country matters: sexing the reconciled Republic of Australia

This essay analyses how Australian postcolonial discourses, influenced by both Republicanism and Reconciliation, deploy the trope of woman to signify political change in both feminist and cultural debates about belonging, national legitimacy and sovereignty. I point out that white feminist rejection of the Queen in favour of embracing indigeneity is itself complicit with a history of ‘incorporating’ and assimilating indigeneity – a complicity that is sublimated in favour of a triumphant rejection of Imperial white womanhood. The essay looks at a contemporary Australian novel, media depictions of Paul Keating's ‘embrace’ of Queen Elizabeth II (as a kind of captivity narrative), critical whiteness studies’ ‘rejection’ of the Queen and the misrecognition of Australia's distinct characteristics as a ‘settler culture’ (that incorporates indigeneity) within Australian feminist debates and claims of ‘transgression’ that are made for interracial relationships in Australia.     

Palpable insecurity and Sen’s comparative view of justice: anthropological considerations

Amartya Sen’s comparative approach to justice makes clear that notions of justice are shaped by human agency and experience, and both his focus on the ‘internal view’ of well-being that emphasizes suffering as a central feature of illness and his recognition that social and cultural factors shape perceived injustice are critical to this approach. However, Sen questionably depicts the contributions of anthropological research to this project as limited to ‘the sensory dimension of ill-health.’ Focusing on mental health in the context of global justice, I argue that Sen’s treatise on justice can be refined through an ethnographic method that synchronizes attention to (1) cultural knowledge and social relations in ecological settings; (2) fundamental human needs; and (3) levels of analytic specificity involving situations, categories, and events. This method integrates analysis of internal phenomenology and external constraints of political economy and ideology. To demonstrate I discuss three cases involving students and violence in Rio de Janeiro, women and witchcraft in Ghana, and historical migration and war trauma among Vietnamese immigrants in which external conditions of insecurity and inequality contributed to deteriorating mental health conditions including depression, trauma, and debilitating anxiety.     

Guest Editorial: Political geographies of children and young people

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the present Special Issue of Space & Polity tackling the political geographies of children and young people. Historically given scant attention by the sub-discipline, since children and young people appear to have little active influence on the workings of states, nations, geopolitics and the like, there are now small signs of how and why political geographers might look anew at the experiences and contribu tions of this population cohort. An empirical vignette, based on letters written by children and young people to Eleanor Roosevelt during the Great De pression, is deployed to develop this claim. Contrasts are then drawn between political geographies of children and young people that are ‘adult-centred’ and those that are ‘child-centred’, as related to claims about the distinctions and connections between ‘macro-politics’ and ‘micro-politics’. It is suggested that, notwithstanding the exciting insights to be derived from child-centred approaches, the situation should not be a matter of privileging these over adult-centred approaches. Indeed, it is argued that there are dangers in going down such a route and of thereby collapsing ‘the political’ into ‘the personal’, thus missing what is distinctively political about the geographies needing to be researched and written. Following a brief excursion into debates about the supposed political apathy of (post)modern children and young people, the paper then introduces the other contributions to the Special Issue.     

csr,Tax and Development

This article explores and critically examines the connections between tax and development on the one hand and tax and corporate social responsibility (csr) on the other. It does so because, while there is increasing recognition of the importance of taxation to efforts to resource the state and to finance ways of tackling poverty, there is a surprising lack of attention to tax avoidance and evasion as a csr issue for transnational corporations operating in the South, even among those companies that pride themselves on being csr leaders. We review evidence of these trends, provide an empirical analysis of how leading firms deal with tax in their corporate reporting and make the case for including taxation as a new frontier in progressive csr.     

Literary Reviews

Tyranny and redemption. Anthills of the Savannah. Chinua Achebe. London: William Heinemann. 1987. 233pp. £10.95hb

Suffering with stoicism: Kenyan histories. Coming to Birth. Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye. London: Virago Press. 1986. 150pp. £3.95pb

The Present Moment. Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye. London: Heinemann. 1987. 155pp. £10.95hb

The politics of the soul. Search Sweet Country. B Kojo Laing. London: Picador. 1987. 318pp. £3.95pb

Images of Istanbul. The Sea‐Crossed Fisherman. Yashar Kemal. Translated from the Turkish by Thilda Kemal. London: Methuen. 1986. 289pp. £3.95pb

The Birds Have Also Gone. Yashar Kemal. Translated from the Turkish by Thilda Kemal. London: Collins Harvill. 1987. 122pp. £8.95hb

Enemies within. War in the Land of Egypt. Yusuf al Qa'id. Translated from the Arabic by Olive and Lome Kenny and Christopher Tingley. London: Al Saqi. 1986. 192pp. £4.95pb

Frustrated fantasies. Heartbreak Tango: A Serial. Manuel Puig. Translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine London: Arean. 1987. 224pp. £2.95pb

Pubis Angelical. Manuel Puig. Translated from the Spanish by Elena Brunet. London: Faber and Faber. 1987. 236pp. £9.95hb

Tending towards one voice. Faces and Masks. Eduardo Galeano. Translated from the Spanish by Cedric Belfrage. London: Quartet. 1987. 304pp. £14.95hb

Land of riches. Cuzcatlan. Manlio Axgueta. Translated from the Spanish by Clark Hansen. London: Chatto and Windus. 1987. 255pp. £11.95hb

Autobiography of the age. The Infinite Rehearsal. Wilson Harris. London: Faber and Faber. 1987. 88pp. £8.95hb

Caribbean childhoods. Summer Lightning and Other Stories. Olive Senior. Harlow, England: Longman. 1986. 134pp. £2.95pb

Whole of a Morning Sky. Grace Nichols. London: Virago. 1987. 156pp. £3.50pb

Traumas of partition. Kingdom's End and Other Stories. Saadat Hasan Manto. Translated from the Urdu by Khalid Hasan. London/New York: Verso. 1987. 257pp. £U.95/S18.95hb

Mirroring Pakistan: reflections and distortions. The Thirteenth House. Adam Zameenzad. London: Fourth Estate. 1987. 202pp. £10.95hb

Black Mirrors. Farooq Khalid. Translated from the Urdu by Eric Cyprian. London: Jonathan Cape. 1987. 285pp. £10.95hb

Christopher Shackle. School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Prize poetry. Under Another Sky: An Anthology of Commonwealth Poetry Prize Winners. Edited by Alastair Niven. Manchester and New York: Carcanet. 1987. 103pp. £6.96/S10.95pb     

Stakeholders,natural resource management and Australian rural local governments: A Q methodological study

This paper reports on a Q methodological study of stakeholder perceptions of rural local government management of natural resources. Data analysis of the Q sorts revealed that there are five distinct stakeholder perspectives relating to rural local government and natural resource management. In terms of natural resource management at the local level rural stakeholders perceive local government as an unwilling participant, an inconsequential participant, as a problematic participant, as a potential participant, and, most positively, a participatory partner. The paper describes each of these five stakeholder perspectives in detail before examining the implications of these findings for greater natural resource management at the local level in non-metropolitan Australia.     

How Much Is Too Much? Media Attention and Popular Support for an Insurgent Party

It is commonly observed that parties and candidates tend to receive coverage in the news media and attention in proportion to their electoral support. Although this norm serves to ensure that coverage is balanced or fair, news values often produce a different pattern of coverage in the television news media. This article considers the dynamic relationship between coverage in the news media and popular support for an insurgent party - the Reform party - in the 1993 Canadian election campaign. The analysis shows that coverage of Reform in the news media underwent an important change during the campaign that appears to have occurred before any change in popular support. While this change in attention to Reform was critical for Reform's ability to mobilize its potential electoral support, it also provides empirical support for the argument that there is an underlying equilibrium between the amount of coverage a party receives and its political support. Data for this analysis come from a campaign wave survey of vote intentions as part of the 1993 Canadian Election Study and a television content analysis of campaign news. The analysis applies an error-correction approach, which assumes an underlying equilibrium relationship, to model media access and vote intentions. The article thus expands the current applications of the error-correction technique while offering substantively important evidence of the political impacts of media decisions for the electoral support of new parties.     

Providing eyewitnesses with initial retrieval support: what works at immediate and subsequent recall?

The effect of retrieval support on eyewitness recall was investigated in two experiments. Based on the outshining hypothesis, Experiment 1 tested whether retrieval support enhances witness performance (compared to free recall) especially when witnessing conditions are suboptimal (e.g., because witnesses were distracted during the crime). Eighty-eight participants watched a videotaped crime with either full or divided attention and subsequently received retrieval support with the Self-Administered Interview© (SAI) or completed a free recall (FR). One week later (Time 2 – T2) all participants completed a second FR. Unexpectedly, retrieval support did not lead to better memory performance than FR under divided attention conditions, suggesting that retrieval support is not effective to overcome adverse effects of divided attention. Moreover, presence of retrieval support at Time 1 (T1) had no effect on memory performance at T2. Experiment 2 (N = 81) tested the hypothesis that these T2-results were due to a reporting issue undermining the memory-preserving effect of T1-retrieval support by manipulating retrieval support (SAI vs. FR) at T1 and T2. As expected, T1-retrieval support led to increased accuracy at T2. Thus, the beneficial value of T1-retrieval support seems greatest with high-quality T2-interviews. Interviewers should consider this when planning a subsequent interview.     

On Measuring Legislative Agenda‐Setting Power

We propose a typology for measuring agenda‐setting success and failure in a legislative context. Our typology goes beyond the most commonly used measure (“rolls”) and includes the full range of agenda‐setting outcomes—rolls (opposing a proposal that subsequently passes), as well as “blocks” (opposing a proposal that is subsequently defeated), “successes” (supporting a proposal that subsequently passes), and “disappointments” (supporting a proposal that is subsequently defeated)—and thus takes into account instances of both positive and negative agenda power. We discuss these measures, and the theoretical questions surrounding them, with the hope of providing some guidance to scholars of the U.S. House, as well as those analyzing agenda power in other legislatures. As a first step in this direction, we explore variation in agenda‐setting measures in 85 American state legislative chambers, the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, and the Canadian House of Commons.     

Effective Practitioner–Scholar Relationships: Lessons from a Coproduction Partnership

This article presents a continuum of possible coproduction arrangements between scholars and practitioners and suggests that greater engagement is necessary to bridge the commonly cited problems that create the gap between research and practice. Reflections on an Australian case of a major public sector coproduction partnership, the highest degree of interaction on the continuum, are used to argue that successful engagement between practitioners and scholars is possible, while also recognizing the difficulties inherent in this process. The benefits and challenges of this partnership are presented, as well as critical factors that drive effective relationships. Lessons are drawn for the development of future coproduction partnerships, including the importance of recognizing that both scholars and practitioners are, in fact, researchers.