Australian Eclecticism and Theorizing in Information Systems Research

explains a variety of IS research approaches found in Australia, and relates them the the history of IS research and teaching in Australia, and to Australian culture in genera

Toward using an oxidatively damaged plasmid as an intra- and inter-laboratory standard for ancient DNA studies

The following paper was originally presented by Dr Thomas H. Loy at the 6th International Conference on Ancient DNA and Associated Biomolecules held in Israel, July 2002. It is included here with editorial and formatting changes with the intention of demonstrating the passion and lateral thinking that underpinned Tomï½s approach to the field of Molecular Archaeology. The paper represents research from three honours projects conducted during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Building a modern model for ancient DNA that could be used during routine procedures was a concept that Tom had long held as an important step forward for the burgeoning discipline. With the equipment and technology that was available at the time, the Damaged Plasmid Model concept was completely viable and worthy of detailed validation. As with all historical accounts, an understanding of more recent developments in molecular techniques and equipment will highlight the need for considerable optimisation of the model before it can be used as an interlaboratory standard for ancient DN

Global Thought, Local Action: Australian Activism during the Vietnam War 1961-1972

This thesis is a history of protest practice in Australia during the ‘long 1960s’. It begins with the coordinated protests against nuclear proliferation in the eastern states in 1961 and 1962, and ends with the Vietnam Moratorium Campaigns. It examines the intersections between anti-war and anti-conscription protest, the anti-nuclear campaigns of the early 1960s, and the anti-Apartheid protests that emerged during the 1971 South African rugby team tour of Australia. Rather than offering a history of Australian activism as an organisational network or monolithic, homogenous ‘movement,’ it treats protest as an exercise in political meaning-making, and traces the development of protest practice over time. This focus contests the characterisation of the arrival of the New Left in Australia after 1966 as a watershed or moment of rupture, and draws out long-term continuities in Australian activism. It also provides for an analysis of the transnational influences on Australian protesters without falling into the contemporary trap of labelling protest derivative. This methodological approach reveals that Australian protesters in the Vietnam epoch shifted between two major ideological explanations for their protest. One framed protest as a representative activity on behalf of an imagined Australian public, on behalf of whom protesters critiqued government policy and held the government to account. Protest organisations attempted to position themselves as representatives of the public, and used public opinion to legitimate their ideas. By contrast, liberalism’s concentration on individual sovereign rights especially nourished anti-conscription activists, whose protests made much of the principle of non-interference in the private lives of citizens as a foundational model of citizenship. This thesis will chart the development and evolution of these two explanations of protest, their interactions and fusions. Through their careful articulation of protest as a democratic process and an individual right, and their sustained presence in public conversations about commitment and conscription, Australian protesters helped to change the meaning of the Vietnam War in Australian public political life