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1

NATHAN, STUART. "AM in the frame." Engineer 300, no. 7913 (January 2020): 42–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.12968/s0013-7758(22)90053-4.

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2

Wulf, Ines Catharina, and Sascha Alexander Ruhle. "Psychische Gesundheitskompetenz am Arbeitsplatz." Diagnostica 66, no. 1 (January 2020): 50–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1026/0012-1924/a000237.

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Zusammenfassung. Das Mental Health Literacy tool for the Workplace (MHL-W; Moll, Zanhour, Patten, Stuart & MacDermid, 2017 ) ist ein vignettenbasiertes Instrument mit 16 Items zur Messung psychischer Gesundheitskompetenz im Arbeitskontext. Nach der Übersetzung ins Deutsche sowie einer Anpassung der Vignetten anhand einer qualitativen Expertenbefragung, wurde das MHL-W-G an zwei deutschsprachigen Stichproben mit 122 Studierenden sowie 317 Berufstätigen hinsichtlich Reliabilität, Konstruktvalidität, Messinvarianz, Geschlechtereffekte und Faktorstruktur analysiert. Erstmalig wurde die Faktorenstruktur (EFA/CFA) des MHL-W-G untersucht: Im Gegensatz zu dem von Moll et al. (2017) ursprünglich angenommenen einfaktoriellen Modell zeigte ein Modell zweiter Ordnung eine deutlich bessere Passung. Weiterführende Analysen ergaben gute interne Konsistenzen und Intraklassenkorrelationen. Die Ergebnisse deuten auf Messinvarianz des MHL-W-G unabhängig vom Geschlecht hin. Insgesamt lassen die psychometrischen Eigenschaften den Schluss zu, dass mithilfe des MHL-W-G psychische Gesundheitskompetenz am Arbeitsplatz reliabel und valide erfasst werden kann.
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3

Reding, Viviane. "The United Kingdom and the European Union: Inevitably Drifting Apart?" Cambridge Yearbook of European Legal Studies 16 (2014): 3–11. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1528887000002536.

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I am delighted and truly honoured to be able to speak to you tonight to deliver the 2014 Mackenzie-Stuart lecture. President Barroso was speaking in London last Friday where he said: ‘The European Union would not have become what it is today if it weren’t for British politicians and entrepreneurs, British thinkers and British ideas’. Scholars from this University and from its Centre for European Legal Studies have contributed enormously. Looking just to the Union’s Courts, Judges Lord Mackenzie-Stuart, David Edward, Konrad Schiemann, Christopher Vajda and Nicholas Forewood, Advocates-General Francis Jacobs and Eleanor Sharpston are true architects of our Union.
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4

Braese, Stephan. "Abwehr des Dokumentartheaters: Mary Stuart." Literatur für Leser 38, no. 3 (January 1, 2015): 199–207. http://dx.doi.org/10.3726/90073_199.

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Das Jahr 1965 nimmt einen spezifischen Platz in der Werkbiographie Wolfgang Hildesheimers ein. Im März dieses Jahres erschien Tynset, dessen Erfolg bei Publikum und Kritik in die Verleihung des Bremer Literaturpreises und des Büchner-Preises im Folgejahr mündete. Das Buch hatte aus der Krise des Schriftstellers Anfang der sechziger Jahre, der er in seinen Vergeblichen Aufzeichnungen 1963 Ausdruck verliehen hatte, eine inhaltlich wie poetologisch spektakuläre Konsequenz gezogen und gilt bis heute als die vielleicht herausragendste Leistung des Schriftstellers. Kaum bekannt hingegen ist, dass in dieses selbe Jahr bereits die Anfänge der Arbeit an einem Text fallen, der mit dem Tonfall, den Stoffen, aber auch den Schauplätzen der monologischen Prosa, die Hildesheimer in Tynset entfaltet hatte, nahezu keine Übereinstimmung aufweist: das Drama Mary Stuart.1 Den Impetus, der Hildesheimers Arbeit an diesem Text maßgeblich bestimmte, gab der Schriftsteller am 2. April 1966 dem Suhrkamp-Lektor Karlheinz Braun gegenüber zu erkennen. In einem knappen Abriss des Projekts teilte er ihm mit, dass sein ,,Wunsch, gerade Mary Stuart zu behandeln, zum Teil eine Reaktion gegen dieses entsetzliche Dokumentarstückfieber“2 sei.
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5

Howlett, Michael. "Rejoinder to Stuart Soroka, “Policy Agenda-Setting Theory Revisited: A Critique of Howlett on Downs, Baumgartner and Jones, and Kingdon”." Canadian Journal of Political Science 32, no. 4 (December 1999): 773–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0008423900016991.

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I am pleased to respond to Stuart Soroka's set of criticisms of the concepts, methodology and conclusions of my research into Canadian federal agenda-setting. My two articles were not intended to be the last word on the subject, and I am glad to see that they have sparked some interest and, hopefully, some future additional research into the subject. That having been said, let me make several points with respect to the central issues raised in the discussion and the general arguments made about the role of empirical research in the policy sciences.
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6

Verhoeven, Marc. "Structure, diversity and context in neolithic ritual practice: A reply to Stuart Campbell and Jonathan Last." Archaeological Dialogues 7, no. 1 (September 2000): 73–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1380203800001628.

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I am most grateful for the critical, yet on the whole positive and inspiring reactions of Stuart Campbell and Jonathan Last, who offer ample opportunities for an archaeological dialogue. Besides specific questions, they raise a number of important issues which have a general theoretical significance. Last, moreover, presents some new and most interesting data on horned objects from Çatalhöyük West, whereas Campbell comes up with some additional and intriguing examples of the relations between death, fire and abandonment in the late Neolithic of the Near East. In my reply I wish to start with the specific issues before I move on to more general topics.
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7

Gray, G. A. C. "Airlines and the New Technology Aircraft: A Discussion Paper." Journal of Navigation 39, no. 1 (January 1986): 110–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0373463300014296.

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The aircraft referred to in the title are the Airbus Industrie A 310, the Boeing 767 and the Boeing 757. The paper has been written in conjunction with representatives from British Caledonian Airways, Britannia Airways and British Airways, airlines which are currently operating these aircraft. I am indebted to the following for their contributions: Captain Stuart Grieve (Chief Pilot, Britannia Airways), Captain Chris Norman (Britannia Airways), Captain Brian Myers, (Chief Training Captain A 310, British Caledonian Airways), Bill Grice (Chief Development Engineer Avionics, British Airways), Captain Rod Fulton (Flight Training Manager 757, British Airways) and Captain Paul Woodburn (Flight Manager Technical 757, British Airways).
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8

Chambert-Loir, Henri. "Stuart Robson. I am Sri : Sri’s story as she told it, freely translated from the Javanese." Archipel, no. 98 (December 3, 2019): 269–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/archipel.1502.

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9

Vagts, Detlev F. "Senate Materials and Treaty Interpretation: Some Research Hints for the Supreme Court." American Journal of International Law 83, no. 3 (July 1989): 546–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2203314.

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In his concurring opinion in the recent tax treaty case United States v. Stuart, Justice Scalia reports that “I have been unable to discover a single case in which this Court has consulted the Senate debate, committee hearings or committee reports” to interpret a treaty. Even more sweepingly, he says that two 1988 opinions in a district court are the “first (and, as far as I am aware, the only) federal decisions relying upon pre-ratification Senate materials for the interpretation of a treaty.” He moves from there to conclude that the “Restatement (Third) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States §314, Comment d (1986); id., §325, Reporter’s [sic] Note 5 … must be regarded as a proposal for change rather than a restatement of existing doctrine.” Those are the paragraphs in which the Restatement approves the use of such materials.
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10

Zorowitz, Robert A. "Response to the Stuart RB, Thielke S. Conditional Permission to Not Resuscitate: A Middle Ground for Resuscitation. J Am Med Dir Assoc 2019;20:679‒682." Journal of the American Medical Directors Association 20, no. 11 (November 2019): 1469. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jamda.2019.07.011.

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11

Niederberger, Andreas, and Philipp Schink. "Wandlungen des Liberalismus. Zum Zusammenhang von Herrschaftskritik und Theoriestruktur." Themenheft zur Dialektik des Liberalismus 11, no. 2-2020 (April 14, 2021): 191–206. http://dx.doi.org/10.3224/zpth.v11i2.02.

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Jüngere Formen des (Neo-)Republikanismus fordern, die politische Theorie wieder stärker herrschaftskritisch auszurichten, und wenden sich damit vor allem auch gegen den klassischen Liberalismus. Dieser Artikel zeigt am Beispiel von John Stuart Mill zunächst, dass diese Diagnose fehlgeht. Insbesondere in Mills Schriften zur Geschlechterunterdrückung lässt sich nachzeichnen, dass in der „Erfindung“ des Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert tatsächlich Problemstellungen des historisch früheren Republikanismus aufgegriffen werden. Unter dem Eindruck der geänderten gesellschaftlich-politischen Verhältnisse sowie der neuen Perspektiven werden die republikanischen Ausgangspunkte allerdings korrigiert und weiterentwickelt. Über den Ansatz von Ronald Dworkin wird daran anschließend rekonstruiert, wie dieser die republikanisch-liberale Vorgehensweise zurückweist und den Liberalismus grundsätzlich neu bestimmt. Es kommt zum Übergang von einem Freiheits- zu einem Gleichheitsfokus, was wichtige Folgen für die gesellschaftlichen und politischen Phänomene und Konfliktlagen hat, die thematisiert werden können. Der dritte Abschnitt dieses Artikels fragt, ob es dem Neo-Republikanismus gelingt, normative Grundlagen und Herrschaftskritik wieder enger miteinander zu verbinden. Im Gegensatz zur Selbstwahrnehmung kehrt der Neo-Republikanismus aber in seiner Theoriestruktur nicht zum früheren Republikanismus zurück. Er verbleibt vielmehr in der Theoriestruktur des jüngeren Liberalismus und nimmt lediglich Veränderungen in den normativen Grundlagen vor, die politischen Institutionen größere Bedeutung zuweisen. Abschließend wird demgegenüber argumentiert, dass es sich lohnt, die Theoriestruktur aufzunehmen, die sich sowohl im Republikanismus wie auch im frühen Liberalismus findet und von minimalen normativen Überlegungen ausgehend mögliche Beherrschungsphänomene und –formen diskutiert.
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12

Shmukler, Boris E., Jeffrey S. Clark, Ann Hsu, David H. Vandorpe, Andrew K. Stewart, Christine E. Kurschat, Seong-Kyu Choe, et al. "Zebrafish ae2.2 encodes a second slc4a2 anion exchanger." American Journal of Physiology-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology 294, no. 3 (March 2008): R1081—R1091. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/ajpregu.00690.2007.

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The genome of zebrafish ( Danio rerio) encodes two unlinked genes equally closely related to the SLC4A2/AE2 anion exchanger genes of mammals. One of these is the recently reported zebrafish ae2 gene (Shmukler BE, Kurschat CE, Ackermann GE, Jiang L, Zhou Y, Barut B, Stuart-Tilley AK, Zhao J, Zon LI, Drummond IA, Vandorpe DH, Paw BH, Alper SL. Am J Physiol Renal Physiol Renal Physiol 289: F835–F849, 2005), now called ae2.1. We now report the structural and functional characterization of Ae2.2, the product of the second zebrafish Ae2 gene, ae2.2. The ae2.2 gene of zebrafish linkage group 24 encodes a polypeptide of 1,232 aa in length, sharing 70% amino acid identity with zebrafish Ae2.1 and 67% identity with mouse AE2a. Zebrafish Ae2.2 expressed in Xenopus oocytes encodes a 135-kDa polypeptide that mediates bidirectional, DIDS-sensitive Cl−/Cl− exchange and Cl−/HCO3− exchange. Ae2.2-mediated Cl−/Cl− exchange is cation independent, voltage insensitive, and electroneutral. Acute regulation of anion exchange mediated by Ae2.2 includes activation by NH4+ and independent inhibition by acidic intracellular pH and by acidic extracellular pH. In situ hybridization reveals low-level expression of Ae2.2 mRNA in zebrafish embryo, most notably in posterior tectum, eye, pharynx, epidermal cells, and axial vascular structures, without notable expression in the Ae2.1-expressing pronephric duct. Knockdown of Ae2.2 mRNA, of Ae2.1 mRNA, or of both with nontoxic or minimally toxic levels of N-morpholino oligomers produced no grossly detectable morphological phenotype, and preserved normal structure of the head and the pronephric duct at 24 h postfertilization.
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13

Nicolson, Michael. "The GLOBUS Model: Computer Simulation of Worldwide Political and Economic Developments edited by Stuart A. Bremer. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag and Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 944 pp. $98.50." Journal of Public Policy 8, no. 3-4 (July 1988): 403–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0143814x00008680.

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14

Menšík, Josef. "The Origins of the Income Theory of Money." Review of Economic Perspectives 14, no. 4 (January 29, 2015): 373–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/revecp-2015-0005.

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Abstract The income theory of money was conceived in the 19th century, and in the first half of the 20th century it formed the backbone of all the main monetary approaches of the time. Yet, since it did so mostly implicitly rather than explicitly, and since the later developments moved economic theory in a different direction, the income theory of money is hardly remembered at present. While mainly accounting for the origins of the approach, I am also offering a brief comparison with the present mainstream economics and I shortly address the question of the possible future of the theory too. The income theory of money explains how nominal prices are formed by interaction of nominal expenditures streams with real streams of goods sold. While various ideas leading to this theory were expressed already by John Law, Richard Cantillon, and Jean-Baptiste Say, it is perhaps only Thomas Tooke whom we might want to call the originator of the theory. Within the Classical School of Political Economy, Tooke's ideas were further elaborated by John Stuart Mill. The theory reached a momentous formulation in the works of Knut Wicksell, in many respects a similar exposition was delivered also by Friedrich Wieser. The recognition of the theory was impaired by a change of the main-stream paradigm as well as by a surge in emphasis laid on the quantitative modelling in economics. Yet, there are certain fundamental questions of the monetary theory which the general equilibrium style models cannot cope with, while the income theory of money can, at least to a certain degree. This might give the theory some hope for the future.
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15

Blanton, Virginia, and Jennifer Phegley. "‘I rebel against the story. I am sure the half of it was never told us’: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ ‘The True Story of Guenever’ and Nineteenth-Century Women in the Literary Marketplace." Arthuriana 30, no. 4 (2020): 3–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/art.2020.0034.

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16

Kalra, Vijay K., Nitin Patel, Caryn Gonsalves, Minyang Yang, and Punam Malik. "Placenta Growth Factor Induces 5-Lipoxygenase-Activating Protein Via Hypoxia-Inducible Factor-1α and Contributes to Increased Leukotrienes in Sickle Cell Disease." Blood 112, no. 11 (November 16, 2008): 1447. http://dx.doi.org/10.1182/blood.v112.11.1447.1447.

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Abstract Subjects with sickle cell disease (SCD) have a chronic baseline inflammation and higher incidence of lung disease – airway hyper-reactivity predominates in children and restrictive lung disease in adults. The degree of inflammation, reflected in leukocytosis and leukocyte activation, correlates with higher mortality (Platt, NEJM, 1994). Stuart and colleagues have shown high plasma and urinary leukotriene (LT)-B4 at steady state, and even higher levels during acute sickle events and acute chest syndrome (J Lab Clin Med 2002). DeBaun and colleagues have shown high levels of urinary LT-E4 in this patient population (Am J Hematol, 2008). LT-B4 is one of the most potent activator of neutrophils, while cysteinyl leukotrienes (cys-LT), LT-C4, LT-D4 and LT-E4, promote bronchial smooth muscle constriction and asthma. LT are produced from arachidonic acid through a series of metabolic steps, with two critical steps catalyzed by five-lipoxygenase (5LO) and 5-lipoxygenase activating protein (FLAP). We have previously shown that that placenta growth factor (PLGF) is produced at high levels from the hyperplastic erythroid compartment in SCD and thalassemia and induces a strong proinflammatory cytochemokine response from monocytes (Perelman et al, Blood 2003; Selvaraj et al, Blood 2003). PLGF levels were high in subjects with SCD, and associated with activated mononuclear cells with augmented expression of pro-inflammatory cytochemokines (Perelman et al, Blood 2003). We now show PLGF induces FLAP expression. FLAP mRNA was significantly higher in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBM) of subjects with SCD at steady state, compared to healthy controls. PLGF activated PBM to increase FLAP expression and LT-B4 formation. It also increased Cys-LT production from PBM and the THP-1 monocytic cell line. PLGF-mediated increased FLAP expression was attenuated by PI-3 kinase inhibitor and PTEN; and by NADPH-oxidase inhibitor and p47phox siRNA in THP-1 cells. An in silico analysis of the FLAP promoter showed presence of hypoxia response elements, CEBP and NFκB sites. We found that FLAP induction by PLGF was mediated via HIF-1α. PLGF induced HIF-1α mRNA expression. Silencing with HIF-1α siRNA attenuated PLGF mediated FLAP expression, while over expression of HIF-1α had the converse effect. PLGF augmented FLAP-promoter luciferase activity by several folds, and this effect was abrogated upon mutation of hypoxia-response element (HRE), but not the NF-κB binding site in the FLAP proximal promoter. These studies indicate the role of HIF-1α motif in inducing FLAP expression, which was confirmed by electrophoretic mobility shift assays. Chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) analysis further confirmed the role of HIF-1a in regulating PLGF-mediated FLAP expression. Our studies identify, for the first time, HIF-1α as a hypoxia-independent target of PLGF, which then upregulates FLAP and increases LT formation. Our studies define a mechanism of increased LT in SCD. The intrinsic elevated levels of PLGF seen in SCD could explain the increased leukotriene levels observed in patients with SCD, thereby contributing to the baseline inflammation and pulmonary pathology present in this disease. LT inhibitors are FDA approved in asthma, and could be used as a new modality to ameliorate inflammation and lung complications in SCD.
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17

Del Caño-Espinel, R., V. Posada-Franco, F. García-Bol, A. López-Moreno, A. Roldán-Valero, S. Castro-Merino, and M. del Caño-Espinel. "PROPOSAL FOR “RETURN TO SPORT” TESTS AFTER INJURY, SPECIFIC TO FOOTBALL." Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine 6, no. 6_suppl3 (June 1, 2018): 2325967118S0004. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2325967118s00043.

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The decision to return to sport (RTS) after an injury is one of the most complicated in sports medicine, due to the posibility of reinjury.1 The return to sport tests allow one to set goals to assess the condition of the patient and establish certain criteria before returning to competition.2 These tests include: strength tests, jumping tests and stability tests, and are based on the “Limb Symetry Indexes” (LSI).3 Nevertheless, there are studies which indicate that this method of evaluation could overestimate knee function values, 4 and the need to include specific sport movements in the tests.5 OBJECTIVES: To design a specific RTS protocol for football which is objetivable, adaptable and easily-reproduced. A survey was conducted among 22 professional players (6 defenders, 8 midfielders and 8 forwards) of a second-division Spanish team, which compiled 24 basic football movements based on technique (individual, collective and defensive) and their key actions, according to the Royal Spanish Football Association (RFEF: Real Federación Española de Fútbol) 6, and in which they were asked: - the frequency of executing the action. - the perception of risk associated with the action. - the injuries suffered that were associated with the action. - the conditioning of their mode of play due to the perception of risk of injury. Dependant on the frequency of the action and according to the player’s position, it has been established: 12 common plays, 3 specific plays for defenders, 2 for midfielders and 3 for forwards. A play was identified with a high index of risk perception by the players: jumping off-balance due to contact from a rival. The study outlined the actions suffered by players with a greater injury index, which were confirmed by experts in sports medicine, who completed the protocol The injuries suffered by players did not condicionate significantly their play. An RTS protocol was created, based on the general and specific actions determined in this study, which will be objetived through video analysis among others and through 2 measurements, previously taken during pre-season. Sanders TL, Maradit Kremers H, Bryan AJ, Larson DR, Dahm DL, Levy BA, Stuart MJ, Krych AJ. Incidence of Anterior Cruciate Ligament Tears and Reconstruction: A 21-Year Population-Based Study. Am J Sports Med. 2016 Jun; 44(6):1502-7. Ardern CL, Glasgow P, Schneiders A, Witvrouw E, Clarsen B, Cools A, Gojanovic B, Griffin S, Khan KM, Moksnes H, Mutch SA, Phillips N, Reurink G, Sadler R, Silbernagel KG, Thorborg K, Wangensteen A, Wilk KE, Bizzini M. 2016 Consensus statement on return to sport from the First World Congress in Sports Physical Therapy, Bern. Br J Sports Med. 2016 Jul; 50(14):853-64. van Melick N, van Cingel RE, Brooijmans F, Neeter C, van Tienen T, Hullegie W, Nijhuis-van der Sanden MW. Evidence-based clinical practice update: practice guidelines for anterior cruciate ligament rehabilitation based on a systematic review and multidisciplinary consensus. Br J Sports Med. 2016 Dec; 50(24):1506-1515. Wellsandt E, Failla MJ, Snyder-Mackler L. Limb Symmetry Indexes Can Overestimate Knee Function After Anterior Cruciate Ligament Injury. J Orthop Sports Phys Ther. 2017 Mar 29:1-18. Hoog P, Warren M, Smith CA, Chimera NJ. FUNCTIONAL HOP TESTS AND TUCK JUMP ASSESSMENT SCORES BETWEEN FEMALE DIVISION I COLLEGIATE ATHLETES PARTICIPATING IN HIGH VERSUS LOW ACL INJURY PRONE SPORTS: A CROSS SECTIONAL ANALYSIS. Int J Sports Phys Ther. 2016 Dec; 11(6):945-953. Moreno, M. La técnica aplicada al alto rendimiento. Curso nivel-3 entrenador nacional de fútbol, técnico deportivo superior. 3ª ed. España: Real Federación Española de Fútbol, Escuela Nacional; 2003.
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18

Krysiak, Kilannin, Meagan A. Jacoby, Zachary L. Skidmore, Arpad M. Danos, Michelle O'Laughlin, Eric J. Duncavage, Matthew J. Walter, Malachi Griffith, Obi L. Griffith, and Lukas D. Wartman. "Deleterious Germline Mutations in Telomere Maintenance Genes Identified in a Subset of Patients with Myelodysplastic Syndrome and Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis." Blood 128, no. 22 (December 2, 2016): 4306. http://dx.doi.org/10.1182/blood.v128.22.4306.4306.

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Abstract The myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) are the most common cause of bone marrow failure in adults, with an incidence of 40,000 cases per year. Next-generation sequencing of candidate genes has led to major advances in the description of the genetic landscape of MDS, identifying recurrently mutated genes and cellular pathways involved in disease pathogenesis. However, use of targeted panels indicates more comprehensive, unbiased sequencing techniques may yet identify additional recurrently mutated genes or cellular pathways important in MDS. Diseases caused by defects in telomere maintenance (telomeropathies) are variable in clinical and genetic presentation but often involve bone marrow failure. We hypothesized that acquired mutations in telomerase maintenance genes may be a recurrent event in MDS. This is significant as identification of recurrent somatic mutations in telomerase maintenance genes would provide further insight into MDS pathogenesis and identify a potential druggable pathway for MDS patients, as novel agents targeting the telomerase pathway are currently in clinical development. First, we identified three adults who presented in middle age with MDS and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), two of which also had a family history of IPF. All three patients had shortened telomeres (<1st centile), but no mutations detected in the telomerase pathway genes TERC, TERT, TINF2, or DKC2. In order to identify inherited and/or acquired genetic mutations affecting telomere biology, we performed exome sequencing on paired whole bone marrow (tumor) and skin (comparator/germline) samples from each patient. In patient 1 (see Table), we identified a heterozygous, inherited frameshift variant in RTEL1, (R132fs, not previously reported), a helicase required for telomere maintenance that has not been reported in MDS. Compound heterozygous mutations in RTEL1 have been implicated in Hoyeral-Hreiderson syndrome, and recent work showed ~5% of patients with familial IPF have heterozygous germline RTEL1 mutations (Cogan J.D. et al., Am J Resp Crit Care Med, 2015 and Stuart B.D. et al., Nat Genet, 2015). In patient 2, we identified a heterozygous inherited missense variant in ACD (V484I), a component of the telomerase shelterin complex also implicated in Hoyeral-Hreiderson syndrome that is not a common population variant (absent from 1000 genomes, the Exome Sequencing Project, and dbSNP). Analysis of constitutional alterations using the exome data from patient 3, did not identify an obvious causative variant; thus, whole genome sequencing is ongoing. These data show that inherited telomerase maintenance gene variants are found in patients with MDS and IPF. Next, to determine if telomerase complex genes were recurrently mutated in an unselected, de novo MDS population, we performed targeted next-generation sequencing of telomerase maintenance genes (15 genes) combined with sequencing of 335 myeloid malignancy-associated genes in 96 paired tumor/skin samples from MDS patients. Somatic variants were identified in the tumor compared to the paired skin using the Genome Modeling System, as previously reported (Griffith M. et al., PLoS Comput Biol. 2015). As expected, somatic analysis identified mutations in recurrently mutated MDS genes such as U2AF1, ASXL1, TET2, TP53 and others. A single, likely deleterious somatic inversion involving exon 9 of RTEL1 was identified; however, somatic analysis for telomere maintenance gene mutations was otherwise unremarkable. Evaluation of these genes for germline variants identified rare (ExAC allele frequency < 0.0007), apparently heterozygous, in-frame and frame-shift deletion variants affecting CTC1 (n=2), NOP10 (n=1) and TERT (n=1) in 4 individuals. The two CTC1 frame shift variants have been previously described in multiple patients with pediatric telomeropathies resulting from compound heterozygous mutations in CTC1. Additional heterozygous missense mutations previously associated with aplastic anemia were identified in 2 other individuals but are of uncertain significance. Collectively, these results indicate that germline mutations in telomere maintenance genes, other than TERT and TERC, underlie genetic predisposition for MDS and IPF in a subset of patients, which has not been previously appreciated, but are rare events in de novo MDS. Table Table. Disclosures Jacoby: Sunesis: Research Funding; Quintiles: Consultancy; Celgene: Speakers Bureau.
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19

Li, Ting, Pan Boan, Yuan Gao, Huang Xiaobo, Jiangbo Pu, and Chong Huang. "Noninvasive and Wearable Optical Monitoring of Brain Death with Aid of a Protocol at Differentiated Fractions of Oxygen Inspired." Blood 134, Supplement_1 (November 13, 2019): 5808. http://dx.doi.org/10.1182/blood-2019-124448.

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Brain death is a permanent loss of all brain function [1]. Current clinical organ transplantations mostly depend on the organs from brain-dead patients [2]. And of note, a lot of blood deases are easy to cause cerebral haemorrhage, which is quite of danger and usually induce brain death if not detected and treated in time. Thus prompt evaluation of brain death is of great significance for saving medical resources and reducing economic burden of the patients' families. Current guide for diagnosing brain death required to perform a list of >30 hours neurological examninations, some of which are even invasive, not in time and easily hampered by many confounding factors. An ideal ancillary test to assess brain death is highlighted to be noninvasive, sensitive, universally available, timely, and easy to perform at the bedside. Near infrared spectroscopy ( NIRS ) is capable of monitoring hemodynamics in response to brain activity noninvasively, conveniently, continually, and relatively inexpensively, evidented by a series of clinical cerebral studies recently. Weigl et al newly reported to use a time resolved NIRS to detect the fluorescence photons excited in the indocyanine green ( ICG ) for cerebral perfusion detection. It provided a novel optical ancillary tool to assess brain death, while its accuracy was only 69.2%, which did not reach the level of brain death confirmation. Plus, it was invasive, requiring injection of optical contrast agent. We attempted to assess brain death completely in nonivasive way with just a custom wearable NIRS device developed in our lab [3] ( fig.1 a ). We novelly incororate a protocol at markedly but safely varied fractions of oxygen respiration. Firstly, Monte Carlo modeling were carried out to test the difference in photon transport within human brain at different oxygen concentrations induced by varied fractions of oxygen respiration ( FIO2 ) [4]. 18 healthy subjects ( 41 ± 11 years old ) and 17 brain dead patients were recruited from the intensive care unit (ICU) in Sichuan Academy of Medical Sciences & Sichuan Provincial People's Hospital. No significant difference in age was found between patients and healthy groups ( p >0.413 ). These patients were finally clinically diagnosed by the international standards of brain death. Two protocols were used ( fig.1 b). One is consisted of 1 hour resting, 3-minute baseline measure, half-hour measurement at 60% FIO2 ( phase I, high oxygen ),a half hour measure at 40% FIO2 ( phase II, low oxygen ), and a half hour measure at 60% FIO2 ( phase III, high oxygen ). The other is low, high, and low. The Δ[Hb] and Δ[HbO2] time courses were recorded by NIRS in real time with related signal processing ( fig.1 c ). Statistical analysis were focus on the sensitivity and specificiy of our proposed methodology at combination of NIRS and above protocol, as well as which protocol act better. Fig.1 ( c right ) showed that the detected light signal profile dramatically differed among varied oxygen concentrations in human brain. Plus the hemodynamic responses varied clearly between two subject groups among varied FIO2 in both protocols ( fig1. d ). The ' II-III ' phase act more distinct in differing two groups than ' I-II ' phase. And the low-high-low protocol acted almost perfect in accessing brain death with highest sensitivity and specificity. Over all, the novel incorporation of NIRS and a low-high-low varied FIO2 protocol was shown to a be most sensitive, highly specific, noninvasive and real time way to assess brain death and promptly offer quality assured donor organs. [1] E. F. M. Wijdicks, P. N. Varelas, G. S. Gronseth, D. M. Greer, Evidence-based guideline update: Determining brain death in adults report of the quality standards subcommittee of the American Academy of Neurology, Neurology, vol. 74, no. 23, pp. 1911-1918, 2010 [2] K. Singbartl, R. Murugan, A. M. Kaynar, D. W. Crippen, S. A. Tisherman, K. Shutterly, S. A. Stuart, R. Simmons, Intensivist-led management of brain-dead donors is associated with an increase in organ recovery for transplantation, J. M. Darby, Am. J. Transplant., vol. 11, no. 7, pp. 1517-1521, 2011 [3] T. Li, M. Duan, Y. Zhao, G. Yu, Z. Ruan. Bedside monitoring of patients with shock using a portable spatially-resolved near-infrared spectroscopy. Biomed. Opt. Express, vol. 6, no. 9, pp. 3431-3436, 2015 [4] B. Pan, C. Huang, X. Fang, X. Huang, T. Li*, Noninvasive and Sensitive Optical Assessment of Brain Death, J. Biophotonics, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. e201800240, 2018 Disclosures No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.
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Uys, Philip. "Educational Technology for Active Connections in Blended Learning Environments." EDEN Conference Proceedings, no. 1 (June 16, 2019): 183–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.38069/edenconf-2019-ac-0021.

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This conference focuses on employing educational technology for connections. It assumes that these connections will be active, and not latent – otherwise these will be meaningless and ineffective. The emphasis is thus on creating effective learning environments. Such learning environments are not just online or digital, but can also be physical learning spaces in which educational technology can play a key role.A key strategy to ensure that educational technology connections are indeed active is to employ educational technology within an active learning framework for both online and on-campus learning i.e. blended learning. Educational technology on its own does not lead to active learning – only when it is used within well-founded learning designs – of which constructive alignment is highlighted below. I am thus agreeing with Veletsianos and Moe (2017) that educational technology by itself is not “education’s silver bullet” but should be located within “the essentials of teaching and learning: theory, pedagogy and emergent trends in the research.” Such active learning will lead to learner engagement, leading to effective learning and learner success. The vision for instance for educational technologies at Charles Sturt University is to “support educational practices focussed on student success by providing cutting edge, stable learning environments”.
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"Commission 51: Bioastronomy: Search for Extraterrestrial Life." Transactions of the International Astronomical Union 23, no. 1 (1997): 251–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0251107x00011548.

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The past three years have been extraordinarily productive for the Bioastronomy community. In particular, the detection of extrasolar planets and the possible evidence for fossil life on Mars have given substance to the concept of life elsewhere in the universe, and reinforced the connection between life on Earth and its cosmic origin. The structure of this report follows the agenda from the highly successful IAU Colloquium 161 on Bioastronomy, organized by Cristiano Cosmovici and Stuart Bowyer on the island of Capri in July 1996. The content has been provided by attendees of that Colloquium. Given the breadth of the subject matter covered by this Commission, this report could not have been generated any other way, and I am most grateful to all the contributors.
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Santana, Fábio, and Cimara Valim de Melo. "Movimentos transnacionais e construções identitárias: analisando a impermanência e a fluidez na narrativa de Adriana Lisboa." A MARgem - Revista Eletrônica de Ciências Humanas, Letras e Artes 17, no. 1 (July 27, 2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.14393/am-v17n1-2020-56344.

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A contemporaneidade trouxe consigo a (des/re)construção da noção de identidade, a qual passa da fixidez à fluidez. A partir dessa premissa, o presente artigo visa à análise do processo de construção identitária individual e coletiva a partir da representação literária, tomando como base o conto “O escritor, sua mulher e o gato”, presente no livro O sucesso (2016), de Adriana Lisboa. Busca-se, assim, compreender como a narrativa brasileira contemporânea, tomando como exemplo o conto, tem representado o indivíduo em termos identitários por meio dos trânsitos realizados pelas personagens. Os estudos de Zygmunt Bauman (1996, 2005, 2012) e Stuart Hall (1996, 2005) sobre identidade, mobilidade e globalização servem como referencial do trabalho, cuja análise parte da fluidez identitária do protagonista em sua relação com elementos simbólicos presentes no texto. Como resultado, observa-se que há uma tendência na narrativa brasileira contemporânea em representar indivíduos fluídos, desenraizados de seus espaços de origem, os quais experimentam a mobilidade sob diferentes perspectivas, trazendo consigo as consequências da globalização em termos culturais.
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"Best Paper Selection." Yearbook of Medical Informatics 28, no. 01 (August 2019): 055. http://dx.doi.org/10.1055/s-0039-1677926.

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Albers DJ, Levine ME, Stuart A, Mamykina L, Gluckman B, Hripcsak G. Mechanistic machine learning: how data assimilation leverages physiological knowledge using bayesian inference to forecast the future, infer the present, and phenotype. J Am Med Inform Assoc 2018;25(10):1392-401 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6188514/ Oktay O, Ferrante E, Kamnitsas K, Heinrich M, Bai W, Caballero J, Cook SA, de Marvao A, Dawes T, O'Regan DP, Kainz B, Glocker B, Rueckert D. Anatomically Constrained Neural Networks (ACNNs): application to cardiac image enhancement and segmentation. IEEE Trans Med Imaging 2018;37(2):384-95 https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk:8443/handle/10044/1/50440 Lee J, Sun J, Wang F, Wang S, Jun CH, Jiang X. Privacy-preserving patient similarity learning in a federated environment: development and analysis. JMIR Med Inform 2018;6(2):e20 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5924379/
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Kim, Dong Hun. "Umsetzung und Verwandlung der Konzeption des Erhabenen bei Schiller. Eine Untersuchung über die Wechselwirkung zwischen Dramentheorie, Drama und Inszenierung am Beispiel von Schillers Maria Stuart." Trajectoires, no. 13 (March 26, 2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/trajectoires.5264.

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"Dynamic Asset Allocation Techniques. Discussion held at the Institute of Actuaries." British Actuarial Journal 15, no. 3 (September 2009): 656–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1357321700005754.

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The President (Mr N. B. Masters, F.I.A.): The subject of this evening is a paper by Adrian Lawrence, Stuart Jarvis and Sheng Miao on Dynamic Asset Allocation Techniques, very much a flavour of the day at the moment as we struggle with the gyrations of both the stock market and interest rates. If I may, I will ask Dr Jarvis to introduce the paper.Dr S. J. Jarvis, F.I.A.: We are acutely aware that the paper has not been finalised yet and so thank you in advance for any help you can give us this evening in improving our paper.In the absence of the final paper, we are going to spend a bit longer than is normal at these meetings to describe what our paper consists of and why we have written what we have written.I am going to start off by talking about some of our motivations. The paper is a fairly technical paper. It focuses on investment, but our motivation comes from applications so we will spend a bit of time talking about those first. We will then talk about the formulation of problems, and some of the techniques that we apply to look at them. That is the focus of the paper—the methods that we found useful. Finally we will talk through some of our results.
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"Best Paper Selection." Yearbook of Medical Informatics 27, no. 01 (August 2018): 226. http://dx.doi.org/10.1055/s-0038-1667096.

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Chakravarty D, Gao J, Phillips SM, Kundra R, Zhang H, Wang J, Rudolph JE, Yaeger R, Soumerai T, Nissan MH, Chang MT, Chandarlapaty S, Traina TA, Paik PK, Ho AL, Hantash FM, Grupe A, Baxi SS, Callahan MK, Snyder A, Chi P, Danila D, Gounder M, Harding JJ, Hellmann MD, Iyer G, Janjigian Y, Kaley T, Levine DA, Lowery M, Omuro A, Postow MA, Rathkopf D, Shoushtari AN, Shukla N, Voss M, Paraiso E, Zehir A, Berger MF, Taylor BS, Saltz LB, Riely GJ, Ladanyi M, Hyman DM, Baselga J, Sabbatini P, Solit DB, Schultz N. OncoKB: a precision oncology knowledge base. JCO Precis Oncol 2017 Jul;2017 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmid/28890946/ Newton Y, Novak AM, Swatloski T, McColl DC, Chopra S, Graim K, Weinstein AS, Baertsch R, Salama SR, Ellrott K, Chopra M, Goldstein TC, Haussler D, Morozova O, Stuart JM. TumorMap: exploring the molecular similarities of cancer samples in an interactive portal. Cancer Res 2017 Nov 1;77(21):e111-e114 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmid/29092953/ Seyednasrollah F, Koestler DC, Wang T, Piccolo SR, Vega R, Greiner R, Fuchs C, Gofer E, Kumar L, Wolfinger RD, Winner KK, Bare C, Neto EC, Yu T, Shen L, Abdallah K, Norman T, Stolovitzky G, Soule HR, Sweeney CJ, Ryan CJ, Scher HI, Sartor O, Elo LL, Zhou FL, Guinney J, Costello JC, and Prostate Cancer DREAM Challenge Community. A DREAM challenge to build prediction models for short-term discontinuation of docetaxel in metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. JCO Clin Cancer Inform 2017 Aug 4;(1):1-15 http://ascopubs.org/doi/abs/10.1200/CCI.17.00018
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Wearden, John H. "Three Women in Time: Beatrice Edgell, Josephine Nash Curtis, and Mary Sturt." Timing & Time Perception, May 3, 2021, 1–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/22134468-bja10035.

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Abstract This article discusses research on time perception published by three women (Beatrice Edgell, Josephine Nash Curtis, and Mary Sturt) active in the early years of the 20th. Century. Edgell (On time judgment, Am. J. Psychol., 1903) was involved in psychophysical studies on the perception of brief durations, in the tradition of Vierordt and other mostly German authors. Curtis (Duration and the temporal judgment, Am. J. Psychol., 1916) provided detailed reports of introspections from participants performing timing tasks, in the manner of her supervisor, Titchener. Sturt (via the article by Oakden & Sturt, The development of the knowledge of time in children, Br. J. Psychol., 1922, an article by Sturt herself, Experiments on the estimate of duration, Br. J. Psychol. 1923, and her book The Psychology of Time, 1925) was involved in extensive developmental studies on the understanding of everyday time concepts, such as years, months, and dates, as well as other work involving variations in time judgements as a function of different conditions, such as when receiving painful stimulation.
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"Stuart Jenks, Jürgen Sarnowsky, and Marie-Luise Laudage, eds., Vera Lex Historiae: Studien zu mittelalterlichen Quellen. Festschrift für Dietrich Kurze zu seinem 65. Geburtstag am 1. Januar 1993. Cologne, Vienna, and Weimar: Böhlau, 1993. Pp. xvii, 499; black-and-white frontispiece, graphs, and tables. DM 128." Speculum 70, no. 02 (April 1995): 454–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0038713400107080.

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Lithgow, Kirstie, and Bernard Corenblum. "Polyuria: A Pathophysiologic Approach." Canadian Journal of General Internal Medicine 12, no. 2 (September 11, 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.22374/cjgim.v12i2.247.

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A 22-year-old man presented with a 3-week history of increased thirst, polydipsia, and polyuria. He described consuming large volumes of water and waking up multiple times throughout the night to drink and urinate. He also endorsed symptoms of fatigue and frequent headaches. Prior to this, he had been well. There was no history of diuretic use, lithium use, or renal disease. There was no prior head trauma, cranial irradiation, or intracranial pathology. He denied consumption of nutritional or protein supplements. Clinical exam revealed a well appearing young man with normal heart rate and blood pressure. Visual fields and general neurologic exam were grossly normal.Baselines investigations revealed serum sodium ranging from 141–142 mmol/L (reference range 133–145 mmol/L), creatinine 92 umol/L (50–120 umol/L), random glucose 5.4 mmol/L (3.3–11.0 mmol/L), potassium 4.0 (3.3–5.1 mmol/L) and ionized calcium 1.25 mmol/L (1.15–1.35 mmol/L). A 24-hour urine collection was arranged, and returned a urine volume of 5.6L (normal less than 3 litres/24 hours). Further investigations revealed a serum sodium of 142 mmol/L, serum osmolality 306 mmol/kg (280–300 mmol/kg), and urine osmolality of 102 mmol/kg (50–1200 mmol/kg). AM cortisol was 372 nmol/L (200–690 nmol/L).These results demonstrated inability to concentrate the urine, despite the physiologic stimulus of hyperosmolarity. Based on this, a presumptive diagnosis of diabetes insipidus was made. The patient was instructed to drink as much as he needed to satiate his thirst, and to avoid fluid restriction. The patient was started on DDAVP intranasal spray, which provided immediate relief from his symptoms. Magnetic resonance imaging of the brain revealed an unremarkable pituitary gland with abnormal thickening of the pituitary stalk and loss of the posterior pituitary bright spot. This confirmed the diagnosis of central diabetes insipidus, presumed secondary to infiltrative disease affecting the pituitary stalk.IntroductionPolyuria is defined as inappropriately high urine output relative to effective arterial blood volume and serum sodium. In adults, polyuria can be objectively quantified as urine output in excess of 3–3.5 L per day with a low urine osmolality (<300 mmol/kg).2Daily urine output is dependent on 2 major factors. The first is the amount of daily solute excretion, and the second is the urine concentrating capability of the nephron.3 Disturbances in either of these factors can occur by many different mechanisms, and can lead to a diuresis. This diuresis can be driven either by solute (solute diuresis), water (water diuresis) or a combination of these processes.4 A diagnostic algorithm for polyuria is outlined in Figure 1.Figure 1. Diagnostic Approach to Polyuria Solute DiuresisDaily solute intake varies between individuals, but typically averages about 10 mmol/kg or 500–800 mmol/day.2,3 Solute diuresis is the result of a higher solute load that exceeds the usual solute excretion. 4 Higher solute loads can be a consequence of either increased solute intake or increased solute generation through metabolism. High solute intake can occur from intravenous fluids, enteral or parental nutrition, and any other sources of exogenous protein, glucose, bicarbonate, or sugar alcohols.2,4 Metabolic processes leading to increased solute generation include hyperglycemia and azotemia. 2,4 Increased solute excretion drives urine output in a linear fashion.3 Furthermore, solute diuresis impairs the ability of the kidney to concentrate urine. Typically, in a pure solute diuresis, urine concentration is between 300 and 500 mmol/kg.2,4 The specific cause of solute diuresis can be further delineated with estimation of the urine electrolyte solute over 24 hours: 2(urine [Na]+urine [K]) ×24 hours.4 Values greater than 600 mmol/day suggest electrolytes are the solutes driving the diuresis, while values less than 600 mmol/day imply that the diuresis is due to a non-electrolyte solute, typically glucose or urea.Water DiuresisWater diuresis can occur due to excessive amounts of free water consumption (primary polydipsia) or impaired secretion or response to ADH (diabetes insipidus). In both cases, urine osmolality should be less than 100 mmol/kg.2 Primary polydipsia is characterized by excessive water consumption. This can be a result of compulsive water drinking (often observed in psychiatric disorders) or a defect in the thirst centre of the hypothalamus due to an infiltrative disease process.5,6The osmotic threshold for ADH release occurs at 280–290 mmol/kg. Failure to maximally concentrate the urine (1000–1200 mmol/kg in healthy kidneys) when serum osmolality rises above the osmotic threshold suggest diabetes insipidus.3 Diabetes insipidus (DI) can result from either insufficient ADH secretion from the posterior pituitary (central DI) or ADH resistance (nephrogenic DI).1Central DI can be caused by both congenital and acquired conditions known to affect the hypothalamic-neurohypophyseal system7,8 (Table 1). Polyuria occurs when 80% or more of the ADH secreting neurons are damaged 7. Metastatic disease has a predilection for the posterior pituitary, as its blood supply is derived from the systemic circulation, in contrast to the anterior pituitary which is supplied by the hypophyseal portal system.9 Rapid onset of polydipsia and polyuria in a patient older than 50 years of age should therefore raise immediate suspicion for metastatic disease.9 Treatment of adrenal insufficiency may “unmask” or exacerbate central DI, as normalization of blood pressure following glucocorticoid replacement inhibits ADH release.10 In the pregnant state, ADH degradation is increased due to placental production of vasopressinase. Any mechanism of hepatic dysfunction that occurs in pregnancy (pre-eclampsia, HELLP, acute fatty liver) will augment this normal physiology by reducing vasopressinase clearance, and can subsequently lead to transient DI 11In nephrogenic DI, ADH is present but the kidneys are unable to respond appropriately.8 In normal physiology, ADH acts to concentrate the urine via activation of the vasopressin V2 receptor, which leads to insertion of aquaporin-2 water channels in the collecting duct. 3,12 Nephrogenic DI can be primary (genetic) or secondary (acquired). Primary nephrogenic DI occurs as a result of genetic mutations affecting either the vasopressin 2 receptor or aquaporin-2 water channels; typically, such conditions present in infancy.12 Secondary nephrogenic DI can occur by a variety of mechanisms; the most common is chronic lithium administration. Lithium enters the principal cell in the collecting duct via epithelial sodium channels, and is thought to impair urinary concentrating ability via reduction in the number of principal cells and interference in signalling pathways involved in aquaporin. 12,13 Hypercalcemia, hypokalemia, obstructive uropathy, and pregnancy can lead to transient nephrogenic DI. 12,13 Hypercalcemia can lead to nephrogenic DI by causing a renal concentrating defect when calcium levels are persistently above 2.75 mmol/ L.14 Increased hydrostatic pressure from obstructive uropathy may lead to suppression of aquaporin-2 expression, resulting in transient nephrogenic DI.12 Nephrogenic DI can be caused by various renal diseases due to impairment of renal concentrating mechanisms, even before glomerular filtration rate is impaired. Polycystic kidney disease causes anatomic disruption of the medullary architecture. Polyuria in sickle cell disease results from a similar mechanism, as sickling in the vasa recta interferes with the countercurrent exchange mechanisms 16. Infiltrative renal disease including amyloid and Sjogren’s syndrome impair renal tubular function due to amyloid deposition and lymphocytic infiltration.17,18Mixed Water-Solute DiuresisIn some cases, polyuria can be caused by a combination of both mechanisms. The linear relationship between solute excretion and urine output described above is strongly influenced by ADH. In the setting of a solute diuresis, absence or deficiency of ADH can augment the degree of polyuria quite dramatically.14,19 Clinical examples of mixed diuresis include concurrent loading of both water and solute, chronic renal failure or infiltrative renal disease, relief of prolonged urinary obstruction, and partial DI.2,4 Typically in such scenarios, urine osmolality ranges from 100–300 mmol/kg.2 Conclusion Polyuria has a broad range of causes and can be a diagnostic challenge for clinicians. Understanding the pathophysiology that underpins the different mechanisms of polyuria is essential to appropriate workup, diagnosis, and treatment of this condition. If this is a complaint, the first step is to quantitate the 24-hour urine volume. We recommend referral to endocrinology when there is evidence of hypothalamic or pituitary disease, when a water deprivation test is required, or in cases where the diagnosis is unclear. DisclosureFunding sources: None.Conflicts of interest: None. References 1. Leung AK, Robson WL, Halperin ML. Polyuria in childhood. Clin Pediatr (Phila) 1991;30(11):634–40.2. Bhasin B, Velez JC. Evaluation of polyuria: the roles of solute loading and water diuresis. Am J Kidney Dis 2016;67(3):507–11.3. Rennke HG, Denker BM. Renal pathophysiology: the essentials. 4th ed. Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer/Lippincott Williams & Wilkins; 2014.4. Oster JR, Singer I, Thatte L, Grant-Taylor I, Diego JM. The polyuria of solute diuresis. Arch Intern Med 1997;157(7):721–9.5. Grois N, Fahrner B, Arceci RJ, Henter JI, McClain K, Lassmann H, et al. Central nervous system disease in Langerhans cell histiocytosis. J Pediatr 2010;156(6):873–81, 81.e1.6. Stuart CA, Neelon FA, Lebovitz HE. Disordered control of thirst in hypothalamic-pituitary sarcoidosis. N Engl J Med 1980;303(19):1078–82.7. Di Iorgi N, Napoli F, Allegri AE, Olivieri I, Bertelli E, Gallizia A, et al. Diabetes insipidus--diagnosis and management. Horm Res Paediatr 2012;77(2):69–84.8. Mahzari M, Liu D, Arnaout A, Lochnan H. Immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy associated hypophysitis. Clin Med Ins Endocrin Diabet 2015;8:21–8.9. Hermet M, Delévaux I, Trouillier S, André M, Chazal J, Aumaître O. Diabète insipide révélateur de métastases hypophysaires : quatre observations et revue de la littérature. La Revue de Médecine Interne 2009;30(5):425-9.10. Martin MM. Coexisting anterior pituitary and neurohypophyseal insufficiency: A syndrome with diagnostic implication. Arch Intern Med 1969;123(4):409–16.11. Aleksandrov N, Audibert F, Bedard MJ, Mahone M, Goffinet F, Kadoch IJ. Gestational diabetes insipidus: a review of an underdiagnosed condition. J Obstet Gynaecol Can 2010;32(3):225–31.12. Bockenhauer D, Bichet DG. Pathophysiology, diagnosis and management of nephrogenic diabetes insipidus. Nat Rev Nephrol 2015;11(10):576–88.13. Grünfeld JP, Rossier BC. Lithium nephrotoxicity revisited. Nat Rev Nephrol 2009;5(5):270.14. Rose BD, Post TW. Clinical physiology of acid-base and electrolyte disorders. 5th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, Medical Pub. Division; 2001, 754.15. Gabow PA, Kaehny WD, Johnson AM, Duley IT, Manco-Johnson M, Lezotte DC, et al. The clinical utility of renal concentrating capacity in polycystic kidney disease. Kidney Internat 35(2):675–80.16. Hatch FE, Culbertson JW, Diggs LW. Nature of the renal concentrating defect in sickle cell disease. J Clin Invest 1967;46(3):336–4517. Carone FA, Epstein FH. Nephrogenic diabetes insipidus caused by amyloid disease: Evidence in man of the role of the collecting ducts in concentrating urine. Am J Med 1960;29(3):539–44.18. Shearn MA, Tu W-H. Nephrogenic diabetes insipidus and other defects of renal tubular function in Sjögren's syndrome. Am J Med 1965;39(2):312–8.19. Rennke HG, Denker BM. Renal pathophysiology: the essentials. 4th ed. Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer/Lippincott Williams & Wilkins; 2014. Figure 3.7, effects of ADH and solute excretion on urine volume, 88.
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"Buchbesprechungen." Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung: Volume 48, Issue 1 48, no. 1 (January 1, 2021): 87–210. http://dx.doi.org/10.3790/zhf.48.1.87.

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Strootman, Rolf / Floris van den Eijnde / Roy van Wijk (Hrsg.), Empires of the Sea. Maritime Power Networks in World History (Cultural Interactions in the Mediterranean, 4), Leiden / Boston 2020, Brill, X u. 361 S. / Abb., € 119,00. (Lena Moser, Tübingen) Schilling, Lothar / Christoph Schönberger / Andreas Thier (Hrsg.), Verfassung und Öffentlichkeit in der Verfassungsgeschichte. Tagung der Vereinigung für Verfassungsgeschichte vom 22. bis 24. Februar 2016 auf der Insel Reichenau (Beihefte zu „Der Staat“, 25), Berlin 2020, Duncker &amp; Humblot, 220 S., € 69,90. (Michael Stolleis, Kronberg) Pieper, Lennart, Einheit im Konflikt. Dynastiebildung in den Grafenhäusern Lippe und Waldeck in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Norm und Struktur, 49), Wien / Köln / Weimar 2019, Böhlau, 623 S. / Abb., € 90,00. (Pauline Puppel, Aumühle) Das Totenbuch des Zisterzienserinnenklosters Feldbach (1279 – 1706), hrsg. v. Gabriela Signori (Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für geschichtliche Landeskunde in Baden-Württemberg. Reihe A: Quellen, 63), Stuttgart 2020, Kohlhammer, XLVI u. 134 S. / Abb., € 22,00. (Alkuin Schachenmayr, Salzburg) Ptak, Roderich, China und Asiens maritime Achse im Mittelalter. Konzepte, Wahrnehmungen, offene Fragen (Das mittelalterliche Jahrtausend, 5), Berlin / Boston 2019, de Gruyter, 61 S. / Abb., € 14,95. (Folker Reichert, Stuttgart) Harari, Yuval N., Fürsten im Fadenkreuz. Geheimoperationen im Zeitalter der Ritter 1100 – 1550. Aus dem Englischen v. Andreas Wirthensohn, München 2020, Beck, 347 S. / Abb., € 26,95. (Malte Prietzel, Paderborn) Signori, Gabriela (Hrsg.), Inselklöster – Klosterinseln. Topographie und Toponymie einer monastischen Formation (Studien zur Germania Sacra. Neue Folge, 9), Berlin / Boston 2019, de Gruyter Akademie Forschung, VI u. 254 S. / Abb., € 119, 95. (Matthias Untermann, Heidelberg) Korpiola, Mia / Anu Lahtinen (Hrsg.), Planning for Death. 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(Arndt Brendecke, München) Kleinehagenbrock, Frank / Dorothea Klein / Anuschka Tischer / Joachim Hamm (Hrsg.), Reformation und katholische Reform. Zwischen Kontinuität und Innovation (Publikationen aus dem Kolleg „Mittelalter und Frühe Neuzeit“, 7), Würzburg 2019, Königshausen &amp; Neumann, VIII u. 602 S. / Abb., € 68,00. (Marc Mudrak, Berlin) Wendebourg, Dorothea / Euan Cameron / Martin Ohst (Hrsg.), Sister Reformations III. From Reformation Movements to Reformation Churches in the Holy Roman Empire and on the British Isles / Schwesterreformationen III. Von der reformatorischen Bewegung zur Kirche im Heiligen Römischen Reich und auf den britischen Inseln, Tübingen 2019, Mohr Siebeck, XXIII u. 630 S., € 184,00. (Tobias Jammerthal, Neuendettelsau) Labouvie, Eva (Hrsg.), Glaube und Geschlecht – Gender Reformation, Wien / Köln / Weimar 2019, Böhlau, 387 S. / Abb., € 60,00. (Heike Talkenberger, Stuttgart) Jensen, Mads L., A Humanist in Reformation Politics. 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(Studies in Jewish History and Culture, 58), Leiden / Boston 2020, Brill, XIX u. 400 S. / Abb., € 168,00. (Wolfgang Reinhard, Freiburg i. Br.) Kendrick, Jeff / Katherine S. Maynard (Hrsg.), Polemic and Literature surrounding the French Wars of Religion (Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, 68), Boston / Berlin 2019, de Gruyter, VIII u. 208 S. / Abb., € 86,95. (Gabriele Haug-Moritz, Graz) Larminie, Vivienne (Hrsg.), Huguenot Networks, 1560 – 1780. The Interactions and Impact of a Protestant Minority in Europe (Politics and Culture in Europe, 1650 – 1750), New York / London 2018, Routledge, VI u. 233 S. / Abb., £ 96,00. (Alexander Schunka, Berlin) Gwynn, Robin, The Huguenots in Later Stuart Britain, Bd. 1: Crisis, Renewal, and the Ministers’ Dilemma, Brighton / Portland / Toronto 2015 [Paperback 2018], Sussex Academic Press, XVIII u. 481 S. / Abb., £ 37,50. 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VIEIRA, Eliana Sales. "REMEMORAR É PRECISO: ECOS DA ESCRAVIDÃO NOS POEMAS DE FÁTIMA TRINCHÃO." Trama 15, no. 36 (October 11, 2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.48075/rt.v15i36.22335.

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Abstract:
O presente texto propõe-se a analisar a produção literária da escritora negra baiana Fátima Trinchão, como uma prática de (r)existência, com base nos estudos sobre feminismo negro a partir de uma leitura decolonial. Para compor tal reflexão, foram selecionados poemas da escritora que rememoram a escravidão, período no qual o corpo das mulheres negras foi destituído de mente (HOOKS, 1995), sendo sistematicamente violentado pelos senhores brancos. A partir dessa análise, pretende-se pensar como essa escrita (re)significa as memórias da escravidão, entendendo que esse ato de rememoração reveste-se, conforme aponta Márcia dos Santos (2007), de uma intencionalidade que, para além da perspectiva de “conhecer o passado”, delimita também ações e reações necessárias ao exercício político, marcando identidades e lutas.REFERÊNCIAS:ALBUQUERQUE, Wlamyra R. de; FRAGA FILHO, Walter. Uma história do negro no Brasil. Salvador: Centro de Estudos Afro-Orientais; Brasília: Fundação Cultural Palmares, 2006. Disponível em: https://www.geledes.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/uma-historia-do-negro-no-brasil.pdf. Acesso: 13 ago. 2018.BENJAMIN, Walter. Sobre o conceito da história. In: ______ Magia e técnica, arte e política: ensaios sobre literatura e história da cultura – Obras Escolhidas, Volume I. Trad. Paulo Sérgio Rouanet – 8. ed. – São Paulo: Brasiliense, 2012, p. 241-252.CARNEIRO, Sueli. Enegrecer o feminismo: a situação da mulher negra na América Latina a partir de uma perspectiva de gênero. In Ashoka Empreendimentos Sociais Takano Cidadania (Orgs.). Racismos contemporâneos. Rio de Janeiro: Takano Editora, 2003, p. 49-58. Disponível em: https://pt.scribd.com/document/322208263/Sueli-Carneiro-Enegrecer-o-Feminismo. Acesso em: 28 maio 2018.DAVIS, Ângela. O legado da escravatura: bases para uma nova natureza feminina. In: ________ Mulher, Raça e Classe. Tradução Livre. Plataforma Gueto, 2013. Disponível em: https://we.riseup.net/assets/165852/mulheres-rac3a7a-e-classe.pdf. Acesso em: 23 maio 2018.DELEUZE, Gilles. A literatura e a vida. In:______. Crítica e clínica. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2004. p. 11-16.EVARISTO, Conceição. Conceição Evaristo: minha escrita é contaminada pela condição de mulher negra. Nexo Jornal, São Paulo, 26 maio 2017. Entrevista concedida a Juliana Domingos de Lima. Disponível em: https://www.nexojornal.com.br/entrevista/2017/05/26/Concei%C3%A7%C3%A3o-Evaristo-%E2%80%98minha-escrita-%C3%A9-contaminada-pela-condi%C3%A7%C3%A3o-de-mulher-negra%E2%80%99. Acesso: 13 ago. 2018.EVARISTO, Conceição. Da grafia-desenho de minha mãe, um dos lugares de nascimento de minha escrita. In: ALEXANDRE, Marcos Antônio (org). Representações performáticas brasileiras: teorias, práticas e suas interfaces. Belo Horizonte: Mazza Edições, 2007, p 16-21. Disponível em: http://nossaescrevivencia.blogspot.com/2012/08/da-grafia-desenho-de-minha-mae-um-dos.html. Acesso: 13 ago. 2018.FIGUEIREDO, Eurídice. Mulheres ao espelho: autobiografia, ficção, autoficção. Rio de Janeiro: EdUERJ, 2013.FOUCAULT, Michel. Microfísica do poder. Trad. de Roberto Machado. 2a ed. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 2015.GAGNEBIN, Jeanne Marie. Memória, história, testemunho. In: ______. Lembrar escrever esquecer. São Paulo: Ed. 34, 2006, p. 49-57. Disponível em: https://joaocamillopenna.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/gagnebin-jeanne-marie-lembrar-escrever-esquecer.pdf. Acesso: 25 maio. 2014.GOMES, Nilma Lino. Intelectuais Negros e Produção do Conhecimento: algumas reflexões sobre a realidade brasileira. In: SANTOS, Boaventura de Sousa; MENESES, Maria Paula. (Orgs.) Epistemologias do Sul. Coimbra: Edições Almedina. AS, 2009, p. 419-441. Disponível em: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/conhecer/biblioteca-digital-camoes/pensamento-e-ciencia/2106-2106/file.html. Acesso em: 27 maio 2018.GONZALEZ, Lélia. Racismo e sexismo na cultura brasileira. In: Revista Ciências Sociais Hoje, Anpocs, 1984, p. 223-244. Disponível em: https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/4130749/mod_resource/content/1/Gonzalez.Lelia%281983-original%29.Racismo%20e%20sexismo%20na%20cultura%20brasileira_1983.pdf. Acesso em: 28 maio 2018.HOOKS, bell. Mulheres negras: moldando a teoria feminista. In: Revista Brasileira de Ciência Política, nº16. Tradução de Roberto Cataldo Costa. Brasília, janeiro - abril de 2015, pp. 193-210. Disponível em: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/rbcpol/n16/0103-3352-rbcpol-16-00193.pdf. Acesso em: 23 maio 2018.HOUAISS, Antônio. Dicionário Houaiss da Língua Portuguesa. Rio de Janeiro, Ed. Objetiva, 2001.KILOMBA, Grada. Descolonizando o conhecimento: uma palestra-performance de Grada Kilomba. 2016. Tradução: Jessica Oliveira. Disponível em: http://www.goethe.de/mmo/priv/15259710-STANDARD.pdf. Acesso em: 6 de jun de 2018.LE GOFF, Jacques. Memória. In: ______ História e memória. Tradução Bernardo Leitão et al. Campinas: EDUNICAMP, 1990, p. 423-483. (Coleção Repertórios) Disponível em: http://memorial.trt11.jus.br/wp-content/uploads/Hist%C3%B3ria-e-Mem%C3%B3ria.pdf. Acesso em: 20 maio 2014.LUZ, Marco Aurélio. Cultura negra e ideologia do recalque. 3a ed. Salvador: EDUFBA; Rio de Janeiro: PALLAS, 2011.SANTIAGO, Ana Rita. Vozes literárias de escritoras negras. Cruz das Almas/BA: UFRB, 2012. Disponível em: https://www1.ufrb.edu.br/editora/component/phocadownload/category/2-e-books?download=19:vozes-literarias-de-escritoras-negras. Acesso em: 27 maio 2018.SANTOS, Márcia Pereira dos. História e memória: desafios de uma relação teórica. In: OPSIS – Revista do Núcleo Interdisciplinar de Pesquisa e Estudos culturais, v.7, n.9, 2007, p. 81-97. Disponível em: http://www.revistas.ufg.br/index.php/Opsis/article/viewFile/9331/6423. Acesso em: 25 maio. 2014.SILVA, Ana Rita Santiago da. Literatura de autoria feminina negra: (des)silenciamentos e ressignificações. Vertentes Interfaces I: Estudos Literários e Comparados. Fólio – Revista de Letras, Vitória da Conquista, v. 2, n. 1 p. 20-37, jan./jun. 2010. Disponível em: http://periodicos.uesb.br/index.php/folio/article/viewFile/38/276. Acesso em: 28 abr. 2018.SILVA, Ana Rita Santiago da. O tear de memórias na poética de escritoras negras baianas. In: LEÃO, Allison; CAVALHEIRO, Juciane RIOS, Otávio. Colóquio Nacional Poéticas do Imaginário da Cátedra Amazonense de Estudos Literários: literatura, história, memória. Manaus, AM: UEA Edições, 2009, p. 22-36. Disponível em: http://www.pos.uea.edu.br/data/area/download/download/51-1.pdf. Acesso em: 23 maio 2018.SILVA, Tomaz Tadeu da. A produção social da identidade e da diferença. In: ______ (org.); HALL, Stuart; WOODWARD, Kathryn. Identidade e diferença: a perspectiva dos estudos culturais. 13. ed. Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes, 2013, p. 73-102.TRINCHÃO, Fátima. Ecos do passado. Disponível em: http://www.fatimatrinchao.net/. Acesso em: 23 maio 2018.TRINCHÃO, Fátima. Mulheres negras mulheres. Disponível em: http://www.fatimatrinchao.net/. Acesso em: 23 maio 2018.TRINCHÃO, Fátima. O canto da chibata. Disponível em: http://www.fatimatrinchao.net/. Acesso em: 23 maio 2018.TRINCHÃO, Fátima. Saudades da terra. Disponível em: http://www.fatimatrinchao.net/. Acesso em: 23 maio 2018.ENVIADO EM 09-06-19 | ACEITO EM 26-06-19
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Capalbo-Silva, Rodrigo, Henrique Hadad, Jonathas Eduardo Virgilio Piassi, Luara Teixeira Colombo, Bruno Coelho Mendes, Fábio Roberto de Souza Batista, Idelmo Rangel Garcia Júnior, and Francisley Ávila de Souza. "Late mandibular fracture after attempted third molar surgery: case report." ARCHIVES OF HEALTH INVESTIGATION 9, no. 3 (August 25, 2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.21270/archi.v9i3.4673.

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Removal of lower third molar corresponds to one of the most common procedures in oral surgery. The extraction can result in several intraoperative or postoperative complications, especially when fully impacted molars are involved. This case report describes a mandibular angle fracture following removal of a fully impacted lower third molar of a 41 years old male patient. The fracture occurred 3 days after the attempt to extract the tooth 38 by a dentist surgeon. Several factors influencing the possibility of fracture including gender, age, dental position, and angulation were reviewed and associated with the injury. A fracture line in the angular region of the jaw was observed in radiological and tomographic analysis, both essential to perform the diagnosis. Open reduction internal fixation treatment approach was realized to ensure the best patient’s recovery. We conclude that the difficult to maintain a soft diet and the complete dentition factor could have been determinant to cause the fracture.Descriptors: Mandibular Fractures; Fracture Fixation; Molar, Third.ReferencesAl-Belasy FA, Tozoglu S, Ertas U. Mastication and late mandibular fracture after surgery of impacted third molars associated with no gross pathology. J Oral Maxillofac Surg. 2009; 67(4):856-61.daBodner L, Brennan PA, McLeod NM. Characteristics of iatrogenic mandibular fractures associated with tooth removal: review and analysis of 189 cases. Br J Oral Maxillofac Surg. 2011;49(7):567-72.Bouloux GF, Steed MB, Perciaccante VJ. Complications of third molar surgery. Oral Maxillofac Surg Clin North Am. 2007; 19(1):117-28.Joshi A, Goel M, Thorat A. Identifying the risk factors causing iatrogenic mandibular fractures associated with exodontia: a systemic meta-analysis of 200 cases from 1953 to 2015. Oral Maxillofac Surg. 2016;20(4):391-96.Libersa P, Roze D, Cachart T, Libersa JC. Immediate and late mandibular fractures after third molar removal. J Oral Maxillofac Surg. 2002;60(2):163-66.Perry PA, Goldberg MH. Late mandibular fracture after third molar surgery: a survey of Connecticut oral and maxillofacial surgeons. J Oral Maxillofac Surg. 2000;58(8):858-61.Pires WR, Bonardi JP, Faverani LP, Momesso GAC, Muñoz XMJP, Silva AFM et al. Late mandibular fracture occurring in the postoperative period after third molar removal: systematic review and analysis of 124 cases. Int J Oral Maxillofac Surg. 2017;46(1):46-53.Krimmel M, Reinert S. Mandibular fracture after third molar removal. J Oral Maxillofac Surg. 2000;58(10):1110-12.Wagner KW, Otten JE, Schoen R, Schmelzeisen R. Pathological mandibular fractures following third molar removal. Int J Oral Maxillofac Surg. 2005;34(7):722-26.Ethunandan M, Shanahan D, Patel M. Iatrogenic mandibular fractures following removal of impacted third molars: an analysis of 130 cases. Br Dent J. 2012;212(4):179-84.Ellis E 3rd. Management of fractures through the angle of the mandible. Oral Maxillofac Surg Clin North Am. 2009;21(2):163-74.Pell GJ, Gregory GT. Report on a ten year study of a tooth division technique for removal of impacted teeth. Am J Orthodont Surg. 1942; 28:660-71.Antoun JS, Lee KH. Sports-related maxillofacial fractures over an 11-year period. J Oral Maxillofac Surg. 2008;66(3):504-8.Chrcanovic BR, Custódio AL. Considerations of mandibular angle fractures during and after surgery for removal of third molars: a review of the literature. Oral Maxillofac Surg. 2010; 14(2):71-80. Iizuka T, Tanner S, Berthold H. Mandibular fractures following third molar extraction. A retrospective clinical and radiological study. Int J Oral Maxillofac Surg. 1997;26(5):338-43.Woldenberg Y, Gatot I, Bodner L. Iatrogenic mandibular fracture associated with third molar removal. Can it be prevented?. Med Oral Patol Oral Cir Bucal. 2007;12(1):E70-2.Miyaura K, Matsuka Y, Morita M, Yamashita A, Watanabe T. Comparison of biting forces in different age and sex groups: a study of biting efficiency with mobile and non-mobile teeth. J Oral Rehabil. 1999;26(3):223-27.Bezerra TP, Studart-Soares EC, Pita-Neto IC, Costa FW, Batista SH. Do third molars weaken the mandibular angle?. Med Oral Patol Oral Cir Bucal. 2011;16(5):e657-63.Grau-Manclús V, Gargallo-Albiol J, Almendros-Marqués N, Gay-Escoda C. Mandibular fractures related to the surgical extraction of impacted lower third molars: a report of 11 cases. J Oral Maxillofac Surg. 2011;69(5):1286-90.
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Mills, Brett. "What Happens When Your Home Is on Television?" M/C Journal 10, no. 4 (August 1, 2007). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2694.

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In the third episode of the British sci-fi/thriller television series Torchwood (BBC3, 2007-) the team are investigating a portable ‘ghost machine’, which allows its users to see events which occurred in the past. After visiting an old man whose younger self the device may have allowed them to witness, the team’s medic, Owen Harper, spots Bernie Harris, who’d previously been in possession of the machine. A chase ensues; they run past a park, between a gang of kids playing football, over a railway bridge, through a housing estate, and eventually Bernie is cornered in a back garden and taken away for questioning. The scene demonstrates the series’ intention to be a fast-paced, modern, glossy thriller, with loud incidental music, fast cuts, and energetic camerawork. Yet for me the scene has quite a different meaning. The housing estate they run through is the one in which I used to live; the railway bridge they run over is the one I crossed every day on my way to and from work; the street they run down is my street; and there, in the background, clear and apparent and obvious for all to see, is my home. Yes; my house was on Torchwood. As Blunt and Dowling note, “home does not simply exist, but is made … [and] … this process has both material and imaginative elements” (23). It is through such imaginative elements that we turn ‘spaces’ that are “unnamed, unhistoried, unnarativized” into ‘places’ that are “indubitably bound up with personal experience” (Darby 50). Such experiences may be ‘real’ (as in things that actually happened there) or ‘representational’ (as in seen on television); my relationship to ‘home’ is here being inflected through the “indexical bond” (Kilborn and Izod 29) that links both of these strategies. In using a scene from Torchwood to say something about my personal history, I’m taking what is, in essence, a televisual ‘space’ and converting it into a ‘place’ which is not only defined by my “profilmic” (Ward 8) relationship to it, but also helps express that relationship. Telling everyone that my house was on Torchwood certainly says something about the programme; but more fundamentally I’m engaging in a process intended to say something about me. A bit of autobiography. The house is in Splott, a residential area of Cardiff, the capital of Wales, where Torchwood is set and filmed. I lived in Cardiff from 2000 to 2006, when I worked at the University of Glamorgan. For much of that time I lived in rented accommodation in Cathays, the student area of Cardiff. But in 2005 I bought a house in Splott, and this was the first property I ever owned. A year later I moved to Norwich (virtually the other side of the UK from Cardiff) to take a job at the University of East Anglia, but I kept the house in Cardiff and now rent it out. It was while living in Norwich that my house appeared on Torchwood, and I had no idea that the programme had been filming in that area. This means that, strictly speaking, at the time it was on television the property was no longer my ‘home’, but was instead my tenants’. Yet what I want to examine here is the “geography of feeling and emotion” (Rodaway 263) which is central to the idea of ‘home’, and which has been kick-started in me since some fictional television characters ran down the street I used to live in and the ‘real’ and the ‘representational’ began to intersect. There certainly is something personal which is required in order to turn a ‘space’ into a ‘place’, but what is it that then transforms it into ‘home’? That is, for me Cardiff is more than a ‘place’ which I know. Owning a property there makes a difference, but that is to too easily equate a commercial transaction with an emotive sense of feeling. Indeed, Cardiff felt like ‘home’ before I’d bought a house, and the majority of my memories of the city are connected to other properties I’ve lived in. In a capitalist society it’s tempting to equate ‘home’ with the property we own, and this probably is the case for the majority of people (Morley 19). Nevertheless, something emotive stirred in me when I saw my house in a chase sequence on a science-fiction television programme when I live in an entirely different city. Tuan defines this as ‘topophilia’, which is “the affective bond between people and place or setting” (Topophilia 4), and it’s clear that such bonds can be highly emotionally charged and a significant aspect of one’s sense of self. This is noticeable because of the ways in which I’ve used my house’s appearance on television. I’ve not been quiet about it; I was telling everyone at work the day after it appeared. Whenever people mention Torchwood it’s something I point out. This might not sound as if that is likely to occur very often, but considering the programme is a spin-off from the highly successful revival of Doctor Who (BBC1, 1963-89, 1996, 2005-) it is part of a well-known media landscape. Both Doctor Who and Torchwood are predominantly filmed in Cardiff and the surrounding areas of South Wales, but whereas Torchwood is also narratively set in Cardiff, Doctor Who merely uses the locations to represent other places, most often London. Yet many of these places are distinctive and therefore obviously Cardiff for those who know the area. For example, the hospital in the episode ‘New Earth’ (2006) is recognisably the interior of the Wales Millennium Centre, just as the exterior location where the Tardis lands at the beginning of the episode is clearly Rhossili on the Gower Peninsula. Inevitably, the use of such locations has often disrupted my understanding of the story being told. That is, it’s hard to accept that this episode is taking place on a planet at the other end of the galaxy thousands of years into the future if the characters are standing on a cliff you recognise because you’ve been camping there. Of course, the use of locations to represent other places is necessary in media fictions, and I’m not trying to carry out some kind of trainspotter location identification in an attempt to undermine the programme’s diegesis. But it is important to note that while “remembering is a process that today is increasingly media-afflicted” (Hoskins 110), media texts can also be affected by the memories, whether communal or individual, that we bring to bear on them. A ‘real’ relationship with a place can be so intimate that it refuses to be ignored when ‘representations’ require it to be unnecessary. I’m a fan of Doctor Who and would rather not recognise the places so I can just get on with enjoying the programme. But it’s not possible to simply erase “Expressions of community” (Moores 368) which bring together identity and place, especially when that place is your home. Importantly, my idea of ‘home’ is inextricably bound up in the past. As it is a place I no longer live in, the ways in which I feel towards it are predicated on the notion that I used to live there, but no longer do. It’s clear that notions of home – especially those related to nation – are often predicated on ideas of history with significant emotional resonance (Anderson; Blunt and Dowling 140-195; Calhoun). This is a place that is an emotional rather than geographical home, even if it used to also be my home geographically. In buying a house, and engaging in the consumer culture which dominates the ways in which we turn a house into a home (oh, those endless hours at Ikea), I spent a lot of time wondering what it was that this sofa, or those lampshades, or that rug, said about me. The idea that the buildings that we own are a key way of creating and demonstrating a particular kind of identity or affiliation with a certain social group is necessary to consumer capitalism. But as I no longer live in it, the inside of this house can no longer be used as something I can show to other people hoping that they’ll ‘read’ my home how I want them to. Instead, the sense of home invigorated by my house’s appearance on Torchwood is one centred on location, related to the city and the housing estate where my house is, rather than what I did to it. ‘Home’ here becomes something symbolised by the bricks and mortar of the house I bought, but is instead more accurately located in the city and area which the house sits in; Cardiff. More importantly, Cardiff and my house become emotionally meaningful because I’m no longer there. That is, while it’s clear I had a particular relationship to Cardiff when I was a resident, this has altered since my move to Norwich. In moving to a new city – one which I had never visited before, and had no family or friends living in – it seems that my understanding of Cardiff as my ‘home’ has become intensified. This might be because continuing to own property there gives me an investment in the city, both emotionally and financially. But this idea of ‘home’ would, I think, have existed even if I’d sold my house. Instead, Cardiff-as-home is predicated on an idea of personal history and nostalgia (Wheeler; Massey). Academics are used to moving great distances in order to get jobs; indeed, “To spend an entire working career in a single department may seem to be a failure of geographical imagination” (Ley 182). The labour market insists that “All people may now be wanderers” (Bauman, Globalization 87), and hence geographical origins become something to be discussed with new colleagues. For me, like most people, this is a complicated question; does it mean where I was born, or where I grew up, or where I studied, or where I have lived most of my life? In the choices I make to answer this question, I’m acknowledging that “migration is a complex process of cultural negotiation, resistance, and adaptation” (Sinclair and Cunningham 14). As Freeman notes, “the history one tells, via memory, assumes the form of a narrative of the past that charts the trajectory of how one’s self came to be” (33, italics in original). Importantly, this narrative must be seen to make sense; that is, it must help explain the present, conforming to narrative ideas of cause and effect. In constructing a “narratable self” (Caravero 33, italics in original) I’m demonstrating how I think I came to end up where I am now, doing the job I’m doing. In order to show that “I am more than what the thin present defines” (Tuan, Space and Place 186) it’s necessary to reiterate a notion of ‘home’ which supports and illustrates the desired identity narrative. This narrative is as much about “the reflexive project of the self” (Gauntlett 99) in these “liquid times” (Bauman, Liquid Times), as it is a “performance” (Goffman) for others. The coherence and stability of my performance was undercut in a recent episode of Doctor Who – ‘Smith and Jones’ (2007) – in which a family row occurred outside a pub. I became quite distraught that I couldn’t work out where that pub was, and was later reassured to discover that it was in Pontypridd, a town a good few miles from Cardiff, and therefore it wasn’t surprising that I couldn’t recognise it. But in being distraught at not recognising locations I was demonstrating how central knowledge is to an idea of ‘home’. Knowing your way around, knowing where certain shops are, knowing the history of the place; these are all aspects of home, all parts of what Crouch calls “lay knowledge” (217). Ignorance of a space marks the outsider, who must stand on street corners with a map and ask locals for directions. For someone like me who prides himself on his sense of direction (who says I conform to gender stereotypes?) an inability to recognise a pub that I thought I should know suggested my knowledge of the area was dissipating, and so perhaps my ability to define that city as my home was becoming less valid. This must be why I take pleasure in noting that Torchwood’s diegesis is often geographically correct, for the ‘representational’ helps demonstrate my knowledge of the ‘real’ place’s layout. As Tuan notes, “When space feels thoroughly familiar to us, it has become place” (Space and Place 73), and the demonstration of that familiarity is one of the ways of reasserting one’s relationship to home. In demonstrating a knowledge of the place I’m defining as home, I’m also insisting that I’m not a tourist. Urry shows how visitors use a “tourist gaze” (The Tourist Gaze), arguing viewing is the most important activity when encountering a place, just as Tuan (Space and Place 16) and Strain (3) do. To visit somewhere is to employ “a dominance of the eye” (Urry, “Sensing the City” 71); this is why photography has become the dominant manner for recording tourist activity. Strain sees the tourist gaze as one “trained for consumerism” (15) with tourist activity defined primarily by commerce. Since Doctor Who returned Cardiff has promoted its association with the programme, opening an ‘Up Close’ exhibition and debating whether to put together a tourist trail of locations. As a fan of these programmes I’m certainly excited by all of this, and have been to the exhibition. Yet it feels odd being a tourist in a place I want to call home, and some of my activity seems an attempt to demonstrate that it was my home before it became a place I might want to visit for its associations with a television programme. For example, I never went and watched the programme being filmed, even though much of it was shot within walking distance of my house, and “The physical places of fandom clearly have an extraordinary importance for fans” (Sandvoss 61). While some of this was due to not wanting to know what was going to happen in the programme, I was uncomfortable with carrying out an activity that would turn a “landscape” into a “mediascape” (Jansson 432), replacing the ‘real’ with the ‘representational’. In insisting on seeing Cardiff, and my house, as something which existed prior to the programmes, I’m attempting to maintain the “imagined community” (Anderson) I have for my home, distinguishing it from the taint of commerce, no matter how pointless or naïve such an act is in effect. Hence, home is resolutely not a commercial place; or, at least, it is a location whose primary emotive aspects are not defined by consumerism. When houses are seen as nothing more than aspects of commerce, that’s when they remain ‘houses’ or ‘properties’; the affective aspects of ‘homes’ are instead emotionally detached from the commercial factors which bring them about. I think this is why I’m keen to demonstrate that my associations with Cardiff existed before Doctor Who started being made there, for if the place only meant anything to me because of the programme that would define me as a tourist and therefore undermine those emotional and personal aspects of the city which allow me to call it ‘home’. It also means I can be proud that such a cultural institution is being made in ‘my’ city. But it’s a city I can no longer claim residence in. This means that Torchwood and Doctor Who have become useful ways for me to ‘visit’ Cardiff. It seems I have started to adopt a ‘tourist gaze’, for the programmes visually recreate the locations and all I can do is view them, no matter how much I use my knowledge of location in an attempt to interpret those images differently from a tourist. It’s tempting to suggest that this shows how there is a “perpetual negotiation between the real event and its representation” (Bruzzi 9), and how willing I am to engage in the “mobile privatization” that Williams saw as a defining aspect of television (26). But this would be to accept the “unhomeyness” which results from “the ultimate failures of the home in postmodern times” (Lewis and Cho 74). In adopting an autobiographical approach to these issues, I hope I’ve demonstrated the ways in which individuals can experience emotional resonances related to ‘home’ which, while clearly inflected through the social, cultural, and technological aspects I’ve outlined, are nevertheless meaningful and maintain a dominance of the ‘real’ over the ‘representational’. Furthermore, my job tells me I shouldn’t feel this way about my home; or, at least, it reminds me that such emotionality can be explained away through cultural analysis. But that doesn’t in any way make ‘home’ any less powerful nor fully explain how such dry criteria mutate into humanist, emotional significance. So, I can tell you what my home is: but I’m not sure I can get you to understand how seeing my home on television makes me feel. In that sense it’s almost too neat that the episode which kick-started all of this is called ‘Ghost Machine’, for television has become the technology through which the ghosts of my home haunt me on a weekly basis, and ghosts have always been difficult to make sense of. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983. Bauman, Zygmunt. Globalization: The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity, 1998. ———. Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Calhoun, Craig. Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Caravero, Adriana. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. Trans. Paul A. Kottman. London and New York: Routledge, 2000/1997. Crouch, David. “Surrounded by Place: Embodied Encounters.” Tourism: Between Place and Performance. Eds. Simon Coleman and Mike Crang. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2002. 207-18. Darby, Wendy Joy. Landscape and Identity: Geographies of Nation and Class in England. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000. Freeman, Mark. Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Gauntlett, David. Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Goffmann, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin, 1959. Hoskins, Andrew. “Television and the Collapse of Memory.” Time and Society 13.1 (2004): 109-27. Jansson, André. “Spatial Phantasmagoria: the Mediatization of Tourism Experience.” European Journal of Communication 17.4 (2002): 429-43. Kilborn, Richard, and John Izod. An Introduction to Television Documentary: Confronting Reality. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997. Lewis, Tyson, and Daniel Cho. “Home Is Where the Neurosis Is: A Topography of the Spatial Unconscious.” Cultural Critique 64.1 (2006): 69-91. Ley, David. “Places and Contexts.” Approaches to Human Geography. Eds. Stuart Aitken and Gill Valentine. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage, 2006. 178-83. Massey, Doris. For Space. London: Sage, 2005. Moores, Shaun. “Television, Geography and ‘Mobile Privatization’.” European Journal of Communication 8.4 (1993): 365-79. Morley, David. Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Rodaway, Paul. “Humanism and People-Centred Methods.” Approaches to Human Geography. Eds. Stuart Aitken and Gill Valentine. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage, 2006. 263-72. Sandvoss, Cornel. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Sinclair, John, and Stuart Cunningham. “Go with the Flow: Diasporas and the Media.” Television and New Media 1.1 (2000): 11-31. Strain, Ellen. Public Places, Private Journeys: Ethnography, Entertainment, and the Tourist Gaze. New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers UP, 2003. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. New York: Columbia UP, 1974. ———. Space and Place: the Perspective of Experience. London: Edward Arnold, 1977. Urry, John. “Sensing the City.” The Tourist City. Eds. Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1999. 71-86. ———. The Tourist Gaze. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2002. Ward, Paul. Documentary: The Margins of Reality. London and New York: Wallflower, 2005. Wheeler, Wendy. A New Modernity: Change in Science, Literature and Politics. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1999. Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mills, Brett. "What Happens When Your Home Is on Television?." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/08-mills.php>. APA Style Mills, B. (Aug. 2007) "What Happens When Your Home Is on Television?," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/08-mills.php>.
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McGrath, Shane. "Compassionate Refugee Politics?" M/C Journal 8, no. 6 (December 1, 2005). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2440.

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One of the most distinct places the politics of affect have played out in Australia of late has been in the struggles around the mandatory detention of undocumented migrants; specifically, in arguments about the amount of compassion border control practices should or do entail. Indeed, in 1990 the newly established Joint Standing Committee on Migration (JSCM) published its first report, Illegal Entrants in Australia: Balancing Control and Compassion. Contemporaneous, thought not specifically concerned, with the establishment of mandatory detention for asylum seekers, this report helped shape the context in which detention policy developed. As the Bureau of Immigration and Population Research put it in their summary of the report, “the Committee endorsed a tough stance regarding all future illegal entrants but a more compassionate stance regarding those now in Australia” (24). It would be easy now to frame this report in a narrative of decline. Under a Labor government the JSCM had at least some compassion to offer; since the 1996 conservative Coalition victory any such compassion has been in increasingly short supply, if not an outright political liability. This is a popular narrative for those clinging to the belief that Labor is still, in some residual sense, a social-democratic party. I am more interested in the ways the report’s subtitle effectively predicted the framework in which debates about detention have since been constructed: control vs. compassion, with balance as the appropriate mediating term. Control and compassion are presented as the poles of a single governmental project insofar as they can be properly calibrated; but at the same time, compassion is presented as an external balance to the governmental project (control), an extra-political restriction of the political sphere. This is a very formal way to put it, but it reflects a simple, vernacular theory that circulates widely among refugee activists. It is expressed with concision in Peter Mares’ groundbreaking book on detention centres, Borderlines, in the chapter title “Compassion as a vice”. Compassion remains one of the major themes and demands of Australian refugee advocates. They thematise compassion not only for the obvious reasons that mandatory detention involves a devastating lack thereof, and that its critics are frequently driven by intense emotional connections both to particular detainees and TPV holders and, more generally, to all who suffer the effects of Australian border control. There is also a historical or conjunctural element: as Ghassan Hage has written, for the last ten years or so many forms of political opposition in Australia have organised their criticisms in terms of “things like compassion or hospitality rather than in the name of a left/right political divide” (7). This tendency is not limited to any one group; it ranges across the spectrum from Liberal Party wets to anarchist collectives, via dozens of organised groups and individuals varying greatly in their political beliefs and intentions. In this context, it would be tendentious to offer any particular example(s) of compassionate activism, so let me instead cite a complaint. In November 2002, the conservative journal Quadrant worried that morality and compassion “have been appropriated as if by right by those who are opposed to the government’s policies” on border protection (“False Refugees” 2). Thus, the right was forced to begin to speak the language of compassion as well. The Department of Immigration, often considered the epitome of the lack of compassion in Australian politics, use the phrase “Australia is a compassionate country, but…” so often they might as well inscribe it on their letterhead. Of course this is hypocritical, but it is not enough to say the right are deforming the true meaning of the term. The point is that compassion is a contested term in Australian political discourse; its meanings are not fixed, but constructed and struggled over by competing political interests. This should not be particularly surprising. Stuart Hall, following Ernesto Laclau and others, famously argued that no political term has an intrinsic meaning. Meanings are produced – articulated, and de- or re-articulated – through a dynamic and partisan “suturing together of elements that have no necessary or eternal belongingness” (10). Compassion has many possible political meanings; it can be articulated to diverse social (and antisocial) ends. If I was writing on the politics of compassion in the US, for example, I would be talking about George W. Bush’s slogan of “compassionate conservatism”, and whatever Hannah Arendt meant when she argued that “the passion of compassion has haunted and driven the best men [sic] of all revolutions” (65), I think she meant something very different by the term than do, say, Rural Australians for Refugees. As Lauren Berlant has written, “politicized feeling is a kind of thinking that too often assumes the obviousness of the thought it has” (48). Hage has also opened this assumed obviousness to question, writing that “small-‘l’ liberals often translate the social conditions that allow them to hold certain superior ethical views into a kind of innate moral superiority. They see ethics as a matter of will” (8-9). These social conditions are complex – it isn’t just that, as some on the right like to assert, compassion is a product of middle class comfort. The actual relations are more dynamic and open. Connections between class and occupational categories on the one hand, and social attitudes and values on the other, are not given but constructed, articulated and struggled over. As Hall put it, the way class functions in the distribution of ideologies is “not as the permanent class-colonization of a discourse, but as the work entailed in articulating these discourses to different political class practices” (139). The point here is to emphasise that the politics of compassion are not straightforward, and that we can recognise and affirm feelings of compassion while questioning the politics that seem to emanate from those feelings. For example, a politics that takes compassion as its basis seems ill-suited to think through issues it can’t put a human face to – that is, the systematic and structural conditions for mandatory detention and border control. Compassion’s political investments accrue to specifiable individuals and groups, and to the harms done to them. This is not, as such, a bad thing, particularly if you happen to be a specifiable individual to whom a substantive harm has been done. But compassion, going one by one, group by group, doesn’t cope well with situations where the form of the one, or the form of the disadvantaged minority, constitutes not only a basis for aid or emancipation, but also violently imposes particular ideas of modern western subjectivity. How does this violence work? I want to answer by way of the story of an Iranian man who applied for asylum in Australia in 2004. In the available documents he is referred to as “the Applicant”. The Applicant claimed asylum based on his homosexuality, and his fear of persecution should he return to Iran. His asylum application was rejected by the Refugee Review Tribunal because the Tribunal did not believe he was really gay. In their decision they write that “the Tribunal was surprised to observe such a comprehensive inability on the Applicant’s part to identify any kind of emotion-stirring or dignity-arousing phenomena in the world around him”. The phenomena the Tribunal suggest might have been emotion-stirring for a gay Iranian include Oscar Wilde, Alexander the Great, Andre Gide, Greco-Roman wrestling, Bette Midler, and Madonna. I can personally think of much worse bases for immigration decisions than Madonna fandom, but there is obviously something more at stake here. (All quotes from the hearing are taken from the High Court transcript “WAAG v MIMIA”. I have been unable to locate a transcript of the original RRT decision, and so far as I know it remains unavailable. Thanks to Mark Pendleton for drawing my attention to this case, and for help with references.) Justice Kirby, one of the presiding Justices at the Applicant’s High Court appeal, responded to this with the obvious point, “Madonna, Bette Midler and so on are phenomena of the Western culture. In Iran, where there is death for some people who are homosexuals, these are not in the forefront of the mind”. Indeed, the High Court is repeatedly critical and even scornful of the Tribunal decision. When Mr Bennett, who is appearing for the Minister for Immigration in the appeal begins his case, he says, “your Honour, the primary attack which seems to be made on the decision of the –”, he is cut off by Justice Gummow, who says, “Well, in lay terms, the primary attack is that it was botched in the Tribunal, Mr Solicitor”. But Mr Bennett replies by saying no, “it was not botched. If one reads the whole of the Tribunal judgement, one sees a consistent line of reasoning and a conclusion being reached”. In a sense this is true; the deep tragicomic weirdness of the Tribunal decision is based very much in the unfolding of a particular form of homophobic rationality specific to border control and refugee determination. There have been hundreds of applications for protection specifically from homophobic persecution since 1994, when the first such application was made in Australia. As of 2002, only 22% of those applications had been successful, with the odds stacked heavily against lesbians – only 7% of lesbian applicants were successful, against a shocking enough 26% of gay men (Millbank, Imagining Otherness 148). There are a number of reasons for this. The Tribunal has routinely decided that even if persecution had occurred on the basis of homosexuality, the Applicant would be able to avoid such persecution if she or he acted ‘discreetly’, that is, hid their sexuality. The High Court ruled out this argument in 2003, but the Tribunal maintains an array of effective techniques of homophobic exclusion. For example, the Tribunal often uses the Spartacus International Gay Guide to find out about local conditions of lesbian and gay life even though it is a tourist guide book aimed at Western gay men with plenty of disposable income (Dauvergne and Millbank 178-9). And even in cases which have found in favour of particular lesbian and gay asylum seekers, the Tribunal has often gone out of its way to assert that lesbians and gay men are, nevertheless, not the subjects of human rights. States, that is, violate no rights when they legislate against lesbian and gay identities and practices, and the victims of such legislation have no rights to protection (Millbank, Fear 252-3). To go back to Madonna. Bennett’s basic point with respect to the references to the Material Girl et al is that the Tribunal specifically rules them as irrelevant. Mr Bennett: The criticism which is being made concerns a question which the Tribunal asked and what is very much treated in the Tribunal’s judgement as a passing reference. If one looks, for example, at page 34 – Kirby J: This is where Oscar, Alexander and Bette as well as Madonna turn up? Mr Bennett: Yes. The very paragraph my learned friend relies on, if one reads the sentence, what the Tribunal is saying is, “I am not looking for these things”. Gummow J: Well, why mention it? What sort of training do these people get in decision making before they are appointed to this body, Mr Solicitor? Mr Bennett: I cannot assist your Honour on that. Gummow J: No. Well, whatever it is, what happened here does not speak highly of the results of it. To gloss this, Bennett argues that the High Court are making too much of an irrelevant minor point in the decision. Mr Bennett: One would think [based on the High Court’s questions] that the only things in this judgement were the throwaway references saying, “I wasn’t looking for an understanding of Oscar Wilde”, et cetera. That is simply, when one reads the judgement as a whole, not something which goes to the centre at all… There is a small part of the judgement which could be criticized and which is put, in the judgement itself, as a subsidiary element and prefaced with the word “not”. Kirby J: But the “not” is a bit undone by what follows when I think Marilyn [Monroe] is thrown in. Mr Bennett: Well, your Honour, I am not sure why she is thrown in. Kirby J: Well, that is exactly the point. Mr Bennett holds that, as per Wayne’s World, the word “not” negates any clause to which it is attached. Justice Kirby, on the other hand, feels that this “not” comes undone, and that this undoing – and the uncertainty that accrues to it – is exactly the point. But the Tribunal won’t be tied down on this, and makes use of its “not” to hold gay stereotypes at arm’s length – which is still, of course, to hold them, at a remove that will insulate homophobia against its own illegitimacy. The Tribunal defends itself against accusations of homophobia by announcing specifically and repeatedly, in terms that consciously evoke culturally specific gay stereotypes, that it is not interested in those stereotypes. This unconvincing alibi works to prevent any inconvenient accusations of bias from butting in on the routine business of heteronormativity. Paul Morrison has noted that not many people will refuse to believe you’re gay: “Claims to normativity are characteristically met with scepticism. Only parents doubt confessions of deviance” (5). In this case, it is not a parent but a paternalistic state apparatus. The reasons the Tribunal did not believe the applicant [were] (a) because of “inconsistencies about the first sexual experience”, (b) “the uniformity of relationships”, (c) the “absence of a “gay” circle of friends”, (d) “lack of contact with the “gay” underground” and [(e)] “lack of other forms of identification”. Of these the most telling, I think, are the last three: a lack of gay friends, of contact with the gay underground, or of unspecified other forms of identification. What we can see here is that even if the Tribunal isn’t looking for the stereotypical icons of Western gay culture, it is looking for the characteristic forms of Western gay identity which, as we know, are far from universal. The assumptions about the continuities between sex acts and identities that we codify with names like lesbian, gay, homosexual and so on, often very poorly translate the ways in which non-Western populations understand and describe themselves, if they translate them at all. Gayatri Gopinath, for example, uses the term “queer diaspor[a]... in contradistinction to the globalization of “gay” identity that replicates a colonial narrative of development and progress that judges all other sexual cultures, communities, and practices against a model of Euro-American sexual identity” (11). I can’t assess the accuracy of the Tribunal’s claims regarding the Applicant’s social life, although I am inclined to scepticism. But if the Applicant in this case indeed had no gay friends, no contact with the gay underground and no other forms of identification with the big bad world of gaydom, he may obviously, nevertheless, have been a Man Who Has Sex With Men, as they sometimes say in AIDS prevention work. But this would not, either in the terms of Australian law or the UN Convention, qualify him as a refugee. You can only achieve refugee status under the terms of the Convention based on membership of a ‘specific social group’. Lesbians and gay men are held to constitute such groups, but what this means is that there’s a certain forcing of Western identity norms onto the identity and onto the body of the sexual other. This shouldn’t read simply as a moral point about how we should respect diversity. There’s a real sense that our own lives as political and sexual beings are radically impoverished to the extent we fail to foster and affirm non-Western non-heterosexualities. There’s a sustaining enrichment that we miss out on, of course, in addition to the much more serious forms of violence others will be subject to. And these are kinds of violence as well as forms of enrichment that compassionate politics, organised around the good refugee, just does not apprehend. In an essay on “The politics of bad feeling”, Sara Ahmed makes a related argument about national shame and mourning. “Words cannot be separated from bodies, or other signs of life. So the word ‘mourns’ might get attached to some subjects (some more than others represent the nation in mourning), and it might get attached to some objects (some losses more than others may count as losses for this nation)” (73). At one level, these points are often made with regard to compassion, especially as it is racialised in Australian politics; for example, that there would be a public outcry were we to detain hypothetical white boat people. But Ahmed’s point stretches further – in the necessary relation between words and bodies, she asks not only which bodies do the describing and which are described, but which are permitted a relation to language at all? If “words cannot be separated from bodies”, what happens to those bodies words fail? The queer diasporic body, so reductively captured in that phrase, is a case in point. How do we honour its singularity, as well as its sociality? How do we understand the systematicity of the forces that degrade and subjugate it? What do the politics of compassion have to offer here? It’s easy for the critic or the cynic to sneer at such politics – so liberal, so sentimental, so wet – or to deconstruct them, expose “the violence of sentimentality” (Berlant 62), show “how compassion towards the other’s suffering might sustain the violence of appropriation” (Ahmed 74). These are not moves I want to make. A guiding assumption of this essay is that there is never a unilinear trajectory between feelings and politics. Any particular affect or set of affects may be progressive, reactionary, apolitical, or a combination thereof, in a given situation; compassionate politics are no more necessarily bad than they are necessarily good. On the other hand, “not necessarily bad” is a weak basis for a political movement, especially one that needs to understand and negotiate the ways the enclosures and borders of late capitalism mass-produce bodies we can’t put names to, people outside familiar and recognisable forms of identity and subjectivity. As Etienne Balibar has put it, “in utter disregard of certain borders – or, in certain cases, under covers of such borders – indefinable and impossible identities emerge in various places, identities which are, as a consequence, regarded as non-identities. However, their existence is, none the less, a life-and-death question for large numbers of human beings” (77). Any answer to that question starts with our compassion – and our rage – at an unacceptable situation. But it doesn’t end there. References Ahmed, Sara. “The Politics of Bad Feeling.” Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association Journal 1.1 (2005): 72-85. Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. Balibar, Etienne. We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Trans. James Swenson. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004. Berlant, Lauren. “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy and Politics.” Cultural Studies and Political Theory. Ed. Jodi Dean. Ithaca and Cornell: Cornell UP, 2000. 42-62. Bureau of Immigration and Population Research. Illegal Entrants in Australia: An Annotated Bibliography. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1994. Dauvergne, Catherine and Jenni Millbank. “Cruisingforsex.com: An Empirical Critique of the Evidentiary Practices of the Australian Refugee Review Tribunal.” Alternative Law Journal 28 (2003): 176-81. “False Refugees and Misplaced Compassion” Editorial. Quadrant 390 (2002): 2-4. Hage, Ghassan. Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society. Annandale: Pluto, 2003. Hall, Stuart. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso, 1988. Joint Standing Committee on Migration. Illegal Entrants in Australia: Balancing Control and Compassion. Canberra: The Committee, 1990. Mares, Peter. Borderline: Australia’s Treatment of Refugees and Asylum Seekers. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2001. Millbank, Jenni. “Imagining Otherness: Refugee Claims on the Basis of Sexuality in Canada and Australia.” Melbourne University Law Review 26 (2002): 144-77. ———. “Fear of Persecution or Just a Queer Feeling? Refugee Status and Sexual orientation in Australia.” Alternative Law Journal 20 (1995): 261-65, 299. Morrison, Paul. The Explanation for Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity. New York: New York UP, 2001. Pendleton, Mark. “Borderline.” Bite 2 (2004): 3-4. “WAAG v MIMIA [2004]. HCATrans 475 (19 Nov. 2004)” High Court of Australia Transcripts. 2005. 17 Oct. 2005 http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/HCATrans/2004/475.html>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style McGrath, Shane. "Compassionate Refugee Politics?." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/02-mcgrath.php>. APA Style McGrath, S. (Dec. 2005) "Compassionate Refugee Politics?," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/02-mcgrath.php>.
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35

Bender, Stuart Marshall. "You Are Not Expected to Survive: Affective Friction in the Combat Shooter Game Battlefield 1." M/C Journal 20, no. 1 (March 15, 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1207.

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IntroductionI stumble to my feet breathing heavily and, over the roar of a tank, a nearby soldier yells right into my face: “We’re surrounded! We have to hold this line!” I follow him, moving past burning debris and wounded men being helped walk back in the opposite direction. Shells explode around me, a whistle sounds, and then the Hun attack; shadowy figures that I fire upon as they approach through the battlefield fog and smoke. I shoot some. I take cover behind walls as others fire back. I reload the weapon. I am hit by incoming fire, and a red damage indicator appears onscreen, so I move to a better cover position. As I am hit again and again, the image becomes blurry and appears as if in slow-motion, the sound also becoming muffled. As an enemy wielding a flame-thrower appears and blasts me with thick fire, my avatar gasps and collapses. The screen fades to black.So far, so very normal in the World War One themed first-person shooter Battlefield 1 (Electronic Arts 2016). But then the game does something unanticipated. I expect to reappear—or respawn—in the same scenario to play better, to stay in the fight longer. Instead, the camera view switches to an external position, craning upwards cinematically from my character’s dying body. Text superimposed over the view indicates the minimalist epitaph: “Harvey Nottoway 1889-1918.” The camera view then races backwards, high over the battlefield and finally settles into position behind a mounted machine-gun further back from the frontline as the enemy advances closer. Immediately I commence shooting, mowing down German troops as they enter our trenches. Soon I am hit and knocked away from the machine-gun. Picking up a shotgun I start shooting the enemy at close-quarters, until I am once again overrun and my character collapses. Now the onscreen text states I was playing as “Dean Stevenson 1899-1918.”I have attempted this prologue to the Battlefield 1 campaign a number of times. No matter how skilfully I play, or how effectively I simply run away and hide from the combat, this pattern continues: the structure of the game forces the player’s avatar to be repeatedly killed in order for the narrative to progress. Over a series of player deaths, respawning as an entirely new character each time, the combat grows in ferocity and the music also becomes increasingly frenetic. The fighting turns to hand-to-hand combat, or shovel-to-head combat to be more precise, and eventually an artillery barrage wipes everybody out (Figure 1). At this point, the prologue is complete and the gamer may continue in a variety of single-player episodes in different theatres of WW1, each of which is structured according to the normal rules of combat games: when your avatar is killed, you respawn at the most recent checkpoint for a follow-up attempt.What are we to make of this alternative narrative structure deployed by the opening episode of Battlefield 1? In contrast to the normal video-game affordances of re-playability until completion, this narrative necessitation of death is in some ways motivated by the onscreen text that introduces the prologue: “What follows is frontline combat. You are not expected to survive.” Certainly it is true that the rest of the game (either single-player or in its online multiplayer deathmatch mode) follows the predictable pattern of dying, replaying, completing. And also we would not expect Battlefield 1 to be motivated primarily by a kind of historical fidelity given that an earlier instalment in the series, Battlefield 1942 (2002) was described by one reviewer as:a comic book version of WWII. The fact that any player can casually hop into a tank, drive around, hop out and pick off an enemy soldier with a sniper rifle, hop into a plane, parachute out, and then call in artillery fire (within the span of a few minutes) should tell you a lot about the game. (Osborne)However what is happening in this will-to-die structure of the game’s prologue represents an alternative and affectively unsettling game experience both in its ludological structure as well as its affective impact. Defamiliarization and Humanization Drawing upon a phenomenology of game-play, whereby the scholar examines the game “as played” (see Atkins and Kryzwinska; Keogh; Wilson) to consider how the text reveals itself to the player, I argue that the introductory single-player episode of Battlefield 1 functions to create a defamiliarizing effect on the player. Defamiliarization, the Russian Formalist term for the effect created by art when some unusual aspect of a text challenges accepted perceptions and/or representations (Schklovski; Thompson), is a remarkably common effect created by the techniques used in combat cinema and video-games. This is unsurprising. After all, warfare is one of the very examples Schklovski uses as something that audiences have developed habituated responses to and which artworks must defamiliarize. The effect may be created by many techniques in a text, and in certain cases a work may defamiliarize even its own form. For instance, recent work on the violence in Saving Private Ryan shows that during the lengthy Omaha Beach sequence, the most vivid instances of violence—including the famous shot of a soldier picking up his dismembered arm—occur well after the audience has potentially become inured to the onslaught of the earlier frequent, but less graphic, carnage (Bender Film Style and WW2). To make these moments stand out with equivalent horrific impact against the background of the Normandy beach bloodbath Spielberg also treats them with a stuttered frame effect and accompanying audio distortion, motivated (to use a related Formalist term) by the character’s apparent concussion and temporary disorientation. Effectively a sequence of point of view shots then, this moment in Private Ryan has become a model for many other war texts, and indeed the player’s death in the opening sequence of Battlefield 1 is portrayed using a very similar (though not identical) audio-visual treatment (Figure 2).Although the Formalists never played videogames, recent scholarship has approached the medium from a similar perspective. For example, Brendan Keogh has focused on the challenges to traditional videogame pleasure generated by the 2012 dystopian shooter Spec Ops: The Line. Keogh notes that the game developers intended to create displeasure and “[forcing] the player to consider what is obscured in the pixilation of war” by, for instance, having them kill fellow American troops in order for the game narrative to continue (Keogh 9). In addition, the game openly taunts the player’s expectations of entertainment based, uncritical run-and-gun gameplay with onscreen text during level loading periods such as “Do you feel like a hero yet?” (8).These kinds of challenges to the expectations of entertainment in combat shooters are found also in one sequence from the 2009 game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in which the player—as an undercover operative—is forced to participate in a terrorist attack in which civilians are killed (Figure 3). While playing that level, titled “No Russian,” Timothy Welsh argues: “The player may shoot the unarmed civilians or not; the level still creeps slowly forward regardless” (Welsh 409). In Welsh’s analysis, this level emerges as an unusual attempt by a popular video game to “humanize” the non-playing characters that are ordinarily gunned down without any critical and self-reflective thought by the player in most shooter games. The player is forced into a scenario in which they must make a highly difficult ethical choice, but the game will show civilians being killed either way.In contrast to the usual criticisms of violent video games—eg., that they may be held responsible for school shootings, increased adolescent aggression and so on —the “No Russian” sequence drew dramatic complaints of being a “terrorist simulator” (Welsh 389). But for Welsh this ethical choice facing the player, to shoot or not to shoot civilians, raises the game to a textual experience offering self-inspection. As in the fictional theme park of Westworld (HBO 2016), it does not really matter to the digital victim if a player kills them, but it should—and does—matter to the player. There are no external consequences to killing a computer game character composed only of pixels, or killing/raping a robot in the Westworld theme park, however there are internal consequences: it makes you a killer, or a rapist (see Harris and Bloom).Thus, from the perspective of defamiliarization, the game can be regarded as creating the effect that Matthew Payne has labelled “critical displeasure.” Writing about the way this is created by Spec Ops, Payne argues that:the result is a game that wields its affective distance as a critique of the necessary illusion that all military shooters trade in, but one that so few acknowledge. In particular, the game’s brutal mise-en-scène, its intertextual references to other war media, and its real and imagined opportunities for player choice, create a discordant feeling that lays bare the ease with which most video war games indulge in their power fantasies. (Payne 270)There is then, a minor tradition of alternative military-themed video game works that attempt to invite or enable the player to conduct a kind of ethical self-examination around their engagement with interactive representations of war via particular incursions of realism. The critical displeasure invoked by texts such as Spec Ops and the “No Russian” level of Call of Duty is particularly interesting in light of another military game that was ultimately cancelled by the publisher after it received public criticism. Titled Six Days in Fallujah, the game was developed with the participation of Marines who had fought in that real life battle and aimed to depict the events as they unfolded in 2004 during the campaign in Iraq. As Justin Rashid argues:the controversy that arose around Six Days in Fallujah was, of course, a result of the view that commercial video games can only ever be pure entertainment; games do not have the authority or credibility to be part of a serious debate. (Rashid 17)On this basis, perhaps a criterial attribute of an acceptable alternative military game is that there is enough familiarity to evoke some critical distance, but not too much familiarity that the player must think about legitimately real-life consequences and impact. After all, Call of Duty was a successful release, even amid the controversy of “No Russian.” This makes sense as the level does not really challenge the overall enjoyment of the game. The novelty of the level, on the one hand, is that it is merely one part of the general narrative and cannot be regarded as representative of the whole game experience. On the other hand, because none of the events and scenarios have a clear indexical relationship to real-world terrorist attacks (at least prior to the Brussels attack in 2016) it is easy to play the ethical choice of shooting or not shooting civilians as a mental exercise rather than a reflection on something that really happened. This is the same lesson learned by the developers of the 2010 game Medal of Honor who ultimately changed the name of the enemy soldiers from “The Taliban” to “OPFOR” (standing in for a generic “Opposing Forces”) after facing pressure from the US and UK Military who claimed that the multiplayer capacities of the game enabled players to play as the Taliban (see Rashid). Conclusion: Affective Friction in Battlefield 1In important ways then, these game experiences are precursors to Battlefield 1’s single player prologue. However, the latter does not attempt a wholesale deconstruction of the genre—as does Spec Ops—or represent an attempt to humanise (or perhaps re-humanise) the non-playable victim characters as Welsh suggests “No Russian” attempts to do. Battlefield 1’s opening structure of death-and-respawn-as-different-character can be read as humanizing the player’s avatar. But most importantly, I take Battlefield’s initially unusual gameplay as an aesthetic attempt to set a particular tone to the game. Motivated by the general cultural attitude of deferential respect for the Great War, Battlefield 1 takes an almost austere stance toward the violence depicted, paradoxically even as this impact is muted in the later gameplay structured according to normal multiplayer deathmatch rules of run-and-gun killing. The futility implied by the player’s constant dying is clearly motivated by an attempt at realism as one of the cultural memories of World War One is the sheer likelihood of being killed, whether as a frontline soldier or a citizen of a country engaged in combat (see Kramer). For Battlefield 1, the repeated dying is really part of the text’s aesthetic engagement. For this reason I prefer the term affective friction rather than critical displeasure. The austere tone of the game is indicated early, just prior to the prologue gameplay with onscreen text that reads:Battlefield 1 is based on events that unfolded over 100 years agoMore than 60 million soldiers fought in “The War to End All Wars”It ended nothing.Yet it changed the world forever. At a simple level, the player’s experience of being killed in order for the next part of the narrative to progress evokes this sense of futility. There have been real responses indicating this, for instance one reviewer argues that the structure is “a powerful treatment” (Howley). But there is potential for increased engagement with the game itself as the structure breaks the replay-cycle of usual games. For instance, another reviewer responds to the overall single-player campaign by suggesting “It is not something you can sit down and play through and not experience on a higher level than just clicking a mouse and tapping a keyboard” (Simpson). This affective friction amplifies, and draws attention to, the other advances in violent stylistics presented in the game. For instance, although the standard onscreen visual distortions are used to show character damage and the direction from which the attack came, the game does use slow-motion to draw out the character’s death. In addition, the game features incidental battlefield details of shell-shock, such as soldiers simply holding the head in their hands, frozen as the battle rages around them (Figure 4). The presence of flame-thrower troops, and subsequently the depictions of characters running as they burn to death are also significant developments in violent aesthetics from earlier games. These elements of violence are constitutive of the affective friction. We may marvel at the technical achievement of such real-time rendering of dynamic fire and the artistic care given to animate deaths and shell-shock depictions. But simultaneously, these “violent delights”—to borrow from Westworld’s citation of Shakespeare—are innovations upon the depictions of earlier games, even contemporary, combat games. Indeed, one critic has almost ashamedly noted: “For a game about one of the most horrific wars in human history, it sure is pretty” (Kain).These violent depictions show a continuation in the tradition of increased detail which has been linked to a model of “reported realism” as a means of understanding audience’s claims of realism in combat films and modern videogames as a result primarily of their hypersaturated audio-visual texture (Bender "Blood Splats"). Here, saturation refers not to the specific technical quality of colour saturation but to the densely layered audio-visual structure often found in contemporary films and videogames. For example, thick mixing of soundtracks, details of gore, and nuanced movements (particularly of dying characters) all contribute to a hypersaturated aesthetic which tends to prompt audiences to make claims of realism for a combat text regardless of whether or not these viewers/players have any real world referent for comparison. Of course, there are likely to be players who will simply blast through any shooter game, giving no regard to the critical displeasure offered by Spec Ops narrative choices or the ethical dilemma of “No Russian.” There are also likely to be players who bypass the single-player campaign altogether and only bother with the multiplayer deathmatch experience, which functions in the same way as it does in other shooter games, including the previous Battlefield games. But perhaps the value of this game’s attempt at alternative storytelling, with its emphasis on tone and affect, is that even the “kill-em-all” player may experience a momentary impact from the violence depicted. This is particularly important given that, to borrow from Stephanie Fisher’s argument in regard to WW2 games, many young people encounter the history of warfare through such popular videogames (Fisher). In the centenary period of World War One, especially in Australia amid the present Anzac commemorative moment, the opportunity for young audiences to engage with the significance of the events. As a side-note, the later part of the single-player campaign even has a Gallipoli sequence, though the narrative of this component is designed as an action-hero adventure. Indeed, this is one example of how the alternative dying-to-continue structure of the prologue creates an affective friction against the normal gameplay and narratives that feature in the rest of the text. The ambivalent ways in which this unsettling opening scenario impacts on the remainder of the game-play, including for instance its depiction of PTSD, is illustrated by some industry reviewers. As one reviewer argues, the game does generate the feeling that “war isn’t fun — except when it is” (Plante). From this view, the cognitive challenge created by the will to die in the prologue creates an affective friction with the normalised entertainment inherent in the game’s multiplayer run-and-gun components that dominate the rest of Battlefield 1’s experience. Therefore, although Battlefield 1 ultimately proves to be an entertainment-oriented combat shooter, it is significant that the developers of this major commercial production decided to include an experimental structure to the prologue as a way of generating tone and affect in a fresh way. ReferencesAtkins, Barry, and Tanya Kryzwinska. "Introduction: Videogame, Player, Text." Videogame, Player, Text. Eds. Atkins, Barry and Tanya Kryzwinska. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.Bender, Stuart Marshall. "Blood Splats and Bodily Collapse: Reported Realism and the Perception of Violence in Combat Films and Videogames." Projections 8.2 (2014): 1-25.Bender, Stuart Marshall. Film Style and the World War II Combat Film. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.Fisher, Stephanie. "The Best Possible Story? Learning about WWII from FPS Video Games." Guns, Grenades, and Grunts: First-Person Shooter Games. Eds. Gerald A. Voorhees, Josh Call and Katie Whitlock. New York: Continuum, 2012. 299-318.Harris, Sam, and Paul Bloom. "Waking Up with Sam Harris #56 – Abusing Dolores." Sam Harris 12 Dec. 2016. Howley, Daniel. "Review: Beautiful Battlefield 1 Gives the War to End All Wars Its Due Respect." Yahoo! 2016. Kain, Erik. "'Battlefield 1' Is Stunningly Beautiful on PC." Forbes 2016.Keogh, Brendan. Spec Ops: The Line's Conventional Subversion of the Military Shooter. Paper presented at DiGRA 2013: Defragging Game Studies.Kramer, Alan. Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War. UK: Oxford University Press, 2007. Osborne, Scott. "Battlefield 1942 Review." Gamesport 2002. Payne, Matthew Thomas. "War Bytes: The Critique of Militainment in Spec Ops: The Line." Critical Studies in Media Communication 31.4 (2014): 265-82. Plante, Chris. "Battlefield 1 Is Excellent Because the Series Has Stopped Trying to Be Call of Duty." The Verge 2016. Rashid, Justin. Terrorism in Video Games and the Storytelling War against Extremism. Paper presented at Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities, 9-12 Jan. 2011.Schklovski, Viktor. "Sterne's Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary." Trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. 25-60.Simpson, Campbell. "Battlefield 1 Isn't a Game: It's a History Lesson." Kotaku 2016. Thompson, Kristin. Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988. Welsh, Timothy. "Face to Face: Humanizing the Digital Display in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2." Guns, Grenade, and Grunts: First-Person Shooter Games. Eds. Gerald A. Voorhees, Josh. Call, and Katie Whitlock. New York: Continuum, 2012. 389-414. Wilson, Jason Anthony. "Gameplay and the Aesthetics of Intimacy." PhD diss. Brisbane: Griffith University, 2007.
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"Inhalt." Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 47, no. 1 (January 1, 2020): 1–4. http://dx.doi.org/10.3790/zhf.47.1.toc.

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Abhandlungen und Aufsätze Robert Gramsch-Stehfest, Von der Metapher zur Methode. Netzwerkanalyse als Instrument zur Erforschung vormoderner Gesellschaften . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Sarah-Maria Schober, Zibet und Zeit. Timescapes eines frühneuzeitlichen Geruchs 41 Buchbesprechungen Crailsheim, Eberhard /Maria D. Elizalde (Hrsg.), The Representation of External Threats. From the Middle Ages to the Modern World (Wolfgang Reinhard) . . . . 79 Höfele, Andreas / Beate Kellner (Hrsg.), Natur in politischenOrdnungsentwürfen der Vormoderne. Unter Mitwirkung von Christian Kaiser (Stefano Saracino) 80 Jütte, Robert / Romedio Schmitz-Esser (Hrsg.), Handgebrauch. Geschichten von der Hand aus dem Mittelalter und der Frühen Neuzeit (Barbara Stollberg- Rilinger) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 Tomaini, Thea (Hrsg.), Dealing with the Dead. Mortality and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Europe Lahtinen, Anu / Mia Korpiola (Hrsg.), Dying Prepared in Medieval and Early Modern Northern Europe (Ralf-Peter Fuchs) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Dyer, Christopher / Erik Thoen / Tom Williamson (Hrsg.), Peasants and Their Fields. The Rationale of Open-Field Agriculture, c. 700–1800 (Werner Troßbach) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 Andermann, Kurt / Nina Gallion (Hrsg.), Weg und Steg. Aspekte des Verkehrswesens von der Spätantike bis zum Ende des Alten Reiches (Sascha Bütow) 88 Jaspert, Nikolas / Christian A. Neumann /Marco di Branco (Hrsg.), Ein Meer und seine Heiligen. Hagiographie im mittelalterlichen Mediterraneum (Michael North) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 Müller, Harald (Hrsg.), Der Verlust der Eindeutigkeit. Zur Krise päpstlicher Autorität im Kampf um die Cathedra Petri (Thomas Wetzstein) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Ehrensperger, Alfred, Geschichte des Gottesdienstes in Zürich Stadt und Land im Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Reformation bis 1531 (Andreas Odenthal) 93 Demurger, Alain, Die Verfolgung der Templer. Chronik einer Vernichtung. 1307– 1314 (Jochen Burgtorf) . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Caudrey, Philip J., Military Society and the Court of Chivalry in the Age of the Hundred Years War (Stefan G. Holz) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Hesse, Christian / Regula Schmid / Roland Gerber (Hrsg.), Eroberung und Inbesitznahme. Die Eroberung des Aargaus 1415 im europäischen Vergleich / Conquest and Occupation. The 1415 Seizure of the Aargau in European Perspective (Rainer Hugener) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 Krafft, Otfried, Landgraf Ludwig I. von Hessen (1402–1458). Politik und historiographische Rezeption (Uwe Schirmer) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 Neustadt, Cornelia, Kommunikation im Konflikt. König Erik VII. von Dänemark und die Städte im südlichen Ostseeraum (1423–1435) (Carsten Jahnke) . . . . . . . 102 Kekewich, Margaret, Sir John Fortescue and the Governance of England (Maree Shirota). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 MacGregor, Arthur, Naturalists inthe Field. Collecting, Recording andPreserving the Natural World from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century (Bettina Dietz) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Jones, Pamela M. / Barbara Wisch / Simon Ditchfield (Hrsg.), A Companion to Early Modern Rome, 1492–1692 (Wolfgang Reinhard) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Frömmer, Judith, Italien im Heiligen Land. Typologien frühneuzeitlicher Gründungsnarrative (Cornel Zwierlein) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 De Benedictis, Angela, Neither Disobedients nor Rebels. Lawful Resistance in Early Modern Italy (Wolfgang Reinhard) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Raggio, Osvaldo, Feuds and State Formation, 1550–1700. The Backcountry of the Republic of Genoa (Magnus Ressel) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 Ingram,Kevin, ConversoNon-Conformism in Early Modern Spain.BadBlood and Faith from Alonso de Cartagena to Diego Velázquez (Joël Graf) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Kirschvink, Dominik, Die Revision als Rechtsmittel im Alten Reich (Tobias Schenk) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 Haag, Norbert, Dynastie, Region, Konfession. Die Hochstifte des Heiligen Römischen Reiches Deutscher Nation zwischen Dynastisierung und Konfessionalisierung (1448–1648) (Kurt Andermann) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 Steinfels, Marc / Helmut Meyer, Vom Scharfrichteramt ins Zürcher Bürgertum. Die Familie Volmar-Steinfelsundder Schweizer Strafvollzug (FranciscaLoetz) 120 Kohnle, Armin (Hrsg.), Luthers Tod. Ereignis und Wirkung (Eike Wolgast) . . . . . . 122 Zwierlein, Cornel / Vincenzo Lavenia (Hrsg.), Fruits of Migration. Heterodox Italian Migrants and Central European Culture 1550–1620 (Stephan Steiner) 123 „Inquisitionis Hispanicae Artes“: The Arts of the Spanish Inquisition. Reginaldus Gonsalvius Montanus. A Critical Edition of the „Sanctae Inquisitionis Hispanicae Artes aliquot“ (1567) with aModern English Translation, hrsg. v. Marcos J. Herráiz Pareja / Ignacio J. García Pinilla / Jonathan L. Nelson (Wolfram Drews) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Lattmann, Christopher, Der Teufel, die Hexe und der Rechtsgelehrte. Crimen magiae und Hexenprozess in Jean Bodins „De la Démonomanie des Sorciers“ (Andreas Flurschütz da Cruz) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 Gorrochategui Santos, Luis, The English Armada. The Greatest Naval Disaster in English History (Patrick Schmidt) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Schäfer-Griebel, Alexandra, Die Medialität der Französischen Religionskriege. Frankreich und das Heilige Römische Reich 1589 (Mona Garloff) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 Malettke, Klaus, Richelieu. Ein Leben im Dienste des Königs und Frankreichs (Michael Rohrschneider) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 Windler, Christian, Missionare in Persien. Kulturelle Diversität und Normenkonkurrenz im globalen Katholizismus (17.–18. Jahrhundert) (Tobias Winnerling) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134 Amsler, Nadine, Jesuits and Matriarchs. Domestic Worship in Early Modern China (Tobias Winnerling) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 Seppel, Marten / Keith Tribe (Hrsg.), Cameralism in Practice. State Administration and Economy in Early Modern Europe (Justus Nipperdey) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 Fludd, Robert, Utriusque Cosmi Historia. Faksimile-Edition der Ausgabe Oppenheim/ Frankfurt, Johann Theodor de Bry, 1617–1624, hrsg. u. mit ausführlichen Einleitungen versehen v. Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann (Martin Mulsow) 140 Rebitsch, Robert (Hrsg.), 1618. Der Beginn des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (Fabian Schulze) . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142 Kilián, Jan, Der Gerber und der Krieg. Soziale Biographie eines böhmischen Bürgers aus der Zeit des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (Robert Jütte) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 Caldari, Valentina / Sara J. Wolfson (Hrsg.), Stuart Marriage Diplomacy. Dynastic Politics in Their European Context, 1604–1630 (Martin Foerster) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 Blakemore, Richard J. / Elaine Murphy, The British Civil Wars at Sea, 1638–1653 (Jann M. Witt) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Deflers, Isabelle /ChristianKühner(Hrsg.),LudwigXIV. –VorbildundFeindbild. Inszenierung und Rezeption der Herrschaft eines barocken Monarchen zwischen Heroisierung,Nachahmung undDämonisierung/LouisXIV– fascination et répulsion.Mise en scène et réception du règne d’un monarque baroque entre héroïsation, imitation et diabolisation (Anuschka Tischer) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Pérez Sarrión, Guillermo, The Emergence of a National Market in Spain, 1650– 1800. Trade Networks, Foreign Powers and the State (Hanna Sonkajärvi) . . . . . 151 Alimento, Antonella / Koen Stapelbroek (Hrsg.), The Politics of Commercial Treaties in the Eighteenth Century. Balance of Power, Balance of Trade (Justus Nipperdey) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 McDowell, Paula, The Invention of the Oral. Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Markus Friedrich) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Bernhard, Jan-Andrea / Judith Engeler (Hrsg.), „Dass das Blut der heiligen Wunden mich durchgehet alle Stunden“. Frauen und ihre Lektüre im Pietismus (Helga Meise) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Hammer-Luza, Elke, Im Arrest. Zucht-, Arbeits- und Strafhäuser in Graz (1700– 1850) (Simon Karstens) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Oldach, Robert, Stadt und Festung Stralsund. Die schwedische Militärpräsenz in Schwedisch-Pommern 1721–1807 (Michael Busch) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 Koller, Ekaterina E., Religiöse Grenzgänger im östlichen Europa. Glaubensenthusiasten um die Prophetin Ekaterina Tatarinova und den Pseudomessias Jakob Frank im Vergleich (1750–1850) (Agnieszka Pufelska) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Häberlein, Mark / Holger Zaunstöck (Hrsg.), Halle als Zentrum der Mehrsprachigkeit im langen 18. Jahrhundert (Martin Gierl) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164 Geffarth, Renko / Markus Meumann / Holger Zaunstöck (Hrsg.), Kampf um die Aufklärung? Institutionelle Konkurrenzen und intellektuelle Vielfalt im Halle des 18. Jahrhunderts (Martin Gierl) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 Giro d’Italia. Die Reiseberichte des bayerischen Kurprinzen Karl Albrecht (1715/ 16). Eine historisch-kritische Edition, hrsg. v. Andrea Zedler / Jörg Zedler (Michael Maurer) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 Backerra, Charlotte, Wien und London, 1727–1735. Internationale Beziehungen im frühen 18. Jahrhundert (Michael Schaich) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170 Gottesdienst im Bamberger Dom zwischen Barock und Aufklärung. Die Handschrift des Ordinarius L des Subkustos Johann Graff von 1730 als Edition mit Kommentar, hrsg. v. Franz Kohlschein / Werner Zeißner unter Mitarbeit v. Walter Milutzki (Tillmann Lohse) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 Warnke, Marcus, Logistik und friderizianische Kriegsführung. 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37

Glover, Stuart. "Failed Fantasies of Cohesion: Retrieving Positives from the Stalled Dream of Whole-of-Government Cultural Policy." M/C Journal 13, no. 1 (March 21, 2010). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.213.

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In mid-2001, in a cultural policy discussion at Arts Queensland, an Australian state government arts policy and funding apparatus, a senior arts bureaucrat seeking to draw a funding client’s gaze back to the bigger picture of what the state government was trying to achieve through its cultural policy settings excused his own abstracting comments with the phrase, “but then I might just be a policy ‘wank’”. There was some awkward laughter before one of his colleagues asked, “did you mean a policy ‘wonk’”? The incident was a misstatement of a term adopted in the 1990s to characterise the policy workers in the Clinton Whitehouse (Cunningham). This was not its exclusive use, but many saw Clinton as an exemplary wonk: less a pragmatic politician than one entertained by the elaboration of policy. The policy work of Clinton’s kitchen cabinet was, in part, driven by a pervasive rationalist belief in the usefulness of ordered policy processes as a method of producing social and economic outcomes, and, in part, by the seductions of policy-play: its ambivalences, its conundrums, and, in some sense, its aesthetics (Klein 193-94). There, far from being characterised as unproductive “self-abuse” of the body-politic, policy processes were alive as a pragmatic technology, an operationalisation of ideology, as an aestheticised field of play, but more than anything as a central rationalist tenant of government action. This final idea—the possibilities of policy for effecting change, promoting development, meeting government objectives—is at the centre of the bureaucratic imagination. Policy is effective. And a concomitant belief is that ordered or organised policy processes result in the best policy and the best outcomes. Starting with Harold Lasswell, policy theorists extended the general rationalist suppositions of Western representative democracies into executive government by arguing for the value of information/knowledge and the usefulness of ordered process in addressing thus identified policy problems. In the post-war period particularly, a case can be made for the usefulness of policy processes to government—although, in a paradox, these rationalist conceptions of the policy process were strangely irrational, even Utopian, in their view of transformational capacities possibilities of policy. The early policy scientists often moved beyond a view of policy science as a useful tool, to the advocacy of policy science and the policy scientist as panaceas for public ills (Parsons 18-19). The Utopian ambitions of policy science finds one of their extremes in the contemporary interest in whole-of-government approaches to policy making. Whole-of-governmentalism, concern with co-ordination of policy and delivery across all areas of the state, can seen as produced out of Western governments’ paradoxical concern with (on one hand) order, totality, and consistency, and (on the other) deconstructing existing mechanisms of public administration. Whole-of-governmentalism requires a horizontal purview of government goals, programs, outputs, processes, politics, and outcomes, alongside—and perhaps in tension with—the long-standing vertical purview that is fundamental to ministerial responsibility. This often presents a set of public management problems largely internal to government. Policy discussion and decision-making, while affecting community outcomes and stakeholder utility, are, in this circumstance, largely inter-agency in focus. Any eventual policy document may well have bureaucrats rather than citizens as its target readers—or at least as its closest readers. Internally, cohesion of objective, discourse, tool and delivery are pursued as a prime interests of policy making. Failing at Policy So what happens when whole-of-government policy processes, particularly cultural policy processes, break down or fail? Is there anything productive to be retrieved from a failed fantasy of policy cohesion? This paper examines the utility of a failure to cohere and order in cultural policy processes. I argue that the conditions of contemporary cultural policy-making, particularly the tension between the “boutique” scale of cultural policy-making bodies and the revised, near universal, remit of cultural policy, require policy work to be undertaken in an environment and in such a way that failure is almost inevitable. Coherence and cohesions are fundamental principles of whole-of-government policy but cultural policy ambitions are necessarily too comprehensive to be achievable. This is especially so for the small arts or cultural offices government that normally act as lead agencies for cultural policy development within government. Yet, that these failed processes can still give rise to positive outcomes or positive intermediate outputs that can be taken up in a productive way in the ongoing cycle of policy work that categorises contemporary cultural governance. Herein, I detail the development of Building the Future, a cultural policy planning paper (and the name of a policy planning process) undertaken within Arts Queensland in 1999 and 2000. (While this process is now ten years in the past, it is only with a decade past that as a consultant I am in apposition to write about the material.) The abandonment of this process before the production of a public policy program allows something to be said about the utility and role of failure in cultural policy-making. The working draft of Building the Future never became a public document, but the eight months of its development helped produce a series of shifts in the discourse of Queensland Government cultural policy: from “arts” to “creative industries”; and from arts bureaucracy-centred cultural policy to the whole-of-government policy frameworks. These concepts were then taken up and elaborated in the Creative Queensland policy statement published by Arts Queensland in October 2002, particularly the concern with creative industries; whole-of-government cultural policy; and the repositioning of Arts Queensland as a service agency to other potential cultural funding-bodies within government. Despite the failure of the Building the Future process, it had a role in the production of the policy document and policy processes that superseded it. This critique of cultural policy-making rather than cultural policy texts, announcements and settings is offered as part of a project to bring to cultural policy studies material and theoretical accounts of the particularities of making cultural policy. While directions in cultural policy have much to do with the overall directions of government—which might over the past decade be categorised as focus on de-regulation, out-sourcing of services—there are developments in cultural policy settings and in cultural policy processes that are particular to cultural policy and cultural policy-making. Central to the development of cultural policy studies and to cultural policy is a transformational broadening of the operant definition of culture within government (O'Regan). Following Raymond Williams, the domain of culture is broadened to include the high culture, popular culture, folk culture and the culture of everyday life. Accordingly, in some sense, every issue of governance is deemed to have a cultural dimension—be it policy questions around urban space, tourism, community building and so on. Contemporary governments are required to act with a concern for cultural questions both within and across a number of long-persisting and otherwise discrete policy silos. This has implications for cultural policy makers and for program delivery. The definition of culture as “everyday life”, while truistically defendable, becomes unwieldy as an imprimatur or a container for administrative activity. Transforming cultural policy into a domain incorporating most social policy and significant elements of economic policy makes the domain titanically large. Potentially, it compromises usual government efforts to order policy activity through the division or apportionment of responsibility (Glover and Cunningham 19). The problem has given rise to a new mode of policy-making which attends to the co-ordination of policy across and between levels of government, known as whole-of government policy-making (see O’Regan). Within the domain of cultural policy the task of whole-of-government cultural policy is complicated by the position of, and the limits upon, arts and cultural bureaux within state and federal governments. Dedicated cultural planning bureaux often operate as “boutique” agencies. They are usually discrete line agencies or line departments within government—only rarely are they part of the core policy function of departments of a Premier or a Prime Minister. Instead, like most line agencies, they lack the leverage within the bureaucracy or policy apparatus to deliver whole-of-government cultural policy change. In some sense, failure is the inevitable outcome of all policy processes, particularly when held up against the mechanistic representation of policy processes in policy typical of policy handbooks (see Bridgman and Davis 42). Against such models, which describe policy a series of discrete linear steps, all policy efforts fail. The rationalist assumptions of early policy models—and the rigid templates for policy process that arise from their assumptions—in retrospect condemn every policy process to failure or at least profound shortcoming. This is particularly so with whole-of-government cultural policy making To re-think this, it can be argued that the error then is not really in the failure of the process, which is invariably brought about by the difficulty for coherent policy process to survive exogenous complexity, but instead the error rests with the simplicity of policy models and assumptions about the possibility of cohesion. In some sense, mechanistic policy processes make failure endogenous. The contemporary experience of making policy has tended to erode any fantasies of order, clear process, or, even, clear-sightedness within government. Achieving a coherence to the policy message is nigh on impossible—likewise cohesion of the policy framework is unlikely. Yet, importantly, failed policy is not without value. The churn of policy work—the exercise of attempting cohrent policy-making—constitutes, in some sense, the deliberative function of government, and potentially operates as a force (and site) of change. Policy briefings, reports, and draft policies—the constitution of ideas in the policy process and the mechanism for their dissemination within the body of government and perhaps to other stakeholders—are discursive acts in the process of extending the discourse of government and forming its later actions. For arts and cultural policy agencies in particular, who act without the leverage or resources of central agencies, the expansive ambitions of whole-of-government cultural policy makes failure inevitable. In such a circumstance, retrieving some benefits at the margins of policy processes, through the churn of policy work towards cohesion, is an important consolation. Case study: Cultural Policy 2000 The policy process I wish to examine is now complete. It ran over the period 1999–2002, although I wish to concentrate on my involvement in the process in early 2000 during which, as a consultant to Arts Queensland, I generated a draft policy document, Building the Future: A policy framework for the next five years (working draft). The imperative to develop a new state cultural policy followed the election of the first Beattie Labor government in July 1998. By 1999, senior Arts Queensland staff began to argue (within government at least) for the development of a new state cultural policy. The bureaucrats perceived policy development as one way of establishing “traction” in the process of bidding for new funds for the portfolio. Arts Minister Matt Foley was initially reluctant to “green-light” the policy process, but eventually in early 1999 he acceded to it on the advice of Arts Queensland, the industry, his own policy advisors and the Department of Premier. As stated above, this case study is offered now because the passing of time makes the analysis of relatively sensitive material possible. From the outset, an abbreviated timeframe for consultation and drafting seem to guarantee a difficult birth for the policy document. This was compounded by a failure to clarity the aims and process of the project. In presenting the draft policy to the advisory group, it became clear that there was no agreed strategic purpose to the document: Was it to be an advertisement, a framework for policy ideas, an audit, or a report on achievements? Tied to this, were questions about the audience for the policy statement. Was it aimed at the public, the arts industry, bureaucrats inside Arts Queensland, or, in keeping with the whole-of-government inflection to the document and its putative use in bidding for funds inside government, bureaucrats outside of Arts Queensland? My own conception of the document was as a cultural policy framework for the whole-of-government for the coming five years. It would concentrate on cultural policy in three realms: Arts Queensland; the arts instrumentalities; and other departments (particularly the cultural initiatives undertaken by the Department of Premier and the Department of State Development). In order to do this I articulated (for myself) a series of goals for the document. It needed to provide the philosophical underpinnings for a new arts and cultural policy, discuss the cultural significance of “community” in the context of the arts, outline expansion plans for the arts infrastructure throughout Queensland, advance ideas for increased employment in the arts and cultural industries, explore the development of new audiences and markets, address contemporary issues of technology, globalisation and culture commodification, promote a whole-of-government approach to the arts and cultural industries, address social justice and equity concerns associated with cultural diversity, and present examples of current and new arts and cultural practices. Five key strategies were identified: i) building strong communities and supporting diversity; ii) building the creative industries and the cultural economy; iii) developing audiences and telling Queensland’s stories; iv) delivering to the world; and v) a new role for government. While the second aim of building the creative industries and the cultural economy was an addition to the existing Australian arts policy discourse, it is the articulation of a new role for government that is most radical here. The document went to the length of explicitly suggesting a series of actions to enable Arts Queensland to re-position itself inside government: develop an ongoing policy cycle; position Arts Queensland as a lead agency for cultural policy development; establish a mechanism for joint policy planning across the arts portfolio; adopt a whole-of-government approach to policy-making and program delivery; use arts and cultural strategies to deliver on social and economic policy agendas; centralise some cultural policy functions and project; maintain and develop mechanisms and peer assessment; establish long-term strategic relationships with the Commonwealth and local government; investigate new vehicles for arts and cultural investment; investigate partnerships between industry, community and government; and develop appropriate performance measures for the cultural industries. In short, the scope of the document was titanically large, and prohibitively expansive as a basis for policy change. A chief limitation of these aims is that they seem to place the cohesion and coherence of the policy discourse at the centre of the project—when it might have better privileged a concern with policy outputs and industry/community outcomes. The subsequent dismal fortunes of the document are instructive. The policy document went through several drafts over the first half of 2000. By August 2000, I had removed myself from the process and handed the drafting back to Arts Queensland which then produced shorter version less discursive than my initial draft. However, by November 2000, it is reasonable to say that the policy document was abandoned. Significantly, after May 2000 the working drafts began to be used as internal discussion documents with government. Thus, despite the abandonment of the policy process, largely due to the unworkable breadth of its ambition, the document had a continued policy utility. The subsequent discussions helped organise future policy statements and structural adjustments by government. After the re-election of the Beattie government in January 2001, a more substantial policy process was commenced with the earlier policy documents as a starting point. By early 2002 the document was in substantial draft. The eventual policy, Creative Queensland, was released in October 2002. Significantly, this document sought to advance two ideas that I believe the earlier process did much to mobilise: a whole-of-government approach to culture; and a broader operant definition of culture. It is important not to see these as ideas merely existing “textually” in the earlier policy draft of Building the Future, but instead to see them as ideas that had begun adhere themselves to the cultural policy mechanism of government, and begun to be deployed in internal policy discussions and in program design, before finding an eventual home in a published policy text. Analysis The productive effects of the aborted policy process in which I participated are difficult to quantify. They are difficult, in fact, to separate out from governments’ ongoing processes of producing and circulating policy ideas. What is clear is that the effects of Building the Future were not entirely negated by it never becoming public. Instead, despite only circulating to a readership of bureaucrats it represented the ideas of part of the bureaucracy at a point in time. In this instance, a “failed” policy process, and its intermediate outcomes, the draft policy, through the churn of policy work, assisted government towards an eventual policy statement and a new form of governmental organisation. This suggests that processes of cultural policy discussion, or policy churn, can be as productive as the public “enunciation” of formal policy in helping to organise ideas within government and determine programs and the allocation of resources. This is even so where the Utopian idealism of the policy process is abandoned for something more graspable or politic. For the small arts or cultural policy bureau this is an important incremental benefit. Two final implications should be noted. The first is for models of policy process. Bridgman and Davis’s model of the Australian policy cycle, despite its mechanistic qualities, is ambiguous about where the policy process begins and ends. In one instance they represent it as linear but strictly circular, always coming back to its own starting point (27). Elsewhere, however, they represent it as linear, but not necessarily circular, passing through eight stages with a defined beginning and end: identification of issues; policy analysis; choosing policy instruments; consultation; co-ordination; decision; implementation; and evaluation (28–29). What is clear from the 1999-2002 policy process—if we take the full period between when Arts Queensland began to organise the development of a new arts policy and its publication as Creative Queensland in October 2002—is that the policy process was not a linear one progressing in an orderly fashion towards policy outcomes. Instead, Building the Future, is a snapshot in time (namely early to mid-2000) of a fragmenting policy process; it reveals policy-making as involving a concurrency of policy activity rather than a progression through linear steps. Following Mark Considine’s conception of policy work as the state’s effort at “system-wide information exchange and policy transfer” (271), the document is concerned less in the ordering of resources than the organisation of policy discourse. The churn of policy is the mobilisation of information, or for Considine: policy-making, when considered as an innovation system among linked or interdependent actors, becomes a learning and regulating web based upon continuous exchanges of information and skill. Learning occurs through regulated exchange, rather than through heroic insight or special legislative feats of the kind regularly described in newspapers. (269) The acceptance of this underpins a turn in contemporary accounts of policy (Considine 252-72) where policy processes become contingent and incomplete Policy. The ordering of policy is something to be attempted rather than achieved. Policy becomes pragmatic and ad hoc. It is only coherent in as much as a policy statement represents a bringing together of elements of an agency or government’s objectives and program. The order, in some sense, arrives through the act of collection, narrativisation and representation. The second implication is more directly for cultural policy makers facing the prospect of whole-of-government cultural policy making. While it is reasonable for government to wish to make coherent totalising statements about its cultural interests, such ambitions bring the near certainty of failure for the small agency. Yet these failures of coherence and cohesion should be viewed as delivering incremental benefits through the effort and process of this policy “churn”. As was the case with the Building the Future policy process, while aborted it was not a totally wasted effort. Instead, Building the Future mobilised a set of ideas within Arts Queensland and within government. For the small arts or cultural bureaux approaching the enormous task of whole-of government cultural policy making such marginal benefits are important. References Arts Queensland. Creative Queensland: The Queensland Government Cultural Policy 2002. Brisbane: Arts Queensland, 2002. Bridgman, Peter, and Glyn Davis. Australian Policy Handbook. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1998. Considine, Mark. Public Policy: A Critical Approach. South Melbourne: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996. Cunningham, Stuart. "Willing Wonkers at the Policy Factory." Media Information Australia 73 (1994): 4-7. Glover, Stuart, and Stuart Cunningham. "The New Brisbane." Artlink 23.2 (2003): 16-23. Glover, Stuart, and Gillian Gardiner. Building the Future: A Policy Framework for the Next Five Years (Working Draft). Brisbane: Arts Queensland, 2000. Klein, Joe. "Eight Years." New Yorker 16 & 23 Oct. 2000: 188-217. O'Regan, Tom. "Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither". 2001. rtf.file. (26 July): AKCCMP. 9 Aug. 2001. ‹http://www.gu.edu.au/centre/cmp>. Parsons, Wayne. Public Policy: An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Policy Analysis. Aldershot: Edward Edgar, 1995.Williams, Raymond. Key Words: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana, 1976.
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Rossiter, Ned. "Creative Industries and the Limits of Critique from." M/C Journal 6, no. 3 (June 1, 2003). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2208.

Full text
Abstract:
‘Every space has become ad space’. Steve Hayden, Wired Magazine, May 2003. Marshall McLuhan’s (1964) dictum that media technologies constitute a sensory extension of the body shares a conceptual affinity with Ernst Jünger’s notion of ‘“organic construction” [which] indicates [a] synergy between man and machine’ and Walter Benjamin’s exploration of the mimetic correspondence between the organic and the inorganic, between human and non-human forms (Bolz, 2002: 19). The logo or brand is co-extensive with various media of communication – billboards, TV advertisements, fashion labels, book spines, mobile phones, etc. Often the logo is interchangeable with the product itself or a way or life. Since all social relations are mediated, whether by communications technologies or architectonic forms ranging from corporate buildings to sporting grounds to family living rooms, it follows that there can be no outside for sociality. The social is and always has been in a mutually determining relationship with mediating forms. It is in this sense that there is no outside. Such an idea has become a refrain amongst various contemporary media theorists. Here’s a sample: There is no outside position anymore, nor is this perceived as something desirable. (Lovink, 2002a: 4) Both “us” and “them” (whoever we are, whoever they are) are all always situated in this same virtual geography. There’s no outside …. There is nothing outside the vector. (Wark, 2002: 316) There is no more outside. The critique of information is in the information itself. (Lash, 2002: 220) In declaring a universality for media culture and information flows, all of the above statements acknowledge the political and conceptual failure of assuming a critical position outside socio-technically constituted relations. Similarly, they recognise the problems inherent in the “ideology critique” of the Frankfurt School who, in their distinction between “truth” and “false-consciousness”, claimed a sort of absolute knowledge for the critic that transcended the field of ideology as it is produced by the culture industry. Althusser’s more complex conception of ideology, material practices and subject formation nevertheless also fell prey to the pretence of historical materialism as an autonomous “science” that is able to determine the totality, albeit fragmented, of lived social relations. One of the key failings of ideology critique, then, is its incapacity to account for the ways in which the critic, theorist or intellectual is implicated in the operations of ideology. That is, such approaches displace the reflexivity and power relationships between epistemology, ontology and their constitution as material practices within socio-political institutions and historical constellations, which in turn are the settings for the formation of ideology. Scott Lash abandons the term ideology altogether due to its conceptual legacies within German dialectics and French post-structuralist aporetics, both of which ‘are based in a fundamental dualism, a fundamental binary, of the two types of reason. One speaks of grounding and reconciliation, the other of unbridgeability …. Both presume a sphere of transcendence’ (Lash, 2002: 8). Such assertions can be made at a general level concerning these diverse and often conflicting approaches when they are reduced to categories for the purpose of a polemic. However, the work of “post-structuralists” such as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari and the work of German systems theorist Niklas Luhmann is clearly amenable to the task of critique within information societies (see Rossiter, 2003). Indeed, Lash draws on such theorists in assembling his critical dispositif for the information age. More concretely, Lash (2002: 9) advances his case for a new mode of critique by noting the socio-technical and historical shift from ‘constitutive dualisms of the era of the national manufacturing society’ to global information cultures, whose constitutive form is immanent to informational networks and flows. Such a shift, according to Lash, needs to be met with a corresponding mode of critique: Ideologycritique [ideologiekritik] had to be somehow outside of ideology. With the disappearance of a constitutive outside, informationcritique must be inside of information. There is no outside any more. (2002: 10) Lash goes on to note, quite rightly, that ‘Informationcritique itself is branded, another object of intellectual property, machinically mediated’ (2002: 10). It is the political and conceptual tensions between information critique and its regulation via intellectual property regimes which condition critique as yet another brand or logo that I wish to explore in the rest of this essay. Further, I will question the supposed erasure of a “constitutive outside” to the field of socio-technical relations within network societies and informational economies. Lash is far too totalising in supposing a break between industrial modes of production and informational flows. Moreover, the assertion that there is no more outside to information too readily and simplistically assumes informational relations as universal and horizontally organised, and hence overlooks the significant structural, cultural and economic obstacles to participation within media vectors. That is, there certainly is an outside to information! Indeed, there are a plurality of outsides. These outsides are intertwined with the flows of capital and the imperial biopower of Empire, as Hardt and Negri (2000) have argued. As difficult as it may be to ascertain the boundaries of life in all its complexity, borders, however defined, nonetheless exist. Just ask the so-called “illegal immigrant”! This essay identifies three key modalities comprising a constitutive outside: material (uneven geographies of labour-power and the digital divide), symbolic (cultural capital), and strategic (figures of critique). My point of reference in developing this inquiry will pivot around an analysis of the importation in Australia of the British “Creative Industries” project and the problematic foundation such a project presents to the branding and commercialisation of intellectual labour. The creative industries movement – or Queensland Ideology, as I’ve discussed elsewhere with Danny Butt (2002) – holds further implications for the political and economic position of the university vis-à-vis the arts and humanities. Creative industries constructs itself as inside the culture of informationalism and its concomitant economies by the very fact that it is an exercise in branding. Such branding is evidenced in the discourses, rhetoric and policies of creative industries as adopted by university faculties, government departments and the cultural industries and service sectors seeking to reposition themselves in an institutional environment that is adjusting to ongoing structural reforms attributed to the demands by the “New Economy” for increased labour flexibility and specialisation, institutional and economic deregulation, product customisation and capital accumulation. Within the creative industries the content produced by labour-power is branded as copyrights and trademarks within the system of Intellectual Property Regimes (IPRs). However, as I will go on to show, a constitutive outside figures in material, symbolic and strategic ways that condition the possibility of creative industries. The creative industries project, as envisioned by the Blair government’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) responsible for the Creative Industry Task Force Mapping Documents of 1998 and 2001, is interested in enhancing the “creative” potential of cultural labour in order to extract a commercial value from cultural objects and services. Just as there is no outside for informationcritique, for proponents of the creative industries there is no culture that is worth its name if it is outside a market economy. That is, the commercialisation of “creativity” – or indeed commerce as a creative undertaking – acts as a legitimising function and hence plays a delimiting role for “culture” and, by association, sociality. And let us not forget, the institutional life of career academics is also at stake in this legitimating process. The DCMS cast its net wide when defining creative sectors and deploys a lexicon that is as vague and unquantifiable as the next mission statement by government and corporate bodies enmeshed within a neo-liberal paradigm. At least one of the key proponents of the creative industries in Australia is ready to acknowledge this (see Cunningham, 2003). The list of sectors identified as holding creative capacities in the CITF Mapping Document include: film, music, television and radio, publishing, software, interactive leisure software, design, designer fashion, architecture, performing arts, crafts, arts and antique markets, architecture and advertising. The Mapping Document seeks to demonstrate how these sectors consist of ‘... activities which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have the potential for wealth and job creation through generation and exploitation of intellectual property’ (CITF: 1998/2001). The CITF’s identification of intellectual property as central to the creation of jobs and wealth firmly places the creative industries within informational and knowledge economies. Unlike material property, intellectual property such as artistic creations (films, music, books) and innovative technical processes (software, biotechnologies) are forms of knowledge that do not diminish when they are distributed. This is especially the case when information has been encoded in a digital form and distributed through technologies such as the internet. In such instances, information is often attributed an “immaterial” and nonrivalrous quality, although this can be highly misleading for both the conceptualisation of information and the politics of knowledge production. Intellectual property, as distinct from material property, operates as a scaling device in which the unit cost of labour is offset by the potential for substantial profit margins realised by distribution techniques availed by new information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their capacity to infinitely reproduce the digital commodity object as a property relation. Within the logic of intellectual property regimes, the use of content is based on the capacity of individuals and institutions to pay. The syndication of media content ensures that market saturation is optimal and competition is kept to a minimum. However, such a legal architecture and hegemonic media industry has run into conflict with other net cultures such as open source movements and peer-to-peer networks (Lovink, 2002b; Meikle, 2002), which is to say nothing of the digital piracy of software and digitally encoded cinematic forms. To this end, IPRs are an unstable architecture for extracting profit. The operation of Intellectual Property Regimes constitutes an outside within creative industries by alienating labour from its mode of information or form of expression. Lash is apposite on this point: ‘Intellectual property carries with it the right to exclude’ (Lash, 2002: 24). This principle of exclusion applies not only to those outside the informational economy and culture of networks as result of geographic, economic, infrastructural, and cultural constraints. The very practitioners within the creative industries are excluded from control over their creations. It is in this sense that a legal and material outside is established within an informational society. At the same time, this internal outside – to put it rather clumsily – operates in a constitutive manner in as much as the creative industries, by definition, depend upon the capacity to exploit the IP produced by its primary source of labour. For all the emphasis the Mapping Document places on exploiting intellectual property, it’s really quite remarkable how absent any elaboration or considered development of IP is from creative industries rhetoric. It’s even more astonishing that media and cultural studies academics have given at best passing attention to the issues of IPRs. Terry Flew (2002: 154-159) is one of the rare exceptions, though even here there is no attempt to identify the implications IPRs hold for those working in the creative industries sectors. Perhaps such oversights by academics associated with the creative industries can be accounted for by the fact that their own jobs rest within the modern, industrial institution of the university which continues to offer the security of a salary award system and continuing if not tenured employment despite the onslaught of neo-liberal reforms since the 1980s. Such an industrial system of traditional and organised labour, however, does not define the labour conditions for those working in the so-called creative industries. Within those sectors engaged more intensively in commercialising culture, labour practices closely resemble work characterised by the dotcom boom, which saw young people working excessively long hours without any of the sort of employment security and protection vis-à-vis salary, health benefits and pension schemes peculiar to traditional and organised labour (see McRobbie, 2002; Ross, 2003). During the dotcom mania of the mid to late 90s, stock options were frequently offered to people as an incentive for offsetting the often minimum or even deferred payment of wages (see Frank, 2000). It is understandable that the creative industries project holds an appeal for managerial intellectuals operating in arts and humanities disciplines in Australia, most particularly at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), which claims to have established the ‘world’s first’ Creative Industries faculty (http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com/). The creative industries provide a validating discourse for those suffering anxiety disorders over what Ruth Barcan (2003) has called the ‘usefulness’ of ‘idle’ intellectual pastimes. As a project that endeavours to articulate graduate skills with labour markets, the creative industries is a natural extension of the neo-liberal agenda within education as advocated by successive governments in Australia since the Dawkins reforms in the mid 1980s (see Marginson and Considine, 2000). Certainly there’s a constructive dimension to this: graduates, after all, need jobs and universities should display an awareness of market conditions; they also have a responsibility to do so. And on this count, I find it remarkable that so many university departments in my own field of communications and media studies are so bold and, let’s face it, stupid, as to make unwavering assertions about market demands and student needs on the basis of doing little more than sniffing the wind! Time for a bit of a reality check, I’d say. And this means becoming a little more serious about allocating funds and resources towards market research and analysis based on the combination of needs between students, staff, disciplinary values, university expectations, and the political economy of markets. However, the extent to which there should be a wholesale shift of the arts and humanities into a creative industries model is open to debate. The arts and humanities, after all, are a set of disciplinary practices and values that operate as a constitutive outside for creative industries. Indeed, in their creative industries manifesto, Stuart Cunningham and John Hartley (2002) loath the arts and humanities in such confused, paradoxical and hypocritical ways in order to establish the arts and humanities as a cultural and ideological outside. To this end, to subsume the arts and humanities into the creative industries, if not eradicate them altogether, is to spell the end of creative industries as it’s currently conceived at the institutional level within academe. Too much specialisation in one post-industrial sector, broad as it may be, ensures a situation of labour reserves that exceed market needs. One only needs to consider all those now unemployed web-designers that graduated from multi-media programs in the mid to late 90s. Further, it does not augur well for the inevitable shift from or collapse of a creative industries economy. Where is the standing reserve of labour shaped by university education and training in a post-creative industries economy? Diehard neo-liberals and true-believers in the capacity for perpetual institutional flexibility would say that this isn’t a problem. The university will just “organically” adapt to prevailing market conditions and shape their curriculum and staff composition accordingly. Perhaps. Arguably if the university is to maintain a modality of time that is distinct from the just-in-time mode of production characteristic of informational economies – and indeed, such a difference is a quality that defines the market value of the educational commodity – then limits have to be established between institutions of education and the corporate organisation or creative industry entity. The creative industries project is a reactionary model insofar as it reinforces the status quo of labour relations within a neo-liberal paradigm in which bids for industry contracts are based on a combination of rich technological infrastructures that have often been subsidised by the state (i.e. paid for by the public), high labour skills, a low currency exchange rate and the lowest possible labour costs. In this respect it is no wonder that literature on the creative industries omits discussion of the importance of unions within informational, networked economies. What is the place of unions in a labour force constituted as individualised units? The conditions of possibility for creative industries within Australia are at once its frailties. In many respects, the success of the creative industries sector depends upon the ongoing combination of cheap labour enabled by a low currency exchange rate and the capacity of students to access the skills and training offered by universities. Certainly in relation to matters such as these there is no outside for the creative industries. There’s a great need to explore alternative economic models to the content production one if wealth is to be successfully extracted and distributed from activities in the new media sectors. The suggestion that the creative industries project initiates a strategic response to the conditions of cultural production within network societies and informational economies is highly debateable. The now well documented history of digital piracy in the film and software industries and the difficulties associated with regulating violations to proprietors of IP in the form of copyright and trademarks is enough of a reason to look for alternative models of wealth extraction. And you can be sure this will occur irrespective of the endeavours of the creative industries. To conclude, I am suggesting that those working in the creative industries, be they content producers or educators, need to intervene in IPRs in such a way that: 1) ensures the alienation of their labour is minimised; 2) collectivising “creative” labour in the form of unions or what Wark (2001) has termed the “hacker class”, as distinct from the “vectoralist class”, may be one way of achieving this; and 3) the advocates of creative industries within the higher education sector in particular are made aware of the implications IPRs have for graduates entering the workforce and adjust their rhetoric, curriculum, and policy engagements accordingly. Works Cited Barcan, Ruth. ‘The Idleness of Academics: Reflections on the Usefulness of Cultural Studies’. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies (forthcoming, 2003). Bolz, Norbert. ‘Rethinking Media Aesthetics’, in Geert Lovink, Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002, 18-27. Butt, Danny and Rossiter, Ned. ‘Blowing Bubbles: Post-Crash Creative Industries and the Withering of Political Critique in Cultural Studies’. Paper presented at Ute Culture: The Utility of Culture and the Uses of Cultural Studies, Cultural Studies Association of Australia Conference, Melbourne, 5-7 December, 2002. Posted to fibreculture mailing list, 10 December, 2002, http://www.fibreculture.org/archives/index.html Creative Industry Task Force: Mapping Document, DCMS (Department of Culture, Media and Sport), London, 1998/2001. http://www.culture.gov.uk/creative/mapping.html Cunningham, Stuart. ‘The Evolving Creative Industries: From Original Assumptions to Contemporary Interpretations’. Seminar Paper, QUT, Brisbane, 9 May, 2003, http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com/research/cirac/documen... ...ts/THE_EVOLVING_CREATIVE_INDUSTRIES.pdf Cunningham, Stuart; Hearn, Gregory; Cox, Stephen; Ninan, Abraham and Keane, Michael. Brisbane’s Creative Industries 2003. Report delivered to Brisbane City Council, Community and Economic Development, Brisbane: CIRAC, 2003. http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com/research/cirac/documen... ...ts/bccreportonly.pdf Flew, Terry. New Media: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Frank, Thomas. One Market under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy. New York: Anchor Books, 2000. Hartley, John and Cunningham, Stuart. ‘Creative Industries: from Blue Poles to fat pipes’, in Malcolm Gillies (ed.) The National Humanities and Social Sciences Summit: Position Papers. Canberra: DEST, 2002. Hayden, Steve. ‘Tastes Great, Less Filling: Ad Space – Will Advertisers Learn the Hard Lesson of Over-Development?’. Wired Magazine 11.06 (June, 2003), http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/ad_spc.html Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. Lash, Scott. Critique of Information. London: Sage, 2002. Lovink, Geert. Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002a. Lovink, Geert. Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002b. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964. McRobbie, Angela. ‘Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded up Creative Worlds’, Cultural Studies 16.4 (2002): 516-31. Marginson, Simon and Considine, Mark. The Enterprise University: Power, Governance and Reinvention in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Meikle, Graham. Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet. Sydney: Pluto Press, 2002. Ross, Andrew. No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Rossiter, Ned. ‘Processual Media Theory’, in Adrian Miles (ed.) Streaming Worlds: 5th International Digital Arts & Culture (DAC) Conference. 19-23 May. Melbourne: RMIT University, 2003, 173-184. http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/Rossiter.pdf Sassen, Saskia. Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Wark, McKenzie. ‘Abstraction’ and ‘Hack’, in Hugh Brown, Geert Lovink, Helen Merrick, Ned Rossiter, David Teh, Michele Willson (eds). Politics of a Digital Present: An Inventory of Australian Net Culture, Criticism and Theory. Melbourne: Fibreculture Publications, 2001, 3-7, 99-102. Wark, McKenzie. ‘The Power of Multiplicity and the Multiplicity of Power’, in Geert Lovink, Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002, 314-325. Links http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/Rossiter.pdf http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com/ http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com/research/cirac/documents/THE_EVOLVING_CREATIVE_INDUSTRIES.pdf http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com/research/cirac/documents/bccreportonly.pdf http://www.culture.gov.uk/creative/mapping.html http://www.fibreculture.org/archives/index.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/ad_spc.html Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Rossiter, Ned. "Creative Industries and the Limits of Critique from " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/11-creativeindustries.php>. APA Style Rossiter, N. (2003, Jun 19). Creative Industries and the Limits of Critique from . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/11-creativeindustries.php>
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39

Probyn, Elspeth. "Indigestion of Identities." M/C Journal 2, no. 7 (October 1, 1999). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1791.

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Do we eat what we are, or are we what we eat? Do we eat or are we eaten? In less cryptic terms, in eating, do we confirm our identities, or are our identities reforged, and refracted by what and how we eat? In posing these questions, I want to shift the terms of current debates about identity. I want to signal that the study of identity may take on new insights when we look at how we are or want to be in terms of what, how, and with whom we eat. If the analysis of identity has by and large been conducted through the optic of sex, it may well be that in western societies we are witnessing a shift away from sex as the sovereign signifier, or to put it more finely, the question of what we are is a constantly morphing one that mixes up bodies, appetites, classes, genders and ethnicities. It must be said that the question of identity and subjectivity has been so well trodden in the last several decades that the possibility of any virgin territory is slim. Bombarded by critiques of identity politics, any cultural critic still interested in why and how individuals fabricate themselves must either cringe before accusations of sociological do-gooding (and defend the importance of the categories of race, class, sex, gender and so forth), or face the endless clichés that seemingly support the investigation of identity. The momentum of my investigation is carried by a weak wager, by which I mean that the areas and examples I study cannot be overdetermined by a sole axis of investigation. My point of departure is basic: what if we were to think identities in another dimension, through the optic of eating and its associated qualities: hunger, greed, shame, disgust, pleasure, etc? While the connections suggested by eating are diverse and illuminating, interrogating identity through this angle brings its own load of assumptions and preconceptions. One of the more onerous aspects of 'writing about food' is the weight of previous studies. The field of food is a well traversed one, staked out by influential authors concerned with proper anthropological, historical and sociological questions. They are by and large attracted to food for its role in securing social categories and classifications. They have left a legacy of truisms, such as Lévi-Strauss's oft-stated maxim that food is good to think with1, or Brillat-Savarin's aphorism, 'tell me what you eat: I will tell you what you are' (13). In turn, scientific idioms meet up with the buzzing clichés that hover about food. These can be primarily grouped around the notion that food is fundamental, that we all eat, and so on. Indeed, buffeted by the winds of postmodernism that have permeated public debates, it seems that there is a popular acceptance of the fact that identities are henceforth difficult, fragmented, temporary, unhinged by massive changes to modes of employment and the economy, re-formations of family, and the changes in the gender and sexual order. Living with and through these changes on a daily basis, it is no wonder that food and eating has been popularly reclaimed as a 'fundamental' issue, as the last bastion of authenticity in our lives. To put it another way, and in the terms that guide me, eating is seen as immediate -- it is something we all have to do; and it is a powerful mode of mediation, of joining us with others. What, how, and where we eat has emerged as a site of considerable social concern: from the fact that most do not eat en famille, that we increasingly eat out and through drive-in fast food outlets (in the US, 50% of the food budget is spent on eating outside the home), to the worries about genetically altered food and horror food -- mad cows, sick chickens, square tomatoes. Eating performs different connections and disconnections. Increasingly the attention to what we eat is seen as immediately connecting us, our bodies, to large social questions. At a broad level, this can be as diffuse as the winds that some argue spread genetically modified seed stock from one region to another. Or it can be as individually focussed as the knowledge that others are starving as we eat. This connection has long haunted children told 'to eat up everything on your plate because little children are starving in Africa', and in more evolved terms has served as a staple of forms of vegetarianism and other ethical forms of eating. From the pictures of starving children staring from magazine pages, the spectre of hunger is now broadcast by the Internet, exemplified in the Hunger Site where 'users are met by a map of the world and every 3.6 seconds, a country flashes black signifying a death due to hunger'. Here eating is the subject of a double articulation: the recognition of hunger is presumed to be a fundamental capacity of individuals, and our feelings are then galvanised into painless action: each time a user clicks on the 'hunger' button one of the sponsors donates a cup and a half of food. As the site explains, 'our sponsors pay for the donations as a form of advertising and public relations'. Here, the logic is that hunger is visceral, that it is a basic human feeling, which is to say that it is understood as immediate, and that it connects us in a basic way to other humans. That advertising companies know that it can also be a profitable form of meditation, transforming 'humans' into consumers is but one example of how eating connects us in complex ways to other people, to products, to new formulations of identity, and in this case altruism (the site has been called 'the altruistic mouse')2. Eating continually interweaves individual needs, desires and aspirations within global economies of identities. Of course the interlocking of the global and the local has been the subject of much debate over the last decade. For instance, in his recent book on globalisation, John Tomlinson uses 'global food and local identity' as a site through which to problematise these terms. It is clear that changes in food processing and transportation technologies have altered our sense of connection to the near and the far away, allowing us to routinely find in our supermarkets and eat products that previously would have been the food stuff of the élite. These institutional and technological changes rework the connections individuals have to their local, to the regions and nations in which they live. As Tomlinson argues, 'globalisation, from its early impact, does clearly undermine a close material relationship between the provenance of food and locality' (123). As he further states, the effects have been good (availability and variety), and bad (disrupting 'the subtle connection between climate, season, locality and cultural practice'). In terms of what we can now eat, Tomlinson points out that 'the very cultural stereotypes that identify food with, say, national culture become weakened' (124). Defusing the whiff of moralism that accompanies so much writing about food, Tomlinson argues that these changes to how we eat are not 'typically experienced as simply cultural loss or estrangement but as a complex and ambiguous blend: of familiarity and difference, expansion of cultural horizons and increased perceptions of vulnerability, access to the "world out there" accompanied by penetration of our own private worlds, new opportunities and new risks' (128). For the sake of my own argument his attention to the increased sense of vulnerability is particularly important. To put it more strongly, I'd argue that eating is of interest for the ways in which it can be a mundane exposition of the visceral nature of our connectedness, or distance from each other, from ourselves, and our social environment: it throws into relief the heartfelt, the painful, playful or pleasurable articulations of identity. To put it more clearly, I want to use eating and its associations in order to think about how the most ordinary of activities can be used to help us reflect on how we are connected to others, and to large and small social issues. This is again to attend to the immediacy of eating, and the ways in which that immediacy is communicated, mediated and can be put to use in thinking about culture. The adjective 'visceral' comes to mind: 'of the viscera', the inner organs. Could something as ordinary as eating contain the seeds of an extraordinary reflection, a visceral reaction to who and what we are becoming? In mining eating and its qualities might we glimpse gut reactions to the histories and present of the cultures within which we live? As Emily Jenkins writes in her account of 'adventures in physical culture', what if we were to go 'into things tongue first. To see how they taste' (5). In this sense, I want to plunder the visceral, gut levels revealed by that most boring and fascinating of topics: food and eating. In turn, I want to think about what bodies are and do when they eat. To take up the terms with which I started, eating both confirms what and who we are, to ourselves and to others, and can reveal new ways of thinking about those relations. To take the most basic of facts: food goes in, and then broken down it comes out of the body, and every time this happens our bodies are affected. While in the usual course of things we may not dwell upon this process, that basic ingestion allows us to think of our bodies as complex assemblages connected to a wide range of other assemblages. In eating, the diverse nature of where and how different parts of ourselves attach to different aspects of the social becomes clear, just as it scrambles preconceptions about alimentary identities. Of course, we eat according to social rules, in fact we ingest them. 'Feed the man meat', the ads proclaim following the line of masculinity inwards; while others draw a line outwards from biology and femininity into 'Eat lean beef'. The body that eats has been theorised in ways that seek to draw out the sociological equations about who we are in terms of class and gender. But rather than taking the body as known, as already and always ordered in advance by what and how it eats, we can turn such hypotheses on their head. In the act of ingestion, strict divisions get blurred. The most basic fact of eating reveals some of the strangeness of the body's workings. Consequently it becomes harder to capture the body within categories, to order stable identities. This then forcefully reminds us that we still do not know what a body is capable of, to take up a refrain that has a long heritage (from Spinoza to Deleuze to feminist investigations of the body). As Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd argue in terms of this idea, 'each body exists in relations of interdependence with other bodies and these relations form a "world" in which individuals of all kinds exchange their constitutive parts -- leading to the enrichment of some and the demise of others (e.g. eating involves the destruction of one body at the same time as it involves the enhancement of the other)' (101). I am particularly interested in how individuals replay equations between eating and identity. But that phrase sounds impossibly abstracted from the minute instances I have in mind. From the lofty heights, I follow the injunction to 'look down, look way down', to lead, as it were, with the stomach. In this vein, I begin to note petty details, like the fact of recently discovering breakfast. From a diet of coffee (now with a milk called 'Life') and cigarettes, I dutifully munch on fortified cereal that provides large amounts of folate should I be pregnant (and as I eat it I wonder am I, should I be?3). Spurred on by articles sprinkled with dire warnings about what happens to women in Western societies, I search out soy, linseed and other ingredients that will help me mimic the high phytoestrogen diet of Japanese women. Eating cereal, I am told, will stave off depression, especially with the addition of bananas. Washed down with yoghurt 'enhanced' with acidophilius and bifidus to give me 'friendly' bacteria that will fight against nasty heliobacter pylori, I am assured that I will even lose weight by eating breakfast. It's all a bit much first thing in the morning when the promise of a long life seems like a threat. The myriad of printed promises of the intricate world of alimentary programming serve as an interesting counterpoint to the straightforward statements on cigarette packages. 'Smoking kills' versus the weak promises that eating so much of such and such a cereal 'is a good source of soy phytoestrogenes (isolfavones) that are believed to be very beneficial'. Apart from the unpronounceable ingredients (do you really want to eat something that you can't say?), the terms of the contract between me and the cereal makers is thin: that such and such is 'believed to be beneficial'? While what in fact they may benefit is nebulous, it gets scarier when they specify that 'a diet rich in folate may reduce the risk of birth defects such as spina bifida'. The conditional tense wavers as I ponder the way spina bifida is produced as a real possibility. There is of course a long history to the web of nutritional messages that now surrounds us. In her potted teleology of food messages, Sue Thompson, a consultant dietitian, writes that in the 1960s, the slogan was 'you are what you eat'. Then in the 1970s and 1980s, the idea was that food was bad for you. In her words, 'it became a time of "Don't eat" and "bad foods". Now, happily, 'we are moving into a time of appreciating the health benefits of food' (Promotional release by the Dairy Farmers, 1997). As the new battle ground for extended enhanced life, eating takes on fortified meaning. Awed by the enthusiasm, I am also somewhat shocked by the intimacy of detail. I can handle descriptions of sex, but the idea of discussing the ways in which you 'are reducing the bacterial toxins produced from small bowel overgrowth' (Thompson), is just too much. Gut level intimacy indeed. However, eating is intimate. But strangely enough except for the effusive health gurus, and the gossip about the eating habits of celebrities, normally in terms of not-eating, we tend not to publicly air the fact that we all operate as 'mouth machines' (to take Noëlle Châtelet's term). To be blunt about it, 'to eat, is to connect ... the mouth and the anus' (Châtelet 34). We would, with good reason, rather not think about this; it is an area of conversation reserved for our intimates. For instance, in relationships the moment of broaching the subject of one's gut may mark the beginning of the end. So let us stay for the moment at the level of the mouth machine, and the ways it brings together the physical fact of what goes in, and the symbolic production of what comes out: meanings, statements, ideas. To sanitise it further, I want to think of the mouth machine as a metonym4 for the operations of a term that has been central to cultural studies: 'articulation'. Stuart Hall's now classic definition states that 'articulation refers to the complex set of historical practices by which we struggle to produce identity or structural unity out of, on top of, complexity, difference, contradiction' (qtd. in Grossberg, "History" 64). While the term has tended to be used rather indiscriminately -- theorists wildly 'articulate' this or that -- its precise terms are useful. Basically it refers to how individuals relate themselves to their social contexts and histories. While we are all in some sense the repositories of past practices, through our actions we 'articulate', bridge and connect ourselves to practices and contexts in ways that are new to us. In other terms, we continually shuttle between practices and meanings that are already constituted and 'the real conditions' in which we find ourselves. As Lawrence Grossberg argues, this offers 'a nonessentialist theory of agency ... a fragmented, decentered human agent, an agent who is both "subject-ed" by power and capable of acting against power' ("History" 65). Elsewhere Grossberg elaborates on the term, arguing that 'articulation is the production of identity on top of difference, of unities out of fragments, of structures across practices' (We Gotta Get Out 54). We are then 'articulated' subjects, the product of being integrated into past practices and structures, but we are also always 'articulating' subjects: through our enactment of practices we reforge new meanings, new identities for ourselves. This then reveals a view of the subject as a fluctuating entity, neither totally voluntaristic, nor overdetermined. In more down to earth terms, just because we are informed by practices not of our own making, 'that doesn't mean we swallow our lessons without protest' (Jenkins 5). The mouth machine takes in but it also spits out. In these actions the individual is constantly connecting, disconnecting and reconnecting. Grossberg joins the theory of articulation to Deleuze and Guattari's notion of rhizomes. In real and theoretical terms, a rhizome is a wonderful entity: it is a type of plant, such as a potato plant or an orchid, that instead of having tap roots spreads its shoots outwards, where new roots can sprout off old. Used as a figure to map out social relations, the rhizome allows us to think about other types of connection. Beyond the arboreal, tap root logic of, say, the family tree which ties me in lineage to my forefathers, the rhizome allows me to spread laterally and horizontally: as Deleuze puts it, the rhizome is antigenealogical, 'it always has multiple entryways' compelling us to think of how we are connected diversely, to obvious and sometimes not so obvious entities (35). For Grossberg the appeal of joining a theory of articulation with one inspired by rhizomes is that it combines the 'vertical complexity' of culture and context, with the 'wild realism' of the horizontal possibilities that connect us outward. To use another metaphor dear to Deleuze and Guattari, this is to think about the spread of rhizomatic roots, the 'lines of flight' that break open seemingly closed structures, including those we call ourselves: 'lines of flight disarticulate, open up the assemblage to its exterior, cutting across and dismantling unity, identity, centers and hierarchies' (qtd. in Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out 58). In this way, bodies can be seen as assemblages: bits of past and present practice, openings, attachments to parts of the social, closings and aversion to other parts. The tongue as it ventures out to taste something new may bring back fond memories, or it may cause us to recoil in disgust. As Jenkins writes, this produces a fascinating 'contradiction -- how the body is both a prison and a vehicle for adventure' (4). It highlights the fact that the 'body is not the same from day to day. Not even from minute to minute ... . Sometimes it seems like home, sometimes more like a cheap motel near Pittsburgh' (7). As we ingest we mutate, we expand and contract, we change, sometimes subtly, sometimes violently. The openings and closings of our bodies constantly rearranges our dealings with others, as Jenkins writes, the body's 'distortions, anxieties, ecstasies and discomforts all influence a person's interaction with the people who service it'. In more theoretical terms, this produces the body as 'an articulated plane whose organisation defines its own relations of power and sites of struggle', which 'points to the existence of another politics, a politics of feeling' (Grossberg, "History" 72). These theoretical considerations illuminate the interest and the complexity of bodies that eat. The mouth machine registers experiences, and then articulates them -- utters them. In eating, we may munch into whole chains of previously established connotations, just as we may disrupt them. For instance, an email arrives, leaving traces of its rhizomatic passage zapping from one part of the world to another, and then to me. Unsolicited, it sets out a statement from a Dr. Johannes Van Vugt in San Francisco who on October 11, 1999, National Coming Out Day in the US, began an ongoing 'Fast for Equal Rights for persons who are gay, lesbian and other sexual orientation minorities'. Yoking his fast with the teachings of Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Dr. Van Vugt says he is fasting to 'call on you to choose love, not fear, and to do something about it'. The statement also reveals that he previously fasted 'to raise awareness and funds for African famine relief for which he received a Congressional commendation'. While personally I don't give much for his chances of getting a second commendation, this is an example of how the mouth machine closed still operates to articulate identities and politics to wildly diverging sites. While there is something of an arboreal logic to fasting for awareness of famine, the connection between not eating and anti-homophobic politics is decidedly rhizomatic. Whether or not it succeeds in its aim, and one of the tenets of a rhizomatic logic is that the points of connection cannot be guaranteed in advance, it does join the mouth with sex with the mouth with homophobic statements that it utters. There is then a sort of 'wild realism' at work here that endeavours to set up new assemblages of bodies, mouths and politics. From fasting to writing, what of the body that writes of the body that eats? In Grossberg's argument, the move to a rhizomatic field of analysis promises to return cultural theory to a consideration of 'the real'. He argues that such a theory must be 'concerned with particular configurations of practices, how they produce effects and how such effects are organized and deployed' (We Gotta Get Out 45). However, it is crucial to remember that these practices do not exist in a pure state in culture, divorced from their representations or those of the body that analyses them. The type of 'wild realism' that Grossberg calls for, as in Deleuze's 'new empiricism' is both a way of seeing the world, and offers it anew, illuminates otherly its structures and individuals' interaction with them. Following the line of the rhizome means that we must 'forcibly work both on semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows', Guattari goes on to argue that 'there is no tripartition between a field of reality, the world, a field of representation, the book, and a field of subjectivity, the author. But an arrangement places in connection certain multiplicities taken from each of these orders' (qtd. in Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out 48). In terms of the possibilities offered by eating, these theoretical and conceptual arguments direct us to other ways of thinking about identity as both digestion and as indigestible. Bodies eat into culture. The mouth machine is central to the articulation of different orders, but so too is the tongue that sticks out, that draws in food, objects and people. Analysed along multiple alimentary lines of flight, in eating we constantly take in, chew up and spit out identities. Footnotes 1. As Barbara Santich has recently pointed out, Lévi-Strauss's point was made in relation to taboos on eating totem animals in traditional societies and wasn't a general comment on the connection between eating and thinking (4). 2. The sponsors of the Hunger Site include 0-0.com, a search engine, Proflowers.com, and an assortment of other examples of this new form of altruism (such as GreaterGood.com which advertises itself as a 'shop to benefit your favorite cause'), and 'World-Wide Recipes', which features a 'virtual restaurant'. 3. The pregnant body is of course one of the most policed entities in our culture, and pregnant friends report on the anxieties that are produced about what will go into the future child's body. 4. While Châtelet writes that thinking about the eating body 'throws her into full metaphor ... joining, for example the nutritional mouth and the lover's mouth' (8), I have tried to avoid the tug of metaphor. Of course, the seduction of metaphor is great, and there are copious examples of the metaphorisation of eating in regards to consumption, ingestion, reading and writing. However, as I've argued elsewhere (Probyn, Outside Belongings), I prefer to focus on the 'work' (or as Le Doeuff would say, 'le faire des images') that Deleuze and Guattari's terms accomplish as ways of modelling the social. This is a particularly crucial (if here underdeveloped) point in terms of my present project, where I seek to analyse the ways in which eating may reproduce an awareness of the visceral nature of social relations. That said, and as my valued colleague Melissa Hardie has often pointed out, my text is littered with metaphor. References Brillat-Savarin, Jean-Anthelme. The Physiology of Taste. Trans. Anne Drayton. Penguin, 1974. Châtelet, Noëlle. Le Corps a Corps Culinaire. Paris: Seuil, 1977. Deleuze, Gilles. "Rhizome versus Trees." The Deleuze Reader. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1973. Gatens, Moira, and Genevieve Lloyd. Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. Grossberg, Lawrence. "History, Politics and Postmodernism: Stuart Hall and Cultural Studies." Journal of Communication Inquiry 10.2 (1986): 61-77. ---. We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. New York and London: Routledge,1992. Le Doeuff, Michèle. L'Étude et le Rouet. Paris: Seuil, 1989. Jenkins, Emily. Tongue First: Adventures in Physical Culture. London: Virago, 1999. Probyn, Elspeth. Outside Belongings. New York and London: Routledge, 1996. ---. Sexing the Self. Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies. New York and London: Routledge, 1993. Santich, Barbara. "Research Notes." The Centre for the History of Food and Drink Newsletter. The University of Adelaide, September 1999. Thompson, Sue. Promotional pamphlet for the Dairy Farmers' Association. 1997. Tomlinson, John. Globalization and Culture. Oxford: Polity Press, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Elspeth Probyn. "The Indigestion of Identities." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/indigestion.php>. Chicago style: Elspeth Probyn, "The Indigestion of Identities," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 7 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/indigestion.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Elspeth Probyn. (1999) The indigestion of identities. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(7). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/indigestion.php> ([your date of access]).
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40

Leavy, Patricia. "Grande, Decaf, Low Fat, Extra Dry Cappuccino." M/C Journal 2, no. 5 (July 1, 1999). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1772.

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Desire. A longing, craving, hunger. A powerful motive. The representation of hope. Seemingly carnal. While historically the term "desire" has been categorized as an innately human and ultimately basic natural force, within the postmodern context "desire" becomes far more complex and contradictory and accordingly requires more expansive defining. Regardless of the content of the desire, whether it be the desire for romantic love or a successful career or an ice cold soda, whose desire is it? Can we within postmodernity separate the carnal from the calculated, the individual from the collective? How many others are involved in the desires that I have? Where do my desires come from? A dialogue regarding the strategic forces used to create consumer desire is well established within academia, dating back at least twenty-five years. This has been in response to the expansive advertising efforts engineered by industrial corporations which began in the early 1900s as mass production increased, necessitating new consumer markets. This research has provided insights into how advertising developed not merely to inform consumers about product availability, but also to reconstruct consumer perception (Ewen 41). Additionally, this modernist approach to the study of consumer desire has explored how advertisers study "mass psychology" in order to understand the way representations of products work to enhance product desirability (Ewen 47-9). While this dialogue is most important, within postmodernity, questions of representation become even more complex. Building upon questions of how images of consumption operate, we must now ask what, if anything, is behind those images. One of the characteristics of postmodernity is that I remember images of events that I did not witness. For example, while I was not present at the assassination of President Kennedy or during the Viet Nam War, I can recall, both spontaneously and at will, crystal clear visual moments of each historical event. In this postmodern time and space we all share a collective memory of images associated with events we may not have personally witnessed. Given this historically unique phenomenon, and that images often work within the realm of the unconscious, how do I know where my images of desire come from? Moreover, is there a universality that even my most seemingly personal desires maintain? Baudrillard asserts that we live in a world of simulation where referents are lost and we live by a system of signs without origin, no longer able to distinguish the real from the imaginary. He posits, "simulation threatens the difference between the true and the false, the real and the imaginary" (3). Desire forcefully manifests itself as true and real within each of our lives. In our hyperreal postmodern time and space, how can we individually and collectively be able to distinguish what our own true desires are as our I/eyes are mediated in multiple and often invisible ways (Pfohl)? Furthermore, do we desire what is represented in signs that don't actually have an origin in reality? Sociologist Stephen Pfohl writes the following: "The last thing that happened to me was a memory. Flash. Snap. Crack(le). Pop. I was watching television when suddenly I was recalled, taken by a sensational image of a desire to return to a time that never existed. Where does this image of desire come from? Where is it taking me? Where is it taking others?" (6). Combining the works of Baudrillard and Pfohl I am left wondering not only where does desire come from, but do images of desire actually spark our lives? This raises two pertinent questions: 1) as previously stated, we have a collective remembrance of images; therefore, to what extent are desires universal within any given historical time and geographic location, and, 2) who constructs those omnipresent images of desire? To what extent do media conglomerates, advertisers and politicians serve as mediators in our consciousness? I desire an answer to the following question: why is it that I drink diet coke? To quench a thirst or multiple thirsts? When I desire a cold diet coke, what might I gain from satisfying that craving? In the movie You've Got Mail the character played by actor Tom Hanks says: "The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf., decaf., low fat, nonfat, etc. So people who don't know what the hell they're doing or who on earth they are, can for only 2.95, can get not just a cup of coffee, but, an absolutely defining sense of self. Tall. Decaf. Cappuccino." The promise of both the product and the experience of fulfilling "personal" passion(s) has historically risen and is now at an all-time high. This increase in expectations can bring about two new results: 1) the fulfillment of the desire does not live up to the promise of fulfillment, or, 2) the satisfaction(s) gained from fulfilling the desire are illusions or partial illusions. For example, the first possibility occurs when I purchase a cappuccino to both quench my physical thirst and exert my decision-making ability even if on some unconscious level. Should the latter not occur, the desire for the possibility of the product is felt to be greater then the reality of the product. In the second case, I, as the character in the film asserts, may gain a false sense or illusion that purchasing and consuming this product demonstrates my decision-making ability. Turning to the issue of the universality of our images of desire, what happens to the individual when he/she discovers that the most intimate of desires is shared by countless others? What happens to the value placed upon that desire? In 1908 classical Sociologist Georg Simmel shared the following insight: In the stage of first passion, erotic relations strongly reject any thought of generalisation. A love such as this has never existed before; there is nothing to compare either with the person one loves or with our feelings for that person. An estrangement is wont to set in (whether as cause or effect is hard to decide) at the moment when this feeling of uniqueness disappears from the relationship. A skepticism regarding the intrinsic value of the relationship and its value for us adheres to the very thought that in this relation, after all, one is only fulfilling a general human destiny, that one has had an experience that has occurred a thousand times before, and that, if one had not accidentally met this precise person, someone else would have acquired the same meaning for us. (147) Are all of my desires comparable or even parallel to those of strangers? One does not desire without an object or subject. The desire for romantic passion involves a subject while the desire for a product involves an object. Even desires regarding success that may appear to live only within the individual actually exist within institutions and/or based upon some level of comparison exterior to the individual. The desire for the product or passion does not exist in my body alone but rather in the relation between the object or subject and myself. In our postmodern context the mediating factors between what is desired and the desirous individual are increasingly manifold yet often invisible. I'm going to Starbucks. I want a grande, decaf, low fat, extra dry cappuccino. Obey your thirst! References Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Michigan: U of Michigan P, 1994. Ewen, Stuart. All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture. Basic Books, 1988. Pfohl, Stephen. Death at the Parasite Café: Social Science (Fictions) and the Postmodern. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992. Simmel, Georg. On Individuality and Social Forms. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1971. You've Got Mail. Warner Bros., 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Patricia Leavy. "Grande, Decaf, Low Fat, Extra Dry Cappuccino: Postmodern Desire." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.5 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/grande.php>. Chicago style: Patricia Leavy, "Grande, Decaf, Low Fat, Extra Dry Cappuccino: Postmodern Desire," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 5 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/grande.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Patricia Leavy. (1999) Grande, decaf, low fat, extra dry cappuccino: postmodern desire. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/grande.php> (your date of access]).
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41

"Buchbesprechungen." Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 46, no. 4 (October 1, 2019): 641–754. http://dx.doi.org/10.3790/zhf.46.4.641.

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Studien zu Entstehung, Funktion und Verbreitung einer Königschronik im 15. Jahrhundert (Geschichtliche Landeskunde, 73), Stuttgart 2018, Steiner, 369 S. / Abb., € 62,00. (Gerhard Fouquet, Kiel) The London Customs Accounts. 24 Henry VI (1445/46), hrsg. v. Stuart Jenks (Quellen und Darstellungen zur Hansischen Geschichte. Neue Folge, 74), Köln / Weimar / Wien 2018, Böhlau, LXIII u. 407 S., € 60,00. (Harm von Seggern, Kiel) Pietro Montes „Collectanea“. The Arms, Armour and Fighting Techniques of a Fifteenth-Century Soldier, hrsg. u. übers. v. Jeffrey L. Forgeng, Woodbridge 2018, The Boydell Press, VII u. 313 S. / Abb., £ 60,00. (Patrick Leiske, Heidelberg) Sander-Faes, Stephan, Europas habsburgisches Jahrhundert. 1450 – 1550 (Geschichte kompakt), Darmstadt 2018, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 160 S. / Abb., € 19,95. (Thomas Winkelbauer, Wien) Helmrath, Johannes / Ursula Kocher / Andrea Sieber (Hrsg.), Maximilians Welt. 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"Buchbesprechungen." Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung: Volume 46, Issue 2 46, no. 2 (April 1, 2019): 289–406. http://dx.doi.org/10.3790/zhf.46.2.289.

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43

Leung, Linda. "Mobility and Displacement." M/C Journal 10, no. 1 (March 1, 2007). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2612.

Full text
Abstract:
The paper discusses mobility in the context of displacement. How is the mobile phone appropriated by refugees in immigration detention? What does the mobile phone, and indeed, mobility, signify in an Australian policy landscape of mandatory detention of asylum seekers and formerly prohibited access to mobile phones for detainees inside immigration detention centres? What does this intimate about the perceived dangers of “new” and mobile media? The author’s preliminary research with refugees in Australian immigration detention centres compares policy and practice. Firstly, it interrogates the unwritten policies regulating refugees’ access to media technologies when incarcerated in immigration detention. As there is no written policy on technology access and practices vary across immigration detention centres, the information in this paper has been given by detainees and has not been verified by the management of detention centres. The paper suggests that the utopian promises of mobile media echo those made about cyberspace in the 1990s. Furthermore, the residual effects of such rhetoric have infiltrated government policy in terms of perceiving mobile media as dangerous when adopted by marginalised groups such as refugees. Secondly, the research examines how and why the mobile phone has been adopted by immigration detainees despite their former prohibition. It explores the ways in which refugees practice an imagined mobility through media whilst in detention, and finds that this is critical to sustaining connection with their imagined communities. Why Refugees? In the context of increased forced migration of people due to circumstances such as political instability, war, natural disaster and famine; it is necessary to better understand how refugees mobilise and organise in situations of displacement. As new technologies encourage the capacity for borderlessness, such advantages also have to be contrasted with the potential dangers of spontaneous border crossings. The study of the behaviour and practices of refugees in relation to communication technologies offers an insight into the efficacy of immigration detention policy in filtering movement and interaction, both physical and virtual, between Australia and other countries. Although the study of refugees is a discipline in its own right, there has been minimal examination of how they appropriate technology, particularly that which facilitates and complements their mobility, to maintain connections with their diasporic networks while in situations of displacement. The studies that have been undertaken concentrate on the use of technology by refugees living in the wider community (see Glazebrook, McIver Jr. and Prokosch; Howard and Owens), rather than in the context of detention. In previous research of diasporas within the discipline of Cultural Studies, technology has been regarded as vital to subcultures and minority groups. Technology has been the tool by which such communities respond to their structural conditions (see Cunningham; Hall; Halleck). Such investigations have concentrated on the intersection of class, gender and ethnicity and how they inscribe meanings to specific technologies, which in turn, become intrinsic to the identities of the groups and communities. The research extends the work that has been done within Cultural Studies by similarly focusing on a marginalised group, refugees, and their participation in particular technologies. A review of literature across refugee studies, diaspora studies and technology studies has shown that: The study of technology use by refugees has had minimal investigation The study of diasporas has rarely included refugees The study of communities and communication practices which surround particular technologies has concentrated on groups other than refugees The escalation of issues of asylum and border control in public discourse warrant more knowledge about refugees and their networks of communication beyond the boundaries of detention and Australia The notion of “networks” refers to people, technologies, processes and practices that form the relationships between refugees in institutionalised immigration detention and the outside world. The Australian Immigration Detention Context Between 1992 and 1994, Australian law moved from permitting (but not enforcing) limited detention of asylum seekers, to a blanket policy of mandatory detention (HREOC) which, at one point, had up to 12,000 individuals in detention (Castan Centre for Human Rights Law). The detention context is particularly relevant to Australia, because its policy of mandatory detention means that refugees have restricted contact with the world outside of the detention centre. In 2005, the Migration Amendment (Detention Arrangements) Bill allowed detained families with children to live in community detention, that is, in residential accommodation outside of an immigration detention centre. Although community detention carries with it specific conditions, families are unaccompanied and have more freedom of movement. This paper discusses the author’s preliminary work with refugees in immigration detention, prior to the introduction of community detention. The research sought to investigate how asylum seekers use technology to sustain connections with their virtual communities in situations of displacement. Specifically, it explored how technology is appropriated to mediate communication in the context of institutionalised detention. The key research questions addressed by the research were: what kinds of technologies are available to refugees? How are these used? How are their benefits and limitations perceived? What, if any, kinds of social networks surround these technologies? How are relationships of power surrounding these technologies negotiated? Can technology assist refugees in sustaining connections with their communities of choice and reducing their sense of isolation? Can technology play a role in reducing the well-documented effects of this incarceration by providing mediated social interaction? What are the implications for policy, especially in relation to permitted technologies and surveillance of communication practices? Access to informants was gained by working with a refugee community advocacy group, which has established links with refugees in detention and experience in dealing with the management of detention centres. One such group is ChilOut, which organises visitor programs to immigration detention centres. This affiliation was important in gaining access to, and trust of, detainees who were willing to participate in the research. It presented opportunities to interact with detainees on a social basis. Semi-structured interviews with the research subjects were conducted to ascertain the strategies and resources currently utilised to counter the effects of mandatory detention. In 2005, detainees had access to a range of technology which can be broadly termed “old media”, while access to “new media” – such as the Internet and mobile phones – are prohibited. At the time of printing, detainees reported that mobile phones without cameras were only recently permitted. Detainees have access to pay phones inside the centre. Visitors are allowed to give detainees phone cards so they can use the pay phones without charge or the need for change. In addition to pay phones, detainees are provided with access to a fax and photocopier, which are generally used to liaise with and send relevant documentation to lawyers. There is distrust of using the fax machine at the detention centre because it is in a management office area and the detainees require permission to use it. It means the guards can read the faxes that are sent, as well as those that are received before notifying the detainees that they have received one. Detainees also have television, videos, DVDs and newspapers, so there is the possibility of feeling like part of an imagined community (Anderson) through these media. There are computers available, but no Internet access. Some of the children load computer games on them to play, others have Playstation in their rooms. It is noteworthy that the only technology to which detainees have access and which facilitates real-time person-to-person interaction is the telephone. The phone offers the opportunity for direct contact with the outside world without the visual and other sensory realities of detention. The telephone is able to mask the extent of imprisonment as it does not show the barbed razor wire surrounding the compound. Yet detainees were not permitted to have mobile phones for a long time. Thus, the key question remains: why were they deprived of access to mobile phones while allowed access to pay phones and landlines? What does this suggest about the perceived dangers of mobile media and the resonance of last century’s techno-utopian discourses? Given that detainees were only given access to “old media”, it seems that this tired but resolutely upbeat rhetoric about new technology which celebrates it as inherently liberating actually inflected policies determining the kinds of technologies to which detainees have access. It confirms the pessimistic assertions of media theorists such as Schiller and Mosco, that new technologies further alienate disadvantaged groups. As the Australian government attempts to regulate the physical movement of people across its borders, mantras of the dot.com era such as “everyone is a free agent” (Kumar 77) appear to undermine this agenda. The assumptions of liberty and democracy embedded in this “free agency” are implicit in policies that denied refugees access to “new media” such as the Internet and mobile phones. The “liberating” nature of such technology was regarded as unsafe in the hands of refugees, whose freedom of movement is institutionally contained by the Australian government through mandatory detention. The physical movement of refugees, as well as the agency and freedom with which they can claim asylum in a country, is actively discouraged through immigration detention policy and limitations on access to technology. The promise of self-expression afforded by mobile media seemed antithetical to the prejudicial administration of refugees, which is premised upon a distrust of their claims of identity and asylum. Subsequently, their use of mobile technology was also assumed to be suspect and therefore had to be restricted. Detained refugees serve as a reminder of the parameters of upbeat discourses about new technology. That is, the utopian possibilities of mobile media appear to be conditional such that its “power” can only be entrusted to certain groups. In policy terms, the mobile phone is a rich site of signification. Not only does the technology itself imply a way of being (that is free, mobile, always accessible and always able to access), but it also connotes an ideal type of user, one that is appropriate and deserving of such technology. It seems that refugees are not entitled to their mobility and, therefore, do not have rights to media that is considered to facilitate such mobility, in spite of their detention. Furthermore, there is a suggested dichotomy in the government’s classification of the technologies to which refugees have access. The fact of detention means refugees are surrounded by technology, held captive by it and are inevitably in close proximity to it. It is technology which is seen as antithetical to mobility and therefore could be described as “static”: phones, faxes, photocopiers, television, video – all of which may be characterised as “old media”. The binary opposite of such technology is that which can be regarded as mobile or new or interactive media; that which resonates with the residual effects of 1990s techno-utopian rhetoric; and could be considered as threatening in the hands of those who have physically made unauthorised border crossings. However, prior investigations of “mobile” technologies, demonstrates that such dualisms are flawed as the lowest technologies also have the capacity to facilitate mobility. Examples include Paul Gilroy’s work on the Black Atlantic, which notes that books and records have been vital in carrying oppositional ideologies and philosophies across the black diaspora. Within Asian diasporas, the exchange of video letters and taped Bollywood movies have been interpreted as forms of localised challenges to the centralised power of the broadcast media industries (Ang; Gillespie). These economies of exchange as facilitated by older forms of mobile media have been studied in relation to issues of migration and marginalisation. Given that refugees are also affected by such issues, their mobile media practices are a sobering reminder that mobility is not necessarily hi-tech nor confined to the realms of the affluent, educated and socio-economically advantaged. Rather, mobility can be a tenuous state of being displaced and itinerant, with technology adopted to manage and adapt to its challenges. The Mobile Media Practices of Detained Refugees The initial findings from the fieldwork indicate that for refugees, the mobile phone is not a technology of choice but instead, a technology of necessity and survival. Every technology that is available to them is used to sustain connection to their localized and globalised networks. The restriction to their physical movement of detainees is compensated through use of technology which allows any sort of interaction and communication. Being part of a technologically-mediated community appears to minimise the marginalisation and isolation they experience. Such feelings of dislocation have been well-documented in studies of the impact of incarceration on the mental health of refugees (see Mares and Jureidini; RANZCP; Hodes). It seems that the telephone and fax are the mainstays of their communication networks. However, such technologies are closely monitored, as landline phone calls can be traced or even tapped, and faxes have to be sent from an office manned by guards. An experienced visitor to detention centres commented that “most” detainees had mobile phones and when they were contraband, guards knew about them but generally ignored their use by detainees. Only mobile phones offer the potential for communication to be free from the surveillance by detention centres staff. The ways in which mobile phones are used by detainees is decidedly lo-tech, for example, for communication with family where use of a landline is impractical. One of the detainees said that he speaks to his wife and children on the centre pay phone every few days. However, the call costs are expensive as his family only has a mobile phone, not a landline, at their place of residence. For them to call him is also expensive and awkward, because they have to call the pay phone and if somebody answers, they have then to locate him somewhere within the compound. Thus, the connections between the detainees and their loved ones are very fragile in that they are almost totally dependent on the phone to maintain these relationships. In this instance, the mobile phone offers another means for managing the tenuous nature of these ties. The mobile phone, particularly SMS technology, offers a suitable alternative as the detainee can communicate with his family cheaply and quickly. It compensates for the constraints of the pay phone. The informal interactions afforded by the mobile phone also extend beyond family members of detainees to their supporters and advocates. Likewise, the mobile phone complements the communication practices facilitated through permitted technologies. For example, when detainees are liaising with the Department of Immigration (DIMIA), they will ask advice from the regular visitors to the immigration detention centre who come from an array of organizations such as churches, refugee advocacy groups, law firms and health organizations. Visitors generally offer whatever assistance they can by obtaining necessary forms from the department, searching the Internet, undertaking letter writing campaigns, and lobbying government ministers. Something worked in amongst all the network activity that took place over the course of this week. As promised to the family, I scoured the DIMIA web site for a form for applying under Section 417. While there didn’t seem to be an official form, I used the opportunity to research the section of the Migration Act. Googling turned up a 12 page “guide to section 417 applications” written by a barrister, which I printed out and faxed to them. So as to ensure that the family received the fax, I SMS-ed them to let them know a fax was on its way and how many pages to expect. They responded to me by fax, saying that they had been notified that they too were going to be released into community detention in the coming weeks. (Extract from fieldwork diary) The mobile phone serves the function of anticipating and verifying communications which may potentially be surveilled by staff of detention centres. Where detainees may not trust that they are being given all the letters or faxes that have been sent to them, the mobile phone enables a degree of privacy so that they at least know what to expect from their correspondents. Furthermore, it provides the opportunity for detainees to speak about matters related to their case for asylum that are regarded as too sensitive to risk being discussed in a public place such as on the centre pay phone. Often this involves seeking assistance with their application for asylum. He rang T on the centre pay phone and said that he would like to speak with me, but did not have my number. He didn’t have a pen and paper to jot down my details at the time, so he gave T his mobile number and asked her to pass it onto me, so I could ring him on it. When I rang, he had returned to his room where he could talk freely. He told me about the visit from the Commonwealth Ombudsman, who undertook to look into his case over the next couple of weeks. We talked about what would assist the Ombudsman in reviewing the case. I said I would write a letter or email in the first instance, and if he wanted other letters of support, I could circulate details of his case on the ChilOut newsletter. He said he didn’t want publicity at this stage. I offered to fax him a copy of my email, but he preferred that I give it to him in person as the fax machine in the office was too public and any documents received could be read. Again, the mobile seems to be the most appropriate technology for coordinating and organising privately away from centre surveillance… (Extract from fieldwork diary) Fear of breaches of confidentiality form only part of detainees’ desire for privacy from detention centre staff. There is also a need for private space away from other detainees as their imprisonment necessitates the constant use of communal facilities such as the pay phone. In addition to being used for its capacity for private communication, the mobile phone was also exploited as a broadcast technology by detained refugees. Text messages proved an effective way of providing brief updates to family and friends about the status of their case: 20 September 200510:24:07 Hi Linda. I am fine thank u. not news yet, I think they’ll come to see me soon, if I got news, I’ll let u know. Wish u have a good time. 15 October 200516:31:49 HI Linda, I was interview by Ombudsman yesterday, we talked about one hour and a half, it sound good…Thank u for yr concern 25 December 200520:26:54 Hi Linda. I am still in [detention centre]. No any news from Ombudsman, may be early next year. I am fine here, thanks. Tuesday 17 October 200613:44:41 Hi Linda…I transferd to [community] housing. Its much better here. How a u? takecare ur health, thanks. Thursday 16 November 200618:46:23 HI There is a good news to let u know I got the decision from that I won the FC case. Thus, for detained refugees, the mobile phone has been adopted for simple, lo-tech use. None of the respondents indicated a desire for a camera function on their mobile phones. However, one detainee did suggest that she would like to use a webcam to see and hear her child in China, whom she has not seen in eight years. While she did use the Internet for this purpose when she was on the “outside”, now she can only rely on weekly telephone conversations made from inside the detention centre. Conclusion What happens when technology is placed in the hands of those for whom it was never meant? It makes explicit what is often implied in studies of adoption of new technology, that the “utopian promise” is confined to a narrow socio-economic demographic: the advantaged, the affluent and the educated. Those who fall outside these perimeters are perceived as undeserving and untrustworthy of such technology. This is exemplified in the Australian government’s policy to deny refugees access to “new” and mobile media whilst being compulsorily detained. The decision to withhold mobile technology from mobile communities who are not so materially privileged is not only ironic but unwarranted in light of the empirical data. This has since been acknowledged by allowing detainees use of mobile phones. The mobile phone practices of detained refugees show that it is being used as a complementary and alternative technology, that is, to compensate for the inadequacies of the communication media allowed by detention centres. The mobile phone is exploited for the functions that permitted technologies do not offer: firstly, the ability to communicate with friends and family more immediately and effectively; secondly, the capacity to communicate privately with less probability of surveillance; thirdly, the opportunity to broadcast content one to many. In such communications, use of the mobile phone is simple and lo-tech: it is deployed for straightforward (but improved) interaction with detainees’ imagined communities which would otherwise be possible anyway through the “old” media technologies provided in detention. In practice, there was no evidence of the use of the hi-tech functions of mobile phones; nor was there any indication, as implied by policy, of the possible dangers that may ensue if such features of mobile media were available to detained refugees. Potentially, the research can impact on immigration detention policy, particularly in terms of reviewing the conditions under which technology is made available to refugees in institutionalised detention contexts. However, further research is required, especially a comparison of the former prohibited use of mobile media in immigration detention centres with the permitted use of these in community immigration detention. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1993. Ang, Ien. Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World. London: Routledge, 1996. Castan Centre for Human Rights Law. 2003. “Detention, Children and Asylum Seekers: A Comparative Study.” Submission to the National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention. 26 July 2004. http://www.hreoc.gov.au/human_rights/children_detention/ submissions/castan.html>. Cunningham, Stuart. “Popular Media as Public ‘Sphericules’ for Diasporic Communities.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 4.2 (2001): 131-147. Gillespie, Marie. Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change. London: Routledge, 1995. Gilroy, Paul. There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack. London: Hutchison, 1987. Glazebrook, Diana. “Becoming Mobile after Detention.” Social Analysis: International Journal of Cultural and Social Practice 48.3 (2004). Hall, Stuart. “Aspirations and Attitude… Reflections on Black Britain in the 90s.” New Formations: Frontlines, Backyards. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1998. Halleck, Dee. “Watch Out Dick Tracy! Popular Video in the Wake of Exxon Valdez.” Technoculture. Eds. Constance Penley and Andrew Ross. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991. Hodes, Matthew. “Three Key Issues for Young Refugees’ Mental Health.” Transcultural Psychiatry 39.2 (2002): 196-213. Howard, Ellen, and Christine Owens. “Using the Internet to Communicate with Immigrant/Refugee Communities about Health.” Poster presentation at JCDL ‘02, Portland, Oregon, 13-17 July 2002. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC). “A Last Resort?” Report on National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention. 26 July 2004. http://www.hreoc.gov.au/human_rights/children_detention/ submissions/castan.html>. Kumar, Amitava. “Temporary Access: The Indian H-1B Worker in the US.” Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life. Eds. Alondra Nelson and Thuy Linh Tu. New York: NYU P, 2001. Mares, Sarah, and Jon Jureidini. “Children and Families Referred from a Remote Immigration Detention Centre.” Forgotten Rights – Responding to the Crisis of Asylum Seeker Health Care: A National Summit. 12 Nov. 2003. McIver, William, and Arthur Prokosch. “Towards a Critical Approach to Examining the Digital Divide”. IEEE, 2002. Mosco, Vincent. Pushbutton Fantasies: Critical Perspectives in Videotex and Information Technology. Norwood: Ablex, 1982. Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists. “RANZCP Airs Deep Concern at the Mandatory Detention of Child Asylum Seekers.” Media release, 11 Nov. 2003. Schiller, Herbert. Information Inequality: The Deepening Social Crisis in America. London: Routledge, 1996. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Leung, Linda. "Mobility and Displacement: Refugees' Mobile Media Practices in Immigration Detention." M/C Journal 10.1 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0703/10-leung.php>. APA Style Leung, L. (Mar. 2007) "Mobility and Displacement: Refugees' Mobile Media Practices in Immigration Detention," M/C Journal, 10(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0703/10-leung.php>.
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44

Brabazon, Tara. "A Red Light Sabre to Go, and Other Histories of the Present." M/C Journal 2, no. 4 (June 1, 1999). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1761.

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If I find out that you have bought a $90 red light sabre, Tara, well there's going to be trouble. -- Kevin Brabazon A few Saturdays ago, my 71-year old father tried to convince me of imminent responsibilities. As I am considering the purchase of a house, there are mortgages, bank fees and years of misery to endure. Unfortunately, I am not an effective Big Picture Person. The lure of the light sabre is almost too great. For 30 year old Generation Xers like myself, it is more than a cultural object. It is a textual anchor, and a necessary component to any future history of the present. Revelling in the aura of the Australian release for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, this paper investigates popular memory, an undertheorised affiliation between popular culture and cultural studies.1 The excitement encircling the Star Wars prequel has been justified in terms of 'hype' or marketing. Such judgements frame the men and women cuing for tickets, talking Yodas and light sabres as fools or duped souls who need to get out more. My analysis explores why Star Wars has generated this enthusiasm, and how cultural studies can mobilise this passionate commitment to consider notions of popularity, preservation and ephemerality. We'll always have Tattooine. Star Wars has been a primary popular cultural social formation for a generation. The stories of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca, Darth Vader, Yoda, C-3PO and R2D2 offer an alternative narrative for the late 1970s and 1980s. It was a comfort to have the Royal Shakespearian tones of Alec Guinness confirming that the Force would be with us, through economic rationalism, unemployment, Pauline Hanson and Madonna discovering yoga. The Star Wars Trilogy, encompassing A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, was released between 1977 and 1983. These films have rarely slipped from public attention, being periodically 'brought back' through new cinematic and video releases. The currency of Star Wars is matched with the other great popular cultural formations of the post-war period: the James Bond series and Star Trek. One reason for the continued success of these programmes is that other writers, film makers and producers cannot leave these texts alone. Bond survives not only through Pierce Brosnan's good looks, but the 'Hey Baby' antics of Austin Powers. Star Trek, through four distinct series, has become an industry that will last longer than Voyager's passage back from the Delta Quadrant. Star Wars, perhaps even more effectively than the other popular cultural heavyweights, has enmeshed itself into other filmic and televisual programming. Films like Spaceballs and television quizzes on Good News Week keep the knowledge system and language current and pertinent.2 Like Umberto Eco realised of Casablanca, Star Wars is "a living example of living textuality" (199). Both films are popular because of imperfections and intertextual archetypes, forming a filmic quilt of sensations and affectivities. Viewers are aware that "the cliches are talking among themselves" (Eco 209). As these cinematic texts move through time, the depth and commitment of these (con)textual dialogues are repeated and reinscribed. To hold on to a memory is to isolate a moment or an image and encircle it with meaning. Each day we experience millions of texts: some are remembered, but most are lost. Some popular cultural texts move from ephemera to popular memory to history. In moving beyond individual reminiscences -- the personal experiences of our lifetime -- we enter the sphere of popular culture. Collective or popular memory is a group or community experience of a textualised reality. For example, during the Second World War, there were many private experiences, but certain moments arch beyond the individual. Songs by Vera Lynn are fully textualised experiences that become the fodder for collective memory. Similarly, Star Wars provides a sense-making mechanism for the 1980s. Like all popular culture, these texts allow myriad readership strategies, but there is collective recognition of relevance and importance. Popular memory is such an important site because it provides us, as cultural critics, with a map of emotionally resonant sites of the past, moments that are linked with specific subjectivities and a commonality of expression. While Star Wars, like all popular cultural formations, has a wide audience, there are specific readings that are pertinent for particular groups. To unify a generation around cultural texts is an act of collective memory. As Harris has suggested, "sometimes, youth does interesting things with its legacy and creatively adapts its problematic into seemingly autonomous cultural forms" (79). Generation X refers to an age cohort born between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s. Finally cultural studies theorists have found a Grail subculture. Being depthless, ambivalent, sexually repressed and social failures, Xers are a cultural studies dream come true. They were the children of the media revolution. Star Wars is integral to this textualised database. A fan on the night of the first screening corrected a journalist: "we aren't Generation X, we are the Star Wars generation" (Brendon, in Miller 9). An infatuation and reflexivity with the media is the single framework of knowledge in which Xers operate. This shared understanding is the basis for comedy, and particularly revealed (in Australia) in programmes like The Panel and Good News Week. Television themes, lines of film dialogue and contemporary news broadcasts are the basis of the game show. The aesthetics of life transforms television into a real. Or, put another way, "individual lives may be fragmented and confused but McDonald's is universal" (Hopkins 17). A group of textual readers share a literacy, a new way of reading the word and world of texts. Nostalgia is a weapon. The 1990s has been a decade of revivals: from Abba to skateboards, an era of retro reinscription has challenged linear theories of history and popular culture. As Timothy Carter reveals, "we all loved the Star Wars movies when we were younger, and so we naturally look forward to a continuation of those films" (9). The 1980s has often been portrayed as a bad time, of Thatcher and Reagan, cold war brinkmanship, youth unemployment and HIV. For those who were children and (amorphously phrased) 'young adults' of this era, the popular memory is of fluorescent fingerless gloves, Ray Bans, 'Choose Life' t-shirts and bubble skirts. It was an era of styling mousse, big hair, the Wham tan, Kylie and Jason and Rick Astley's dancing. Star Wars action figures gave the films a tangibility, holding the future of the rebellion in our hands (literally). These memories clumsily slop into the cup of the present. The problem with 'youth' is that it is semiotically too rich: the expression is understood, but not explained, by discourses as varied as the educational system, family structures, leisure industries and legal, medical and psychological institutions. It is a term of saturation, where normality is taught, and deviance is monitored. All cultural studies theorists carry the baggage of the Birmingham Centre into any history of youth culture. The taken-for-granted 'youth as resistance' mantra, embodied in Resistance through Rituals and Subculture: The Meaning of Style, transformed young people into the ventriloquist's puppet of cultural studies. The strings of the dancing, smoking, swearing and drinking puppet took many years to cut. The feminist blade of Angela McRobbie did some damage to the fraying filaments, as did Dick Hebdige's reflexive corrections in Hiding in the Light. However, the publications, promotion and pedagogy of Gen X ended the theoretical charade. Gen X, the media sophisticates, played with popular culture, rather than 'proper politics.' In Coupland's Generation X, Claire, one of the main characters believed that "Either our lives become stories, or there's just no way to get through them." ... We know that this is why the three of us left our lives behind us and came to the desert -- to tell stories and to make our own lives worthwhile tales in the process. (8) Television and film are part of this story telling process. This intense connection generated an ironic and reflexive literacy in the media. Television became the basis for personal pleasures and local resistances, resulting in a disciplined mobilisation of popular cultural surfaces. Even better than the real thing. As the youngest of Generation Xers are now in their late twenties, they have moved from McJobs to careers. Robert Kizlik, a teacher trainer at an American community college expressed horror as the lack of 'commonsensical knowledge' from his new students. He conducted a survey for teachers training in the social sciences, assessing their grasp of history. There was one hundred percent recognition of such names as Madonna, Mike Tyson, and Sharon Stone, but they hardly qualify as important social studies content ... . I wondered silently just what it is that these students are going to teach when they become employed ... . The deeper question is not that we have so many high school graduates and third and fourth year college students who are devoid of basic information about American history and culture, but rather, how, in the first place, these students came to have the expectations that they could become teachers. (n. pag.) Kizlik's fear is that the students, regardless of their enthusiasm, had poor recognition of knowledge he deemed significant and worthy. His teaching task, to convince students of the need for non-popular cultural knowledges, has resulted in his course being termed 'boring' or 'hard'. He has been unable to reconcile the convoluted connections between personal stories and televisual narratives. I am reminded (perhaps unhelpfully) of one of the most famous filmic teachers, Mr Holland. Upon being attacked by his superiors for using rock and roll in his classes, he replied that he would use anything to instil in his students a love of music. Working with, rather than against, popular culture is an obvious pedagogical imperative. George Lucas has, for example, confirmed the Oprahfied spirituality of the current age. Obviously Star Wars utilises fables, myths3 and fairy tales to summon the beautiful Princess, the gallant hero and the evil Empire, but has become something more. Star Wars slots cleanly into an era of Body Shop Feminism, John Gray's gender politics and Rikki Lake's relationship management. Brian Johnson and Susan Oh argued that the film is actually a new religion. A long time ago in a galaxy far far away -- late 1970s California -- the known universe of George Lucas came into being. In the beginning, George created Star Wars. And the screen was without form, and void. And George said, 'Let there be light', and there was Industrial Light and Magic. And George divided the light from the darkness, with light sabres, and called the darkness the Evil Empire.... And George saw that it was good. (14) The writers underestimate the profound emotional investment placed in the trilogy by millions of people. Genesis narratives describe the Star Wars phenomenon, but do not analyse it. The reason why the films are important is not only because they are a replacement for religion. Instead, they are an integrated component of popular memory. Johnson and Oh have underestimated the influence of pop culture as "the new religion" (14). It is not a form of cheap grace. The history of ideas is neither linear nor traceable. There is no clear path from Plato to Prozac or Moses to Mogadon. Obi-Wan Kenobi is not a personal trainer for the ailing spirituality of our age. It was Ewan McGregor who fulfilled the Xer dream to be the young Obi Wan. As he has stated, "there is nothing cooler than being a Jedi knight" (qtd. in Grant 15). Having survived feet sawing in Shallow Grave and a painfully large enema in Trainspotting, there are few actors who are better prepared to carry the iconographic burden of a Star Wars prequel. Born in 1971, he is the Molly Ringwall of the 1990s. There is something delicious about the new Obi Wan, that hails what Hicks described as "a sense of awareness and self- awareness, of detached observation, of not taking things seriously, and a use of subtle dry humour" (79). The metaphoric light sabre was passed to McGregor. The pull of the dark side. When fans attend The Phantom Menace, they tend to the past, as to a loved garden. Whether this memory is a monument or a ruin depends on the preservation of the analogue world in the digital realm. The most significant theoretical and discursive task in the present is to disrupt the dual ideologies punctuating the contemporary era: inevitable technological change and progress.4 Only then may theorists ponder the future of a digitised past. Disempowered groups, who were denied a voice and role in the analogue history of the twentieth century, will have inequalities reified and reinforced through the digital archiving of contemporary life. The Web has been pivotal to the new Star Wars film. Lucasfilm has an Internet division and an official Website. Between mid November and May, this site has been accessed twenty million times (Gallott 15). Other sites, such as TheForce.net and Countdown to Star Wars, are a record of the enthusiasm and passion of fans. As Daniel Fallon and Matthew Buchanan have realised, "these sites represent the ultimate in film fandom -- virtual communities where like-minded enthusiasts can bathe in the aura generated by their favourite masterpiece" (27). Screensavers, games, desktop wallpaper, interviews and photo galleries have been downloaded and customised. Some ephemeral responses to The Phantom Menace have been digitally recorded. Yet this moment of audience affectivity will be lost without a consideration of digital memory. The potentials and problems of the digital and analogue environments need to be oriented into critical theories of information, knowledge, entertainment and pleasure. The binary language of computer-mediated communication allows a smooth transference of data. Knowledge and meaning systems are not exchanged as easily. Classifying, organising and preserving information make it useful. Archival procedures have been both late and irregular in their application.5 Bocher and Ihlenfeldt assert that 2500 new web sites are coming on-line every day ("A Higher Signal-to-Noise Ratio"). The difficulties and problems confronting librarians and archivists who wish to preserve digital information is revealed in the Australian government's PADI (Preserving Access to Digital Information) Site. Compared with an object in a museum which may lie undisturbed for years in a storeroom, or a book on a shelf, or even Egyptian hieroglyd on the wall of a tomb, digital information requires much more active maintenance. If we want access to digital information in the future, we must plan and act now. (PADI, "Why Preserve Access to Digital Information?") phics carve The speed of digitisation means that responsibility for preserving cultural texts, and the skills necessary to enact this process, is increasing the pressure facing information professionals. An even greater difficulty when preserving digital information is what to keep, and what to release to the ephemeral winds of cyberspace. 'Qualitative criteria' construct an historical record that restates the ideologies of the powerful. Concerns with quality undermine the voices of the disempowered, displaced and decentred. The media's instability through technological obsolescence adds a time imperative that is absent from other archival discussions.6 While these problems have always taken place in the analogue world, there was a myriad of alternative sites where ephemeral material was stored, such as the family home. Popular cultural information will suffer most from the 'blind spots' of digital archivists. While libraries rarely preserve the ephemera of a time, many homes (including mine) preserve the 'trash' of a culture. A red light sabre, toy dalek, Duran Duran posters and a talking Undertaker are all traces of past obsessions and fandoms. Passion evaporates, and interests morph into new trends. These objects remain in attics, under beds, in boxes and sheds throughout the world. Digital documents necessitate a larger project of preservation, with great financial (and spatial) commitments of technology, software and maintenance. Libraries rarely preserve the ephemera -- the texture and light -- of the analogue world. The digital era reduces the number of fan-based archivists. Subsequently forfeited is the spectrum of interests and ideologies that construct the popular memory of a culture. Once bits replace atoms, the recorded world becomes structured by digital codes. Only particular texts will be significant enough to store digitally. Samuel Florman stated that "in the digital age nothing need be lost; do we face the prospect of drowning in trivia as the generations succeed each other?" (n. pag.) The trivia of academics may be the fodder (and pleasures) of everyday life. Digitised preservation, like analogue preservation, can never 'represent' plural paths through the past. There is always a limit and boundary to what is acceptable obsolescence. The Star Wars films suggests that "the whole palette of digital technology is much more subtle and supple; if you can dream it, you can see it" (Corliss 65). This film will also record how many of the dreams survive and are archived. Films, throughout the century, have changed the way in which we construct and remember the past. They convey an expressive memory, rather than an accurate history. Certainly, Star Wars is only a movie. Yet, as Rushkoff has suggested, "we have developed a new language of references and self-references that identify media as a real thing and media history as an actual social history" (32). The build up in Australia to The Phantom Menace has been wilfully joyful. This is a history of the present, a time which I know will, in retrospect, be remembered with great fondness. It is a collective event for a generation, but it speaks to us all in different ways. At ten, it is easy to be amazed and enthralled at popular culture. By thirty, it is more difficult. When we see Star Wars, we go back to visit our memories. With red light sabre in hand, we splice through time, as much as space. Footnotes The United States release of the film occurred on 19 May 1999. In Australia, the film's first screenings were on 3 June. Many cinemas showed The Phantom Menace at 12:01 am, (very) early Thursday morning. The three main players of the GNW team, Paul McDermott, Mikey Robbins and Julie McCrossin, were featured on the cover of Australia's Juice magazine in costumes from The Phantom Menace, being Obi-Wan, Yoda and Queen Amidala respectively. Actually, the National Air and Space Museum had a Star Wars exhibition in 1997, titled "Star Wars: The Magic of Myth". For example, Janet Collins, Michael Hammond and Jerry Wellington, in Teaching and Learning with the Media, stated that "the message is simple: we now have the technology to inform, entertain and educate. Miss it and you, your family and your school will be left behind" (3). Herb Brody described the Net as "an overstuffed, underorganised attic full of pictures and documents that vary wildly in value", in "Wired Science". The interesting question is, whose values will predominate when the attic is being cleared and sorted? This problem is extended because the statutory provision of legal deposit, which obliges publishers to place copies of publications in the national library of the country in which the item is published, does not include CD-ROMs or software. References Bocher, Bob, and Kay Ihlenfeldt. "A Higher Signal-to-Noise Ratio: Effective Use of WebSearch Engines." State of Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Website. 13 Mar. 1998. 15 June 1999 <http://www.dpi.state.wi.us/dpi/dlcl/lbstat/search2.php>. Brody, Herb. "Wired Science." Technology Review Oct. 1996. 15 June 1999 <http://www.techreview.com/articles/oct96/brody.php>. Carter, Timothy. "Wars Weary." Cinescape 39 (Mar./Apr. 1999): 9. Collins, Janet, Michael Hammond, and Jerry Wellington. Teaching and Learning with Multimedia. London: Routledge, 1997. Corliss, Richard. "Ready, Set, Glow!" Time 18 (3 May 1999): 65. Count Down to Star Wars. 1999. 15 June 1999 <http://starwars.countingdown.com/>. Coupland, Douglas. Generation X. London: Abacus, 1991. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyper-Reality. London: Picador, 1987. Fallon, Daniel, and Matthew Buchanan. "Now Screening." Australian Net Guide 4.5 (June 1999): 27. Florman, Samuel. "From Here to Eternity." MIT's Technology Review 100.3 (Apr. 1997). Gallott, Kirsten. "May the Web Be with you." Who Weekly 24 May 1999: 15. Grant, Fiona. "Ewan's Star Soars!" TV Week 29 May - 4 June 1999: 15. Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson, eds. Resistance through Rituals. London: Hutchinson, 1976. Harris, David. From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure: the Effects of Gramscianism on Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1992. Hebdige, Dick. Hiding in the Light. London: Routledge, 1988. Hopkins, Susan. "Generation Pulp." Youth Studies Australia Spring 1995. Johnson, Brian, and Susan Oh. "The Second Coming: as the Newest Star Wars Film Illustrates, Pop Culture Has Become a New Religion." Maclean's 24 May 1999: 14-8. Juice 78 (June 1999). Kizlik, Robert. "Generation X Wants to Teach." International Journal of Instructional Media 26.2 (Spring 1999). Lucasfilm Ltd. Star Wars: Welcome to the Official Site. 1999. 15 June 1999 <http://www.starwars.com/>. Miller, Nick. "Generation X-Wing Fighter." The West Australian 4 June 1999: 9. PADI. "What Digital Information Should be Preserved? Appraisal and Selection." Preserving Access to Digital Information (PADI) Website. 11 March 1999. 15 June 1999 <http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/what.php>. PADI. "Why Preserve Access to Digital Information?" Preserving Access to Digital Information (PADI) Website. <http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/why.php>. Rushkoff, Douglas. Media Virus. Sydney: Random House, 1994. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Tara Brabazon. "A Red Light Sabre to Go, and Other Histories of the Present." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.4 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/sabre.php>. Chicago style: Tara Brabazon, "A Red Light Sabre to Go, and Other Histories of the Present," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 4 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/sabre.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Tara Brabazon. (1999) A red light sabre to go, and other histories of the present. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(4). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/sabre.php> ([your date of access]).
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45

Williams, Graeme Henry. "Australian Artists Abroad." M/C Journal 19, no. 5 (October 13, 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1154.

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At the start of the twentieth century, many young Australian artists travelled abroad to expand their art education and to gain exposure to the modern art movements of Europe. Most of these artists were active members of artist associations such as the Victorian Artists Society or the New South Wales Society of Artists. Male artists from Victoria were generally also members of the Melbourne Savage Club, a club with a strong association with the arts.This paper investigates the dual function of the club, as a space where the artists felt “at home” in the familiar environment that the club offered whilst they were abroad and, at the same time, a meeting space where they could engage in a stimulating artistic environment and gain introductions to leading figures in the art world. For those artists who chose England, London’s arts clubs played a large role, for it was in these establishments that they discussed, exhibited, shared, and met with their English counterparts. The club environment in London would have a significant impact on male Australian artists, as it offered a space where they were integrated into the English art world, which enhanced their experience whilst abroad.Artists were seldom members of Australia’s early gentlemen’s clubs, however, in the late nineteenth century Melbourne, artists formed less formal social groupings with exotic names such as the Prehistoric Order of Cannibals, the Buonarotti Club, and the Ishmael Club (Mead). Melbourne artists congregated in these clubs until the Melbourne Savage Club, modelled on the London Savage Club (1857)—a club whose membership was restricted to practitioners in the performing and visual arts—opened its doors in 1894.The Melbourne Savage Club had its origins in the Metropolitan Music Club, established in the late 1880s by a group of professional and amateur musicians and music lovers. The club initially admitted musicians and people from the dramatic professions free-of-charge, however, author Randolph Bedford (1868–1941) and artist Alf Vincent (1874–1915) were not content to be treated on a different basis to the musicians and actors, and two months after Vincent joined the club, at a Special General Meeting, the club resolved to vary Rule 6, “to admit landscape or portrait painters and sculptors without entrance fee” (Melbourne Savage Club). At another Special General Meeting, a year later, the rule was altered to admit “recognised members of the musical, dramatic and artistic professions and sculptors without payment of entrance fee” (Melbourne Savage Club).This resulted in an immediate influx of prominent Victorian male artists (Williams) and the Melbourne Savage Club became their place of choice to gather and enjoy the fellowship the club offered and to share ideas in a convivial atmosphere. When the opportunity arose for them to travel to London in the early twentieth century, they met in London’s famous art clubs. Membership of the Melbourne Savage Club not only conferred rights to visit reciprocal clubs whilst in London, but also facilitated introductions to potential patrons. The London clubs were the venue of choice for visiting artists to meet their fellow artist expatriates and to share experiences and, importantly, to meet with their British counterparts, exhibit their works, and establish valuable contacts.The London Savage Club attracted many Australian expatriates. Not only is it the grandfather of London’s bohemian clubs but also it was the model for arts clubs the world over. Founded in 1857, the qualification for admission was (and still is) to be, “a working man in literature or art, and a good fellow” (Halliday vii). If a candidate met these requirements, he would be cordially received “come whence he may.” This was embodied in the club’s first rules which required applicants for membership to be from a restricted range of pursuits relating to the arts thought to be commensurate with its bohemian ideals, namely art, literature, drama, or music.The second London arts club that attracted expatriate Australian artists was the New English Arts Club, founded in 1886 by young English artists returning from studying art in Paris. Members of The New English Arts Club were influenced by the Impressionist style as opposed to the academic art shown at the Royal Academy. As a meeting place for Australia’s expatriate artists, the New English Arts Club had a particular influence, as it exposed them to significant early Modern artist members such as John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), Walter Sickert (1860–1942), William Orpen (1878–1931) and Augustus John (1878–1961) (Corbett and Perry; Thornton; Melbourne Savage Club).The third, and arguably the most popular with the expatriate Australian artists’ club, was the Chelsea Arts Club, a bohemian club formed in 1891 by local working artists looking for a place to go to “meet, talk, eat and drink” (Cross).Apart from the American-born founding member, James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), amongst the biggest Chelsea names at the time of the influx of travelling young Australian artists were modernists Sir William Orpen, Augustus John, and John Sargent. The opportunity to mix with these leading British contemporary artists was irresistible to these antipodean artists (55).When Melbourne artist, Miles Evergood (1871–1939) arrived in London from America in 1910, he had been an active exhibiting member of the Salmagundi Club, a New York artists’ club. Almost immediately he joined the New English Arts Club and the Chelsea Arts Club. Hammer tells of him associating with “writer Israel Zangwill, sculptor Jacob Epstein, and anti-academic artists including Walter Sickert, Augustus John, John Lavery, John Singer Sargent and C.R.W. Nevison, who challenged art values in Britain at the beginning of the century” (Hammer 41).Arthur Streeton (1867–1943) used the Chelsea Arts Club as his postal address, as did many expatriate artists. The Melbourne Savage Club archives contain letters and greetings, with news from abroad, written from artist members back to their “Brother Savages” (Various).In late 1902, Streeton wrote to fellow artist and Savage Club member Tom Roberts (1856–1931) from London:I belong to the Chelsea Arts Club now, & meet the artists – MacKennel says it’s about the most artistic club (speaking in the real sense) in England. … They all seem to be here – McKennal, Longstaff, Mahony, Fullwood, Norman, Minns, Fox, Plataganet Tudor St. George Tucker, Quinn, Coates, Bunny, Alston, K, Sonny Pole, other minor lights and your old friend and admirer Smike – within 100 yards of here – there must be 30 different studios. (Streeton 94)Whilst some of the artists whom Streeton mentioned were studying at either the Royal Academy or the Slade School, it was the clubs like the Chelsea Arts Club where they were most likely to encounter fellow Australian artists. Tom Roberts was obviously attentive to Streeton’s enthusiastic account and, when he returned to London the following year to work on his commission for The Big Picture of the 1901 opening of the first Commonwealth Parliament, he soon joined. Roberts, through his expansive personality, became particularly active in London’s Australian expatriate artistic community and later became Vice-President of the Chelsea Arts Club. Along with Streeton and Roberts, other visiting Melbourne Savage Club artists joined the Chelsea Arts Club. They included, John Longstaff (1861–1941), James Quinn (1869–1951), George Coates (1869–1930), and Will Dyson (1880–1938), along with Sydney artists Henry Fullwood (1863–1930), George Lambert (1873–1930), and Will Ashton (1881–1963) (Croll 95). Smith describes the exodus to London and Paris: “It was the Chelsea Arts Club that the Heidelberg School established its last and least distinguished camp” (Smith, Smith and Heathcote 152).Streeton, who retained his Chelsea Arts Club membership when he returned for a while to Australia, wrote to Roberts in 1907, “I miss Chelsea & the Club-boys” (Streeton 107). In relation to Frederick McCubbin’s pending visit he wrote: “Prof McCubbin left here a week ago by German ‘Prinz Heinrich.’ … You’ll introduce him at the Chelsea Club and I hope they make him an Hon. Member, etc” (Streeton et al. 85). McCubbin wrote, after an evening at the Chelsea Arts Club, following a visit to the Royal Academy: “Tonight, I am dining with Australian artists in Soho, and shall be there to greet my old friends. How glad I am! Longstaff will be there, and Frank Stuart, Roberts, Fullwood, Pontin, Coates, Quinn, and Tucker’s brother, and many others from all around” (MacDonald, McCubbin and McCubbin 75). Impressed by the work of Turner he wrote to his wife Annie, following avisit to the Tate Gallery:I went yesterday with Fullwood and G. Coates and Tom Roberts for a ramble … to the Tate Gallery – a beautiful freestone building facing the river through a portico into the gallery where the lately found turners are exhibited – these are not like the greater number of pictures in the National Gallery – they represent his different periods, but are mostly in his latest style, when he had realised the quality of light (McCubbin).Clearly Turner’s paintings had a profound impression on him. In the same letter he wrote:they are mostly unfinished but they are divine – such dreams of colour – a dozen of them are like pearls … mist and cloud and sea and land, drenched in light … They glow with tender brilliancy that radiates from these canvases – how he loved the dazzling brilliancy of morning or evening – these gems with their opal colour – you feel how he gloried in these tender visions of light and air. He worked from darkness into light.The Chelsea Arts Club also served as a venue for artists to entertain and host distinguished visitors from home. These guests included; Melbourne Savage Club artist member Alf Vincent (Joske 112), National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) Trustee and popular patron of the arts, Professor Baldwin Spencer (1860–1929), Professor Frederick S. Delmer (1864–1931) and conductor George Marshall-Hall (1862–1915) (Mulvaney and Calaby 329; Streeton 111).Artist Miles Evergood arrived in London in 1910, and visited the Chelsea Arts Club. He mentions expatriate Australian artists gathering at the Club, including Will Dyson, Fred Leist (1873–1945), David Davies (1864–1939), Will Ashton (1881–1963), and Henry Fullwood (Hammer 41).Most of the Melbourne Savage Club artist members were active in the London Savage Club. On one occasion, in November 1908, Roberts, with fellow artist MacKennal in the Chair, attended the Australian Artists’ Dinner held there. This event attracted twenty-five expatriate Australian artists, all residing in London at the time (McQueen 532).These London arts clubs had a significant influence on the expatriate Australian artists for they became the “glue” that held them together whilst abroad. Although some artists travelled abroad specifically to take up places at the Royal Academy School or the Slade School, only a minority of artists arriving in London from Australia and other British colonies were offered positions at these prestigious schools. Many artists travelled to “try their luck.” The arts clubs of London, whilst similarly discerning in their membership criteria, generally offered a visiting “brother-of-the-brush” a warm welcome as a professional courtesy. They featured the familiar rollicking all-male “Smoke Nights” a feature of the Melbourne Savage Club. With a greater “artist” membership than the clubs in Australia, expatriate artists were not only able to catch up with their friends from Australia, but also they could associate with England’s finest and most progressive artists in a familiar congenial environment. The clubs were a “home away from home” and described by Underhill as, “an artistic Earl’s Court” (Underhill 99). Most importantly, the clubs were a centre for discourse, arguably even more so than were the teaching academies. Britain’s leading modernist artists were members of the Chelsea Arts Club and the New English Arts Club and mixed freely with the visiting Australian artists.Many Australian artists, such as Miles Evergood and George Bell (1878–1966), held anti-academic views similar to English club members and embraced the new artistic trends, which they would bring back to Australia. Streeton had no illusions about the relative worth of the famed institutions and the exhibitions held by clubs such as the New English. Writing to Roberts before he joins him in London, he describes the Royal Academy as having, “an inartistic atmosphere” and claims he “hasn’t the least desire to go again” (Streeton 77). His preference lay with a concurrent “International Exhibition”, which featured works by Rodin, Whistler, Condor, Degas, and others who were setting the pace rather than merely continuing the academic traditions.Architect Hardy Wilson (1881–1955) served as secretary of The Chelsea Arts Club. When he returned to Australia he brought back with him a number of British works by Streeton and Lambert for an exhibition at the Guild Hall Melbourne (Underhill 92). Artists and Bohemians, a history of the Chelsea Arts Club, makes special reference of its world-wide contacts and singles out many of its prominent Australian members for specific mention including; Sir John William (Will) Ashton OBE, later Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Will Dyson, whose illustrious career as an Australian war artist was described in some detail. Dyson’s popularity led to his later appointment as Chairman of the Chelsea Arts Club where he initiated an ambitious rebuilding program, improving staff accommodation, refurbishing the members’ areas, and adding five bedrooms for visiting members (Bross 87-90).Whilst the influence of travel abroad on Australian artists has been noted, the importance of the London Clubs has not been fully explored. These clubs offered artists a space where they felt “at home” and a familiar environment whilst they were abroad. The clubs functioned as a meeting space where they could engage in a stimulating artistic environment and gain introductions to leading figures in the art world. For those artists who chose England, London’s arts clubs played a large role, for it was in these establishments that they discussed, exhibited, shared, and met with their English counterparts. The club environment in London had a significant impact on male Australian artists as it offered a space where they were integrated into the English art world which enhanced their experience whilst abroad and influenced the direction of their art.ReferencesCorbett, David Peters, and Lara Perry, eds. English Art, 1860–1914: Modern Artists and Identity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.Croll, Robert Henderson. Tom Roberts: Father of Australian Landscape Painting. Melbourne: Robertson & Mullens, 1935.Cross, Tom. Artists and Bohemians: 100 Years with the Chelsea Arts Club. 1992. 1st ed. London: Quiller Press, 1992.Gray, Anne, and National Gallery of Australia. McCubbin: Last Impressions 1907–17. 1st ed. Parkes, A.C.T.: National Gallery of Australia, 2009.Halliday, Andrew, ed. The Savage Papers. 1867. 1st ed. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1867.Hammer, Gael. Miles Evergood: No End of Passion. Willoughby, NSW: Phillip Mathews, 2013.Joske, Prue. Debonair Jack: A Biography of Sir John Longstaff. 1st ed. Melbourne: Claremont Publishing, 1994.MacDonald, James S., Frederick McCubbin, and Alexander McCubbin. The Art of F. McCubbin. Melbourne: Lothian Book Publishing, 1916.McCaughy, Patrick. Strange Country: Why Australian Painting Matters. Ed. Paige Amor. The Miegunyah Press, 2014.McCubbin, Frederick. Papers, Ca. 1900–Ca. 1915. Melbourne.McQueen, Humphrey. Tom Roberts. Sydney: Macmillan, 1996.Mead, Stephen. "Bohemia in Melbourne: An Investigation of the Writer Marcus Clarke and Four Artistic Clubs during the Late 1860s – 1901.” PhD thesis. Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 2009.Melbourne Savage Club. Secretary. Minute Book: Melbourne Savage Club. Club Minutes (General Committee). Melbourne: Savage Archives.Mulvaney, Derek John, and J.H. Calaby. So Much That Is New: Baldwin Spencer, 1860–1929, a Biography. Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1985.Smith, Bernard, Terry Smith, and Christopher Heathcote. Australian Painting, 1788–2000. 4th ed. South Melbourne, Vic.: Oxford University Press, 2001.Streeton, Arthur, et al. Smike to Bulldog: Letters from Sir Arthur Streeton to Tom Roberts. Sydney: Ure Smith, 1946.Streeton, Arthur, ed. Letters from Smike: The Letters of Arthur Streeton, 1890–1943. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1989.Thornton, Alfred, and New English Art Club. Fifty Years of the New English Art Club, 1886–1935. London: New English Art Club, Curwen Press 1935.Underhill, Nancy D.H. Making Australian Art 1916–49: Sydney Ure Smith Patron and Publisher. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991.Various. Melbourne Savage Club Correspondence Book: 1902–1916. Melbourne: Melbourne Savage Club.Williams, Graeme Henry. "A Socio-Cultural Reading: The Melbourne Savage Club through Its Collections." Masters of Arts thesis. Melbourne: Deakin University, 2013.
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Kennedy, Ümit, and Emma Maguire. "The Texts and Subjects of Automediality." M/C Journal 21, no. 2 (April 25, 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1395.

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Abstract:
Being is an empty fiction. The “apparent” world is the only world: the “true world” is just a lie added on to it… —Nietzsche. Anna Poletti: I’m attracted to autobiography in a non-narrative context because I’m very interested in texts that people create that demonstrate their thinking or their fantasies or their processing, generally.Lauren Berlant: Right, in that sense it’s autobiography in your larger sense of what autobiography is: a record of […] processing. —Anna Poletti and Julie Rak with Lauren Berlant. The medium is the message. —Marshall McLuhanWelcome to the M/C Journal issue on automediality. If “automediality” sounds like another academic buzzword to you, you are right. But it is more than a buzzword for scholars interested in exploring the significant role of mediation in auto/biographical engagement. Automediality is, we think, an incredibly useful way of framing and grouping scholarly investigations of the processes and practices that people engage when they mediate their lives and selves in a range of auto/biographical forms.We are incredibly excited to bring you this vibrant collection of research about what we are calling “automediality,” but first it is useful to lay some groundwork in terms of explicitly articulating what we think automediality is and does, and why we think it is necessary.As life writing scholars exploring contemporary examples of digital auto/biography in our own research, we were both struck by the need for a new definition of auto/biography that expands beyond text, beyond narrative, beyond subject in any complete sense or form, to reflect the multiplicity of ways that lives are lived and recorded using new media today. We each found ourselves limited, at times, by existing assumptions about what auto/biography traditionally is. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, in their field defining work Reading Autobiography, offer an etymological cue that summarises the prevailing use and perception of autobiographical work: “in Greek, autos denotes ‘self,’ bios ‘life,’ and graphe ‘writing.’ Taken together in this order, the words self life writing offer a brief definition of the autobiography” (1).If “autobiography” has denoted a way to write the self from the location of the self, automediality points to the range of media forms and technologies through which people engage in digital, visual, filmic, performative, textual, and transmediated forms of documenting, constructing and presenting the self. Smith and Watson introduce automediality as a possible theoretical framework for “approaching life storytelling in diverse visual and digital media” (Reading 168). Originally developed by European scholars such as Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser, the term was introduced in order “to expand the definition of how subjectivity is constructed in writing, image, or new media” (Smith and Watson Reading 168).Conjoining autos and media, the concept redresses a tendency in autobiography studies to consider media as “tools” for rendering a pre-existent self. Theorists of automediality emphasize that the choice of medium is determined by self-expression; and the materiality of the medium is constitutive of the subjectivity rendered. Thus media technologies do not simplify or undermine the interiority of the subject but, on the contrary, expand the field of self-representation beyond the literary to cultural and media practices. New media of the self revise notions of identity and the rhetoric and modalities of self-presentation, and they prompt new imaginings of virtual sociality enabled by concepts of community that do not depend on personal encounter. (Reading 168)Looking at auto/biographical practices from a framework of automediality moves away from a conception of texts as able to capture and transmit preexisting selves, lives and identities, and towards an understanding of selves, lives and identities as constructed by and through textual and media practices. It is through creating an autobiographical text that the “self” a person thinks they are comes into being. The mode of creation here, be it a Facebook status update, a memoir, or an alt account, for example, is situated within networks of power, meaning and social capital to shape ways of being a “self” in a particular environment or context. Automedial reading takes all of these formative elements into consideration.Julie Rak suggests that automedia “describes the enactment of a life story in a new media environment” (155), but we think that the term is even more useful as a framework or approach to studying not only new media life stories, but auto/biographical practices as they are enacted in a range of media forms, analogue and digital alike. Importantly, our aim here is not simply to introduce another buzzword, but rather to draw attention to the current need to rethink the significant role of mediation in auto/biographical production, performance, and practices. As Rak points out, “it is time not only to rename the practices we study, but also to think critically about online life as life, and not as the texts many of us are more used to studying, which are meant to represent a life” (156). This kind of critical rethinking about how media is embedded in the living of lives, and the scholarly shift that Rak suggests from examining representation in texts to examining “online life as life” is crucial to the notion of automediality. And it has us—the editors of this issue—divided. A Conversation between EditorsÜmit: choosing “subject” and “process” over “text.”I think what automediality is, which is different to auto/biography, is process rather than product. Automediality allows us to explore how our lives intertwine with different mediums and technologies resulting in new subjects, but subjects in motion. There is no product, there is no complete narrative, there is no snapshot that captures the subject. The subject is always developing, always in motion, always in the “process of doing” (Rak 156), of being and becoming. It is a “moving target” as Smith and Watson suggest (“Virtually” 71). And therefore, automediality, as Rak suggests, is the process of living: living in relationship with media. Where as an autobiographical enquiry has usually (not always) involved the study of a subject in a complete form (although susceptible to other “versions”)—a text in other words, which can be examined by itself—an automedial enquiry has to adapt to the fact that there isn’t a product that can be examined in isolation. As Emma has argued elsewhere, we can never hold “a single cohesive version” of automedial subjects in our hands and we never reach “the end” of a subject’s self-representation as long as they continue to “post” (“Self-Branding” 75). What we are exploring as scholars of automediality is a process of living. How people live, create and present themselves, participate, narrativise, and simply “be” in different spaces, using different mediums and technologies. The mediated lives and subjects that we’re exploring in this issue require new language, new words and definitions. We are not dealing with “texts,” although there are textual components, we are not dealing with “narratives,” although one (or many) is (or are) always in formation (see Rak 156), and most importantly, we are not dealing with “products,” that hold any significance in isolation. What we are dealing with are processes: processes of being, doing, creating, and distributing the self, in relationship with media and their affordances, limitations and participants. My objection to language such as “text” is that it implies something tangible, taking for granted the ephemerality of the subjects of automediality. So often in my research I have taken a “snapshot” of a subject (in the form of a YouTube video, for example) and treated it like a text ready for analysis only to find when I revisit it that it has changed, been edited or contradicted, or completely erased (see Kennedy). And when we treat “snapshots” as “texts” for analysis I think we miss the most important point: that is the process through which the subject was and is being formed (in relationship with the medium, its technologies, and the people and things that congregate and participate in that space). We need to expand the way we explore mediated subjects and lives and “automediality” allows us to do this—it gives us a “space” in which to develop new language and methods of enquiry.Emma: texts are vital to studying automediality.Elsewhere, I have suggested that textuality is key to a definition of automediality: “The aim of an automedial approach is to discover what texts can tell us about cultural understandings of selfhood and what it means to portray ‘real’ life and ‘real’ selves through media. The emphasis is on thinking critically about mediation” (Girls, 22). However, Ümit’s thinking about automedia as process has been instrumental to progressing how I am defining and thinking about automediality. For me, though, (and perhaps my background in literary studies is showing here), framing autobiographical production and performance as texts that we can read is a useful framework that allows us to disentangle and examine abstract, slippery concepts like being, living, identity, and selfhood in process in a way that brings the roles and effects of mediation into sharp focus.Retaining the terminology around texts and textual practices—specifically that branch that is concerned with cultural production—also means that we can observe the labour of auto/biography, which is important for thinking about the economies in which automediation occurs as well as acknowledging the work that goes into creating these self-presentations or performances. It takes skills, labour, literacies, and—for me—nuanced understanding and facility with crucial modalities of reading to participate and "play" in any kind of media form. My definition of reading is broad: people read meaning, identities, lives, media, and the world around them in order to figure out how they fit into any given context, and it is the texts produced in even the most fleeting or participatory automediation that record or hold traces of this work, this process, that we as scholars can then examine.The spirit in which I apply “text” is deeply influenced by the field of semiotics within Cultural Studies. The work of semioticians like Saussure, Althusser, Derrida and Lotman that I studied during my undergraduate degree leads me, like many literary scholars, to think about not only cultural products like books and media as texts, but also bodies, surfaces, ephemeral and immaterial performances, and a range of autobiographical practices as texts. As agents we create meaning by reading, decoding, interpreting, and negotiating texts. The work of mediation, for me, is deeply connected to textual practices.I still think that texts—as well as the practices and processes that go into creating, distributing, and reading them—are a productive framework for examining strategies of self-presentation and identity performance. However, Ümit’s observations around process (articulated in her short essay “Vulnerability” and developed here) is particularly vital to thinking about the context for the participation of produsers in media economies where automedial production is often fleeting, ephemeral, and in flux. And I think that the importance of process in analysing more (apparently or materially) stable media is important, too. One way of thinking about a middle ground between text and subject is by considering the concept of becoming as central to the conceptual framework of automediality. Ümit: finding a middle ground.I agree our difference of opinion about viewing these subjects as texts comes from our different disciplines. For you, Emma, the word “text” is important because it emphasises the agency and labour involved in its creation. As a communications and media scholar, I operate on the assumption that communicating the self involves a huge amount of conscious and unconscious work. I take the agency and labour involved in mediating the self for granted. I still have an issue with “text,” however, as taking the process through which it was created for granted. I do concede, though, that we can’t completely disregard the products of mediation, because there are products (as long as we agree that they are in motion), and these are worthy of study.Although mediated subjects and texts can be fleeting and ephemeral, the fact that they are mediated, as you suggest, means that to some extent they are traceable. The mediation of the self means we can see and track its progression, its influencers, its forms, its relationships and dialogues. Although it is changeable and deletable, “doing” (living in relationship with media) leaves a record. On YouTube, for example, I can see the interactions that take place, through comments, likes and subscriptions, and I can therefore trace the subject as it changes. Mediating the self in this way materialises the process of self-formation. Automediality illuminates the process and makes it accessible to us to research. I think the concept of becoming is a perfect middle ground. “Becoming” as a Middle GroundWe are interested in using the concept of automediality to unpack and examine how selves and lives are brought into being through media forms by examining, simultaneously, both the process of mediation and the product (i.e. the autobiographical subjects and text). A crucial part of this examination is attending to the process of construction, of the process through which the textual self is mediated. One way of thinking about this in relation to the construction of lives and selves, is by thinking about how the concept of becoming is traceable in mediation.Rob Cover’s discussion of becoming in social networking is influential to our thinking here. Cover, drawing on Judith Butler, explains that underlying his approach is “the idea that identity and subjectivity is an ongoing process of becoming, rather than an ontological state of being” (56) and he argues that looking at the practices and artifacts of online identity performance can reveal the intricacies of identity in process. Also important here is the work of Stuart Hall who, in 1989, wrote about becoming in terms of how it is implicated in identity as a cultural practice or process:Cultural identity […] is a matter of 'becoming' as well as of 'being'. […] It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant trans-formation. Far from being eternally fixed […], they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power. Far from being grounded in a mere 'recovery' of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which, when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narrative of the past. (70)Hall’s description of becoming as the process by which identity is continually brought into being has parallels to how we are thinking of mediation and life narrative in this issue. Hall is speaking about reading and representing identity, about the processes and products through which people enact, express, perform, and consume identity categories. Similarly, we are looking at subjectivities and identities in process, and we both agree that automediality as a conceptual tool and classifying label turns our attention to the ways in which people identify themselves and others using media. Media use, here, encompasses practices of engagement in terms of both consumption and creation. And, increasingly, users participate by engaging in both production and consumption simultaneously, becoming produsers—a term coined by the editor of this journal, Axel Bruns (2). Bruns’s notion of produsers illustrates the complex relationship between consumers, producers and users in the current media economy (2). One of the significant aspects of an automedial enquiry is the blurring of boundaries between creators and consumers. Automedial subjects are created in dialogue with the other participants in the space. The lives and identities are not only merged with the medium and technologies involved in their creation, but also with the other produsers in the space. This is critical when we begin to explore how to research automediality, as an automedial enquiry demands automediation of the researcher. In order to explore these subjects, the researcher must participate, to some extent, in the practice. Exploring subjects on social media, for example, requires the researcher to create an account and therefore participate in the same activity they are observing/consuming/researching.Questions for Automedial EnquiryTaking these ideas from theory to practice, from our point of view, reading auto/biographical texts and practices through a framework of automediality involves asking some of the following questions and paying attention to some of the following elements:What are the affordances, constraints and features of this medium that have shaped how a subject can inscribe, perform, or construct a self-presentation? As Nancy Baym writes, “our ability to construct an online self-presentation ... is limited and enabled by the communicative tools, or affordances, a platform makes available and our skills at strategically managing them” (124).What networks of power traverse this technology, this medium, and thus this mode of self-presentation?How does this performance of selfhood engage the different autobiographical “I”s: the narrating self and the narrated self; the subject and its creator; the online self and the offline IRL (in real life) self or selves. Although, as Smith and Watson state, “theorists of media and autobiography […] approach the constructed self not as an essence but as a subject” (Reading, 71), we have to acknowledge the person or constructs that exist outside of (and informs) the performance. How do these different facets of the self, and identities, speak to each other in automedia? In what networks of production and consumption does the automedia exist? How is the audience positioned in relation to the text or subject?Surface reading: the textual elements that form the interface between reader and story can tell us about what forces are shaping the self-presentations within the text, and also how the reader is positioned in relation to the autobiographical narrative. What does a surface reading reveal about how the self is being constructed by both media conventions and cultural meanings? The possibility of multiple and fragmented selves. The self that a subject performs or creates in one media platform may be a very different self that they perform in another or that they feel themselves to “be” in “real” life. What is the relationship between these selves? How do they inform and speak to each other?Authenticity is always suspect. Rather than a concrete guarantee that the media presentation correlates truthfully or sincerely to the IRL (in real life) identity or life of the narrator, authenticity in automedia is “an effect created by the form and style” of an auto/biographical performance (Maguire Girls, 11; drawing on Poletti Intimate, 28-9; emphasis added). Thus, it is less useful to weigh up how authentic or how real a particular self-presentation or media form is, and more interesting to examine how particular media constructs or creates effects of authenticity, or makes appeals to truth/authenticity. And finally, method: How can we develop methods to explore automedia which critically examine the text/subject, as well as the “process of doing” (Rak) through which the text/subject is being and “becoming” (Hall). Introducing the ArticlesEach of these excellent articles responds to technological effects on selfhood. By canvassing a range of media forms and approaches to conceptualising the mediation of lives and selves, our contributors’ ideas probe new directions for automediality as a framework for reading and thinking through self-mediation.The feature article, authored by Anna Poletti and Julie Rak, proposes that RuPaul’s Drag Race demonstrates automedia in action and suggests that the reality TV show, by modelling “queer time,” presents a challenge to dominant (straight) patterns of temporality in life narratives. This piece presents an argument for considering how identities that have been positioned as marginal are able, through automediality, to reconfigure understandings of what a life and a self can look like.Wes Hill addresses a key claim that we are making when we talk about autmediality: that media interfaces and contexts shape and construct the forms of selfhood that are brought into being through them. Hill takes the case study of artist and filmmaker Ryan Trecartin and argues that Trecartin’s videos demonstrate a fragmented set of identities that are deeply constituted by a style of performance that Hill calls “Internet-era camp.” Here, Internet-era camp becomes a mode through which to constitute the self through fragmented sets of intertextual and affective meanings. Emily van der Nagel highlights the multi-faceted nature of the mediated self through her investigation of Alt (alternative) accounts on Twitter. Her article demonstrates the way people use different accounts on the same platform for different facets of the self, and for different audiences. Isabel Pederson and Kristen Aspevig extend our discussion of automediality to explore agency and consent in the example of children producing their own automedial subjects and texts on YouTube, in the form of toy reviews. Kylie Cardell explores the digital self-tracking device many of us wear on our wrists, the Fitbit, and asks whether this wearable technology constitutes a diary. In her article, Cardell examines how a Fitbit can become an almanac for self-improvement, where the constant tracking of our physical behaviour changes the way that we live.Anu A Harju critically examines the world of “fatshion” blogging to reveal the relational way “fatshionistas” are formed in dialogue with medium, community and market. Harju situates the self as a product of relations, “borne out of them as well as dependent on them.” Chad Habel takes up masculine gender performance in video games by investigating how genre facilitates (or doesn’t) particular modes of identification by coaxing aggressive gameplay.Mick Broderick, Stuart Marshall Bender and Tony McHugh take a look how artificial intelligence technologies are currently being used to create immersive virtual reality experiences. They question the use of trauma in such projects, and suggest that affect—particularly when used to explore suffering within virtual worlds—needs careful thought moving forward with these technologies.ConclusionThis collection of interdisciplinary scholarship is an exploration of the different ways that people mediate the self. Focusing on mediation as a process that brings the subject into being, these essays explore the connections between lives, selves, identities and media technologies. The textual constructs that hold selves together become traces or products that can perform social functions, but they also have immense richness as objects of study. By taking apart and examining the processes and effects of mediation on life narratives, as scholars we are able to re-focus the microscope on the becoming of lives, selves and identities that are constructed in autobiographical texts. In seeking contributions for this collection, we were guided by two key questions: How do people mediate their identities, selves and experiences? How do media forms and conventions limit or facilitate the possibilities for particular kinds of selfhood to be articulated? Scholars of life narrative warn us that “the self” is not a unified and pre-existing entity that can simply be transcribed or translated through media. Rather, the self is brought into being through writing—or mediation. Media technologies like the camera, the diary, social media platforms, and books each have conventions, affordances, abilities and limits that both enable and restrict the kinds of self-presentation that are possible. Particular media bring particular subjectivities to life. It is our opinion that examining such sites and modes of automediality can tell us about the ways in which “technologies and subjectivity” are connected (Smith and Watson “Virtually” 77), and this is what we hope this collection of work offers to scholars of media and life narrative, as well as those working in interrelated fields. But this is only the beginning. The interfaces between life narrative and media technologies remains an exciting space for new ideas and theories to flourish.Future avenues for investigation of automediality might include examining: the platforms, mediums and technologies of automediality; the affordances of automediality for alternative narratives and identities; the vulnerabilities of mediated narratives and identities; the mediated self as brand/consumable product; cases that explore when automediality is lasting and permanent and when it is ephemeral and shifting; and multiple methodologies for investigating the mediated self, particularly in the context of digital media. An upcoming development that we’re particularly excited about is Anna Poletti’s forthcoming monograph Biomediations which will, we expect, move this thinking forward again.We hope that this issue of M/C Journal inspires more ideas about how media shapes the kinds of selves we think we are, now, in the past, and into the future. ReferencesBaym, Nancy K. Personal Connections in the Digital Age. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Polity, 2015. Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.Cover, Rob. “Becoming and Belonging: Performativity, Subjectivity, and the Cultural Purposes of Social Networking.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. 55-69.Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 36 (1989): 68-81.Kennedy, Ümit. “The Vulnerability of Contemporary Digital Autobiography.” a/b Auto/Biography Studies 32.2 (2017): 409-11.Maguire, Emma. Girls, Autobiography, Media: Gender and Self-Meditation in Digital Economies. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.———. “Self-Branding, Hotness, and Girlhood in the Video Blogs of Jenna Marbles.” Biography 38.1 (2015): 72-86.Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. “Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer.” The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings. Eds. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman. Trans. Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 153-230.Poletti, Anna. Biomediations. New York: New York UP, forthcoming 2019.———. Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture. Carlton, VIC: Melbourne UP, 2008.Poletti, Anna, and Julie Rak. “The Blog as Experimental Setting: An Interview with Lauren Berlant.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. 259-72.Rak, Julie. “Life Writing versus Automedia: The Sims 3 Game as a Life Lab.” Biography 38.2 (2015): 155-80.Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.———. “Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. 70-95.
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47

Rizzo, Sergio. "Adaptation and the Art of Survival." M/C Journal 10, no. 2 (May 1, 2007). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2623.

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To use the overworked metaphor of the movie reviewers, Adaptation (2002)—directed by Spike Jonze and written by Charlie Kaufman—is that rare Hollywood flower, a “literary” film that succeeds both with the critics and at the box office. But Kaufman’s literary colleagues, his fellow screenwriters whose opinions are rarely noticed by movie reviewers or the public, express their support in more interesting terms. Robert McKee, the real-life screenwriter and teacher played by Brian Cox in the movie, writes about Kaufman as one of the few to “step out of screenwriting anonymity to gain national recognition as an artist—without becoming a director” (131). And the screenwriter Stephen Schiff (Lolita [Adrian Lyne, 1997], The Deep End of the Ocean [Ulu Grosbard, 1999]) embraces the film as a manifesto, claiming that Kaufman’s work offers “redemption” to him and his fellow screenwriters who are “struggling to adapt to the world’s dismissive view of adaptation.” The comments by Kaufman’s colleagues suggest that new respect for the work of adaptation, and the role of the screenwriter go hand in hand. The director—whom auteur theory, the New Wave, and film schools helped to establish as the primary creative agent behind a film—has long overshadowed the screenwriter, but Kaufman’s acclaim as a screenwriter reflects a new sensibility. This was illustrated by the controversy among Academy Award voters in 2002. They found that year’s nominees, including Adaptation, unsettled the Academy’s traditional distinction between “original screenplay” and “adapted screenplay”, debating whether a nominee for best original screenplay, such as My Big Fat Greek Wedding (Joel Zwik, 2002), was more like an adaptation, while Adaptation, a nominee for best adapted screenplay, was more like an original screenplay. The Academy’s confusion on this score is not without precedents; nonetheless, as Rick Lyman of The New York Times reports, it led some to wonder, “in an age of narrative deconstruction and ‘reality television’,” whether the distinction between original and adaptation was still valid. If, as the famed critic Alexandre Astruc claimed, the director should be seen as someone who uses the camera as a pen to “write” the movie, then the screenwriter, in Ben Stoltzfus’s words, is increasingly seen as someone who uses the pen to “shoot” the movie. While this appreciation of the screenwriter as an “adaptor” who directs the movie opens new possibilities within Hollywood filmmaking, it also occurs in a Hollywood where TV shows, video games, and rides at Disneyland are adapted to film as readily as literary works once were. Granted, some stand to gain, but who or what is lost in this new hyper-adaptive environment? While there is much to be said for Kaufman’s movie, I suggest its optimistic account of adaptation—both as an existential principle and cinematic practice—is one-sided. Part of the dramatic impact of the movie’s one word title is the way it shoves the act of adaptation out from the wings and places it front and center in the filmmaking process. An amusing depiction of the screenwriter’s marginalisation occurs at the movie’s beginning, immediately following Charlie’s (Nicholas Cage) opening monologue delivered against a black screen. It is presented as a flashback to the making of Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999), the movie for which Kaufman wrote his first screenplay, making him “a name” in Hollywood. Although scripted, the scene is shot with a hand-held video camera and looks as though it is occurring in real time. The central character is John Malkovich in costume as a woman who shouts orders at everyone on the set—deftly illustrating how the star’s power in the new Hollywood enables him or her to become “the director” of the movie. His directions are then followed by ones from the first assistant director and the cinematographer. Meanwhile, Charlie stands silently and awkwardly off to the side, until he is chased away by the first assistant director—not even the director or the cinematographer—who tells him, “You. You’re in the eyeline. Can you please get off the stage?” (Kaufman and Kaufman, 3). There are other references that make the movie’s one-word title evocative. It forces one to think about the biological and literary senses of the word—evolution as a narrative process and narrative as an evolutionary process—lifting the word’s more colloquial meaning of “getting along” to the level of an existential principle. Or, as Laroche (Chris Cooper) explains to Orlean (Meryl Streep), “Adaptation’s a profound process. It means you figure out how to thrive in the world” (Kaufman and Kaufman, 35). But Laroche’s definition of adaptation, which the movie endorses and dramatises, is only half the story. In fact evolutionary science shows that nature’s “losers” vastly outnumber nature’s “winners.” As Peter Bowler expresses it in his historical account of the theory of natural selection, “Evolution becomes a process of trial and error based on massive wastage and the death of vast numbers of unfit creatures”(6). Turning the “profound process” of adaptation into a story about the tiny fraction who “figure out how to thrive in the world” has been done before. It manifested itself in Herbert Spencer’s late-nineteenth-century philosophical “adaptation” of Charles Darwin’s work on natural selection, coining the phrase, “survival of the fittest.” Both the scientist Darwin and the philosopher Spencer, as Bowler points out, would have been horrified at how their work was used to justify the rapacious capitalism and harsh social policies of American industry (301). Nonetheless, although by now largely discredited in the academy, the ideology of social Darwinism persists within the broader culture in various watered-down or subterranean forms. Perhaps in the movie’s violent climax when Laroche is killed by an alligator—a creature that represents one of the more impressive examples of adaptation in the natural world—Kaufman is suggesting the darker side to the story of natural selection in which adaptation is not only a story about the mutable and agile orchid that “figure[s] out how to thrive in the world.” There are no guarantees for the tiny fraction of species that do survive, whether they are as perfectly adapted to their environment as orchids and alligators or, for that matter, individuals like Laroche with his uncanny ability to adapt to whatever life throws at him. But after the movie’s violent eruption, which does away not only with Laroche but also Donald (Nicholas Cage) and in effect Orlean, Charlie emerges as the sole survivor, reassuring the viewer that the story of adaptation is about nature’s winners. The darker side to the story of natural selection is subsumed within the movie’s layers of meta-commentary, which make the violence at the movie’s end an ironic device within Charlie’s personal and artistic evolution—a way for him to maintain a critical distance on the Hollywood conventions he has resisted while simultaneously incorporating them into his art. A cinematically effective montage dramatically represents the process of evolution. However, as with the movie’s one-sided account of adaptation, as a story about those who “figure out how to thrive in the world,” this depiction of evolution is framed, both figuratively and literally, by Charlie’s personal growth—as though the logical and inevitable endpoint of the evolutionary process is the human individual. The montage is instigated by Charlie’s questions to himself, “Why am I here? How did I get here?” and concludes with a close-up on the bawling face of a newborn baby, whom the viewer assumes is Charlie (Kaufman and Kaufman, 3). This assumption is reinforced by the next scene, which begins with a close-up on the face of the adult Charlie who is sweating profusely as he struggles to survive a business luncheon with the attractive studio executive Valerie (Tilda Swinton). Although Orlean’s novel doesn’t provide a feminist reading of Darwin, she does alert her readers to the fact that he was a Victorian man and, as such, his science might reflect the prejudices of his day. In discussing Darwin’s particular fondness for his “‘beloved Orchids’” (47), she recounts his experiments to determine how they release their pollen: “He experimented by poking them with needles, camel-hair brushes, bristles, pencils, and his fingers. He discovered that parts were so sensitive that they released pollen upon the slightest touch, but that ‘moderate degrees of violence’ on the less sensitive parts had no effect ….” (48). In contrast to this humorous view of Darwin as the historically situated man of science, the movie depicts Darwin (Bob Yerkes) as the stereotypical Man of Science. Kaufman does incorporate some of Orlean’s discussion of Darwin’s study of orchids, but the portion he uses advances the screenplay’s sexualisation/romanticisation of Orlean’s relationship with Laroche. At an orchid show, Laroche lectures to Orlean about Darwin’s theory that a particular orchid, Angraecum sesquipedale, is pollinated by a moth with a twelve-inch proboscis. When Orlean takes exception to Laroche for telling her that proboscis means “nose,” he chides her, “Hey, let’s not get off the subject. This isn’t a pissing contest” (23). After this scene bristling with phallic imagery—and with his female pupil sufficiently chastised—Laroche proceeds to wax poetic about pollination as a “little dance” (24) between flower and insect. “[The] only barometer you have is your heart …” (24) he tells Orlean, who is clearly impressed by the depth of his soliloquy. On the literary and social level, a one-sided reading of adaptation as a positive process may be more justified, although here too one may question what the movie slights or ignores. What about the human ability to adapt to murderous and dehumanising social systems: slavery, fascism, colonialism, and so on? Or, more immediately, even if one acknowledges the writer’s “maturity,” as T.S. Eliot famously phrased it, in “stealing” from his or her source, what about the element of compromise implicit in the concept of adaptation? Several critics question whether the film’s ending, despite the movie’s self-referential ironies, ultimately reinforces the Hollywood formulas it sets out to critique. But only Stuart Klawans of The Nation connects it to the movie’s optimistic, one-sided view of adaptation. “Still,” he concludes, “I’m disappointed by that crashing final act. I wonder about the environmental pressure that must bear down on today’s filmmakers as they struggle to adapt, even when they’re as prodigious as Charlie Kaufman.” Oddly, for a self-reflexive movie about the creative process, it has little to say about the “environmental pressure” of the studio system and its toll on the artist. There are incisive character sketches of studio types, such as the attractive and painfully earnest executive, Valerie, who hires Charlie to write the screenplay for Orlean’s book, or Charlie’s sophomoric agent, Marty (Ron Livingston), who daydreams about anal sex with the women in his office while talking to his client. And, of course, a central plot line of the movie is the competition, at least as one of them sees it, between Charlie and his twin brother Donald. Charlie, the self-conscious Hollywood screenwriter who is stymied by his success and notions of artistic integrity, suffers defeat after humiliating defeat as Donald, the screenwriting neophyte who will stoop to any cliché or cheap device to advance his screenplay, receives a six-figure contract for his first effort: a formulaic and absurd serial-killer movie, The Three, that their mother admires as a cross between Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991). Because of the emotional arc of the brothers’ personal relationship, however, any qualms about Donald selling out look churlish at best. When Donald excitedly tells his brother about his good fortune, Charlie responds approvingly, rather than with one of the snide putdowns the viewer has grown to expect from him, signaling not only Charlie’s acceptance of his brother but the new awareness that will enable him to overcome his writer’s block. While there is a good deal of satire directed at the filmmaking process—as distinct from the studio system—it is ultimately a cherishing sort of satire. It certainly doesn’t reach the level of indictment found in Robert Altman’s The Player (1992) or Joel and Ethan Cohen’s Barton Fink (1991) for example. But the movie most frequently compared to Adaptation is Frederico Fellini’s masterpiece of auteurist self-reflexivity, 8 ½ (1963). This is high praise indeed, although the enthusiastic endorsements of some film critics do not stop there. Writing for the Observer, Philip French cites such New Wave movies as Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mepris (1963), Francois Truffaut’s La Nuit Americaine (1973), and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Trans-Europ-Express (1966). However, in passing, he qualifies the comparison by pointing out that, unlike the French auteurs, “Kaufman and Jonze are concerned with turning someone else’s idea into a piece of commercial cinema.” Some would argue the filmmakers’ ability to playfully adapt Orlean’s artistry to the commercial environment of Hollywood is what saves Adaptation’s meta-commentary from the didactic and elitist seriousness of many of its literary and cinematic precursors (Miller). This is a valid preference, but it slights the “environmental pressure” of the new studio system and how it sets the terms for success and failure. While Fellini and the New Wave auteurs were not entirely free of commercial cinema, they could claim an opposition to it that Kaufman, even if he wanted to, cannot. Film scholar Timothy Corrigan argues that the convergence of the new media, in particular television and film, radically alters the meaning and function of “independent” cinema: a more flexible and varied distribution network has responded to contemporary audiences, who now have the need and the power to pick and choose among the glut of images in contemporary television and film culture. Within this climate and under these conditions, the different, the more peculiar, the controversial enter the marketplace not as an opposition but as a revision and invasion of an audience market defined as too large and diverse by the dominant blockbusters. (25-6) Corrigan’s argument explains the qualitative differences between the sense of adaptation employed by the older auteurs and the new sense of adaptation required by contemporary auteurs fully incorporated within the new studio system and its new distribution technologies. Not everyone is disturbed by this state of affairs. A. O. Scott, writing for the New York Times, notes a similar “two-tier system” in Hollywood—with studios producing lavish “critic- and audience-proof franchise pictures” on the one hand and “art” or “independent” movies on the other—which strikes him as “a pretty good arrangement.” Based on what Adaptation does and does not say about the studio system, one imagines that Kaufman would, ultimately, concur. In contrast, however, a comment by Michel Gondry, the director Kaufman worked with on Human Nature (2001), gives a better indication of the costs incurred by adapting to the current system when he expresses his frustration with the delayed release of the picture by New Line Cinema: ‘First they were, like, “O.K. if Rush Hour 2 [Brett Ratner, 2001] does good business, then we’re in a good position,”’ Mr. Gondry said. ‘You fight to do something original and then you depend on Rush Hour 2 for the success of your movie? It’s like you are the last little thing on the bottom of the scale and you’re looking up watching the planets colliding. It’s been so frustrating.’ (Rochlin) No doubt, when Fellini and Godard thought about doing “something original” they also had considerable obstacles to face. But at least the success of 8 ½ or Le Mepris wasn’t dependent upon the success of films like Rush Hour 2. Given this sort of environmental pressure, as Klawans and Corrigan remind us, we need to keep in mind what might be lost as the present system’s winners adapt to what is generally understood as “a pretty good arrangement.” Another indication of the environmental pressure on artists in Hollywood’s present arrangement comes from Adaptation’s own story of adaptation—not the one told by Kaufman or his movie, but the one found in Susan Orlean’s account of how she and her novel were “adapted” by the filmmakers. Although Orlean is an enthusiastic supporter of the movie, when she first read the screenplay, she thought, “the whole thing ‘seemed completely nuts’” and wondered whether she wanted “that much visibility” (Boxer). She decided to give her consent on the condition they not use her name. This solution, however, wouldn’t work because she didn’t want her book “in a movie with someone else’s name on it” (Boxer). Forced to choose between an uncomfortable visibility and the loss of authorship, she chose the former. Of course, her predicament is not Kaufman’s fault; nonetheless, it is important to stress that the process of adaptation did not enforce a similar “choice” upon him. Her situation, like that of Gondry, indicates that successful adaptation to any system is a story of losing as well as winning. References Astruc, Alexandre. “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: Le Camera-Stylo.” Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader. Ed. Timothy Corrigan. Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999, 158-62. Bowler, Peter J. Evolution: The History of an Idea. 3rd ed. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2003. Boxer, Sarah. “New Yorker Writer Turns Gun-Toting Floozy? That’s Showbiz.” The New York Times 9 Dec. 2002, sec. E. Corrigan, Timothy. A Cinema without Walls. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1991. Eliot, T.S. “Philip Massinger.” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. 1922. http://www.bartleby.com/> French, Philip. “The Towering Twins.” The Observer 2 Mar. 2003. Guardian Unlimited. 12 Feb. 2007. http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review>. Kaufman, Charlie and Donald Kaufman. Adaptation: The Shooting Script. New York: Newmarket Press, 2002. Klawans, Stuart. “Adeptations.” The Nation 23 Dec. 2002. 12 Febr. 2007. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20021223/klawans>. Lyman, Rick. “A Jumble of Categories for Screenwriter Awards.” The New York Times 21 Feb. 2003. McKee, Robert. “Critical Commentary.” Adaptation: The Shooting Script. New York: Newmarket Press, 2002. 131-5. Miller, Laura. “This Is the Way We Live Now.” The New York Times Magazine 17 Nov. 2002. Orlean, Susan. The Orchid Thief. New York: Ballantine Books, 1998. Rochlin, Margy. “From an Untamed Mind Springs an Ape Man.” The New York Times 7 Apr. 2002. Schiff, Stephen. “All Right, You Try: Adaptation Isn’t Easy.” The New York Times 1 Dec. 2002. Scott, A. O. “As Requested My Thoughts on the Oscars.” The New York Times 9 Feb. 2003. Stoltzfus, Ben. “Shooting with the Pen.” Writing in a Film Age. Ed. Keith Cohen. Niwot, CO: UP of Colorado, 1991. 246-63. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Rizzo, Sergio. "Adaptation and the Art of Survival." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/02-rizzo.php>. APA Style Rizzo, S. (May 2007) "Adaptation and the Art of Survival," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/02-rizzo.php>.
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48

"Buchbesprechungen." Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 47, no. 1 (January 1, 2020): 79–182. http://dx.doi.org/10.3790/zhf.47.1.79.

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(Patrick Schmidt, Rostock) Schäfer-Griebel, Alexandra, Die Medialität der Französischen Religionskriege. Frankreich und das Heilige Römische Reich 1589 (Beiträge zur Kommunikationsgeschichte, 30), Stuttgart 2018, Steiner, 556 S. / Abb., € 84,00. (Mona Garloff, Stuttgart / Wien) Malettke, Klaus, Richelieu. Ein Leben im Dienste des Königs und Frankreichs, Paderborn 2018, Schöningh, 1076 S. / Abb., € 128,00. (Michael Rohrschneider, Bonn) Windler, Christian, Missionare in Persien. Kulturelle Diversität und Normenkonkurrenz im globalen Katholizismus (17.-18. Jahrhundert) (Externa, 12), Köln / Weimar / Wien 2018, Böhlau, 764 S. / Abb., € 95,00. (Tobias Winnerling, Düsseldorf) Amsler, Nadine, Jesuits and Matriarchs. Domestic Worship in Early Modern China, Seattle 2018, University of Washington Press, X u. 258 S. / Abb., $ 30,00. (Tobias Winnerling, Düsseldorf) Seppel, Marten / Keith Tribe (Hrsg.), Cameralism in Practice. 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Dynastic Politics in Their European Context, 1604 - 1630 (Studies in Earl Modern Cultural, Political and Social History, 31), Woodbridge / Rochester 2018, The Boydell Press, XVIII u. 367 S., £ 75,00. (Martin Foerster, Hamburg) Blakemore, Richard J. / Elaine Murphy, The British Civil Wars at Sea, 1638 - 1653, Woodbridge 2018, The Boydell Press, X u. 225 S. / Abb., £ 65,00. (Jann M. Witt, Laboe) Deflers, Isabelle / Christian Kühner (Hrsg.), Ludwig XIV. - Vorbild und Feindbild. Inszenierung und Rezeption der Herrschaft eines barocken Monarchen zwischen Heroisierung, Nachahmung und Dämonisierung / Louis XIV - fascination et répulsion. Mise en scène et réception du règne d’un monarque baroque entre héroïsation, imitation et diabolisation (Studien des Frankreich-Zentrums der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, 25), Berlin 2018, Schmidt, 296 S. / Abb., € 69,95. (Anuschka Tischer, Würzburg) Pérez Sarrión, Guillermo, The Emergence of a National Market in Spain, 1650 - 1800. 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Zucht-‍, Arbeits- und Strafhäuser in Graz (1700 - 1850) (Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung. Ergänzungsband, 63; Forschungen zur geschichtlichen Landeskunde der Steiermark, 83), Wien / Köln / Weimar 2019, Böhlau, 556 S. / Abb., € 85,00. (Simon Karstens, Trier) Oldach, Robert, Stadt und Festung Stralsund. Die schwedische Militärpräsenz in Schwedisch-Pommern 1721 - 1807 (Quellen und Studien aus den Landesarchiven Mecklenburg-Vorpommerns, 20), Köln / Weimar / Wien 2018, Böhlau, 518 S. / Abb., € 60,00. (Michael Busch, Rostock) Koller, Ekaterina E., Religiöse Grenzgänger im östlichen Europa. Glaubensenthusiasten um die Prophetin Ekaterina Tatarinova und den Pseudomessias Jakob Frank im Vergleich (1750 - 1850) (Lebenswelten osteuropäischer Juden, 17), Wien / Köln / Weimar 2019, Böhlau, 352 S., € 60,00. (Agnieszka Pufelska, Lüneburg) Häberlein, Mark / Holger Zaunstöck (Hrsg.), Halle als Zentrum der Mehrsprachigkeit im langen 18. Jahrhundert (Hallesche Forschungen, 47), Halle a. d. S. 2017, Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen, VI u. 265 S. / Abb., € 56,00. (Martin Gierl, Göttingen) Geffarth, Renko / Markus Meumann / Holger Zaunstöck (Hrsg.), Kampf um die Aufklärung? Institutionelle Konkurrenzen und intellektuelle Vielfalt im Halle des 18. Jahrhunderts, Halle a. d. S. 2018, Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 334 S., € 50,00. (Martin Gierl, Göttingen) Giro d’Italia. Die Reiseberichte des bayerischen Kurprinzen Karl Albrecht (1715/16). Eine historisch-kritische Edition, hrsg. v. Andrea Zedler / Jörg Zedler (Beihefte zum Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 90), Wien / Köln / Weimar 2019, Böhlau, 694 S. / Abb., € 90,00. (Michael Maurer, Jena) Backerra, Charlotte, Wien und London, 1727 - 1735. Internationale Beziehungen im frühen 18. Jahrhundert (Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für europäische Geschichte Mainz, 253), Göttingen 2018, Vandenhoeck &amp; Ruprecht, 474 S., € 80,00. (Michael Schaich, London) Gottesdienst im Bamberger Dom zwischen Barock und Aufklärung. Die Handschrift des Ordinarius L des Subkustos Johann Graff von 1730 als Edition mit Kommentar, hrsg. v. Franz Kohlschein / Werner Zeißner unter Mitarbeit v. Walter Milutzki (Studien zur Bamberger Bistumsgeschichte, 9), Petersberg 2018, Imhoff, 687 S. / Abb., € 79,00. (Tillmann Lohse, Berlin / Leipzig) Warnke, Marcus, Logistik und friderizianische Kriegsführung. Eine Studie zur Verteilung, Mobilisierung und Wirkungsmächtigkeit militärisch relevanter Ressourcen im Siebenjährigen Krieg am Beispiel des Jahres 1757 (Quellen und Forschungen zur Brandenburgischen und Preußischen Geschichte, 50), Berlin 2018, Duncker &amp; Humblot, 696 S. / Abb., € 139,90. (Tilman Stieve, Aachen) Frey, Linda / Marsha Frey, The Culture of French Revolutionary Diplomacy. In the Face of Europe (Studies in Diplomacy and International Relations), Cham 2018, Palgrave Macmillan, XI u. 300 S., € 149,79. (Christine Vogel, Vechta) Wagner, Johann Conrad, „Meine Erfahrungen in dem gegenwärtigen Kriege“. Tagebuch des Feldzugs mit Herzog Carl August von Weimar, hrsg. v. Edith Zehm (Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft, 78), Göttingen 2018, Wallstein, 552 S. / Abb. / Faltkarte, € 59,00. (Michael Kaiser, Köln / Bonn) Zamoyski, Adam, Napoleon. Ein Leben. Aus dem Englischen übers. v. Ruth Keen / Erhard Stölting, München 2018, Beck, 863 S. / Abb., € 29,95. (Hans-Ulrich Thamer, Münster)
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49

Starrs, Bruno. "Publish and Graduate?: Earning a PhD by Published Papers in Australia." M/C Journal 11, no. 4 (June 24, 2008). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.37.

Full text
Abstract:
Refereed publications (also known as peer-reviewed) are the currency of academia, yet many PhD theses in Australia result in only one or two such papers. Typically, a doctoral thesis requires the candidate to present (and pass) a public Confirmation Seminar, around nine to twelve months into candidacy, in which a panel of the candidate’s supervisors and invited experts adjudicate upon whether the work is likely to continue and ultimately succeed in the goal of a coherent and original contribution to knowledge. A Final Seminar, also public and sometimes involving the traditional viva voce or oral defence of the thesis, is presented two or three months before approval is given to send the 80,000 to 100,000 word tome off for external examination. And that soul-destroying or elation-releasing examiner’s verdict can be many months in the delivery: a limbo-like period during which the candidate’s status as a student is ended and her or his receipt of any scholarship or funding guerdon is terminated with perfunctory speed. This is the only time most students spend seriously writing up their research for publication although, naturally, many are more involved in job hunting as they pin their hopes on passing the thesis examination.There is, however, a slightly more palatable alternative to this nail-biting process of the traditional PhD, and that is the PhD by Published Papers (also known as PhD by Publications or PhD by Published Works). The form of my own soon-to-be-submitted thesis, it permits the submission for examination of a collection of papers that have been refereed and accepted (or are in the process of being refereed) for publication in academic journals or books. Apart from the obvious benefits in getting published early in one’s (hopefully) burgeoning academic career, it also takes away a lot of the stress come final submission time. After all, I try to assure myself, the thesis examiners can’t really discredit the process of double-blind, peer-review the bulk of the thesis has already undergone: their job is to examine how well I’ve unified the papers into a cohesive thesis … right? But perhaps they should at least be wary, because, unfortunately, the requirements for this kind of PhD vary considerably from institution to institution and there have been some cases where the submitted work is of questionable quality compared to that produced by graduates from more demanding universities. Hence, this paper argues that in my subject area of interest—film and television studies—there is a huge range in the set requirements for doctorates, from universities that award the degree to film artists for prior published work that has undergone little or no academic scrutiny and has involved little or no on-campus participation to at least three Australian universities that require candidates be enrolled for a minimum period of full-time study and only submit scholarly work generated and published (or submitted for publication) during candidature. I would also suggest that uncertainty about where a graduate’s work rests on this continuum risks confusing a hard-won PhD by Published Papers with the sometimes risible honorary doctorate. Let’s begin by dredging the depths of those murky, quasi-academic waters to examine the occasionally less-than-salubrious honorary doctorate. The conferring of this degree is generally a recognition of an individual’s body of (usually published) work but is often conferred for contributions to knowledge or society in general that are not even remotely academic. The honorary doctorate does not usually carry with it the right to use the title “Dr” (although many self-aggrandising recipients in the non-academic world flout this unwritten code of conduct, and, indeed, Monash University’s Monash Magazine had no hesitation in describing its 2008 recipient, musician, screenwriter, and art-school-dropout Nick Cave, as “Dr Cave” (O’Loughlin)). Some shady universities even offer such degrees for sale or ‘donation’ and thus do great damage to that institution’s credibility as well as to the credibility of the degree itself. Such overseas “diploma mills”—including Ashwood University, Belford University, Glendale University and Suffield University—are identified by their advertising of “Life Experience Degrees,” for which a curriculum vitae outlining the prospective graduand’s oeuvre is accepted on face value as long as their credit cards are not rejected. An aspiring screen auteur simply specifies film and television as their major and before you can shout “Cut!” there’s a degree in the mail. Most of these pseudo-universities are not based in Australia but are perfectly happy to confer their ‘titles’ to any well-heeled, vanity-driven Australians capable of completing the online form. Nevertheless, many academics fear a similarly disreputable marketplace might develop here, and Norfolk Island-based Greenwich University presents a particularly illuminating example. Previously empowered by an Act of Parliament consented to by Senator Ian Macdonald, the then Minister for Territories, this “university” had the legal right to confer honorary degrees from 1998. The Act was eventually overridden by legislation passed in 2002, after a concerted effort by the Australian Universities Quality Agency Ltd. and the Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee to force the accreditation requirements of the Australian Qualifications Framework upon the institution in question, thus preventing it from making degrees available for purchase over the Internet. Greenwich University did not seek re-approval and soon relocated to its original home of Hawaii (Brown). But even real universities flounder in similarly muddy waters when, unsolicited, they make dubious decisions to grant degrees to individuals they hold in high esteem. Although meaning well by not courting pecuniary gain, they nevertheless invite criticism over their choice of recipient for their honoris causa, despite the decision usually only being reached after a process of debate and discussion by university committees. Often people are rewarded, it seems, as much for their fame as for their achievements or publications. One such example of a celebrity who has had his onscreen renown recognised by an honorary doctorate is film and television actor/comedian Billy Connolly who was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters by The University of Glasgow in 2006, prompting Stuart Jeffries to complain that “something has gone terribly wrong in British academia” (Jeffries). Eileen McNamara also bemoans the levels to which some institutions will sink to in search of media attention and exposure, when she writes of St Andrews University in Scotland conferring an honorary doctorate to film actor and producer, Michael Douglas: “What was designed to acknowledge intellectual achievement has devolved into a publicity grab with universities competing for celebrity honorees” (McNamara). Fame as an actor (and the list gets even weirder when the scope of enquiry is widened beyond the field of film and television), seems to be an achievement worth recognising with an honorary doctorate, according to some universities, and this kind of discredit is best avoided by Australian institutions of higher learning if they are to maintain credibility. Certainly, universities down under would do well to follow elsewhere than in the footprints of Long Island University’s Southampton College. Perhaps the height of academic prostitution of parchments for the attention of mass media occurred when in 1996 this US school bestowed an Honorary Doctorate of Amphibious Letters upon that mop-like puppet of film and television fame known as the “muppet,” Kermit the Frog. Indeed, this polystyrene and cloth creation with an anonymous hand operating its mouth had its acceptance speech duly published (see “Kermit’s Acceptance Speech”) and the Long Island University’s Southampton College received much valuable press. After all, any publicity is good publicity. Or perhaps this furry frog’s honorary degree was a cynical stunt meant to highlight the ridiculousness of the practice? In 1986 a similar example, much closer to my own home, occurred when in anticipation and condemnation of the conferral of an honorary doctorate upon Prince Philip by Monash University in Melbourne, the “Members of the Monash Association of Students had earlier given a 21-month-old Chihuahua an honorary science degree” (Jeffries), effectively suggesting that the honorary doctorate is, in fact, a dog of a degree. On a more serious note, there have been honorary doctorates conferred upon far more worthy recipients in the field of film and television by some Australian universities. Indigenous film-maker Tracey Moffatt was awarded an honorary doctorate by Griffith University in November of 2004. Moffatt was a graduate of the Griffith University’s film school and had an excellent body of work including the films Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1990) and beDevil (1993). Acclaimed playwright and screenwriter David Williamson was presented with an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by The University of Queensland in December of 2004. His work had previously picked up four Australian Film Institute awards for best screenplay. An Honorary Doctorate of Visual and Performing Arts was given to film director Fred Schepisi AO by The University of Melbourne in May of 2006. His films had also been earlier recognised with Australian Film Institute awards as well as the Golden Globe Best Miniseries or Television Movie award for Empire Falls in 2006. Director George Miller was crowned with an Honorary Doctorate in Film from the Australian Film, Television, and Radio School in April 2007, although he already had a medical doctor’s testamur on his wall. In May of this year, filmmaker George Gittoes, a fine arts dropout from The University of Sydney, received an honorary doctorate by The University of New South Wales. His documentaries, Soundtrack to War (2005) and Rampage (2006), screened at the Sydney and Berlin film festivals, and he has been employed by the Australian Government as an official war artist. Interestingly, the high quality screen work recognised by these Australian universities may have earned the recipients ‘real’ PhDs had they sought the qualification. Many of these film artists could have just as easily submitted their work for the degree of PhD by Published Papers at several universities that accept prior work in lieu of an original exegesis, and where a film is equated with a book or journal article. But such universities still invite comparisons of their PhDs by Published Papers with honorary doctorates due to rather too-easy-to-meet criteria. The privately funded Bond University, for example, recommends a minimum full-time enrolment of just three months and certainly seems more lax in its regulations than other Antipodean institution: a healthy curriculum vitae and payment of the prescribed fee (currently AUD$24,500 per annum) are the only requirements. Restricting my enquiries once again to the field of my own research, film and television, I note that Dr. Ingo Petzke achieved his 2004 PhD by Published Works based upon films produced in Germany well before enrolling at Bond, contextualized within a discussion of the history of avant-garde film-making in that country. Might not a cynic enquire as to how this PhD significantly differs from an honorary doctorate? Although Petzke undoubtedly paid his fees and met all of Bond’s requirements for his thesis entitled Slow Motion: Thirty Years in Film, one cannot criticise that cynic for wondering if Petzke’s films are indeed equivalent to a collection of refereed papers. It should be noted that Bond is not alone when it comes to awarding candidates the PhD by Published Papers for work published or screened in the distant past. Although yet to grant it in the area of film or television, Swinburne University of Technology (SUT) is an institution that distinctly specifies its PhD by Publications is to be awarded for “research which has been carried out prior to admission to candidature” (8). Similarly, the Griffith Law School states: “The PhD (by publications) is awarded to established researchers who have an international reputation based on already published works” (1). It appears that Bond is no solitary voice in the academic wilderness, for SUT and the Griffith Law School also apparently consider the usual milestones of Confirmation and Final Seminars to be unnecessary if the so-called candidate is already well published. Like Bond, Griffith University (GU) is prepared to consider a collection of films to be equivalent to a number of refereed papers. Dr Ian Lang’s 2002 PhD (by Publication) thesis entitled Conditional Truths: Remapping Paths To Documentary ‘Independence’ contains not refereed, scholarly articles but the following videos: Wheels Across the Himalaya (1981); Yallambee, People of Hope (1986); This Is What I Call Living (1988); The Art of Place: Hanoi Brisbane Art Exchange (1995); and Millennium Shift: The Search for New World Art (1997). While this is a most impressive body of work, and is well unified by appropriate discussion within the thesis, the cynic who raised eyebrows at Petzke’s thesis might also be questioning this thesis: Dr Lang’s videos all preceded enrolment at GU and none have been refereed or acknowledged with major prizes. Certainly, the act of releasing a film for distribution has much in common with book publishing, but should these videos be considered to be on a par with academic papers published in, say, the prestigious and demanding journal Screen? While recognition at awards ceremonies might arguably correlate with peer review there is still the question as to how scholarly a film actually is. Of course, documentary films such as those in Lang’s thesis can be shown to be addressing gaps in the literature, as is the expectation of any research paper, but the onus remains on the author/film-maker to demonstrate this via a detailed contextual review and a well-written, erudite argument that unifies the works into a cohesive thesis. This Lang has done, to the extent that suspicious cynic might wonder why he chose not to present his work for a standard PhD award. Another issue unaddressed by most institutions is the possibility that the publications have been self-refereed or refereed by the candidate’s editorial colleagues in a case wherein the papers appear in a book the candidate has edited or co-edited. Dr Gillian Swanson’s 2004 GU thesis Towards a Cultural History of Private Life: Sexual Character, Consuming Practices and Cultural Knowledge, which addresses amongst many other cultural artefacts the film Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean 1962), has nine publications: five of which come from two books she co-edited, Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and Cinema in Britain in World War Two, (Gledhill and Swanson 1996) and Deciphering Culture: Ordinary Curiosities and Subjective Narratives (Crisp et al 2000). While few would dispute the quality of Swanson’s work, the persistent cynic might wonder if these five papers really qualify as refereed publications. The tacit understanding of a refereed publication is that it is blind reviewed i.e. the contributor’s name is removed from the document. Such a system is used to prevent bias and favouritism but this level of anonymity might be absent when the contributor to a book is also one of the book’s editors. Of course, Dr Swanson probably took great care to distance herself from the refereeing process undertaken by her co-editors, but without an inbuilt check, allegations of cronyism from unfriendly cynics may well result. A related factor in making comparisons of different university’s PhDs by Published Papers is the requirements different universities have about the standard of the journal the paper is published in. It used to be a simple matter in Australia: the government’s Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) held a Register of Refereed Journals. If your benefactor in disseminating your work was on the list, your publications were of near-unquestionable quality. Not any more: DEST will no longer accept nominations for listing on the Register and will not undertake to rule on whether a particular journal article meets the HERDC [Higher Education Research Data Collection] requirements for inclusion in publication counts. HEPs [Higher Education Providers] have always had the discretion to determine if a publication produced in a journal meets the requirements for inclusion in the HERDC regardless of whether or not the journal was included on the Register of Refereed Journals. As stated in the HERDC specifications, the Register is not an exhaustive list of all journals which satisfy the peer-review requirements (DEST). The last listing for the DEST Register of Refereed Journals was the 3rd of February 2006, making way for a new tiered list of academic journals, which is currently under review in the Australian tertiary education sector (see discussion of this development in the Redden and Mitchell articles in this issue). In the interim, some university faculties created their own rankings of journals, but not the Faculty of Creative Industries at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) where I am studying for my PhD by Published Papers. Although QUT does not have a list of ranked journals for a candidate to submit papers to, it is otherwise quite strict in its requirements. The QUT University Regulations state, “Papers submitted as a PhD thesis must be closely related in terms of subject matter and form a cohesive research narrative” (QUT PhD regulation 14.1.2). Thus there is the requirement at QUT that apart from the usual introduction, methodology and literature review, an argument must be made as to how the papers present a sustained research project via “an overarching discussion of the main features linking the publications” (14.2.12). It is also therein stated that it should be an “account of research progress linking the research papers” (4.2.6). In other words, a unifying essay must make an argument for consideration of the sometimes diversely published papers as a cohesive body of work, undertaken in a deliberate journey of research. In my own case, an aural auteur analysis of sound in the films of Rolf de Heer, I argue that my published papers (eight in total) represent a journey from genre analysis (one paper) to standard auteur analysis (three papers) to an argument that sound should be considered in auteur analysis (one paper) to the major innovation of the thesis, aural auteur analysis (three papers). It should also be noted that unlike Bond, GU or SUT, the QUT regulations for the standard PhD still apply: a Confirmation Seminar, Final Seminar and a minimum two years of full-time enrolment (with a minimum of three months residency in Brisbane) are all compulsory. Such milestones and sine qua non ensure the candidate’s academic progress and intellectual development such that she or he is able to confidently engage in meaningful quodlibets regarding the thesis’s topic. Another interesting and significant feature of the QUT guidelines for this type of degree is the edict that papers submitted must be “published, accepted or submitted during the period of candidature” (14.1.1). Similarly, the University of Canberra (UC) states “The articles or other published material must be prepared during the period of candidature” (10). Likewise, Edith Cowan University (ECU) will confer its PhD by Publications to those candidates whose thesis consists of “only papers published in refereed scholarly media during the period of enrolment” (2). In other words, one cannot simply front up to ECU, QUT, or UC with a résumé of articles or films published over a lifetime of writing or film-making and ask for a PhD by Published Papers. Publications of the candidate prepared prior to commencement of candidature are simply not acceptable at these institutions and such PhDs by Published Papers from QUT, UC and ECU are entirely different to those offered by Bond, GU and SUT. Furthermore, without a requirement for a substantial period of enrolment and residency, recipients of PhDs by Published Papers from Bond, GU, or SUT are unlikely to have participated significantly in the research environment of their relevant faculty and peers. Such newly minted doctors may be as unfamiliar with the campus and its research activities as the recipient of an honorary doctorate usually is, as he or she poses for the media’s cameras en route to the glamorous awards ceremony. Much of my argument in this paper is built upon the assumption that the process of refereeing a paper (or for that matter, a film) guarantees a high level of academic rigour, but I confess that this premise is patently naïve, if not actually flawed. Refereeing can result in the rejection of new ideas that conflict with the established opinions of the referees. Interdisciplinary collaboration can be impeded and the lack of referee’s accountability is a potential problem, too. It can also be no less nail-biting a process than the examination of a finished thesis, given that some journals take over a year to complete the refereeing process, and some journal’s editorial committees have recognised this shortcoming. Despite being a mainstay of its editorial approach since 1869, the prestigious science journal, Nature, which only publishes about 7% of its submissions, has led the way with regard to varying the procedure of refereeing, implementing in 2006 a four-month trial period of ‘Open Peer Review’. Their website states, Authors could choose to have their submissions posted on a preprint server for open comments, in parallel with the conventional peer review process. Anyone in the field could then post comments, provided they were prepared to identify themselves. Once the usual confidential peer review process is complete, the public ‘open peer review’ process was closed and the editors made their decision about publication with the help of all reports and comments (Campbell). Unfortunately, the experiment was unpopular with both authors and online peer reviewers. What the Nature experiment does demonstrate, however, is that the traditional process of blind refereeing is not yet perfected and can possibly evolve into something less problematic in the future. Until then, refereeing continues to be the best system there is for applying structured academic scrutiny to submitted papers. With the reforms of the higher education sector, including forced mergers of universities and colleges of advanced education and the re-introduction of university fees (carried out under the aegis of John Dawkins, Minister for Employment, Education and Training from 1987 to 1991), and the subsequent rationing of monies according to research dividends (calculated according to numbers of research degree conferrals and publications), there has been a veritable explosion in the number of institutions offering PhDs in Australia. But the general public may not always be capable of differentiating between legitimately accredited programs and diploma mills, given that the requirements for the first differ substantially. From relatively easily obtainable PhDs by Published Papers at Bond, GU and SUT to more rigorous requirements at ECU, QUT and UC, there is undoubtedly a huge range in the demands of degrees that recognise a candidate’s published body of work. The cynical reader may assume that with this paper I am simply trying to shore up my own forthcoming graduation with a PhD by Published papers from potential criticisms that it is on par with a ‘purchased’ doctorate. Perhaps they are right, for this is a new degree in QUT’s Creative Industries faculty and has only been awarded to one other candidate (Dr Marcus Foth for his 2006 thesis entitled Towards a Design Methodology to Support Social Networks of Residents in Inner-City Apartment Buildings). But I believe QUT is setting a benchmark, along with ECU and UC, to which other universities should aspire. In conclusion, I believe further efforts should be undertaken to heighten the differences in status between PhDs by Published Papers generated during enrolment, PhDs by Published Papers generated before enrolment and honorary doctorates awarded for non-academic published work. Failure to do so courts cynical comparison of all PhD by Published Papers with unearnt doctorates bought from Internet shysters. References Brown, George. “Protecting Australia’s Higher Education System: A Proactive Versus Reactive Approach in Review (1999–2004).” Proceedings of the Australian Universities Quality Forum 2004. Australian Universities Quality Agency, 2004. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.auqa.edu.au/auqf/2004/program/papers/Brown.pdf>. Campbell, Philip. “Nature Peer Review Trial and Debate.” Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science. December 2006. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/> Crisp, Jane, Kay Ferres, and Gillian Swanson, eds. Deciphering Culture: Ordinary Curiosities and Subjective Narratives. London: Routledge, 2000. Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST). “Closed—Register of Refereed Journals.” Higher Education Research Data Collection, 2008. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/research_sector/online_forms_services/ higher_education_research_data_ collection.htm>. Edith Cowan University. “Policy Content.” Postgraduate Research: Thesis by Publication, 2003. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.ecu.edu.au/GPPS/policies_db/tmp/ac063.pdf>. Gledhill, Christine, and Gillian Swanson, eds. Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and Cinema in Britain in World War Two. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. Griffith Law School, Griffith University. Handbook for Research Higher Degree Students. 24 March 2004. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.griffith.edu.au/centre/slrc/pdf/rhdhandbook.pdf>. Jeffries, Stuart. “I’m a celebrity, get me an honorary degree!” The Guardian 6 July 2006. 11 June 2008 ‹http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/0,,1813525,00.html>. Kermit the Frog. “Kermit’s Commencement Address at Southampton Graduate Campus.” Long Island University News 19 May 1996. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.southampton.liu.edu/news/commence/1996/kermit.htm>. McNamara, Eileen. “Honorary senselessness.” The Boston Globe 7 May 2006. ‹http://www. boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/05/07/honorary_senselessness/>. O’Loughlin, Shaunnagh. “Doctor Cave.” Monash Magazine 21 (May 2008). 13 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.monash.edu.au/pubs/monmag/issue21-2008/alumni/cave.html>. Queensland University of Technology. “Presentation of PhD Theses by Published Papers.” Queensland University of Technology Doctor of Philosophy Regulations (IF49). 12 Oct. 2007. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.mopp.qut.edu.au/Appendix/appendix09.jsp#14%20Presentation %20of%20PhD%20Theses>. Swinburne University of Technology. Research Higher Degrees and Policies. 14 Nov. 2007. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.swinburne.edu.au/corporate/registrar/ppd/docs/RHDpolicy& procedure.pdf>. University of Canberra. Higher Degrees by Research: Policy and Procedures (The Gold Book). 7.3.3.27 (a). 15 Nov. 2004. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.canberra.edu.au/research/attachments/ goldbook/Pt207_AB20approved3220arp07.pdf>.
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50

Mercieca, Paul Dominic. "‘Southern’ Northern Soul: Changing Senses of Direction, Place, Space, Identity and Time." M/C Journal 20, no. 6 (December 31, 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1361.

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Abstract:
Music from Another Time – One Perth Night in 2009The following extract is taken from fieldwork notes from research into the enduring Northern Soul dance scene in Perth, Western Australia.It’s 9.30 and I’m walking towards the Hyde Park Hotel on a warm May night. I stop to talk to Jenny, from London, who tells me about her 1970s trip to India and teenage visits to soul clubs in Soho. I enter a cavernous low-ceilinged hall, which used to be a jazz venue and will be a Dan Murphy’s bottle shop before the year ends. South West Soul organiser Tommy, wearing 34-inch baggy trousers, gives me a Northern Soul handshake, involving upturned thumbs. ‘Spread the Faith’, he says. Drinkers are lined up along the long bar to the right and I grab a glass of iced water. A few dancers are out on the wooden floor and a mirror ball rotates overhead. Pat Fisher, the main Perth scene organiser, is away working in Monaco, but the usual suspects are there: Carlisle Derek, Ivan from Cheltenham, Ron and Gracie from Derby. Danny is back from DJing in Tuscany, after a few days in Widnes with old friends. We chat briefly mouth to ear, as the swirling strings and echo-drenched vocals of the Seven Souls’ 45 record, ‘I still love you’ boom through the sound system. The drinkers at the bar hit the floor for Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Move on up’ and the crowd swells to about 80. When I move onto the floor, Barbara Acklin’s ‘Am I the Same Girl?’ plays, prompting reflection on being the same, older person dancing to a record from my teenage years. On the bridge of the piano and conga driven ‘’Cause you’re mine’, by the Vibrations, everybody claps in unison, some above their heads, some behind their backs, some with an expansive, open-armed gesture. The sound is like the crack of pistol. We are all living in the moment, lost in the music, moving forward and backward, gliding sideways, and some of us spinning, dervish-like, for a few seconds, if we can still maintain our balance.Having relocated their scene from England south to the Antipodes, most of the participants described on this night are now in their sixties. Part of the original scene myself, I was a participant observer, dancing and interviewing, and documenting and exploring scene practices over five years.The local Perth scene, which started in 1996, is still going strong, part of a wider Australian and New Zealand scene. The global scene goes back nearly 50 years to the late 1960s. Northern Soul has now also become southern. It has also become significantly present in the USA, its place of inspiration, and in such disparate places as Medellin, in Colombia, and Kobe, in Japan.The feeling of ‘living in the moment’ described is a common feature of dance-oriented subcultures. It enables escape from routines, stretches the present opportunity for leisure and postpones the return to other responsibilities. The music and familiar dance steps of a long-standing scene like Northern Soul also stimulate a nostalgic reverie, in which you can persuade yourself you are 18 again.Dance steps are forward, backward and sideways and on crowded dancefloors self-expression is necessarily attenuated. These movements are repeated and varied as each bar returns to the first beat and in subcultures like Northern Soul are sufficiently stylised as to show solidarity. This solidarity is enhanced by a unison handclap, triggered by cues in some records. Northern Soul is not line-dancing. Dancers develop their own moves.Place of Origin: Soul from the North?For those new to Northern Soul, the northern connection may seem a little puzzling. The North of England is often still imagined as a cold, rainy wasteland of desolate moors and smoky, industrial, mostly working-class cities, but such stereotyping obscures real understanding. Social histories have also tended to focus on such phenomena as the early twentieth century Salford gang members, the “Northern Scuttlers”, with “bell-bottomed trousers … and the thick iron-shod clogs” (Roberts 123).The 1977 Granada television documentary about the key Northern Soul club, Wigan Casino, This England, captured rare footage; but this was framed by hackneyed backdrops of mills and collieries. Yet, some elements of the northern stereotype are grounded in reality.Engels’s portrayal of the horrors of early nineteenth century Manchester in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 was an influential exploration of the birth pains of this first industrial city, and many northern towns and cities have experienced similar traumas. Levels of social disadvantage in contemporary Britain, whilst palpable everywhere, are still particularly significant in the North, as researched by Buchan, Kontopantelis, Sperrin, Chandola and Doran in North-South Disparities in English Mortality 1965–2015: Longitudinal Population Study.By the end of the 1960s, the relative affluence of Harold Wilson’s England began to recede and there was increased political and counter-cultural activity. Into this social climate emerged both skinheads, as described by Fowler in Skins Rule and the Northern Soul scene.Northern Soul scene essentially developed as an extension of the 1960s ‘mod’ lifestyle, built around soul music and fashion. A mostly working-class response to urban life and routine, it also evidenced the ability of the more socially mobile young to get out and stay up late.Although more London mods moved into psychedelia and underground music, many soul fans sought out obscure, but still prototypical Motown-like records, often from the northern American cities Detroit and Chicago. In Manchester, surplus American records were transported up the Ship Canal to Trafford Park, the port zone (Ritson and Russell 1) and became cult club hits, as described in Rylatt and Scott’s Central 1179: The Story of Manchester's Twisted Wheel.In the early 1970s, the rare soul fans found a name for their scene. “The Dave Godin Column” in the fanzine Blues and Soul, published in London, referred for the first time to ‘Northern Soul’ in 1971, really defining ‘Northern’ directionally, as a relative location anywhere ‘north of Watford’, not a specific place.The scene gradually developed specific sites, clothes, dances and cultural practices, and was also popular in southern England, and actually less visible in cities such as Liverpool and Newcastle. As Nowell (199) argues, the idea that Northern Soul was regionally based is unfounded, a wider movement emerging as a result of the increased mobility made possible by railways and motorways (Ritson and Russell 14).Clubs like the Blackpool Mecca and Wigan Casino were very close to motorway slip roads and accessible to visitors from further south. The initial scene was not self-consciously northern and many early clubs, like the ‘Golden Torch’, in Tunstall were based in the Midlands, as recounted by Wall (441).The Time and Space of the DancefloorThe Northern Soul scene’s growth was initially covered in fanzines like Blues and Soul, and then by Frith and Cummings (23-32). Following Cosgrove (38-41) and Chambers (142), a number of insider accounts (Soul Survivors: The Wigan Casino Story by Winstanley and Nowell; Too Darn Soulful: The Story of Northern Soul by Nowell; The In-Crowd: The Story of the Northern & Rare Soul Scene by Ritson & Russell) were followed by academic studies (Milestone 134-149; Hollows and Milestone 83-103; Wall 431-445). The scene was first explored by an American academic in Browne’s Identity Scene and Material Culture: The Place of African American Rare Soul Music on the British Northern Soul Scene.Many clubs in earlier days were alcohol-free, though many club-goers substituted amphetamines (Wilson 1-5) as a result, but across the modern scene, drug-taking is not significant. On Northern Soul nights, dancing is the main activity and drinking is incidental. However, dance has received less subtle attention than it deserves as a key nexus between the culture of the scene and black America.Pruter (187) referred to the earlier, pre-disco “myopia” of many music writers on the subject of dance, though its connection to leisure, pleasure, the body and “serious self-realization” (Chambers 7) has been noted. Clearly Northern Soul dancers find “evasive” pleasure (Fiske 127) and “jouissance” (Barthes v) in the merging of self into record.Wall (440) has been more nuanced in his perceptions of the particular “physical geography” of the Northern Soul dance floor, seeing it as both responsive to the music, and a vehicle for navigating social and individual space. Dancers respond to each other, give others room to move and are also connected to those who stand and watch. Although friends often dance close, they are careful not to exclude others and dancing between couples is rare. At the end of popular records, there is often applause. Some dance all night, with a few breaks; others ‘pace’ themselves (Mercieca et al. 78).The gymnastics of Northern Soul have attracted attention, but the forward dives, back drops and spins are now less common. Two less noticed markers of the Northern Soul dancing style, the glide and the soul clap, were highlighted by Wall (432). Cosgrove (38) also noted the sideways glide characteristic of long-time insiders and particularly well deployed by female dancers.Significantly, friction-reducing talcum powder is almost sacramentally sprinkled on the floor, assisting dancers to glide more effectively. This fluid feature of the dancing makes the scene more attractive to those whose forms of expression are less overtly masculine.Sprung wooden floors are preferred and drink on the floor is frowned upon, as spillage compromises gliding. The soul clap is a communal clap, usually executed at key points in a record. Sometimes very loud, this perfectly timed unison clap is a remarkable, though mostly unselfconscious, display of group co-ordination, solidarity and resonance.Billy from Manchester, one of the Perth regulars, and notable for his downward clapping motion, explained simply that the claps go “where the breaks are” (Mercieca et al. 71). The Northern Soul clap demonstrates key attributes of what Wunderlich (384) described as “place-temporality in urban space”, emerging from the flow of music and movement in a heightened form of synchronisation and marked by the “vivid sense of time” (385) produced by emotional and social involvement.Crucially, as Morris noted, A Sense of Space is needed to have a sense of time and dancers may spin and return via the beat of the music to the same spot. For Northern Soul dancers, the movements forwards, backwards, sideways through objective, “geometric space” are paralleled by a traversing of existential, “conceived space”. The steps in microcosm symbolise the relentless wider movements we make through life. For Lefebvre, in The Production of Space, these “trialectics” create “lived space”.A Sense of Place and Evolving IdentitySpaces are plastic environments, charged with emerging meanings. For Augé, they can also remain spaces or be manipulated into “Non-Places”. When the sense of space is heightened there is the potential for lived spaces to become places. The space/place distinction is a matter of contention, but, broadly, space is universal and non-relational, and place is particular and relational.For Augé, a space can be social, but if it lacks implicit, shared cultural understandings and requires explicit signs and rules, as with an airport or supermarket, it is a non-place. It is not relational. It lacks history. Time cannot be stretched or temporarily suspended. As non-places proliferate, urban people spend more time alone in crowds, ”always, and never, at home” (109), though this anonymity can still provide the possibility of changing identity and widening experience.Northern Soul as a culture in the abstract, is a space, but one with distinct practices which tend towards the creation of places and identities. Perth’s Hyde Park Hotel is a place with a function space at the back. This empty hall, on the night described in the opening, temporarily became a Northern Soul Club. The dance floor was empty as the night began, but gradually became not just a space, but a place. To step onto a mostly empty dance floor early in the night, is to cross liminal space, and to take a risk that you will be conspicuous or lonely for a while, or both.This negotiation of space is what Northern Soul, like many other club cultures has always offered, the promise and risk of excitement outside the home. Even when the floor is busy, it is still possible to feel alone in a crowd, but at some stage in the night, there is also the possibility, via some moment of resonance, that a feeling of connection with others will develop. This is a familiar teenage theme, a need to escape bonds and make new ones, to be both mobile and stable. Northern Soul is one of the many third spaces/places (Soja 137) which can create opportunities to navigate time, space and place, and to find a new sense of direction and identity. Nicky from Cornwall, who arrived in Perth in the early 1970s, felt like “a fish out of water”, until involvement in the Northern Soul scene helped him to achieve a successful migration (Mercieca et al. 34-38). Figure 1: A Perth Northern Soul night in 2007. Note the talcum powder on the DJ table, for sprinkling on the dancefloor. The record playing is ‘Helpless’, by Kim Weston.McRobbie has argued in Dance and Social Fantasy that Northern Soul provides places for women to define and express themselves, and it has appealed to more to female and LGBTQIA participants than the more masculine dominated rock, funk and hip-hop scenes. The shared appreciation of records and the possibilities for expression and sociality in dance unite participants and blur gender lines.While the more athletic dancers have tended to be male, dancing is essentially non-contact, as in many other post-1960s ‘discotheque’ styles, yet there is little overt sexual display or flirtation involved. Male and female styles, based on foot rather than arm movements, are similar, almost ungendered, and the Soul scene has differed from more mainstream nightlife cultures focussed on finding partners, as noted in Soul Survivors: The Wigan Casino Story by Winstanley and Nowell. Whilst males, who are also involved in record buying, predominated in the early scene, women now often dominate the dance floor (Wall 441).The Perth scene is little different, yet the changed gender balance has not produced more partner-seeking for either the older participants, who are mostly in long-term relationships and the newer, younger members, who enjoy the relative gender-blindness, and focus on communality and cultural affinity. Figure 2: A younger scene member, ‘Nash’, DJing in Perth in 2016. He has since headed north to Denmark and is now part of the Nordic Northern Soul scene.In Perth, for Stan from Derby, Northern Soul linked the experiences of “poor white working class kids” with young black Americans (Mercieca et al. 97). Hollows and Milestone (87-94) mapped a cultural geographic relationship between Northern Soul and the Northern cities of the USA where the music originated. However, Wall (442) suggested that Northern Soul is drawn from the more bi-racial soul of the mid-1960s than the funky, Afro-centric 1970s and essentially deploys the content of the music to create an alternative British identity, rather than to align more closely with the American movement for self-determination. Essentially, Northern Soul shows how “the meanings of one culture can be transformed in the cultural practices of another time and place” (Wall 444).Many contemporary Australian youth cultures are more socially and ethnically mixed than the Northern Soul scene. However, over the years, the greater participation of women, and of younger and newer members, has made its practices less exclusive, and the notion of an “in-crowd” more relaxed (Wall 439). The ‘Northern’ connection is less meaningful, as members have a more adaptable sense of cultural identity, linked to a global scene made possible by the internet and migration. In Australia, attachment seems stronger to locality rather than nation or region, to place of birth in Britain and place of residence in Perth, two places which represent ‘home’. Northern Soul appears to work well for all members because it provides both continuity and change. As Mercieca et al. suggested of the scene (71) “there is potential for new meanings to continue to emerge”.ConclusionThe elements of expression and directional manoeuvres of Northern Soul dancing, symbolise the individual and social negotiation of direction, place, space, identity and time. The sense of time and space travelled can create a feeling of being pushed forward without control. It can also produce an emotional pull backwards, like an elastic band being stretched. For those growing older and moving far from places of birth, these dynamics can be particularly challenging. Membership of global subcultures can clearly help to create successful migrations, providing third spaces/places (Soja 137) between home and host culture identities, as evidenced by the ‘Southern’ Northern Soul scene in Australia. For these once teenagers, now grandparents in Australia, connections to time and space have been both transformed and transcended. They remain grounded in their youth, but have reduced the gravitational force of home connections, projecting themselves forward into the future by balancing aspects of both stability and mobility. Physical places and places and their connections with culture have been replaced by multiple and overlapping mappings, but it is important not to romanticise notions of agency, hybridity, third spaces and “deterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia). In a globalised world, most people are still located geographically and labelled ideologically. The Northern Soul repurposing of the culture indicates a transilience (Richmond 328) “differentially available to those in different locations in the field of power” (Gupta and Ferguson 20). However, the way in which Northern Soul has moved south over the decade via migration, has arguably now provided a stronger possible sense of resonance with the lives of black Americans whose lives in places like Chicago and Detroit in the 1960s, and their wonderful music, are grounded in the experience of family migrations in the opposite direction from the South to the North (Mercieca et al. 11). In such a celebration of “memory, loss, and nostalgia” (Gupta and Ferguson 13), it may still be possible to move beyond the exclusion that characterises defensive identities.ReferencesAugé, Marc. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. London: Verso, 2008.Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975Browne, Kimasi L. "Identity Scene and Material Culture: The Place of African American Rare Soul Music on the British Northern Soul Scene." Proceedings of Manchester Music & Place Conference. Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University. Vol. 8. 2006.Buchan, Iain E., Evangelos Kontopantelis, Matthew Sperrin, Tarani Chandola, and Tim Doran. "North-South Disparities in English Mortality 1965–2015: Longitudinal Population Study." Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 71 (2017): 928-936.Chambers, Iain. Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture. London: Macmillan, 1985.Cosgrove, Stuart. "Long after Tonight Is All Over." Collusion 2 (1982): 38-41.Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977.Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844. Trans. Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1892.Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989.Fowler, Pete. "Skins Rule." The Beat Goes On: The Rock File Reader. Ed. Charlie Gillett. London: Pluto Press, 1972. 10-26.Frith, Simon, and Tony Cummings. “Playing Records.” Rock File 3. Eds. Charlie Gillett and Simon Frith. St Albans: Panther, 1975. 21–48.Godin, Dave. “The Dave Godin Column”. Blues and Soul 67 (1971).Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. "Beyond 'Culture': Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference." Cultural Anthropology 7.1 (1992): 6-23.Hollows, Joanne, and Katie Milestone. "Welcome to Dreamsville: A History and Geography of Northern Soul." The Place of Music. Eds. Andrew Leyshon, David Matless, and George Revill. New York: The Guilford Press, 1998. 83-103.Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.McRobbie, Angela. "Dance and Social Fantasy." Gender and Generation. Eds. Angela McRobbie and Mica Nava. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984. 130-161.Mercieca, Paul, Anne Chapman, and Marnie O'Neill. To the Ends of the Earth: Northern Soul and Southern Nights in Western Australia. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2013.Milestone, Katie. "Love Factory: The Sites, Practices and Media Relationships of Northern Soul." The Clubcultures Reader. Eds. Steve Redhead, Derek Wynne, and Justin O’Connor. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. 134-149.Morris, David. The Sense of Space. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004.Nowell, David. Too Darn Soulful: The Story of Northern Soul. London: Robson, 1999.Pruter, Robert. Chicago Soul. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992.Richmond, Anthony H. "Sociology of Migration in Industrial and Post-Industrial Societies." Migration (1969): 238-281.Ritson, Mike, and Stuart Russell. The In Crowd: The Story of the Northern & Rare Soul Scene. London: Robson, 1999.Roberts, Robert. The Classic Slum. London: Penguin, 1971.Rylatt, Keith, and Phil Scott. Central 1179: The Story of Manchester's Twisted Wheel Club. London: Bee Cool, 2001.Soja, Edward W. "Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places." Capital & Class 22.1 (1998): 137-139.This England. TV documentary. Manchester: Granada Television, 1977.Wall, Tim. "Out on the Floor: The Politics of Dancing on the Northern Soul Scene." Popular Music 25.3 (2006): 431-445.Wilson, Andrew. Northern Soul: Music, Drugs and Subcultural Identity. Cullompton: Willan, 2007.Winstanley, Russ, and David Nowell. Soul Survivors: The Wigan Casino Story. London: Robson, 1996.Wunderlich, Filipa Matos. "Place-Temporality and Urban Place-Rhythms in Urban Analysis and Design: An Aesthetic Akin to Music." Journal of Urban Design 18.3 (2013): 383-408.
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