Political theory in the Australian Journal of Political Science: A review

The place of political theory in AJPS has historically been a fairly marginal one, partly because Australia does not seem to have a strong national tradition of political theorizing. This is thought to be a function of living in a nation that never produced a great political theorist and was born neither in revolution or utopianism. Yet, although there has been a marked absence of high theory or exegetically-inclined history of ideas over the life of the journal, theorists have responded by contributing work that usefully illuminates applied problems with theoretical insight. Further, it may be the case that there is a peculiarly Australian style of political theory that is pragmatic and self-consciously embedded within our institutions and political culture. The paper explores this and other means by which Australian theorists have adapted in order to retain a presence within the journal.     

The Liverpool Economy during the War of American Independence, 1775–83

Much has been written about how the American War of Independence, a key imperial event, affected the British Isles. However, within this body of work there is limited reference to Liverpool, which was arguably becoming ‘the second city of empire’. This article attempts to fill this gap in the historiography, and addresses the economic impact of the war upon this key port town. It shows that there were four overall stages to Liverpool’s foreign commerce during this period—initially trade remained broadly steady, then there was a noticeable decline, the penultimate stage marked a sluggish improvement, and finally it was not until the post-war years that a sustained recovery took hold. That said, despite these overall trends, individual markets such as the trans-Atlantic slave trade often had their own dynamics. Although privateers (private ships of war) contributed towards the town’s eventual commercial recovery, this activity was by no means the only factor in explaining this rebound. Furthermore, the American war had an impact upon other sectors of the Liverpudlian economy, including shipbuilding and infrastructure projects. Combined, this evidence suggests that eighteenth-century warfare had positive and negative repercussions for the UK economy. As a result, we learn more about being ‘at home with the empire’.     

Mourned Choices and Grievable Lives: The Anti‐Abortion Movement's Influence in Defining the Abortion Experience in Australia Since the 1960s

This article provides a genealogy of foetocentric grief, an emotion that permeates accounts of abortion in Australia across multiple discursive sites. Foetocentric grief represents women as indelibly mourning their ‘unborn children’ after abortion. The emotion first came to prominence in anti‐abortion activism of the mid‐1980s. Focus on the purported consequences of abortion for women enabled anti‐abortionists to respond to charges that they were unsympathetic towards women who have abortions. Foetocentric grief also transcribes the primary claim of the anti‐abortion movement – that abortion entails a mother's destruction of her unborn child – onto the very experience of abortion. Since the mid‐1980s, foetocentric grief has moved outside the anti‐abortion movement to dominate accounts of the abortion experience in the print media as well as, surprisingly, mainstream pro‐choice activism. This article maps the convergence of these trends and examines the political and regulatory effects of foetocentric grief. It argues that foetocentric grief is a culturally enforced emotion that discursively recuperates the figure of the aborting woman to normative regimes of pregnancy and femininity, where pregnant women are envisaged as already mothers to autonomous foetal‐subjects.     

A geography of residents' worry about the disruptive effects of contaminated sites

While the links between contaminated sites and adverse effects on human health and well‐being are being increasingly recognised, some argue that the magnitude of the health problem is inadequately addressed because it is largely invisible. Health geographies literature has sought to highlight this invisibility by focusing on the link between contaminated sites and health. This study adds to health geographies by presenting unique insights into the geography of residents' worry about the disruptive effect of environmental contamination on health and well‐being. It analyses a sample of residents (n = 485) living near 13 contaminated sites across Australia. Ordinal logistic regression analysis of closed‐format survey questions was combined with coding of open‐ended survey questions to reveal the geography of residents' worry about contamination from nearby sites. First, the study explores some of the main relationships between residents, their environs, and contaminants from nearby source sites, which determines their levels of worry: residents' demographics, residents' proximity to sites, contaminant boundaries and borders, and type of contaminant. Second, the study investigates how worry affects residents' health and well‐being, ranging from effects on their personal functioning through to their sense of ontological security, which depends in part upon their perceptions of contaminants' impacts. Despite having identified a range of diverse and negative effects of worry about contamination on residents, we found that worry for contamination can also prompt coping strategies and problem‐solving, reinforcing the need for more research on this subject.     

How Can Liberal Democracies Defend Themselves against Tyranny?

Tyranny in the modern era turned toward totalitarianism through the idea that human nature needed to be “perfected”; communism's enemy was a matter of class, Nazism's a matter of race. Democracy would seem by definition to resist such ideologies, but even the modern democratic state now possesses mechanisms that can be turned in tyrannical directions: regulatory powers, social welfare systems, and the new tools of artificial intelligence and “big data.” American democracy has been trending toward the “direct” form of democracy that the Founders recognized in ancient Athens and were determined to avoid, a degree of popular sovereignty capable of producing demands upon government that, in turn, could transform a people's government into a government's people. The best defense may be found in classic American literature's examination of national character and identity.     

Visibly Mute: Ethical Sociality and the Everyday Exurban

In this paper, we argue for an ethical understanding of exurban environments, which we propose as symptomatic spaces of neoliberalization. We outline the idea that civility within public places is a mode of moral communication grounded in everyday encounters and embedded in the ordinary places in which they are enacted. We also advance the argument that exurban environments, as properties of neoliberal capital, employ distinct strategies to monopolize the use of space and encourage its inattentive occupation. We illustrate this through our case study in the North of England, a business and retail park which we suggest as typical of spaces produced through wider processes of neoliberalization. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the writers and theories explored throughout the piece for a critical understanding of place, one that is premised on the importance of a quotidian understanding of the social, an everyday morality.     

Sex work and exclusion in the tourist districts of Salvador,Brazil

Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia, in the Northeastern region of Brazil, is composed of racialized, gendered, and sexualized spaces in which certain people are welcome, while others are marginalized and excluded. Praça da Sé, in the Centro Histórico, is a major site of both the local commercial sex industry and the tourist industry in Salvador. With their public visibility in sites heavily frequented by tourists, sex workers in Salvador reveal how sexuality is public, politically contested, economically charged, and, most significantly, racialized. If, as Tom Boellstorff argues, ‘globalization resignifies the meaning of place rather than making place irrelevant’ (2007, 23), how does one then study racialized sexualities in the context of the globalized tourism industry? How do class, space, and race influence practices of sex work and sex tourism in Salvador? This article offers a critical analysis of racialized sexualities in the study of the sexual economies of tourism in Salvador. I conceptualize Salvador as a ‘site of desire’ (Manderson and Jolly 1997) where issues of socioeconomic inequality, racism, and sexism coexist alongside celebratory affirmations of Afro-Brazilian cultural production in Salvador. This article explores how the touristic cityscape of Salvador is divided into carefully demarcated zones where class and race are crucial factors in determining who ‘belongs’ and who is ‘out of place.’     

The medical content of English almanacs 1640-1700

There has been a great deal of recent interest in popular health care in early modern England, resulting in studies on a range of topics from practitioners through remedial treatment. Over the past decade, the history of books has also attracted growing interest. This is particularly true for the seventeenth century, a period marked by a dramatic rise in all types of printed works. The 1640s are especially significant in the evolution of printed vernacular medical publications, which continued to flourish during the rest of the century. While recent studies on popular medical books have contributed greatly to our understanding of contemporary medical beliefs and practices, they have failed to properly recognize the effect that almanacs had on early modern medicine. Although their primary function was not to disseminate medical information, most provided a great deal of medical information. Furthermore, these cheap, annual publications targeted and were read by a wide cross-section of the public, making them the first true form of British mass media. This article is based on the content of 1,392 almanacs printed between 1640 and 1700, which may make it the largest comparative study of the medical content of any early modern printed works. The project has resulted in two major findings. First of all, almanacs played a major part in the dissemination, continuing popularity, and longevity of traditional astrological and Galenic beliefs and practices. Secondly, at the same time, almanacs played an important early role in the growth of medical materialism in Britain.