Antipodean Aesthetics, Public Policy and the Museum: Te Papa, for example

The Museum of New Zealand–Te Papa Tongarewa has proved a complex cultural site that has generated much public debate and a growing academic literature. This article departs from critical approaches that resolve the analysis of this museum by pointing up its programmatic inconsistencies, internal contradictions, representational inadequacies or its institutional paradoxes. Rather than establishing Te Papa as an object for reform the author reads it as an archive for reflection on the cultural predicament of an antipodean modernity

A history of New Year’s Eve, Sydney : from ‘the crowd’ to ‘crowded places’

This article presents a history of Sydney's New Year's Eve event. First established when a crowd gathered outside Sydney's General Post Office in 1897 to celebrate the inauguration of International Standard Time, in more recent years it has evolved into a signature event on the city's calendar, drawing in excess of 1 million people into the Central Business District in a spectacular celebration of the global city. For those authorities charged with managing the event an enduring problem concerns the question of security: how is the aggregate of human bodies that gather to be governed in ways that secure it from the risks it presents: be they risks to public order (riot), to the crowd itself (panic), or external to it (terror attack) or to the population (viral spread)? This article maps how crowds have been thought as objects of government in relation to the New Year’s Eve event

Morale and Mass Observation: Governing the Affective Atmosphere on the Home-Front

This paper focuses on Mass Observation (MO)’s morale work, commissioned by the British Government over the period 1939–41. It examines the ways in which MO’s earlier collecting practices were recomposed through its research into civilian morale, and linked up with national centres of calculation, in particular the Ministry of Information (MoI). We explore the associations through which civilian morale was established, simultaneously, as an autonomous object of knowledge and as a particular field of intervention. As an object of knowledge, morale posited the existence of a dynamic affective ‘atmosphere’ associated with collective everyday life, which could be calibrated through various social scientific methods. As a particular field of intervention, technicians of morale postulated that this atmosphere might be regulated through various policy instruments. This paper traces the ways in which MO practices were implicated along these two axes in the emergence of civilian morale as a domain warranting the state’s ‘constant attention and supervision’

Biomarkers of Nutrition for Development (BOND)—Iron Review

This is the fifth in the series of reviews developed as part of the Biomarkers of Nutrition for Development (BOND) program. The BOND Iron Expert Panel (I-EP) reviewed the extant knowledge regarding iron biology, public health implications, and the relative usefulness of currently available biomarkers of iron status from deficiency to overload. Approaches to assessing intake, including bioavailability, are also covered. The report also covers technical and laboratory considerations for the use of available biomarkers of iron status, and concludes with a description of research priorities along with a brief discussion of new biomarkers with potential for use across the spectrum of activities related to the study of iron in human health. The I-EP concluded that current iron biomarkers are reliable for accurately assessing many aspects of iron nutrition. However, a clear distinction is made between the relative strengths of biomarkers to assess hematological consequences of iron deficiency versus other putative functional outcomes, particularly the relationship between maternal and fetal iron status during pregnancy, birth outcomes, and infant cognitive, motor and emotional development. The I-EP also highlighted the importance of considering the confounding effects of inflammation and infection on the interpretation of iron biomarker results, as well as the impact of life stage. Finally, alternative approaches to the evaluation of the risk for nutritional iron overload at the population level are presented, because the currently designated upper limits for the biomarker generally employed (serum ferritin) may not differentiate between true iron overload and the effects of subclinical inflammation

Antipodean aesthetics, public policy and the museum : Te Papa, for example

The Museum of New Zealand–Te Papa Tongarewa has proved a complex cultural site that has generated much public debate and a growing academic literature. This article departs from critical approaches that resolve the analysis of this museum by pointing up its programmatic inconsistencies, internal contradictions, representational inadequacies or its institutional paradoxes. Rather than establishing Te Papa as an object for reform the author reads it as an archive for reflection on the cultural predicament of an antipodean modernity

The museum's redemption : contact zones, government and the limits of reform

Despite a history deeply implicated in an imperial, bourgeois and phallocentric social order, the museum is a cultural institution that can be redeemed from this legacy of racism, classism and sexism. Or so it would seem from reading the now burgeoning critical scholarship on museums. Here, almost all of the museum’s analysts argue that, in some way or another, the institution can be reformed so that it can overcome the exclusions of the past and realize its true democratic vocation. Seduced by the institution’s own rhetoric of its democratic potential, these cultural analysts produce redemptive narratives that ultimately mimic the reformism of the museum’s own political logic. Defending this contention, this article proceeds, first, by demonstrating the persistence of this redemptive narrative as an enduring trope in critical museum scholarship; second, it focuses on two sophisticated variations on this narrative - those articulated respectively by James Clifford and Tony Bennett. Third, drawing on Foucault’s work on subjectivation, this article proposes a critical politics that returns to museums not with the demand that they better represent ‘us’ so that ‘we’ can finally ‘discover who we are’, but rather with the theoretical and political injunction that, as modern institutional sites that subjectivize subjects, museums are one of those key cultural loci where ‘we’ might, indeed must, ‘refuse what we are’