What sits behind cricket's balltampering Scandal A measure of cricket's popularity is the volume of publicity it receives. This might be gleaned from a check of the library holdings of 'cricket' books. The State Library of Victoria's database lists 3012 such books. My local, suburban library lists 183. Such random measures provide a small window on why cricket's ball-tampering crisis generated such a high level of public interest and engagement. And this is without any…
How are we to understand the hopes, fears and consequences of the contemporary world of technoscience and electronic capitalism? Whether we are trying to understand the social conditions that frame the post-human projections of stem-cell technology research, the big-bang pretensions of the Large Hadron Collider, the current inability to institute more than market-based solutions to climate change, or the continuing but largely submerged possibility of nuclear holocaust, existing commentary tends to provide us only with…
Performance imperatives and quiescence in the football machine. The AFL has been concerned about elite players using recreational drugs for a long time. The more serious issue of performance-enhancing supplements largely went under the radar, until, that is, February 2013 when Minister for Justice Jason Clare and Minister for Sport Kate Lundy announced ASADA's findings into doping in sport and the use of illegal substances in the AFL and NRL. Shock and horror followed, with…
Review(s) of: The university in chains: Confronting the military-industrial-academic complex, by Henry A. Giroux, Paradigm Publishers, 2007; Hearts of darkness: Torturing children in the war on terror, by Henry A. Giroux, Paradigm Publishers, 2010; Twilight of the social, by Henry A. Giroux, Paradigm Publishers, 2010.
How do we understand and respond to the contemporary state's reaction to protest? In Australia there is a long history of public protest: against the hanging of Ronald Ryan in 1967, the anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s and 70s, protest against the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and Reclaim the Night, to name a few. In each case police have been present, in a management role, but rarely with the intent to stop such…
'Time Magazine' declared 2011 'person' of the year to be the protester - participants in a large number of global protests. While rolling together a range of protest events, one element of commonality that Time noted was protestors' dissatisfaction with political regimes that 'favor the rich and powerful' and that are 'dysfunctional and corrupt'.
In 1970 Joe Raposo, a United States-based songwriter, penned a tune titled 'Bein Green'. Produced originally for the children's television program Sesame Street, this composition has since had far-reaching impact. A quick search of the WWW soon reveals a vast number of sites where the central caption 'It's not that easy being green' has been taken and applied. Forty-one years ago Raposo gave voice to growing concerns about the environment. These concerns are now expressed…
In early 2008 the Australian federal government passed legislation, the Water Act 2007, concerning national water quality, distribution mechanisms and the coordination of inter-governmental management processes and the outcome of over a decade of effort to reform water policy. One part of the Act was a directive for a long-term reform strategy for the Murray-Darling Basin. In early October 2010 this statement was released to the public and therefore to the communities that had been…
