Australian foster carers' negotiations of intimacy with agency workers, birth families and children

This item is under embargo for a period of 12 months from the date of publication, in accordance with the publisher's policy. The author version (post-peer-review, pre-copy edited version) will available June 2015 This is a post-peer-review, pre-copy edited version of an article published in Families, Relationships and Society. The definitive publisher-authenticated version [Riggs, D. (2014). Australian foster carers' negotiations of intimacy with agency workers, birth families and children. Families, Relationships and Society, 3(2)] is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1332/204674314X14008543149659This article seeks to examine what are argued to be a particular set of non-normative relationships between Australian foster carers, the children in their care, the children’s birth parents, and agency workers who act as legal guardians for children who are removed from their birth parents. Eighty-five Australian foster carers participated in interviews on the topic of foster family life. Coding of responses to questions related to agency workers, abuse allegations and birth parents suggested a novel topic of ‘intimacy’ in regards to foster carers’ experiences of these three areas. Findings indicate three key themes within the overarching focus on intimacy: (a) the impact of abuse allegations on foster family intimacy, (b) the intimate presence of birth families and (c) what are termed ‘awkward intimacies’ with agency workers. While such intimacies may be viewed as non-normative, they nonetheless would appear to play a formative role in interactions between all parties, and thus warrant ongoing attention

Impact validity: A politics of possibilities

Author version made available in accordance with the publisher's policy - under embargo for a period of 2 years from the date of publication. This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: [ Riggs, D.W. (2013). Impact validity: A politics of possibilities. Journal of Social Issues, 69, 797-803. ], which has been published in final form at DOI:10.1111/josi.12042. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.This commentary reflects upon the possibilities opened up by the concept of ‘impact validity’. Particular attention is paid to three key issues that appear across the entire issue, namely: 1) the role of understandings of politics in research that aims to achieve impact validity, 2) the intersections of career and real world impact, and 3) how researchers who aim for impact validity manage the needs of the differing audiences of their work. Overall, the commentary suggests that the concept of impact validity holds great potential to contribute to how we think about the ways we do research, and the role that researchers can play in the public sphere in terms of creating the space for news ways of knowing about the world, in addition to encouraging those in positions of power to think about how they may usefully be influenced by academic knowledge. Key Words: impact validity, politics, research, policy, powe

‘25 degrees of separation’ versus the ‘ease of doing it closer to home’: Motivations to offshore surrogacy arrangements amongst Australian citizens

Author version made available in accordance with the publisher's policy. This article has been accepted for publication by Edinburgh University Press in the journal 'Somatechnics'.At present, onshore commercial surrogacy is illegal in all Australian states and territories. By contrast, offshore commercial surrogacy is legal in all bar one territory and two states. As a result, significant numbers of Australian citizens undertake travel each year to enter into commercial surrogacy arrangements. The present paper reports on findings derived from interview data collected with 21 Australian citizens who had children through an offshore commercial surrogacy arrangement, either in India or the United States. Framed by an understanding of the vulnerability that arises from the demand of reproductive citizenship, the analysis focuses specifically on whether or not the participants would have entered into an onshore commercial surrogacy arrangement had this been legal at the time. The findings suggest that for some participants, undertaking surrogacy ‘at a distance’ was perceived to be safer and provided a degree of privacy, whilst for other participants surrogacy closer to home would have removed some of the more challenging aspects of offshore arrangements. With these findings in mind, the paper concludes by considering Millbank’s (2014) suggestion that Australian states and territories should legalise onshore commercial surrogacy, and the barriers that may exist to the uptake of such potential legal change

Narratives of Choice amongst white Australians who undertake Surrogacy Arrangements in India

“The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10912-015-9330-z." Post print (author accepted) manuscript made available in accordance with publisher copyright policy.This paper reports on a rhetorical analysis of interviews with fifteen white Australian citizens who had undertaken offshore commercial surrogacy in India. Extending previous research, the findings suggest that genetic relatedness was valorized, and surrogacy constructed as a less tenuous route to family formation. The paper concludes with a discussion of the need for further research on 1) how the contentious nature of offshore commercial surrogacy may prevent full consideration of its ethical implications, 2) the differing belief systems between India and Australia in terms of children as alienable objects, and 3) ongoing consideration of how and when genetic-relatedness is made to matter

Critical psychology in a context of ongoing acts of colonisation

Copyright 2013 Manchester Metropolitan University - Discourse Unit. Published version of the paper reproduced here with permission from the publisherAlthough encompassing a broad range of topic areas, approaches to analysis, and theoretical frameworks, it is arguably the case that critical psychology in Australia is best represented by research undertaken on the topic of racism. The primary reason why critical research on racism has been so prevalent in Australia, is because of the ongoing history of colonisation in the country. Critical psychological approaches thus allow for a political (and discursive) examination of the psychology of racism. This paper first outlines the context of Australia as a colonial nation, before going on to analyse a press release made by one Australian politician in 2011. The analysis, focused primarily on specific rhetorical devices, examines how Indigenous sovereignty - centred in the paper as an empirical fact against which all knowledge or truth claims must be assessed - is denied, and moreover how the press release signifies an investment in this denial. The paper concludes by suggesting that critical psychology in Australia has an important ongoing role both in deconstructing existing truth claims about race, as well as reconstructing new possibilities for thinking about and relating to the fact of Indigenous sovereignty and colonisation. Keywords: Australia, critical psychology, racism, colonisation, Indigenous sovereignty, politic

What makes a man? Thomas Beatie, embodiment, and ‘mundane transphobia’

Author version made available here in accordance with Publisher copyright policy.Critical scholars have long examined the ways in which identity categories are forcibly written upon bodies through the functioning of social norms. For many marginalised groups, such critiques have been central to challenging pathologising understandings of identity categories, often by uncoupling bodies from identities. Yet despite this, normative accounts of embodiment are still forcibly written upon the bodies of many groups of people, albeit often in mundane ways. Nowhere is this perhaps more evident than in the lives of trans people. This paper explores one instance of this by examining in close detail some of the key discursive strategies deployed by Oprah Winfrey in her first interview with Thomas Beatie. It is argued that Beatie is constantly drawn into a logic of ‘bodily evidence’ that demands of him an aetiological account of himself as a man, and from which, Winfrey concludes, he is always left lacking

Transgender men's self-representations of bearing children post-transition

Chapter reproduced here with permission from the publisher.Since reports of Thomas Beatie’s pregnancy appeared in the media in 2008, the visibility of transgender men having children post-transition has increased considerably. Whilst this visibility, it may be argued, has attracted negative attention to transgender men who choose to bear a child (and transgender men more broadly), it may also be argued that representations of transgender men bearing children have usefully drawn attention to the complex negotiations that transgender men undertake in having children. At the heart of these negotiations lies what is often framed as a competition between transgender men’s masculinity, and their undertaking of a role historically undertaken by people who identify as women (i.e., child bearing). Yet what is repeatedly demonstrated in transgender men’s own self-representations of their pregnancies post-transition, is that they are very much men, even if their masculinity is placed in question by a society that equates child bearing with women. The present chapter takes transgender men’s self-representations as its starting place in seeking to elaborate how such men reconcile their masculinity with child bearing

Anti-Asian sentiment amongst a sample of white Australian men on gaydar

Author version made available in accordance with the Publisher's policy. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11199-012-0119-5Whilst the homogenizing descriptor 'gay' is often used in a singular sense to refer to 'the gay community,' research has increasingly recognized that individuals within gay communities are as diverse as they are within the broader community. Importantly, recognition of this diversity requires an acknowledgement of the fact that, just as in the broader community, discrimination occurs within gay communities. The present study sought to examine the degree to which racism occurs within gay men's online communities (in the form of anti-Asian sentiment expressed in the profiles of a small number of the 60,082 White Australian gay men living in five major Australian states whose profiles were listed on the website gaydar.com.au during October 2010), the forms that such racism takes, and whether any White gay men resisted such racism. The findings report on a thematic and subsequent rhetorical analysis of the profiles of the sub-sample of 403 White gay men who expressed anti-Asian sentiment. Such sentiment, it was found, was expressed in four distinct ways: 1) the construction of racism as 'personal preference,' 2) the construction of Asian gay men as not 'real men,' 3) the construction of Asian gay men as a 'type,' and 4) the assumption that saying 'sorry' renders anti-Asian sentiment somehow acceptable. Whilst the numbers of White gay men expressing anti-Asian sentiment were relatively small, it is suggested that the potential impact of anti-Asian sentiment upon Asian gay men who view such profiles may be considerable, and thus that this phenomenon requires ongoing examination

Heteronormativity in online information about sex: A South Australian case study

Author version made available in accordance with the Publisher's policyWhilst sex education in Australia has moved beyond a focus solely on abstinence, it is still in many instances shaped by what Silin (1995) refers to as the ‘silences’ that accompany topics considered unspeakable to young people. The present paper focuses specifically on one such silence, namely the representation of non-heterosexual sexualities and non-gender normative people in the context of sex education. By focusing on three South Australian websites that act as first ports of call in terms of information about sex and sex education to young people and their parents, the analysis provided suggests that two of the three websites evoke a range of heteronormative and gender normative assumptions, with one of these sites more explicitly emphasising reproductive heterosex, and the other adopting a liberal approach that nonetheless fails to adequately challenge stereotypes about non-heterosexuality and non-gender normativity. The third site, by contrast, provides relatively progressive inclusion of a range of genders and sexualities, and addresses homophobia and its effects. The paper concludes by suggesting that websites providing information about sex to young people and their parents must make a substantive shift away from perpetuating the silencing of marginal sexualities and genders, and towards contributing to open public discussion about young people and sex

Moving Beyond English as a Requirement to "Fit In": Considering Refugee and Migrant Education in South Australia

This paper presents findings from research conducted in two primary schools in South Australia with New Arrivals Programs (NAPs). The paper draws upon two forms of data: questionnaires administered to teachers and ethnographic observations of children at play in the schoolyard. These data are used to examine two aspects of education for refugees and other migrants: (1) the assumption that English language acquisition is central to the “integration” of refugees and other newly arrived migrants (and both that integration is of key importance and that the work of integration must primarily be undertaken by refugees and other migrants, not the broader community); and (2) the impact of power differentials between NAP and non- NAP students in the use of playground spaces. We argue that the education provided to refugee and newly arrived migrant students in NAPs needs to move beyond treating English language acquisition as a requirement to “fit in,” and we call for schools with high populations of refugee and migrant students to consider how spatial relations in their schools may be negatively impacting these student populations. Finally, the paper calls for an approach to education that is situated in global contexts of colonization and power relations, and in which the terms for inclusion of NAP students are mutually negotiated, rather than predetermined.Cet article présente les résultats de la recherche menée dans deux écoles primaires en Australie-Méridionale offrant des programmes pour nouveaux arrivants (New Arrivals Programs). La recherche s’appuie sur deux types de données: questionnaires administrés aux enseignants et observations ethnographiques des enfants au jeu dans la cour d’école. Ces données sont utilisées pour examiner deux aspects de l’éducation pour réfugiés et autres migrants: 1) l’hypothèse voulant que l’acquisition de la langue anglaise est au cœur de «l’intégration» des réfugiés et autres nouveaux arrivants (et à la fois que l’intégration est d’une importance capitale et que le travail d’intégration doit se faire prioritairement par les réfugiés et autres migrants, et non l’ensemble de la communauté); 2) l’impact des écarts de pouvoir entre les nouveaux arrivants et les autres écoliers dans l’utilisation des espaces de jeux . Les auteurs soutiennent que l’enseignement dispensé aux écoliers réfugiés et nouvellement arrivés dans le cadre des programmes pour nouveaux arrivants doit aller au-delà du traitement de l’acquisition de la langue anglaise comme nécessaire à l’«intégration», et demandent aux écoles ayant de fortes populations d’écoliers réfugiés et migrants d’examiner comment les relations spatiales au sein de l’école peuvent avoir un impact négatif sur ces populations. Enfin, les auteurs favorisent une approche éducative située dans les contextes mondiaux de la colonisation et des relations de pouvoir dans laquelle les conditions d’intégration des écoliers nouvellement arrivés sont mutuellement négociées, plutôt que prédéterminées