Search

Whilst there has been an increase in attention to infrastructure in the social sciences and humanities over the last two decades, this focus has primarily explored urban landscapes, neglecting infrastructural dynamics in rural areas. This paper explores the synergistic relationship between rurality and infrastructure by focusing on examples and experiences of infrastructural ruin in Australia's New England North West. Drawing on 2 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper argues that ruination is a common modality though which infrastructure is experienced in rural contexts, and that this ruination, which is tied to the histories and everyday experience of rural spaces, becomes a means by which rurality is (re)produced both materially and culturally. Exploring infrastructural ruination in rural regions allows for narratives to be told of rural spaces that move beyond revivalist and declinist paradigms of rural scholarship. Instead, attention to the experience of infrastructural ruin positions rural spaces as unique landscapes where engagements with infrastructure play an integral role in shaping the material and cultural composition of contemporary rurality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this methodological paper is to discuss the challenges of conducting fieldwork, using reflections from our experiences of accessing a research site for ethnographic data collection. The research project aimed to explore nurses' social relations in their workplace and the inequities between and within these relations among nurses of diverse social positions. Due to the sensitive nature of this topic, access to the research site posed several challenges and was further complicated by the bureaucratic ethics process that governs clinical sites in Australia. Although this study was considered a low and negligible risk research, negotiating the ethics process was full of hitches and hindrances resulting in the refusal of access. This paper offers ethnographers a reflection on challenges in accessing clinical sites to conduct research and a discussion of strategies that may be useful to navigate and counter these challenges by managing social relations in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon a long-term study of venture philanthropy and public schools in Australia, this paper focuses on Teach For Australia (TFA) as a major component of a venture philanthropic network, one that builds critical infrastructures and connections between non-government organisations and the state, creating a product pipeline into public schools. Utilising interviews with staff from Teach For Australia and venture philanthropic organisations, comprehensive and rigorous financial data, reviews, reports and website data, the analysis aims to identify the major philanthropic funders, individual actors and private foundations that leverage Teach For Australia, illustrating how this network develops for-profit pathways into public schools. In pushing a deficit framing of public schools, these networks incur privatisation effects, including flows of money, resources and key decision-making. They compromise the democratic principles upon which public schools are ideally based, in that the most disadvantaged public schools are opened up to 'entrepreneurial' and risk-taking corporate behaviour to test out teachers, products and services. By examining streams of revenue, partnerships and networks, we show how the purportedly non-profit Teach For Australia develops for-profit opportunities and business partnerships nested in corporate philanthropy, resulting in a privatisation effect on public schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have found that many post-secondary music students suffer from physical and mental health issues. However, researchers have mainly studied these problems at the individual level, with little investigation of how music students' work is shaped by the coordinating effects of policies, texts, and discourses at and beyond their local site. This paper describes a protocol for an international project that will explore the health of music students in the context of their daily work. Using an institutional ethnography approach, we will examine the social organization of music students' work at three universities: two in Canada and one in Australia. This will be the first set of studies that use institutional ethnography specifically for the purpose of understanding how the social organization of music students' work shapes their health. Data will be collected using several methods common to institutional ethnography: interviews, focus groups, observations, and collecting texts. Data analysis will begin during the data collection process and proceed in two fluid stages. The first stage will involve a detailed investigation of the pertinent work activities at each music school. The second will involve linking that work to specific social relations within and beyond the institution. After data analysis has been completed at all three sites, findings will be compared to one another to identify commonalities and differences in how students' work is organized. Findings of the entire project may inform policy-making and lead to positive change at the institutions studied, as well as others where similar social organization may occur. The novel approach described here will provide opportunities to expand current knowledge about music students' work and health beyond what has been learned through approaches that focus on students' individual behaviours and attributes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Behavioral public policy (BPP) has become increasingly popular with governments across the globe but what defines it in practice? It is not a concrete concept, encompassing a series of instruments, evaluation methods and theoretical influences. Using the findings from an ethnographic study of a behavioral insights team in the Australian Government this paper interrogates how BPP has been translated from these discrete components into practice by policymakers. This research posits that a significant degree of adaptation has taken place during this translation process. Participants could be referring to multiple different things when speaking about and implementing BPP, sometimes even communicating at cross-purposes. This paper incorporates Bevir and Rhodes 'traditions' to existing policy translation research to further interrogate how actors make meaning from and adapt ideas like BPP. This framework makes it possible to explore which translations carry greater influence and asks what this means for the BPP agenda moving forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim Design Methods Results Conclusion Impact Reporting Method No Patient or Public Contribution The focus of this paper is to provide a detailed ethnographic exploration of rural nurses' experiences of their resuscitation preparedness and the subsequent post‐resuscitation period.An ethnographic study across two small rural hospital sites in New South Wales, Australia.Fieldwork was undertaken between December 2020 and March 2022 and included over 240 h of nonparticipant observation, journalling and interviews. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis.The first key theme—‘Sense of Preparedness’—included three subthemes: ‘Gaining experience’, ‘Issues with training and education’ and ‘Lack of warning’. The second key theme ‘Aftermath’ comprised two subthemes: ‘Getting on with it’ and ‘Making sense of the resus’.This study has highlighted the intricate relationship between resuscitative preparedness and the post‐resuscitation period in shaping rural nurse's experiences and their well‐being. Rural nurses are asking for an authentic and contextually relevant training experience that mirrors the unique rural challenges they experience. In the absence of frequent resuscitation presentations, the post‐resuscitation period should be viewed as a crucible moment that can be leveraged as a valuable learning opportunity enhancing rural nurses' sense of preparedness and the provision of quality resuscitation care.Having a greater level of insight into the challenges that rural nurses experience in the pre‐ and post‐resuscitation period is critical. This insight opens the door for fortifying policies and work processes that will better support rural nurses in the resuscitation environment.Reporting complied with COREQ criteria for qualitative research.This study explored the experiences of rural nurses. No patient data were collected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports an Australian project designed to simultaneously explore and capacity build professional practice when working at the intersection of parental mental health and/or problematic substance use and domestic violence (DV). Data from this paper are derived from two main sources: observations and ethnographic notes obtained during 28 Community of Practice (CoP) meetings and semi‐structured interviews with 28 CoP participants. Participants were front‐line workers from a range of government and non‐government organizations providing services to families experiencing DV across three Australian states who participated in The STACY Project: Safe and Together Addressing ComplexitY. Thematic analysis was employed to examine the research questions: How do professionals and organizations understand and respond to families experiencing DV, parental mental health difficulties and problematic substance use issues? How did practitioners report participation in the STACY Project reorienting professional practice with families experiencing DV, parental mental health difficulties, and substance misuse issues? This paper reports workers' exploration of practice implications. The research found that 'domestic violence blind' practice has become entrenched at the intersections of child protection, substance misuse and mental health problems, but a shared framework could bring practitioners from diverse sectors together to generate new ways of working with these complex problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have witnessed the outsourcing of immigration and border controls to economically struggling states. Infrastructural projects around controlling migration are transforming localities in the Global South: from shifting legal and political economic systems to altering socialities between migrant and local populations. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the Republic of Nauru, this paper considers how past and present infrastructural forms give shape to the ways that (in)justices are created. Nauru, the world's smallest island state, was almost entirely economically dependent on the phosphate industry in the twentieth century. After the wealth it derived from phosphate extraction was depleted in the 1990s, the sovereign state resurged on the back of the refugee industry by importing Australia's maritime asylum seeking populations. In this paper, I examine the material life of infrastructure around managing migration in Nauru's 21 km2 locality, including the toxic interrelationships between phosphate and refugee processing, the industries' built environments, and the people who live and work in them. I explore how Nauru's refugee project has reconfigured colonial infrastructural forms, practices of dependency, and socio-legal affiliations as the country is refashioned as a company town in line with new forms of human production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on four decades of research (via ethnographic returning) to explore the social transformations in travel and communication technologies that have impacted the lived experiences, and consequently the theoretical conceptualization, of migrant visits. A comparison of migration waves between Italy and Australia reveals both continuities in visiting experience as deeply relational practices that facilitate a mutuality of being, but also transformations brought about by the technological turn. Visits take on different meanings depending on individual/ family life stage, generation, and community and national histories. The capacity for both physical and virtual copresence must be understood as coconstitutive, requiring a temporal perspective. The experiences of immobile migrants in residential care suggest that, in the context of rich histories of copresence over time, digital kinning can provide the capacity to share a mutuality of being that safeguards the socio‐relational ties of individual and collective identities and belonging that make us human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From January 2017 until January 2020, the Stormont assembly in Northern Ireland was suspended, with the Irish language being cited as the main stumbling block to the restoration of government. The continued debate around the necessity of an Irish Language Act (ILA) for Northern Ireland is bound up with more general divisions in society surrounding national identity, and as such, it divided political parties and the nationalist and unionist communities from which they draw their support. Through the analysis of ethnographic interviews conducted in various language learning centres across Belfast, I explore how this debate around legislating for the language impacted on the engagement of learners with the language in the city. By considering the role played by the media in the engagement of interview participants with the Irish language in Belfast, I aim to examine how the policy delay and political discourse affects those engaging with the language. This paper aims to address changing attitudes to the Irish language in Belfast in a period of political crisis, and what it means for those who use the language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Work-integrated learning (WIL) provides an opportunity for integrating Indigenous and Western learning pedagogies and facilitate a meaningful pathway for authentic learning through developing partnerships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous stakeholders. However, research in developing WIL with Indigenous communities and appropriate learning pedagogies is limited. This paper discusses how WIL can inculcate Indigenous and non-Indigenous learning pedagogies to facilitate authentic, culturally enhanced learning. The proposed theoretical framework was constructed using the concepts relating to '8 Ways of Knowing Indigenous Learning' framework, Studio Based Learning, Co-design, and WIL. The research method draws on autoethnographic approaches to reflect and critically analyze academic observations and reflections across two case studies. The findings propose a WIL pedagogical approach integrating Indigenous and non-Indigenous learning pedagogies to enable authentic learning by co-generating emergent knowledge in complex socio-cultural contexts. Moreover, this approach enables training architecture students to represent cultures and values of the Indigenous communities in the mainstream Anglo Australian architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the processes of assemblage as an important aspect in studies of contemporary Australian settler colonialism. I explore how, what I am calling the Indigenous development assemblage, is made up of various government policies, actors, discourse, knowledge, legal frameworks and institutions, intersect and cohere with each other. I also explore how this assemblage affects not only material outcomes but also generates an atmosphere that affects aspirations, hope and possibility for change. Through examining various processes of the assemblage underway in the town of Kununurra, I argue that settler colonialism is different to the totalitarian form it often is described as. Through understanding the processes of assemblage, incoherence, disruption and emergence was also observed which opens up possibilities of the destabilisation of the assemblage itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The education of students with disability has changed dramatically over the past 50 years. Universal declarations and conventions have underpinned many of these changes at both an international level and within Australia. In the early 1970s, the philosophy of John Rawls provided a theory of justice to preserve social justice and individual liberty within communities. This mirrored attempts to advance education to ensure social justice, rights and access to education for learners with disability. This micro-historical ethnography provides a review spanning the past half century in Australia of changes to the education of students with disability. Underpinned by an ethnographic epistemology through interviews with the presentism of eight educators involved in Western Australian education for learners with disability, and viewed through an interpretivist lens, major elements of change are identified. An analytical framework deduced from the work of Rawls is used to reflect upon the changes and discuss the degree that Rawls' justice as fairness has been enacted in education for learners with disability from 1970 to 2021 in Australia. Key words: Australia, learners with disability, special education, inclusion, Rawls, equity, social justice [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A tourist's cultural construction of nature can shape their nature sports experience. It can also impact how they perceive the destinations where they engage in nature sports. This ethnography identifies how international tourists on a surfing trip in Australia draw on their cultural knowledge of nature to assign meaning to their experiences and surroundings. The nature sports experience is influenced by three types of cultural knowledge applied to nature: declarative, evaluative, and procedural. Interaction with nature activates that knowledge. Theoretical contributions include offering a comprehensive explanation for how cultural knowledge of nature can transform the nature sports experience and providing a more complete picture of how cultural knowledge impacts the tourist's interpretation of a destination. Applied implications involve drawing on different types of cultural knowledge to create compelling nature sports and destination promotion campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Poignant collection of more than 17,500 photographs and associated archival material reflects the work of Axel Poignant (1906–1986), who established his career as a portrait photographer in Australia, and the anthropologist Roslyn Poignant (1927–2019). Bequeathed by Roslyn to the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA), Cambridge upon her death in 2019, the collection came into the care of MAA in 2021. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights a divergence between equivalent cultural practices undertaken by Calabrians in Italy and by individuals originating from Calabria living in Australia. It offers a reflexive framework on identity and authenticity. Previous research on a group of Calabrian-Australian families living in Australia found a widespread feeling among participants that they were 'more Italian' than the Italians who live in Italy. On the other hand, similar claims were made in Italy, during a brief period of fieldwork in Calabria among the 'sedentaries' (those who did not emigrate). Data show differences between the modus operandi of equivalent cultural practices among the participants in Adelaide and in Calabria and a divergence in participants' perceptions of ethnic identity and authenticity. In proposing the terms 'Archetype village' and 'Alter Ego village' to refer respectively to the migrants' village of origin and their community overseas the article examines notions of authenticity utilising socio-anthropological theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: To explore the perceptions and experiences of nurses in communicating the care and caring in the intensive care unit (ICU). Design: A focused ethnography. Methods: This study was conducted in an Australian metropolitan hospital, in which data were gathered from multiple sources: participant observations, document reviews, interviews, and participant's additional written information ‐ over six months (April‐September, 2014). The data were analysed thematically. Findings: This study addressed inclusively communicating care and caring to patients, families, nurses and other health professionals in ICU. The findings identified main themes concerning the changing patterns of communicating the care and caring in ICU, various patterns of communication used, enablers and barriers of communicating care and caring, and significant issues in communicating care and caring in ICU. Documentation of patients' psychological and emotional needs, and nurses' caring behaviours are crucial. These findings need further consideration from all stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the researchers report findings on how food meanings, culture and gender intersect in the experiences of Italian-Australian women. In-depth narrative interviews were thematically analyzed using a feminist social constructionist framework informed by anthropological theories about "foodways" and culture. Three core themes were identified in the women's narratives: "il cibo e' tutto, il cibo e amore" – "food is everything, food is love"; "fare la bella figura" – "to make a good impression"; and "il mio piatto" – "it's my plate". The researchers demonstrate how gendered expectations of women in Italian-Australian culture intersect with food meanings, cultural ideals and practices to produce distinct experiences of disordered eating and restricted access to formal support. The relevance of the findings are likely to be applicable to other migrant communities across the world. Particularly where ethnic communities retain distinctive food related meanings and practices post migration, that may intersect with cultural ideals venerating female thinness and the psycho-medical models and practices that pathologize disordered eating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade, the attention to the Calabrian mafia, the 'ndrangheta, has been rekindled everywhere in the world. On the one hand, Italian attention to the phenomenon has increased; on the other hand, the mobility of the Calabrian clans has been the object of scrutiny in view of the clan's wealth and ability to commit transnational criminal activities. This has also fed the presumption that (alleged) offenders of Calabrian origins around the world must belong to, and replicate the structure of, the 'ndrangheta clans, also down under. This contribution will be a reflection on the difficulties and the complexities of a journey into researching the 'ndrangheta in Australia from a criminological-anthropological perspective, in consideration of--but in contrast with--the mythical figures associated with the Calabrian mafia and its illicit global markets. Some of the difficulties, as well as some of the mistakes that I have made in this research, because of the involuntary (and disorganized) nature of the ethnography, directly question the narrative of the illegal global reach of this mafia and provide methodological reflections and lessons for criminological ethnographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social workers and anthropologists encounter different representations of mediation as a professional practice: On the one hand, Social Work is grounded in mediation as expert knowledge that helps others to resolve interpersonal disputes. For example, mediation as Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) can enable court cases to resolve without formal trials. On the other hand, Anthropology is grounded in mediation as a research field site and by past intervention experience of anthropologists. As mediation professionalized and became mandated across public institutions, anthropologists became strong ADR critics. Academic debate between mediation proponents and critics ended as critics abandoned research in the 1990s and 2000s. My initial research goal was to pick up from past empirical study. Research was conducted in Australia, Ghana, and the United States in two areas of mediation practice; resolving parenting disputes between adults who are separating or not married, and "elder mediation" cases involving older adults. Initial findings reified past debate through data that supported proponents and critics. Further insight was gained through return to fieldwork using an expanded, ethnographic case study design. This article provides a journey through a seemingly intractable divide that was ultimately resolved through prolonged time in fieldwork focused on understanding client perspectives. I show how social work and anthropology scholars of professional mediation have been positioned on opposite sides of an expert knowledge/fieldwork research boundary. This boundary can be made productive through open exchange about mediation as a practice that evolves through an interplay of expert knowledge, intervention practice, and client engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, an experimental programme is used to examine how boomerangs may be used to retouch stone tools. The programme's findings confirm ethnographic data pertaining to the employment of hardwood boomerangs in retouching activities and investigate their technological similarities to Palaeolithic bone retouchers. For the first time, the use-wear produced on boomerangs during retouching is defined and added to a reference collection. This information may be used in future studies to identify one of the many functions of boomerangs stored in museum collections in Australia and other parts of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]