Computers: Equipment and Services

published or submitted for publicatio

Reading the Archive: Historians as Expert Witnesses

In a substantial study into the relationship between law and history in Australian jurisprudence, Curthoys, Genovese and Reilly found that when historians appear as expert witnesses in Australian courts, they have often not been well received. While it is acknowledged that historians have particular skills in identifying relevant sources in archives, Australian courts have generally been resistant to the idea that they bring special interpretative skills, because lawyers and judges believe that the hermeneutic processes involved in the interpretation of historical documents is a skill in which they are already well versed. A number of developments have occurred in relation to the role of historians as experts in the decade since this study. For example, the Federal Court of Australia has introduced procedural rules for expert conferences and for the production of concurrent evidence of expert witnesses. In this article, I will discuss the legal reception of expert opinion evidence from historians through an investigation of what has happened in the period since the mid-2000s. This research suggests that the collision that occurred between historians and the law during the 1990s subsequently resulted in an impasse between the disciplines of law and history. Legal counsel are disinclined to call historians as expert witnesses; historians themselves have resiled from the role of witnesses, and have been critical of courts’ failure to recognise the particular value of their skills in reading an archive. The article will report on empirical research conducted into the role of historians as expert witnesses in Australia and will include reference to transnational research conducted in New Zealand and Canada

Core content modules at Leeds Metropolitan University

As part of Leeds Metropolitan University’s review of the postgraduate curriculum in 2012–13, Libraries and Learning Innovation (LLI) was asked to lead a project group to create two core content modules for use at Level 7 (Masters level) in Research Practice and Project Management. The rationale for choosing these two areas was the sheer number of modules in these subjects taught across a wide range of disciplines, each of which is currently designed and populated by individual course teams. The group consisted of representatives from the University’s Centre for Teaching and Learning, academic staff, learning technologists and academic librarians, and was chaired by the Associate Director of LLI, Wendy Luker

Decision making conditioned by radical uncertainty: Credibility assessment at the Australian refugee review tribunal

The increasing global magnitude and exigency of refugee status determination is resulting in recent attention to the parameters of credibility as part of evidentiary assessment in refugee law. In Australia, as in other countries, it is well recognised that applications for review of primary level decisions on refugee status commonly fail on the basis of credibility evidence. Furthermore, it has been suggested that the assessment of credibility is likely to be a source of error in decision making. This article reports on the results of a small-scale study into decision making and credibility assessment at the Australian Refugee Review Tribunal involving interviews with decision makers. Drawing on feminist theories of epistemic responsibility, it argues for a revised standard of proof, suggesting a rebuttable presumption of credibility, or truthfulness, on the part of the applicant seeking asylum. Such an approach may go some way towards addressing the potential for epistemic injustice and is consistent with a position of epistemological responsibility demanded by an ethical obligation to the refugee. © The Author (2013)

A Modern Breakfast

Non-fiction Robert Luke

Imaging chemokine receptor dimerization with firefly luciferase complementation

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/154639/1/fsb2fj08116749.pd

Civil society, social capital and the churches: HIV/AIDS in Papua New Guinea

The churches are crucial actors in the response to Papua New Guineas growing problem with HIV/AIDS, but often they excite ambivalence. While several have led the way in supporting people affected by HIV, Christianity tends to be identified with teachings about sexuality and an opposition to condoms that many people involved with prevention deplore. In this paper I try to move beyond the glib assessment that the churches are bad at prevention, good at care. I frame HIV/AIDS in terms of development, and broadly conceptualise the activities that can affect the course and impacts of the epidemic. Without venturing far into theoretical debates surrounding civil society and social capital, I use these concepts or ideas associated with them - to think about the churches. Although they are major institutions in PNG and other Pacific Island countries, very little secular analysis of their contemporary social capacities and roles is available. Finally, I reflect upon the future roles of the churches in response to HIV/AIDS. These parting thoughts have some bearing on general issues concerning the role of churches in development.AusAID(Paper presented at the Governance and Civil Society Seminar, in Symposium Governance in Pacific States: reassessing roles and remedies, University of the South Pacific, 30 September - 2 October 2003

The role of non-native plants in the integration of non-native phytophagous invertebrates in native food webs

This thesis brings together a series of studies, examining the role of non-native plants in the integration of non-native invertebrates in native food webs. I use data from comprehensive surveys of formally-planted gardens to investigate the efficacy of straightforward measures of non-native plant presence and/or landscape parameters, as reliable predictors of non-native invertebrate presence, finding that non-native invertebrate richness increases with non-native plant species richness, with invertebrates showing a clear preference for woody plants. I then use the context of metapopulation theory to explore the facilitative role of non-native plants in the ability of a non-native invertebrate to persist within a community, finding that where host-plant habitat patches are closer together, the likelihood of a patch being occupied is greater, especially if the patch is occupied but that this effect is not universal, with species-specific effects present also. I then explore the potential for apparent competition, in the form of negative indirect interactions between native and non-native plants mediated by a shared invertebrate enemy, with the indirect interactions biased by plant relatedness, finding that phylogenetically ranked pairwise native/non-native plant interactions are weakly correlated with observed shared invertebrate interactions, while a significant Mantel test result indicates a significant potential for apparent competition. Finally, I test for detectability of apparent competition in a gall wasp community, finding no evidence of apparent competition but potential evidence for the unexpected occurrence of apparent mutualism. Collectively, these findings provide original insight into how non-native plants and non-native invertebrates interact in an ecological community, and how these interactions help to structure the community. Additionally, they have implications for non-native invertebrate species management, from the practical application of ground-level planting decisions to the development of reliable predictive tools

Women into print: Feminist presses in Australia

The freedom of the press belongs to those who control the press’ was one of the enduring slogans of the second-wave women’s movement. Reflecting the belief that the printed word could incite social change, feminists asserted their position in the public sphere of publishing, as authors, in print production and through the establishment of feminist presses. Reclaiming and celebrating women’s writing was a defining characteristic of second-wave feminism, and feminist literary and cultural historians took up the literature of Australian women writers from the nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century. The Australian second-wave women’s movement emphasised cultural forms; it was a catalyst for feminist writing, in the form of journalism, autobiography, short fiction, novels, poetry and plays, as well as feminist history, political theory, gender and sexuality studies. These texts, in turn, form a body of cultural memory that informs how feminism marks its own past, providing a narrative for individual and collective remembering