Wounded Identities,Sex and Pleasure: "Doing it" at School. NOT!

Sex and pleasure are fundamental aspects of students' lives and school cultures. They are also integral to students' sense of well-being and can determine their propensity to engage or disengage with the desire to love, learn and transform themselves. Taking the fundamental role of pleasure as its starting point, this paper discusses the idea of how a Foucaultian inspired "ethics of pleasure" might be used to proliferate ways of reading, producing and experiencing research related to sexualities and schooling in Australia and the United States. This "ethics of pleasure" is considered through a reading of two texts, Young, Gay and Proud (YGP) (1978), a text written for lesbian and gay young people by an autonomous collective of the Melbourne Gay Teachers' and students' Group (MGTSG) and, a letter written to Dan Savage, a nationally syndicated "agony aunt" in the United States.     

Everyone here speaks TXT: deaf people using SMS in Australia and the rest of the world

This article examines the extent to which Short Message Service (SMS) messages are breaking down communication barriers among deaf people and between deaf and hearing people. It is predicted that deaf texters will use SMS to increase the bonds between themselves in deaf communities, creating new opportunities to develop relationships, understanding, and intimacy with those not physically present. The most exciting question raised by this article is whether those kinds of relationships, understanding, and intimacy will develop to the same extent with hearing colleagues, friends, and intimates.     

SALUS: online co-operation between South Australian health libraries

The establishment of the South Australian Health Libraries Consortium led to the development of the SALUS project which enabled the online delivery of core health, clinical information and bibliographic databases with full-text resources across South Australian government health services. This was the first venture of Australian health librarians to create an online consortium. This article discusses the policy and management issues surrounding the implementation of the SALUS project and its influence on the evolution of the health Libraries Consortium over several years. Lessons learned during this process included: the necessity to plan well ahead yet to remain flexible in implementing those plans, to avoid procedure becoming more important than improvization during planning, to be willing to take well judged risks on occasions, and to be fully aware of changing circumstances in the project's funding and political environment. The importance of securing influential advocates outside of the participating libraries to support continued project funding is also considered.