Jane Mummery

Discourses of democracy in the aftermath of 9/11 and other events: protectivism versus humanitarianism

In responding to the events of 11 September 2001—the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington—George W. Bush announced to the world that democracy itself was under attack, and that such an attack1 represented a threat to democracy. Such an interpretation of these events, along with portraying Western democracy as a victim in need of protection and as ‘good’—and establishing thereby the moral high ground—also represented one of the main discourses in which the Tampa refugees were discussed in Australia, and has continued to be a prominent discourse in public discussion within Australia about the War on Terror, the Bali Bombings and both refugees and detention centres. Drawing on a detailed analysis of letters to the editor published in The Australian in the aftermath of 9/11, this paper seeks to show not only that discussion of the events of 2001 and 2002 has tended to coalesce around two apparently irreconcilable discourses—that of the aforementioned desire to protect democracy or ‘our way of life’ versus that expressive of a kind of ‘globalized humanitarianism’—but that these discourses are indeed not so much irreconcilable but share a common ground along with common stakes and ends.

Discursive Australia: Refugees, Australianness, and the Australian public sphere

The discussion within Australia of events of the last five years, such as 9/11, the Bali Bombing, the Tampa and the Children Overboard affair, the Cronulla Riots, as well as the numbers of refugees approaching Australian shores, has typically fallen into a binarized form with public discourses coalescing around calls for either ‘protectivism’ or ‘humanitarianism’ (Mummery & Rodan, 2003). This discursive framework has in turn instantiated an ongoing debate concerning the issue of what it means to be Australian, and who is or should be included or excluded from this national identity, questions which have been particularly contentious in recent years. This project, however, aims to unpack and analyse just one manifestation of this debate, that carried out in letters to the editor published between 22 January and 28 February 2002 in both The Australian (Australia’s national daily broadsheet) and The West Australian (Western Australia’s daily broadsheet). The period chosen for this analysis is important for several reasons. First, given that it encompasses the Woomera Detention

Mediation for affect: Coming to care about factory-farmed animals

In this article, we examine the digitalised emotional campaigning of one of Australia’s peak animal welfare body, Animals Australia, focusing on their most effective digital strategies associated with their campaigns against factory farming. Our broader interest lies with sounding out the affective affordances of the technologies informing such activist work; technologies of affect in a very significant sense. This discussion comprises three parts. First, we unpack the context for the problematic faced by animal and environmental activisms: neoliberalism, showing how neoliberal assumptions constrain such activisms to emotional appeals and denounce them for such strategising. Second, we sound out some of the affordances of digital media technologies for affectively oriented activisms; and finally, we delve into some of Animals Australia’s digital campaigning with regard to issues of factory farming in order to show the efficacy of such affectively oriented mediated strategising for the forming of new relations with factory farm.

Imperatives for Climate Governance for States in the Anthropocene: An Agenda for Transformation

Given recognition of human causation of planetary-scale climate change, this chapter proposes four imperatives which together enable the testing of governance approaches regarding their address of climate change. After elaborating each imperative in turn, they are used to evaluate how climate change-oriented governance has performed in several Australian contexts, including renewable energy, water policy reform and management of synthetic greenhouse gases. What is foregrounded through analysis is that these imperatives must come to drive governance and policy across levels and across domains, whether directly framed as targeting climate change or not, along with the importance of polycentric and decentralised approaches. This is particularly true when national leadership is inadequate because of the strong intersectionality and impact of leadership, experimentation and anticipation in climate change-oriented governance.

Reflecting critically on the critical disposition within Internationalisation of the Curriculum (IoC): the developmental journey of a curriculum design team

ABSTRACT Internationalisation of curriculum (IoC) practices promote students developing knowledge of other cultures, attitudes, values and ethics. This conceptual article argues that embedding critical reflection in the IoC program – through integrating insights from both IoC thinkers and critical reflection literature – may allow educators and students to not only gain understanding and/or competency in other cultures but better address questions of privilege, power and colonisation and thereby interrogate their own normative cultural understandings. Borrowing from debates within IoC pedagogy, as well as from Ahmed’s work on critical reflection, this article also argues that cross/intercultural understanding should be understood (and taught) not as a competency but a disposition towards thinking, analysing and understanding the world which is based on critiquing the ‘self’ and its relationship with the ‘other’.

Human-aligned artificial intelligence is a multiobjective problem

As the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) systems improve, it becomes important to constrain their actions to ensure their behaviour remains beneficial to humanity. A variety of ethical, legal and safety-based frameworks have been proposed as a basis for designing these constraints. Despite their variations, these frameworks share the common characteristic that decision-making must consider multiple potentially conflicting factors. We demonstrate that these alignment frameworks can be represented as utility functions, but that the widely used Maximum Expected Utility (MEU) paradigm provides insufficient support for such multiobjective decision-making. We show that a Multiobjective Maximum Expected Utility paradigm based on the combination of vector utilities and non-linear action–selection can overcome many of the issues which limit MEU’s effectiveness in implementing aligned AI. We examine existing approaches to multiobjective AI, and identify how these can contribute to the development of human-aligned intelligent agents.

Students’ Beliefs Regarding Philosophical Study and Their Development as Critical Thinkers

There is agreement between national governments, employers, and teaching practitioners and researchers that one of the foundational objectives of the university system is the acquisition by students of those skills and attitudes commonly grouped under the umbrella of “critical thinking”. Laurillard (1993), for example, contends: “student learning is not just about acquiring high level knowledge. The way students handle that knowledge is what really concerns academics.” That is, students need to become effective critical thinkers and successful problem-solvers able to display flexibility and adaptability in their management of workplace and social change (e.g. Candy, 2000; Moon, 2007; Treleaven & Voola, 2008).