‘I felt like I was the only person in the world studying’: place and affect in the constitution of online higher education study for rural Australian students

The Australian Educational Researcher · 2025-06-19

Abstract Higher education study has become more accessible to rural places through the development of stronger technologies, interfaces and pedagogy for online study. However, while these have made higher education more accessible, they also overlook the substantial impact that social circumstances and resources have on the means to meaningfully participate in higher education. Our study, conducted with 38 online higher education students, demonstrates how broader conditions in place shape study experience and possibilities. We consider how place makes certain practices and identities possible or realisable. In particular, we explore how place and affect shape the possibility of online study in rural areas. This includes how relationships in place also shape how higher education is perceived—both through what to study, how and where to study, or whether higher education is deemed to be valuable. Subsequently, the personal resources available to each student—be it social, cultural, educational or economic, have an exaggerated effect on the experiences and outcome of study. We suggest equitable higher education needs to take account of more than just the offering of online study narrowly conceived of a student identity only as a learner, recognising that personal, ‘placial’ and affective resources are critical in developing a meaningful sense of belonging in higher education.

Reducing nuclear dangers

Science · 2024-06-20 · 7 citations

Dark clouds loom on the nuclear horizon, with threats from all directions: Russia's nuclear bombast in its war on Ukraine, China's construction of hundreds of nuclear missile silos, North Korea's missile testing, India and Pakistan's ongoing nuclear competition, and Iran's push toward nuclear weapons capability. In response, US policy-makers are discussing whether a further American nuclear arms buildup is needed. At the same time, evolving technologies, from hypersonic missiles to artificial intelligence, are straining military balances and may be making them more unstable. The risk of nuclear war has not been so high since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Making futures: equity and social justice in higher education timescapes

2023-04-26 · 1 citations

Categorisations of care: Exploring representations of care leavers in higher education through critical praxis

British Educational Research Journal · 2023-09-01 · 1 citations

Abstract In this paper, we explore the critical praxis approach of an equity initiative with students who have left care. We contend that ‘praxis’ ( International Studies in Widening Participation , 2018, 5: 10–20) – understood here as the close, dialogic and iterative relationship between research and practice, can be a powerful tool for approaching ordinarily rigid equity categorisations as a means for interrogating their conceptual efficacy while simultaneously creating more exploratory approaches to equity populations and initiatives. We examine how unproblematised notions of care leavers migrate between fields and institutions, arguing for a more robust and rigorous interrogation of the salience of the concept of a care leaver as it is integrated into the field of higher education. We contend that rigid definitions of care that narrowly define people only through their relationship to formalised state‐legitimated forms of welfare intervention risk making ‘absent’ ( Epistemologies of the south: Justice against Epistemicide , 2014; Routledge) the substantial population of people nearby this experience of care. This includes people who have escaped official definitions as policies change, circumstances that are similar or identical to people placed in care that have not been included in the official definition of care, or the overlapping and intersecting conditions of marginality that often shape the conditions for being removed into state care. Critical praxis is offered here as providing the basis for allowing the category of ‘care leaver’ or ‘care experienced’ to become an in‐road for expanding practice initiatives and research understandings to further dimensions of marginalisation and social vulnerability.

Evaluation for equity: reclaiming evaluation by striving towards counter-hegemonic democratic practices

2023-09-08

Insider Threats to Nuclear Security

Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023-06-20 · 2 citations

Abstract Threats from insiders—individuals with authorized access to protected locations, materials, and information—represent the most serious threats to nuclear organizations around the world. Insider threats are rare but can be devastating. Nearly all the cases of nuclear theft in which the circumstances of the theft are known were perpetrated either by insiders or with the help of insiders, as were nearly all the known cases of sabotage of nuclear facilities. Insiders pose substantial threats because they have access inside many of the layers of an organization’s security; they may understand the security system and its vulnerabilities; they are able to plan, collect intelligence from inside the facility, and recruit for months at a time; and they are known and trusted individuals, which often makes the organization slow to detect and react to possible indicators of a threat. The chapter describes several illustrative cases of devastating insider threats, outlines the categories of insider actions and motivations, and describes some of the organizational challenges of mitigating the threat. The chapter also highlights how nuclear organizations must find ways to protect against insider threats while building internal trust and cooperation needed for their success. It discusses some of the recent steps the international community has taken to address the insider issue, as well as the good practices organizations are already implementing.

The Iran nuclear archive: impressions and implications

2022-03-01 · 6 citations

A review of selected on Iran’s nuclear weapons program seized by Israeli intelligence confirms that: senior Iranian officials had decided in the late 1990s to actually manufacture nuclear weapons and carry out an underground nuclear test; that Iran’s program to do so made more technical progress than had previously been understood; and that Iran had help from quite a number of foreign scientists, including access to several foreign nuclear weapon designs. The archive also leaves open a wide range of questions, including what Iran’s nuclear-weapons-related plans and activities have been in 17 years since 2003.

Classed trajectories in higher education and the graduate labour market: affective affinities in a ‘meritocracy’

British Journal of Sociology of Education · 2022-09-26 · 14 citations

In this article, we draw from a recent empirical study to consider how a person’s classed trajectory impacts students from different class backgrounds in higher education (HE). Students face rapidly evolving social and academic circumstances and must build reasonable strategies to navigate their trajectory from education to work. In these situational processes, social class becomes emotionally exposed as a durable relational social ordering principle. Affinities with educational and labour market norms provide emotional advantages. To explore the classed nature of accumulated being in Australian HE in the context of widening participation, we examine experiences of access to and participation in HE, and strategies towards entry into the labour market. The movement into, through and out of HE orders and organises classed experience, demonstrating the durability of class in the face of doxic meritocratic choice discourse.

The Edgeworker’s Habitus: Climbing and Ordinary Risks

Critical studies in risk and uncertainty · 2022-01-01 · 1 citations

Tensions in access and accountability

Elsevier eBooks · 2022-11-18