Group Treatment for Aggressive Women: An Initial Evaluation

There is virtually no information or research on group treatment for women who may behave abusively to intimate partners. The Calgary Counseling Centre has offered a group treatment program for such clients, Responsible Choices for Women, over the past several years. This paper describes the group format, the demographic characteristics of the 64 women who began the group, and a comparison of those who completed treatment versus those who dropped out. The pre/mid/post-test group evaluation utilized measures of physical and non-physical partner abuse, self-esteem, depression, clinical stress, marital satisfaction, family relations, locus of control, sex roles, and assertiveness. The repeated measures analysis on data from 33 women found statistically significant improvements on non-physical abuse of partner, clinical stress, generalized contentment, self-esteem and assertiveness, using a conservative p-value of .009, given the use of multiple tests. Clinical implications of these results are described.

‘Those Chosen by the Planet’: <Emphasis Type="Italic">Final Fantasy VII</Emphasis> and Earth Jurisprudence

This article allies the 1997 PlayStation video game Final Fantasy VII with Slavoj ?i?ek’s writings on ecology to critique the area of legal philosophy known as ‘earth jurisprudence’. Earth jurisprudents argue that law bears a large part of the responsibility for humanity’s exploitation of the environment, as law helps to bar nature from subjectivity. However, as ?i?ek warns—and as FFVII illustrates—the desire for meaning incites people to manufacture a harmonious vision of nature that obscures the chaotic forces at work in the environment and ultimately absolves humanity of responsibility towards the world. Therefore, earth jurisprudence’s program of using legal rights to limit human intervention should be rejected in favour of an approach that enables people to take an active role in addressing the ecological crisis.     

Bearing Witness: Essays in Honour of Brij V. Lal

Bearing Witness: Essays in Honour of Brij V. Lal . Edited by Doug Munro and Jack Corbett (Canberra: ANU Press, 2017), pp.333, AU$53.00 (pb).     

Memorializing genocide: embodied semiotics in concentration camp memorials

Theorists have argued that the “attempt to comprehend” the genocidal event represented by Auschwitz has “defeated the intellects of countless men and women”. Memorials at Auschwitz and other concentration camps such as Dachau and Buchenwald, and to a certain extent those outside of Europe, such as Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek in Cambodia, are attempts to call attention to these atrocities in the hope of preventing the repetition of their like. Yet these projects, like all historical monuments and memorials, face the problem of a certain coldness and indifference caused by historical distance, consumerist culture and the seemingly abstract nature of historical images and documents. Concentration camp memorials are not entirely immune from these problems. However, in their use of an embodied semiotics invoking the visitor’s own body as a direct participant in immersive environments, sensory surfaces and displays, these memorials engage – not unproblematically – in a project to realize this history in visceral and concrete ways. This paper examines the semiotic strategies of the concentration camp as a technique of “embodying” suffering that is intended to counter the dissipation of affect in a media-saturated consumerist era.     

The Wheels of Misfortune: The Street and Cycles of Displacement in Surabaya,Indonesia

This focus of this paper is not Surabaya's increasingly free-flowing streets, but the people those streets displace. Based on research in a low-income neighbourhood, or kampung, of Indonesia's second largest city, this paper shows how the street facilitates displacement and exacerbates the marginalisation of underemployed kampung men. This argument is set against the struggles over the use of public space between Surabaya's kampung residents and the municipality since independence and is grounded through the biographical detail of seven kampung men over the ten years since the economic crisis of 1998.