Matthew Bunn
Biographic Data
| ID | 108222 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthew Bunn |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthew |
| FAMILY NAME | Bunn |
| SIGNATURE | BUNN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Newcastle Australia |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6184-5312 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 118 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
‘I felt like I was the only person in the world studying’: Place and affect in the constitution of online higher education study for rural Australian students
Higher education study has become more accessible to rural places through the development of stronger technologies, interfaces and pedagogy for online study. However, while these have made higher education more accessible, they also overlook the substantial impact that social circumstances and resources have on the means to meaningfully participate in higher education. Our study, conducted with 38 online higher education students, demonstrates ho…
Categorisations of care: Exploring representations of care leavers in higher education through critical praxis
In this paper, we explore the critical praxis approach of an equity initiative with students who have left care. We contend that ‘praxis’ ( International Studies in Widening Participation , 2018, 5: 10–20) – understood here as the close, dialogic and iterative relationship between research and practice, can be a powerful tool for approaching ordinarily rigid equity categorisations as a means for interrogating their conceptual efficacy while simul…
Should I stay or should I go? The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on regional, rural and remote undergraduate students at an Australian University
While widening participation in higher education for regional, rural and remote (RRR) Australian communities has been a major policy focus in recent years, the pandemic and resulting lockdowns and closures of internal borders between Australian states and territories has impacted significantly upon RRR students who relocate to pursue tertiary education. In this article we draw on intersectional theory and in-depth interview data to understand the…
Classed trajectories in higher education and the graduate labour market: Affective affinities in a ‘meritocracy’
In this article, we draw from a recent empirical study to consider how a person’s classed trajectory impacts students from different class backgrounds in higher education (HE). Students face rapidly evolving social and academic circumstances and must build reasonable strategies to navigate their trajectory from education to work. In these situational processes, social class becomes emotionally exposed as a durable relational social ordering princ…
The Limits of Risk: Exploring the Subject/Object Divide and its Breach in a Climbing Accident
This article explores an auto-ethnographic account of a climbing accident. Climbing communities invest large amounts of time in identifying 'risks', that is, making the chances of involvement in a serious or fatal accident more calculable and controllable, and hence less likely. However, little attention has been given to understanding the post-risk state. Rather risk discourses are intended to sustain a sense of control over vertical spaces; spa…
The Iran nuclear archive: Impressions and implications
A review of selected on Iran’s nuclear weapons program seized by Israeli intelligence confirms that: senior Iranian officials had decided in the late 1990s to actually manufacture nuclear weapons and carry out an underground nuclear test; that Iran’s program to do so made more technical progress than had previously been understood; and that Iran had help from quite a number of foreign scientists, including access to several foreign nuclear weapon…
Evaluation for equity: Reclaiming evaluation by striving towards counter-hegemonic democratic practices
Formal evaluation of policies, programmes and people has become ubiquitous in contemporary western contexts. This is the case for equity and widening participation (WP) agendas in higher education, for which evaluation is often required to measure ‘what works’. Although evaluation has a ‘fundamentally social, political, and value-oriented character’ (Guba and Lincoln. 1989. Fourth Generation Evaluation. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 7), an experimental…
Making futures: Equity and social justice in higher education timescapes
Neo-liberal higher education is preoccupied with the future, with study increasingly viewed as being important for and in the future, rather than valuable in the present. We argue that a preoccupation with the future itself has become the generator of the present as precarious. Paradoxically, the certainty of future transformation or change, forms present uncertainty, which is also experienced as distressing and frantic in pace. We must work to k…
Class in Australian higher education: The university as a site of social reproduction
Explanations of inequality in higher education primarily use the dominant language of institutional equity discourses, such as low socio-economic status (LSES), 'under-represented' or 'non-traditional' backgrounds. We argue that analysis that relies on a static series of objective categories regularly fails to account for the symbolic-historical conditions that have produced class boundaries. In acknowledging this, one of the challenges in higher…
In the anytime: Flexible time structures, student experience and temporal equity in higher education
Time is often taken-for-granted as abstract and constant, even though the lives we lead are always changing within the context of time and because of time. In this paper, we explore the hidden challenges of hegemonic neoliberal framings of 'flexibility' which urge students to presume that study-time is asynchronous and can be engaged with anytime, eroding recognition that it is contextual and much more structured than expected. Timing is dynamic …
Lived experiences of environmental change: Solastalgia, power and place
A disposition of risk: Climbing practice, reflexive modernity and the habitus
The paper utilizes climbing practice to examine how risk societies generate risk consciousness in agents. It critiques the cognitive basis of reflexivity, particularly in Beck's work, and seeks an alternative rooted in embodied practice. Sweetman's 'reflexive habitus' serves as a starting point to synthesize a relationship between Ulrich Beck's risk society and Bourdieu's theory of practice. However, it is argued that both Sweetman and Beck overs…
I'm gonna do this over and over and over forever: Overlapping fields and climbing practice
In this article I explore some of the aspects of shared doxic principles between outdoor fields and how these contribute to agents becoming interested in 'high-consequence' climbing styles. I argue that people who come to be high-risk climbers do not become involved for the purpose of participating in risky activities, but instead move into climbing through 'overlapping fields' that share practices and dispositions of climbing. Becoming a climber…
Habitus and Disposition in High-risk Mountain-climbing
Habitus has been an attractive concept for works examining body-centric practices. This article draws on interviews and 18 months of ethnographic research with high-risk climbers primarily throughout North America. An important guide to this research has been the concept of habitus. However, this article demonstrates that there are limits to habitus being used to address the moment of action. The scope of habitus ranges widely, limiting its capac…
Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After
Emerging from the work of Foucault and Bourdieu in particular, a powerful theoretical critique of prevailing notions of censorship and its opposite, free speech, emerged in the waning decades of the last century. The principal theoretical contribution, I will argue, of this "New Censorship Theory" has been not to overthrow the dominant liberal conception of censorship, but rather to bracket this conception as a separate and ultimately subordinate…
Censorship is Official Critique”: Contesting the Limits of Scholarship in the Censorship of the Hallische Jahrbücher
While censorship touched upon the careers of every German writer in the nineteenth century, a few cases stood out to contemporaries, defining their era. If the Demagogenverfolgung stamped the early 1820s and the prohibition of Young Germany the 1830s, the assault on left-wing or “Young” Hegelianism in 1842–43 was the major censorship case of the decade. Banning the Deutsche Jahrbücher, Rheinische Zeitung , and Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung was par…
Reducing the greatest risks of nuclear theft & terrorism
Terrorist Nuclear Weapon Construction: How Difficult
The likelihood of a nuclear terrorist attack depends in part on the ability of terrorist groups to acquire, construct, and detonate a nuclear device. This article attempts to determine the difficulty of such an endeavor by examining the underlying physical facts about nuclear fission, nuclear materials, and nuclear weapons design. The facts bear out a simple conclusion: while the danger should not be exaggerated, a nuclear terrorist attack is pot…
A Mathematical Model of the Risk of Nuclear Terrorism
This article presents a mathematical model for measuring the global risk of nuclear theft and terrorism. One plausible set of parameter values used in a numerical example suggests a 29 percent probability of a nuclear terrorist attack in the next decade. The expected loss over that period would be $1.17 trillion (undiscounted), or more than $100 billion per year. Historical and other evidence is used to explore the likely values of several of the…
The Seven Myths of Nuclear Terrorism
A small but dedicated and resourceful terrorist group could very plausibly design and build at least a crude nuclear bomb. And the danger that they could get the nuclear material needed to do so is very real
Arms Control's Enduring Worth
Lived experiences of environmental change: Solastalgia, power and place
Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After
Emerging from the work of Foucault and Bourdieu in particular, a powerful theoretical critique of prevailing notions of censorship and its opposite, free speech, emerged in the waning decades of the last century. The principal theoretical contribution, I will argue, of this "New Censorship Theory" has been not to overthrow the dominant liberal conception of censorship, but rather to bracket this conception as a separate and ultimately subordinate…
Habitus and Disposition in High-risk Mountain-climbing
Habitus has been an attractive concept for works examining body-centric practices. This article draws on interviews and 18 months of ethnographic research with high-risk climbers primarily throughout North America. An important guide to this research has been the concept of habitus. However, this article demonstrates that there are limits to habitus being used to address the moment of action. The scope of habitus ranges widely, limiting its capac…
In the anytime: Flexible time structures, student experience and temporal equity in higher education
Time is often taken-for-granted as abstract and constant, even though the lives we lead are always changing within the context of time and because of time. In this paper, we explore the hidden challenges of hegemonic neoliberal framings of 'flexibility' which urge students to presume that study-time is asynchronous and can be engaged with anytime, eroding recognition that it is contextual and much more structured than expected. Timing is dynamic …
Terrorist Nuclear Weapon Construction: How Difficult
The likelihood of a nuclear terrorist attack depends in part on the ability of terrorist groups to acquire, construct, and detonate a nuclear device. This article attempts to determine the difficulty of such an endeavor by examining the underlying physical facts about nuclear fission, nuclear materials, and nuclear weapons design. The facts bear out a simple conclusion: while the danger should not be exaggerated, a nuclear terrorist attack is pot…
Class in Australian higher education: The university as a site of social reproduction
Explanations of inequality in higher education primarily use the dominant language of institutional equity discourses, such as low socio-economic status (LSES), 'under-represented' or 'non-traditional' backgrounds. We argue that analysis that relies on a static series of objective categories regularly fails to account for the symbolic-historical conditions that have produced class boundaries. In acknowledging this, one of the challenges in higher…
Classed trajectories in higher education and the graduate labour market: Affective affinities in a ‘meritocracy’
In this article, we draw from a recent empirical study to consider how a person’s classed trajectory impacts students from different class backgrounds in higher education (HE). Students face rapidly evolving social and academic circumstances and must build reasonable strategies to navigate their trajectory from education to work. In these situational processes, social class becomes emotionally exposed as a durable relational social ordering princ…
A disposition of risk: Climbing practice, reflexive modernity and the habitus
The paper utilizes climbing practice to examine how risk societies generate risk consciousness in agents. It critiques the cognitive basis of reflexivity, particularly in Beck's work, and seeks an alternative rooted in embodied practice. Sweetman's 'reflexive habitus' serves as a starting point to synthesize a relationship between Ulrich Beck's risk society and Bourdieu's theory of practice. However, it is argued that both Sweetman and Beck overs…
I'm gonna do this over and over and over forever: Overlapping fields and climbing practice
In this article I explore some of the aspects of shared doxic principles between outdoor fields and how these contribute to agents becoming interested in 'high-consequence' climbing styles. I argue that people who come to be high-risk climbers do not become involved for the purpose of participating in risky activities, but instead move into climbing through 'overlapping fields' that share practices and dispositions of climbing. Becoming a climber…
A Mathematical Model of the Risk of Nuclear Terrorism
This article presents a mathematical model for measuring the global risk of nuclear theft and terrorism. One plausible set of parameter values used in a numerical example suggests a 29 percent probability of a nuclear terrorist attack in the next decade. The expected loss over that period would be $1.17 trillion (undiscounted), or more than $100 billion per year. Historical and other evidence is used to explore the likely values of several of the…
Categorisations of care: Exploring representations of care leavers in higher education through critical praxis
In this paper, we explore the critical praxis approach of an equity initiative with students who have left care. We contend that ‘praxis’ ( International Studies in Widening Participation , 2018, 5: 10–20) – understood here as the close, dialogic and iterative relationship between research and practice, can be a powerful tool for approaching ordinarily rigid equity categorisations as a means for interrogating their conceptual efficacy while simul…
The Limits of Risk: Exploring the Subject/Object Divide and its Breach in a Climbing Accident
This article explores an auto-ethnographic account of a climbing accident. Climbing communities invest large amounts of time in identifying 'risks', that is, making the chances of involvement in a serious or fatal accident more calculable and controllable, and hence less likely. However, little attention has been given to understanding the post-risk state. Rather risk discourses are intended to sustain a sense of control over vertical spaces; spa…
Evaluation for equity: Reclaiming evaluation by striving towards counter-hegemonic democratic practices
Formal evaluation of policies, programmes and people has become ubiquitous in contemporary western contexts. This is the case for equity and widening participation (WP) agendas in higher education, for which evaluation is often required to measure ‘what works’. Although evaluation has a ‘fundamentally social, political, and value-oriented character’ (Guba and Lincoln. 1989. Fourth Generation Evaluation. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 7), an experimental…
Censorship is Official Critique”: Contesting the Limits of Scholarship in the Censorship of the Hallische Jahrbücher
While censorship touched upon the careers of every German writer in the nineteenth century, a few cases stood out to contemporaries, defining their era. If the Demagogenverfolgung stamped the early 1820s and the prohibition of Young Germany the 1830s, the assault on left-wing or “Young” Hegelianism in 1842–43 was the major censorship case of the decade. Banning the Deutsche Jahrbücher, Rheinische Zeitung , and Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung was par…
Reducing the greatest risks of nuclear theft & terrorism
Arms Control's Enduring Worth
Arms Control's Enduring Worth
The Seven Myths of Nuclear Terrorism
A small but dedicated and resourceful terrorist group could very plausibly design and build at least a crude nuclear bomb. And the danger that they could get the nuclear material needed to do so is very real
Terrorist Nuclear Weapon Construction: How Difficult
The likelihood of a nuclear terrorist attack depends in part on the ability of terrorist groups to acquire, construct, and detonate a nuclear device. This article attempts to determine the difficulty of such an endeavor by examining the underlying physical facts about nuclear fission, nuclear materials, and nuclear weapons design. The facts bear out a simple conclusion: while the danger should not be exaggerated, a nuclear terrorist attack is pot…
A Mathematical Model of the Risk of Nuclear Terrorism
This article presents a mathematical model for measuring the global risk of nuclear theft and terrorism. One plausible set of parameter values used in a numerical example suggests a 29 percent probability of a nuclear terrorist attack in the next decade. The expected loss over that period would be $1.17 trillion (undiscounted), or more than $100 billion per year. Historical and other evidence is used to explore the likely values of several of the…
Reducing the greatest risks of nuclear theft & terrorism
Censorship is Official Critique”: Contesting the Limits of Scholarship in the Censorship of the Hallische Jahrbücher
While censorship touched upon the careers of every German writer in the nineteenth century, a few cases stood out to contemporaries, defining their era. If the Demagogenverfolgung stamped the early 1820s and the prohibition of Young Germany the 1830s, the assault on left-wing or “Young” Hegelianism in 1842–43 was the major censorship case of the decade. Banning the Deutsche Jahrbücher, Rheinische Zeitung , and Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung was par…
Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After
Emerging from the work of Foucault and Bourdieu in particular, a powerful theoretical critique of prevailing notions of censorship and its opposite, free speech, emerged in the waning decades of the last century. The principal theoretical contribution, I will argue, of this "New Censorship Theory" has been not to overthrow the dominant liberal conception of censorship, but rather to bracket this conception as a separate and ultimately subordinate…
Habitus and Disposition in High-risk Mountain-climbing
Habitus has been an attractive concept for works examining body-centric practices. This article draws on interviews and 18 months of ethnographic research with high-risk climbers primarily throughout North America. An important guide to this research has been the concept of habitus. However, this article demonstrates that there are limits to habitus being used to address the moment of action. The scope of habitus ranges widely, limiting its capac…
A disposition of risk: Climbing practice, reflexive modernity and the habitus
The paper utilizes climbing practice to examine how risk societies generate risk consciousness in agents. It critiques the cognitive basis of reflexivity, particularly in Beck's work, and seeks an alternative rooted in embodied practice. Sweetman's 'reflexive habitus' serves as a starting point to synthesize a relationship between Ulrich Beck's risk society and Bourdieu's theory of practice. However, it is argued that both Sweetman and Beck overs…
I'm gonna do this over and over and over forever: Overlapping fields and climbing practice
In this article I explore some of the aspects of shared doxic principles between outdoor fields and how these contribute to agents becoming interested in 'high-consequence' climbing styles. I argue that people who come to be high-risk climbers do not become involved for the purpose of participating in risky activities, but instead move into climbing through 'overlapping fields' that share practices and dispositions of climbing. Becoming a climber…
Lived experiences of environmental change: Solastalgia, power and place
In the anytime: Flexible time structures, student experience and temporal equity in higher education
Time is often taken-for-granted as abstract and constant, even though the lives we lead are always changing within the context of time and because of time. In this paper, we explore the hidden challenges of hegemonic neoliberal framings of 'flexibility' which urge students to presume that study-time is asynchronous and can be engaged with anytime, eroding recognition that it is contextual and much more structured than expected. Timing is dynamic …
Making futures: Equity and social justice in higher education timescapes
Neo-liberal higher education is preoccupied with the future, with study increasingly viewed as being important for and in the future, rather than valuable in the present. We argue that a preoccupation with the future itself has become the generator of the present as precarious. Paradoxically, the certainty of future transformation or change, forms present uncertainty, which is also experienced as distressing and frantic in pace. We must work to k…
Class in Australian higher education: The university as a site of social reproduction
Explanations of inequality in higher education primarily use the dominant language of institutional equity discourses, such as low socio-economic status (LSES), 'under-represented' or 'non-traditional' backgrounds. We argue that analysis that relies on a static series of objective categories regularly fails to account for the symbolic-historical conditions that have produced class boundaries. In acknowledging this, one of the challenges in higher…
The Iran nuclear archive: Impressions and implications
A review of selected on Iran’s nuclear weapons program seized by Israeli intelligence confirms that: senior Iranian officials had decided in the late 1990s to actually manufacture nuclear weapons and carry out an underground nuclear test; that Iran’s program to do so made more technical progress than had previously been understood; and that Iran had help from quite a number of foreign scientists, including access to several foreign nuclear weapon…
Evaluation for equity: Reclaiming evaluation by striving towards counter-hegemonic democratic practices
Formal evaluation of policies, programmes and people has become ubiquitous in contemporary western contexts. This is the case for equity and widening participation (WP) agendas in higher education, for which evaluation is often required to measure ‘what works’. Although evaluation has a ‘fundamentally social, political, and value-oriented character’ (Guba and Lincoln. 1989. Fourth Generation Evaluation. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 7), an experimental…
Should I stay or should I go? The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on regional, rural and remote undergraduate students at an Australian University
While widening participation in higher education for regional, rural and remote (RRR) Australian communities has been a major policy focus in recent years, the pandemic and resulting lockdowns and closures of internal borders between Australian states and territories has impacted significantly upon RRR students who relocate to pursue tertiary education. In this article we draw on intersectional theory and in-depth interview data to understand the…
Classed trajectories in higher education and the graduate labour market: Affective affinities in a ‘meritocracy’
In this article, we draw from a recent empirical study to consider how a person’s classed trajectory impacts students from different class backgrounds in higher education (HE). Students face rapidly evolving social and academic circumstances and must build reasonable strategies to navigate their trajectory from education to work. In these situational processes, social class becomes emotionally exposed as a durable relational social ordering princ…
The Limits of Risk: Exploring the Subject/Object Divide and its Breach in a Climbing Accident
This article explores an auto-ethnographic account of a climbing accident. Climbing communities invest large amounts of time in identifying 'risks', that is, making the chances of involvement in a serious or fatal accident more calculable and controllable, and hence less likely. However, little attention has been given to understanding the post-risk state. Rather risk discourses are intended to sustain a sense of control over vertical spaces; spa…
Categorisations of care: Exploring representations of care leavers in higher education through critical praxis
In this paper, we explore the critical praxis approach of an equity initiative with students who have left care. We contend that ‘praxis’ ( International Studies in Widening Participation , 2018, 5: 10–20) – understood here as the close, dialogic and iterative relationship between research and practice, can be a powerful tool for approaching ordinarily rigid equity categorisations as a means for interrogating their conceptual efficacy while simul…
‘I felt like I was the only person in the world studying’: Place and affect in the constitution of online higher education study for rural Australian students
Higher education study has become more accessible to rural places through the development of stronger technologies, interfaces and pedagogy for online study. However, while these have made higher education more accessible, they also overlook the substantial impact that social circumstances and resources have on the means to meaningfully participate in higher education. Our study, conducted with 38 online higher education students, demonstrates ho…
Political science (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Law (11 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Social science (7 works) · Economics (6 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Higher education (5 works) · History (5 works)