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This chapter explores the importance of the multifaceted levels of Aboriginal Being through my personal story. I, as the author will not only be the Researcher but also will be the researched. It is my journey that exposes me as the student, researcher, and teacher. By drawing on my life’s journey I narrate who I am and where I come from through both autoethnographical methodology and self-reflexivity. It is through this that I open up a space for wholistic education. It is envisaged that this work will uncover some of the complexities associated with Connection and Disconnection that has contributed to my personal growth and educational journey, connected to my Being. It is this experience I now transition onto my students. I am working with like-minded Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People, towards the vision and mission for my College. We as a collective continue to elaborate on the extremity and prevalence in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People, and their need for a safe space. It is within this space that we as a College understand the importance of flexibility, ensuring healing, decolonisation, and transitioning in allowing for the development of a culturally appropriate wholistic education in the vocational and education sector.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a personal-professional reflection on Canadian author Toni Samek’s learning since publication of her 2007 book project entitled Librarianship and human rights: A twenty-first century guide.

The reflection, written in first-person and accessible terms appealing to a broad readership, is structured by the following sections: introduction; privilege and position; sobering experiences; the risk factor; a common project; unease; expectation; and, closing thoughts.

This endeavor encourages contributors to the field of library and information studies to situate their work within micro (individuals), meso (institutions), and macro (society) level understandings of privilege and power, including respect for the compassion and conviction demonstrated by street-level library and information workers who may never be rewarded for their good fights, or worse, may suffer loss(es) because of them.

This reflective work affirms the book’s original dedication in Librarianship and human rights: A twenty-first century guide to the many courageous library and information workers throughout the world and through the generations who have taken personal and professional risk to push for social change, as well as the enduring value of librarianship and human rights as a common project and one that involves both learning and unlearning. Librarianship and human rights: A twenty-first century guide was used as an example, when in 2007, activist librarian proposed the subject heading “critical librarianship” to the Cataloging and Support Office of the Library of Congress. This reflection adds to that case.

In this chapter, I use the issue of violence against transgender individuals to explore the (limited) meanings of gender within the context of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in the United Nations (UN).

Using constructivist grounded theory and institutional ethnography I bring together field research from two ethnographic qualitative research projects I have been pursuing from 2008 to 2012; I studied transgender communities in the US and the CSW through their annual meetings in the New York Headquarters of the UN.

I first demonstrate the severity of transphobic violence as a global public health problem. I proceed to report highlights of global LGBT activism, such as the Yogyakarta Principles and the latest developments within the Human Rights Council of the UN for the first time addressing global LGBT violence in 2011. I then examine the silencing of transgender experiences in the CSW by exploring the contested use of the term gender over the last two decades of intergovernmental negotiations.

This study highlights the need to broaden the conceptualization of violence and gender violence which has important theoretical and policy implications. Linking micro experiences of violent victimization in local trans-communities to the macro context of gender violence in global gender equality policy development is crucial to the advancement of human rights.

Purpose: To consider the extent to which the legal recognition of non-binary gender has the potential to disrupt the gender binary.

Methodology/Approach: This chapter will employ case study as method, focusing on recent changes to Australian law and policy, which introduce a third gender category. I rely on the work of queer theorists on normativity and recognition as a theoretical framework and on the work of social scientists on transgender people as evidence.

Findings: This chapter finds that while there is much to be celebrated about increasing alternatives to the dominant categories of male and female, the legal recognition of non-binary gender may in fact serve to conceptually purge the dominant gender categories of non-conforming elements while simultaneously masking the ways in which institutions of regulatory power continue to demand conformity with normative standards of gender.

Research Limitations: Since few non-binary individuals in Australia have adopted the X marker the implications laid out in this paper are speculative. The experiences of non-binary individuals present an important avenue for further research.

Practical Implications: I recommend, as an alternative to further gender classifications, that we should seek to minimize the degree to which membership of a particular gender category is used to distribute rights and privileges.

Originality/Value of Paper: This chapter advances the literature on non-binary gender, contributes to existing queer and feminist analyses of the gender binary and extends work on normativity to legal recognition of alternative genders.

This chapter introduces readers to a complex adaptive systems approach for integrating research on genes, behavior, and social structures/institutions. Until recently, scientists have resorted to reductionism as a decoding and epistemological strategy for understanding human health. The complex bonds among health’s biological, behavioral, and social dimensions, however, cannot be fully grasped with reductionist schemas. Moreover, because reducing and simplifying can lead to incomplete understanding of phenomena, the resulting deficient knowledge has the potential to be harmful.

To achieve its purpose, this primer will: (1) introduce fundamental notions from complexity science, useful for inquiry and practice integrating research on genes, behavior, and social structures; (2) outline selected methodological strategies employed in studying complex adaptive/dynamic systems; (3) address the question, “Specifically, how can a dynamic systems approach be helpful for integrating research on genes, behavior, and social structures/institutions, to improve the public’s health?”; and (4) provide examples of studies currently deploying a complexity perspective.

The originality/value of this primer rests in its critique of the research status quo and the proposition of an alternative lens for integrating genomic, biomedical, and sociological research to improve the public’s health. The topic of complex adaptive/dynamic systems has begun to flourish within sociology, medicine, and public health, but many researchers lack exposure to the topic’s basic notions and applications.

In this chapter, I suggest that institutional guidelines and principles for conducting ethical research within Indigenous and cross-cultural contexts (see for example, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Guidelines for Ethical Research in Indigenous Studies, 2012) may not, in themselves be enough to promote the ethical practices nor lead to innovative outcomes if the fundamental premises of Western research in Indigenous contexts remain the same. Alternatively, valuing and applying Indigenous conceptions of Being, relationality and knowing when engaging with Indigenous participants and also, within actual procedures of research may lead to greater ethical know-how and a deeper understanding of how Indigenous modes of knowledge production can extend the frontiers of knowledge to solve real world problems. Such possibilities are predicated on recognising the limitations of our own epistemologies and ontologies and addressing the question of how we might refigure the role and positioning of ‘outsider’ researchers in ways that imbed, more self-reflexive and culturally appropriate modes of engagement and the application of Indigenous notions of Being, knowing and doing into research procedures to enhance the impact and benefits of research both within and beyond Indigenous communities.

When considered as organized solutions to problems of provision of public goods, Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) productions share a number of their defining features with the organized anarchies described by Cohen, March and Olsen in their “Garbage Can Model” (GCM). The open and voluntary contribution of software developers creates constant fluctuations in levels of attention and an extremely fluid participation. The lack of predefined hierarchical access to organizational problems determines a fundamental uncertainty about how collective goals may be linked to individual activities, and in how responsibilities and tasks may be allocated efficiently within the project. Finally, the complexity involved in the collective production of tens of thousands of lines of computer code without explicit coordination creates a situation of technological ambiguity supported by a radically decentralized activity of organizational problem finding and problem solving. In this paper we take these broad similarities as point of departure to specify an empirical model that captures some of the garbage can properties of organizational problem-solving activities in the context of a specific F/OSS project followed throughout a complete release cycle. We examine the interconnected system of individual decisions emerging from problem-solving activities performed by the 135 contributors involved in the F/OSS project on the 719 software bugs reported during the period of observation. We treat the evolving two-mode network produced by encounters between carriers of organizational solutions (contributors) and organizational problems (software bugs) as a dynamic opportunity structure that constrains and enables organizational decision making. We document how stable local configurations linking problems and solutions are induced by – and at the same time sustain – decentralized problem-solving activities with meaningful self-organizing properties.

This introduction by the volume editors discusses the multiple ways in which visibility and erasure of gender are manifested in social life. Following that discussion, the 12 chapters included in this volume are grouped in ways that demonstrate the relationships among them and are briefly summarized.