Debating credibility: Refugees and rape in the media

© John Benjamins Publishing Company. This article explores public debates about credibility in media discourse regarding a Somali refugee who was raped on Nauru. Given the pseudonym “Abyan”, she was living on Nauru as a result of Australian refugee policy and was brought to Australia for medical assistance. Her treatment by the Australian authorities became the subject of debate and was widely discussed in the Australian media. Analyzing a corpus of media articles reporting and commenting on this debate, this article explores how the media’s representations of the key actors shape their credibility. Reflecting existing research, this article finds that Abyan’s experience is used to support broader policy arguments. Further, the discourse presents Abyan as a key speaker, despite her limited ability to defend her credibility. The article concludes that credibility remains an important theme in discourse on refugees and that power asymmetries hidden within this discourse create obstacles for those wishing to challenge it

Communicative resources and credibility in public discourse on refugees

© Copyright Cambridge University Press 2019. This article examines how communicative resources affect the construction of credible texts and identities in a public debate on Australia's treatment of a refugee. It centres on two key written statements-one from the Immigration Minister, and another from a Somali refugee. The analysis is divided into four levels, exploring the parties' respective linguistic, material, identity, and platform resources, and how these impact their statements' creation and reception, and their participation in discourse creation more generally. The article finds that there are inequalities on all four resource levels that largely undermine the refugee's ability to present a credible text and identity and challenge mainstream discourse on refugees. The article demonstrates how a multi-level analysis of communicative resources can challenge assumptions about participation and uncover inequalities invisible in the prevailing discourse. (Asylum, Australia, communicative resources, discourse, intercultural communication, media, power, refugee)

Changes in Soybean Global Gene Expression after Application of Lipo-Chitooligosaccharide from Bradyrhizobium japonicum under Sub-Optimal Temperature

Lipo-chitooligosaccharides (LCOs), signal compounds produced by N2-fixing rhizobacteria after isoflavone induction, initiate nodule formation in host legumes. Given LCOs' structural similarity to pathogen-response-eliciting chitin oligomers, foliar application of LCOs was tested for ability to induce stress-related genes under optimal growth conditions. In order to study the effects of LCO foliar spray under stressed conditions, soybean (Glycine max) seedlings grown at optimal temperature were transferred to sub-optimal temperature. After a 5-day acclimation period, the first trifoliate leaves were sprayed with 10−7 M LCO (NodBj-V (C18∶1, MeFuc)) purified from genistein-induced Bradyrhizobium japonicum culture, and harvested at 0 and 48 h following treatment. Microarray analysis was performed using Affymetrix GeneChip® Soybean Genome Arrays. Compared to the control at 48 h after LCO treatment, a total of 147 genes were differentially expressed as a result of LCO treatment, including a number of stress-related genes and transcription factors. In addition, during the 48 h time period following foliar spray application, over a thousand genes exhibited differential expression, including hundreds of those specific to the LCO-treated plants. Our results indicated that the dynamic soybean foliar transcriptome was highly responsive to LCO treatment. Quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) validated the microarray data

Submission to Review ‘Creating a world class migration advice industry’

Submission made to the Department of Home Affairs' 2020 review ‘Creating a world class migration advice industry’. See https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/reports-and-publications/submissions-and-discussion-papers/migration-advice-industr

Aboriginal ways of using English

A book review of 'Aboriginal ways of using English' by Diana Eades (2013). Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, ISBN 9781922059260.4 page(s

Incorporating Sociolinguistic Perspectives in Australian Refugee Credibility Assessments: the Case of CRL18

Credibility assessments in asylum visa applications have attracted criticism across diverse research fields. This article builds on existing critical examinations by presenting a case study of a successful appeal in the Federal Court of Australia (FCA) which overturned a decision involving one such problematic credibility assessment. The article establishes that credibility assessments often rely on flawed language ideologies and reasoning that transform the asylum seeker into the sole participant responsible for the texts produced in institutional processes. As a contrast, it then explores the FCA decision, analysing the judge’s treatment of three different premises on which the lower-level rejection relied. It demonstrates how, when dealing with each of these premises, the judge’s approach aligns with sociolinguistic scholarship. The case study demonstrates the potential of sociolinguistic awareness to denaturalize the problematic ideologies underlying credibility assessments. However, the article equally acknowledges and discusses the systemic limitations on challenging credibility assessments, due to the narrow scope for judicial review, and the need for professional legal assistance to argue one’s case successfully. The article concludes that while credibility assessments serve to act as a powerful gatekeeping tool to support increasingly restrictive asylum policy, judicial receptiveness of sociolinguistic understandings of communication can sometimes provide an avenue for successful appeals. It thus provides a powerful example of the potential benefits of communicating sociolinguistic research to law students, legal practitioners and decision-makers

Deficiencies and loopholes: Clashing discourses, problems and solutions in Australian migration advice regulation

In Australia, access to high-quality migration advice can often be crucial to obtaining a visa, and migration advisors have attracted ongoing scrutiny from policymakers, leading to successive inquiries and reviews. Such inquiries and the recommendations they produce are used to justify policy design and reform that can have significant impacts on a range of stakeholders, including of course, migration advisors and their clients. This article explores one such recent inquiry, completed in 2018. It adopts a critical discourse analysis to examine the way the inquiry’s official report presents migration advisors, and how it frames the inquiry process itself. Finding that the report presents its recommendations as being based on evidence created by external stakeholder submissions, the examination goes on to explore to what extent this is actually the case. Through an examination of the ‘textual travels’ submissions undergo when incorporated in the report, the article finds that these texts are either transformed to support dominant discourses, or simply excluded. The article concludes that decision-making is inaccurately presented as a participatory, evidence-based process, thus legitimising particular policy decisions, and unfairly continuing to present migration advisors as problems requiring fixing

Induction of Antigen-Specific Human Cytotoxic T Cells by Toxoplasma Gondii

To further the understanding of the role of T cells in immunity to the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, antigen-specific T cell clones were generated using peripheral blood mononuclear cells from seropositive individuals. Whole parasites were used to stimulate a proliferative expansion of antigen-reactive cells, followed by limiting dilution cloning in the presence of irradiated, autologous PBMC and rIL-2. Three parasite antigen-specific T cell clones expressing the CD3+ phenotype were selected for further characterization. Phenotypic analysis with monoclonal antibodies revealed two clones reactive with CD8 (RTg1 and RTg3) while the other (RTg2) phenotyped as CD4+, CD8-. When tested in a proliferation assay using a panel of different T. gondii proteins, clone RTg1 reacted with a single large protein (Mr greater than 180,000) as well as smaller components (less than 12,000), clone RTg2 reacted with a protein of Mr = 28,000 and clone RTg3 reacted with a protein of 116,000 plus smaller components (less than 12,000). Only the 28,000 = Mr antigen recognized by RTg2 was reactive on Western blot with autologous donor antisera. All three clones produced IFN-gamma and IL-2 in varying amounts upon antigenic stimulation in the presence of irradiated APC. Moreover, one clone RTg1, exhibited direct parasite cytotoxicity, inhibiting extracellular T. gondii by greater than 70% when incubated at an effector/target ratio of 40:1. This clone was alpha, beta TCR heterodimer positive and exerted its cytotoxic parasiticidal activity in the apparent absence of MHC restriction. The results provide evidence for the existence of circulating antigen-specific cytotoxic T cells in normal humans who are toxoplasma antibody seropositive

The legal protection of refugees with disabilities: Forgotten and invisible?

© Mary Crock, Laura Smith-Khan, Ron McCallum and Ben Saul 2017. This ground-breaking book focuses on the 'forgotten refugees', detailing people with disabilities who have crossed borders in search of protection from disaster or human conflict. The authors explore the intersection between one of the oldest international human rights treaties, the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, with one of the newest: the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Drawing on fieldwork in six countries hosting refugees in a variety of contexts - Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Uganda, Jordan and Turkey - the book examines how the CRPD is (or should) be changing the way that governments and aid agencies engage with and accommodate persons with disabilities in situations of displacement. The timeliness of the book is underscored by the adoption in mid-2016 of the UN Charter on Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities in Humanitarian Action adopted at the World Humanitarian Summit