The Catastrophe of Images

A review of:Allen MeekBiopolitical Media: Catastrophe, Immunity and Bare LifeRoutledge, Abingdon, 2016ISBN 9781138887060 RRP £90.00 (hb

How to Disassemble a Christian-capitalist Machine …

A review of William E. Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2008)

Out of Time: The Limits of Secular Critique

A review of Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech and Michael Warner, Jonathan Vanantwerpen, and Craig Calhoun (eds), Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age

Research mentoring on the edge : early career researchers and academic fringe-dwelling

Discourses of research leadership define not only what quality research leadership can and should be, but also identify those who speak and act with authority. Similarly, these discourses construct particular professional identities and idealised ‘ways of being’. They provide possibilities for research leaders as well as those categorised as \u27Early Career Researchers\u27 (ECRs) to create alternative identities and representations of themselves. This study reports the views of 32 academics across 16 Australian universities in four States about research mentoring and leadership for ECRs. The primary interest was to explore how research leadership is conceptualised, implemented and negotiated in the disciplinary fields of business, nursing and education. Whilst a number of ECRs viewed formal research mentoring as taking a ‘tick the box’ approach that they believed of limited value, a number of research leaders had different views. Most senior research leaders viewed the systemic provision of assistance their universities offered in a positive light. The dissonance in views centred on the subject positioning of academics in research. The dissatisfaction expressed by ECRs, a number of whom positioned themselves as fringe-dwellers ‘on the edge’ of their institutional research culture, raises questions about research sustainability and succession planning in Australian tertiaryinstitutions

“You’re Not the Police. You’re Providing a Library Service”: Reflections on Maintenance and Repair in/of Public Libraries During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This paper explores how services gaps between public libraries, governmental authorities, and other institutions were addressed during the COVID-19 pandemic and how the labor of filling these gaps reveals the repair and maintenance work in and on the public good of the library. The site for this exploration is the project Australian Public Libraries During the COVID-19 Crisis: Implications for Future Policy and Practice, which used mixed-methods questionnaires and interviews to understand the library and information science (LIS) profession’s response to the pandemic. During the pandemic, public institutions labored to maintain services and repair any gaps arising from disrupted services. The extraordinary labor instigated by the pandemic can be used to theorize the ordinary labor of maintaining public institutions such as libraries and how notions of the public good are reaffirmed through individual and institutional acts of care. The maintenance and repair of public libraries as institutions with community service obligations reveals assumptions about essential services, which communities are disadvantaged, and the policing role of libraries. Understanding the repair role of libraries helps researchers and practitioners to theorize and conceptualize their work and service to the community in new ways

‘Inspired and assisted’, or ‘berated and destroyed’? Research leadership, management and performativity in troubled times

Research leadership in Australian universities takes place against a backdrop of policy reforms concerned with measurement and comparison of institutional research performance. In particular, the Excellence in Research in Australian initiative undertaken by the Australian Research Council sets out to evaluate research quality in Australian universities, using a combination of expert review process, and assessment of performance against &lsquo;quality indicators&rsquo;. Benchmarking exercises of this sort continue to shape institutional policy and practice, with inevitable effects on the ways in which research leadership, mentoring and practice are played out within university faculties and departments. In an exploratory study that interviewed 32 Australian academics in universities in four Australian states, we asked participants, occupying formal or informal research leadership roles, to comment on their perceptions of research leadership as envisioned and enacted in their particular workplaces. We found a pervasive concern amongst participants that coalesced around binaries characterized in metaphoric terms of &lsquo;carrots and whips&rsquo;. Research leadership was seen by many as managerial in nature, and as such, largely tethered to instrumentalist notions of productivity and performativity, while research cultures were seen as languishing under the demoralizing weight of reward and punishment systems. Here, we consider what is at stake for the future of the academic workforce under such conditions, arguing that new models of visionary research leadership are urgently needed in the &lsquo;troubled times&rsquo; of techno-bureaucratic university reforms.<br /

Editorial : Marking Race and Whiteness in its Diverse Locations

4 page(s

The Secular contract : sovereignty, secularism and law in Australia

What does it mean to say that a nation-state is secular? Secular law typically begins when a state has no religious competitor for authority. For this reason, it can be said that the Australian state is secular because its authority is derived from its own laws. What makes Australian law sovereign, the highest authority within the state, is its secularity. However, given Australia's colonial heritage, it is not just the absence of religious authority, such as a state religion, that gives the state its secularity. The law's foundations in colonial violence and the extinguishment of Indigenous sovereignty as a competing authority are also a crucial way in which secular Australian law can continue to operate as the sovereign authority within the state. Using the work of Charles W. Mills, I will critically interrogate how legal and political characterisations of the law as secular work to disavow the state's racialised foundations in colonial violence in the form of a "secular contract". In developing this notion of a "secular contract" I hope to show that secularism be must re-thought of as not simply the operation of law without religion, but also, as complicit with the ways indigenous sovereignties in (post)colonial states are negated.16 page(s

'Common values' : whiteness, Christianity, asylum seekers and the Howard Government

The articulation of whiteness as a moral homogeneity comprising ‘common’ Judeo-Christian values has contributed to the formation and representation of Australian national identity as unproblematically Anglo-Celtic. The ways in which the Howard Government cites Christianity is reflective of this investment in, and protection of, a white teleology of Australian nationalism. By imputing a universal status to Australian and Christian values through an articulation of a ‘common’ set of values reflective of a ‘broad church’, Howard’s statements on religion and national culture attempt to reproduce racially unmarked subjects and disassociate this location from the investment in and protection of white hegemony. By examining governmental responses to media reports of asylum seekers converting to Christianity it will be shown how the discursive association between whiteness and Australianness is produced as a naturalised norm. Within the media reports on asylum seekers converting to Christianity, differentiations based on race are subsumed by assumptions of moral difference that locate Christianity with Australianness. By aligning these values with a discourse of secular, Western nations, the Howard Government makes invisible a religiously inflected cultural agenda that presents Australian values as ‘broad’ and inclusive but underpinned by an adherence to a teleology of Australian nationality that is Anglocentric in its outlook.14 page(s