Amanda Third

Children and young people’s rights in the digital age: An emerging agenda:

Rights-based approaches to children’s digital media practices are gaining attention offering a framework for research, policy and initiatives that can balance children’s need for protection online with their capacity to maximize the opportunities and benefits of connectivity. But what does it mean to bring the concepts of the digital, rights and the child into dialogue? Arguing that the child represents a limit case of adult normative discourses about both rights and digital media practices, this article harnesses the radical potential of the figure of the child to rethink (human and children’s) rights in relation to the digital. In doing so, we critique the implicitly adult, seemingly invulnerable subject of rights common in research and advocacy about digital environments. We thereby introduce the articles selected for this special issue and the thinking that links them, in order to draw out the wider tensions and dilemmas driving the emerging agenda for children’s rights in the digital age.

The tactical researcher : cultural studies research as pedagogy

Pedagogy is foundational to cultural studies. From the very outset cultural studies positioned pedagogy as significantly more than just formalised and institutionally-centred activations of teaching and learning. For cultural studies, pedagogy is witnessed in the social practices, relationships, routines and life-ways people engage in the living of lives. This collection presents accounts of pedagogy that move beyond simple (and simplistic) articulations of pedagogy as occurring solely within the classroom. Taking pedagogy beyond formal institutional settings The Pedagogies of Cultural Studies seeks to look again at the implications of pedagogy by (re)opening for consideration pedagogy as something fundamental to the disciplinary formulations of the discipline. Evident not only in the objects of study prefigured by cultural studies but also in the practice of the discipline itself, pedagogy mediates the formations of cultural studies’ disciplinary terrain. The Pedagogies of Cultural Studies seeks to look again at the deep-held assumptions that guide cultural studies in order to explicate the signature pedagogies that shape the discipline and provide the foundation for its disciplinarity.

Imprisonment and Excessive Femininity:Reading Ulrike Meinhof's Brain

It’s a question of submitting feminine disorder, its laughter, its inability to take the drumbeats seriously, to the threat of decapitation. If man operates under the threat of castration, if masculinity is culturally ordered by the castration complex, it might be said that the backlash, the return, on women of this castration anxiety is its displacement as decapitation, execution, or woman, as loss of her head. Hélène Cixous.

Cultivating (Digital) Capacities: A Role for Social Living Labs?

Abstract Digital divide, digital inclusion and digital participation: these and many other terms have been used to name, identify and address technology access and use as a perceived problem, need or opportunity. In this chapter we first reflect on what the development of these terms has achieved, and consider the specific implications of their uptake in the Australian context. We then present a concept of ‘digital capacities’. We argue that this concept can usefully shift the focus from individuals to communities, from fixed to dynamic needs and contexts and from personal deficits to shared strengths and opportunities. Moreover the concept puts forward an understanding of ‘the digital’ as sociotechnical relations, thus challenging the idea present in much popular and policy discourse that ‘the social’ and ‘the digital’ are separate realms. In the final section of the chapter we explore the ways social living labs might operationalize and cultivate capacities to thrive in a digital age.

Editorial: ‘Futures’ in retrospect

During the 1960s migrants to South Australia often had work sponsorship at Whyalla, the iron and steel town. This was to be their new life, their new future. On the coach trip to the town migrants often joined in singing to the tune of Tom Jones hit ‘Delilah’: ‘Why, Why, Why . . . Whyalla?’ Almost half a century later, in early December 2008, over 100 academics endured exhausting journeys by car, bus and train to attend the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (CSAA) conference in Kalgoorlie, at the Western Australia School of Mines. For those delegates, and the readers of this issue, a similar question may be posed: Why Kalgoorlie? Most obviously, Kalgoorlie resonated with the conference theme of ‘Futures’ because it is the historic centre of mining in Western Australia. The Perth–Kalgoorlie pipeline, completed in 1903, was a contentious development that opened up the goldfields and signified a commitment to the future of WA. The town’s growth gave rise to satellite industries such as tourism, beer brewing, and sex work, and today Kalgoorlie is a thriving regional city. However, like any industry centred on natural resources, the mining industry has a finite future. The choice of Kalgoorlie as a venue made visible how the future is a dynamic driven by tensions between development and sustainability. The venue was also meant to put into practice the Association’s policy of addressing the needs of regional communities, although this point is problematic. Kalgoorlie is a