The ‘WPR’ approach is a resource, or tool, intended to facilitate critical interrogation of public policies. It starts from the premise that what one proposes to do about something reveals what one thinks is problematic (needs to change). Following this thinking, policies and policy proposals contain implicit representations of what is considered to be the ‘problem’ (‘problem representations’). For example, if forms of training are recommended to improve women's status and promotion opportunities, the implication is that their lack of training is the ‘problem’, responsible for ‘holding them back’. The task in a ‘WPR’ analysis is to read policies with an eye to discerning how the ‘problem’ is represented within them and to subject this problem representation to critical scrutiny. This task is accomplished through a set of six questions and an accompanying undertaking to apply the questions to one's own proposals for change:

1. What's the ‘problem’ (for example, of ‘problem gamblers’, ‘drug use/abuse’, ‘gender inequality’, ‘domestic violence’, ‘global warming’, ‘sexual harassment’, etc.) represented to be in a specific policy or policy proposal?

2. What presuppositions or assumptions underpin this representation of the ‘problem’?

3. How has this representation of the ‘problem’ come about?

4. What is left unproblematic in this problem representation? Where are the silences? Can the ‘problem’ be thought about differently?

5. What effects are produced by this representation of the ‘problem’?

6. How/where has this representation of the ‘problem’ been produced, disseminated and defended? How has it been (or could it be) questioned, disrupted and replaced?

I am one of China's Generation Y. I had a joyful childhood, heavy-burdened school life and physical comfort when I grew up. I cannot clearly recall what China was like when I was little, but I clearly remember the doubts that China left in the little girl growing up. For instance, I wondered why news on TV always displayed a happy China while I could see that people around me were suffering. Why, when people complained about certain things on the dinner table, were they always told: “Be cautious.” I wasn't brave enough to ask anyone to satisfy my curiosity at that time because I was one of the “outstanding model students” at school. Being a model student, you were not expected to ask questions irrelevant to your study.

In 2000, I stood on “Western” land for the first time in my life. I went to England for a higher degree. As a spoiled post-80s young person who had rarely done any housework at home, I had to learn everything from changing quilt-covers to feeding myself. I felt lonely in a foreign land and the Internet proved to be my best friend; from talking to people back home to doing research for my essays, I wouldn't have been able to live without the Internet. What I experienced during my stay in the UK contradicted most of my previous understandings of the West, and my Internet searches provided me with answers to my earlier doubts.

Political participation in China

Censorship mechanisms in China seem to have partially loosened up, affording Chinese people limited freedom to pursue personal goals. But will these apparent signs of political liberalism lead China to political democracy? This is the question that interests Western media. This chapter examines Western media interest in Chinese censorship so as to examine this key concern.

Although the Chinese government's encouragement of Internet use for personal consumption could be interpreted as an early symptom of political liberalism, in reality this encouragement has merely helped to stabilize the current political framework in China — witness Chinese bloggers' anger at Western criticisms of Chinese censorship practices (see Chapter 4). Analysis of the political implications of Internet use in China is crucial both to understanding Chinese bloggers' anger and to dissecting the short- and long-term potential for political change.

Chinese Internet use has attracted political interest and observation since it was first allowed, creating what Zhou has called a “monster complex” (2006, p. 2). During the global infancy of the Internet, Western observers tended to view it as a vehicle of expression and communication, a sort of benign monster that might lead authoritarian regimes to democracy. However, after witnessing the effective control of the Internet in China, the “benign monster” in China clearly proved to be less powerful than its rival, the Chinese government, and its effective censorship mechanisms. Subsequently, the Western media has credited the Chinese government as a powerful monster.

I remember sitting in the Napier Building's lecture theatre at The University of Adelaide in Carol Bacchi's undergraduate course as she developed her ‘What's the Problem Represented to be?’ approach to policy studies. I wondered at how it could even be contentious that policy solutions represented problems in particular ways that could be otherwise (Bacchi 1999)—her insights seemed so clear, so well argued, and so consistent with the way I understood the world. I also recall determining a few years later that the only way I would pursue my higher degree in Politics would be if Carol would agree to be my supervisor—which thankfully she did. This chapter, which is based on my PhD research, is, I think, an attempt to discern what the ‘What's the Problem Represented to be?’ approach might look like in practice. Here, I both offer a synthesis of my key findings and explain how they stem from Carol Bacchi's groundbreaking research. In doing so, I hope, to pay tribute to Carol the teacher and mentor as well as Carol Bacchi the fine thinker.

In this chapter I use Bacchi's distinction between rational policy-making—the assumption that there is a pre-existing problem in the world that we can identify and solve— and a recognition that policies represent problems in particular ways that have effects on people and social relations (policy-as-discourse). The ‘What's the Problem Represented to be?’ approach is premised on and develops this latter understanding of policy. As noted, in approaching my research I was interested in exploring what a policy-as-discourse approach to policy might look like in practice.

ABSTRACT

It is argued that dental structures within the oral environment have evolved with an ability to resist dissolution when exposed to acidic conditions, and to promote remineralisation after damage has occurred. It is hypothesised that dietary acids acted as one of the selective forces in the evolution of the oral environment. It appears that a balance was achieved in hunter-gatherer populations, with the composition and action of saliva, and associated oral biofilms, evolving to protect the teeth against dietary acids. However, in the relatively short period of time since the development of farming and especially with the adoption of modern cultural practices, changes in diet have overwhelmed the oral environment, creating an imbalance. In general, the vast increase in consumption of acidic foods and drinks has decreased the protective mechanisms of saliva. Similarly, the increased consumption of sugar has changed the ecology of oral biofilms, leading to and maintaining a lower oral pH. A combination of these factors has tipped the balance towards demineralisation and increased the risk of oral diseases, such as dental caries and erosive wear, that are so prevalent in many of today's societies.

INTRODUCTION

The Paleolithic, stone age or hunter-gatherer way of life, covers a period of over 2.5 million years of hominin evolution, culminating with the appearance of modern Homo sapiens over 200,000 years ago. This period demonstrates the most basic technological developments including the use of the most primitive stone tools (Toth and Schick, 2007).

A difference of opinion

A recent blogging conflict between Western media and young people in China who displayed intense anger at how the West was evaluating China provided the catalyst for this book. The development of tension between Chinese bloggers and Western media has highlighted a major difference in the understanding of the natures of nationalism and censorship between China and the West. The notion of “the West”, too, is open to interpretation. The term has specific reference in the blogging conflict featured in this book. By it, Chinese Internet users mean the UK and USA mainly. The reasons are historical and linguistic. These two countries were the leading countries of the Eight Power Allied Forces that invaded China on 7 September 1901. The other six were France, Germany, Japan, Russia, Austria and Italy, non-English speaking nations whose languages do not operate as world languages on the Internet. In this book, I follow the bloggers' understanding of ‘Western’ while understanding that the term has other broader meanings.

By the time of the blogging conflict, China had already captured global attention owing to its recent accelerated pace of market-based economic reform and accompanying high rates of economic growth. Discussion of political reforms that might follow the economic development paralleled the commentaries on the historic economic changes. These discussions converged with debates about the increasing use of the Internet in China, because growth in the use of these new media and communication technologies has depended upon both economic and political change.

This is a struggle of resistance against western hegemonic discourse. We need to fully recognize that this will be a long-term, difficult and complex battle. But regardless of the outcome, we all firmly believe: western nations' days of using several of their crap media in an absurd attempt to fool people with their rotten words will soon be over for good!

Introduction

Carol Bacchi's book Women, Policy and Politics: the Construction of Policy Problems, published in 1999, introduced a powerful new approach to the study of policy which resonated with researchers and practitioners in a wide range of fields, in Australia and internationally. In some ways, the book can be seen as having had a ‘matchmaking’ role. It comprehensively introduced post-structuralism and social constructionism to policy studies, but it also introduced feminists to alternative ways of conceptualising policy, policy processes and policy analysis. Both of these meetings have been incredibly fruitful. For feminists undertaking research on gender issues, the book provided new perspectives on key areas of concern such as pay equity, abortion, childcare and domestic violence. Scholarship and practice in each of these areas have benefitted from the insights provided in the book. In this chapter, however, I focus predominantly on the implications for the field of policy studies (including, of course, feminist policy studies), arguing that the framework developed in Women, Policy and Politics, and expanded and refined in later work, significantly recast the field.

ABSTRACT

Recent studies of twins have confirmed that there is a strong genetic contribution to variation in timing of primary tooth emergence. Although environmental factors, such as severe nutritional deficiency of the infant, may affect primary tooth emergence, the roles of other environmental factors remain unclear. This study aimed to determine whether newborn feeding practices, gestation length, and birth weight affect the emergence time of the first primary tooth. Data were collected from questionnaires and parental records as part of an ongoing longitudinal study of Australian twins and their families. The sample comprised 217 twin pairs. Most commonly, a mandibular central incisor was the first tooth to emerge, with the next being a maxillary central incisor. F-and t-tests were performed, comparing variables and mean values between groups, and statistical significance was set at p<0.05. No statistically significant difference was found in age at first primary tooth emergence between breast-fed and bottle-fed babies, with mean emergence times of 8.0 and 8.6 months respectively. Extremely premature infants (gestation <30 weeks) had a significantly later mean emergence time compared with infants born full-term (gestation ≥37 weeks) (10.7mo compared with 7.6mo). Significantly greater variation in timing was also observed with preterm infants. Very low birth weight babies (<1500g) also displayed a significant delay in tooth emergence compared with normal birth weight babies (>2500g) (10.1mo compared with 7.9mo). These findings indicate that the development of the primary dentition is well ‘protected’ against environmental disturbances, with only extreme prematurity or very low birth weight leading to significant delays in emergence.

Introduction

In this chapter we (Chris and Carol) consider the genesis of the concept of ‘social flesh’, our imaginative reconceptualisation of social space and social relations. This concept emerged from a close working partnership over several years and from a series of joint publications. Here we trace the stages in the development of our ideas, moving specifically from queries about the disjunction between theories of citizenship and embodiment to exploration of how the concept ‘social flesh’ produces new ways of thinking about a range of pressing contemporary political issues. Specifically we offer the concept as a counter to the currently hegemonic ethic of neo-liberal ‘man’.

We aim to articulate explicitly our conceptual trajectory, outlining in a step by step fashion how we developed the notion of social flesh. The chapter provides a chronological and accretive account of the way in which we moved, partially in response to personal experiences, through a series of literatures consequent upon our concern to challenge the neo-liberal (presumptive masculine) ‘individual’. In the process of outlining this trajectory, we discuss the difficulties we found in the scholarship associated respectively with mainstream and feminist writings on citizenship, literature attending to community and social interconnection including those referring to trust and care, the body of work dealing with democratic theory, and finally analytical materials focussed upon social movements and socio-political change. This sequential critique of existing literatures works towards the assembling of a constructive alternative framework. Moreover, the identification of factors—involving intersecting personal, emotional, bodily, intellectual and professional elements—which shaped this conceptual trajectory, also provides a contribution to an ethnography of research practices.

Methodology—theorising on the methods we use when doing research—is a central but quite often neglected dimension in research. The acknowledgement of and interest in the methodological dimension of research differs, both between and within different disciplines and fields of study. For example, I would argue that discussions and debates on methodology have been more prominent in feminist studies compared to my other ‘home’ in the academy—political science. Being a feminist scholar interested in comparative politics I have been struck by the difficulties of trying to do comparative analysis differently, differently in terms of challenging the prevailing positivistic paradigm where ‘the world’ is seen as already there and instead promoting a post-structuralist position where ‘reality’ is regarded as only understandable through the constitutive lens of the research process.

These challenges have made me question the methodological dimension of research on politics, and especially on comparative politics. They have also brought me to the point of departure of this chapter-that is, methodologies matter and have political implications. I am specifically concerned with considering what a failure to recognise the political significance of methodologies means for feminist research and the potential of feminist research to be transformative.

The chapter is structured in three parts. The first part explains why and how methodology matters politically and situates this understanding of methodology as political in established feminist criticism. The second part of the chapter demonstrates the absence of attention to critical and political questions of methodology in existing comparative studies and feminist comparative studies more specifically.

The focus of this chapter—research as political practice—highlights a long-standing concern in my work with the connections between concepts and theories, and political investments. My particular interest is the ways these investments operate at non-conscious (note: not unconscious) levels and how they shape or constitute us as particular kinds of political subjects. In my PhD thesis on the range of reasons for supporting women's enfranchisement, I explored the packages of proposals and norms that featured in the practices and textual performances of the women and men involved in the English-Canadian suffrage movement. Of course I did not describe the project in those terms at the time. At the time I was an historian! And so the thesis was titled: ‘The ideas of the English-Canadian suffragists’ (Bacchi 1976, 1989, emphasis added). I have since learned new languages to express my interpretations. Finding new languages is exciting because they add a dimension to existing thinking. They sharpen an angle of analysis that you were developing while making you feel that, in a sense, you may have arrived home. I had this feeling when I encountered the term ‘ontological politics’ in the writing of Annemarie Mol (2002, 1999) and John Law (2009, 2004)—as I shall go on to discuss.

My reasons for highlighting the connections between research and political practice reflect my personal academic experience and the decision to take early retirement. In the later years of my academic career I felt less and less in control of the direction of my research. I felt more and more that I was acting in the service of ‘forces’ that somehow were empowered to set my research agenda.

Carol Bacchi's scholarship is both substantial and wide-ranging. Beginning her academic career as a historian in the field of English-Canadian women's suffrage, Bacchi has made innovative and insightful contributions to the fields of feminist theory, critical policy studies, and post-structuralist theory. One of the characteristic traits of her scholarship is her interest in revising and revisiting analytic problems from a range of perspectives. To mention just one area in which this is so—the issue of gender difference—Bacchi has explored the use of ‘identity’ categories in (specifically) gender politics (1996); drawn attention to the way the construction of difference is enacted as a political attribution (2001) and, more recently with collaborator and friend Joan Eveline (2010), put forward the proposition that we ought to conceptualise gender as a verb: an activity or process, rather than as a noun. In each of these projects she has offered a new way to think the ‘problem’ of identity categories and ‘difference’ which long preoccupied, and, indeed, frustrated, feminist scholars. The persistence and imagination that is highlighted by this willingness to review and rework key analytical themes and issues is reflective of the tenacity and commitment Bacchi exhibits as a scholar and intellectual.