Public passion and debate about Australia’s indigenous peoples ebb and flow. During the 1990s, Mabo, Wik, reconciliation and the Stolen Generations dominated public debate for months on end. Indigenous leaders such as Pat and Mick Dodson, Lowitja O’Donohue and Noel Pearson became familiar figures, prodding politicians and the public to remember unfinished business. As the official reconciliati ... (read more)
Anthony Moran
Anthony Moran is a lecturer in Social Sciences at La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia. He teaches in the areas of ethnicity, race, indigenous issues, nationalism, qualitative research methods, political sociology, social policy, and community studies. He is the author of Australia: Nation, Belonging and Globalization (Routledge, 2005), the co-author (with Judith Brett) of Ordinary People’s Politics (Pluto Press Australia, 2006), and the co-editor (with Sean Watson) of Trust, Risk and Uncertainty (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). He has published many articles in international journals on issues of race, ethnicity, multiculturalism, indigenous/settler politics and relations, cosmopolitanism, and nationalism. He is currently writing on multiculturalism in Australia.
Our lives are awash with opinion polls. The daily newspapers, television, radio, and internet poll people on just about every subject. The survey of public opinion has become, since the 1940s, a pervasive feature of everyday life, and is now central to the political process. Sophisticated, large-scale polling of attitudes at the national level – such as the National Social Science Survey, the Au ... (read more)
Zygmunt Bauman has a talent for metaphors. When, in the late 1980s, he entered the fray of the modernity/postmodernity debates, he suggested that, while premodernity had been presided over by ‘gamekeepers’ managing a disorderly nature and society, modernity was presided over by ‘gardeners’ obsessed with creating order out of messy reality. In his most recent work, beginning with Liquid Mod ... (read more)
Since the mid 1990s, when Robert Putnam lionised the concept in his famous essay ‘Bowling Alone’, writing on ‘social capital’ has proliferated. It caught the eye of politicians, including then United States President Bill Clinton, and for a while it seemed that everyone was lamenting its decline; it became a staple of debate among politicians, within policy networks, and in the major newsp ... (read more)