Faculty of Education - Research Publications
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ItemWar on terror: the dilemma of Guantanamo Bay( 2004)David Hicks will stand trial before a United States military commission in January 2005. Having been detained in Guantanamo Bay (‘Gitmo’ in US military slang) for nearly three years as an ‘enemy combatant’, he will have his day in court to face charges of conspiracy to commit war crimes, attempted murder by an unprivileged belligerent and aiding the enemy. It will not, however, be a court familiar to Australian citizens. Common law rules of evidence will not apply. The counsel appearing for the accused will be assigned from the military. The judgement will be delivered by military personnel. There will be no avenues of appeal to a non-military court. An agreement has been reached between the Australian and US governments that, in the case of Hicks, the death penalty will not be considered and the hearing will be open; it is not known if these concessions will apply to those detainees whose governments have not reached such agreements with the US. Even before the trial process begins, Hicks’ family and lawyers are claiming that he has been subjected to physical and mental abuse while being detained and interrogated. The facts of the alleged abuse are open to debate, what is not is that he was held for more than two and a half years before being charged. Clearly, prosecuting a War on Terror creates rights predicaments beyond even those evidenced in twentieth century guerrilla warfare; the human rights vacuum created at Gitmo is a direct consequence of the refusal of the current US administration to acknowledge the importance of these dilemmas.
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ItemDoes curriculum matter?: revisiting access and women's rights to education in the context of the UN Millenium Development Targets(Sage, 2006-03)This article discusses the relevance of curriculum to current UN Millenium targets to extend access to education and equality in education for women. It argues firstly, that it is contradictory to be concerned about women’s access to education but leave curriculum out of the discussion; secondly, that curriculum is not adequately seen as a choice between imposing new universal values or leaving cultural traditions untouched, but is about choices within a situation where cultural traditions are neither untouched nor monolithic; and thirdly that attention to who speaks and who is heard in developing and assessing new practices remains important in any initiatives to extend education rights for women.This article has been published in Theory and Research in Education, Vol. 4, No. 1, 85-99 (2006) ) and is available to subscribers in both print and online formats.
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ItemAssuming responsibility in the hope of reconciliation( 2004)Agamben insists that the concept of responsibility is ‘irremediably contaminated by law’, arguing instead for an ethical conception of non-responsibility that entails ‘a confrontation with a responsibility that is infinitely greater than we could ever assume’. Against Agamben, I argue that the assumption of responsibility should be understood primarily neither in legal or ethical but political terms. Drawing on Ricoeur and Arendt, I suggest a political conception of responsibility as a responsiveness to the fragility of polity. As a political undertaking, assuming responsibility in the hope of reconciliation would mean not taking for granted the possibility of reconciliation. Rather, it would be predicated on an awareness of the political nature of the terms on which reconciliation might be realised and of the contingency of the reconciled community that is hoped for. Rather than seeking to "settle accounts" in order to ‘restore’ community, assuming responsibility would mean committing to an open-ended and agonistic interaction in the hope of realising a community that is not so much always to come as a fragile possibility of the present political moment.
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ItemPolitical Big Brother site masks curious agenda(australia.internet.com, 2001)Outlines some of the interesting characteristics of political campaigning aimed at youth in the 2001 Australian federal election using online webpages.
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ItemRealtime interviewing using the World Wide Web(Universities of Surrey and Stirling, Sage Publications Ltd. and the British Sociological Association, 1999)This paper outlines the adaptation of in-depth interviewing using World Wide Web-based interviewing software between the interviewer and their subject. Through a structured, realtime interviewing process the researcher is able to use the Internet to facilitate communication, recording interviews directly to a file without incurring the costs associated with traditional face-to-face or telephone interviews. The benefits of this approach are the ability of the researcher to conduct inexpensive interviewing over distances and elimination of transcription costs from the research process, allowing the researcher to undertake a wider range of interviews than may be possible on a limited budget. The interview method has problems associated with the depth of material available from this approach, the loss of paralinguistic cues and the limited size of the available sample, limitations that must be accounted for by any researcher considering using the approach