T.E. Woronov

ABSTRACT
When environmental NGOs in Australia successfully sued the nation’s
environment minister in August 2015 to temporarily withhold environmental  approval for Australia’s largest coal mine, the ruling Coalition government accused environmentalists of waging “lawfare.” Through a critical discourse analysis of Parliamentary debate and media coverage, this article explores the lawfare battles fought in Australia in 2015, arguing that these were a site of depoliticization, in Mouffe’s (2005, Mouffe, Chantal. 2005. On the Political.
Abingdon: Routledge) sense of the term. By exploring how the question of legal regulation of coal mining was rationalized, moralized, and stripped of significant political or ideological differences, this seeks to add to our understanding of processes of depoliticization by considering metadiscourses concerning “the law.”

“消费模范”：城市中国的美女博主、日常专家以及治理术
Chinese translation of '"Model Consumers': Beauty Bloggers, Everyday Experts and Governmentality in Urban China" (in Elaine Jeffreys and David Bray, eds, 'New Mentalities of Government in China'. London: Routledge. 2016.
Do not cite without attribution to 中国研究, 2015

Educational inequality takes many forms in China. This chapter argues that China’s high-stakes exams systems create lifelong inequalities for the nation’s youth in the form of class sorting, a process by which success or failure an exam determines a young person’s future class position. Although most attention in China focuses on the University Entrance Exams (UEE), this chapter examines the High School Entrance Exam (HSEE), taken by students after year 9. The chapter argues that the HSEE serves as a pernicious form of class sorting, for the youth who fail this exam are locked out of the academic educational stream, and out of white-collar and middle-jobs jobs in the future. Moral discourse in China erases the role of the state in setting passing rates on the exam, and blames failing youth for their poor test scores and their working-class futures. The chapter, based on small-scale qualitative research, calls for additional research on the class background of HSEE test takers and failures, to better understand the class sorting mechanisms of this high-stakes exam.

This essay discusses an interesting paradox forming in urban China today. Using a Weberian framework, it argues that recent changes in state policy, educational structures, and forms of social status are producing new social classes. Yet at the same time, the very processes and policies that enable these new class formations also mitigate against the development of class consciousness. Based on a year of ethnographic research in two vocational secondary schools in Nanjing, this essay looks closely at the ways in which young people who are preparing to enter the lower echelons of the urban service economy are potentially part of a new social class, but one with very limited potential to develop class consciousness.