Fellows felt that their patients are actively involved in decisions about their care during pregnancy and birth and that the media influences their knowledge and attitudes. The Internet appears to have an increasingly important role in providing women with information. Obstetricians need to be aware of what their patients are accessing on the Internet.
By the time of Australian Federation in 1901, almost 70 per cent of Sydney's population were living in the suburbs: a statistic that suggests that despite prevalent and enduring images of the bushman and the ocker, the 'real' Australia was, and still is, more likely to be located in what Barry Humphries has described as Australia's 'vast and unexplored suburban tundra'.1 As a satirist, Humphries has been in the forefront of an expedition to map the tragi-comic dimensions of this territory with characters such as Dame Edna Everage, who first appeared on Australian television in 1956, offering the box room of `her lovely home' as a potential billet for an athlete during the Melbourne Olympic Games.2 Some 50 years later, Dame Edna not only presided over the closing ceremony of the 2006 Commonwealth Games, but was joined on the steps of the Melbourne Town Hall, during a ceremony to award her the key to the city, by two more recent suburban icons, Kath and Kim. With the international success of Dame Edna and Kath and Kim, it seems that the Antipodean suburb is still being mapped and mined for comic effect on television both at home and abroad. This article will explore the conditions of such success within a long tradition of anti-suburbanism dating back to the nineteenth century while exploring the role of comedy in constructing a national imaginary which is now widely circulated via increasingly transnational flows in television.
The idea of listening offers a means of reframing contemporary media theory and the project of cultural studies in such a way that the 'other half' of communication can enter the picture on an equal footing. Many of the implications, both politically and conceptually, of such a move were canvassed in a special issue of Continuum in 2009.This paper engages with the themes of the special issue and elaborates on the implications through a consideration of core issues from perspectives not covered in that issue. We draw particularly on the traditions of hermeneutics, pragmatism and social constructionism to refashion the idea of communicating so that intersubjectivity and praxis are brought to the fore. This refashioning provides the basis for a critical consideration of what it can mean to engage in dialogue. Ideas of dialogue driven by the presumption of shared understanding are discarded in favour of a form of dialogic listening across difference. We proceed to show how these ideas contribute to the heart of the Listening Project's research agenda: understanding and meeting the challenges of democratic dialogue.The special Continuum issue on Listening was under the guest editorship of Penny O'Donnell, Justine Lloyd, and Tanja Dreher, convenors of the Listening Project in Australia. As we read that special issue, we were struck by the extent to which the contributors appeared open to explorations that, to use Mark Gibson's phrase, 'restore [d] politics and culture to a more communicative space ' (2009, 472). But what struck us even more forcibly were the attributes ascribed to that communicative space: there was repeated use of such concepts as dialogue, relational spaces, meaningful interaction, agency, reciprocity, subjectivity and democracy.We were excited by the ideas offered in the special issue. They were, as Nick Couldry said, a 'genuinely new intervention' for cultural studies (2009, 579). The arguments in that issue also suggested there may be an opportune conjunction for listening (and talking) across paradigms from other areas of the amorphous field of communication. This paper attempts just that. In the words of Bickford (1996), we endeavour to establish the possibility for 'pathbuilding' across different perspectives that have, historically at least, not been visible in cultural studies.Our pathbuilding takes the form of four progressive moves. The first considers the nature of the problems that the Listening Project addresses and the issues that are at stake. The second stage of the journey offers a way of refashioning communication that meets the needs of the Listening Project and that allows us to segue into the third by suggesting
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