Lara McKenzie

Beyond "Just Being There": Teaching Internationalization at Home in Two Qualitative Methods Units.

Study-abroad and international-student programs are commonly understood to transform their participants into “global citizens” possessing “cross-cultural competencies.” Similar benefits are anticipated from “internationalization at home”—defined as any on-campus, internationally related activity—whereby international students engage with and thus enrich the lives of domestic students. In this article, we reflect on a research project tied to two coursework units, in which largely domestic undergraduate students undertake qualitative research with or about international students. When developing the project, we postulated that the researcher–informant engagement that characterizes qualitative research mirrors that required for effective domestic–international student engagement. In describing engagement, we utilize research on experiential learning, which suggests that experiences can become knowledge only through reflection, analysis, and synthesis. We examine the ways that cross-cultural engagement and experiential learning gained through students’ qualitative research might lead to the realization of the anticipated benefits of internationalization at home.

A Precarious Passion: Gendered and Age-Based Insecurity Among Aspiring Academics in Australia

The ageing and impending retirement of much of the academic workforce, as well as the growing casualization of university staff, are two major issues impacting Australian universities today. These issues are particularly pertinent for recent PhD graduates who aspire to academic careers. While research has been carried out on this group in Australia, virtually all studies have been quantitative, or have focused solely on the casual academic. Such research has revealed a sharp increase in the proportion of casual academic positions over the past two decades (May, Peetz, & Strachan 2013). These casual employees are disproportionately female, and, indeed, women continue to be underrepresented in permanent academic positions across Australia (May 2011). In this paper, I offer qualitative insights into the experiences and practices of aspiring academics, who may or may not be employed as casuals. I draw on 17 semi-structured interviews conducted with both female and male early career academics in the arts, humanities, or social science.

Choosing love? Tensions and transformations of modern marriage in Married at First Sight

Abstract Anthropologists and sociologists frequently suggest that marriage is undergoing rapid, worldwide transformation. Yet, while trends in nuptiality and divorce are used to demonstrate its decline, heterosexual marriage based on romantic love remains a cultural ideal in many contexts. This tension is reflected in cultural products like television programmes, including the increasingly popular genre of reality romance television. In this paper, we focus on an Australian version of a recent programme format, Married at First Sight (MaFS), in which ‘singles’ are matched by ‘relationship experts’ and then meet for the first time at their wedding ceremonies. The show purports to document singles’ lives prior to, during and following their weddings. By considering the content and structure of the show, as well as public and media responses to it, we explore Married at First Sight Australia in the context of other reality romance programmes produced and popular in Australia. We propose that the show offers a discourse of marriage based on objective compatibility rather than individual choice, but nonetheless dependent upon scripts of romantic love. Further, MaFS reflects (uneven) realities and popular understandings of transformation in modern Australian marriage.

[Book review] Death of the public university? Uncertain futures for higher education in the knowledge economy, edited by Susan Wright and Cris Shore

givable. Winarnita is careful to avoid such a faux pas. In Chapter 6 – the conclusion – the experience of this Perth migrant female community is summed up noting how the women through a new activity (dancing) attempt ‘to negotiate images of themselves with the intersecting discourses of what it is to be an Indonesian woman in this place together with acceptable expressions of femininity’ (39). I found Winarnita’s discussion in Chapter 3 particularly engaging. The old ‘grannies’ in the group, not conforming to received notions of sexual allure of feminine characters because of their age, would take on masculine roles as a strategy for them to be endorsed as ‘cultural dancers’ and to bypass any possible ridicule, especially among Indonesians, for attempting to present dances usually meant to be performed by beautiful, much younger, women. Winarnita maintains that ‘the rejection of ageing female bodies as sexually unappealing is also indicative of rather narrow and inflexible ideals of female beauty and sexual desirability among Indonesians in this migrant community’ (93). I am fully aware that ageing was not the main focus of Winarnita’s research, and, moreover, I acknowledge that there is indeed a tendency toward extreme conservatism in relation to the ideals cherished by diasporic communities and their notions of ‘tradition’. Nevertheless, I would have liked to see here some further unpacking and some reference, if only in passing, to current work, especially within Indonesia, which aims to critique and subvert ‘traditional’ notions of beauty and youth. Indonesian feminist publications such as the online Magdalene.co have endeavoured to initiate a new discourse on female sexuality, age and issues of beauty but it would seem that this has failed to be noticed by current academic research addressing such topics. Overall, and despite the latter, Winarnita’s book is an admirable contribution to a number of growing disciplines and discourses, enriching the burgeoning literature on migration and diaspora and proving to be a relevant offering to anthropology and to dance, performance and gender studies. Its great merit is that it provides precious insights into the lives of a group of highly imaginative and irrepressible women and as such it makes a compelling read.

The Meaning of Money in China and the United States: The 1986 Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures, by Emily Martin

In The Meaning of Money in China and the United States, Emily Martin publishes for the first time her Lewis Henry Morgan lectures, presented at the University of Rochester in 1986. Martin gave four...

Free to Be Fated: Similarity, Compatibility, and Choice or Blind, Fated Love in Couple Formation

When speaking about how their relationships had begun, my interviewees often made several, seemingly contradictory, arguments. I have identified these as representing two related pairs of understandings. The first pair comprises the understandings concerning who the relationship was formed with: relationships are based on similarity or compatibility and love is blind (see also McKenzie 2014). Interviewees saw similarity and compatibility as extremely important with regard to one’s partner (a tendency that was explored in the previous chapter, where I spoke about interviewees’ claims that their relationships were actually age-similar). Yet they also expressed an understanding that, rather than being based upon a series of pre-determined criteria, love for a partner is ‘blind’ to factors such as age, class, culture, and ethnicity.

‘They’re Just a Child’: Uncovering the Boundaries of a Normative Relationship through Dialogue on Media Depictions of Age-Dissimilar Couples

When selecting my interviewees, I did not strictly define what constituted an age-dissimilar relationship, as it seemed to me that this was determined by more than just partners’ chronological ages. In this chapter, I investigate how relationships were culturally and socially defined, by exploring focus group participants’ understandings of the boundaries between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ age-dissimilar relationships. I do this by drawing on the dialogue that took place during two focus groups. Participants in these groups discussed several media depictions of age-dissimilar couples.

Love through the Ages: Theorising and Historicising the Contradictions of Romantic and Age-Dissimilar Couples

Social scientists have widely theorised romantic love in recent decades, especially within Western contexts. These accounts, both qualitative and quantitative, have frequently focused on historical change. Shifts commonly discussed include: those toward a romantic love ideal in marriage (Ahearn 2001; Campbell 1987; Goode 1959; Hirsch & Wardlow 2006; Padilla et al. 2007; Yan 2003); those towards greater personal autonomy in relationship formation, dissolution, or in partnerships themselves (Bauman 2003; Beck & Beck-Gernsheim 1995, 2002; Bellah et al. 1985; Giddens 1992; Weeks 1995); and, more generally, those towards relationships increasingly influenced by the tenets of democracy, individualism, capitalism, and consumerism (Bellah et al. 1985; Campbell 1987; Giddens 1992; Hochschild 2003a, 2003b; Illouz 1997, 2007, 2012; Miller 1998).

‘Age Is Just a Number’: How Couples Challenged Chronological Age and Minimised Their Age Differences

It was extremely common for my interviewees to make comments such as these. Survey respondents, too, made similar claims. For instance, when respondents were asked if they would consider a relationship with someone older than them, 45 per cent of those who answered ‘yes’ made comments along the lines of ‘age doesn’t matter’. When asked if they would date someone younger, 36 per cent of those who said ‘yes’ made comparable comments. Yet although a bold statement like ‘age is just a number’ and ‘age doesn’t matter’ was often people’s first response to my questions, once interviewees began to speak specifically about their own or others’ relationships, understandings emerged that contradicted these claims. For instance, when they referred to their or their partners’ ages, they did not suggest that the concept of ‘age’ was meaningless, but, rather, that ‘chronological age’ — that is, ‘the number of years lived’ by a person (Fairhurst 1998: 272) — was irrele vant in their case. Interviewees saw non-chronological, individually variable factors as having a far greater influence on their ages. Their ‘real age’, they argued, was younger or more mature than that implied by straightforward chronology. This was why age-dissimilar relationships were seen as suitable, even desirable, for them. Yet interviewees considered chronology to be an accurate measure of age for the vast majority of other people.

Equal and Autonomous? Couples’ Gendered Differences and Power Relations

Central to many discussions of heterosexual, age-dissimilar relationships has been the question of couples’ power relations and, more specifically, how they are influenced by gender (Blood & Wolfe 1960; Pyke 1994; Pyke & Adams 2010). Within the context of this chapter, addressing all possible dimensions and combinations of couples’ power relations is not feasible; as such, my focus here is primarily on gender. Indeed, the clearest patterns in couples’ power relations were those related to gender differences, with the influence of age and other social factors (such as education, socio-economic status, and culture) following gendered patterns. I found that those in male-older couples tended to speak more frequently about their power relations, perhaps being conscious of perceptions that such relationships were male-dominated (see also Pyke & Adams 2010). Here, however, I am not concerned with whether age-dissimilar relationships were characterised by a greater or lesser degree of inequality than were age-similar ones. Rather, I focus on how interviewees spoke about their power relations, and how factors such as gender, age, and culture influenced their perspectives.