Japanese Popular Prints: From Votive Slips to Playing Cards

The rationale for this book was to expose to a western audience artefacts made using woodblock which are largely unknown outside Japan. The western definition and knowledge of Japanese woodblock is fairly narrowly focused on ukiyo-e and knowledge of other areas is limited. I chose to make the definition as broad as possible to allow for a selection of objects which would be unusual and challenging even for a Japanese audience. The provision of a cultural context to the selected objects was fundamental to the project. Research began with secondary English sources which were extremely limited as this subject has never been covered before. Japanese secondary sources provided extensive background information however in many areas it was insufficient to provide adequate analysis of the objects and their uses. Several research trips to Japan were required to conduct interviews with both practitioners and collectors to complete the investigation of the artefacts. Picture research was particularly challenging due to the ephemeral nature of the objects of research. Due to their perceived lack of cultural status, few collections exist and indeed very few examples survive. I sourced examples from public and private collections in Japan, Germany, Holland, the United Kingdom and the United States of America

Surface bundles over surfaces with arbitrarily many fiberings

In this paper we give the first example of a surface bundle over a surface with at least three fiberings. In fact, for each $n \ge 3$ we construct $4$-manifolds $E$ admitting at least $n$ distinct fiberings $p_i: E \to \Sigma_{g_i}$ as a surface bundle over a surface with base and fiber both closed surfaces of negative Euler characteristic. We give examples of surface bundles admitting multiple fiberings for which the monodromy representation has image in the Torelli group, showing the necessity of all of the assumptions made in the main theorem of our recent paper [arXiv:1404.0066]. Our examples show that the number of surface bundle structures that can be realized on a $4$-manifold $E$ with Euler characteristic $d$ grows exponentially with $d$.Comment: This version contains the same text as the published versio

Building resistance to the ‘GERM’: Discourse Theory, Discursive Struggle and the ‘teacher’ subject position

In April 2013 the NZEI (New Zealand Educational Institute), the trade union which provides representation and advocacy to around 50,000 primary and ECE teachers and support staff, mobilized around 8,000 of its members and sympathizers in coordinated protest marches across the country. Promotion posters for the rally emphasized not the stalled collective agreement negotiations, but concern “about the impact the Government’s education policies are having on children and their learning” (NZEI, 2013). The NZEI’s ‘Stand Up For Kids: Protect Our Schools’ campaign site (http://www.standupforkids.org.nz/g-e-r-m/) characterizes the government’s reform programme as part of the GERM; the Global Education Reform Movement, a term coined by the Finnish education expert Pasi Sahlberg (Sahlberg, 2013). The NZEI’s web-page contains an illustration image of the ‘GERM’ as an actual germ, a ghoulish monster dripping with slime and significantly carrying a briefcase, together with a dichotomized outline of the two sides of the debate from Sahlberg’s blog; ‘Standardization’ versus ‘Personalized Learning’, ‘Competition’ versus ‘Collaboration’ etc. Utilizing concepts from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Discourse Theory (Laclau & Mouffe 1985; Laclau 1990, 2005), this PhD study, as yet in its early stages, will aim to theorize the ‘Stand Up For Kids: Protect Our Schools’ campaign as a hegemonic, or discursive struggle, which discursively constructs an ‘antagonistic frontier’ with a ‘constitutive outside’ in the GERM. ‘Empty signifiers’ such as ‘Teacher’, ‘School’ and ‘Kids’ become the discursive space where the two articulations compete to attain objectivity; relatively stable ‘common-sense’ understandings, while at the same time constituting antagonistic identities on both sides of the argument. [From the Introduction

Closing Remarks

This closing remark conatins the text of John Salter\u27s speech closing the conference organized by the Human Rights Institute to commemorate the Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration of the International Bar Association

Journalism in the Academy, a MacIntyean account of the institutions and practices of journalism education in England

This paper to considers some of the systematic problems and constraints faced by academics teaching and researching in the field of journalism and journalism studies. To do this, I draw on MacIntyre’s philosophical concept of practice, applying it to the practice of journalism and the practice of academia, which I argue here have many commonalities. This conceptualisation of the practical activities of journalists and academics also takes account of their factual dependence on institutions. MacIntyre argues that although institutions should be considered to be necessary, in bureaucratic capitalist social systems they tend to pursue external goods at the cost of the goods internal to the practice. Practices thus become corrupted as institutions orient them to the pursuit of external goods. I argue that both journalists and academics are subject to similar processes of institutional domination, or colonisation, and that because of this, the capacity study, teach, and then practice a critical journalism adequate to a properly democratic community is stymied. The most significant problem on this analysis is that processes of colonisation are not discrete, they are systematic, extensive and commonly experienced. Consequently it is inadequate to consider discrete forms of resistance to these problems and constraints. Instead, I argue, we must consider common and collective forms of resistance

Neoliberalization, media, and union resistance : identity struggles in New Zealand education 1984-2014 : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree in Doctor of Philosophy in Communication and Journalism at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand

On 13 April 2013, New Zealand’s primary teachers union the New Zealand Educational Institute (NZEI) organized protests across the country, attended by approximately 10,000 members and sympathisers. Protesters held aloft two-sided placards – on one side read “Stand Up For Kids, Save Our Schools” and on the other a grotesque cartoon figure accompanied “Fight the GERM”. The GERM stood for the Global Education Reform Movement and was intended to represent the policy programme of the Government as a threat to New Zealand’s “world class” public education system. Following the launch of their flagship National Standards policy in October 2009, the governing National Party had become involved in a series of struggles with teachers, schools and their unions, contributing to the splitting of the discursive landscape into two antagonistically opposed sides. This situation was then intensified by the introduction of two more controversial policies without sector-consultation: charter schools and an increase to class size ratios. This thesis aims to investigate the underlying discursive ground structuring the three policies. By doing so, it aims to uncover the logics behind them, addressing such questions as why would the National Party, already scarred by previous battles with a powerful and relatively unified education sector, seek to implement policies on the premise that schools were failing the nation and that many teachers were not doing their jobs properly? And, conversely, why would the NZEI seek to represent the Government’s policy agenda through this combative frame? I demonstrate that the three policies, while divergent from each other, are distinctly neoliberal; each emphasizing diverse, overlapping facets of education within neoliberal governance, by setting them within a context of two previous decades of the neoliberalization of education in Aotearoa New Zealand. By employing the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau, the Government’s and the union’s mediated framings of the policies are understood as a series of interlinked but contingent discursive struggles to fix meaning. Both sides employ a populist articulatory logic, which constructs different symbolic enemies, in order to attempt to make their version of events hegemonic. Through an analysis of diverse texts such as policy documents, speeches, newspaper editorials, blogs and interviews with activists, I argue that definitions of three subject-positions, together with the relations between them, were integral to this struggle: the teacher, the parent and the student. While neoliberal discourse progressively colonized these identities with individualistic, self-centred traits that emphasised entrepreneurial capacities, articulations of a holistic educational ethos contested these meanings, instead emphasising an ethics of care, humanism, democracy, justice, fairness and collectivity. In other words, the level of the subject provided the limits to neoliberal discourse, providing a place of continuous disconnect