Suchergebnisse

In addition to the literature surveyed in the review article and the references provided by each of the authors, further sources are provided here. This selection might appear idiosyncratic for international readers given its Australian focus but it has been made because the sources (not likely to be widely known outside Australia) provide current, rich and unique ethnographic data on the complex politics of intercountry adoption in a receiving country and of past practices in domestic adoption, both of which have implications for current policy and practice.

Consider a social phenomenon which for over sixty years has seen the increasingly systematic and organised (but involuntary) expatriation, migration and resettlement of around one million children around the globe (Selman, 2012). In most cases, this expatriation entails the complete severance of ties with home countries, communities and families of origin; the provision of new families and citizenship; a legal change of identity that may include the issuing of new birth certificates; and, for many, a life among people from whom they remain visibly different just as they remain culturally and linguistically different from the communities in which they were born but from whom they are removed at an early age.

A series of harrowing reports across the 1990s on the past removal of children, black and white, from their families have impacted on children and family policy in contemporary Australia, and on the way in which this is reported by the media and understood by the public. This paper briefly surveys some of these consequences and asks how we, as a community, can learn from the past with respect to questions of the welfare of children, without being burdened by that past.

Africa is being re-imagined as a knowledge economy, and higher education (HE) systems have been propelled into the centre of national economic plans and strategies. This paper provides an analysis of four recent major initiatives directed to the revitalisation of HE in sub-Saharan Africa: the Pan African University (2010), the Africa Higher Education Centers of Excellence Project (2014), The Kigali Communiqué on Higher Education for Science, Technology and Innovation (2014), and the Dakar Declaration and Action Plan on Revitalising Higher Education for Africa's Future (2015). Guided by critical frame analysis, we examined assumptions and expectations of these regionally/globally structured HE development agendas. The findings show that, while there is a convergence of thinking on the promise for economic transformation held by invigorated HE sectors in Africa, there are uncritically adopted premises about how this transformation is to be achieved. In particular, we find that the promise held out for economic transformation through HE is at risk of failing through the inadequate contextualisation of global policy orthodoxies to African conditions, and that some of the premises about the nature and scale of the economic transformation required to make the re-imagined Africa a reality need to be reconsidered.

This essay places the long‐standing campaign for redress and apology of women separated from their children through adoption in an historical and political context, tracing the rise of the single mother as a political voice through the Council for the Single Mother and her Child and the emergence of birth mother advocacy groups. The political actions of these mothers must be seen alongside the two national apologies already delivered and the political activism which led to them. Activism for apologies for past wrongs ought be understood in terms of the contemporary Australian politics of apology in which, in the words of Hannah Arendt, "pity is elevated to the level of a political principle". However, in the case of these mothers, the Australian story of national regret and apology is complicated by issues of gender and sexuality. The women, unlike the Stolen Generations, child migrants and institutionalised children, do not easily or readily fit within the terms of national apology as formulated in the apologies of 2008 and 2009 which were addressed primarily to wronged and innocent children. If and when an apology is addressed to these women, its terms will necessarily differ from the earlier apologies.