Academic literature on the topic 'Degree Discipline: Botany'

Plant diseases can be traced back almost as far as recorded history. Numerous ancient writings describe plagues and blasts destroying crops and modern civilization still faces many plant disease challenges. Plant pathology has its roots in botany and notable scientists such as Tillet, Prevost, and deBary already had concluded microscopic organisms could cause plant diseases before Robert Koch established the rules of proof of pathogenicity with sheep anthrax. Plant pathologists can be credited with helping improve crop yields and food production throughout the world. However, at a time when there are increasing challenges to crop production, some that potentially may increase the severity or distribution of plant diseases, the training of future plant pathologists appears to be declining, at least in the United States. The ability of the U.S. Land Grant University (USLGU) system to attract and train future generations of plant pathologists may be at risk. Recent data from university plant pathology departments collected by The American Phytopathological Society (APS) documents a decline in the number of students completing advanced degrees in plant pathology, departments with fewer faculty with a diverse expertise in applied plant pathology, fewer stand-alone, single discipline departments of plant pathology, a reduced ability of many departments to offer specific curricular aspects of plant pathology, and a demographic profile that casts an ominous prediction for an unusually large number of faculty retirements over the next decade. The impact of these factors could be a shortage of highly skilled, applied plant pathologists in the U.S. in coming years. The affect also may be felt globally as fewer international students may receive pre-doctoral and post-doctoral training in plant pathology in the U.S. as faculty retire and are not replaced. On the other hand, this likely will create greater opportunities for universities around the world to take leadership in many aspects of plant pathology education. While a decline in students and young faculty trained in applied and field-level specialties of plant pathology (mycology, bacteriology, plant nematology, forest pathology, epidemiology, etc.) is occurring, those trained in the cellular and molecular host-pathogen interactions specialties appear to be increasing. Many plant pathology faculty hired at USLGUs in the last decade are trained in molecular biology and received their Ph.D. degree in a field other than plant pathology. They are now applying those skills to research numerous aspects of host-pathogen interactions of model pathosystems. A shift to a greater research emphasis on molecular host-pathogen interactions over the last decade is evidenced by the number of research articles published in the three APS journals; Plant Disease, Phytopathology and Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions (MPMI). From 1985 to 2007, there has been a decline in the number of articles published in Plant Disease (–29%) and Phytopathology (–36%) and a steady increase in those published in MPMI since its inception in 1990 (+111%). With new research tools come new research questions. The tools of molecular biology have allowed us to look deeper into questions than ever before and provided us with a perspective not before seen. As we dissect and decode the genomes of the world’s most notorious plant pathogens we get closer and closer to alleviating the global losses and human suffering caused by plant diseases. New “designer crops” with engineered traits for drought and cold tolerance, pest resistance, increased levels of micronutrients, healthier oils such as omega fatty acids, and plant-derived pharmaceuticals are all on the horizon. Research in the future likely will focus on new problems, traditionally seen as outside the discipline of plant pathology. The impact of climate change on plant diseases will be significant. As many parts of the world become warmer and drier some plant diseases likely will increase in severity. Pathogens are likely to migrate and survive in more northern latitudes greatly expanding their range and diseases exacerbated by abiotic stresses such as drought and salinity will increase. Plant pathology will continue to evolve as a multidisciplinary science. These changes will open up many new research opportunities. Plant pathology will play a bigger role in global food security. Research into the molecular and cellular interactions of symbiotic and endophytic organisms will help provide answers to food-borne illnesses caused by E. coli and Salmonella and how these and other human pathogens become established in plants in the field. Plant pathologists will team up with biomedical and aeronautical engineers, nanotechnologists, and computer scientists to develop microsensory technology to detect the introduction and spread of pathogens for biosecurity, diagnostics and epidemiological modeling purposes. Traditional areas of plant disease management and the use of biologicals for disease control also will benefit from a better understanding of the molecular and cellular processes and the similarity of virulence mechanisms and pathogen effectors between plant, insect, and vertebrate pathogens likely will bring new insights into human diseases. And last, but not least, there likely will be a resurgence in plant disease management and epidemiological research as the world’s dependence on biofuels increases and results in new diseases on intensively cultivated plant species used for biomass production.

July 7, 2019 marks the 60th anniversary of the renowned scientist in the field of plant physiology and microbiology, Doctor of Agricultural Sciences, Professor, Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Higher School of Ukraine, Head of the Department of Botany and Zoology of the Ternopil National Pedagogical University and University Svitlana Vasylivna was born in the village of Ishkiv, Koziv district, Ternopil region, to a family of teachers. She started schooling at the Ishkiv eight-year school and later Ternopil Secondary School #8, which she graduated with honours in 1976. In August 1977, she entered Ternopil Pedagogical Institute, Natural Sciences faculty. She graduated with honors in 1982 and got qualification of a teacher of chemistry and biology Since July 1982, Svitlana Vasylivna's work has been associated with the Department of Botany (now the Department of Botany and Zoology of Ternopil Volodymyr Hnatiuk National Pedagogical University), where she became an assistant at the laboratory of plant physiology and biology. As a laboratory assistant, S.V. Pyda commenced her first scientific studies concerned with nitrogen nutrition of legumes supervised by Professor, Head of the Symbiotic Nitrogenation Department of the Institute of Plant Physiology and Genetics of NAS of Ukraine Yukhym Polikarpovych Starchenko, candidates of biological sciences, professor of the Department of Botany of Ternopil Pedagogical Institute Vekirchyk Kuzma Mykolaiovych and associate professor Butnytskyi Ivan Mykolaiovych. From 1989 to 1993 S.V. Pyda carried out scientific research at National Botanical Garden M.M. Hrishko NAS of Ukraine (Kyiv) supervised by professor, head of allelopathy department Holovko Erast Anatoliiovych. May 26, 1994 as a result of scientific research S.V. Pyda became a successful defense of a Ph.D. thesis for the degree of Candidate of Biological Sciences in the specialty 03.00.12 – plant physiology in the specialized scientific council of the Institute of Plant Physiology and Genetics of NAS of Ukraine entitled: «Allelopathic and symbiotic features of lupine at different levels of nitrogen nutrition». During her postgraduate studies, in 1990 S. V. Pyda was transitioned to the position of Assistant Professor of the Department of Botany of Ternopil Pedagogical Institute, and after the defense of her Ph.D. thesis in January 1995 – to the post of Senior Lecturer, Associate Professor of Botany – on December 25, 1997. Pyda S.V. was given the academic title of Associate Professor of Botany. Pyda S.V. managed to combine her teaching career with scientific research concerned with a wide range of questions of plant physiology, biochemistry and ecology, microbiology, agriculture. Her major research focuses on the biological fixation of molecular nitrogen by legumes, allelopathic and biochemical features of species of the genus Lupine and some floral-ornamental plants, problems of chemical interaction between plants in natural and artificial phytocenoses, microorganisms and agriculture. Her 13-year-long scientific work found its expression in the manuscript of the doctoral dissertation, successfully defended on June 14, 2007 for the degree of Doctor of Agricultural Sciences in the specialized academic council of the Uman Agrarian University (now Uman National University of Horticulture) entitled: “Physiology of symbiosis of Bradyrhizobium sp. (Lupinus) – Lupinus L.: allelopathic analysis” specialty 03.00.12 – plant physiology. On April 1, 2008, after a significant achievement in the scientific and pedagogical field, the decision of the Scientific Council of the Ternopil Volodymyr Hnatiuk National Pedagogical University Pyda S.V. was appointed the professor of the Department of Botany. On January 20, 2011, by the decision of the Attestation Board of the Ministry of Education and Science, Pyda S.V. was awarded the academic title of Professor of Botany. Since November 26, 2014 prof. Pyda S.V. has been the head of the Department of Botany and Zoology after the merging of the departments of Botany and Zoology. Svitlana Vasylivna Pyda’s legacy comprises 342 works, including 4 monographs, 7 utility model patents, over 30 scientific articles, 2 textbooks, 7 methodological tutorials, 1 bibliographic index, 2 e-courses etc. Professor S.V. Pyda has been teaching at the University for many years the disciplines "Plant Physiology", "Microbiology with the Fundamentals of Virology", "Research Methods", "Nutrition and Productivity of Plants", "Mechanisms of Plant Productivity". She is also a teacher of Ternopil Oblast Territory -Municipal Branch of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, a member of the jury and head at the numerous competitions of city and all-Ukrainian importance, the head of the Ternopil branch of the Ukrainian Society of Plant Physiologists and Ternopil branch of the Society of microbiologists of Ukraine. For a significant contribution to the teacher training courses, the introduction of modern technologies of education and upbringing of student youth and the support of gifted students, Svitlana Vasylivna Pyda was elected Academician of the Academy of Sciences of Higher School of Ukraine, awarded by Ternopil state administration, Volodymyr Hnatiuk National Pedagogical University, Ternopil Oblast Ecological and Naturalistic Center student youth, Ternopil Regional Communal Territorial Branch of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, NAS of Ukraine, Ministry of Education and Science, etc. Svitlana Vasylivna considers herself a happy person because she had the best teachers – Yavonenko A.F., Vekirchyk K.M., Shusta I.V., Barna M.M., Butnytskyi I.M., Shymanska V.A., Kuzmovych L.G., Orchuk K.I., Talposha V.S., Grushka S.I., Yakovleva V.O., Yakovenko B.V., Kuratova T.S., colleagues and scholars such as Y. P. Starchenko, E.A. Golovko, V.P.Patyk, I.P. Grygoryuk, friends, and sincere and friendly people. She is a role model and we all appreciate her dignity, integrity, high spirits and loyalty to Ukraine and science.

The development of the terminology of each language depends on the socio-cultural conditions in which the carriers of this idiom live. This is a major factor affecting the configuration of the entire terminology system, and the features of its individual parts, and the general tradition of terminology, serving as one of the parties to standardize the literary language. An example of such a establishedness can be the difficult and controversial formation of terminology in the language of the colonized people, which by any cultural acts, even at first glance, the capitulatory, hides the general idea of its resistance to the dominant language and culture. In the social typology of languages, national terminology plays a prominent role, since it affects the characterization of several relevant attributes of the idiom. Terminology directly depends and at the same time to a certain extent determines the power of foreign-language influences, the communicative sphere of language, and also indirectly determines the degree of tradition of the idiom. In other words, it affects half of the parameters required to create a language characteristic by the methods of social typology. Certainly, throughout all history these parameters do not remain constant, vary depending on cultural-historical conditions. Belarusian linguistics has a long tradition of studying the principles and methods of creating terminology. However, terminology in Belarus as an independent scientific discipline was formed only in the second half of the twentieth century. Based on various sources, researchers analyzed botanical, grammatical, entomological, agricultural, philosophical, legal, automotive, water transport, and others varieties of terminology in the Belarusian language. However, the problem of the perception of Ukrainian traditions in the Belarusian terminology has still little studied. In the scientific level, the issues of foreign-language influences on the lexical subsystem of the new Belarusian literary language (respectively, and on the Belarusian terminology) were first raised in the 1920’s when there were active processes of codification of the idiom. Purposeful and scientifically substantiated Belarusian terminology was initiated in 1921-1922, since it was at this time that the first (mathematical) dictionary from the series “Belarusian Scientific Terminology”, as well as 8 terminological collections containing materials on grammar, logic, arithmetic, algebra, botany, geometry, trigonometry. However, the general codification, and hence the beginning of the terms of the Belarusian language, was initiated in 1918, during the First World War, when under the auspices of the occupation headquarters of the German Army in the East, was printed “Sieben-Sprachen Wörterbuch: Deutsch, Polnisch, Russisch, Weißruthenisch, Litauisch, Lettisch, Jiddisch”, is also known in the history of lexicography as “The Lexicon of the Belarusian Language in German Processing”, or the Seven-language Glossary. Vilnius (in the Belarusian tradition for the name of this city was used exonym Vilna) played the role of the leading cultural centre in the Belarusian national revival until the 1930s. In the first half of the 20’s of the twentieth century the study literature originally came out in Vilnius, but only later – in Minsk, which was separated from the western Belarusian lands by the state Polish-Soviet border (in fact since 1919, legally since 1921 – after the signing of the Riga Peace Treaty). Terminology created in the western Belarusian lands during the 1920’s was freely used in Soviet Belarus. Ukrainian influences on Belarusian terminology were not limited to only one era, alternating throughout the period of the formation and development of a new Belarusian literary language. Let’s say they are quite expressive in the nineteenth century, in the 20’s and 30’s of the twentieth century. As a result, a number of elements of Ukrainian origin have been consolidated in the Belarusian linguistic terminology. After the language reform of 1933 and up to our time, the researchers of Belarus mostly focused on studying the role of the Russian language as the main source of borrowing in the field of Belarusian terminology. The influence of Ukrainian tradition on the terminological system of the Belarusian language from the second half of the twentieth century gradually weakens, but it does not fade well in our time. The study of this problem in a wide range of Belarusian texts will allow us to show in which groups of lexicon the perception of Ukrainian traditions are most entrenched.

The year 1985 was a landmark in Canadian biology, for it witnessed both the first Canadian Congress of Biology and the 80th birthday of Professor Vladimir Joseph Krajina. Because Krajina's work has had an impact on more than one biological discipline, we believed that the congress would be an appropriate forum to pay tribute to one of Canada's premier ecologists and botanists. Krajina has done much to awaken Canada's environmental consciousness and shape its ecological thinking and, in the process, has made major contributions to the international discipline of ecology.Professor Krajina was born in 1905 in Slavice, a small Moravian village in Czechoslovakia. Historians of science have characterized 1905 as “the miraculous year.” That was the year Albeit Einstein published the theory of relativity and George Santayana began his book The Life of Reason with the following first line printed in boldface, “Man affects his environment, sometimes to good purpose.” E. M. Forster published his Where Angels Fear to Tread, Vladimir Lenin his Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, and Sigmund Freud his Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex. That year, the English novelist and science educator C. P. Snow was born, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan were formed.It was a very significant year for ecology as well. The first American textbook, Research Methods in Ecology, was published by a then little-known ecologist named Frederick E. Clements. Carl Raunkiaer in Denmark published his Types biologiques pour la géographie botanique, later to be cited in ecological literature as Raunkiaer's system of life forms and biological spectra. In addition, Karel Domin, who would become Krajina's mentor, published Das böhmische Mittelgebirge in Czechoslovakia.Krajina received his doctorate at the age of 22 from Charles University in Prague. There, he rose to become Professor of Botany and Head of the Department of Plant Sociology and Ecology. Krajina was a major force in the Second World War. A champion of democracy and possessing immense foresight and fortitude, he provided strategic information to the Allies, not without great personal hardship. This aspect of his life is beyond the scope of this review, but many volumes are available that document his indomitable courage and his contributions (see, for example, J. Korbel, The Communist Subversion of Czechoslovakia, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1959). After the war, he received both military and civilian medals and was elected to the Czechoslovakian parliament.He arrived in Vancouver in 1949. Not in possession of his transcripts or even a reprint of his own work, he joined the University of British Columbia as Lady Davis Foundation Fellow and Special Lecturer, and later attained the rank of full professor. It was here that he developed the ecological schema that bear his imprint and guided 33 students through their doctoral and master's programs. Highly respected as a teacher and researcher, he has left an indelible mark on Canadian ecology. His contributions have been recognized by honorary degrees from major universities, by medals of honor from many societies, and in several feature films on environment from the National Film Board of Canada. Even today, he remains active in finalizing his massive treatise on the ecology of British Columbia vegetation.In presenting this series of papers as a tribute to Professor Krajina, it was the intention of the organizers to reflect on two contemporary topics of ecology, rather than present a comprehensive overview or a complete documentation of Krajina's contributions. What is presented here, therefore, is a series of ecological vignettes on community organization and ecosystem conservation, areas of science in which Professor Krajina has played a major role.The organizers extend their warm thanks to Professor Jennifer Shay of the University of Manitoba for her help and assistance, to Professor Jack Major for writing the epilogue, to Professor Taylor A. Steeves, who encouraged the publication of this symposium, and to Professor Paul F. Maycock, Associate Editor of the Canadian Journal of Botany, who edited this series of articles.

Since the founding of the Missouri Botanical Garden (MBG) in 1859, the emphasis on research and the distribution of research findings in botany has been, and will remain, one of the central components of the garden’s mission. Likewise, Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL), the MBG’s partner in graduate programs since 1885, has had a continuous and similarly strong emphasis on research and the dissemination of research findings in plant science through publications. Since the beginning of this partnership, the ongoing extension of common research themes has been critical, through the early focus on traditional botanical studies (1885–1930) at the MBG, the move toward a focus on physiology and the emerging field of ecology (1930–1960), and eventually the shift to the study of biochemistry, molecular biology, and genomic studies in plant science (1960–present), primarily at WUSTL. For more than 135 years (1885–2020), this St. Louis–based collaboration has had a prominent place in the region’s rich history in plant science. In recent years, collaboration with and contributions from other St. Louis–area degree-granting institutions in the field (such as Saint Louis University [SLU] and the University of Missouri–St. Louis [UMSL]) have steadily increased. Couple this with the addition of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center (Danforth Center) in 2000, which, like the MBG, has undertaken research and training in plant science, and you now have impressive depth and diversity within St. Louis’s plant science offerings. As a result, both organizations train students and carry out peer-reviewed research funded by the same agencies (i.e., National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Agriculture) as the region’s degree-granting institutions. Every year, a significant number of master’s degree and Ph.D. graduates in this consortium comprise an impressive pool of talent available for postdoctoral training, research, and teaching positions, as well as employment in government entities and private and public life science corporations. To this end, St. Louis has one of the largest concentrations of plant science Ph.D.’s in the world (with more than 1,000 such individuals residing in the region [BioSTL, 2018]), as well as a broad diversity of disciplines represented. In addition, the faculties at both the Danforth Center and MBG frequently serve as adjunct members of university departments and as advisors to graduate students, and greatly increase the breadth of topics offered in the St. Louis plant science community, particularly in areas not directly supported by the universities. Both organizations contribute to an increasingly important part of this ecosystem. Below is a short history of the relationship between the MBG and WUSTL, and how this collaboration, primarily through graduate research education, has been foundational for the St. Louis area’s impressive plant science ecosystem. This is not a detailed review of the science generated by these organizations, but rather an account of the initial events and leaders that led to the region becoming the present-day hub for plant science.

This paper presents the Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) observations conducted for the project "Heritage preservation and ethnobotany. Analysis of the influence of conservation treatment on genetic material comprised in historic herbaria“ (project no. 2014/13/N/HS2/03118) funded by the National Science Centre in Poland. The main aim of the project is to establish if treatment methods used by herbarium conservators and mounters in different countries are harmful for the DNA material comprised in herbarium specimens. In order to analyse this problem the author conducted an international survey among specialists with documented experience in herbarium treatment. The next step was the evaluation of the results and the choice of materials. The chosen materials were then applied to samples of herbarium specimens, artificially aged in the climatic chamber, and subjected to DNA analysis. The results of the survey illustrated the variety of the materials used to treat and mount specimens. Some of them, such as methyl cellulose, were used in different concentrations and different degrees of polymerization. The project limitations determined the selection of materials for further testing, particularly when it comes to the concentration of a particular adhesive/consolidant. At the same time the main assumption was to identify versions of the material that can effectively penetrate the specimen in order to intensify the potential influence on its DNA. Dessicated plant specimens are not a common material in conservation research because their structure is highly heterogenic, fragile and brittle. Moreover, the materials used for mounting and conservation treatment are most often adapted from bookbinding and paper conservation disciplines. They are not always suitable for the treatment of botanic material and may cause damage. When observations of stratigraphic samples under a traditional microscope proved unsatisfactory, the potential of SEM imaging was examined. SEM turned out to be a very useful tool to observe the effects of simulated conservation treatments conducted on herbarium specimen samples, but only when samples were coated with gold. The conclusions from these observations informed decisions about what versions of the conservation and mounting materials should be used for further testing. Additionally, some samples were observed after artificial aging in aclimatic chamber. It enabled us to observe the degradation of the layers of materials applied onto the specimens. The analysis focussed on the leaves of two species, Fragaria vesca (wild strawberry) and Arabidopsis thaliana (thale cress).

There is, in our sense of place, little cognisance of what lies underground. Yet our sense of place, instinctive, unconscious, primeval, has its own underground: the secret spaces which mirror our insides; the world beneath the skin. Our roots lie beneath the ground, with the minerals and the dead. (Hughes 83) The-Home-and-Away-Game Imagine the earth-grounded, “diagrammatological” trajectory of a footballer who as one member of a team is psyching himself up before the start of a game. The siren blasts its trumpet call. The footballer bursts out of the pavilion (where this psyching up has taken place) to engage in the opening bounce or kick of the game. And then: running, leaping, limping after injury, marking, sliding, kicking, and possibly even passing out from concussion. Finally, the elation accompanying the final siren, after which hugs, handshakes and raised fists conclude the actual match on the football oval. This exit from the pavilion, the course the player takes during the game itself, and return to the pavilion, forms a combination of stasis and movement, and a return to exhausted stasis again, that every player engages with regardless of the game code. Examined from a “diagrammatological” perspective, a perspective Rowan Wilken (following in the path of Gilles Deleuze and W. J. T. Mitchell) understands as “a generative process: a ‘metaphor’ or way of thinking — diagrammatic, diagrammatological thinking — which in turn, is linked to poetic thinking” (48), this footballer’s scenario arises out of an aerial perspective that depicts the actual spatial trajectory the player takes during the course of a game. It is a diagram that is digitally encoded via a sensor on the footballer’s body, and being an electronically encoded diagram it can also make available multiple sets of data such as speed, heartbeat, blood pressure, maybe even brain-wave patterns. From this limited point of view there is only one footballer’s playing trajectory to consider; various groupings within the team, the whole team itself, and the diagrammatological depiction of its games with various other teams might also be possible. This singular imagining though is itself an actuality: as a diagram it is encoded as a graphic image by a satellite hovering around the earth with a Global Positioning System (GPS) reading the sensor attached to the footballer which then digitally encodes this diagrammatological trajectory for appraisal later by the player, coach, team and management. In one respect, this practice is another example of a willing self-surveillance critical to explaining the reflexive subject and its attribute of continuous self-improvement. According to Docker, Official Magazine of the Fremantle Football Club, this is a technique the club uses as a part of game/play assessment, a system that can provide a “running map” for each player equipped with such a tracking device during a game. As the Fremantle Club’s Strength and Conditioning Coach Ben Tarbox says of this tactic, “We’re getting a physiological profile that has started to build a really good picture of how individual players react during a game” (21). With a little extra effort (and some sizeable computer processing grunt) this two dimensional linear graphic diagram of a footballer working the football ground could also form the raw material for a three-dimensional animation, maybe a virtual reality game, even a hologram. It could also be used to sideline a non-performing player. Now try another related but different imagining: what if this diagrammatological trajectory could be enlarged a little to include the possibility that this same player’s movements could be mapped out by the idea of home-and-away games; say over the course of a season, maybe even a whole career, for instance? No doubt, a wide range of differing diagrammatological perspectives might suggest themselves. My own particular refinement of this movement/stasis on the footballer’s part suggests my own distinctive comings and goings to and from my own specific piece of home country. And in this incessantly domestic/real world reciprocity, in this diurnally repetitive leaving and coming back to home country, might it be plausible to think of “Home as Capital of the Region”? If, as Walter Benjamin suggests in the prelude to his monumental Arcades Project, “Paris — the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” could it be that both in and through my comings and goings to and from this selfsame home country, my own burgeoning sense of regionality is constituted in every minute-by-minutiae of lived experience? Could it be that this feeling about home is manifested in my every day-to-night manoeuvre of home-and-away-and-away-and-home-making, of every singular instance of exit, play/engage, and the return home? “Home, Capital of the Region” then examines the idea that my home is that part of the country which is the still-point of eternal return, the bedrock to which I retreat after the daily grind, and the point from which I start out and do it all again the next day. It employs, firstly, this ‘diagrammatological’ perspective to illustrate the point that this stasis/movement across country can make an electronic record of my own psychic self-surveillance and actualisation in-situ. And secondly, the architectural plan of the domestic home (examined through the perspective of critical regionalism) is used as a conduit to illustrate how I am physically embedded in country. Lastly, intermingling these digressive threads is chora, Plato’s notion of embodied place and itself an ancient regional rendering of this eternal return to the beginning, the place where the essential diversity of country decisively enters the soul. Chora: Core of Regionality Kevin Lynch writes that, “Our senses are local, while our experience is regional” (10), a combination that suggests this regional emphasis on home-and-away-making might be a useful frame of reference (simultaneously spatiotemporal, both a visceral and encoded communication) for me to include as a crucial vector in my own life-long learning package. Regionality (as, variously, a sub-generic categorisation and an extension/concentration of nationality, as well as a recently re-emerged friend/antagonist to a global understanding) infuses my world of home with a grounded footing in country, one that is a site of an Eternal Return to the Beginning in the micro-world of the everyday. This is a point John Sallis discusses at length in his analysis of Plato’s Timaeus and its founding notion of regionality: chora. More extended absences away from home-base are of course possible but one’s return to home on most days and for most nights is a given of post/modern, maybe even of ancient everyday experience. Even for the continually shifting nomad, nightfall in some part of the country brings the rest and recreation necessary for the next day’s wanderings. This fundamental question of an Eternal Return to the Beginning arises as a crucial element of the method in Plato’s Timaeus, a seemingly “unstructured” mythic/scientific dialogue about the origins and structure of both the psychically and the physically implaced world. In the Timaeus, “incoherence is especially obvious in the way the natural sequence in which a narrative would usually unfold is interrupted by regressions, corrections, repetitions, and abrupt new beginnings” (Gadamer 160). Right in the middle of the Timaeus, in between its sections on the “Work of Reason” and the “Work of Necessity”, sits chora, both an actual spatial and bodily site where my being intersects with my becoming, and where my lived life criss-crosses the various arts necessary to articulating a recorded version of that life. Every home is a grounded chora-logical timespace harness guiding its occupant’s thoughts, feelings and actions. My own regionally implaced chora (an example of which is the diagrammatological trajectory already outlined above as my various everyday comings and goings, of me acting in and projecting myself into context) could in part be understood as a graphical realisation of the extent of my movements and stationary rests in my own particular timespace trajectory. The shorthand for this process is ‘embedded’. Gregory Ulmer writes of chora that, “While chorography as a term is close to choreography, it duplicates a term that already exists in the discipline of geography, thus establishing a valuable resonance for a rhetoric of invention concerned with the history of ‘place’ in relation to memory” (Heuretics 39, original italics). Chorography is the geographic discipline for the systematic study and analysis of regions. Chora, home, country and regionality thus form an important multi-dimensional zone of interplay in memorialising the game of everyday life. In light of these observations I might even go so far as to suggest that this diagrammatological trajectory (being both digital and GPS originated) is part of the increasingly electrate condition that guides the production of knowledge in any global/regional context. This last point is a contextual connection usefully examined in Alan J. Scott’s Regions and the World Economy: The Coming Shape of Global Production, Competition, and Political Order and Michael Storper’s The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy. Their analyses explicitly suggest that the symbiosis between globalisation and regionalisation has been gathering pace since at least the end of World War Two and the Bretton Woods agreement. Our emerging understanding of electracy also happens to be Gregory Ulmer’s part-remedy for shifting the ground under the intense debates surrounding il/literacy in the current era (see, in particular, Internet Invention). And, for Tony Bennett, Michael Emmison and John Frow’s analysis of “Australian Everyday Cultures” (“Media Culture and the Home” 57–86), it is within the home that our un.conscious understanding of electronic media is at its most intense, a pattern that emerges in the longer term through receiving telegrams, compiling photo albums, listening to the radio, home- and video-movies, watching the evening news on television, and logging onto the computer in the home-office, media-room or home-studio. These various generalisations (along with this diagrammatological view of my comings and goings to and from the built space of home), all point indiscriminately to a productive confusion surrounding the sedentary and nomadic opposition/conjunction. If natural spaces are constituted in nouns like oceans, forests, plains, grasslands, steppes, deserts, rivers, tidal interstices, farmland etc. (and each categorisation here relies on the others for its existence and demarcation) then built space is often seen as constituting its human sedentary equivalent. For Deleuze and Guatteri (in A Thousand Plateaus, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology — The War Machine”) these natural spaces help instigate a nomadic movement across localities and regions. From a nomadology perspective, these smooth spaces unsettle a scientific, numerical calculation, sometimes even aesthetic demarcation and order. If they are marked at all, it is by heterogenous and differential forces, energised through constantly oscillating intensities. A Thousand Plateaus is careful though not to elevate these smooth nomadic spaces over the more sedentary spaces of culture and power (372–373). Nonetheless, as Edward S. Casey warns, “In their insistence on becoming and movement, however, the authors of A Thousand Plateaus overlook the placial potential of settled dwelling — of […] ‘built places’” (309, original italics). Sedentary, settled dwelling centred on home country may have a crust of easy legibility and order about it but it also formats a locally/regionally specific nomadic quality, a point underscored above in the diagrammatological perspective. The sedentary tendency also emerges once again in relation to home in the architectural drafting of the domestic domicile. The Real Estate Revolution When Captain Cook planted the British flag in the sand at Botany Bay in 1770 and declared the country it spiked as Crown Land and henceforth will come under the ownership of an English sovereign, it was also the moment when white Australia’s current fascination with real estate was conceived. In the wake of this spiking came the intense anxiety over Native Title that surfaced in late twentieth century Australia when claims of Indigenous land grabs would repossess suburban homes. While easily dismissed as hyperbole, a rhetorical gesture intended to arouse this very anxiety, its emergence is nonetheless an indication of the potential for political and psychic unsettling at the heart of the ownership and control of built place, or ‘settled dwelling’ in the Australian context. And here it would be wise to include not just the gridded, architectural quality of home-building and home-making, but also the home as the site of the family romance, another source of unsettling as much as a peaceful calming. Spreading out from the boundaries of the home are the built spaces of fences, bridges, roads, railways, airport terminals (along with their interconnecting pathways), which of course brings us back to the communications infrastructure which have so often followed alongside the development of transport infrastructure. These and other elements represent this conglomerate of built space, possibly the most significant transformation of natural space that humanity has brought about. For the purposes of this meditation though it is the more personal aspect of built space — my home and regional embeddedness, along with their connections into the global electrosphere — that constitutes the primary concern here. For a sedentary, striated space to settle into an unchallenged existence though requires a repression of the highest order, primarily because of the home’s proximity to everyday life, of the latter’s now fading ability to sometimes leave its presuppositions well enough alone. In settled, regionally experienced space, repressions are more difficult to abstract away, they are lived with on a daily basis, which also helps to explain the extra intensity brought to their sometimes-unsettling quality. Inversely, and encased in this globalised electro-spherical ambience, home cannot merely be a place where one dwells within avoiding those presuppositions, I take them with me when I travel and they come back with me from afar. This is a point obliquely reflected in Pico Iyer’s comment that “Australians have so flexible a sense of home, perhaps, that they can make themselves at home anywhere” (185). While our sense of home may well be, according to J. Douglas Porteous, “the territorial core” of our being, when other arrangements of space and knowledge shift it must inevitably do so as well. In these shifts of spatial affiliation (aided and abetted by regionalisation, globalisation and electronic knowledge), the built place of home can no longer be considered exclusively under the illusion of an autonomous sanctuary wholly guaranteed by capitalist property relations, one of the key factors in its attraction. These shifts in the cultural, economic and psychic relation of home to country are important to a sense of local and regional implacement. The “feeling” of autonomy and security involved in home occupation and/or ownership designates a component of this implacement, a point leading to Eric Leed’s comment that, “By the sixteenth century, literacy had become one of the definitive signs — along with the possession of property and a permanent residence — of an independent social status” (53). Globalising and regionalising forces make this feeling of autonomy and security dynamic, shifting the ground of home, work-place practices and citizenship allegiances in the process. Gathering these wide-ranging forces impacting on psychic and built space together is the emergence of critical regionalism as a branch of architectonics, considered here as a theory of domestic architecture. Critical Regionality Critical regionalism emerged out of the collective thinking of Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis (Tropical Architecture; Critical Regionalism), and as these authors themselves acknowledge, was itself deeply influenced by the work of Lewis Mumford during the first part of the twentieth century when he was arguing against the authority of the international style in architecture, a style epitomised by the Bauhaus movement. It is Kenneth Frampton’s essay, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance” that deliberately takes this question of critical regionalism and makes it a part of a domestic architectonic project. In many ways the ideas critical regionalism espouses can themselves be a microcosm of this concomitantly emerging global/regional polis. With public examples of built-form the power of the centre is on display by virtue of a building’s enormous size and frequently high-cultural aesthetic power. This is a fact restated again and again from the ancient world’s agora to Australia’s own political bunker — its Houses of Parliament in Canberra. While Frampton discusses a range of aspects dealing with the universal/implaced axis across his discussion, it is points five and six that deserve attention from a domestically implaced perspective. Under the sub-heading, “Culture Versus Nature: Topography, Context, Climate, Light and Tectonic Form” is where he writes that, Here again, one touches in concrete terms this fundamental opposition between universal civilization and autochthonous culture. The bulldozing of an irregular topography into a flat site is clearly a technocratic gesture which aspires to a condition of absolute placelessness, whereas the terracing of the same site to receive the stepped form of a building is an engagement in the act of “cultivating” the site. (26, original italics) The “totally flat datum” that the universalising tendency sometimes presupposes is, within the critical regionalist perspective, an erroneous assumption. The “cultivation” of a site for the design of a building illustrates the point that built space emerges out of an interaction between parallel phenomena as they contrast and/or converge in a particular set of timespace co-ordinates. These are phenomena that could include (but are not limited to) geomorphic data like soil and rock formations, seismic activity, inclination and declension; climatic considerations in the form of wind patterns, temperature variations, rainfall patterns, available light and dark, humidity and the like; the building context in relation to the cardinal points of north, south, east, and west, along with their intermediary positions. There are also architectural considerations in the form of available building materials and personnel to consider. The social, psychological and cultural requirements of the building’s prospective in-dwellers are intermingled with all these phenomena. This is not so much a question of where to place the air conditioning system but the actuality of the way the building itself is placed on its site, or indeed if that site should be built on at all. A critical regionalist building practice, then, is autochthonous to the degree that a full consideration of this wide range of in-situ interactions is taken into consideration in the development of its design plan. And given this autochthonous quality of the critical regionalist project, it also suggests that the architectural design plan itself (especially when it utilised in conjunction with CAD and virtual reality simulations), might be the better model for designing electrate-centred projects rather than writing or even the script. The proliferation of ‘McMansions’ across many Australian suburbs during the 1990s (generally, oversized domestic buildings designed in the abstract with little or no thought to the above mentioned elements, on bulldozed sites, with powerful air-conditioning systems, and no verandas or roof eves to speak of) demonstrates the continuing influence of a universal, centralising dogma in the realm of built place. As summer temperatures start to climb into the 40°C range all these air-conditioners start to hum in unison, which in turn raises the susceptibility of the supporting infrastructure to collapse under the weight of an overbearing electrical load. The McMansion is a clear example of a built form that is envisioned more so in a drafting room, a space where the architect is remote-sensing the locational specificities. In this envisioning (driven more by a direct line-of-sight idiom dominant in “flat datum” and economic considerations rather than architectural or experiential ones), the tactile is subordinated, which is the subject of Frampton’s sixth point: It is symptomatic of the priority given to sight that we find it necessary to remind ourselves that the tactile is an important dimension in the perception of built form. One has in mind a whole range of complementary sensory perceptions which are registered by the labile body: the intensity of light, darkness, heat and cold; the feeling of humidity; the aroma of material; the almost palpable presence of masonry as the body senses it own confinement; the momentum of an induced gait and the relative inertia of the body as it traverses the floor; the echoing resonance of our own footfall. (28) The point here is clear: in its wider recognition of, and the foregrounding of my body’s full range of sensate capacities in relation to both natural and built space, the critical regionalist approach to built form spreads its meaning-making capacities across a broader range of knowledge modalities. This tactility is further elaborated in more thoroughly personal ways by Margaret Morse in her illuminating essay, “Home: Smell, Taste, Posture, Gleam”. Paradoxically, this synaesthetic, syncretic approach to bodily meaning-making in a built place, regional milieu intensely concentrates the site-centred locus of everyday life, while simultaneously, the electronic knowledge that increasingly underpins it expands both my body’s and its region’s knowledge-making possibilities into a global gestalt, sometimes even a cosmological one. It is a paradoxical transformation that makes us look anew at social, cultural and political givens, even objective and empirical understandings, especially as they are articulated through national frames of reference. Domestic built space then is a kind of micro-version of the multi-function polis where work, pleasure, family, rest, public display and privacy intermingle. So in both this reduction and expansion in the constitution of domestic home life, one that increasingly represents the location of the production of knowledge, built place represents a concentration of energy that forces us to re-imagine border-making, order, and the dynamic interplay of nomadic movement and sedentary return, a point that echoes Nicolas Rothwell’s comment that “every exile has in it a homecoming” (80). Albeit, this is a knowledge-making milieu with an expanded range of modalities incorporated and expressed through a wide range of bodily intensities not simply cognitive ones. Much of the ambiguous discontent manifested in McMansion style domiciles across many Western countries might be traced to the fact that their occupants have had little or no say in the way those domiciles have been designed and/or constructed. In Heidegger’s terms, they have not thought deeply enough about “dwelling” in that building, although with the advent of the media room the question of whether a “building” securely borders both “dwelling” and “thinking” is now open to question. As anxieties over border-making at all scales intensifies, the complexities and un/sureties of natural and built space take ever greater hold of the psyche, sometimes through the advance of a “high level of critical self-consciousness”, a process Frampton describes as a “double mediation” of world culture and local conditions (21). Nearly all commentators warn of a nostalgic, romantic or a sentimental regionalism, the sum total of which is aimed at privileging the local/regional and is sometimes utilised as a means of excluding the global or universal, sometimes even the national (Berry 67). Critical regionalism is itself a mediating factor between these dispositions, working its methods and practices through my own psyche into the local, the regional, the national and the global, rejecting and/or accepting elements of these domains, as my own specific context, in its multiplicity, demands it. If the politico-economic and cultural dimensions of this global/regional world have tended to undermine the process of border-making across a range of scales, we can see in domestic forms of built place the intense residue of both their continuing importance and an increased dependency on this electro-mediated world. This is especially apparent in those domiciles whose media rooms (with their satellite dishes, telephone lines, computers, television sets, games consuls, and music stereos) are connecting them to it in virtuality if not in reality. Indeed, the thought emerges (once again keeping in mind Eric Leed’s remark on the literate-configured sense of autonomy that is further enhanced by a separate physical address and residence) that the intense importance attached to domestically orientated built place by globally/regionally orientated peoples will figure as possibly the most viable means via which this sense of autonomy will transfer to electronic forms of knowledge. If, however, this here domestic habitué turns his gaze away from the screen that transports me into this global/regional milieu and I focus my attention on the physicality of the building in which I dwell, I once again stand in the presence of another beginning. This other beginning is framed diagrammatologically by the building’s architectural plans (usually conceived in either an in-situ, autochthonous, or a universal manner), and is a graphical conception that anchors my body in country long after the architects and builders have packed up their tools and left. This is so regardless of whether a home is built, bought, rented or squatted in. Ihab Hassan writes that, “Home is not where one is pushed into the light, but where one gathers it into oneself to become light” (417), an aphorism that might be rephrased as follows: “Home is not where one is pushed into the country, but where one gathers it into oneself to become country.” For the in-and-out-and-around-and-about domestic dweller of the twenty-first century, then, home is where both regional and global forms of country decisively enter the soul via the conduits of the virtuality of digital flows and the reality of architectural footings. Acknowledgements I’m indebted to both David Fosdick and Phil Roe for alerting me to the importance to the Fremantle Dockers Football Club. The research and an original draft of this essay were carried out under the auspices of a PhD scholarship from Central Queensland University, and from whom I would also like to thank Denis Cryle and Geoff Danaher for their advice. References Benjamin, Walter. “Paris — the Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Trans. Quintin Hoare. London: New Left Books, 1973. 155–176. Bennett, Tony, Michael Emmison and John Frow. Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Berry, Wendell. “The Regional Motive.” A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural. San Diego: Harcourt Brace. 63–70. Casey, Edward S. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles. “The Diagram.” The Deleuze Reader. Ed. Constantin Boundas. Trans. Constantin Boundas and Jacqueline Code. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. 193–200. Frampton, Kenneth. “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-Modern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983. 16–30. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Idea and Reality in Plato’s Timaeus.” Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato. Trans. P. Christopher Smith. New Haven: Yale UP, 1980. 156–193. Hassan, Ihab. “How Australian Is It?” The Best Australian Essays. Ed. Peter Craven. Melbourne: Black Inc., 2000. 405–417. Heidegger, Martin. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. 145–161. Hughes, John. The Idea of Home: Autobiographical Essays. Sydney: Giramondo, 2004. Iyer, Pico. “Australia 1988: Five Thousand Miles from Anywhere.” Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World. London: Jonathon Cape, 1993. 173–190. “Keeping Track.” Docker, Official Magazine of the Fremantle Football Club. Edition 3, September (2005): 21. Leed, Eric. “‘Voice’ and ‘Print’: Master Symbols in the History of Communication.” The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture. Ed. Kathleen Woodward. Madison, Wisconsin: Coda Press, 1980. 41–61. Lefaivre, Liane and Alexander Tzonis. “The Suppression and Rethinking of Regionalism and Tropicalism After 1945.” Tropical Architecture: Critical Regionalism in the Age of Globalization. Eds. Alexander Tzonis, Liane Lefaivre and Bruno Stagno. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Academy, 2001. 14–58. Lefaivre, Liane and Alexander Tzonis. Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World. New York: Prestel, 2003. Lynch, Kevin. Managing the Sense of a Region. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT P, 1976. Mitchell, W. J. T. “Diagrammatology.” Critical Inquiry 7.3 (1981): 622–633. Morse, Margaret. “Home: Smell, Taste, Posture, Gleam.” Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place. Ed. Hamid Naficy. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. 63–74. Plato. Timaeus and Critias. Trans. Desmond Lee. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1973. Porteous, J. Douglas. “Home: The Territorial Core.” Geographical Review LXVI (1976): 383-390. Rothwell, Nicolas. Wings of the Kite-Hawk: A Journey into the Heart of Australia. Sydney: Pidador, 2003. Sallis, John. Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus. Bloomington: Indianapolis UP, 1999. Scott, Allen J. Regions and the World Economy: The Coming Shape of Global Production, Competition, and Political Order. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Storper, Michael. The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy. New York: The Guildford Press, 1997. Ulmer, Gregory L. 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Introduction The term ‘resilience’ is on everyone’s lips - from politicians to community service providers to the seemingly endless supply of self-help gurus. The concept is undergoing a renaissance of sorts in contemporary Western society; but why resilience now? One possible explanation is that individuals and their communities are experiencing increased and intensified levels of adversity and hardship, necessitating the accumulation and deployment of ‘more resilience’. Whilst a strong argument could made that this is in fact the case, it would seem that the capacity to survive and thrive has been a feature of human survival and growth long before we had a name for it. Rather than an inherent characteristic, trait or set of behaviours of particularly ‘resilient’ individuals or groups, resilience has come to be viewed more as a common and everyday capacity, expressed and expressible by all people. Having researched the concept for some time now, we believe that we are only marginally closer to understanding this captivating but ultimately elusive concept. What we are fairly certain of is that resilience is more than basic survival but less than an invulnerability to adversity, resting somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. Given the increasing prevalence of populations affected by war and other disasters, we are certain however that efforts to better understand the accumulative dynamics of resilience, are now, more than ever, a vital area of public and academic concern. In our contemporary world, the concept of resilience is coming to represent a vital conceptual tool for responding to the complex challenges emerging from broad scale movements in climate change, rural and urban migration patterns, pollution, economic integration and other consequences of globalisation. In this article, the phenomenon of human resilience is defined as the cumulative build-up of both particular kinds of knowledge, skills and capabilities as well as positive affects such as hope, which sediment over time as transpersonal capacities for self-preservation and ongoing growth (Wilson). Although the accumulation of positive affect is crucial to the formation of resilience, the ability to re-imagine and utilise negative affects, events and environmental limitations, as productive cultural resources, is a reciprocal and under-researched aspect of the phenomenon. In short, we argue that resilience is the protective shield, which capacitates individuals and communities to at least deal with, and at best, overcome potential challenges, while also facilitating the realisation of hoped-for objects and outcomes. Closely tied to the formation of resilience is the lived experience of hope and hoping practices, with an important feature of resilience related to the future-oriented dimensions of hope (Parse). Yet it is important to note that the accumulation of hope, as with resilience, is not headed towards some state of invulnerability to adversity; as presumed to exist in the foundational period of psychological research on the construct (Garmezy; Werner and Smith; Werner). In contrast, we argue that the positive affective experience of hopefulness provides individuals and communities with a means of enduring the present, while the future-oriented dimensions of hope offer them an instrument for imagining a better future to come (Wilson). Given the complex, elusive and non-uniform nature of resilience, it is important to consider the continued relevance of the resilience concept. For example, is resilience too narrow a term to describe and explain the multiple capacities, strategies and resources required to survive and thrive in today’s world? Furthermore, why do some individuals and communities mobilise and respond to a crisis; and why do some collapse? In a related discussion, Ungar (Constructionist) posed the question, “Why keep the term resilience?” Terms like resilience, even strengths, empowerment and health, are a counterpoint to notions of disease and disorder that have made us look at people as glasses half empty rather than half full. Resilience reminds us that children survive and thrive in a myriad of ways, and that understanding the etiology of health is as, or more, important than studying the etiology of disease. (Ungar, Constructionist 91) This productive orientation towards health, creativity and meaning-making demonstrates the continued conceptual and existential relevance of resilience, and why it will remain a critical subject of inquiry now and into the future. Early Psychological Studies of Resilience Definitions of resilience vary considerably across disciplines and time, and according to the theoretical context or group under investigation (Harvey and Delfabro). During the 1970s and early 1980s, the developmental literature on resilience focused primarily on the “personal qualities” of “resilient children” exposed to adverse life circumstances (Garmezy Vulnerability; Masten; Rutter; Werner). From this narrow and largely individualistic viewpoint, resilience was defined as an innate “self-righting mechanism” (Werner and Smith 202). Writing from within the psychological tradition, Masten argued that the early research on resilience (Garmezy Vulnerability; Werner and Smith) regularly implied that resilient children were special or remarkable by virtue of their invulnerability to adversity. As research into resilience progressed, researchers began to acknowledge the ordinariness or everydayness of resilience-related phenomena. Furthermore, that “resilience may often derive from factors external to the child” (Luthar; Cicchetti and Becker 544). Besides the personal attributes of children, researchers within the psychological sciences also began to explore the effects of family dynamics and impacts of the broader social environment in the development of resilience. Rather than identifying which child, family or environmental factors were resilient or resilience producing, they turned their attention to how these underlying protective mechanisms facilitated positive resilience outcomes. As research evolved, resilience as an absolute or unchanging attribute made way for more relational and dynamic conceptualisations. As Luthar et al noted, “it became clear that positive adaptation despite exposure to adversity involves a developmental progression, such that new vulnerabilities and/or strengths often emerge with changing life circumstances” (543-44). Accordingly, resilience came to be viewed as a dynamic process, involving positive adaptations within contexts of adversity (Luthar et al. 543). Although closer to the operational definition of resilience argued for here, there remain a number of definitional concerns and theoretical limitations of the psychological approach; in particular, the limitation of positive adaptation to the context of significant adversity. In doing so, this definition fails to account for the subjective experience and culturally located understandings of ‘health’, ‘adversity’ and ‘adaptation’ so crucial to the formation of resilience. Our major criticism of the psychodynamic approach to resilience relates to the construction of a false dichotomy between “resilient” and “non-resilient” individuals. This dichotomy is perpetuated by psychological approaches that view resilience as a distinct construct, specific to “resilient” individuals. In combating this assumption, Ungar maintained that this bifurcation could be replaced by an understanding of mental health “as residing in all individuals even when significant impairment is present” (Thicker 352). We tend to agree. In terms of economic resilience, we must also be alert to similar false binaries that place the first and low-income world into simple, apposite positions of coping or not-coping, ‘having’ or ‘not-having’ resilience. There is evidence to indicate, for example, that emerging economies fared somewhat better than high-income nations during the global financial crisis (GFC). According to Frankel and Saravelos, several low-income nations attained better rates of gross domestic product GDP, though the impacts on the respective populations were found to be equally hard (Lane and Milesi-Ferretti). While the reasons for this are broad and complex, a study by Kose and Prasad found that a broad set of policy tools had been developed that allowed for greater flexibility in responding to the crisis. Positive Affect Despite Adversity An emphasis on deficit, suffering and pathology among marginalised populations such as refugees and young people has detracted from culturally located strengths. As Te Riele explained, marginalised young people residing in conditions of adversity are often identified within “at-risk” discourses. These social support frameworks have tended to highlight pathologies and antisocial behaviours rather than cultural competencies. This attitude towards marginalised “at risk” young people has been perpetuated by psychotherapeutic discourse that has tended to focus on the relief of suffering and treatment of individual pathologies (Davidson and Shahar). By focusing on pain avoidance and temporary relief, we may be missing opportunities to better understand the productive role of ‘negative’ affects and bodily sensations in alerting us to underlying conditions, in need of attention or change. A similar deficit approach is undertaken through education – particularly civics – where young people are treated as ‘citizens in waiting’ (Collin). From this perspective, citizenship is something that young people are expected to ‘grow into’, and until that point, are seen as lacking any political agency or ability to respond to adversity (Holdsworth). Although a certain amount of internal discomfort is required to promote change, Davidson and Shahar noted that clinical psychotherapists still “for the most part, envision an eventual state of happiness – both for our patients and for ourselves, described as free of tension, pain, disease, and suffering” (229). In challenging this assumption, they asked, But if desiring-production is essential to what makes us human, would we not expect happiness or health to involve the active, creative process of producing? How can one produce anything while sitting, standing, or lying still? (229) A number of studies exploring the affective experiences of migrants have contested the embedded psychological assumption that happiness or well-being “stands apart” from experiences of suffering (Crocker and Major; Fozdar and Torezani; Ruggireo and Taylor; Tsenkova, Love, Singer and Ryff). A concern for Ahmed is how much the turn to happiness or happiness turn “depends on the very distinction between good and bad feelings that presume bad feelings are backward and conservative and good feelings are forward and progressive” (Happiness 135). Highlighting the productive potential of unhappy affects, Ahmed suggested that the airing of unhappy affects in their various forms provides people with “an alternative set of imaginings of what might count as a good or at least better life” (Happiness 135). An interesting feature of refugee narratives is the paradoxical relationship between negative migration experiences and the reporting of a positive life outlook. In a study involving former Yugoslavian, Middle Eastern and African refugees, Fozdar and Torezani investigated the “apparent paradox between high-levels of discrimination experienced by humanitarian migrants to Australia in the labour market and everyday life” (30), and the reporting of positive wellbeing. The interaction between negative experiences of discrimination and reports of wellbeing suggested a counter-intuitive propensity among refugees to adapt to and make sense of their migration experiences in unique, resourceful and life-affirming ways. In a study of unaccompanied Sudanese youth living in the United States, Goodman reported that, “none of the participants displayed a sense of victimhood at the time of the interviews” (1182). Although individual narratives did reflect a sense of victimisation and helplessness relating to the enormity of past trauma, the young participants viewed themselves primarily as survivors and agents of their own future. Goodman further stated that the tone of the refugee testimonials was not bitter: “Instead, feelings of brotherliness, kindness, and hope prevailed” (1183). Such response patterns among refugees and trauma survivors indicate a similar resilience-related capacity to positively interpret and derive meaning from negative migration experiences and associated emotions. It is important to point out that demonstrations of resilience appear loosely proportional to the amount or intensity of adverse life events experienced. However, resilience is not expressed or employed uniformly among individuals or communities. Some respond in a resilient manner, while others collapse. On this point, an argument could be made that collapse and breakdown is a built-in aspect of resilience, and necessary for renewal and ongoing growth. Cultures of Resilience In a cross continental study of communities living and relying on waterways for their daily subsistence, Arvanitakis is involved in a broader research project aiming to understand why some cultures collapse and why others survive in the face of adversity. The research aims to look beyond systems of resilience, and proposes the term ‘cultures of resilience’ to describe the situated strategies of these communities for coping with a variety of human-induced environmental challenges. More specifically, the concept of ‘cultures of resilience’ assists in explaining the specific ways individuals and communities are responding to the many stresses and struggles associated with living on the ‘front-line’ of major waterways that are being impacted by large-scale, human-environment development and disasters. Among these diverse locations are Botany Bay (Australia), Sankhla Lake (Thailand), rural Bangladesh, the Ganges (India), and Chesapeake Bay (USA). These communities face very different challenges in a range of distinctive contexts. Within these settings, we have identified communities that are prospering despite the emerging challenges while others are in the midst of collapse and dispersion. In recognising the specific contexts of each of these communities, the researchers are working to uncover a common set of narratives of resilience and hope. We are not looking for the ’magic ingredient’ of resilience, but what kinds of strategies these communities have employed and what can they learn from each other. One example that is being pursued is a community of Thai rice farmers who have reinstated ceremonies to celebrate successful harvests by sharing in an indigenous rice species in the hope of promoting a shared sense of community. These were communities on the cusp of collapse brought on by changing economic and environmental climates, but who have reversed this trend by employing a series of culturally located practices. The vulnerability of these communities can be traced back to the 1960s ‘green revolution’ when they where encouraged by local government authorities to move to ‘white rice’ species to meet export markets. In the process they were forced to abandoned their indigenous rice varieties and abandon traditional seed saving practices (Shiva, Sengupta). Since then, the rice monocultures have been found to be vulnerable to the changing climate as well as other environmental influences. The above ceremonies allowed the farmers to re-discover the indigenous rice species and plant them alongside the ‘white rice’ for export creating a more robust harvest. The indigenous species are kept for local consumption and trade, while the ‘white rice’ is exported, giving the farmers access to both the international markets and income and the local informal economies. In addition, the indigenous rice acts as a form of ‘insurance’ against the vagaries of international trade (Shiva). Informants stated that the authorities that once encouraged them to abandon indigenous rice species and practices are now working with the communities to re-instigate these. This has created a partnership between the local government-funded research centres, government institutions and the farmers. A third element that the informants discussed was the everyday practices that prepare a community to face these challenges and allow it recover in partnership with government, including formal and informal communication channels. These everyday practices create a culture of reciprocity where the challenges of the community are seen to be those of the individual. This is not meant to romanticise these communities. In close proximity, there are also communities engulfed in despair. Such communities are overwhelmed with the various challenges described above of changing rural/urban settlement patterns, pollution and climate change, and seem to have lacked the cultural and social capital to respond. By contrasting the communities that have demonstrated resilience and those that have not been overwhelmed, it is becoming increasingly obvious that there is no single 'magic' ingredient of resilience. What exist are various constituted factors that involve a combination of community agency, social capital, government assistance and structures of governance. The example of the rice farmers highlights three of these established practices: working across formal and informal economies; crossing localised and expert knowledge as well as the emergence of everyday practices that promote social capital. As such, while financial transactions occur that link even the smallest of communities to the global economy, there is also the everyday exchange of cultural practices, which is described elsewhere by Arvanitakis as 'the cultural commons': visions of hope, trust, shared intellect, and a sense of safety. Reflecting the refugee narratives citied above, these communities also report a positive life outlook, refusing to see themselves as victims. There is a propensity among members of these communities to adapt an outlook of hope and survival. Like the response patterns among refugees and trauma survivors, initial research is confirming a resilience-related capacity to interpret the various challenges that have been confronted, and see their survival as reason to hope. Future Visions, Hopeful Visions Hope is a crucial aspect of resilience, as it represents a present- and future-oriented mode of situated defence against adversity. The capacity to hope can increase one’s powers of action despite a complex range of adversities experienced in everyday life and during particularly difficult times. The term “hope” is commonly employed in a tokenistic way, as a “nice” rhetorical device in the mind-body-spirit or self-help literature or as a strategic instrument in increasingly empty domestic and international political vocabularies. With a few notable exceptions (Anderson; Bloch; Godfrey; Hage; Marcel; Parse; Zournazi), the concept of hope has received only modest attention from within sociology and cultural studies. Significant increases in the prevalence of war and disaster-affected populations makes qualitative research into the lived experience of hope a vital subject of academic interest. Parse observed among health care professionals a growing attention to “the lived experience of hope”, a phenomenon which has significant consequences for health and the quality of one’s life (vvi). Hope is an integral aspect of resilience as it can act as a mechanism for coping and defense in relation to adversity. Interestingly, it is during times of hardship and adversity that the phenomenological experience of hope seems to “kick in” or “switch on”. With similarities to the “taken-for-grantedness” of resilience in everyday life, Anderson observed that hope and hoping are taken-for-granted aspects of the affective fabric of everyday life in contemporary Western culture. Although the lived experience of hope, namely, hopefulness, is commonly conceptualised as a “future-oriented” state of mind, the affectivity of hope, in the present moment of hoping, has important implications in terms of resilience formation. The phrase, the “lived deferral of hope” is an idea that Wilson has developed elsewhere which hopefully brings together and holds in creative tension the two dominant perspectives on hope as a lived experience in the present and a deferred, future-oriented practice of hoping and hopefulness. Zournazi defined hope as a “basic human condition that involves belief and trust in the world” (12). She argued that the meaning of hope is “located in the act of living, the ordinary elements of everyday life” and not in “some future or ideal sense” (18). Furthermore, she proposed a more “everyday” hope which “is not based on threat or deferral of gratification”, but is related to joy “as another kind of contentment – the affirmation of life as it emerges and in the transitions and movements of our everyday lives and relationships” (150). While qualitative studies focusing on the everyday experience of hope have reinvigorated academic research on the concept of hope, our concept of “the lived deferral of hope” brings together Zournazi’s “everyday hope” and the future-oriented dimensions of hope and hoping practices, so important to the formation of resilience. Along similar lines to Ahmed’s (Happy Objects) suggestion that happiness “involves a specific kind of intentionality” that is “end-orientated”, practices of hope are also intentional and “end-orientated” (33). If objects of hope are a means to happiness, as Ahmed wrote, “in directing ourselves towards this or that [hope] object we are aiming somewhere else: toward a happiness that is presumed to follow” (Happy Objects 34), in other words, to a hope that is “not yet present”. It is the capacity to imagine alternative possibilities in the future that can help individuals and communities endure adverse experiences in the present and inspire confidence in the ongoingness of their existence. Although well-intentioned, Zournazi’s concept of an “everyday hope” seemingly ignores the fact that in contexts of daily threat, loss and death there is often a distinct lack of affirmative or affirmable things. In these contexts, the deferral of joy and gratification, located in the future acquisition of objects, outcomes or ideals, can be the only means of getting through particularly difficult events or circumstances. One might argue that hope in hopeless situations can be disabling; however, we contend that hope is always enabling to some degree, as it can facilitate alternative imaginings and temporary affective relief in even in the most hopeless situations. Hope bears similarity to resilience in terms of its facilities for coping and endurance. Likewise the formation and maintenance of hope can help individuals and communities endure and cope with adverse events or circumstances. The symbolic dimension of hope capacitates individuals and communities to endure the present without the hoped-for outcomes and to live with the uncertainty of their attainment. In the lives of refugees, for example, the imaginative dimension of hope is directly related to resilience in that it provides them with the ability to respond to adversity in productive and life-affirming ways. For Oliver, hope “provides continuity between the past and the present…giving power to find meaning in the worst adversity” (in Parse 16). In terms of making sense of the migration and resettlement experiences of refugees and other migrants, Lynch proposed a useful definition of hope as “the fundamental knowledge and feeling that there is a way out of difficulty, that things can work out” (32). As it pertains to everyday mobility and life routes, Parse considered hope to be “essential to one’s becoming” (32). She maintained that hope is a lived experience and “a way of propelling self toward envisioned possibilities in everyday encounters with the world” (p. 12). Expanding on her definition of the lived experience of hope, Parse stated, “Hope is anticipating possibilities through envisioning the not-yet in harmoniously living the comfort-discomfort of everydayness while unfolding a different perspective of an expanding view” (15). From Nietzsche’s “classically dark version of hope” (in Hage 11), Parse’s “positive” definition of hope as a propulsion to envisaged possibilities would in all likelihood be defined as “the worst of all evils, for it protracts the torment of man”. Hage correctly pointed out that both the positive and negative perspectives perceive hope “as a force that keeps us going in life” (11). Parse’s more optimistic vision of hope as propulsion to envisaged possibilities links nicely to what Arvanitakis described as an ‘active hope’. According to him, the idea of ‘active hope’ is not only a vision that a better world is possible, but also a sense of agency that our actions can make this happen. Conclusion As we move further into the 21st century, humankind will be faced with a series of traumas, many of which are as yet unimagined. To meet these challenges, we, as a global collective, will need to develop specific capacities and resources for coping, endurance, innovation, and hope, all of which are involved the formation of resilience (Wilson 269). Although the accumulation of resilience at an individual level is important, our continued existence, survival, and prosperity lie in the strength and collective will of many. As Wittgenstein wrote, the strength of a thread “resides not in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres” (xcv). If resilience can be accumulated at the level of the individual, it follows that it can be accumulated as a form of capital at the local, national, and international levels in very real and meaningful ways. 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