The workshop will identify and explore the theories used to support a range of mandated medico-legal interventions such as involuntary detention, compulsory treatment and mandated alcohol rehabilitation. It will identify opportunities for improving the operation of these interventions, and provide recommendations for policy and legal practice that strengthen current policies to support impaired individuals while protecting the public.
We expect social surveys and other forms of social science research to inform, shape, and critique government and other public policies, but this was not always the case. This workshop brings together scholars from around the world to examine how, when, and why the techniques of social science surveying took on such public prominence, and to consider the effects and legacies of that process.
Many policy practitioners, researchers, public intellectuals, business leaders, church leaders and political/community activists worry about the quality of current policy debate, which is said to hinder our capacity to reach robust decisions on pressing policy and political challenges. This workshop will assess the grounds for such concern and recommend measures for regenerating policy capacity and restoring trust in policy processes.
The aim of this workshop is to bring together a multidisciplinary team of Australian and international experts in the field of normal and abnormal child development. We will leverage the expertise of this group to build robust cross-discipline collaborations to develop knowledge, which can be translated into practice in the field of early child development to improve child outcomes.
This two-day workshop was co-convened by Warwick Anderson (University of Sydney), Clare Corbould (Monash University), Charlotte Greenhalgh (Monash University), and Catherine Waldby (Australian National University) in order to examine the […]
This workshop brings researchers, advocates and practitioners together to investigate the social and historical significance of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. It will explore the role of the social sciences in developing a knowledge base for the work of the Commission, and in understanding the wide-ranging implications of this landmark public inquiry.
This interdisciplinary workshop will survey the history, present situation and future prospects of IVF and assisted reproduction in their cultural and social context. The outcomes of this workshop will include an edited collection, a digested analysis paper and a briefing paper which will have the potential to inform future policy deliberations in Australia.
By bringing together prominent scholars and policy analysts from different disciplinary backgrounds, this workshop explores the social impacts of robotics and artificial intelligence on work, employment and unemployment. The Workshop will strengthen Australian research capacity regarding the digital capability and skills of Australian citizens to compete in a global economy increasingly shaped by technological automation.
This international workshop assembles leading Indigenous researchers, private sector and community leaders for a cross-country conversation on what is happening that is innovative and productive in Indigenous development of lands and resources. The goal of the workshop is to share governance experiences, strategies, and solutions that can assist Indigenous communities in meeting their contemporary needs and aspirations.
The workshop will address the intersections between gender, migration and social care, locating Australian experience in an international context, with particular reference to Canada. It will create policy-focused dialogue between researchers, practitioners and policy makers. Care work is a highly gendered activity, with the vast majority of care workers being women, many of them migrants even though Australia (in contrast to Canada) does not directly recruit unskilled care workers. The workshop will result in clearer conceptualisation of the connections between gender, migration and care. It will identify key implications for policy makers, care recipients and the care workforce. Selected papers will be published in a special issue of Global Social Policy.
This workshop asks whether and how Aboriginal reconciliation in Australia might connect to the attitudes of non-Indigenous people in ways that prompt a deeper engagement with Indigenous needs and aspirations. It will ask invited participants to explore concepts and practices of reconciliation, considering its specific application in the context of Australia and of other nations that have undergone reconciliation processes. The discussions will bring together and complement current research approaches to the problems of responsibility and engagement between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples. Contributions made at this workshop will be collated into an edited collection published for professional and scholarly readers.
Now home to society’s most disadvantaged populations, public housing has long been viewed as a policy problem, yet it is about to undergo a new and radical set of reforms that reconfigure the way public housing is governed – from the state to the private and community sectors. As this reform process begins, it is necessary to ‘take stock’ of existing knowledge of public housing in Australia in order to help understand the likely consequences of these imminent changes. The workshop will provide a forum for researchers to generate new and important questions about the proposed reforms and develop an agenda for future research on them in collaboration with policymakers and practitioners.
The aim of the proposed workshop is to consider how the application of social and political science theories to the analysis of disease prevention and health promotion policies in Australia could improve the potential for these policies to enhance health and equity. The focus will be on how issues do or do not arrive on the policy agenda, how the success or otherwise of policy implementation can be assessed and on examining the role of policy networks in policy formulation and implementation.
The workshop will involve leading policy analysts from Australia and internationally and policy actors. It will also build on the work of research groups at the Southgate Institute for Health, Society and Equity, Flinders University which are studying a variety of aspects of disease prevention and health promotion policy. This includes an evaluation of the implementation of the South Australian Health in All Policies funded by NH&MRC and ARC funded research on the extent to which prevention and promotion feature in Australian health policy.
This workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners whose work centres on justice in the allocation and management of natural resources. Justice research within natural resource management (NRM) is rare, but growing in Australia, and researchers typically focus on specific sectors, groups or places using different disciplinary approaches. While justice concerns over resources such as water or gas are growing in importance, justice research is scattered within the social sciences needing consolidation, synthesis and a coordinated future research agenda. This workshop will be a first step in this, allowing shared learning across disciplines and forging collaborative networks.
Industrial relations reform is a topical subject, which has important political, economic and social implications for Australia. This workshop will critically examine the recent history of industrial relations reform, based on research evidence, and will discuss the major policy issues, which are facing governments, employers, trade unions and employees now and in the future. It is intended that the research findings discussed at the workshop will influence the debate on industrial relations reform. The findings of both the Productivity Commission review as well as the Royal Commission into trade unions should have been released during the coming year and the issue of industrial relations reform will be of considerable public interest.
This workshop will explore the contemporary relevance of a tradition of histories of labour rights by
framing them in the context of recent debates about the place of economics in history and the history of
capatalism more broadly. Our aim is to broaden the field of labour rights history by focusing on the global
response to the problems of contract and indentured labour and what became known as the ‘coolie
question’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the past the ‘coolie question’ has been
conceptualised in two main ways – as an offshoot of histories of slavery and anti-slavery and in the
context of histories of migration to colonies of the former British and Spanish empires. This symposium
aims to bring interdiciplinary approaches to the ‘coolie question’ into conversation with the new debates
regarding capatalism. Its participants will reflect on the implications of the ‘coolie question’ for new
transnational and global accounts of the history of labour rights in the globalising present.
This Workshop brings together researchers from economics, law, social policy and political science with the aim of investigating gender equality in the Australian tax and transfer (social security) system. The Workshop will examine four themes of significance: (1) size and structure of the fiscal state; (2) work, care and capabilities of women over the lifecourse; (3) saving, assets and retirement provision; and (4) gender-based analysis and evaluation of fiscal reform. Outcomes will include recommendations to achieve gender equality for policy makers engaged in tax and social security reform; an open access academic publication and policy notes that contribute to public debate.
Over the past thirty years, globalisation and more recently financialisation have shaped the changing landscape for economies around the world. Countries have experienced rapid structural change in the sectoral composition of their national economies. The recent financial crisis, and its transformation into a crisis of the real economy, has led to a questioning of growth models and a renewed debate on the role of national industrial policy. This workshop investigates the financialisation-globalisation-induced changes to the industrial structure and the implications for national industrial policies which will inform policy debates and set directions for future research.
Through bringing together key researchers and regional refugee support agencies, this workshop will explore current research on the impacts of Australian policies on aylum seekers and refugees, governments and civil society in Indonesia, Malaysia and Sri Lanka since the commencement of Operation Sovereign Borders. It will also identify where further research is needed. Outcomes will include a paper that outlines what is currently known about the regional impacts of these policies which will be widely distributed. The papers presented at the workshop will also be published in a special edition of Cosmopolitan Civil Societies (Issue 2, 2016). This workshop will make an important contribution to further understandings of the regional impacts of Australian asylum seeker policies. http://www.sbs.com.au/news/dateline/story/turned-back-torture
This workshop will re-examine the conflict over conscription in Australia during World War I and the two plebiscites in which it was rejected. It will seek to re-establish the centrality of this conflict to our understanding of the war years and their legacy, place the conflict in international context, consider its lessons, and honour the memory of those involved.
International and transnational historical approaches have become increasingly prominent in recent years and have generated significant scholarship in Australia and beyond. Meanwhile, this growing academic interest in global methodologies sits uneasily alongside public historical discourse, where the ‘Australian story’ remains central to discussions in the media, politics, education and among the public itself (as consumers of these national narratives). In response, this workshop considers the impact of the turn towards transnationalism on Australian history. It examines (1) how the transnantional lens has complicated and challenged conventional understandings of the national narrative, and (2) the limits of such international perspectives in national historiographical debate.
Principal-agent thinking has been the foundation for many of the public service designs that have been introduced over the past two or three decades. This includes contracting structures and budgetary and performance protocols. Is this approach compatible with continuous improvement and contextualised or decentralised action? If the answer is negative, how is central accountability to be preserved and re-cast? This workshop will explore these matters in the context of an alternative ‘learning-by-doing’ architecture. It will explore the conjecture that this latter approach best responds to contemporary imperatives. Alone among the alternatives, it promises to square the circle between contextualised programmes, continuous improvement and central accountability.
The aim of the workshop is to critically analyse the development and administration of Income Management (IM) situated within the context of the interplay between evidence, ideology and policy implementation in Australia, but within a comparative context. The workshop will explore how income management fits within the competing philosophies that underpin different components of a neo-liberal welfare regime, which has been coupled with paternalism in the implementation of income management.
By bringing together prominent scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, this workshop explores how high-carbon patterns of mobile life might become restructured in a world of scarce energy distribution. This workshop features the research of various scholars of ‘global mobilities’ – including the pioneering expertise of Professor John Urry (University of Lancaster, UK), whose work will be open for discussion.
The purpose of this workshop is to draw on emerging knowledge about mobilities, emplacement, displacement and belonging within the social sciences to create dialog between academics, practitioners and policy makers that will extend this knowledge and make it accessible for policy-oriented research and development. As one of the world’s most mobile nations, Australia offers an important arena for this work.
To mark the 10-year anniversary of the Australia-US FTA, this workshop examines Australia’s existing trade policy objectives and prospects for achieving them. What have been the strengths and limitations of Australia’s trade policy approach over the past decade? What are the major trade-related challenges facing Australia in the next ten years? And how might these challenges best be met?
The development of the world’s first global systems of states was a momentous achievement of the twentieth century. Drawing on a wealth of new scholarship in international relations, history, and international law, this workshop reconsiders the emergence of this unique system, and will culiminate in the publication of an edited volume with a leading university press.
As one of the key organisational building blocks of representative democracy, political parties are central to democratic life in a diverse range of polities and at numerous levels of government. Political parties inherently shape the electoral contest – before, during and after polling day. Several aspects of party organisation illustrate this influence: the rules that parties use to select their leaders and candidates profoundly affect political competition, recruitment and access. Variations in organisational structures can facilitate or hinder parties in building and mobilising support bases, promoting citizen engagement in politics, and either helping to stabilise political competition or to contribute to its volatility.
The objective of this workshop is to critically examine approaches to environmental decision-making and processes of public policy-making. Specifically, we seek to investigate how current institutionalised norms and processes subordinate popular and cultural understandings about ‘environment’ and ‘participation’, and we aim to explore the role of social movements in improving environmental governance. The structure of this workshop will juxtapose cultural and environmental theory with mainstream economic and environmental paradigms to begin a different kind of environmental discussion. The aim is to provide a new set of markers for thinking about environmental decision-making and policy formulation, and to conceive of new and more creative approaches to public participation in environmental governance.
Globally, coal extraction and burning is booming. The burning of coal has released unprecedented quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and exacerbated anthropogenic climate change. This Workshop investigates this ‘coal rush’ in socio-political terms, asking how it can be superseded. We seek explanations of why new coal facilities are constructed, investigate social conflicts that are centred on the facilities, and analyse what factors may enable transition from coal. Specific sites, national contexts and international frameworks will be analysed compared to develop a global understanding of dependence on coal, and how it may be overcome.
In recent years the role of religion in Australian sexual politics has come under increasing scrutiny. As social and cultural attitudes about marriage, family, and sexual identity have shifted, ostensible conflicts have emerged between religious liberty and sexual discrimination. Simultaneously, it has become apparent that the relationship between religion and sexual politics in Australia is not well understood. Models used to explain the nexus of religious and sexual discrimination in other places, such as Europe and the USA, are not well suited to the Australian context. Further research is needed to explain religious sexual politics in this country’s recent history.
The overall intellectual purpose of the Workshop is to improve the links between international migration theory and broader social theory. It builds on the international, interdisciplinary collaboration established through the Social Transformation and International Migration in the 21st Century Project (STIM). The project is based at the University of Sydney, and is led by Professor Stephen Castles. It contributes to the development of social scientific knowledge through analysing the relationship between neo-liberal globalisation and human mobility, and understanding how global processes are mediated through specific national and local social and cultural experiences. Using a mixed methods and multi-scalar approach, the project examines four countries that have experienced significant social transformation and migration since the 1970s: South Korea, Mexico, Turkey and Australia. This 5-year project is funded by the Australia Research Council. It includes fieldwork by five University of Sydney doctoral candidates, and close partnerships with leading researchers in the four countries.
The central theme of the workshop is the exploration of how policies in various youth-related fields identify certain young people as requiring support or intervention. The interdisciplinary approach to the workshop will demonstrate how ‘vulnerable’ young people are understood in different fields and examine the impacts of such understandings.
The workshop Prospects for regional cooperation: Opportunities for Indonesian-Australian collaboration explores a broad set of questions related to the practice and understanding of regionalism on the part of Australia and Indonesia, two significant but very different states straddling strategically vital Indian and Pacific Ocean littorals. Having been a core battleground of the Cold War, the islands and waterways in the southeastern-most extension of the Eurasian landmass have once again have become a site in the showdown of competing superpowers. Southeast Asia is home to more than 600 million people and is a conduit for nearly two-thirds of world trade. It straddles overlapping American, Chinese and Indian spheres of influence, and hosts middle-power aspirants, Indonesia, Vietnam and Australia, as well as smaller but influential players, notably Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Recent standoffs between the Chinese, Vietnamese and Filipino navies remind us what is at stake in the region, as do the rising tensions in Sino-Japanese relations and the enduring regional echoes of the global ‘war on terror.’
This workshop arises from a concern about the way knowledge is being shaped by the commodification of higher education. Rather than being regarded principally as a public good, knowledge has been transformed increasingly into a private good and this is exercising a profound effect on the social sciences. After 20 years, the shift of the cost of Australian higher education from community to “consumers” is almost complete. Some Australian law schools, for example, now receive as little as 10 per cent of their income from governments.
“Retirement” is most often associated with concepts of work and the individual (Shultz & Wang, 2011), but easily could extend to activity of any sort or even existence itself, and by extension, wider society. Historically speaking, the issue of what to do when people live to a “ripe old age” has been addressed through strategies varying from veneration to ostracism.
Intergovernmental policy processes in federal and multi-level states have neglected gender equality issues (Haussman et al 2010). Policy areas such as violence against women and reproductive rights, have rarely been addressed through intergovernmental policy making machinery. At the same time, the social and economic policies prioritised in intergovernmental processes are seldom analysed for their gender dimensions. Paralleling this neglect, social and legal policy researchers attentive to gender have yet to systematically explore the impact of intergovernmental relations on policy development and outcomes.
This workshop will address the questions of evidence quality and methodological rigour with which policy-makers have recently engaged, and promote discussion with researchers on these questions through a series of case studies: HIV, alcohol and illicit drugs policy, climate change and income management. It will advance these debates through the presentation of policy-relevant theoretical papers on both the sociology of scientific practice and the traffic between the social and the scientific realms. Each of the papers will engage with current debates and reframe their terms, through discussions of science, policy and practice.
The Workshop is to review progress on the project to develop the first Cambridge Economic History of Australia. The Cambridge Economic History of Australia is intended both for class-room use and to inform researchers, but also to reach policy makers through understanding and assessment of the Australian economic achievement and the policy settings that have led to the current economic outcomes and how they might need to be reconfigured for the future.
Mission historiography tends to be framed either in the context of imperialism and colonialism, or with hagiographic tendencies from inside the church. But missions have played an ambivalent role in the contact zone, and this is sometimes reflected in indigenous biographies. Missions were homes, and places of refuge and training, and therefore a vital space in the contact zones, where interpersonal relations and the continual negotiation of meanings were absolutely central.
The workshop will examine how new forms of expertise, professions and associations are being brought into the realm of government in contemporary China. On the one hand, it will consider how these new forms provide a range of hitherto absent services for a rapidly changing society. On the other, it will demonstrate how the privatisation and professionalisation of `public’ service provision is transforming government in China.
By bringing the Australian and Italian developments into dialogue, the workshop maps significant points of connection and difference between otherwise distinct jurisdictions. The comparative approach allows similarities and differences between the two destination countries, Australia and Italy, to be explored in a global, comparative context and thus present a different paradigm through which to view problems and solutions. The transnational and interdisciplinary nature of this workshop will provide an important foundation for sharing experiences and knowledge concerning the politico-legal issues surrounding irregular migration, with a view to reframing and reconceptualising this unresolved problem for states.
Increasingly, Westminster-derived parliamentary democracies are experimenting with non-traditional governing arrangements, while traditional understandings of unwritten conventions are being challenged. This is apparent at the sub-national level in Australia where South Australia, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory, have had independents and minor party parliamentarians serving in cabinets but outside coalitions and with special concessions.
The workshop brings together academics from interdisciplinary backgrounds who are active in research and public policy debates on migration processes including the regulation of borders, modes of belonging and entitlements, social and cultural networks, human rights and the interaction of these issues with local populations.
Changing patterns of labour market participation are having profound effects on Australian society. Women’s labour market participation is growing, men’s is falling, the participation of older workers is on the rise, and more and more workers combine simultaneous paid work and care responsibilities. This has implications for the quality of life for men, women and children. It also has implications for productivity and economic growth. These implications drive a high level of public policy activity in Australia. It is vital that this public policy activity and reform is informed by current social science research and policy.
The symposium will seek to make new sense of Antarctica as a political space, but it will also target the key issue of whether its existing political arrangements can take advantage of the opportunities and survive the worrying challenges of the twenty-first century. The challenges are plain. Some examples: the Madrid Protocol bans all forms of mining until 2048 yet the continent remains vulnerable to corporate market pressures. The local ozone hole still grows in size; glacier outflow rates in West Antarctica are on the rise; tourism has become a big business; and conflicting practices, laws and jurisdictions are hampering efforts to deal effectively with such issues as bio-prospecting. There are complaints that the existing governing institutions of Antarctica are insufficiently representative of different social and political interests. There are concerns that states exercise too much influence; and there are calls for giving greater voice to civil society organisations and networks in the local governing arrangements. The symposium will engage each of these developments in order to draw policy-relevant
The aim of this workshop is to bring together scholars in different disciplines and from different parts of Oceania who are been working independently on these questions. Regional and disciplinary specialisation has hampered a general discussion of these questions and it is hoped that through the sharing of new concrete data and ideas participants will be better able to appreciate the generality and specificity of their material. Questions discussed will range from a discussion of the generality of Altman and Peterson’s respective ideas about the hybrid economy and demand sharing to the presentation of concrete case study material on how people in different domestic settings cope with the problems of finding money to pay for school fees, life-cycle rituals, paying off loans and other demands of everyday life.
This proposal is generated against a backdrop of research, new concepts, debates and tensions in the social sciences concerning the role of the emotions in social life. In the 1996 Zaharoff lecture, Naomi Schor suggested that this turn to emotion, and in particular to melancholia, signified the end of the post-modern paradigm. Our objective in this workshop is to tease out some of the key tensions emerging in this new paradigm.
The theme of the workshop is of central relevance to current governance research on community engagement in policy development and the relationship between such engagement and ‘evidence-based’ policy. Although there is an existing literature on gender assessment within the policy process and an increasing body of literature on the history of WNGO engagement with governments, these have not been brought together systematically.
This workshop will adopt a multi-disciplinary, multi-national, multi-level perspective to examine the role of religious organisations in social policy formulation in Australia and several of its neighbours in order to better understand how religion and social policy intersect in different national, religious and policy contexts. The workshop will bring together academics from a range of disciplines with expertise in social policy and knowledge of the role that religion plays in different national and policy settings. It will engage with members of leading Australian faith-based NGOs to discuss the practical dimensions of the role of religion in social policy by drawing on regional NGO experience.
This workshop will bring together Australian researchers who adopt a longitudinal and life course approach to examining work, family and well being. It will be organized around 3 stages of the life course: the transition to adulthood (18 – 30); mid-life (30 – 50); and older Australians (50+).
The central theme of the workshop is the exploration of how various governmental and non-governmental actors in these countries (Australia, Japan, China and Indonesia) understand the nature of humanitarian obligations, and how they believe these obligations should be acted upon in responding to humanitarian emergencies. This entails comparing and contrasting of how these actors’ understandings of the humanitarian imperatives are expressed in responses to three key questions: Who acts in response to humanitarian crises? why do they act? and how do they act?
To bring Australian researchers and practitioners up to speed on the complex issues involved, and to give them an opportunity to develop a rigorous Australian neurolaw research agenda, the proposed workshop will be co-funded by the University of Queensland and Macquarie University. This will enable us to bring several leading experts from around the world to Australia into a setting where participants will focus on discussing current work in neurolaw and on identifying neurolaw issues relevant to the Australian context.
The workshop will comprise eight sessions based around sub-themes. For all sessions, presenters will have prepared advanced drafts of papers, copied and distributed beforehand to all participants. Presenters will speak to their papers, briefly identifying the major points and arguments. A discussant will be appointed for each session and will highlight commonalities, differences and issues raised in the papers, before opening discussion to other participants. All participants will be expected to attend all sessions to to engage constructively with presenters.
This workshop is one of five workshops funded under ASSA’s International Science Linkage (ISL) program in 2010-11. ASSA’s ISL Workshop program was funded by the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research and administered by the Academy, with the aim of promoting access to and participation by Australian social researchers in strategically focussed, leading edge, international researchers and their research findings and increasing strategic alliances between Australian and overseas social science researchers and institutions.
In some developed market economies, long established social partnerships between unions and management, based on collective bargaining, have been replaced by individual contracts which have been unilaterally determined by employers, while in other economies social partnerships are being developed or remade. Many newly industrializing economies are experimenting with new forms of employee representation and establishing labour market institutions for the first time.
The aim of the workshop is to allow the participating researchers from all Australian jurisdictions to meet and exchange ideas concerning their findings in order to achieve five major objectives: to review the research findings, to identify and prioritize the policy,to undertake the detailed planning for the scholarly outputs of the study,to develop a research dissemination strategy and to identify future research directions.
The proposed workshop will bring together leading Australian scholars for a focussed investigation of the nature of neoliberalism. Based upon these understandings, the policy implications of the current global financial crisis for the future of neoliberalism will then be considered.
The Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia has, for several years, supported a series of Post-election workshops and books. The workshops bring together a team of around 22 to 25 comprising academics and practitioners to present and debate their points of view about the most recent national election.
The workshop will bring new research knowledge to bear on policy debates and practice in the changing field of intercountry adoption (ICA), inform policy debate, and set directions for future research. It is a response to issues emerging in international research which are yet to be addressed by social scientists in Australia; and, current and emerging policy challenges identified by the Intercountry Adoption Branch of the Office of the Federal Attorney-General (the Central Authority on ICA in Australia under the Hague Convention).
The proposed Workshop is intended to provide an innovative forum for interdisciplinary discussion of the study of human emotions, including the historical understanding of the nature of emotions in the pre-modern period. It will combine researchers from the areas of history, literature, philosophy and the arts with researchers in psychology, neuroscience and psychiatry.
The central aim of the proposed ASSA workshop Rethinking Australian research on migration and diversity is to explore ways of strengthening Australian research in this important field, and to think through strategies for reconnecting it both to mainstream social science and to international debates. The precondition for this is to improve understanding of trends in human mobility and diversity for Australia, our region and the world, and to explore the tasks such trends are likely to create for Australian migration research.
The Workshop brought together an international group of scholars of the state, global civil society, and international political economy, including early career and senior scholars from Australia, North America, and Europe, to examine the logics underlying the process of ‘public-private hybridisation’ of state-provided functions, businesses and services. This phenomenon has been attributed to the neoliberal turn in politics and economics. The workshop probed the idea that hybridisation represents a reorganised form of governmental rule and authority, both within and between states, that serves to maintain and even reassert state power in new ways that extends also to the international arena.
On 31 March 2010, The Academy of the Social Sciences, Universities Australia and the Australian Human Rights Commission jointly convened a workshop examining the issue of Racism and the Student Experience. The multidisciplinary workshop assembled 20 social scientists with expertise in the issues of racism and racially motivated crime, and tertiary students in Australia. The first in a series of events designed to connect researchers and policy practitioners, the workshop participants assessed current social sciences knowledge and knowledge gaps and the ways in which social sciences research could contribute to policy responses which mitigate against racism and racially motivated crimes against tertiary students in Australia.
This workshop will bring together scholars from a range of social science disciplines with Indigenous practitioners of community governance to explore governance relations between Indigenous and settler peoples, and why these continue to be tense and difficult.
The workshop will address four core themes that are directly relevant to both the history of the social sciences and contemporary debates: citizenship, national and cosmopolitan identity; globalisation, international relations and public policy; self and collective or national improvement; and taste, cultural judgement and modernity.
This two day invited workshop brings together key thinkers from numerous disciplines and occupations to consider questions concerning ethics for living. The starting premise is the fact that we are now living in an era of unprecedented rapid environmental and social change. The long 10,000 year history of climatic stability on Earth enabled the rise of agriculture and domestication, the growth of cities, numerous technological revolutions, and the growth of modernity.
The Workshop objectives are to analyse the map of past, current and planned research in teacher education in Australia, identify specific conceptual and methodological resources which could help to address gaps in research, develop a national research program agenda within which shared projects and collaborative efforts can occur across institutions and disciplines and to commence planning for cooperative and parallel studies in teacher education for the ‘global south’
The aim of this workshop, is, for the first time, to assemble a cross-disciplinary group of leading established and emerging researchers to share and build upon this existing work on the MPE. In particular the workshop aims to use the differing disciplinary and methodological approaches of invited participants in the fields of sociology, geography, planning, criminology, labour studies and social work to address two key aspects of this phenomenon: The question of governance and privatisation of the public realm and the issue of community, and the way it is imagined and experienced, both by property developers and by residents.
The workshop Energy Security in the Era of Climate Change: A Dialogue on Current Trends and Future Options will reconsider the whole notion of energy security and its global and regional implications, with particular reference to Australia and the Asia-Pacific region.
The proposed conference will address the formational relationship between religion and the state through investigation of historical cases and recent developments. The political dimension of religions and their necessary relations with the political state in terms of both competition and sponsorship has been frequently ignored by sociologies of religion which have instead attempted to analyse religions through the social and organizational sources of transcendental aspirations inherent in religious doctrines.
Over the last fifteen years, an expanding social science and popular literature has examined social institutions in terms of the way in which they manage and allocate risk of various kinds. Traditionally, the social-democratic welfare state has been viewed as a set of institutions for the social management of risk.
There is a growing need to develop an understanding of the positive pathways that strengthen the relationships of Australian couples and families. This need is highlighted by the Australian Research Council (ARC) flagging “Strengthening Australia’s social and economic fabric” as a national research priority area.
Contemporary Australian society is currently addressing the impacts of climate change as the nation deals with hotter dryer summers leading to water shortages and the prediction of continuing shortages over the long term, as well as more dramatic cyclonic and storm events.
During the last two decades, profound organisational changes have swept through human service agencies, as the ‘New Public Management’ (NPM) has reshaped how and by whom human services are funded and delivered. Many public services have been privatised or contracted out, generic managers have replaced those specialised in human services, new modes of accountability and surveillance for both providers and service users have been enacted, and market concepts and frames have been imposed on the discourse and organisation of human services work.
This inter-disciplinary project will bring together historians, political theorists, philosophers, and international relations specialists to present and discuss a series of papers on British thinkers from Thomas Hobbes to Lewis Namier, each of whom has reflected upon the problems and possibilities of international politics, at a two-day workshop to be held in July 2008.
This workshop aims to undertake a critical analysis of Australian climate change diplomacy, the relationship of the AP6 to the Kyoto Protocol and other international initiatives responding to climate change, such as the 27th Session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in Valencia(12-17 Nov).
The two fold objectives of the workshop interact: to explore theories and evidence about social exclusion and significant social policy issues in Australia; and through these researcher/policymaker/practitioner conversations to advance understanding and knowledge about joined up government and community-consultative approaches.
This workshop will focus on the success and limitations of Australian anti-discrimination laws. Such laws have major importance as the symbol of our social commitment to equity and intergroup harmony, but they are also expected to provide remedies in individual cases of discrimination and mechanisms for deterring and reducing the incidence of discriminatory practices and behaviour.
The workshop will bring together a group of academics and policy makers from a wide range of disciplines, including social policy, economics, law, psychology, public health, philosophy and sociology, as well as key stakeholders from the NGO sector, federal and state governments and Children’s Commissioners.
From terrorism to local insurgencies, conflict is endemic in today’s world. The clash between different religious, ethnic and civilisational norms is widely seen as particularly fateful. Dealing with the ensuing dilemmas is thus one of the most challenging tasks ahead.
The landscape of schooling has changed immeasurably from its twentieth-century antecedents. While the need for higher levels of educational attainment is seen as paramount the means by which that is to be achieved have become increasingly complex.
One of the biggest challenges facing our region in the 21st century is the large-scale cross-border movement of people. Key issues include international labour migration; migration flows provoked by political instability and natural disasters, other refugee flows, human trafficking and people smuggling.
Globally, macro and micro economic policies currently feature the liberalisation of prices (including currencies and factor prices) in the belief that this will improve the allocation of resources and facilitate the achievement of internal and external balance.
This workshop builds on the interest of the Academy in social capital (particularly Marginson’s Investing in Social Capital and Manderson’s Re-Thinking Well-Being) by taking up the challenges foreshadowed by this earlier work of the ASSA.
In the United States research is going ahead into drugs that would inhibit the formation of traumatic emotions and thereby inhibit the strength and intensity of traumatic memories by “blocking” the effects of stress hormones and the brain’s hormonal reactions to fear. The rationale behind this research is that such drugs would be useful for individuals who must face traumatic events as part of their work, such as soldiers, police and fire-fighters, as well as providing a possible way of preventing and treating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Hate speech is speech or expression which is capable of instilling or inciting hatred of, or prejudice towards, a person or group of people on a specified ground. Hate speech laws are usually directed to vilification on the grounds of race, nationality, ethnicity, country of origin, ethno-religious identity, religion or sexuality.
Childcare is a critical issue for Australian families and our society. Its outcomes are critical for children. Questions of availability, affordability and quality overwhelm many parents and particularly mothers struggling to maintain attachment to the labour market in their area of skill and expertise, or trying to return to work. Others look to childcare for development opportunities for children and respite from their care.
The ANZAC legend has developed into one of Australia’s – and New Zealand’s – most significant aspects of culture. Contemporary attitudes towards conflict suggest that ANZAC Day commemorations, however, might wane in the future. On the other hand, increasing attendance numbers at ANZAC Day Services, particularly of younger generations, suggest that support for ANZAC Day is gaining momentum. Different stakeholders of the day will be seeking different meaning and experiences from their participation, and their non-participation, in the commemorations. Issues of integrity and sustainability therefore are emerging. It is imperative that questions be raised with regard to the future of ANZAC Day.
It is a widely-held perception that September 11, and the threat of globalised terrorism it embodies represents the advent of a new era and that the exceptional threat posed by global non-State terrorism justifies far-reaching measures.
Paid care, notably of children, the elderly, and people with a disability has been increasing in Australia, and is likely to continue to do so. This is due to a combination of demographic factors such as the aging population and the extended lifespan of people with a disability, and shifts in the extent to which families are currently able to provide unpaid caring as women (as the traditional unpaid carers) have moved into the paid labour force.
HIV/AIDS is one of the greatest contemporary threats to global human security, and its rapid growth in parts of the Asia/Pacific region makes it a major concern for Australia. The Australian government has made it a priority to deal with both state failure and the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
The objective of the workshop is to bring together a number of scholars to examine the way in which the processes of globalisation have had an impact on, and been mediated by, various political institutions and public policies in Australia and New Zealand.
Communication between organisations has always been an important and beneficial form of collaboration. The interorganizational domain provides the setting for a mutual exchange of complementary competences with the prospect of building synergies if the collaboration is sufficiently wide-ranging and sustained.
Although largely overlooked in migration studies, understanding the secondand subsequent immigrant generations is critical to a comprehensive analysis of the migration process. The current policy and practice of diversity management in countries of immigration tends to be heavily focused on the settlement of new migrants.
In less than a decade the research focus and policy interest in the area of work and family has dramatically intensified in Australia. There is now a plethora of research on work and family emanating from a variety of social science disciplines, including industrial relations, political science, the law, sociology and health.
The Workshop on Gender, Socialism and Globalization in Contemporary Vietnam and China addressed the issues concerning the relationship between gender relations, the state and globalization in two East Asian socialist societies undergoing market liberalization.
In the last decade, debates over the shape and future of Australian education have been frustratingly parochial and inward looking – focusing almost exclusively on issues of funding and standards, marketisation and accountability, and the production of human capital.
The objective of the workshop is to raise issues, formalise the issues as questions, critique and debate the ways in which the practical applications of social capital may be useful in (a) conceiving the notion of persistent poverty in contemporary societies, (b) refining the focus of the conceptions around the contributions that notions of social capital and social exclusion can provide when analysing issues of poverty and deprivation in remote areas with high concentration of Indigenous Australians and (c) formulating researchable scenarios for testing ‘solutions’ to the problem.
The topic of occupational stress is a particularly apposite one for Australia in the early 21st Century. The nature of occupations and the social and inter-personal structures within which many occupations are carried out are undergoing rapid and sometimes dramatic change.
In the 1950s and 1960s as globalisation accelerated, the mantra of the developing Asian countries was industrialisation, which was identified with modernisation. The modern state was an industrial state where governments were able to incorporate and transform peasant sectors and contain uneven development.
In the considerable increase in interest in non-metropolitan Australia in recent years the focus of attention has been on the economic and environmental sustainability of the areas outside of the nations major cities.
As we enter the 21st century, the Asia-Pacific region is faced by a widespread expression of micronationalist and local religious movements, in the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea (Bougainville), Indonesia (Halmahera, West Papua, East Timor and elsewhere), the Philippines, among the most newsworthy.
The workshop examined the historical bases, current debates and emerging issues surrounding the concepts of ‘mutual obligation’, ‘dependence’ and ‘community’ as embedded in welfare discourse and practice in Australia and other western liberal democracies.
For more information contact:
Zoe Perry
Email: Zoe.Perry@socialsciences.org.au
Phone: (02) 6249 1788