Still methodologically becoming: collaboration,feminist politics and ‘Team Ismaili’

This article mobilizes a feminist analytic to examine team research and collaborative knowledge production. We center our encounter with team research – a collectivity we named ‘Team Ismaili’ – and our study with first- and second-generation East African Shia Ismaili Muslim immigrants in Greater Vancouver, Canada. We draw upon feminist politics to highlight the ways in which ‘Team Ismaili’ at once destabilized and unwittingly reproduced normative academic power relations and lines of authority. A ‘backstage tour’, of ‘Team Ismaili’ shows the messiness and momentum of team research and sheds light on how collaborative knowledge production can challenge and reconfirm assumed hierarchies. Even as we are still methodologically becoming, through this discussion we strive to interrupt the prevailing silence on team research in human geography, to prompt more dialogue on collaboration and to foreground the insight garnered through feminist politics.     

The environment and minor-party insurgency in Australian politics: the case of logging and the ‘liberals for forests’

It is known that many Liberal–National voters are environmentally conscious. However, the lack of importance of environmentalism in influencing voter behaviour in Australia, compared with socio-economic ideologies and issues, means that few Liberal–National identifiers are likely to find appeal in the parties which place most emphasis on protecting the natural environment, as these parties are generally Left-leaning with regard to socio-economic policy. Given the balance of influences on the vote, Liberal–National vulnerability on environmental issues would seem to be most exploitable by a Right-of-Centre environmental party. This article examines the case of the ‘liberals for forests’, a rare example of just such a party, which had some success in Western Australian State elections in 2001. The paper supports the notion that environmental issues, including those such as logging often linked with Left partisan ship, have the potential to influence vote choice, in a positive sense, on the Right as well as the Left of Australian politics. Implications for the Liberal Party and the party system are discussed.     

‘Homes’ and being ‘at home’ in New Zealand: women's place-making in internationalised higher education

Research on students' experiences in internationalised higher education largely assumes students' autonomy and privileges their public selves. New Zealand research is no exception. Little attention has been paid to students' lives beyond classroom contexts; how national policy and institutional practices shape students' everyday experiences and ‘home’ lives similarly and differently. In addition, gender is afforded scant attention or considered only as a secondary concern, and people whose partners or family members are international students are invisible. This article endeavours to address the relative inattention to gender in international education research and the invisibility of women whose partners are international students. It draws on data from interviews with 17 women involved in a broader doctoral research project during 2005 and 2006. The women were either migrant or international students or had partners enrolled as international students. The article uses ‘home’ as a lens for examining women's situated and transnational place-making and factors that promoted or precluded a sense of belonging in New Zealand. It draws connections between women's accounts of ‘home’ and feeling ‘at home’, and broader politics, policies and institutional practices in New Zealand higher education.     

The ‘Australian settlement’ and Australian political thought

Arguments for reshaping political agendas invariably begin from an appraisal of past errors and achievements. Paul Kelly's notion of the ‘Australian Settlement’ attempts such a task. Kelly identifies a particular ideological and institutional tradition in Australian politics that dominated much of the twentieth century and that is now deemed to have broken down. This article accepts that the notion of a Settlement provides certain insights into the evolution of Australian political thought. Nonetheless, the paper takes issue with the specific content of Kelly's version of the ‘Australian Settlement’ and indicates how it may be reformulated. It argues that, to the extent that we can speak of a ‘Settlement’ in Australia, it was one reached on a wider range of key conflicts or cleavages than those to which Kelly refers.     

Australian ‘left’ and ‘right’: (Social composition and ideological integrity)

Political self‐identification and interest in politics are used in this paper to define ‘left’, ‘centre’ and ‘right’ affiliation within the Australian public. Detailed political attitudes of these three groups are then analysed. The Australian ‘left’ is half the size of the ‘right’. It is, however, much better educated and much more ideological. Its political attitudes are twice as coherent as the attitudes of the ‘right’. The left's ideological congruence partly results from the better education of its affiliates. However, the difference in ideological congruence of the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ remains quite great even when the impact of education is statistically eliminated.     

‘Working out’ for two: performances of ‘fitness’ and femininity in Australian prenatal aerobics classes

In this article, I consider the distinctly classed places/spaces in which affluent Australian pregnant women physically maintain their bodies through aerobics. The case study described is drawn from data obtained between 2006 and 2008 in a longitudinal study examining feelings about body image and ‘fatness’ in a sample of pregnant women in Melbourne, Australia. The ways in which pregnant bodies are disciplined within gym spaces are discussed through a case study of a prenatal fitness centre, FitForTwo, and drawing on narrative data of pregnant informants. FitForTwo is described as a primary site for the performance of ‘fit’ pregnancy and underscored by bodies that can be shaped, trained, moulded and modified. This case study is analysed against a backdrop of a growing Australian moral panics about ‘fighting’ maternal obesity. It adds to a body of feminist geographical and qualitative studies of pregnancy, bringing both a more sustained, longitudinal analysis than previously offered, and an Australian context that offers rich comparative material.     

The Ruini system and ‘Berlusconismo’: synergy and transformation between the Catholic Church and Italian politics in the ‘Second Republic’

This article aims to correlate the political rather than the pastoral action of Cardinal Camillo Ruini with the rise and consolidation of the politician Silvio Berlusconi from 1994 to 2007, set in the context of the major changes that occurred in the Catholic Church and in Italian republican politics during the 1980s and 1990s. The main theme is an ‘instrumental interaction’ between the two systems, Ruinismo and Berlusconismo, which only coincided at the level of political opportunity and gave rise to important synergies between two men who otherwise had nothing in common.     

Critical feminist reflexivity and the politics of whiteness in the ‘field’

Feminist geographic commonsense suggests that power shapes knowledge production, prompting the long-standing reflexive turn. Yet, often such reflexivity fixes racial power and elides more nuanced operations of difference – moves feminist scholars have, in fact, long problematized. To counter this, we revisit Kobayashi's (1994) ‘Coloring the Field’ [‘Coloring the Field: Gender, “Race”, and the Politics of Fieldwork,’ Professional Geographer 46 (1): 73–90]. Twenty years on, and grounded in our fieldwork in South Sudan and Honduras, we highlight how colonial and gender ideologies are interwoven through emotion. Decentering a concern with guilt, we focus on the way whiteness may inspire awe while scholars of color evoke disdain among participants. Conversely, bodies associated with colonizing pasts or presents can prompt suspicion, an emotive reaction to whiteness not always fixed to white bodies. These feelings have significant repercussions for the authority, legitimacy, and access afforded to researchers. Our efforts thus disrupt notions that we, as researchers, always wield power over our participants. Instead we argue that the positioning of ‘subjects of color’ in the global south, racially and in their relationships with us, is historically produced and socioculturally and geographically contingent. Rethinking the field in this way, as a site of messy, affective, and contingent racialized power, demonstrates the insights offered by bringing together feminist postcolonial and emotional geographies.     

The ‘secular’ settlement and Australian political thought

This paper challenges the tendency among contemporary historians and political scientists to read secularism and religion in Australian political history in binary terms. It is argued that this framework is anachronistic, creating a barrier to a proper appreciation of religion in Australian political history. In keeping with much British Enlightenment thinking, religion through much of Australia’s history was deemed to have great social utility and its promotion was of central secular significance. This understanding framed the education debates of the second half of the nineteenth century as well as the social welfare reforms and institution building around the Federation period. Such developments cast doubt on claims that secularism of an exclusionary kind is a key element of the now widely invoked category of the Australian settlement.     

‘A Most Manly and Amusing Game’: Australian Football and the Frontier Wars

Formed in the 1850s frontier contact zone, Australian Football owes more to the experiences of the skirmishes between white settlers and Indigenous Australians than is usually recognised. If we reassess the historical sources from a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective, we observe that the ‘Game of Our Own’ is a mix of British and Indigenous styles of warfare. The four men who drafted the rules of this new ‘most manly and amusing game’ were misfits from British society who were seeking new lives on the frontier. Their code contained ‘striating’ features played across ‘smooth’ spaces. The football teams adopted totemic plants and animals in their nomenclature; the players were bedizened in costumes that spoke of Empire; the bloody Frontier Wars were in living memory of the players and their ‘barrackers’.     

Protecting the citizen body: The commonwealth's role in shaping and defending an ‘Australian’ population

This article traces the activities of the Commonwealth in shaping a population that it felt comfortable with and capable of governing successfully from 1901 to 1962. We argue that the body of desirable Australian citizens was defined negatively by who was to be excluded, in particular ‘aboriginal natives’. This quickly became an area of administrative rather than legislative concern. A close examination of the archival record illuminates the bureaucratic image of the desirable Australian and the modes by which that image was generated. The administrative activities increasingly focused on the ‘hard cases’, particularly those of the so‐called ‘half‐castes’. A narrow reasoning process, propensity to make expedient changes to established practice, and the metaphorical language in which the issue was discussed shaped the administration's thinking on citizenship policy.     

‘Days of Rage’ Downunder: Considering American Influences on ‘Home-Grown’ Terrorism and ASIO's response in 1970s Australia

Between late 1969 and mid-1972 there were 176 premeditated and politically motivated attacks against a range of mostly government, military, judicial, diplomatic and commercial targets in Australia. Most were undertaken by radical left-wing actors. Such incidents and the organisations and individuals who carried them out can be examined through the lens of ‘home-grown’ terrorism. This article corrects the popular and historiographical amnesia associated with these events and demonstrates that like the moderate social movements of the ‘long Sixties’ that sustained Australia's ‘Years of Hope’, the home-grown terrorist actors who contributed to Australia's ‘Days of Rage’ were, most especially, influenced by American developments, cultural productions and actors. Further, in its attempts to understand and deal with these new threats, elements of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) were similarly influenced by a range of American ideas and events including social science research methodologies.     

‘The Pathos of Conservation’: Raphael Samuel and the politics of heritage

When Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture was published in 1994, it was critically received. Yet, the book has not had the impact of other key works such as Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign Country (1985) or Hewison’s The Heritage Industry (1987). A number of factors have contributed to this, such as Theatres essentially being an unfinished project, and ‘heritage’ in the book having multiple personas – the net result being that Samuel’s arguments can at times be hard to pin down. Yet with interest in his approach to heritage now growing, this article seeks to unravel Samuel’s core ideas and arguments pertaining to heritage, and to give an historical background to their evolution. With the central tenets of Samuel’s argument essentially being a case for the democratisation of heritage; the validity of what we might today call ‘unofficial’ narratives and discourses; and to challenge the dominant view that heritage was ultimately history’s poor cousin, I argue that Samuel’s ideas have much to offer contemporary research agendas in heritage.