During the 1980s, the newly established industry and youth subculture associated with role-playing games came under sustained attack from schools, churches, parents and governments, instigated by the Christian Right via organizations such as B.A.D.D. (Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons). While both the organization B.A.D.D and its claims linking Role-playing games to youth suicide, drug use and Satanism eventually were discredited, the impact of these accusations lingers on to the present. This article examines the impact of the role-playing game “moral panic” on the role-playing game community and investigates the responses and coping mechanisms utilised by those directly targeted and harassed by churches, the police, schools and governments during the height of the “moral panic” in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The article also investigates the effect that the shared experience of being targeted by a “moral panic” had on the formation of a role-playing counter culture and community.

The aim of this paper is to set out the effects of romanticism on attitudes of the New Age movement to Indigenous Aboriginal Australian culture and people. Past scholarship has clearly expounded insensitive and exploitative New Age appropriation of Indigenous culture and emphasized inequalities in the power to represent one's own group. Essentialist, romantic stereotypes detract from deep understanding of Indigenous Australians, and negotiated solutions are not really possible when the parties involved are in grossly unequal circumstances. Scholarship acknowledges diversity within Indigenous groups and the New Age movement as well as convergences and reciprocal cultural borrowing, often within romantic epistemologies. A simple dichotomy of cultural theft by New Age practitioners from Indigenous Australians is inadequate to explain the complexities of the interaction.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced universities worldwide to move their teaching online within an unprecedentedly short timeframe. Whilst the move online learning has increased the reach of tertiary educational delivery it has also raised significant issues of equity, accessibility and student engagement. This includes concerns around access to technology and reliable internet connectivity, academic and digital literacy, and other factors such as mental health and work-life balance. This paper examines two studies of student engagement with online learning during 2020 when then pandemic began. One study was conducted in South Africa the other in a small regional university in South-Eastern Australia. A mixed method approach was used in both studies and then student responses were analysed using the student engagement framework presented by Kahu and Nelson (2018). A key focus in this analysis is the critical importance the educational interface and shared mutually formative experience of learning between students and universities. Findings show that despite the two different contexts, student concerns around digital literacy and engagement in an online learning environment share many similarities.

The Neopagan movement relies extensively on representations of the past for historical, cultural and ideological legitimacy. Of particular importance in these histories is the reclaiming or re-creation of pre-Christian pagan societies, the witchhunting crazes of the early modern period, and the reinterpretation of the rise of modernity and industrialism. The means by which these histories are constructed and the changes in the processes by which historical representations are formed are indicative of broader changes in the configuration of historical legitimacy in western culture.

This article employs a Jungian analytical perspective in its exploration of the phenomenon of ghost hoaxing in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial Victoria, Australia, as observed through its reportage in the print media of the era.