Changing the world: Time,space and perceptions

The vicissitudes of one small feminist organisation are used to illustrate the problems of others, even in the context of a period when attention has supposedly been directed at women. The prejudices and problems experienced have, however, come from other women as well as from men, and these require examination in order to be overcome. The objectives of the organisation are outlined, with several informal strategies that have evolved through the experience of putting the objectives into effect.     

Why University Education Matters: Youth Work and the Australian Experience

In many countries youth work education in the university confronts a precarious future. Paradoxically, this takes place as the labor market is unable to meet demands for qualified practitioners. This article makes a case for further investment in university-based youth work education. While presenting labor demand and supply arguments, we also suggest that a good university education is important for producing graduates capable of becoming experts and good practitioners in the Aristotelian sense of the word. This entails the provision of learning opportunities to attain specialist knowledge, technical expertise and ethical capacities of the kind that distinguish youth work practice from other approaches to work with young people. Such an education also promotes the prospect that practitioners are able to develop a professional habitus that advances youth work as a discrete field of professional practice. While the material used in this article is Australian, we suggest there are sufficient commonalities between the Australian experience and many other countries for the arguments, findings and recommendations made here to have more general applicability.     

Household production and the national economy: Concepts for the analysis of Agrarian formations

This essay argues that the central concept for analysis of agrarian social relations is the form of production. This is conceived through a double specification of the unit of production and the social formation. The approach allows for the analytical specification of simple commodity production and capitalist relations of production in a manner consistent with the development of new concepts within political economy for agrarian structures which do not correspond to modes of production. The latter have generally been referred to as ‘peasant’, a term derived through empirical generalisation and resting on a (usually) implicit contrast with simple commodity production. The contrast can be made more rigorous through the concept of commoditisation, defined as the penetration into reproduction of commodity relations. Simple commodity production is a concept within political economy, allowing for deduction of conditions of reproduction and class relations. ‘Peasant production is negatively defined as resisting commoditisation, and nothing can be deduced about reproduction or class relations. ‘Peasant’ must be replaced ty a comprehensive and mutually exclusive set of rigorously defined concepts specifying forms of production. Procedures for defining such forms of production are suggested.     

Unravelling Identities: Performance and Criticism in Australian Feminisms

The following article is an exploration of the non-linear and non-unified identities that make up Australian feminism. The main premise is that the divergent strands of rational and romantic thought, central to the project of liberalism, are inherent in the characterization of Australian feminisms. As a result, there have always been tensions between feminists, centred around politics of self-identification. These tensions continue to exist, but to be articulated in different ways in different decades as a result of the ever changing relationships between feminist, state and media/public discourses. These ideas are explored through comparing two key moments in our recent past in which differences between feminisms were declared. These two events - the Mary Daly visit to Australia to promote Gyn/Ecology in 1981, and the debate engendered by Helen Garner's The First Stone in 1995 - are taken to be performative metaphors through which the continuities and discontinuities of the nature of Australian feminisms can be subjectively explored.     

Creating the space: Feminist publications outside the mainstream

Some mainstream publisher have been responsible for feminist publications; some mainstream publishers have also suggested that feminism was an interesting but passing phase. The Crossing Press has a different view and a sound rationale for insisting on the necessity and the value of small publishers who can publish and promote feminist writing.     

Negotiating the Politics of Inclusion: Women and Australian Labor Governments 1983 to 1995

The Hawke and Keating Labor governments have tended to practise a politics of inclusion in which women, along with other social groups, are seen to have an important part to play in building the new, internationally competitive Australian economy of the twenty-first century. Australian politics have therefore had a very different nature from that of the more exclusionary politics practised by British Conservative governments. While the politics of inclusion have given feminists room for manoeuvre, and facilitated some positive developments in areas such as affirmative action and childcare policies, feminists have had little success in challenging the overall direction of the governments' right-wing economic policies. Furthermore, the ‘economic’ has functioned as a meta-category which dissolves difference and conflict. The Australian experience therefore has both practical and theoretical implications for British feminists who may be experiencing a Labour government themselves before too long.     

Attitudes to marriage and prostitution in the writings of olive schreiner,Mona Caird,Sarah Grand and George Egerton

Abstract

In recent years scholars have carried out valuable research into aspects of Victorian sexuality. This article offers some insights into the many and varied attitudes taken in the late nineteenth century towards marriage and prostitution, highlighting the fact that a number of advanced thinkers actually dared to speak of marriage itself as a form of prostitution. Four major figures of the fin-de-siècle period are discussed: Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird, Sarah Grand and George Egerton.     

论创造性人才的知识智能结构及其培养

创造性人才必须具备创造能力和创造人格两方面的素质。进步性、时代性、创造性是创造性人才的本质属性。创造性人才的最优知识智能品质结构 ,包括广博精深的知识、孕育创造的智力和凝聚智慧的能力。培养和造就创造性人才必须创造教育 ,即要依托创造性的环境、要依托建设创造型的师资队伍 ,还要善于运用创造性的教学方法。