Melbourne Graduate School of Education - Research Publications

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    What does 'significance' look like? Assessing the assessment process in competitive grants schemes
    Yates, L. (Australian Association for Research in Education, 2006)
    This paper focuses on the writer’s experiences from 2002-2004 as the sole Education member of the Australian Research Council committee that assesses applications across the ‘social, behavioural and economic sciences’. It is drawn from a wider analysis of how judgments about research quality are produced across different spheres of education research activity, drawing particular attention to the characteristics of those who judge, their explicit and implicit criteria, and the textual markers of ‘quality’ that they work with. The article conside rs how the explicit categories for scoring; the characteristics of those appointed to the committee; the histo ry of dominant research traditions, and a slippage between the categories ‘significance’, ‘national benefit’ and ‘national research priorities’ all influence the judgments and scores that eventuate from assessors and pro duce the final rankings.
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    Islamic religious education and the debate on itsreform post-September 11
    SAEED, ABDULLAH (University of New South Wales Press, 2005)
    The place of Islam and Muslims in the West has been a source of much debate in the post-September 11 era, not least in the area of Islamic education – an area seen by some Western commentators as a major source of anti-Western attitudes, and a breeding ground for terrorism. Such simplistic views of Islamic religious educational systems and institutions ignore the complex history of Islamic education and the diverse forms that it has taken across different times, places and cultures. This chapter from the book Islam and the West: Reflections from Australia explores the development of Islamic religious education over time, tracing its growth and decline in the pre-modern period and moves towards reform in the modern era. This is followed by a discussion of the generally simplistic perception, held particularly among Western commentators post-September 11, 2001, that Islamic religious education is closely linked to terrorism. Saeed notes that the hijackers involved in the 2001 attacks were not graduates of traditional Islamic education, a fact overlooked by many commentators. Although many prominent Muslim academics and scholars have been working to reform Islamic education over the past century, Saeed argues that these efforts may well have been hindered rather than helped by the authoritarian and coercive forms of reform which are being called for by some commentators in the West. In fact, the war on terror may well be the biggest stumbling block to the reform of Islamic religious education.
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    A deal at any cost
    CAPLING, ANN (University of New South Wales Press, 2005)
    Spells out the unanswered questions about the Australia–US FTA. What are the implications of the Howard government’s linking of trade and security? How will the trade agreement affect relations with our other major trade partners, especially those in the East Asian region? Will the Australia–US trade agreement strengthen our ties with the United States, leading to deeper economic integration and more investment and jobs in Australia, or will it diminish our capacity to provide social programs that reflect particularly Australian values?
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    Reconciliation and politics
    Schaap, Andrew (Routledge, 2005)
    Since the end of the Cold War, the concept of reconciliation has emerged as a central term of political discourse within societies divided by a history of political violence. Reconciliation has been promoted as a way of reckoning with the legacy of past wrongs while opening the way for community in the future. This book examines the issues of transitional justice in the context of contemporary debates in political theory concerning the nature of 'the political'. Bringing together research on transitional justice and political theory, the author argues that if we are to talk of reconciliation in politics we need to think about it in a fundamentally different way than is commonly presupposed; as agonistic rather than restorative.
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    Introduction
    HOLMES, LESLIE (Duke University Press, 2006)
    Official corruption has become increasingly prevalent around the world since the early 1990s. The situation appears to be particularly acute in the post-communist states. Corruption — be it real or perceived — is a major problem with concrete implications, including a lowered likelihood of foreign investment. In Rotten States? Leslie Holmes analyzes corruption in post-communist countries, paying particular attention to Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Russia, as well as China, which Holmes argues has produced, through its recent economic liberalization, a system similar to post-communism. As he points out, these countries offer useful comparisons: they vary in terms of size, religious orientation, ethnic homogeneity, and their approaches to and economic success with the transition from communism.Drawing on data including surveys commissioned especially for this study, Holmes examines the causes and consequences of official corruption as well as ways of combating it. He focuses particular attention on the timing of the recent increase in reports of corruption, the relationship between post-communism and corruption, and the interplay between corruption and the delegitimation and weakening of the state. Holmes argues that the global turn toward neoliberalism — with its focus on ends over means, flexibility, and a reduced role for the state — has generated much of the corruption in post-communist states. At the same time, he points out that neoliberalism is perhaps the single most powerful tool for overcoming the communist legacy, which is an even more significant cause of corruption. Among the conclusions that Holmes draws is that a strong democratic state is needed in the early stages of the transition from communism in order to prevent corruption from taking hold.
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    Movements and globalization
    McDonald, Dr Kevin (Blackwell, 2006-01)
    The past decade has witnessed an extraordinary rise of new global movements that throw into question the way we think about culture, power, and action in a globalizing world. This book surveys the field and explores some of the most significant of these movements, including antiglobalization and the new Islamic movements. These movements require a rethinking of the very idea of social movement, a concept that owes a great deal to the civic and industrial culture that was so critical to Western modernity, but may be less adequate when exploring forms of culture, action, and communication in a globalized world. This book explores key dimensions of these movements, the tensions they confront, and the crises to which they are subject. It will provide an essential text for students on globalization and social movements.
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    Reconciliation
    Schaap, Andrew (Oxford University Press, 2006)
    Reconciliation emerged in the 1990s as a central term of political discourse in divided societies such as South Africa, Chile and Australia. Originating in theology, the concept of reconciliation is often criticised in politics for fostering acquiescence in social relations that are neither desirable nor necessary. As a state-sanctioned project, reconciliation is always in danger of becoming ideological in this sense. However, there is nothing inherently problematic about reconciliation as a term of political discourse as long as it is kept in view for being just that. As such, the concept expands the vocabulary in terms of which political actors can confront, debate and contest the most political of all questions: namely, the constitution of ‘the people’ from whose will the legitimacy of law is supposed to derive in a democracy.
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    Forgiveness, reconciliation and transitional justice
    Schaap, Andrew (Palgrave, 2005)
    In this chapter, I develop an Arendtian account of political forgiveness against the background of recent discussion about reconciliation and transitional justice within the study of international relations. I begin by reviewing the philosophical literature on the nature of personal forgiveness. I argue that forgiveness involves not only relinquishing a just claim against one who has wronged us but also setting aside resentment against one’s enemy. While it may not be possible to cease resenting the other as an act of will, it is possible to want to forgive and to seek grounds for setting aside resentment. I then consider what might constitute political grounds for forgiveness. Against the liberal and realist traditions of IR theory, I argue that neither necessity nor reason are adequate grounds for political forgiveness. For if a willingness to forgive depends on the dictates of necessity it is reduced to compromise whereas if it is conditional on having moral reasons it becomes redundant. Following Arendt, I argue that appropriate grounds for forgiveness in politics are, rather, the natality of the other and frailty of the world. Political forgiveness, on this account, does not refer to the closing moment of reconciliation in which wrongdoers are restored to community with those they have wronged. Rather, readiness to forgive makes possible a politics in which members of a divided polity contest each other’s understandings of the violence of the past and its significance for their political association. Drawing on this account of the political grounds for forgiveness, I consider the relation between amnesty and political forgiveness in the workings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. In the final section, I offer some speculations about the place of forgiveness in sustaining what John Williams (in this volume) refers to as the ‘international space in-between’.
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    Civil rights: how indigenous Australians won formal equality
    CHESTERMAN, J. (University of Queensland Press, 2005)
    Australians know very little about how Indigenous Australians came to gain the civil rights that other Australians had long taken for granted. One of the key reasons for this is the entrenched belief that civil rights were handed to Indigenous people and not won by them.In this book John Chesterman draws on government and other archival material from around the country to make a compelling case that Indigenous people, together with non-Indigenous supporters, did effectively agitate for civil rights, and that this activism, in conjunction with international pressure, led to legal reforms. Chesterman argues that these struggles have laid important foundations for future dealings between Indigenous people and Australian governments.
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    Enabling structures for coordinated action: community organizations, social capital, and rural community sustainability
    Barraket, Jo (University of British Columbia Press, 2005)
    Throughout Australia, as in other countries, rural communities are responding to the local effects of economic, political, and social restructuring. While federal and state governments have historically taken a “top down” regional economic development approach in this country, there is now a growing emphasis being placed on the role of local actors in achieving effective responses to community challenges across economic, social, and environmental indicators. The concept of social capital - which, drawing on Putnam, Leonardi, and Nanetti’s (1993, 167) definitions, constitutes “those features of social organisation, such as trust, norms, and networks, that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions” - has gained increasing popularity in policy discourses that seek to locate effective responses to global problems within local community.