Making Culture Bloom

On 16 June 1904, exactly one hundred years before the establishment of CHASS, an Irish Jew of Hungarian extraction called Leopold Bloom set off on a twenty-four hour perambulation around the streets and bars of Dublin. This fictional incident is the basis of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the greatest novel of modern times. It has also given rise to Bloomsday, a kind of Irish literary holy day celebrated in cities all around the world. It was a specially appropriate moment for us to celebrate the birth of our new peak body, because Bloomsday provides a perfect parable for why the Australian public and government should cherish our sector

Linking the local and the global. What today’s environmental humanities movement can learn from their predecessors successful leadership of the 1965-1975 war to save the Great Barrier Reef

For a decade from 1965–1975, an Australian poet, Judith Wright, and a Reef artist, John Busst, played a major role in helping to save the Great Barrier Reef. The Queensland State Government had declared its intention of mining up to eighty percent of the Reef’s corals for oil, gas, fertiliser and cement. The campaign of resistance led by these two humanists, in alliance with a forester, Dr. Len Webb, contributed substantively to the establishment of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park in 1975 and to then to the Reef’s World Heritage listing in 1983 as ‘the most impressive marine environment in the world’. This paper explains the challenges facing today’s environmental scholars and activists as they attempt to replicate the success of their 1970s predecessors in helping to save the Great Barrier Reef from even graver and more immediate threats to its survival

Introduction

Visitors to the National Museum of Australia's repository can encounter a crazy mechanical sculpture, entitled 'The Law Machine', constructed by political cartoonist Bruce Petty. A distinctive lawyer's wig, copperplate writing on wood, antique money, musical instruments, knives, forks and a range of old and new everyday objects are loosely assembled into an anthropomorphic machine evoking centuries-old traditions. When the handle of this unique apparatus is turned, the adversarial system pits defence against prosecution to process money, persuasion, judgement, penalties and human rights in an apparently random fashion. Consuming at the wig end and excreting jurisprudential outcomes at the other, Petty's Law Machine surprises the legal system's unclear logic and the icons of its authority

Popular radicalism and freethought in early nineteenth century England : a study of Richard Carlile and his followers, 1815-32

On 9 March 1817 a 27 year old journeyman tinmaker left the manufactory of Matthews and Masterson, Union Court, Holborn intent on joining a new trade. His hopes depended on a carefully-wrapped bundle containing 100 copies of Jonathan Wooler's Black Dwarf, London's latest, most extreme, 2d. pamphlet periodical. In the weeks following he tramped through the streets and alleys of the Strand^ Soho, Holborn, Clerkenwell, Whitechapel, Westminster and Southwark - sometimes thirty miles a day - persuading booksellers to risk libel prosecution by taking a few copies. Daily profit never exceeded 18d .; just enough, when all were sold, to repay the loan on their original purchase and feed his family. Still, Wooler was delighted at the enlistment of some 20 new Metropolitan agents? and promised future custom. Richard Carlile had made his debut as a hawker of 'blasphemy and sedition'; the least-skilled, lowest-paid, and most perilous occupation associated with London's radical popular press

Humanities for the environment—A manifesto for research and action

Human preferences, practices and actions are the main drivers of global environmental change in the 21st century. It is crucial, therefore, to promote pro-environmental behavior. In order to accomplish this, we need to move beyond rational choice and behavioral decision theories, which do not capture the full range of commitments, assumptions, imaginaries, and belief systems that drive those preferences and actions. Humanities disciplines, such as philosophy, history, religious studies, gender studies, language and literary studies, psychology, and pedagogics do offer deep insights into human motivations, values, and choices. We believe that the expertise of such fields for transforming human preferences, practices and actions is ignored at society’s peril. We propose an agenda that focuses global humanities research on stepping up to the challenges of planetary environmental change. We have established Environmental Humanities Observatories through which to observe, explore and enact the crucial ways humanistic disciplines may help us understand and engage with global ecological problems by providing insight into human action, perceptions, and motivation. We present this Manifesto as an invitation for others to join the “Humanities for the Environment” open global consortium of humanities observatories as we continue to develop a shared research agenda

An immune dysfunction score for stratification of patients with acute infection based on whole-blood gene expression

Dysregulated host responses to infection can lead to organ dysfunction and sepsis, causing millions of global deaths each year. To alleviate this burden, improved prognostication and biomarkers of response are urgently needed. We investigated the use of whole-blood transcriptomics for stratification of patients with severe infection by integrating data from 3149 samples from patients with sepsis due to community-acquired pneumonia or fecal peritonitis admitted to intensive care and healthy individuals into a gene expression reference map. We used this map to derive a quantitative sepsis response signature (SRSq) score reflective of immune dysfunction and predictive of clinical outcomes, which can be estimated using a 7- or 12-gene signature. Last, we built a machine learning framework, SepstratifieR, to deploy SRSq in adult and pediatric bacterial and viral sepsis, H1N1 influenza, and COVID-19, demonstrating clinically relevant stratification across diseases and revealing some of the physiological alterations linking immune dysregulation to mortality. Our method enables early identification of individuals with dysfunctional immune profiles, bringing us closer to precision medicine in infection.peer-reviewe

In the days of fear: How Mosman beach-siders grew up with sharks

[Extract] I grew up in Nyasaland in Central Africa, many miles and several countries away from the sea, which I saw only on occasional visits to South Africa. Instead, I spent a good deal of my boyhood holidays swimming and sailing in Lake Nyasa, a vast freshwater lake 587 kilometres long and 80 kilometres wide, whose main aquatic hazards were crocodiles and hippos

Jill Roe—My boss, my mentor and my friend

[Extract] I arrived at Macquarie University in January 1972 in order to get some clear air by taking work as a tutor in history while struggling to finish a postgraduate thesis at the Australian National University. I knew nobody at Macquarie and, as a relatively recent migrant from Central Africa, next to nothing about the history department. I’d been hired to tutor there in a large compulsory first year history course called ‘The West in Early Modern Times’, and also in a third year subject on ‘Victorian Social History’ taught by a Dr Jill Roe