Curriculum reform: a transformation or consumption model for politics and international relations?

For decades, politics and international relations (PaIR) programs across Australia have taken a smorgasbord or student consumption approach to curriculum development. This article examines whether, with the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF), there has been a systematisation and transformation of curriculum. It surveys 21 programs and majors in the field offered at 10 universities. It analyses directions in program structure, content and to a lesser extent delivery in order to discover whether there is a shared picture of graduate outcomes. The model of curriculum as a product students’ select elements of to consume has largely continued and there has been no disciplinary debate about direction. This may well result in marginalisation if PaIR cannot successfully attract enough new students or influence regulatory debates, which will likely expand given the ongoing massification of higher education in Australia.     

Introduction: Foreign travel,transnational sex,and transformations of heterosexualities

Transformation of heterosexuality in the context of transnational mobility has been much neglected in the scholarly literature. In this themed issue we bring together four articles to contribute to the debates about negotiations of heterosexual sexual relations and practices between European and North American women and local men at holiday destinations. The focus is on Euro-North American women's performances of heterosexuality as bound up with gender, race, age, and nationality. Each article uses ethnographic methods to demonstrate how transformation of heterosexuality is spatially and culturally contingent and contested in relation to normative expectations of heterosexual love, sex, and romance regulating women's sexuality both in the women travellers' home countries and in the destination of the encounters. More broadly, articles in this themed issue contribute to the emerging literature aiming to re-think heterosexualities.     

‘It’s the best place on Earth’: Newfoundland women’s outmigration,diaspora and the myth of return*

This article explores Newfoundland women’s experiences of outmigration as a gendered process of displacement. Experiences of displacement can provide significant insight into Newfoundland and Labrador’s fractured political relationship with the nation of Canada. This article argues that Newfoundland outmigration must be viewed through the lenses of diaspora and intersectionality, as nationalist sentiment and the province’s peripheral place within Canada affect women’s experiences of outmigration. Tensions shaped by gender, ethnicity and socio-economic status affect their ability to integrate into Canadian society and influence their decisions about returning home.     

Variations in Human Adaptations During the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene at Quebrada Jaguay (QJ-280) and the Ring Site,Southern Perú

Vertebrate remains from two stratified sites, the Quebrada Jaguay site (QJ-280) and the Ring Site, reveal details about economic strategies practiced between 13,145 and 7500 cal yr BP on the southern coast of Perú. The near absence of terrestrial resources, a broad continuity in economic activities focused on marine resources, and flexibility within the overall strategy, are among the most interesting aspects of these data. Although they reflect economic and social decisions driven, in part, by fluctuations in environmental conditions, they demonstrate that people were sophisticated strategists actively responding to dynamic environmental conditions.     

Access anxiety: HIPAA and historical research

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) establishes new standards for the protection of private health information in the United States. The Privacy Rule, one of the specific regulatory provisions of the act, went into effect 14 April 2003 for covered health care providers, institutions, and businesses. The Privacy Rule directly affected medical archivists and their collections. It has significant implications for historians of health care, as well. The Privacy Rule is the first major regulation that protects the privacy of the deceased in perpetuity. It establishes requirements that researchers must satisfy in order to gain access to "individually identifiable health information" held by HIPAA-protected institutions. While these requirements will burden historians in some cases, the Privacy Rule could open up opportunities for well-prepared historians to work with a more extensive range of twentieth-century documents.     

Deadly medicine

This article discusses the methods the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum used to make an exhibition on the complex history of Nazi eugenics accessible to the museum's mass public and at the same time, provocative for special audiences consisting of professionals and students from the biomedical fields. Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race showed how both eugenics and related "euthanasia" programs in Nazi Germany helped pave the road to the Holocaust. The exhibition implicitly evoked the present-day appeal of biological explanations for human behavior and of new visions of human perfection. Educational programs used the exhibition as a springboard for discussions of bioethics and medical ethics.