Australian Cinema Studies: How the Subject Is Taught in Australian Universities

Since the mid-1970s, the subject Australian Cinema, and its various synonyms and neologisms, has been studied in humanities, social sciences and the arts in Australian higher education, and research in the field has played an important role in informing the critical approaches underpinning curriculum. Yet to date there is limited insight into the types of subjects offered, approaches to curriculum and syllabus, and their alignment with research. This article maps Australian cinema studies in higher education at an undergraduate level, and provides insight into common curriculum and syllabus models. Findings are drawn from an online survey of university course handbooks, content and thematic analysis of study guides and weekly syllabus, and correspondence with coordinators. Twenty-seven universities offered subjects with a dominant Australian cinema focus. Australian cinema studies is firmly embedded in national cinema curriculum, and three common curriculum models include the following: (1) a historical chronology of Australian cinema, (2) a text-dominant approach organised around the weekly study of a key film and (3) an approach predominately structured around Australian cinema discourses and critical theory. Despite the increasing importance of transnational approaches to Australian screen in research, transnationalism rarely functions as a dominant organising logic for curriculum in its own right.     

Administrative Innovations and Accountability Failures: The Termination of the Spanish Telecommunications Agency

We discuss how far accountability practices may be relevant to the success of independent regulators in countries without a tradition of administrative autonomy. We develop a conceptualisation of agency accountability failures and develop an analytical framework to examine the life and termination of the Spanish regulatory agency for telecommunications, CMT (Comisión del Mercado de las Telecomunicaciones - Telecommunications Market Commission). We argue that the CMT’s termination was related, among other reasons, to accountability failures in its institutional design. The paper relies on a variety of sources, including legislation, literature, media coverage, and semistructured interviews with agency officials and several stakeholders.     

International product life cycles,trade and development stages

The Journal of Technology Transfer - In this paper we first propose a proxy for early stage activity in a country’s exports based on product life cycle theory. Employing a conditional latent...     

Racial Stereotypes and Asian American Youth Paradox

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Asian Americans are simultaneously stereotyped as a perpetual foreigner and a model minority. This cross-sectional study of 308 Filipino American youth (mean age...     

Mobilizing from the Margins: Domestic Citizen Politics and Yasukuni Shrine

Prime Minister Koizumi’s six consecutive annual visits to Yasukuni shrine played a key role in initiating a new phase of domestic citizen political mobilization not seen since the early 1970s. This paper is based on field research during the Koizumi years (2001–2006) centering on domestic groups that conduct activities in “protection” of or “opposition” to Yasukuni shrine. As a study of street-based politics, this paper seeks to uncover the processes, strategies, and outcomes of citizen responses to elite political action at Yasukuni Shrine as well as explore meaning of their actions within the context of Japan’s democratic polity.

Body mass and suicide risk

Body mass has been neglected as a possible predictor of suicidal behavior. The present investigation explores the association between body mass index and completed suicide. Data are from the National Mortality Followback Survey and refer to 373 suicides, and 518 deaths from motor vehicle accidents as controls. The results of a logistic regression analysis indicated that, for females, the greater the BMI the greater the suicide risk. However, this relationship did not hold up under controls for race and other covariates of BMI. For males, the BMI was not significantly related to suicide risk either at the bivariate or multivariate levels of analysis. The best predictors of suicide were living alone for females, and alcohol abuse for males.     

Turf wars: Using social media network analysis to examine the suspected astroturfing campaign for the Adani Carmichael Coal mine on Twitter

This article uses social media network analysis (SMNA) to examine whether there was an astroturfing campaign on Twitter in support of the Adani Carmichael coal mine in 2017. It shows that SMNA can be used to visualize and analyze outsider lobbying activity in issue arenas and is capable of identifying networks of fake opinion. This study found that in April 2017, there was a small network of accounts that made a series of suspiciously similar pro‐Adani tweets that could be considered a form of duplicitous lobbying. However, this study concludes that these posts were likely a weak influence on public opinion in Australia and largely ineffectual as a lobbying tactic. Nevertheless, this analysis shows how communitas public interests can be subverted by covert social media campaigns used in support of corporatas goals, as well as the role digital research methods can play in protecting the integrity on public debates by exposing disingenuous actors.