Questions about ‘security’ provide a lens that brings issues of national independence into sharp focus. In the first instance, security concerns the ability of a state to protect its inhabitants from danger. The idea that security is the first responsibility of government has long been a political mantra. But choosing strategies to ensure a country’s eff…
Orkney is an archipelago that lies off the rugged northeastern coast of Caithness in northern Scotland (Fig. 1.1). It is separated from the Scottish mainland by the volatile Pentland Firth, one of the roughest and unpredictable stretches of water in the world. On calm summer days the southern isles of Orkney appear colourful, tranquil and e…
The quotation above was one of several responses received from teachers in a series of interviews that sought their perceptions of how Irish reading is taught and of the particular challenges they face in helping school children develop literacy skills in their second language. Although less specific than some responses, this one captures vividly the sense of frustration on the part of teac…
We are all familiar with the many reasons why we should fight poverty. Poor people do not have enough money to meet their basic needs, are excluded from society, are often not given proper respect, or can become easy prey at the hands of others who want to dominate them. In the domains of both material and immaterial goods, there is a widespread understanding about what it means w…
A World You Do Not Know explores the wilful ignorance demonstrated by North America’s settlers in establishing their societies on lands already occupied by indigenous nations. Using the Innu of Labrador-Quebec as one powerful contemporary example, Colin Samson shows how the processes of displacement and assimilation today resemble those of the 19th century as the state and corporations scramb…
My empirical research for this book began in 2016 with funding from the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. This faculty grant supported an experimental pilot of my methods and ways of recording them, which formed the basis for the meth-ods that feature in this book. This early work was undertaken at a community service provider in west Sydney. This …
This book is about purpose or rather the achievement of purpose, whichis the realization of the highest form of aspiration of any organization orindividual.It is the argument of this bookthat the real battle our globalized worldis facing today is not between liberalism and protectionism, or betweenChina and the United States, or between globalization and nationalism,but rather between a sense o…
In perhaps the most striking passages of The Dominion in 1983, the author writing under the pseudonym Ralph Centennius predicted the use of “light and beautiful rocket cars, which [dart] through the air at the rate of sixty miles in one minute.” Constructed of polished metal, these fifty-seat rocket cars would fly through the sky at heights of up to fifteen hundred feet and land on rails wh…
his interdisciplinary collection—spanning the disciplines of engineering, law and planning—draws helpfully on a range of practical and theoretical perspectives. It is the collaborative effort of leading experts in the fields of infrastructure project initiation and financing, and is based on international research conducted by the University of Melbourne, Universitas Indonesia and Universit…