This book explores how the concepts of social justice, diversity, equity and inclusion can be understood within the context of higher education. While terms such as these are often in common use in universities, they are not always used with clarity and precision. The editors and contributors offer a serious and detailed examination of pressing contemporary concerns around 'social justice' across politics, practice and pedagogy in order to encourage hard thinking and practical agenda setting for social-justice oriented research, teaching and community engagement. Drawing upon new theoretical work, research projects and innovative university teaching, this book offers both useful theoretical insights and practical possibilities for action. This collective and collaborative volume will be of interest and value to all those interested in promoting social justice, in particular how it can be promoted within the university setting.

This book offers a novel, refreshing and politically engaged way to think about public policy. Instead of treating policy as simply the government's best efforts to address problems, it offers a way to question critically how policies produce "problems" as particular sorts of problems, with important political implications. Governing, it is argued, takes place through these problematizations. According to the authors, interrogating policies and policy proposals as problematizations involves asking questions about the assumptions they rely upon, how they have been made, what their effects are, as well as how they could be unmade. To enable this form of critical analysis, this book introduces an analytic strategy, the "What's the Problem Represented to be?" (WPR) approach. It features examples of applications of the approach with topics as diverse as obesity, economic policy, migration, drug and alcohol policy, and gender equality to illustrate the growing popularity of this way of thinking and to provide clear and useful examples of poststructural policy analysis in practice.

This book explores how the concepts of social justice, diversity, equity and inclusion can be understood within the context of higher education. While terms such as these are often in common use in universities, they are not always used with clarity and precision. The editors and contributors offer a serious and detailed examination of pressing contemporary concerns around 'social justice' across politics, practice and pedagogy in order to encourage hard thinking and practical agenda setting for social-justice oriented research, teaching and community engagement. Drawing upon new theoretical work, research projects and innovative university teaching, this book offers both useful theoretical insights and practical possibilities for action. This collective and collaborative volume will be of interest and value to all those interested in promoting social justice, in particular how it can be promoted within the university setting.

The Good Mother brings together essays on the contemporary relevance of the 'good mother' in Australia. Although the ideals of the 'good mother' change with time, fashion and context, they persist in public policy, the media, popular culture and workplaces. They place pressure on women to conform to particular standards, against which they are judged and judge themselves. This book captures the diversity of contemporary women's experiences. Chapters address the experiences of executive mothers, mothers working in manual trades, 'yummy mummies' and 'slummy mummies', low income mothers, single mothers, Indigenous mothers, lesbian parents, adoptive mothers and mothers negotiating schools and school choice. The essays demonstrate that while the 'good mother' is no longer exclusively white, heterosexual, economically dependent and child focused, prevailing ideas about mothers and motherhood continue to influence the way 'types' of women are represented and the way that all mothers think, act and present themselves.

The Sociological Bent: Inside Metro Culture is an engaging introduction to sociology and to some exciting, illuminating and powerful ways of thinking about society. Written in a clear and accessible style, and drawing on the work of both contemporary and classical sociologists, this innovative text explores the relationships between various cultural forms, institutional sites and the practices of everyday life. The text is divided into thirty-seven short, digestible modules that address issues and topics of interest to contemporary students, ranging from passports and car advertising to personal hygiene and sex re-assignment surgery. Core concepts such as modernity, hegemony, ideology, discourse and culture are discussed in order to provide intellectual frameworks for the reading of diverse cultural forms and practices. Students are encouraged to move beyond commonsense assumptions about social experience and to theorise many naturalised and familiar aspects of their everyday lives, such as: • celebrity and the social functions of fame • fashions in food, clothing and consumer goods • globalisation, corporate collapse and crime • the nature of ‘belonging’ to nations, groups or subcultures • transformations in intimacy, and in sex and gender relations. The text also introduces students to a range of methods for comprehending contemporary life – including social semiotics, discourse analysis, field immersion and ethnography – equipping them with the most sophisticated tools of analysis that current scholarship can provide. The Sociological Bent demonstrates the diversity of sociological thinking and research, and explains the historical background and meaning of the key concepts applied in each area of focus. It provides students with an excellent foundation for developing a sociological understanding of the contemporary world, as well as the sociological framework or infrastructure required for them to undertake further sociological studies.