Book reviews

Australian politics

Francis G. Castles (ed.), Australia Compared. People, Policies and Politics (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991) pp.290. $22.95 ISBN 0 04 442339 X.

A. Kouzmin and N. Scott (eds), Dynamics in Australian Public Management: Selected Essays (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1990) pp.454. $34.95 ISBN 0 7329 0187 1.

Raymond Markey, The Making of the Labor Party in New South Wales 1880–1900 (Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1988) pp.320. $24.95 ISBN 0 86840 370 9.

Rosemary Whip and Colin A. Hughes, Political Crossroad: The 1989 Queensland Election (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1991) pp.270. $29.95 ISBN 0 7022 2362 X.

Glenn Withers (ed.), Commonality and Difference: Australia and the United States (Sydney: Allen & Unwin in association with the Australian/American Educational Foundation, 1991) pp.138. $19.95 ISBN 1 86373 074 5.

Comparative and international politics

Joel D. Aberbach, Keeping A Watchful Eye: The Politics of Congressional Oversight (Washington DC: The Brookings Institution, 1990) pp.288. $US12.95 ISBN 0 81570 059 8.

Zehra F. Arat, Democracy & Human Rights in Developing Countries (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991) pp.219 $n.p. ISBN 1 55587 170 4.

Ian Bellany, A Basis for Arms Control (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1991) pp.155. $n.p. ISBN 1 85521 051 7.

Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (London and New York: Verso, 1991) pp.421. $n.p. ISBN 0 86091 318 X.

Ivo Daalder, The Nature and Practice of Flexible Response: NATO Strategy and Theater Nuclear Forces Since 1967 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) pp.411. $US57.00 ISBN 0 231 17520 0.

John Darwin, The End of the British Empire: The Historical Debate (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991) pp.128. $27.95 ISBN 0 631 16428 6.

Bogdan Denitch, The End Of The Cold War: European Unity, Socialism, and the Shift in Global Power (London: Verso, 1990) pp.123. $24.95 ISBN 0 86091 532 8.

David Donnison, A Radical Agenda: After the New Right and the Old Left (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1991) pp.215. £9.95. ISBN 1 85489 030 1.

Peter Drysdale (ed.), The Soviets and the Pacific Challenge (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991) pp.160. $17.95 ISBN 1 86373 010 9.

Leon Hurwitz and Christian Lequesne (eds), The State of the European Community (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1991) pp.475. $49.95. ISBN 1 55587 249 2.

Tetsuya Kataoka, The Price of a Constitution: The Origin of Japan's Postwar Politics, (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1991) pp.237. $n.p. ISBN 0 8448 1714 7.

Daphne A Kenyon and John Kincaid (eds) Competition among States and Local Governments (Washington, DC: The Urban Institute Press, with the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, 1991) pp.285. $n.p. ISBN 0 87766 517 6.

Jan‐Erik Lane and Svante O. Ersson, Politics and Society in Western Europe, 2^nd edn, (London: Sage, 1991) pp.421. £10.95. ISBN 0 8039 8407 3.

Stephanie Lawson, The Failure of Democratic Politics in Fiji (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) pp.307. $90.00 ISBN 0 19 827322 3.

E.M. McLeay (ed.), The 1990 General Election: Perspectives on Political Change in New Zealand, Occasional Publication No.3 (Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington, 1991) pp.183. $NZ29.95. ISBN 0 475 11202 4. ISSN 1170 7356.

Henry Phelps Brown, Egalitarianism and the Generation of Inequality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) pp.552. $n.p. ISBN 0 19828 390 3.

Philip R. Pryde, Environmental Management in the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) pp.314. $37.50 ISBN 0 521 40905 5.

Anthony Smith The Age of Behemoths. The Globalization of Mass Media Firms (New York: A Twentieth Century Fund Paper. Priority Press Publications, 1991) pp.80. $n.p. ISBN 0 87078 325 4.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World‐System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) pp.242. $35.00 ISBN 0 52140604 8.

Daniel Warner, An Ethic of Responsibility in International Relations (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 1991) pp.151. $US30.00 ISBN 1 55S7 266 2.

Political theory and methodology

Norman Barry, Welfare (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990) pp.144. $24.95 ISBN 0 335 15595 2.

Peter Beilbarz, Labour's Utopias: Bolshevism, Fabianism, Social Democracy (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) pp.168. $49.95 ISBN 0 415 06616 6.

Sebastian de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989) pp.497. $n.p. ISBN 0 7450 0634 5.

Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991) pp.242. $29.95 ISBN 0 86091 538 7.

Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller Jr., and Jeffrey Paul (eds), Ethics, Politics, and Human Nature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), pp.191. $39.95 ISBN 0 631 17885 6.

Barry Hindess, Choice, Rationality, and Social Theory (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988) pp.132. $70.00 ISBN 0 04 301306 6.

A. Khoshkish, Power or Authority? The Entelechy of Power (Lanham: University Press of America, 1991) pp.128. $n.p. ISBN 0 8191 8395 4.

Frank Lewins, Social Science Methodology: A Brief but Critical Introduction (South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1992) pp.110. $14.95 ISBN 0 7329 1331 4.

David Miller (ed.), assisted by Janet Coleman, William Connolly and Alan Ryan, The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991) pp.570. $39.95 ISBN 0 631 17944 5.

Raymond Plant, Modern Political Thought (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991) pp.398. $34.95 ISBN 0 631 14224 X.

Alan Udoff, Leo Strauss's Thought: Towards a Critical Engagement (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 1991) pp.327. $n.p. ISBN 1 55587 232 8.     

Walking with preschool‐aged children to explore their local wellbeing affordances

An increasingly well‐developed body of research uses neighbourhood walks to better understand primary school children's experiences of local environments, yet virtually nothing is known about preschool‐aged children's connections to their neighbourhoods. A reason for this omission is the commonly held view that preschool children lack competency to reflect on lived environments beyond playgrounds, kindergartens, and other confined settings that dominate early childhood. However, preliterate children walk around, use, and create intimate relationships with local environments as shown by 10 children aged 3–5 years from Dunedin in New Zealand during go‐along interviews. We asked each to walk us around their locale, explaining and pointing out favourite and less beloved places and activities. In this article, we advance two arguments: first that preschoolers are knowledgeable meaning makers of place; second that walking with them is a key step to understanding their life worlds and provides a way for preliterate and preverbal children to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of their spatial worlds, including as research participants. We challenge the idea that children of this age lack large‐scale spatial competency and understanding. Walking with them generated an in‐depth appreciation of their experiences of environments and revealed deep connections they had with their locales at varied scales. The work enables us to offer novel insights into spatial competency, sociospatial complexities, and the multiple dimensions of young children's wellbeing affordances in urban environments. Such insights are highly relevant for geographers, planners, and others who shape children's urban environments.     

‘The Tent’s Big Enough for Everyone’: online slash fiction as a site for activism and change

This article draws on a piece of wide-scale mixed-methods research (n = 429) that examines how women who write and read male/male erotica feel their involvement with the genre has affected their views on gender and sexuality and their political engagement with gay rights issues. Previous work has looked at how online slashfic communities might provide a safe space for exploring gender performance and sexuality, while other researchers have observed a tension between those who identify as queer themselves and those who only ‘play at queerness’ exclusively within the online environment. However, much of this work has examined the theoretical positioning of such forums as transgressive and/or political. Far fewer pieces have attempted to engage with the women who frequent such sites to ask them about whether their involvement in these online spaces has affected their attitudes and behaviours. This study looks not only at the ways in which online m/m fandoms can act as a safe space for women to explore their sexualities and gender identities, but whether and how these insights connect to women’s real-world lives. Data presented here shows a strong consensus among participants that involvement with explicit slash communities has had a positive effect on their lives, as well as contributing to beneficial changes in their knowledge, attitudes, and practices with regards to LGBTQ+ issues. Overall, slash is seen as a medium which can create better allies, encourage cross-identification, and bring about positive personal changes. To this extent, I argue that explicit online slash sites can act as heterotopias.     

Fabricating the Thanatopolitical Body in Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s Cárcel de Árboles

Guatemalan author Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s first novella, Cárcel de árboles (1991), tells the story of a secret politico-medical experiment conducted on prisoners who have been condemned to death by the State. The experiment takes place in a prison camp located in the tropical forest. In this article, I examine the portrayal of power and embodiment in Rey Rosa’s novella, placing the text in dialogue with thanatopolitical theory and outlining the ways it evokes the historical context of violence and economic transition in Guatemala. I commence by discussing the forms of power at work in the novella’s prison camp, before examining the significance of medical science to Rey Rosa’s depiction of embodiment. I then explore the complex aesthetic and ethical questions embedded in the relationship between language, textuality and the body in the novella. Finally, I discuss the post-human dimensions of the text that emerge in the relationship between the human bodies of the prisoners and the non-human terrain. Over the course of this analysis, I contend that Rey Rosa marshals the body to invoke the ways in which the category of the ‘human’ is formed, deconstructed and reconfigured in the face of the destructive power that operates in the modern techno-scientific epoch.     

Intimate citizenship? Rethinking the politics and experience of citizenship as emotional in Wales and Singapore

Conversations around, and conceptions of, citizenship have changed over time. Assumed initially as a mark of membership, of belonging to a political community (Marshall 1950), the essence of what it means to be a citizen and what the contractual ties of citizenship are have evolved over time. This evolution has been encouraged by processes of migration and increasing mobility. More recently, our ability to traverse geographical and political boundaries has meant that notions of borders and boundaries, of who belongs where and why, have also been subject to dramatic changes. This article investigates the impact of such mobility on the individual lived experience of migrant women who, as a group, have been traditionally excluded from more formal political arenas, and asks questions of what citizenship means for them. Though I do not contest the very political fact of citizenship as status, this article challenges the way in which the nature of this status is assumed or implied for all. This article therefore argues that citizenship itself is a much more fluid concept, incorporating the emotional and lived experience of individuals and that it is in these emotional accounts through which citizenship, and its extended rights and political capabilities, must be understood through a sense of everyday, grounded and personal politics.     

Girls’ Carnival Morris Dancing and Contemporary Folk Dance Scholarship

Competitive, urban-centred and female-led, girls’ carnival morris dancing functions at a remove from the ‘traditional’ spaces of the English folk movement. However, it has a comparable history in north-western England where it retains great popularity. Perhaps this overlooked practice has the potential to unsettle dominant assumptions about contemporary folk performance in the United Kingdom.     

Morgawr: an experimental Bronze Age‐type sewn‐plank craft based on the Ferriby boats

This paper reports on the construction of a full‐scale Bronze Age‐type sewn‐plank boat based on the Ferriby boats. The boat, which was named Morgawr, was constructed in the National Maritime Museum Cornwall in Falmouth, England, during 2012 and the first months of 2013, as part of a larger exhibition in the museum. This paper provides the background and context of the project, describes the process of building the craft, and reflects in particular on differences between Morgawr and the ‘hypothetical reconstruction of a complete sewn‐plank boat’ published in 1990 by Ted Wright and John Coates which formed the basis for this project.     

Watercourses and Discourses: Coalmining in the Upper Hunter Valley,New South Wales

ABSTRACT Water is a resource that both unites and divides people in the Upper Hunter Valley of New South Wales, where many communities are facing the prospect of large‐scale open‐cut coalmining developments on productive mixed use land, or already live in proximity to mines and power stations. This article analyses conflicts over a proposed coal mine at Bickham in the Upper Hunter Valley, by contrasting the various protagonists' discourses of water scarcity, supply, and connectivity. It examines the ways in which the terms of opposition are narrowed to the arena of state and industry supported science and economic development, marginalising other cultural values and environmental ethics that are integral to opponents' discourses. Opponents have achieved some measure of success through contestation of the uncertain science of hydrological modelling, bolstered by the context of drought and increasing public acceptance of climate change science.