News archive
This page contains highlights of news from 2006. See also: 2005, 2004, 2003 and 2001–2002
- ARC successes
- Indian visitors in September
- Gender Indicators Online
- Leading feminist economics researchers at HRISS in July
- Visiting Professor Dave Hill
- New director Alan Mayne
- Farewell to Alison Mackinnon
- Bullying conference
ARC successes
Congratulations to these HRISS researchers who have been awarded Australian Research Council grants to begin in 2007:
- Dr Susan Nichols and Assoc Prof Helen Nixon (with Dr J Rowsell), Parents' networks: the circulation of knowledge about children's literacy learning. ARC Discovery project 2007–2009.
- Prof Alan Reid (with Assoc Prof NC Cranston, Prof JP Keating and Prof WR Mulford), Education investment in Australian schooling: serving public purposes. ARC Linkage project 2007–2009. Partner Organisations: Australian Government Primary Principals Association and Education Foundation
- Prof Bobby Banerjee and Deirdre Tedmanson (with Dr MR Muirhead), Social and cultural factors in Indigenous enterprise management and governance. ARC Linkage project 2007–2008. Partner Organisations: UnitingCare Wesley Adelaide, Pukatja Community Council, Turkey Bore and Tjutjunpiri Community, Anilalya Homelands Council
These ARC Linkage grants for 2006–2009 were announced earlier in the year:
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Dr Patrick O'Leary (with Dr Donna Chung), 'Stopping domestic violence in urban and rural areas: evaluating and improving the effectiveness of domestic violence perpetrator programs', $175,197, Partner Organisation: CJS Training Unit.
- Professor Rick Sarre (with Assoc Prof TJ Penzler and Mr TC Murphy), 'Private security and public interest: exploring private security trends and directions for reform in the new era of plural policing', $166,650, Partner Organisation: Australian Security Industry Association Limited.
Indian visitors in September
In September HRISS hosted a visit from Assoc Prof Amita Singh. Assoc Prof Singh works in the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research project is titled ICT Applications in Programs for Women’s Empowerment: India–Australia Perspectives and seeks to achieve an understanding of mainstreaming public policies for women in this era of high and rapid technology development through information and communication technology advancement.
Also visiting HRISS on Australia-India Council Australian Studies Fellowships in September were Prof Deb Narayan Bandyopadhyay and Mr Angshuman Kar, both from the Department of English, Burdwan University, West Bengal, India. Professor Bandyopadhyay’s research project is titled Curriculum Development: Redefining the Australian Studies Syllabus at Indian Universities. The aim of the project is to form a curriculum derived from the historical and material context of Australian studies and to develop a model curriculum of Australian studies that will address all major themes and issues relating to Australian studies. Mr Kar’s project is titled Petitions as Culture Texts: Mapping the Aboriginal Protest since 1796. He aims to develop a book that will collect and anthologise all major petitions available and create a critical awareness among researchers of Aboriginal studies.
Gender Indicators Online
Gender Indicators Online is a new resource for policy makers and researchers. It provides a range of gender indicators on the status of women in South Australia. The project arose out of the recommendation of the report commissioned by the Premier’s Council for Women, Gender data online: the development of a gender-disaggregated data management resource authored by HRISS researcher Rhonda Sharp and Australian Institute for Social Research (AISR) researchers John Spoehr, Ray Broomhill, Sonia Martin and Carla Medlin. HRISS professors Eleanor Ramsay and Alison Mackinnon were members of the report’s reference group. The website was developed by the Australian Institute for Social Research in collaboration with the Premier's Council for Women, Office for Women, Department of Premier and Cabinet.
Gender Indicators Online is linked with South Australian Policy Online (SAPO), a joint initiative of AISR, HRISS and Flinders University. The conceptual framework and key features of Gender Indicators Online will be published in the September 2006 issue of the Development Bulletin in an article authored by Sharp, Broomhill and Spoehr.
Leading feminist economics researchers at HRISS in July
The Hawke Research Institute hosted three major international researchers on feminist economic theory and practice in July: Prof Julie Nelson (Global Development and Environment Institute, Tufts University, Massachusetts), Prof Yasuko Muramatsu (Professor Emeritus, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University and Chair of Japanese Research Center for Gender and Development) and Prof Diane Elson (Department of Sociology and Member of Human Rights Centre, University of Essex and also Senior Scholar, Levy Economics Institute, Bard College).
All three visited Australia for the annual conference of the International Association for Feminist Economics, 7–9 July. Their visits to HRISS were arranged by Prof Rhonda Sharp, former president of IAFFE. HRISS already has a strong focus on issues of gender in sustainable development and our visitors added to our connections and intellectual capacity in this area by mentoring postgraduates, running reading groups and other activities. Each visitor presented a HRISS seminar.
Visiting Professor Dave Hill
In an action-packed and stimulating couple of days in mid June Prof Dave Hill from the University of Northampton, UK was jointly hosted by HRISS and the School of Education and Social Justice Research Collective, Flinders University. Prof Hill addressed seminars at UniSA Magill Campus on 14 June and Flinders Sturt Campus on 15 June and in between met with members of the Australian Education Union (SA). Dave, who is passionately devoted to social justice in schooling, brought to those gatherings his experiences as a teacher in schools and colleges in inner-city London and as a social, political and union activist.
In his address at HRISS, ‘Blair, New Labour and education policy: sustainability for social justice in public schooling’, Prof Hill spoke from a critical democratic socialist perspective on issues concerning the Blair government’s restructuring of schools and teacher education in conformity with the neo-liberal and neoconservative agenda for education’s privatisation. He analysed recent UK education legislation as the 'pre-privatisation' of state schools in England. One of the intentions of the legislation is to introduce new types of schools and academies, organised and operated as businesses, that are available for private purchase and control. The conclusion that can be drawn from Dave’s presentation is that the Blair government’s education policy is not sustainable for social justice either for taxpayers or for public schooling.
In the seminar ‘Schooling and teachers’ work: efficiency, equity and social change’ at Flinders School of Education Dave was joined by Jenni Devereaux, Research Officer with the AEU(SA), Kay Whitehead, Associate Professor and Associate Dean (Research) in the School of Education at Flinders University, and Rob Hattam, HRISS.
Rob Hattam made the case for a critical theory of teachers’ work, including a nuanced analysis in terms of the specifity of the Australian scene. Jenni Devereaux focused on the tension between the concepts of ‘efficiency’ and ‘equity’ in a number of education reform initiatives in South Australia in the 1990s and early 2000s. From a perspective of an engaged participant she outlined some of the ways in which marketisation, corporatisation and privatisation have shaped government policy and the effects on structures of schooling, students and teachers, and discussed the fate of equity and social-justice-based educational and social programs. Kay Whitehead followed with a historical account of women teachers’ work in early twentieth-century state schools, demonstrating that issues of efficiency and equity in this period resonate with teaching in contemporary times.
By way of drawing together the themes of previous speakers Dave concentrated on theorising how education and other cultural workers might resist the current neo-liberal onslaught that has become a worldwide phenomenon. The key characteristics of this onslaught, he proposed, are the obscene and widening economic, social and educational inequalities both within states and globally, and a disregard for theorising about education and the regulation of critical thought and activism through ideological and repressive state apparatuses. He concluded with the question of the role critical transformative education and cultural/media workers might play in replacing the class-based capitalist system with a more economically and socially just and environmentally sustainable society other than state capitalist, social democratic and traditionalist alternatives.
The papers of Dave Hill's presentations are available from helen.raduntz@unisa.edu.au and Kay Whitehead's paper from Kay herself at Kay.Whitehead@flinders.edu.au. Or see the 2006 events page for Dave's PowerPoint presentations.
Dave is keen to maintain contact with those he met on his visit. He can therefore be reached at his email address dave.hill35@btopenworld.com and at the websites of the Institute for Education Policy Studies (http://www.ieps.org.uk) and the international refereed academic journal, Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies (http://www.jceps.com), of which Dave is respectively director and chief editor.
With thanks to Grant Banfield, Lecturer, School of Education, Flinders University and Helen Raduntz, Adjunct Research Fellow, UniSA
New director
Professor Alan Mayne has taken up his position as Director, Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable Societies, taking over from Prof Alison Mackinnon, who retired in December 2005. Professor Mayne joins us from the History Department at the University of Melbourne.
Prof Mayne is a historian whose work has focused on social life and social policy in Australia, Britain and North America. His research interests and publications range across Australian immigration and settlement policy, cultural heritage interpretation and cultural tourism, historical archaeology, ‘slums’ and urban ‘renewal’ in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, the United States and Australia, and community formation and resilience in regional Australia.
At present he is leading an ARC-funded research project on social sustainability in rural and regional Australia, which necessarily emphasises the experiences of Indigenous peoples, and the imbalance between booming commodity production and the erosion of local communities. The first of a series of books on this subject will be published in 2006.
Prof Mayne has a strong record in developing a diverse and productive research culture, and an outstanding record of PhD supervision. Some of his substantial achievements in building research networks and partnerships across academic disciplines and countries are evidenced by his work as an editor and advisor for H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, as an advisory board member for the leading international urban studies journal, Urban History, and partnerships with archaeologists and geographers in Canada and the US, with state and federal agencies in Australia, and with business and community groups.
Prof Mayne’s background and research interests connect strongly to the Hawke Research Institute theme of sustainable societies.
New HRISS Director
By Geraldine Hinter. From UniSA News, February 2006
Studies of regional and remote communities will be part of the research focus within the Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable Societies, according to its new Director, Professor Alan Mayne, a historian who comes to UniSA from the University of Melbourne.
Prof Mayne has a strong record in developing a diverse and productive research culture. His studies into social life and social policy have generated extensive research networks and partnerships across academic disciplines and countries in Europe, North America, Asia and Africa.
Modern urban history has long been a major research focus for Prof Mayne, and he is now also exploring contemporary issues of justice and social disadvantage in third world cities, where massive urban growth has brought with it a raft of infrastructure and social problems that need to be effectively addressed.
More recently, Prof Mayne’s research has broadened to include social sustainability in rural and regional communities.
'If we take Australia’s wheat belt as an example, Australia is a key player in wheat production flowing into world markets, but the benefits don’t flow back effectively in terms of social returns for those communities', Prof Mayne said.
'I will be encouraging studies of remote and regional areas and identifying strategies that enable us to capture a sense of the vitality that harnesses grassroots energy within these communities. This includes building communication links with remote Indigenous communities by working with them and for them', he said.
Prof Mayne will take up his new position in March, following the retirement of Professor Alison Mackinnon in December last year.
Farewell to Alison Mackinnon
Alison Mackinnon, centre, is pictured here with Gerry Bloustien and Tony Winefield at the first of many events to celebrate her career and to wish her well in her retirement.
Alison was the Foundation Director of the Hawke Research Institute (1997–2005) and she nurtured it from its modest beginnings into the bustling, diverse social sciences research institute it is today. In 1997 Alison was appointed Professor of History and Gender Studies at the University of South Australia, and she was previously the Director of the Institute for Social Research (1994–1999) and Director, University Research Development (1996–1998).
She has received worldwide recognition for her research on the history of gender and education. Her contribution to research has been recognised through her Honorary Doctorate from the University of Umeå, Sweden, awarded in November 2000, and her Fellowship of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Alison will continue to participate in Hawke Research Institute activities as an Emeritus Professor.
Alison Mackinnon is pictured here receiving her title of Emeritus Professor, March 2006.
Bullying conference
Dr Barbara Spears and Prof Ken Rigby, Conflict Management Research Group, HRISS, along with members of the Coalition to Reduce Bullying, Aggression and Violence in Schools, convened a teacher conference on bullying, involving 4 international visiting scholars, on 29–30 June titled Safer Schools: Meeting the Challenge of Bullying. Both presented their work at the conference, alongside the visiting researchers and teachers from schools who showcased their programs. A research seminar for academics was also held on 28 June called 'New Directions in Bullying Research'.