From the interpersonal to the internet: social service digitisation and the implications for vulnerable individuals and communities

In Australia, e-government is continuously re-defining service boundaries. While this may be good in the case of transactional interactions, for example the online submission of tax returns, it is less clear that interpersonal services, such as working closely with the long-term unemployed, are best delivered digitally. We consider the impact of social services digitisation on vulnerable communities drawing on an analysis of remote Aboriginal communities. Digital uptake affords great opportunities, but it also carries risks. Some communities have no digital infrastructure and in certain cases traditional face-to-face services have been curtailed, leaving those not online with reduced assistance. We find that concerns about the ‘digital divide’ are well founded. Problems generated by e-government flow across boundaries and appear left to the third sector to resolve with the state playing an even more diminished role in the lives of disadvantaged citizens.     

Governance,public policy and boundary-making

This symposium draws attention to innovative and emerging research in Australian public policy exploring the interplay of governance, public policy and boundary-making. Conceptually and substantively, boundaries are fundamental to understanding policy outcomes, yet remain overlooked and undertheorised. We aim to contribute to public policy debates, in Australia and beyond, by provoking further reflection on this theme, in particular, the distributive effects of boundaries in policy-making; the blurring of boundaries implicit to governance frameworks; the crossing of boundaries, especially by policy-officials within and between institutions; the construction of boundaries to separate and marginalise; and the existence of temporal–spatial boundaries that demarcate jurisdiction and authority. In short, the study of governance and public policy-making is marked by multiple different types of boundaries but the way in which boundaries get drawn and redrawn is also suffuse with political contestation meaning they raise crucial questions about the exercise of power.     

Railway Architecture: The Great Northern Railway (Ireland) at Dundalk

ABSTRACT

This article is adapted from the dissertation ‘Railway Architecture: The Great Northern Railway (Ireland) at Dundalk’, completed by Siobhan Osgood for the MPhil in Art History: Art + Ireland, where it was awarded a distinction. The study provides an historical analysis in the context of architectural development and broader railway culture in Ireland to provide an interpretation and understanding of the use of polychromatic yellow, red and black brickwork to create a visual identity for railway architecture. The use of accented colours to pick out key features is repeated across a series of buildings, thus creating a distinctive style of ‘brick-branding’. These are most prominent in the town of Dundalk, where the GNRI had its central engineering works at the halfway point on the Dublin to Belfast mainline and at the point where the Irish North line extended west and north. The buildings were each intricately designed by the GNRI's first chief engineer, William Hemingway Mills, a second-generation railway engineer who merged the roles of architect and engineer using an amalgamation of architectural designs from his earlier career in Derby, Scotland, Mexico and Spain. Mills thus created his own ‘Millsian’ style of industrial architectural design.     

Materiality and Autonomy in the Pocumtuck Homeland

The Indigenous people of New England’s middle Connecticut River Valley are often imagined as having been subservient to powerful tribal nations elsewhere. Yet, archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence suggests Pocumtuck independence and autonomy in relations with neighboring Native groups and with Dutch, English, and French colonizers during the seventeenth century. We employ a decolonizing framework, drawing on H.M. Wobst’s critique of the preoccupation with dominance and geopolitical “centers” to analyze this evidence. By framing artifacts, colonial texts, and cultural interactions as both past and present “material interventions,” we can generate better understandings of Pocumtuck political autonomy, agency and identity.     

Female identity in process in Soraya Nini's Ils disent que je suis une beurette

In this article Soraya Nini's book Ils disent que suis une beurette is subjected to a feminist reading in order to discuss the portrayal of the female socialisation process. Deploying critical methodology including analysis of the narrative, and examining the factor of race, the article points up the continuing pertinence of the category Bildungsroman for women writers of ethnic origin.     

Searching for safe space: the absent presence of childhood sexual abuse in human geography

In 1993, Julia Cream published an article deconstructing the politics surrounding the ‘cluster’ of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) diagnoses in Cleveland, UK. In 2014, in a viewpoint article in this journal, Dowler, Cuomo, and Laliberte called for a change in higher education governance, after the widely publicised Penn State CSA scandal. Within this 20-year period, these were two of only a handful of articles to be published in geography, focusing on CSA. Upwards of one in eight people in the UK, North America, Australia and New Zealand are survivors of CSA. Other social science disciplines have established the impact CSA can have on mental health, relationships and life choices, all of which are lived out in space and place. CSA survivors are also over-represented amongst geographically marginalised groups. We argue that human geography's silence on CSA represents a significant oversight not only in terms of understandings people's relations to, use of and perceptions of space and place but also in terms of contributing to the silencing of survivors. We call for a recognition that this absent presence is associated with individual and social processes of dissociation and denial.     

‘[A]ll Sorts of Stiches’: Looking at Detail in a Proclamation of Solomon Embroidery

This object lesson considers a mid- to late seventeenth-century embroidery, now held by the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, which portrays the proclamation of Solomon. It assesses how viewers’ attention was directed by the application of materials, textures and stitches, examining tensions between modes of viewing concerned with narrative, individual motifs, material content, skill and realism. It considers how these various forms of attention would have complemented or competed with one another, and how they may have appealed to different viewers in different contexts.