Rock Art Pilot Project Main Report

A report on the results of a pilot project to investigate the current state of research, conservation, management and presentation of prehistoric rock art in England commissioned by English Heritage from Archaeology Group, School of Conservation Sciences, Bournemouth Unviersity and the Institute of Archaeology, University College Londo

Personal and societal attitudes to disability

The research addresses theoretical and conceptual frameworks dealing with the formation and change of attitudes, cognitive dissonance, positive and negative prejudice, the concept of "spread", overt and covert attitudes and their formation, and the nexus between attitudes and behavior toward disability. Two attitude scales - the interaction with disabled persons and the scale of attitudes toward disabled persons - are reviewed and results of two studies are presented. Major findings are that it is easier to change societal attitudes than personal attitudes. Additionally, the use of contact with a person with a disability was more efficacious in changing attitudes than only information provision. Implications for the practice of hospitality and tourism management service provision are discussed. © 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Queering Australian Museums: Management, Collections, Exhibitions, and Connections

Queering Australian Museums addresses the problem of how queer or LGBTIQ communities can be further included in Australian museums on their own terms. It looks at four areas of museums—management, collections, exhibitions, and connections with audiences and communities—to consider barriers and enablers of queer inclusion in these often heteronormative institutions. Case studies of queer-inclusive efforts in public Australian museums are interpreted from institutional and community perspectives drawn from 25 interviews. The interviews are put into critical conversation with archival material and literature from museum studies and the emerging field of queer museology. The study evaluates the visibility of the history, cultures, and identities of queer communities in Australian museums. It establishes that many public representations of queerness have been driven by the efforts of LGBTIQ communities, particularly through community-based heritage organisations. It also gathers and reflects upon examples of critical queer inclusion that have occurred in public museums. Using these exemplars, it argues that queer communities should be empowered to make decisions about their own heritage with the support of museums and their unique attributes; that individual and organisational leadership, involving queer individuals and allies, should be brought to bear on this task; and that effectively navigating the tensions between museums and queer communities requires mutual understanding and accommodation. Through the process of queering the museum, it is suggested, each party might be transformed, leading to LGBTIQ diversity being valued as an integral part of society. The thesis addresses the gap in Australian museum studies literature on queer or LGBTIQ inclusion compared with Euro-American settings. It further contributes original case studies to the international field of queer museology, and to museum studies literature on including and empowering diverse communities. Both recognising the agency of queer communities and also engaging with the language and conventions of museums, it constructs a distinct account of how to navigate the historical tensions between the two. It thereby aims to enrich museum offerings for all audiences on the terms of those erstwhile excluded

Indigenous Invisibility in the City

"Indigenous Invisibility in the City contextualises the significant social change in Indigenous life circumstances and resurgence that came out of social movements in cities. It is about Indigenous resurgence and community development by First Nations people for First Nations people in cities. Seventy-five years ago, First Nations peoples began a significant post-war period of relocation to cities in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand. First Nations peoples engaged in projects of resurgence and community development in the cities of the four settler states. First Nations peoples, who were motivated by aspirations for autonomy and empowerment, went on to create the foundations of Indigenous social infrastructure. This book explains the ways First Nations people in cities created and took control of their own futures. A fact largely wilfully ignored in policy contexts. Today, differences exist over the way governments and First Nations peoples see the role and responsibilities of Indigenous institutions in cities. What remains hidden in plain sight is their societal function as a social and political apparatus through which much of the social processes of Indigenous resurgence and community development in cities occurred. The struggle for self-determination in settler cities plays out through First Nations people’s efforts to sustain their own institutions and resurgence, but also rights and recognition in cities. This book will be of interest to Indigenous studies scholars, urban sociologists, urban political scientists, urban studies scholars, and development studies scholars interested in urban issues and community building and development.

Faith-based charity and professional ambition in the life of Charles Gordon O'Neill (1828-1900)

This translocational biography provides an interpretation of the life of Catholic philanthropist, colonial parliamentarian and civil engineer Charles Gordon O’Neill (1828-1900). Focusing on the two most significant elements in his life, commitment to faith-based charity and professional ambition in pursuit of an empire career in civil engineering, it also examines the balance between O’Neill’s Irish Catholic and British identities. Covering O’Neill’s life in Victorian Scotland (1828-1863), colonial New Zealand (1864-1880) and pre-Federation New South Wales (1881-1900), the biography traces the sequence and patterns of these two respective elements through a broadly chronological theme-based historiography. This biography analyses O’Neill’s greatest professional achievements, particularly in New Zealand in such endeavours as town planning, and railways and tramways development. It also reveals his prescient environmental concerns, through his promotion of forest conservation and the advocacy of global forest-climate connection in the New Zealand Parliament between 1868 and 1874. Of more enduring memory was O’Neill’s commitment to faith-based charity through his pioneering of the St Vincent de Paul Society in all three societies. The defining moment of his life was to embrace a faith-based mission to the Australian colonies beginning in 1880, leading to the establishment of the St Vincent de Paul Society in New South Wales. The growth of the Society’s outdoor relief for the poor in Sydney owed much to the expertise O’Neill gained previously in Glasgow and Wellington. The thesis explains the Catholic religious influences that transformed O’Neill into a pioneer of non-intrusive charity during the 1880s. A key theme, examining three cycles of the vicissitudes of O’Neill’s life, reveals the pattern of fusion and fragmentation of the two elements of commitment to faith-based charity and professional ambition. The thesis concludes with a brief thanatography and analysis of subsequent hagiographic interpretations of O’Neill’s life that had ended with a final submission in faith

Exploring a coastal lawscape : a legal geography of coastal climate change adaptation in two New South Wales localities

As the world is reshaped by global warming, both private and public actors must adapt to environmental changes in coastal localities. Coastlines are already experiencing significant impacts from climate change including an increase in floods and coastal storms and continuing coastal erosion. The central project of this dissertation is to understand how climate change adaptation strategies are framed by different policies and laws, how these strategies are negotiated by the relationships between local councils, state policy and private property owners, and by cultural understandings of property, climate change and the material environment. This dissertation undertakes empirical research in two coastal localities where there has been significant debate and contestation over how climate change adaptation measures are to be implemented. It describes and analyses relevant land use planning law and common law doctrines designed to respond to changes in private property title for waterfront property. It argues that government climate change adaptation policies and regulations ought not to disproportionally benefit private parties who own coastal property, notwithstanding significant social, cultural, political and economic pressures on public authorities to protect private property investments. In addition, the dissertation argues that coastal climate change adaptation ought to take into account the interplay between a variety of interests and factors to advance knowledge of the relationships between private interests and political actors, and of the ways in which these groups utilise existing laws, policies and discourses of property to shape adaptation outcomes. This dissertation is interdisciplinary and adopts a range of social research methods to explore a legal geography of coastal climate change adaptation including qualitative research, document analysis, and legal analysis, insofar as the latter informs the sociality of law. The rationale for the research design is to ensure a relational view of law, property and place, and as between persons and interests in coastal climate change adaptation. The dissertation makes three key findings. First, coastal management laws in New South Wales have sought to take account of the many competing interests in the coast, with several iterations of law reform. By adapting such reforms to allow for mechanisms such as rolling easements, law remains a potential enabler of climate change adaptation. Second, the dissertation shows that discourses of private property, which have dominated Australian land use planning since the formation of the state, have underpinned governmental responses to climate change. This has impeded the effectiveness of land use planning as a tool to facilitate climate change adaptation. This undermining of land use planning is evidenced by tensions between expert discourse and political expediency, and is justified by rationalising decision-making with reference to fears of potential legal liability for land use planning and development decisions. Third, informing residents’ engagement with climate change adaptation policy are perspectives of property as an asset and instances of place attachment, underpinned by perceptions of environmental change and climate impacts. Residents in both localities express desires for regulatory intervention in protecting their own properties from climate impacts, but favoured no intervention in the provision of broader coastal protections. This disjunct is, in some instances, underpinned by ‘Not In My Back Yard’ (NIMBY) attitudes toward sea level rise. Ultimately, the dissertation finds that coastal climate change adaptation is complicated by multiple factors: the challenges of applying uniform laws in dynamic physical environments; varied interpretations of the same laws in different localities; social power and the use of litigation to enforce that power; and the ways in which governments frame and perpetuate cultural property discourses where these discourses prioritise private property rights. This dissertation demonstrates that exploring the interplay between these factors can contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between law, people, governments, property and the coast—a relationship that can be usefully categorised as a ‘coastal lawscape’. In doing so, the dissertation contributes to both legal geography scholarship and to the understanding of the drivers of, and barriers to, climate change adaptation

Constructing Ionian identities: the Ionian Islands in British official discourses; 1815-1864

Utilising material such as colonial correspondence, private papers, parliamentary debates and the press, this thesis examines how the Ionian Islands were defined by British politicians and how this influenced various forms of rule in the Islands between 1815 and 1864. It explores the articulation of particular forms of colonial subjectivities for the Ionian people by colonial governors and officials. This is set in the context of political reforms that occurred in Britain and the Empire during the first half of the nineteenth-century, especially in the white settler colonies, such as Canada and Australia. It reveals how British understandings of Ionian peoples led to complex negotiations of otherness, informing the development of varieties of colonial rule. Britain suggested a variety of forms of government for the Ionians ranging from authoritarian (during the governorships of T. Maitland, H. Douglas, H. Ward, J. Young, H. Storks) to representative (under Lord Nugent, and Lord Seaton), to responsible government (under W. Gladstone’s tenure in office). All these attempted solutions (over fifty years) failed to make the Ionian Islands governable for Britain. The Ionian Protectorate was a failed colonial experiment in Europe, highlighting the difficulties of governing white, Christian Europeans within a colonial framework

Humanities Research Centre

Humanities; Research; Histor