This paper discusses the transformation of the learning/teaching culture in a tertiary education environment brought about by the evolution and application of digital communication technology. In examining how technological development has altered the way in which study materials are delivered to, and accessed by students this paper outlines changes observed in student attitudes to the tertiary learning experience over a ten-year period at a regional university. The paper argues that an intensely private and absorbing multimedia world has emerged in which many contemporary university students – acculturated as they are to an electronic visual environment – acquire information in short chunks as and when they need it. It also argues for the possible use of the technology that has helped create this cultural construct – The Backyard Blitz syndrome – to transform the way in which academics interact with multimedia savvy students in order to engage their interest in studying theoretical material they often find boring and irrelevant to their needs.

This paper argues that Japanese women's media which portray images of foreign (nearly always white) men and Japanese gay men as objects of desire and fascination for Japanese women function as rhetorical mirrors whose real intent is to reflect back the supposed deficiencies of 'traditional' Japanese men. The paper concludes that women's media are being used as a vehicle for anti-male rhetoric, a channel for an indirect discourse of complaint whose main purpose is to critique the perceived shortcomings of ordinary Japanese men.

In many ways, historically and today, women of Burma hold a unique and enviable position. At home and in business activities, women in Burmese society compared to women in its two historically powerful neighbours, India and China, have greater legal rights (traditionally, equal to that of men) and enjoy a high degree of tolerance and independence. Yet, on the other hand, there is strong evidence of gender-specific cultural practices that undermine this apparent equality. This is sanctioned by the Buddhist religion, of which the paper provides an insightful view of; of Theravada Buddhism’s influence on gender divisions and how these divisions are expressed and the boundaries defined in private and public spaces.

This article investigates the (history) lessons revealed by THE FACE about the present. As such it concentrates on one area of deviation that exists within THE FACE – the yearly fashion issue. The seductive, and highly hegemonic, nature of fashion is no more obvious than in the pages of monthly style and genre journals. Within these pages, fashion literacy is assumed and naturalised as commonsensical. The visual communities that revolve around magazines like THE FACE further enhance this legitimising process. This framing requires a literacy of THE FACE discourse, one that melds the knowledge of fashion with the familiarity of lifestyle, consumption and pleasure. Fashion, then, is a language embedded with the signs and syntax of the everyday. Fashion is not a free-standing construct: it is socially defined within the sphere of a community ideology. The illustration of THE FACE community could concentrate on many facets of the magazine, but in this investigation it is these vogue registers that demand a specialised understanding of THE FACE and its mobilisation of a verbal and visual fashion language, or indeed a fashionable FACE language.

Memories are called up by many different methods. Jewish family life is so tightly wound up with mothers and chicken soup that these memories are best accessed via the kitchen. This fragment of culinary memoir attempts to convey the way in which certain foods conjure competing images of brown-eyed Jewish mothers and desolation in the desert. Enjoy already!

Drum’n’bass is a musical form that expresses the antagonisms of British identity in the 1990s and it also situates itself outside of the dominant terms of African-American expressions of black identity. It speaks of a more productive possibility in the traditional relationship between national and global polarities or public and private histories. Being at once an expression of the crucial significance of place in any characterisation of identity, it also recognises the influence of circumstances that exist outside of the narrow terms of national affiliation. Drum’n’bass represents a metonymic formulation of the long history of race and migration and its (often invisible) effects on the nature of British cultural identity in particular and popular music in general.

Thirty years ago a new trend in Australia’s internal migration turned attention to the warm coastal-countryside. And yet it is only recently that much research attention has been focused on this coastal shift. This article reviews the material on internal migration in Australia, with a focus on New South Wale’s mid-north coast which has experienced burgeoning new-settler populations since the 1970s. It suggests there is much to be done in ethnographic research on this population shift.