Tanya King

Making connections in a regional city: Social capital and the primary social contract

Government policy in many countries encourages migration to regional centres to relieve pressure on major cities and to boost economic development. Migrants are more likely to remain in a new location if they have meaningful work and establish social connections there. This article explores how organisations and groups in a regional city provide newcomers with access to social capital resources which migrants can use to forge social connections. Past research has shown that migrants require a mix of linking, bridging and bonding social capital to form an effective primary social contract with their new home. This research suggests that regional cities – such as Geelong, Victoria – which are proactive in assembling diverse social capital resources and making them accessible to migrants, are more likely not only to receive more newcomers but also more likely to retain migrants and a skilled workforce. The findings have relevance to other regional centres.

Tasting Wine: A Learning Experience

This paper describes a field trip by senior undergraduate anthropology students to a local winery, where they participated in a wine-tasting class with winery staff. In response to explicit hints from a wine-tasting facilitator, and more subtle cues from the cultural capital embedded in their surroundings and the winery staff, the students expressed a shift in their perception of the wines as they learned to taste them in a way that was socially validated. In this way the students learned, as embodied knowledge, how their physical senses were influenced by their cultural surroundings. We describe the student excursion, and particularly their experiences, and we consider the trend in experiential learning literature to focus on the reflection stage in the constructivist cycle of experience, reflection, abstraction, and testing. While recognising the pedagogic value of reflection and rule extrapolation, we seek to characterise the learning that occurs “in the moment.”

Applying cultural-historical activity theory to understand the development of inclusive curriculum practices in higher education

ABSTRACT One year after the implementation of an Inclusive Curriculum Capacity Building (ICCB) project in an Australian university Arts faculty, this paper revisits the curriculum, teaching staff and student outcomes, exploring what it takes to achieve lasting change. There are positive findings to report, but the study also finds that lasting change in curriculum development practices requires more than a ‘grassroots’ approach. The authors undertook a formative, collaborative intervention informed by principles of cultural-historical activity theory to help bring about changes to these practices. In revisiting the key players and curriculum after a year, our question was: to what extent had culturally new patterns of activity emerged to sustain the ongoing development of more inclusive curricula in the faculty? We apply an activity theory lens to help identify contradictions and discontinuities that could become possibilities for ongoing change and the foundations for expansive learning in this context.

Encrypted landscapes, nation-states : The Australian National Botanic Gardens, Canberra

As visitors perambulate around the Australian National Botanic Gardens, in Canberra, relationships among citizens, environments, and the nation-state are enacted: The central is emphasized over the peripheral, the Canberran space is depicted as a literal miniature model of the wider nation, science is privileged in the design of that representation, and “nature” is appreciated as isolatable from humans but controllable by them. As with other architectural aspects of Canberra, assumptions about the relative relationships among elements of the state are reflected in the spatial positioning and delineation of the items and embodied in those who move in and around them.