Queensland University of Technology

The transnational perspectives offered in Indigenous Research Methodologies by Bagele Chilisa make this book not only a valuable resource for university- and community-based research and engagement, but also one with practical and wide-reaching appeal for scholars, community researchers, and graduate students. Bagele Chilisa, a Botswanabased scholar, undertakes an extensive examination of Indigenous methodologies that draws on theories and practices from a variety of cultural and academic contexts. Her examples range across African proverbs and songs, Indigenous story-telling and mixed research methods including Indigenized Euro-Western approaches.

This article demonstrates the credibility and rigor of yarning, an Indigenous cultural form of conversation, through its use as a data gathering tool with two different Indigenous groups, one in Australia and the second in Botswana. Yarning was employed not only to collect information during the research interview but to establish a relationship with Indigenous participants prior to gathering their stories through storytelling, also known as narrative. In exploring the concept of yarning in research, this article discusses the different types of yarning that emerged during the research project, how these differences were identified and their applicability in the research process. The influence of gender during the interview is also included in the discussion.

AFFECT/AFFECTION. Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment in Deleuze and Guattai). L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act. L’affection (Spinoza’s affection) is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body … (Massumi, Plateaus xvi) Although feeling and affect are routinely used interchangeably, it is important not to confuse affect with feelings and emotions. As Brian Massumi’s definition of affect in his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus makes clear, affect is not a personal feeling. Feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects are prepersonal. In the remainder of this essay, I will attempt to unpack the previous sentence and provide some examples that will illustrate why the distinction I’ve made between feelings, emotions, and affects is more than pedantry. A feeling is a sensation that has been checked against previous experiences and labelled. It is personal and biographical because every person has a distinct set of previous sensations from which to draw when interpreting and labelling their feelings. An infant does not experience feelings because she/he lacks both language and biography. Yet, almost every parent will state unequivocally that their child has feelings and expresses them regularly (what the parent is actually bearing witness to is affect, about which, more shortly). An emotion is the projection/display of a feeling. Unlike feelings, the display of emotion can be either genuine or feigned. The distinction between feelings and emotions was highlighted by an experiment conducted by Paul Ekman who videotaped American and Japanese subjects as they watched films depicting facial surgery. When they watched alone, both groups displayed similar expressions. When they watched in groups, the expressions were different. We broadcast emotion to the world; sometimes that broadcast is an expression of our internal state and other times it is contrived in order to fulfill social expectations. Infants display emotions although they do not have the biography nor language skills to experience feelings. The emotions of the infant are direct expressions of affect. An affect is a non-conscious experience of intensity; it is a moment of unformed and unstructured potential. Of the three central terms in this essay – feeling, emotion, and affect – affect is the most abstract because affect cannot be fully realised in language, and because affect is always prior to and/or outside of consciousness (Massumi, Parables). Affect is the body’s way of preparing itself for action in a given circumstance by adding a quantitative dimension of intensity to the quality of an experience. The body has a grammar of its own that cannot be fully captured in language because it “doesn’t just absorb pulses or discrete stimulations; it infolds contexts…” (Massumi, Parables 30). Before this gets too abstract, let’s return to the example of the infant. An infant has no language skills with which to cognitively process sensations, nor a history of previous experiences from which to draw in assessing the continuous flow of sensations coursing through his or her body. Therefore, the infant has to rely upon intensities (a term that Massumi equates with affect). “Affects are comprised of correlated sets of responses involving the facial muscles, the viscera, the respiratory system, the skeleton, autonomic blood flow changes, and vocalisations that act together to produce an analogue of the particular gradient or intensity of stimulation impinging on the organism” (Demos 19). The key here is that for the infant affect is innate. Through facial expression, respiration, posture, color, and vocalisations infants are able to express the intensity of the stimulations that impinge upon them. Thus, parents are correct when they say their children express emotion. On the other hand, they are incorrect when they attribute feelings to the little tots. Their offspring have neither the biography nor the language to feel. The transition from childhood to adulthood is one in which we partially learn how to bring the display of emotion under conscious control. Affects, however, remain non-conscious and unformed and “are aroused easily by factors over which the individual has little control . . .” (Tompkins 54). For the infant affect is emotion, for the adult affect is what makes feelings feel. It is what determines the intensity (quantity) of a feeling (quality), as well as the background intensity of our everyday lives (the half-sensed, ongoing hum of quantity/quality that we experience when we are not really attuned to any experience at all). One of the simplest ways to understand how affect continues to operate meaningfully in the lives of adults even after they have gained some conscious control over their emotions is to look at an individual whose affect system has gone haywire. Neurologist, Oliver Sacks, described his experience with such a person. She was an elderly patient who had suffered a hip fracture. The fracture resulted in the immobilisation of her leg for an extended period of time. At the time Sacks began working with her, the woman hadn’t regained feeling in her leg in three years. She was not able to consciously move her leg and she felt that it was “missing.” However, when she heard music she would involuntarily tap her foot to the beat. “This suggested the possibility of music therapy – ordinary physiotherapy had been of no use. Using support (a walker, etc.), we were able gradually to get her to dance, and we finally achieved a virtually complete recovery of the leg, even though it had been defunct for three years” (Sacks 170-1). The woman in the previous story couldn’t move her leg via the usual conscious mechanisms because the leg had become disconnected from her a-conscious awareness of her body, or “proprioception.” Proprioception is the “continuous but unconscious sensory flow from the movable parts of our body (muscles, tendons, joints), by which their position and tone and motion are continually monitored and adjusted, but in a way which is hidden from us because it is automatic and unconscious” (Sacks 43). Affect adds intensity, or a sense of urgency to proprioception which is why music – the recollection of which is partially stored in the body – could move this woman’s leg when will alone could not. What is remarkable about the story of the woman whose leg danced all on its own is not so much that affect trumped will in this particular case, but that this is just one example of the way in which affect always precedes will and consciousness (Massumi, Parables 29). At any moment hundreds, perhaps thousands of stimuli impinge upon the human body and the body responds by infolding them all at once and registering them as an intensity. Affect is this intensity. In the infant it is pure expression; in the adult it is pure potential (a measure of the body’s readiness to act in a given circumstance). Silvan Tompkins explains that affect has the power to influence consciousness by amplifying our awareness of our biological state: The affect mechanism is like the pain mechanism in this respect. If we cut our hand, saw it bleeding, but had no innate pain receptors, we would know we had done something which needed repair, but there would be no urgency to it. Like our automobile which needs a tune-up, we might well let it go until next week when we had more time. But the pain mechanism, like the affect mechanism, so amplifies our awareness of the injury which activates it that we are forced to be concerned, and concerned immediately (Tomkins 88). Without affect feelings do not “feel” because they have no intensity, and without feelings rational decision-making becomes problematic (Damasio 204-22). In short, affect plays an important role in determining the relationship between our bodies, our environment, and others, and the subjective experience that we feel/think as affect dissolves into experience. What does all of this mean for individuals who are interested in media and cultural studies? It means that describing “media effects” in terms of the communication of ideology sometimes results in the post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this therefore because of this) fallacy. This has to do with the second term in Massumi’s definitions of affect/affection. L’affection is the process whereby affect is transmitted between bodies. “The transmission of affect means that we are not self-contained in terms of our energies. There is no secure distinction between the ‘individual’ and the ‘environment’” (Brennan 6). Because affect is unformed and unstructured (unlike feelings and emotions) it can be transmitted between bodies. The importance of affect rests upon the fact that in many cases the message consciously received may be of less import to the receiver of that message than his or her non-conscious affective resonance with the source of the message. Music provides perhaps the clearest example of how the intensity of the impingement of sensations on the body can “mean” more to people than meaning itself. As Jeremy Gilbert put it, “Music has physical effects which can be identified, described and discussed but which are not the same thing as it having meanings, and any attempt to understand how music works in culture must . . . be able to say something about those effects without trying to collapse them into meanings.” In a lot of cases, the pleasure that individuals derive from music has less to do with the communication of meaning, and far more to do with the way that a particular piece of music “moves” them. While it would b

Higher education providers are becoming increasingly aware of the diversity of their current and potential learners and are moving to provide a range of options for their engagement. The increasingly flexible delivery modes available for university students provide multiple pathways and opportunities for those seeking further education. In changing between and across modes, a one-size-fits-all approach is often used. That is, internal content is converted into a form deemed suitable for an external delivery. However, there is a significant problem with the one-size-fits-all approach for external students who feel or experience isolation. When compared to their internal counterparts, these students often face a number of barriers to their full participation in coursework units. These barriers may not be experienced by those engaging in these same units via face-to-face or blended enrolment modes and therefore present another type of learner to consider in the planning and implementation of learning activities online. The barriers to participation appear particularly evident in groupwork activities. The online environment also presents challenges for many academic staff who increasingly require higher levels of technological competency and proficiency on top of their regular academic workload. Drawing on reflections of several years of facilitating student learning online, this paper provides one lecturer’s perspective and critical commentary on some of the challenges faced by external students and the implications of an increasingly online delivery framework for practice.

Current research and practice related to the first year experience (FYE) of commencing higher education students are still mainly piecemeal rather than institution-wide with institutions struggling to achieve cross-institutional integration, coordination and coherence of FYE policy and practice.Drawing on a decade of FYE-related research including an ALTC Senior Fellowship and evidence at a large Australian metropolitan university, this paper explores how one institution has addressed that issue by tracing the evolution and maturation of strategies that ultimately conceptualize FYE as "everybody's business."It is argued that, when first generation co-curricular and second generation curricular approaches are integrated and implemented through an intentionally designed curriculum by seamless partnerships of academic and professional staff in a whole-of-institution transformation, we have a third generation approach labelled here as transition pedagogy.It is suggested that transition pedagogy provides the optimal vehicle for dealing with the increasingly diverse commencing student cohorts by facilitating a sense of engagement, support and belonging.What is presented here is an example of transition pedagogy in action.

The Feature for this issue—Reflections on Student Persistence—has been prepared by Professor Vincent Tinto, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at Syracuse University, United States of America (USA) and a long-time friend and supporter of STARS. Vincent explores the case for motivation to be considered as a significant aspect of the tertiary student psyche by drawing on theoretical frameworks, research and practical experiences related to the issue. He synthesises this extensive, detailed, rich but often somewhat impenetrable data into a trilogy of clear and credible key dimensions of the motivation construct—student self-efficacy, sense of belonging and perceived value of the curriculum. This interpretation of the literature is a personal but informed reflection and is a timely piece which highlights the breadth and profundity of the presentations at this year’s conference in Adelaide, Australia where students in all their diversity are central to our focus on enhancing the student experience. In this opening article, Vincent refers directly to the STARS papers selected for this Conference issue of the Journal which also address the importance of student persistence, self-efficacy and building the sense of belonging within their own institutional communities (Fernandes, Ford, Rayner & Pretorius; Kahu, Nelson, & Picton; McFarlane, Spes-Skrbis &Taib; Naylor; Smallhorn). Echoing his position on social justice and his advocacy for underserved students, Vincent reminds us that educational equity gaps still exist, and he encourages us to see the issue of persistence through the eyes of the students to support their perseverance and completion and thereby help reduce educational disadvantage.

Feminist Rosemary Tong long ago alluded to the profound possibilities of using critical disability studies theory to recomprehend and respatialize the landscape of thinking about race and gender as sites of signification. This piece presents a preliminary conversation in the emergent field of studies in ableism and desires to not only problematize but refuse the notion of able(ness). Our attention is on Ableism’s production and performance. Such an exploratory work is indebted to conversations already commenced by Campbell, Hughes and Overboe. My approach is three pronged. Firstly I explore the problem of speaking/thinking/feeling – about the Other (in this case persons referred to as ‘disabled people’) and the ‘extraordinary’ Other, the ‘Abled’. This conversation is captured under the banner of “The Ableist Project”. Here I argue it is necessary to shift the gaze of contemporary scholarship away from the spotlight on disability to a more nuanced exploration of epistemologies and ontologies of ableism. As part of this project of exposure my second task then will be to tease out the strands of what can be called “Ableist Relations”, including the effects of the compulsion to emulate ableist regulatory norms. Finally, as part of a commitment to make the necessary connections between theory and practice, I look at the tasks ahead in the refusal of Ability and the commitment to a disability/not-abled imaginary. I. Shifting the Gaze – “The Ableist Project” Typically literature within disability and cultural studies has concentrated on the practices and production of disablism, specifically by examining those attitudes and barriers that contribute to the subordination of people with disabilities in liberal society. Disablism is a set of assumptions (conscious or unconscious) and practices that promote the differential or unequal treatment of people because of actual or presumed disabilities. On this basis the strategic positions adopted to facilitate emancipatory social change whilst diverse, essentially relate to reforming those negative attitudes, assimilating people with disabilities into normative civil society and providing compensatory initiatives and safety nets in cases of enduring vulnerability. In other words, the site of reformation has been at the intermediate level of function, structure and institution in civil society and shifting values in the cultural arena. Such an emphasis produces scholarship that contains serious distortions, gaps and omissions regarding the production of disability and re-inscribes an able-bodied voice/lens towards disability. Disability, often quite unconsciously, continues to be examined and taught from the perspective of the Other (Marks; Solis). The challenge then is to reverse, to invert this traditional approach, to shift our gaze and concentrate on what the study of disability tells us about the production, operation and maintenance of ableism. The earlier work of Tom Shakespeare concludes, “… perhaps the maintenance of a non-disabled identity … is a more useful problem with which to be concerned; rather than interrogating the other, let us de-construct the normality-which-is-to-be-assumed” (28). Hughes captures this project forcefully by calling for a study of the “pathologies of non-disablement” (683). An Abled imaginary relies upon the existence of an hitherto unacknowledged imagined shared community of able-bodied/minded people (c.f. Butler & Parr) held together by a common ableist homosocial world view that asserts the preferability and compulsoriness of the norms of ableism. Overboe and Campbell point to the compulsion to emulate the norm through the internalisation of ableism. Ableistnormativity results in compulsive passing, wherein there is a failure to ask about difference, to imagine human be-ingness differently. Compulsory ableness and its conviction to and seduction of sameness as the basis to equality, claims results in a resistance to consider ontologically peripheral lives as distinct ways of being human least they produce a heightened devaluation. Ontological reframing poses different preoccupations: what does the study of the politics of ‘deafness’ tell us about what it means to be ‘hearing’? Indeed how is the very conceptualisation of ‘hearing’ framed in the light of discourses of ‘deafness’? By decentring Abledness, it is possible to “to look at the world from the inside out)” (Linton 13) and unveil the ‘non-disabled/ableist’ stance. In a different context Haraway (152) exclaims “… [this] cannot be said quite out loud, or it loses its crucial position as a pre-condition of vision and becomes the object of scrutiny”. So what is meant by the concept of ‘ableism’? A survey of the literature suggests that the term is often referred to in a fleeting way with limited definitional or conceptual specificity (Clear; Iwasaki & Mactavish: Watts & Erevelles). When there is commentary, ableism is described as denoting an attitude that devalues or differentiates disability through the valuation of able-bodiedness equated to normalcy. For some, the term ableism is used interchangeably with the term disablism. I argue however that these two words render quite radically different understandings of the status of disability to the norm. Furthermore, as a conceptual tool, ableism transcends the procedures, structures, for governing civil society and locates itself clearly in the arena of genealogies of knowledge. There is little consensus as to what practices and behaviours constitute ableism. We can nevertheless say that a chief feature of an ableist viewpoint is a belief that impairment or disability (irrespective of ‘type’) is inherently negative and should the opportunity present itself, be ameliorated, cured or indeed eliminated. Ableism refers to … a network of beliefs, processes and practices that produces a particular kind of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is projected as the perfect, species-typical and therefore essential and fully human. Disability then, is cast as a diminished state of being human (Campbell 44). In a similar vein, Veronica Chouinard defines ableism as “ideas, practices, institutions and social relations that presume ablebodiedness, and by so doing, construct persons with disabilities as marginalised … and largely invisible ‘others’” (380). In contrast, Amundson & Taira attribute a doctrinal posture to ableism in their suggestion that “Ableism is a doctrine that falsely treats impairments as inherently and naturally horrible and blames the impairments themselves for the problems experienced by the people who have them” (54). Whilst there is little argument with this presupposition, what is absent from the definition is any mention of ableism’s function in inaugurating the norm. Campbell and Chouinard’s approach is less about the coherency and intentionalities of ableism; rather their emphasis is on a conception of ableism as a hub network functioning around shifting interest convergences. Linton defines ableism as “includ[ing] the idea that a person’s abilities or characteristics are determined by disability or that people with disabilities as a group are inferior to non-disabled people” (9). There are problems with simply endorsing a schema that posits a particular worldview that either favours or disfavours dis/able-bodied people as if each category is discrete, self-evident and fixed. As I will argue later, Ableism sets up a binary dynamic which is not simply comparative but rather co-relationally constitutive. Campbell’s formulation of ableism not only problematises the signifier disability but points to the fact that the essential core of ableism is the formation of a naturalised understanding of being fully human and this as Chouinard notes, is articulated on a basis of an enforced presumption that erases difference. Whether it be the ‘species typical body’ (in science), the ‘normative citizen’ (in political theory), the ‘reasonable man’ (in law), all these signifiers point to a fabrication that reaches into the very soul that sweeps us into life and as such is the outcome and instrument of a political constitution: a hostage of the body (Foucault). The creation of such regimes of ontological separation appears disassociated from power. Bodies in this way become elements that may be moved, used, transformed, demarcated, improved and articulated with others. Daily the identities of disabled and abled are performed repeatedly. An ethos of compulsory abled-bodiedness as McRuer puts it, “showcase[d] for able-bodied performance” (93) pursuant to the incessant consuming of objects of health, beauty, strength and capability. In the next section, the dividing practices of ableism are considered in more detail. II. “Ableist Relations” Central to regimes of ableism are two core elements that feature irrespective of its localised enactment, namely the notion of the normative (and normate individual) and the enforcement of a constitutional divide between perfected naturalized humanity and the aberrant, the unthinkable, quasi-human hybrid and therefore non-human. This constitution provides the layout, the blueprint for the scaling and marking of bodies and the ordering of their terms of relation. It is not possible to have a concept of difference without Ableism. Let’s take each of these two elements separately and explore them more closely. The Able/Not-Able Divide It is necessary to establish and enforce a constitutional divide. The divide is at the levels of ontology, materiality and sentiency. I wish to focus on the constitutionality of that divide between the normal and the pathological and mechanisms of ordering. This analysis is influenced by the proposals advanced by Bruno Latour in We Have Never been Modern. Latour speaks of the practices of translation and purification: … ‘translation’, creates mixtures between entirely new types of being

In a TED talk in June 2009, media scholar Clay Shirky cited the devastating earthquake that struck the Sichuan province of China in May 2008 as an example of how media flows are changing. He explained how the first reports of the quake came not from traditional news media, but from local residents who sent messages on QQ, China’s largest social network, and on Twitter, the world’s most popular micro-blogging service. "As the quake was happening, the news was reported," said Shirky. This was neither a unique nor isolated incident. It has become commonplace for the people caught up in the news to provide the first accounts, images and video of events unfolding around them. Studies in participatory journalism suggest that professional journalists now share jurisdiction over the news in the sense that citizens are participating in the observation, selection, filtering, distribution and interpretation of events. This paper argues that the ability of citizens to play “an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analysing and disseminating news and information” (Bowman and Willis 9) means we need to reassess the meaning of ‘ambient’ as applied to news and journalism. Twitter has emerged as a key medium for news and information about major events, such as during the earthquake in Chile in February 2010 (see, for example, Silverman; Dickinson). This paper discusses how social media technologies such as Twitter, which facilitate the immediate dissemination of digital fragments of news and information, are creating what I have described as “ambient journalism” (Hermida). It approaches real-time, networked digital technologies as awareness systems that offer diverse means to collect, communicate, share and display news and information in the periphery of a user's awareness. Twitter shares some similarities with other forms of communication. Like the telephone, it facilitates a real-time exchange of information. Like instant messaging, the information is sent in short bursts. But it extends the affordances of previous modes of communication by combining these features in both a one-to-many and many-to-many framework that is public, archived and searchable. Twitter allows a large number of users to communicate with each other simultaneously in real-time, based on an asymmetrical relationship between friends and followers. The messages form social streams of connected data that provide value both individually and in aggregate. News All Around The term ‘ambient’ has been used in journalism to describe the ubiquitous nature of news in today's society. In their 2002 study, Hargreaves and Thomas said one of the defining features of the media landscape in the UK was the easy availability of news through a host of media platforms, such as public billboards and mobile phones, and in spaces, such as trains and aircraft. “News is, in a word, ambient, like the air we breathe,” they concluded (44). The availability of news all around meant that citizens were able to maintain an awareness of what was taking place in the world as they went about their everyday activities. One of the ways news has become ambient has been through the proliferation of displays in public places carrying 24-hour news channels or showing news headlines. In her book, Ambient Television, Anna McCarthy explored how television has become pervasive by extending outside the home and dominating public spaces, from the doctor’s waiting room to the bar. “When we search for TV in public places, we find a dense, ambient clutter of public audio-visual apparatuses,” wrote McCarthy (13). In some ways, the proliferation of news on digital platforms has intensified the presence of ambient news. In a March 2010 Pew Internet report, Purcell et al. found that “in the digital era, news has become omnipresent. Americans access it in multiple formats on multiple platforms on myriad devices” (2). It seems that, if anything, digital technologies have increased the presence of ambient news. This approach to the term ‘ambient’ is based on a twentieth century model of mass media. Traditional mass media, from newspapers through radio to television, are largely one-directional, impersonal one-to-many carriers of news and information (McQuail 55). The most palpable feature of the mass media is to reach the many, and this affects the relationship between the media and the audience. Consequently, the news audience does not act for itself, but is “acted upon” (McQuail 57). It is assigned the role of consumer. The public is present in news as citizens who receive information about, and interpretation of, events from professional journalists. The public as the recipient of information fits in with the concept of ambient news as “news which is free at the point of consumption, available on demand and very often available in the background to people’s lives without them even looking” (Hargreaves and Thomas 51). To suggest that members of the audience are just empty receptacles to be filled with news is an oversimplification. For example, television viewers are not solely defined in terms of spectatorship (see, for example, Ang). But audiences have, traditionally, been kept well outside the journalistic process, defined as the “selecting, writing, editing, positioning, scheduling, repeating and otherwise massaging information to become news” (Shoemaker et al. 73). This audience is cast as the receiver, with virtually no sense of agency over the news process. As a result, journalistic communication has evolved, largely, as a process of one-way, one-to-many transmission of news and information to the public. The following section explores the shift towards a more participatory media environment. News as a Social Experience The shift from an era of broadcast mass media to an era of networked digital media has fundamentally altered flows of information. Non-linear, many-to-many digital communication technologies have transferred the means of media production and dissemination into the hands of the public, and are rewriting the relationship between the audience and journalists. Where there were once limited and cost-intensive channels for the distribution of content, there are now a myriad of widely available digital channels. Henry Jenkins has written about the emergence of a participatory culture that “contrasts with older notions of passive media spectatorship. Rather than talking about media producers and consumers occupying separate roles, we might now see them as participants who interact with each other according to a new set of rules that none of us fully understands” (3). Axel Bruns has coined the term “produsage” (2) to refer to the blurred line between producers and consumers, while Jay Rosen has talked about the “people formerly know as the audience.” For some, the consequences of this shift could be “a new model of journalism, labelled participatory journalism,” (Domingo et al. 331), raising questions about who can be described as a journalist and perhaps, even, how journalism itself is defined. The trend towards a more participatory media ecosystem was evident in the March 2010 study on news habits in the USA by Pew Internet. It highlighted that the news was becoming a social experience. “News is becoming a participatory activity, as people contribute their own stories and experiences and post their reactions to events” (Purcell et al. 40). The study found that 37% of Internet users, described by Pew as “news participators,” had actively contributed to the creation, commentary, or dissemination of news (44). This reflects how the Internet has changed the relationship between journalists and audiences from a one-way, asymmetric model of communication to a more participatory and collective system (Boczkowski; Deuze). The following sections considers how the ability of the audience to participate in the gathering, analysis and communication of news and information requires a re-examination of the concept of ambient news. A Distributed Conversation As I’ve discussed, ambient news is based on the idea of the audience as the receiver. Ambient journalism, on the other hand, takes account of how audiences are able to become part of the news process. However, this does not mean that citizens are necessarily producing journalism within the established framework of accounts and analysis through narratives, with the aim of providing accurate and objective portrayals of reality. Rather, I suggest that ambient journalism presents a multi-faceted and fragmented news experience, where citizens are producing small pieces of content that can be collectively considered as journalism. It acknowledges the audience as both a receiver and a sender. I suggest that micro-blogging social media services such as Twitter, that enable millions of people to communicate instantly, share and discuss events, are an expression of ambient journalism. Micro-blogging is a new media technology that enables and extends society's ability to communicate, enabling users to share brief bursts of information from multiple digital devices. Twitter has become one of the most popular micro-blogging platforms, with some 50 million messages sent daily by February 2010 (Twitter). Twitter enables users to communicate with each other simultaneously via short messages no longer than 140 characters, known as ‘tweets’. The micro-blogging platform shares some similarities with instant messaging. It allows for near synchronous communications from users, resulting in a continuous stream of up-to-date messages, usually in a conversational tone. Unlike instant messaging, Twitter is largely public, creating a new body of content online that can be archived, searched and retrieved. The messages can be extracted, analysed and aggregated, providing a measure of activity around a particular event or subject and, in some cases, an indication of the general sentiment about it. For example, the deluge of twee

Professor Vincent Tinto opens this issue of the International Journal of the First Year in Higher Education by highlighting the importance of paying attention to students' experiences in the classroom.With the classroom experience of students in the United States college system firmly in mind, Tinto draws attention to what he calls the "attributes of effective classrooms".The classroom attributes he describes, such as clear expectations, timely support, feedback on assessment, engaging pedagogies and enhancing teaching skills, though drawn from the United States experience, are universal and as such are transferrable across national boundaries and applicable to higher education educators, leaders and policy makers globally.You can assess this universality by relating Tinto's criteria to your teaching environment.

This paper explores the role that men’s rights activism (MRA) is playing in a contemporary backlash to feminist anti-rape activism. We engage in a discourse analysis of popular MRA websites to reveal a set of interrelated claims, including: that sexual violence, like domestic violence, is a gender-neutral problem; that feminists are responsible for erasing men’s experiences of victimization; that false allegations are widespread; and that rape culture is a feminist-produced moral panic. We argue that sexual violence is emerging as a new focus of the men’s rights movement, competing with a longstanding emphasis on fathers’ rights. The subject of MRA activism has shifted and is becoming less familial and more sexual. MRAs appear to be using the issue of rape to mobilize young men and to exploit their anxieties about shifting consent standards and changing gender norms.

Prison kitchen workers occupy a distinctive position within Indonesian prisons because their labour gives them access to food distribution, institutional space, and informal authority. This study examines how kitchen inmates participate in managing cadong rice, how their role contributes to prison security and stability, and what privileges they receive from prison authorities. Using a qualitative descriptive approach, the study draws on observation and in-depth interviews with inmates to analyse the everyday power relations surrounding prison food management. The findings show that the tamping’s management of cadong rice functions as an informal mechanism of social control that helps maintain institutional order and creates unequal access to resources. The study argues that kitchen work should not be understood merely as prison labour, but as a privileged institutional position that can reproduce hierarchy inside detention settings. These findings underline the need for policy reform to ensure that prison food management is consistent with equality, accountability, and human rights principles

The objective of this study was to analyse the inclusive culture in the Faculty of Engineering of a private university in Lima. The research focused on teaching staff and student perceptions regarding the value of student diversity and the barriers that hinder academic performance. The approach was qualitative with a phenomenological design and included a sample of 10 university teachers and six students. The instruments used were a semi-structured interview guide for university teachers and a focus group guide for students. The data analysis procedure was conducted using ATLAS.ti (version 23). The results demonstrate a gap between the valuation of diversity and inclusive practice, whereby Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is not incorporated into session planning. Likewise, a lack of learning supports is recognised as a result of institutional deficiencies.

Early identification of students experiencing academic difficulty is critical to supporting student success and retention in their first year of university. This study examines an interpretable learning analytics framework designed to support timely intervention in a first-year introductory statistics unit. Data from 566 students across three cohorts were used to develop and evaluate predictive models using assessment results collected during the teaching period and enrolment characteristics. The selected model demonstrated strong predictive performance and was validated on a subsequent cohort. To support practical implementation, predictions were translated into a colour-coded risk report that enables educators to quickly identify and prioritise students requiring academic support. SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP)-based explanations were incorporated to provide transparency and assist educators in understanding the factors contributing to individual risk classifications. Findings indicate that formative assessments are the strongest indicators of academic success, highlighting opportunities for proactive and targeted intervention. The framework demonstrates how interpretable learning analytics can support evidence-informed decision-making and student success in large first-year units.

This study examined how caregiving and employment affected academic engagement among Ghanaian university students. Drawing on Role Congruity Theory and the Conservation of Resources framework, it employed a cross-sectional survey of 316 undergraduates at Bolgatanga Technical University. Logistic regression was used to analyse how caregiving and work contribute to academic disruption, defined as missed classes, reduced study time and compromised performance. Results showed that caregiving and employment were strong predictors of disruption: caregivers were over 34 times, and employed or dual-role students over 75 times, more likely to miss classes than peers without such roles. Although gender–role interactions were not statistically significant, predicted probabilities revealed that female students faced greater disruption (88%) than males (69%). Marital status also heightened the risk of disruption, underscoring the compounding effect of family obligations. The study concluded that caregiving and employment are central determinants of academic success and calls for gender-responsive institutional policies to reduce inequities.

This study investigates how clan (hamula) and family affiliation influence youth involvement in gangs and organised crime within Arab communities in Israel. The research examines two groups. Group 1 comprises youth who are actively or were formerly involved in organised crime, while Group 2 consists of non-involved youth from the same communities who observe peers engaged in criminal activity. The findings reveal the dual role of clan affiliation. It can serve as a risk factor when clan loyalty, honour codes and collective identity pressure youth into gang activity; the clan structure may facilitate recruitment through kinship ties and perceived obligations to extended family members to engage in illicit activities. Conversely, clan affiliation can function as a protective mechanism when cultural values are redirected towards prosocial outcomes and individual agency is affirmed. Non-involved youth identify supportive clan intervention and positive family influence as key protective factors enabling desistance and integration into conventional society. Understanding this double-edged dynamic from both involved and non-involved youth perspectives is essential for developing culturally sensitive intervention strategies.

Student happiness plays an important role in promoting academic engagement, well-being, and meaningful learning experiences in higher education. This study examined the level of learning happiness among students at the Ganesha University of Education (Universitas Pendidikan Ganesha), Bali, Indonesia, within the cultural context of the Balinese philosophies of Tri Hita Karana and Tri Kaya Parisudha. A quantitative descriptive survey was conducted with 150 undergraduate students using a 27-item questionnaire measuring five dimensions of learning happiness. The five dimensions were derived from established theoretical perspectives and contextualised through the integration of the principles of Tri Hita Karana and Tri Kaya Parisudha to reflect the cultural context of students’ learning experiences. Descriptive statistics were employed to analyse the data. The findings revealed that students reported a high level of learning happiness overall (M = 83.64, SD = 10.30). Among the five dimensions, social relationships in the lecture environment recorded the highest mean score, whereas academic workload received the lowest mean score, although it remained within the high category. High levels of learning happiness were also observed across all semester levels and both gender groups. These findings suggest that students generally experience positive and meaningful learning, despite academic demands, within an educational environment informed by the values of Tri Hita Karana and Tri Kaya Parisudha. As the study was conducted at a single university and employed a descriptive design, future research should examine learning happiness across multiple universities and investigate its relationship with important educational outcomes, such as academic engagement, student persistence, and academic achievement.

Students choose to study criminology for various intrinsic and extrinsic reasons. This article explores whether any distinct groupings can be discerned in relation to underlying motivational profiles. Drawing on a survey of 430 Australian undergraduate criminology and criminal justice students, we utilise latent class analysis to identify distinct motivational profiles underlying respondent decisions to study criminology. Five motivational profiles were revealed – Curious, Activist, Lived Experience Altruist, Lived Experience Reformer, and Unclear. Empathic motivations were key in shaping study choices within all of the profiles except the fifth. However, the first four profiles differed in their emphasis: Curious and Lived Experience Altruist place greater weight on helping individual victims of crime, whereas for Activist and Lived Experience Reformer structural reform drives their educational decisions. A multinomial logistic regression demonstrated that class classification was influenced by respondents’ political ideology, attitudes towards the criminal legal system, punitiveness, and individualising moral foundations. These findings can help to address the educational challenges associated with student cohorts that have diverse enrolment motivations, and inform ongoing curriculum development. Further research can track the temporal evolution of motivational profiles to explore when and how they vary.

First-year, first-time (FYFT) students enter university with expectations shaped by institutional recruitment communications, social media, and broader media narratives. During transition, lived experiences may diverge from these expectations, creating expectation-experience mismatch. While student expectations and satisfaction are well researched, less is known about how students respond to expectation-experience mismatch and how these responses influence satisfaction. Drawing on cognitive dissonance and coping response literature, this study examines FYFT students in regional Australian universities. Data were collected through a national survey of 405 students and analysed using structural equation modelling. Findings show that expectations were associated with both positive and negative emotional response outcomes, and that these outcomes influenced satisfaction. Positive emotional response outcomes had a stronger relationship with satisfaction than negative emotional response outcomes. The study reframes expectation-experience mismatch as a common feature of transition and highlights the value of student-driven strategies that strengthen constructive action and student agency during the first year.

Antarctic krill is a keystone species in the Southern Ocean ecosystem, in that it plays an essential role in healthy marine food webs and carbon sequestration. However, its survival is increasingly being threatened by a growing industrial fishery dominated by powerful corporations alongside habitat changes caused by climate change. This article examines how states enable and/or fail to prevent the large-scale depletion of Antarctic krill by corporate actors, questioning whether this constitutes state–corporate environmental crime. This illustrates potential governance failures to manage stocks sustainably within the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR). Drawing on state–corporate crime theory, green criminology and comparative cases of transnational extractive harm, the article analyses governance failures within the CCAMLR as a site of regulatory capture and institutional inertia. The analysis reveals patterns of state–corporate collusion and regulatory inaction, with states such as Norway and China promoting krill exploitation for economic benefit by blocking stricter quotas and the establishment of marine protected areas. These omissions and actions by states in partnership with industry amount to state-enabled ecological harm, effectively entrenching transnational environmental harms. The article concludes that stronger international oversight, reformed governance procedures and genuine accountability for the state and corporate actors driving ecological degradation in Antarctica are urgently required, and that CCAMLR member states must prioritise scientific guidance over commercial interests in the management of this ecologically critical species.

Suspicion is an important, yet elusive concept in anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing (AML/CFT), which allows for intervention below the threshold of proof. In its traditional form, suspicion can be understood as a situated legal judgement by human actors within identifiable jurisdictions. It is argued that this understanding is no longer adequate. As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes an integral part of financial surveillance, suspicion is increasingly produced through data-driven processes. This transformation is epistemic, but also spatial. Since AI-driven financial surveillance operates through transnational data infrastructures, regulatory reach is less a matter of where conduct occurs than a question of whether such conduct becomes visible within data systems. This article develops the concept of algorithmic extraterritoriality, understood as a form of regulatory power mediated by data infrastructures rather than formal assertions of jurisdiction. Moreover, since individuals are increasingly constituted as datafied subjects of suspicion, they are rendered governable through dispersed and opaque processes of evaluation. This constitutes a challenge for accountability and contestability because suspicion becomes more difficult to locate, explain or contest.