World citizens: Australian women’s internationalist broadcasts, 1930–1939

This article examines how Australian women broadcasters used radio to claim their own voices as experts on international affairs and encourage other women to become active world citizens in the 1930s. During a decade when the Great Depression limited the ability of many to travel, and the increasing calamity of the rise of fascism and the descent into World War II brought foreign affairs to the forefront of public debate, broadcasting became a key tool used by internationalist women to educate their female listeners about the world beyond Australia’s shores. They also used the medium to encourage other women to become actively involved in international causes including feminism, peace activism and Zionism. Through their broadcasts, women such as Constance Duncan, Irene Greenwood and Ruby Rich demonstrated the value of radio as a tool for active citizenship and further opened up the public sphere to women’s voices and opinions on social and political issues.     

‘A sort of Rathmines version of a Dior design’: Maeve Brennan,Self-Fashioning and the Uses of Style

This article explores the politics of style in the writing of Maeve Brennan. Brennan's concern with style, subjectivity and power is strikingly visible in her short stories and ‘Talk of the Town’ essays for the New Yorker. While in some of her short stories published in the New Yorker in the 1950s, Brennan seems to offer an extended critique of dandyism, elsewhere in her writing self-fashioning takes on an altogether more positive value and is steeped in the political as well as literary commitments of her work. The article argues that Brennan's interest in the politics of style, both personally and in her writing, is informed by the different strategies she deployed as an Irish woman writer establishing her place amongst a New York literary elite in the mid twentieth century.     

Public Value and the Integrative Mind: How Multiple Sectors Can Collaborate in City Building

Creating the public realm in an era of constrained resources demands a level of cooperation among multiple sectors rarely seen before and a recognition that the boundaries between what we have considered “public” and “private” have become porous and blurred. A number of recent projects on either side of the Mississippi River near downtown Minneapolis show what this means in terms of delivering public value much greater than any one sector could produce on its own.