Pleasure, profit and pain: Alcohol in New Zealand and the contemporary culture of intoxication

This book details the rich, complex and often contested role of alcohol in New Zealand society. It explores the three fundamental alcohol rights that continue to fight for dominance of the national drinking culture: the rights of individual drinkers to enjoy the pleasures of alcohol, the rights of society to protect itself from the harms of alcohol, and the rights of the alcohol industry to profit from the sale of a legal commodity. Historically, most of our intoxicated drinkers were adult males and drinking was typically separated from family, food and entertainment. With the sweeping social changes of the 1960s and 1970s, women and later young people, increasingly engaged with alcohol. A growing proportion of these groups have since joined men in a culture of intoxication, or binge drinking culture as it is often termed. New Zealand is not alone however, in having a culture of intoxication, with similar alcohol consumption patterns evident in many other developed nations. This book identifies the local and the global influences that have affected New Zealand society (and much of the rest of the world) since the late 1900s and details how these influences have sustained the contemporary culture of intoxication. Finally, this book will propose that to implement effective change to our national drinking culture, the rights of the alcohol industry and of individual drinkers will need to be pulled back from the liberal excesses that the 1980s and 1990s provided. A re-balancing is required in order to strengthen and sustain society’s right to protect itself from alcohol-related harm

Communications in education

The paper aims to provide evidence of the role of communications in education. The term communications is used in three interrelated ways: it refers to the interactions and engagements which take place between different actors in the education sector; it looks at the transmission of information, knowledge or data between two or more points; and it refers to the processes and means though which these interactions take place. The report identifies where communications in the education sector has been successful and some of its weaknesses. The paper focuses on spaces for communications in education, the processes of communications and the direct and indirect impacts of communications initiatives. It gives examples of a range of communication initiatives and provides evidence of impact, where available

Animacy in early New Zealand english

The literature suggests that animacy effects in present-day spoken New Zealand English (NZE) differ from animacy effects in other varieties of English. We seek to determine if such differences have a history in earlier NZE writing or not. We revisit two grammatical phenomena — progressives and genitives — that are well known to be sensitive to animacy effects, and we study these phenomena in corpora sampling 19th- and early 20th-century written NZE; for reference purposes, we also study parallel samples of 19th- and early 20th-century British English and American English. We indeed find significant regional differences between early New Zealand writing and the other varieties in terms of the effect that animacy has on the frequency and probabilities of grammatical phenomena

Honk against homophobia : rethinking relations between media and sexual minorities

The theory of “symbolic annihilation” or “symbolic violence” has been used in academic literature to describe the way in which sexual minorities have been ignored, trivialized, or condemned by the media. This article aims to de-center research from issues of media representation to consider the capacity for minority groups to proactively use new media and its various avenues for interactivity, social networking, and feedback to fight social exclusion. This work suggests that new media has become a space in which the nominally marginal in society may acquire “social artillery”—a term used to describe how sexual minorities utilize their expanding and more readily accessible social connections in digital space to combat instances of homophobia. The research draws on the results of an inquiry into the relation between media and a regional youth social justice group in Australia tackling homophobia. The research demonstrates that the group is becoming increasingly adept and comfortable with using a cross-section of media platforms to fulfill their own objectives, rather than seeing themselves as passive subjects of media representation. This article argues that this sets an example for other socially excluded groups looking to renegotiate their relation with the media in regional areas

The construction and form of modern cities: exploring identities and community

‘Urban historians’, we are told, are ‘obliged to be more eclectic’ than other scholars of the city. The volumes covered by this review certainly speak to the rich diversity of urban history making.* While the others can take a ‘well-defined disciplinary perspective’ – as sociologists, geographers, etc. – only we are expected to ‘study the interaction of the urban fabric on the social fabric’ in its ‘unique spatial setting’ across social, economic and political boundaries (and of course through time). This is a rhetoric – an ideal, perhaps – with which most of us, doubtless, are already familiar. But how does it translate into practice? In our everyday imperfect world of time constraints a nominal commitment to eclecticism can instead spawn specialization, and thus a lack of cross-disciplinary ‘cohesion’, so that the ‘umbrella’ of diversity instead becomes an agency for introversion. To be truly eclectic, therefore, presumably urban historians need to be not only better read (and/or brighter) than other academic colleagues, but also better resourced! Yet before we all rush to our respective departmental heads to make a claim, we need to ask, too, whether this declaration of eclecticism is little more than yet another ‘idealized’ story that we tell about ourselves: part of our identity, of how we would like to be seen, an affirmation of our self-view. Is it as ‘imagined’, for example, as other forms of identity – a construct to serve a purpose? Is it there to make us feel special, valued and privileged

Paper versus Electronic Sources for Law Review Cite Checking: Should Paper Be the Gold Standard?

Despite law students\u27 reliance on electronic sources for legal research, a survey confirmed that many journals make their staff members check authors\u27 citations against paper sources. Rumsey and Schwartz argue that the advent of image-based document collections should change this practice, making life easier for law students and law school librarians

The Fellowship of Reconciliation\u27s Propaganda and Theodora Wilson Wilson\u27s Literary Contribution 1914-1917

During World War I Theodora Wilson Wilson, who shortly before the war had returned to her ancestral Quaker faith, made a unique contribution to the Fellowship of Reconciliation\u27s (FOR) propaganda. Instead of the usual expository writings aimed at the well educated, she wrote simple stories directed at casual readers. They emphasised the kind of activity, \u27doing\u27, the FOR leadership had decided to curtail after an attempt at tramping in the Midlands in the summer of 1915 had resulted in a near riot. Her perspective reflected that of many Friends. Some very limited attention has been given to these stories, but their contexts have not been explored adequately. This essay attempts to correct this deficiency and provides insight into an important Quaker stream within the FOR

From local Creoles to global Creoles : insights from the Seychelles

In this paper, Seychellois society is discussed from the perspective of a small island society whose smallness and insulation in its early formation contributed to the emergence of a very distinctive type of creole culture and identity. This is symptomatic of other island creole societies in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean, which have been described as culturally hybrid populations, as a result of 17th-19th Century colonialism and slavery. Political connections between these societies have led to the construction of a wider creole identity, based on their shared history. More recently, these plantation types of creole societies have come to realise that they must share their creole identity more widely since, as a result of globalisation and the acceleration of migration, the metropoles of the world are becoming centres of creolisation in the sense of mixing and hybridity. Is this the same process that occurred in places like Seychelles and Martinique, and is this what is happening in Europe, with the advent of immigration from the Global South? Or, should the term ‘creolisation’ be reserved for a particular historical and sociocultural situation resulting from plantation slavery? In other words, is creolisation a global or localised phenomenon? Furthermore, can these new metropolitan centres of creolisation learn anything from the way small creole island states and territories have adapted to their social environment, or should they continue to be seen as the core from which modernity and progress flow to the periphery?peer-reviewe

Possibilities of quality enhancement in higher education by intensive use of information technology

Quality of higher education is a multi-dimensional concept. It lies in effectiveness of transmitting knowledge and skill; the authenticity, content, coverage and depth of information; availability of reading/teaching materials; help in removing obstacles to learning; applicability of knowledge in solving the real life problems; fruitfulness of knowledge in personal and social domains; convergence of content and variety of knowledge over space (countries and regions) and different sections of the people; cost-effectiveness and administrative efficiency. Information technology has progressed very fast in the last three decades; it has produced equipments at affordable cost and it has now made their wider application feasible. This technology has made search, gathering, dissemination, storing, retrieval, transmission and reception of knowledge easier, cheaper and faster. Side by side, a vast virtual library vying with the library in prints has emerged and continues growing rapidly. One may hold that the e-libraries are the libraries of tomorrow when the libraries in prints will be the antiques or the archival objects of the past. This paper discusses in details how information technology can be applied to enhance the quality of higher education at affordable cost. It also discusses the major obstacles to optimal utilization of information technology and measures to remove them.Information Technology; Quality in Higher Education; e-library; e-book; e-journal