First fossil pollen record of Auriculiidites Elsik, 1964 in Australia

Macphail, M.K. & Partridge, A.D., June 2012. First fossil pollen record of Auriculiidites Elsik, 1964 Elsik, W. C. 1964. A new sporomorph genus from eastern Peru. Pollen et Spores, 6: 601–604.  [Google Scholar] in Australia. Alcheringa 36, 283–286. ISSN 0311-5518.

Fossil auriculate pollen assigned to Auriculiidites Elsik is preserved in middle early Eocene estuarine facies near Strahan, on the west coast of Tasmania. This is the first record of this otherwise Late Cretaceous–Paleocene morphogenus in Australia and possibly the Southern Hemisphere. Auriculiidites is one of several, now tropical, taxa found at Strahan and underscores the area's importance in understanding the impact of early Eocene global warming at high latitudes.

Mike Macphail [mike.macphail@anu.edu.au], Department of Archaeology & Natural History, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, ACT 0200, Australia; Alan D. Partridge, Biostrata Pty. Ltd. 302 Waiora Rd., Macleod, Victoria 3085, Australia. Received 28.8.2011, revised 5.2.2012, accepted 16.2.2012.     

Transient dwelling: trains as places of identification for the floating population of China

China has experienced massive rural–urban migration, producing the huge so-called ‘floating population’ (liudong renkou). This article attends to what it means to be thus between places by focusing on the embodied and emotional experience of migrant travel. Each year sees the Spring Festival rush (Chun Yun) with the largest annual movement of people as millions of these rural migrant laborers (nongmingong) return to their homes for the holidays. The Spring Festival rush is marked by huge crowds queuing overnight for train tickets, with throngs of migrants carrying woven bags of belongings and gifts on their shoulders, who end up standing in the overcrowded ‘hard-seat’ carriages of trains. By closely reading some of the poems from the emerging genre of ‘Hired laborers literature,’ this article explores migrants' affective and emotional journeys. It argues that this transit experience is one of the key shared sites of common identification for a migrant population whose mode of inhabitation is through circulation and mobility. It also argues that mobility creates shared experiences characterized by specific corporealities, material cultures, and senses of social stratification.     

Continuity and Discontinuity in the Historical Development of Modern Psychopharmacology

In the middle of the twentieth century psychiatry underwent a transition that is often referred to as the “psychopharmacology revolution.” Implicit in the term revolution is the idea that a paradigm shift occurred. Specifically, it has been argued that psychiatry abandoned the psychoanalytic paradigm in favor of a qualitatively distinct conceptual system based on brain chemistry. The validity of this view requires that psychoanalysis had the status of a paradigm. This paper presents evidence that psychoanalysis did not constitute a paradigm and that the advent of psychopharmacology was not, technically, a scientific revolution. Instead, the rise of modern psychopharmacology was the culmination of a linear growth of biological knowledge that began to develop in the nineteenth century.     

Enlivened Geographies of Volunteering: Situated,Embodied and Emotional Practices of Voluntary Action

Abstract

Examining the everyday practices and feelings of volunteering, in particular their situated, emotional and embodied nature, serves to place the experiences of volunteers centrally in accounts of what matters in the doing of volunteering and goes beyond service provision or active citizenship. Using qualitative evidence from three collaborative research projects, we present enlivened geographies of volunteering which focus on: the situatedness of formal volunteering in place and the negotiation of local ‘moral economies’ of norms and expectations surrounding access to volunteering opportunities and the practices of volunteering; complex positionings of informal volunteering in biographies of social participation; and intersections of embodiment and emotions in experiences among environmental volunteers. We contribute to the development of social geographies which are ‘more-than-representational’ and argue that connecting insights on everyday practices of volunteering with wider policy and practice agendas requires a focus on the enduring, but also emergent and excessive nature of the spaces of doing volunteering, on the relational nature of volunteering, and on opening up debates in the networks of research-policy-practice which understand spaces of volunteering as entailing more than volunteering.     

Theatre sports in the Southern Ocean: engagement options for Australia in whale research protest action

In the great whaling debate, fuelled twice yearly by the annual International Whaling Commission meeting and the departure of the Japanese research fleet for the Southern Ocean, silliness knows no bounds. 2008 was no exception, as the Southern Ocean again became the location of protest action (sometimes provocative and potentially life-threatening) against Japanese scientific research vessels. The Japanese are accused of ‘whaling’ in a whale sanctuary off the Australian Antarctic Territory, yet this claim to sovereignty is not legally proven and therefore not universally accepted. The Rudd Labor Government bowed to significant pressure and sent its Customs vessel, the Oceanic Viking, to spy on the Japanese fleet and gather evidence for a possible ‘world court’ action. This paper examines what options were available to Australia to intervene in the protest action, to monitor the Japanese research and to take legal action in an international forum within the constraints of internationally defined diplomatic and legal boundaries. It concludes that the risk of attracting the wrath of the Japanese government and other Antarctic Treaty countries is great indeed and the Australian government must be careful not to step too far outside these boundaries.     

Export-led Technology Development in the Four Dragons: The Case of Electronics

To date, little attention has been paid to the strategies of local firms in bringing about industrialization in Bast Asia. This article focuses on the methods by which domestic firms utilized foreign connections to overcome technology and market barriers in electronics. A simple market-technology model is developed as a first approximation of how domestic technology assimilation relates to export marketing in the four ‘Dragons' of East Asia (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore). It proposes that export demand shaped the pace and pattern of technological progress in electronics in each of the four Dragons. Historical evidence shows that each country used a distinctive mix of direct and indirect export mechanisms to acquire technology and to enter international markets. Foreign buyers, transnational corporations (TNCs), original equipment manufacturer (OEM) arrangements, joint ventures and licensing deals were exploited by ‘latecomer’ firms to their market and technology advantage. Asian firms progressed from simple assembly tasks to more sophisticated product design and development capabilities, travelling ‘backwards' along the product life cycle of traditional innovation models. Today, leading Asian firms invest heavily in R&D and engage in partnerships with TNCs to acquire and develop advanced new electronics technologies. The technological progress of latecomers remains closely coupled to export demand through OEM and other institutional arrangements.