The Social Dynamics of Wellbeing and Rights
Convenor: Melanie Nolan
This theme divides into three sub-themes —
Wellbeing: The social processes determining health and human security.
Humans and Nature: The imagined and the real relationships, and future challenges; urban and rural.
Tensions, Resolutions and Rights: Inclusion and exclusion on the basis of class, gender, cultural and other differences, with particular attention to Indigenous worlds.
‘Well-being ‘is a goal of human activity. Although people vary in their understandings of the fundamentals
of ‘wellbeing’ and of its requisites, we can be sure that physical and mental health, and security – of food, of income, of identity (personal and collective), of domestic life and of public spaces – are among the factors determining ‘well-being’. The second half of the twentieth century has made two ways of considering and striving for well-being more prominent: the evolving discourse of human rights (economic, social and cultural rights); and the growing, scientifi cally-informed awareness of the relationship of humans to the natural environments that they inhabit.
In our attention to these themes, Australia should be prominent, without being the only ‘society’, nationstate or ‘people’ that we study. Our scope should be: ‘the world, with special emphasis on Australia and its region’. Both the human rights and the environmental perspectives make it impossible (politically and analytically) to be satisfied with the nation-state as the default unit of study. That ours is a world of sovereign states should not be taken as a given but examined as a dynamic and problematic configuration of possibilities and interconnections. One of the briefs of this Theme should be to keep opening up the issue of the appropriate ‘unit of analysis’. One could inquire into the ‘well-being’ and ‘social dynamics’ of all of humanity, at a national, supranational or international level, as well as of a particular region, of a particular culture, kinship unit or confessional community. All the social sciences and humanities, including legal studies, can contribute to this theme.
Events
Past events
12-14 December 2007
‘Governing by Looking Back’: How History Matters in Society, Politics and Government. In association with the ‘Comparative Public Policy, Government and International Relations’ theme. See the conference website for further details.
9 October 2007
The Howard Government's Intervention into the Northern Territory Aboriginal Communities: The National Emergency
Paul 't Hart (Political Science, RSSS), Bryan Rodgers (National Centre for Epidemilogy & Population Health) and Maggie Brady (CAEPR) offered their perspectives on the Howard Government's current intervention in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. The seminar was hosted by theme convener Tim Rowse. Further details and podcasts of the three papers.
23 July 2007
Ruralism and the Limits of Neo-liberalism
Discussion introduced and chaired by Linda Botterill (ANU). Presenters: Jon Altman (ANU), Ian Gray (Charles Sturt University), John Gray (Anthropology, University of Adelaide), Daniela Stehlik (Curtin University of Technology), Carolyn Morris (University of Canterbury).
In many nations, including Australia and New Zealand, rural communities have had to contend with the global extension of market-based social and economic policies. Their self-understanding as 'families' and 'communities' have been challenged by governmental social imaginaries in which they appear as incipient or actual entrepreneurs and enterprises or as unreconstructed pockets of subsidised, rent-seeking inefficiency. Succeeding generations of rural dwellers have been invited to identify with either their rural heritage, with the winds of change, or to contrive their own compromise between the two. In Australia there have been two versions of this clash. One has featured non-Indigenous practitioners of various forms of agriculture. Public policy in the past secured their land base cheaply, ensured their access to relatively inexpensive finance, and stabilised the markets for their produce. It was widely assumed that there was a sympathetic relationship between the norms of kinship and of productive efficiency. There has long been a market-based critique of this form of 'rurality', but it had a strong political defence. The advance of neo-liberal approaches to property, finance and trade has strengthened the political challenge to these Australian rural institutions and ways of life, in the last thirty years. The other clash has emerged more recently. Over the last forty years, Indigenous Australians have lost their position as a rural labour force, and become owners of a large proportion of the Australian land mass (around 20 per cent). There have been large variations in the pace and the extent of this shift from being labourers to being land-owners. One of the most striking instances of this shift was the decentralisation of the remote Aboriginal population, a shift made possible by changes in land tenure and by the entry of remote Aboriginal people into the Australian welfare state. In recent years this rural transition has come under sustained critique by policy intellectuals who argue that this rural reformation has produced 'ghettos', a 'lost generation', a socially unviable economy propped up by public subvention. These critics seek the social inclusion of remote Aborigines as bearers of human capital, as private home-owners and as commercially-oriented owners of natural resources - transitions that require public policy to intervene in new ways in the social reproduction of remote Aborigines.
26 February 2007
The Australian Census: History versus Privacy?
Terry Hull (ANU)
When looking back into the first century of Australian history following white settlement we often rely on the records of musters, listings and censuses to provide information on individuals and communities. The first census of New South Wales in 1828 was little more than a directory of names of settlers and settlements, but both professional historians and genealogists regard it as invaluable. As the scientific principles of censuses were developed over the course of the nineteenth century the information collected became ever more important for social scientists and economists. In the twentieth century professional historians in the UK and USA opened wholly new perspectives on society by looking to the census for records of common families who were not recorded in the newspapers or diaries of the time, and the community structures in which they lived. Unfortunately such innovations have not been possible in Australia. The individual records of most colonial and all Commonwealth censuses are not to be found in the libraries or archives. Concerns about privacy have forced generations of statisticians to destroy these most important records soon after the basic tables have been completed. This paper explores the history behind the anomalous practice of destroying census records in Australia, and poses some questions about the role of the census in the writing of histories of Australian people. There were two discussants: Daniel Stewart (College of Law), and a nominee of the Australian Bureau of Statistics.