Euthanasia

Very recent article about Euthanasia:http://www.nationaltimes.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/blogs/crime-and-punishment/voluntary-euthanasia--is-there-a-slippery-slope-20110310-1bp7b.html

Immigration

Australia and immigration what's the deal. Despite being a country built on immigration, we remain a country that on the whole is opposed to immigration. Concepts such as the 'Yellow Peril', 'The Domino Effect', and the 'Pacific Solution' have been embedded not just in our history but in our psyche.
Despite priding ourselves on being a classless society and one where we value egalitarianism, we can't seem to extend these ideas to people who were not born in Australia--unless of course they are white and speak English fluently.
Why is it so?

Indigenous Australian Culture & Australian Mainstream Culture

Indigenous Australian Culture is a complex culture to define, mostly it is defined in ways such as found at http://www.culture.gov.au/articles/indigenous/ which refers mostly to a historical discussion and traditional culture, modern Indigenous Culture is largely ignored. The wikipedia site has some interesting points of note about modern indigenous australian culture.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_Australians

Australian mainstream culture it can be argued is predominantly caucasian, of british (anglo-saxon) origin, modern views of the world largely align themselves with other western cultures such as those of the United Kingdom, the United States and Western Europe. There is a strong link to Christianity in the country's professed moral beliefs although these might not be followed at an individual level.

Youths and Adults

What is meant by the terms youth and adults. They are different, one may say that adults are people over 18 who have responsibilities that can not be avoided or it might be they have different interests to those people who are youths. Dictionary definition of youth can be found at http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Youth  a more detailed and analytical discussion can be found at http://www.answers.com/topic/youth

Adults while generally considered from a legal point of view to be people over 18, from a social perspective it is not necessarily so simple, a quite detailed discussion can be found at http://www.answers.com/topic/adult

Defining Adolescents and Children

Adolescents can be defined biologically, but of interest to us from a social studies perspective, adolescents refer to a sub-group within a society who are not adults and are not children. In western culture the term seems to be interchangeable with teenager, who are a much more easily  defined group as they categorised by ages ending in 'teen ie thirteen years of age to nineteen. Some definitions of adolescents include:http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Adolescent and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolescence

Children are generally considered to be those who are not teenagers from a social point of view,  from a legal point of view though some may argue that anyone under the age of eighteen is a child. Some definitions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child and http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/children An interesting definition can be found at http://www.aic.gov.au/crime_community/demographicgroup/youngpeople/definition.aspx

Society & Culture information--defining culture and youth culture

Hello and welcome to my blog. This blog will primarily be used for information regarding Stage 2 Society and Culture. Information will be posted here regularly before and after lessons including relevant web links and discussions on relevant issues and issues to consider for IRs.
The first bit of information concerns definitions related to the holiday assignments all students were asssigned.
There are numerous definitions of the word culture, but one of most relevance to us is the one at Dictionary.com:
"the behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a particular social, ethnic, or age group: the youth culture; the drug culture".http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/culture 
The term youth culture is not really so simple to define as it can be quite diverse, while many people may be considered youths they may not necessarily be part of the same sub-group. The following links will help with some parameters to consider:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_subculture (NB this is a wikipedia page, so must be supported with other references such as http://www.uq.edu.au/boilerhouse/docs/YC%20report%20final%20email.pdf (NB only read up to page 10 of this document).
Some audiovisual representations of youth culture can be found at:http://aso.gov.au/education/culture/youth-culture/
For a detailed and somewhat complicated discussion of youth culture go to:Encyclopedia.com
One of the hardest parts of categorising and defining this term is trying to define what is youth, in the context of our subject we need to consider that it is a group that does not have adult responsibilities such as a mortgage, full time job, children etc--we can consider it to be anyone under the age of 18, but that ignores a group that while being adults in the eyes of the law, would indeed consider themselves part of a youthful sub-group. This is not THE definition, but one to consider.