Academic literature on the topic 'Construction nationale – Belize'

Abstract: This article examines how the Belizean nation and national belonging are constructed in the representational politics of Belizean Belikin Beer campaign advertisements. In 2012, Belikin Beer released a series of commercials showcasing the “culture of Belize,” while addressing themes related to Belizean national identity, labor, heritage, and commemoration. Contrary to national constructions of Belize as a multicultural and plural society, the Belizean identity performed in Belikin’s campaign located Belize within an ambiguous regional geography, portraying it as a unique site within Central America and the broader Circum-Caribbean that provides the space for the reconciliation of diasporic and transnational Black and Indigenous identities. Belize provides a complex framework for the examination of Central American Caribbean identities and the utilization of Blackness and Indigeneity by the tourism industry. In tourism industry-driven cultural projects, competing ideals of Belizean identity, Belizean Blackness(es) and Indigeneities are heightened in new media and cultural productions that draw on the peculiarities of Belizean ethnic relations and ideology of national identity.

The long and rich history of archaeological research in Belize has produced an unparalleled whole vessel and ceramic sherd type collection spanning the entire country and all of Maya prehistory. Such ceramic collections are imperative for cross-dating and understanding inter-site and interregional connections. The Institute of Archaeology (IA), NICH, has been actively engaged in systematically curating their collections through reorganizing type collections, checking the proveniences of whole vessels, and attempting to identify contexts of unprovenienced pots. Specifically, the IA has been curating the National Collections by providing better storage and organization, however this is an ongoing process that needs the attention and support of all archaeologists conducting research in Belize, in the same way that researchers have focused on excavation and “the site”. The IA has received few type collections from current and past archaeological projects since the 1980’s, and project record-keeping in the laboratory has not always paid the necessary nor equal attention to detail as excavation records. As researchers interested in the archaeological history of the country, both foreign projects and government entities have a responsibility to the cultural heritage and patrimony of Belize. Thus, it is necessary to curate these collections properly so that they remain available to future archaeological endeavours, students, researchers, and the people of Belize.

In 2009, the first LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) was flown over Caracol, Belize, transforming our understanding of Maya settlement, agriculture, and environment, and positioning the country of Belize as a leader in this transformation. Flown a decade later in 2019, this article reports on an 18 square kilometer LiDAR survey at Aventura, northern Belize. The National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping at the University of Houston used an Optech Titan sensor, the world’s first multispectral airborne LiDAR sensor, in the Aventura LiDAR survey. With approximately 25 points per square meter, we were able to maximize our detection of smaller features, as documented in ground truthing. LiDAR has two primary uses: (1) locating previously unidentified sites and (2) providing a complex human geography of ancient places that link people and land. This paper highlights how LiDAR facilitates the development of a human geography of ancient places. At Aventura, LiDAR research illustrates a human geography that links people, settlement, agricultural, and environment. Raised field agricultural systems at Aventura along the New River, and systems of bajos and pocket bajos, provide a window into understanding Aventura’s environmental positioning, wetland resources, and agrarian roots and insight into a broader New River agricultural-environmental system.

This paper summarizes excavations of a suspected fish processing location at the submerged site of Ek Way Nal located in Paynes Creek National Park. Based on use-wear analysis of chert tools found near Building A and a line of palmetto palm posts indicated that fish processing was taking place at Ek Way Nal. In addition to fish processing, Ek Way Nal represents one of 110 Late Classic salt making settlements of the southern coast of Belize. Analysis of survey data, excavation data, and artifact analysis provides information about settlement organization, trade relationships, and activities taking place at the Paynes Creek Salt Works. Excavation data also suggests the presence of a deflated leaching mound created through long-term production of salt at this site. High volumes of charcoal indicate large amounts of wood harvested and burnt for brine boiling. Low-quality and high-quality stone tools and debitage indicate local and long-distance acquisition of stone materials. Artifacts associated with preserved wooden structures indicates building function across the site.

Excavations in the spring and summer of 2022 were carried out at the underwater ancient Maya salt work of Ek Way Nal in Punta Ycacos Lagoon, Paynes Creek National Park, Belize. Ek Way Nal provided salt to the ancient Maya during the Late and Terminal Classic periods (600-900 C.E.). In additional to excavations in buildings at the site, a 1 X 2 m unit was excavated to extract a sediment column for examining the relationship between the ancient Maya settlement at Ek Way Nal and sea-level rise. In this article, the excavations, extraction of the sediment column, and processing it for laboratory analyses are described. Field observations are discussed. Fine red mangrove root (Rhizophora mangle) and charcoal samples were extracted from the sediment column for radiocarbon dating. The results from the datum core excavation indicate that sea-level rise occurred before, during, and after the ancient Maya occupation at Ek Way Nal.

Introduction In the elite space of Haute Couture, fashion is presented through a theatrical array of dynamics—the engagement of specific bodies performing for select audiences in highly curated spaces. Each element is both very precise in its objectives and carefully selected for impact. In this way, the production of Haute Couture makes itself accessible to only a few select members of society. Globally, there are only an estimated 4,000 direct consumers of Haute Couture (Hendrik). Given this limited market, the work of elite couturiers relies on other forms of artistic media, namely film, photography, and increasingly, museum spaces, to reach broader audiences who are then enabled to participate in the fashion ‘space’ via a process of visual consumption. For these audiences, Haute Couture is less about material consumption than it is about the aspirational consumption and contestation of notions of identity. This article uses qualitative textual analysis and draws on semiotic theory to explore symbolism and values in Haute Couture. Semiotics, an approach popularised by the work of Roland Barthes, examines signifiers as elements of the construction of metalanguage and myth. Barthes recognised a broad understanding of language that extended beyond oral and written forms. He acknowledged that a photograph or artefact may also constitute “a kind of speech” (111). Similarly, fashion can be seen as both an important signifier and mode of communication. The model of fashion as communication is one extensively explored within culture studies (e.g. Hall; Lurie). Much of the discussion of semiotics in this literature is predicated on sender/receiver models. These models conceive of fashion as the mechanism through which individual senders communicate to another individual or to collective (and largely passive) audiences (Barnard). Yet, fashion is not a unidirectional form of communication. It can be seen as a dialogical and discursive space of encounter and contestation. To understand the role of Haute Couture as a contested space of identity and socio-political discourse, this article examines the work of Chinese couturier Guo Pei. An artisan such as Guo Pei places the results of needle and thread into spaces of the theatrical, the spectacular, and, significantly, the powerfully socio-political. Guo Pei’s contributions to Haute Couture are extravagant, fantastical productions that also serve as spaces of socio-cultural information exchange and debate. Guo Pei’s creations bring together political history, memory, and fantasy. Here we explore the socio-cultural and political semiotics that emerge when the humble stitch is dramatically amplified onto the Haute Couture runway. We argue that Guo Pei’s work speaks not only to a cultural imaginary but also to the contested nature of gender and socio-political authority in contemporary China. The Politicisation of Fashion in China The majority of literature regarding Chinese fashion in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has focussed on the use of fashion to communicate socio-political messages (Finnane). This is most clearly seen in analyses of the connections between dress and egalitarian ideals during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. As Zhang (952-952) notes, revolutionary fashion emphasised simplicity, frugality, and homogenisation. It rejected style choices that reflected both traditional Chinese and Western fashions. In Mao’s China, fashion was utilised by the state and adopted by the populace as a means of reinforcing the regime’s ideological orientations. For example, the ubiquitous Mao suit, worn by both men and women during the Cultural Revolution “was intended not merely as a unisex garment but a means to deemphasise gender altogether” (Feng 79). The Maoist regime’s intention to create a type of social equality through sartorial homogenisation was clear. Reflecting on the ways in which fashion both responded to and shaped women’s positionality, Mao stated, “women are regarded as criminals to begin with, and tall buns and long skirts are the instruments of torture applied to them by men. There is also their facial makeup, which is the brand of the criminal, the jewellery on their hands, which constitutes shackles and their pierced ears and bound feet which represent corporal punishment” (Mao cited in Finnane 23). Mao’s suit—the homogenising militaristic uniform adopted by many citizens—may have been intended as a mechanism for promoting equality, freeing women from the bonds of gendered oppression and all citizens from visual markers of class. Nonetheless, in practice Maoist fashion and policing of appearance during the Cultural Revolution enforced a politics of amnesia and perversely may have “entailed feminizing the undesirable, by conflating woman, bourgeoisie, and colour while also insisting on a type of gender equality that the belted Mao jacket belied” (Chen 161). In work on cultural transformations in the post-Maoist period, Braester argues that since the late 1980s Chinese cultural products—here taken to include artefacts such as Haute Couture—have similarly been defined by the politics of memory and identity. Evocation of historically important symbols and motifs may serve to impose a form of narrative continuity, connecting the present to the past. Yet, as Braester notes, such strategies may belie stability: “to contemplate memory and forgetting is tantamount to acknowledging the temporal and spatial instability of the post-industrial, globalizing world” (435). In this way, cultural products are not only sites of cultural continuity, but also of contestation. Imperial Dreams of Feminine Power The work of Chinese couturier Guo Pei showcases traditional Chinese embroidery techniques alongside more typically Western fashion design practices as a means of demonstrating not only Haute Couturier craftsmanship but also celebrating Chinese imperial culture through nostalgic fantasies in her contemporary designs. Born in Beijing, in 1967, at the beginning of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Guo Pei studied fashion at the Beijing Second Light Industry School before working in private and state-owned fashion houses. She eventually moved to establish her own fashion design studio and was recognised as “the designer of choice for high society and the political elite” in China (Yoong 19). Her work was catapulted into Western consciousness when her cape, titled ‘Yellow Empress’ was donned by Rihanna for the 2015 Met Gala. The design was a response to an era in which the colour yellow was forbidden to all but the emperor. In the same year, Guo Pei was named an invited member of La Federation de la Haute Couture, becoming the first and only Chinese-born and trained couturier to receive the honour. Recognition of her work at political and socio-economic levels earned her an award for ‘Outstanding Contribution to Economy and Cultural Diplomacy’ by the Asian Couture Federation in 2019. While Maoist fashion influences pursued a vision of gender equality through the ‘unsexing’ of fashion, Guo Pei’s work presents a very different reading of female adornment. One example is her exquisite Snow Queen dress, which draws on imperial motifs in its design. An ensemble of silk, gold embroidery, and Swarovski crystals weighing 50 kilograms, the Snow Queen “characterises Guo Pei’s ideal woman who is noble, resilient and can bear the weight of responsibility” (Yoong 140). In its initial appearance on the Haute Couture runway, the dress was worn by 78-year-old American model, Carmen Dell’Orefice, signalling the equation of age with strength and beauty. Rather than being a site of torture or corporal punishment, as suggested by Mao, the Snow Queen dress positions imagined traditional imperial fashion as a space for celebration and empowerment of the feminine form. The choice of model reinforces this message, while simultaneously contesting global narratives that conflate women’s beauty and physical ability with youthfulness. In this way, fashion can be understood as an intersectional space. On the one hand, Guo Pei's work reinvigorates a particular nostalgic vision of Chinese imperial culture and in doing so pushes back against the socio-political ‘non-fashion’ and uniformity of Maoist dress codes. Yet, on the other hand, positioning her work in the very elite space of Haute Couture serves to reinstate social stratification and class boundaries through the creation of economically inaccessible artefacts: a process that in turn involves the reification and museumification of fashion as material culture. Ideals of femininity, identity, individuality, and the expressions of either creating or dismantling power, are anchored within cultural, social, and temporal landscapes. Benedict Anderson argues that the museumising imagination is “profoundly political” (123). Like sacred texts and maps, fashion as material ephemera evokes and reinforces a sense of continuity and connection to history. Yet, the belonging engendered through engagement with material and imagined pasts is imprecise in its orientation. As much as it is about maintaining threads to an historical past, it is simultaneously an appeal to present possibilities. In his broader analysis, Anderson explores the notion of parallelity, the potentiality not to recreate some geographically or temporally removed place, but to open a space of “living lives parallel …] along the same trajectory” (131). Guo Pei’s creations appeal to a similar museumising imagination. At once, her work evokes both a particular imagined past of imperial grandeur, against instability of the politically shifting present, and appeals to new possibilities of gendered emancipation within that imagined space. Contesting and Complicating East-West Dualism The design process frequently involves borrowing, reinterpretation, and renewal of ideas. The erasure of certain cultural and political aspects of social continuity through the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the socio-political changes thereafter, have created fertile ground for an artist like Guo Pei. Her palimpsest reaches back through time, picks up those cultural threads of extravagance, and projects them wholesale into the spaces of fashion in the present moment. Cognisance of design intentionality and historical and contemporary fashion discourses influence the various interpretations of fashion semiotics. However, there are also audience-created meanings within the various modes of performance and consumption. Where Kaiser and Green assert that “the process of fashion is inevitably linked to making and sustaining as well as resisting and dismantling power” (1), we can also observe that sartorial semiotics can have different meanings at different times. In the documentary, Yellow Is Forbidden, Guo Pei reflects on shifting semiotics in fashion. Speaking with a client, she remarks that “dragons and phoenixes used to represent the Chinese emperor—now they represent the spirit of the Chinese” (Brettkelly). Once a symbol of sacred, individual power, these iconic signifiers now communicate collective national identity. Both playing with and reimagining not only the grandeur of China’s imperial past, but also the particular role of the feminine form and female power therein, Guo Pei’s corpus evokes and complicates such contestations of power. On the one hand, her work serves to contest homogenising narratives of identity and femininity within China. Equally important, however, are the ways in which this work, which is possible both through and in spite of a Euro-American centric system of patronage within the fashion industry, complicates notions of East-West dualism. For Guo Pei, drawing on broadly accessible visual signifiers of Chinese heritage and culture has been critical in bringing attention to her endeavours. Her work draws significantly from her cultural heritage in terms of colour selections and traditional Chinese embroidery techniques. Symbols and motifs peculiar to Chinese culture are abundant: lotus flowers, dragons, phoenixes, auspicious numbers, and favourable Chinese language characters such as buttons in the shape of ‘double happiness’ (囍) are often present in her designs. Likewise, her techniques pay homage to traditional craft work, including Peranakan beading. The parallelity conjured by these choices is deliberate. In staging Guo Pei’s work for museum exhibitions at museums such as the Asian Civilizations Museum, her designs are often showcased beside the historical artefacts that inspired them (Fu). On her Chinese website, Guo Pei, highlights the historical connections between her designs and traditional Chinese embroidery craft through a sub-section of the “Spirit” header, entitled simply, “Inheritance”. These influences and expressions of Chinese culture are, in Guo Pei's own words her “design language” (Brettkelly). However, Guo Pei has also expressed an ambivalence about her positioning as a Chinese designer. She has maintained that she does not want “to be labelled as a Chinese storyteller ... and thinks about a global audience” (Yoong). In her expression of this desire to both derive power through design choices and historically situated practices and symbols, and simultaneously move beyond nationally bounded identity frameworks, Guo Pei positions herself in a space ‘betwixt and between.’ This is not only a space of encounter between East and West, but also a space that calls into question the limits and possibilities of semiotic expression. Authenticity and Legitimacy Global audiences of fashion rely on social devices of diffusion other than the runway: photography, film, museums, and galleries. Unique to Haute Couture, however, is the way in which such processes are often abstracted, decontextualised and pushed to the extremities of theatrical opulence. De Perthuis argues that to remove context “greatly reduce[s] the social, political, psychological and semiotic meanings” of fashion (151). When iconic motifs are utilised, the western gaze risks falling back on essentialising reification of identity. To this extent, for non-Chinese audiences Guo Pei’s works may serve not so much to problemitise historical and contemporary feminine identities and inheritances, so much as project an essentialisation of Chinese femininity. The double-bind created through Guo Pei’s simultaneous appeal to and resistance of archetypical notions of Chinese identity and femininity complicates the semiotic currency of her work. Moreover, Guo Pei’s work highlights tensions concerning understandings of Chinese culture between those in China and the diaspora. In her process of accessing reference material, Guo Pei has necessarily been driven to travel internationally, due to her concerns about a lack of access to material artefacts within China. She has sought out remnants of her ancestral culture in both the Chinese diaspora as well as material culture designed for export (Yoong; Brettkelly). This borrowing of Chinese design as depicted outside of China proper, alongside the use of western influences and patronage in Guo’s work has resulted in her work being dismissed by critics as “superficial … export ware, reimported” (Thurman). The insinuation that her work is derivative is tinged with denigration. Such critiques question not only the authenticity of the motifs and techniques utilised in Guo Pei’s designs, but also the legitimacy of the narratives of both feminine and Chinese identity communicated therein. Questions of cultural ‘authenticity’ serve to deny how culture, both tangible and intangible, is mutable over time and space. In his work on tourism, Taylor suggests that wherever “the production of authenticity is dependent on some act of (re)production, it is conventionally the past which is seen to hold the model of the original” (9). In this way, legitimacy of semiotic communication in works that evoke a temporally distant past is often seen to be adjudicated through notions of fidelity to the past. This authenticity of the ‘traditional’ associates ‘tradition’ with ‘truth’ and ‘authenticity.’ It is itself a form of mythmaking. As Guo Pei’s work is at once quintessentially Chinese and, through its audiences and capitalist modes of circulation, fundamentally Western, it challenges notions of authenticity and legitimacy both within the fashion world and in broader social discourses. Speaking about similar processes in literary fiction, Colavincenzo notes that works that attempt to “take on the myth of historical discourse and practice … expose the ways in which this discourse is constructed and how it fails to meet the various claims it makes for itself” (143). Rather than reinforcing imagined ‘truths’, appeals to an historical imagination such as that deployed by Guo Pei reveal its contingency. Conclusion In Fashion in Altermodern China, Feng suggests that we can “understand the sartorial as situating a set of visible codes and structures of meaning” (1). More than a reductionistic process of sender/receiver communication, fashion is profoundly embedded with intersectional dialogues. It is not the precision of signifiers, but their instability, fluidity, and mutability that is revealing. Guo Pei’s work offers narratives at the junction of Chinese and foreign, original and derivative, mythical and historical that have an unsettled nature. This ineffable tension between construction and deconstruction draws in both fashion creators and audiences. Whether encountering fashion on the runway, in museum cabinets, or on magazine pages, all renditions rely on its audience to engage with processes of imagination, fantasy, and memory as the first step of comprehending the semiotic languages of cloth. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 2016. Barnard, Malcolm. "Fashion as Communication Revisited." Fashion Theory. Routledge, 2020. 247-258. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. London: J. Cape, 1972. Braester, Yomi. "The Post-Maoist Politics of Memory." A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. Ed. Yingjin Zhang. London: John Wiley and Sons. 434-51. Brettkelly, Pietra (dir.). Yellow Is Forbidden. Madman Entertainment, 2019. Chen, Tina Mai. "Dressing for the Party: Clothing, Citizenship, and Gender-Formation in Mao's China." Fashion Theory 5.2 (2001): 143-71. Colavincenzo, Marc. "Trading Fact for Magic—Mythologizing History in Postmodern Historical Fiction." Trading Magic for Fact, Fact for Magic. Ed. Marc Colavincenzo. Brill, 2003. 85-106. De Perthuis, Karen. "The Utopian 'No Place' of the Fashion Photograph." Fashion, Performance and Performativity: The Complex Spaces of Fashion. Eds. Andrea Kollnitz and Marco Pecorari. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. 145-60. Feng, Jie. Fashion in Altermodern China. Dress Cultures. Eds. Reina Lewis and Elizabeth Wilson. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022. Finnane, Antonia. Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. Fu, Courtney R. "Guo Pei: Chinese Art and Couture." Fashion Theory 25.1 (2021): 127-140. Hall, Stuart. "Encoding – Decoding." Crime and Media. Ed. Chris Greer. London: Routledge, 2019. Hendrik, Joris. "The History of Haute Couture in Numbers." Vogue (France), 2021. Kaiser, Susan B., and Denise N. Green. Fashion and Cultural Studies. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. Lurie, Alison. The Language of Clothes. London: Bloomsbury, 1992. Taylor, John P. "Authenticity and Sincerity in Tourism." Annals of Tourism Research 28.1 (2001): 7-26. Thurman, Judith. "The Empire's New Clothes – China’s Rich Have Their First Homegrown Haute Couturier." The New Yorker, 2016. Yoong, Jackie. "Guo Pei: Chinese Art and Couture." Singapore: Asian Civilisations Museum, 2019. Zhang, Weiwei. "Politicizing Fashion: Inconspicuous Consumption and Anti-Intellectualism during the Cultural Revolution in China." Journal of Consumer Culture 21.4 (2021): 950-966.

Newspapers and the 7:15 Showing Cinemagoing involves planning. Even in the most impromptu instances, one has to consider meeting places, line-ups and competing responsibilities. One arranges child care, postpones household chores, or rushes to finish meals. One must organise transportation and think about routes, traffic, parking or public transit. And during the course of making plans for a trip to the cinema, whether alone or in the company of others, typically one turns to locate a recent newspaper. Consulting its printed page lets us ascertain locations, a selection of film titles and their corresponding show times. In preparing to feed a cinema craving, we burrow through a newspaper to an entertainment section, finding a tableau of information and promotional appeals. Such sections compile the mini-posters of movie advertisements, with their truncated credits, as well as various reviews and entertainment news. We see names of shopping malls doubling as names of theatres. We read celebrity gossip that may or may not pertain to the film selected for that occasion. We informally rank viewing priorities ranging from essential theatrical experiences to those that can wait for the videotape release. We attempt to assess our own mood and the taste of our filmgoing companions, matching up what we suppose are appropriate selections. Certainly, other media vie to supplant the newspaper's role in cinemagoing; many now access on-line sources and telephone services that offer the crucial details about start times. Nonetheless, as a campaign by the Newspaper Association of America in Variety aimed to remind film marketers, 80% of cinemagoers refer to newspaper listings for times and locations before heading out. The accuracy of that association's statistics notwithstanding, for the moment, the local daily or weekly newspaper has a secure place in the routines of cinematic life. A basic impetus for the newspaper's role is its presentation of a schedule of show times. Whatever the venue -- published, phone or on-line -- it strikes me as especially telling that schedules are part of the ordinariness of cinemagoing. To be sure, there are those who decide what film to see on site. Anecdotally, I have had several people comment recently that they no longer decide what movie to see, but where to see a (any) movie. Regardless, the schedule, coupled with the theatre's location, figures as a point of coordination for travel through community space to a site of film consumption. The choice of show time is governed by countless demands of everyday life. How often has the timing of a film -- not the film itself, the theatre at which it's playing, nor one's financial situation --determined one's attendance? How familiar is the assessment that show times are such that one cannot make it, that the film begins a bit too earlier, that it will run too late for whatever reason, and that other tasks intervene to take precedence? I want to make several observations related to the scheduling of film exhibition. Most generally, it makes manifest that cinemagoing involves an exercise in the application of cinema knowledge -- that is, minute, everyday facilities and familiarities that help orchestrate the ordinariness of cultural life. Such knowledge informs what Michel de Certeau characterises as "the procedures of everyday creativity" (xiv). Far from random, the unexceptional decisions and actions involved with cinemagoing bear an ordering and a predictability. Novelty in audience activity appears, but it is alongside fairly exact expectations about the event. The schedule of start times is essential to the routinisation of filmgoing. Displaying a Fordist logic of streamlining commodity distribution and the time management of consumption, audiences circulate through a machine that shapes their constituency, providing a set time for seating, departure, snack purchases and socialising. Even with the staggered times offered by multiplex cinemas, schedules still lay down a fixed template around which other activities have to be arrayed by the patron. As audiences move to and through the theatre, the schedule endeavours to regulate practice, making us the subjects of a temporal grid, a city context, a cinema space, as well as of the film itself. To be sure, one can arrive late and leave early, confounding the schedule's disciplining force. Most importantly, with or without such forms of evasion, it channels the actions of audiences in ways that consideration of the gaze cannot address. Taking account of the scheduling of cinema culture, and its implication of adjunct procedures of everyday life, points to dimensions of subjectivity neglected by dominant theories of spectatorship. To be the subject of a cinema schedule is to understand one assemblage of the parameters of everyday creativity. It would be foolish to see cinema audiences as cattle, herded and processed alone, in some crude Gustave LeBon fashion. It would be equally foolish not to recognise the manner in which film distribution and exhibition operates precisely by constructing images of the activity of people as demographic clusters and generalised cultural consumers. The ordinary tactics of filmgoing are supplemental to, and run alongside, a set of industrial structures and practices. While there is a correlation between a culture industry's imagined audience and the life that ensues around its offerings, we cannot neglect that, as attention to film scheduling alerts us, audiences are subjects of an institutional apparatus, brought into being for the reproduction of an industrial edifice. Streamline Audiences In this, film is no different from any culture industry. Film exhibition and distribution relies on an understanding of both the market and the product or service being sold at any given point in time. Operations respond to economic conditions, competing companies, and alternative activities. Economic rationality in this strategic process, however, only explains so much. This is especially true for an industry that must continually predict, and arguably give shape to, the "mood" and predilections of disparate and distant audiences. Producers, distributors and exhibitors assess which films will "work", to whom they will be marketed, as well as establish the very terms of success. Without a doubt, much of the film industry's attentions act to reduce this uncertainty; here, one need only think of the various forms of textual continuity (genre films, star performances, etc.) and the economies of mass advertising as ways to ensure box office receipts. Yet, at the core of the operations of film exhibition remains a number of flexible assumptions about audience activity, taste and desire. These assumptions emerge from a variety of sources to form a brand of temporary industry "commonsense", and as such are harbingers of an industrial logic. Ien Ang has usefully pursued this view in her comparative analysis of three national television structures and their operating assumptions about audiences. Broadcasters streamline and discipline audiences as part of their organisational procedures, with the consequence of shaping ideas about consumers as well as assuring the reproduction of the industrial structure itself. She writes, "institutional knowledge is driven toward making the audience visible in such a way that it helps the institutions to increase their power to get their relationship with the audience under control, and this can only be done by symbolically constructing 'television audience' as an objectified category of others that can be controlled, that is, contained in the interest of a predetermined institutional goal" (7). Ang demonstrates, in particular, how various industrially sanctioned programming strategies (programme strips, "hammocking" new shows between successful ones, and counter-programming to a competitor's strengths) and modes of audience measurement grow out of, and invariably support, those institutional goals. And, most crucially, her approach is not an effort to ascertain the empirical certainty of "actual" audiences; instead, it charts the discursive terrain in which the abstract concept of audience becomes material for the continuation of industry practices. Ang's work tenders special insight to film culture. In fact, television scholarship has taken full advantage of exploring the routine nature of that medium, the best of which deploys its findings to lay bare configurations of power in domestic contexts. One aspect has been television time and schedules. For example, David Morley points to the role of television in structuring everyday life, discussing a range of research that emphasises the temporal dimension. Alerting us to the non- necessary determination of television's temporal structure, he comments that we "need to maintain a sensitivity to these micro-levels of division and differentiation while we attend to the macro-questions of the media's own role in the social structuring of time" (265). As such, the negotiation of temporal structures implies that schedules are not monolithic impositions of order. Indeed, as Morley puts it, they "must be seen as both entering into already constructed, historically specific divisions of space and time, and also as transforming those pre-existing division" (266). Television's temporal grid has been address by others as well. Paddy Scannell characterises scheduling and continuity techniques, which link programmes, as a standardisation of use, making radio and television predictable, 'user friendly' media (9). John Caughie refers to the organization of flow as a way to talk about the national particularities of British and American television (49-50). All, while making their own contributions, appeal to a detailing of viewing context as part of any study of audience, consumption or experience; uncovering the practices of television programmers as they attempt to apprehend and create viewing conditions for their audiences is a first step in this detailing. Why has a similar conceptual framework not been applied with the same rigour to film? Certainly the history of film and television's association with different, at times divergent, disciplinary formations helps us appreciate such theoretical disparities. I would like to mention one less conspicuous explanation. It occurs to me that one frequently sees a collapse in the distinction between the everyday and the domestic; in much scholarship, the latter term appears as a powerful trope of the former. The consequence has been the absenting of a myriad of other -- if you will, non-domestic -- manifestations of everyday-ness, unfortunately encouraging a rather literal understanding of the everyday. The impression is that the abstractions of the everyday are reduced to daily occurrences. Simply put, my minor appeal is for the extension of this vein of television scholarship to out-of-home technologies and cultural forms, that is, other sites and locations of the everyday. In so doing, we pay attention to extra-textual structures of cinematic life; other regimes of knowledge, power, subjectivity and practice appear. Film audiences require a discussion about the ordinary, the calculated and the casual practices of cinematic engagement. Such a discussion would chart institutional knowledge, identifying operating strategies and recognising the creativity and multidimensionality of cinemagoing. What are the discursive parameters in which the film industry imagines cinema audiences? What are the related implications for the structures in which the practice of cinemagoing occurs? Vectors of Exhibition Time One set of those structures of audience and industry practice involves the temporal dimension of film exhibition. In what follows, I want to speculate on three vectors of the temporality of cinema spaces (meaning that I will not address issues of diegetic time). Note further that my observations emerge from a close study of industrial discourse in the U.S. and Canada. I would be interested to hear how they are manifest in other continental contexts. First, the running times of films encourage turnovers of the audience during the course of a single day at each screen. The special event of lengthy anomalies has helped mark the epic, and the historic, from standard fare. As discussed above, show times coordinate cinemagoing and regulate leisure time. Knowing the codes of screenings means participating in an extension of the industrial model of labour and service management. Running times incorporate more texts than the feature presentation alone. Besides the history of double features, there are now advertisements, trailers for coming attractions, trailers for films now playing in neighbouring auditoriums, promotional shorts demonstrating new sound systems, public service announcements, reminders to turn off cell phones and pagers, and the exhibitor's own signature clips. A growing focal point for filmgoing, these introductory texts received a boost in 1990, when the Motion Picture Association of America changed its standards for the length of trailers, boosting it from 90 seconds to a full two minutes (Brookman). This intertextuality needs to be supplemented by a consideration of inter- media appeals. For example, advertisements for television began appearing in theatres in the 1990s. And many lobbies of multiplex cinemas now offer a range of media forms, including video previews, magazines, arcades and virtual reality games. Implied here is that motion pictures are not the only media audiences experience in cinemas and that there is an explicit attempt to integrate a cinema's texts with those at other sites and locations. Thus, an exhibitor's schedule accommodates an intertextual strip, offering a limited parallel to Raymond Williams's concept of "flow", which he characterised by stating -- quite erroneously -- "in all communication systems before broadcasting the essential items were discrete" (86-7). Certainly, the flow between trailers, advertisements and feature presentations is not identical to that of the endless, ongoing text of television. There are not the same possibilities for "interruption" that Williams emphasises with respect to broadcasting flow. Further, in theatrical exhibition, there is an end-time, a time at which there is a public acknowledgement of the completion of the projected performance, one that necessitates vacating the cinema. This end-time is a moment at which the "rental" of the space has come due; and it harkens a return to the street, to the negotiation of city space, to modes of public transit and the mobile privatisation of cars. Nonetheless, a schedule constructs a temporal boundary in which audiences encounter a range of texts and media in what might be seen as limited flow. Second, the ephemerality of audiences -- moving to the cinema, consuming its texts, then passing the seat on to someone else -- is matched by the ephemerality of the features themselves. Distributors' demand for increasing numbers of screens necessary for massive, saturation openings has meant that films now replace one another more rapidly than in the past. Films that may have run for months now expect weeks, with fewer exceptions. Wider openings and shorter runs have created a cinemagoing culture characterised by flux. The acceleration of the turnover of films has been made possible by the expansion of various secondary markets for distribution, most importantly videotape, splintering where we might find audiences and multiplying viewing contexts. Speeding up the popular in this fashion means that the influence of individual texts can only be truly gauged via cross-media scrutiny. Short theatrical runs are not axiomatically designed for cinemagoers anymore; they can also be intended to attract the attention of video renters, purchasers and retailers. Independent video distributors, especially, "view theatrical release as a marketing expense, not a profit center" (Hindes & Roman 16). In this respect, we might think of such theatrical runs as "trailers" or "loss leaders" for the video release, with selected locations for a film's release potentially providing visibility, even prestige, in certain city markets or neighbourhoods. Distributors are able to count on some promotion through popular consumer- guide reviews, usually accompanying theatrical release as opposed to the passing critical attention given to video release. Consequently, this shapes the kinds of uses an assessment of the current cinema is put to; acknowledging that new releases function as a resource for cinema knowledge highlights the way audiences choose between and determine big screen and small screen films. Taken in this manner, popular audiences see the current cinema as largely a rough catalogue to future cultural consumption. Third, motion picture release is part of the structure of memories and activities over the course of a year. New films appear in an informal and ever-fluctuating structure of seasons. The concepts of summer movies and Christmas films, or the opening weekends that are marked by a holiday, sets up a fit between cinemagoing and other activities -- family gatherings, celebrations, etc. Further, this fit is presumably resonant for both the industry and popular audiences alike, though certainly for different reasons. The concentration of new films around visible holiday periods results in a temporally defined dearth of cinemas; an inordinate focus upon three periods in the year in the U.S. and Canada -- the last weekend in May, June/July/August and December -- creates seasonal shortages of screens (Rice-Barker 20). In fact, the boom in theatre construction through the latter half of the 1990s was, in part, to deal with those short-term shortages and not some year-round inadequate seating. Configurations of releasing colour a calendar with the tactical manoeuvres of distributors and exhibitors. Releasing provides a particular shape to the "current cinema", a term I employ to refer to a temporally designated slate of cinematic texts characterised most prominently by their newness. Television arranges programmes to capitalise on flow, to carry forward audiences and to counter-programme competitors' simultaneous offerings. Similarly, distributors jostle with each other, with their films and with certain key dates, for the limited weekends available, hoping to match a competitor's film intended for one audience with one intended for another. Industry reporter Leonard Klady sketched some of the contemporary truisms of releasing based upon the experience of 1997. He remarks upon the success of moving Liar, Liar (Tom Shadyac, 1997) to a March opening and the early May openings of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (Jay Roach, 1997) and Breakdown (Jonathan Mostow, 1997), generally seen as not desirable times of the year for premieres. He cautions against opening two films the same weekend, and thus competing with yourself, using the example of Fox's Soul Food (George Tillman, Jr., 1997) and The Edge (Lee Tamahori, 1997). While distributors seek out weekends clear of films that would threaten to overshadow their own, Klady points to the exception of two hits opening on the same date of December 19, 1997 -- Tomorrow Never Dies (Roger Spottiswoode, 1997) and Titanic (James Cameron, 1997). Though but a single opinion, Klady's observations are a peek into a conventional strain of strategising among distributors and exhibitors. Such planning for the timing and appearance of films is akin to the programming decisions of network executives. And I would hazard to say that digital cinema, reportedly -- though unlikely -- just on the horizon and in which texts will be beamed to cinemas via satellite rather than circulated in prints, will only augment this comparison; releasing will become that much more like programming, or at least will be conceptualised as such. To summarize, the first vector of exhibition temporality is the scheduling and running time; the second is the theatrical run; the third is the idea of seasons and the "programming" of openings. These are just some of the forces streamlining filmgoers; the temporal structuring of screenings, runs and film seasons provides a material contour to the abstraction of audience. Here, what I have delineated are components of an industrial logic about popular and public entertainment, one that offers a certain controlled knowledge about and for cinemagoing audiences. Shifting Conceptual Frameworks A note of caution is in order. I emphatically resist an interpretation that we are witnessing the becoming-film of television and the becoming-tv of film. Underneath the "inversion" argument is a weak brand of technological determinism, as though each asserts its own essential qualities. Such a pat declaration seems more in line with the mythos of convergence, and its quasi-Darwinian "natural" collapse of technologies. Instead, my point here is quite the opposite, that there is nothing essential or unique about the scheduling or flow of television; indeed, one does not have to look far to find examples of less schedule-dependent television. What I want to highlight is that application of any term of distinction -- event/flow, gaze/glance, public/private, and so on -- has more to do with our thinking, with the core discursive arrangements that have made film and television, and their audiences, available to us as knowable and different. So, using empirical evidence to slide one term over to the other is a strategy intended to supplement and destabilise the manner in which we draw conclusions, and even pose questions, of each. What this proposes is, again following the contributions of Ien Ang, that we need to see cinemagoing in its institutional formation, rather than some stable technological, textual or experiential apparatus. The activity is not only a function of a constraining industrial practice or of wildly creative patrons, but of a complex inter-determination between the two. Cinemagoing is an organisational entity harbouring, reviving and constituting knowledge and commonsense about film commodities, audiences and everyday life. An event of cinema begins well before the dimming of an auditorium's lights. The moment a newspaper is consulted, with its local representation of an internationally circulating current cinema, its listings belie a scheduling, an orderliness, to the possible projections in a given location. As audiences are formed as subjects of the current cinema, we are also agents in the continuation of a set of institutions as well. References Ang, Ien. Desperately Seeking the Audience. New York: Routledge, 1991. Brookman, Faye. "Trailers: The Big Business of Drawing Crowds." Variety 13 June 1990: 48. Caughie, John. "Playing at Being American: Games and Tactics." Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Ed. Patricia Mellencamp. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steve Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Hindes, Andrew, and Monica Roman. "Video Titles Do Pitstops on Screens." Variety 16-22 Sep. 1996: 11+. Klady, Leonard. "Hitting and Missing the Market: Studios Show Savvy -- or Just Luck -- with Pic Release Strategies." Variety 19-25 Jan. 1998: 18. Morley, David. Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992. Newspaper Association of America. "Before They See It Here..." Advertisement. Variety 22-28 Nov. 1999: 38. Rice-Barker, Leo. "Industry Banks on New Technology, Expanded Slates." Playback 6 May 1996: 19-20. Scannell, Paddy. Radio, Television and Modern Life. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken, 1975. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Charles Acland. "Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: Cinemagoing Audiences as Institutional Subjects." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/cinema.php>. Chicago style: Charles Acland, "Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: Cinemagoing Audiences as Institutional Subjects," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/cinema.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Charles Acland. (2000) Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: Cinemagoing Audiences as Institutional Subjects. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/cinema.php> ([your date of access]).

Dans ce travail, « nation » et « diversité » sont pensées et questionnées ensemble, depuis le champ de l'éducation. Cette thèse apporte des éléments qui expliquent comment se construisent et se naturalisent les formes d'identification à une catégorie nationale. Les réflexions visent à décentrer l'idée qu'une nation est « une et homogène » et à questionner la place que les différences culturelles occupent, en termes d'inclusion et d'exclusion, dans les discours sur la nation. Ici, le concept de « nation », composant du modèle politique de l'État-nation, est compris comme une construction politique et sociale. Il est question du Belize (historiquement colonisé par la Grande-Bretagne et indépendant depuis 1981) qui, comme de nombreuses « nouvelles » nations après les décolonisations, a été légitimée par un pouvoir mondial et a été définie, délimitée et « manufacturée » depuis « le haut » par un État. L'éducation est un outil largement investi par les États pour diffuser des représentations et des symboles qui contribuent à la construction d'identifications nationales. Les écoles sont aussi des espaces de socialisations multiples où les individus se socialisent et construisent des identifications selon des catégories sociales. Cette recherche examine les manières dans lesquelles les acteurs du système éducatif (institutions et espaces scolaires) mobilisent et transforment, dans les récits historiques (textes, paroles, images, etc.), des catégories raciales et ethniques qui participent, dans les écoles, aux processus d'incorporation et d'identification à la nation. Pour appréhender la complexité des processus de « nationalisations » des écoliers, cette recherche combine trois axes d'analyses : l'histoire sociale de l'institutionnalisation de l'école coloniale ; une sociologie des acteurs d'institutions éducatives chargés d'écrire l'histoire nationale ; une ethnographie des pratiques éducatives dans des écoles primaires. Ainsi, ce travail considère les dimensions historiques, institutionnelles, idéologiques et sociales qui participent à la socialisation des acteurs qui font l'école. Depuis des perspectives locales et globales, les analyses montrent que le développement de l'éducation coloniale a contribué à façonner des identités raciales et ethniques propres au Belize, qui se réarticulent, aujourd'hui, à l'école nationale. La thèse met en lumière les liens entre les institutions de l'État (ministère de l'Éducation, université) avec une organisation ethnique et avec les écoles primaires, dans l'élaboration et l'implantation de programmes éducatifs. Elle rend compte de reproductions, de transformations et d'appropriations ethnopolitiques de l'histoire coloniale qui font évoluer, non seulement, les discours historiques sur la nation, mais qui éclairent aussi la diversité des significations que les acteurs construisent sur les différences. Enfin, les voix des écoliers nuancent et questionnent les discours schématiques et stéréotypés des institutions. Le poids de l'histoire est conséquent, néanmoins, les expressions des enfants recueillies dans le cadre de cette étude montrent à quel point les imaginaires nationaux sont fluides et pluriels, les élèves s'approprient et réinterprètent les discours, en faisant preuve qu'il n'existe pas « une nation », mais bien une multiplicité de perceptions et de vécus qui donnent du sens à des identifications qualifiées de nationales
In this work, “nation” and “diversity” are thought and questioned together from the Education field. This dissertation brings elements that explain how identifications to a national category are constructed and naturalized. The reflections aim to decenter the idea that a nation is “one and homogenous” and to question the place that cultural differences occupy, in terms of inclusion and exclusion, in the discourses about the nation. Here, the concept of nation, as part of the Nation-state political model, is understood as a political and social construction. It is about Belize, historically colonized by Great Britain and independent from 1981, that like many other “new” nations after decolonization, were legitimized by an international power and was defined, demarcated, and “manufactured” from a State. The Education is a tool largely invested by States to diffuse representations and symbols that contribute to constructions of national identifications. The schools are also spaces where children socialize daily and construct identifications according to social categories. This research studies the ways in which actors of the educative system (institutions and schools) mobilize and transform, in historical accounts (texts, speeches, images, etc.) racial and ethnic categories which participate, in the schools, to the process of national incorporation and identification. In order to understand the complexity of the process of “nationalization” of students, this study combines three analytical approaches: the social history of the institutionalization of the colonial education; a sociology of actors in educational institutions responsible to write the national history; an ethnography of educational practices in primary schools. In this way, this work considers the historical, institutional, ideological, and social dimensions that contribute to build national socializations in schools. From local and global perspectives, the analyses show that the development of the colonial education participated to shape racial and ethnic identities specific to Belize that are rearticulated today in the national school. The dissertation enlightens the links between governmental institutions (ministry of Education, University) with an ethnic organization and primary schools, in the elaboration and implementation of educational programs or projects. It reports on reproductions, transformations and ethnopolitical appropriations of the colonial history that make evolved, not only the historical stories of the nation, but also shows the diversity of significations that actors construct about differences. Finally, the voices of the children nuance and question the schematical and stereotypical discourses of the institutions. The weight of history is significant, however, the student expressions collected in this study, show how far the national imaginaries are smooth and plural, the pupils appropriate and reinterpret the discourses, proving that there is no “one nation”, but a multiplicity of perceptions and backgrounds that give meanings to identifications qualified as nationals

Ce travail tente de mettre en évidence le lien entre les politiques de la langue et le nationalisme en Belgique de 1780 à 1970. Il prend en compte l'administration politique et linguistique des territoires belges avant la création de l'état; la mobilisation par les entrepreneurs nationalistes flamands et wallons, depuis le XIXème siècle, de segments croissants de la population, en vue d'inscrire leurs revendications linguistiques sur l'agenda des gouvernements successifs; ainsi que l'ensemble des législations linguistiques depuis 1795. Nous concluons à la réussite des constructions nationales autour d'un élément fédérateur primordial: la langue. Celle-ci est destinée, par un transfert métonymique, à signifier la nation et à niveler les disparités sociales au profit de l'identification commune au travers de l'expression linguistique
This dissertation is an analysis of the link between language policies and nationalism in belgium from 1780 to 1970. It takes the following facts into account : the political and linguistic administration of the belgian territories before the birth of the state (1830); the mobilization of increasing parts of the population by flemmish and walloon political entrepreneurs since the 19th century, attempting to put their linguistic demands on the governments agenda; all the language laws since 1795. The national constructions via the most important element of federation, the language, are successful. The language signifies nation-ness and it is used to level down social inequalities to the benefit of common identification

La thèse analyse l'évolution de la législation de la nationalité du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg du Code civil des Français (1803) à la loi toute récente de 2008, avec une étude détaillée de la période qui va de l'indépendance du pays (1839) au début de la Seconde guerre mondiale (1940). L'étude dégage l'influence importante de la législation des pays voisins sur cette évolution.L'histoire de l'Etat-nation, des migrations et de la politique migratoire est également abordée.

The dissertation analyzes the evolution of the nationality legislation of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg from the French Code civil (1803) till the most recent law of 2008.
Doctorat en Histoire, art et archéologie
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Abstract During World War II, the United States built more than 200 defense installations on sovereign soil in Latin America in the name of cooperation in hemisphere defense. Predictably, it proved to be a fraught affair. Despite widespread acclaim for Pan-American unity with the Allied cause, defense construction incited local conflicts that belied the wartime rhetoric of fraternity and equality. This book reconstructs the history of US basing in World War II Latin America, from the elegant chambers of the American foreign ministries to the cantinas, courtrooms, plazas, and brothels surrounding US defense sites. Foregrounding the wartime experiences of Brazil, Cuba, and Panama, the book considers how Latin American leaders and diplomats used basing rights as bargaining chips to advance their nation-building agendas with US resources, while limiting overreach by the “Colossus of the North” as best they could; but conflicts on the ground over labor rights, discrimination, sex, and criminal jurisdiction routinely threatened the peace. Steeped in conflict, the story of wartime basing certainly departs from the celebratory triumphalism commonly associated with this period in US–Latin American relations, but this book does not wholly upend the conventional account of wartime cooperation. Rather, the history of basing distills a central tension that has infused regional affairs since a wave of independence movements first transformed the Americas into a society of nations: though national sovereignty and international cooperation are compatible concepts in principle, they are difficult to reconcile in practice.

AbstractVölkisch, racist, and essentialist constructions of religious belief flourished in the first half of the twentieth century. After 1933, debates on Germanness in the German Youth Movement, and among intellectuals, artists, and state functionaries helped shape the politics of national socialist (NS) institutions. Discussions that sought to ground religious experience in scientific and historical evidence, drew on a combination of the phenomenology of religion, speculations about the nature of primordial belief, biological and historical evolutionism, and race theory. The author examines the formation of a discourse in which knowledge about India was selected from the academic discipline of Indology and relocated to suit the positions of the contributors to the debate. Essentially, the field reproduced aspects of religion that emphasized confessionalism, rationality, nationalism, the arts, science, and ritual in relation to modernity.

In the Globalization Period, national actors in the newly independent Belize advocated for educational content on Belizean culture and history to help citizens overcome colonial legacies, embrace national identity, and address diversity issues. Drawing from analyses of recent social studies curricula, education practices, and interviews with state actors, this chapter demonstrates that Belizean education related to culture and history connects with nationalist goals, global trends, and social and economic development rhetoric and continues to essentialize and stereotype cultural differences. The author also reveals local negotiations of official constructions of heritage in educational contexts, providing examples from ethnographic observations and interviews with teachers and young people from rural Kriol villages. Though local citizens replicate narrow ethnic divisions, cultural stereotypes, and social hierarchies, they also challenge them, resist state institutions and foreigners, advocate for their communities, and engage in vernacular heritage practices.

This introductory chapter presents a model of the national construction of knowledge regimes—a model based on the comparative historical analysis presented in subsequent chapters. To begin with, knowledge regimes produce the analysis, advice, and other ideas that others have shown often influence public policy. However, knowledge regimes themselves are shaped largely by the nationally specific policymaking and production regimes with which they are associated. Challenges to and changes in production and policymaking regimes often cause changes in knowledge regimes, which is not surprising insofar as institutional change in one area of a political economy can cause change in another, particularly when people believe that institutional complementarities have broken down and try to renew them. As such, this book argues that policy ideas have national origins and the way they are produced is largely determined by nationally specific institutions.

How was neoliberalization accomplished, and by whom? The answer in countries such as Chile and Argentina in the 1970s was as simple as it was swift, brutal, and sure: a military coup backed by the traditional upper classes (as well as by the US government), followed by the fierce repression of all solidarities created within the labour and urban social movements which had so threatened their power. But the neoliberal revolution usually attributed to Thatcher and Reagan after 1979 had to be accomplished by democratic means. For a shift of this magnitude to occur required the prior construction of political consent across a sufficiently large spectrum of the population to win elections. What Gramsci calls ‘common sense’ (defined as ‘the sense held in common’) typically grounds consent. Common sense is constructed out of longstanding practices of cultural socialization often rooted deep in regional or national traditions. It is not the same as the ‘good sense’ that can be constructed out of critical engagement with the issues of the day. Common sense can, therefore, be profoundly misleading, obfuscating or disguising real problems under cultural prejudices. Cultural and traditional values (such as belief in God and country or views on the position of women in society) and fears (of communists, immigrants, strangers, or ‘others’) can be mobilized to mask other realities. Political slogans can be invoked that mask specific strategies beneath vague rhetorical devices. The word ‘freedom’ resonates so widely within the common-sense understanding of Americans that it becomes ‘a button that elites can press to open the door to the masses’ to justify almost anything. Thus could Bush retrospectively justify the Iraq war. Gramsci therefore concluded that political questions become ‘insoluble’ when ‘disguised as cultural ones’. In seeking to understand the construction of political consent, we must learn to extract political meanings from their cultural integuments. So how, then, was sufficient popular consent generated to legitimize the neoliberal turn? The channels through which this was done were diverse. Powerful ideological influences circulated through the corporations, the media, and the numerous institutions that constitute civil society––such as the universities, schools, churches, and professional associations.

In 1911 Charles Ives wrote “The New River,” a song unique among his works for its outspoken environmentalist stance. Composed in direct response to the diversion of waters from Ives's beloved Housatonic River to feed New York City reservoirs and plans for constructing a dam, the song also captured widespread national outrage over the Hetch Hetchy Dam being built at the same time through Yosemite National Park. Combining transcendentalist understandings of nature with more contemporary arguments to save Hetch Hetchy published by Robert Underwood Johnson and John Muir, Ives's song sounds his belief “the fabric of life weaves itself whole.”

Abstract It is widely believed that since the mid-1980s the United States has been experiencing a hate crime epidemic. This belief has been expressed over and over again by politicians, journalists, scholars, and spokespersons for racial, religious, gay and lesbian, and other advocacy groups. Leo McCarthy, lieutenant governor of California, declared that “[t]here is an epidemic of hate crimes and hate violence rising in California”;1 Mississippi State Senator Bill Minor warned, “this is the type of crime that easily spreads like an epidemic.”2 The District Attorney for St. Paul, Minnesota claimed that state and local governments faced a “massive increase in hate crimes.”3 A journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that “hate-motivated violence is spreading across the United States in 'epidemic’ proportions.”4 Dr. Arthur Caliandro, cochair of the religious group, Partnership of Faith, termed hate crimes “a virus that has turned into a disease that has grown into an epidemic.”5 A New Tork Times journalist characterized the incidence of hate crime as “rain[ing] down hard and heavy,” and as “a recent explosion.”6 The Boston Globe claimed that “incidents of racial and religious harassment or intimidation have skyrocketed.”7 An article in the National Law Journal characterized the 1990s as “the decade of hate—or at least, of hate crime.”

International relations (IR) moral realism has been mistakenly affiliated with the ‘Chinese School’ and accused of sharing the same defects of that school. Theorists of IR moral realism oppose the idea of constructing an IR theory with a national or cultural identity because they believe IR theories should have universal applicability. The motivation of constructing moral realism is to enrich modern IR theory academically rather than to legitimize Chinese foreign policy politically. IR moral realism is not a theory of Chinese exceptionalism because it explains the strategic preferences of leaders of major powers, both Chinese and foreign; meanwhile, it never asserts that China will provide a global leadership more moral than those of other major powers. The theory is constructed by hybridizing Chinese traditional thought with modern IR theories and it is not affected by Sino-centrism. It is tested by the current changes in international order like all other IR theories.

In the earliest period of American history, astronomy and the exploration of the heavens was considered a hallmark of intellectual development and a noble endeavor for the colonial elite. In the wake of the American Revolution, the desire to signal a robust and independent national presence intensified in all areas, including astronomy. Major efforts in this regard were led by John Quincy Adams. From the mid-1830s, and for the next four decades, the construction of observatories accelerated rapidly as part of what has been referred to as “the American Observatory Movement” starting with university and college observatories and progressing to observatories with broader social contexts. An observatory located on top of a Philadelphia high school was an unlikely inflexion point in the history of American space exploration. The motivations of religious belief also played a significant role in the funding of early American observatories. The Georgetown Observatory was a point of contention between American Jesuits and the Superior General in Rome, and politics and ambition elevated the Navy’s Depot for Charts and Instruments to America’s first National Observatory.

‘The watering of the West’ describes the 1902 Reclamation Act (or Newlands Act) that established a National Bureau of Reclamation charged with constructing dams and irrigation projects in the western United States to reclaim the region from arid nature, open new lands for farmers, and restore the American dream for generations to come. The watering of the West required belief in new “scientific” propositions—many dubious—and entailed assigning added responsibilities to experts, often employed by the federal government, who took charge over not only the manipulation of western waters, but also the management of western lands and the regulation of other natural resources. This made westerners ever more dependent on federal stewardship and federal expenditures—and ever more resentful of federal oversight.

Since the 1990s, the scale and speed of cross-border academic mobility has notably increased. Universities around the world are recruiting across national boundaries and increasingly employ a diverse and transnational academic workforce. Ferdman argues that working toward inclusion in diverse organizations (such as universities) can present many challenges and tensions and is complex and multifaceted, because of issues concerning safety, voice, authenticity, equity, and equality for people across multiple identity groups. This chapter draws on 17 semi-structured interviews with transnational academics from 11 countries employed by eight different universities across Australia to explore the workplace experiences of diversity and inclusion in terms of their voice and/or silence. The findings indicate that although the respondents believe in having constructive forms of voice in their workplace, they often reported that they were reluctant to speak up.

The Wa people on the China-Myanmar border are one of the last primitive ethnic groups in China, and they are also one of the floating ethnic groups without the concept of national boundaries in history. The measurement method of traditional Wa buildings is based on the human scale, and every part of the building has a close relationship with people. In previous studies, little attention has been paid to the relationship between the Wa people and traditional architecture, and it only describes the architecture. This paper analyzes the conventional building construction techniques of the Wa people in Cangyuan Wa Autonomous County in China. Further, this paper uses fieldwork research and data collection to compare the impact of traditional Wa people's housing and modern housing on comfort and belief levels. A detailed survey of villages in Mengdong Town, Mengjiao Township, and Danjia Township in Cangyuan County studies the changes in local materials and building structures in Cangyuan. Identify the human factors and actual usage of traditional and modern housing in Wa villages.

Abstract. Achieving performance in badminton without developing an efficient footwork is Utopian, considering the dynamics of the game. The hypothesis of the study: we believe that badminton footwork is substantially different between each level of players' performance. The purpose of the study is to determinate the time required for players to move from the center of the court to the key points of defense in order to cover the full court and also to identify the main differences of how players move on the court regarding each level of performance. The main research methods used in the study are: bibliographical method, measurement and evaluation method, mathematical-statistical method and the graphical method. The study is realized with participation of 24 players, spanning 3 age groups and different performance levels in the national championship. The results of the study will help to research the construction of an innovative electronic device, designed to improve reaction times, speed and to help players learn the specific paths of the badminton court. The electronic device uses eight motion sensors in order to detect the players when they reach their action areas. Four sensors are placed in the corners of the half court (in badminton each player moves in his half court) and other four are placed in the middle of the courts' lines. Each sensor has a visual signal (a colored led) which is turned off when an obstacle (the players' body) reaches its action area. The device uses a microcontroller which commands the visual signals according to the difficulty of the selected program.

Achieving performance in badminton without developing an efficient footwork is Utopian, considering the dynamics of the game. The hypothesis of the study: we believe that badminton footwork is substantially different between each level of players' performance. The purpose of the study is to determinate the time required for players to move from the center of the court to the key points of defense in order to cover the full court and also to identify the main differences of how players move on the court regarding each level of performance. The main research methods used in the study are: bibliographical method, measurement and evaluation method, mathematical-statistical method and the graphical method. The study is realized with participation of 24 players, spanning 3 age groups and different performance levels in the national championship. The results of the study will help to research the construction of an innovative electronic device, designed to improve reaction times, speed and to help players learn the specific paths of the badminton court. The electronic device uses eight motion sensors in order to detect the players when they reach their action areas. Four sensors are placed in the corners of the half court (in badminton each player moves in his half court) and other four are placed in the middle of the courts' lines. Each sensor has a visual signal (a colored led) which is turned off when an obstacle (the players' body) reaches its action area. The device uses a microcontroller which commands the visual signals according to the difficulty of the selected program.

The starting point of the present paper is the hypothesis that the distribution of discursive words characterizes the trends in the development of the writing style of the 19th century. The paper presents and discusses the results of an experiment based on the data of the Russian National Corpus on the frequency of using discursive words with the semantics of epistemic modality, such as konechno, razumeetsya (both roughly meaning ‘of course’), po-vidimomu ‘apparently’, kak kazhetsya, kazalos’ by (both ≈ ‘it would seem’), naverno ≈ ‘as it were’, veroyatno ‘probably’, pozhaluy ≈ ‘maybe’, deystvitel’no ‘really’, etc. We show that the frequency of this group of expressions increases in the second half of the 19th century. A similar trend is also observed for some syntactic constructions with the same semantics: (ya) dumayu, chto… ‘(I) think that...’; (ya) schitayu, chto… ‘(I) believe that...’; (mne) kazhetsya, chto… ‘it seems to me that’. The revealed regularity is considered as a discursive practice in changing the style of fiction, which consisted in expanding the modus part of the utterance as compared to the earlier period. The discursive practice of expanding the modus was inherent only to a group of innovative writers (first of all, F. M. Dostoevsky, M. E. SaltykovShchedrin, L. N. Tolstoy, I. A. Goncharov, A. F. Pisemsky, P. I. MelnikovPechersky, N. S. Leskov, and I. S. Turgenev), who, however, due to their talent, social significance, and the number of published texts, had a significant impact on the language of fiction. The task of studying the dynamics of artistic style is to identify and describe a set of discursive practices that establish written discourse as such.

Abstract In drilling operation, drilling NPT caused by top drive mechanical failure and high noisy and energy suffered a lot onsite. This paper introduces a top drive which utilizes a permanent magnet synchronous AC motor to drive the quill directly without a gearbox which can shorten drive chain. Meanwhile, its symmetrical and compact mechanical construction and shorter main and control cables obviously improve installation efficiency and effectively reduce the failure rate. We conducted research through structural design, motor efficiency and heat dissipation, and automation system upgrades to form a set of high-efficiency, high-performance direct drive top drive. Transmission structure aspect: design of direct-drive top drive structure, calculation and verification of main load bearing parts, analysis of top drive failure types and effects. Motor energy efficiency aspect: research on speed measurement method of permanent magnet direct drive motor, precise control method of permanent magnet direct drive motor, and closed phase change heat dissipation technology. Automation enhancement aspect: research on control system architecture, self-diagnosis system, One-click operating system. This study resulted in three research findings including synchronous permanent magnet motor design, One-Click operating system with self-diagnosis and efficient self-circulation heat dissipation technology. The new generation of direct-drive top drive can reduce current required by 100-200A and increase efficiency by 20-30% compared with asynchronous motor, while meeting the requirements of corresponding rated load, rated power, speed and continuous torque. It can realize quill rotation precision less than 1° under load and keep the speed fluctuation reduced from 10.6% to 1.1% by improving the motor dynamic response performance. The One-click control method realized by preset parameters can reduce the driller's repeated operation and visual judgment. The tripping efficiency can be increased by 11.9%, reducing the driller's operation complexity and improving drilling safety. The application of phase-change heat dissipation system can reduce ambient noise to 72dB without external circulating pump. At present, over 10 sets of this new equipment have been delivered and industrial applications have been launched in CNPC Dagang Oilfield, CNPC Weiyuan National Shale-Gas Demonstration Zone and Sinopec NiuYe Shale-Gas Demonstration Zone. Till now nearly 20 wells have been conduct with running trouble-free throughout. Intelligent direct drive top drive of synchronous permanent magnet motor with phase change heat dissipation can not only improve the top drive mechanical transmission efficiency and extend the service life of main components, but also can reduce energy consumption and improve the automation level of top drive, making the top drive further satisfy the high-demanded requirements in drilling operation. We believe that there will be a great demand in deep wells, ultra-deep wells and unconventional oil and gas resources exploitation, which has a broad application prospect and good economic and social benefits.

As artistic research work in various disciplines and national contexts continues to develop, the diversity of approaches to the field becomes ever more apparent. This is to be welcomed, because it keeps alive ideas of plurality and complexity at a particular time in history when the gross oversimplifications and obfuscations of political discourses are compromising the nature of language itself, leading to what several commentators have already called ‘a post-truth’ world. In this brutal environment where ‘information’ is uncoupled from reality and validated only by how loudly and often it is voiced, the artist researcher has a responsibility that goes beyond the confines of our discipline to articulate the truth-content of his or her artistic practice. To do this, they must embrace daring and risk-taking, finding ways of communicating that flow against the current norms. In artistic research, the empathic communication of information and experience – and not merely the ‘verbally empathic’ – is a sign of research transferability, a marker for research content. But this, in some circles, is still a heretical point of view. Research, in its more traditional manifestations mistrusts empathy and individually-incarnated human experience; the researcher, although a sentient being in the world, is expected to behave dispassionately in their professional discourse, and with a distrust for insights that come primarily from instinct. For the construction of empathic systems in which to study and research, our structures still need to change. So, we need to work toward a new world (one that is still not our idea), a world that is symptomatic of what we might like artistic research to be. Risk is one of the elements that helps us to make the conceptual twist that turns subjective, reflexive experience into transpersonal, empathic communication and/or scientifically-viable modes of exchange. It gives us something to work with in engaging with debates because it means that something is at stake. To propose a space where such risks may be taken, I shall revisit Gillian Rose’s metaphor of ‘the fold’ that I analysed in the first Symposium presented by the Arne Nordheim Centre for Artistic Research (NordART) at the Norwegian Academy of Music in November 2015. I shall deepen the exploration of the process of ‘unfolding’, elaborating on my belief in its appropriateness for artistic research work; I shall further suggest that Rose’s metaphor provides a way to bridge some of the gaps of understanding that have already developed between those undertaking artistic research and those working in the more established music disciplines.