资源民族主义或自由主义?——解析澳大利亚对中国矿业投资的态度

自2005年以来,中国火爆的矿业投资浪潮在澳大利亚铁矿石和煤炭开采部门掀起了新一轮的“矿业繁荣“。照理说这是个可喜的发展,但是,投资者是中国的国有企业,并且这种投资被认为是具有战略性质的,这两点引发了澳政府对其监管的担忧。2008年2月澳大利亚政府宣布欲对国有企业直接投资进行更严格的审查,该政策的支持者与反对者都认为:这是澳大利亚针对与中国的贸易投资活动所采取的“资源民族主义“行为。本文通过考察中国矿业直接投资的特点、澳大利亚政府所面临的困境及其相对克制的反应,驳斥了这一说法,并由此认为:澳大利亚的直接投资政策是针对中国国有企业潜在战略性行为所采取的防御措施,而不是将矿业贸易和投资置于政治控制下的国家计划。基于这一观点,本文认为澳大利亚的投资新政体现了“资源自由主义“,是为了确保中澳矿业贸易与投资管理的市场化

Inside Out Literacies: Learning About Literacy Learning with a Peer-Led Prison Reading Scheme

Since 1997, adult literacy education has been of increasing interest to UK policy makers amidst perceptions/claims of a causal relationship between attainment in literacy and positive economic participation, social inclusion, and life chance transformation. With further regard to the associations documented between low literacy attainment and participation in criminal activity (Morrisroe, 2014; Canton et al 2011), it is no surprise that literacy education is currently high on the UK government’s agenda for prison reform (Coates 2016). However, research in the field of Literacy Studies suggests that many prisoners who identify as beginner readers, report feeling alienated by formal education which, it is argued, is too often ‘done to them’ (Wilson 2007:192) failing to take sufficient account of the social identities learners bring to their learning or how they want to use literacy to bring about change in their lives. This has resulted in deficit models of the prisoner as learner that impose ‘spoiled educational identities’ and fail to engage prisoners as active, agentic participants in their learning. In this paper, we draw on data produced in the qualitative phase of a year long study across the English prison estate of Shannon Trust’s prison based reading plan, to explore alternative approaches to prison literacy education that challenge the traditions of formal education and put learner identity and aspiration at the heart of the beginner reader learning process. The qualitative phase of the project involved twelve focus groups across eight prison settings and included 20 learner and 37 mentor participants engaged in the Shannon Trust peer-reading programme. We listen closely to the voices of learners and mentors describing their experiences of peer to peer learning and plug in Anita Wilson’s concepts of educentricity and third space literacies to read participants’ experiences of formal and informal literacy education. We make use of this analysis to identify and describe a ‘grounded pedagogy’ approach that pays attention to learning as social practice and enables prisoners to re-imagine themselves both as learners and social actors and to begin to connect their learning to self-directed desistence identity building. We conclude with a consideration of the implications of this work for prison literacy teaching and the potential role of grounded pedagogy ideas in the development of more provocative approaches to prison teacher education