Museum Outreach Programs to Promote Community Engagement in Local Environmental Issues

Ideas of ‘community’ and ‘community voice’ have been mobilised in collaborative programs developed between the National Museum of Australia and the Murray‐Darling Basin Commission since 1992. This collaboration is set within a broader context of changing ideas and practice around governance, community and environmental issues. The recent Murray‐Darling Outreach Project (MDOP), a series of museum outreach projects with regional communities aiming to increase community engagement in local environmental issues in the Murray‐Darling Basin, is specifically examined. Evaluation research on the MDOP found that the approach to program development significantly shaped the types of voices, range of issues presented and the nature of the communicative forums established. The potential impacts on online audiences are discussed along with broader implications for government agencies involved in community partnerships.     

School uniform revisited: procedure,pressure and equality

The House of Lords’ decision in R. (on the application of Begum) v. The Headteacher and Governors of Denbigh High School considered whether a particular school uniform policy infringed a student's right to manifest her religion under Article 9. This paper analyses the content of this decision, and explores how schools should approach the issue of balancing reglious rights with other interests in designing their uniform policy.     

The social factory of democracy in underdeveloped Spain

This article aims to analyse the contribution made by Christian movements towards constructing a democratic citizenship in an authoritarian context in the backward province of Albacete. Our study attempts to analyse the efforts made by grassroots Catholic sectors to foster democratic enclaves free from the interference of the Francoist state in 1960s and 1970s Spain. These alternative social spaces enabled new habits of civil resistance that confronted the socio-cultural hegemony of authoritarian values. As a result, throughout these years, various social groups started to challenge the sense of the regime's impregnable unity. This grassroots experience with the “power of the powerless” laid the foundations for negotiations among the political elites during the transition to democracy in Spain.     

Coke in Context: Early Modern Legal Observation and Sir Edward Coke's Reports

Our understanding of Sir Edward Coke's Reports turn upon an appreciation of his methodology as a reporter; the strengths and limitations of the Reports as a source of legal and political commentary have implications for our reading of the early Stuart constitution. This article locates Coke's Reports within the broader habits of record-keeping and observation employed by common lawyers in the early seventeenth century. It argues that a conflation of personal observation and professional opinion, promoted through the educational techniques of English law, provided Coke with a unique opportunity to place his own views at the heart of the profession.     

American Militarism and Blowback: The Costs of Letting the Pentagon Dominate Foreign Policy

"Blowback" is a CIA term first used in March 1954 in a report on the 1953 operation to overthrow the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. It is a metaphor for the unintended consequences of covert operations against foreign nations and governments. The suicidal attacks of September 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were instances of blowback from American clandestine operations in Afghanistan. They have greatly accelerated tendencies toward militarism in the United States, which is defined as the phenomenon in which a nation's armed services come to put their institutional preservation ahead of effectiveness in achieving national security or a commitment to the integrity of the governmental structure of which they are a part.