Women's recreational surfing: a patronising experience

Research analysing the operation of power within sport and physical activity has exposed the marginalisation and exclusion of women's sport in explicit and institutionalised ways. However, for women in recreational and alternative physical activities like surfing, sporting experiences lie outside institutionalised structures, thus requiring alternative surfing of conceptualising the processes of exclusionary power. In this paper, we focus on the voices of women recreational surfers to explore the changes which may or may not be occurring at smaller, more localised levels of women's engagement with surfing culture. An ethnographic methodology was employed to ask women how and why they engage in surfing and what it means for them, rather than asking questions based on existing assumptions. In presenting the data we draw upon the double meaning afforded by the term ‘to patronise’ as a means of framing the complex ways that women continue to be differentiated in surfing culture, and the ways they respond to this. In the final section, we employ a Foucauldian analytic lens to explore the subtle normalising practices in which women are incited to recognise and undertake the practices of the valued masculine ideal of the ‘good surfer’ through caring acts and advice offered by male surfers. This post-structuralist perspective offers space to think outside of simple resistance and reproduction, instead considering a complex space where women and men negotiate power in a range of ways from contextual, subjective positions. In conclusion, we argue that women recreational surfers are enacting alternative ways of operating within the power relations that circulate in the waves, creating ever-changing spaces for new ways of doing and knowing surfing to emerge.     

INTERNATIONAL ACADEMIC RELATIONS: SOME REFLECTIONS ON UNIVERSITIES AS CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS IN THE WORLD COMMUNITY

The premise of this article is that international academic relations as a field of study need to be defined and given a theoretical underpinning. The authors therefore analyse various approaches to the study of international relations in general and propose ways by which the particularities of international academic relations might be linked to the larger subject. Of importance here is the development of a framework which will take into account the political‐economic role of the university both as a cultural institution and as a knowledge institution. The framework they suggest is then tested with regard to an examination of the international academic relations of the OECD countries, particularly Canada, with the universities of China.     

A decade of research with dyslexic college students: A summary of findings

The major findings of several research projects that investigated dyslexic college students are summarized in this paper. Consistent findings of these investigations led to the following conclusions. 1) Developmental dyslexia is a syndrome made up of the following four symptoms: slow rate of reading, error-prone oral reading, poor written spelling, and grammatically incorrect writing; 2) all these symptoms could be traced to a poor mastery of the grapheme-phoneme relational rules; 3) developmental dyslexia can be found in subjects who appear to have adequate oral language skills; 4) ex-dyslexics who appear to be “poor spellers but good readers” have subtle reading deficits; and 5) the 20 dyslexic subjects investigated appear to constitute a homogeneous group which raises questions regarding dyslexia subtypes.     

Emergency Response Systems and the Creeping Legibility of People and Places

Over the last 35 years, centralized universal-number (in the United States, 9-1-1) systems have come to be the preferred means of emergency-response dispatching. The creation of these systems has motivated the development of information systems that render the landscape, to those with the right access, increasingly legible. This has been to the benefit of those receiving emergency services, but also to the benefit of police and commercial interests, who have used the improved infrastructure as bases for the creation of geodemographic and other profiling systems. More recently, the creation of wireless telephony has motivated the creation of a further surveillance infrastructure built on and integrated into that landscape. One consequence has been the commercialization of the systems in ways that permit the incorporation of more intimate and detailed data into preexisting systems. Public concern with locational surveillance systems has focused on privacy. However, “privacy” may be an inadequate frame through which to understand these issues and to fashion appropriate responses.