Zeitschriftenartikel zum Thema „Aboriginal homelessness“

The homelessness of Aboriginal young women takes place in the historical context of lost homes and lost homelands. This article focuses on homeless Aboriginal women in the city of Edmonton and explores their perception of this experience. Involving nine young women who were interviewed over a two year period, researchers further investigated the historical profiles of their families and their attempts to transition out of homelessness. Part of a larger study of the homeless experience of eighteen girls and young women in Edmonton, this article breaks out data that focuses on the experience of Aboriginal participants and contextualizes their discourse in light of enforced home loss in western Canada. While their experience overlaps with the non-Aboriginal participants in our study we also find significant cultural and historically located differences.

This article explores structural determinants as possible causes of the homelessness of Aboriginal youth in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It includes a brief literature review and provides some of the findings of a recent research project, which implemented an Aboriginal research methodology with homeless youth in Toronto. These findings point to a strong link between Aboriginal children growing up in poverty and involvement in child welfare and becoming homeless as youth. Suggestions for positive change at the policy level are offered in order to prevent the next generation of Aboriginal children growing up to become homeless youth.

This article explores structural determinants as possible causes of the homelessness of Aboriginal youth in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It includes a brief literature review and provides some of the findings of a recent research project, which implemented an Aboriginal research methodology with homeless youth in Toronto. These findings point to a strong link between Aboriginal children growing up in poverty and involvement in child welfare and becoming homeless as a youth. Suggestions for positive change at the policy-level are offered in order to prevent the next generation of Aboriginal children growing up to become homeless youth.

Background: Aboriginal people in rural and remote areas of the Northern Territory of Australia have suffered longstanding issues of homelessness and profound health and social inequities. The town and region of Katherine are particularly impacted by such inequities and have the highest rates of homelessness in Australia, composed almost entirely of Aboriginal people who represent 51% of the total population of 24,000 people. The region is serviced by a 60-bed hospital, and a small cohort of frequent attenders (FAs) represent 11% of the Emergency Department (ED) case load. The vast majority of FAs are Aboriginal and have very high burdens of social inequity and homelessness. FAs are a challenge to efficient and effective use of resources for most hospitals around the world, and investment in programs to address underlying social and chronic health issues contributing to frequent attendance have been demonstrated to be effective. Methods: These are the interim findings of a prospective cohort study using five sources of linked health and related data to evaluate a community-based case management pilot in a culturally competent framework to support frequent attenders to the Katherine Hospital ED. FAs were defined as people with six or more presentations in 12 preceding months. The intervention composed of a community-based case management program with a multi-agency service delivery addressing underlying vulnerabilities contributing to ED presentations. Results: Among this predominantly Aboriginal cohort (91%), there were high rates of homelessness (64%), food insecurity (60%) and alcohol misuse (64%), limited access to transport, and complex comorbidities (average of 2.8 chronic conditions per client). Following intervention, there was a statistically significant reduction in ED presentations (IRR 0.77, 95% CI 0.69–0.85), increased engagement with primary health care (IRR 1.90, 95% CI 1.78–2.03), and ambulance utilisation (IRR 1.21, 95% CI 1.07–1.38). Reductions in hospital admissions (IRR 0.93, 95% CI 0.77–1.10) and aeromedical retrievals (IRR 0.67, 95% CI 0.35–1.20) were not statistically significant. Conclusions: This study demonstrates the short-term impacts of community-led case management extending beyond the hospital setting, to address causes of recurrent ED presentations among people with complex social and medical backgrounds. Improving engagement with primary care is a particularly important outcome given the national impetus to reduce preventable hospital admissions.

Many policy interventions have attempted to address the entrenched disadvantage of Aboriginal Australians1; however, sustained improvement in social, cultural, physical, and emotional well-being is not evident. This disadvantage is compounded by paternalistic practices which do not promote Aboriginal self-determination or empowerment. This article presents the lived experience and voice of Aboriginal Australians spending time in parks in Perth, Western Australia. A community-based participatory action research approach informed by critical Indigenous methodologies involving collaboration between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal service providers was used. Participants experienced disconnection from kin and country, serious risk to personal safety, homelessness, and problematic health; all related to, and intersecting with, time spent in the parks. The participants’ narratives highlight the enduring impacts of colonization, dispossession, and racism. These lived experiences are situated within contexts of rising moral panic from politicians, residents and mass media, and siloed policy and service delivery responses.

Background: Aboriginal Australians are disproportionately affected by homelessness, with traditional housing models failing to recognise the importance of kinship obligations and ongoing systemic racism. The Wongee Mia project is a pilot initiative emerging out of a Housing First project tackling homelessness among Perth’s most vulnerable rough sleepers. The project takes a different approach to working with and providing long-term housing to Aboriginal families in Perth, Western Australia. Methods: The Wongee Mia project is centred around one person “Robby” and his family to prevent eviction. Data are collected from monthly action research meetings, yarning sessions with family Elders, and case notes. Results: The project identified 32 family members who had potential to place “Robby’s” tenancy at risk. As at December 2019, 29 members of Robby’s family have been supported by the Wongee Mia case workers, and five have been housed. Key elements of Wongee Mia are the broader links to end homelessness initiatives (the Housing First program), the cultural backgrounds of the case workers and their ability to connect in a meaningful way with the family, Elder involvement (including the co-production of this paper), and an underlying action research model enabling program delivery improvements. Conclusion: The Wongee Mia project offers an innovative way of working with families to prevent unnecessary eviction by working through the whole family’s needs rather than those of an individual in relation to housing.

Suicide amongst Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is a major cause of premature mortality and a significant contributor to the health and life expectancy gap. This study aimed to estimate the prevalence of thoughts of self-harm or suicide in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people attending an urban primary health care service and identify factors associated with these thoughts. Multilevel mixed-effects modified Poisson regression models were employed to analyse three years of data gathered during the annual Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health assessments. At their first health assessment, 11.5% (191/1664) of people reported thoughts of suicide or self-harm in the prior two weeks. Having children, participating in sport or community activities or being employed full-time decreased the risk of such thoughts. Conversely, factors relating to social exclusion including homelessness, drug use, unemployment and job insecurity increased the risk of thoughts of self-harm or suicide. Individual clinicians, health services, and policy-makers all have a role in suicide prevention. Clinicians need appropriate training to be able to respond to people expressing these thoughts. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community organisations need sovereignty and self-determination over resources to provide programs that promote cultural connectivity and address social exclusion, thereby saving lives.

This paper describes the collaboration between an Aboriginal community and Western Australia's (WA) Department for Child Protection (DCP) in designing and operating a residential child care facility in a predominantly Aboriginal community. Research literature has established that the effective operation of child protection systems in remote Aboriginal communities requires practitioners and policy-makers to have awareness of local and extra-local cultural, historical and contemporary social factors in nurturing children. This ethnographic case study describes how a newspaper campaign heightened public and professional awareness of child abuse in the town of Halls Creek, in WA's Kimberley region. With its largely Aboriginal population, Halls Creek lacked the infrastructure to accommodate an inflow of regional people. Homelessness, neglect and poverty were widespread. Within a broader government and local response, DCP joined with community leaders to plan out of home care for children. Detailed are the importance and complexities of negotiating between universal standardised models of care and local input. Strategies for building positive relationships with children's family while strengthening both parenting capacity and community acceptance, and use of the facility are identified. Key to success was the development of a collaborative ‘third-space’ for threading together local and professional child protection knowledge.

There is urgent need for a new model to address the housing crisis in remote Australian Indigenous communities. Decades of major government expenditure have not significantly improved the endemic problems, which include homelessness, overcrowding, substandard dwellings, and unemployment. Between 2017–2020, Foundation for Indigenous Sustainable Health (FISH) worked with the remote Kimberley Aboriginal community, Bawoorrooga, by facilitating the co-design and co-build of a culturally and climatically appropriate home with community members. This housing model incorporates a program of education, health, governance, justice system programs, and land tenure reforms. Build features incorporate sustainable local/recycled materials and earth construction, and ‘Solar Passive Design’. The project faced challenges, including limited funding, extreme climate and remoteness, cultural barriers, and mental health issues. Nevertheless, the program was ultimately successful, producing a house which is culturally designed, climatically/thermally effective, comparatively cheap to build, and efficient to run. The project produced improvements in mental health, schooling outcomes, reduced youth incarceration, and other spheres of community development, including enterprise and community governance. Co-design and co-build projects are slower and more complex than the conventional model of external contracting, but the outcomes can be far superior across broad areas of social and emotional wellbeing, house quality and comfort, energy consumption, long-term maintenance, community physical and mental health, pride, and ownership. These factors are essential in breaking intergenerational cycles of poverty, trauma, and engagement with the justice system. This paper provides a narrative case study of the project and outlines the core principles applied and the lessons learned.

AbstractObjective:The current study explored the experiences and aspirations of a cohort of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults with neurocognitive disability residing in a homeless shelter in regional Queensland, Australia. Neurocognitive disability (NCD) refers to any acquired disorder or injury to the brain where the primary clinical deficit is in cognitive function.Method:The data reported on in this paper emerged from a broader study that aimed to understand the extent and nature of neurocognitive disability amongst homeless Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The broader study found high levels of NCD which impacted on people’s ability to participate in society. As part of the study, qualitative information was sought regarding participant life experiences. A culturally safe and acceptable structure of “past, present and future” was applied to open-ended questions.Results:Thematic analysis of the data identified four broad themes of i) normalisation of illness and disability; ii) trauma and loss; iii) socioeconomic disadvantage; and iv) hope and disempowerment. This paper reports on these themes and experiences, which occurred across the life span, intersected with NCD, and contributed to what we have termed ‘complex disablement’ amongst this cohort.Conclusions:While causal links between life experience, disability and disablement are not always clear, our findings suggest that attempts to address homelessness must engage with this complexity. The application of holistic, intersectoral supports, which encompass culturally informed, community driven approaches are needed. Understanding the impacts of individual and intergenerational trauma is crucial to safe and effective service provision for this cohort.

The past 30 years has seen the Australian community undergo significant structural and qualitative changes bringing prosperity and unprecedented standards of living to most citizens. But for some people these changes have left them behind and today their plight has reached scandalous proportions such that the nation's sense of social justice is in question.Today we are only too well aware of the statistics on poverty, homelessness, child abuse and neglect, drug abuse and community violence. Thirty years ago we would not have thought it possible that sectors of the Australian community, apart from Aboriginal communities, would have such a growing sense of hopelessness and isolation from the mainstream of Australian life.These difficulties are now pressing upon child welfare services and at a time of expenditure neutrality of the public welfare dollar. More and more as the costs of the welfare state approach crisis point, government and the community in general are being forced to turn to the resources of the family to find solutions to problems of social and personal need. In child welfare the notion of turning to the family and seeking resources or building upon inherent strengths is a new direction requiring a new understanding, knowledge and skills.

This book by Barry McPherson is the fourth edition of Canada's first textbook on aging. Aging as a Social Process is a comprehensive text that elucidates and links the physiological, psychological, and social domains of aging within the context of what are known as individual and population aging. As the title implies, the book focuses primarily on the social processes of aging embedded in the micro-, meso-, and macro-level environments. It therefore balances individual-level experiences and social-structural forces connected to the causes and consequences of aging. It has been updated and expanded to reflect the increasing diversity in aging and the aged and the concomitant growth in research. This is captured through the integration of theory, research, and policy, from multiple perspectives and methodologies, applied to a wider range of substantive issues than in previous editions of the text. For instance, Aboriginal people and aging, homelessness, dating and sexuality, gay and lesbian relationships, end-of-life care, home care, and older drivers are but a few of the topics added or significantly supplemented in this new edition. In particular, I found the inclusion of a chapter dealing with individual and population health a needed and welcome addition. A life-course perspective on these topics that embraces the multiplicity of experience as individuals move through life stages, exposed to different historical and cultural contexts and facing and creating different life choices and chances, connects the material presented in this text.

Purpose – This participatory health research project of researchers and women prisoners examined housing and homelessness as perceived by incarcerated women to understand this public health concern and help guide policy. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – A participatory research team designed and conducted a survey of 83 incarcerated women in BC, Canada. Using descriptive statistics, the authors examined socio-demographic factors related to social support networks and family housing and women’s housing preference upon release. Findings – In total, 44 percent of participants reported no family home upon release while 31 percent reported lost family ties due to their incarceration. Most vulnerable subpopulations were women aged 25-34, aboriginal women and those with multiple incarcerations. Housing preferences differed between participants suggesting needs for varied options. Further implementation, evaluation and appraisal of social programs are required. Research limitations/implications – This study surveyed one correctional facility: future research could utilize multiple centers. Practical implications – Addressing housing instability among released incarcerated individuals is important fiscally and from a public health lens. Improved discharge planning and housing stability is needed through policy changes and social programs. A social support network, “Women in2 Healing,” has developed from the research group to address these issues. Social implications – Housing stability and recidivism are closely linked: providing stable housing options will lessen the social, fiscal and medical burden of individuals returning to crime, substance abuse, illness and poverty. Originality/value – Housing instability addresses an important social determinant of health and focussing on incarcerated women builds upon a small body of literature.

BackgroundThe integration of digital technology into everyday lives of young people has become widespread. It is not known whether and how technology influences barriers and facilitators to healthcare, and whether and how young people navigate between face-to-face and virtual healthcare. To provide new knowledge essential to policy and practice, we designed a study that would explore health system access and navigation in the digital age. The study objectives are to: (1) describe experiences of young people accessing and navigating the health system in New South Wales (NSW), Australia; (2) identify barriers and facilitators to healthcare for young people and how these vary between groups; (3) describe health system inefficiencies, particularly for young people who are marginalised; (4) provide policy-relevant knowledge translation of the research data.Methods and analysisThis mixed methods study has four parts, including: (1) a cross-sectional survey of young people (12–24 years) residing in NSW, Australia; (2) a longitudinal, qualitative study of a subsample of marginalised young people (defined as young people who: identify as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander; are experiencing homelessness; identify as sexuality and/or gender diverse; are of refugee or vulnerable migrant background; and/or live in rural or remote NSW); (3) interviews with professionals; (4) a knowledge translation forum.Ethics and disseminationEthics approvals were sought and granted. Data collection commenced in March 2016 and will continue until June 2017. This study will gather practice and policy-relevant intelligence about contemporary experiences of young people and health services, with a unique focus on five different groups of marginalised young people, documenting their experiences over time.Access 3will explore navigation around all levels of the health system, determine whether digital technology is integrated into this, and if so how, and will translate findings into policy-relevant recommendations.

Objective. We review the evidence on innovations in Tier 2 of the Access to Allied Psychological Services (ATAPS) program, which is designed to facilitate the provision of primary mental healthcare to hard-to-reach and at-risk population groups (including women with perinatal depression, people at risk of self-harm or suicide, people experiencing or at risk of homelessness, people affected by the 2009 Victorian bushfires, people in remote locations, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and children with mental disorders) and the trialling of new modalities of service delivery (e.g. telephone-based or web-based CBT). The primary focus is on the uptake, outcomes and issues associated with the provision of ATAPS Tier 2. Methods. Drawing on data from an ongoing national ATAPS evaluation, including a national minimum dataset, key informant interviews and surveys, the impact of ATAPS innovations is analysed and illustrated through program examples. Results. ATAPS Tier 2 facilitates access to, uptake of and positive clinical outcomes from primary mental healthcare for population groups with particular needs, although it requires periods of time to implement locally. Conclusions. Relatively simple innovations in mental health program design can have important practical ramifications for service provision, extending program reach and improving mental health outcomes for target populations. What is known about the topic? It is recognised that innovative approaches are required to tailor mental health programs for hard-to-reach and at-risk population groups. Divisions of General Practice have implemented innovations in the Access to Allied Psychological Services (ATAPS) program for several years. What does this paper add? Drawing on data from an ongoing national ATAPS evaluation, this paper presents a systematic analysis of the uptake, outcomes and issues associated with provision of the innovative ATAPS program. What are the implications for practitioners? The findings highlight the benefits of introducing innovations in primary mental healthcare in terms of increased access to care and positive consumer outcomes. They also identify challenges to and facilitators of the implementation process, which can inform innovation efforts in other primary care contexts.

Introduction: The social determinants of health (SDoH) can play a significant role in a person’s overall wellbeing. This is especially true for adults with mental illness and mental health disorders. In this study, we describe the SDoH of patients presenting to an academic, inner-city emergency department (ED) with an acute mental health complaint (AMHC). Methods: We prospectively identified and enrolled a convenience sample of patients presenting to an ED with an annual census of 85,000 visits. Participants provided informed written consent, and completed a questionnaire package containing questions related to demographics and SDoH. As well, participants were asked to complete four mental health, quality of life, and recovery validated patient-reported outcome measures. Results: A total 108 participants were enrolled in this study, of which 65% were male, aged 37.5 years (IQR 26.7-50.3), 56% Caucasian, and 22% Aboriginal. Depression was the primary diagnosis reported by 55% of participants, with 58.9% meeting the PhQ-9 cutoff for moderate-severe depression. The highest level of educational achievement for 44% of participants was high school or less, with 75% reporting being unemployed. Almost half (45%) reported engaging in less than two hours of structured activity each week. Thirty eight percent of participants reported living in their own apartment, with 25% reporting being homeless and 17% living in a single-room housing unit. The majority of participants (56%) sampled were not satisfied with their housing, and 67% were actively looking for new housing. Sixty percent of participants reported smoking cigarettes daily and 40% reported weekly cannabis use. A total of 11% of the sample reported that they did not have access to clean drinking water; 35% worried that their food would run out, and 47% reported cutting the size of meals due to a lack of money. Conclusion: This study lends evidence towards the circumstances in which patients presenting to the ED with an AMHC live and work. A considerable proportion of patients reported homelessness or being marginally housed, lack access to clean drinking water and sufficient food, and high rates of unemployment. Mitigating the effects of harmful social determinants is critical for optimal health of this population. Future work is needed to clarify the role of the ED in the surveillance, screening, and intervention of SDoH for this vulnerable patient group.

Homelessness among Indigenous peoples is an important issue in Canada and internationally. Research was conducted in seven metropolitan areas in the four western provinces of Canada to explore current services with the aim of developing a best practices framework to end homelessness for Aboriginal peoples. Sequential mixed methods were used. Key results found agreement that Aboriginal peoples were overrepresented among the homeless and policy determined the approach to and comprehensiveness of services provided. Funding, lack of time, and lack of resources were highlighted as issues. Gaps identified included a lack of partnership, cross-cultural collaboration, cultural safety, and evaluation and research in service provision. Best practices included ensuring cultural safety, fostering partnerships among agencies, implementing Aboriginal governance, ensuring adequate and sustainable funding, equitable employment of Aboriginal staff, incorporating cultural reconnection, and undertaking research and evaluation to guide policy and practices related to homelessness among Aboriginal peoples.

This article explores the structural determinants of Aboriginal youth homelessness in Toronto, Canada. It includes a literature review and provides some of the findings of a recent research project, which implemented an Aboriginal research methodology, with homeless youth in Toronto. These findings point to a strong link between Aboriginal children growing up with involvement in child welfare and becoming homeless as youth. Suggestions for positive change at the policy level are offered in order to prevent the next generation of Aboriginal children growing up to become homeless youth.

The following historiographical analysis briefly outlines the legacy of Indigenous encampments on the Aboriginal Burial Ground in Rossdale Flats in what is colonially known as Edmonton, AB. Specifically, the following analysis documents the grassroots activism of prayer camp pekiwewin in the final months of 2020. Beginning with a brief overview of the encampment site, this research analysis critiques the ongoing colonialism in urban settler cities which regulate how peoples can operate in relation with the land. The methodologies of the state explored herein pertain to the function of public history, ongoing settler colonial oppression, and the criminalization of homelessness as factors that reproduce inequalities. Keywords: settler colonial, public history, homelessness, Indigenous Peoples, urban cities

A multi-disciplinary team explored the journey they took with female inmates to develop a collaborative research strategy among the university, community organizations, and the correctional facility. The team consisted of academic researchers, inner city physicians, social workers, nurses, Aboriginal art therapists, Aboriginal cultural consultants, correctional healthcare administrators, and inner city chaplains from non-profit organizations. This paper describes how the team reflected on the journey to determine the impact of incarceration and/or homelessness on the health of female inmates, as they (the team) patiently waited for ethics boards and administrative approval; negotiated correctional center lockdowns; and became exhausted from trying to reconnect with women who were released from incarceration. The researchers discovered what kept them passionate about helping female inmates work through multiple hurdles that included housing, child custody, employment, probation appointments, and counseling. These administrative and operational challenges strengthened the team’s resolve to support these vulnerable women.

The purpose of this policy review was to critically examine the Aboriginal Justice Strategy (AJS), which is a federal governmental program founded in 1991 to combat the problem of high rates of criminality in the Aboriginal population in Canada. Considering the high recidivism rates of AJS program participants, we suggest the AJS is not as effective in achieving its objectives. Looking at this strategy through a lens of structural social work, we found that it is inattentive to the impact of structural factors on criminality in some Aboriginal communities, groups, and individuals. Also, the strategy does not take into consideration gender-based factors that influence the interaction of Aboriginal men and women with the criminal justice system, which is profoundly different. Moreover, the strategy is inattentive to the five pathways that often bring Aboriginal women into contact with the criminal justice system - poverty, violence, sex trade, mental illness, and addiction. These pathways are inherently linked to the primary structures of colonialism, racism, and sexism, which continue to oppress Aboriginal women in Canada. For these reasons, we proposed that gender-based analysis would be useful for an improved understanding of these pathways. We also provided several recommendations for lowering the rates of crime committed by Aboriginal women, which include, state supported economic investments for community development, job creation, education attainment, and employability skills as well as policies against homelessness and supports for trauma, addictions, and mental health issues.

Abstract Aim: This article documents the impact of a Nurse Practitioner-led primary health service for disadvantaged children living in housing instability or homelessness. It identifies that First Nations children miss out on essential primary care, particularly immunisation, but have less severe health conditions than non-First Nations children living in housing insecurity. Background: Health services for homeless populations focus on the 11% of rough sleepers, little is done for the 22% of children in Australia living in housing instability; many of whom are from First Nations families. Little is known of the health status of these children or their connections to appropriate primary health care. Methods: This research implemented an innovative model of extended health care delivery, embedding a Nurse Practitioner in a homeless service to work with families providing health assessments and referrals, using clinically validated assessment tools. This article reports on proof of concept findings on the service that measured immunisation rates, developmental, medical, dental and mental health needs of children, particularly First Nations children, using a three-point severity level scale with Level 3 being the most severe and in need of immediate referral to a specialist medical service. Findings: Forty-three children were referred by the service to the Nurse Practitioner over a 6-month period, with nine identifying as First Nations children. Differences in severity levels between First Nations/non-First Nations children were Level 1, First Nations/non-First Nations 0/15%; Level 2, 10/17%; and Level 3, 45/29%. Forty-five percent of First Nations children had no health problems, as compared to 29% on non-First Nations children. Immunisation rates were low for both cohorts. No First Nations child was immunised and only 9% of the non-First Nations children. While numbers for both cohorts are too low for valid statistical analysis, the lower levels of severity for First Nations children suggest stronger extended family support and the positive impact of cultural norms of reciprocity.

IntroductionWhilst there is limited published information on the benefits of engaging the public in linked data research, our presentation will add to international knowledge about the benefits of involving the community in a priority setting exercise for future research areas in a new linkage project. Objectives and ApproachWe’ll co-present with a consumer about our experiences of the community having a role in linked data research over the past 20-years. Community members have provided input into: research projects; feedback to government agencies; submissions to federal/state governments; issues about access to data; and priorities for research. In 2017 community members prioritised broad research areas for a new project involving cross-agency linkage, investigating pathways to wellbeing and social-outcomes across the life-course to improve outcomes and identify cost-efficiencies. Community members completed a survey to rank the broad themes and then attended a workshop to discuss the themes and identify gaps or new ideas. ResultsFollowing the workshop all suggestions made on the day were themed into broad areas and then circulated to the attendees to rank in order of importance. These community activities identified the top ten priorities, as shown below, as being the most important areas for future research: Aboriginal Health and Wellbeing Children in Care Disability Education Families Health Homelessness Refugees Alcohol and other drugs Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders The community input has provided valuable insights about ‘what is important to them’ and informed the development of the proposal for this new cross-agency project. It also had a positive impact on the community member’s perception of, and support for, this potential new research. Conclusion/ImplicationsThe 20 years’ experience gained by the WA Consumer and Community Health Research Network in Western Australia has led to the development of a range of methods for involving the community in linked data research. These methods enable us to clearly demonstrate benefits and value of consumer and community involvement.

Introduction I think the Privacy Act is a huge edifice to protect the minority of things that could go wrong. I’ve got a good example for you, I’m just trying to think … yeah the worst one I’ve ever seen was the Balga Youth Program where we took these students on a reward excursion all the way to Fremantle and suddenly this very alienated kid started to jump under a bus, a moving bus so the kid had to be restrained. The cops from Fremantle arrived because all the very good people in Fremantle were alarmed at these grown-ups manhandling a kid and what had happened is that DCD [Department of Community Development] had dropped him into the program but hadn’t told us that this kid had suicide tendencies. No, it’s just chronically bad. And there were caseworkers involved and … there is some information that we have to have that doesn’t get handed down. Rather than a blanket rule that everything’s confidential coming from them to us, and that was a real live situation, and you imagine how we’re trying to handle it, we had taxis going from Balga to Fremantle to get staff involved and we only had to know what to watch out for and we probably could have … well what you would have done is not gone on the excursion I suppose (School Principal, quoted in Balnaves and Luca 49). These comments are from a school principal in Perth, Western Australia in a school that is concerned with “at-risk” students, and in a context where the Commonwealth Privacy Act 1988 has imposed limitations on their work. Under this Act it is illegal to pass health, personal or sensitive information concerning an individual on to other people. In the story cited above the Department of Community Development personnel were apparently protecting the student’s “negative right”, that is, “freedom from” interference by others. On the other hand, the principal’s assertion that such information should be shared is potentially a “positive right” because it could cause something to be done in that person’s or society’s interests. Balnaves and Luca noted that positive and negative rights have complex philosophical underpinnings, and they inform much of how we operate in everyday life and of the dilemmas that arise (49). For example, a ban on euthanasia or the “assisted suicide” of a terminally ill person can be a “positive right” because it is considered to be in the best interests of society in general. However, physicians who tacitly approve a patient’s right to end their lives with a lethal dose by legally prescribed dose of medication could be perceived as protecting the patient’s “negative right” as a “freedom from” interference by others. While acknowledging the merits of collaboration between people who are working to improve the wellbeing of students “at-risk”, this paper examines some of the barriers to collaboration. Based on both primary and secondary sources, and particularly on oral testimonies, the paper highlights the tension between privacy as a negative right and collaborative helping as a positive right. It also points to other difficulties and dilemmas within and between the institutions engaged in this joint undertaking. The authors acknowledge Michel Foucault’s contention that discourse is power. The discourse on privacy and the sharing of information in modern societies suggests that privacy is a negative right that gives freedom from bureaucratic interference and protects the individual. However, arguably, collaboration between agencies that are working to support individuals “at-risk” requires a measured relaxation of the requirements of this negative right. Children and young people “at-risk” are a case in point. Towards Collaboration From a series of interviews conducted in 2004, the school authorities at Balga Senior High School and Midvale Primary School, people working for the Western Australian departments of Community Development, Justice, and Education and Training in Western Australia, and academics at the Edith Cowan and Curtin universities, who are working to improve the wellbeing of students “at-risk” as part of an Australian Research Council (ARC) project called Smart Communities, have identified students “at-risk” as individuals who have behavioural problems and little motivation, who are alienated and possibly violent or angry, who under-perform in the classroom and have begun to truant. They noted also that students “at-risk” often suffer from poor health, lack of food and medication, are victims of unwanted pregnancies, and are engaged in antisocial and illegal behaviour such as stealing cars and substance abuse. These students are also often subject to domestic violence (parents on drugs or alcohol), family separation, and homelessness. Some are depressed or suicidal. Sometimes cultural factors contribute to students being regarded as “at-risk”. For example, a social worker in the Smart Communities project stated: Cultural factors sometimes come into that as well … like with some Muslim families … they can flog their daughter or their son, usually the daughter … so cultural factors can create a risk. Research elsewhere has revealed that those children between the ages of 11-17 who have been subjected to bullying at school or physical or sexual abuse at home and who have threatened and/or harmed another person or suicidal are “high-risk” youths (Farmer 4). In an attempt to bring about a positive change in these alienated or “at-risk” adolescents, Balga Senior High School has developed several programs such as the Youth Parents Program, Swan Nyunger Sports Education program, Intensive English Centre, and lower secondary mainstream program. The Midvale Primary School has provided services such as counsellors, Aboriginal child protection workers, and Aboriginal police liaison officers for these “at-risk” students. On the other hand, the Department of Community Development (DCD) has provided services to parents and caregivers for children up to 18 years. Academics from Edith Cowan and Curtin universities are engaged in gathering the life stories of these “at-risk” students. One aspect of this research entails the students writing their life stories in a secured web portal that the universities have developed. The researchers believe that by engaging the students in these self-exploration activities, they (the students) would develop a more hopeful outlook on life. Though all agencies and educational institutions involved in this collaborative project are working for the well-being of the children “at-risk”, the Privacy Act forbids the authorities from sharing information about them. A school psychologist expressed concern over the Privacy Act: When the Juvenile Justice Department want to reintroduce a student into a school, we can’t find out anything about this student so we can’t do any preplanning. They want to give the student a fresh start, so there’s always that tension … eventually everyone overcomes [this] because you realise that the student has to come to the school and has to be engaged. Of course, the manner and consequences of a student’s engagement in school cannot be predicted. In the scenario described above students may have been given a fair chance to reform themselves, which is their positive right but if they turn out to be at “high risk” it would appear that the Juvenile Department protected the negative right of the students by supporting “freedom from” interference by others. Likewise, a school health nurse in the project considered confidentiality or the Privacy Act an important factor in the security of the student “at-risk”: I was trying to think about this kid who’s one of the children who has been sexually abused, who’s a client of DCD, and I guess if police got involved there and wanted to know details and DCD didn’t want to give that information out then I’d guess I’d say to the police “Well no, you’ll have to talk to the parents about getting further information.” I guess that way, recognising these students are minor and that they are very vulnerable, their information … where it’s going, where is it leading? Who wants to know? Where will it be stored? What will be the outcomes in the future for this kid? As a 14 year old, if they’re reckless and get into things, you know, do they get a black record against them by the time they’re 19? What will that information be used for if it’s disclosed? So I guess I become an advocate for the student in that way? Thus the nurse considers a sexually abused child should not be identified. It is a positive right in the interest of the person. Once again, though, if the student turns out to be at “high risk” or suicidal, then it would appear that the nurse was protecting the youth’s negative right—“freedom from” interference by others. Since collaboration is a positive right and aims at the students’ welfare, the workable solution to prevent the students from suicide would be to develop inter-agency trust and to share vital information about “high-risk” students. Dilemmas of Collaboration Some recent cases of the deaths of young non-Caucasian girls in Western countries, either because of the implications of the Privacy Act or due to a lack of efficient and effective communication and coordination amongst agencies, have raised debates on effective child protection. For example, the British Laming report (2003) found that Victoria Climbié, a young African girl, was sent by her parents to her aunt in Britain in order to obtain a good education and was murdered by her aunt and aunt’s boyfriend. However, the risk that she could be harmed was widely known. The girl’s problems were known to 6 local authorities, 3 housing authorities, 4 social services, 2 child protection teams, and the police, the local church, and the hospital, but not to the education authorities. According to the Laming Report, her death could have been prevented if there had been inter-agency sharing of information and appropriate evaluation (Balnaves and Luca 49). The agencies had supported the negative rights of the young girl’s “freedom from” interference by others, but at the cost of her life. Perhaps Victoria’s racial background may have contributed to the concealment of information and added to her disadvantaged position. Similarly, in Western Australia, the Gordon Inquiry into the death of Susan Taylor, a 15 year old girl Aboriginal girl at the Swan Nyungah Community, found that in her short life this girl had encountered sexual violation, violence, and the ravages of alcohol and substance abuse. The Gordon Inquiry reported: Although up to thirteen different agencies were involved in providing services to Susan Taylor and her family, the D[epartment] of C[ommunity] D[evelopment] stated they were unaware of “all the services being provided by each agency” and there was a lack of clarity as to a “lead coordinating agency” (Gordon et al. quoted in Scott 45). In this case too, multiple factors—domestic, racial, and the Privacy Act—may have led to Susan Taylor’s tragic end. In the United Kingdom, Harry Ferguson noted that when a child is reported to be “at-risk” from domestic incidents, they can suffer further harm because of their family’s concealment (204). Ferguson’s study showed that in 11 per cent of the 319 case sample, children were known to be re-harmed within a year of initial referral. Sometimes, the parents apply a veil of secrecy around themselves and their children by resisting or avoiding services. In such cases the collaborative efforts of the agencies and education may be thwarted. Lack of cultural education among teachers, youth workers, and agencies could also put the “at-risk” cultural minorities into a high risk category. For example, an “at-risk” Muslim student may not be willing to share personal experiences with the school or agencies because of religious sensitivities. This happened in the UK when Khadji Rouf was abused by her father, a Bangladeshi. Rouf’s mother, a white woman, and her female cousin from Bangladesh, both supported Rouf when she finally disclosed that she had been sexually abused for over eight years. After group therapy, Rouf stated that she was able to accept her identity and to call herself proudly “mixed race”, whereas she rejected the Asian part of herself because it represented her father. Other Asian girls and young women in this study reported that they could not disclose their abuse to white teachers or social workers because of the feeling that they would be “letting down their race or their Muslim culture” (Rouf 113). The marginalisation of many Muslim Australians both in the job market and in society is long standing. For example, in 1996 and again in 2001 the Muslim unemployment rate was three times higher than the national total (Australian Bureau of Statistics). But since the 9/11 tragedy and Bali bombings visible Muslims, such as women wearing hijabs (headscarves), have sometimes been verbally and physically abused and called ‘terrorists’ by some members of the wider community (Dreher 13). The Howard government’s new anti-terrorism legislation and the surveillance hotline ‘Be alert not alarmed’ has further marginalised some Muslims. Some politicians have also linked Muslim asylum seekers with terrorists (Kabir 303), which inevitably has led Muslim “at-risk” refugee students to withdraw from school support such as counselling. Under these circumstances, Muslim “at-risk” students and their parents may prefer to maintain a low profile rather than engage with agencies. In this case, arguably, federal government politics have exacerbated the barriers to collaboration. It appears that unfamiliarity with Muslim culture is not confined to mainstream Australians. For example, an Aboriginal liaison police officer engaged in the Smart Communities project in Western Australia had this to say about Muslim youths “at-risk”: Different laws and stuff from different countries and they’re coming in and sort of thinking that they can bring their own laws and religions and stuff … and when I say religions there’s laws within their religions as well that they don’t seem to understand that with Australia and our laws. Such generalised misperceptions of Muslim youths “at-risk” would further alienate them, thus causing a major hindrance to collaboration. The “at-risk” factors associated with Aboriginal youths have historical connections. Research findings have revealed that indigenous youths aged between 10-16 years constitute a vast majority in all Australian States’ juvenile detention centres. This over-representation is widely recognised as associated with the nature of European colonisation, and is inter-related with poverty, marginalisation and racial discrimination (Watson et al. 404). Like the Muslims, their unemployment rate was three times higher than the national total in 2001 (ABS). However, in 1998 it was estimated that suicide rates among Indigenous peoples were at least 40 per cent higher than national average (National Advisory Council for Youth Suicide Prevention, quoted in Elliot-Farrelly 2). Although the wider community’s unemployment rate is much lower than the Aboriginals and the Muslims, the “at-risk” factors of mainstream Australian youths are often associated with dysfunctional families, high conflict, low-cohesive families, high levels of harsh parental discipline, high levels of victimisation by peers, and high behavioural inhibition (Watson et al. 404). The Macquarie Fields riots in 2005 revealed the existence of “White” underclass and “at-risk” people in Sydney. Macquarie Fields’ unemployment rate was more than twice the national average. Children growing up in this suburb are at greater risk of being involved in crime (The Age). Thus small pockets of mainstream underclass youngsters also require collaborative attention. In Western Australia people working on the Smart Communities project identified that lack of resources can be a hindrance to collaboration for all sectors. As one social worker commented: “government agencies are hierarchical systems and lack resources”. They went on to say that in their department they can not give “at-risk” youngsters financial assistance in times of crisis: We had a petty cash box which has got about 40 bucks in it and sometimes in an emergency we might give a customer a couple of dollars but that’s all we can do, we can’t give them any larger amount. We have bus/metro rail passes, that’s the only thing that we’ve actually got. A youth worker in Smart Communities commented that a lot of uncertainty is involved with young people “at-risk”. They said that there are only a few paid workers in their field who are supported and assisted by “a pool of volunteers”. Because the latter give their time voluntarily they are under no obligation to be constant in their attendance, so the number of available helpers can easily fluctuate. Another youth worker identified a particularly important barrier to collaboration: because of workers’ relatively low remuneration and high levels of work stress, the turnover rates are high. The consequence of this is as follows: The other barrier from my point is that you’re talking to somebody about a student “at-risk”, and within 14 months or 18 months a new person comes in [to that position] then you’ve got to start again. This way you miss a lot of information [which could be beneficial for the youth]. Conclusion The Privacy Act creates a dilemma in that it can be either beneficial or counter-productive for a student’s security. To be blunt, a youth who has suicided might have had their privacy protected, but not their life. Lack of funding can also be a constraint on collaboration by undermining stability and autonomy in the workforce, and blocking inter-agency initiatives. Lack of awareness about cultural differences can also affect unity of action. The deepening inequality between the “haves” and “have-nots” in the Australian society, and the Howard government’s harshness on national security issues, can also pose barriers to collaboration on youth issues. Despite these exigencies and dilemmas, it would seem that collaboration is “the only game” when it comes to helping students “at-risk”. To enhance this collaboration, there needs to be a sensible modification of legal restrictions to information sharing, an increase in government funding and support for inter-agency cooperation and informal information sharing, and an increased awareness about the cultural needs of minority groups and knowledge of the mainstream underclass. Acknowledgments The research is part of a major Australian Research Council (ARC) funded project, Smart Communities. The authors very gratefully acknowledge the contribution of the interviewees, and thank *Donald E. Scott for conducting the interviews. References Australian Bureau of Statistics. 1996 and 2001. Balnaves, Mark, and Joe Luca. “The Impact of Digital Persona on the Future of Learning: A Case Study on Digital Repositories and the Sharing of Information about Children At-Risk in Western Australia”, paper presented at Ascilite, Brisbane (2005): 49-56. 10 April 2006. http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/brisbane05/blogs/proceedings/ 06_Balnaves.pdf>. Dreher, Tanya. ‘Targeted’: Experiences of Racism in NSW after September 11, 2001. Sydney: University of Technology, 2005. Elliot-Farrelly, Terri. “Australian Aboriginal Suicide: The Need for an Aboriginal Suicidology”? Australian e-Journal for the Advancement of Mental Health, 3.3 (2004): 1-8. 15 April 2006 http://www.auseinet.com/journal/vol3iss3/elliottfarrelly.pdf>. Farmer, James. A. High-Risk Teenagers: Real Cases and Interception Strategies with Resistant Adolescents. Springfield, Ill.: C.C. Thomas, 1990. Ferguson, Harry. Protecting Children in Time: Child Abuse, Child Protection and the Consequences of Modernity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Kabir, Nahid. Muslims in Australia: Immigration, Race Relations and Cultural History. London: Kegan Paul, 2005. Rouf, Khadji. “Myself in Echoes. My Voice in Song.” Ed. A. Bannister, et al. Listening to Children. London: Longman, 1990. Scott E. Donald. “Exploring Communication Patterns within and across a School and Associated Agencies to Increase the Effectiveness of Service to At-Risk Individuals.” MS Thesis, Curtin University of Technology, August 2005. The Age. “Investing in People Means Investing in the Future.” The Age 5 March, 2005. 15 April 2006 http://www.theage.com.au>. Watson, Malcolm, et al. “Pathways to Aggression in Children and Adolescents.” Harvard Educational Review, 74.4 (Winter 2004): 404-428. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Kabir, Nahid, and Mark Balnaves. "Students “at Risk”: Dilemmas of Collaboration." M/C Journal 9.2 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/04-kabirbalnaves.php>. APA Style Kabir, N., and M. Balnaves. (May 2006) "Students “at Risk”: Dilemmas of Collaboration," M/C Journal, 9(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/04-kabirbalnaves.php>.

In this paper we explore the rise of anti-gambling apps in the context of the massive expansion of gambling in new spheres of life (online and offline) and an acceleration in strategies of anticipatory and individualised management of harm caused by gambling. These apps, and the techniques and forms of labour they demand, are examples of and a mechanism through which a mode of governance premised on ‘self-care’ and ‘self-control’ is articulated and put into practice. To support this argument, we explore two government initiatives in the Australian context. Quit Pokies, a mobile app project between the Moreland City Council, North East Primary Care Partnership and the Victorian Local Governance Association, is an example of an emerging service paradigm of ‘self-care’ that uses online and mobile platforms with geo-location to deliver real time health and support interventions. A similar mobile app, Gambling Terminator, was launched by the NSW government in late 2012. Both apps work on the premise that interrupting a gaming session through a trigger, described by Quit Pokies’ creator as a “tap on the shoulder” provides gamblers the opportunity to take a reflexive stance and cut short their gambling practice in the course of play. We critically examine these apps as self-disciplining techniques of contemporary neo-liberalism directed towards anticipating and reducing the personal harm and social risk associated with gambling. We analyse the material and discursive elements, and new forms of user labour, through which this consumable media is framed and assembled. We argue that understanding the role of these apps, and mobile media more generally, in generating new techniques and technologies of the self, is important for identifying emerging modes of governance and their implications at a time when gambling is going through an immense period of cultural normalisation in online and offline environments. The Australian context is particularly germane for the way gambling permeates everyday spaces of sociality and leisure, and the potential of gambling interventions to interrupt and re-configure these spaces and institute a new kind of subject-state relation. Gambling in Australia Though a global phenomenon, the growth and expansion of gambling manifests distinctly in Australia because of its long cultural and historical attachment to games of chance. Australians are among the biggest betters and losers in the world (Ziolkowski), mainly on Electronic Gaming Machines (EGM) or pokies. As of 2013, according to The World Count of Gaming Machine (Ziolkowski), there were 198,150 EGMs in the country, of which 197,274 were slot machines, with the rest being electronic table games of roulette, blackjack and poker. There are 118 persons per machine in Australia. New South Wales is the jurisdiction with most EGMs (95,799), followed by Queensland (46,680) and Victoria (28,758) (Ziolkowski). Gambling is significant in Australian cultural history and average Australian households spend at least some money on different forms of gambling, from pokies to scratch cards, every year (Worthington et al.). In 1985, long-time gambling researcher Geoffrey Caldwell stated thatAustralians seem to take a pride in the belief that we are a nation of gamblers. Thus we do not appear to be ashamed of our gambling instincts, habits and practices. Gambling is regarded by most Australians as a normal, everyday practice in contrast to the view that gambling is a sinful activity which weakens the moral fibre of the individual and the community. (Caldwell 18) The omnipresence of gambling opportunities in most Australian states has been further facilitated by the availability of online and mobile gambling and gambling-like spaces. Social casino apps, for instance, are widely popular in Australia. The slots social casino app Slotomania was the most downloaded product in the iTunes store in 2012 (Metherell). In response to the high rate of different forms of gambling in Australia, a range of disparate interest groups have identified the expansion of gambling as a concerning trend. Health researchers have pointed out that online gamblers have a higher risk of experiencing problems with gambling (at 30%) compared to 15% in offline bettors (Hastings). The incidence of gambling problems is also disproportionately high in specific vulnerable demographics, including university students (Cervini), young adults prone to substance abuse problems (Hayatbakhsh et al.), migrants (Tanasornnarong et al.; Scull & Woolcock; Ohtsuka & Ohtsuka), pensioners (Hing & Breen), female players (Lee), Aboriginal communities (Young et al.; McMillen & Donnelly) and individuals experiencing homelessness (Holsworth et al.). While there is general recognition of the personal and public health impacts of gambling in Australia, there is a contradiction in the approach to gambling at a governance level. On one hand, its expansion is promoted and even encouraged by the federal and state governments, as gambling is an enormous source of revenue, as evidenced, for example, by the construction of the new Crown casino in Barangaroo in Sydney (Markham & Young). Campaigns trying to limit the use of poker machines, which are associated with concerns over problem gambling and addiction, are deemed by the gambling lobby as un-Australian. Paradoxically, efforts to restrict gambling or control gambling winnings have also been described as un-Australian, such as in the Australian Taxation Office’s campaign against MONA’s founder, David Walsh, whose immense art collection was acquired with the funds from a gambling scheme (Global Mail). On the other hand, people experiencing problems with gambling are often categorised as addicts and the ultimate blame (and responsibility) is attributed to the individual. In Australia, attitudes towards people who are arguably addicted to gambling are different than those towards individuals afflicted by alcohol or drug abuse (Jean). While “Australians tend to be sympathetic towards people with alcohol and other drug addictions who seek help,” unless it is seen as one of the more socially acceptable forms of occasional, controlled gambling (such as sports betting, gambling on the Melbourne Cup or celebrating ANZAC Day with Two-Up), gambling is framed as an individual “problem” and “moral failing” (Jean). The expansion of gambling is the backdrop to another development in health care and public health discourse, which have for some time now been devoted to the ideal of what Lupton has called the “digitally engaged patient” (Lupton). Technologies are central to the delivery of this model of health service provision that puts the patient at the centre of, and responsible for, their own health and medical care. Lupton has pointed out how this discourse, while appearing new, is in fact the latest version of the 1970s emphasis on the ‘patient as consumer’, an idea given an extra injection by the massive development and availability of digital and interactive web-based and mobile platforms, many of these directed towards the provision of health and health-related information and services. What this means for patients is that, rather than relying solely on professional medical expertise and care, the patient is encouraged to take on some of this medical/health work to conduct practices of ‘self-care’ (Lupton). The Discourse of ‘Self-Management’ and ‘Self-Care’ The model of ‘self-care’ and ‘self-management’ by ‘empowering’ digital technology has now become a dominant discourse within health and medicine, and is increasingly deployed across a range of related sectors such as welfare services. In recent research conducted on homelessness and mobile media, for example, government department staff involved in the reform of welfare services referred to ‘self-management’ as the new service paradigm that underpins their digital reform strategy. Echoing ideas and language similar to the “digitally engaged patient”, customers of Centrelink, Medicare and other ‘human services’ are being encouraged (through planned strategic initiatives aimed at shifting targeted customer groups online) to transact with government services digitally and manage their own personal profiles and health information. One departmental staff member described this in terms of an “opportunity cost”, the savings in time otherwise spent standing in long queues in service centres (Humphry). Rather than view these examples as isolated incidents taking place within or across sectors or disciplines, these are better understood as features of an emerging ‘discursive formation’ , a term Foucault used to describe the way in which particular institutions and/or the state establish a regime of truth, or an accepted social reality and which gives definition to a new historical episteme and subject: in this case that of the self-disciplined and “digitally engaged medical/health patient”. As Foucault explained, once this subject has become fully integrated into and across the social field, it is no longer easy to excavate, since it lies below the surface of articulation and is held together through everyday actions, habits and institutional routines and techniques that appear to be universal, necessary and/normal. The way in which this citizen subject becomes a universal model and norm, however, is not a straightforward or linear story and since we are in the midst of its rise, is not a story with a foretold conclusion. Nevertheless, across a range of different fields of governance: medicine; health and welfare, we can see signs of this emerging figure of the self-caring “digitally engaged patient” constituted from a range of different techniques and practices of self-governance. In Australia, this figure is at the centre of a concerted strategy of service digitisation involving a number of cross sector initiatives such as Australia’s National EHealth Strategy (2008), the National Digital Economy Strategy (2011) and the Australian Public Service Mobile Roadmap (2013). This figure of the self-caring “digitally engaged” patient, aligns well and is entirely compatible with neo-liberal formulations of the individual and the reduced role of the state as a provider of welfare and care. Berry refers to Foucault’s definition of neoliberalism as outlined in his lectures to the College de France as a “particular form of post-welfare state politics in which the state essentially outsources the responsibility of the ‘well-being' of the population” (65). In the case of gambling, the neoliberal defined state enables the wedding of two seemingly contradictory stances: promoting gambling as a major source of revenue and capitalisation on the one hand, and identifying and treating gambling addiction as an individual pursuit and potential risk on the other. Risk avoidance strategies are focused on particular groups of people who are targeted for self-treatment to avoid the harm of gambling addiction, which is similarly framed as individual rather than socially and systematically produced. What unites and makes possible this alignment of neoliberalism and the new “digitally engaged subject/patient” is first and foremost, the construction of a subject in a chronic state of ill health. This figure is positioned as terminal from the start. They are ‘sick’, a ‘patient’, an ‘addict’: in need of immediate and continuous treatment. Secondly, this neoliberal patient/addict is enabled (we could even go so far as to say ‘empowered’) by digital technology, especially smartphones and the apps available through these devices in the form of a myriad of applications for intervening and treating ones afflictions. These apps range fromself-tracking programs such as mood regulators through to social media interventions. Anti-Pokie Apps and the Neoliberal Gambler We now turn to two examples which illustrate this alignment between neoliberalism and the new “digitally engaged subject/patient” in relation to gambling. Anti-gambling apps function to both replace or ‘take the place’ of institutions and individuals actively involved in the treatment of problem gambling and re-engineer this service through the logics of ‘self-care’ and ‘self-management’. Here, we depart somewhat from Foucault’s model of disciplinary power summed up in the institution (with the prison exemplifying this disciplinary logic) and move towards Deleuze’s understanding of power as exerted by the State not through enclosures but through diffuse and rhizomatic information flows and technologies (Deleuze). At the same time, we retain Foucault’s attention to the role and agency of the user in this power-dynamic, identifiable in the technics of self-regulation and in his ideas on governmentality. We now turn to analyse these apps more closely, and explore the way in which these articulate and perform these disciplinary logics. The app Quit Pokies was a joint venture of the North East Primary Care Partnership, the Victorian Local Governance Association and the Moreland City Council, launched in early 2014. The idea of the rational, self-reflexive and agentic user is evident in the description of the app by app developer Susan Rennie who described it this way: What they need is for someone to tap them on the shoulder and tell them to get out of there… I thought the phone could be that tap on the shoulder. The “tap on the shoulder” feature uses geolocation and works by emitting a sound alert when the user enters a gaming venue. It also provides information about each user’s losses at that venue. This “tap on the shoulder” is both an alert and a reprimand from past gambling sessions. Through the Responsible Gambling Fund, the NSW government also launched an anti-pokie app in 2013, Gambling Terminator, including a similar feature. The app runs on Apple and Android smartphone platforms, and when a person is inside a gambling venue in New South Wales it: sends reminder messages that interrupt gaming-machine play and gives you a chance to re-think your choices. It also provides instant access to live phone and online counselling services which operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. (Google Play Store) Yet an approach that tries to prevent harm by anticipating the harm that will come from gambling at the point of entering a venue, also eliminates the chance of potential negotiations and encounters a user might have during a visit to the pub and how this experience will unfold. It reduces the “tap on the shoulder”, which may involve a far wider set of interactions and affects, to a software operation and it frames the pub or the club (which under some conditions functions as hubs for socialization and community building) as dangerous places that should be avoided. This has the potential to lead to further stigmatisation of gamblers, their isolation and their exclusion from everyday spaces. Moreland Mayor, Councillor Tapinos captures the implicit framing of self-care as a private act in his explanation of the app as a method for problem gamblers to avoid being stigmatised by, for example, publicly attending group meetings. Yet, curiously, the app has the potential to create a new kind of public stigmatisation through potentially drawing other peoples’ attention to users’ gambling play (as the alarm is triggered) generating embarrassment and humiliation at being “caught out” in an act framed as aberrant and literally, “alarming”. Both Quit Pokies and Gambling Terminator require their users to perform ‘acts’ of physical and affective labour aimed at behaviour change and developing the skills of self-control. After downloading Quit Pokies on the iPhone and launching the app, the user is presented an initial request: “Before you set up this app. please write a list of the pokies venues that you regularly use because the app will ask you to identify these venues so it can send you alerts if you spend time in these locations. It will also use your set up location to identify other venues you might use so we recommend that you set up the App in the location where you spend most time. Congratulation on choosing Quit Pokies.”Self-performed processes include installation, setting up, updating the app software, programming in gambling venues to be detected by the smartphone’s inbuilt GPS, monitoring and responding to the program’s alerts and engaging in alternate “legitimate” forms of leisure such as going to the movies or the library, having coffee with a friend or browsing Facebook. These self-performed labours can be understood as ‘technologies of the self’, a term used by Foucault to describe the way in which social members are obliged to regulate and police their ‘selves’ through a range of different techniques. While Foucault traces the origins of ‘technologies of the self’ to the Greco-Roman texts with their emphasis on “care of oneself” as one of the duties of citizenry, he notes the shift to “self-knowledge” under Christianity around the 8th century, where it became bound up in ideals of self-renunciation and truth. Quit Pokies and Gambling Terminator may signal a recuperation of the ideal of self-care, over confession and disclosure. These apps institute a set of bodily activities and obligations directed to the user’s health and wellbeing, aided through activities of self-examination such as charting your recovery through a Recovery Diary and implementing a number of suggested “Strategies for Change” such as “writing a list” and “learning about ways to manage your money better”. Writing is central to the acts of self-examination. As Jeremy Prangnell, gambling counsellor from Mission Australia for Wollongong and Shellharbour regions explained the app is “like an electronic diary, which is a really common tool for people who are trying to change their behaviour” (Thompson). The labours required by users are also implicated in the functionality and performance of the platform itself suggesting the way in which ‘technologies of the self’ simultaneously function as a form of platform work: user labour that supports and sustains the operation of digital systems and is central to the performance and continuation of digital capitalism in general (Humphry, Demanding Media). In addition to the acts of labour performed on the self and platform, bodies are themselves potentially mobilised (and put into new circuits of consumption and production), as a result of triggers to nudge users away from gambling venues, towards a range of other cultural practices in alternative social spaces considered to be more legitimate.Conclusion Whether or not these technological interventions are effective or successful is yet to be tested. Indeed, the lack of recent activity in the community forums and preponderance of issues reported on installation and use suggests otherwise, pointing to a need for more empirical research into these developments. Regardless, what we’ve tried to identify is the way in which apps such as these embody a new kind of subject-state relation that emphasises self-control of gambling harm and hastens the divestment of institutional and social responsibility at a time when gambling is going through an immense period of expansion in many respects backed by and sanctioned by the state. Patterns of smartphone take up in the mainstream population and the rise of the so called ‘mobile only population’ (ACMA) provide support for this new subject and service paradigm and are often cited as the rationale for digital service reform (APSMR). Media convergence feeds into these dynamics: service delivery becomes the new frontier for the merging of previously separate media distribution systems (Dwyer). Letters, customer service centres, face-to-face meetings and web sites, are combined and in some instances replaced, with online and mobile media platforms, accessible from multiple and mobile devices. These changes are not, however, simply the migration of services to a digital medium with little effective change to the service itself. Health and medical services are re-invented through their technological re-assemblage, bringing into play new meanings, practices and negotiations among the state, industry and neoliberal subjects (in the case of problem gambling apps, a new subjectivity, the ‘neoliberal addict’). These new assemblages are as much about bringing forth a new kind of subject and mode of governance, as they are a solution to problem gambling. 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IntroductionThe walking tour is an enduring feature of cities. Fuelled by a desire to learn more about the hidden and unknown spaces of the city, the walking tour has moved beyond its historical role as tourist attraction to play a key role in the transformation of urban space through gentrification. Conversely, the walking tour has a counter-history as part of a critical urban praxis. This article reflects on historical examples, as well as our own experience of conducting Field Trip, a critical geographical walking tour through an industrial precinct in Marrickville, a suburb of Sydney that is set to undergo rapid change as a result of high-rise residential apartment construction (Gibson et al.). This precinct, known as Carrington Road, is located on the unceded land of the Cadigal and Wangal people of the Eora nation who call the area Bulanaming.Drawing on a long history of philosophical walking, many contemporary writers (Solnit; Gros; Bendiner-Viani) have described walking as a practice that can open different ways of thinking, observing and being in the world. Some have focused on the value of walking to the study of place (Hall; Philips; Heddon), and have underscored its relationship to established research methods, such as sensory ethnography (Springgay and Truman). The work of Michel de Certeau pays particular attention to the relationship between walking and the city. In particular, the concepts of tactics and strategy have been applied in a variety of ways across cultural studies, cultural geography, and urban studies (Morris). In line with de Certeau’s thinking, we view walking as an example of a tactic – a routine and often unconscious practice that can become a form of creative resistance.In this sense, walking can be a way to engage in and design the city by opposing its structures, or strategies. For example, walking in a city such as Sydney that is designed for cars requires choosing alternative paths, redirecting flows of people and traffic, and creating custom shortcuts. Choosing pedestrianism in Sydney can certainly feel like a form of resistance, and we make the argument that Field Trip – and walking tours more generally – can be a way of doing this collectively, firstly by moving in opposite directions, and secondly, at incongruent speeds to those for whom the scale and style of strategic urban development is inevitable. How such tactical walking relates to the design of cities, however, is less clear. Walking is a generally described in the literature as an individual act, while the design of cities is, at its best participatory, and always involving multiple stakeholders. This reveals a tension between the practice of walking as a détournement or appropriation of urban space, and its relationship to existing built form. Field Trip, as an example of collective walking, is one such appropriation of urban space – one designed to lead to more democratic decision making around the planning and design of cities. Given the anti-democratic, “post-political” nature of contemporary “consultation” processes, this is a seemingly huge task (Legacy et al.; Ruming). We make the argument that Field Trip – and walking tours more generally – can be a form of collective resistance to top-down urban planning.By using an open-source wiki in combination with the Internet Archive, Field Trip also seeks to collectively document and make public the local knowledge generated by walking at the frontier of gentrification. We discuss these digital choices as oppositional practice, and consider the idea of tactical media (Lovink and Garcia; Raley) in order to connect knowledge sharing with the practice of walking.This article is structured in four parts. Firstly, we provide a historical introduction to the relationship between walking tours and gentrification of global cities. Secondly, we examine the significance of walking tours in Sydney and then specifically within Marrickville. Thirdly, we discuss the Field Trip project as a citizen-led walking tour and, finally, elaborate on its role as tactical media project and offer some conclusions.The Walking Tour and Gentrification From the outset, people have been walking the city in their own ways and creating their own systems of navigation, often in spite of the plans of officialdom. The rapid expansion of cities following the Industrial Revolution led to the emergence of “imaginative geographies”, where mediated representations of different urban conditions became a stand-in for lived experience (Steinbrink 219). The urban walking tour as mediated political tactic was utilised as far back as Victorian England, for reasons including the celebration of public works like the sewer system (Garrett), and the “othering” of the working class through upper- and middle-class “slum tourism” in London’s East End (Steinbrink 220). The influence of the Situationist theory of dérive has been immense upon those interested in walking the city, and we borrow from the dérive a desire to report on the under-reported spaces of the city, and to articulate alternative voices within the city in this project. It should be noted, however, that as Field Trip was developed for general public participation, and was organised with institutional support, some aspects of the dérive – particularly its disregard for formal structure – were unable to be incorporated into the project. Our responsibility to the participants of Field Trip, moreover, required the imposition of structure and timetable upon the walk. However, our individual and collective preparation for Field Trip, as well as our collective understanding of the area to be examined, has been heavily informed by psychogeographic methods that focus on quotidian and informal urban practices (Crosby and Searle; Iveson et al).In post-war American cities, walking tours were utilised in the service of gentrification. Many tours were organised by real estate agents with the express purpose of selling devalorised inner-city real estate to urban “pioneers” for renovation, including in Boston’s South End (Tissot) and Brooklyn’s Park Slope, among others (Lees et al 25). These tours focused on a symbolic revalorisation of “slum neighbourhoods” through a focus on “high culture”, with architectural and design heritage featuring prominently. At the same time, urban socio-economic and cultural issues – poverty, homelessness, income disparity, displacement – were downplayed or overlooked. These tours contributed to a climate in which property speculation and displacement through gentrification practices were normalised. To this day, “ghetto tours” operate in minority neighbourhoods in Brooklyn, serving as a beachhead for gentrification.Elsewhere in the world, walking tours are often voyeuristic, featuring “locals” guiding well-meaning tourists through the neighbourhoods of some of the world’s most impoverished communities. Examples include the long runningKlong Toei Private Tour, through “Bangkok’s oldest and largest slum”, or the now-ceased Jakarta Hidden Tours, which took tourists to the riverbanks of Jakarta to see the city’s poorest before they were displaced by gentrification.More recently, all over the world activists have engaged in walking tours to provide their own perspective on urban change, attempting to direct the gentrifier’s gaze inward. Whilst the most confrontational of these might be the Yuppie Gazing Tour of Vancouver’s historically marginalised Downtown Eastside, other tours have highlighted the deleterious effects of gentrification in Williamsburg, San Francisco, Oakland, and Surabaya, among others. In smaller towns, walking tours have been utilised to highlight the erasure of marginalised scenes and subcultures, including underground creative spaces, migrant enclaves, alternative and queer spaces. Walking Sydney, Walking Marrickville In many cities, there are now both walking tours that intend to scaffold urban renewal, and those that resist gentrification with alternative narratives. There are also some that unwittingly do both simultaneously. Marrickville is a historically working-class and migrant suburb with sizeable populations of Greek and Vietnamese migrants (Graham and Connell), as well as a strong history of manufacturing (Castles et al.), which has been undergoing gentrification for some time, with the arts playing an often contradictory role in its transformation (Gibson and Homan). More recently, as the suburb experiences rampant, financialised property development driven by global flows of capital, property developers have organised their own self-guided walking tours, deployed to facilitate the familiarisation of potential purchasers of dwellings with local amenities and ‘character’ in precincts where redevelopment is set to occur. Mirvac, Marrickville’s most active developer, has designed its own self-guided walking tour Hit the Marrickville Pavement to “explore what’s on offer” and “chat to locals”: just 7km from the CBD, Marrickville is fast becoming one of Sydney’s most iconic suburbs – a melting pot of cuisines, creative arts and characters founded on a rich multicultural heritage.The perfect introduction, this self-guided walking tour explores Marrickville’s historical architecture at a leisurely pace, finishing up at the pub.So, strap on your walking shoes; you're in for a treat.Other walking tours in the area seek to highlight political, ecological, and architectural dimension of Marrickville. For example, Marrickville Maps: Tropical Imaginaries of Abundance provides a series of plant-led walks in the suburb; The Warren Walk is a tour organised by local Australian Labor Party MP Anthony Albanese highlighting “the influence of early settlers such as the Schwebel family on the area’s history” whilst presenting a “political snapshot” of ALP history in the area. The Australian Ugliness, in contrast, was a walking tour organised by Thomas Lee in 2016 that offered an insight into the relationships between the visual amenity of the streetscape, aesthetic judgments of an ambiguous nature, and the discursive and archival potentialities afforded by camera-equipped smartphones and photo-sharing services like Instagram. Figure 1: Thomas Lee points out canals under the street of Marrickville during The Australian Ugliness, 2016.Sydney is a city adept at erasing its past through poorly designed mega-projects like freeways and office towers, and memorialisation of lost landscapes has tended towards the literary (Berry; Mudie). Resistance to redevelopment, however, has often taken the form of spectacular public intervention, in which public knowledge sharing was a key goal. The Green Bans of the 1970s were partially spurred by redevelopment plans for places like the Rocks and Woolloomooloo (Cook; Iveson), while the remaking of Sydney around the 2000 Olympics led to anti-gentrification actions such as SquatSpace and the Tour of Beauty, an “aesthetic activist” tour of sites in the suburbs of Redfern and Waterloo threatened with “revitalisation.” Figure 2: "Tour of Beauty", Redfern-Waterloo 2016. What marks the Tour of Beauty as significant in this context is the participatory nature of knowledge production: participants in the tours were addressed by representatives of the local community – the Aboriginal Housing Company, the local Indigenous Women’s Centre, REDWatch activist group, architects, designers and more. Each speaker presented their perspective on the rapidly gentrifying suburb, demonstrating how urban space is made an remade through processes of contestation. This differentiation is particularly relevant when considering the basis for Sydney-centric walking tours. Mirvac’s self-guided tour focuses on the easy-to-see historical “high culture” of Marrickville, and encourages participants to “chat to locals” at the pub. It is a highly filtered approach that does not consider broader relations of class, race and gender that constitute Marrickville. A more intense exploration of the social fabric of the city – providing a glimpse of the hidden or unknown spaces – uncovers the layers of social, cultural, and economic history that produce urban space, and fosters a deeper engagement with questions of urban socio-spatial justice.Solnit argues that walking can allow us to encounter “new thoughts and possibilities.” To walk, she writes, is to take a “subversive detour… the scenic route through a half-abandoned landscape of ideas and experiences” (13). In this way, tactical activist walking tours aim to make visible what cannot be seen, in a way that considers the polysemic nature of place, and in doing so, they make visible the hidden relations of power that produce the contemporary city. In contrast, developer-led walking tours are singularly focussed, seeking to attract inflows of capital to neighbourhoods undergoing “renewal.” These tours encourage participants to adopt the position of urban voyeur, whilst activist-led walking tours encourage collaboration and participation in urban struggles to protect and preserve the contested spaces of the city. It is in this context that we sought to devise our own walking tour – Field Trip – to encourage active participation in issues of urban renewal.In organising this walking tour, however, we acknowledge our own entanglements within processes of gentrification. As designers, musicians, writers, academics, researchers, venue managers, artists, and activists, in organising Field Trip, we could easily be identified as “creatives”, implicated in Marrickville’s ongoing transformation. All of us have ongoing and deep-rooted connections to various Sydney subcultures – the same subcultures so routinely splashed across developer advertising material. This project was borne out of Frontyard – a community not-just-art space, and has been supported by the local Inner West Council. As such, Field Trip cannot be divorced from the highly contentious processes of redevelopment and gentrification that are always simmering in the background of discussions about Marrickville. We hope, however, that in this project we have started to highlight alternative voices in those redevelopment processes – and that this may contribute towards a “method of equality” for an ongoing democratisation of those processes (Davidson and Iveson).Field Trip: Urban Geographical Enquiry as Activism Given this context, Field Trip was designed as a public knowledge project that would connect local residents, workers, researchers, and decision-makers to share their experiences living and working in various parts of Sydney that are undergoing rapid change. The site of our project – Carrington Road, Marrickville in Sydney’s inner-west – has been earmarked for major redevelopment in coming years and is quickly becoming a flashpoint for the debates that permeate throughout the whole of Sydney: housing affordability, employment accessibility, gentrification and displacement. To date, public engagement and consultation regarding proposed development at Carrington Road has been limited. A major landholder in the area has engaged a consultancy firm to establish a community reference group (CRG) the help guide the project. The CRG arose after public outcry at an original $1.3 billion proposal to build 2,616 units in twenty towers of up to 105m in height (up to thirty-five storeys) in a predominantly low-rise residential suburb. Save Marrickville, a community group created in response to the proposal, has representatives on this reference group, and has endeavoured to make this process public. Ruming (181) has described these forms of consultation as “post-political,” stating thatin a universe of consensual decision-making among diverse interests, spaces for democratic contest and antagonistic politics are downplayed and technocratic policy development is deployed to support market and development outcomes.Given the notable deficit of spaces for democratic contest, Field Trip was devised as a way to reframe the debate outside of State- and developer-led consultation regimes that guide participants towards accepting the supposed inevitability of redevelopment. We invited a number of people affected by the proposed plans to speak during the walking tour at a location of their choosing, to discuss the work they do, the effect that redevelopment would have on their work, and their hopes and plans for the future. The walking tour was advertised publicly and the talks were recorded, edited and released as freely available podcasts. The proposed redevelopment of Carrington Road provided us with a unique opportunity to develop and operate our own walking tour. The linear street created an obvious “circuit” to the tour – up one side of the road, and down the other. We selected speakers based on pre-existing relationships, some formed during prior rounds of research (Gibson et al.). Speakers included a local Aboriginal elder, a representative from the Marrickville Historical Society, two workers (who also gave tours of their workplaces), the Lead Heritage Adviser at Sydney Water, who gave us a tour of the Carrington Road pumping station, and a representative from the Save Marrickville residents’ group. Whilst this provided a number of perspectives on the day, regrettably some groups were unrepresented, most notably the perspective of migrant groups who have a long-standing association with industrial precincts in Marrickville. It is hoped that further community input and collaboration in future iterations of Field Trip will address these issues of representation in community-led walking tours.A number of new understandings became apparent during the walking tour. For instance, the heritage-listed Carrington Road sewage pumping station, which is of “historic and aesthetic significance”, is unable to cope with the proposed level of residential development. According to Philip Bennett, Lead Heritage Adviser at Sydney Water, the best way to maintain this piece of heritage infrastructure is to keep it running. While this issue had been discussed in private meetings between Sydney Water and the developer, there is no formal mechanism to make this expert knowledge public or accessible. Similarly, through the Acknowledgement of Country for Field Trip, undertaken by Donna Ingram, Cultural Representative and a member of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council, it became clear that the local Indigenous community had not been consulted in the development proposals for Carrington Road. This information, while not necessary secret, had also not been made public. Finally, the inclusion of knowledgeable local workers whose businesses are located on Carrington Road provided an insight into the “everyday.” They talked of community and collaboration, of site-specificity, the importance of clustering within their niche industries, and their fears for of displacement should redevelopment proceed.Via a community-led, participatory walking tour like Field Trip, threads of knowledge and new information are uncovered. These help create new spatial stories and readings of the landscape, broadening the scope of possibility for democratic participation in cities. Figure 3: Donna Ingram at Field Trip 2018.Tactical Walking, Tactical Media Stories connected to walking provide an opportunity for people to read the landscape differently (Mitchell). One of the goals of Field Trip was to begin a public knowledge exchange about Carrington Road so that spatial stories could be shared, and new readings of urban development could spread beyond the confines of the self-contained tour. Once shared, this knowledge becomes a story, and once remixed into existing stories and integrated into the way we understand the neighbourhood, a collective spatial practice is generated. “Every story is a travel story – a spatial practice”, says de Certeau in “Spatial Stories”. “In reality, they organise walks” (72). As well as taking a tactical approach to walking, we took a tactical approach to the mediation of the knowledge, by recording and broadcasting the voices on the walk and feeding information to a publicly accessible wiki. The term “tactical media” is an extension of de Certeau’s concept of tactics. David Garcia and Geert Lovink applied de Certeau’s concept of tactics to the field of media activism in their manifesto of tactical media, identifying a class of producers who amplify temporary reversals in the flow of power by exploiting the spaces, channels and platforms necessary for their practices. Tactical media has been used since the late nineties to help explain a range of open-source practices that appropriate technological tools for political purposes. While pointing out the many material distinctions between different types of tactical media projects within the arts, Rita Raley describes them as “forms of critical intervention, dissent and resistance” (6). The term has also been adopted by media activists engaged in a range of practices all over the world, including the Tactical Technology Collective. For Field Trip, tactical media is a way of creating representations that help navigate neighbourhoods as well as alternative political processes that shape them. In this sense, tactical representations do not “offer the omniscient point of view we associate with Cartesian cartographic practice” (Raley 2). Rather these representations are politically subjective systems of navigation that make visible hidden information and connect people to the decisions affecting their lives. Conclusion We have shown that the walking tour can be a tourist attraction, a catalyst to the transformation of urban space through gentrification, and an activist intervention into processes of urban renewal that exclude people and alternative ways of being in the city. This article presents practice-led research through the design of Field Trip. By walking collectively, we have focused on tactical ways of opening up participation in the future of neighbourhoods, and more broadly in designing the city. 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