Australian Settlement Policy and Refugee Discourses: The Impact on Emerging African Communities

Australian Settlement Policy and Refugee Discourses: The Impact on Emerging African Communities This research examines the emerging discourse around recent refugee settlement in Australia and its impact on emerging African communities. Borrowing from Foucault’s power/knowledge and governmentality concepts, the research examines a number of social and institutional procedures, conditions and interrelationships that produce discourses in relation to African refugee settlement in Australia. The research employs two bodies of data to demonstrate how a refugee discourse has evolved in the Australian context and how this discourse is employed and exercised to affect the capacities of small African emerging communities. The first body of data is the documentation of debates and policy decisions that contributed to the growth of a refugee discourse and the second body of data is derived from focus groups and interviews with key actors in the settlem . ent services community. Based on the data the research demonstrates how emerging refugee discourses are manifested in the delivery of settlement services and in policy development. It analyses how the construction of discourse around refugees by the Australian public, settlement service providers and the African refugee settlers themselves has enabled a power relationship or strategic positioning through various tactics of governmentality. In other words the research investigates causes and consequences around the construction of a refugee discourse based on the theory that such a discourse is not innocent and always results in complex reconfigurations of power relationships

Tiny microbes, enormous impacts: what matters in gut microbiome studies?

Many factors affect the microbiomes of humans, mice, and other mammals, but substantial challenges remain in determining which of these factors are of practical importance. Considering the relative effect sizes of both biological and technical covariates can help improve study design and the quality of biological conclusions. Care must be taken to avoid technical bias that can lead to incorrect biological conclusions. The presentation of quantitative effect sizes in addition to P values will improve our ability to perform meta-analysis and to evaluate potentially relevant biological effects. A better consideration of effect size and statistical power will lead to more robust biological conclusions in microbiome studies

Preservation Methods Differ in Fecal Microbiome Stability, Affecting Suitability for Field Studies.

Immediate freezing at -20°C or below has been considered the gold standard for microbiome preservation, yet this approach is not feasible for many field studies, ranging from anthropology to wildlife conservation. Here we tested five methods for preserving human and dog fecal specimens for periods of up to 8 weeks, including such types of variation as freeze-thaw cycles and the high temperature fluctuations often encountered under field conditions. We found that three of the methods-95% ethanol, FTA cards, and the OMNIgene Gut kit-can preserve samples sufficiently well at ambient temperatures such that differences at 8 weeks are comparable to differences among technical replicates. However, even the worst methods, including those with no fixative, were able to reveal microbiome differences between species at 8 weeks and between individuals after a week, allowing meta-analyses of samples collected using various methods when the effect of interest is expected to be larger than interindividual variation (although use of a single method within a study is strongly recommended to reduce batch effects). Encouragingly for FTA cards, the differences caused by this method are systematic and can be detrended. As in other studies, we strongly caution against the use of 70% ethanol. The results, spanning 15 individuals and over 1,200 samples, provide our most comprehensive view to date of storage effects on stool and provide a paradigm for the future studies of other sample types that will be required to provide a global view of microbial diversity and its interaction among humans, animals, and the environment. IMPORTANCE Our study, spanning 15 individuals and over 1,200 samples, provides our most comprehensive view to date of storage and stabilization effects on stool. We tested five methods for preserving human and dog fecal specimens for periods of up to 8 weeks, including the types of variation often encountered under field conditions, such as freeze-thaw cycles and high temperature fluctuations. We show that several cost-effective methods provide excellent microbiome stability out to 8 weeks, opening up a range of field studies with humans and wildlife that would otherwise be cost-prohibitive

How Much and When Do We Need Higher-order Information in Hypergraphs? A Case Study on Hyperedge Prediction

Hypergraphs provide a natural way of representing group relations, whose complexity motivates an extensive array of prior work to adopt some form of abstraction and simplification of higher-order interactions. However, the following question has yet to be addressed: How much abstraction of group interactions is sufficient in solving a hypergraph task, and how different such results become across datasets? This question, if properly answered, provides a useful engineering guideline on how to trade off between complexity and accuracy of solving a downstream task. To this end, we propose a method of incrementally representing group interactions using a notion of n-projected graph whose accumulation contains information on up to n-way interactions, and quantify the accuracy of solving a task as n grows for various datasets. As a downstream task, we consider hyperedge prediction, an extension of link prediction, which is a canonical task for evaluating graph models. Through experiments on 15 real-world datasets, we draw the following messages: (a) Diminishing returns: small n is enough to achieve accuracy comparable with near-perfect approximations, (b) Troubleshooter: as the task becomes more challenging, larger n brings more benefit, and (c) Irreducibility: datasets whose pairwise interactions do not tell much about higher-order interactions lose much accuracy when reduced to pairwise abstractions

Study of social enterprise in CALD migrant and refugee communities in Sydney

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Business.Despite the popular discourse that social enterprise can positively engage the socially disadvantaged and address social issues affecting them, less is known about how and to what extent such processes occur. Similar to many other countries, Australia has also seen the rapid growth of social enterprise in recent years, particularly following the global financial crisis. However, the efficacy of social enterprise for engaging the socially disadvantaged and bringing about benefits such as creating employment opportunities and reducing social exclusion is largely assumed based on available discourses. The research primarily employs the qualitative method of semi-structured interviews. A total of 40 informants were interviewed with two different cohorts: 20 of them were social entrepreneurs at managerial level involved in the establishment and management of social enterprises in CALD migrant and refugee communities, and 20 of them were stakeholders from various sectors who had expert knowledge about social enterprises in CALD migrant and refugee communities. The informants from the stakeholder cohort were recruited from a variety of organisations such as social enterprise intermediaries, local governments, impact investment organisations, and private social enterprise consultancies. The increase of social enterprises as a practice aimed at engaging marginalised communities in recent years in Australia-such as CALD migrant and refugee communities- has primarily been driven by policies adopted in response to emerging social enterprise discourses. Many non-profit organisations hold the belief that social enterprise can provide community development opportunities for marginalised communities and empower their members, while establishments of social enterprises enable them to be financially independent from funding bodies. In the absence of empirical evidence in Australia and overseas, such decisions have been largely influenced by the dominant discourse created and catalysed by a number of institutional factors that emerged in a response to such discourses. One of the consequences of such a policy driven approach is the fact that most social enterprises in CALD migrant and refugee communities were predominantly established and managed by non-migrants and non-refugees. The role of members from marginalised communities or beneficiaries of social enterprises is limited to passive participation. Though the idea of the enterprising self and self-help is an integral part of legitimising social enterprise discourse, the research found that the application of social enterprise as a policy instrument has largely been rendered a charity mindset rather than encompassing innovative and entrepreneurial spirits of members of disadvantaged communities. This has given rise to the issue of agency

Intervention Strategies Based on Information-Motivation-Behavioral Skills Model for Health Behavior Change: A Systematic Review

SummaryPurposeThis study systematically reviewed research on behavioral interventions based on the information-motivation-behavioral skills (IMB) model to investigate specific intervention strategies that focus on information, motivation, and behavioral skills and to evaluate their effectiveness for people with chronic diseases.MethodsA systematic review was conducted in accordance with the guidelines of both the National Evidence-based Healthcare Collaborating Agency and Im and Chang. A literature search was conducted using electronic databases. Randomized controlled trials that tested behavioral interventions based on the IMB model for promoting health behaviors among people with chronic diseases were included. Four investigators independently reviewed the studies and assessed the quality of each study. A narrative synthesis was used.ResultsA total of 12 studies were included in the review. Nine studies investigated patients with HIV/AIDS. The most frequently used intervention strategies were instructional pamphlets for the information construct, motivational interviewing techniques for the motivation construct, and instruction or role playing for the behavioral skills construct. Ten studies reported significant behavior changes at the first post-intervention assessment.ConclusionThis review indicates the potential strength of the IMB model as a theoretical framework to develop behavioral interventions. The specific integration strategies delineated for each construct of the model can be utilized to design model-based interventions