Monochrome males and colorful females:do gender and age influence the color and content of drawings?

Influences of educational level and gender were examined through free drawings. A total of 216 participants were recruited ranging from nursery school to university students. Using an adaptation of Turgeon’s methodology, participants were given a standardized set of colored pens and asked to draw a picture. Pictures were analyzed for the area of the page covered, colors used, number of colors used, and content. Overall, females covered more of the page, and used more colors than males. Females drew significantly more sky, flowers/trees and buildings (in most cases houses), and males drew more people and vehicles. In relation to educational level, nursery children used fewer colors than the other groups and secondary school children used more colors than primary school children. It was concluded that gender differences in content, and color, of drawings exist and these differences remain stable into adulthood. Results are discussed in terms of social and evolutionary theory

Writing on the What Matters Festival, 11–15 April 2012

No abstract availableThis review essay was originally published by Parallel Press, an imprint of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, as part of The International Journal of Screendance, Volume 3 (2013), Parallel Press. It is made available here with the kind permission of Parallel Press

Sound Check: Bylaws, Busking and the Local Government Act 2002

This article examines the law-making powers of local authorities under the Local Government Act 2002.  It argues that there are insufficient checks and balances on local government law-making, which may lead to local government powers being misused. It also criticises the Act's processes of bylaw enactment and review, arguing that they may encourage local authorities to abandon bylaws in favour of the new power of general competence, under which local authorities can operate beyond the relative safety of many existing checks and balances.&nbsp

West Coast

Scholarships & Prizes Office. University of Sydne

Staging the suburb : imagination, transformation and suburbia in Australian poetry

The suburbs are an important element in the physical and imaginary landscapes of this country. They are where more than 95% of the population lives and makes its home; and they have become integral to our imagining of the average citizen and their hopes, dreams and political inclinations. But this formulation does not capture the imaginative and dramatic uses to which the suburbs have been put, or their changing representation in literature and criticism. The two Australian poets that I consider in this thesis – Gwen Harwood and Dorothy Porter – were writing about suburbia in different eras, and against different conceptions of the space, yet both use the suburbs in passionate and theatrical ways. Harwood was writing mostly in the conservative Menzies era, when literary depictions of the suburb tended to portray it as stultifying, homogenous and dull. She often works with pseudonymous personae – including a suburban housewife, exiled academics from Old Europe and a young radical – and with recurring characters to satirise assumptions about suburbia and the people who inhabit it; or charges her more personal suburban poems with a range of competing and contradictory emotions, and with claims for the coexistence there of art and domesticity, transcendence and routine. Porter’s poetry mostly dates from the 1980s to the turn of the millennium, an era with a more sympathetic view of the suburbs, and their ordinariness and diversity. Her theatricality plays out in the dramatic monologues and masks that she uses to draw attention to the extreme experiences and conditions that are always a part of everyday life, and to the wild energies and vitality which can spring from ordinary objects and spaces. The thesis begins by charting the shifting cultural and historical perspectives on the Australian suburb, before moving to a close analysis of the poetry of Harwood and Porter, in order to examine each poet’s complex and often ambivalent response to suburban space and the lives lived within it; the claims each makes for the imaginative perspectives, emotions and intensities that are contained within domestic environments; and the ways in which the stuff of the everyday can be used to dramatise the self and its endeavours. The argument then moves to my creative examination of these themes in the book-length collection of poems titled ‘Domestic Interior.’ In these poems I explore the interplay between memory, experience and place, with how places become symbolic and poetic, and how this process intersects with ideas of belonging, identity, the everyday and the imaginary, the public and the private worlds. They explore what I see as a ‘featurist aesthetic’ – drawing on and subverting Robin Boyd’s description of the superficial elaborations of Australian suburban architecture. I see this suburban aesthetic as employing small details to build lively and multivalent spaces and scenes, by surrounding them with layers of symbolic objects, apprehended details, memories and sensations

Palestine, my love: The ethico-politics of love and mourning in Jewish Israeli solidarity activism

Jewish Israeli left-wing activists engage in a subversive affective politics when they express love for, and mourn the loss of, Palestinian life. But the affects of love and mourning also bind these solidarity activists to Israeli state violence and sovereignty in various ways, entangling them in the very forms of power they aim to challenge. Loving and mourning the Palestinian Other involves an ambivalent ethics in which the activist subject objectifies the Other, and this objectification is a kind of violence that emerges in the affective becomings of solidarity activism. Activist loving and mourning thus call into question the nature of solidarity and alert us to the difficulty of ethics as troubled relations enmeshed in the violence of politics.Economic and Social Research Council 1+3 Doctoral Studentship 2008-201

What constitutes a high quality discharge summary?:A comparison between the views of secondary and primary care doctors

This study aimed to identify any differences in opinion between UK hospital junior doctors and community General Practitioners (GPs) with respect to the ideal content and characteristics of discharge summaries, and to explore junior doctors' training for and awareness of post-discharge requirements of GPs

Evolution and change in palliative care around the world

Palliative care developed in the later part of the 20th century as a social movement and medical speciality. Central to its modern development were the ideas of Dr Cicely Saunders, whose vision for improving the care of the dying encompassed the physical, psychological, social and spiritual domains while emphasizing the importance of rigorous clinical practice, training and research. St Christopher’s Hospice, which she founded, inspired generations of practitioners and influenced the expansion of hospices nationally and internationally. Terminal care evolved into the discipline of palliative care, which applied holistic principles to the care of those earlier in their disease trajectory and in different settings, such as hospitals and the community. Some countries now have national strategies for palliative care that are supported by government. Palliative care attracts increasing attention as an aspect of the public health system and there are calls for access to it to be recognized as a human right. Yet around the world, palliative care is not uniformly developed and it needs to press hard to secure full integration with prevailing health policies. Palliative care still reaches only a tiny proportion of those who could benefit from it, especially those with diseases other than cancer. The global challenge for palliative care in the 21st century is to develop models and coverage appropriate to those in need, whatever their diagnosis, income or setti

Another America is Possible: The Impact of NAFTA on the U.S. Latino Community and Lessons for Future Trade Agreements

A joint report by Labor Council for Latin American Advancement and Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. The Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA) and Public Citizen celebrate the promise of increased interaction and cross-border cooperation among different nationalities on pressing global concerns. This is why we are concerned about the current model of corporate globalization being fostered by "free trade" agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Negotiated behind closed doors by unelected and largely unaccountable bureaucrats who represent mainly business interests, these trade agreements invariably fail to promote equitable regional integration and cooperation. Instead, this model of corporate globalization explicitly benefits large multinational corporations at the expense of workers, farmers, immigrants, women, people of color, the environment and democratic governance. As the fastest-growing sector of the U.S. population, Latinos are and will continue to be among the groups most affected by this model of corporate globalization. Whether newcomers from El Salvador or fifth-generation Mexican-Americans, U.S. Latinos are seeing adverse effects on their job security, health and environment. Many are immigrants who left their homelands due to the economic and social devastation caused by the current globalization model. In both the United States and in their countries of origin, Latinos have seen their environment and their livelihoods harmed by the status quo globalization package of free trade, investment and finance liberalization, new protections for foreign investors and intellectual property, and new powers that enable multinational corporations to attack state, local and federal public interest laws. In this report, we examine the impact of NAFTA on Latino communities throughout the United States. Implemented in 1994, NAFTA is the most fully realized version of the corporate globalization model. It is currently being used as the blueprint for other trade and investment agreements that the Bush Administration is pushing in the hemisphere, such as the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and an array of bilateral free trade agreements with the Andean countries (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru) and Panama. Although we support trade, we feel that NAFTA is not the model to follow and should not be copied in these agreements

Making Good of Crisis: Temporalities of Care in UK Mental Health Services.

A paradoxical concept of crisis has come to dominate contemporary understandings of suffering and care: as that which will reach a critical turning point, while also being chronic and enduring. I analyze this temporal enigma through an ethnography of mental health care practitioners in the UK who see themselves as embedded in a crisis-stricken care system, yet attempt to reformulate their therapeutic approach to crisis in productive ways: to make "good" of crisis. I argue that their efforts to make good in and of the temporal interstices of crisis disclose care as temporally unstable as well as ethically ambivalent.This research was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme [grant agreement 683033]