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The article discusses a content analysis of papers on social work in Australia published between 2002 and 2005. Balance is seen in papers reporting original research or evaluation which comprise 43% of the 112 papers published within the period. Twelve percent focused on describing new or innovative service developments. Sixty-six percent discussed the nature of social work, social work skills, community programmes and knowledge about the characteristics of particular client groups. Calls for papers are also made.

Yolŋu Aboriginal people's knowledge about water ("gapu") and its governance has strong cultural significance and meaning in East Arnhem Land Aboriginal worlds in northern Australia. This study used transdisciplinary research methods to explore the ways in which Yolŋu Aboriginal gapu and Western science hydrological knowledge can work together and contribute towards water management on Milingimbi Island, a small, resource-constrained, bedrock island. Transcending disciplinary boundaries is distinctly different to an interdisciplinary, socio-hydrological perspective, which can pose a risk to hybridizing Aboriginal knowledge and Western science. Community engagement activities and workshops were conducted as part of a three-year research project to bring together the incommensurable knowledge communities. A participatory three-dimensional mapping exercise created a shared space, facilitating an open-dialogue exchange of insight and knowledge among Aboriginal knowledge authorities, hydrologists, public servants, and academic researchers. This paper prompts readers to reconsider the ways water can be perceived and conserved in a decolonizing way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction of discipline standards in Australia has required a comprehensive rethinking of humanities and social science curricula from first year through to graduation. This paper proposes a model to facilitate academics’ engagement with discipline standards and their implication for first-year curricula. The model supports discipline-focussed professional development that integrates consideration of discipline threshold learning outcomes, first-year pedagogy principles, and discipline threshold concepts. The model is demonstrated using strategies that were applied, tested, and shown to be effective in workshops across five disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reports on our use of a two-phased, feminist memory work in a project conducted with 11 women, social science students at an Australian university. We begin by describing government-led attempts to widen participation in Australian universities because 10 of the 11 women who participated in our project were fromnon-traditionalbackgrounds. We discuss qualitative group research, identifying some of the benefits and limitations of focus groups, before differentiating them from feminist memory work and analysing key findings. Using excerpts from participants’ written stories and oral discussions, we analyse some of the obstacles the women faced trying to complete their studies. Our attention then turns to methodological concerns where we examine memory work as a feminist inquiry method. As second-wave feminists understood several decades ago through their use of consciousness-raising groups, we describe how we derived many benefits from using feminist memory work. The method invites deep reflection on the intersections between the personal and political and can be productive of insights about how people feel, not just think, about their experiences. A sense of solidarity can stem from this awareness amongst participants who have a chance to workshop and thus reinterpret their own stories and those of others, which can mean a growth in self-confidence and a reduction in self-blame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the attitudes and perceptions of three cohorts of Australian humanities and social science undergraduate students towards peer assessment. It seeks to gain a deeper understanding of local dissatisfaction with peer assessment through an in‐depth analysis of students’ contributions to focus group discussions. Responding to education theorists’ claims that peer and other forms of innovative assessment empower students, the paper concentrates on themes of power evident within students’ narratives. The interpretive framework coheres around four interrelated conceptions of power: sovereign, epistemological, disciplinary and structural. Students were found to support the notion of peer assessment as a formative exercise, yet were highly critical of it as a summative practice. Significantly, some of the students’ dissatisfaction stemmed from broader changes across the higher education sector more generally. The paper draws attention to the need for this to be taken into account when considering assessment as a technology of power and empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like all social scientists, housing researchers must consider their role as knowledge producers in a changing social world. Questions about the appropriate means and ends of social research raise important considerations about policy impact, research quality and the public value of social inquiry. Answering these questions is not helped by the binary between the natural and the social sciences, which has created hierarchies of knowledge in which we have become comfortable and complacent with distinctions between “agency” and “structure”, “soft” and “hard” data; “objective” and “subjective” phenomena and “material” and “discursive” realities. Underpinning these distinctions is a fundamental tension between different rationalities, such as the difference between what Aristotle called techne (technical rationality) and phronesis (value rationality). Research that clarifies the risks and problems faced by contemporary societies should embrace both a value and technical rationality. In the first part of the paper I argue that much of what constitutes institutionally funded housing research, at least in Australia, has been dominated by a technical rationality; with much less attention being given to the significance of values and ethics in clarifying the problems of our time. In the final part of the paper I consider how housing researchers might reframe problems, design methods of inquiry and communicate their findings in a way that contributes to public debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflecting on neo-liberal and Deleuzian theory, this paper examines how new modes of governance are shaping Australian regions and what kind of resistance is emerging in response to them, in particular to government encouragement of business and commercial appropriation. The first part of the paper discusses recent literature on regional policy-making in the context of neo-liberalism. It is argued that Deleuzian metaphors such as 'reterritorialisation', 'deterritorialisation', 'machinic assemblages', 'folding' and 'lines of flight' provide a rich conceptual vocabulary that can be used to enhance an understanding of contemporary regional policy-making. To demonstrate the efficacy of this claim, the paper draws upon the example of policy-making in the Australian State of Tasmania and the conflicts these policies have generated. Amongst the paper's conclusions is that the competitive practices now being pursued within the auspices of regional policy-making generate a set of new interactions that have significance both across Australia and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years the concept of 'governance' has become a widely used concept within political science discourse. Although the meanings of 'governance' are contested, its position of influence is rarely questioned. This paper contends that the term exercises a prescriptive influence that shapes understandings about how governing should be interpreted and executed in the current era. The paper begins by examining briefly several prominent 'narratives of governance' that currently frame contemporary understandings of the term's significance. Attention then turns to an analysis of the return of 'governance', conceptually speaking, to the discourse of political science in Australia. The paper identifies when this began to occur and then examines the conceptual load that scholars expected 'governance' to carry at that time. These meanings are then counterpoised against the currently dominant cluster of meanings noted earlier in the paper to illustrate that they are not the only ways of interpreting how 'governance' should be understood. Furthermore, it will also be suggested that these hegemonic meanings represent a trajectory that, paradoxically, de-politicises what was once a clearly politicised term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between the contested domains of Aboriginal traditional owners and non-Aboriginal Park users, specifically bushwalkers, in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory of Australia. It argues that Kakadu remains a cultural borderland where a negotiated relationship between local Aboriginal traditional owners and non-Aboriginal Park users is struggling to emerge. It finds that the rhetoric of Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal co-existence, which pervades the Park, is infused by the legacy of a colonial settler state, which has presumed access to territory, marginalized Indigenous people and obviated their social and cultural landscape in favour of an expansionist aesthetic of wilderness preservation and appreciation. This paper finds that the activities of bushwalkers and the concerns that these activities generate in the local Aboriginal domain produce a novel space where place is contested and transformed, a space of negotiation and resistance where people's cherished values both compete with and influence one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses one of the weaknesses of many rankings - the exclusion of the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS) from university and discipline cluster ranking systems and examines some ways in which this situation can be corrected. In particular, it traces the development of indicators such as 'target expanded' citation analysis and tiering or ranking of outlets, including books and conferences as well as journals. It draws on experience in Australia, especially with the attempt to construct consensually derived tiered outlets for numerous disciplines including those in HASS in the context of the introduction of a new Research Quality Framework along the lines of similar exercises in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Library history has constituted a significant portion of the research articles published in the Australian Library Journal and in Australian Academic & Research Libraries. By contrast, archives history has attracted much less interest from researchers publishing in Archives and Manuscripts. The author uses these articles together with papers delivered at the seven Australian Library History Forums convened between 1984 and 1996 to provide snapshots of library and archives history producers and production in an attempt to explain this disparity. He demonstrates that research higher degrees have strongly driven the production of library (and, to a lesser extent, archives) history but suggests that archives and records professionals have been more ambivalent towards history and historical studies than their library counterparts. The roots of this ambivalence may lie in debates over library control of archives and the professional identity of archivists in the 1950s and 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research plays an important role in underpinning a country `s economic and social life. Universities are at the centre of the research and human capital generating process. The aim of this paper is to explore the links between research output, research income, academic and non-academic labour and some of the characteristics of Australian universities. The results indicate that research income, academic staff and postgraduates are all positively associated with research output. There are noticeable differences across different types of universities, with the newer universities lagging in research performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genetic discrimination, defined as the differential treatment of individuals or their relatives on the basis of actual or presumed genetic differences, is an emerging issue of interest in academic, clinical, social and legal contexts. While its potential significance has been discussed widely, verified empirical data are scarce. Genetic discrimination is a complex phenomenon to describe and investigate, as evidenced by the recent Australian Law Reform Commission inquiry in Australia. The authors research project, which commenced in 2002, aims to document the multiple perspectives and experiences regarding genetic discrimination in Australia and inform future policy development and law reform. Data are being collected from consumers, employers, insurers and the legal system. Attempted verification of alleged accounts of genetic discrimination will be a novel feature of the research. This paper overviews the early stages of the research, including conceptual challenges and their methodological implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the way 'choice' is constituted by professional and support staff in naturally-occurring-talk within an Australian disability service. That choice is really the choice you have when you are not having a choice, a situation indicative of the wider social milieu and the disablism found in society. Membership Categorisation Analysis is used to highlight the moral reasoning which occurs in the everyday, based upon disablist norms. In light of this, critical reflection upon contemporary bioethics is used to suggest that choice as an expression of autonomy is not only contextual, but far more than the hedonistic approach adopted by Western disability services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]