Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment policy and Welfare to Work: The Community Development Programme and the need for new narratives,new alliances and new institutions

The way Australian federal governments have approached Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment and welfare policy over the last two decades has been a paradigmatic example of what not to do in policymaking. In the absence of effective engagement or consultation, a series of decisions under Coalition and Australian Labor Party governments have had a range of negative consequences for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. These changes – centred around the closure of the Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) scheme and implementation of the Community Development Programme (CDP) – have resulted in increased unemployment, inadequate support for job creation, a dramatic over‐application of income penalties to social security recipients and reduced capacity in many community organisations. This article argues that these outcomes constitute policy failure, especially given that genuine engagement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people could have prevented many of these consequences. It then turns to an exploration of three ways in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are responding to such policy failure: through promotion of new narratives, new alliances, and new institutions. The study concludes that while we should avoid “specious hope”, there is room for optimism in a renewed push for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty.     

私人生活的公共转向——基于个体化视角的广场舞分析

广场舞象征个体的私人生活正在向公共空间扩展，基于个体需求自发形成具有公共性的组织化形态。在家庭核心化与个体崛起的背景下，广场舞对个体而言既是一种健身运动，进行身体展示与个体审美追求，个体也渴望在广场空间找到属于自己的位置，实现为自己而活的身份追求。作为具有公共属性的广场舞并没有形成紧密封闭的公共生活，在团体内部出现了“抱团”与“找朋友”的双重公共生活，前者体现了群体内部的圈层互动，后者呈现了个体希望通过主体间的互动建构群体归属感。总体而言，广场舞刻画出一个松散而开放的公共社群生活，凸显了私人生活的公共转向，实现了个体私人生活与公共空间的有效联结。     

Israel's military public diplomacy evolution: Historical and conceptual dimensions

This study provides an historical overview of the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit (ISU) from the early years of the State of Israel until 2009. Analyzing five periods during which the ISU played a key role in Israel's public diplomacy, this research sheds light on the challenges the ISU faced in different periods and circumstances and examines how the ISU tried to modify its methods and actions in response to geopolitical changes and media development, albeit not always successfully. The study suggests better understanding the adaptation process by applying a three-layer framework for analysis: the tactical layer, the strategic layer and the perceptional layer. The findings of this work demonstrate that in adapting to new circumstances, the ISU focused mainly on the tactical response level, with the result that it did not undertake any review or debate over the need for deeper perceptional changes in ISU policies.     

Intersections on the Class Escalator: Gender,Race, and Occupational Segregation in Paid Care Work

As U.S. manufacturing and production industries have declined, the growth of the care sector has increasingly become an important source of jobs for workers without a college degree. Often requiring some form of postsecondary credentialing, many care occupations can provide better wages, job stability, and possible upward mobility for less educated workers. However, employment patterns in paid care work are both gendered and racialized: women and workers of color are overrepresented in care occupations with fewer entry barriers, benefits, and lower pay. Although these patterns are well documented, the mechanisms producing them are less well understood. Using event history analysis and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), this study evaluates the explanatory power of neoclassical economic, status attainment, and social closure theories of occupational segregation for black women’s and men’s greater hazard or “risk” of entering care occupations, relative to white workers. Net of individual and closure mechanisms, significant residual effects suggest labor market discrimination remains a primary explanation for the over-representation of black workers in less credentialed care jobs with fewer benefits.     

Love thy neighbour: Social identity and public support for humanitarian aid

Humanitarian aid can be contentious. Should finite national resources be sacrificed to serve the needy abroad? Social identity theorists argue that identification with a superordinate group, in this case the larger world community, should increase individual support for policies such as international humanitarian assistance. However, individuals can simultaneously associate with multiple identities. How does the combination of world and national identities affect support for humanitarian assistance? Using cross‐national survey data, we find evidence that support for international humanitarian aid is highest among those with a strong world identity and weak national identity relative to other identity combinations, though even those with a strong world identity and strong national identity can be supportive of aid.     

Paradox of public sector capacity building: Lessons from MATT2 UK–Bangladesh co‐operation

This study focuses on the Government of Bangladesh and the UK Department for International Development (DFID) public sector capacity‐building project under collaborative public governance. It examines the efficiency and effectiveness of a foreign‐funded and multistakeholder‐led public sector capacity‐development initiative dubbed Managing at the Top Stage 2 (MATT2) project, and how it contributed to the human resource capacity development in Bangladesh. A combination of data from Government sources, in‐depth interviews, focus group discussions, participant observation and author analysis was adopted. The results showed the project to have been largely successful, despite some challenges.     

Use of Redundant Industrial Buildings as Injections into the Cultural Sector in Norway

Prime aim is to examine the way the culture sector reuses industrial buildings to instigate cultural activities in the municipalities. The discussion of various actors’ motivation for engagement is based on results from a case study, supplemented with findings from a coarse-meshed telephone survey. At national level overarching political guidelines can be traced back to white papers concerning cultural policy, urban transformation and cultural heritage, and the municipalities’ cultural policies mirror these guidelines. What tends to decide if such initiatives are considered successful are local abilities to cross sectorial divisions and instigate cooperation between municipal planners, private entrepreneurs and NGOs.     

Bad News Has Wings: Dread Risk Mediates Social Amplification in Risk Communication

Social diffusion of information amplifies risk through processes of birth, death, and distortion of message content. Dread risk—involving uncontrollable, fatal, involuntary, and catastrophic outcomes (e.g., terrorist attacks and nuclear accidents)—may be particularly susceptible to amplification because of the psychological biases inherent in dread risk avoidance. To test this, initially balanced information about high or low dread topics was given to a set of individuals who then communicated this information through diffusion chains, each person passing a message to the next. A subset of these chains were also reexposed to the original information. We measured prior knowledge, perceived risk before and after transmission, and, at each link, number of positive and negative statements. Results showed that the more a message was transmitted the more negative statements it contained. This was highest for the high dread topic. Increased perceived risk and production of negative messages was closely related to the amount of negative information that was received, with domain knowledge mitigating this effect. Reexposure to the initial information was ineffectual in reducing bias, demonstrating the enhanced danger of socially transmitted information.     

Bitch,slut, skank,cunt: patterned resistance to women’s visibility in digital publics

Resistance to women’s public voice and visibility via street harassment and workplace sexual harassment have long constrained women’s use of and comfort in physical public spaces; this gender-based resistance now extends into digital arenas. Women face extreme hostility in the form of digital sexism in discussion rooms, comment sections, gaming communities, and on social media platforms. Reflecting on two years of in-depth interviews with women who have been on the receiving end of gender-based digital abuse (n?=?38), conversations with industry professionals working in content moderation and digital safety, the extant literature, and news stories about digital attacks against women, I offer a lens to think through the prominent patterns in digital sexism, showing (1) that aggressors draw upon three overlapping strategies – intimidating, shaming, and discrediting – to limit women’s impact in digital publics, (2) the way femininity and femaleness are used to undermine women’s contributions, and (3) men call attention to women’s physicality as a way to pull gender – and the male advantage that comes with it – to the fore in digital exchanges. Finally, I argue that when digital sexism succeeds in pressing women out of digital spaces, constrains the topics they address publicly, or limits the ways they address them, we must consider the democratic costs of gender-based harassment, in addition to the personal ones.     

Family support in practice: voices from the field

This paper revisits core family support messages for social work practice in working with children and families, linking to findings from high-profile child protection cases in the UK and the Republic of Ireland. Drawing on a comparative study where these identified practice messages were explored through the lens of testimony of family support workers in the UK and Ireland, these core messages are examined. Operating with hard-to-engage children and parents, we hear how families and family support worker colleagues now view the core functions of child and family work across both jurisdictions (Ireland and England). The authors argue that by naming a more detailed set of practices that are deemed as most useful by families, based on the benefits and challenges of intensive family support work, key messages arise that have major resonance for social work and multiagency practice into the future. A basic message from this study is that valuable lessons on engagement and intervention with families can be drawn for professionals by examining the practice elements of this group of paraprofessionals in the child and family arena. This paper adds to debates on the role of support and intervention in social work and family support work.