The changing pattern of urban fertility in Eastern Australia 1966-1976

This paper uses unpublished data from official sources to analyze variations in urban marital and overall fertility in Eastern Australia between 1966-71 and between 1971-76. It further attempts to assess the relevance of the convergence thesis to changing fertility patterns and to evaluate the utility of an ecologic analysis of interurban fertility differences. The data indicate that urban fertility levels declined dramatically in 1966-76 and interurban differentials were substantially reduced. By 1976, the 2-child family norm had been widely adopted throughout Australia, regardless of region, community size, or sociocultural composition. Examination of marital fertility trends suggests that, although different areas had different elasticities of response to cyclical fertility movements in the 1960s, the magnitude of these differences was insufficient to do more than slow the pace of the decline while increasing the pace of interarea differential convergence. Declines in both proportions married and marital fertility after 1971 were reflected in declining overall fertility in all urban areas in Eastern Australia. During this period, however, divergence replaced the convergence evident in the 1960s. The present high level of uniformity in both marital and overall fertility rates throughout the study area about mean levels means that the regionally variable effects of future cyclical changes in fertility levels may be difficult to identify. As a result, detailed analyses at the individual/behavioral level that focus specifically on attitudes, values, and family size preferences may be more appropriate for understanding of post-transitional demographic change than studies based on spatial analyses at the local level.     

Growing up in a tourist destination: negotiating space,identity and belonging

There is little research on children’s experiences of growing up in a popular tourist destination, where place and space are contested with visitors, migrants and temporary residents. Existing literature on young people’s experiences of their socio-spatial surroundings has focused predominantly on the rural/urban dichotomy, often neglecting to explore how identity and belonging are negotiated in complex community contexts such as tourist destinations. This paper reports on recent research that suggests that young people’s experiences of growing up in such an environment are nuanced and diverse, with their rich narratives disrupting socially constructed distinctions between the rural and the urban, merging experiences from both worlds.     

The evolution of urbanization in medieval Ireland

In Ireland, relatively little research has been carried out into the influence during the medieval period of the Anglo-Normans upon the evolution of urbanization. This paper presents a model (which primarily operates at a regional scale), the purpose of which is to explain interrelationships between the evolutionary processes operating in the early medieval period. It is argued that a settlement's relationship to a stratified land-holding system determined the operation of locational and temporal constraints, varying combinations of which influenced the functional development of urban settlements. Evidence supporting the validity of the model is presented and discussed.     

Illegible ethnicity and the invention of Scots-Irish narratives on the stages of Belfast and Appalachia

Theatrical stages have long been home to performances of identity, creating and sustaining legible visions of various peoples and groups for their audiences. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, the playwright/actor Dion Boucicault popularised the “stage Irishman” for Irish and American audiences alike, thus contributing to the invention of “Irish-America”. This paper examines a similar attempt in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to query the definition of a distinct group of Irish-Americans: the Scots-Irish. Productions from Belfast, Northern Ireland, as well as from the southern Appalachian Mountains, demonstrate how the illegibility of the Scots-Irish – in other words, their status as a non-recognisable, incoherent segment of the white population in the USA – allows for narratives about this group to be highly malleable. Contemporary productions of the Scots-Irish story demonstrate the ways in which ethnic identities emerge as constructions of past and present, memory and history, and politics and culture.     

Assembling the Austrasian Letters at Trier and Lorsch

This article is a reconsideration of the Epistulae Austrasicae. We critique the widespread notion that the constituent letters were compiled by a courtier in the late sixth century at Metz as a book of models for use in the Austrasian chancellery. We argue instead that a monk from the monastery of Lorsch assembled the letters in the early ninth century from individual exemplars and groupings that he found in archives at Trier. We conclude by outlining some implications of this rereading for the edition and interpretation of the letters as sources for the Merovingian period, and point out some avenues for future research on their reception in the Carolingian period.     

Expectation,motivation, engagement and ownership: using student reflections in the conative and affective domains to enhance residential field courses

Residential field courses are important and should be designed and delivered to maximize their value to students, staff and institutions. In this context, we use a novel approach involving analysis of the daily affective and conative reflections of students immersed in the field course experience to better understand student engagement with fieldwork. We show that students base their field course choice on a range of factors (costs and benefits) and that these choices subsequently influence student expectations and motivation to engage with fieldwork. We also show that the motivation of students to engage with fieldwork-based learning varies from person to person and from day to day. Our findings suggest that having a more nuanced understanding of the decisions students make when deciding which field course to enrol upon would enhance our ability to design attractive, accessible and useful field courses; that having an awareness of the expectations of students around field courses would enable us to better prepare them to undertake them; and that students are more motivated when they are afforded an opportunity to work independently and perceive themselves to have ownership of their learning.