineations between healthy and diseased populations, concluding that their use will likely multiply uncertainties and heighten rather than lessen anxieties.

On 27 September 2020, Azerbaijan went to war with Armenia on a scale not seen since the ceasefire of 1994. The conflict ended in another ceasefire on 10 November 2020, however, in addition to the theatre of war, the conflict has been prosecuted and continues to be fought post-ceasefire, through claims to cultural heritage which are employed in international organisations to substantiate the legitimacy of territorial claims. In this paper, we specifically focus on carpets and their display in museums to unpack the relationship between carpet as an instance of instrumentalised cultural heritage and the two countries’ territorial conflict and claims. Focusing on two major carpet museums in Armenian-occupied Nagorno-Karabakh (Shusha) and Azerbaijan (Baku), respectively, we will explain how ostensibly innocuous claims of cultural ownership and authenticity underline territorial claims with violent outcomes.

This article seeks to advance our understanding of contemporary transnational youth mobility, drawing on the concept ‘mobile transitions’ to explore scholarly approaches to the mobility practices of young Italians moving abroad. We present a critical literature review of the intersections of migration, youth and transition studies to argue that the literature on youth transnational mobility currently features two contrasting models comprising a ‘transitions-focused’ Global South model and an ‘experiential-focused’ Global North model. This bifurcation fails to account for emergent regional models of mobility that may help to sharpen scholarly understandings of a new generation of youth ‘on the move’. We propose an alternative model positioned somewhere along the spectrum between the Global North and Global South models, which we define as the Mediterranean model of ‘family-centred’ transnational youth mobility. This model reflects aspects of both privileged, experiential youth migrations, which tend to undervalue the impact on transitions to adulthood, and economically driven youth migrations, which tend to focus more directly on the economic dimensions of youth to adulthood transitions. The Mediterranean model highlights more broadly how mobility enables and shapes transitions, which are simultaneously driven by both economic imperatives and individual experiential desires, and mediated through family and culture.

In the face of looming environmental crises and a swelling global population, Big Data’s acolytes envision a “digital revolution” as a solution for global hunger. Interrogating this promise, we argue that Big Data’s imagined futures articulate the realms of international development and smallholder agriculture in the Global South with an ongoing digital reorganisation of global capitalism—integrating farmers into new informational modes of production, and reshaping the nature of labour and human–environment relations in the process. This reorganisation must be located within a long history of crises and spatio-technical fixes for capital accumulation. More specifically, we situate the prefigurations of Big Data along a trajectory of capitalist technical innovations implicated in the propagation of colonial logics, particularly through the apparatuses of international development—for example, through the technical regimes of the “Green Revolution”. The rhetoric of Big Data and its applications within global food systems both reproduce earlier logics of primitive accumulation and colonial biopolitics, and extend them into new forms of digital imperialism that, we suggest, express incipient mutations in the nature of surplus value itself as it is retooled for the Anthropocene era. Big Data therefore portends novel forms of expropriation that are at once material and immaterial.

A variety of forms and practices of citizenship in China has been well studied, but, unfortunately, studies on industrial citizenship are missing. Moreover, while there has been a growing literature on Chinese workers and their relationship with management in the last decade or so, most of it has focussed on protest and litigation rather than on deliberation and industrial citizenship. This paper fills the intellectual gap by applying T. H. Marshall’s idea of industrial citizenship to workplaces in China and examining it through a case study of a workplace deliberation experiment. The workplace deliberation experiment showed that, first, workplace deliberation in China can be seen as a form of industrial citizenship and “participatory management”, which still retains an element of hierarchy, but falls short of the radical idea of industrial democracy and unionism. Second, workplace deliberation improved management practices but still faced significant obstacles, such as asymmetric power relationships and the control characteristics of industrial relations. Though Chinese industries are institutionalizing more workers’ voice input, Beijing nevertheless forestalls the Polish style of an independent trade union, thus workplace deliberation can be seen as a part of its authoritarian empowerment strategy.

Linked to extractive practices, territorial dispossession can be traced back to the colonisation of Abya Yala. From a decolonial commitment, this article complicates notions of dispossession and extractivism as merely emerging from war in Colombia and focuses on their presence in Campesinas territories. Based on the conceptualisations of the coloniality of power and coloniality of gender, I narrate how territorial dispossession and extractivism are felt in women’s ‘body-lands’ through foreign tourism/conservation development and new export crops in two rural veredas in the Colombian Andes and in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta where I conducted participatory visual projects in 2016. From a relational understanding of place, I also demonstrate the ways that the rural population is resisting and negotiating within these processes. Ultimately, I make a call for feminist scholars to politically commit to the dismantling of the coloniality of gender, and to the resistances to territorial dispossession and extractivism (epistemic and economic) that rural women are leading in place in the Global South.

Globally, Indigenous populations have higher rates of suicidal behavior and psychological distress compared to non-Indigenous populations. Indigenous populations also report high rates of exposure to discrimination, which could potentially contribute to poor mental health outcomes. The objectives of this paper were to estimate the prevalence of discrimination among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander males in Australia and to examine the role of discrimination in the association between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander status and suicidal thoughts and depressive symptoms.

This paper explores public discourses of race and nation in Australia and Singapore, focusing on their historical and contemporary relationship with China and the Chinese. Both countries are governed by a multicultural ideology but are experiencing evolving tensions rooted in their (post)colonial and settler histories, dominated by respective Anglo-Australian and Singaporean-Chinese majorities. To illuminate these issues, we analyse public discourses by politicians and other opinion leaders, as reported in influential media. We discuss how the two nation-states accommodate their rapidly growing mainland Chinese minorities in the context of a rising China as a global power, and in conjunction with their cultural-spatial dislocations. We found a renewed Sinophobia in both countries, but with different historic and contemporary origins and manifestations: in Australia a historically grounded fear of the Chinese as “Yellow Peril”; in Singapore, a co-ethnic anxiety about the incoming mainland Chinese who are construed as “other” to the Singaporean-Chinese.

One of the most widely used and influential ways of creating foundational myths for authoritarian legitimation is to construct a necropolitical narrative around the significance of dying for the nation, homeland, state and the leader, i.e. martyrdom. Mbembe’s concept ‘necropolitics’ (the right of the sovereign to determine who shall live and who shall die) has been expanded to include the political instrumentalization of martyrdom narratives. However, the literature has not analyzed the necropolitical martyr-icons. This paper aims to address this gap by looking at two historical episodes in Turkey, one in the 1930s dominated by secularists and post-2016 dominated by Islamists.

Living together in culturally plural societies poses numerous challenges for members of ethnocultural groups and for the larger society. An important goal of these societies is to achieve positive intercultural relations among all their peoples. Successful management of these relations depends on many factors including a research-based understanding of the historical, political, economic, religious and psychological features of the groups that are in contact. The core question is ‘how we shall we all live together?’ In the project reported in this paper (Mutual Intercultural Relations in Plural Societies; MIRIPS), we seek to provide such research by reviewing three core psychological hypotheses of intercultural relations (multiculturalism, contact and integration) in 21 culturally plural societies. The main goal of the project is to evaluate these hypotheses across societies within the MIRIPS project in order to identify if there are some basic psychological principles that underlie intercultural relations panculturally. If there are, the eventual goal is to employ the findings to propose some policies and programmes that may improve the quality of intercultural relationship globally. An internal meta-analysis using the MIRIPS project data showed that the empirical findings from these societies generally support the validity of the three hypotheses. Implications for the development of policies and programmes to enhance the quality of intercultural relations are discussed.

Zoonotic disease emergence has become a core concern of biodiversity conservation amid the ongoing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Major international conservation groups now comprehensively center larger human–nature imbalances not only as problems of global public health but as a core challenge of the conservation movement, alongside habitat destruction, biodiversity loss and climate change. There is, however, little consideration of how new biosecurity concerns might alter conservation practice with unexpected and potential harmful impacts on human communities, particularly in developing nations with significant human–wildlife interfaces. Reviewing emerging policy positions from key conservation organizations, this article argues that the proposed responses to the COVID-19 pandemic hold the potential to (a) amplify existing people-park conflicts, and (b) generate new tensions by integrating global systems of viral surveillance into biodiversity conservation. I conclude that the close integration of biosecurity concerns into conservation policies requires greater acknowledgment of the unique challenges for human communities.

The study examined whether there was an influence of region of origin, area, or residence prior to migration, religion, and perceived discrimination on the acculturation strategies of sub-Saharan African migrants in Australia. These factors have been found to affect acculturation, given the multi-dimensionality of identify formation. Data were obtained on 425 sub-Saharan African migrants and refugees living in Victoria and South Australia. Acculturation was measured using the Vancouver Acculturation Index. Compared to migrants from central Africa, those from eastern Africa (adjusted odds ratio [AOR], 0.45; p < 0.01) were less likely to assimilate, while migrants who lived in large towns or the city prior to migration (AOR, 0.54; p < 0.05) were less likely to separate but more likely to assimilate (AOR, 2.26; p < 0.01) than those who came from refugee camps. Compared to Muslims, Christians (AOR, 0.57; p < 0.05) were less likely to integrate while those practising religions other than Islam or Christianity (AOR, 3.54; p < 0.01) were more likely to separate. Migrants reporting not fitting in/excluded were less likely to be in the culturally marginalised group (OR, 0.86; p < 0.01) but more likely to report being integrated (AOR, 1.14; p < 0.01), whereas those reporting personal discrimination (AOR, 1.12; p < 0.01) and societal discrimination (AOR, 1.13; p < 0.01) were more likely to separate or remain traditional. In order to promote cultural pluralism and facilitate cultural adaptations among sub-Saharan African migrants, educational programs, anti-racism policy, and legislative reforms need to reposition multiculturalism in a way that promotes tolerance and acceptance of ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity.

This article explores the relationship between hybrid regimes and civil society. It examines the extant debate between ‘neo-Tocquevilleans’ and their opponents over whether or not a robust civil society portends democratic transition and consolidation. It demonstrates the limits of these two models by arguing that civil society in hybrid regimes can in fact agitate against the state, advocate for democratic freedoms and achieve significant political reforms even when these do not lead to broader democratization. To demonstrate, this article documents the case of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions through 15 years of complex Iraqi politics, from the 2003 US-led intervention and during the incumbency of Prime Minister’s Maliki (2006–2014) and Abadi (2014–2018). By analysing primary materials produced by and about the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions, it finds that this case holds important lessons for those seeking to understand the complex interface between civil society and the state in hybrid regimes.

To examine the prevalence of young childrens’ reported experiences of racial discrimination and to assess whether discriminatory experiences vary by gender, religion and country of birth. Data came from Speak Out Against Racism (SOAR), a cross-sectional study of 4664 public school students in grades 5-9 in two Australian states in 2017. An adaption of the Adolescent Discrimination Distress Index (ADDI), as a measure of discrimination, was used across four Indigenous and ethnic categories (Indigenous, Asian and non-Asian visible minorities, Anglo/European). Effect-measure modification (EMM) examined how experiences of racial discrimination across ethnic groups varied by gender, country of birth and religion.

In his article, “In Defense of Resistance,” Ferrell (2019) argues for the importance and centrality of the study of everyday and emergent acts of resistance to unjust power and authority. In my response, I contend that by failing to position contemporary resistance within a coherent theory of the production and reproduction of real life under capitalism, support for free-floating forms of resistance may serve to legitimize and strengthen the status quo, rather than challenge it. Through a Marxist lens, I call for a renewed criminological focus on: (1) the criminogenic nature of capitalism and its structures of exploitation of people and the environment; (2) class struggle and the possibility of a post-capitalist society based on an eco-socialist mode of production; and, (3) the possible consequences of not moving beyond capitalism in the twenty-first century.

Discourses of hustling are ever-present in a global, capitalist society in which, among other reforms, notions of time are compressed and intensified and neoliberalism is operationalised as a form of affective self-governance. Global brand campaigns like Nike’s ‘Rise and Grind’ want consumers to believe that hard work and persistence produces individual exceptionalism. Young people working in technology, cultural and creative industries in urban cities ‘never stop hustling – one never exits a kind of work rapture, in which the chief purpose of exercising or attending a concert is to get inspiration that leads back to the desk’ . This is the latest iteration of a corporatised vision of the hustle that seeks to glamourise exploitative working conditions, creating a culture where overwork and an obsession with being productive is the norm. This article considers how these discourses come into contact with localised migrant understandings of ‘the hustle’: an orientation to work rooted in the legacy of ethnic entrepreneurship. Drawing on a qualitative study with creative and cultural workers of ethnic minority backgrounds in Australia, the article explores their motivations to pursue creative vocational pathways in spite of structural challenges. While creative and cultural workers are heralded as model entrepreneurial subjects for their highly autonomous and flexible work patterns, here I draw on narratives about work and creative expression to suggest that the experiences of racialised young women lead to new possibilities for a race critical analysis of postfeminist, neoliberal discourses of entrepreneurship. By exploring how precarity and work insecurity is negotiated in the context of racialised young women’s lives, I ask what the implications are for minority young women who buy into the neoliberal values of individual exceptionalism and the myths of meritocracy while remaining embedded in their local communities.

This paper seeks to historicise the formation of youth studies in Australia with a specific focus on how the absence of Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall and other race critical and postcolonial scholars has produced particular research cultures, trajectories and traditions that have thus far made it difficult to incorporate race and ethnicity as central to an Australian youth studies agenda, both theoretically and methodologically. Drawing on a range of historical and contemporary examples of how racialisation plays out in Australia, it will be argued youth studies, as a field, needs to respond to how race as a complex, global, structural phenomenon comes to bear on the development of young people’s identity making, life choices and lived experiences a necessary scholarly development.

The work of Nancy Fraser has been remarkable in the last decades for reintroducing questions surrounding capitalism, economics, and redistribution into the field of critical theory.1 This period has been marked on the one hand by a massive concentration of wealth globally and within nations like the US, and the privatization and retrenchment of forms of social governance.

This article argues that guns, as objects used in and for crime, have received insufficient criminological attention. It proposes a socio-material perspective for taking crime guns seriously as material agents in the ways many serious crimes are planned and executed. Drawing in part upon affordance theory, the perspective links the ‘objective’ physical properties of guns to their allure and take up for the purposes of carrying out crime. Guns are powerful organising objects in the commission of crime, it is argued, capable of provoking as well as enabling a range of threatening and harmful activities. The perspective is developed drawing upon interview data from a large qualitative study of convicted gun criminals. These data enable the notion of materiality to be considered at different stages of criminal career, particularly prior to first criminal gun use through to enforced or voluntary desistance. The article concludes with a consideration of policy options suggested by the socio-material perspective. In a post-Covid 19 world in which guns have gained greater salience in many countries, it is argued that the need to ‘dematerialise’ gun attraction and use has never been greater.

This article discusses findings from an ethnographic study of a bail and remand court in Victoria, Australia. Through a focus on the sensory dimensions of forced movements within and through the bail court, the article contributes to the burgeoning sub-field of sensory criminology and develops the concept of ‘carceral churn’. The article argues that the bail court’s churn reproduces criminal and carceral subjects and is implicated in a project of carceral buildup. The churn of the bail court involves forms of mobility and exchange via the inter- and intra-carceral spaces that variously dull, distort, deprive or assault the senses with oppressive effects. This includes both ‘new’ and ‘old’ penal technologies such as holding cells, the custody dock, AV links and court-prison transport. The analysis of sensory violence challenges the notion that court ‘efficiency’ can improve justice experiences and outcomes and instead calls for increased attention to the harms and lethality that flow from carceral churn left un-checked.

Per-capita, Indonesia has one of the world’s largest user bases of social media. However, in terms of online participation, Indonesian women lag behind their male counterparts (Suwana [2017]. “Empowering Indonesian Women Through Building Digital Media Literacy.” Kasetsart Journal of Social Sciences 38 (3): 212–217). This article contributes to a greater understanding of how digital media and engagement enables Indonesian women (as digital citizens) to creatively express themselves, contest gendered ideals, and coordinate political and social activism. It builds on literature that seeks to understand what this means for Indonesian women’s active participation in and undertaking of digital citizenship. Drawing on interdisciplinary projects conducted by the authors, we discuss how female journalists negotiate digital activism in the Indonesian context. We demonstrate that Indonesian women’s digital engagement and their active participation in the production of digital media enables them to creatively express and contest gendered ideals, as well as mobilise activism around political and social causes. In doing so, this article applies a gendered perspective to emerging concepts of digital citizenship, highlighting women’s engagement, activism, autonomy, and creative expression.

That the news media should operate as an impartial and responsible “fourth estate” in a democracy is a pervasive ideal, but there are serious obstacles – economic, organizational and political – to its achievement in practice. These obstacles, we argue, may be lower when an outlet reports on politics in another country, which is strategically allied to its own. And, for this reason, the quality of news coverage of that country’s politics may be higher in the reporting by foreign media outlets than in the reporting by domestic outlets. This article outlines the theory behind this conjecture and then examines it empirically through a content analysis of media representations of Donald Trump’s rise in two non-American outlets, The Australian and The Guardian. Their coverage, our analysis suggests, approximated fourth-estate ideals more closely than did the domestic coverage of Trump’s rise.

Tunisia, the birthplace of the ‘Arab Spring’, has emerged as the only credible story of political transition and democratic consolidation across the region. However, ongoing challenges are tempering the euphoria of the early emancipatory mantra of freedom and dignity. Nevertheless, the political transformation continues to gather assured democratic momentum. And whilst the country’s political elite and leading civil society organizations have managed to avoid the chaotic, and in some cases violent, scenarios in neighbouring countries, some significant challenges remain ahead, none less important than enduring corruption, socio-economic inequalities, sporadic but highly damaging security events, and persistent economic problems, most notably high unemployment among university graduates. Based on qualitative insights and quantitative data, this paper shows that many of these challenges are epitomized in the critical demographic cohort of youth who are disengaging from all forms of formal political activities. The paper argues that democratic gains can be fragile and will be jeopardized unless urgent structural reforms and transformative initiatives are introduced in the country to restore, even partially, the youth’s capacity to influence the social reform agenda and the overall democratization process.

Individualized, maternalist and marketized discourses of childcare are pervasive in Australia as they are in other liberal welfare states. Responsibility is overwhelmingly placed on mothers to carry out most childcare work themselves or to arrange informal or paid childcare. One of the key tasks for most employed mothers is transporting children alongside their commuting journeys. In this context we used mapping/graphic elicitation interviews with 45 Australian employed mothers to explore their commuting experiences through the lens of emotional geographies. Our findings reveal that mothers’ experiences of their commutes were shaped by negotiations with intensive mothering and ‘ideal worker’ ideologies during this journey resulting in emotions of guilt, shame and stress. The spatial and temporal organization of childcare, and incompatibilities between their commuting transport needs and the organization of public transport and parking, tended to amplify these tensions. Through an emotional geographies lens we complicate linear understandings of commuting and mainstream transport and planning work, while calling for more attention to the affective and relational dimensions of mothers’ everyday geographies of care and paid work.

In this paper I discuss the ethnographic encounter between two Aboriginal men and various Australian anthropologists during the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century. These men, Mickey Dow Dow and Jim Kite, played a critical role in the development of a body of knowledge associated with Australian Aboriginal people. The important role that these men played in shaping an understanding of Aboriginal relationships to place, personhood and myth is significant. By critically interrogating the field notebooks and diaries of the seminal Australian ethnographers that worked with these men I bring to the fore the nature of these engagements and discuss the various ways in which ideas were communicated. Critically, it was illustrations, maps and acts of translation and performance that often worked to bridge the gap between understandings.