The Duke of Conceptual Architecture

I take every opportunity possible to tell people what I do. Not only does it give me a chance to practice whatever blurb I have for my thesis, it allows me to get a sense of what people make of the discipline of sociology. The thing that strikes me is that those people who have…

Where education was once spoken of as an investment in our future, it is now heralded as an investment in my future. There’s nothing inherently insidious with thinking of the private and personal benefits of education. The debate, however, has been whether or not this has come at the expense of the greater good. To…

As is typically the case when Sara visits from Darwin, she is starved for ‘culture’. By the time she gets here, I usually am too because I am lazy and don’t get out much unless forced to. This visit, however, Sara and I came dangerously close to overdosing on cinema. Thankfully the choices we made…

Depending on how you see it, race has either made a comeback or people are realising it had never actually left the stage. Despite all attempts against it, ever since Obama became the Democratic Presidential candidate, race has once again become a political issue in the US. His election to the Presidency was taken to…

The death of Kwementyaye Ryder earlier this year sparked some anxiety about race relations in Alice Springs. This, however, has very little grounding in what is known about the circumstances of the murder – for all intents and purposes there is no real evidence known to the public that the murder was racially motivated. This…

Drunken violence seems to have an unintended consequence: it has made public authorities stupider. ABC’s TWT has reported on a recent incident in the Melbourne CBD and what makes me numb are the responses of the police and the Mayor. On the weekend a police officer was seriously injured after being smashed in the head…

So The Chaser is once again in trouble. This time, however, it has reached ridiculous proportions. The first time, it was because they made fun of sick and terminally ill children. This time, it’s because they have supposedly made fun of guide dogs. I say ‘supposedly’, because, contrary to what the Guide Dog Association is…

I’m often looking at how the media reports findings of academic social research. I don’t believe you need to be an academic researcher to read such reports, but this also depends on the report being well-written. A tantalising headline grabbed my attention today on the ABC website: ‘Security guards now outnumber police’. There’s not much…

So, Mick Dodson provided a colourful start to his tenure as Australian of the Year by calling on the PM to change the date of Australia Day because Indigenous people see it as “invasion day”. The general idea being that changing the date would make our annual celebration of being Australian more inclusive. Unfortunately, the…

With my lappy in dire need of a new hard drive, I have no way of easily accessing the internet at the moment. Alas, promised photos of my graduation and recent wanderings are on hold. This post, however, is a reply to a couple of replies written on the blog. I originally wrote an entry…

In a previous post I commented upon the misadventures of our very own Advance Alice – a group whose recent fame has been propelled by their night-time patrols of the increasingly violent streets of Alice Springs. In that post I commented upon the divisions being exposed within the community and the way in which they…

I really wonder whether or not I would be trying to defend multiculturalism this much if there was a more robust debate about its merits or otherwise. I seriously doubt it, but the triumphalism of the Howard government in having poisoned the well that is multiculturalism needs a counter-weight. Plus, I love taking unpopular positions…

Give up ABC! SBS’s Insight program does it a shit load better! I almost didn’t make it past the introductions in the premier of ABC’s new program, Difference of Opinion. For starters, the one-hour program said that it was going to deal with the idea of a) a ‘fair go’, b) multiculturalism and c) Australian…

And, so this political year began on predictable grounds – climate change. I never thought I would ever get to say this given the present government’s intransigence, verging on belligerence, against the issue over the last decade. Just because our government is talking about it is no reason to feel comforted. Let’s have a look…

I plucked this from a report in the SMH today about the dismal state of the NSW economy: A LEADING economic forecaster has declared that NSW is so sick it risks “adoption by Angelina Jolie” – amid business demands for sweeping reforms to revive state growth. Hahaha!