Keywords: Rachel Woodlock
-
AUSTRALIA
- Rachel Woodlock
- 24 January 2019
13 Comments
What do Indigenous and Muslim Australians have in common? They are the foil against which normative White Australian identity is contrasted. The latest group to join them are African migrants, subject of a new campaign of fear. Because the stories we tell ourselves can change, one day there might be one that honours all of us.
READ MORE 
-
INTERNATIONAL
- Rachel Woodlock
- 02 November 2018
4 Comments
It is the ordinary people — the pensioners on trollies, the sick interminably waiting on ever-increasing lists, the patients being treated in understaffed hospitals — who will truly suffer from Brexit's immediate body shocks to an already frail healthcare system decimated by years of austerity funding cuts.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- Rachel Woodlock
- 20 September 2018
7 Comments
While we worked to find him a permanent place, he was put in a temporary one, far away from us. The decision-makers gave no thought to Mum's battling public transport and traffic, but it seemed like a nice place. We thought Dad was just being difficult when he begged us to take him home.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- Rachel Woodlock
- 24 July 2018
18 Comments
Either they are flat-out wrong, unable to read crime reports or understand what the police and other agencies are telling them (which leaves in question their ability to accurately and intelligently govern), or some apparatchik in the strategy back-rooms has decided it is a good way to garner votes with a 'tough-on-crime' campaign.
READ MORE
-
RELIGION
- Rachel Woodlock
- 15 June 2018
14 Comments
Amid the shock and grief for Anthony Bourdain's death, one blue-tick Twitterer attempted to capture five minutes of shameful fame, declaring that religious people believe hell or purgatory is his afterworld destination. While all the great religious traditions generally proscribe suicide, they also contain nuanced views of the suicide's fate.
READ MORE
-
INTERNATIONAL
- Rachel Woodlock
- 05 April 2018
4 Comments
Punish A Muslim Day has come and gone. While we won't know for a few months if there was a statistical increase in the number of reported attacks on Muslims, the campaign's real purpose was simply to reiterate a message of stigma and exclusion. This is what makes the various counter-campaigns so important.
READ MORE
-
RELIGION
- Rachel Woodlock
- 18 January 2018
9 Comments
Nur Warsame hopes to open a gay-friendly mosque, quite a feat, in a country where mosque applications often face fierce resistance from non-Muslim locals. Gay Muslims are mostly rejected by the Muslim community for being gay and stigmatised by the wider community for being Muslim. Many cannot reconcile the two identities.
READ MORE
-
INTERNATIONAL
- Rachel Woodlock
- 14 November 2017
7 Comments
These lone-wolf terrorists are more like miners' canaries. Whether it is a paranoid loner, an enraged ideologue, a jihadist or a white supremacist, they are screaming out at the top of their lungs that something is terribly wrong.
READ MORE
-
RELIGION
- Rachel Woodlock
- 15 September 2017
9 Comments
As the mum of a 13 year old daughter, I'm trying to prepare her for adulthood in a world that will, at times, judge her for being female. She's at the beginning of her adolescent journey, when the future seems to hold so much promise but also new dangers. The one that gives me pause, in the odd moment when I allow myself to think about it, is what I can tell her about protecting herself from bad men who might want to harm her, without scaring her into believing all men are potential rapists.
READ MORE
-
RELIGION
- Rachel Woodlock
- 07 September 2017
32 Comments
The state doesn't have an opinion on whether God approves of the union because theocracy went out of fashion in the West, along with the Divine Right of Kings. These days in Australia, the state doesn't even care to enforce sexual exclusivity of partners, although once upon a time that was a major element of marital law. Divorce is all about distribution of assets and establishing proper care of the kids. So why the brouhaha over marriage for gay people?
READ MORE
-
RELIGION
- Rachel Woodlock
- 24 August 2017
29 Comments
For an item of clothing that virtually no Australian Muslims wear, the burqa sure gets plenty of airtime. I've never seen the (usually blue) all-enveloping cloak with the small material grill for sale in any of the bricks-and-mortar Islamic clothing stores I've visited. Short of travelling to Afghanistan, the only place I can think where an anti-Islam protester might get one is by searching Halloween costume listings on eBay or Etsy.
READ MORE
-
INTERNATIONAL
- Todor Shindarov
- 07 August 2017
4 Comments
Today’s highly technological era amazes us with possibilities for human growth and innovation, but in our amazement we often forget to tackle various pitfalls. Arguably, the biggest risk is the emerging military technology, about which there are many unanswered questions. We are faced with many uncertainties: security risks due to loss of competitiveness, potential control over advanced weapons by terrorists and, most importantly, reduced comprehension by the wider society—let alone any participation in the decision making process, as the frenzied pace of technological development increases.
READ MORE