Representations of Social Work in the Australian News Media

How the news media constructs social work has been an area of great concern for the social work profession for several decades. It is a discussion within the professional literature that has been dominated by the assumption that the media has portrayed an unfairly critical representation of the profession. To address a significant dearth of knowledge surrounding this highly discussed but poorly researched topic, this article presents the findings from a study that analysed 12 months of social work coverage in Melbourne, Australia. The findings indicate that coverage was not necessarily unfairly critical, but rather relatively absent. Furthermore, the analysis found that existing reporting constructed the profession as being highly diverse in fields, practice methods, and worker demographics. The findings have significant implications for how the professional community understands the relationship, challenging dominant assumptions, but also informing future action and engagement with the news media.     

Representations of Climate Change in Canadian National Print Media: The Banalization of Global Warming

L'article ausculte des tendances longitudinales dans la couverture médiatique d'enjeux reliés aux changements climatiques au sein des journaux canadiens à distribution nationale. Nous constatons que cette couverture est devenu moins nuancée et davantage restreinte sur le plan thématique au fil du temps malgré le fait que les changements climatiques constituent aujourd'hui un enjeu scientifique et politique à polyvalence marquée. Bien que le contexte contemporain témoigne d'une intensité de couverture sans précédents, nous soutenons que les journaux canadiens à distribution nationale ont pris part d'un processus de «décontextualisation» des changements climatiques. Ainsi, nous notons un traitement infréquent de sujets reliés aux causes et impacts potentiels du phénomène ainsi qu'aux débats scientifiques pertinents. Simultanément, l'agencement superficielle de cet enjeu aux tiraillements politiques quotidiens et aux occurrences au sein du monde des d'affaires représente la tendance discursive dominante. This article examines longitudinal trends in media coverage of global climate change issues in Canada's national print media. While climate change is a multilayered scientific and political issue, we find that media coverage has become less nuanced and thematically narrower over time. Despite unprecedented levels of coverage in recent years, we argue that the Canadian national print media has been complicit in the “decontextualization” of climate change, whereby less attention is paid to issues of causation, scientific claims, and potential impacts, while more attention is granted to how climate change superficially intersects with everyday politicking and business issues.     

The Trouble With Triumph: Discourses of Governmentality in Mainstream Media Representations of Urban Youth

The Assets Coming Together for Youth project conducted a critical discourse analysis of mainstream media depictions of Jane-Finch to better understand the discursive strategies used to constitute urban youth. Although a substantive body of literature investigates the negative discourses, little analysis interrogates the nominally positive discourses deployed by mainstream media. The findings suggest that the sociopolitical significance of these nominally positive discourses may go uncontested and pose a challenge to communities advocating for policies to support urban youth development. These discourses are examined using governmentality theory to reveal how racialized narratives of individual triumph re/produce troubled communities.     

The Power and Limits of Marriage: Married Gay Men's Family Relationships

Same‐sex marriage has received much scholarly attention in the United States in the past decade. Yet we know little about how same‐sex couples experience marriage. In this article, I present findings from in‐depth interviews with 32 legally married gay men in Iowa. I focus on their experiences with families of origin and investigate the legitimating potential of same‐sex marriage. The men had high expectations about the power of marriage to help them gain recognition and support, but their experiences with family members were more varied and complex than they expected. Although marriage often led to positive family outcomes, it also commonly had negative consequences, including new and renewed experiences of family rejection. This study complicates ideas about the legitimating potential of marriage for same‐sex couples by illuminating both its power and limits in helping gay men gain status and support from their families of origin.     

A comparison of the Korean minorities in China and Japan

"This article compares the Korean minorities in China and Japan in their differential levels of cultural autonomy and ethnic identity....In explaining the differential levels of ethnicity between the two Korean minority groups, this paper focuses on the basic differences in minority policy between the two countries; the difference in the context of migration; the existence or absence of a territorial base; and the differential levels of influence from Korea."     

A Long Loop: Transmigration of Korean Women in Japan

Focusing on new women immigrants/migrants from Korea to Japan in recent years, this article explores the form of transmigratory practice of U‐turnees, who have past experiences of having lived in Japan or been born there prior to the end of Japan's colonial rule in 1945 and returned to Japan around the year 1989 when the South Korean government lifted the restriction of overseas travel for its citizens. I suggest through mini life histories of five women that their lives can best be understood in terms of ongoing engagement with more than one nation‐state as home. On this basis, I argue that what might look like a chaotic swirl of new immigrants/migrants is in fact not based on the discovery of a brave new world, but firmly based on family history and configurated by state‐to‐state relations.     

Korean residents in Japan during the second world war: Official reports on rumours and public feeling

The article identifies some of the ways in which the ‘Victorian Gypsy’ was constructed by a group of authors known as Gypsy lorists, and develops reading strategies that highlight the politics of their writing, in particular using Jacques Derrida's theorisation of the archive. For the Victorians, it seemed that the Gypsy way of life would soon die out. The Gypsies' apparently imminent disappearance marks their world as delicate, natural and formerly pure. However, the structure of the archive means that the lorists' attempts to preserve their version of Gypsy culture are threatened from within: they hasten the forgetting of that which they would conserve and archivally silence Gypsy voices with their own. Claims of extinction have evidently been disproved, however, and new archives successfully augment what the lorists considered to be the last word on Gypsies in Britain.     

Gender Construction Through Interactions Between the Media and Audience in Japan

This paper traces feminist studies in Japan on mass media texts and the audience's readings since the 1970s in the historical and social context, and reviews them from a perspective of gender identity construction. The four studies referred to examine differences in text readings by audience, and some also explore the audience's livelihood as a background. Methodologically, the studies qualitatively analyse populations consisting of people who have been identified as representative or typical of each audience, based on quantitative surveys. The readings made by audiences are defined by characteristics of Japanese society, historical background including media environment, and living situations. In the 1970s, home–oriented adult women found common values in television dramas and identified their way of living as "woman". The studies conducted after the 1980s, on hero shows for children and on girl–oriented novels, suggest that media experience, with some momentum towards promoting changes of gender roles, still function dominantly in reproducing the existing gender system through construction of gender–specific identities. In the current era, new studies and activities of media literacy have emerged in order to raise audiences' critical awareness of text readings.     

第五届全国特奥会对提升城市软实力的影响

特奥会的开展使大家更加关注智障人群,关注弱势群体。从特奥会的前期、中期到后期,发现社会上助残之风盛行,人们在日常生活中和公共生活中,明显对弱势群体有了更多的关注和帮助,这也从侧面说明了特奥会对提升城市软实力的影响是巨大的。文章对如何更好地提升福州乃至其他更多城市的软实力提出建议与相关的对策。     

Media, Racism and Islamophobia: The Representation of Islam and Muslims in the Media

This article examines the representation of Islam and Muslims in the British press. It suggests that British Muslims are portrayed as an 'alien other' within the media. It suggests that this misrepresenatation can be linked to the development of a 'racism', namely, Islamphobia that has its roots in cultural representations of the 'other'. In order to develop this arguement, the article provies a summary/overview of how ethnic minorities have been represented in the British press and argues that the treatment of British Muslims and Islam follows these themes of 'deviance' and 'un-Britishness'.     

提升上海城市软实力的比较优势研究

软实力是城市的核心竞争力,更是建设全球城市的必要条件和动力来源。伴随着城市硬实力上升到一定水平,城市软实力在城市发展中的地位越来越重要。比较研究发现,上海城市软实力虽在国内处于领先水平,也在部分方面达到国际一流水平,但与纽约、伦敦等全球城市相比还存在较大差距,有很大的提升空间。展望未来30年,上海要成为比肩纽约、伦敦的全球城市,必须塑造国际领先的城市软实力,更要依托城市软实力实现快速崛起。为此,要注重和加强城市软实力的建设,从多方面做起,持续提升上海的软实力。     

Ordinary Usage of New Media: Internet Usage via Mobile Phone in Japan

Abstract:  This paper, by analyzing Internet usage via mobile phones in Japan, aims to clarify an aspect of information behavior in present-day Japanese society.
Many discourses on the mobile Internet in Japan, either positive or negative, emphasize its novelty and describe this new media as an exotic phenomenon. These discourses can be divided into two categories. The nationalistic discourses and the moral panic discourses. Both types of discourse have built certain images of social influences of the mobile Internet in the future. However, it would be unwise to conclude that those images of the mobile Internet express the reality of this new medium, simply because they lack empirical ground.
With these points in mind, based on the result of our national survey conducted in 2001, we would like to show the actual status of use of the mobile Internet and discuss that the ordinary usage is a critically important realm to understand the process of social reception of the mobile Internet. As our data shows, although the actual usage of the mobile Internet is not very conspicuous, it gives us a chance to understand how the mobile Internet has been integrated into our everyday lives.     

Making Sense of a Transnational Merger: Media Texts and the (Re)construction of Power Relations

In this study of symbolic power relations in a transnational merger, we suggest that the popular media can provide a significant arena for (re)constructing national identities and power in this kind of dramatic industrial restructuring, and are an under-utilized source of empirical data in research studies. Focusing on the press coverage of a recent Swedish-Finnish merger, we specify and illustrate a particular feature of discursive (re)construction of asymmetric power relations; superior (Swedish) and inferior (Finnish) national identities, which, we argue, are embedded in the history of colonization and domination between the two nations. The findings of the present study lead us to suggest that a lens taken from post-colonial theory is particularly useful in understanding the wider symbolic power implications of international industrial restructuring.     

Ethnic Stratification and Inter-Generational Differences in Japan: A Comparative Study of Korean and Japanese Status Attainment

Abstract: There are plenty of stereotypical discourses concerning the Korean minority in Japan that are widely accepted, not because of their plausibility, but because of the lack of basic empirical data. In order to fill this intellectual vacuum, I conducted a social stratification and mobility survey focusing on resident Korean men in 1995, comparable with the Japanese sample. The purpose of this article is exploratory rather than aimed at hypothesis testing, given the extreme paucity of the earlier empirical data for the ana‐lysis of Korean minority status attainment. The results show that:  

• 1 For the Korean minority in Japan, class resources translate into educational attainment to a much lower extent than for the Japanese.
• 2 Korean status attainment patterns deviate from those of their Japanese counterparts. For the Japanese, the crucial status attainment path is secured through educational attainment, which is not the case among Koreans.
• 3 Despite being denied access to such mainstream status attainment paths, major status indicators for Koreans are not significantly different than those of Japanese, and regarding this equality of outcomes, one of the possible explanations is that Korean ethnic disadvantages in the status attainment process may have been overcome by mobilizing informal bilateral ethnic networks.

     

The Clinician's Voice and the Limits of Bioethics

The bioethics movement has long promulgated a model of ‘principled decision‐making’ in which ethical dilemmas and conflicts between various rights, interests, and ethical principles are central. In many respects this movement has had a laudatory impact on health care and on health professionals, but we will also argue that the bioethical model of ethical analysis has important limitations. The model's theoretical orientation is discontinuous with the training and skills of health professionals, the manner in which health professionals conceptualise and solve problems that arise in a clinical setting, and the time constraints inherent in most clinical situations. As such, the model is not readily applicable to much of the day‐to‐day work of clinicians and, in particular, to the routine ethical questions and situations that arise in caring for patients. What we suggest is that the bioethical model does not take into account that health care professionals, as part of their daily work, encounter and manage difficult, often conflictual situations and that they do so by bringing to bear conceptual frameworks and therapeutic techniques that have, embedded within them, the ethical values and goals of their own fields, as well as established ways of dealing with problems and addressing competing priorities. We further argue that from a systems perspective, the bioethical model and the pragmatic, problem‐focused ethical decision‐making of clinicians operate on different levels of complexity; whereas the former is especially appropriate for situations that resist consensus or that raise significant issues of public policy, the latter serves as an effective framework in less difficult or complex situations that can be moved effectively toward consensus and closure.