Class,ethnicity, and voting behaviour in Australia∗

This paper assesses the importance of a range of social structural influences on Australian electoral behaviour, with specific reference to ethnicity and occupational class. The analysis is conducted on two levels. Firstly, aggregate level data is employed, using the 1976 census matched by federal electorate to the 1977 election results. Techniques from factorial ecology are used to construct conceptually unambiguous measures of constituency characteristics, and these are related to voting behaviour using multivariate techniques. Secondly, individual level survey data collected in 1979 are used to confirm the importance of the socioeconomic cleavage and urban‐rural divisions. They also indicate that ethnicity has an appreciable influence on electoral behaviour among those born in Mediterranean countries. Northern Europeans (mainly British) prove to be no different in their electoral behaviour than native‐born Australians, while the results for Eastern Europeans are inconclusive.     

Building an industrial society: welfare capitalism in the ‘city of factories’, Sesto San Giovanni,Italy

The article retraces the steps which marked the transformation of Sesto San Giovanni to becoming one of the principal centres of Italian industry. The premises serve to better comprehend the case of Sesto San Giovanni. Its uniqueness lies, however, in being the outcome of action by a plurality of businesses which contributed to building the ‘factory city’. From 1905, their choice of setting up their plants caused a sudden increase in the population, which was followed by an equally sharp increase in the demand for lodgings and social infrastructures. The employers were forced to invest in building, at first with the intention of rapidly housing the workers, and then to proceed with a more rational planning of specific villages for the workforce. In the decades between the wars, Sesto San Giovanni was provided with a wide range of services in the fields of health care, schooling and even leisure. These policies permitted the creation of solid, close-knit company communities, founded on the intense participation of the workforce in the functioning of production activities. The social network, however, held together principally on the basis of the recognition of mutual obligations and responsibilities, rather than on mere subordination to paternalistic domination.     

Political travel across the ‘Iron Curtain’ and Communist youth identities in West Germany and Greece in the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract

This article explores tours through the Iron Curtain arranged by West German and Greek pro-Soviet Communist youth groups, in an attempt to shed light on the transformation of European youth cultures beyond the ‘Americanisation’ story. It argues that the concept of the ‘black box’, employed by Rob Kroes to describe the influence of American cultural patterns on Western European youth, also applies to the reception of Eastern Bloc policies and norms by the Communists under study. Such selective reception was part of these groups’ efforts to devise a modernity alternative to the ‘capitalist’ one, an alternative modernity which tours across the Iron Curtain would help establish. Nevertheless, the organisers did not wish such travel to help eliminate American/Western influences on youth lifestyles entirely: the article analyses the excursions’ aims with regard to two core components of youth lifestyles in Western Europe since the 1960s, which have been affected by intra-Western flows, the spirit of ‘doing one’s own thing’ and transformations of sexual practices. The article also addresses the experience of the travellers in question, showing that they felt an unresolved tension: the tours neither served as a means of Sovietisation nor as an impulse to develop an openly anti-Soviet stance.     

War without end? Military humanitarianism and the limits of biopolitical approaches to security in Central America and the Caribbean

In 2008, the U.S. Southern Command launched Operation Continuing Promise as an ongoing mission to provide humanitarian aid and assistance to vulnerable populations in the Caribbean and Latin America. Conceived as a means of fostering regional security, the Operation's humanitarian aim was designed to improve regional security by ensuring life against the risk of a range of disasters. Much as that mission reflects biopolitical analyses of humanitarianism that emphasize the ability to protect life as the basis for sovereignty, closer attention to the timing and location of SOUTHCOM's efforts offers a more contextual understanding. That approach is developed here through an analysis of Operation Continuing Promise's stop in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, contrasting SOUTHCOM's focus on biophysical vulnerability with intended recipients' sense of their condition as a historical and political outcome. That contrast frames a contextual understanding of Operation Continuing Promise, placing it within broader efforts to construct Puerto Cabezas as vulnerable. That approach also points up the limits of biopolitical analyses of humanitarianism, suggesting the ways in which vulnerability is never merely a biological condition. The narrow humanitarian focus of Operation Continuing Promise can therefore be assessed in terms of its inability to address political and historical factors shaping vulnerability. So long as vulnerability persists, the potential for intervention persists indefinitely, making humanitarianism into a means of waging war without end.     

Who and what is Canada? Constructing cultural identities in health care research

This paper concerns the negotiation of cultural categories embedded in and informing the ongoing nation formation of Canada. It discusses the construction of cultural identities by health care professional students as they participated in a qualitative study concerned with health care practice in an increasingly culturally diverse society. The study methodology, embedded in layers of narrative about «difference», fostered a negotiation of «self» and «other» on the part of the students and provided an intense site for reflection on cultural identities and social categories in a period of rapid demographic change in Canada. As the students defined and interpreted cultural issues during their fieldwork placements they interrogated and contested various dimensions of difference, including their own sense of Canadian-ness as this played out in «lived» multiculturalism in a specific Canadian city. It is argued that the students» negotiations of boundaries of the cultural «self» were closely linked to a changing place narrative and identity of Canada, expressed in discourses and material practices around difference at local and national scales.     

Partitioned identities? Everyday national distinctions in Northern Ireland and the Irish state

How does political structure affect ethno‐national distinction? Partitioned societies are a good test case where we can see the effects of changed socio‐political circumstances on historically inherited distinction. This article takes nominally identical distinctions of nationality and religion with common historical roots and shows how they are differentially understood in two polities partitioned in 1920: Northern Ireland, a devolved region of the United Kingdom, and the Irish state. Using a data base of interviews with over 220 respondents, of which 75 in Northern Ireland, conducted between 2003 and 2006, it shows how complex, potentially totalising and exclusive ‘ethnic’ and ‘ethno‐national’ divisions are built up from simpler and more permeable distinctions. Respondents interrelate the same elements into a loosely‐knit symbolic structure – different in each jurisdiction – which frames expectations and discourse, and which is associated with different logics of national discourse, one focussing on personal orientation, the other on group belonging. The resultant ‘ethno‐national’ distinctions function differently North and South.     

Who were bennelong and Pemulwuy? Museums in Sydney and interpretation of eora aboriginal culture

Abstract

The Eora Aboriginal People are the original inhabitants of the Sydney region [in NSW, Australia]. There are an estimated 2, 000 Aboriginal rock engravings in Sydney. Some museums in Sydney now acknowledge the traditional Aboriginal owners and use Eora words to name their exhibitions. These include: Ngaramang bayumi – music & dance (Powerhouse Museum); Merana Eora Nora – first people (Australian National Maritime Museum); Yiribana (Art Gallery of New South Wales); and Cadi Eora Birrung: Under the Sydney Stars (Sydney Observatory). The Aboriginal history of Sydney, however, is only told at the Museum of Sydney with installations, videos and spoken exhibits about Eora, the indigenous peoples of Sydney. This paper reviews the Eora Aboriginal exhibits at the Museum of Sydney. It questions whether visitors to Sydney learn about Bennelong and Pemulwuy, two key Aboriginal figures in the the early European settlement around Sydney Harbour. Sydney Aboriginal Discoveries on their Dreamtime cruise of Sydney Harbour provide another interpretation of Eora history and culture. The paper suggests the Eora heritage of Sydney should be more widely interpreted in Museums, National Parks and other public venues to rightfully acknowledge this Aboriginal history.     

‘An entirely new land’? Italy’s post-war culture and its Fascist past

Scholarship has for decades emphasized the significant continuities in Italian culture and society after Fascism, calling into question the rhetoric of post-war renewal. This article proposes a reassessment of that rhetoric through the analysis of five key metaphors with which Italian intellectuals represented national recovery after 1945: parenthesis, disease, flood, childhood and discovery. While the current critical consensus would lead us to expect a cultural conversation characterized by repression and evasion, an analysis of these five post-war metaphors instead reveals both a penetrating reassessment of Italian culture after Fascism and an earnest adherence to the cause of national revitalization. Foregrounding the inter-relation of Italy’s prospects for change and its continuities with Fascism, these metaphors suggest that post-war Italian intellectuals conceived of their country’s hopes for renewal, as well as its connections to the recent past, in terms that transcend the binary division favoured in many historical accounts.     

REFINA—An Integrated and Multilevel Approach to Dealing with Land Consumption?

In Germany, land consumption for settlement and transport development amounts to 100?ha/day, thus significantly exceeding the goal set by Germany's sustainability strategy, which aims at reducing the rate of the expansion of built-up areas to 30?ha/day by the year 2020. Increased orientation of local authorities and stakeholders towards the promotion of economic competitiveness, complex interrelations between actors involved in planning, substantial planning autonomy of Germany's local administrative units, as well as stronger democratic norms in planning, render a traditional linear planning scheme obsolete. The federal administration and publicly funded research institutions therefore opted for a non-legislative approach aiming at the production of a body of methodologies, which would engage participation processes and deliberative decision-making. The name being a German acronym for “Research for the Reduction of Land Consumption and for Sustainable Land Management”, this collaborative national programme gathered a number of planning actors who have framed the complex topic of sustainable land use into a series of manageable, fundable and adjustable projects which take into account multiple spatial and time scales. This paper emphasizes the elements found within REFINA which lead the way towards a strategic communication-based, integrated and multilevel approach to dealing with land consumption.     

Ecology and economy of the Late Neolithic Jevišovice culture in Austria. An interdisciplinary working program

Abstract

This paper presents the working program for a research project in progress at the Institute of Pre- and Early History at the University in Vienna, Austria: 'Copper Age Man and the Environment in the Middle Danubian Region. Ecological, economic and sociological sources relating to the Late Neolithic Jevi?ovice Culture'. The programme offers archaeological research the opportunity to gain a completely new source base for the area of the Upper and Middle Danube. This has been developed in recent years and when placed in a scientific context it will provide completely new data relating to the ecological, economic and sociological conditions of the 4th and 3rd millennia BC.

Investigations since 1999 have adopted a targeted approach aimed at improving the research status for this period. Through the application of new and innovative methods, the study of well-documented and finely-stratified features, and the early involvement of interdisciplinary research partners, an outstanding new source base been created. The application of scientific disciplines has led to new advances and a completely new insight into the life during the Copper Age — one of the most innovative epochs in prehistory. It has also proved possible to open up a completely new source base for related scientific disciplines, providing them with new research opportunities. This is due to very favourable conditions of preservation, both quantitative and qualitative, allowing the application of a great diversity of innovative methods.     

Who Shapes the Politics of Expertise? Co-Production and Authoritative Knowledge in Thailand's Political Forests

Expert environmental knowledge has often been described as a governmental rationality that reduces political debate and facilitates state control. In this paper, I argue instead that this line of reasoning simplifies how knowledge gains political authority, especially when expertise is shared and left unchallenged by diverse actors, including those in conflict with each other. Using the framework of co-production from Science and Technology Studies (STS), I apply this argument to conflicts over the supposed watershed functions of forests in Thailand, where simplified narratives about the impacts of land use on water supply are used as justifications for territorialisation and restrictions on forest land. In particular, I focus on local resistance to the proposed Kaeng Sua Ten dam in northern Thailand in order to demonstrate how protestors have deliberately reproduced formal expertise to empower themselves, but by so doing also reinforcing simplified visions of watershed science and community culture. I argue that exposing the co-production of authoritative knowledge and visions of social order offer greater opportunities for understanding the role of expertise as a political force than analysing competing assemblages based on oppositions of state-led expert knowledge and traditional local practices.     

What happened to provocation in science and technology studies?

Science and technology studies (STS) is an important and often controversial interdisciplinary field which has proved to be provocative and influential. But has its institutionalization and influence occurred at the expense of some of its provocative power? This paper considers the fate of provocative ideas associated with STS as they become appropriated and transformed by new social institutions and audiences. It aims to sketch a preliminary framework for analysing the social dynamics of the persistence and/or attenuation of its ideas and impacts. The argument reviews the main early aspirations and targets of STS. It suggests that changing emphases in STS can be understood as responses to successive versions of the principle of symmetry. It argues that the continual renewal and recruitment of audiences for STS is central to sustaining its capacity for provocation.     

Transposition in Japanese state identities: overseas troop dispatches and the emergence of a humanitarian power?

This article aims to illustrate the trajectory of Japan's security identity transposition. As one of the catalysts in identity transposition, it focuses on the constitutive roles of norms regulating Japan's overseas dispatches of the Self-Defense Forces (SDF). Whilst keeping the identities of ‘a peace state’ and ‘a civilian power’, the authors argue that Japan has crafted a new security identity after the end of the cold war and the 9/11 terrorist attacks—namely, ‘an international humanitarian power’. As evidence of this transposition, the authors illustrate a dramatic increase in the number of overseas SDF dispatches on humanitarian missions, and the shift of domestic and foreign responses to it. The authors note that Japan has been on the road to remilitarisation and internationalisation during the past four decades through the enactments of laws for overseas SDF dispatches, the general public's shift of attitude on the SDF's roles, the evolution of the alliance in a more operational direction, and the creation of threats from North Korea and China. Lastly, the authors argue that there is still a long way to go before Japan emerges as a normal state because of the presence of many domestic and structural barriers, especially multiple identities defining the Japanese state.