Academic literature on the topic 'College choice Victoria'

The 1960s were a time of great change and growth in New Zealand's tertiary eduction sector, and the university-based discipline of architecture was in no way exempt from this progress. In response to the Parry Report of 1959-1960, the New Zealand government passed the 1961 Universities Act, which dissolved the federated University of New Zealand. This Act opened the way for the independence of the four universities of Auckland, Victoria, Canterbury and Otago, and the two allied agricultural colleges of Massey and Lincoln. Under the federated university system, Auckland University College had been the centre of architectural training, and had delivered extramural course through colleges in the other centres. As the "disproportionate number" of extramural and part-time study had been criticisms levelled by the Parry Report, it was obvious that another School of Architecture would now be required, but where? Ever an argumentative association, members of the New Zealand Institute of Architects engaged in a lively debate on the choice, positing Victoria University in Wellington, and Canterbury University in Christchurch, as the major contenders. By the end of the decade university-based architectural training would expand at both Auckland and (the new) Wellington Schools, New Zealand's first PhD in Architecture would be conferred on Dr John Dickson, and many of the careers of architects and architectural academics who went on to construct the discipline as it is today, had begun.

Many higher education institutions are moving towards blended learning environments that seek to move towards a student-centred ethos, where students are stakeholders in the learning process. This often involves multi-modal learner-support technologies capable of operating in a range of time and place settings. This article considers the impact of an Audience Response System (ARS) upon the ongoing development of an Information Systems Professional course at the Masters level in the College of Business at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. The course allows students to consider ethical issues faced by an Information Systems Professional. Given the sensitivity of some of the topics explored within this area, an ARS offers an ideal vehicle for allowing students to respond to potentially contentious questions without revealing their identity to the rest of the group. The paper reports the findings of a pilot scheme designed to explore the efficacy of the technology. Use of a blended learning framework to frame the discussion allowed the authors to consider the readiness of institution, lecturers, and students to use ARS. From a usage viewpoint, multiple choice questions lead to further discussion of student responses related to important issues in the unit. From an impact viewpoint the use of ARS in the class appeared to be successful, but some limitations were reported.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss the effectiveness of image-repair strategies adopted by organizations to restore their public image and reputation following crisis situations, the lessons learned from these cases and the significance of contextual factors that are likely to affect image-repair efforts and strategies adopted. Design/methodology/approach Three cases have been reviewed in this paper: Weather, Jordan; Nestlé Waters, Jordan; and Victoria College School, Jordan. Information was obtained from published materials, such as YouTube commentaries, local newspapers and online news agents, primarily the Jordan Times, which is considered the number one daily in the country. The discussion of these cases is original and based on academic theory and literature. Findings Organizations differ in terms of the ways they respond to corporate crises and the strategies they are likely to adopt to restore/recover their reputation and public image. Practical implications Corporate reputation or public image is an asset that is built over time. Organizations within all industries seek to secure positive images in the minds of people. The image of an organization however can be threatened by crises. Trust and public image decline when stakeholders feel they have not been adequately informed in times of crises regarding the different attributes of the situation or how the organization is dealing with the crisis. Organizations have the choice to adopt one image-repair strategy at a time or a combination of strategies according to the requirements of the situation. Originality/value Image-repair strategies have been examined in American and European contexts but have, to the author’s knowledge, never been examined in the context of Arab organizations and more specifically in the context of Jordanian organizations. This paper therefore provides a new insight into how to apply these strategies in a unique and new context and will also motivate future research in this regard.

The great social and cultural changes in the Victorian period had a great impact on gender roles. In both public and private sphere, the divisions in gender roles started to disappear with the emergence of a type of woman willing to be active in every area of life. Along with more frequent appearance and growing numbers of women in the work force through the late nineteenth century Elaine Showalter’s notion of “sexual anarchy” and its different forms were invigorated. How the social status of women started to change along with industrialization by the end of the nineteenth-century was also reflected upon Victorian literature. For instance, in Mrs Warren’s Profession the protagonist Vivie represents the new woman type who is ambitious to get education and to participate in work life as a self-sufficient woman in Victorian drama. When compared with the traditional woman type, she is more free-minded, independent and career-oriented. In D. H. Lawrence’ The Rainbow, Ursula, is another significant prototype for the ‘new woman’, who struggles for more freedom and independence. She is well-educated and it is very difficult for her to come to terms with her pregnancy as she cannot accept the fact that one part of hers belongs to a man. She is unconventional and rebellious. She counters domesticity. In The Story of An African Farm by Olive Schreiner the protagonist Lyndall’s life story on an ostrich farm depicts the limited choices and living conditions of a woman constrained by the rigid conventions of Boer lifestyle. Her main goal in life is to pursue after her own choices. In The Type-Writer Girl by Grant Allen, Juliet Appleton stands out with some infamous characteristics of her identity as a New Woman, such as smoking cigarettes, attending college, travelling on her bicycle, and wearing rational clothing. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that working women had an unstable position at the end of the nineteenth century, based on all these trappings of the New Woman, and the intersection of gender with the discourses of class, evolution and technology through a feminist perspective. Social pressure and prejudices restrict the opportunities of the new woman to go beyond her capacity and reach real freedom and happiness. Therefore, the society mostly puts barriers in front of her ideals and her dreams. Through a feminist lens, this study reveals the fact that the new woman expects to live in a more democratic society where she is honoured with equal rights and opportunities with men. She rejects being completely dependent upon men finally, instead she adopts the idea of self-help to gain the respect she deserves as a self-sufficient woman.

05–104Alwright, D. (U of Lancaster, UK), From teaching points to learning opportunities and beyond. TESOL Quarterly (Alexandria, VA, USA) 39.1 (2005), 9–32.05–105Beckett, G. & Slater, T. (U of Cincinnati, USA), The Project Framework: a tool for language, content, and skills integration. ELT Journal (Oxford, UK) 59.2 (2005), 108–116.05–106Belcher, Diane D. (Georgia State U, USA; dbelcher1@gsu.edu), Trends in teaching English for specific purposes. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (Cambridge, UK) 24 (2004), 165–186.05–107Berne, Jane E. (U North Dakota, USA), Listening comprehension strategies: a review of the literature. Foreign Language Annals (Alexandria, VA, USA) 37.4 (2004), 521–533.05–108Bohn, Mariko T. (Stanford U, USA; mbohn@stanford.edu), Japanese classroom behavior: a micro-analysis of self-reports versus classroom observations with implications for language teachers. Applied Language Learning (Monterey, CA, USA) 14.1 (2004), 1–35.05–109Byon, Andrew Sangpil (Albany State U, USA; abyon@albany.edu), Learning linguistic politeness. Applied Language Learning (Monterey, CA, USA) 14.1 (2004), 37–62.05–110Carrell, Patricia L., Dunkel, Patricia A. (Georgia State U, USA; pcarrell@gsu.edu) & Mollaun, Pamela, The effects of notetaking, lecture length, and topic on a computer-based test of ESL listening comprehension. Applied Language Learning (Monterey, CA, USA) 14.1 (2004), 83–105.05–111Chacón, Carmen Teresa (U of Los Andes Tachira, Venezuela; ctchacon@cantv.net), Teachers' perceived efficacy among English as a foreign language teachers in middle schools in Venezuela. Teaching and Teacher Education (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 21.3 (2005), 257–273.05–112Dewey, Dan P. (U of Pittsburgh, USA), Connections between teacher and student attitudes regarding script choice in first-year Japanese language classrooms. Foreign Language Annals (Alexandria, VA, USA) 37.4 (2004), 567–583.05–113Dogancay-Aktuna, S. (Southern Illinois U, USA), Intercultural communication in English language teacher education. ELT Journal (Oxford, UK) 59.2 (2005), 99–107.05–114Doyé, Peter (Technische Universität Brunschweig, Germany; p.doye@tu-bs.de), A methodological framework for the teaching of intercomprehension. Language Learning Journal (Rugby, UK) 30 (2004), 59–68.05–115Erling, Elisabeth J. (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany), The many names of English. English Today (Cambridge, UK) 21.1 (2005), 40–44.05–116Flowerdew, Lynne (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China; lclynn@ust.hk), An integration of corpus-based and genre-based approaches to text analysis in EAP/ESP: countering criticisms against corpus-based methodologies. English for Specific Purposes (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 24.3 (2005), 321–332.05–117Grabe, William (Northern Arizona U, USA; William.Grabe@nau.edu), Research on teaching reading. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (Cambridge, UK) 24 (2004), 44–69.05–118Jackson, J. (Chinese U of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China; jjackson@edu.hk), An inter-university, cross-disciplinary analysis of business education: perceptions of business faculty in Hong Kong. English for Specific Purposes (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 24.3 (2005), 293–306.05–119Jarrell, Douglas (Nagoya Women's U, Japan; djarrell@nagoya-wu.ac.jp) & Mark R. Freiermuth (Gunma Prefectural Women's U, Japan; mark-f@gpwu.ac.jp), The motivational power of internet chat. RELC Journal (Thousand Oaks, CA, USA) 36.1 (2005), 59–72.05–120Jenkins, Jennifer (Kings College London, UK; jennifer.jenkins@kcl.ac.uk), Research in teaching pronunciation and intonation. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (Cambridge, UK) 24 (2004), 109–125.05–121Kern, Richard, Ware, Paige (California U, Berkeley, USA; kernrg@socrates.berkeley.edu) & Warschauer, Mark, Crossing frontiers: new directions in online pedagogy and research. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (Cambridge, UK) 24 (2004), 243–260.05–122Lou Leaver, Betty (New York Institute of Technology, USA), Ehrman, Madeline & Lekic, Maria, Distinguished-level learning online: support materials from LangNet and RussNet. Foreign Language Annals (Alexandria, VA, USA) 37.4 (2004), 556–566.05–123McCarthy, Michael (Nottingham U, UK) & O'Keefe, Anne, Research in the teaching of speaking. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (Cambridge, UK) 24 (2004), 26–43.05–124McGarry, Richard (Appalachian State U, NC, USA), Error correction as a cultural phenomenon. Applied Language Learning (Monterey, CA, USA) 14.1 (2004), 63–82.05–125Nassaji, Hossein (Victoria U, Canada; nassaji@uvic.ca) & Fotos, Sandra, Current developments in research on the teaching of grammar. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (Cambridge, UK) 24 (2004), 126–145.05–126Perrin, G. (German Government Language Centre, Germany), Teachers, testers, and the research enterprise – a slow meeting of minds. ELT Journal (Oxford, UK) 59.2 (2005), 144–150.05–127Seidlhofer, Barbara (Vienna U, Austria; barbara.seidlhofer@univie.ac.at), Research perspectives on teaching English as a lingua franca. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (Cambridge, UK) 24 (2004), 209–239.05–128Silva, Tony (Purdue U, USA; tony@purdue.edu) & Brice, Colleen, Research in teaching writing. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (Cambridge, UK) 24 (2004), 70–106.05–129Simmons-Mcdonald, Hazel (West Indies U, Barbados; hsimmac@uwichill.edu.bb), Trends in teaching standard varieties to creole and vernacular speakers. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (Cambridge, UK) 24 (2004), 187–208.05–130Stoller, Fredricka L. (Northern Arizona U, USA; Fredricka.Stoller@nau.edu), Content-based instruction: perspectives on curriculum planning. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (Cambridge, UK) 24 (2004), 261–283.05–131Tan, M. (U of Central Lancashire, UK), Authentic language or language errors? Lessons from a learner corpus. ELT Journal (Oxford, UK) 59.2 (2005), 126–134.05–132Wilberschied, Lee (Cleveland State U, USA) & Berman, Peiyan M., Effect of using photos from authentic video as advance organisers on listening comprehension in an FLES Chinese class. Foreign Language Annals (Alexandria, VA, USA) 37.4 (2004), 534–540.05–133Xu, Y., Gelfer, J. & Perkins, P. (U of Wisconsin, USA), Using peer tutoring to increase social interactions in early schooling. TESOL Quarterly (Alexandria, VA, USA) 39.1 (2005), 83–106.05–134Yeh, Aiden (National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technology, Taiwan, China; aidenyeh@yahoo.com), Poetry from the heart. English Today (Cambridge, UK) 21.1 (2005), 45–51

07–91Almaguer, Isela (The U Texas-Pan American, USA), Effects of dyad reading instruction on the reading achievement of Hispanic third-grade English language learners. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 29.3 (2005), 509–526.07–92Almarza, Dario J. (U Missouri-Columbia, USA), Connecting multicultural education theories with practice: A case study of an intervention course using the realistic approach in teacher education. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 29.3 (2005), 527–539.07–93Arkoudis, Sophie (U Melbourne, Australia), Negotiating the rough ground between ESL and mainstream teachers. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Multilingual Matters) 9.4 (2006), 415–433.07–94Arteagoitia, Igone, Elizabeth R. Howard, Mohammed Louguit, Valerie Malabonga & Dorry M. Kenyon (Center for Applied Linguistics, USA), The Spanish developmental contrastive spelling test: An instrument for investigating intra-linguistic and crosslinguistic influences on Spanish-spelling development. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 29.3 (2005), 541–560.07–95Branum-Martin, Lee (U Houston, USA; Lee.Branum-Martin@times.uh.edu),Paras D. Mehta, Jack M. Fletcher, Coleen D. Carlson, Alba Ortiz, Maria Carlo & David J. Francis, Bilingual phonological awareness: Multilevel construct validation among Spanish-speaking kindergarteners in transitional bilingual education classrooms. Journal of Educational Psychology (American Psychological Association) 98.1 (2006), 170–181.07–96Brown, Clara Lee (The U Tennessee, Knoxville, USA), Equity of literacy-based math performance assessments for English language learners. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 29.2 (2005), 337–363.07–97Callahan, Rebecca M. (U Texas, USA), The intersection of accountability and language: Can reading intervention replace English language development?Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 30.1 (2006), 1–21.07–98Cavallaro, Francesco (Nanyang Technological U, Singapore), Language maintenance revisited: An Australian perspective. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 29.3 (2005), 561–582.07–99Cheung, Alan & Robert E. Slavin (Center for Data-Driven Reform in Education, USA), Effective reading programs for English language learners and other language-minority students. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 29.2 (2005), 244–267.07–100Courtney, Michael (Springdale Public Schools, USA), Teaching Roberto. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 29.2 (2005), 475–484.07–101Creese, Angela (U Birmingham, UK), Supporting talk? Partnership teachers in classroom interaction. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Multilingual Matters) 9.4 (2006), 434–453.07–102Davison, Chris (U Hong Kong, China), Collaboration between ESL and content teachers: How do we know when we are doing it right?International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Multilingual Matters) 9.4 (2006), 454–475.07–103de Jong, Ester (U Florida, USA), Integrated bilingual education: An alternative approach. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 30.1 (2006), 22–44.07–104Domínguez, Higinio (U Texas at Austin, USA), Bilingual students' articulation and gesticulation of mathematical knowledge during problem solving. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 29.2 (2005), 269–293.07–105Duren Green, Tonika, MyLuong Tran & Russell Young (San Diego State U, USA), The impact of ethnicity, socioeconomic status, language, and training program on teaching choice among new teachers in California. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 29.3 (2005), 583–598.07–106García-Nevarez, Ana G. (California State U, Sacramento, USA), Mary E. Stafford & Beatriz Arias, Arizona elementary teachers' attitudes toward English language learners and the use of Spanish in classroom instruction. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 29.2 (2005), 295–317.07–107Gardner, Sheena (U Warwick, UK), Centre-stage in the instructional register: Partnership talk in Primary EAL. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Multilingual Matters) 9.4 (2006), 476–494.07–108Garza, Aimee V. & Lindy Crawford (U Colorado at Colorado Springs, USA), Hegemonic multiculturalism: English immersion, ideology, and subtractive schooling. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 29.3 (2005), 598–619.07–109Hasson, Deborah J. (Florida State U, USA), Bilingual language use in Hispanic young adults: Did elementary bilingual programs help?Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 30.1 (2006), 45–64.07–110Helmberger, Janet L. (Minneapolis Public Schools, USA), Language and ethnicity: Multiple literacies in context, language education in Guatemala. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 30.1 (2006), 65–86.07–111Johnson, Eric (Arizona State U, USA), WAR in the media: Metaphors, ideology, and the formation of language policy. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 29.3 (2005), 621–640.07–112Kandel, Sonia (U Pierre Mendes, France; Sonia.Kandel@upmf-grenoble.fr),Carlos J. Álvarez & Nathalie Vallée, Syllables as processing units in handwriting production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance (American Psychological Association) 32.1 (2006), 18–31.07–113Laija-Rodríguez, Wilda (California State U, USA), Salvador Hector Ochoa & Richard Parker, The crosslinguistic role of cognitive academic language proficiency on reading growth in Spanish and English. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 30.1 (2006), 87–106.07–114Langdon, Henriette W. (San José State U, USA),Elisabeth H. Wiig & Niels Peter Nielsen, Dual-dimension naming speed and language-dominance ratings by bilingual Hispanic adults. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 29.2 (2005), 319–336.07–115Lee, Steven K. (Portland State U, USA), The Latino students’ attitudes, perceptions, and views on bilingual education. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 30.1 (2006), 107–122.07–116Leung, Constant (King's College London, UK; constant.leung@kcl.ac.uk), Language and content in bilingual education. Linguistics and Education (Elsevier) 16.2 (2005), 238–252.07–117Lindholm-Leary, Kathryn (San Jose State U, USA) & Graciela Borsato, Hispanic high schoolers and mathematics: Follow-up of students who had participated in two-way bilingual elementary programs. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 29.3 (2005), 641–652.07–118López, María G. & Abbas Tashakkori (Florida International U, USA), Differential outcomes of two bilingual education programs on English language learners. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 30.1 (2006), 123–144.07–119Lung, Rachel (Lingnan U, Hong Kong, China; wclung@ln.edu.hk), Translation training needs for adult learners. Babel (John Benjamins) 51.3 (2005), 224–237.07–120MacSwan, Jeff (Arizona State U, USA) & Lisa Pray, Learning English bilingually: Age of onset of exposure and rate of acquisition among English language learners in a bilingual education program. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 29.3 (2005), 653–678.07–121Monzó, Lilia D. (U California, Los Angeles, USA), Latino parents' ‘choice’ for bilingual education in an urban California school: language politics in the aftermath of proposition 227. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 29.2 (2005), 365–386.07–122Mugaddam, Abdel Rahim Hamid (U Khartoum, Sudan), Language status and use in Dilling City, the Nuba Mountains. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (Multilingual Matters) 27.4 (2006), 290–304.07–123Napier, Jemina (Macquarie U, Australia; jemina.napier@ling.mq.edu.au), Training sign language interpreters in Australia: An innovative approach. Babel (John Benjamins) 51.3 (2005), 207–223.07–124Oladejo, James (National Kaohsiung Normal U, Taiwan), Parents’ attitudes towards bilingual education policy in Taiwan. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 30.1 (2006), 147–170.07–125Paneque, Oneyda M. (Barry U, USA) & Patricia M. Barbetta, A study of teacher efficacy of special education teachers of English language learners with disabilities. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 30.1 (2006), 171–193.07–126Proctor, Patrick C. (Center for Applied Special Technology, USA), Diane August, María S. Carlo & Catherine Snow, The intriguing role of Spanish language vocabulary knowledge in predicting English reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology (American Psychological Association) 98.1 (2006), 159–169.07–127Ramírez-Esparza, Nairán (U Texas, USA; nairan@mail.utexas.edu), Samuel D. Gosling, Verónica Benet-Martínez, Jeffrey P. Potter & James W. Pennebaker, Do bilinguals have two personalities? A special case of cultural frame switching. Journal of Research in Personality (Elsevier) 40.2 (2006), 99–120.07–128Ramos, Francisco (Loyola Marymount U, USA), Spanish teachers’ opinions about the use of Spanish in mainstream English classrooms before and after their first year in California. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 29.2 (2005), 411–433.07–129Reese, Leslie (California State U, USA),Ronald Gallimore & Donald Guthrie, Reading trajectories of immigrant Latino students in transitional bilingual programs. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 29.3 (2005), 679–697.07–130Rogers, Catherine, L. (U South Florida USA; crogers@cas.usf.edu),Jennifer J. Lister, Dashielle M. Febo, Joan M. Besing & Harvey B. Abrams, Effects of bilingualism, noise and reverberation on speech perception by listeners with normal hearing. Applied Psycholinguistics (Cambridge University Press) 27.3 (2006), 465–485.07–131Sandoval-Lucero, Elena (U Colorado at Denver, USA), Recruiting paraeducators into bilingual teaching roles: The importance of support, supervision, and self-efficacy. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 30.1 (2006), 195–218.07–132Stritikus, Tom T. (U Washington, USA), Making meaning matter: A look at instructional practice in additive and subtractive contexts. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 30.1 (2006), 219–227.07–133Sutterby, John A., Javier Ayala & Sandra Murillo (U Texas at Brownsville, USA), El sendero torcido al español [The twisted path to Spanish]: The development of bilingual teachers’ Spanish-language proficiency. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 29.2 (2005), 435–452.07–134 Takeuchi, Masae (Victoria U, Australia), The Japanese language development of children through the ‘one parent–one language’ approach in Melbourne. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (Multilingual Matters) 27.4 (2006), 319–331.07–135Torres-Guzmán, María E. & Tatyana Kleyn (Teachers College, Columbia U, USA) & Stella Morales-Rodríguez,Annie Han, Self-designated dual-language programs: Is there a gap between labeling and implementation? Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 29.2 (2005), 453–474.07–136Wang, Min (U Maryland, USA; minwag@umd.edu),Yoonjung Park & Kyoung Rang Lee, Korean–English biliteracy acquisition: Cross-language phonological and orthographic transfer. Journal of Educational Psychology (American Psychological Association) 98.1 (2006), 148–158.07–137Weisskirch, Robert S. (California State U, Monterey Bay, USA), Emotional aspects of language brokering among Mexican American adults. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (Multilingual Matters) 27.4 (2006), 332–343.07–138You, Byeong-keun (Arizona State U, USA), Children negotiating Korean American ethnic identity through their heritage language. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 29.3 (2005), 711–721.

The academic journal is obsolete. In a world where there are more titles than ever, this is a comment on their form – especially the print journal – rather than their quantity. Now that you can get everything online, it doesn’t really matter what journal a paper appears in; certainly it doesn’t matter what’s in the same issue. The experience of a journal is rapidly obsolescing, for both editors and readers. I’m obviously not the first person to notice this (see, for instance, "Scholarly Communication"; "Transforming Scholarly Communication"; Houghton; Policy Perspectives; Teute), but I do have a personal stake in the process. For if the journal is obsolete then it follows that the editor is obsolete, and I am the editor of the International Journal of Cultural Studies. I founded the IJCS and have been sole editor ever since. Next year will see the fiftieth issue. So far, I have been responsible for over 280 published articles – over 2.25 million words of other people’s scholarship … and counting. We won’t say anything about the words that did not get published, except that the IJCS rejection rate is currently 87 per cent. Perhaps the first point that needs to be made, then, is that obsolescence does not imply lack of success. By any standard the IJCS is a successful journal, and getting more so. It has recently been assessed as a top-rating A* journal in the Australian Research Council’s journal rankings for ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia), the newly activated research assessment exercise. (In case you’re wondering, M/C Journal is rated B.) The ARC says of the ranking exercise: ‘The lists are a result of consultations with the sector and rigorous review by leading researchers and the ARC.’ The ARC definition of an A* journal is given as: Typically an A* journal would be one of the best in its field or subfield in which to publish and would typically cover the entire field/ subfield. Virtually all papers they publish will be of very high quality. These are journals where most of the work is important (it will really shape the field) and where researchers boast about getting accepted.Acceptance rates would typically be low and the editorial board would be dominated by field leaders, including many from top institutions. (Appendix I, p. 21; and see p. 4.)Talking of boasting, I love to prate about the excellent people we’ve published in the IJCS. We have introduced new talent to the field, and we have published new work by some of its pioneers – including Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall. We’ve also published – among many others – Sara Ahmed, Mohammad Amouzadeh, Tony Bennett, Goran Bolin, Charlotte Brunsdon, William Boddy, Nico Carpentier, Stephen Coleman, Nick Couldry, Sean Cubitt, Michael Curtin, Daniel Dayan, Ben Dibley, Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, John Frow, Elfriede Fursich, Christine Geraghty, Mark Gibson, Paul Gilroy, Faye Ginsberg, Jonathan Gray, Lawrence Grossberg, Judith Halberstam, Hanno Hardt, Gay Hawkins, Joke Hermes, Su Holmes, Desmond Hui, Fred Inglis, Henry Jenkins, Deborah Jermyn, Ariel Heryanto, Elihu Katz, Senator Rod Kemp (Australian government minister), Youna Kim, Agnes Ku, Richard E. Lee, Jeff Lewis, David Lodge (the novelist), Knut Lundby, Eric Ma, Anna McCarthy, Divya McMillin, Antonio Menendez-Alarcon, Toby Miller, Joe Moran, Chris Norris, John Quiggin, Chris Rojek, Jane Roscoe, Jeffrey Sconce, Lynn Spigel, John Storey, Su Tong, the late Sako Takeshi, Sue Turnbull, Graeme Turner, William Uricchio, José van Dijck, Georgette Wang, Jing Wang, Elizabeth Wilson, Janice Winship, Handel Wright, Wu Jing, Wu Qidi (Chinese Vice-Minister of Education), Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh, Robert Young and Zhao Bin. As this partial list makes clear, as well as publishing the top ‘hegemons’ we also publish work pointing in new directions, including papers from neighbouring disciplines such as anthropology, area studies, economics, education, feminism, history, literary studies, philosophy, political science, and sociology. We have sought to represent neglected regions, especially Chinese cultural studies, which has grown strongly during the past decade. And for quite a few up-and-coming scholars we’ve been the proud host of their first international publication. The IJCS was first published in 1998, already well into the internet era, but it was print-only at that time. Since then, all content, from volume 1:1 onwards, has been digitised and is available online (although vol 1:2 is unaccountably missing). The publishers, Sage Publications Ltd, London, have steadily added online functionality, so that now libraries can get the journal in various packages, including offering this title among many others in online-only bundles, and individuals can purchase single articles online. Thus, in addition to institutional and individual subscriptions, which remain the core business of the journal, income is derived by the publisher from multi-site licensing, incremental consortial sales income, single- and back-issue sales (print), pay-per-view, and deep back file sales (electronic). So what’s obsolete about it? In that boasting paragraph of mine (above), about what wonderful authors we’ve published, lies one of the seeds of obsolescence. For now that it is available online, ‘users’ (no longer ‘readers’!) can search for what they want and ignore the journal as such altogether. This is presumably how most active researchers experience any journal – they are looking for articles (or less: quotations; data; references) relevant to a given topic, literature review, thesis etc. They encounter a journal online through its ‘content’ rather than its ‘form.’ The latter is irrelevant to them, and may as well not exist. The Cover Some losses are associated with this change. First is the loss of the front cover. Now you, dear reader, scrolling through this article online, might well complain, why all the fuss about covers? Internet-generation journals don’t have covers, so all of the work that goes into them to establish the brand, the identity and even the ‘affect’ of a journal is now, well, obsolete. So let me just remind you of what’s at stake. Editors, designers and publishers all take a good deal of trouble over covers, since they are the point of intersection of editorial, design and marketing priorities. Thus, the IJCS cover contains the only ‘content’ of the journal for which we pay a fee to designers and photographers (usually the publisher pays, but in one case I did). Like any other cover, ours has three main elements: title, colour and image. Thought goes into every detail. Title I won’t say anything about the journal’s title as such, except that it was the result of protracted discussions (I suggested Terra Nullius at one point, but Sage weren’t having any of that). The present concern is with how a title looks on a cover. Our title-typeface is Frutiger. Originally designed by Adrian Frutiger for Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, it is suitably international, being used for the corporate identity of the UK National Health Service, Telefónica O2, the Royal Navy, the London School of Economics , the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Conservative Party of Canada, Banco Bradesco of Brazil, the Finnish Defence Forces and on road signs in Switzerland (Wikipedia, "Frutiger"). Frutiger is legible, informal, and reads well in small copy. Sage’s designer and I corresponded on which of the words in our cumbersome name were most important, agreeing that ‘international’ combined with ‘cultural’ is the USP (Unique Selling Point) of the journal, so they should be picked out (in bold small-caps) from the rest of the title, which the designer presented in a variety of Frutiger fonts (regular, italic, and reversed – white on black), presumably to signify the dynamism and diversity of our content. The word ‘studies’ appears on a lozenge-shaped cartouche that is also used as a design element throughout the journal, for bullet points, titles and keywords. Colour We used to change this every two years, but since volume 7 it has stabilised with the distinctive Pantone 247, ‘new fuchsia.’ This colour arose from my own environment at QUT, where it was chosen (by me) for the new Creative Industries Faculty’s academic gowns and hoods, and thence as a detailing colour for the otherwise monochrome Creative Industries Precinct buildings. There’s a lot of it around my office, including on the wall and the furniture. New Fuchsia is – we are frequently told – a somewhat ‘girly’ colour, especially when contrasted with the Business Faculty’s blue or Law’s silver; its similarity to the Girlfriend/Dolly palette does introduce a mild ‘politics of prestige’ element, since it is determinedly pop culture, feminised, and non-canonical. Image Right at the start, the IJCS set out to signal its difference from other journals. At that time, all Sage journals had calligraphic colours – but I was insistent that we needed a photograph (I have ‘form’ in this respect: in 1985 I changed the cover of the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies from a line drawing (albeit by Sydney Nolan) to a photograph; and I co-designed the photo-cover of Cultural Studies in 1987). For IJCS I knew which photo I wanted, and Sage went along with the choice. I explained it in the launch issue’s editorial (Hartley, "Editorial"). That original picture, a goanna on a cattle grid in the outback, by Australian photographer Grant Hobson, lasted ten years. Since volume 11 – in time for our second decade – the goanna has been replaced with a picture by Italian-based photographer Patrick Nicholas, called ‘Reality’ (Hartley, "Cover Narrative"). We have also used two other photos as cover images, once each. They are: Daniel Meadows’s 1974 ‘Karen & Barbara’ (Hartley, "Who"); and a 1962 portrait of Richard Hoggart from the National Portrait Gallery in London (Owen & Hartley 2007). The choice of picture has involved intense – sometimes very tense – negotiations with Sage. Most recently, they were adamant the Daniel Meadows picture, which I wanted to use as the long-term replacement of the goanna, was too ‘English’ and they would not accept it. We exchanged rather sharp words before compromising. There’s no need to rehearse the dispute here; the point is that both sides, publisher and editor, felt that vital interests were at stake in the choice of a cover-image. Was it too obscure; too Australian; too English; too provocative (the current cover features, albeit in the deep background, a TV screen-shot of a topless Italian game-show contestant)? Running Order Beyond the cover, the next obsolete feature of a journal is the running order of articles. Obviously what goes in the journal is contingent upon what has been submitted and what is ready at a given time, so this is a creative role within a very limited context, which is what makes it pleasurable. Out of a limited number of available papers, a choice must be made about which one goes first, what order the other papers should follow, and which ones must be held over to the next issue. The first priority is to choose the lead article: like the ‘first face’ in a fashion show (if you don’t know what I mean by that, see FTV.com. It sets the look, the tone, and the standard for the issue. I always choose articles I like for this slot. It sends a message to the field – look at this! Next comes the running order. We have about six articles per issue. It is important to maintain the IJCS’s international mix, so I check for the country of origin, or failing that (since so many articles come from Anglosphere countries like the USA, UK and Australia), the location of the analysis. Attention also has to be paid to the gender balance among authors, and to the mix of senior and emergent scholars. Sometimes a weak article needs to be ‘hammocked’ between two good ones (these are relative terms – everything published in the IJCS is of a high scholarly standard). And we need to think about disciplinary mix, so as not to let the journal stray too far towards one particular methodological domain. Running order is thus a statement about the field – the disciplinary domain – rather than about an individual paper. It is a proposition about how different voices connect together in some sort of disciplinary syntax. One might even claim that the combination of cover and running order is a last vestige of collegiate collectivism in an era of competitive academic individualism. Now all that matters is the individual paper and author; the ‘currency’ is tenure, promotion and research metrics, not relations among peers. The running order is obsolete. Special Issues An extreme version of running order is the special issue. The IJCS has regularly published these; they are devoted to field-shaping initiatives, as follows: Title Editor(s) Issue Date Radiocracy: Radio, Development and Democracy Amanda Hopkinson, Jo Tacchi 3.2 2000 Television and Cultural Studies Graeme Turner 4.4 2001 Cultural Studies and Education Karl Maton, Handel Wright 5.4 2002 Re-Imagining Communities Sara Ahmed, Anne-Marie Fortier 6.3 2003 The New Economy, Creativity and Consumption John Hartley 7.1 2004 Creative Industries and Innovation in China Michael Keane, John Hartley 9.3 2006 The Uses of Richard Hoggart Sue Owen, John Hartley 10.1 2007 A Cultural History of Celebrity Liz Barry 11.3 2008 Caribbean Media Worlds Anna Pertierra, Heather Horst 12.2 2009 Co-Creative Labour Mark Deuze, John Banks 12.5 2009 It’s obvious that special issues have a place in disciplinary innovation – they can draw attention in a timely manner to new problems, neglected regions, or innovative approaches, and thus they advance the field. They are indispensible. But because of online publication, readers are not held to the ‘project’ of a special issue and can pick and choose whatever they want. And because of the peculiarities of research assessment exercises, editing special issues doesn’t count as research output. The incentive to do them is to that extent reduced, and some universities are quite heavy-handed about letting academics ‘waste’ time on activities that don’t produce ‘metrics.’ The special issue is therefore threatened with obsolescence too. Refereeing In many top-rating journals, the human side of refereeing is becoming obsolete. Increasingly this labour-intensive chore is automated and the labour is technologically outsourced from editors and publishers to authors and referees. You have to log on to some website and follow prompts in order to contribute both papers and the assessment of papers; interactions with editors are minimal. At the IJCS the process is still handled by humans – namely, journal administrator Tina Horton and me. We spend a lot of time checking how papers are faring, from trying to find the right referees through to getting the comments and then the author’s revisions completed in time for a paper to be scheduled into an issue. The volume of email correspondence is considerable. We get to know authors and referees. So we maintain a sense of an interactive and conversational community, albeit by correspondence rather than face to face. Doubtless, sooner or later, there will be a depersonalised Text Management System. But in the meantime we cling to the romantic notion that we are involved in refereeing for the sake of the field, for raising the standard of scholarship, for building a globally dispersed virtual college of cultural studies, and for giving everyone – from unfavoured countries and neglected regions to famous professors in old-money universities – the same chance to get their research published. In fact, these are largely delusional ideals, for as everyone knows, refereeing is part of the political economy of publicly-funded research. It’s about academic credentials, tenure and promotion for the individual, and about measurable research metrics for the academic organisation or funding agency (Hartley, "Death"). The IJCS has no choice but to participate: we do what is required to qualify as a ‘double-blind refereed journal’ because that is the only way to maintain repute, and thence the flow of submissions, not to mention subscriptions, without which there would be no journal. As with journals themselves, which proliferate even as the print form becomes obsolete, so refereeing is burgeoning as a practice. It’s almost an industry, even though the currency is not money but time: part gift-economy; part attention-economy; partly the payment of dues to the suzerain funding agencies. But refereeing is becoming obsolete in the sense of gathering an ‘imagined community’ of people one might expect to know personally around a particular enterprise. The process of dispersal and anonymisation of the field is exacerbated by blind refereeing, which we do because we must. This is suited to a scientific domain of objective knowledge, but everyone knows it’s not quite like that in the ‘new humanities’. The agency and identity of the researcher is often a salient fact in the research. The embedded positionality of the author, their reflexiveness about their own context and room-for-manoeuvre, and the radical contextuality of knowledge itself – these are all more or less axiomatic in cultural studies, but they’re not easily served by ‘double-blind’ refereeing. When refereeing is depersonalised to the extent that is now rife (especially in journals owned by international commercial publishers), it is hard to maintain a sense of contextualised productivity in the knowledge domain, much less a ‘common cause’ to which both author and referee wish to contribute. Even though refereeing can still be seen as altruistic, it is in the service of something much more general (‘scholarship’) and much more particular (‘my career’) than the kind of reviewing that wants to share and improve a particular intellectual enterprise. It is this mid-range altruism – something that might once have been identified as a politics of knowledge – that’s becoming obsolete, along with the printed journals that were the banner and rallying point for the cause. If I were to start a new journal (such as cultural-science.org), I would prefer ‘open refereeing’: uploading papers on an open site, subjecting them to peer-review and criticism, and archiving revised versions once they have received enough votes and comments. In other words I’d like to see refereeing shifted from the ‘supply’ or production side of a journal to the ‘demand’ or readership side. But of course, ‘demand’ for ‘blind’ refereeing doesn’t come from readers; it comes from the funding agencies. The Reading Experience Finally, the experience of reading a journal is obsolete. Two aspects of this seem worthy of note. First, reading is ‘out of time’ – it no longer needs to conform to the rhythms of scholarly publication, which are in any case speeding up. Scholarship is no longer seasonal, as it has been since the Middle Ages (with university terms organised around agricultural and ecclesiastical rhythms). Once you have a paper’s DOI number, you can read it any time, 24/7. It is no longer necessary even to wait for publication. With some journals in our field (e.g. Journalism Studies), assuming your Library subscribes, you can access papers as soon as they’re uploaded on the journal’s website, before the published edition is printed. Soon this will be the norm, just as it is for the top science journals, where timely publication, and thereby the ability to claim first discovery, is the basis of intellectual property rights. The IJCS doesn’t (yet) offer this service, but its frequency is speeding up. It was launched in 1998 with three issues a year. It went quarterly in 2001 and remained a quarterly for eight years. It has recently increased to six issues a year. That too causes changes in the reading experience. The excited ripping open of the package is less of a thrill the more often it arrives. Indeed, how many subscribers will admit that sometimes they don’t even open the envelope? Second, reading is ‘out of place’ – you never have to see the journal in which a paper appears, so you can avoid contact with anything that you haven’t already decided to read. This is more significant than might first appear, because it is affecting journalism in general, not just academic journals. As we move from the broadcast to the broadband era, communicative usage is shifting too, from ‘mass’ communication to customisation. This is a mixed blessing. One of the pleasures of old-style newspapers and the TV news was that you’d come across stories you did not expect to find. Indeed, an important attribute of the industrial form of journalism is its success in getting whole populations to read or watch stories about things they aren’t interested in, or things like wars and crises that they’d rather not know about at all. That historic textual achievement is in jeopardy in the broadband era, because ‘the public’ no longer needs to gather around any particular masthead or bulletin to get their news. With Web 2.0 affordances, you can exercise much more choice over what you attend to. This is great from the point of view of maximising individual choice, but sub-optimal in relation to what I’ve called ‘population-gathering’, especially the gathering of communities of interest around ‘tales of the unexpected’ – novelty or anomalies. Obsolete: Collegiality, Trust and Innovation? The individuation of reading choices may stimulate prejudice, because prejudice (literally, ‘pre-judging’) is built in when you decide only to access news feeds about familiar topics, stories or people in which you’re already interested. That sort of thing may encourage narrow-mindedness. It is certainly an impediment to chance discovery, unplanned juxtaposition, unstructured curiosity and thence, perhaps, to innovation itself. This is a worry for citizenship in general, but it is also an issue for academic ‘knowledge professionals,’ in our ever-narrower disciplinary silos. An in-close specialist focus on one’s own area of expertise need no longer be troubled by the concerns of the person in the next office, never mind the next department. Now, we don’t even have to meet on the page. One of the advantages of whole journals, then, is that each issue encourages ‘macro’ as well as ‘micro’ perspectives, and opens reading up to surprises. This willingness to ‘take things on trust’ describes a ‘we’ community – a community of trust. Trust too is obsolete in these days of performance evaluation. We’re assessed by an anonymous system that’s managed by people we’ll never meet. If the ‘population-gathering’ aspects of print journals are indeed obsolete, this may reduce collegiate trust and fellow-feeling, increase individualist competitiveness, and inhibit innovation. In the face of that prospect, I’m going to keep on thinking about covers, running orders, referees and reading until the role of editor is obsolete too. ReferencesHartley, John. "'Cover Narrative': From Nightmare to Reality." International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.2 (2005): 131-137. ———. "Death of the Book?" Symposium of the National Scholarly Communication Forum & Australian Academy of the Humanities, Sydney Maritime Museum, 2005. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.humanities.org.au/Resources/Downloads/NSCF/RoundTables1-17/PDF/Hartley.pdf›. ———. "Editorial: With Goanna." International Journal of Cultural Studies 1.1 (1998): 5-10. ———. "'Who Are You Going to Believe – Me or Your Own Eyes?' New Decade; New Directions." International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.1 (2008): 5-14. Houghton, John. "Economics of Scholarly Communication: A Discussion Paper." Center for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University, 2000. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.caul.edu.au/cisc/EconomicsScholarlyCommunication.pdf›. Owen, Sue, and John Hartley, eds. The Uses of Richard Hoggart. International Journal of Cultural Studies (special issue), 10.1 (2007). Policy Perspectives: To Publish and Perish. (Special issue cosponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, Association of American Universities and the Pew Higher Education Roundtable) 7.4 (1998). 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.arl.org/scomm/pew/pewrept.html›. "Scholarly Communication: Crisis and Revolution." University of California Berkeley Library. N.d. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/Collections/crisis.html›. Teute, F. J. "To Publish or Perish: Who Are the Dinosaurs in Scholarly Publishing?" Journal of Scholarly Publishing 32.2 (2001). 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.utpjournals.com/product/jsp/322/perish5.html›."Transforming Scholarly Communication." University of Houston Library. 2005. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://info.lib.uh.edu/scomm/transforming.htm›.

Bones are one of the oldest materials used to create musical instruments. Currently, the world’s oldest known instruments are flutes made out of bones (Turk, Turk, and Otte 11). In fact, bones have been used to create or enhance musical instruments in a variety of settings throughout history and in modern day instrument making. Bone bull roarers, jaw bone percussion, clappers, trumpets, drum shells, lyres, or construction parts, such as frets, plectrums, pipes and pipe fittings, embouchure adjustments, or percussive strikes are just a few of the more common uses of bones in musical instrument construction. One man even made a guitar out of the skeleton of his dead uncle to memorialise the person who influenced his musical tastes and career (Bienstock). Bones can therefore be taken as a somewhat common material for making musical instruments. All of these instruments share a common trait, and not just the obvious one that they are all made out of or incorporate bones. None of these instruments are intended to represent something monstrous. Instead, they represent the ephemeral nature of humanity (Cupchik 33), a celebration of lineage or religious beliefs (Davis), or simply are the materials available or suitable to create a sound-making device (Regan). It is not possible to know the full intentions of a maker, in many cases, but a link to monstrosity and a representation of the ‘horrific’ or ‘freakish’ seems missing for the most. There are instruments, however, that do house this sentiment and some that utilise bones in the construction with the purpose of making this connection between the remains and something beast-like. In this article, I argue that the Bone Guitar Thing (BGT) built and played by raxil4 is one of those instruments. Introducing the 'Thing' Raxil4 is the stage name of sonic artist Andrew Page. He has been playing his Bone Guitar Thing for almost twenty years in a variety of settings (Page, email interview, 25 June 2021). The instrument has undergone slight changes during that time, but primarily it has retained its specific visual, timbral, and underlying associative features. The BGT is complex, more so than it may seem at first. By investigating the materials used, the performance techniques employed, and raxil4’s intentions as a musician, instrument maker, and community member within his circles of activity, the monstrous nature of the BGT comes to light. The resultant series of entanglements exhibits and supports a definition of what is a 'monster' that, like several definitions in monster theory discourse (Levina and Bui 6; Cohen 7; Mittman 51), includes challenging that which may be seen as ‘normal’ and thereby may nurture levels of unease or fear. However, in the case of the BGT, that which is monstrous is simultaneously being taken as something positive alongside its beast-like characteristics, and rather than evolving into something that needs to be repressed or eliminated, the ’monster’ here becomes a hero or champion, colleague, or even a friend. The Bone Guitar Thing is not really a guitar. It is a zither with a piece of driftwood for a base, (currently) five strings, and an electric pick-up (see Fig. 1). The bridge for the instrument is two bones, and the pitch and timbre of the strings is sometimes changed with bones used for Cage-like preparation (Cage 7-8; Bunger). Bones are also used to play the instrument, sometimes like a plectrum, others like a hammered dulcimer, or occasionally, simply pounding the string or the soundboard with great force to make a combination of percussive and string sounds. Glissandos are created by using the plectrum bones as a slide, and Page also uses jaw bones to introduce ratchet sounds, string scraping, and precise pitch bending (with the sharper edged part of the bones) (raxil4, “Livestream”). The instrument is electric, so the bones are enhanced with guitar pedals (typically reverb, distortion, and octave-splitter; Page, email interview, 25 June 2021), but the tonal qualities retain a semblance of the bone usage. Fig. 1: raxil4's Bone Guitar Thing. Photograph: Andrew Page. Page often uses the BGT as part of his sonic arsenal to perform dark ambient music, noisescapes, improv music, or live film soundtracks both in live concerts and recording situations. He plays solo as much as with ensembles, and more often improvises his music or parts, but occasionally works with predetermined organisation or scores of some description (although he admits to typically abandoning predetermined passages or scores during live performances; Page, email interview, 14 July 2021). Currently in London, raxil4 presents concerts in a variety of settings, typically well-suited for his brand of sonic art, such as Ryan Jordan’s long-running concert series Noise=Noise (raxil4 feat. King Sara), experimental music shows at the Barbican (raxil4 + King Sara + P23), and dark ambient showcases promoted and arranged by one of his record labels, Sombre Soniks (Wright). Sounds beyond Words: Monstrous Music One series of performances in which raxil4 used the BGT took the form of an immersive theatre show produced by Dread Falls Theatre called Father Dagon, based on the works of horror author H. P. Lovecraft. The performance incorporated a breaking of the ’fourth wall’ in which the audience wanders freely through the performance space, with actor- and sometimes audience-interactive musical performances of partially improvised, partially composed passages by musicians located throughout the set. Director and writer Victoria Snaith considered the use of live, semi-mobile, experimental music dispersed through the audience (mixed with an overall backing soundtrack) as heightening the intensity of the experience by introducing unfamiliar aspects to the setting. She discusses having made this decision based on Lovecraft’s own approach to story-telling that highlights a sense of unfamiliarity and therefore sense of “fear of the unknown”. The usefulness of creating unfamiliarity in this context can serve to support the parts of the narrative that contains supernatural and monstrous aspects. Given that the elements of the supernatural and horrible monsters in Lovecraftian tales are primarily indescribable (both because Lovecraft would recount beasts and fantastic magical happenings in his works as being such, and because in a practical theatrical situation, these things would be impossible to describe, especially without text or specific props or costumes, which the show purposefully uses sparingly, also as a conscious choice to embrace the unknown). Sounds created on instruments that are unique, or generated through unusual performance techniques would lend themselves to being more difficult to describe, and therefore fitting to support a desire to present something regarded as also difficult to describe, that being supernatural happenings or horrific creatures. (Connor 77) Page’s use of the BGT in these performances added directly to this notion both sonically and visually. The homemade nature of his instrument increased the potential that audience members would be less familiar with the source of his sounds, even if they were watching him perform, and the resultant soundscape he provided introduced harsh timbres, undulating pads, and aggressive punctuation of movement. Page sees the BGT as an instrument “reclaimed from the watery depths” (matching the theme of the show’s narrative), therefore as one fitting into the Lovecraft show “quite nicely” (Page, email interview, 25 June 2021). He likens the sounds created by the BGT as presenting “otherworldly melodies” akin to those played by Erich Zann (a character in another Lovecraft story who conjures a gateway to an alternate dimension full of indescribable creatures and nightmares via performing unusual music on his viola de gamba), which Page also sees as fitting (ibid.). His instrument in this setting as a producer and provider of unfamiliarity is supportive of constructing and maintaining a definition of “monstrous” or “terrifying” (Levina and Bui 6). Fig. 2: raxil4 performing in Dread Falls Theatre's Father Dagon, London 2012. Photograph: Pierre Ketteridge. Finding Community in the 'Freakish' Raxil4 also notes that the Bone Guitar Thing is appropriate for creative input within improv music circles (Page, email interview, 25 June 2021). Generally speaking, contemporary improv music (meaning the broad genre) is improvised performance focussing on sonic exploration over melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic content (even though all will be present in most cases; Toop 132-137). In my experience working with improv musicians since 1981, I find that these performers typically attempt to create sounds that are unusual or unexpected. Players often embrace extended techniques, repurposing non-musical items to be sound-making devices, and employ self-built instruments. Improv musicians seek to break free from the constraints of what may be seen as Western standard musical practices (ibid.), but they simultaneously strive to uphold some parallel aspects of artisanship and virtuosity, perhaps as a means to validate their departure from Classical/mainstream music norms. The instruments and approaches can be seen as factors that separate the experimental artists from the conservatory-based performers, yet still affords them the clout of being hard-working, innovative, expressive, and professional. As the name implies, improv music emphasises improvisation. André Hodier (23-36) in his classic book The Worlds of Jazz likens improvising jazz musicians to an alien race who battle each other on a daily basis (via jazz battles) in order to see who resides at the top of the improvisation chain. Improv musicians (some of whom come from a jazz background) tend to engage in this sort of hierarchical status ranking system using a much more ’polite’ and co-supportive mentality (at least in the scenes in which I have been privileged to participate). Improv musicians can occasionally embrace a friendly attitude that one should surpass the experimental nature of other performers, and may do so by presenting a new sound, technique, or instrument. The BGT can serve this function. It can stand out among other improv musicians’ gear, even if a majority of the instruments are self-built, through its use of bones and its intentional evocation of something horrific. Improvised music is sometimes looked down upon by musical communities who value conservatory training, popular music, or more traditional Western classical approaches to music. Referring to avant-garde jazz in the 60s and 70s, Valerie Wilmer (6) recounts that critics and Classical music enthusiasts perceived experimental and improv music as “‘freakish’ and only worthy of passing interest”. The dynamic is different today, but the overall attitude remains, at least in part. The improv music scene is creatively valid, but in comparison to conservative or more mainstream music, incorporates more experimental practices, therefore sometimes musical form, interactions, and preparation is less obvious to audience members outside the experimental music circles. The Bone Guitar Thing also plays into this construction. It is artistically valid, yet perhaps simultaneously challenging to the less-experienced listener. The BGT in this setting is multifunctional. Page (email interview, 25 June 2021) sees the BGT as a means to cut through or rise above other improv musicians, partly by being more recognisable as a “freakish” instrument at performances where the music is already considered freakish by some outsiders. Additionally, the fact that Page has taken the time to make this instrument, and uses notably practiced techniques to create the sounds he introduces, may position him as an innovative professional, rather than a non-trained imposter. The BGT can (at least for raxil4, but for others as well) become a monster among monsters that allows Page to validate his brand of creativity (Ibid). Musical ’freakishness’ appears in other settings as well. An example of this is a performance in which raxil4 took part where an ensemble provided experimental music for a live tattooing event (raxil4, “Listening”). Here, the congruency with being monstrous or freakish is perhaps more overt. Similar to the soundscape being performed, Fenske (6) points out that tattoos may still be seen as unfit or unexpected for certain classes, genders, or education levels, and may even still be associated with illustrated circus performers of the past. Furthermore, Kinzey (32) suggests that avant-garde and counter-culture communities (such as ones where tattooing and live music converge in a single event) often value uniqueness that serves to “erase boundaries between everyday life and art”. The combined performativity of live music and tattoo inking (both the artistic activity and the art itself) associates raxil4 and the BGT with this non-mainstream circle (to some degree), potentially conjuring an identity of something freakish or monstrous to people with different values. Engaging with Expressive Objects The conception and evolution of the Bone Guitar Thing has its roots in personal experience, art experimentation, and material culture related to Page’s life and the musical communities in which he played and plays. In the past, Page endeavored to make small sculptures to be given as Christmas and birthday gifts from materials he found on the shore of the River Thames, many including bones. Page then began to create new musical instruments with what he had available. Page’s brother is a doctor specialising in gunshot wounds and knife trauma, and his apartment was filled with remnants of his brother’s occupation, including a number of crutches. From these, Page crafted his first instruments in this period: crutch harps that utilised the leftover medical devices to build stringed sound generators. He claims the instruments at first were not overly successful, so he began to experiment with his bone sculptures to create more serviceable instruments. An early attempt was a percussion instrument made from various found bones, which Page deemed the “Xylobone” (see Fig. 4). This instrument and advanced crutch harps (6-string tenor (see Fig. 3.) and 2-string bass) became his first arsenal of sound makers, but Page felt the instruments ultimately failed to meet expectations and opted to rethink his approaches and designs. Fig. 3: One of Page's 6-stringed crutch harps. Photograph: Andrew Page. Fig. 4: The Xylobone - raxil4's bone xylophone percussion instrument. Photograph: Andrew Page. The BGT was intended to be more “playable”, “expressive”, and audible to battle louder co-performers. As mentioned, the driftwood base and bones for the instrument originated from the River Thames. The electronics come from a destroyed guitar that was the result of performing in a previous project in which Page was the singer, where the guitarist “had a habit of smashing his guitars on stage, in a sort of expensive tribute to [grunge guitarist] Kurt Cobain" (Page, email interview, 25 June 2021). The BGT started off as a 6-string zither that used guitar-gauge steel strings, but according to Page, given the harsh performance technique of beating or scraping the strings with bones, he was encouraged to switch to using wound, bass-gauge strings, affording him a lower pitch and greater resistance to energetic performance practices. One tuning peg, however, snapped off quite early in its life (as it was in a thinner, more weathered part of the driftwood), leaving the instrument one string shorter. Page says he likes to think that the instrument decided itself that it would be a “5-stringed beast” (ibid.). Conclusion The Bone Guitar Thing is, in fact, beast-like, at least in the settings, sonic attributes, and mindsets of the player and the communities in which the instrument is played, but it may not be the case that this beast-like nature is equal to being monstrous. Cohen (3-25) in his discussion of seven potential monster theories outlines several different notions of what can be considered “monstrous” and relates the monster in each theoretical situation to those fearing the monstrous construct. Most closely related to the situation in which the BGT is observed is a parallel theory based on the concept of “Us versus Them”, meaning “Us” as those who are dealing with the monster in question, and “Them” as being those on the side of the monster or the monster itself (Cohen 19-20). However, with the BGT, the monster is not unanimous with “them”, but rather with “us”. In all the situations outlined here, the instrument takes on the role of a beast, but not a negative role for Page (email interview, 14 July 2021) or fans of raxil4 (Wright). Instead, the beast is more like part of the team of noise makers actively engaged in the community’s activities of creation, entertainment, identity, and validation of values upheld thereof. Each of the performance settings can be argued to exhibit a sense of welcoming outsiders or praising diversity, rather than ostracising it. The Lovecraft performance and story were constructed on the premise of questioning what is a monster and who determines that definition. The Bone Guitar Thing supports and interacts precisely within this parameter to enhance the artistic commentary presented. Within the improv music setting, the instrument assists Page to achieve uniqueness among that which is already unique and highlights the values of community including a show of innovation, exploration, and personal performance technique development. For the live tattooing, the instrument stands out as a unifying sonic flag, connecting other (perhaps less-monstrous) artists into a stronger group of alternative creatives. Effectively, the BGT is a 'freak among freaks', serving to simultaneously fit in and rise above, all while maintaining a sense of “us” within respective circles. The beast-like nature is not entirely an outward force. Page (email interviews, 25 June 2021 and 14 July 2021) is aware that he has received no formal education in music. He admits he is less familiar with music theory, and more familiar with the science and technology behind the music. Page considers himself to be experimental in his approach to sound creation, which he sees as being more unique due to ignoring the “rulebooks” (ibid.). As a result, he feels (at least a slight) pressure of feeling “unprofessional” or “correct” in the eyes of Western conservatory-trained musicians and composers or those with a similar mentality (Page, email interview, 25 June 2021). The BGT was also, to a degree, built to battle being told what was “right”. For Page, his instrument is akin to a beast that helped him break free of the constraints of Western tonal and virtuosic constraints. “I made my own [instrument] so that nobody could tell me I was playing it the wrong way” (ibid.). His “beast” helped him break down barriers and asserted himself as an innovative musician and creative professional. So, then, the Bone Guitar Thing is a monster; sonically, visually, and physically. It represents a monster, it is called “the beast”, and it takes on the role of a terrifying creature raging through (sometimes, extremely quietly – raxil4; raxil 4 feat. King Sara; raxil4 + King Sara + P23) soundscapes, settings, and performances, rallying the like-minded and routing the unsuspecting or “others”. That is an overdramatic take on the situation, perhaps, but the instrument does uphold a series of values and creative aesthetics that fosters positive relationships between the artist, the community, and the sonic and physical qualities of the zither. Rather than being a device that places a horrific barrier to be overcome in an “us versus them” scenario, the monster takes on an alternate role and becomes a source of empowerment for “outsiders” or marginalised groups or people (Mittman 51). Thus the Bone Guitar Thing allows Page to demolish barriers and amalgamate fellow community members into a larger version of “us” to create a space in which the beast is no longer a monster. References Bienstock, Richard. “Man Builds Guitar Out of His Dead Uncle’s Skeleton.” Guitar World 11 Feb. 2021. Web. 13 June 2021 <https://www.guitarworld.com/news/man-builds-guitar-out-of-his-dead-uncles-skeleton-uses-it-to-play-black-metal>. Bunger, Richard. The Well-Prepared Piano. Colorado Springs: Colorado College Music P, 1973. Cage, John. Empty Words: Writings ’73-’78. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University P, 1981. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. 3–25. Connor, Will. “Performing the Sounds of Darkness: An Exploratory Discussion of Musical Instruments and the Gothic Aesthetic.” The Dark Arts Journal: Reimaging the Gothic 2.I2 (Autumn 2016). 26 June 2021 <https://thedarkartsjournal.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/the-dark-arts-journal-2-21.pdf>. Cupchik, Jeffrey. “Buddhism as Performing Art: Visualizing Music in the Tibetan Sacred Ritual Music Liturgies.” Yale Journal of Music & Religion 1.1 (2015): 31–62. Davis, Josh. “Some Bronze Age Britons Turned the Bones of Dead Relatives into Musical Instruments.” Natural History Museum. 1 Sep. 2020. 23 June 2021 <https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2020/september/bronze-age-britons-turned-the-bones-of-dead-relatives-into-musical-instruments.html>. Fenske, Mindy. Tattoos in American Visual Culture. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Hodier, André. The Worlds of Jazz. New York: Grove P, 1972. Kinzey, Jake. The Sacred and the Profane: An Investigation of Hipsters. Winchester, U.K.: Zero Books, 2012. Levina, Marina, and Diem-My T. Bui. “Introduction: Toward a Comprehensive Monster Theory in the 21st Century.” Monster Culture in the 21st Century: A Reader. Eds. Marina Levina and Diem-My T. Bui. New Delhi: Bloomsbury. 1–14. Mittman, Asa Simon. “Introduction: The Impact of Monsters and Monster Studies.” The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. Eds. Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. 44–60. Raxil4. Listening Circuits: 19/06/21 with Live Tattooing from Catmouse. 21 June 2021. 23 June 2021 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZgUC5TTOxk&list=LL&index=3>. ———. raxil4 – Livestream for Iklecktik: 21/06/20. 22 June 2020. 23 June 2021 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zW-Mw2jRDQ&list=LL&index=6>. Raxil4 feat: King Sara. raxil4 feat: King Sara – Sawbones 13 – Live @ Noise=Noise (14/01/13). 26 Jan. 2013. 23 June 2021 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxFMA77yQ_A&list=LL&index=5>. raxil4 + King Sara + P23. raxil4 + King Sara + P23 – Barbican: 15/08/13. 11 Sep. 2018. 23 June 2021 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N619ooZxx-0&list=LL&index=4>. Page, Andrew. Email interview. 25 June 2021. ———. Email interview. 14 July 2021. Regan, Marty. Video interview. 13 July 2021. Snaith, Victoria. Personal interview. 17 April 2016. Toop, David. Ocean of Sound. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2001. Turk, Matija, Ivan Turk, and Marcel Otte. “The Neanderthal Musical Instrument from Divje Babe I Cave (Slovenia): A Critical Review of the Discussion.” Applied Sciences 10-1226.2 (2020): 1–11. Wilmer, Valerie. As Serious as Your Life. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2018. Wright, Kevin. Email interview. 29 June 2021.

The need to sustain and/or create a collective identity is regularly seen as one of the cultural priorities of diasporic peoples and this, in turn, depends upon the existence of a uniquely diasporic form of communication and connection with the country of origin. Today, digital media technologies provide easy information recording and retrieval, and mobile IT networks allow global accessibility and participation in the redefinition of identities. Vis-à-vis our understanding of the proximity and connectivity associated with globalisation, the role of ICTs cannot be underestimated and is clearly more than a simple instrument for the expression of a pre-existing diasporic identity. Indeed, the concept of “e-diaspora” is gaining popularity. Consequently, research into the role of ICTs in the lives of diasporic peoples contributes to a definition of the concept of diaspora, understood here as the result of the dispersal of all members of a nation in several countries. In this context, I will demonstrate how members of the Bulgarian diaspora negotiate not only their identities but also their identifications through one of the most popular community websites, Facebook. My methodology consists of the active observation of Bulgarian users belonging to the diaspora, the participation in groups and forums on Facebook, and the analysis of discourses produced online. This research was conducted for the first time between 1 August 2008 and 31 May 2009 through the largest 20 (of 195) Bulgarian groups on the French version of Facebook and 40 (of over 500) on the English one. It is important to note that the public considered to be predominantly involved in Facebook is a young audience in the age group of 18-35 years. Therefore, this article is focused on two generations of Bulgarian immigrants: mostly recent young and second-generation migrants. The observed users are therefore members of the Bulgarian diaspora who have little or no experience of communism, who don’t feel the weight of the past, and who have grown up as free and often cosmopolitan citizens. Communist hegemony in Bulgaria began on 9 September 1944, when the army and the communist militiamen deposed the country’s government and handed power over to an anti-fascist coalition. During the following decades, Bulgaria became the perfect Soviet satellite and the imposed Stalinist model led to sharp curtailing of the economic and social contacts with the free world beyond the Iron Curtain. In 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the communist era and the political and economic structures that supported it. Identity, Internet, and Diaspora Through the work of Mead, Todorov, and boyd it is possible to conceptualise the subject in terms of both of internal and external social identity (Mead, Todorov, boyd). In this article, I will focus, in particular, on social and national identities as expressions of the process of sharing stories, experiences, and understanding between individuals. In this respect, the phenomenon of Facebook is especially well placed to mediate between identifications which, according to Freud, facilitate the plural subjectivities and the establishment of an emotional network of mutual bonds between the individual and the group (Freud). This research also draws on Goffman who, from a sociological point of view, demystifies the representation of the Self by developing a dramaturgical theory (Goffman), whereby identity is constructed through the "roles" that people play on the social scene. Social life is a vast stage where the actors are required to adhere to certain socially acceptable rituals and guidelines. It means that we can consider the presentation of Self, or Others, as a facade or a construction of socially accepted features. Among all the ICTs, the Internet is, by far, the medium most likely to facilitate free expression of identity through a multitude of possible actions and community interactions. Personal and national memories circulate in the transnational space of the Internet and are reshaped when framed from specific circumstances such as those raised by the migration process. In an age of globalisation marked by the proliferation of population movements, instant communication, and cultural exchanges across geographic boundaries, the phenomenon of the diaspora has caught the attention of a growing number of scholars. I shall be working with Robin Cohen’s definition of diaspora which highlights the following common features: (1) dispersal from an original homeland; (2) the expansion from a homeland in search of work; (3) a collective memory and myth about the homeland; (4) an idealisation of the supposed ancestral homeland; (5) a return movement; (6) a strong ethnic group consciousness sustained over a long time; (7) a troubled relationship with host societies; (8) a sense of solidarity with co-ethnic members in other countries; and (9) the possibility of a distinctive creative, enriching life in tolerant host countries (Cohen). Following on this earlier work on the ways in which diasporas give rise to new forms of subjectivity, the concept of “e-diaspora” is now rapidly gaining in popularity. The complex association between diasporic groups and ICTs has led to a concept of e-diasporas that actively utilise ICTs to achieve community-specific goals, and that have become critical for the formation and sustenance of an exilic community for migrant groups around the globe (Srinivasan and Pyati). Diaspora and the Digital Age Anderson points out two key features of the Internet: first, it is a heterogeneous electronic medium, with hardly perceptible contours, and is in a state of constant development; second, it is a repository of “imagined communities” without geographical or legal legitimacy, whose members will probably never meet (Anderson). Unlike “real” communities, where people have physical interactions, in the imagined communities, individuals do not have face-to-face communication and daily contact, but they nonetheless feel a strong emotional attachment to the nation. The Internet not only opens new opportunities to gain greater visibility and strengthen the sense of belonging to community, but it also contributes to the emergence of a transnational public sphere where the communities scattered in various locations freely exchange their views and ideas without fear of restrictions or censorship from traditional media (Appadurai, Bernal). As a result, the Web becomes a virtual diasporic space which opens up, to those who have left their country, a new means of confrontation and social participation. Within this new diasporic space, migrants are bound in their disparate geographical locations by a common vision or myth about the homeland (Karim). Thanks to the Internet, the computer has become a primary technological intermediary between virtual networks, bringing its members closer in a “global village” where everyone is immediately connected to others. Thus, today’s diasporas are not the diaspora of previous generations in that the migration is experienced and negotiated very differently: people in one country are now able to continue to participate actively in another country. In this context, the arrival of community sites has increased the capacity of users to create a network on the Internet, to rediscover lost links, and strengthen new ones. Unlike offline communities, which may weaken once their members have left the physical space, online communities that are no longer limited by the requirement of physical presence in the common space have the capacity to endure. Identity Strategies of New Generations of Bulgarian Migrants It is very difficult to quantify migration to or from Bulgaria. Existing data is not only partial and limited but, in some cases, give an inaccurate view of migration from Bulgaria (Soultanova). Informal data confirm that one million Bulgarians, around 15 per cent of Bulgaria’s entire population (7,620,238 inhabitants in 2007), are now scattered around the world (National Statistical Institute of Bulgaria). The Bulgarian migrant is caught in a system of redefinition of identity through the duration of his or her relocation. Emigrating from a country like Bulgaria implies a high number of contingencies. Bulgarians’ self-identification is relative to the inferiority complex of a poor country which has a great deal to do to catch up with its neighbours. Before the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union, the country was often associated with what have been called “Third World countries” and seen as a source of crime and social problems. Members of the Bulgarian diaspora faced daily prejudice due to the bad reputation of their country of origin, though the extent of the hostility depended upon the “host” nation (Marcheva). Geographically, Bulgaria is one of the most eastern countries in Europe, the last to enter the European Union, and its image abroad has not facilitated the integration of the Bulgarian diaspora. The differences between Bulgarian migrants and the “host society” perpetuate a sentiment of marginality that is now countered with an online appeal for national identity markers and shared experiences. Facebook: The Ultimate Social Network The Growing Popularity of Facebook With more than 500 million active members, Facebook is the most visited website in the world. In June 2007, Facebook experienced a record annual increase of 270 per cent of connections in one year (source: comScore World Metrix). More than 70 translations of the site are available to date, including the Bulgarian version. What makes it unique is that Facebook positively encourages identity games. Moreover, Facebook provides the symbolic building blocks with which to build a collective identity through shared forms of discourse and ways of thinking. People are desperate to make a good impression on the Internet: that is why they spend so much time managing their online identity. One of the most important aspects of Facebook is that it enables users to control and manage their image, leaving the choice of how their profile appears on the pages of others a matter of personal preference at any given time. Despite some limitations, we will see that Facebook offers the Bulgarian community abroad the possibility of an intense and ongoing interaction with fellow nationals, including the opportunity to assert and develop a complex new national/transnational identity. Facebook Experiences of the Bulgarian Diaspora Created in the United States in 2004 and extended to use in Europe two or three years later, Facebook was quickly adopted by members of the Bulgarian diaspora. Here, it is very important to note that, although the Internet per se has enabled Bulgarians across the globe to introduce Cyrillic script into the public arena, it is definitely Facebook that has made digital Cyrillic visible. Early in computer history, keyboards with the Cyrillic alphabet simply did not exist. Thus, Bulgarians were forced to translate their language into Latin script. Today, almost all members of the Bulgarian population who own a computer use a keyboard that combines the two alphabets, Latin and Cyrillic, and this allows alternation between the two. This is not the case for the majority of Bulgarians living abroad who are forced to use a keyboard specific to their country of residence. Thus, Bulgarians online have adopted a hybrid code to speak and communicate. Since foreign keyboards are not equipped with the same consonants and vowels that exist in the Bulgarian language, they use the Latin letters that best suit the Bulgarian phonetic. Several possible interpretations of these “encoded” texts exist which become another way for the Bulgarian migrants to distinguish and assert themselves. One of these encoded scripts is supplemented by figures. For example, the number “6” written in Bulgarian “шест” is applied to represent the Bulgarian letter “ш.” Bulgarian immigrants therefore employ very specific codes of communication that enhance the feeling of belonging to a community that shares the same language, which is often incomprehensible to others. As the ultimate social networking website, Facebook brings together Bulgarians from all over the world and offers them a space to preserve online memorials and digital archives. As a result, the Bulgarian diaspora privileges this website in order to manage the strong links between its members. Indeed, within months of coming into online existence, Facebook established itself as a powerful social phenomenon for the Bulgarian diaspora and, very soon, a virtual map of the Bulgarian diaspora was formed. It should be noted, however, that this mapping was focused on the new generation of Bulgarian migrants more familiar with the Internet and most likely to travel. By identifying the presence of online groups by country or city, I was able to locate the most active Bulgarian communities: “Bulgarians in UK” (524 members), “Bulgarians in Chicago” (436 members), “Bulgarians studying in the UK” (346 members), “Bulgarians in America” (333 members), “Bulgarians in the USA” (314 members), “Bulgarians in Montreal” (249 members), “Bulgarians in Munich” (241 members), and so on. These figures are based on the “Groups” Application of Facebook as updated in February 2010. Through those groups, a symbolic diasporic geography is imagined and communicated: the digital “border crossing,” as well as the real one, becomes a major identity resource. Thus, Bulgarian users of Facebook are connecting from the four corners of the globe in order to rebuild family links and to participate virtually in the marriages, births, and lives of their families. It sometimes seems that the whole country has an appointment on Facebook, and that all the photos and stories of Bulgarians are more or less accessible to the community in general. Among its virtual initiatives, Facebook has made available to its users an effective mobilising tool, the Causes, which is used as a virtual noticeboard for activities and ideas circulating in “real life.” The members of the Bulgarian diaspora choose to adhere to different “causes” that may be local, national, or global, and that are complementary to the civic and socially responsible side of the identity they have chosen to construct online. Acting as a virtual realm in which distinct and overlapping trajectories coexist, Facebook thus enables users to articulate different stories and meanings and to foster a democratic imaginary about both the past and the future. Facebook encourages diasporas to produce new initiatives to revive or create collective memories and common values. Through photos and videos, scenes of everyday life are celebrated and manipulated as tools to reconstruct, reconcile, and display a part of the history and the identity of the migrant. By combating the feelings of disorientation, the consciousness of sharing the same national background and culture facilitates dialogue and neutralises the anxiety and loneliness of Bulgarian migrants. When cultural differences become more acute, the sense of isolation increases and this encourages migrants to look for company and solidarity online. As the number of immigrants connected and visible on Facebook gets larger, so the use of the Internet heightens their sense of a substantial collective identity. This is especially important for migrants during the early years of relocation when their sense of identity is most fragile. It can therefore be argued that, through the Internet, some Bulgarian migrants are replacing alienating face-to-face contact with virtual friends and enjoying the feeling of reassurance and belonging to a transnational community of compatriots. In this sense, Facebook is a propitious ground for the establishment of the three identity strategies defined by Herzfeld: cultural intimacy (or self-stereotypes); structural nostalgia (the evocation of a time when everything was going better); and the social poetic (the strategies aiming to retrieve a particular advantage and turn it into a permanent condition). In this way, the willingness to remain continuously in virtual contact with other Bulgarians often reveals a desire to return to the place of birth. Nostalgia and outsourcing of such sentiments help migrants to cope with feelings of frustration and disappointment. I observed that it is just after their return from summer holidays spent in Bulgaria that members of the Bulgarian diaspora are most active on the Bulgarian forums and pages on Facebook. The “return tourism” (Fourcade) during the summer or for the winter holidays seems to be a central theme in the forums on Facebook and an important source of emotional refuelling. Tensions between identities can also lead to creative formulations through Facebook’s pages. Thus, the group “You know you’re a Bulgarian when...”, which enjoys very active participation from the Bulgarian diaspora, is a space where everyone is invited to share, through a single sentence, some fact of everyday life with which all Bulgarians can identify. With humour and self-irony, this Facebook page demonstrates what is distinctive about being Bulgarian but also highlights frustration with certain prejudices and stereotypes. Frequently these profiles are characterised by seemingly “glocal” features. The same Bulgarian user could define himself as a Parisian, adhering to the group “You know you’re from Paris when...”, but also a native of a Bulgarian town (“You know you’re from Varna when...”). At the same time, he is an architect (“All architects on Facebook”), supporting the candidacy of Barack Obama, a fan of Japanese manga (“maNga”), of a French actor, an American cinema director, or Indian food. He joins a cause to save a wild beach on the Black Sea coast (“We love camping: Gradina Smokinia and Arapia”) and protests virtually against the slaughter of dolphins in the Faroe Islands (“World shame”). One month, the individual could identify as Bulgarian, but next month he might choose to locate himself in the country in which he is now resident. Thus, Facebook creates a virtual territory without borders for the cosmopolitan subject (Negroponte) and this confirms the premise that the Internet does not lead to the convergence of cultures, but rather confirms the opportunities for diversification and pluralism through multiple social and national affiliations. Facebook must therefore be seen as an advantageous space for the representation and interpretation of identity and for performance and digital existence. Bulgarian migrants bring together elements of their offline lives in order to construct, online, entirely new composite identities. The Bulgarians we have studied as part of this research almost never use pseudonyms and do not seem to feel the need to hide their material identities. This suggests that they are mature people who value their status as migrants of Bulgarian origin and who feel confident in presenting their natal identities rather than hiding behind a false name. Starting from this material social/national identity, which is revealed through the display of surname with a Slavic consonance, members of the Bulgarian diaspora choose to manage their complex virtual identities online. Conclusion Far from their homeland, beset with feelings of insecurity and alienation as well as daily experiences of social and cultural exclusion (much of it stemming from an ongoing prejudice towards citizens from ex-communist countries), it is no wonder that migrants from Bulgaria find relief in meeting up with compatriots in front of their screens. Although some migrants assume their Bulgarian identity as a mixture of different cultures and are trying to rethink and continuously negotiate their cultural practices (often through the display of contradictory feelings and identifications), others identify with an imagined community and enjoy drawing boundaries between what is “Bulgarian” and what is not. The indispensable daily visit to Facebook is clearly a means of forging an ongoing sense of belonging to the Bulgarian community scattered across the globe. Facebook makes possible the double presence of Bulgarian immigrants both here and there and facilitates the ongoing processes of identity construction that depend, more and more, upon new media. In this respect, the role that Facebook plays in the life of the Bulgarian diaspora may be seen as a facet of an increasingly dynamic transnational world in which interactive media may be seen to contribute creatively to the formation of collective identities and the deformation of monolithic cultures. References Anderson, Benedict. L’Imaginaire National: Réflexions sur l’Origine et l’Essor du Nationalisme. Paris: La Découverte, 1983. Appadurai, Ajun. Après le Colonialisme: Les Conséquences Culturelles de la Globalisation. Paris: Payot, 2001. Bernal, Victoria. “Diaspora, Cyberspace and Political Imagination: The Eritrean Diaspora Online.” Global Network 6 (2006): 161-79. boyd, danah. “Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?” Knowledge Tree (May 2007). Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: University College London Press. 1997. Goffman, Erving. La Présentation de Soi. Paris: Editions de Minuit, Collection Le Sens Commun, 1973. Fourcade, Marie-Blanche. “De l’Arménie au Québec: Itinéraires de Souvenirs Touristiques.” Ethnologies 27.1 (2005): 245-76. Freud, Sigmund. “Psychologie des Foules et Analyses du Moi.” Essais de Psychanalyse. Paris: Petite Bibliothèque Payot, 2001 (1921). Herzfeld, Michael. Intimité Culturelle. Presse de l’Université de Laval, 2008. Karim, Karim-Haiderali. The Media of Diaspora. Oxford: Routledge, 2003. Marcheva, Marta. “Bulgarian Diaspora and the Media Treatment of Bulgaria in the French, Italian and North American Press (1992–2007).” Unpublished PhD dissertation. Paris: University Panthéon – Assas Paris 2, 2010. Mead, George Herbert. L’Esprit, le Soi et la Société. Paris: PUF, 2006. Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. Vintage, 2005. Soultanova, Ralitza. “Les Migrations Multiples de la Population Bulgare.” Actes du Dolloque «La France et les Migrants des Balkans: Un État des Lieux.” Paris: Courrier des Balkans, 2005. Srinivasan, Ramesh, and Ajit Pyati. “Diasporic Information Environments: Reframing Immigrant-Focused Information Research.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58.12 (2007): 1734-44. Todorov, Tzvetan. Nous et les Autres: La Réflexion Française sur la Diversité Humaine. Paris: Seuil, 1989.

In the age of digital transformations of images, communications, and storytelling, Marshall McLuhan's insight that "the medium is the message" can be augmented with the corollary that the media is the mix. Digital forms of narrative are not only characterized by their mixed, hybrid forms and content, but their recombinations 1 draw the spectator into the mix in unforeseen ways. By mixing varying degrees of non-linearity and interactivity in what are ultimately animations, digital narratives create new kinds of digital spectatorship. The examples I'll explore here are three films, Conceiving Ada, Gamer, and Time Code. In different yet interconnected ways, each privileges the mix of media over content, or rather, foregrounds the mix as content. These digital narratives divert the reader/spectator/ participant from the traditional ways of making meaning--or at least sense--of narrative. One way to illuminate the examples is to explore how they mix linearity and interactivity. In teaching The Theory and Practice of Digital Narrative, my students and I developed a model for analyzing how different works create new modes of storytelling, and fresh relations of looking at and within the frame.2 Extending some of the terms that Janet Murray develops in Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, the diagram posits an x axis of linearity and a y axis of agency.3 Click here for an animated version of this graph. The linearity axis spans narratives from most linear (one plot line that progresses chronologically through time and space to one outcome through a series of cause and effect occurrences represented from a singular point of view) to non-linear (narratives that could be circular, rhizome-shaped, achronological, synchronic, multiple plotlines, multiple points of view, multidimensional).4 The agency axis spans media that call for very little active participation from the reader/spectator/listener to media that demands a high level of interaction. Of course, all "reading" is in some way active, both in the physical acts of seeing and turning pages/clicking a mouse 5 and in comprehending, imagining, remembering, and making meaning. Nevertheless, there is a distinction between page-turning and making choices in a hypermedia work, and Murray uses the term agency to suggest an "active creation of belief" (as opposed to Coleridge's "willing suspension of belief"). Digital environments require that belief be created and reinforced; as William Gibson posited in Neuromancer, the imagined place of cyberspace is a "consensual hallucination," a social agreement to act as if the places in cyberspace exist. The willing creation of belief is a social agreement that relies on a like-minded community. The more self-reflexive and unconventional the narrative, the more it calls for the will to believe. These examples of digital cinema "interpellate," or hail, their spectators as willing agents in the common project of the creation of belief. The subjectivity that these films seek to create for their viewers is one of being an active, technologically-savvy spectator. Instead of encouraging participation in, to use Guy Debord's phrase, the society of the spectacle, these digital narratives perform a Brechtian function in a distinctly technological manner that derives from the mix of media that is digital cinema. The term "digital cinema" has acquired many meanings, ranging from movies shot on digital video in a manner we associate with film (i.e.: single camera) to digital exhibition of media in digitally-equipped movie theaters and streaming video on the web. Lev Manovich defines digital cinema as "a particular case of animation which uses live action footage as one of its many elements."6 Manovich's historical argument suggests commonalities between the earliest moving images and current developments in digital media; animation was marginalized in the development of cinema, and although some of its techniques were adopted by the avant garde, only now animation returns at the very center of digital cinema.7 Lynn Hershman Leeson's film Conceiving Ada explores digital media in both form and content. In the film Emmy, a contemporary computer software engineer, uses technology to make contact with Ada Lovelace, who invented the first computer language in Victorian England. The narrative moves between Emmy in the present day and Ada in the past as Emmy figures out how to send a software agent into the past to retrieve information. Although the plot doesn't really make sense scientifically, it resonates emotionally; despite the 150 years separating their lives, Emmy and Ada face some of the same issues as women working with technology. Instead of building sets, Leeson developed a technique of blending live action footage shot against a blue screen with digitized photographs of Victorian inns. As she explains in the technical notes of the DVD of the film (and also on the Conceiving Ada website): I felt it important to use the technology Ada pioneered. Virtual sets and digital sound . . . provided environments in which she moves freely through time, becomes liberated and, ultimately, moves into visibility. The actors and filmmaker collaborated in what amounts to a consensual hallucination: On the set, these images were maneuvered through several computers where mattes were added and images were put into perspective or enlarged. They were then laid onto digital videotape while the actors were performing. Actors could reference their location through a monitor that showed them their "virtual" environment. . . . The immediacy of shooting live action while simultaneously manipulating digitized backgrounds in real time was, remarkably, exhilarating. By mixing past and present, fact and fiction, personal and professional, digital and analog, live action and animation, Conceiving Ada tells its powerful story in both form and content. Although it is not immediately obvious that the sets are virtual rather than actual, much of the story takes place in front of and inside Emmy's computer equipment. There are many shots of Emmy gazing into the computer, trying to make her programs work, and when she does make contact with Ada, she can see her memories and talk with her on the computer screen. The film frame often encompasses the computer screen, so we too see the graphic interfaces Emmy designs and animates. By mixing some of the techniques of video art with film style and the malleability of the digital image, Leeson extends her trailblazing career in many directions at once in a work that is a mix about mix. A representation of intense digital interactivity, Conceiving Ada's heroines, creators, and spectators use technology, and specifically digital imaging technology, to create agency. Like Conceiving Ada, Time Code is also an example of digital cinema that calls attention to the digital techniques used in its production, and enlists its spectators as accomplices in creating the narrative. Time Code is itself the product of improvisation, and uses digital technology to capture "real time." Director Mike Figgis divides the screen into four frames; each quadrant contains a continuous 90-minute take of an unscripted, improvised performance, all shot simultaneously with four Sony Dvcam DSR-130s; the film was blocked out on music paper. Figgis describes his movie as a "black comedy about a 90-minute slice of life in Hollywood," and it takes filmmaking as one of its subjects along with jealousy, infidelity, and a fin-de-siecle philosophical and artistic exhaustion. The audio mix of the theatrical release of the film shifts its emphasis between the quadrants, thus directing the spectator's attention to a certain quadrant. Choosing to focus on a quadrant is a kind of spectator-editing. Looking at the entire frame means seeing a new kind of animation, created by multiple screens, encompassing multiple points of view. (See Time Code clip here.) The film folds in on itself self-reflexively. The plot centers around the intersecting lives of four characters involved personally and/or professionally with Red Mullet, Inc., a movie studio (which is the real-life name of Figgis's production company; see www.red-mullet.com), and becomes increasingly Brechtian as the movie builds to the climactic scene in which a hot young independent filmmaker pitches a movie that, like the one we are watching, splits the screen and follows the interactions between four characters. In what could be taken as a manifesto for digital cinema that counters the "chastity" of DOGME 95 with the passionate embrace of technology, the filmmaker announces, "Montage has created a fake reality. . . . Technology has arrived, digital video has arrived, and is demanding new expressions, new sensations. . . . It's time to say again: Art, Technology: a new union." She shows the studio executives storyboards of how four cameras will follow four characters, who are really four aspects of the same character at different points in their lives. But the filmmaker's passionate and theoretical speech is undercut by the context of black comedy that infuses the film: artistic praxis clashes with business practice, and all the plotlines peak as Stellan Skarsgard's Alex bursts into laughter and exclaims, "This is the most pretentious crap I've ever heard. . . . Do you think anybody around this table has a clue about what you're talking about?" Figgis assumes his audience does, that Bauhaus, Soviet montage, and Guy Debord are not as foreign to his spectators as they are to the executives; the filmmakers both within and outside the frames show their theoretical orientation. Time Code is the first major work of digital cinema. It creates a new kind of animation based on subjectivity and point of view, and calls for an active creation of belief from the spectator-editor who takes in and ultimately creates the narrative of the film. The DVD extends the spectator's agency even further. Among its special features is a documentary about how the film was shot 15 times, all four cameras operating simultaneously around the actors' improvisation. Figgis chose the fifteenth version for the theatrical release, but also includes the first version on the DVD. Because the making of the film, and how it uses digital technology, is so central to the spectator's experience, the director's commentary and interviews with the cast reinforce the spectator as an active creator of belief and meaning in the film. Moreover, by including a special audio mixing feature, the DVD gives the medium a new level of interactivity. Using the remote control of a DVD player, the spectator/participant can switch between the audio of the different quadrants. Because the audio is a major aspect of directing the spectator's attention (in addition to visual elements such as movement and stasis), being able to make choices in the audio mix is, to use the music metaphor that the film is based on conceptually, to become the conductor of the film.8 The medium is the mix. Like Time Code and Conceiving Ada, the new French film Gamer is also a particularly digital mix. Gamer moves between live action and digital environments as its main character Tony gets the idea for, designs, and then is swindled out of a computer game. The first time the film environment switches to the game environment is when the hero is in a car chase and his car morphs into a game graphic of a car. The shift between a reality created by conventional film style and the unconventional use of game graphics style reveals the main character's subjectivity, for his reality (and other characters' as well) are constructed through their interaction in the playing and making of games. Gamer is aesthetically and viscerally ambitious in the range of live action and computer graphic interfaces it moves between. The adrenalized state of game-playing mixes with a fictionalized account of game design. Gamer succeeds in creating an immersive text about two differently immersive mediums, film and computer games. When the film depicts how live action can be made digital, and both shows and denies the indexicality of the digital image, it explores the nature of digital cinema in a way that is complementary to the projects of Conceiving Ada and Time Code. In addition to fostering new relations of looking, these digital narratives make forays into nonlinearity. Conceiving Ada and Gamer both have discursive plots that revise the conventions of the linear plot, moving between nested narrative frames in time, space, and subjectivity. Time Code is in one way relentlessly linear, but its synchronic depiction of multiple physical and emotional points of view ruptures the cinematic conventions of time and space constructed by the dominant style of continuity editing. Taken separately, these three films hover around the center point of my diagram, raising the issues of agency and linearity that will continue to be at the center of digital narrative. Taken together the films offer a model of digital transformation that points the way to what is bound to be a medium that increasingly involves its audience in thinking about and then participating in increasingly immersive, nonlinear, and interactive experiences. Notes 1. In the “renew” issue of M/C, David Marshall suggests that one of the areas Cultural Studies can look to is how the culture industries that produce “recombinant culture,” make efforts “to incorporate new technologies into different forms in order to reconstitute audiences in ways that in their distinctiveness produce value that is exchangeable as capital.” This essay is part of a larger work that attempts to open up some of the avenues suggested by Marshall. P. David Marshall. "Renewing Cultural Studies." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.6 (2000). [22 February 2001] . 2. This diagram is a work in progress. My students and I have had much discussion about what to term the bottom of the agency axis. “Passive” seems too simple, yet other terms we’ve come up with such as structured, controlled, limited, voyeuristic, or (my favorite) enslaved don’t seem to work. Special thanks to my students Elliott Davis, Tom Mannino, and John O’Connell, for such discussions. 3. Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, MIT Press, 1999, esp. 128. 4. For an interesting discussion and diagramming of story shapes, see Katherine Phelps, “Story Shapes for Digital Media.” [3/7/01] < http://www.glasswings.com.au/modern/shapes/>. Steven Johnson’s assertion that the hyperlink is the “first significant new form of punctuation to emerge in centuries” is an intriguing one for thinking about the connections possible in hypermedia. (Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate (San Francisco: HarperEdge, 1997), 110-111). 6. Lev Manovich, “What Is Digital Cinema?” http://jupiter.ucsd.edu/~manovich/text/digital-cinema.html 7. In a footnote, Manovich makes an interesting point on avant-garde strategies such as collage, painting on film, combining print with animation and live action footage, and combining many images in a single frame: “what used to be exceptions for traditional cinema became the normal, intended techniques of digital filmmaking, embedded in technology design itself.” Innovative forays into the mix of digital media like my examples illuminate not only the emergence of exceptional techniques but also of innovative narrative and spectatorial strategies. 8. Figgis is using the quadrant method once again in a new film, Hotel, which recently finished production in Florence. During the filming, there was a brilliant site that every day had a new page with the four-quadrant split. In addition to quicktimes of footage of the shoot and the actors in the hotel where the film is set, there were some of the cleverest animations I have ever seen on the web. Unfortunately the site shut down after the shoot finished, but it will be up again in May, most likely at www.filmfour.com/hotel, but check www.red-mullet.com as well.

In this creative‐writing research project, I set out to create a narrative nonfiction manuscript that investigates the contemporary politics surrounding abortion. The fundamental question driving the creative manuscript was, ‘Why is abortion largely invisible in Australia?’ Abortion is the second‐most common therapeutic surgical procedure in Australia, yet the history, the politics and the practice of abortion remain hidden from view. This invisibility allows us to avoid grappling with and confronting the complicated issues abortion raises. Using techniques commonly associated with fiction writing, such as narrative arc, characterisation, dialogue and scenes, the 69,000‐word manuscript investigates the factors, tiers and characters involved with abortion in Australia. The narrative nonfiction manuscript should be read first. The manuscript is accompanied by a 31,500‐word exegesis analysing the production, lineage and ethical implications of consciously political narrative nonfiction, a term that refers to works that make deliberate political interventions. Similarly to Hartsock (2000), I argue that when writing a consciously political narrative nonfiction work, the writer does not objectify the world as something different or alien from the reader, and instead strives to render characters as complex human beings. The exegesis reviews theories of ethics, objectivity and narrative within a form that is fundamentally journalism, yet can never fit within this narrow definition as it is primarily about mapping the cultural other (Sanderson 2004). The exegesis also scrutinises the usefulness and complexity of immersion as a research methodology. While I initially attempted to immerse myself as a limited participant‐observer in the world of pro‐choice and pro‐life politics, over the course of the research, my methodology resulted in a kind of radicalisation prompted by my fieldwork. For example, after witnessing the ongoing harassment of clinic patients and staff, I found myself openly hostile to the position and tactics of pro‐life activists. While I felt I remained capable of transcribing and depicting the worlds of these subjects, a seditious need grew to challenge their authority and worldview outside the text. This led me to make a political intervention inside and outside the text, and I thus crossed the precipice from observation to active participation. While I acknowledge that this is an unconventional narrative position, one that rejects ideals of journalistic objectivity, I argue that this subject position was born of the research and practice of this project – that is, of actually participating in the world of my subject, abortion. Moreover, this level of participation in the world of the textual subject is a direct result of writing a consciously political narrative nonfiction work, a subgenre that allows for the practitioner’s politics and reactions to situations to help shape the text, and the consequences beyond.

This is the third edition of the definitive book on the unique system by which Americans choose a presidents, and why that system should be changed. It is a critique of the U.S. electoral college and includes a new chapter focusing on the 2016 election. The book examines the function of the electoral college during the 2016 presidential elections and argues that the electoral college did not work as it should have. The book claims that the electoral college distorted the electoral process and gave the candidates strong incentives to ignore most of the country. It did not guarantee victory to the candidate receiving the most votes, nor ensure national harmony, nor provide the winner a broad coalition and a mandate to govern. The book asserts that there is a need to focus directly and systematically on the core questions surrounding the electoral college and assess whether its role in American democracy is justified.

Charles Carter was appointed Lecturer in Statistics at Cambridge in 1945, and in 1947 became a Fellow of Emmanuel College. He wrote many papers in his six years at Cambridge on a range of post-war economic problems. In 1959 He became Stanley Jevons Professor of Political Economy and Cobden Lecturer at the Victoria University of Manchester. In 1962 the University Grants Committee had appointed a Planning Board to establish the University of Lancaster, with Sir Noel Hall, Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford, as Chairman. The Board made its plans for the nature of the University and its buildings on a greenfields site, and then sought a Vice-Chancellor. Charles Carter was the Board's choice. He soon proved himself to be a superb administrator. When grants for residential buildings were less than expected he borrowed the necessary funds, and had buildings designed suitable for letting to visitors during student vacations. He attracted academic and research staff of high quality, and he was influential in providing for more students choice in the nature of their degree studies.

In 1916, Crystal Eastman quietly married Walter Fuller, after becoming pregnant with their first child. At the same time, she faced one of the cruelest dilemmas of her political life. It was an election year, and Woodrow Wilson promised peace but not suffrage while his opponent, former New York governor Charles Evans Hughes, promised suffrage but not peace. She chose peace, backed Wilson, and broke with every downtown feminist and militant suffragist with whom she had stood since college. But after Election Day, Wilson’s promises for American “peace without victory” eroded with changing circumstances. Ultimately, the infamous “Zimmerman telegram,” in which Germany promised to help Mexico recover territory lost to the United States in the 1840s if they joined the war on the side of the Central Powers, turned the tide. When Eastman’s colleagues met with Wilson on February 28, 1917, they knew the United States would soon enter the world war.

‘Another Legal Monster?’ That was the question asked by the Law Department of the European University Institute on 16 February 2012 in a debate about the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union (TSCG), also known as the Fiscal Compact Treaty. On 2 March 2012, twenty-five Member States of the European Union minus the United Kingdom and the Czech Republic signed the TSCG. A month before, on 2 February 2012, the euro area Member States signed the Treaty Establishing the European Stability Mechanism (ESM Treaty), another legal monster. In both cases, the monstrosity lies in the fact that Member States have preferred to conclude an international treaty, rather than to use the European Union (EU) institutional system. Why did the European Commission not propose a legislative act to establish a financial assistance mechanism in the Eurozone and strengthen the fiscal discipline in the EU? Does this mean the end of community method and a victory for the intergovernmental method? As Herman Van Rompuy commented about the crisis; ‘often the choice is not between the community method and the intergovernmental method, but between a co-ordinated European position and nothing at all’. In 2010, Angela Merkel defended her vision of a new ‘Union Method’ in a speech held at the College of Europe. This approach can be defined by the following description: ‘co-ordinated action in a spirit of solidarity–each of us in the area for which we are responsible but all working towards the same goal’. Each of us means the European institutions and Member States. The new ‘Euro-international’ treaties (or inter se treaties) raise a number of questions regarding their compatibility with EU law, implications for the Union legal system, institutional balance, national sovereignty and democratic accountability. These questions are all the more important because international treaties raise a number of questions on their compatibility with EU law, implications for the Union legal system and institutional balance.

Many higher education institutions are moving towards blended learning environments that seek to move towards a student-centred ethos, where students are stakeholders in the learning process. This often involves multi-modal learner-support technologies capable of operating in a range of time and place settings. This article considers the impact of an Audience Response System (ARS) upon the ongoing development of an Information Systems Professional course at the Masters level in the College of Business at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. The course allows students to consider ethical issues faced by an Information Systems Professional. Given the sensitivity of some of the topics explored within this area, an ARS offers an ideal vehicle for allowing students to respond to potentially contentious questions without revealing their identity to the rest of the group. The paper reports the findings of a pilot scheme designed to explore the efficacy of the technology. Use of a blended learning framework to frame the discussion allowed the authors to consider the readiness of institution, lecturers, and students to use ARS. From a usage viewpoint, multiple choice questions lead to further discussion of student responses related to important issues in the unit. From an impact viewpoint the use of ARS in the class appeared to be successful, but some limitations were reported.