Editors' Introduction

Population Research and Policy Review -     

Editors' Introduction

For the professional middle class in information industries, “working from home” is an increasingly common feature of the employment landscape, resulting from the affordability and portability of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The phrase invokes a sense of freedom from the banality of the traditional office, offering flexibility in both working hours and location when other commitments prevail. In recent debates in Australian politics, working from home is also offered as an empowered choice for women who seek to combine paid work and childcare duties, thereby consecrating a preferable version of (post)feminist subjectivity suited to neoliberal economics and ideologies. This paper shows how these subjectivities have been represented in recent ICT advertising for two purposes: firstly, to highlight the role of mainstream media in normalising preferred uses of new media technology for work purposes; and secondly, to note how this process contributes to wider discourses limiting the aspirations of middle-class feminist politics to an individual level. In doing so, the paper seeks to question the ethical horizon of new media advertising as well as the feminist and labour politics upon which its appeal relies.     

Guest Editors' Introduction

This discourse analysis explores traditional and feminist articulations of rape in online mediated discourse regarding the sexual attack on CBS journalist Lara Logan in Egypt in February 2011. Examination of 175 stories and links in the top ten news blogs in the United States showed that the blogosphere contested traditional rape narratives that blamed Logan for the attack and conceptualized rape through a more varied means. In doing so, bloggers engaged in a struggle for meaning, and mainstreamed feminist understandings of sexual violence within the online public space.     

Living in Freedom and Hope: Editors' Introduction

Have radical discourses about children's sexual liberation/empowerment become normative technologies of neoliberal governmentality? How do we see sexualised representations of girls and what does the sexualised child look like? A contemporary consensus between media narratives and radical cultural critiques about the dangerous intolerance of child sexual abuse (CSA) moral panics suggests that the CSA moral panic discourse is caught up in the neoliberal “regulation of intolerance” (Brown 2006) through the governance of the gaze. Focusing on the 2008 Australian media event that erupted over Bill Henson's “art” photographs of naked girls, this article analyses how a perception that the images sexualised children was governed by experts as a reactionary and perverse CSA moral panic gaze. I argue that this form of governance depends on the exclusion of the political gaze of the survivor, a gaze that has been vital to a feminist critique of hetero-normative paedophilia. Re-claiming an affective feminist gaze involves thinking beyond the upwardly mobile discourse of CSA moral panic and through the occluded question of the sexual politics of paedophilia.     

A note on mortality in Jamaica

This article analyses briefly various aspects of mortality in Jamaica. After an appraisal of available vital statistics, the mortality trend, as revealed in several measures, is traced and brief comparison with other West Indian colonies made. A discussion of the marked differential between legitimate and illegitimate infant mortality leads to the conclusion that the higher rate of the latter is associated with lower socio-economic status of the parents. Mortality from a few causes of death is also analysed and the possibility of improvement stressed. The probable consequences of declining mortality are illustrated by examining the probable growth of the population to 1951 in three broad age groups.     

A note on migration and employment

This paper examines the nature of the relation between migration and employment. A preliminary investigation confirms a previous observation that the employment rate of migrants is generally lower than that of non-migrants. A further analysis, however, suggests that this does not mean that migration has no effect on employment; in fact, the two appear to be strongly related. Migration enables some unemployed and initially disadvantaged persons to improve their employment status, making it more nearly comparable, though not equal, to that of the general population.     

A note on key factor analysis

Summary Various aspects of a model for key factor analysis (Manly, 1977a) are discussed. Equations for estimating the parameters of the model are given. The jackknife method is suggested for obtaining standard errors for estimators. The case of circular populations (where the adults in one generation produce all the individuals alive at the start of the next, generation) is considered. A computer program is described. Varley et al.’s (1973) data on the winter moth is used for illustrative purposes.     

Tribal affiliation and fertility: A note

This not extends T. L. F. Devis's recent investigation of the relationship between tribal affiliation and fertility in Sierra Leone. Controls are introduced for age structure and economic variables. The findings suggest that tribal affiliation does not have much independent influence on fertility after these factors are allowed for.     

Tribal affiliation and fertility: A note

Summary This not extends T. L. F. Devis's recent investigation of the relationship between tribal affiliation and fertility in Sierra Leone. Controls are introduced for age structure and economic variables. The findings suggest that tribal affiliation does not have much independent influence on fertility after these factors are allowed for.