Journal articles on the topic 'Canadian Tire Corporation - History'

To a remarkable extent the course of Canadian housing policy from 1935 to 1952 was set by the deputy minister of finance, W. C. Clark. By developing programs that stimulated the building of new homes for sale, he was able to deflect growing calls for a substantial federal program of subsidized low rental housing. Working in close consultation with representatives of mortgage-lending institutions, including D'Arcy Leonard, and with David Mansur, inspector of mortgages for Sun Life and later president of Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Clark was able to build an alliance of realty interests, home builders, life insurance companies, and material supply companies, such as retail lumber dealers. This alliance prevailed over public-housing supporters: trade unions, large construction companies, architects, social workers and urban planners. Clark was largely responsible for drafting the Dominion Housing Act of 1935 and the national housing acts of 1938 and 1944. Although all his legislation was geared to building new homes, and reducing political criticism, these acts also contained misleading and unworkable provisions for low-income housing. During World War II Clark reluctantly accepted rent-control and federal rental housing, but he restricted their scope and oversaw their phasing out by his long-time associate Mansur. Clark was also crucial in developing government programs that fostered large residential builders to plan future urban communities.

Introduction: In the Southwest Oncology Group trial SWOG S0777 (NCT00644228), lenalidomide (LEN), bortezomib (BORT), and dexamethasone (DEX; RVd) demonstrated superior median progression-free survival (PFS; 43 months vs. 30 months, P = 0.002) and overall survival (OS; 75 months vs. 64 months, P = 0.025) compared with Rd in patients with newly diagnosed multiple myeloma (NDMM) not eligible for immediate autologous stem cell transplantation (ASCT). This analysis compared the cost-effectiveness of RVd with existing treatment options for Canadian patients with NDMM not intended for ASCT (including LEN and DEX (Rd); and BORT, melphalan, and prednisone [VMP]), and regimens such as daratumumab plus VMP [D-VMP], which is currently under review by the pan-Canadian Oncology Drug Review (pCODR). Methods: The natural history of disease was modelled using a partitioned survival analysis and comprised of 3 health states (pre-progression, post-progression, and death). PFS and OS for RVd and Rd were estimated based on analysis of the SWOG S0777 trial data. Survival estimates for VMP and D-VMP were informed by a previously published network meta-analysis (NMA). Although cyclophosphamide, BORT, and DEX (CyBorD) is a commonly used therapy for MM patients in Canada, due to the lack of randomized trial data on its efficacy VMP was used as a proxy. Given the non-proportional hazards for PFS observed between regimens with a fixed duration (e.g. VMP) and those used until progression (e.g. Rd), a piecewise model was fit to the PFS data from the MM-020 trial comparing melphalan, prednisone, and thalidomide (MPT) and Rd, and hazard ratios (HR) from the NMA for VMP and D-VMP were applied to MPT. The OS curve for VMP was generated by applying the published HR to the modelled Rd arm. Given the paucity of OS data for D-VMP, this was assumed to be equivalent to RVd, based on feedback from clinical experts. A threshold analysis was also conducted to estimate the OS HR needed for D-VMP to be cost-effective at a threshold of Canadian dollars (CAD)100,000 compared with RVd. Quality-of-life estimates were obtained from data collected from transplant-ineligible patients in the MM-020 trial. Costs included drug acquisition and administration, supportive care and monitoring, adverse events, subsequent treatment, and end-of-life care. The analysis was conducted from the perspective of the Canadian public payer over a 30-year time horizon. Cost-effectiveness results were presented in terms of the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) per quality-adjusted life year (QALY). Costs and outcomes were discounted at a rate of 1.5% per year. The robustness of the results and the impact of the model's assumptions were tested in sensitivity and scenario analyses. Results: In the reference case, RVd was associated with the highest total number of life years gained and QALYs. ICERs for RVd were CAD 43,632 per QALY gained versus Rd, CAD 70,488 per QALY gained versus VMP, and RVd was superior to D-VMP (more QALYs and lower costs). Scenario analyses showed that the most sensitive factors were the use of the second-best fitting model for extrapolating OS (RVd vs. VMP ICER increased by CAD 13,007) and the assumption of no drug wastage (RVd vs. Rd ICER decreased by CAD 7,236). Age of patients at baseline was associated with substantial variation in ICER across all comparators, with older patients having larger ICERs. For D-VMP to be cost effective over RVd at the threshold of CAD 100,000, the required HR for OS will have to be 0.18 or better versus VMP in the ALCYONE (NCT02195479) trial; for comparison, the current PFS and time to second progression (PFS2) HRs have been reported as 0.43 and 0.59 in the ALCYONE trial. Conclusions: This cost-effectiveness analysis demonstrated that RVd is associated with both survival and QALY gains compared with treatments that are currently available or pending approval and is a cost-effective strategy in the management of patients with NDMM not intended for ASCT in Canada, a setting with a high unmet need in terms of patient survival. Disclosures Sebag: Janssen: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Amgen: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Takeda: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Celgene: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees. Stakiw:Janssen: Honoraria, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Novartis: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; Roche: Research Funding; BMS: Honoraria; Amgen: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; Celgene: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; Lundbeck: Honoraria; Sanofi: Honoraria. Stephens:Amaris Consulting: Employment; Celgene Corporation: Consultancy. Padhiar:Amaris Consulting: Employment. Kim:Celgene Corporation: Employment, Equity Ownership. Shum:Celgene Corporation: Employment, Equity Ownership. Dhanasiri:Celgene Corporation: Employment, Equity Ownership. Trudel:Amgen: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Takeda: Honoraria; Astellas: Research Funding; Genentech: Research Funding; Sanofi: Honoraria; Janssen: Honoraria, Research Funding; Pfizer: Honoraria; Celgene: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; GlaxoSmithKline: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding.

This case study explores the potential purchase of the Forzani Group Limited by the Canadian Tire Corporation. Students take on the role of Sara Brown, a new member of Canadian Tire’s board of directors. With an emergency meeting scheduled for the following morning to decide the fate of the proposed acquisition, Brown has been called upon to provide input to the board given her aptitude for corporate acquisitions and mergers. The case profiles both companies and details the state of the retail sport industry in Canada. Notably, there is emphasis on company product offerings (e.g., merchandise), financials (e.g., balance sheets), and goodwill (e.g., charities) to provide students with pertinent information to develop their argument(s) for and/or against the acquisition. Primary learning objectives include engaging in environmental scanning exercises (e.g., SWOT analyses) and evaluating market forces present in the retail sporting goods industry.

This article describes a series of failed attempts by the English and French networks of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to present translated news. On one level, it is concerned with the impulse that prompts people during moments of crisis to suggest translated news as a solution to a problems related to Canadian identity and the reasons their suggestions to translate news programs are not acted upon. On a deeper level, it is concerned with a methodological and epistemological problem facing translation historians: what happens when the relevant documents are not preserved because journalists’ notions of translation differ from those of historians? It recommends that historians turn to “para-archives,” or collections created and preserved by non-news organizations, that contain descriptions of the documents journalists have not kept. These para-archives can provide evidence for the creation of plausible narratives about the competing interests shaping decisions not to produce translated news. They can also reveal how historians actively produce the categories they use to define their object of study.

Between 1941 and 1947 a federal crown corporation called Wartime Housing Limited (WHL) successfully built and managed thousands of rental units for war workers and veterans. WHL represents a directly interventionist approach to housing problems and demonstrates that the federal government could efficiently meet social needs by participating in housing supply. Though the Advisory Committee on Reconstruction recommended a national, comprehensive housing program emphasizing low-rental housing, the federal government initiated a post-war program promoting home ownership and private enterprise and, in the process, neglected long-range planning and low income housing. In addition, during the late 1940s, WHL's stock of affordable housing was privatized. This market-oriented perspective hindered advances in postwar housing policy in the same way that, for decades, the poor law tradition blocked government acceptance of unemployment relief. This paper reviews the housing record of WHL and examines the federal government's failure to redirect WHL's expertise into a permanent low-rental housing agency at the war's end.

Internships are a common component of journalism education in Canada and, in some cases, a requirement for graduation. I look at the history and development of internships, both paid and unpaid, in the English-language national television newsroom of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Canada’s public broadcaster. This account is informed by interviews with CBC staff, union officials, and former CBC interns as well as a survey of post-secondary education institutions that place interns with the CBC. I explore the establishment of unpaid internships at the CBC and the role of the Canadian Media Guild in creating the contract language defining the parameters of internship placements. Internships at the CBC are perceived by some of the Corporation’s staff as a responsibility of the public broadcaster, and representatives of the colleges and universities that participate in the program view the internships as valuable. I argue that the absence of institutional statistics on internships is a missed opportunity to deepen understanding of the role of internships at the CBC, and that systematic information-gathering by academic institutions regarding placements and offers of paid employment would be a useful resource in the debate over unpaid internships.

Abstract The Contempra is widely considered to be the first telephone designed and manufactured in Canada. Designed in 1967, Canada’s centennial year, it was a conspicuous departure from prevailing conventions of North American telephone styling in both its conception and design. It was designated as an icon of Canadian modern design and became a symbol of Canada’s identity as a modern nation at home and abroad. Its popularity in domestic and international markets set the stage for the transformation of its developer, Northern Electric, into a global telecommunication leader and Canada’s most valuable corporation, eventually renamed Nortel Networks. The history of the Contempra’s design and development offers an opportunity to consider how designed technological artefacts take on cultural and ideological meaning. Most accounts celebrate the Contempra as a distinctly Canadian design story, but do not elaborate on or question its ‘Canadian-ness’, and they are silent on the circumstances and events that culminated in the telephone’s development. This article examines the historical events, ideological discourses, human relationships, design values and material constraints that set the stage for what can be best described as the Contempra telephone’s performance of modern Canadian nationalism.

Between 1965 and 1972 the provincial government of British Columbia introduced a new resource towns policy aimed at changing the relationship between corporations, the provincial government, and resource based settlements. The Instant Towns Act, together with the creation of new municipalities, represented a new level of government involvement and intervention in resource towns. The policy served to pass townsite costs from the companies to the workforce and to rationalise the further involvement of the state in resource extraction activities. The provincial government and the companies argued that a new settlements policy was necessary to replace the older model of company towns in order to attract a new and more stable labour force. At the same time as this policy was being shaped, the government was also engaged in developing industrial infrastructure to facilitate the expansion and the changing needs of capital. The Instant Towns Act of 1965 was part of the legislation for the expansion of large firms in the resource extraction sector. This form of infrastructure planning, to coincide with the changing structure of capital, reflects a level of state intervention in the economy of British Columbia, in other Canadian provinces, and indeed in most other western capitalist societies in recent years.

In 1991, the Canadian documentary Starting Fire with Gunpowder was produced, focusing in part on the history of early media productions by the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation (IBC). It examined how the creation of Inuktitut media content could be an effective means of creative improvisation, linguistic and cultural preservation, and transmission of traditional knowledge. Almost 20 years later, the Internet serves as one of the primary communicative methods for young Inuit in the Canadian Arctic. However, it remains to be seen whether the quality of Inuktitut media online can compare with the example of linguistic and cultural preservation set by the visionaries of the early IBC. This article challenges prevailing critical approaches to the Inuit as linguistically and culturally vulnerable. It views Inuktitut New Media content as an embodiment of the word airaq (‘edible roots’), used here as a model of strength, resilience, and adaptability. It concludes that the creativity and prolificacy of the early IBC productions should set the standard for a new generation of Inuktitut content creators online.

This article outlines impulses toward internationalism in women's programming during the twentieth century at two public service broadcasters: the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in Canada and the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) in Australia. These case studies show common patterns as well as key differences in the establishment of an international frame for the modern domestic sphere. Research conducted in paper and audio recording archives relating to nonfiction programming for women demonstrates pervasive tensions between women's international versus national solidarities. The article argues that these contradictions must be highlighted—rather than papered over in a simplistic understanding of such programming as reflecting a binary domestic ideology of private versus public, home versus world—to fully understand media history and cultural memory from a gendered perspective.

This article outlines the evolution of sports broadcasting on Canadian television, focusing on the broadcast of the Olympic Games. I argue that history of the Olympics on national television exemplifies the evolution of the idea of public service television in Canada. Specifically, it reflects the delicate balance between the nation’s public and private broadcasters, whose relationship extends far beyond mere competition. The public service raison d’être and mission have nonetheless been called into question throughout the development of television. Incidentally, the values of the Olympic movement were also called into question in this period, during which the Games evolved from an all-amateur Olympiad to a fully commercial spectacle designed for (and by) television.

AbstractThe Valour and the Horroris a series of three documentary films describing Canadian participation during the Second World War which were aired by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in 1992. The series aggressively challenged “official” war history, arguing that while ordinary soldiers served with dignity and bravery, the incompetence and immorality of senior British and Canadian commanders produced terrible blunders and losses and grotesque assaults against civilian populations in Germany. This article analyzes the controversy that surrounded the series, a controversy that mushroomed into a political struggle over who had the right to control “memory” and who had the right to produce and interpret “reality.” The struggle produced a Senate subcommittee investigation, placed the CBC under intense pressure and scrutiny and evoked strong reactions from veterans' groups and the journalistic and artistic communities. Three frameworks are used to assess the forces that contend against each other in media production: the hegemonic view (that the media celebrate and reinforce the dominant interests in society); the organizational or institutional perspective (that media organizations pursue their own interests even if these interests do not necessarily coincide with those of other dominant groups in society); and the journalist-centred framework (that journalists as professionals exercise considerable discretion over their own work). The article suggests that each of these perspectives can provide valuable insights, but that each by itself fails to provide a satisfactory explanation for the events. By utilizing multiple perspectives for the analysis, a wider range of questions is addressed.

NOTE: THIS ARTICLE WAS PUBLISHED WITH THE INFORMING SCIENCE INSTITUTE. Aim/Purpose...................................................................................................................................................................................................... The African-Canadian Career Excellence (ACCE) initiative was developed to address the loss of highly-educated, English-speaking Black youth from the Greater Montreal Area (Quebec, Canada) facing issues of unemployment and underemployment. Background........................................................................................................................................................................................................ The ACCE initiative partners – African and Caribbean Synergic inter-organizational Network of Canada (ACSioN Network), Black Community Resource Center (BCRC) and Community Economic Development and Employability Corporation (CEDEC) – worked to mitigate the exodus of educated Black youth through building their professional capacities to attain meaningful, sustainable local employment; encouraging their contribution to Quebec’s vitality, and assisting employers to diversify their workforce. Methodology....................................................................................................................................................................................................... The Black undergraduate students of African descent who were surveyed were English-speaking youth from the Greater Montreal Area; these included Canadian citizens, landed immigrants and temporary and permanent residents. Survey respondents will be referred to as Black African undergraduate students for the remainder of this article. In the 2011-2012 academic year, Black African undergraduate students from five Montreal post-secondary institutions were surveyed. On-campus promotion and in-person solicitation resulted in a non-random convenience sample of 92 individuals. Data from the 34 categorical and open-ended questions in an English-language online survey were analysed using SurveyMonkey, Microsoft Excel and SPSS. Contribution........................................................................................................................................................................................................ Montreal's English-speaking Black African undergraduate students represent an under-documented demographic in migration studies, specifically in terms of career plans, workplace skills, career path, employment resource awareness and discrimination. This portrait highlights the experience and career expectations of Montreal Black African undergraduate youth and is relevant within the contexts of Black history, community development, skills and career development, education and employment. Findings.............................................................................................................................................................................................................. These results suggest that English-speaking Black African undergraduates expected to follow an appropriate career path in their desired field by attaining meaningful and sustainable local employment commensurate with their skills. Many of these youth were not able to access the same career opportunities as their peers, and therefore left before fully participating in Quebec’s economy. Recommendation for Practitioner................................................................................................................................................................... This article suggests that businesses seeking to diversify their workforce can collaborate with public institutions and civil society organizations to better prepare and integrate Montreal’s skilled Black African youth. It is suggested that career-advancement training focus on addressing job security and skills gap concerns, in addition to awareness of discrimination in the workplace and strategies for identifying and redressing the situation. Recommendation for Researcher.................................................................................................................................................................... Future research could be conducted within the same Montreal population to compare the findings a decade later. Subsequent outreach to targeted employers might reveal progress and additional recommendations in diversifying their workplace. Impact on Society.............................................................................................................................................................................................. Collaboration among public institutions, private businesses and civil society organizations can lead to increased integration of Black African youth into the labor market.

Background: AML is driven by a small subpopulation of leukemia stem cells (LSCs), which possess stem-cell properties such as quiescence and self-renewal that are linked to therapy resistance and relapse. The LSC17 score was derived from genes differentially expressed between functionally validated LSC+ and LSC- cell fractions from 78 AML patients. The LSC17 score was strongly associated with survival in 4 independent cohorts of AML patients treated with curative intent (n = 908), and accurately predicted initial response. Patients with high LSC17 scores had poor outcomes with standard treatment strategies. The LSC17 score remained highly significant in multivariate analyses, independent of commonly used prognostic factors. A critical advantage of the LSC17 test over cytogenetic analysis is its rapid turnaround time (24-48h on a NanoString platform), providing clinicians with a powerful tool for upfront risk stratification. To date, no RNA-based, stem cell-derived score has been transitioned into a Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) certified laboratory. Study design and methods: The study consists of 2 phases. Phase 1 aims to validate the assay in a CLIA certified laboratory setting. Phase 2 aims to determine prospectively the feasibility and prognostic power of LSC17 score testing in newly diagnosed AML patients in the real-world setting. Clinical endpoints include primary induction failure rate, relapse free survival and overall survival. All patients with a suspected diagnosis of de novo or secondary AML, who are deemed fit and appropriate by their treating physician to undergo intensive induction chemotherapy, are considered for this study. Patients who received any prior anti-leukemia treatments (except hydroxyurea) and patients with a confirmed diagnosis of acute promyelocytic leukemia are excluded. Current participating centres include Princess Margaret Cancer Centre (Toronto), Juravinski Cancer Centre (Hamilton), and The Ottawa Hospital Cancer Centre (Ottawa). Pre-study sample size analysis suggests that 150 patients will be required to demonstrate a hazard ratio for death of 2.3 between patients with a high and low LSC17 score (α = 0.05, power = 0.8). The survival for the high and low LSC17 score groups will be compared using the Cox proportional hazards model. Traditional risk stratification will also be tested within a Cox proportional hazards model. Phase 1 of the study has been completed and several key quality control measures have been created. Initial derivation and validation of the LSC17 score was performed using standard chemistry on the NanoString platform; for CLIA lab validation, the assay was transitioned to Elements© chemistry, which does not require custom codeset manufacture by NanoString. The original AML reference cohort was retested using Elements© chemistry to derive an absolute median threshold for prospective LSC17 score determination in individual patients. The lab validation process compared and found no difference in LSC17 scores between samples processed by Ficoll or collected in Paxgene for ease of processing. A standardised quality assurance (QA) process was completed to identify optimal sample requirements as well as specimen storage conditions, score stability during sample storage and turnaround time for testing. An algorithm has been created using the laboratory information system to allow standardised and rapid calculation of the LSC17 score from NanoString nCounter output data. The LSC17 score can be tested on peripheral blood or bone marrow, although bone marrow samples are preferred for patients with very low peripheral blast counts. Samples are ideally stored in RNA Paxgene tubes for RNA stability and to maximize RNA yield. The prospective phase of the study (Phase 2) opened in April 2018 and as of June 2019, 233 patients have been enrolled, of which 120 received induction chemotherapy. 54 patients were excluded due to an alternative diagnosis or failed QA. The remaining patients had non-intensive therapy based on patient choice. Standard prognostic markers including cytogenetics, molecular studies and targeted sequencing using a 49-gene AML panel are performed in parallel to the LSC17 score. Treatment was administered according to physician preference, based on patient history and results of standard prognostic assays, when available. The study continues to recruit and is open to collaborations in other centres. Disclosures Ng: Celgene: Research Funding. Leber:Novartis: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau; Pfizer: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau; Celgene Corporation: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau; AbbVie: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau; Astellas: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Jazz: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Alexion: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau. Sabloff:Celgene: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Astellas Pharma Canada: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; ASTX: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Jazz Pharmaceuticals: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Pfizer Canada: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Actinium Pharmaceuticals, Inc: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Novartis Pharmaceuticals: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Sanofi Canada: Research Funding. Minden:Trillium Therapetuics: Other: licensing agreement. Wang:NanoString: Other: Travel and accommodation; Trilium therapeutics: Other: licensing agreement, Research Funding; Pfizer AG Switzerland: Honoraria, Other: Travel and accommodation; Pfizer International: Honoraria, Other: Travel and accommodation.

Abstract Introduction: The advent of next generation sequencing (NGS) has brought intense interest to the complex genetic landscape of myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPN). However, data regarding clinical outcomes in the context of novel MPN therapies such as JAK inhibitors are scarce. Limited data indicate that high molecular risk signature (HMR, presence of at least one mutation in ASXL1, EZH2, IDH1/2, SRSF2) or multiple mutations may be associated with decreased spleen response and a shorter time to discontinuation of Ruxolitinib in myelofibrosis (Patel et al, Blood 2015). Methods: All myelofibrosis patients seen in the MPN program at Princess Margaret Hospital between November 2009 and May 2016 and treated with JAK1/2 inhibitor therapy were identified. NGS molecular profiling of 54 genes (39 hotspot region; 15 complete coding region coverage) was performed on peripheral blood or bone marrow samples using the TruSight Myeloid Sequencing Panel. Reporting was restricted to well-covered, exonic nonsynonymous, intronic splice site, and known pathogenic synonymous variants. Variants with global mean allele frequency >1% were identified using multiple population databases (1000 genomes, ESP, ExAC) and excluded. The primary endpoint was time from start of JAK1/2 inhibitor therapy to treatment failure (TTF) defined as treatment discontinuation, progression to accelerated phase or leukemic transformation, spleen progression or death. Secondary endpoints included best spleen, anemia and IWG response achieved by 48 weeks of treatment and overall survival. Response was assessed according to the 2013 revised IWG-MRT criteria. Transfusion dependency was assessed as any transfusion in 12 weeks prior to treatment or being identified as transfusion dependent in medical history. Results: Of 159 patients treated with JAK1/2 inhibitors at our institution, 102 met the inclusion criteria (see Table 1). Patients were excluded if; no sample was available for analysis (19), short use of JAK inhibitor prior to transplant (9), active clinical trial (5), in accelerated phase/acute leukemia (4) and others (20). First JAK inhibitor used was ruxolitinib in 77 patients and momelotinib in 25. At least one mutation was identified in every patient. Twenty (20%) patients had one mutation, 32 (31%) had 2 mutations and 50 (49%) patients had ≥ 3 mutations. Eighty (82%) patients had the JAK2V617F mutation, 15 (15%) had mutations in CALR, 4 (4%) had MPL mutations and one patient was triple negative. One patient had mutations in both CALR and JAK2 while another had mutations in MPL and CALR. Forty-eight (47%) patients had mutations consistent with HMR profile. Mutation profile is summarized in Table 2. With median follow-up of 2.5 years, 51 (50%) patients experienced treatment failure. On univariate analysis, TTF was associated with DIPSS, pre-treatment transfusion status and Hb <100 prior to initiating JAK inhibitor therapy. However, TTF was not associated with specific driver mutations, the number of mutations or HMR profile. Exploratory analysis of genes mutated in ≥5% of the population showed EZH2 (p=0.004) and CBL (p=0.005) mutated patients had shorter TTF. Multi-variable analysis employing anemia <100 and DIPSS with either of the number of mutations or HMR profile did not show any association with TTF. There was a trend towards TTF in patients with Hb<100 (HR 2.21, 95%CI: 0.99-4.95, p=0.05). Of 102 patients, 91 were evaluable for spleen response with 43 (47%) achieving a spleen response by 48 weeks of treatment. Twelve (23%) of the 53 patients evaluated met criteria for anemia response. Neither spleen nor anemia response was associated with the use of a particular JAK inhibitor. Of the 95 patients with at least 48-week follow-up, best response while on treatment was clinical improvement and spleen response in 29 (31%) and 19 (20%) patients respectively. Conclusions: In this study of myelofibrosis patients treated with JAK inhibitors, EZH2 and CBL mutated patients had shorter TTF. We did not find any association between TTF and number of mutations or other high risk mutations such as ASXL1/SRSF2. Anemia was the only significant independent predictor of shorter TTF. Our findings highlight the need for multicenter collaborative studies on a large number of patients and cautious use of mutation profiling results in routine clinical decision making with current treatment approaches. Spiegel and McNamara are co-primary authors. Disclosures Panzarella: Cellgene: Consultancy. Schimmer:Novartis: Honoraria. Schuh:Amgen: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees. Yee:Novartis Canada: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding. Kamel-Reid:BMS: Research Funding. Gupta:Novartis: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; Incyte Corporation: Consultancy, Research Funding.

Background Direct oral anticoagulants (DOACs) have emerged as a treatment of choice in patients with chronic atrial fibrillation (AF) or for secondary prevention of venous-thromboembolism (VTE). In myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPN) very small series have been reported and robust data reporting the safety/efficacy profile of these drugs is not available. We conducted an international, multi-country, retrospective study involving 19 hematologic centers from Europe, US and Canada, with the aim to describe in a large cohort of MPN patients the incidence of thrombosis and bleeding complications associated with DOAC use in real word clinical practice. Methods Centers reported in an electronic CRF data on 442 patients (M/F: 221/221; median age: 65 years) with a WHO diagnosis of polycythemia vera (PV, n=178), essential thrombocythemia (ET, n=172) and primary myelofibrosis (PMF, n=92) who had received DOACs (Rivaroxaban n=187; Apixaban n=157; Dabigatran n=50; Edoxaban n=48) for either primary and secondary antithrombotic prophylaxis in atrial fibrillation (AF, n=203) or secondary prophylaxis of venous thromboembolism (VTE, n=239). Eighty-two patients (18.6%) shifted to DOAC after a previous exposure to a vitamin K antagonist (VKA) mainly due to patient preference (8.4%), bleeding/thrombosis (5.2%) or INR instability (4.1%). In 60 patients, DOAC was discontinued after a median duration of 1.1 years; reasons included completion of a pre-determined duration (2.9%), patient decision (0.9%), major bleeding (2.5%) or thrombosis (2.9%), minor bleeding (0.9%), thrombocytopenia (2.0%), surgery (0.9%), or other (0.5%). Results Median time from MPN diagnosis to DOAC initiation was 4.4 years (range: 0-34.7 years). Concomitant therapies included antiplatelet agents (31%) and cytoreductive drugs in 90% (hydroxyurea in 87%of cases). After a median follow-up of 1.83 years, 32 major thrombotic events (rate: 3.3% pts/yr) and 26 major bleeding events (rate: 2.6% pts/yr) were reported. 1. AF. Ten thrombotic events (rate: 2.1% pts/yr) occurred in patients receiving DOACs: 4 TIA, 3 MI and 3 DVT of the lower extremities (LE); the rate was remarkably different in primary prevention (1.5% pts/yr) vs. secondary prophylaxis (i.e. after a previous thrombosis, mainly arterial: 4.6% pts/yr). This rate was almost double that reported in secondary prophylaxis in non-MPN population in randomized clinical trials (RCTs) (2.1-3.2% pts/yr). Previous arterial thrombosis was the only significant risk factor for recurrences in this subset (HR: 3.89, p=0.035). 2. VTE. Twenty-two recurrences while receiving DOACs were reported (5 arterial, 10 DVT of the LE +/- PE, 3 splanchnic vein and 4 others venous; rate: 4.5% pts/yr) and irrespective of initial site of thrombosis and type of DOACs. This rate was similar to MPN patients receiving VKAs (5.3% pts/yrs - De Stefano V et al, Leukemia 2016) but higher than in non-MPN population in RCTs (1.4-1.9% pts/yr). In univariate analysis, significant factors for recurrences were: previous arterial thrombosis (HR: 3.55, p=0.023), hypertension (HR: 2.88, p=0.021) and diabetes (HR: 3.33, p=0.018). 3. Among 26 major bleeding events, 12 were gastrointestinal, 7 intramuscular, 1 CNS and 6 in other sites. The overall rate was 2.6% patients/year, which is comparable to that reported in MPN patients under VKA (2.4% pt/yrs, De Stefano V et al, ibidem) and in non-MPN population of RCTs (1.60-3.11% pt/yrs). The frequency of major bleeding was similar in AF (3% pt/yrs) and VTE (2.3% pt/yrs) setting. In univariate analysis, significant risk factors were PMF diagnosis (HR: 2.95, p=0.007) and the use of Dabigatran in comparison to the other DOACs (HR: 2.91, p=0.016) whereas no increase was due to antiplatelet drugs. Conclusions This is the largest observational study describing vascular events in MPN patients receiving DOACs for prevention of thrombosis in AF or secondary prevention of VTE. Overall, the rate of re-thrombosis is similar to that reported with warfarin in MPN and double the rate of non-MPN population. The highest rate was found in patients with a previous history of arterial thrombosis and with cardiovascular risk factors. In regard to bleeding, we highlight the significant bleeding tendency in PMF and treatment with Dabigatran. In conclusion, the risk/benefit profile of DOACs in MPN is similar to that of Warfarin. Disclosures Barbui: AOP-Orphan: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Novartis: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding. De Stefano:Novartis: Other: Personal fee, Research Funding; Amgen: Other: Personal fee; Bayer: Other: Non-financial support; Celgene: Other: Non-financial support, personal fee; Janssen Cilag: Other: Non-financial support. Vannucchi:AbbVie: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau; Blueprint: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Incyte: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Novartis: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau; Celgene/BMS: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau. Palandri:Novartis: Consultancy, Honoraria. Harrison:Celgene: Honoraria, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Gilead Sciences: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; Incyte Corporation: Speakers Bureau; Janssen: Speakers Bureau; Novartis: Honoraria, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Shire: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; AOP Orphan Pharmaceuticals: Honoraria; Promedior: Honoraria; Roche: Honoraria; Sierra Oncology: Honoraria; CTI Biopharma Corp: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau. Griesshammer:Novartis: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; AOP Orphan: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; Celgene: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; CTI: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; Shire: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau. Koschmieder:Celgene/BMS: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Other: travel support, Research Funding; Janssen: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Other: travel support, Research Funding; Geron Corporation: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Other: travel support; Incyte/Ariad: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Other: travel support; Roche: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Other: travel support; CTI Biopharma: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Other: travel support; Novartis: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Other: travel support, Research Funding; Pfizer: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Other: travel support; Bayer: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Other: travel support; AOP Pharma: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Other: travel support, Research Funding; Promedior: Other. Benevolo:Amgen: Honoraria; Celgene: Honoraria; Novartis: Honoraria. Gupta:Pfizer: Consultancy; Novartis: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Sierra Oncology: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Bristol MyersSquibb: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Incyte: Honoraria, Research Funding. Mascarenhas:Incyte, Kartos, Roche, Promedior, Merck, Merus, Arog, CTI Biopharma, Janssen, and PharmaEssentia: Other: Research funding (institution); Celgene, Prelude, Galecto, Promedior, Geron, Constellation, and Incyte: Consultancy.

Although most patients (pts) with newly diagnosed stage III or IV Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) will be cured with initial therapy (tx), about 20-25% of pts will have relapsed or refractory (R/R) HL. The standard initial tx for adults with advanced stage HL, doxorubicin, bleomycin, vinblastine, and dacarbazine (ABVD), is associated with pulmonary toxicity due to bleomycin. Recent studies have demonstrated that in pts with a negative interim PET scan, the omission of bleomycin after 2 cycles is non-inferior with regards to survival. However, a significant proportion of pts have a positive interim PET scan and require escalation to BEACOPP - an effective but toxic regimen associated with secondary malignancies and infertility. Recently, the addition of brentuximab vedotin (BV) to AVD chemotherapy (BV-AVD) demonstrated improved modified and traditionally-defined progression-free survival (PFS) compared to ABVD. However, the BV-AVD regimen was associated with higher rates of neutropenia, sepsis, and peripheral neuropathy compared to ABVD, and there still was a ~20% failure rate. In adolescent and young adult pts with advanced stage HL, there is a similar ~20% failure rate using ABVE-PC (AB, vincristine, etoposide, prednisone, cyclophosphamide) and response-adapted radiation therapy (RT) - with RT use in a majority of pts. There remains room to improve outcomes in pediatric and adult pts with newly diagnosed advanced stage HL. The PD-1 pathway plays a critical role in the pathogenesis of HL and the disease is exquisitely sensitive to PD-1 blockade, as demonstrated in clinical trials of nivolumab and pembrolizumab in pts with heavily treated R/R HL. A phase II trial evaluating nivolumab combined with AVD (N-AVD) demonstrated promising safety and efficacy in pts with newly diagnosed HL. The incorporation of PD-1 blockade into front-line tx represents a clear opportunity to potentially improve the outcomes and tolerability of initial tx for pts with newly diagnosed advanced stage HL. A meeting was convened between the North American cooperative group Lymphoma Committee chairs, expert HL researchers and physicians, representatives from the Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program (CTEP), and patient advocates with the goals of harmonizing treatment approaches in advanced stage HL across pediatric and adult pts and reaching consensus regarding the optimal study design for a randomized trial incorporating PD-1 blockade into frontline tx for pts with advanced stage HL. Study champions were identified from each of the North American cooperative groups (SWOG, ECOG-ACRIN, Alliance, Canadian Cancer Trials Group, and Children's Oncology Group) and experts in imaging, radiation oncology, lymphoma biology and patient-reported outcomes were included in the study team. The resulting clinical trial - S1826, led by SWOG Cancer Research Network - represents the largest advanced stage HL study in the history of the North American cooperative groups and the first prospective collaboration between COG and the adult cooperative groups in HL. S1826 (NCT03907488) is a randomized, phase III study of N-AVD versus BV-AVD in pts with newly diagnosed advanced stage HL. Eligible pts must be 12 years or older and have stage III or IV HL. Pts are randomized 1:1 to receive 6 cycles of treatment with either N-AVD or BV-AVD. Pts randomized to BV-AVD are required to receive G-CSF prophylaxis for neutropenia. Pts are eligible to receive RT to residually metabolically active areas on the end of treatment (EOT) PET scan at the discretion of the treating investigator. Pts are stratified during randomization based on age, international prognostic score, and intention to use EOT RT. The primary endpoint is to compare the PFS in pts randomized to N-AVD versus BV-AVD. Secondary endpoints include overall survival, event-free survival, the EOT complete metabolic response rate, and the safety and tolerability of N-AVD compared to BV-AVD. Another key secondary endpoint will be a comparison of patient-reported symptoms and health-related quality of life (overall, fatigue, neuropathy) between the study arms. 940 eligible pts are expected to be accrued over 4 years with a total of 987 pts assuming an expected ineligible rate of 5%. The S1826 study represents an unprecedented effort across the North American clinical trial cooperative groups to improve the cure rate in advanced stage HL and harmonize treatment approaches across pediatric and adult pts. Figure Disclosures Herrera: Merck: Consultancy, Research Funding; Genentech, Inc./F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd: Consultancy, Research Funding; Bristol Myers Squibb: Consultancy, Other: Travel, Accomodations, Expenses, Research Funding; Seattle Genetics: Consultancy, Research Funding; Gilead Sciences: Consultancy, Research Funding; AstraZeneca: Research Funding; Karyopharm: Consultancy; Immune Design: Research Funding; Pharmacyclics: Research Funding. Rutherford:Heron: Consultancy; Regeneron: Research Funding; Juno: Consultancy; Dova: Consultancy; Genentech/Roche: Research Funding; AstraZeneca: Consultancy; Celgene: Consultancy; Karyopharm: Consultancy, Research Funding; Kite: Consultancy; LAM Therapeutics: Research Funding; Seattle Genetics: Consultancy. Parsons:Seattle Genetics: Consultancy. Prica:astra zeneca: Honoraria; seattle genetics: Honoraria; Gilead: Honoraria. Shipp:Ono Pharmaceutical: Honoraria; Celgene: Honoraria; Merck: Research Funding; Bristol Myers Squibb: Consultancy, Research Funding; Bayer: Honoraria. Crump:Kite/Gilead: Consultancy; Roche: Consultancy; Servier: Consultancy. Kahl:BeiGene: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Roche Laboratories Inc: Consultancy; Pharmacyclics LLC: Consultancy; Genentech: Consultancy; Celgene Corporation: Consultancy; Janssen: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals LP: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; AbbVie: Consultancy; ADC Therapeutics: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Acerta: Consultancy, Research Funding. Leonard:Miltenyi: Consultancy; Roche/Genentech: Consultancy; BMS/Celgene: Consultancy; MEI Pharma: Consultancy; Gilead/Kite: Consultancy; Bayer: Consultancy; ADC Therapeutics: Consultancy; Regeneron: Consultancy; Epizyme: Consultancy; AstraZeneca: Consultancy; GenMab: Consultancy; Sutro: Consultancy; Karyopharm: Consultancy. Smith:Karyopharm: Consultancy, Research Funding; TG Therapeutics: Consultancy, Research Funding; Celgene: Consultancy, Research Funding; Janssen: Consultancy; BMS: Consultancy; FortySeven: Research Funding; Pharmacyclics: Research Funding; Acerta: Research Funding; Genentech/Roche: Consultancy, Other: Support of parent study and funding of editorial support, Research Funding. Friedberg:Acerta Pharma - A member of the AstraZeneca Group, Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals.: Other; Seattle Genetics: Research Funding; Roche: Other: Travel expenses; Astellas: Consultancy; Portola Pharmaceuticals: Consultancy; Kite Pharmaceuticals: Research Funding; Bayer: Consultancy.

Abstract Introduction: Genetic alterations at 9p24.1 resulting in overexpression of programmed death-1 (PD-1) ligands are near-universal in cHL (Roemer et al, J Clin Oncol 2016); cHL may thus be uniquely sensitive to PD-1 blockade. Nivolumab (nivo), an anti-PD-1 monoclonal antibody, was associated with an objective response rate (ORR) of 69% in relapsed/refractory (R/R) cHL after auto-HCT and irrespective of prior brentuximab vedotin (BV) in the phase 2 CheckMate 205 study (Armand et al, J Clin Oncol 2018; NCT02181738). Whether some patient (pts) can derive very long clinical benefit, whether depth of response predicts long-term outcome, whether treatment (Tx) can be interrupted in complete remission (CR), and whether the safety profile of nivo in R/R cHL changes with prolonged Tx all remain unclear. We therefore present an updated analysis of CheckMate 205, focusing on long-term efficacy and safety. Methods: This international, single-arm, multi-cohort study enrolled pts aged ≥18 y with R/R cHL after auto-HCT. Pts were BV naïve (Cohort A), had prior BV failure after auto-HCT (Cohort B), or had received BV before and/or after auto-HCT (Cohort C). Pts received nivo 3 mg/kg every 2 wk until disease progression (PD)/unacceptable toxicity. Pts in Cohort C discontinued nivo after 1 y in CR and could resume if they relapsed within 2 y of the last dose. Primary endpoint was ORR per independent radiology review committee (IRC); additional endpoints included duration of response (DOR) per IRC, progression-free survival (PFS) per IRC, overall survival (OS), and safety. Time to next Tx (TTNT: time from first dose to next systemic Tx or death) was an exploratory post-hoc analysis. Responses were assessed using International Working Group 2007 criteria. Results: In total, 243 pts were enrolled to Cohorts A (n=63), B (n=80), and C (n=100). Baseline characteristics have been previously described (Armand et al, J Clin Oncol 2018). At data cut-off, minimum follow-up was 31 mo and 49 pts (20%) were still on Tx; the most common reason for discontinuation was PD (35%). Median duration of Tx was 14 mo. ORR per IRC was 71% (65%, 71%, 75% in Cohorts A, B, C, respectively) with a best overall response (BOR) of CR in 21% (32%, 14%, 20% in Cohorts A, B, C, respectively). Among 51 pts who achieved CR, 20 had CR as the first response and 31 improved from partial remission (PR), mostly (n=28/31) within 1 year of first PR. Median time to response was 2 mo, and to CR was 4 mo. Within the first 6, 12, and 18 mo, 68%, 71%, and 71% of pts, respectively, achieved a response. Median DOR was 18 mo overall, and was 32 and 13 mo in pts with a BOR of CR and PR, respectively. Among responders, 64%, 44%, 31%, and 21% of pts had a DOR of at least 6, 12, 18, and 24 mo, respectively. Overall, 11 pts in Cohort C discontinued with persistent investigator-assessed CR; 2 reinitiated nivo due to PD. Median (95% CI) PFS per IRC among all pts was 15 (11-19) mo (Figure A), and was 17, 12 and 15 mo in Cohorts A, B, and C, respectively. Median OS was not reached in any cohort; 24-mo OS rates were 90%, 86%, and 86% in Cohorts A, B, and C, respectively, and were similar among pts in CR, PR, or with stable disease (SD; Figure B). Median TTNT was 29, 27, and 20 mo in Cohorts A, B, and C, respectively. The most common Tx-related adverse events (AEs) of any grade (G) were fatigue (24%), diarrhea (16%), and rash (12%), each <1% G3-4. Tx-related infections were reported in 15% of pts, 2% G3-4. Tx-related infusion related reactions were reported in 34 pts (14%), <1% G3-4. The most commonly reported immune-mediated AE category was rash, which was G3-4 in 4 pts (2%). In total, 26 pts (11%) experienced an AE of any cause leading to discontinuation. There were no Tx-related deaths. Conclusions: With the longest phase 2-3 study follow-up of a checkpoint inhibitor in R/R cHL to date, nivo was associated with frequent and durable responses regardless of BV Tx history. More than 1 in 5 responders remained in response ≥2 years later. With extended follow-up, additional pts achieved CR in all cohorts. Pts with CR had longer PFS than pts with PR or SD. However, pts with both PR and SD had prolonged OS, unlike pts with PD, which may suggest that clinical benefit duration is not well predicted by conventional response criteria. Nivo continued to be well tolerated, with no new safety signals. Characteristics of long-term responders will be presented. Study support: BMS. Medical writing: A Gill, Caudex, funded by BMS Figure. Figure. Disclosures Armand: Infinity: Consultancy; Affimed: Consultancy, Research Funding; Pfizer: Consultancy; Otsuka: Research Funding; Adaptive: Research Funding; Merck: Consultancy, Research Funding; Bristol-Myers Squibb: Consultancy, Research Funding; Roche: Research Funding; Tensha: Research Funding. Younes:Celgene: Honoraria; Genentech: Research Funding; Janssen: Honoraria, Research Funding; Bayer: Honoraria; Novartis: Research Funding; J&J: Research Funding; Astra Zeneca: Research Funding; BMS: Honoraria, Research Funding; Merck: Honoraria; Abbvie: Honoraria; Takeda: Honoraria; Seattle Genetics: Honoraria; Roche: Honoraria, Research Funding; Sanofi: Honoraria; Incyte: Honoraria; Curis: Research Funding; Pharmacyclics: Research Funding. Zinzani:PFIZER: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Takeda: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; TG Pharmaceuticals: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Verastem: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau; Gilead: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau; PFIZER: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Celgene: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau; Janssen: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; BMS: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau; MSD: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; Celltrion: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau; Merck: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Bayer: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Astra Zeneca: Speakers Bureau; Merck: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Roche: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; SERVIER: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau; TG Pharmaceuticals: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Bayer: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees. Collins:ADC Therapeutics: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; Takeda: Consultancy, Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; Celleron: Consultancy, Honoraria; Gilead: Consultancy, Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; Pfizer: Consultancy, Honoraria; Roche: Consultancy, Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; Celgene Corporation: Research Funding; BMS: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; MSD: Consultancy, Honoraria; Amgen: Research Funding. Ramchandren:Merck: Research Funding; Bristol-Myers Squibb: Consultancy; Seattle Genetics: Consultancy, Research Funding; Pharmacyclics LLC an AbbVie Company: Consultancy, Research Funding; Janssen: Consultancy, Research Funding. Cohen:Novartis: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; BioInvent: Consultancy; Celgene: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Janssen: Research Funding; Takeda: Research Funding; Seattle Genetics: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Infinity Pharmaceuticals: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Bristol-Myers Squibb: Research Funding; AbbVie: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Pharmacyclics: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Millennium: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees. De Boer:Merck: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; MSD: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; EISA: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees. Kuruvilla:Lundbeck: Honoraria; Gilead: Consultancy, Honoraria; Seattle Genetics: Consultancy, Honoraria; Janssen: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation: Research Funding; Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Canada: Research Funding; Abbvie: Consultancy; Merck: Consultancy, Honoraria; Karyopharm: Honoraria; Roche: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; BMS: Consultancy, Honoraria; Amgen: Honoraria; Celgene: Honoraria. Trněný:F. Hoffman-La Roche Ltd: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Other: Advisory board, Research Funding; Sandoz: Honoraria; Gilead: Honoraria; Takeda: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Other: Advisory board; Abbvie: Honoraria, Research Funding; Celgene: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Other: Advisory board; Incyte: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Other: Advisory board; Morphosys: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Other: Advisory board; Janssen: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Other: Advisory board. Shipp:Merck: Research Funding; Bayer: Research Funding; AstraZeneca: Honoraria; Bristol-Myers Squibb: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding. Sacchi:Bristol-Myers Squibb: Employment, Equity Ownership. Sumbul:Bristol-Myers Squibb: Employment. Ansell:Trillium: Research Funding; Pfizer: Research Funding; Regeneron: Research Funding; Celldex: Research Funding; Seattle Genetics: Research Funding; Affimed: Research Funding; Merck & Co: Research Funding; LAM Therapeutics: Research Funding; Bristol-Myers Squibb: Research Funding; Takeda: Research Funding.

The model of Late Pleistocene-Holocene sequence stratigraphy of the subaqueous Red River delta and the adjacent shelf is proposed by interpretation of high-resolution seismic documents and comparison with previous research results on Holocene sedimentary evolution on the delta plain. Four units (U1, U2, U3, and U4) and four sequence stratigraphic surfaces (SB1, TS, TRS and MFS) were determined. The formation of these units and surfaces is related to the global sea-level change in Late Pleistocene-Holocene. SB1, defined as the sequence boundary, was generated by subaerial processes during the Late Pleistocene regression and could be remolded partially or significantly by transgressive ravinement processes subsequently. The basal unit U1 (fluvial formations) within incised valleys is arranged into the lowstand systems tract (LST) formed in the early slow sea-level rise ~19-14.5 cal.kyr BP, the U2 unit is arranged into the early transgressive systems tract (E-TST) deposited mainly within incised-valleys under the tide-influenced river to estuarine conditions in the rapid sea-level rise ~14.5-9 cal.kyr BP, the U3 unit is arranged into the late transgressive systems tract (L-TST) deposited widely on the continental shelf in the fully marine condition during the late sea-level rise ~9-7 cal.kyr BP, and the U4 unit represents for the highstand systems tract (HST) with clinoform structure surrounding the modern delta coast, extending to the water depth of 25-30 m, developed by sediments from the Red River system in ~3-0 cal.kyr BP.ReferencesBadley M.E., 1985. Practical Seismic Interpretation. International Human Resources Development Corporation, Boston, 266p.Bergh G.D. 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Transgressive and highstand systems tracts and post-glacial transgression, the East China Sea. Sedimentary Geology, 122, 217-232.Stattegger K., Tjallingii R., Saito Y., Michelli M., Nguyen T.T., Wetzel A., 2013. Mid to late Holocene sea-level reconstruction of Southeast Vietnam using beachrock and beach-ridge deposits. Global and Planetary Change, 110, 214-222.Tanabe S., Hori K., Saito Y., Haruyama S., Doanh L.Q., Sato Y., Hiraide S., 2003a. Sedimentary facies and radiocarbon dates of the Nam Dinh-1 core from the Song Hong (Red River) delta, Vietnam. Journal of Asian Earth Sciences, 21, 503-513.Tanabe S., Hori K., Saito Y., Haruyama S., Phai V.V., Kitamura A., 2003b. Song Hong (Red River) delta evolution related to millennium-scale Holocene sea-level changes. Quaternary Science Reviews, 22(21-22), 2345-2361.Tanabe S., Saito Y., Lan V.Q., Hanebuth T.J.J., Lan N.Q., Kitamura A., 2006. Holocene evolution of the Song Hong (Red River) delta system, northern Vietnam. 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Shoplifting is a major issue in Canada, with 87 percent of small and medium sized stores victimized each year. As a result, shopkeepers face a difficult decision between allowing this loss of product, or detaining the individual and facing tortious liability for an unlawful arrest. The legal debate regarding allowing a shopkeeper’s privilege to detain an individual, when they have reasonable suspicion of theft, attempts to balance competing values of personal liberty and the protection of property. Due to the changing context surrounding this issue, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice recently endorsed the shopkeeper’s privilege in Mann v. Canadian Tire Corporation Ltd. In Mann, Justice Akhtar drew on existing Canadian, American, and United Kingdom jurisprudence to articulate a new test for shopkeeper’s privilege in Canada.

In the summer of 1999, four ships carrying 599 Fujianese people arrived on the west coast of Canada. They survived a desperate and dangerous journey only for the Canadian Government to put them in prison. After numerous deportations, there are still about 40 of these people in Canadian prisons as of January 2001. They have been in jail for over a year and a half under mere suspicion of flight risk. About 24 people have been granted refugee status. Most people deported to China have been placed in Chinese prisons and fined. It is worth remembering that these migrants may have been undocumented but they are not "illegal" in that they have mobility rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes everyone's right to leave any country and to seek asylum. It can be argued that it is not the migrants who are illegal, but the unjust laws that criminalize their freedom of movement. In considering people's rights, we need to keep in mind not only the civil and political rights that the West tends to privilege, but equally important social and economic rights as well. As a local response to a global phenomenon, Direct Action Against Refugee Exploitation (DAARE) formed in Vancouver to support the rights of the Fujianese women, eleven of whom at the time of writing are still being held in the Burnaby Correctional Centre for Women (BCCW). In DAARE’s view, Immigration Canada's decision to detain all these people is based on a racialized group-profiling policy which violates basic human rights and ignores Canadian responsibility in the creation of the global economic and societal conditions which give rise to widespread migration. In light of the Canadian government's plans to implement even more punitive immigration legislation, DAARE endorses the Coalition for a Just Immigration and Refugee Policy's "Position Paper on Bill C31." They call for humanitarian review and release for the remaining Fujianese people. This review would include a few released refugee claimants who are still in Canada, children, women who were past victims of family planning, people facing religious persecution and, of course, those who are still in prison after 18 months and who have never been charged with any crime. Suspicion of flight risk is not a valid reason to incarcerate people for such a long time. Who Is a Migrant? The lines between "voluntary" and "forced" migration are no longer adequate to explain the complexities of population movements today. Motives for forced displacement include political, economic, social and environmental factors. This spectrum runs from the immediate threats to life, safety and freedom due to war or persecution, to situations where economic conditions make the prospects of survival marginal and non-existent. (Moussa 2000). Terms like "economic migrant" and "bogus refugee" have been used in the media to discredit migrants such as the Fujianese and to foster hostility against them. This scapegoating process oversimplifies the situation, for all refugees and all migrants are entitled to the basic respect due all human beings as enshrined in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. There can be multiple reasons for an individual to migrate—ranging from family reunification to economic pressures to personal survival; to fear of government corruption and of political persecution, to name just a few. The reduction of everything to merely the economic does not allow one to understand why migration is occurring and likely to increase in the future. Most immigrants to Canada could also be described as economic migrants. Conrad Black is an economic migrant. The privileging of rich migrants over poor ones romanticizes globalization as corporate progress and ignores the immense human suffering it entails for the majority of the world's population as the gap between the wealthy and the poor rapidly increases. Hundreds of years ago, when migrants came to this aboriginal territory we now call Canada, they came in order to survive—in short, they too were "economic migrants." Many of those migrants who came from Europe would not qualify to enter Canada today under its current immigration admissions guidelines. Indeed, over 50% of Canadians would not be able to independently immigrate to Canada given its current elitist restrictions. One of the major reasons for an increase in migration is the destruction of rural economies in Asia and elsewhere in the world. Millions of people have been displaced by changes in agriculture that separate people from the land. These waves of internal migration also result in the movement of peoples across national borders in order to survive. Chinese provinces such as Fujian and Guangdong, whose people have a long history of overseas travel, are particularly common sources of out-migration. In discussing migration, we need to be wary of how we can inadvertently reinforce the colonization of First Nations people unless we consciously work against that by actively supporting aboriginal self-determination. For example, some First Nations people have been accused of "smuggling" people across borders—this subjects them to the same process of criminalization which the migrants have experienced, and ignores the sovereign rights of First Nations people. We need ways of relating to one another which do not reenact domination, but which work in solidarity with First Nations' struggles. This requires an understanding of the ways in which racism, colonialism, classism, and other tactics through which "dividing and conquering" take place. For those of us who are first, second, third, fourth, fifth generation migrants to this land, our survival and liberation are intimately connected to that of aboriginal people. History Repeating Itself? The arrival of the Fujianese people met with a racist media hysteria reminiscent of earlier episodes of Canadian history. Front page newspaper headlines such as "Go Home" increased hostility against these people. In Victoria, people were offering to adopt the dog on one of the ships at the same time that they were calling to deport the Chinese. From the corporate media accounts of the situation, one would think that most Canadians did not care about the dangerous voyage these people had endured, a voyage during which two people from the second ship died. Accusations that people were trying to enter the country "illegally" overlooked how historically, the Chinese, like other people of colour, have had to find ways to compensate for racist and classist biases in Canada's immigration system. For example, from 1960 to 1973, Canada granted amnesty to over 12,000 "paper sons," that is, people who had immigrated under names other than their own. The granting of "legal" status to the "paper sons" who arrived before 1960 finally recognized that Canada's legislation had unfairly excluded Chinese people for decades. From 1923 to 1947, Canada's Chinese Exclusion Act had basically prevented Chinese people from entering this country. The xenophobic attitudes that gave rise to the Chinese Exclusion Act and the head tax occurred within a colonial context that privileged British migrants. Today, colonialism may no longer be as rhetorically attached to the British empire, but its patterns—particularly the globally inequitable distribution of wealth and resources—continue to accelerate through the mechanism of transnational corporations, for example. As Helene Moussa has pointed out, "the interconnections of globalisation with racist and colonialist ideology are only too clear when all evidence shows that globalisation '¼ legitimise[s] and sustain[s] an international system that tolerates an unbelievable divide not only between the North and the South but also inside them'" (2000). Moreover, according to the United Nations Development Programme, the income gap between people in the world's wealthiest nations and the poorest nations has shifted from 30:1 in 1960 to 60:1 in 1990 and to 74:1 in 1997. (Moussa 2000) As capital or electronic money moves across borders faster than ever before in what some have called the casino economy (Mander and Goldsmith), change and instability are rapidly increasing for the majority of the world's population. People are justifiably anxious about their well-being in the face of growing transnational corporate power; however, "protecting" national borders through enforcement and detention of displaced people is a form of reactive, violent, and often racist, nationalism which scapegoats the vulnerable without truly addressing the root causes of instability and migration. In short, reactive nationalism is ineffective in safe-guarding people's survival. Asserting solidarity with those who are most immediately displaced and impoverished by globalization is strategically a better way to work towards our common survival. Substantive freedom requires equitable economic relations; that is, fairly shared wealth. Canadian Response Abilities The Canadian government should take responsibility for its role in creating the conditions that displace people and force them to migrate within their countries and across borders. As a major sponsor of efforts to privatize economies and undertake environmentally devastating projects such as hydro-electric dams, Canada has played a significant role in the creation of an unemployed "floating population" in China which is estimated to reach 200 million people this year. Punitive tactics will not stop the movement of people, who migrate to survive. According to Peter Kwong, "The well-publicized Chinese government's market reforms have practically eliminated all labor laws, labour benefits and protections. In the "free enterprise zones" workers live virtually on the factory floor, laboring fourteen hours a day for a mere two dollars—that is, about 20 cents an hour" (136). As Sunera Thobani has phrased it, "What makes it alright for us to buy a t-shirt on the streets of Vancouver for $3, which was made in China, then stand up all outraged as Canadian citizens when the woman who made that t-shirt tries to come here and live with us on a basis of equality?" Canada should respond to the urgent situations which cause people to move—not only on the grounds upon which Convention refugees were defined in 1949 (race, religion, nationality, social group, political opinion) which continue to be valid—but also to strengthen Canada's system to include a contemporary understanding that all people have basic economic and environmental survival rights. Some migrants have lives that fit into the narrow definition of a UN Convention refugee and some may not. Those who do not fit this definition have nonetheless urgent needs that deserve attention. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has pointed out that there are at least 18 million people working in 124 export zones in China. A living wage in China is estimated to be 87 cents per hour. Canadians benefit from these conditions of cheap labour, yet when the producers of these goods come to our shores, we hypocritically disavow any relationship with them. Responsibility in this context need not refer so much to some stern sense of duty, obligation or altruism as to a full "response"—intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual—that such a situation provokes in relations between those who "benefit"—materially at least—from such a system and those who do not. References Anderson, Sarah, et al. Field Guide to the Global Economy. New York: New Press, 2000. Canadian Council of Refugees. "Migrant Smuggling and Trafficking in Persons." February 20, 2000. Canadian Woman Studies: Immigrant and Refugee Women. 19.3 (Fall 1999). Chin, Ko-lin. Smuggled Chinese. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999. Coalition for a Just Immigration and Refugee Policy. "Position Paper on Bill C31." 2000. Davis, Angela. The Angela Davis Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, Foundation Against Trafficking in Women, and International Human Rights Law Group. "Human Rights Standards for the Treatment of Trafficked Persons." January 1999. Henry, Frances and Tator, Carol. Racist Discourses in Canada's English Print Media. Toronto: Canadian Foundation for Race Relations, 2000. Jameson, Fredric and Miyoshi, Masao, Eds. The Cultures of Globalization. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Kwong, Peter. Forbidden Workers. New York: New Press, 1997. Mander, Jerry and Goldsmith, Edward, Eds. The Case Against the Global Economy. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996. Moussa, Helene. "The Interconnections of Globalisation and Migration with Racism and Colonialism: Tracing Complicity." 2000. ---. "Violence against Refugee Women: Gender Oppression, Canadian Policy, and the International Struggle for Human Rights." Resources for Feminist Research 26 (3-4). 1998 Migrant Forum statement (from Asia Pacific People's Assembly on APEC) 'Occasional Paper Migration: an economic and social analysis.' Pizarro, Gabriela Rodriguez. "Human Rights of Migrants." United Nations Report. Seabrook, Jeremy. "The Migrant in the Mirror." New Internationalist 327 (September 2000): 34-5. Sharma, Nandita. "The Real Snakeheads: Canadian government and corporations." Kinesis. October/November (1999): 11. Spivak, Gayatri. "Diasporas Old and New: Women in the Transnational World." Class Issues. Ed. Amitava Kumar. New York: New York University Press, 1997. States of Disarray: The Social Effects of Globalization. London: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UN RISD), 1995. Thobani, Sunera. "The Creation of a ‘Crisis’." Kinesis October/November (1999): 12-13. Whores, Maids and Wives: Making Links. Proceedings of the North American Regional Consultative Forum on Trafficking in Women, 1997.

A number of Canadians need to borrow money from lenders to purchase residential properties through mortgage route. The history of existing mortgage system in Canada is more than 100 years old. Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) was created in 1946 to regulate the industry. There were 4.3 million homes under mortgage debt until 2017 and 0.5 million homes had Home Equity Line of Credit. In 2018, the Banking Regulatory Authority Canada imposed a New Stress Test on mortgage borrowers and changed the criteria of loan approval. Previously, the lenders do not need to test the affordability of those borrowers who put a down payment of 20% or above but now the lenders must need to test the borrowing power of all applicants under higher interest rates imposed by the government rather than the actual rate of interest being offered by lenders to borrowers. The descriptive study examined the influence of stress test in lending process, borrowing capacity of home buyers and loan affordability to pay off the debt under agreed terms. The study explains the current situation of delinquency and possible default after analyzing 370 samples collected from the city of Brampton. The research findings also highlighted the testing criteria, payment frequencies and actual amount to pay off the debt after purchasing.

BY an interesting co-incidence, on taking up Knowlton Nash's Cue the Elephant!, the pages fell open at the story of Norman Jewison's difficulties with General Electric when it objected to his "sexy and impudent" shows and his decision to use writer Reuben Ship, who had been blacklisted in the US as a communist. The CBC should never be at the mercy of sponsors and their hucksters -- as it so frequently has been and still is! Nash's book is what it claims to be: Backstage Tales at the CBC. His previous work, The Microphone Wars (1994) was his history of the Corporation. The new book is about the artists and celebrities, from John Drainie to the Happy Gang and on to The Royal Canadian Air Farce, who brought CBC radio and television to life and became its bright personalities and stars. The younger generation of today will never have...

Abstract: In the summer of 2008, one of the worst cases of food contamination in Canadian history was confirmed when the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and Maple Leaf Foods issued a “health hazard alert” warning the public not to serve or consumer Sure Slice brand cold cuts. This localized warning quickly spiralled into a major listeriosis epidemic. More than 200 Maple Leaf Foods products were recalled, but not in time to prevent 20 deaths, the illness of thousands more and a class action lawsuit. This article explores Maple Leaf’s crisis response strategy. Locating our analysis in relation to theorizing about the legitimacy problems that corporations and other powerful actors face in late modernity, it demonstrates that Maple Leaf’s apology was effective in terms of restoring consumer trust and confidence to the extent that it addressed the uncertainties and anxieties that are endemic to contemporary risk society; and, more broadly, it "worked" by disrupting the distribution of risk and blame to other stakeholders.Résumé : Pendant l’été 2008, un des pires cas de contamination alimentaire de l’histoire canadienne a été confirmé quand l’Agence canadienne d’inspection des aliments et les Aliments Maple Leaf ont émis une alerte de risque pour la santé avertissant le public de ne pas servir ou consommer les viandes froides « Sure Slice ». Cet incident localisé a rapidement pris l’envergure d’une épidémie de listériose. Maple Leaf a dû rappeler plus de deux cents de ses produits, mais cette action est arrivée trop tard pour prévenir la mort de vingt personnes, la maladie de milliers d’autres et une action collective contre la compagnie. Dans cet article, nous explorons la stratégie menée par Maple Leaf pour contrer cette crise. Nous situons notre analyse dans le cadre de théories sur les problèmes de légitimité éprouvés par les compagnies commerciales et autres dans la période actuelle de la modernité avancée. Nous démontrons ainsi que les excuses faites par Maple Leaf se sont avérées efficaces, car elles ont rétabli la confiance du public à leur égard dans la mesure où elles ont diminué les craintes et incertitudes qui caractérisent la société du risque contemporaine. Plus généralement, ces excuses ont réussi en interrompant la diffusion des risques et accusations vers d’autres parties prenantes.

Abstract: In 1992, the Société Radio-Canada (SRC), French network of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, created an Office of the Ombudsman, mandated to address public complaints concerning journalistic practices. This article proposes first to better define the concept of journalistic accountability. After presenting a history of this function and giving an account of its relative scarcity, it describes the model of accountability set up at the SRC as revealed through an analysis of the annual reports from 1992-93 to 2000-01. Then it draws up a preliminary summary of the evolution of this form of journalistic self-regulation at the SRC. Résumé : Depuis 1992, la Société Radio-Canada (SRC) s'est dotée d'un Bureau de l'ombudsman qui a le mandat d'enquêter sur les plaintes du public concernant les pratiques journalistiques. Le présent article propose d'abord de mieux définir la notion d'imputabilité journalistique. Après avoir dressé un historique de cette fonction et rendu compte de sa rareté relative, il décrit le modèle d'imputabilité mis en place à la Société Radio-Canada tel que le révèle une analyse des rapports annuels de 1992-93 à 2000-01. Enfin, il dresse un premier état des lieux de l'évolution de cette forme d'autorégulation journalistique à la SRC.

1991 An afternoon in late 1991 found me on a Sydney bus reading Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991). A disembarking passenger paused at my side and, as I glanced up, hissed, ‘I don’t know how you can read that filth’. As she continued to make her way to the front of the vehicle, I was as stunned as if she had struck me physically. There was real vehemence in both her words and how they were delivered, and I can still see her eyes squeezing into slits as she hesitated while curling her mouth around that final angry word: ‘filth’. Now, almost fifteen years later, the memory is remarkably vivid. As the event is also still remarkable; this comment remaining the only remark ever made to me by a stranger about anything I have been reading during three decades of travelling on public transport. That inflamed commuter summed up much of the furore that greeted the publication of American Psycho. More than this, and unusually, condemnation of the work both actually preceded, and affected, its publication. Although Ellis had been paid a substantial U.S. $300,000 advance by Simon & Schuster, pre-publication stories based on circulating galley proofs were so negative—offering assessments of the book as: ‘moronic … pointless … themeless … worthless (Rosenblatt 3), ‘superficial’, ‘a tapeworm narrative’ (Sheppard 100) and ‘vile … pornography, not literature … immoral, but also artless’ (Miner 43)—that the publisher cancelled the contract (forfeiting the advance) only months before the scheduled release date. CEO of Simon & Schuster, Richard E. Snyder, explained: ‘it was an error of judgement to put our name on a book of such questionable taste’ (quoted in McDowell, “Vintage” 13). American Psycho was, instead, published by Random House/Knopf in March 1991 under its prestige paperback imprint, Vintage Contemporary (Zaller; Freccero 48) – Sonny Mehta having signed the book to Random House some two days after Simon & Schuster withdrew from its agreement with Ellis. While many commented on the fact that Ellis was paid two substantial advances, it was rarely noted that Random House was a more prestigious publisher than Simon & Schuster (Iannone 52). After its release, American Psycho was almost universally vilified and denigrated by the American critical establishment. The work was criticised on both moral and aesthetic/literary/artistic grounds; that is, in terms of both what Ellis wrote and how he wrote it. Critics found it ‘meaningless’ (Lehmann-Haupt C18), ‘abysmally written … schlock’ (Kennedy 427), ‘repulsive, a bloodbath serving no purpose save that of morbidity, titillation and sensation … pure trash, as scummy and mean as anything it depicts, a dirty book by a dirty writer’ (Yardley B1) and ‘garbage’ (Gurley Brown 21). Mark Archer found that ‘the attempt to confuse style with content is callow’ (31), while Naomi Wolf wrote that: ‘overall, reading American Psycho holds the same fascination as watching a maladjusted 11-year-old draw on his desk’ (34). John Leo’s assessment sums up the passionate intensity of those critical of the work: ‘totally hateful … violent junk … no discernible plot, no believable characterization, no sensibility at work that comes anywhere close to making art out of all the blood and torture … Ellis displays little feel for narration, words, grammar or the rhythm of language’ (23). These reviews, as those printed pre-publication, were titled in similarly unequivocal language: ‘A Revolting Development’ (Sheppard 100), ‘Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity’ (Leo 23), ‘Designer Porn’ (Manguel 46) and ‘Essence of Trash’ (Yardley B1). Perhaps the most unambiguous in its message was Roger Rosenblatt’s ‘Snuff this Book!’ (3). Of all works published in the U.S.A. at that time, including those clearly carrying X ratings, the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) selected American Psycho for special notice, stating that the book ‘legitimizes inhuman and savage violence masquerading as sexuality’ (NOW 114). Judging the book ‘the most misogynistic communication’ the organisation had ever encountered (NOW L.A. chapter president, Tammy Bruce, quoted in Kennedy 427) and, on the grounds that ‘violence against women in any form is no longer socially acceptable’ (McDowell, “NOW” C17), NOW called for a boycott of the entire Random House catalogue for the remainder of 1991. Naomi Wolf agreed, calling the novel ‘a violation not of obscenity standards, but of women’s civil rights, insofar as it results in conditioning male sexual response to female suffering or degradation’ (34). Later, the boycott was narrowed to Knopf and Vintage titles (Love 46), but also extended to all of the many products, companies, corporations, firms and brand names that are a feature of Ellis’s novel (Kauffman, “American” 41). There were other unexpected responses such as the Walt Disney Corporation barring Ellis from the opening of Euro Disney (Tyrnauer 101), although Ellis had already been driven from public view after receiving a number of death threats and did not undertake a book tour (Kennedy 427). Despite this, the book received significant publicity courtesy of the controversy and, although several national bookstore chains and numerous booksellers around the world refused to sell the book, more than 100,000 copies were sold in the U.S.A. in the fortnight after publication (Dwyer 55). Even this success had an unprecedented effect: when American Psycho became a bestseller, The New York Times announced that it would be removing the title from its bestseller lists because of the book’s content. In the days following publication in the U.S.A., Canadian customs announced that it was considering whether to allow the local arm of Random House to, first, import American Psycho for sale in Canada and, then, publish it in Canada (Kirchhoff, “Psycho” C1). Two weeks later, when the book was passed for sale (Kirchhoff, “Customs” C1), demonstrators protested the entrance of a shipment of the book. In May, the Canadian Defence Force made headlines when it withdrew copies of the book from the library shelves of a navy base in Halifax (Canadian Press C1). Also in May 1991, the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC), the federal agency that administers the classification scheme for all films, computer games and ‘submittable’ publications (including books) that are sold, hired or exhibited in Australia, announced that it had classified American Psycho as ‘Category 1 Restricted’ (W. Fraser, “Book” 5), to be sold sealed, to only those over 18 years of age. This was the first such classification of a mainstream literary work since the rating scheme was introduced (Graham), and the first time a work of literature had been restricted for sale since Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969. The chief censor, John Dickie, said the OFLC could not justify refusing the book classification (and essentially banning the work), and while ‘as a satire on yuppies it has a lot going for it’, personally he found the book ‘distasteful’ (quoted in W. Fraser, “Sensitive” 5). Moreover, while this ‘R’ classification was, and remains, a national classification, Australian States and Territories have their own sale and distribution regulation systems. Under this regime, American Psycho remains banned from sale in Queensland, as are all other books in this classification category (Vnuk). These various reactions led to a flood of articles published in the U.S.A., Canada, Australia and the U.K., voicing passionate opinions on a range of issues including free speech and censorship, the corporate control of artistic thought and practice, and cynicism on the part of authors and their publishers about what works might attract publicity and (therefore) sell in large numbers (see, for instance, Hitchens 7; Irving 1). The relationship between violence in society and its representation in the media was a common theme, with only a few commentators (including Norman Mailer in a high profile Vanity Fair article) suggesting that, instead of inciting violence, the media largely reflected, and commented upon, societal violence. Elayne Rapping, an academic in the field of Communications, proposed that the media did actively glorify violence, but only because there was a market for such representations: ‘We, as a society love violence, thrive on violence as the very basis of our social stability, our ideological belief system … The problem, after all, is not media violence but real violence’ (36, 38). Many more commentators, however, agreed with NOW, Wolf and others and charged Ellis’s work with encouraging, and even instigating, violent acts, and especially those against women, calling American Psycho ‘a kind of advertising for violence against women’ (anthropologist Elliot Leyton quoted in Dwyer 55) and, even, a ‘how-to manual on the torture and dismemberment of women’ (Leo 23). Support for the book was difficult to find in the flood of vitriol directed against it, but a small number wrote in Ellis’s defence. Sonny Mehta, himself the target of death threats for acquiring the book for Random House, stood by this assessment, and was widely quoted in his belief that American Psycho was ‘a serious book by a serious writer’ and that Ellis was ‘remarkably talented’ (Knight-Ridder L10). Publishing director of Pan Macmillan Australia, James Fraser, defended his decision to release American Psycho on the grounds that the book told important truths about society, arguing: ‘A publisher’s office is a clearing house for ideas … the real issue for community debate [is] – to what extent does it want to hear the truth about itself, about individuals within the community and about the governments the community elects. If we care about the preservation of standards, there is none higher than this. Gore Vidal was among the very few who stated outright that he liked the book, finding it ‘really rather inspired … a wonderfully comic novel’ (quoted in Tyrnauer 73). Fay Weldon agreed, judging the book as ‘brilliant’, and focusing on the importance of Ellis’s message: ‘Bret Easton Ellis is a very good writer. He gets us to a ‘T’. And we can’t stand it. It’s our problem, not his. American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel that revolves around its own nasty bits’ (C1). Since 1991 As unlikely as this now seems, I first read American Psycho without any awareness of the controversy raging around its publication. I had read Ellis’s earlier works, Less than Zero (1985) and The Rules of Attraction (1987) and, with my energies fully engaged elsewhere, cannot now even remember how I acquired the book. Since that angry remark on the bus, however, I have followed American Psycho’s infamy and how it has remained in the public eye over the last decade and a half. Australian OFLC decisions can be reviewed and reversed – as when Pasolini’s final film Salo (1975), which was banned in Australia from the time of its release in 1975 until it was un-banned in 1993, was then banned again in 1998 – however, American Psycho’s initial classification has remained unchanged. In July 2006, I purchased a new paperback copy in rural New South Wales. It was shrink-wrapped in plastic and labelled: ‘R. Category One. Not available to persons under 18 years. Restricted’. While exact sales figures are difficult to ascertain, by working with U.S.A., U.K. and Australian figures, this copy was, I estimate, one of some 1.5 to 1.6 million sold since publication. In the U.S.A., backlist sales remain very strong, with some 22,000 copies sold annually (Holt and Abbott), while lifetime sales in the U.K. are just under 720,000 over five paperback editions. Sales in Australia are currently estimated by Pan MacMillan to total some 100,000, with a new printing of 5,000 copies recently ordered in Australia on the strength of the book being featured on the inaugural Australian Broadcasting Commission’s First Tuesday Book Club national television program (2006). Predictably, the controversy around the publication of American Psycho is regularly revisited by those reviewing Ellis’s subsequent works. A major article in Vanity Fair on Ellis’s next book, The Informers (1994), opened with a graphic description of the death threats Ellis received upon the publication of American Psycho (Tyrnauer 70) and then outlined the controversy in detail (70-71). Those writing about Ellis’s two most recent novels, Glamorama (1999) and Lunar Park (2005), have shared this narrative strategy, which also forms at least part of the frame of every interview article. American Psycho also, again predictably, became a major topic of discussion in relation to the contracting, making and then release of the eponymous film in 2000 as, for example, in Linda S. Kauffman’s extensive and considered review of the film, which spent the first third discussing the history of the book’s publication (“American” 41-45). Playing with this interest, Ellis continues his practice of reusing characters in subsequent works. Thus, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, who first appeared in The Rules of Attraction as the elder brother of the main character, Sean – who, in turn, makes a brief appearance in American Psycho – also turns up in Glamorama with ‘strange stains’ on his Armani suit lapels, and again in Lunar Park. The book also continues to be regularly cited in discussions of censorship (see, for example, Dubin; Freccero) and has been included in a number of university-level courses about banned books. In these varied contexts, literary, cultural and other critics have also continued to disagree about the book’s impact upon readers, with some persisting in reading the novel as a pornographic incitement to violence. When Wade Frankum killed seven people in Sydney, many suggested a link between these murders and his consumption of X-rated videos, pornographic magazines and American Psycho (see, for example, Manne 11), although others argued against this (Wark 11). Prosecutors in the trial of Canadian murderer Paul Bernardo argued that American Psycho provided a ‘blueprint’ for Bernardo’s crimes (Canadian Press A5). Others have read Ellis’s work more positively, as for instance when Sonia Baelo Allué compares American Psycho favourably with Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs (1988) – arguing that Harris not only depicts more degrading treatment of women, but also makes Hannibal Lecter, his antihero monster, sexily attractive (7-24). Linda S. Kauffman posits that American Psycho is part of an ‘anti-aesthetic’ movement in art, whereby works that are revoltingly ugly and/or grotesque function to confront the repressed fears and desires of the audience and explore issues of identity and subjectivity (Bad Girls), while Patrick W. Shaw includes American Psycho in his work, The Modern American Novel of Violence because, in his opinion, the violence Ellis depicts is not gratuitous. Lost, however, in much of this often-impassioned debate and dialogue is the book itself – and what Ellis actually wrote. 21-years-old when Less than Zero was published, Ellis was still only 26 when American Psycho was released and his youth presented an obvious target. In 1991, Terry Teachout found ‘no moment in American Psycho where Bret Easton Ellis, who claims to be a serious artist, exhibits the workings of an adult moral imagination’ (45, 46), Brad Miner that it was ‘puerile – the very antithesis of good writing’ (43) and Carol Iannone that ‘the inclusion of the now famous offensive scenes reveals a staggering aesthetic and moral immaturity’ (54). Pagan Kennedy also ‘blamed’ the entire work on this immaturity, suggesting that instead of possessing a developed artistic sensibility, Ellis was reacting to (and, ironically, writing for the approval of) critics who had lauded the documentary realism of his violent and nihilistic teenage characters in Less than Zero, but then panned his less sensational story of campus life in The Rules of Attraction (427-428). Yet, in my opinion, there is not only a clear and coherent aesthetic vision driving Ellis’s oeuvre but, moreover, a profoundly moral imagination at work as well. This was my view upon first reading American Psycho, and part of the reason I was so shocked by that charge of filth on the bus. Once familiar with the controversy, I found this view shared by only a minority of commentators. Writing in the New Statesman & Society, Elizabeth J. Young asked: ‘Where have these people been? … Books of pornographic violence are nothing new … American Psycho outrages no contemporary taboos. Psychotic killers are everywhere’ (24). I was similarly aware that such murderers not only existed in reality, but also in many widely accessed works of literature and film – to the point where a few years later Joyce Carol Oates could suggest that the serial killer was an icon of popular culture (233). While a popular topic for writers of crime fiction and true crime narratives in both print and on film, a number of ‘serious’ literary writers – including Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Kate Millet, Margaret Atwood and Oates herself – have also written about serial killers, and even crossed over into the widely acknowledged as ‘low-brow’ true crime genre. Many of these works (both popular or more literary) are vivid and powerful and have, as American Psycho, taken a strong moral position towards their subject matter. Moreover, many books and films have far more disturbing content than American Psycho, yet have caused no such uproar (Young and Caveney 120). By now, the plot of American Psycho is well known, although the structure of the book, noted by Weldon above (C1), is rarely analysed or even commented upon. First person narrator, Patrick Bateman, a young, handsome stockbroker and stereotypical 1980s yuppie, is also a serial killer. The book is largely, and innovatively, structured around this seeming incompatibility – challenging readers’ expectations that such a depraved criminal can be a wealthy white professional – while vividly contrasting the banal, and meticulously detailed, emptiness of Bateman’s life as a New York über-consumer with the scenes where he humiliates, rapes, tortures, murders, mutilates, dismembers and cannibalises his victims. Although only comprising some 16 out of 399 pages in my Picador edition, these violent scenes are extreme and certainly make the work as a whole disgustingly confronting. But that is the entire point of Ellis’s work. Bateman’s violence is rendered so explicitly because its principal role in the novel is to be inescapably horrific. As noted by Baelo Allué, there is no shift in tone between the most banally described detail and the description of violence (17): ‘I’ve situated the body in front of the new Toshiba television set and in the VCR is an old tape and appearing on the screen is the last girl I filmed. I’m wearing a Joseph Abboud suit, a tie by Paul Stuart, shoes by J. Crew, a vest by someone Italian and I’m kneeling on the floor beside a corpse, eating the girl’s brain, gobbling it down, spreading Grey Poupon over hunks of the pink, fleshy meat’ (Ellis 328). In complete opposition to how pornography functions, Ellis leaves no room for the possible enjoyment of such a scene. Instead of revelling in the ‘spine chilling’ pleasures of classic horror narratives, there is only the real horror of imagining such an act. The effect, as Kauffman has observed is, rather than arousing, often so disgusting as to be emetic (Bad Girls 249). Ellis was surprised that his detractors did not understand that he was trying to be shocking, not offensive (Love 49), or that his overall aim was to symbolise ‘how desensitised our culture has become towards violence’ (quoted in Dwyer 55). Ellis was also understandably frustrated with readings that conflated not only the contents of the book and their meaning, but also the narrator and author: ‘The acts described in the book are truly, indisputably vile. The book itself is not. Patrick Bateman is a monster. I am not’ (quoted in Love 49). Like Fay Weldon, Norman Mailer understood that American Psycho posited ‘that the eighties were spiritually disgusting and the author’s presentation is the crystallization of such horror’ (129). Unlike Weldon, however, Mailer shied away from defending the novel by judging Ellis not accomplished enough a writer to achieve his ‘monstrous’ aims (182), failing because he did not situate Bateman within a moral universe, that is, ‘by having a murderer with enough inner life for us to comprehend him’ (182). Yet, the morality of Ellis’s project is evident. By viewing the world through the lens of a psychotic killer who, in many ways, personifies the American Dream – wealthy, powerful, intelligent, handsome, energetic and successful – and, yet, who gains no pleasure, satisfaction, coherent identity or sense of life’s meaning from his endless, selfish consumption, Ellis exposes the emptiness of both that world and that dream. As Bateman himself explains: ‘Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in. This was civilisation as I saw it, colossal and jagged’ (Ellis 375). Ellis thus situates the responsibility for Bateman’s violence not in his individual moral vacuity, but in the barren values of the society that has shaped him – a selfish society that, in Ellis’s opinion, refused to address the most important issues of the day: corporate greed, mindless consumerism, poverty, homelessness and the prevalence of violent crime. Instead of pornographic, therefore, American Psycho is a profoundly political text: Ellis was never attempting to glorify or incite violence against anyone, but rather to expose the effects of apathy to these broad social problems, including the very kinds of violence the most vocal critics feared the book would engender. Fifteen years after the publication of American Psycho, although our societies are apparently growing in overall prosperity, the gap between rich and poor also continues to grow, more are permanently homeless, violence – whether domestic, random or institutionally-sanctioned – escalates, and yet general apathy has intensified to the point where even the ‘ethics’ of torture as government policy can be posited as a subject for rational debate. The real filth of the saga of American Psycho is, thus, how Ellis’s message was wilfully ignored. While critics and public intellectuals discussed the work at length in almost every prominent publication available, few attempted to think in any depth about what Ellis actually wrote about, or to use their powerful positions to raise any serious debate about the concerns he voiced. Some recent critical reappraisals have begun to appreciate how American Psycho is an ‘ethical denunciation, where the reader cannot but face the real horror behind the serial killer phenomenon’ (Baelo Allué 8), but Ellis, I believe, goes further, exposing the truly filthy causes that underlie the existence of such seemingly ‘senseless’ murder. But, Wait, There’s More It is ironic that American Psycho has, itself, generated a mini-industry of products. A decade after publication, a Canadian team – filmmaker Mary Harron, director of I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), working with scriptwriter, Guinevere Turner, and Vancouver-based Lions Gate Entertainment – adapted the book for a major film (Johnson). Starring Christian Bale, Chloë Sevigny, Willem Dafoe and Reese Witherspoon and, with an estimated budget of U.S.$8 million, the film made U.S.$15 million at the American box office. The soundtrack was released for the film’s opening, with video and DVDs to follow and the ‘Killer Collector’s Edition’ DVD – closed-captioned, in widescreen with surround sound – released in June 2005. Amazon.com lists four movie posters (including a Japanese language version) and, most unexpected of all, a series of film tie-in action dolls. The two most popular of these, judging by E-Bay, are the ‘Cult Classics Series 1: Patrick Bateman’ figure which, attired in a smart suit, comes with essential accoutrements of walkman with headphones, briefcase, Wall Street Journal, video tape and recorder, knife, cleaver, axe, nail gun, severed hand and a display base; and the 18” tall ‘motion activated sound’ edition – a larger version of the same doll with fewer accessories, but which plays sound bites from the movie. Thanks to Stephen Harris and Suzie Gibson (UNE) for stimulating conversations about this book, Stephen Harris for information about the recent Australian reprint of American Psycho and Mark Seebeck (Pan Macmillan) for sales information. References Archer, Mark. “The Funeral Baked Meats.” The Spectator 27 April 1991: 31. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. First Tuesday Book Club. First broadcast 1 August 2006. Baelo Allué, Sonia. “The Aesthetics of Serial Killing: Working against Ethics in The Silence of the Lambs (1988) and American Psycho (1991).” Atlantis 24.2 (Dec. 2002): 7-24. Canadian Press. “Navy Yanks American Psycho.” The Globe and Mail 17 May 1991: C1. Canadian Press. “Gruesome Novel Was Bedside Reading.” Kitchener-Waterloo Record 1 Sep. 1995: A5. Dubin, Steven C. “Art’s Enemies: Censors to the Right of Me, Censors to the Left of Me.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 28.4 (Winter 1994): 44-54. Dwyer, Victor. “Literary Firestorm: Canada Customs Scrutinizes a Brutal Novel.” Maclean’s April 1991: 55. Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. London: Macmillan-Picador, 1991. ———. Glamorama. New York: Knopf, 1999. ———. The Informers. New York: Knopf, 1994. ———. Less than Zero. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. ———. Lunar Park. New York: Knopf, 2005. ———. The Rules of Attraction. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. Fraser, James. :The Case for Publishing.” The Bulletin 18 June 1991. Fraser, William. “Book May Go under Wraps.” The Sydney Morning Herald 23 May 1991: 5. ———. “The Sensitive Censor and the Psycho.” The Sydney Morning Herald 24 May 1991: 5. Freccero, Carla. “Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of American Psycho.” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 27.2 (Summer 1997): 44-58. Graham, I. “Australian Censorship History.” Libertus.net 9 Dec. 2001. 17 May 2006 http://libertus.net/censor/hist20on.html>. Gurley Brown, Helen. Commentary in “Editorial Judgement or Censorship?: The Case of American Psycho.” The Writer May 1991: 20-23. Harris, Thomas. The Silence of the Lambs. New York: St Martins Press, 1988. Harron, Mary (dir.). American Psycho [film]. Edward R. Pressman Film Corporation, Lions Gate Films, Muse Productions, P.P.S. Films, Quadra Entertainment, Universal Pictures, 2004. Hitchens, Christopher. “Minority Report.” The Nation 7-14 January 1991: 7. Holt, Karen, and Charlotte Abbott. “Lunar Park: The Novel.” Publishers Weekly 11 July 2005. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA624404.html? pubdate=7%2F11%2F2005&display=archive>. Iannone, Carol. “PC & the Ellis Affair.” Commentary Magazine July 1991: 52-4. Irving, John. “Pornography and the New Puritans.” The New York Times Book Review 29 March 1992: Section 7, 1. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/15/lifetimes/25665.html>. Johnson, Brian D. “Canadian Cool Meets American Psycho.” Maclean’s 10 April 2000. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.macleans.ca/culture/films/article.jsp?content=33146>. Kauffman, Linda S. “American Psycho [film review].” Film Quarterly 54.2 (Winter 2000-2001): 41-45. ———. Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Kennedy, Pagan. “Generation Gaffe: American Psycho.” The Nation 1 April 1991: 426-8. Kirchhoff, H. J. “Customs Clears Psycho: Booksellers’ Reaction Mixed.” The Globe and Mail 26 March 1991: C1. ———. “Psycho Sits in Limbo: Publisher Awaits Customs Ruling.” The Globe and Mail 14 March 1991: C1. Knight-Ridder News Service. “Vintage Picks up Ellis’ American Psycho.” Los Angeles Daily News 17 November 1990: L10. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “Psycho: Wither Death without Life?” The New York Times 11 March 1991: C18. Leo, John. “Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity.” U.S. News & World Report 3 Dec. 1990: 23. Love, Robert. “Psycho Analysis: Interview with Bret Easton Ellis.” Rolling Stone 4 April 1991: 45-46, 49-51. Mailer, Norman. “Children of the Pied Piper: Mailer on American Psycho.” Vanity Fair March 1991: 124-9, 182-3. Manguel, Alberto. “Designer Porn.” Saturday Night 106.6 (July 1991): 46-8. Manne, Robert. “Liberals Deny the Video Link.” The Australian 6 Jan. 1997: 11. McDowell, Edwin. “NOW Chapter Seeks Boycott of ‘Psycho’ Novel.” The New York Times 6 Dec. 1990: C17. ———. “Vintage Buys Violent Book Dropped by Simon & Schuster.” The New York Times 17 Nov. 1990: 13. Miner, Brad. “Random Notes.” National Review 31 Dec. 1990: 43. National Organization for Women. Library Journal 2.91 (1991): 114. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Three American Gothics.” Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going: Essays, Reviews and Prose. New York: Plume, 1999. 232-43. Rapping, Elayne. “The Uses of Violence.” Progressive 55 (1991): 36-8. Rosenblatt, Roger. “Snuff this Book!: Will Brett Easton Ellis Get Away with Murder?” New York Times Book Review 16 Dec. 1990: 3, 16. Roth, Philip. Portnoy’s Complaint. New York: Random House, 1969. Shaw, Patrick W. The Modern American Novel of Violence. Troy, NY: Whitson, 2000. Sheppard, R. Z. “A Revolting Development.” Time 29 Oct. 1990: 100. Teachout, Terry. “Applied Deconstruction.” National Review 24 June 1991: 45-6. Tyrnauer, Matthew. “Who’s Afraid of Bret Easton Ellis?” Vanity Fair 57.8 (Aug. 1994): 70-3, 100-1. Vnuk, Helen. “X-rated? Outdated.” The Age 21 Sep. 2003. 17 May 2006 http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/09/19/1063625202157.html>. Wark, McKenzie. “Video Link Is a Distorted View.” The Australian 8 Jan. 1997: 11. Weldon, Fay. “Now You’re Squeamish?: In a World as Sick as Ours, It’s Silly to Target American Psycho.” The Washington Post 28 April 1991: C1. Wolf, Naomi. “The Animals Speak.” New Statesman & Society 12 April 1991: 33-4. Yardley, Jonathan. “American Psycho: Essence of Trash.” The Washington Post 27 Feb. 1991: B1. Young, Elizabeth J. “Psycho Killers. Last Lines: How to Shock the English.” New Statesman & Society 5 April 1991: 24. Young, Elizabeth J., and Graham Caveney. Shopping in Space: Essays on American ‘Blank Generation’ Fiction. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992. Zaller, Robert “American Psycho, American Censorship and the Dahmer Case.” Revue Francaise d’Etudes Americaines 16.56 (1993): 317-25. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Brien, Donna Lee. "The Real Filth in : A Critical Reassessment." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php>. APA Style Brien, D. (Nov. 2006) "The Real Filth in American Psycho: A Critical Reassessment," M/C Journal, 9(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php>.

In a light-speed economy of communication, the only thing that moves faster than information is imagination. And in a time when, more than ever before, information is the currency of global politics, economics, conflict, and conquest what better way to critique and crinkle the global-social than to combine the two - information and imagination - into an hilarious mockery of, and a brief incursion into the vistas of the globalitarian order. This is precisely the reflexive and rhetorical pot-pourri that the group 'the Yes Men' (www.theyesmen.org) have formed. Beginning in 2000, the Yes Men describe themselves as a "network of impostors". Basically, the Yes Men (no they're not all men) fool organisations into believing they are representatives of the WTO (World Trade Organisation) and in-turn receive, and accept, invitations to speak (as WTO representatives) at conferences, meetings, seminars, and all manner and locale of corporate pow-wows. At these meetings, the Yes Men deliver their own very special brand of WTO public address. Let's walk through a hypothetical situation. Ashley is organising a conference for a multinational adult entertainment company, at which the management might discuss ways in which it could cut costs from its dildo manufacturing sector by moving production to Indonesia where labour is cheap and tax non-existent (for some), rubber is in abundance, and where the workers hands are slender enough so as to make even the "slimline-tickler" range appear gushingly large in annual report photographs. Ashley decides that a presentation from Supachai Panitchpakdi - head of the WTO body - on the virtues of unrestrained capitalism would be a great way to start the conference, and to build esprit de corps among participants - to summon some good vibrations, if you will. So Ashley jumps on the net. After the obligatory four hours of trying to close the myriad porn site pop-ups that plague internet users of the adult entertainment industry, Ashley comes across the WTO site - or at least what looks like the WTO site - and, via the email link, goes about inviting Supachai Panitchpakdi to speak at the conference. What Ashley doesn't realise is that the site is a mirror site of the actual WTO site. This is not, however, grounds for Ashley's termination because it is only after careful and timely scrutiny that you can tell the difference - and in a hypercapitalist economy who has got time to carefully scrutinize? You see, the Yes Men own the domain name www.gatt.org (GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade]being the former, not so formalised and globally sanctioned incarnation of the WTO), so in the higgledy-piggeldy cross-referencing infosphere of the internet, and its economy of keywords, unsuspecting WTO fans often find themselves perusing the Yes Men site. The Yes Men are sirens in both senses of the word. They raise alarm to rampant corporatism; and they sing the tunes of corporatism to lure their victims – they signal and seduce. The Yes Men are pull marketers, as opposed to the push tactics of logo based activism, and this is what takes them beyond logoism and its focus on the brand bullies. During the few years the Yes Men have been operating their ingenious rhetorical realignment of the WTO, they have pulled off some of the most golden moments in tactical media’s short history. In May 2002, after accepting an email invitation from conference organisers, the Yes Men hit an accountancy conference in Sydney. In his keynote speech, yes man Andy Bichlbaum announced that as of that day the WTO had decided to "effect a cessation of all operations, to be accomplished over a period of four months, culminating in September". He announced that "the WTO will reintegrate as a new trade body whose charter will be to ensure that trade benefits the poor" (ref). The shocking news hit a surprisingly receptive audience and even sparked debate in the floor of the Canadian Parliament where questions were asked by MP John Duncan about "what impact this will have on our appeals on lumber, agriculture, and other ongoing trade disputes". The Certified Practicing Accountants (CPA) Australia reported that [t]he changes come in response to recent studies which indicate strongly that the current free trade rules and policies have increased poverty, pollution, and inequality, and have eroded democratic principles, with a disproportionatly large negative effect on the poorest countries (CPA: 2002) In another Yes Men assault, this time at a Finnish textiles conference, yes man Hank Hardy Unruh gave a speech (in stead of the then WTO head Mike Moore) arguing that the U.S. civil war (in which slavery became illegal) was a useless waste of time because the system of imported labour (slavery) has been supplanted now by a system of remote labour (sweatshops)- instead of bringing the "labour" to the dildos via ships from Africa, now we can take the dildos to the "labour", or more precisely, the idea of a dildo - or in biblical terms - take the mount'em to Mohammed, Mhemmet, or Ming. Unruh meandered through his speech to the usual complicit audience, happy to accept his bold assertions in the coma-like stride of a conference delegate, that is, until he ripped off his business suit (with help from an accomplice) to reveal a full-body golden leotard replete with a giant golden phallus which he proceeded to inflate with the aid of a small gas canister. He went on to describe to the audience that the suit, dubbed "the management leisure suit", was a new innovation in the remote labour control field. He informed the textiles delegates that located in the end of the phallus was a small video interface through which one could view workers in the Third World and administer, by remote control, electric shocks to those employees not working hard enough. Apparently after the speech only one objection was forwarded and that was from a woman who complained that the phallus device was not appropriate because not only men can oppress workers in the third world. It is from the complicity of their audiences that the Yes Men derive their most virulent critique. They point out that the "aim is to get people to think more seriously about the sort of bullshit they are prepared to swallow, if and when the information comes from a suitably respected authority. By appearing, for example, in the name of the WTO, one could even make out a case for justifying homicide, irrespective of the target audience's training and intellect" (Yes men) Unruh says. And this is the real statement that the Yes Men make, their real-life, real-time theatre hollows-out the signifer of the WTO and injects its own signified to highlight the predominant role of language - rhetoric - in the globalising of the ideas of neo-liberalism. In speaking shit and having people, nay, experts, swallow it comfortably, the Yes Men punctuate that globalisation is as much a movement of ideas across societies as it is a movement of things through societies. It is a movement of ideals - a movement of meanings. Organisations like the WTO propagate these meanings, and propagandise a situation where there is no alternative to initiatives like free trade and the top-down, repressive regime espoused buy neoliberal triumphalists. The Yes Men highlight that the seemingly immutable and inevitable charge of neoliberalism, is in fact simply the dominance of a single way of structuring social life - one dictated by the market. Through their unique brand of semiotic puppetry, the Yes Men show that the project of unelected treaty organisations like the WTO and their push toward the globalisation of neoliberalism is not inevitable, it is not a fait accompli, but rather, that their claims of an inexorable movement toward a neo-liberal capitalism are simply more rhetorical than real. By using the spin and speak of the WTO to suggest ideas like forcing the world's poor to recycle hamburgers to cure world hunger, the Yes Men demonstrate that the power of the WTO lies on the tip of their tongue, and their ability to convince people the world over of the unquestionable legitimacy of that tongue-tip teetering power. But it is that same power that has threatened the future of the Yes Men. In November 2001, the owners of the gatt.org website received a call from the host of its webpage, Verio. The WTO had contacted Verio and asked them to shut down the gatt.org site for copyright violations. But the Yes Men came up with their own response - they developed software that is freely available and which allows the user to mirror any site on the internet easily. Called "Reamweaver", the software allows the user to instantly "funhouse-mirror" anyone's website, copying the real-time "look and feel" but letting the user change any words, images, etc. that they choose. The thought of anyone being able to mimic any site on the internet is perhaps a little scary - especially in terms of e-commerce - imagine that "lizard-tongue belly button tickler" never arriving! Or thinking you had invited a bunch of swingers over to your house via a swingers website, only to find that you'd been duped by a rogue gang of fifteen tax accountants who had come to your house to give you a lecture on the issues associated with the inclusion of pro-forma information in preliminary announcements in East Europe 1955-1958. But seriously, I'm yet to critique the work of the Yes Men. Their brand of protest has come under fire most predictably from the WTO, and least surprisingly from their duped victims. But, really, in an era where the neo-liberal conservative right dominate the high-end operations of sociality, I am reticent to say a bad word about the Yes Men's light, creative, and refreshing style of dissent. I can hear the "free speech" cry coming from those who'd charge the Yes Men with denying their victims the right to freely express their ideas - and I suppose they are correct. But can supra-national institutions like the WTO and their ilk really complain about the Yes Men’s infringement on their rights to a fair communicative playing field when daily they ride rough-shod over the rights of people and the people-defined "rights" of all else with which we share this planet? This is a hazardous junction for the dissent of the Yes Men because it is a point at which personal actions collide head-on with social ethics. The Yes Men’s brand of dissent is a form of direct action, and like direct action, the emphasis is on putting physical bodies between the oppressor and the oppressed – in this case between the subaltern and the supra-national. The Yes Men put their bodies between and within bodies – they penetrate the veneer of the brand to crawl around inside and mess with the mind of the host company body. Messing with anybody’s body is going to be bothersome. But while corporations enjoy the “rights” of embodied citizens, they are spared from the consequences citizens must endure. Take Worldcom’s fraudulent accounting (the biggest in US history) for instance, surely such a monumental deception necessitates more than a USD500 million fine. When will “capital punishment” be introduced to apply to corporations? As in “killing off” the corporation and all its articles of association? Such inconsistencies in the citizenry praxis of corporations paint a pedestrian crossing at the junction where “body” activism meets the ethic (right?) of unequivocal free-speech for all – and when we factor-in crippling policies like structural adjustment, the ethically hazardous junction becomes shadowed by a glorious pedestrian overpass! Where logocentric activism literally concentrates on the apparel – the branded surface - the focus of groups like the Yes Men is on the body beneath – both corporate and corporeal. But are the tactics of the Yes Men enough? Does this step beyond logocentric focused activism wade into the territory of substantive change? Of course the answer is a resounding no. The Yes Men are culture jammers - and culture jamming exists in the realm of ephemera. It asks a question, for a fleeting moment in the grand scheme of struggle, and then fades away. Fetishising the tactics of the Yes Men risks steering dissent into a form of entertainment - much like the entertainmentised politics it opposes. What the Yes Men do is creative and skilful, but it does not express the depth of commitment displayed by those activists working tirelessly on myriad - less-glamorous - campaigns such as the free West Papua movement, and other broader issues of social activism like indigenous rights. If politics is entertainment, then the politics of the Yes Men celebrates the actor while ignoring the hard work of the production team. But having said that, I believe the Yes Men serve an important function in the complex mechanics of dissent. They are but one tactic - they cannot be expected to work with history, they exist in the moment, a transitory trance of reason. And provided the Yes Men continue to use their staged opportunities as platforms to suggest BETTER IDEAS, while also acknowledging the depth and complexity of the subject matter with which they deal, then their brand of protest is valid and effective. The Yes Men ride the cusp of a new style of contemporary social protest, and the more people who likewise use imagination to counter the globalitarian regime and its commodity logic, the better. Through intelligent satire and deft use of communication technologies, the Yes Men lay bare the internal illogic (in terms of human and ecological wellbeing) of the fetishistic charge to cut costs at all costs. Thank-Gatt for the Yes Men, the chastisers of the global eco-social pimps. Works Cited CPA. (2002). World Trade Organisation to Redefine Charter. http://theyesmen.org/tro/cpa.html Yes Men: http://theyesmen.org/ * And thanks to Phil Graham for the “capital punishment” idea. Links http://theyesmen.org/ http://theyesmen.org/tro/cpa.html http://www.gatt.org http://www.theyesmen.org/ Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Pace, John. "The Yes Men" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/05-yesmen.php>. APA Style Pace, J. (2003, Jun 19). The Yes Men. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/05-yesmen.php>

Have you been following Amy’s Marathon of books? Inspired by by Terry Fox’s and Rick Hansen’s Canadian journeys, Amy Mathers is honouring her passion for reading and Canadian teen literature while working around her physical limitations through a Marathon of Books. Amy will be reading teen fiction books from every province and territory, exploring Canada and promoting Canadian teen authors and books by finishing a book a day for each day of 2014, writing a review for each book she reads. The goal is to raise money for the Canadian Children’s Book Centre (CCBC) in order to endow a Canadian teen book award to be presented at the yearly Canadian Children’s Literature Awards gala. Amy will collect fundraising pledges (which are eligible for a charitable tax receipt). http://amysmarathonofbooks.ca/The National Reading Campaign (NRC) is thrilled to announce the inaugural week-long event READING TOWN CANADA. For one week, May 3-10th, 2014, the National Reading Campaign will turn Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan into an exemplary model of what a reading Canada would look like. Reading will be woven into every feature of life through a series of exciting events: Imagine having a poem delivered with your pizza, wandering into a fully-stocked ‘reading glen’ in Crescent Park, discovering a book by a local author in your Welcome Wagon package, or finding a tiny lending library at the end of your street. http://www.nationalreadingcampaign.ca/about-reading-town-canada/IBBY Canada (the Canadian national section of the International Board on Books for Young People) named Bonnie Tulloch as the Frances E. Russell Grant recipient. Bonnie is a graduate student in the children’s literature program of the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is doing an analysis of contemporary Canadian children’s and young adult novels that focus on island adventures; the resulting work will be titled “No ‘Man’ is an Island: Examining Island Imagery and its Relation to Female Identity in a Selection of Canadian Children’s and Young Adult Fiction.” http://www.ibby-canada.org/?p=2080CANSCAIP is presenting two upcoming workshops: Imagine a Story, a day of workshops for those interested in writing, illustrating and performing for children, will be held May 31 at Dawson College in Montreal; Packaging Your Imagination, Canada's oldest and largest conference on the craft and business of writing, illustrating and performing for children, will be held October 18 at Humber College Lakeshore Campus in Toronto. Registration for the latter conference will commence in late May. http://www.canscaip.org/Award Season is soon to be blossoming along with spring and summer. Recent announcements for shortlists include the 2014 Atlantic Book Awards and The Canadian Science Writers’ Association (CSWA).The shortlists for the Atlantic Book Awards are:Ann Connor Brimer Award for Children’s LiteratureNix Minus One, by Jill MacLean (Pajama Press)The Power of Harmony, by Jan L. Coates (Red Deer Press)The Stowaways, by Meghan Marentette, Illustrated by Dean Griffiths (Pajama Press)Lillian Shepherd Award for Excellence in IllustrationLasso the Wind: Aurélia’s Verses and Other Poems Illustrated by Susan Tooke and written by George Elliott Clarke (Nimbus Publishing)Pisim Finds her Miskanow Illustrated by Leonard Paul and written by William Dumas (Portage & Main Press)Singily Skipping Along, Illustrated by Deanne Fitzpatrick and written by Sheree Fitch (Nimbus Publishing)In addition two other children’s titles were also shortlisted:Ghost Boy of MacKenzie House by Patti Larsen (Acorn Press) for the Prince Edward Island Book Award (fiction category)Formac Publishing was nominated for the APMA Best Atlantic-Published Book Award (sponsored by Friesens Corporation), for Bluenose Adventure by Jacqueline Halsey with illustrations by Eric Orchard.http://atlanticbookawards.ca/ The shortlist for the Canadian Science Writers’ Association for outstanding youth book:Au labo, les Debrouillards! written by Yannick Bergeron (Bayard jeunesse)Before the World Was Ready written by Claire Eamer and illustrated by Sa Boothroyd (Annick Press)Buzz About Bees written by Kari-Lynn Winters (Fitzhenry & Whiteside)Dirty Science: 25 Experiments with Soil written by Shar Levine and Leslie Johnstone, illustrated by Lorzeno Del Bianco (Scholastic Canada)A History of Just About Everything: 180 Events, People and Inventions That Changed the World written by Elizabeth MacLeod and Frieda Wishinsky, illustrated by Qin Leng (Kids Can Press)Pandemic Survival: It's Why You're Alive written by Ann Love and Jane Drake, illustrated by Bill Slavin (Tundra Books).http://sciencewriters.ca/2014/04/01/cswa-book-awards-shortlist-2/Gail de VosGail de Vos, an adjunct instructor, teaches courses on Canadian children's literature, Young Adult Literature and Comic Books and Graphic Novels at the School of Library and Information Studies for the University of Alberta and is the author of nine books on storytelling and folklore. She is a professional storyteller and has taught the storytelling course at SLIS for over two decades.

Mac, Carrie. The Gryphon Project. 2009. Puffin Canada. Print. A lot happens in the first 6-page chapter. We are introduced to a small and suitably multicultural clique of teenage friends with cute nicknames: Phoenix (Phee); her slightly older brother Gryphon (Gryph); his buddies Saul, Huy, Tariq; Phee’s best friend Nadia who is also Saul’s girlfriend; and Nadia’s younger brother Neko, the tag-along clique mascot. Also, we meet Phee and Gryph’s seemingly bland background of a family - a mom who spends evenings going over work files, a United Church minister Dad, and a cute younger sister. The story begins with Phoenix lamenting the souring of her formerly idyllic relationship with Gryph. While she wonders whether his sudden change from “perfect big brother” to “just an asshole who lived in her house” is because of drugs, his major athletic sponsorship contract with the Chrysalis corporation, or just being a teenager, the reader might well wonder if this will just be another generic story of teenage angst and relationship drama holding little promise of creativity or challenging ideas. Fortunately, the last sentence of Chapter One catches our attention: “fifteen years ago tomorrow, Phoenix had died. For the first time… and the Chrysalis corporation had brought her back from the dead.” The next 275-odd pages are certainly filled with a lot of the usual teenage concerns: why does my brother hate me? Does my boyfriend really love me? My little sister is really annoying sometimes. My parents just don’t get me, etc, etc. However, there is an underlying; not-so-far-fetched technological advance called “reconning” that adds a fascinating moral and ethical tension. Carrie Mac embeds this ability to bring people back to life so deeply into this fictional society that the reader only slowly realises the main theme of the novel is actually the exploration of how death affects the way we live our lives and how the sudden discovery of a way to cheat death might be handled. Of course, the immediate thought is that eliminating death could be nothing but good – no more sorrow, no more angst about making mistakes, endless time to iron out mistakes in relationships. But would eternal life for everyone be desirable? And if limits were necessary, who would decide on and then control those limits (e.g. a private corporation, churches, government)? How would our actions change if we knew we had three “recons” left or that we had been born into a segment of society where the so-called “importance” of our parents’ occupations dictated whether we were allocated three, two, one, or even no recons? How would we react if we suddenly discovered that our banal family in our boring suburb and our seemingly pointless education system was actually part of the privileged elite and a whole world of poverty, violence, and a lack of recons existed just kilometres away? Would having three deaths make us more curious about death and more willing to take on risk, or would we value life even more? The surface story in The Gryphon Project is enthralling enough as Phoenix and Nadia slowly unravel the mystery of the older boys’ strange behaviour and ominous secrecy. The underlying theme, however, makes this a thought-provoking exploration into the meaning of life and how the sudden ability to override death would change us. I suspect many readers could enjoy this book just for the surface story of adventure but anyone who even occasionally gives thought to the meaning of life and social justice would really enjoy the additional and challenging layers. Highly recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: David SulzDavid is a librarian at the University of Alberta working mostly with scholars in Economics, Religious Studies, and Social Work. His university studies included: Library Studies, History, Elementary Education, Japanese, and Economics. On the education front, he taught various grades and subjects for several years in schools as well as museums. His interest in Japan and things Japanese stands above his other diverse interests.

Property as both an idea and a practice has been interpreted through the prism of a liberal, law and economics paradigm since at least the 18th century. This dominant (and domineering) perspective stresses the primacy of individualism, the power of exclusion, and the values of private commodity. By contrast, concepts of property that evolved out of the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s challenged this hegemony. Countercultural, or Aquarian, ideas of property stressed pre-liberal, long forgotten property norms such as sociability, community, inclusion and personhood, and contested a private uniformity that seemed “totalizing and universalizing” (Blomley, Unsettling 102). This paper situates what it terms “Aquarian property” in the context of emergent property theory in the 1960s and 1970s, and the propertied practices these new theories engendered. Importantly, this paper also grounds Aquarian ideas of property to location. As legal geographers observe, the law inexorably occurs in place as well as time. “Nearly every aspect of law is located, takes place, is in motion, or has some spatial frame of reference” (Braverman et al. 1). Property’s radical yet simultaneously ancient alter-narrative found fertile soil where the countercultural experiment flourished. In Australia, one such place was the green, sub-tropical landscape of the New South Wales Northern Rivers, home of the 1973 Australian Union of Student’s Aquarius Festival at Nimbin. The Counterculture and Property Theory Well before the “Age of Aquarius” entered western youth consciousness (Munro-Clark 56), and 19 years before the Nimbin Aquarius Festival, US legal scholar Felix Cohen defined property in seminally private and exclusionary terms. To the world: Keep off X unless you have my permission, which I may grant or withhold.Signed: Private citizenEndorsed: The state. (374) Cohen’s formula was private property at its 1950s apogee, an unambiguous expression of its centrality to post-war materialism. William Blackstone’s famous trope of property as “that sole and despotic dominion” had become self-fulfilling (Rose, Canons). Why had this occurred? What had made property so narrow and instrumentalist to a private end? Several property theorists identify the enclosure period in the 17th and 18th centuries as seminal to this change (Blomley, Law; Graham). The enclosures, and their discourse of improvement and modernity, saw ancient common rights swept away in favour of the liberal private right. Property diversity was supplanted by monotony, group rights by the individual, and inclusion by exclusion. Common property rights were rights of shared use, traditionally agrarian incidents enjoyed through community membership. However, for the proponents of enclosure, common rights stood in the way of progress. Thus, what was once a vested right (such as the common right to glean) became a “mere practice”, condemned by its “universal promiscuity” and perceptions of vagrancy (Buck 17-8). What was once sited to context, to village and parish, evolved into abstraction. And what had meaning for person and place, “a sense of self; […] a part of a tribe’ (Neeson 180), became a tradable commodity, detached and indifferent to the consequences of its adverse use (Leopold). These were the transformed ideas of property exported to so-called “settler” societies, where colonialists demanded the secure property rights denied to them at home. In the common law tradition, a very modern yet selective amnesia took hold, a collective forgetting of property’s shared and sociable past (McLaren). Yet, property as commodity proved to be a narrow, one-sided account of property, an unsatisfactory “half right” explanation (Alexander 2) that omits inconvenient links between ownership on the one hand, and self and place on the other. Pioneering US conservationist Aldo Leopold detected as much a few years before Felix Cohen’s defining statement of private dominance. In Leopold’s iconic A Sand County Almanac, he wrote presciently of the curious phenomenon of hardheaded farmers replanting selected paddocks with native wildflowers. As if foreseeing what the next few decades may bring, Leopold describes a growing resistance to the dominant property paradigm: I call it Revolt – revolt against the tedium of the merely economic attitude towards land. We assume that because we had to subjugate the land to live on it, the best farm is therefore the one most completely tamed. These […] farmers have learned from experience that the wholly tamed farm offers not only a slender livelihood but a constricted life. (188)By the early 1960s, frustrations over the constrictions of post-war life were given voice in dissenting property literature. Affirming that property is a social institution, emerging ideas of property conformed to the contours of changing values (Singer), and the countercultural zeitgeist sweeping America’s universities (Miller). Thus, in 1964, Charles Reich saw property as the vanguard for a new civic compact, an ambitious “New Property” that would transform “government largess” into a property right to address social inequity. For Joseph Sax, property scholar and author of a groundbreaking citizen’s manifesto, the assertion of public property rights were critical to the protection of the environment (174). And in 1972, to Christopher Stone, it seemed a natural property incident that trees should enjoy equivalent standing to legal persons. In an age when “progress” was measured by the installation of plastic trees in Los Angeles median strips (Tribe), jurists aspired to new ideas of property with social justice and environmental resonance. Theirs was a scholarly “Revolt” against the tedium of property as commodity, an act of resistance to the centuries-old conformity of the enclosures (Blomley, Law). Aquarian Theory in Propertied Practice Imagining new property ideas in theory yielded in practice a diverse Aquarian tenure. In the emerging communes and intentional communities of the late 1960s and early 1970s, common property norms were unwittingly absorbed into their ethos and legal structure (Zablocki; Page). As a “way out of a dead-end future” (Smith and Crossley), a generation of young, mostly university-educated people sought new ways to relate to land. Yet, as Benjamin Zablocki observed at the time, “there is surprisingly little awareness among present-day communitarians of their historical forebears” (43). The alchemy that was property and the counterculture was given form and substance by place, time, geography, climate, culture, and social history. Unlike the dominant private paradigm that was placeless and universal, the tenurial experiments of the counter-culture were contextual and diverse. Hence, to generalise is to invite the problematic. Nonetheless, three broad themes of Aquarian property are discernible. First, property ceased being a vehicle for the acquisition of private wealth; rather it invested self-meaning within a communitarian context, “a sense of self [as] a part of a tribe.” Second, the “back to the land” movement signified a return to the country, an interregnum in the otherwise unidirectional post-enclosure drift to the city. Third, Aquarian property was premised on obligation, recognising that ownership was more than a bundle of autonomous rights, but rights imbricated with a corresponding duty to land health. Like common property and its practices of sustained yield, Aquarian owners were environmental stewards, with inter-connected responsibilities to others and the earth (Page). The counterculture was a journey in self-fulfillment, a search for personal identity amidst the empowerment of community. Property’s role in the counterculture was to affirm the under-regarded notion of property as propriety; where ownership fostered well lived and capacious lives in flourishing communities (Alexander). As Margaret Munro-Clark observed of the early 1970s, “the enrichment of individual identity or selfhood [is] the distinguishing mark of the current wave of communitarianism” (33). Or, as another 1970s settler remarked twenty years later, “our ownership means that we can’t liquefy our assets and move on with any appreciable amount of capital. This arrangement has many advantages; we don’t waste time wondering if we would be better off living somewhere else, so we have commitment to place and community” (Metcalf 52). In personhood terms, property became “who we are, how we live” (Lismore Regional Gallery), not a measure of commoditised worth. Personhood also took legal form, manifested in early title-holding structures, where consensus-based co-operatives (in which capital gain was precluded) were favoured ideologically over the capitalist, majority-rules corporation (Munro-Clark). As noted, Aquarian property was also predominantly rural. For many communitarians, the way out of a soulless urban life was to abandon its difficulties for the yearnings of a simpler rural idyll (Smith and Crossley). The 1970s saw an extraordinary return to the physicality of land, measured by a willingness to get “earth under the nails” (Farran). In Australia, communities proliferated on the NSW Northern Rivers, in Western Australia’s southwest, and in the rural hinterlands behind Queensland’s Sunshine Coast and Cairns. In New Zealand, intentional communities appeared on the rural Coromandel Peninsula, east of Auckland, and in the Golden Bay region on the remote northwestern tip of the South Island. In all these localities, land was plentiful, the climate seemed sunny, and the landscape soulful. Aquarians “bought cheap land in beautiful places in which to opt out and live a simpler life [...] in remote backwaters, up mountains, in steep valleys, or on the shorelines of wild coastal districts” (Sargisson and Sargent 117). Their “hard won freedom” was to escape from city life, suffused by a belief that “the city is hardly needed, life should spring out of the country” (Jones and Baker 5). Aquarian property likewise instilled environmental ethics into the notion of land ownership. Michael Metzger, writing in 1975 in the barely minted Ecology Law Quarterly, observed that humankind had forgotten three basic ecological laws, that “everything is connected to everything else”, that “everything must go somewhere”, and that “nature knows best” (797). With an ever-increasing focus on abstraction, the language of private property: enabled us to create separate realities, and to remove ourselves from the natural world in which we live to a cerebral world of our own creation. When we act in accord with our artificial world, the disastrous impact of our fantasies upon the natural world in which we live is ignored. (796)By contrast, Aquarian property was intrinsically contextual. It revolved around the owner as environmental steward, whose duty it was “to repair the ravages of previous land use battles, and to live in accord with the natural environment” (Aquarian Archives). Reflecting ancient common rights, Aquarian property rights internalised norms of prudence, proportionality and moderation of resource use (Rose, Futures). Simply, an ecological view of land ownership was necessary for survival. As Dr. Moss Cass, the Federal environment minister wrote in the preface to The Way Out: Radical Alternatives in Australia, ‘”there is a common conviction that something is rotten at the core of conventional human existence.” Across the Tasman, the sense of latent environmental crisis was equally palpable, “we are surrounded by glistening surfaces and rotten centres” (Jones and Baker 5). Property and Countercultural Place and Time In the emerging discipline of legal geography, the law and its institutions (such as property) are explained through the prism of spatiotemporal context. What even more recent law and geography scholarship argues is that space is privileged as “theoretically interesting” while “temporality is reduced to empirical history” (Braverman et al. 53). This part seeks to consider the intersection of property, the counterculture, and time and place without privileging either the spatial or temporal dimensions. It considers simply the place of Nimbin, New South Wales, in early May 1973, and how property conformed to the exigencies of both. Legal geographers also see property through the theory of performance. Through this view, property is a “relational effect, not a prior ground, that is brought into being by the very act of performance” (Blomley, Performing 13). In other words, doing does not merely describe or represent property, but it enacts, such that property becomes a reality through its performance. In short, property is because it does. Performance theory is liberating (Page et al) because it concentrates not on property’s arcane rules and doctrines, nor on the legal geographer’s alleged privileging of place over time, but on its simple doing. Thus, Nicholas Blomley sees private property as a series of constant and reiterative performances: paying rates, building fences, registering titles, and so on. Adopting this approach, Aquarian property is described as a series of performances, seen through the prism of the legal practitioner, and its countercultural participants. The intersection of counterculture and property law implicated my family in its performative narrative. My father had been a solicitor in Nimbin since 1948; his modest legal practice was conducted from the side annexe of the School of Arts. Equipped with a battered leather briefcase and a trusty portable typewriter, like clockwork, he drove the 20 miles from Lismore to Nimbin every Saturday morning. I often accompanied him on his weekly visits. Forty-one years ago, in early May 1973, we drove into town to an extraordinary sight. Seen through ten-year old eyes, surreal scenes of energy, colour, and longhaired, bare-footed young people remain vivid. At almost the exact halfway point in my father’s legal career, new ways of thinking about property rushed headlong and irrevocably into his working life. After May 1973, dinnertime conversations became very different. Gone was the mundane monopoly of mortgages, subdivisions, and cottage conveyancing. The topics now ranged to hippies, communes, co-operatives and shared ownerships. Property was no longer a dull transactional monochrome, a lifeless file bound in pink legal tape. It became an idea replete with diversity and innovation, a concept populated with interesting characters and entertaining, often quirky stories. If property is a narrative (Rose, Persuasion), then the micro-story of property on the NSW Northern Rivers became infinitely more compelling and interesting in the years after Aquarius. For the practitioner, Aquarian property involved new practices and skills: the registration of co-operatives, the drafting of shareholder deeds that regulated the use of common lands, the settling of idealistic trusts, and the ever-increasing frequency of visits to the Nimbin School of Arts every working Saturday. For the 1970s settler in Nimbin, performing Aquarian property took more direct and lived forms. It may have started by reading the open letter that festival co-organiser Graeme Dunstan wrote to the Federal Minister for Urban Affairs, Tom Uren, inviting him to Nimbin as a “holiday rather than a political duty”, and seeking his support for “a community group of 100-200 people to hold a lease dedicated to building a self-sufficient community [...] whose central design principles are creative living and ecological survival” (1). It lay in the performances at the Festival’s Learning Exchange, where ideas of philosophy, organic farming, alternative technology, and law reform were debated in free and unstructured form, the key topics of the latter being abortion and land. And as the Festival came to its conclusion, it was the gathering at the showground, titled “After Nimbin What?—How will the social and environmental experiment at Nimbin effect the setting up of alternative communities, not only in the North Coast, but generally in Australia” (Richmond River Historical Society). In the days and months after Aquarius, it was the founding of new communities such as Co-ordination Co-operative at Tuntable Creek, described by co-founder Terry McGee in 1973 as “a radical experiment in a new way of life. The people who join us […] have to be prepared to jump off the cliff with the certainty that when they get to the bottom, they will be all right” (Munro-Clark 126; Cock 121). The image of jumping off a cliff is a metaphorical performance that supposes a leap into the unknown. While orthodox concepts of property in land were left behind, discarded at the top, the Aquarian leap was not so much into the unknown, but the long forgotten. The success of those communities that survived lay in the innovative and adaptive ways in which common forms of property fitted into registered land title, a system otherwise premised on individual ownership. Achieved through the use of outside private shells—title-holding co-operatives or companies (Page)—inside the shell, the norms and practices of common property were inclusively facilitated and performed (McLaren; Rose, Futures). In 2014, the performance of Aquarian property endures, in the dozens of intentional communities in the Nimbin environs that remain a witness to the zeal and spirit of the times and its countercultural ideals. Conclusion The Aquarian idea of property had profound meaning for self, community, and the environment. It was simultaneously new and old, radical as well as ancient. It re-invented a pre-liberal, pre-enclosure idea of property. For property theory, its legacy is its imaginings of diversity, the idea that property can take pluralistic forms and assert multiple values, a defiant challenge to the dominant paradigm. Aquarian property offers rich pickings compared to the pauperised private monotone. Over 41 years ago, in the legal geography that was Nimbin, New South Wales, the imaginings of property escaped the conformity of enclosure. The Aquarian age represented a moment in “thickened time” (Braverman et al 53), when dissenting theory became practice, and the idea of property indelibly changed for a handful of serendipitous actors, the unscripted performers of a countercultural narrative faithful to its time and place. References Alexander, Gregory. Commodity & Propriety: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought 1776-1970. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Aquarian Archives. "Report into Facilitation of a Rural Intentional Community." Lismore, NSW: Southern Cross University. Blomley, Nicholas. Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power. New York: Guildford Press, 1994. Blomley, Nicholas. Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property. New York: Routledge, 2004. Blomley, Nicholas. “Performing Property, Making the World.” Social Studies Research Network 2053656. 5 Aug. 2013 ‹http://ssrn.com/abstract=2053656›. Braverman, Irus, Nicholas Blomley, David Delaney, and Sandy Kedar. The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2014. Buck, Andrew. The Making of Australian Property Law. Sydney: Federation Press, 2006. Cock, Peter. Alternative Australia: Communities of the Future. London: Quartet Books, 1979. Cohen, Felix. “Dialogue on Private Property.” Rutgers Law Review 9 (1954): 357-387. Dunstan, Graeme. “A Beginning Rather than an End.” The Nimbin Good Times 27 Mar. 1973: 1. Farran, Sue. “Earth under the Nails: The Extraordinary Return to the Land.” Modern Studies in Property Law. Ed. Nicholas Hopkins. 7th edition. Oxford: Hart, 2013. 173-191. Graham, Nicole. Lawscape: Property, Environment, Law. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011. Jones, Tim, and Ian Baker. A Hard Won Freedom: Alternative Communities in New Zealand. Auckland: Hodder & Staughton, 1975. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac with Other Essays on Conservation from Round River. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966. Lismore Regional Gallery. “Not Quite Square: The Story of Northern Rivers Architecture.” Exhibition, 13 Apr. to 2 June 2013. McLaren, John. “The Canadian Doukhobors and the Land Question: Religious Communalists in a Fee Simple World.” Land and Freedom: Law Property Rights and the British Diaspora. Eds. Andrew Buck, John McLaren and Nancy Wright. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2001. 135-168. Metcalf, Bill. Co-operative Lifestyles in Australia: From Utopian Dreaming to Communal Reality. Sydney: UNSW Press, 1995. Miller, Timothy. The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1999. Munro-Clark, Margaret. Communes in Rural Australia: The Movement since 1970. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1986. Neeson, Jeanette M. Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Page, John. “Common Property and the Age of Aquarius.” Griffith Law Review 19 (2010): 172-196. Page, John, Ann Brower, and Johannes Welsh. “The Curious Untidiness of Property and Ecosystem Services: A Hybrid Method of Measuring Place.” Pace Environmental Law Rev. 32 (2015): forthcoming. Reich, Charles. “The New Property.” Yale Law Journal 73 (1964): 733-787. Richmond River Historical Society Archives. “After Nimbin What?” Nimbin Aquarius file, flyer. Lismore, NSW. Rose, Carol M. Property and Persuasion Essays on the History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership. Boulder: Westview, 1994. Rose, Carol M. “The Several Futures of Property: Of Cyberspace and Folk Tales, Emission Trades and Ecosystems.” Minnesota Law Rev. 83 (1998-1999): 129-182. Rose, Carol M. “Canons of Property Talk, or Blackstone’s Anxiety.” Yale Law Journal 108 (1998): 601-632. Sargisson, Lucy, and Lyman Tower Sargent. Living in Utopia: New Zealand’s Intentional Communities. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2004. 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Spurred by global institutions and treaties such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its’ bantling the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the past three decades have seen many nations of the world develop an economic interconnectedness that parallels the great free trade movement of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. Free trade and the resultant economic ‘globalisation’ have had mixed results for many countries and groups within countries and has incited a complex, inarticulate, and sometimes contradictory debate across all segments of our society. Some groups and geographical locales have benefited handsomely from the structural changes that we generally understand as globalisation, whilst other groups and geographical regions have become economically marginalised through disconnectedness from global flows of money and goods and services. Rural and regional Australia, for instance, has experienced a steady decline in recent years and in fact in rural Victoria, a gloomy report from the Bureau of Statistics, suggests that not one new full-time job has been created in more than thirteen years (Colbatch). In other parts of the country, particularly Sydney and Melbourne, things could not seem better; property values have doubled, unemployment is at record lows, and the new middle classes cram the cafés of the gentrified inner-cities. Wages have risen by up to fifty percent in many of Australia’s inner cities during the late 1990s (Birnbauer and Gurrera). By the end of the 1990s, in response to some of the inequalities of globalisation—particularly between developed and developing countries—a large globally-linked protest movement arose out of Seattle in the United States. The movement formed as a protest against the policies of the WTO and was an eclectic arrangement of political groups who believed that free trade was not the answer to a more equitable world. The problem was that some of the leading thinkers of the movement—in a movement that claimed to have no leaders—were far too short-sighted to see beyond the popular zeitgeist of the time. The turn of the century zeitgeist was based on a well-meaning utopian-libertarian vision of a frictionless and equitable world. The problem was that this vision had no place for nations and thus citizen-based democratically elected national governments. There had apparently been a coup and governments were now captured by shoe manufacturers. One of the best-known authors of the turn of the century globalisation protest movement was the inner-city Canadian journalist Naomi Klein with her popularly acclaimed book No Logo (Klein). Although shrewdly timed, there was nothing particularly ground-breaking about Klein’s work; anxieties about corporate power, exploited workers, and the power of the ideologically potent media industries have for most of the Twentieth Century been the focus of relations between governments and the private sphere everywhere. The book relied heavily on the popular journalistic branding of the time, the ‘new economy’, which was believed to be represented by the industries of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector, advertising, and shoe manufacturers. The new economy never existed; it was merely a popularly accepted business-journalism term that perhaps described parts of the more complex corpus of work on ‘post-industrialism’. Many thinkers have been attempting to understand issues of equity and post-industrialism for more than three decades; perhaps one the best-known authors in Australia is the ex-Labor minister Barry Jones with his celebrated 1982 book Sleeper Wake; Technology and the Future of Work (Jones). The turn of the century globalisation protest movement was in essence a utopian-libertarian movement and even at times claimed to be ‘natural’ and ‘leaderless’. Pithily, the WTO could also be described as ‘utopian-libertarian’ as much of its post-war ideological base stems from the belief that national borders are a hindrance (and the world would be better without them), and national governments should not interfere with its ‘natural’ globalisation schema. The ‘global’ just like the ‘nation’ is an unwieldy meta-structure and can be interpreted in many ways and for many ends. The minimal working definitions of globalisation, or dare I say ‘globalism’, circulate around the processes in which complex interconnections are said to be rapidly developing between societies, institutions, cultures, collectives, and individuals worldwide. These connections are believed to be between cultural, political, and economic practices that are local, national, technological, and corporate. And if there really is such a thing as globalisation, then it is far from a ‘natural’ process, but has developed as the direct result of strategic choices by governments and corporations in the past thirty years. In Australia, our engagement with the dominant form of globalisation was exacerbated by the Hawke/Keating Labor governments (1984-1996) that deregulated large portions of the economy, floated our currency, and embraced the all-trade-is-good mantra of global economic policy. Not surprisingly, the rich countries define the dominant ideologies of globalisation and corporations are the main catalyst (Everend). Many corporations are involved in cultural production thus creating their own world culture and value system. This value system is based on consumerism (like buying sports shoes) and the triumph of individual consumer agency over collective economic practices (like free education). The end of the east-west logic of the Cold War ended the eighty-year ideological wrestle between centralised state economic planning and market driven models. Eric Hobsbawn, in his masterful empirical history, The Age of Extremes, claims that what we understand as the Twentieth Century ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union (Hobsbawn). What we are left with is a world with only one major superpower, one major economic model, and one major Liberal ideology that is increasing the wealth gap between and within societies everywhere (Landes). We do need to urgently understand the forces beyond the nation state, but this should not be at the expense of a political engagement with the democratic processes that make up the nation state. The utopian-libertarian critique of the turn of the century globalisation protest movement was far too simplistic. The Twentieth Century often disastrously taught us that ideas of the nation can be interpreted in many ways, and likewise, ideas of ‘the global’ are contested meta-structures that can be multifariously interpreted. There are no effortless solutions to understanding globalisation processes and those that tell us what the ‘global’ is largely control what it is. This is similar to the history of Australia. Historically Australia has had different ways to see ourselves based on what group has been in power and the particular requirements of this group. The requirements of an elite group of Australians at the moment is perhaps no government at all so that ‘the people’ can consume in peace and not have bothersome local governments do nasty ‘state-authoritarian’ things like build kindergartens or repair street lights. If ‘the people’ loose faith in citizen based democracy then we undermine the only real power that we have as individuals. The simple act of many activists to communicate between various countries and exchange ideas and strategies is not end in itself; it is merely one component of a significant beginning. If we don’t have a major war, or an economic catastrophe, globalisation will probably further arrive over the next few decades. And we need to have representative, fair, collective and geographically specific processes to deal with this. Most of the collective institutional solutions we already have, and it is up to a new generation to take control of their democratic inheritance (like every other generation before us) rather than conjure one-dimensional utopian-libertarian visions that are oppressively close to those of the WTO. Works Cited www.milkbar.com.au Birnbauer, William and Guerrera, Orietta “Rich Shun Easter Suburbs for Inner City” in The Age, Melbourne, June 18. 2002, <http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/06/17/1023864403482.php> (Accessed 11 May, 2003) Colbatch, Tim “Part-time work spawns rural underclass” in The Age, 26 April 2003, <http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2003/04/25/1050777401... ...309.htm> (Accessed 27 April, 2003) Everand, Jerry Virtual States: The Internet and the Boundaries of the Nation State,Routledge, London, 2000. Hobsbawn, Eric Age of Extremes: The short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, Abacus, London, 1994. Jones, Barry Sleepers Wake: Technology and the Future of Work, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1982. Klein, Naomi No Logo, Flamingo, London, 2000. Landes, Richard S The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, WW Norton, New York, 1999. Links http://www.milkbar.com.au http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/06/17/1023864403482.html http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2003/04/25/1050777401309.htm Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Bellamy, Craig. "Post-Logo " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/13-postlogo.php>. APA Style Bellamy, C. (2003, Jun 19). Post-Logo . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/13-postlogo.php>

I have decided to launch a campaign against the skyscraper, that hideous, mediocre form of architecture…. Today we only have an empty version of it, only competing in height.— Rem Koolhaas, “Kool Enough for Beijing?”Figure 1: The CCTV Headquarters—A Courtyard in the Air. Cher Coad, 2020.Introduction: An Anomaly within an Anomaly Construction of Beijing’s China Central Television Headquarters (henceforth CCTV Headquarters) began in 2004 and the building was officially completed in 2012. It is a project by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) headed by Rem Koolhaas (1944-), who has been called “the coolest, hippest, and most cutting-edge architect on the planet”(“Rem Koolhaas Biography”). The CCTV Headquarters is a distinctive feature of downtown Beijing and is heavily associated in the Western world with 21st-century China. It is often used as the backdrop for reports from the China correspondent for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Bill Birtles. The construction of the CCTV Headquarters, however, was very much an international enterprise. Koolhaas himself is Dutch, and the building was one of the first projects the OMA did outside of America after 9/11. As Koolhaas describes it: we had incredible emphasis on New York for five years, and America for five years, and what we decided to do after September 11 when we realized that, you know, things were going to be different in America: [was] to also orient ourselves eastwards [Koolhaas goes on to describe two projects: the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia and the CCTV Headquarters]. (Rem Koolhaas Interview) Problematically, Koolhaas claims that the building we created for CCTV could never have been conceived by the Chinese and could never have been built by Europeans. It is a hybrid by definition. It was also a partnership, not a foreign imposition…. There was a huge Chinese component from the very beginning. We tried to do a building that conveys that it has emerged from the local situation. (Fraioli 117) Our article reinterprets this reading. We suggest that the OMA’s “incredible emphasis” on America—home of the world’s first skyscraper: the Home Insurance Building built in 1885 in Chicago, Illinois—pivotally spills over into its engagement with China. The emergence of the CCTV Headquarters “from the local situation”, such as it is, is more in spite of Koolhaas’s stated “hybrid” approach than because of it, for what’s missing from his analysis of the CCTV Headquarters’ provenance is the siheyuan or classical Chinese courtyard house. We will argue that the CCTV Headquarters is an anomaly within an anomaly in contemporary Beijing’s urban landscape, to the extent that it turns the typologies of both the (vertical, American) skyscraper and the (horizontal, Chinese) siheyuan on a 90 degree angle. The important point to make here, however, is that these two anomalous elements of the building are not of the same order. While the anomalous re-configuration of the skyscraper typology is clearly part of Koolhaas’s architectural manifesto, it is against his architectural intentionality that the CCTV Headquarters sustains the typology of the siheyuan. This bespeaks the persistent and perhaps functional presence of traditional Chinese architecture and urbanism in the building. Koolhaas’s building contains both starkly evident and more secretive anomalies. Ironically then, there is a certain truth in Koolhaas’s words, beneath the critique we made of it above as an example of American-dominated, homogenising globalisation. And the significance of the CCTV Headquarters’ hybridity as both skyscraper and siheyuan can be elaborated through Daniel M. Abramson’s thesis that a consideration of unbuilt architecture has the potential to re-open architecture to its historical conditions. Roberto Schwarz argues that “forms are the abstract of specific social relationships” (53). Drawing on Schwarz’s work and Abramson’s, we conclude that the historical presence—as secretive anomaly—of the siheyuan in the CCTV Headquarters suggests that the building’s formal debt to the siheyuan (more so than to the American skyscraper) may continue to unsettle the “specific social relationship” of Chinese to Western society (Schwarz 53). The site of this unsettlement, we suggest, is data. The CCTV Headquarters might well be the most data-rich site in all of China—it is, after all, a monumental television station. Suggestively, this wealth of airborne data is literally enclosed within the aerial “courtyard”, with its classical Chinese form, of the CCTV Headquarters. This could hardly be irrelevant in the context of the geo-politics of globalised data. The “form of data”, to coin a phrase, radiates through all the social consequences of data flow and usage, and here the form of data is entwined with a form always already saturated with social consequence. The secretive architectural anomaly of Koolhaas’s building is thus a heterotopic space within the broader Western engagement with China, so much of which relates to flows and captures of data. The Ubiquitous Siheyuan or Classical Chinese Courtyard House According to Ying Liu and Adenrele Awotona, “the courtyard house, a residential compound with buildings surrounding a courtyard on four (or sometimes three) sides, has been representative of housing patterns for over one thousand years in China” (248). Liu and Awotona state that “courtyard house patterns could be found in many parts of China, but the most typical forms are those located in the Old City in Beijing, the capital of China for over eight hundred years” (252). In their reading, the siheyuan is a peculiarly elastic architectural typology, whose influence is present as much in the Forbidden City as in the humble family home (252). Prima facie then, it is not surprising that it has also secreted itself within the architectural form of Koolhaas’s creation. It is important to note, however, that while the “most typical forms” of the siheyuan are indeed still to be found in Beijing, the courtyard house is an increasingly uncommon sight in the Chinese capital. An article in the China Daily from 2004 refers to the “few remaining siheyuan” (“Kool Enough for Beijing?”). That said, all is not lost for the siheyuan. Liu and Awotona discuss how the classical form of the courtyard house has been modified to more effectively house current residents in the older parts of Beijing while protecting “the horizontal planning feature of traditional Beijing” (254). “Basic design principles” (255) of the siheyuan have supported “a transition from the traditional single-household courtyard housing form to a contemporary multi-household courtyard housing form” (254). In this process, approaches of “urban renewal [involving] demolition” and “preservation, renovation and rebuilding” have been taken (255). Donia Zhang extends the work of Liu and Awotona in the elaboration of her thesis that “Chinese-Americans interested in building Chinese-style courtyard houses in America are keen to learn about their architectural heritage” (47). Zhang’s article concludes with an illustration that shows how the siheyuan may be merged with the typical American suburban dwelling (66). The final thing to emphasise about the siheyuan is what Liu and Awotona describe as its “special introverted quality” (249). The form is saturated with social consequence by virtue of its philosophical undergirding. The coincidence of philosophies of Daoism (including feng-shui) and Confucianism in the architecture and spatiality of the classical Chinese courtyard house makes it an exceedingly odd anomaly of passivity and power (250-51). The courtyard itself has a highly charged role in the management of family, social and cultural life, which, we suggest, survives its transposition into novel architectural environments. Figure 2: The CCTV Headquarters—Looking Up at “The Overhang”. Cher Coad, 2020. The CCTV Headquarters: A New Type of Skyscraper? Rem Koolhaas is not the only architect to interrogate the standard skyscraper typology. In his essay from 1999, “The Architecture of the Future”, Norman Foster argues that “the world’s increasing ecological crisis” (278) is in part a function of “unchecked urban sprawl” (279). A new type of skyscraper, he suggests, might at least ameliorate the sprawl of our cities: the Millennium Tower that we have proposed in Tokyo takes a traditional horizontal city quarter—housing, shops, restaurants, cinemas, museums, sporting facilities, green spaces and public transport networks—and turns it on its side to create a super-tall building with a multiplicity of uses … . It would create a virtually self-sufficient, fully self-sustaining community in the sky. (279) Koolhaas follows suit, arguing that “the actual point of the skyscraper—to increase worker density—has been lost. Skyscrapers are now only momentary points of high density spaced so far apart that they don’t actually increase density at all” (“Kool Enough for Beijing?”). Foster’s solution to urban sprawl is to make the horizontal (an urban segment) vertical; Koolhaas’s is to make the vertical horizontal: “we’ve [OMA] come up with two types: a very low-rise series of buildings, or a single, condensed hyperbuilding. What we’re doing with CCTV is a prototype of the hyperbuilding” (“Kool Enough for Beijing?”). Interestingly, the “low-rise” type mentioned here brings to mind the siheyuan—textual evidence, perhaps, that the siheyuan is always already a silent fellow traveller of the CCTV Headquarters project. The CCTV Headquarters is, even at over 200 metres tall itself, an anomaly of horizontalism amidst Beijing’s pervasive skyscraper verticality. As Paul Goldberger reports, “some Beijingers have taken to calling it Big Shorts”, which again evokes horizontality. This is its most obvious anomaly, and a somewhat melancholy reminder of “the horizontal planning feature of traditional Beijing” now mutilated by skyscrapers (Liu and Awotona 254). In the same gesture, however, with which it lays the skyscraper on its side, Koolhaas’s creation raises into the air the shape of the courtyard of a classical Chinese house. To our knowledge, no one has noticed this before, let alone written about it. It is, to be sure, a genuine courtyard shape—not merely an archway or a bridge with unoccupied space between. Pure building entirely surrounds the vertical courtyard shape formed in the air. Most images of the building provide an orientation that maximises the size of its vertical courtyard. To this extent, the (secret) courtyard shape of the building is hidden in plain sight. It is possible, however, to make the courtyard narrow to a mere slit of space, and finally to nothing, by circumnavigating the building. Certain perspectives on the building can even make it look like a more-or-less ordinary skyscraper. But, as a quick google-image search reveals, such views are rare. What seems to make the building special to people is precisely that part of it that is not building. Furthermore, anyone approaching the CCTV Headquarters with the intention of locating a courtyard typology within its form will be disappointed unless they look to its vertical plane. There is no hint of a courtyard at the base of the building. Figure 3: The CCTV Headquarters—View from “The Overhang”. Cher Coad, 2020.Figure 4: The CCTV Headquarters—Looking through the Floor of “The Overhang”. Cher Coad, 2020.Visiting the CCTV Headquarters: A “Special Introverted Quality?” In January 2020, we visited the CCTV Headquarters, ostensibly as audience members for a recording of a science spectacular show. Towards the end of the recording, we were granted a quick tour of the building. It is rare for foreigners to gain access to the sections of the building we visited. Taking the lift about 40 floors up, we arrived at the cantilever level—known informally as “the overhang”. Glass discs in the floor allow one to walk out over nothingness, looking down on ant-like pedestrians. Looking down like this was also to peer into the vacant “courtyard” of the building—into a structure “turned or pushed inward on itself”, which is the anatomical definition of “introverted” (Oxford Languages Dictionary). Workers in the building evinced no great affection for it, and certainly nothing of our wide-eyed wonder. Somebody said, “it’s just a place to work”. One of this article’s authors, Patrick West, seemed to feel the overhang almost imperceptibly vibrating beneath him. (Still, he has also experienced this sensation in conventional skyscrapers.) We were told the rumour that the building has started to tilt over dangerously. Being high in the air, but also high on the air, with nothing but air beneath us, felt edgy—somehow special—our own little world. Koolhaas promotes the CCTV Headquarters as (in paraphrase) “its own city, its own community” (“Kool Enough for Beijing?”). This resonated with us on our visit. Conventional skyscrapers fracture any sense of community through their segregated floor-upon-floor verticality; there is never enough room for a little patch of horizontal urbanism to unroll. Within “the overhang”, the CCTV Headquarters felt unlike a standard skyscraper, as if we were in an urban space magically levitated from the streets below. Sure, we had been told by one of the building’s inhabitants that it was “just a place to work”—but compared to the bleak sterility of most skyscraper work places, it wasn’t that sterile. The phrase Liu and Awotona use of the siheyuan comes to mind here, as we recall our experience; somehow, we had been inside a different type of building, one with its own “special introverted quality” (249). Special, that is, in the sense of containing just so much of horizontal urbanism as allows the building to retain its introverted quality as “its own city” (“Kool Enough for Beijing?”). Figure 5: The CCTV Headquarters—View from “The Overhang”. Cher Coad, 2020.Figure 6: The CCTV Headquarters—Inside “The Overhang”. Cher Coad, 2020. Unbuilt Architecture: The Visionary and the Contingent Within the present that it constitutes, built architecture is surrounded by unbuilt architecture at two interfaces: where the past ends; where the future begins. The soupy mix of urbanism continually spawns myriad architectural possibilities, and any given skyscraper is haunted by all the skyscrapers it might have been. History and the past hang heavily from them. Meanwhile, architectural programme or ambition—such as it is—pulls in the other direction: towards an idealised (if not impossible to practically realise) future. Along these lines, Koolhaas and the OMA are plainly a future-directed, as well as self-aware, architectural unit: at OMA we try to build in the greatest possible tolerance and the least amount of rigidity in terms of embodying one particular moment. We want our buildings to evolve. A building has at least two lives—the one imagined by its maker and the life it lives afterward—and they are never the same. (Fraioli 115) Koolhaas makes the same point even more starkly with regard to the CCTV Headquarters project through his use of the word “prototype”: “what we’re doing with CCTV is a prototype of the hyperbuilding” (“Kool Enough for Beijing?”). At the same time, however, as the presence of the siheyuan within the architecture of the CCTV Headquarters shows, the work of the OMA cannot escape from the superabundance of history, within which, as Roberto Schwarz claims, “forms are the abstract of specific social relationships” (53). Supporting our contentions here, Daniel M. Abramson notes that unbuilt architecture implies two sub-categories … the visionary unbuilt, and the contingent … . Visionary schemes invite a forward glance, down one true, vanguard path to a reformed society and discipline. The contingent unbuilts, conversely, invite a backward glance, along multiple routes history might have gone, each with its own likelihood and validity; no privileged truths. (Abramson)Introducing Abramson’s theory to the example of the CCTV Headquarters, the “visionary unbuilt” lines up with Koolhaas’ thesis that the building is a future-directed “prototype”. while the clearest candidate for the “contingent unbuilt”, we suggest, is the siheyuan. Why? Firstly, the siheyuan is hidden in plain sight, within the framing architecture of the CCTV Headquarters; secondly, it is ubiquitous in Beijing urbanism—little wonder then that it turns up, unannounced, in this Beijing building; thirdly, and related to the second point, the two buildings share a “special introverted quality” (Liu and Awotona 249). “The contingent”, in this case, is the anomaly nestled within the much more blatant “visionary” (or futuristic) anomaly—the hyperbuilding to come—of the Beijing-embedded CCTV Headquarters. Koolhaas’s building’s most fascinating anomaly relates, not to any forecast of the future, but to the subtle persistence of the past—its muted quotation of the ancient siheyuan form. Our article is, in part, a response to Abramson’s invitation to “pursue … the consequences of the unbuilt … [and thus] to open architectural history more fully to history”. We have supplemented Abramson’s idea with Schwarz’s suggestion that “forms are the abstract of specific social relationships” (53). The anomaly of the siheyuan—alongside that of the hyperbuilding—within the CCTV headquarters, opens the building up (paraphrasing Abramson) to a fuller analysis of its historical positioning within Western and Eastern flows of globalisation (or better, as we are about to suggest, of glocalisation). In parallel, its form (paraphrasing Schwarz) abstracts and re-presents this history’s specific social relationships. Figure 7: The CCTV Headquarters—A Courtyard of Data. Cher Coad, 2020.Conclusion: A Courtyard of Data and Tensions of Glocalisation Koolhaas proposes that the CCTV Headquarters was “a partnership, not a foreign imposition” and that the building “emerged from the local situation” (Fraioli 117). To us, this smacks of Pollyanna globalisation. The CCTV Headquarters is, we suggest, more accurately read as an imposition of the American skyscraper typology, albeit in anomalous form. (One might even argue that the building’s horizontal deviation from the vertical norm reinforces that norm.) Still, amidst a thicket of conventionally vertical skyscrapers, the building’s horizontalism does have the anomalous effect of recalling “the horizontal planning feature of traditional Beijing” (Liu and Awotona 254). Buried within its horizontalism, however, lies a more secretive anomaly in the form of a vertical siheyuan. This anomaly, we contend, motivates a terminological shift from “globalisation” to “glocalisation”, for the latter term better captures the notion of a lack of reconciliation between the “global” and the “local” in the building. Koolhaas’s visionary architectural programme explicitly advances anomaly. The CCTV Headquarters radically reworks the skyscraper typology as the prototype of a hyperbuilding defined by horizontalism. Certainly, such horizontalism recalls the horizontal plane of pre-skyscraper Beijing and, if faintly, that plane’s ubiquitous feature: the classical courtyard house. Simultaneously, however, the siheyuan has a direct if secretive presence within the morphology of the CCTV Headquarters, even as any suggestion of a vertical courtyard is strikingly absent from Koolhaas’s vanguard manifesto. To this extent, the hyperbuilding fits within Abramson’s category of “the visionary unbuilt”, while the siheyuan aligns with Abramson’s “contingent unbuilt” descriptor. The latter is the “might have been” that, largely under the pressure of its ubiquity as Beijing vernacular architecture, “very nearly is”. Drawing on Schwarz’s idea that “forms are the abstract of specific social relationships”, we propose that the siheyuan, as anomalous form of the CCTV Headquarters, is a heterotopic space within the hybrid global harmony (to paraphrase Koolhaas) purportedly represented by the building (53). In this space thus formed collides the built-up historical and philosophical social intensity of the classical Chinese courtyard house and the intensities of data flows and captures that help constitute the predominantly capitalist and neo-liberalist “social relationship” of China and the Western world—the world of the skyscraper (Schwarz). Within the siheyuan of the CCTV Headquarters, globalised data is literally enveloped by Daoism and Confucianism; it is saturated with the social consequence of local place. The term “glocalisation” is, we suggest, to be preferred here to “globalisation”, because of how it better reflects such vernacular interruptions to the hegemony of globalised space. Forms delineate social relationships, and data, which both forms and is formed by social relationships, may be formed by architecture as much as anything else within social space. Attention to the unbuilt architectural forms (vanguard and contingent) contained within the CCTV Headquarters reveals layers of anomaly that might, ultimately, point to another form of architecture entirely, in which glocal tensions are not only recognised, but resolved. Here, Abramson’s historical project intersects, in the final analysis, with a worldwide politics. Figure 8: The CCTV Headquarters—A Sound Stage in Action. Cher Coad, 2020. References Abramson, Daniel M. “Stakes of the Unbuilt.” Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative. 20 July 2020. <http://we-aggregate.org/piece/stakes-of-the-unbuilt>.Foster, N. “The Architecture of the Future.” The Architecture Reader: Essential Writings from Vitruvius to the Present. Ed. A. Krista Sykes. New York: George Braziller, 2007: 276-79. Fraioli, Paul. “The Invention and Reinvention of the City: An Interview with Rem Koolhaas.” Journal of International Affairs 65.2 (Spring/Summer 2012): 113-19. Goldberger, Paul. “Forbidden Cities: Beijing’s Great New Architecture Is a Mixed Blessing for the City.” The New Yorker—The Sky Line. 23 June 2008. <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/30/forbidden-cities>.“Kool Enough for Beijing?” China Daily. 2 March 2004. <https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-03/02/content_310800.htm>. Liu, Ying, and Adenrele Awotona. “The Traditional Courtyard House in China: Its Formation and Transition.” Evolving Environmental Ideals—Changing Way of Life, Values and Design Practices: IAPS 14 Conference Proceedings. IAPS. Stockholm, Sweden: Royal Institute of Technology, 1996: 248-60. <https://iaps.architexturez.net/system/files/pdf/1202bm1029.content.pdf>.Oxford Languages Dictionary. “Rem Koolhaas Biography.” Encyclopedia of World Biography. 20 July 2020. <https://www.notablebiographies.com/news/Ge-La/Koolhaas-Rem.html>. “Rem Koolhaas Interview.” Manufacturing Intellect. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. 2003. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW187PwSjY0>.Schwarz, Roberto. Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture. New York: Verso, 1992. Zhang, Donia. “Classical Courtyard Houses of Beijing: Architecture as Cultural Artifact.” Space and Communication 1.1 (Dec. 2015): 47-68.

Every act of art is able to reveal, balance and revive the relations between a territory and its inhabitants (François Davin, Southern Forest Sculpture Walk Catalogue)Introducing the Understory Art in Nature TrailIn February 2015, a colossal wildfire destroyed 98,300 hectares of farm and bushland surrounding the town of Northcliffe, located 365 km south of Perth, Western Australia (WA). As the largest fire in the recorded history of the southwest region (Southern Forest Arts, After the Burn 8), the disaster attracted national attention however the extraordinary contribution of local knowledge in saving a town considered by authorities to be “undefendable” (Kennedy) is yet to be widely appreciated. In accounting for a creative scene that survived the conflagration, this case study sees culture mobilised as a socioeconomic resource for conservation and the healing of community spirit.Northcliffe (population 850) sits on a coastal plain that hosts majestic old-growth forest and lush bushland. In 2006, Southern Forest Arts (SFA) dedicated a Southern Forest Sculpture Walk for creative professionals to develop artworks along a 1.2 km walk trail through pristine native forest. It was re-branded “Understory—Art in Nature” in 2009; then “Understory Art in Nature Trail” in 2015, the understory vegetation layer beneath the canopy being symbolic of Northcliffe’s deeply layered caché of memories, including “the awe, love, fear, and even the hatred that these trees have provoked among the settlers” (Davin in SFA Catalogue). In the words of the SFA Trailguide, “Every place (no matter how small) has ‘understories’—secrets, songs, dreams—that help us connect with the spirit of place.”In the view of forest arts ecologist Kumi Kato, “It is a sense of place that underlies the commitment to a place’s conservation by its community, broadly embracing those who identify with the place for various reasons, both geographical and conceptual” (149). In bioregional terms such communities form a terrain of consciousness (Berg and Dasmann 218), extending responsibility for conservation across cultures, time and space (Kato 150). A sustainable thematic of place must also include livelihood as the third party between culture and nature that establishes the relationship between them (Giblett 240). With these concepts in mind I gauge creative impact on forest as place, and, in turn, (altered) forest’s impact on people. My abstraction of physical place is inclusive of humankind moving in dialogic engagement with forest. A mapping of Understory’s creative activities sheds light on how artists express physical environments in situated creative practices, clusters, and networks. These, it is argued, constitute unique types of community operating within (and beyond) a foundational scene of inspiration and mystification that is metaphorically “rising from the ashes.” In transcending disconnectedness between humankind and landscape, Understory may be understood to both culturalise nature (as an aesthetic system), and naturalise culture (as an ecologically modelled system), to build on a trope introduced by Feld (199). Arguably when the bush is cultured in this way it attracts consumers who may otherwise disconnect from nature.The trail (henceforth Understory) broaches the histories of human relations with Northcliffe’s natural systems of place. Sub-groups of the Noongar nation have inhabited the southwest for an estimated 50,000 years and their association with the Northcliffe region extends back at least 6,000 years (SFA Catalogue; see also Crawford and Crawford). An indigenous sense of the spirit of forest is manifest in Understory sculpture, literature, and—for the purpose of this article—the compilation CD Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests (henceforth Canopy, Figure 1).As a cultural and environmental construction of place, Canopy sustains the land with acts of seeing, listening to, and interpreting nature; of remembering indigenous people in the forest; and of recalling the hardships of the early settlers. I acknowledge SFA coordinator and Understory custodian Fiona Sinclair for authorising this investigation; Peter Hill for conservation conversations; Robyn Johnston for her Canopy CD sleeve notes; Della Rae Morrison for permissions; and David Pye for discussions. Figure 1. Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests (CD, 2006). Cover image by Raku Pitt, 2002. Courtesy Southern Forest Arts, Northcliffe, WA.Forest Ecology, Emotion, and ActionEstablished in 1924, Northcliffe’s ill-founded Group Settlement Scheme resulted in frontier hardship and heartbreak, and deforestation of the southwest region for little economic return. An historic forest controversy (1992-2001) attracted media to Northcliffe when protesters attempting to disrupt logging chained themselves to tree trunks and suspended themselves from branches. The signing of the Western Australian Regional Forest Agreement in 1999 was followed, in 2001, by deregulation of the dairy industry and a sharp decline in area population.Moved by the gravity of this situation, Fiona Sinclair won her pitch to the Manjimup Council for a sound alternative industry for Northcliffe with projections of jobs: a forest where artists could work collectively and sustainably to reveal the beauty of natural dimensions. A 12-acre pocket of allocated Crown Land adjacent to the town was leased as an A-Class Reserve vested for Education and Recreation, for which SFA secured unified community ownership and grants. Conservation protocols stipulated that no biomass could be removed from the forest and that predominantly raw, natural materials were to be used (F. Sinclair and P. Hill, personal interview, 26 Sep. 2014). With forest as prescribed image (wider than the bounded chunk of earth), Sinclair invited the artists to consider the themes of spirituality, creativity, history, dichotomy, and sensory as a basis for work that was to be “fresh, intimate, and grounded in place.” Her brief encouraged artists to work with humanity and imagination to counteract residual community divisiveness and resentment. Sinclair describes this form of implicit environmentalism as an “around the back” approach that avoids lapsing into political commentary or judgement: “The trail is a love letter from those of us who live here to our visitors, to connect with grace” (F. Sinclair, telephone interview, 6 Apr. 2014). Renewing community connections to local place is essential if our lives and societies are to become more sustainable (Pedelty 128). To define Northcliffe’s new community phase, artists respected differing associations between people and forest. A structure on a karri tree by Indigenous artist Norma MacDonald presents an Aboriginal man standing tall and proud on a rock to become one with the tree and the forest: as it was for thousands of years before European settlement (MacDonald in SFA Catalogue). As Feld observes, “It is the stabilizing persistence of place as a container of experiences that contributes so powerfully to its intrinsic memorability” (201).Adhering to the philosophy that nature should not be used or abused for the sake of art, the works resonate with the biorhythms of the forest, e.g. functional seats and shelters and a cascading retainer that directs rainwater back to the resident fauna. Some sculptures function as receivers for picking up wavelengths of ancient forest. Forest Folk lurk around the understory, while mysterious stone art represents a life-shaping force of planet history. To represent the reality of bushfire, Natalie Williamson’s sculpture wraps itself around a burnt-out stump. The work plays with scale as small native sundew flowers are enlarged and a subtle beauty, easily overlooked, becomes apparent (Figure 2). The sculptor hopes that “spiders will spin their webs about it, incorporating it into the landscape” (SFA Catalogue).Figure 2. Sundew. Sculpture by Natalie Williamson, 2006. Understory Art in Nature Trail, Northcliffe, WA. Image by the author, 2014.Memory is naturally place-oriented or at least place-supported (Feld 201). Topaesthesia (sense of place) denotes movement that connects our biography with our route. This is resonant for the experience of regional character, including the tactile, olfactory, gustatory, visual, and auditory qualities of a place (Ryan 307). By walking, we are in a dialogue with the environment; both literally and figuratively, we re-situate ourselves into our story (Schine 100). For example, during a summer exploration of the trail (5 Jan. 2014), I intuited a personal attachment based on my grandfather’s small bush home being razed by fire, and his struggle to support seven children.Understory’s survival depends on vigilant controlled (cool) burns around its perimeter (Figure 3), organised by volunteer Peter Hill. These burns also hone the forest. On 27 Sept. 2014, the charred vegetation spoke a spring language of opportunity for nature to reassert itself as seedpods burst and continue the cycle; while an autumn walk (17 Mar. 2016) yielded a fresh view of forest colour, patterning, light, shade, and sound.Figure 3. Understory Art in Nature Trail. Map Created by Fiona Sinclair for Southern Forest Sculpture Walk Catalogue (2006). Courtesy Southern Forest Arts, Northcliffe, WA.Understory and the Melody of CanopyForest resilience is celebrated in five MP3 audio tours produced for visitors to dialogue with the trail in sensory contexts of music, poetry, sculptures and stories that name or interpret the setting. The trail starts in heathland and includes three creek crossings. A zone of acacias gives way to stands of the southwest signature trees karri (Eucalyptus diversicolor), jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata), and marri (Corymbia calophylla). Following a sheoak grove, a riverine environment re-enters heathland. Birds, insects, mammals, and reptiles reside around and between the sculptures, rendering the earth-embedded art a fusion of human and natural orders (concept after Relph 141). On Audio Tour 3, Songs for the Southern Forests, the musician-composers reflect on their regionally focused items, each having been birthed according to a personal musical concept (the manner in which an individual artist holds the totality of a composition in cultural context). Arguably the music in question, its composers, performers, audiences, and settings, all have a role to play in defining the processes and effects of forest arts ecology. Local musician Ann Rice billeted a cluster of musicians (mostly from Perth) at her Windy Harbour shack. The energy of the production experience was palpable as all participated in on-site forest workshops, and supported each other’s items as a musical collective (A. Rice, telephone interview, 2 Oct. 2014). Collaborating under producer Lee Buddle’s direction, they orchestrated rich timbres (tone colours) to evoke different musical atmospheres (Table 1). Composer/Performer Title of TrackInstrumentation1. Ann RiceMy Placevocals/guitars/accordion 2. David PyeCicadan Rhythmsangklung/violin/cello/woodblocks/temple blocks/clarinet/tapes 3. Mel RobinsonSheltervocal/cello/double bass 4. DjivaNgank Boodjakvocals/acoustic, electric and slide guitars/drums/percussion 5. Cathie TraversLamentaccordion/vocals/guitar/piano/violin/drums/programming 6. Brendon Humphries and Kevin SmithWhen the Wind First Blewvocals/guitars/dobro/drums/piano/percussion 7. Libby HammerThe Gladevocal/guitar/soprano sax/cello/double bass/drums 8. Pete and Dave JeavonsSanctuaryguitars/percussion/talking drum/cowbell/soprano sax 9. Tomás FordWhite Hazevocal/programming/guitar 10. David HyamsAwakening /Shaking the Tree /When the Light Comes guitar/mandolin/dobro/bodhran/rainstick/cello/accordion/flute 11. Bernard CarneyThe Destiny Waltzvocal/guitar/accordion/drums/recording of The Destiny Waltz 12. Joel BarkerSomething for Everyonevocal/guitars/percussion Table 1. Music Composed for Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests.Source: CD sleeve and http://www.understory.com.au/art.php. Composing out of their own strengths, the musicians transformed the geographic region into a living myth. As Pedelty has observed of similar musicians, “their sounds resonate because they so profoundly reflect our living sense of place” (83-84). The remainder of this essay evidences the capacity of indigenous song, art music, electronica, folk, and jazz-blues to celebrate, historicise, or re-imagine place. Firstly, two items represent the phenomenological approach of site-specific sensitivity to acoustic, biological, and cultural presence/loss, including the materiality of forest as a living process.“Singing Up the Land”In Aboriginal Australia “there is no place that has not been imaginatively grasped through song, dance and design, no place where traditional owners cannot see the imprint of sacred creation” (Rose 18). Canopy’s part-Noongar language song thus repositions the ancient Murrum-Noongar people within their life-sustaining natural habitat and spiritual landscape.Noongar Yorga woman Della Rae Morrison of the Bibbulmun and Wilman nations co-founded The Western Australian Nuclear Free Alliance to campaign against the uranium mining industry threatening Ngank Boodjak (her country, “Mother Earth”) (D.R. Morrison, e-mail, 15 July 2014). In 2004, Morrison formed the duo Djiva (meaning seed power or life force) with Jessie Lloyd, a Murri woman of the Guugu Yimidhirr Nation from North Queensland. After discerning the fundamental qualities of the Understory site, Djiva created the song Ngank Boodjak: “This was inspired by walking the trail […] feeling the energy of the land and the beautiful trees and hearing the birds. When I find a spot that I love, I try to feel out the lay-lines, which feel like vortexes of energy coming out of the ground; it’s pretty amazing” (Morrison in SFA Canopy sleeve) Stanza 1 points to the possibilities of being more fully “in country”:Ssh!Ni dabarkarn kooliny, ngank boodja kookoorninyListen, walk slowly, beautiful Mother EarthThe inclusion of indigenous language powerfully implements an indigenous interpretation of forest: “My elders believe that when we leave this life from our physical bodies that our spirit is earthbound and is living in the rocks or the trees and if you listen carefully you might hear their voices and maybe you will get some answers to your questions” (Morrison in SFA Catalogue).Cicadan Rhythms, by composer David Pye, echoes forest as a lively “more-than-human” world. Pye took his cue from the ambient pulsing of male cicadas communicating in plenum (full assembly) by means of airborne sound. The species were sounding together in tempo with individual rhythm patterns that interlocked to create one fantastic rhythm (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Composer David Pye). The cicada chorus (the loudest known lovesong in the insect world) is the unique summer soundmark (term coined by Truax Handbook, Website) of the southern forests. Pye chased various cicadas through Understory until he was able to notate the rhythms of some individuals in a patch of low-lying scrub.To simulate cicada clicking, the composer set pointillist patterns for Indonesian anklung (joint bamboo tubes suspended within a frame to produce notes when the frame is shaken or tapped). Using instruments made of wood to enhance the rich forest imagery, Pye created all parts using sampled instrumental sounds placed against layers of pre-recorded ambient sounds (D. Pye, telephone interview, 3 Sept. 2014). He takes the listener through a “geographical linear representation” of the trail: “I walked around it with a stopwatch and noted how long it took to get through each section of the forest, and that became the musical timing of the various parts of the work” (Pye in SFA Canopy sleeve). That Understory is a place where reciprocity between nature and culture thrives is, likewise, evident in the remaining tracks.Musicalising Forest History and EnvironmentThree tracks distinguish Canopy as an integrative site for memory. Bernard Carney’s waltz honours the Group Settlers who battled insurmountable terrain without any idea of their destiny, men who, having migrated with a promise of owning their own dairy farms, had to clear trees bare-handedly and build furniture from kerosene tins and gelignite cases. Carney illuminates the culture of Saturday night dancing in the schoolroom to popular tunes like The Destiny Waltz (performed on the Titanic in 1912). His original song fades to strains of the Victor Military Band (1914), to “pay tribute to the era where the inspiration of the song came from” (Carney in SFA Canopy sleeve). Likewise Cathie Travers’s Lament is an evocation of remote settler history that creates a “feeling of being in another location, other timezone, almost like an endless loop” (Travers in SFA Canopy sleeve).An instrumental medley by David Hyams opens with Awakening: the morning sun streaming through tall trees, and the nostalgic sound of an accordion waltz. Shaking the Tree, an Irish jig, recalls humankind’s struggle with forest and the forces of nature. A final title, When the Light Comes, defers to the saying by conservationist John Muir that “The wrongs done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are done in the darkness of ignorance and unbelief, for when the light comes the heart of the people is always right” (quoted by Hyams in SFA Canopy sleeve). Local musician Joel Barker wrote Something for Everyone to personify the old-growth karri as a king with a crown, with “wisdom in his bones.”Kevin Smith’s father was born in Northcliffe in 1924. He and Brendon Humphries fantasise the untouchability of a maiden (pre-human) moment in a forest in their song, When the Wind First Blew. In Libby Hammer’s The Glade (a lover’s lament), instrumental timbres project their own affective languages. The jazz singer intended the accompanying double bass to speak resonantly of old-growth forest; the cello to express suppleness and renewal; a soprano saxophone to impersonate a bird; and the drums to imitate the insect community’s polyrhythmic undercurrent (after Hammer in SFA Canopy sleeve).A hybrid aural environment of synthetic and natural forest sounds contrasts collision with harmony in Sanctuary. The Jeavons Brothers sampled rustling wind on nearby Mt Chudalup to absorb into the track’s opening, and crafted a snare groove for the quirky eco-jazz/trip-hop by banging logs together, and banging rocks against logs. This imaginative use of percussive found objects enhanced their portrayal of forest as “a living, breathing entity.”In dealing with recent history in My Place, Ann Rice cameos a happy childhood growing up on a southwest farm, “damming creeks, climbing trees, breaking bones and skinning knees.” The rich string harmonies of Mel Robinson’s Shelter sculpt the shifting environment of a brewing storm, while White Haze by Tomás Ford describes a smoky controlled burn as “a kind of metaphor for the beautiful mystical healing nature of Northcliffe”: Someone’s burning off the scrubSomeone’s making sure it’s safeSomeone’s whiting out the fearSomeone’s letting me breathe clearAs Sinclair illuminates in a post-fire interview with Sharon Kennedy (Website):When your map, your personal map of life involves a place, and then you think that that place might be gone…” Fiona doesn't finish the sentence. “We all had to face the fact that our little place might disappear." Ultimately, only one house was lost. Pasture and fences, sheds and forest are gone. Yet, says Fiona, “We still have our town. As part of SFA’s ongoing commission, forest rhythm workshops explore different sound properties of potential materials for installing sound sculptures mimicking the surrounding flora and fauna. In 2015, SFA mounted After the Burn (a touring photographic exhibition) and Out of the Ashes (paintings and woodwork featuring ash, charcoal, and resin) (SFA, After the Burn 116). The forthcoming community project Rising From the Ashes will commemorate the fire and allow residents to connect and create as they heal and move forward—ten years on from the foundation of Understory.ConclusionThe Understory Art in Nature Trail stimulates curiosity. It clearly illustrates links between place-based social, economic and material conditions and creative practices and products within a forest that has both given shelter and “done people in.” The trail is an experimental field, a transformative locus in which dedicated physical space frees artists to culturalise forest through varied aesthetic modalities. Conversely, forest possesses agency for naturalising art as a symbol of place. Djiva’s song Ngank Boodjak “sings up the land” to revitalise the timelessness of prior occupation, while David Pye’s Cicadan Rhythms foregrounds the seasonal cycle of entomological music.In drawing out the richness and significance of place, the ecologically inspired album Canopy suggests that the community identity of a forested place may be informed by cultural, economic, geographical, and historical factors as well as endemic flora and fauna. Finally, the musical representation of place is not contingent upon blatant forms of environmentalism. The portrayals of Northcliffe respectfully associate Western Australian people and forests, yet as a place, the town has become an enduring icon for the plight of the Universal Old-growth Forest in all its natural glory, diverse human uses, and (real or perceived) abuses.ReferencesAustralian Broadcasting Commission. “Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests.” Into the Music. Prod. Robyn Johnston. Radio National, 5 May 2007. 12 Aug. 2014 <http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/intothemusic/canopy-songs-for-the-southern-forests/3396338>.———. “Composer David Pye.” Interview with Andrew Ford. The Music Show, Radio National, 12 Sep. 2009. 30 Jan. 2015 <http://canadapodcasts.ca/podcasts/MusicShowThe/1225021>.Berg, Peter, and Raymond Dasmann. “Reinhabiting California.” Reinhabiting a Separate Country: A Bioregional Anthology of Northern California. Ed. Peter Berg. San Francisco: Planet Drum, 1978. 217-20.Crawford, Patricia, and Ian Crawford. Contested Country: A History of the Northcliffe Area, Western Australia. Perth: UWA P, 2003.Feld, Steven. 2001. “Lift-Up-Over Sounding.” The Book of Music and Nature: An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts. Ed. David Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2001. 193-206.Giblett, Rod. People and Places of Nature and Culture. Bristol: Intellect, 2011.Kato, Kumi. “Addressing Global Responsibility for Conservation through Cross-Cultural Collaboration: Kodama Forest, a Forest of Tree Spirits.” The Environmentalist 28.2 (2008): 148-54. 15 Apr. 2014 <http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10669-007-9051-6#page-1>.Kennedy, Sharon. “Local Knowledge Builds Vital Support Networks in Emergencies.” ABC South West WA, 10 Mar. 2015. 26 Mar. 2015 <http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2015/03/09/4193981.htm?site=southwestwa>.Morrison, Della Rae. E-mail. 15 July 2014.Pedelty, Mark. Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP, 2012.Pye, David. Telephone interview. 3 Sep. 2014.Relph, Edward. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion, 1976.Rice, Ann. Telephone interview. 2 Oct. 2014.Rose, Deborah Bird. Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness. Australian Heritage Commission, 1996.Ryan, John C. Green Sense: The Aesthetics of Plants, Place and Language. Oxford: Trueheart Academic, 2012.Schine, Jennifer. “Movement, Memory and the Senses in Soundscape Studies.” Canadian Acoustics: Journal of the Canadian Acoustical Association 38.3 (2010): 100-01. 12 Apr. 2016 <http://jcaa.caa-aca.ca/index.php/jcaa/article/view/2264>.Sinclair, Fiona. Telephone interview. 6 Apr. 2014.Sinclair, Fiona, and Peter Hill. Personal Interview. 26 Sep. 2014.Southern Forest Arts. Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests. CD coordinated by Fiona Sinclair. Recorded and produced by Lee Buddle. Sleeve notes by Robyn Johnston. West Perth: Sound Mine Studios, 2006.———. Southern Forest Sculpture Walk Catalogue. Northcliffe, WA, 2006. Unpaginated booklet.———. Understory—Art in Nature. 2009. 12 Apr. 2016 <http://www.understory.com.au/>.———. Trailguide. Understory. Presented by Southern Forest Arts, n.d.———. After the Burn: Stories, Poems and Photos Shared by the Local Community in Response to the 2015 Northcliffe and Windy Harbour Bushfire. 2nd ed. Ed. Fiona Sinclair. Northcliffe, WA., 2016.Truax, Barry, ed. Handbook for Acoustic Ecology. 2nd ed. Cambridge Street Publishing, 1999. 10 Apr. 2016 <http://www.sfu.ca/sonic-studio/handbook/Soundmark.html>.

Introduction Many destinations promote culinary encounters. Foods and beverages, and especially how these will taste in situ, are being marketed as niche travel motivators and used in destination brand building across the globe. While initial usage of the term culinary tourism focused on experiencing exotic cultures of foreign destinations by sampling unfamiliar food and drinks, the term has expanded to embrace a range of leisure travel experiences where the aim is to locate and taste local specialities as part of a pleasurable, and hopefully notable, culinary encounter (Wolf). Long’s foundational work was central in developing the idea of culinary tourism as an active endeavor, suggesting that via consumption, individuals construct unique experiences. Ignatov and Smith’s literature review-inspired definition confirms the nature of activity as participatory, and adds consuming food production skills—from observing agriculture and local processors to visiting food markets and attending cooking schools—to culinary purchases. Despite importing almost all of its foodstuffs and beverages, including some of its water, Singapore is an acknowledged global leader in culinary tourism. Horng and Tsai note that culinary tourism conceptually implies that a transferal of “local or special knowledge and information that represent local culture and identities” (41) occurs via these experiences. This article adds the act of reading to these participatory activities and suggests that, because food writing forms an important component of Singapore’s suite of culinary tourism offerings, taste contributes to the cultural experience offered to both visitors and locals. While Singapore foodways have attracted significant scholarship (see, for instance, work by Bishop; Duruz; Huat & Rajah; Tarulevicz, Eating), Singapore food writing, like many artefacts of popular culture, has attracted less notice. Yet, this writing is an increasingly visible component of cultural production of, and about, Singapore, and performs a range of functions for locals, tourists and visitors before they arrive. Although many languages are spoken in Singapore, English is the national language (Alsagoff) and this study focuses on food writing in English. Background Tourism comprises a major part of Singapore’s economy, with recent figures detailing that food and beverage sales contribute over 10 per cent of this revenue, with spend on culinary tours and cookery classes, home wares such as tea-sets and cookbooks, food magazines and food memoirs additional to this (Singapore Government). This may be related to the fact that Singapore not only promotes food as a tourist attraction, but also actively promotes itself as an exceptional culinary destination. The Singapore Tourism Board (STB) includes food in its general information brochures and websites, and its print, television and cinema commercials (Huat and Rajah). It also mounts information-rich campaigns both abroad and inside Singapore. The 2007 ‘Singapore Seasons’ campaign, for instance, promoted Singaporean cuisine alongside films, design, books and other cultural products in London, New York and Beijing. Touring cities identified as key tourist markets in 2011, the ‘Singapore Takeout’ pop-up restaurant brought the taste of Singaporean foods into closer focus. Singaporean chefs worked with high profile locals in its kitchen in a custom-fabricated shipping container to create and demonstrate Singaporean dishes, attracting public and media interest. In country, the STB similarly actively promotes the tastes of Singaporean foods, hosting the annual World Gourmet Summit (Chaney and Ryan) and Pacific Food Expo, both attracting international culinary professionals to work alongside local leaders. The Singapore Food Festival each July is marketed to both locals and visitors. In these ways, the STB, as well as providing events for visitors, is actively urging Singaporeans to proud of their food culture and heritage, so that each Singaporean becomes a proactive ambassador of their cuisine. Singapore Food Writing Popular print guidebooks and online guides to Singapore pay significantly more attention to Singaporean food than they do for many other destinations. Sections on food in such publications discuss at relative length the taste of Singaporean food (always delicious) as well as how varied, authentic, hygienic and suited-to-all-budgets it is. These texts also recommend hawker stalls and food courts alongside cafés and restaurants (Henderson et al.), and a range of other culinary experiences such as city and farm food tours and cookery classes. This writing describes not only what can be seen or learned during these experiences, but also what foods can be sampled, and how these might taste. This focus on taste is reflected in the printed materials that greet the in-bound tourist at the airport. On a visit in October 2013, arrival banners featuring mouth-watering images of local specialities such as chicken rice and chilli crab marked the route from arrival to immigration and baggage collection. Even advertising for a bank was illustrated with photographs of luscious-looking fruits. The free maps and guidebooks available featured food-focused tours and restaurant locations, and there were also substantial free booklets dedicated solely to discussing local delicacies and their flavours, plus recommended locations to sample them. A website and free mobile app were available that contain practical information about dishes, ingredients, cookery methods, and places to eat, as well as historical and cultural information. These resources are also freely distributed to many hotels and popular tourist destinations. Alongside organising food walks, bus tours and cookery classes, the STB also recommends the work of a number of Singaporean food writers—principally prominent Singapore food bloggers, reviewers and a number of memoirists—as authentic guides to what are described as unique Singaporean flavours. The strategies at the heart of this promotion are linking advertising to useful information. At a number of food centres, for instance, STB information panels provide details about both specific dishes and Singapore’s food culture more generally (Henderson et al.). This focus is apparent at many tourist destinations, many of which are also popular local attractions. In historic Fort Canning Park, for instance, there is a recreation of Raffles’ experimental garden, established in 1822, where he grew the nutmeg, clove and other plants that were intended to form the foundation for spice plantations but were largely unsuccessful (Reisz). Today, information panels not only indicate the food plants’ names and how to grow them, but also their culinary and medicinal uses, recipes featuring them and the related food memories of famous Singaporeans. The Singapore Botanic Gardens similarly houses the Ginger Garden displaying several hundred species of ginger and information, and an Eco(-nomic/logical) Garden featuring many food plants and their stories. In Chinatown, panels mounted outside prominent heritage brands (often still quite small shops) add content to the shopping experience. A number of museums profile Singapore’s food culture in more depth. The National Museum of Singapore has a permanent Living History gallery that focuses on Singapore’s street food from the 1950s to 1970s. This display includes food-related artefacts, interactive aromatic displays of spices, films of dishes being made and eaten, and oral histories about food vendors, all supported by text panels and booklets. Here food is used to convey messages about the value of Singapore’s ethnic diversity and cross-cultural exchanges. Versions of some of these dishes can then be sampled in the museum café (Time Out Singapore). The Peranakan Museum—which profiles the unique hybrid culture of the descendants of the Chinese and South Indian traders who married local Malay women—shares this focus, with reconstructed kitchens and dining rooms, exhibits of cooking and eating utensils and displays on food’s ceremonial role in weddings and funerals all supported with significant textual information. The Chinatown Heritage Centre not only recreates food preparation areas as a vivid indicator of poor Chinese immigrants’ living conditions, but also houses The National Restaurant of Singapore, which translates this research directly into meals that recreate the heritage kopi tiam (traditional coffee shop) cuisine of Singapore in the 1930s, purposefully bringing taste into the service of education, as its descriptive menu states, “educationally delighting the palate” (Chinatown Heritage Centre). These museums recognise that shopping is a core tourist activity in Singapore (Chang; Yeung et al.). Their gift- and bookshops cater to the culinary tourist by featuring quality culinary products for sale (including, for instance, teapots and cups, teas, spices and traditional sweets, and other foods) many of which are accompanied by informative tags or brochures. At the centre of these curated, purchasable collections are a range written materials: culinary magazines, cookbooks, food histories and memoirs, as well as postcards and stationery printed with recipes. Food Magazines Locally produced food magazines cater to a range of readerships and serve to extend the culinary experience both in, and outside, Singapore. These include high-end gourmet, luxury lifestyle publications like venerable monthly Wine & Dine: The Art of Good Living, which, in in print for almost thirty years, targets an affluent readership (Wine & Dine). The magazine runs features on local dining, gourmet products and trends, as well as international epicurean locations and products. Beautifully illustrated recipes also feature, as the magazine declares, “we’ve recognised that sharing more recipes should be in the DNA of Wine & Dine’s editorial” (Wine & Dine). Appetite magazine, launched in 2006, targets the “new and emerging generation of gourmets—foodies with a discerning and cosmopolitan outlook, broad horizons and a insatiable appetite” (Edipresse Asia) and is reminiscent in much of its styling of New Zealand’s award-winning Cuisine magazine. Its focus is to present a fresh approach to both cooking at home and dining out, as readers are invited to “Whip up the perfect soufflé or feast with us at the finest restaurants in Singapore and around the region” (Edipresse Asia). Chefs from leading local restaurants are interviewed, and the voices of “fellow foodies and industry watchers” offer an “insider track” on food-related news: “what’s good and what’s new” (Edipresse Asia). In between these publications sits Epicure: Life’s Refinements, which features local dishes, chefs, and restaurants as well as an overseas travel section and a food memories column by a featured author. Locally available ingredients are also highlighted, such as abalone (Cheng) and an interesting range of mushrooms (Epicure). While there is a focus on an epicurean experience, this is presented slightly more casually than in Wine & Dine. Food & Travel focuses more on home cookery, but each issue also includes reviews of Singapore restaurants. The bimonthly bilingual (Chinese and English) Gourmet Living features recipes alongside a notable focus on food culture—with food history columns, restaurant reviews and profiles of celebrated chefs. An extensive range of imported international food magazines are also available, with those from nearby Malaysia and Indonesia regularly including articles on Singapore. Cookbooks These magazines all include reviews of cookery books including Singaporean examples – and some feature other food writing such as food histories, memoirs and blogs. These reviews draw attention to how many Singaporean cookbooks include a focus on food history alongside recipes. Cookery teacher Yee Soo Leong’s 1976 Singaporean Cooking was an early example of cookbook as heritage preservation. This 1976 book takes an unusual view of ‘Singaporean’ flavours. Beginning with sweet foods—Nonya/Singaporean and western cakes, biscuits, pies, pastries, bread, desserts and icings—it also focuses on both Singaporean and Western dishes. This text is also unusual as there are only 6 lines of direct authorial address in the author’s acknowledgements section. Expatriate food writer Wendy Hutton’s Singapore Food, first published in 1979, reprinted many times after and revised in 2007, has long been recognised as one of the most authoritative titles on Singapore’s food heritage. Providing an socio-historical map of Singapore’s culinary traditions, some one third of the first edition was devoted to information about Singaporean multi-cultural food history, including detailed profiles of a number of home cooks alongside its recipes. Published in 1980, Kenneth Mitchell’s A Taste of Singapore is clearly aimed at a foreign readership, noting the variety of foods available due to the racial origins of its inhabitants. The more modest, but equally educational in intent, Hawkers Flavour: A Guide to Hawkers Gourmet in Malaysia and Singapore (in its fourth printing in 1998) contains a detailed introductory essay outlining local food culture, favourite foods and drinks and times these might be served, festivals and festive foods, Indian, Indian Muslim, Chinese, Nyonya (Chinese-Malay), Malay and Halal foods and customs, followed with a selection of recipes from each. More contemporary examples of such information-rich cookbooks, such as those published in the frequently reprinted Periplus Mini Cookbook series, are sold at tourist attractions. Each of these modestly priced, 64-page, mouthwateringly illustrated booklets offer framing information, such as about a specific food culture as in the Nonya kitchen in Nonya Favourites (Boi), and explanatory glossaries of ingredients, as in Homestyle Malay Cooking (Jelani). Most recipes include a boxed paragraph detailing cookery or ingredient information that adds cultural nuance, as well as trying to describe tastes that the (obviously foreign) intended reader may not have encountered. Malaysian-born Violet Oon, who has been called the Julia Child of Singapore (Bergman), writes for both local and visiting readers. The FOOD Paper, published monthly for a decade from January 1987 was, she has stated, then “Singapore’s only monthly publication dedicated to the CSF—Certified Singapore Foodie” (Oon, Violet Oon Cooks 7). Under its auspices, Oon promoted her version of Singaporean cuisine to both locals and visitors, as well as running cookery classes and culinary events, hosting her own television cooking series on the Singapore Broadcasting Corporation, and touring internationally for the STB as a ‘Singapore Food Ambassador’ (Ahmad; Kraal). Taking this representation of flavor further, Oon has also produced a branded range of curry powders, spices, and biscuits, and set up a number of food outlets. Her first cookbook, World Peranakan Cookbook, was published in 1978. Her Singapore: 101 Meals of 1986 was commissioned by the STB, then known as the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board. Violet Oon Cooks, a compilation of recipes from The FOOD Paper, published in 1992, attracted a range of major international as well as Singaporean food sponsors, and her Timeless Recipes, published in 1997, similarly aimed to show how manufactured products could be incorporated into classic Singaporean dishes cooked at home. In 1998, Oon produced A Singapore Family Cookbook featuring 100 dishes. Many were from Nonya cuisine and her following books continued to focus on preserving heritage Singaporean recipes, as do a number of other nationally-cuisine focused collections such as Joyceline Tully and Christopher Tan’s Heritage Feasts: A Collection of Singapore Family Recipes. Sylvia Tan’s Singapore Heritage Food: Yesterday’s Recipes for Today’s Cooks, published in 2004, provides “a tentative account of Singapore’s food history” (5). It does this by mapping the various taste profiles of six thematically-arranged chronologically-overlapping sections, from the heritage of British colonialism, to the uptake of American and Russia foods in the Snackbar era of the 1960s and the use of convenience flavoring ingredients such as curry pastes, sauces, dried and frozen supermarket products from the 1970s. Other Volumes Other food-themed volumes focus on specific historical periods. Cecilia Leong-Salobir’s Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire discusses the “unique hybrid” (1) cuisine of British expatriates in Singapore from 1858 to 1963. In 2009, the National Museum of Singapore produced the moving Wong Hong Suen’s Wartime Kitchen: Food and Eating in Singapore 1942–1950. This details the resilience and adaptability of both diners and cooks during the Japanese Occupation and in post-war Singapore, when shortages stimulated creativity. There is a centenary history of the Cold Storage company which shipped frozen foods all over south east Asia (Boon) and location-based studies such as Annette Tan’s Savour Chinatown: Stories Memories & Recipes. Tan interviewed hawkers, chefs and restaurant owners, working from this information to write both the book’s recipes and reflect on Chinatown’s culinary history. Food culture also features in (although it is not the main focus) more general book-length studies such as educational texts such as Chew Yen Fook’s The Magic of Singapore and Melanie Guile’s Culture in Singapore (2000). Works that navigate both spaces (of Singaporean culture more generally and its foodways) such Lily Kong’s Singapore Hawker Centres: People, Places, Food, provide an consistent narrative of food in Singapore, stressing its multicultural flavours that can be enjoyed from eateries ranging from hawker stalls to high-end restaurants that, interestingly, that agrees with that promulgated in the food writing discussed above. Food Memoirs and Blogs Many of these narratives include personal material, drawing on the author’s own food experiences and taste memories. This approach is fully developed in the food memoir, a growing sub-genre of Singapore food writing. While memoirs by expatriate Singaporeans such as Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan’s A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family, produced by major publisher Hyperion in New York, has attracted considerable international attention, it presents a story of Singapore cuisine that agrees with such locally produced texts as television chef and food writer Terry Tan’s Stir-fried and Not Shaken: A Nostalgic Trip Down Singapore’s Memory Lane and the food memoir of the Singaporean chef credited with introducing fine Malay dining to Singapore, Aziza Ali’s Sambal Days, Kampong Cuisine, published in Singapore in 2013 with the support of the National Heritage Board. All these memoirs are currently available in Singapore in both bookshops and a number of museums and other attractions. While underscoring the historical and cultural value of these foods, all describe the unique flavours of Singaporean cuisine and its deliciousness. A number of prominent Singapore food bloggers are featured in general guidebooks and promoted by the STB as useful resources to dining out in Singapore. One of the most prominent of these is Leslie Tay, a medical doctor and “passionate foodie” (Knipp) whose awardwinning ieatŸishootŸipost is currently attracting some 90,000 unique visitors every month and has had over 20,000 million hits since its launch in 2006. An online diary of Tay’s visits to hundreds of Singaporean hawker stalls, it includes descriptions and photographs of meals consumed, creating accumulative oral culinary histories of these dishes and those who prepared them. These narratives have been reorganised and reshaped in Tay’s first book The End of Char Kway Teow and Other Hawker Mysteries, where each chapter tells the story of one particular dish, including recommended hawker stalls where it can be enjoyed. Ladyironchef.com is a popular food and travel site that began as a blog in 2007. An edited collection of reviews of eateries and travel information, many by the editor himself, the site features lists of, for example, the best cafes (LadyIronChef “Best Cafes”), eateries at the airport (LadyIronChef “Guide to Dining”), and hawker stalls (Lim). While attesting to the cultural value of these foods, many articles also discuss flavour, as in Lim’s musings on: ‘how good can chicken on rice taste? … The glistening grains of rice perfumed by fresh chicken stock and a whiff of ginger is so good you can even eat it on its own’. Conclusion Recent Singapore food publishing reflects this focus on taste. Tay’s publisher, Epigram, growing Singaporean food list includes the recently released Heritage Cookbooks Series. This highlights specialist Singaporean recipes and cookery techniques, with the stated aim of preserving tastes and foodways that continue to influence Singaporean food culture today. Volumes published to date on Peranakan, South Indian, Cantonese, Eurasian, and Teochew (from the Chaoshan region in the east of China’s Guangdong province) cuisines offer both cultural and practical guides to the quintessential dishes and flavours of each cuisine, featuring simple family dishes alongside more elaborate special occasion meals. In common with the food writing discussed above, the books in this series, although dealing with very different styles of cookery, contribute to an overall impression of the taste of Singapore food that is highly consistent and extremely persuasive. This food writing narrates that Singapore has a delicious as well as distinctive and interesting food culture that plays a significant role in Singaporean life both currently and historically. It also posits that this food culture is, at the same time, easily accessible and also worthy of detailed consideration and discussion. 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Acknowledgements Research to complete this article was supported by Central Queensland University, Australia, under its Outside Studies Program (OSPRO) and Learning and Teaching Education Research Centre (LTERC). An earlier version of part of this article was presented at the 2nd Australasian Regional Food Networks and Cultures Conference, in the Barossa Valley in South Australia, Australia, 11–14 November 2012. The delegates of that conference and expert reviewers of this article offered some excellent suggestions regarding strengthening this article and their advice was much appreciated. All errors are, of course, my own.

In 1988, historian Nadia Wheatley and indigenous artist Donna Rawlins published their award-winning picture book, My Place, a reinterpretation of Australian national identity and sovereignty prompted by the bicentennial of white settlement. Twenty years later, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) commissioned Penny Chapman’s multi-platform project based on this book. The 13 episodes of the television series begin in 2008, each telling the story of a child at a different point in history, and are accompanied by substantial interactive online content. Issues as diverse as religious difference and immigration, wartime conscription and trauma, and the experiences of Aboriginal Australians are canvassed. The program itself, which has a second series currently in production, introduces child audiences to—and implicates them in—a rich ideological fabric of deeply politicised issues that directly engage with vexed questions of Australian nationhood. The series offers a subversive view of Australian history and society, and it is the child—whether protagonist on the screen or the viewer/user of the content—who is left to discover, negotiate and move beyond often problematic societal norms. As one of the public broadcaster’s keystone projects, My Place signifies important developments in ABC’s construction of multicultural child citizenship. The digitisation of Australian television has facilitated a wave of multi-channel and new media innovation. Though the development of a multi-channel ecology has occurred significantly later in Australia than in the US or Europe, in part due to genre restrictions on broadcasters, all major Australian networks now have at least one additional free-to-air channel, make some of their content available online, and utilise various forms of social media to engage their audiences. The ABC has been in the vanguard of new media innovation, leveraging the industry dominance of ABC Online and its cross-platform radio networks for the repurposing of news, together with the additional funding for digital renewal, new Australian content, and a digital children’s channel in the 2006 and 2009 federal budgets. In line with “market failure” models of broadcasting (Born, Debrett), the ABC was once the most important producer-broadcaster for child viewers. With the recent allocation for the establishment of ABC3, it is now the catalyst for a significant revitalisation of the Australian children’s television industry. The ABC Charter requires it to broadcast programs that “contribute to a sense of national identity” and that “reflect the cultural diversity of the Australian community” (ABC Documents). Through its digital children’s channel (ABC3) and its multi-platform content, child viewers are not only exposed to a much more diverse range of local content, but also politicised by an intricate network of online texts connected to the TV programs. The representation of diasporic communities through and within multi-platformed spaces forms a crucial part of the way(s) in which collective identities are now being negotiated in children’s texts. An analysis of one of the ABC’s My Place “projects” and its associated multi-platformed content reveals an intricate relationship between postcolonial concerns and the construction of child citizenship. Multicultural Places, Multi-Platformed Spaces: New Media Innovation at the ABC The 2007 restructure at the ABC has transformed commissioning practices along the lines noted by James Bennett and Niki Strange of the BBC—a shift of focus from “programs” to multi-platform “projects,” with the latter consisting of a complex network of textual production. These “second shift media practices” (Caldwell) involve the tactical management of “user flows structured into and across the textual terrain that serve to promote a multifaceted and prolonged experience of the project” (Bennett and Strange 115). ABC Managing Director Mark Scott’s polemic deployment of the “digital commons” trope (Murdock, From) differs from that of his opposite number at the BBC, Mark Thompson, in its emphasis on the glocalised openness of the Australian “town square”—at once distinct from, and an integral part of, larger conversations. As announced at the beginning of the ABC’s 2009 annual report, the ABC is redefining the town square as a world of greater opportunities: a world where Australians can engage with one another and explore the ideas and events that are shaping our communities, our nation and beyond … where people can come to speak and be heard, to listen and learn from each other. (ABC ii)The broad emphasis on engagement characterises ABC3’s positioning of children in multi-platformed projects. As the Executive Producer of the ABC’s Children’s Television Multi-platform division comments, “participation is very much the mantra of the new channel” (Glen). The concept of “participation” is integral to what has been described elsewhere as “rehearsals in citizenship” (Northam). Writing of contemporary youth, David Buckingham notes that “‘political thinking’ is not merely an intellectual or developmental achievement, but an interpersonal process which is part of the construction of a collective, social identity” (179). Recent domestically produced children’s programs and their associated multimedia applications have significant potential to contribute to this interpersonal, “participatory” process. Through multi-platform experiences, children are (apparently) invited to construct narratives of their own. Dan Harries coined the term “viewser” to highlight the tension between watching and interacting, and the increased sense of agency on the part of audiences (171–82). Various online texts hosted by the ABC offer engagement with extra content relating to programs, with themed websites serving as “branches” of the overarching ABC3 metasite. The main site—strongly branded as the place for its targeted demographic—combines conventional television guide/program details with “Watch Now!,” a customised iView application within ABC3’s own themed interface; youth-oriented news; online gaming; and avenues for viewsers to create digital art and video, or interact with the community of “Club3” and associated message boards. The profiles created by members of Club3 are moderated and proscribe any personal information, resulting in an (understandably) restricted form of “networked publics” (boyd 124–5). Viewser profiles comprise only a username (which, the website stresses, should not be one’s real name) and an “avatar” (a customisable animated face). As in other social media sites, comments posted are accompanied by the viewser’s “name” and “face,” reinforcing the notion of individuality within the common group. The tool allows users to choose from various skin colours, emphasising the multicultural nature of the ABC3 community. Other customisable elements, including the ability to choose between dozens of pre-designed ABC3 assets and feeds, stress the audience’s “ownership” of the site. The Help instructions for the Club3 site stress the notion of “participation” directly: “Here at ABC3, we don’t want to tell you what your site should look like! We think that you should be able to choose for yourself.” Multi-platformed texts also provide viewsers with opportunities to interact with many of the characters (human actors and animated) from the television texts and share further aspects of their lives and fictional worlds. One example, linked to the representation of diasporic communities, is the Abatti Pizza Game, in which the player must “save the day” by battling obstacles to fulfil a pizza order. The game’s prefacing directions makes clear the ethnicity of the Abatti family, who are also visually distinctive. The dialogue also registers cultural markers: “Poor Nona, whatsa she gonna do? Now it’s up to you to help Johnny and his friends make four pizzas.” The game was acquired from the Canadian-animated franchise, Angela Anaconda; nonetheless, the Abatti family, the pizza store they operate and the dilemma they face translates easily to the Australian context. Dramatisations of diasporic contributions to national youth identities in postcolonial or settler societies—the UK (My Life as a Popat, CITV) and Canada (How to Be Indie)—also contribute to the diversity of ABC3’s television offerings and the positioning of its multi-platform community. The negotiation of diasporic and postcolonial politics is even clearer in the public broadcaster’s commitment to My Place. The project’s multifaceted construction of “places,” the ethical positioning of the child both as an individual and a member of (multicultural) communities, and the significant acknowledgement of ongoing conflict and discrimination, articulate a cultural commons that is more open-ended and challenging than the Eurocentric metaphor, the “town square,” suggests. Diversity, Discrimination and Diasporas: Positioning the Viewser of My Place Throughout the first series of My Place, the experiences of children within different diasporic communities are the focal point of five of the initial six episodes, the plots of which revolve around children with Lebanese, Vietnamese, Greek, and Irish backgrounds. This article focuses on an early episode of the series, “1988,” which explicitly confronts the cultural frictions between dominant Anglocentric Australian and diasporic communities. “1988” centres on the reaction of young Lily to the arrival of her cousin, Phuong, from Vietnam. Lily is a member of a diasporic community, but one who strongly identifies as “an Australian,” allowing a nuanced exploration of the ideological conflicts surrounding the issue of so-called “boat people.” The protagonist’s voice-over narration at the beginning of the episode foregrounds her desire to win Australia’s first Olympic gold medal in gymnastics, thus mobilising nationally identified hierarchies of value. Tensions between diasporic and settler cultures are frequently depicted. One potentially reactionary sequence portrays the recurring character of Michaelis complaining about having to use chopsticks in the Vietnamese restaurant; however, this comment is contextualised several episodes later, when a much younger Michaelis, as protagonist of the episode “1958,” is himself discriminated against, due to his Greek background. The political irony of “1988” pivots on Lily’s assumption that her cousin “won’t know Australian.” There is a patronising tone in her warning to Phuong not to speak Vietnamese for fear of schoolyard bullying: “The kids at school give you heaps if you talk funny. But it’s okay, I can talk for you!” This encourages child viewers to distance themselves from this fictional parallel to the frequent absence of representation of asylum seekers in contemporary debates. Lily’s assumptions and attitudes are treated with a degree of scepticism, particularly when she assures her friends that the silent Phuong will “get normal soon,” before objectifying her cousin for classroom “show and tell.” A close-up camera shot settles on Phuong’s unease while the children around her gossip about her status as a “boat person,” further encouraging the audience to empathise with the bullied character. However, Phuong turns the tables on those around her when she reveals she can competently speak English, is able to perform gymnastics and other feats beyond Lily’s ability, and even invents a story of being attacked by “pirates” in order to silence her gossiping peers. By the end of the narrative, Lily has redeemed herself and shares a close friendship with Phuong. My Place’s structured child “participation” plays a key role in developing the postcolonial perspective required by this episode and the project more broadly. Indeed, despite the record project budget, a second series was commissioned, at least partly on the basis of the overwhelmingly positive reception of viewsers on the ABC website forums (Buckland). The intricate My Place website, accessible through the ABC3 metasite, generates transmedia intertextuality interlocking with, and extending the diegesis of, the televised texts. A hyperlinked timeline leads to collections of personal artefacts “owned” by each protagonist, such as journals, toys, and clothing. Clicking on a gold medal marked “History” in Lily’s collection activates scrolling text describing the political acceptance of the phrase “multiculturalism” and the “Family Reunion” policy, which assisted the arrival of 100,000 Vietnamese immigrants. The viewser is reminded that some people were “not very welcoming” of diasporic groups via an explicit reference to Mrs Benson’s discriminatory attitudes in the series. Viewsers can “visit” virtual representations of the program’s sets. In the bedroom, kitchen, living room and/or backyard of each protagonist can be discovered familiar and additional details of the characters’ lives. The artefacts that can be “played” with in the multimedia applications often imply the enthusiastic (and apparently desirable) adoption of “Australianness” by immigrant children. Lily’s toys (her doll, hair accessories, roller skates, and glass marbles) invoke various aspects of western children’s culture, while her “journal entry” about Phuong states that she is “new to Australia but with her sense of humour she has fitted in really well.” At the same time, the interactive elements within Lily’s kitchen, including a bowl of rice and other Asian food ingredients, emphasise cultural continuity. The description of incense in another room of Lily’s house as a “common link” that is “used in many different cultures and religions for similar purposes” clearly normalises a glocalised world-view. Artefacts inside the restaurant operated by Lily’s mother link to information ranging from the ingredients and (flexible) instructions for how to make rice paper rolls (“Lily and Phuong used these fillings but you can use whatever you like!”) to a brief interactive puzzle game requiring the arrangement of several peppers in order from least hot to most hot. A selectable picture frame downloads a text box labelled “Images of Home.” Combined with a slideshow of static, hand-drawn images of traditional Vietnamese life, the text can be read as symbolic of the multiplicity of My Place’s target audience(s): “These images would have reminded the family of their homeland and also given restaurant customers a sense of Vietnamese culture.” The social-developmental, postcolonial agenda of My Place is registered in both “conventional” ancillary texts, such as the series’ “making of” publication (Wheatley), and the elaborate pedagogical website for teachers developed by the ACTF and Educational Services Australia (http://www.myplace.edu.au/). The politicising function of the latter is encoded in the various summaries of each decade’s historical, political, social, cultural, and technological highlights, often associated with the plot of the relevant episode. The page titled “Multiculturalism” reports on the positive amendments to the Commonwealth’s Migration Act 1958 and provides links to photographs of Vietnamese migrants in 1982, exemplifying the values of equality and cultural diversity through Lily and Phuong’s story. The detailed “Teaching Activities” documents available for each episode serve a similar purpose, providing, for example, the suggestion that teachers “ask students to discuss the importance to a new immigrant of retaining links to family, culture and tradition.” The empathetic positioning of Phuong’s situation is further mirrored in the interactive map available for teacher use that enables children to navigate a boat from Vietnam to the Australian coast, encouraging a perspective that is rarely put forward in Australia’s mass media. This is not to suggest that the My Place project is entirely unproblematic. In her postcolonial analysis of Aboriginal children’s literature, Clare Bradford argues that “it’s all too possible for ‘similarities’ to erase difference and the political significances of [a] text” (188). Lily’s schoolteacher’s lesson in the episode “reminds us that boat people have been coming to Australia for a very long time.” However, the implied connection between convicts and asylum seekers triggered by Phuong’s (mis)understanding awkwardly appropriates a mythologised Australian history. Similarly in the “1998” episode, the Muslim character Mohammad’s use of Ramadan for personal strength in order to emulate the iconic Australian cricketer Shane Warne threatens to subsume the “difference” of the diasporic community. Nonetheless, alongside the similarities between individuals and the various ethnic groups that make up the My Place community, important distinctions remain. Each episode begins and/or ends with the child protagonist(s) playing on or around the central motif of the series—a large fig tree—with the characters declaring that the tree is “my place.” While emphasising the importance of individuality in the project’s construction of child citizens, the cumulative effect of these “my place” sentiments, felt over time by characters from different socio-economic, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, builds a multifaceted conception of Australian identity that consists of numerous (and complementary) “branches.” The project’s multi-platformed content further emphasises this, with the website containing an image of the prominent (literal and figurative) “Community Tree,” through which the viewser can interact with the generations of characters and families from the series (http://www.abc.net.au/abc3/myplace/). The significant role of the ABC’s My Place project showcases the ABC’s remit as a public broadcaster in the digital era. As Tim Brooke-Hunt, the Executive Head of Children’s Content, explains, if the ABC didn’t do it, no other broadcaster was going to come near it. ... I don’t expect My Place to be a humungous commercial or ratings success, but I firmly believe ... that it will be something that will exist for many years and will have a very special place. Conclusion The reversion to iconic aspects of mainstream Anglo-Australian culture is perhaps unsurprising—and certainly telling—when reflecting on the network of local, national, and global forces impacting on the development of a cultural commons. However, this does not detract from the value of the public broadcaster’s construction of child citizens within a clearly self-conscious discourse of “multiculturalism.” The transmedia intertextuality at work across ABC3 projects and platforms serves an important politicising function, offering positive representations of diasporic communities to counter the negative depictions children are exposed to elsewhere, and positioning child viewsers to “participate” in “working through” fraught issues of Australia’s past that still remain starkly relevant today.References ABC. Redefining the Town Square. ABC Annual Report. Sydney: ABC, 2009. Bennett, James, and Niki Strange. “The BBC’s Second-Shift Aesthetics: Interactive Television, Multi-Platform Projects and Public Service Content for a Digital Era.” Media International Australia: Incorporating Culture and Policy 126 (2008): 106-19. Born, Georgina. Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC. London: Vintage, 2004. boyd, danah. “Why Youth ♥ Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life.” Youth, Identity, and Digital Media. Ed. David Buckingham. Cambridge: MIT, 2008. 119-42. Bradford, Clare. Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children’s Literature. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 2001. Brooke-Hunt, Tim. Executive Head of Children’s Content, ABC TV. Interviewed by Dr Leonie Rutherford, ABC Ultimo Center, 16 Mar. 2010. Buckingham, David. After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media. Cambridge: Polity, 2000. Buckland, Jenny. Chief Executive Officer, Australian Children’s Television Foundation. Interviewed by Dr Leonie Rutherford and Dr Nina Weerakkody, ACTF, 2 June 2010. Caldwell, John T. “Second Shift Media Aesthetics: Programming, Interactivity and User Flows.” New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality. Eds. John T. Caldwell and Anna Everett. London: Routledge, 2003. 127-44. Debrett, Mary. “Riding the Wave: Public Service Television in the Multiplatform Era.” Media, Culture & Society 31.5 (2009): 807-27. From, Unni. “Domestically Produced TV-Drama and Cultural Commons.” Cultural Dilemmas in Public Service Broadcasting. Eds. Gregory Ferrell Lowe and Per Jauert. Göteborg: Nordicom, 2005. 163-77. Glen, David. Executive Producer, ABC Multiplatform. Interviewed by Dr Leonie Rutherford, ABC Elsternwick, 6 July 2010. Harries, Dan. “Watching the Internet.” The New Media Book. Ed. Dan Harries. London: BFI, 2002. 171-82. Murdock, Graham. “Building the Digital Commons: Public Broadcasting in the Age of the Internet.” Cultural Dilemmas in Public Service Broadcasting. Ed. Gregory Ferrell Lowe and Per Jauert. Göteborg: Nordicom, 2005. 213–30. My Place, Volumes 1 & 2: 2008–1888. DVD. ABC, 2009. Northam, Jean A. “Rehearsals in Citizenship: BBC Stop-Motion Animation Programmes for Young Children.” Journal for Cultural Research 9.3 (2005): 245-63. Wheatley, Nadia. Making My Place. Sydney and Auckland: HarperCollins, 2010. ———, and Donna Rawlins. My Place, South Melbourne: Longman, 1988.

Political activity is expected to be of interest to a knowledgeable electorate, citizenry or ‘public’. Performance and entertainment have, on the other hand, been considered the domain of the ‘audience’. The line between active electorate and passive audience has been continually blurred, and as more political communication is designed along the lines of entertainment, the less likely it seems that the distinction will become clearer any time soon. The following article will attempt to thoroughly evaluate the contemporary implications of terms related to ‘public’ and ‘audience’, and to suggest a path forward in understanding the now intertwined roles of these two entities. In political commentary of all kinds, the term ‘audience’ has come to be regularly used in place of the more traditionally political terms ‘public’, ‘electorate’, ‘constituency’ or even ‘mass’, ‘mob’ and ‘multitude’. (Bratich 249) This slight alteration of language would seem to suggest an ongoing, and occasionally unintentional debate as to whether or not our increasingly mediated society has become incapable of true political discourse – an audience to be courted and won solely on the basis of visual and aural stimulation. In some instances, the debate goes unacknowledged, with authors using the term interchangeably with that of voter or public. Others seem to be making a more definite statement, as do the authors of Campaign Craft, wherein the term ‘audience’ is often used to refer to the voting population. (Shea and Burton) In either case, it is clear that the ‘public’ and the ‘audience’ are no longer to be considered two entirely separate entities. To understand the significance of this shift, it is necessary to identify the traditional distinctions of these sometimes problematic terms. To do so we must look briefly at how the original and contemporary meanings have developed. Herbert Blau writes that “audiences, such as they are, are nothing like a public, certainly nothing like the capitalised Public of another time” (Blau 22). That “capitalised Public” he refers to is perhaps the ideal state envisioned by Greek and Roman philosophers in which the community, as a whole, is maintained by and for its own members, and each individual plays a significant and specific role in its maintenance. The “audiences”, however, can be popularly defined as “the assembled spectators or listeners at a public event such as a play, film, concert, or meeting” or “the people giving attention to something”. (Soanes & Stevenson) The difference is subtle but significant. The public is expected to take some active interest in its own maintenance and growth, while the audience is not expected to offer action, just attention. The authors of Soundbite Culture, who would seem to see the blurring between audience and public as a negative side effect of mass media, offer this description of the differences between these two entities: Audiences are talked to; publics are talked with. Audiences are entertained; publics are engaged. Audiences live in the moment; publics have both memory and dreams. Audiences have opinions, publics have thoughts. (Slayden & Whillock 7) A ‘public’ is joined by more than their attendance at or attention to a single performance and responsible for more than just the experience of that performance. While an audience is expected to do little more than consume the performance before them, a public must respond to an experience with appropriate action. A public is a community, bound together by activity and mutual concerns. An audience is joined together only by their mutual interest in, or presence at, a performance. Carpini and Williams note that the term ‘public’ is no longer an adequate way to describe the complex levels of interaction that form contemporary political discourse: “people, politics, and the media are far more complex than this. Individuals are simultaneously citizens, consumers, audiences…and so forth” (Carpini & Williams in Bennett & Entman 161). Marshall sees the audience as both a derivative of and a factor in the larger, more political popular body called the “masses”. These masses define the population largely as an unorganised political power, while audiences emerge in relation to consumer products, as rationalised and therefore somewhat subdued categories within that scope. He notes that although the audience, in the twentieth century, has emerged as a “social category” of its own, it has developed as such in relation to both the unharnessed political power of the masses and the active political power of the public (Marshall 61-70). The audience, then, can be said to be a separate but overlapping state that rationalises and segments the potential of the masses, but also informs the subsequent actions of the public. An audience without some degree of action or involvement is not a public. Such a definition provides important insights into the debate from the perspective of political communication. The cohesiveness of the group that is to define the public can be undermined by mass media. It has been argued that mass media, in particular the internet, have removed all sense of local community and instead provided an information outlet that denies individual response. (Franklin 23; Postman 67-69) It can certainly be argued that with media available on such an instant and individual basis, the necessity of group gathering for information and action has been greatly reduced. Thus, one of the primary functions of the public is eliminated, that of joining together for information. This lack of communal information gathering can eliminate the most important functions of the public: debate and personal action. Those who tune-in to national broadcasts or even read national newspapers to receive political information are generally not invited to debate and pose solutions to the problems that are introduced to them, or to take immediate steps to resolve the conflicts addressed. Instead, they are asked only to fulfill that traditional function of the audience, to receive the information and either absorb or dismiss it. Media also blur the audience/public divide by making it necessary to change the means of political communication. Previous to the advent of mass media, political communication was separated from entertainment by its emphasis on debate and information. Television has led a turn toward more ‘emotion’ and image-based campaigning both for election and for support of a particular political agenda. This subsequently implies that this public has increasingly become primarily an audience. Although this attitude is one that has been adopted by many critics and observers, it is not entirely correct to say that there are no longer any opportunities for the audience to regain their function as a public. On a local level, town hall meetings, public consultations and rallies still exist and provide an opportunity for concerned citizens to voice their opinions and assist in forming local policy. Media, often accused of orchestrating the elimination of the active public, occasionally provide opportunities for more traditional public debate. In both Canada and the US, leaders are invited to participate in ‘town hall’ style television debates in which audience members are invited to ask questions. In the UK, both print media and television tend to offer opportunities for leaders to respond to the questions and concerns of individuals. Many newspapers publish responses and letters from many different readers, allowing for public debate and interaction. (McNair 13) In addition, newspapers such as The Washington Post and The Globe and Mail operate Websites that allow the public to comment on articles published in the paper text. In Canada, radio is often used as a forum for public debate and comment. The Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s Cross Country Check Up and Cross Talk allows mediated debate between citizens across the country. Regional stations offer similar programming. Local television news programmes often include ‘person on the street’ interviews on current issues and opportunities for the audience to voice their arguments on-air. Of course, in most of these instances, the information received from the audience is moderated, and shared selectively. This does not, however, negate the fact that there is interaction between that audience and the media. Perhaps the greatest challenge to traditional interpretations of media-audience response is the proliferation of the internet. As McNair observes, “the emergence of the internet has provided new opportunities for public participation in political debate, such as blogging and ‘citizen journalism’. Websites such as YouTube permit marginal political groups to make statements with global reach” (McNair 13). These ‘inter-networks’ not only provide alternative information for audiences to seek out, but also give audience members the ability to respond to any communication in an immediate and public way. Therefore, the audience member can exert potentially wide reaching influence on the public agenda and dialogue, clearly altering the accept-or-refuse model often applied to mediated communication. Opinion polls provide us with an opportunity to verify this shift away from the ‘hypodermic needle’ approach to communication theory (Sanderson King 61). Just as an audience can be responsible for the success of a theatre or television show based on attendance or viewing numbers, so too have public opinion polls been designed to measure, without nuance, only whether the audience accepts or dismisses what is presented to them through the media. There is little place for any measure of actual thought or opinion. The first indications of an upset in this balance resulted in tremendous surprise, as was the case during the US Clinton/Lewinsky scandal (Lawrence & Bennett 425). Stephanopoulos writes that after a full year of coverage of the Monica Lewinsky ‘scandal’, Clinton’s public approval poll numbers were “higher than ever” while the Republican leaders who had initiated the inquiry were suffering from a serious lack of public support (Stephanopoulos 442). Carpini and Williams also observed that public opinion polls taken during the media frenzy showed very little change of any kind, although the movement that did occur was in the direction of increased support for Clinton. This was in direct contrast to what “…traditional agenda-setting, framing, and priming theory would predict” (Carpini & Williams in Bennett & Entman 177). Zaller confirms that the expectation among news organisations, journalists, and political scientists was never realised; despite being cast by the media in a negative role, and despite the consumption of that negative media, the audience refused to judge the President solely on his framed persona (Zaller in Bennett & Entman 255). It was clear that the majority of the population in the US, and in other countries, were exposed to the information regarding the Clinton scandal. At the height of the scandal, it was almost unavoidable (Zaller in Bennett & Entman 254). Therefore it cannot be said that the information the media provided was not being consumed. Rather, the audience did not agree with the media’s attempts to persuade them, and communicated this through opinion polls, creating something resembling a mass political dialogue. As Lawrence and Bennett discuss in their article regarding the Lewinsky/Clinton public opinion “phenomenon”, it should not be assumed by polling institutions or public opinion watchers that the projected angle of the media will be immediately adopted by the public (Lawerence & Bennett 425). Although the media presented a preferred reading of the text, it could not ensure that the audience would interpret that meaning (Hall in Curran, Gurevitch & Harris 343). The audience’s decoding of the media’s message would have to depend on each audience member’s personal experiences and their impression of the media that was presenting the communication. This kind of response is, in fact, encouraging. If the audience relies on mainstream media to provide a frame and context to all political communication, then they are giving up their civic responsibility and placing complete authority in the hands of those actively involved in the process of communicating events. It could be suggested that the reported increase in the perceived reliabilty of internet news sources (Kinsella 251) can be at least partially attributed to the audience’s increasing awareness of these frames and limitations on mainstream media presentation. With the increase in ‘backstage’ reporting, the audience has become hyper-aware of the use of these strategies in communications. The audience is now using its knowledge and media access to decipher information, as it is presented to them, for authenticity and context. While there are those who would lament the fact that the community driven public is largely in the past and focus their attention on finding ways to see the old methods of communication revived, others argue that the way to move forward is not to regret the existence of an audience, but to alter our ideas about how to understand it. It has been suggested that in order to become a more democratic society we must now “re-conceive audiences as citizens” (Golding in Ferguson 98). And despite Blau’s pronouncement that audiences are “nothing like a public”, he later points out that there is still the possibility of unity even in the most diverse of audiences. “The presence of an audience is in itself a sign of coherence”(Blau 23). As Rothenbuhler writes: There is too much casualness in the use of the word spectator…A spectator is almost never simply looking at something. On the contrary, most forms of spectatorship are socially prescribed and performed roles and forms of communication…the spectator, then, is not simply a viewer but a participant in a larger system. (Rothenbuhler 65) We cannot regress to a time when audiences are reserved for the theatre and publics for civic matters. In a highly networked world that relies on communicating via the methods and media of entertainment, it is impossible to remove the role of the audience member from the role of citizen. This does not necessarily need to be a negative aspect of democracy, but instead a step in its constant evolution. There are positive aspects to the audience/public as well as potential negatives. McNair equates the increase in mediated communication with an increase in political knowledge and involvement, particularly for those on the margins of society who are unlikely to be exposed to national political activity in person. He notes that the advent of television may have limited political discourse to a media-friendly sound bite, but that it still increases the information dispensed to the majority of the population. Despite the ideals of democracy, the majority of the voting population is not extremely well informed as to political issues, and prior to the advent of mass media, were very unlikely to have an opportunity to become immersed in the details of policy. Media have increased the amount of political information the average citizen will be exposed to in their lifetime (McNair 41). With this in mind, it is possible to equate the faults of mass media not with their continued growth, but with society’s inability to recognise the effects of the media as technologies and to adjust education accordingly. While the quality of information and understanding regarding the actions and ideals of national political leaders may be disputed, the fact that they are more widely distributed than ever before is not. They have an audience at all times, and though that audience may receive information via a filtered medium, they are still present and active. As McNair notes, if the purpose of democracy is to increase the number of people participating in the political process, then mass media have clearly served to promote the democratic ideal (McNair 204). However, these positives are qualified by the fact that audiences must also possess the skills, the interests and the knowledge of a public, or else risk isolation that limits their power to contribute to public discourse in a meaningful way. The need for an accountable, educated audience has not gone unnoticed throughout the history of mass media. Cultural observers such as Postman, McLuhan, John Kennedy, and even Pope Pius XII have cited the need for education in media. As McLuhan aptly noted, “to the student of media, it is difficult to explain the human indifference to the social effect of these radical forces”(McLuhan 304). In 1964, McLuhan wrote that, “education will become recognised as civil defence against media fallout. The only medium for which our education now offers some civil defence is the print medium”(McLuhan 305). Unfortunately, it is only gradually and usually at an advanced level of higher education that the study and analysis of media has developed to any degree. The mass audiences, those who control the powers of the public, often remain formally uneducated as to the influence that the mediating factors of television have on the distribution of information. Although the audience may have developed a level of sophistication in their awareness of media frames, the public has not been taught how to translate this awareness into any real political or social understanding. The result is a community susceptible to being overtaken by manipulations of any medium. Those who attempt to convey political messages have only added to that confusion by being unclear as to whether or not they are attempting to address an audience or engage a public. In some instances, politicians and their teams focus their sole attention on the public, not taking into consideration the necessities of communicating with an audience, often to the detriment of political success. On the other hand, some focus their attentions on attracting and maintaining an audience, often to the detriment of the political process. This confusion may be a symptom of the mixed messages regarding the appropriate attitude toward performance that is generated by western culture. In an environment where open attention to performance is both demanded and distained, communication choices can be difficult. Instead we are likely to blindly observe the steady increase in the entertainment style packaging of our national politics. Until the audience fully incorporates itself with the public, we will see an absence of action, and excess of confused consumption (Kraus 18). Contemporary society has moved far beyond the traditional concepts of exclusive audience or public domains, and yet we have not fully articulated or defined what this change in structure really means. Although this review does suggest that contemporary citizens are both audience and public simultaneously, it is also clear that further discussion needs to occur before either of those roles can be fully understood in a contemporary communications context. References Bennett, Lance C., and Robert M. Entman. Mediated Politics: Communication in the Future of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Blau, Herbert. The Audience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. Bratich, Jack Z. “Amassing the Multitude: Revisiting Early Audience Studies”. Communication Theory 15 (2005): 242-65. Curran, J., M. Gurevitch, and D. Janet Harris, eds. Mass Communication and Society. Beverley Hills: Sage, 1977. DeLuca, T., and J. Buell. Liars! Cheaters! Evildoers! Demonization and the End of Civil Debate in American Politics. New York: New York UP, 2005. Ferguson, Marjorie, ed. Public Communication: The New Imperatives. London: Sage, 1990. Franklin, Bob. Packaging Politics. London: Edward Arnold, 1994. Gamson, Joshua. Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. Keown, Leslie-Anne. “Keeping Up with the Times: Canadians and Their News Media Diets.” Canadian Social Trends June 2007. Government of Canada. Kinsella, Warren. The War Room. Toronto: Dunduran Group, 2007. Kraus, Sidney. Televised Presidential Debates and Public Policy. New Jersey: Lawerence Erlbaum Associates, 2000. Lawrence, Regina, and Lance Bennett. “Rethinking Media Politics and Public Opinion: Reactions to the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal”. Political Science Quarterly 116 (Fall 2001): 425-46. Marland, Alex. Political Marketing in Modern Canadian Federal Elections. Dalhousie University: Canadian Political Science Association Conference, 2003. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. New ed. London: ARK Paperbacks, 1987 [1964]. McNair, Brian. An Introduction to Political Communication. 4th ed. London: Routledge, 2007. The Oxford Dictionary of English. Eds. Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson. Rev. ed. Oxford UP, 2005. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford UP. 1 Mar. 2008. < http://www.oxfordreference.com.qe2aproxy.mun.ca/views/ ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t140.e4525 >. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. New York: Penguin, 1985. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. Ritual Communication. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 1998. Sanderson King, Sarah. Human Communication as a Field of Study. New York: State U of New York P, 1990. Schultz, David A., ed. It’s Show Time! Media, Politics and Popular Culture. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Shea, Daniel, and Michael John Burton. Campaign Craft. 3rd ed. Westport: Praeger, 2006. Slayden, D., and R.K. Whillock. Soundbite Culture: The Death of Discourse in a Wired World. London: Sage, 1999. Stephanopoulos, George. All Too Human. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1999. Webster, James C. “Beneath the Veneer of Fragmentation: Television Audience Polarization in a Multichannel World.” Journal of Communication 55 (June 2005): 366-82. Woodward, Gary C. Center Stage: Media and the Performance of American Politics. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. Xenos, Michael, and Kirsten Foot. “Not Your Father’s Internet: The Generation Gap in Online Politics.” Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth. Cambridge: MIT P, 2008.

Political activity is expected to be of interest to a knowledgeable electorate, citizenry or ‘public’. Performance and entertainment have, on the other hand, been considered the domain of the ‘audience’. The line between active electorate and passive audience has been continually blurred, and as more political communication is designed along the lines of entertainment, the less likely it seems that the distinction will become clearer any time soon. The following article will attempt to thoroughly evaluate the contemporary implications of terms related to ‘public’ and ‘audience’, and to suggest a path forward in understanding the now intertwined roles of these two entities. In political commentary of all kinds, the term ‘audience’ has come to be regularly used in place of the more traditionally political terms ‘public’, ‘electorate’, ‘constituency’ or even ‘mass’, ‘mob’ and ‘multitude’. (Bratich 249) This slight alteration of language would seem to suggest an ongoing, and occasionally unintentional debate as to whether or not our increasingly mediated society has become incapable of true political discourse – an audience to be courted and won solely on the basis of visual and aural stimulation. In some instances, the debate goes unacknowledged, with authors using the term interchangeably with that of voter or public. Others seem to be making a more definite statement, as do the authors of Campaign Craft, wherein the term ‘audience’ is often used to refer to the voting population. (Shea and Burton) In either case, it is clear that the ‘public’ and the ‘audience’ are no longer to be considered two entirely separate entities. To understand the significance of this shift, it is necessary to identify the traditional distinctions of these sometimes problematic terms. To do so we must look briefly at how the original and contemporary meanings have developed. Herbert Blau writes that “audiences, such as they are, are nothing like a public, certainly nothing like the capitalised Public of another time” (Blau 22). That “capitalised Public” he refers to is perhaps the ideal state envisioned by Greek and Roman philosophers in which the community, as a whole, is maintained by and for its own members, and each individual plays a significant and specific role in its maintenance. The “audiences”, however, can be popularly defined as “the assembled spectators or listeners at a public event such as a play, film, concert, or meeting” or “the people giving attention to something”. (Soanes & Stevenson) The difference is subtle but significant. The public is expected to take some active interest in its own maintenance and growth, while the audience is not expected to offer action, just attention. The authors of Soundbite Culture, who would seem to see the blurring between audience and public as a negative side effect of mass media, offer this description of the differences between these two entities: Audiences are talked to; publics are talked with. Audiences are entertained; publics are engaged. Audiences live in the moment; publics have both memory and dreams. Audiences have opinions, publics have thoughts. (Slayden & Whillock 7) A ‘public’ is joined by more than their attendance at or attention to a single performance and responsible for more than just the experience of that performance. While an audience is expected to do little more than consume the performance before them, a public must respond to an experience with appropriate action. A public is a community, bound together by activity and mutual concerns. An audience is joined together only by their mutual interest in, or presence at, a performance. Carpini and Williams note that the term ‘public’ is no longer an adequate way to describe the complex levels of interaction that form contemporary political discourse: “people, politics, and the media are far more complex than this. Individuals are simultaneously citizens, consumers, audiences…and so forth” (Carpini & Williams in Bennett & Entman 161). Marshall sees the audience as both a derivative of and a factor in the larger, more political popular body called the “masses”. These masses define the population largely as an unorganised political power, while audiences emerge in relation to consumer products, as rationalised and therefore somewhat subdued categories within that scope. He notes that although the audience, in the twentieth century, has emerged as a “social category” of its own, it has developed as such in relation to both the unharnessed political power of the masses and the active political power of the public (Marshall 61-70). The audience, then, can be said to be a separate but overlapping state that rationalises and segments the potential of the masses, but also informs the subsequent actions of the public. An audience without some degree of action or involvement is not a public. Such a definition provides important insights into the debate from the perspective of political communication. The cohesiveness of the group that is to define the public can be undermined by mass media. It has been argued that mass media, in particular the internet, have removed all sense of local community and instead provided an information outlet that denies individual response. (Franklin 23; Postman 67-69) It can certainly be argued that with media available on such an instant and individual basis, the necessity of group gathering for information and action has been greatly reduced. Thus, one of the primary functions of the public is eliminated, that of joining together for information. This lack of communal information gathering can eliminate the most important functions of the public: debate and personal action. Those who tune-in to national broadcasts or even read national newspapers to receive political information are generally not invited to debate and pose solutions to the problems that are introduced to them, or to take immediate steps to resolve the conflicts addressed. Instead, they are asked only to fulfill that traditional function of the audience, to receive the information and either absorb or dismiss it. Media also blur the audience/public divide by making it necessary to change the means of political communication. Previous to the advent of mass media, political communication was separated from entertainment by its emphasis on debate and information. Television has led a turn toward more ‘emotion’ and image-based campaigning both for election and for support of a particular political agenda. This subsequently implies that this public has increasingly become primarily an audience. Although this attitude is one that has been adopted by many critics and observers, it is not entirely correct to say that there are no longer any opportunities for the audience to regain their function as a public. On a local level, town hall meetings, public consultations and rallies still exist and provide an opportunity for concerned citizens to voice their opinions and assist in forming local policy. Media, often accused of orchestrating the elimination of the active public, occasionally provide opportunities for more traditional public debate. In both Canada and the US, leaders are invited to participate in ‘town hall’ style television debates in which audience members are invited to ask questions. In the UK, both print media and television tend to offer opportunities for leaders to respond to the questions and concerns of individuals. Many newspapers publish responses and letters from many different readers, allowing for public debate and interaction. (McNair 13) In addition, newspapers such as The Washington Post and The Globe and Mail operate Websites that allow the public to comment on articles published in the paper text. In Canada, radio is often used as a forum for public debate and comment. The Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s Cross Country Check Up and Cross Talk allows mediated debate between citizens across the country. Regional stations offer similar programming. Local television news programmes often include ‘person on the street’ interviews on current issues and opportunities for the audience to voice their arguments on-air. Of course, in most of these instances, the information received from the audience is moderated, and shared selectively. This does not, however, negate the fact that there is interaction between that audience and the media. Perhaps the greatest challenge to traditional interpretations of media-audience response is the proliferation of the internet. As McNair observes, “the emergence of the internet has provided new opportunities for public participation in political debate, such as blogging and ‘citizen journalism’. Websites such as YouTube permit marginal political groups to make statements with global reach” (McNair 13). These ‘inter-networks’ not only provide alternative information for audiences to seek out, but also give audience members the ability to respond to any communication in an immediate and public way. Therefore, the audience member can exert potentially wide reaching influence on the public agenda and dialogue, clearly altering the accept-or-refuse model often applied to mediated communication. Opinion polls provide us with an opportunity to verify this shift away from the ‘hypodermic needle’ approach to communication theory (Sanderson King 61). Just as an audience can be responsible for the success of a theatre or television show based on attendance or viewing numbers, so too have public opinion polls been designed to measure, without nuance, only whether the audience accepts or dismisses what is presented to them through the media. There is little place for any measure of actual thought or opinion. The first indications of an upset in this balance resulted in tremendous surprise, as was the case during the US Clinton/Lewinsky scandal (Lawrence & Bennett 425). Stephanopoulos writes that after a full year of coverage of the Monica Lewinsky ‘scandal’, Clinton’s public approval poll numbers were “higher than ever” while the Republican leaders who had initiated the inquiry were suffering from a serious lack of public support (Stephanopoulos 442). Carpini and Williams also observed that public opinion polls taken during the media frenzy showed very little change of any kind, although the movement that did occur was in the direction of increased support for Clinton. This was in direct contrast to what “…traditional agenda-setting, framing, and priming theory would predict” (Carpini & Williams in Bennett & Entman 177). Zaller confirms that the expectation among news organisations, journalists, and political scientists was never realised; despite being cast by the media in a negative role, and despite the consumption of that negative media, the audience refused to judge the President solely on his framed persona (Zaller in Bennett & Entman 255). It was clear that the majority of the population in the US, and in other countries, were exposed to the information regarding the Clinton scandal. At the height of the scandal, it was almost unavoidable (Zaller in Bennett & Entman 254). Therefore it cannot be said that the information the media provided was not being consumed. Rather, the audience did not agree with the media’s attempts to persuade them, and communicated this through opinion polls, creating something resembling a mass political dialogue. As Lawrence and Bennett discuss in their article regarding the Lewinsky/Clinton public opinion “phenomenon”, it should not be assumed by polling institutions or public opinion watchers that the projected angle of the media will be immediately adopted by the public (Lawerence & Bennett 425). Although the media presented a preferred reading of the text, it could not ensure that the audience would interpret that meaning (Hall in Curran, Gurevitch & Harris 343). The audience’s decoding of the media’s message would have to depend on each audience member’s personal experiences and their impression of the media that was presenting the communication. This kind of response is, in fact, encouraging. If the audience relies on mainstream media to provide a frame and context to all political communication, then they are giving up their civic responsibility and placing complete authority in the hands of those actively involved in the process of communicating events. It could be suggested that the reported increase in the perceived reliabilty of internet news sources (Kinsella 251) can be at least partially attributed to the audience’s increasing awareness of these frames and limitations on mainstream media presentation. With the increase in ‘backstage’ reporting, the audience has become hyper-aware of the use of these strategies in communications. The audience is now using its knowledge and media access to decipher information, as it is presented to them, for authenticity and context. While there are those who would lament the fact that the community driven public is largely in the past and focus their attention on finding ways to see the old methods of communication revived, others argue that the way to move forward is not to regret the existence of an audience, but to alter our ideas about how to understand it. It has been suggested that in order to become a more democratic society we must now “re-conceive audiences as citizens” (Golding in Ferguson 98). And despite Blau’s pronouncement that audiences are “nothing like a public”, he later points out that there is still the possibility of unity even in the most diverse of audiences. “The presence of an audience is in itself a sign of coherence”(Blau 23). As Rothenbuhler writes: There is too much casualness in the use of the word spectator…A spectator is almost never simply looking at something. On the contrary, most forms of spectatorship are socially prescribed and performed roles and forms of communication…the spectator, then, is not simply a viewer but a participant in a larger system. (Rothenbuhler 65) We cannot regress to a time when audiences are reserved for the theatre and publics for civic matters. In a highly networked world that relies on communicating via the methods and media of entertainment, it is impossible to remove the role of the audience member from the role of citizen. This does not necessarily need to be a negative aspect of democracy, but instead a step in its constant evolution. There are positive aspects to the audience/public as well as potential negatives. McNair equates the increase in mediated communication with an increase in political knowledge and involvement, particularly for those on the margins of society who are unlikely to be exposed to national political activity in person. He notes that the advent of television may have limited political discourse to a media-friendly sound bite, but that it still increases the information dispensed to the majority of the population. Despite the ideals of democracy, the majority of the voting population is not extremely well informed as to political issues, and prior to the advent of mass media, were very unlikely to have an opportunity to become immersed in the details of policy. Media have increased the amount of political information the average citizen will be exposed to in their lifetime (McNair 41). With this in mind, it is possible to equate the faults of mass media not with their continued growth, but with society’s inability to recognise the effects of the media as technologies and to adjust education accordingly. While the quality of information and understanding regarding the actions and ideals of national political leaders may be disputed, the fact that they are more widely distributed than ever before is not. They have an audience at all times, and though that audience may receive information via a filtered medium, they are still present and active. As McNair notes, if the purpose of democracy is to increase the number of people participating in the political process, then mass media have clearly served to promote the democratic ideal (McNair 204). However, these positives are qualified by the fact that audiences must also possess the skills, the interests and the knowledge of a public, or else risk isolation that limits their power to contribute to public discourse in a meaningful way. The need for an accountable, educated audience has not gone unnoticed throughout the history of mass media. Cultural observers such as Postman, McLuhan, John Kennedy, and even Pope Pius XII have cited the need for education in media. As McLuhan aptly noted, “to the student of media, it is difficult to explain the human indifference to the social effect of these radical forces”(McLuhan 304). In 1964, McLuhan wrote that, “education will become recognised as civil defence against media fallout. The only medium for which our education now offers some civil defence is the print medium”(McLuhan 305). Unfortunately, it is only gradually and usually at an advanced level of higher education that the study and analysis of media has developed to any degree. The mass audiences, those who control the powers of the public, often remain formally uneducated as to the influence that the mediating factors of television have on the distribution of information. Although the audience may have developed a level of sophistication in their awareness of media frames, the public has not been taught how to translate this awareness into any real political or social understanding. The result is a community susceptible to being overtaken by manipulations of any medium. Those who attempt to convey political messages have only added to that confusion by being unclear as to whether or not they are attempting to address an audience or engage a public. In some instances, politicians and their teams focus their sole attention on the public, not taking into consideration the necessities of communicating with an audience, often to the detriment of political success. On the other hand, some focus their attentions on attracting and maintaining an audience, often to the detriment of the political process. This confusion may be a symptom of the mixed messages regarding the appropriate attitude toward performance that is generated by western culture. In an environment where open attention to performance is both demanded and distained, communication choices can be difficult. Instead we are likely to blindly observe the steady increase in the entertainment style packaging of our national politics. Until the audience fully incorporates itself with the public, we will see an absence of action, and excess of confused consumption (Kraus 18). Contemporary society has moved far beyond the traditional concepts of exclusive audience or public domains, and yet we have not fully articulated or defined what this change in structure really means. Although this review does suggest that contemporary citizens are both audience and public simultaneously, it is also clear that further discussion needs to occur before either of those roles can be fully understood in a contemporary communications context. References Bennett, Lance C., and Robert M. Entman. Mediated Politics: Communication in the Future of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 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Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mullins, Kimberley. "The Voting Audience." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/03-mullins.php>. APA Style Mullins, K. (Apr. 2008) "The Voting Audience," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/03-mullins.php>.