Boycotting Israeli academics, or boycotting academic freedom?

Written by Gregory Rose, Professor of Law at the University of Wollongong.

Continued boycotts of Israeli academics pose a threat to the very freedoms that academics hold dear. AAP/Joe Castro

On Wednesday last week, the Student Representative Council at the University of Sydney adopted a motion to boycott Israeli academics. The motion called specifically for the University to cut its current research ties with the Technion, Israel’s leading higher education technology institute, and supported the general academic boycott of Israel called for by the University of Sydney’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (CPACS).

That the boycott suppresses academic freedom is clear but less obvious is that it does not promote international peace and that it is fundamentally racist. Earlier this year, The Conversation published an argument in defence of the boycott by the CPACS’ Paul Dulffill, and the issue deserves to have both sides discussed.

What is the launching of a universal boycott of Israel intended to achieve? The purported reason given by CPACS – and supported by the SRC – is that because Israeli academics reside in a country alleged to have breached international law, those smarting academics will supposedly turn around Israeli foreign and security policy.

In reality, Australian academics have minimal influence on this country’s foreign policy, and even less in Israel where national security concerns predominate. Of course, Israeli academics facing attack tend to fight back like the rest of us when pushed against the wall. The academic boycott will never be effective in its supposed objective of changing Israeli policies.

Nevertheless, Students for Palestine and CPACS supporters of the boycott might still assert that it has secondary value in Australia, perhaps because the boycott raises academic awareness here, which might percolate through to Australian foreign policy makers. So, if an implicit objective is to generate Australian antagonism, a local boycott targeting Israeli academics might supposedly influence Australian foreign policy. However, there is no evidence that this symbolic activism at the University of Sydney will influence government or swing votes in the ballot box.

On their own avowal, the members of both the University of Sydney SRC and CPACS are active in Palestine solidarity campaigns and have picked a side in an international dispute – Dulfill says that the CPACS “can hardly be expected to be neutral or disinterested”. That conflict is complex and their choice is morally questionable, but they wish to push their interests on others.

Advocacy for the university to officially engage in a boycott and to propose that it be adhered to by academics is intellectual totalitarianism, anathema to respectable universities which resist political pressure to adopt partisan policies or repress academic research. Within a learning environment the freedom to doubt, to analyse and to form and articulate an independent perspective is fundamental and the essential quality of a university.

Choosing official sides between competing nationalities, religions and races politicises a campus, alienates members of faculty staff and is toxic to faculty collegiality. Jews would be alienated but not only them. It is reminiscent of ideological purges within the Soviet and Chinese communist parties.

Let’s put this in comparative perspective: should the University of Sydney cease all collaborative research with Indonesian institutes until the Papuan self-determination movement is satisfied? What about publishing official Sydney boycott manifestos on the democratic failures in China, Fiji, Malaysia and Singapore? If the problem is military applications of technology, then it must also boycott the ANU, the universities of NSW, Wollongong, and the list goes on.

Should the University of Sydney itself be boycotted if it does not officially adopt a boycott of Israel? Should University of Sydney academics who do not individually endorse an official boycott be penalised?

It has been truthlessly suggested that the academic boycott does not affect individual academics and that the Palestine Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) guidelines are clear on this. To the contrary, the PACBI guidelines do not meaningfully distinguish between Israeli academics and representatives of their institutions. Normally, any academic engaged in an international collaboration is assumed to informally represent his/her own institution. For example, an outstanding Australian-Israeli biomathematics colleague was told by a science journal that it could not publish him because of his Tel Aviv University address.

Academics are members of a social sector who typically tend to be public intellectuals and advocate for individual freedoms, liberal values and social justice. Professor Dan Avnon of the Hebrew University, who was not allowed by the Sydney CPACS to spend part of his sabbatical there, had sought to undertake individual academic work in Arab-Jewish peace studies. Shunning people who typically reach out for peaceful dialogue is an irony all can see.

Of course, the threat to academic freedom would be limited if this is the only boycott. Then, ambivalent University of Sydney staff might feel some relief: the boycott would simply be a symbolic demonstration of the University’s claim of a moral high ground. Just the Jewish state alone and no more. Sad, that is.

Australian suppression of peaceful engagement with Israeli academics could make sense only because its objective has nothing to do with peace. The long-war objective of the academic boycott is the same as the trade and diplomatic boycotts that Arab states have imposed on Israel since its inception 65 years ago.

The Friends of Palestine approach within the SRC and CPACS entails denial of any Jewish state. They are warriors in the conflict, adding fuel to its fire. There could be no more elegant demonstration for why Jews need their own country.

Originally posted on the Conversation.

 

Obama inauguration speech: a historic moment for gay and lesbian equality

Written by Marcus O’Donnell, Lecturer, Program Convenor Journalism at the University of Wollongong.

Obama wove the story of gay rights into the language of America’s founding fathers during his inauguration speech. EPA/Shawn Thew

 

Much has been made of the fact President Obama became the first president to mention the word gay in an inaugural address. But the significance lies not in what he said but how he said it.

In declaring, “Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law” Obama not only declared himself abstractly for “gay rights”, he placed these rights at the heart of the central ideals of the American story.

Obama’s whole speech sprung from his reiteration of the much sung hymn to equality from the Declaration of Independence which he quoted at the start of his speech: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”. Presidents and other American orators are fond of quoting this lodestone of the American dream, so it is not surprise that Obama should refer to it.

But his speech was much more telling because he made clear that he took those words as a call to action: “For history tells us that while these truths maybe self-evident, they have never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth”.

Again, a rousing call to act for freedom and equality is common place in the American presidential tradition. Obama’s distinctive play on this came with his declaration that securing equality and freedom entailed both a steadfast commitment to the founding father’s vision and embracing intelligent changes in the light of contemporary challenges. “But we have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action”.

Obama’s riff on gay and lesbian rights then begins in a very specific way which very skillfully links it to both adaptation to new challenges and collective action: “We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth”.

In this extraordinary declaration, Obama not only declares that adapting to, and fighting for, gay and lesbian rights is important, but that the fight for these rights, which stems from the 1969 Stonewall riots, should be placed on the same footing as the fight for women’s rights at Seneca Falls and the fight for racial equality at Selma. Here the president effectively placed the fight for gay and lesbian rights within the myth of the ongoing American revolution.

This leads to an explicit call for gay and lesbian equality in the next paragraph: “Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well”.

Obama goes further here than any of his predecessors would have dared. This is not just a call for equality under the law, it is a carefully phrased call for same sex marriage: “the love we commit to one another must be equal as well”.

Obama has recently declared his support for same sex marriage, so this is not a new statement. But his inclusion of such a statement in an inaugural address, a key ritual moment of American democracy, and his inclusion of this declaration in the context of the fight for women’s and civil rights marks yet another milestone in the story of gay and lesbian citizenship.

The fight for marriage equality faces several key tests in the US this year, the most significant of which are the cases before the Supreme Court about the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8, both of which define marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman.

One of the ongoing pressure points in American public debate has been around so called “judicial-activism” on social issues. In opposing such “activism” conservative legal scholars often adhere to a doctrine called “originalism”, which proclaims that any constitutional judgement must aim to get as close as possible to the original meaning of the words of the founding fathers when interpreting the constitution.

In this carefully crafted speech, Obama not only laid a claim for gay and lesbian equality and same sex marriage; he was laying a claim that any constitutional value of equality does not have an original or fundamentalist meaning, rather one that constantly evolves.

This is fundamentally at odds with our own Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who appeals to the importance of tradition and “heritage” in her own refusal to acknowledge the marriage rights of gay and lesbian Australians.

Traditions only continue to have meaning when they are reinterpreted and made relevant by each generation. Obama’s inauguration speech was an inspiring attempt to do this. Let’s hope his actions over the next four years are equally inspiring.

Originally posted on The Conversation

Hate blood but want a career in medicine? Don’t worry, there’s a job for you

Written by Ian Wilson, Professor, Associate Dean – Learning and Teaching at University of Wollongong.

Some students come into medicine with a fixed idea of what they want to do – but this often changes. uonottingham

Just before I finished high school, my local general practitioner suggested I consider medicine. But the thought of blood made me feel squeamish, so I went to university to do maths and physics, and to try the new field of computer science. Needing a fourth subject, I opted for biology so that my friend who also did biology could give me a lift to campus.

I ended up becoming fascinated with biology, so much so that I wanted to study neuroscience, and I felt the best way into a research career was through medicine. Luckily, I was successful. As an undergraduate I discovered patients and shifted my focus to a career as a psychiatrist.

I was called up for National Service and ended up on a Defence Force Scholarship. During this time I became interested in trauma surgery and after discharge joined the surgical training scheme. After six months of surgery, I was bored with the technical side but still enjoyed the patient contact and interaction. Being married with one child and another on the way, I opted for general practice with a mental health and procedural focus.

I tell this story in some detail to highlight the meanderings that many students undertake in their career decision-making. Some students come into medicine with a fixed idea of what they want to do and spend their time achieving that goal.

But the majority are more like me and develop multiple interests. Where they end up generally depends on a number of factors such as available training posts, skill levels, controllability of lifestyle and to a very small extent, salary.

The Medical Schools Outcome Database and Longitudinal Tracking Project (MSOD) asks students about their career intentions on entry to and exit from medical school, and as interns (their first year working in a hospital) and residents (their second year of work). On entry to medical school in 2011, 25% of medical students had a first preference for surgery with paediatrics and general practice the next most frequent.

The preferences of those exiting medical school in 2011 were a little different: internal medicine and surgery were the most common career choices (18% each) followed by general practice and then paediatrics. Towards the end of the internship, the preferences changed again, with internal medicine the most frequently chosen (19%) followed by general practice and then surgery.

The least preferable career options tend to be rehabilitation, public health and palliative care – most students come into medicine to save lives, making these specialities less appealing.

With the growing number of medical graduates and the relative shortage of intern and specialist training positions, we have noticed a change in student behaviour.

Increasingly, students are attempting to ensure their undergraduate experiences provide them with the best advantage for their career selection process. Honours degrees or the publication of papers will add a few extra points in some speciality selection processes and students are working hard to achieve these goals.

Hospital choice is also seen as important, as there is a perception among medical students that undertaking an internship in a specific hospital increases their chances of being selected into a specific specialist training program. But these beliefs aren’t necessarily based on facts.

Some experts have suggested using career counselling to increase the number of students entering careers that are less appealing or where there are significant shortages. But there’s no evidence to show career counselling works in this way.

The best way to deal with this issue is around student selection and undergraduate experiences. Choosing students who are more likely to enter a given profession and providing them with experiences that are positive will work much more effectively in promoting careers in the generalist professions (medicine, surgery and rural general practice).

But often the impact of changes does not stop at the school level. Many professionals, including doctors, invest so much of their time and energy into their careers they are surprised that their practice takes on a sameness. Once you have delivered 200 babies or conducted 100 gall bladder operations the procedures lose their excitement.

This is the point at which many doctors start looking for something new and engage in medical politics, education, research, business ventures or artistic endeavours.

Some, like me, become dissatisfied with individual care and want to have a bigger impact on the world. Moving into academia to train the next cohorts of doctors seemed a logical step. In light of my original interest in research, this was a hugely positive for me.

Originally posted on The Conversation

Four visions, three dimensions: the future of 3D printing

By Thomas Birtchnell, Lecturer in Social Sciences, Media and Communication at University of Wollongong, and Professor John Urry, Department of Sociology at Lancaster University.

Originally posted on The Conversation

 

Chances are you’ve heard about 3D printing – or additive manufacturing as it’s otherwise known: a process that turns computer-aided designs into three-dimensional, real-world objects with a range of uses, from a range of materials and on a range of scales.

But you’ve probably heard little in terms of the social impact that 3D printing and its associated technologies will likely have.

Those possible impacts are exactly what we’re investigating at Lancaster University and the University of Wollongong. We’ve identified four potential scenarios that could eventuate in a world that embraces 3D printing and, crucially, how those scenarios could affect everyday life.

Where we’re at

Walking around the 3D Printshow 2012 in London last month, the hype around 3D printing technology was palpable.

The first stall in view was MakerBot’s, and the company’s CEO and founder Bre Pettis was busy spruiking their Replicator 2 – Time Magazine’s Best Invention of 2012.

But it was in the other stalls out the back, populated by artists, entrepreneurs and researchers, where this innovation could be seen doing really interesting things.

In those stalls there were different intimations of the futures we have imagined in our project at Lancaster University.

In one corner there were a couple of children playing the game Minecraft. Their mother explained that they were actually creating 3D designs within the game (in between foraging for food and fighting spiders).

The game players design objects from cube-shaped blocks in the same way they might design in-game houses and caves.

A clever piece of software called Printcraft uploads designs made in Minecraft to a server, which automatically converts the designs into 3D-printable files. Then the player simply prints the design out on an adjacent 3D printer, in this case a MakerBot.

At another company’s stall a salesperson (the inventor was her dad) claimed her printer could print different colours at the same time – something that hasn’t been possible with 3D printers until now.

 Next to this one there was a 3D printer with a handle so it could be carried around – both printers drew on the open-source Reprap design.

An adjacent stall was a bit different in that it didn’t feature 3D printers. Instead, a team of designers and marketing gurus offered their 3D printing expertise for small product runs and trial inventions.

Further along there was a scale model of the Urbee 3D-printed car. There was also a chain-mail shirt made of tiny steel links, amazingly assembled by an expensive laser sintering printer.

And most impressively there was a row of 3D-printed mummified animals from an archaeological project rendered in near-perfect detail down to the bandages, as per the photo below:

Where we’re going

Our research has seen us explore four different social futures around 3D printing.

They were shaped by how corporate this new industrial revolution will be and how much individuals will engage with the technology. In particular we were interested in how 3D printing might influence the transportation of objects and the travel of people.

In order to find out what futures might be, where 3D printing has significance (or not), we held a workshop with the Futures Company in London, and picked the brains of engineers, consultants, policymakers and designers. The four possible futures are below:

1. Home factories

Everyone has a 3D printer in their home sitting next to their paper printer and making plastic jewellery, kitchen utensils, toys, models, homework projects and non-critical replacement parts.

People in this future no longer derive as much satisfaction from shopping in the high street for cheap products and are printing much more “stuff”, mostly made of plastic or resin.

2. Print shops

Manufacturing has “returned” to places such as the UK, the US and Australia.

Companies are integrating high-end 3D printers that print all sorts of exotic materials – from steel and titanium to sandstone and carbon fibre – into their supply chains and retail outlets.

As a result there are efficiency gains in how objects are transported and where they are made. Aeroplane parts and car dashboards, for instance, are made locally and customised to order.

3. Fab labs

Groups of people work together on not-for-profit or subsidised printers provided with support services and technicians.

The main focus is not new markets but rather new communities that craft objects they intend to use for recreation or for trading and selling in specialist “maker fairs”.

These communities hinge on open-source technologies and co-production ethics, and generally people are still relying on a global production system for much of what they need.

4. The 3D bubble

The market bubble has burst as inflated expectations have caused 3D printing to be severely over-hyped.

Many small entrepreneurs have gone bust and multinational corporations have not renewed their product lines. Consumers are dissatisfied with the appearance and unreliability of 3D-printed objects and design software is too complicated to master.

In this fourth future, 3D printing is still being used by specialists for prototyping, preservation of collections and high-end bespoke accessories.

 

 Will any of these futures happen? As always, time will tell. But we should be discussing the potential social impacts now, before the future arrives.

In the meantime, as the 3D Printshow 2012 ably demonstrated, there are already many exciting and inspiring uses of this technology.

Armageddon and its aftermath: dating the Toba super-eruption

By Richard (Bert) Roberts, ARC Australian Professorial Fellow at University of Wollongong

No-one alive today has witnessed a volcanic eruption remotely as big as the Toba “super” eruption. But our ancestors may have done, tens of thousands of years ago, when northern Sumatra exploded, creating a caldera now filled by the largest volcanic lake on Earth, measuring 100km by 30km and 0.5km at its deepest. But when, exactly, did it happen?

In a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) my colleagues Michael Storey, Mokhtar Saidin and I have finally pinned a date on the Toba super-eruption. It happened 73,880 years ago, with an uncertainty of just 640 years (with 95% confidence).

The Eruption

This mega-colossal eruption was the third – and largest – in the last million years at Toba, and the most explosive on Earth for more than two million years.

More than seven trillion tonnes of volcanic material were ejected, of which at least 800km³ was spewed as ash across the Indian Ocean and the adjacent landmasses of South and Southeast Asia, covering several million square kilometres of the planet’s surface in debris.

The Toba blast pumped an equally staggering quantity of sulphurous gases into the atmosphere. The resulting chemical products were transported around the globe and are recognised as sulphate spikes in drill cores collected from ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

The event dwarfs any other historical eruption, the largest of which was Tambora – also in Indonesia – in 1815. Despite being 100-times smaller in magnitude than Toba, Tambora led to a global drop in temperature of about 0.7 ºC and disastrous crop failures across the Northern Hemisphere the following year – dubbed “the year without a summer”.

Given the monumental size of Toba, surely it must have had a correspondingly catastrophic effect on the planet’s climate, landscape, flora and fauna?

And could it have also altered the course of human evolution, reducing the population to such a small size than our ancestors were squeezed through a genetic bottleneck?

Such questions and speculations have provided fodder for researchers since geological evidence for the Toba eruption was first reported at the end of the 19th century.

But, perhaps surprisingly, there remains no consensus at the present time on the climatic or ecological impacts of Toba, and this can be blamed, in large measure, on the fact that the exact date of this explosion had not been fixed to better than a few thousand years, at some point between about 70,000 and 75,000 years ago.

Such a wide margin of error meant that the Toba event could not be precisely aligned with the Earth’s climatic cycles, the comings and goings of animal and plant communities, the dispersals of our early ancestors out of Africa, or the disappearance of other human species in Asia and Europe.

How to date an eruption

My colleagues and I worked out the age of the explosion with high precision by dating crystals of the mineral sanidine using a state-of-the-art mass spectrometer at Roskilde University in Denmark.

Geochronologist Michael Storey measured the tiny amounts of argon gas built up inside the crystals since they were thrust out of the Toba volcano and deposited in adjacent Malaysia, where they now occur in thick beds of ash preserved in the valley bottoms.

In Malaysia’s Lenggong Valley, volcanic ash has buried stone tools that some archaeologists think were made by our early forebears, so our high-resolution age for the Toba eruption suggests that our ancestors were living in Southeast Asia before it erupted, more than 74,000 years ago.

Volcanic Impact

So, can we now answer all of the questions that have eluded researchers for so long? The answer, sadly, is no, but we can establish whether this mega-eruption led or lagged some of the most pronounced oscillations in Earth’s climate system, known as Dansgaard-Oeschger events.

From temperature records extracted from the ice caps at both poles and from calcite formations in caves across Europe and Asia, we know that one of the longest periods of cold climate in the last 130,000 years began 74,000 years ago – when temperatures fell abruptly by several degrees centigrade – and ended 72,000 years ago.

The fall in temperature due to the eruption alone would have lasted no more than a few decades, but it may have accelerated or amplified a climatic cooling event already underway, providing positive feedback at a critical moment.

Although geologically brief, several decades of disruption to the climate and landscape could have had devastating ecological impacts, with potentially dire outcomes for humans living at the time of the blast.

The biota living in the vicinity of Toba would have been decimated over the 14-day duration of the eruption, and southeast Asia was then occupied by possibly four known species of human:

• Homo sapiens
• Homo erectus
• Homo floresiensis(the “Hobbits” of Flores)
• Denisovans – an enigmatic lineage discovered from genetic traces in fossil bones and teeth at Denisova Cave in southern Siberia and detected also in the DNA of modern Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians.

It could be that Toba played a role in shaping human interactions, extinctions and dispersals in Asia and Australia, and has left a legacy of the eruption in our genes.

Much remains to be understood about the aftermath of this exceptional geological event, but at least we now know when it happened – to within a few centuries – and can use its ash and chemical remnants to tie together diverse records of global climate, ecology and human evolution.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Reading from the screen – Young children’s digital literacy

By Dr Lisa Kervin and Dr Jessica Mantei, Language and Literacies, Faculty of Education and members of the Interdisciplinary Educational Research Institute (IERI).

Digital reading, or reading from a computer screen, may seem like second nature to many adults, but what challenges face young children when they read digitally?

Literature examining how children learn to read is plentiful, but there is little literature that discusses young children’s ability to read digitally, which is fundamentally different from the act of reading traditional print based texts.

To address this gap in the literature, we are working in collaboration with Jan Hutton, Michelle Rodwell and Kristy Kervin from the Catholic Diocese Office in Wollongong, and Grant Elmers from Creative Arts (UOW), to design an assessment tool to capture information from early readers, focusing in particular on Kindergarten and Year 1. Initially, the team analysed the “Concepts about Print” assessment (Clay, 1972), a well-respected assessment tool in the literacy field. We identified the under lying principles of assessment and determined which of those principles could be transferred to a digital environment. Next a tool was designed which took the form of a webpage. Professor Don Leu (University of Connecticut), reviewed the tool, providing critical feedback. After making some further refinements the webpage was trialled in the classroom.

Initial findings have proven interesting. When the children looked at the site one of the first questions they were asked is, “what do you notice?” Interestingly, every child focused on something different when initially looking at the screen. This has given a small indication of just how difficult and demanding it can be to read in a digital environment. Further funding for this project is being sought, so as to continue to refine the instrument while working with teachers to see how discoveries made might be applied to transform classroom pedagogies.

This article was originally published in the Interdisciplinary Educational Research Institute Newsletter Issue 6, Winter 2012.

Meet Boston Dynamics’ LS3 – the latest robotic war machine

By Associate Professor Katina Michael. Originally posted on The Conversation.

On first viewing Boston Dynamics’ latest creation, the LS3 (Legged Squad Support System), I could not help but be taken back to the AT-AT (All Terrain Armoured Transport) walker, as depicted in the Star Wars film The Empire Strikes Back.

But it is the AT-TE (All Terrain Tactical Enforcer) walker that appears in Attack of the Clones which strikes the most eerie resemblance to the LS3 concept, as the two images below demonstrate.

The AT-TE is a six-legged walker that appears in Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, and The Clone Wars multimedia campaign. starwars.wikia.com

Boston Dynamics’ LS3 Concept. Boston Dynamics

Star Wars toys have become, it seems, real-world creations. The only discernible difference is that the AT-TE is a six legged beast, while the LS3 has been dubbed the “packed mule”.

According to Boston Dynamics – which made its name with the development of the BigDog quadruped robot in 2005 – the LS3 has been designed to accompany war fighters into battle, carrying 180kg payloads and freeing up troops that would otherwise be carrying such equipment themselves.

The demonstration video below gives a sense of the LS3 in action.

One cannot help thinking this packed mule could serve a variety of functions in a war, as its real-life counterpart did in the Great Wars.

In other words, the LS3 won’t just be carrying the necessities of water, food, shelter and medical supplies – it’s more than likely it will be carrying the instruments of war.

All washed up: have surf megabrands forgotten their roots?

By Andrew Warren, Post-Doctoral Researcher at University of Wollongong and Chris Gibson, Professor of Human Geography at University of Wollongong.

Australia’s surf megabrands — once thriving cultural icons — are now facing a changing tide of fortunes.

 

Yesterday’s announcement that iconic brand Rip Curl plans to sell-up raises the question: just what has happened to Australia’s iconic surf brands?

It has been well publicised that the big three surf labels – Rip Curl, Quiksilver and Billabong – have experienced shrinking sales and expanding debts. Suburban consumers have turned away from expensive surf-branded apparel. Coupled with the rise of online shopping, doubts are growing about the future viability of corporatised surf brands.

Raw economics certainly matters to the surf industry. The big three have been hit hard by recession in the United States and Europe, where they have concentrated most of their retail investment. Their timing was terrible. Just before the GFC, Quiksilver and Billabong both expanded their business operations. Billabong bought up a substantial number of surf retail outlets. Quiksilver acquired, and has since had to sell, a series of non-surf leisure brands – including Rossignol skis and Cleveland Golf equipment. Expansion added huge debts, which became difficult to finance when retail returns evaporated.

A subcultural industry

We think the problems facing the big three can also be explained through understanding surfing subculture. From informal beginnings shaping boards in backyard workshops and tool sheds, the selling of the surf remains strongly influenced by subcultural values and fashion cycles within the surfing scene.

In our new book on the surf industry, to be published next year by University of Hawaii Press, we make the point that, like music, it is a subcultural industry defined by a tension between “major” corporate labels and smaller “independents”. Independent labels have more credibility because they are considered closer to the grassroots of surfing culture. They are often based in specific surf cities and regions – southern California, the Gold Coast, north shore O’ahu – where surf subcultures are strong.

When brands grow and expand, they take on the character of corporate enterprises. The listing of Quiksilver on the NYSE in 1998 and Billabong on the ASX in 2000 signalled abrupt changes to the existing structure of the surf industry. Rightly or wrongly, many surfers felt that profitability and capital growth became more important than fulfilling surfer’s needs and desires. Surf companies have up-scaled production, acquired smaller brands, opened flagship retail stores and supplied stock to department stores. Quiksilver now supplies their surf-wear to department chain Macy’s in the United States and David Jones in Australia. Increasing market share is the goal, to pay shareholders dividends. Brand visibility to the masses is everything. But this undermines the claim to service local roots and the needs of every-day surfers.

Undermining credibility

The marketing of surfing’s cool image has allowed companies to sell the surf to a wider range of consumers. Despite its inland geography, in 2010 the US mid-west region was worth a remarkable $457 million in surf retail sales. The trade-off is that selling surf-wear through department stores undermines scarcity and subcultural value. Brand credibility falters.

This is not new. In the 1960s surf, labels Ocean Pacific and Hang Ten successfully diversified from surfboards and board shorts into different types of surf and swimwear. Yet in the 1980s, when their products moved out of surf shops and into department stores, subcultural affiliation collapsed. The big three now appear to be heading in the same direction.

When scarcity value is lost, other independent labels fill the niche. They look much more authentic and responsive by comparison. Their surfboards, clothes and apparel are harder to find, raising scarcity value. Independent brands appear rooted in surfing cities and regions. Corporate surf firms, by contrast, appear placeless and “uncool”. In time, the “majors” swallow up newer, smaller “independents” (as happened with RVCA, Palmers, Dakine and Von Zipper), temporarily leveraging their street cred. But the cycle starts all over again.

Differences and divergences

While the big three surf brands clearly face hardship, it is wrong to assume that all three are the same, or are equally doomed. Quiksilver and Billabong are listed companies. Responsibilities to shareholders and investors will influence future business planning. Any restructuring of Billabong and Quiksilver, or recapturing of their subcultural cachet, is unlikely to involve winding back stock from department store shelves. The recent appointment of former Target CEO Launa Inman as head of Billabong confirms this.

Rip Curl, on the other hand, remains privately owned. Whether this grants more flexibility to maintain ways of doing business that retain credibility and profitability is moot. Nevertheless, Rip Curl maintains a stronger strategic focus on surf “hardwear”: wetsuits and surfboard retail. Despite a dramatic fall in the last 12 months, Rip Curl remains profitable.

Surfing industry, surfing subculture

Broader economic conditions have gutted the performance of Australia’s largest surf brands. But macroeconomic conditions do not explain the full story. Surfing is a subculture, not an anonymous market for run-of-the-mill consumer goods. Given Australia’s strong connection to surfing, demand for surf products and equipment will endure. Newer, edgier brands will emerge and compete for market share. Whether the big three Australian firms can adapt and maintain their connections to surfing subcultures will be interesting to watch. Beyond the shopping mall, the key to understanding surf capitalism is watching the unfurling logics of its subculture.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
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Who’s hunting who? Misguided responses to shark attacks

By  Andrew Warren and Leah Gibbs, from the School of Earth & Environmental Sciences at University of Wollongong.

There is no evidence that hunting and killing sharks reduces attacks on humans. US Fish and Wildlife Service

The most recent fatal encounter between a shark and a surfer off the coast of Western Australia is a tragic loss of human life. It prompted a Western Australian government reaction to “hunt and kill” the individual animal responsible for the attack. But this is a misguided response, and it’s time we discussed better solutions.

An apparent increase in “shark attacks” has stirred up debates about appropriate longer-term responses, including the possibility of culling sharks to reduce the likelihood of human fatalities. Shark attacks in the past year have been reported amid claims that white shark populations are increasing. But there is a sharp absence of scientific evidence to support this assertion. Rather, increased reports of sightings may indicate change in shark behaviour.

Circulating around these debates is a highly charged public response to both the loss of human life and plans to kill or cull marine animals as a response. There is however, no clear rationale for killing or culling sharks; on this matter governments and the media have been quiet. The governance process that led to the decision to “hunt and kill” in Western Australia remains elusive.

Re-evaluating human behaviour

The conversation about sharks and humans needs to refocus on responses that do not involve killing or culling. Rather than looking at the behaviour of sharks in relation to attacks on humans, it is time to evaluate human behaviour in relation to sharks, and their natural environment.

“Chumming” the ocean to lure sharks close to boats for tourism or recreational fishing is one practice that warrants scrutiny. In Australia and South Africa, tourism industries are now well developed around cage diving and white sharks. Some have suggested that filling the water with blood and fish carcasses to attract sharks close to cages and boats helps them associate a potential meal with the presence of humans.

Scientific evidence is inconclusive. However, at the very least it appears that chumming may alter shark behaviour and movement along coastlines. In light of recent attacks these practices should be discussed.

We can also benefit from using the knowledge we have built up about sharks, both scientific and local knowledge. Accounts from marine biologists, surfers, fishermen and regular beach users hold that entering the water near schools of bait fish is a bad idea. Sharks are often seen chasing small fish schooled together near the surface.

Likewise, swimming near open river mouths (especially after heavy rainfalls), where sharks commonly feed is not recommended. According to accounts by many experienced surfers and fishermen, early morning and dusk are times in the day when the chances of encountering sharks are increased.

Technological interventions provide another set of behavioural responses. On the NSW south coast an aerial patrol is used each summer to spot sharks and warn nearby surfers and swimmers when a sighting occurs. Repellent technology that disturbs sharks’ electroreception organs – their “Ampullae of Lorenzini” – is also being developed. Several companies now sell small battery-powered devices that emit a continuous electrical current. When a shark comes within a few metres it experiences severe discomfort – something like a sharp headache. Testing has shown that the technology can be effective. Devices can be worn by surfers, divers or swimmers and deter sharks without causing long-term harm.

Ethics and philosophy of human – shark relations

Encounters between sharks and humans will continue to occur in Australian waters. Most Australians live near the coast and the ocean is a popular recreational space. When attacks do tragically occur we need to consider a set of deeper philosophical questions and alternative responses:

• What right do we have to approve the killing of an animal for inhabiting its natural environment?
• What might be a better response?

Researchers from numerous disciplines invest enormous effort into such questions. Within our discipline of geography, there is extensive debate about the cultures and politics of human interactions with “nature”. Many scholars are working towards finding new ways of living ethically in the world, ways that are based on co-existence, and that respond to the challenges of rapid environmental change.

Interestingly, these ideas are consistent with a good deal of public discussion in recent months about appropriate responses to shark attacks. Many commentators – including surfers – call for co-existence rather than killing.

Environmental governance

This brings us to the question: why are we killing these sharks? This is inherently a question about governance. How and why is it that the decision-making process leading to a “hunt and kill” strategy is invisible?

Citizens should be in no doubt about the process that leads to such decisions. When the animal in question is a top-predator and protected species, what are our ethical and political obligations, responsibilities and rights? Whose interests should be heard and heeded? We look forward to forthcoming discussions about the protected status of great white sharks, and hope that deliberations are public.

Milton Friedman once said that crises – actual or perceived – are solved by ideas that are “lying around” at the time. Space needs to be created to allow for a public discussion on the politics of nature and environmental management. We must find alternatives that offer humans a sense of security and safety without delivering death and destruction to another species.

Alternative responses to challenging encounters between humans and sharks are “lying around”. We should think less about killing and culling and more about informed scientific, philosophical and political responses that enable co-existence.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
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All hail Jugaad? Understanding the latest management fad from India

By  Thomas Birtchnell, lecturer in Sociology at University of Wollongong.

A jugaad is not only the name for the jalopies driven by India’s rural poor; it also refers to a management technique that refers to that country’s capacity for indigenous innovation.

What do India’s huge blackouts this month have to do with the latest fad for CEOs? Forget guanxi, the Chinese art of networking; forget the Japanese-inspired disciplinary regime, the Six Sigma way. The latest fad to hit the CEO conference circuit is the Indian notion of jugaad. Its supporters include, amongst others, Saatchi and Saatchi’s CEO Worldwide Kevin Roberts. Borrowing a term for the cobbled-together cars the rural poor drive, this new “Indian way” means throwing out all of the complex and costly organisational burdens that clog up smooth and seamless business: occupational health and safety and risk management just for starters. But is jugaad all rosy?

Jugaad innovation

According to Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu and Simone Ahuja, jugaad is a form of innovation combining frugality with flexibility and, in typical MBAese, they say that “Western companies can adopt jugaad to succeed in our hypercompetitive world”.

According to these management experts, there are similar words in other cultures: zizhu chuangxin in China, gambiarra in Brazil, D.I.Y. in the United States, jua kali in Africa and système D in France (and perhaps ‘bodge’ in Australia). However, according to these experts, none of these cultures have made it a way of life like India has.

So what is jugaad and why has it got management gurus and CEOs so excited? On the ground in India, the Hindi word jugaad is the slang term for the cobbled together vehicles driven by the rural poor. These jalopies are, in many cases, the front end of a motorbike attached to the back end of a truck, with some clever rewiring and customisation of the engine and suspension. This is certainly making do, but not in the exciting way these management experts envisage.

Jugaad – The Movie

This value system captures the Indian way of doing things so well they even made a Bollywood movie about it. Jugaad, written and produced by Sandeep Kapur and directed by Anand Kumar, revolves around the exploits of a CEO who is a victim of the Delhi “sealing drive” that saw the enforced closure of shops in residential areas by municipal authorities. To work around this crackdown, the CEO had to mobilise his jugaad. In this movie, the self-empowering connotations of jugaad contrast with the dilapidated and jury-rigged Ambassador car the protagonist drives manically around Delhi as he attempts to mobilise his informal networks and residual capital.

But this is not the jugaad innovation that management gurus are peddling. India became an economic power by tailoring cost-cutting, and corner-cutting, information technology services, applying outsourcing, parachuting, bodyshopping, and all sorts of other techniques to undercut other countries’ local wages and skills. And this is where jugaad innovation meets the global economy.

Despite some criticism, this systemic, strategic jugaad allowed thousands of Indian businesses to win the market and power India’s economy. Outsourcing coding and call centres to India has waned in popularity from the dizzy heights these services attained in the early 2000s. But the no-holds-barred way of doing business in India has captured the imagination of global CEOs and made them look more closely at Indian business.

Power cuts

Surprisingly, aspirational consumers in China and India – the new “middle class” – were unaffected by the global financial crisis, as these countries’ high growth remained relatively intact. Consumers mostly had only nominal debts in the first place.

Upon closer inspection it appeared that those living on the periphery of the global financial system were innovating in some surprising ways. Rather than buying a new car every couple of years through a loan contract, they simply repaired the one they already owned as best they could. Rather than suffering regular brown and blackouts, they go out and cobble together a generator or jerry-rig a solar panel. And when the grid is working, they don’t pay for electricity, but instead steal it from their neighbour, who steals their neighbour’s power and so on, all the way up the line. This jugaad of electricity theft is part of the story behind the vast blackouts in August this year that left half of India’s population without power. Seeing this huge potential market Indian companies cleverly adopted jugaad innovation in their product lines with mixed results.

Carmaker Tata released the “bottom of the pyramid” (BOP) price-point Tata Nano car, essentially a motorbike engine with a car exterior and four wheels. While much lauded in the international media as the world’s cheapest car, ultimately the Tata Nano was less of a success within India as those at the BOP tended to carry on as usual, making do and getting by, repairing and reusing their jalopies.

And so it’s not all as rosy as it seems. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), India has the highest number of road fatalities a year in the world (105,725 at last count) and surely jugaad has something to do with this tally. The word jugaad is also slang for “corruption,” and is too often the face of criminal activity. It should be applied with some caution, and is not necessarily a shining example of innovation for world business.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
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