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Cultural and linguistic diversity in educational settings is the new normal internationally. However, domestic research shows that Indigenous Australian students are still not benefiting from school. Despite global research on Culturally Responsive Pedagogies and Reggio Emilia being proven to work with minoritised groups in settler societies, little research exists in Australia. This paper addresses this noticeable gap in the literature, bringing into dialogue the culturally responsive pedagogy movement with Reggio Emilia principles for theoretical nuanced examination of listening pedagogies. This dialogue seeks to shift epistemological and ontological framings of the child and their schooling experience. The paper argues for a deterritorialising of Indigenous ways of being and knowing that view learning as socially and culturally mediated. A central finding is that culturally responsive Reggio Emilia inspired practice offers educational change through a decolonising frame using instructional dimensions of relational and dialogic teaching. The paper concludes that reductive pedagogy constrains Indigenous listening and learning and that explicitly connecting curriculum to students' cultural strengths is an instructional reform opportunity for reterritorialising pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents an ontology that scopes the digital health ecosystem from a consumer–centered perspective. We used a mixed-method analysis on a set of papers collected for a comprehensive review to identify common themes, components, and patterns that repeatedly emerge within Australian-based digital health studies. Three major and four child themes were identified as the foundational aspects of the proposed ontology. The child themes have more precise concept definitions, inherited and distinguishing attributes. Out of 179 recognized concepts, 33 were related to the Healthcare theme; 23 concepts formed a cluster of employed devices under the Technology theme; 40 concepts were associated with Use and Usability factors. 60 other concepts formed the cluster of the consumer–user theme. The theme of Digital Health was seen as being connected to 2 independent clusters. The main cluster embodied 21 extracted concepts, semantically related to "data, information, and knowledge," whilst the second cluster embodied concepts related to "healthcare." Different stakeholders can utilize this ontology to define their landscape of digitally enabled healthcare. The novelty of this work resides in capturing a consumer–centered perspective and the method we used in deriving the ontology – formalizing the results of a systematic review based on data-driven analysis methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we draw on policy sociology and democratic theory to illustrate how evidence-based practice not only limits teachers' capacities to exercise professional discretion and authority, but also jeopardises the democratic project of schooling more broadly. Using theoretical concepts from Foucault's discipline with Connolly's pluralisation, we argue that evidence-based practice disciplines teachers to comply with a prescribed set of criteria, which constrains their capacity to respond to the evolving and emergent needs of their students and communities. Our argument is built from two projects conducted separately, but concurrently, in Australia and Denmark. The projects involved in-depth interviews with teachers, extensive observations within schools, and the collection and analysis of policy documents and artefacts. Using illustrative excerpts from both studies, we show how teacher participants expressed and embodied inclinations to do (or be) differently, but nonetheless felt the need to adhere to what the evidence established as the right way to do or be. In our view, this points to an increasingly rigid ontological space through which teachers can do, be and become, which raises questions about the extent to which an 'ethos of pluralisation' is possible within these schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multi-species turn is generating significant new opportunities for rethinking theories of justice. However, these efforts to think beyond anthropocentric approaches to justice often sit uneasily alongside the concerns of more human-centered social justice movements. Closely engaging a recent paper that outlines a research agenda for this emerging field, I argue that to take seriously the question of how to build counter-hegemonic coalitions that might ultimately be capable of translating these approaches into durable institutional forms, it is important to more fully engage Indigenous and critical race scholarship while at the same time more carefully attending to the tensions and frictions between them. Both raise questions about the ontological and political priorities of multi-species activists that deserve significantly further engagement. I advance this argument by means of short illustrative snapshots of recent debates within movements for the rights of nature in Australia and the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As urban planners focus on creating more sustainable cities, there is an increasing need to plan for other species. Found in around 40% of Australian households, dogs have a growing, legitimate presence in urban culture and society. Dogs however remain a neglected subject of urban planning scholarship and practice. This paper critically examines why urban planners exclude dogs as subjects of their plans through the voices of practising strategic planners in the urban context of Melbourne, Australia. This paper characterises planning as being governed by two dimensions – the ontological and epistemological – and finds that the actions of planners in excluding dogs from consideration concerns the functioning of their ontologies of gatekeeper and practitioner as they negotiate and reshape the frontier of planning and its field of concern. The importance of anthropocentrism in governing how planners exclude dogs from planning in practice is shown to be profound. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Early childhood education for sustainability (ECEfS) is becoming internationally recognised as an important means for young children to develop their attitudes and behaviour towards sustainability. Yet, there is little research in addressing how ECEfS is differently understood within different cultural contexts, which can compromise the universality of sustainability and ECEfS. This study is to analyse how the ECEfS concepts (the meaning of sustainability, children as agents of change for sustainability, and sustainability in young children's everyday lives) are represented in Australian and Korean national curricular documents through critical document analysis. As a result, it is identified that the curricula have meaningful connections with predominant cultural characteristics of the countries. That is, individualistic and collectivistic factors greatly influence shaping the understanding of sustainability (e.g. analytic versus holistic understanding of sustainability, independent versus interdependent children identity, and selective versus nonselective approaches to children's everyday lives). With these findings, this paper is to discuss and articulate 'culturally inclusive education for sustainability' by adding 'culture' as an essential dimension to the meaning of sustainability, defining children identity with three forms of being (independent, interdependent, and relational), and addressing children's interactive and interconnected everyday lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to investigate and develop a methodology to analyse organizational data in order to evaluate the level of the organizational goals achievement. In order to achieve this aim, we proposed a framework, named GOAL-Framework for the organizational goals based on an ontology. The framework utilizes the organizational goals ontology, including an approach to identify the organizational goals and associated measurement metrics. The case study is presented to explain in detail, along with a description as to how the framework is applied, implemented and evaluated in a higher education institution in Australia. The results show that the framework is effective and efficient in assisting the decision-making process to specify to what extent the organizational goals are achieved. The outcome demonstrates that the framework can be applied for analysis and decision-making based on the metrics presented in the dashboard to evaluate the level of the goals achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The argument of this paper is that social ties beyond the boardroom matter. At the structural level, social ties from non-profit foundations, cultural organizations, university boards, policy planning organizations, and private social clubs add unique ties to those established by interlocking directorates. In addition, the multiple configurations of these social affiliations increase the centrality and reduce the social distance among the corporate directors. Although visualizations of these social networks underscore the changing roles these extra-corporate ties play in uniting corporate directors, they cannot precisely capture the unique effects of ties created by social affiliations outside the boardroom. Utilizing the concepts of structural redundancy and multiplicity, the paper describes the unique contribution each set of ties makes in constructing the social mosaic of corporate America during the second half of the 20th century. The results indicate a dramatic reduction in the role private clubs play in supplementing corporate ties, and an equally significant rise in the importance of social ties generated by policy planning organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the coexistence of competing and contested interests in intercultural natural resource management ( NRM) systems in Australia and Malaysia, this paper explores the ways in which ontological pluralism and the interplay of socio-cultural, political-economic and biophysical influences shape NRM systems. We aim to foster a discursive space in which to reframe the challenges of capacity building in the rapidly changing spaces of intercultural NRM systems. The paper synthesizes the conceptual arguments of field research to conclude that capacity deficits of dominant institutions, processes and knowledge systems drive many systemic failures in land and sea management affecting Indigenous peoples. We advocate urgent action to build intercultural competence and new capacities and competencies in those institutions. The paper reframes intercultural NRM in terms of coexistence and invites wider debate about these 'new geographies of coexistence' in intercultural NRM systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In water resources there is an increasing demand for interoperable data and information systems to provide people and software agents seamless access to multiple relevant data sources. Information and data modelling, with associated standards, controlled vocabularies and ontologies provide the key components in overcoming the syntactic and semantic challenges of interoperability. When combined with metadata registries and data services these components allow users to search and find data and information through structured approaches, and to access and obtain these for a range of end uses. This paper describes the concepts and fundamental components required for successful use of information modelling, including the work in Australia led by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and Bureau of Meteorology to develop and apply information modelling to the problems of interoperability for Australian water resources information systems. These initiatives are delivering tools and methods that support the long term maintenance of information models as they evolve to meet new needs and expanded requirements. The investigation reveals that we have a strong conceptual framework along with rapidly maturing methods and tools, suggesting that we are at the forefront of a new generation of water resources data and information access and interoperability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hybrid economy research in remote Indigenous Australia is what Gibson-Graham [2008. Diverse economies: performative practices for “other worlds”.Progress in Human Geography, 32 (5), 613–632] describe as a performative ontological project. This research seeks to address the marginalisation of customary economic activities that contribute to the well-being of Indigenous Australians. It aims to make the customary sector more real, more credible and more viable as an object of policy and activism, challenging the dual dominance of the state and the market as the focus of development (cf.Gibson-Graham 2008). This paper outlines how hybrid economy research has sought to broaden views of the economic landscape in remote Indigenous Australia amid the withdrawal of key policy and programmatic support by the Australian Government. This research draws on Canadian national surveys of Indigenous peoples, harvest studies and programmatic support for customary harvest – hunting, fishing and gathering of bush foods – to identify ways in which the Australian Government might better see and support Indigenous community food economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This collaboratively written paper takes the reader on a journey to Bawaka, in North East Arnhem Land, northern Australia, to explore how a Yolŋu ontology of co-becoming can inform natural resource management ( NRM) theory and practice. By focusing on the process of gathering and sharing miyapunu mapu (turtle eggs) and the foundational Yolŋu concept of wetj, we challenge NRM to take seriously Indigenous ways of knowing and becoming, and to attend to the vibrant, more-than-human relationality of our world. We discuss this relational cosmology, highlighting the importance of being aware and attentive, as well as the underlying ethical imperative of responsibility and obligation. We argue that as important as the concept of Caring for Country has been for NRM in Australia, it is critical that the human imperative to care for Country is balanced with a multi-directional and beyond-human understanding of the human- Country relationship. This requires engagement with the ways Country also cares and acknowledgement that humans are part of Country and not separate from it. We therefore propose a reframing, that we not only Care for Country but Care as Country. This has implications for understanding the ways that humans can and should relate to the environment as they exist together through co-becoming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia is an old continent with an immensely long history of human settlement. The argument made in this paper is that Australia is, and has always been, a natureculture. Just as English was introduced as the dominant language of education with European colonisation, so arrived an ontological premise that linguistically divides a categorised nature from culture and human from "the" environment. Drawing on published work from the Australian tropics, this paper employs a socionature approach to make a philosophical argument for a more nuanced understanding of language, the cultural interface and contemporary moves towards interculture in Australian environmental education practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to illustrate the benefits that accrue from critical realism's sustained, explicit reflection about ontological issues. The paper pursues this aim by examining the work of radical subjectivist Austrian economists as it has developed since the post-1974 revival in the fortunes of the Austrian school, focusing in particular on their account of the generation of socio-economic order in decentralized market economies. Ambiguities and tensions can be discerned in the radical subjectivist account of the causal forces at work in the market process. It is argued that the conceptual resources required for resolving those tensions and ambiguities are to be found in critical realism. The final section of the paper draws out some of the broader implications of the suggested resolution for radical subjectivist Austrian economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces, and considers how best to write about, a genre of Australian television programming that I call ‘travelling television’, a genre that stretches from (before) the Leyland Brothers to Steve Irwin, and fromAustralian Walkabout(1958) toBush Tucker Man(1988–1990) and beyond. The long history of this genre makes it a useful form through which to ask some very basic questions about broadcast television. I do that here by taking up some suggestions about the changing nature of television by the novelist and essayist, David Foster Wallace, focusing in particular on questions of representation, referentiality and ontology that, in the end, may offer a useful contribution to television scholarship from offshore. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The nature of Aboriginal peoples' relationships to stone artefacts has changed since the 1960s in southeast Australia—now recognisably more social, spiritual, and immediate than temporally distant, historical, or technological. Drawing from published accounts and on personal experience, I suggest that this change, while not universal, is directly linked to compliance or developer-funded archaeology as a dominant mode of archaeological investigation and Indigenous engagement. Archaeological surveys and excavations have enabled Aboriginal individuals and groups to return to parts of Country not visited for one or more generations and thereby they have been able to renegotiate the contemporary meanings of and emotional responses to stone artefacts found there. Such remaking of meanings is being done in ways that contrast with the dominant and disenfranchising Western scientific values typically ascribed to cultural objects by archaeologists and government cultural heritage laws and regulations. In this paper, I explore the opportunities and challenges faced by those concerned with more-than-scientific meanings of stone artefacts. More generally, and based on the evidence presented here, I argue that Indigenous ontologies of care now stand in opposition to state sanctioned ontologies of harm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to increase relevant retrieved results and users satisfaction, information retrieval systems are seeking a way to change keyword-based search to concept-based search. These systems use the tools that can convert terms to concepts. Over the years, this provided the basis for production of tools such as classification schema, vocabularies, subject headings and thesauri. Recently, ontologies are used in complementing this process. The main problem of this research is how the great information retrieval systems of the world claiming to use ontologies and thesauri use the semantic features of these tools in their information retrieval process? In this paper 7 information retrieval systems which use these tools, were selected. Using literature review, the semantic features were presented in the form of research checklist. These features include 5 general categories of concept search, synonyms search, suggestion for search, use of ontologies and display. The researcher examined these features with structured observation in the form of checklist. Though these systems use these tools for searching and retrieving, they don`t show the expected features. In studied factors, ERIC Database and the National Library of Australia achieved maximum scores of 32 and 24 respectively, while the National Archive of Australia and the British Museum had minimum scores of 12 and 13 respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The integration of Indigenous cultural rights with biodiversity protection can be explored in multiple dimensions and occupy contested grounds. This paper outlines the results of a research project that applied discourse analysis as both a theoretical and methodological tool to examine the power and knowledge relations within a case study of the development of a turtle and dugong hunting management plan by the Hope Vale Aboriginal Community in northern Australia. This paper reports on the results of this analysis and shows how multiple binaries exist within and between the different actors in a resource management problem. Findings show that contested constructions of the environment are hugely influential to the success or failure of natural resource management endeavours. The ontological frames that are adopted in supporting Indigenous peoples to manage their land and seas must be understood, otherwise there is a risk of reinforcing the very binaries that need to be avoided. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

A research program around the idea that information systems represent real-world systems was started almost twenty years ago. The program started by Wand and Weber is still going strong with a significant amount of research inspired by them and is one of the few instances incremental foundational research in Information Systems. Much of this research is being undertaken in Australia, and its influence has spread far and wide. Wand and Weber have used ontology, a discipline with roots in two thousand years of philosophy, to drive empirical work into how well information systems represent reality. In this paper the inspiration and progress of the program of research followed over the past two decades is described. The research program has recently progressed from its roots examining information systems development to examine enterprise systems and other package solutions. Further, it is beginning now to more fully use the depth of ontological theory available. However, there are challenges in how Bunge's ontology has been used and opportunities for using complementary ontologies and for different conceptualisations of information systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the question of why certain hunter-gatherers (of the ‘immediate-return’ type in Woodburn's terms) have little interest in visual art. Their lack of interest is striking in comparison with the elaborate traditions of painting and carving in Australia and the circumpolar North, which Ingold (2000) compares, showing that they correspond to totemic and animic ontologies respectively. The ‘immediate-return’ class of hunter-gatherers is examined in relation to Ingold's typology, using the Nayaka of South India as a specific example. It is argued that their lack of interest in depictions corresponds to an ontology which is inseparable from their animistic epistemology (Bird-David 1999). This ontology differs from Ingold's animic and totemic types and can be added to his scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Caring as the ontological and epistemological foundations of nursing: A view of caring from the perspectives of Australian nurses In a study using unstructured interviews to explore nurses’ understanding and interpretations of caring in nursing, one of the major themes emerging from the data is that through caring for patients, nurses discover the meaning and nature of nursing and what it means for them to be nurses. In the process of caring for patients, nurses further develop and understand the knowledge and skill of caring which constitutes the knowledge base of nursing. The data also show that nurses, in their practice, continue to define, develop and shape the meaning and knowledge of caring in nursing. From the evidence of this study, this paper argues that caring can be considered as the ontological and epistemological foundations of nursing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The appropriation of Western visual media technology by indigenous peoples around the world, particularly in Australia, North America, and the Amazon Basin, has drawn the attention of anthropologists impressed with how such people have utilized visual self-representation as a mode of empowerment, political assertion, and cultural revival in the face of Western cultural and economic imperialism. In this paper I maintain, however that there are different relationships between signs, concepts, and sociality in different cultures and that visual media have embedded within them their own Western ontology of these semiotic relations. Anthropologists have by and large not sufficiently problematized their own participation in this modern ontology of representation, and they assume that it is the same framework as that operating in the representational practices of the indigenous peoples on which they focus their attention. I situate a critique of Western visual representation within the progress of marxist theory in the 20th century. I go on to suggest that a dialectical approach to this phenomenon preserves the anthropological perspective on non-Western ritual, art, and representation that was bequeathed to us by Victor Turner and is still an essential component of the "anthropological lens." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the efficacy of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Convention, UN General Assembly, 1989) through the lens of the over-representation of First Nations children placed in out-of-home care in Canada and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in Australia. A general overview of Indigenous worldviews frames a discussion on the coherence of international human rights law and instruments, including the Convention, account for Indigenous Peoples' ontologies. The authors argue that the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UN General Assembly, 2007) and a new theoretical framework published by the Pan American Health Organization (2019) on health equity and inequity are useful tools to augment the Convention's coherence with Indigenous ontologies. The paper discusses how the Convention can be applied to structural and systemic risks driving the over-representation of First Nations and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out of home care in Canada and Australia. These two countries are included as First Nations and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in these countries have both had significant impact in advocating for their children despite experiencing similar barriers including contemporary colonialism. The advocacy work of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society in Canada and the Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency in Victoria, Australia are discussed. The paper ends by outlining some of the challenges ahead that include the need to meaningfully recognize Indigenous self-determination and equitable funding and resources to enable the actualization of self-determination. Further research contrasting international human rights instruments with Indigenous ontologies could help inform possible amendments to international human rights treaties and general comments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Marra Australian Aboriginal philosophies guide archaeological research. • Stone artefacts are embedded within Marra relational philosophies and politics. • Stone 'raw materials' are potent ancestral substances. • Access to powerful Marra ancestral quarries changed through time. • Lithic analyses of Marra stone artefacts reveal changing social worlds. In archaeology, investigations into the social and cultural contexts of stone artefacts have largely focused on their typological styles, manufacturing technologies, functions, geographic distributions and the significance of the quarries they come from. Yet what is oftentimes overlooked is the deeper contemporary understandings by Indigenous groups of the stone artefacts recovered from excavations. In this paper, we analyse an assemblage of 9,642 excavated stone artefacts from the rockshelter site of Walanjiwurru 1 in Marra Country in northern Australia, in light of the cosmological significance of regional stone sources to local Aboriginal groups. Each recovered stone artefact, and the quarries of their raw materials, is laden with meanings that help reveal how Marra Aboriginal people socially and cosmologically engaged with their landscape. By combining archaeological and Marra cultural perspectives, we argue that subtle variations in the range of stones and their relational characteristics signal changing political engagements with ancestral places over the past 2300 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human geography has driven substantive improvements in methodologies and applications of Geographic Information Systems ( GISs), yet Indigenous groups continue to experience erasure in geographic representations. GIS ontologies comprise categorised labels that represent lived contexts, and these ontologies are determined through the shared worldviews of those labelling spatial phenomena for entry into GIS databases. Although Western ontologies and spatial representations reflect Western understandings of human experience, they are often inappropriate in Indigenous contexts. In efforts to be represented in courts and land management, Indigenous groups nevertheless need to engage Western spatial representations to 'claim space'. This paper examines what GISs are and do and shows that GIS technology comes with strings attached to the myriad social contexts that continue to shape the field of GIScience. We show that Intellectual Property Rights Agreements can sever and control these 'strings'; the agreement between the Yorta Yorta Nation Aboriginal Corporation and university researchers reframes GIS from a technology of erasure to a technology of opportunity that enables Indigenous groups to define their own engagement. The visual and narrative outputs will contribute important understandings of the environmental crisis facing the Murray- Darling Basin and connect older and younger generations through knowledge sharing. We conclude the application of GIScience is never simply technological but always has potential to empower particular communities. Applying GIS technology to new circumstances is an engagement of new relationships in the social praxis of technology transfer, where worldviews meet and negotiations are made over what exists and how we know. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nascent spatial turn in peace and conflict studies is a promising development that expands conceptual resources and offers useful correctives to existing scholarship. However, the turn to space and place tends not to adequately emplace itself (including on its own European-derived terms) or sufficiently engage the socio-spatial difference of diverse peoples. Instead, a de-contextualised knower is invited to apply a new set of mobile scholarly tools in various settings without seriously considering diverse peoples' conceptualisation and operationalisation of place in socio-political ordering. Long-standing Aboriginal Australian approaches to place, meanwhile, indicate the diversity and sophistication of approaches to space and place. They furthermore show that western political ontology – including the figures of the individual and the state embedded in much dominant scholarship – may not be relevant in many settings in which peace and conflict scholarship is undertaken. Realising the full potential of the spatial turn requires grappling with the relational emplacement of the knowing subject and the varied ways in which place configures socio-political order both for diverse peoples 'in the field' and in the centres of dominant forms of knowing in the Global North. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a trawlwulwuy woman of tebrakunna country, Australia, I invite scholars to embrace research and writing as kin, extending an ethic of relational accountability to all relations, including the thesis. "Thesis as kin" derives from an Aboriginal ontological translation of the English (originally Latin) word "thesis," broken into two parts, "the" "sis", revealing the short form for sister "sis" as the primary entity. "Thesis as kin" can similarly be translated as "thesis askin," an agentic provocation that situates knowledge production with the thesis itself and suggests the thesis is askin' (asking) questions. Not limited to doctoral studies, imagining thesis as kin respectfully and humbly responds to scholars' calls that Indigenous research paradigms centre relationality. This article advocates for a research practice beyond consumerist reproduction, towards a process of kinship. It is an attempt to caretake all our relations by living the processes of relationality with research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeological approaches to stone-walled tidal fish traps of Indigenous Australians focus on technology and subsistence, with chronological development linked to demands of increased food production associated with demographic change and social intensification. For the Yanyuwa 'Saltwater People' of tropical northern Australia, old stone-walled fish traps found within the intertidal zone are associated with the creative acts of ancestral spirit beings. As such, these fish traps are imbued with spiritual potency and agency such that use requires specialized ritual practices (involving ochre and smoke) by senior men who also prescribe who can and cannot use the traps and eat the resulting catch. Today these traps lie dormant, not because the demand for fish has decreased but because of the demise of old highly initiated men of Law. These senior men not only possessed the requisite ritual knowledge to repair and activate the traps but also the specialized social and political knowledge to ensure adherence to strict and religiously codified laws and rules governing fish catch consumption amongst the community. The Yanyuwa teach us that socio-religious and socio-political factors can in certain contexts be of equal or greater importance than socio-economic factors in understanding why peoples of the past decided to use and dis-use fish trap facilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Including the perspectives of scientists about the nature and process of science is important for an authentic and nuanced portrayal of science in science education. The small number of studies that have explored scientists’ worldviews about science has thus far generated contradictory findings, with recent studies claiming that scientists simultaneously hold contradictory sophisticated and naïve views. This article reports on an exploratory study that uses the framework of Bhaskar’s critical realism to elicit and separately analyse academic scientists’ ontological and epistemological views about science in semi-structured interviews. When the views of scientists are analysed through the lens of critical realism, it is clear that it is possible to hold a realist ontological commitment about what knowledge is of, simultaneously with a fallibilist epistemological commitment about knowledge itself. The apparent incongruence of scientists’ so-called naïve and sophisticated views about science is resolved when analysed using a critical realist framework. Critical realism offers a simple and coherent framework for science educators that avoids many of the problems of positivism and social constructivism by finding a middle ground between them. The three pillars of critical realism: ontological realism, epistemological fallibilism and judgmental rationality help to make sense of how socially constructed scientific knowledge can be anchored in an independent reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the Lurujarri Heritage Trail, an Indigenous tourism experience in Northwest Australia as exemplary for a world different from the teleological-minded futurism of neoliberal market economics. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork undertaken between 2011 and 2015, it first outlines how in 1987 the Trail was established at the very margins of the Australian economy. Through its emphasis on the here and now that is grounded in a collaboration of people and land and acknowledges diverse worldviews and ontological differences, the Trail today offers its participants a means to experience Indigenous culture as different from Western politics and development policies. As a result, its allegedly marginal Dreaming (Bugarrigarra) leads beyond the pursuit of economic opportunity and in doing so enabled the defeat of large-scale industrialisation in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biography is a metaphor for this critical study of a major Australian archive that holds the records of government departments responsible for the administration of Aboriginal affairs in Western Australian from 1897 to 1972. This artefact of totalitarian state control is structured by western colonial ontologies of bureaucracy and legislative control of subject people. The project of decolonizing this archive was begun in the 1970s by Indigenous writers negotiating between the archives and their own cultural knowledge to produce major creative works combining both. These works show the passionate, rich storytelling that emerges when indigenous people release the stories captured in the archives and restore them as living cultural heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last few decades, China's largest city, Shanghai, has been rapidly growing. The city's increasing financial power and China's rapid economic development are reflected by the ever-changing and super-modern Pudong skyline, as well as by the display of luxury goods and the abundance of shopping malls dotting the urban social fabric. Melbourne, the fastest growing and globalizing city of Australia, presently shows the exhaustion of its multicultural philosophy and a heavy transformation of its symbolic environment. Indeed, the "global" pervades and alters the urban social fabric of both cities through "hybrid cultural assemblages." These particular types of images, identified as "condensation symbols and ideological markers of globality", have the power to create the "global imaginary" in a single place. This investigation approaches globalization as a material and ideational process from an alternative aesthetic standpoint. In particular, the inquiry deals with the increasing global consciousness, the production, circulation and consumption of images and metaphors that constitute the common sense of the "global." This image-driven investigation is carried out through a strategic research methodology that combines fieldwork, new theoretical frameworks and case studies method. The research attempts to grasp how the "global imaginary" is symbolically and socially produced in Melbourne and Shanghai, while explaining why "condensation symbols" are deeply relevant to the field of global studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologists have described Aboriginal Australian personhood in various ways. In 1986, Myers spoke about the tension between autonomy and relatedness that he identified as intrinsic aspects of Pintupi identity. More recently, Keen (2006) has identified the extension of Yolngu persons in time and space; others have described Aboriginal personhood as 'dividual.' Based on ethnography from the northwest Kimberley region of Western Australia, I argue that one way of characterizing personhood is as an ontology of embodied relatedness. In this, I draw inspiration from Ashforth's (2011) approach to relational realism, in which he extends the field of relations under consideration to entities beyond the human. I also consider Viveiros de Castro's (2009) synthesis of kinship, exchange, and magic to argue that the relationship between these can be understood through the embodied relationality that is at the core of cultural conceptions of the person. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pergaphaga Gauld, a genus of ctenopelmatine Ichneumonidae endemic to Australia, is revised. The only previously described species, Pergaphaga nigra Gauld, is redescribed. Three additional species are newly described: Pergaphaga iangauldi Cammack & Wharton, sp. n. from New South Wales, ACT, and Victoria, P. leaski Wharton, sp. n. from Victoria, and P. xanthops Wharton, sp. n. from New South Wales and ACT. Keys to species and a phylogenetic analysis are presented. Morphological terms are linked to the Hymenoptera Anatomy Ontology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on interviews with former Australian immigration detainees conducted by the author. The interviews explored the experience and understanding of resistance while in detention. The article calls into question Agamben's twin conclusions that nothing short of a complete re-founding of ontology is required to liberate humanity from biopower and that this refoundation will spring from bare life. Contrary to Agamben's depiction, the camp proves to be a place of determined and often successful defence of a relation of politics and life based not on the camp and biopower, but on solidarity and freedom. Detainees in Australian immigration detention, like prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps, refused to abandon their politics. Rather than seeking to transform bare life, they rejected it and made their own decision on life and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article attempts to determine the point at which the political and symbolic converge with the human body to render its modification violent and a violation of being. It cites the Australian government's policy of excluding asylum seekers from entering the country as an example of why such an analysis might be needed. It aims to offer a better understanding of how others, especially strangers, touch us, why such an experience can be disorienting, and why symbolic or political responses that would exclude these strangers can have a physical and violent impact.