Stuart Murray

Service provision for autism in mainland China: A service providers’ perspective

Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with service providers regarding the current healthcare provision and education services for children with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) and their families in mainland China. 10 service providers described the current policy and identified unmet needs within current practice. Providers perceived that children with ASC were an important but under-served group in mainland China. Two levels of service provision related to ASC were identified: (1) healthcare services mainly provided by government authorities; (2) education services mainly provided by the parents of children with ASC. Little cooperation was reported between the two types of providers. The structure of service provision for ASC is under-developed. There is an important need to establish coherent healthcare and education policies to support children with ASC and their families.

Activism, community and governance: Barry Barclay's The Kaipara Affair (2005)

Abstract This article discusses the most recent film made by Maori film-maker Barry Barclay, the 2005 documentary feature The Kaipara Affair, which centres on disputes over fishing rights in the Kaipara harbour in the North Island of New Zealand. It sees the film as a continuation of Barclays method of activist filmmaking, which demands that Indigenous communities are represented through cultural modes and forms that extend from within the communities themselves. It also stresses the ways in which Barclays film-making method revises a number of the traditions of activist documentary film-making. Finally, the article examines the controversy surrounding the recutting of the film for screening on national television, seeing the event as symptomatic of the cultural tensions that exist in New Zealand over the representation of Maori activism.

Naipaul in the 1970s: Authorial Preferences and the Symptomatic Reading of Place

In terms of its sustained critique of social and individual values of the post-colony, the body of work produced by V. S. Naipaul between 1971 and 1980 has few competitors. These dates, marked by the collection of stories In a Free State (1971) and the collection of journalistic and critical articles that became The Return of Eva Peron, with The Killings in Trinidad (1980), encompass the evolution ofNaipauls pessimistic vision of place, politics, and community. Naipauls early fiction looked for sources in the formative political processes of his home environment of Trinidad, but, by the mid 1960s, his writing had moved away from any commitment to a discussion of a particular situated politics. His focus, especially from The Mimic Men (1967) onwards, is on the nature of a more generalized notion of politics and abstracted version of community in the newly independent postcolonial states. To this end, the settings of Naipauls fiction during this period-the Caribbean islands in The Mimic Men, Guerrillas (1975) and, in the title story of the collection, A Flag on the Island ( 1967); the African nations in the short novel that is the heart of In a Free State and the focus of A Bend in the River ( 1979)-are notionally fictional, though they bear obvious relations to real nation states. The manifestations and consequences of colonial history are one of Naipaul s major interests, but, in avoiding the specific references to place of his earlier novels, his 1970s work seeks, within its own logics, to focus on the method of postcolonial government and the social and psychological structures that determine those who live in such states. This focus of the fiction itself is clear enough, but its method of engaging with an idea of the public sphere requires further interrogation. In his 1970s work, Naipaul does not so much engage with history and politics as produce fiction in which they become sym-