Ben Wadham

Thinking patterns, victimisation and bullying among adolescents in a South Australian metropolitan secondary school

Responding to staff concerns about anti-social behaviour among students (n = 311, 50.5% boys, age range 13–16 years) at a low socio-economic Adelaide metropolitan school, we investigated victimisation and bullying and associated patterns of thinking. Two instruments were administered: the How I Think Questionnaire, which measures self-serving cognitive distortions; and the Bullying Experiences Questionnaire, which requires students to rate victimisation and bullying. The study revealed that: levels of distorted thinking were high; the most frequent forms of victimisation and bullying were verbal, indirect and physical; there were low levels of more extreme forms of victimisation and bullying; and there were higher levels of cognitive distortions among bullies and bully-victims. The research confirms the role of distorted thinking in the enactment of anti-social and bullying behaviours and provides a contemporary update of the types of victimisation/bullying in an Australian secondary school in 2011. Implications for interventions using social-cognitive approaches are addressed.

‘War-fighting and left-wing feminist agendas’: gender and change in the Australian Defence Force

ABSTRACT Western military institutions are reforming to enhance gender inclusion. This imperative is driven by the need to sustain a volunteer force in a society with rapidly changing values coupled with a recognition that sustainability and legitimacy requires diverse representation from the community from which they draw their human resources. Our recent research has considered the changing character of the Australian Defence Force (ADF)’s disposition towards women, and discourse of gender and gender reform. In this paper we critically evaluate these discourses on gender equality across the ADF and outline the salient ideas and claims within institutional reviews and in academic papers written by ADF soldier–scholars. Our purpose is to interrogate current ways of framing and articulating key ideas on gender, sexuality, and equality to scrutinize the implications for the ADF’s stated purpose of creating a gender-inclusive workplace. We find that the driving functional imperative of military effectiveness limits and shapes the extent to which the ADF can become a genuinely gender-inclusive workplace.

Violence in the Military and Relations Among Men: Military Masculinities and ‘Rape Prone Cultures’

Violence in the military refers to hazing, bastardization, sexual assault and rape – violence by military personnel against other personnel. That violence has a long history and is entangled in military tradition, ritual and formal doctrine. Contemporary militaries face a key challenge posed by social change – organizational diversity. This chapter provides theoretical and empirical evidence for making sense of violence within the military. The notions of male fraternity and military masculinities are employed to explain this phenomenon. Moreover, violence in the military and military culture have become increasingly scrutinized in a historical period where liberal democracy is itself increasingly under scrutiny and resistance. How the military addresses such organizational violence and diversity is a study of the liberal potential of authoritarian institutions.

The Dark Side of Defence: Masculinities and Violence in the Military

Militaries are institutions of violence. This chapter considers the dark side of military violence: violence within the military. While many criminological studies have attended to the violence and crime of, and within, environments of war, the study of the source of that violence, the military institution, has been neglected. This chapter draws upon the criminological literature of the dark side of organisations to argue violence within the military: hazing, brutalisation, and sexual assault of, and between service personnel, are a structured element of militarism. This is predominantly male violence and crime. By drawing upon critical gender studies and critical theory, the phenomenon of male violence within the military is considered along three key themes: the scission of civil and military, the production of violent subjectivities through military training, and the fraternal character of military masculinities and military organisation.

Young Australians’ Attitudes to the Military and Military Service

What are young Australians’ understandings of, and attitudes to, the military and military service? This article describes a pilot study of 320 young Australian university students’ attitudes to the military and military service during a time when Australia was engaged in the Afghanistan war. The main purpose of this study was to develop a survey instrument for further work in researching civil–military relations in Australia. Civil–military relations describe the complex set of relationships between the civil and military spheres. The role of the military, the relationship between the state and the military, the division of labor between civilian and military entities, foreign policy, and knowledge of military service are some of the fields that constitute a study of civil–military relations. This article reports on beliefs about, and attitudes to the specificities of military service and responses to the broader field of civil–military relations.

Strange new world: Being a professional and the professional doctorate in the twenty-first century

Abstract The professional doctorate is represented as meeting the challenges of the twenty-first century but is structured by a fundamental dialectic of the academic and the profession. Both of these ideals are under significant erasure and transformation and the professional doctorate tells a story of these changes. In functional terms the professional doctorate is a marker of the twenty-first century and the pervasion of neoliberal educational governance in the higher education sector. In personal terms, it represents a space where the existential moment can serve to draw the professional through strangeness towards new meaningfulness. This paper is structured as a conversation between the Director, Doctor of Education and a Doctor of Education candidate who together explore these aspects within the context of the Doctor of Education at Flinders University. The two voices provide two distinct but complementary perspectives to illuminate the experience of being a twenty-first century higher education professional.

Teaching Mathematics and Science in English at a University in Indonesia

Indonesia is a multicultural country consisting of approximately 300 ethnic groups and a multilingual society having as many as 700 local languages. However, this diverse country shares one national language, Bahasa Indonesia, which functions as the lingua franca. Accordingly, Bahasa Indonesia has been used as the language of instruction at all levels of education across the nation since its independence from the Dutch in 1945

The minister, the Commandant and the cadets: Scandal and the mediation of Australian civil–military relations:

The Australian Defence Force (ADF) has recently undergone the most comprehensive review of its organizational culture since federation. Western militaries across the USA, Canada and the UK are similarly engaged. Military misconduct, including rape, assault and the long traditions of hazing and bastardization, have been increasingly exposed, engaging civil society, agitating government and undermining military integrity. The Skype Affair is described as a particularly important military misconduct scandal that brought these relations, and ruling relations more specifically, into focus. The article describes the contest over democratic control of the armed forces initiated when the jurisdictions and authority of the Defence Minister, the Chief of Defence and the Commandant of the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) converged over the management of this military scandal. This article looks at how relations between Australian civil society, the military and the state are affected by the varying engagements of these sectors with the question of violence in the military and, subsequently, military modernization. The news-mediated discourse is one that highlights the structural split of civil–military relations, between two white masculinized institutions in a context of distinct cultural divergence over the rule of nation.

Critical studies of the military or critical military studies: a response to Rech on recruitment and counter-recruitment

This is a reply to:Rech, Matthew. 2014. “Recruitment, counter-recruitment and critical military studies.” Global Discourse. 4 (2–3): 244–262. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2014.909243.

Marking a marginal past: schooling and dispossession in the Franklin Harbour district

In this paper we review the colonisation of the Franklin Harbour district in South Australia from the 1850s, focusing on public education and social memory. In the late nineteenth century schooling was entirely in women’s hands. Women teachers, notably the McEwen sisters, were important contributors to the district educationally, socially and economically. However, women’s and Aboriginal histories are marginalised in the district’s social memory. Women teachers barely register and the fraught relationships between the Barngarla people and white settlers are subordinated to a white masculinist narrative of progress. This article has been peer-reviewed.