Reflecting on practice: negotiating challenges to ways of working

In this paper I explore some of the issues associated with teaching and researching in the context of dominant/non-dominant group relations. The paper stems from observations, experiences and challenges that I have encountered in researching with indigenous Australians including Aboriginal people from the mainland and Torres Strait Islander people, and teaching undergraduate and post-graduate subjects on cultural diversity. I suggest that guidelines for working in culturally sensitive ways across cultural boundaries are needed and should include issues of power that are implicit in processes of knowledge production (i.e., what we know, how we know, and on whose terms we know) and social identity construction. I also argue that the writing of indigenous authors in Australia, and other contexts, are important resources for promoting critical reflection because it serves to disrupt taken for granted ways of knowing. At a minimum, I suggest, these writings bring into focus the relationships between power and social identities. I focus on the tensions and challenges associated with negotiating the messages conveyed in Aboriginal authors’ writings about self-determination, colonisation and culturally sensitive and transformative practice and research. I locate the reflection within the broader literature base on indigenisation and the development of culturally sensitive psychology. I conclude that engaging in the explication of power associated with social identities in these contexts can be challenging but it is an important part of creating a culturally sensitive psychology

Identity and Oppression: Differential Responses to an In-Between Status

Oppression operates at various levels, with varying degrees of negativity, and groups respond in markedly different ways. In this paper, the in-between status of the colored South African group is used to illustrate issues of identity and oppression under the Apartheid system—and differing ways in which oppression was experienced and used. The colored group had many social advantages over Blacks, but were also used to oppress that group. Habituation, accommodation, and relative advantage were identified as dynamics within the broader context of power and privilege that contributed to cultural and psychological marginality and status ambivalence of the coloreds. These processes must be understood within the historical, social, and political context of the community. What is evident from the data is that groups and individuals can take up various positions along a continuum of oppressor—oppressed, depending upon the contexts, time, and social and legal relationships involved in their interactions

On the minimal ramification problem for ℓ\ell-groups

Let p be a prime number. It is not known if every finite p-group of rank n>1 can be realized as a Galois group over Q with no more than n ramified primes. We prove that this can be done for the family of finite p-groups which contains all the cyclic groups of p-power order, and is closed under direct products, wreath products, and rank preserving homomorphic images. This family contains the Sylow p-subgroups of the symmetric groups and of the classical groups over finite fields of characteristic not p. On the other hand, it does not contain all finite p-groups.Comment: 8 pages. Note added at the en