Bioethics in the news: The values at stake. Why are conservative values so difficult to communicate in the public square and progressive values so easy?

Bioethical issues are complex, often involve factual uncertainty, and have broad and long-term potential consequences for individuals, institutions and society. Simplification is a strategy used by so-called ‘progressive’ values advocates to promote acceptance of their values. It results from excluding consideration of complexity, uncertainty and potentiality in the values disputes around bio-ethical issues. In order to engage effectively in public debates of bioethics issues, it is necessary to understand the current societal values zeitgeist and how it differs from a traditional societal values zeitgeist. Since words are weapons in the values battles, it is necessary to identify how they are being used in the presentation of ethical issues in the media and ethical decision making and, when that use leads to unethical situations, offer alternatives. Moreover, bioethicists must also identify the causes of biased media coverage of ethics issues, including the phenomenon of ‘post-truth’, and work to eliminate them. In particular, Catholic communicators could play a leading role in defending ethical values which further the ‘common good’ in society, including by protecting vulnerable people. As an example, the current euthanasia debate is examined in some detail

Waste as the Artful Excess of Natural Selection

This thought-experiment consists of a series of letters between Feral Susan (Susan Nordstrom), Mississippi River, Memphis, Tennessee, and Emu Girrl (Margaret Somerville), Nepean River, Emu Green in Western Sydney. In this thought experiment, we move in the realm of litter’s inanimate manifestations that tell their own stories of movement and flow, stories of the river. They are stories of the inhuman within the human. Plastic and waste call us back to our rivers, the Nepean and Mississippi to (re)think with waste. Waste creates with, and on us, moves us from its affective production of disgust and aggression, to embrace its proliferation as Artful excess. Our thought experiment with waste materializes transformative becomings that generate past-present-future affective residues of wonder about the materialities of litter and rivers

Walking contemporary Indigenous songlines as public pedagogies of country

The singing and dancing of Darug peoples once echoed throughout the Hawkesbury Nepean riverlands in ceremony. A long and challenging walk through bushland along the Nepean River, from Emu Green to Yarramundi on the Hawkesbury River, invites the walker to meditate on the presences and absences of these river places. Yarramundi is an important site for Darug people today, as it holds the history and cultural memories of singing the rivers in song and ceremony. Walking contemporary Indigenous songlines asks how we can come to know the river through walking the contemporary songlines of Darug songwriters and artists that sing the country of the riverlands today, and what is produced when this is enacted as public pedagogy. The paper explores a process of walking the Nepean River Trail, from my home at Emu Green to the Shaws Creek and Yellomundee Aboriginal cultural trails. The walk is reproduced as public pedagogy with collaborators Leanne and Jacinta Tobin, who have deep family connections to Yarramundi: connections that were temporarily lost through their early lives, and recreated through art, language and music practices in contemporary creations of ancestral songlines and connections. The public pedagogy performance was enacted at the Circular Quay International Passenger Terminal in a presentation of three songs, 73 artworks, and a short explanatory talk to an audience of 700 members of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects. This paper asks: What does this public pedagogy produce? What does it mean to enact it at this historic site of colonial invasion and contemporary arrival of both temporary and permanent immigrants to this landscape

Attempts to Release and Utilize Soil Nutrients by Means of Chelating Agents

The first chapter is a review in four parts. Part one considers, firstly, the forms in which trace metals appear in soil, methods of extraction, and the relation between the quantity of metal extracted by reagents and the quantity naturally available to the plant, and, secondly, the nature of soil organic matter, its extraction and fractionation. Part two reviews both the evidence for and studies into the nature of trace metal-organic matter interactions. Part three discusses various methods of applying trace metals to soil. Finally, in the last part, consideration is given to the influence on trace metal levels in plants of chelating and complexing agents (trace metal free)

Place and sustainability literacy in schools and teacher education

The development of sustainability literate teachers has been identified as a key challenge for the implementation of education for sustainability in Australian schools (Skamp, 2010)and elsewhere (Nolet, 2009). This paper reports on the first year of a participatory action research project that investigates the learning of school teachers, teacher educators, school children and teacher education students, in relation to the integration of place-based sustainability education across the curriculum of a low SES primary school. The methods of data collection included digital visual and audio recorded observations and reflections by teacher educators; reflective observations, focus groups, and interviews with teachers and principals; and the collection of student artefacts from school and teacher education students. A number of different conceptual and theoretical lenses are brought to the analysis of this data including 'thinking through country'; sustainability literacies and new technologies; and contemporary theories of space, place and body. In this baseline paper, the overall findings are summarised under the categories of the participating groups: - teacher, teacher educator, school student, teacher education student, and the school/place/community nexus

A Space In-between: Red Rock

A conversation from the points of view of Laura Hartley's work with rural women and Margaret Somerville's work with Aboriginal place stories and their intersection with a specific place, Red Rock

Indigenous Australians and Universities: A Study of Postgraduate Students' Experiences in Learning Research

This thesis is concerned with conceptualizing the Social World of Learning of Australian Indigenous postgraduates to determine the quality of research training provided for them. The learning experiences of a group of twenty Indigenous postgraduates in eight Australian universities across ten campuses co-operatively contributed to the information base of this Study. Indigenous entry into the Australian postgraduate sector of education is a recent event, consequently little is known about the area inasmuch as only one Study exists. I used a Democratic Evaluation process to find the answer to the research focus question which guided this Study: How do Australian Indigenous postgraduates experience learning research