‘PRi special edition: The intersections between public relations and neoliberalism’ – The road to nowhere: Re-examining activists’ role in civil societies

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1977) argued that the presence of critical counter-voices and powers is a fundamental element of any genuine democracy. However, in Australia these counter-voices are increasingly marginalized and threatened by controversial laws that would limit the legal standing of conservation groups and the use of overseas donations for advocacy purposes based on the argument that “systematic, well-funded” environmental campaigns are threatening the nation’s economic prosperity. Drawing on social movement theory and Bourdieu’s theory of practice, this case study details the final months of the Save Beeliar Wetlands campaign in the lead up to the 2017 West Australian state election. The author challenges three common assumptions in the extant PR activism literature: The existence of activists in opposition to organizations and governments, the presence of a ‘zone of compromise’ between activists and the organizations or governments whose actions they are opposing and the conceptualization of activists as homogenous entity. Evolving into a colorful collective of over 35 local groups, five local councils and thousands of individuals, Beeliar Wetland Defenders successfully created an alternative narrative to the State and Federal Governments’ neoliberal agenda. Activists thereby contributed significantly to a change in leadership and the termination of a $1.9billion infrastructure project. This paper argues that activist groups’ interventions in public debate perform a valuable societal voice as critical counter-voices in challenging established hierarchies and power relationships. However, in mounting and framing their arguments within the neoliberal framework, activist groups may also inadvertently reinforce this worldview

A late Quaternary vertebrate deposit in Kudjal Yolgah Cave, south-western Australia: refining regional late Pleistocene extinctions

We describe the stratigraphy and chronology of Kudjal Yolgah Cave in south-western Australia, a late Quaternary deposit pre- and post-dating regional human arrival and preserving fossils of extinct and extant fauna. Single-grain optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating shows that seven superposed units were deposited over the past 80 ka. Remains of 16 mammal species have been found at the site, all of them represented in Unit 7, for which seven OSL ages indicate accumulation between 80 and 41 ka. Single-grain OSL equivalent dose distribution patterns show no evidence of reworking of older or younger sediments into Unit 7, but late Holocene charcoal has been washed into the top of it from adjacent Unit 2, deposited 1.2 ka ago. Six species that failed to survive the Pleistocene are recorded in Unit 7, but only the south-western wombat Vombatus hacketti is recorded in younger units. Two species, the large extinct kangaroos Protemnodon sp. cf. P. roechus and Procoptodon browneorum, are represented by articulated specimens near the top of Unit 7, immediately adjacent to an OSL sediment sample dated to 41 ± 2 ka. These are the youngest reliably dated records of these genera from mainland Australia, and among the youngest megafaunal remains from the continent. All species currently known from the middle Pleistocene of the south-west persisted into the late Pleistocene, which removes a key pillar supporting the argument against a driving role for human impacts in the extinctions

Magnetic Resonance Techniques for Imaging White Matter

The white matter is a complex network of brain fibers connecting different information processing regions in the brain. In recent years, the investigation of white matter in humans and in animal models has greatly benefitted from the introduction of in vivo noninvasive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques. MRI allows for multiple in vivo time-point whole-brain acquisition in the same subject, thus it can be used longitudinally to monitor white matter brain change, intervention effects, as well as disease progression. However, MRI has low spatial resolution compared to gold standard cellular techniques and MRI measures are sensitive to a number of tissue properties resulting in a lack of specificity.The following chapter describes in simple technical terms to non-imaging experts some common MRI techniques that can be used to investigate white matter structure noninvasively, covering some of the advantages and pitfalls of each technique