Julia Gillard's Citizens' Assembly Proposal for Australia: A Deliberative Democratic Analysis

Many governments have embraced the rhetoric of inclusive citizen engagement. Greater public involvement promises to strengthen democratic institutions and improve the quality of policy decisions and services. How do these aspirations sit alongside the reality of Australian federal politics? This article investigates the responses of elite policy actors to the Gillard government's proposal to conduct a citizens’ assembly on climate change in 2010. Drawing on over 200 media articles, the authors identify a series of procedural, institutional and political objections raised by elite commentators against the citizens’ assembly proposal. Many of these objections have little basis in the experience of deliberative designs in practice. Some, however, reflect the challenge of realising inclusive, deliberative governance in highly politicised contexts.

很多政府对公民广泛参与的说辞爱不释手。更大程度上的公共参与有助于强化民主体制,改善政策及服务的质量。这种渴望与澳大利亚联邦政治的现实相处如何呢？本文考察了政策精英对杰拉德政府倡议在2010年召开的气候变化公民大会的反应。本文浏览了200多篇媒体文章,发现了这些人从程序、体制、政治等等方面反对公民大会的倡议。不少反对意见在精心设计的实践经验中并没多少基础。但有些却反映了高度政治化的语境中正在实现的广泛参与所构成的挑战。     

Rewriting apartheid South Africa: race and space in Miriam Tlali and Lauretta Ngcobo’s novels*

This article employs oppositional black geography as a lens to examine spatiality in the novels of two black South African women writing during apartheid, Miriam Tlali and Lauretta Ngcobo. In analyzing Tlali’s Muriel at Metropolitan and Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die, it argues that the authors used a critical spatial analysis of the nation to critique apartheid and its oppressive policies. It holds that by insisting on authoring their own worlds in a country that sought to deny them creative agency, Tlali and Ngcobo carved out intellectual space that enabled them to critique dominant ideologies of Afrikaner nationalism and white supremacy, while imagining and writing alternatives to a nation to which their relationships were primarily ones of disavowal and subjugation. Both Tlali and Ngcobo render visible the fissures within the seemingly naturalized apartheid sites they construct in their fiction, revealing the inherent contradictions and injustices of apartheid spatiality. Through their fiction, they were thus engaged in situated knowledge production and a reconfiguration of apartheid space into a more socially just place. In narrating subaltern discourses in their novels from the standpoint of those most oppressed by apartheid law and ideology and by creatively engaging the spatiality of apartheid, Tlali and Ngcobo offer new modes for reading the nation, valuable for elucidating the ways in which the national space genders black women, and how black women, in turn shape and reshape that space.     

Say What You Like: Dress,Identity and Heritage in Zanzibar

The paper considers the significance of dress to identity and power among women living on the island of Zanzibar. Drawing on her own preliminary fieldwork in Zanzibar (June 2004) and on the work of Laura Fair (2001 Fair, L. 2001. Pastimes & Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post‐abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945, Oxford: James Currey.  [Google Scholar]), the author discusses the ways in which dress (in general), and the wearing of kanga fabrics in particular, offers women a means of communication in an image conscious and historically stratified society. It is argued that kangas are still an integral part of ritual and social activities in Zanzibar and that they shed light on the complex history of the Swahili coast. Placing the ethnography in a broader and contemporary context, the author states that kangas contribute to the intangible heritage of Zanzibar in their encapsulation of the island's oral history, art, social commentary and concepts of beauty. The author concludes by outlining some of the challenges that heritage regimes face in the Indian Ocean region and potential strategies for preserving or managing its mixed cultural resources.     

European Values and the Asylum Crisis

This article examines the threat to European liberal democratic values posed by the current asylum crisis. Drawing on a historical analysis of European asylum policies, it examines the origins of the post-Second World War refugee regime and the sources of the current challenge to its liberal universalist premises. The argument discerns two dominant forms of critique of the liberal model in twentieth-century debates on refugee policy: welfare protectionist nationalism, and ethno-centric or racist nationalism. Both of these justifications for restricting asylum have resurfaced in contemporary debates, used by—respectively—centre-left and far right parties. Having considered why these arguments have resurfaced, the article suggests three scenarios for future European responses to the asylum crisis and their implications for liberal universalist values. It argues that the liberal approach can only be sustained through more effective EU burden-sharing and the reorientation of EU external policies to incorporate refugee and migration issues.     

How do journalists cope? Conspiracy in the everyday production of political news

Journalism as we know it is said to be under existential threat brought about by a combination of corporatisation and technological change. This has led some scholars to ask whether it can survive. The dominant account is one of under-resourced newsrooms that are at best incapable of adapting and at worst guilty of cynically abandoning professional standards. This article challenges these empirical claims, but at the same time affirms the normative concern underpinning them. In our case – a conspiracy of high politics – journalists do not just report political news but they conspire in its outcome. So, by changing the mode of inquiry we also change the question; not can journalism survive, but how do journalists cope.     

The 'external dimension' of EU immigration and asylum policy

Since the late 1990s, the EU has sought to develop the so-called 'external dimension' of cooperation on immigration and asylum: attempts to manage migration through cooperation with migration sending or transit countries. However, one can discern two rather distinct concepts of the 'external dimension'. The first involves attempts to externalize traditional tools of domestic or EU migration control; the second to prevent the causes of migration and refugee flows, through development assistance and foreign policy tools. Both are based on different assumptions about how best to influence migration flows, and will have divergent impacts on migration flows, refugee protection and relations with third countries. It therefore makes a big difference which of the two is likely to emerge as the predominant pattern of cooperation in the future. This article looks at the factors influencing the emergence of both concepts, focusing on three central determinants: the potential of such approaches to meet migration policy goals; the institutional context; and domestic political—electoral pressures. It argues that the two last factors have militated in favour of the prevalence of externalization approaches to the detriment of longer-term strategies of migration management, refugee protection and relations with third countries.     

Molecular evidence of changing foodways across the Mississippian transition at the George Reeves site (11S650)

ABSTRACT

The George Reeves site (11S650) is a multicomponent village on the bluffs in the central American Bottom, Illinois. The site was occupied from the Late Woodland Rosewood phase through the Mississippian Lohmann phase. Pottery use and dietary variation between the Late Woodland and Emergent Mississippian occupations at the site were explored through stylistic analysis, pottery residue analysis, and compound-specific carbon isotopic analysis of pottery residues. Although more samples should be analyzed, diet and pottery use at George Reeves seems to have been varied, with maize present by cal AD 900–1000, but comprising a relatively small portion of lipid residues in pottery. Residue analysis indicates a C₄ presence in 5 of 16 sampled pots from the early Emergent Mississippian deriving from either maize or from meat from animals consuming maize. Pottery residues were mixed, showing C₃ and C₄ plants as well as meat and fish or shellfish. One residue showed a high incidence of C₄ contribution, most likely from Portulaca oleracea (common purslane), as well as large amounts of fish or shellfish and another C₃ plant. Residue from a ceramic pipestem indicates that maize may have been smoked, probably in the form of maize silk mixed with other nontobacco plants.