{"title":"The negative Commonwealth: Australia as ‘laboratory’, then and now","authors":"Lorenzo Veracini, Dan Tout","doi":"10.1177/07255136231206181","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Federated Australia was seen for a long time as a significant social ‘laboratory’. The Commonwealth itself was seen as an ‘experiment’. This widespread metaphor relied on a particular pattern of perception: the country was ‘new’ (it was not), and the country was allegedly isolated (it was not, at least not completely). Many believed that its social environment could be controlled, like that of a scientific laboratory. A laboratory is designed to shut all disturbances out – the value of the data and experiments depends on it. This article outlines this metaphor in the context of Australian history during the 20th century, its rhetorical power and what made it discursively possible.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":"100 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0000,"publicationDate":"2023-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Thesis Eleven","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231206181","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"SOCIOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Federated Australia was seen for a long time as a significant social ‘laboratory’. The Commonwealth itself was seen as an ‘experiment’. This widespread metaphor relied on a particular pattern of perception: the country was ‘new’ (it was not), and the country was allegedly isolated (it was not, at least not completely). Many believed that its social environment could be controlled, like that of a scientific laboratory. A laboratory is designed to shut all disturbances out – the value of the data and experiments depends on it. This article outlines this metaphor in the context of Australian history during the 20th century, its rhetorical power and what made it discursively possible.
期刊介绍：
Established in 1996 Thesis Eleven is a truly international and interdisciplinary peer reviewed journal. Innovative and authorative the journal encourages the development of social theory in the broadest sense by consistently producing articles, reviews and debate with a central focus on theories of society, culture, and politics and the understanding of modernity. The purpose of this journal is to encourage the development of social theory in the broadest sense. We view social theory as both multidisciplinary and plural, reaching across social sciences and liberal arts and cultivating a diversity of critical theories of modernity across both the German and French senses of critical theory.
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