Gender differences in teenage alcohol consumption and spatial practices

In recent years teenagers have reported a decline in under-age drinking at the same time as their access to public space has been increasingly curtailed. In this paper we explore the spatial practices and drinking behaviours of a group of teenage girls and boys aged 13–14 years in Liverpool, UK. Our analysis considers how their use of space was bound up with experimentation with alcohol and how this varied by gender. We find in support of previous research that both boys and girls report nuanced experiences of public space, with some enjoying greater freedom while others have moved into more domestic and supervised leisure spaces in response to fears about their safety in public spaces. The boys also reported less alcohol consumption than the girls. These gendered experiences were mediated by social relationships and encounters with other young people, their parents and carers and also other adults in positions of authority.     

Discourse and Argument in Bureau of Land Management Wilderness Environmental Impact Statements

This study examines argument as a link between technical information and policy recommendations in wilderness environmental impact statements (EISs) produced by the Bureau of Land Management. As the EISs went from draft to final form, their structure and content changed. The changes reflect a shift to incorporate wilderness protection into the policy agenda for public lands. The analysis suggests that EISs can be understood as a form of argumentative discourse in which agency personnel frame issues and make normative arguments through technical analyses.     

Colonization, kidnap and confinement in the Andamans penal colony, 1771–1864

This paper explores practices of kidnap and confinement in the Andamans penal colony, for the period 1771-1864. It argues that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries indigenous captivity was key to successful colonization. The British kidnapped islanders in an effort to educate them about the supposed benefits of colonial settlement, and in the hope that they would become their cultural advocates. The paper shows also that the close observations that accompanied the confinement of islanders informed global discussions about ‘race’ and ‘origin’, so that the Islands were brought into a larger global frame of understanding around indigenous - settler contact. The paper draws out some of the complexities and specificities of the colonial encounter in the Andamans. It argues that with respect to sexual violence, there was a significant gender dimension to colonization and confinement. Finally, it suggests that in a settlement comprising a penal colony and its associated infrastructure (and no free settlement) there were no straightforward distinctions between ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’. Rather, there were significant overlaps between the treatment and experiences of convicts and islanders, and these expressed something of the inherent ambiguities of the penal colonization of the Andamans itself.     

The Goldfields’ Sabbath: A Postsecular Analysis of Social Cohesion and Social Control on the Ballarat Goldfields, 1854

The historiography of the Sabbath reflects closely the concerns of its Sabbatarian subjects: the rise or fall in public piety and the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of evangelical moral reform and social control. In this article we step away from the question of how religious or secular goldfields society was, and instead, observe how Sunday functioned on the goldfields. In doing so we eschew a dominant narrative of religious history — secularisation — and deploy a postsecular analysis. Such an analysis reveals a remarkable degree of social cohesion: a diverse, but common, practice of rest on the Sabbath. It was only because of the universal honouring of the goldfields’ Sabbath that government troops were able to so quickly and decisively end the Eureka Stockade on Sunday, 3 December 1854.