Journal articles on the topic 'Degree Discipline: Italian'

As a broad range of professionals in clinical and nonclinical settings requires some expertise in human nutrition, the university system must offer academic courses tailored to these different specific needs. In the Italian university system there is still uncertainty with regard to the learning objectives regarding human nutrition. In the ministerial decrees defining the criteria for establishing university courses, the indications about education in human nutrition are rather inconsistent, sometimes detailed, but often just mentioned or even only implied. Education in human nutrition requires both an appropriate duration (number of university credits included in the degree format for different disciplines) and course units that are designed in order to achieve specific expertise. The university system should appropriately design and distinguish the nutritional competencies of the different types of graduates. Physiology and biochemistry are the academic disciplines mostly involved in teaching fundamentals of human nutrition, while the discipline sciences of applied nutrition and dietetics more strictly focuses on applied nutrition and clinical nutrition. Other academic disciplines that may contribute to education in human nutrition, depending on the type of degree, are internal medicine (and its subspecialties), hygiene, endocrinology, food technologies, food chemistry, commodity science, and so forth.

Purpose The main purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between human capital investments and financial performance in the professional football industry. The authors examine this association by controlling for internal (club-level) mechanisms of governance. Specifically, as they deal with a context of highly concentrated ownership and familial control of football clubs, they posit that the degree of family board representation and a dual leadership structure exert a moderating effect on the decision to spend on playing talent. Design/methodology/approach The empirical analysis employs a fixed-effect econometric model on a panel data set of 16 Italian football clubs that spans a nine-year time period ending up with 144 firm-year observations. Findings The main novel finding of this investigation is that clubs with CEO duality and a high degree of family board representation manage to profit from investments in player contracts as opposed to clubs which lack these governance mechanisms. Research limitations/implications A clear implication is that the presence of corporate governance mechanisms at club level may be value-enhancing. In terms of policy direction, the finding makes the case that regulatory bodies should consider the imposition of governance mechanisms at club level as a means to promote actual financial discipline and a further ally to current regulations that are restricted to monitoring processes tied to accounting data. Originality/value This study attempts to explain the financial outcomes of player investments by combining insights from the mainstream governance and family business literature. Prior works in the field are restricted to testing the direct relation between player investments and performance, but fail to consider the potential moderators of this association.

This paper contributes the literature examine inside the discipline of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. The bibliographic database specifically MEDLINE which covered in the Pub Med had been used in this look at. The literature included for the duration i.e. from the year 2001 to 2020 became considered. A total of 15711 records of literature were observed in the field of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. In the year 2020 was covered the maximum publication of records (11.7%) and the other years were showed that every year the records of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery were increased compared to the previous year’s except the year 2018. A total of 10607 records were journal articles. A total of 15233 data were in English language forming 96.96% of the total followed by; Chinese (126 records), German (124 records), French (122 records), Turkish (17 records), Italian (15 records), etc. Only three journals are needed to supply one-third of the journal articles for zone-1. In the journal analysis “Aesthetic plastic surgery” contributed 2307 journal articles in the first position and followed by Plastic and reconstructive surgery (911) and The Journal of craniofacial surgery (698) in the second and third position respectively. The United States covered 14 core journals out of 29 core journals. 32.03% of citations listed with the term ‘Aesthetic Plastic Surgery’ in the MEDLINE database for the period of this study have more than five authors. A total of 90.5% of papers are written by means of multi-authors and the average degree of collaboration is arrived at 0.91.

The relationship between China and Italy has ever been stronger for academic exchanges to flourish. Vital exchange of teachers and students among design universities has soared to paramount levels. With this, beginning in 2007, both Chinese and Italian higher education institutions have established the ‘double master’s degree programs in design’, with the corresponding degrees being ‘environmental (art) design’ and ‘interior and spatial design’ respectively. Meanwhile, there are great strides, followed by demands to strengthen the understanding of the respective cultures, language, and methods of both design institutions. This article aims to assist and facilitate a dialogue of understanding between the two design cultures by analyzing the current status and the evolution of their disciplines in both nations. This research may provide a common basis for the innovation in the field in both countries and contributing useful theoretical notions for the education of design.

<abstract> <p>The pandemic due to Covid-19 ushered Italian universities into the world of digital education, with geography being one of the disciplines that derived multiple benefits from a worldwide, technological transition. Our contribution focuses on the Turin experience of Cultural Geography teaching for the degree-courses of Languages and Cultures for Tourism (Undergraduate course) and of International Communication for Tourism (Master's degree-course). It highlights how the combined use of Moodle, WebEx, Google Earth, and Instagram stimulated an interest in a traditionally neglected subject, but also offers food for thought on the use of the same technologies in teaching Italian language, through geography, in US universities.</p> </abstract>

The Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (CSC), founded in Rome in 1935, has come to signify Italian cinema education in acting, directing, photography, set design, costume design, screenwriting, sound production, editing, production and film animation (since 1983). The CSC has historically admitted a significant number of international students (more than 13 per cent) in the past 85 years. This collaborative article introduces the first comprehensive list of international students in three CSC disciplines: directing, photography and set design. It begins with historical and artistic perspectives addressing the ideal of diversity, the internationalization of culture and the sociopolitical context of studying cinema in Rome. This article also includes graphs and statistics that give a clear sense of the broad geographical representation of foreigners who studied at the CSC. A comprehensive list of their names, nationalities, specializations and year of their degrees is organized in two formats: one by geography and one by chronology. The aim of this article is also to set new research goals so as to broaden our understanding of whether and how the CSC’s Italian cinematic education impacted world cinema.

Medieval Studies at the University of Calgary is a field spread out over several faculties, specifically Humanities, Social Sciences, Arts, and Communication and Culture. There is one multidisciplinary program that draws on courses offered by most of these faculties, a Minor in Medieval, Renaissance and Reformation Studies, with an anchor course in Humanities. Since students do not have to declare a Minor, enrolments are modest. There is no interdisciplinary M.A., but efforts are under way to fit such a program into a generic interdisciplinary M.A.. There are, however, significant opportunities for studying the medieval period and for writing an Honours, M.A. and (the odd) Ph.D. thesis within the traditional disciplines. Moreover, several graduates, especially from History and English, have pursued advanced degrees in Canada (Toronto), the U.S. (Notre Dame, Santa Barbara) and Britain (Oxford). Precisely because it is not a regular discipline, Medieval Studies has not been affected by systemic cutbacks. In addition to the specialists on hand, there have been recent appointments in this area in several departments, but that departmental presence and strength usually depends on just one person. Outside this structure, there is a flourishing Philology Research Group with an impressive range of activities. It was initiated by Ken Brown (French, Italian and Spanish Languages) four years ago and has been successful in attracting funding from the Faculty of Humanities, the university, and SSHRC. Its focus has been on textual editing, including text-encoding, palaeography, codicology and printing, with scholars from the U.S., Europe and Australia teaching workshops in their specialties. The Group has a community outreach program involving high school students, funded by the Delmas Foundation, and publishes its own series of occasional papers. Most recently, a beginning has been made in establishing a Medieval and Renaissance Cultural Studies Research Group with gender as its focus.

This article analyzes an interpreter-mediated speech event from Spanish into Italian. In the case study, the interactional dominance of the main speaker and his communicative style repeatedly challenge the participatory status and the face of the interpreter, who is constantly coping with the speaker’s attempts to involve her in the interaction as an entertainment resource. Although the communicative setting — a book presentation — is typical of conference interpreting events, this encounter was structured unconventionally as an informal story-telling session interspersed with several ad-libs and impromptu conversation exchanges with other participants, all interpreted in the short consecutive mode. The high degree of interactivity that emerged among the participants suggested the adoption of a qualitative multidisciplinary approach which, in addition to conference interpreting research, also draws on dialogue and media interpreting, as well as sister disciplines such as social psychology and conversation analysis in intercultural settings.

The general aim of the current study was to investigate the role of definitional skills in promoting primary school achievement (third- to fifth graders) and how school learning may shape definitional skills. Marks from four school subjects, linguistic (Italian and English) and scientific (Math and Science) were collected as well as scores in a Definitional Task. These two domains were chosen as they clearly entail the two different definition types, that is, lexicographic and scientific. Results indicated that scientific school subject marks are more predictive of definitional skills than linguistic school marks are. The opposite direction (i.e., how definitional skills are predictive of school achievement) appears less clear. In sum, the results, although preliminary, suggest that definitional skills represent a bridge towards school achievement as they promote good marks in all disciplines. Moreover, definitional skills are predicted from levels of competence acquired especially in scientific school subjects that request a higher degree of formal/organized learning. It is then of primary importance to promote interaction–integration between these two kinds of concepts via formal schooling.

This study attempted to provide a general view of the situation and perspective on foreign language learning and teaching at the tertiary level in Sudan, with special focus on English and German. It further explored motivation and reasons for majoring in English and German among Sudanese students and the level of satisfaction in studying theses languages as major disciplines. Additionally, students’ knowledge of foreign languages and their preferences for learning certain foreign languages have been reported. In order to achieve the objective of this study, a questionnaire was administered to a sample composed of 148 students majoring in English and 73 Students majoring in German, at the University of Khartoum. The obtained results revealed that Sudanese students in both departments were highly satisfied in majoring in English and German, however students were majoring in English mostly due to personal interest, while there were more students majoring in German due to entry requirement than those in the English department. Furthermore, students have shown varying degrees of interest in learning other languages such as Chinese, Spanish, French and Italian. Finally, based on the findings of the study, a number of proposals have been made, which might contribute to the improvement of foreign language learning and teaching in Sudan.

Objective – This study sought to determine the characteristics of research materials used by history students in preparing their master’s theses. Of which information resources formats did such students make use, and in what proportions? What was the age distribution of resources used? What was the dispersal over journal titles and over subject classification, i.e., the degree of interdisciplinarity? To what extent did the master’s students make use of non-English-language materials? To what extent did their institution’s library hold the resources in question? The investigator was especially interested in finding quantitative support for what he terms two “hypotheses.” The first of these is that historical research depends to a high degree on monographs, journal articles being far less important to it than they are to research in, especially, the natural sciences and technology. The second is that the age distribution of resources important to historical research is much flatter and longer than that of resources upon which researchers in the natural sciences and technology rely. Design – Citation analysis, supplemented with comprehensive catalogue searches. Setting – Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU), a mid-sized public university located in New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A. Subjects – MA and MS theses (N=47) successfully submitted to the Department of History over the period from academic year 1998/1999 through academic year 2007/2008, inclusive. Methods – The investigator initially identified the theses through a search of the online catalogue (“Consuls”) of the Connecticut State University system, and retrieved all of them in either electronic or hard-copy form. He then subjected all citations (N=3,498) listed in the references sections of these theses to an examination in order to identify for each cited resource the format, the age, the language, and, in the case of scholarly journal articles, the journal of publication. He carried out bibliographic searches in order to rectify any citations which he had noted to be faulty or incomplete. The study took no account of possible additional citations in footnotes or endnotes or in the text, and did not measure citation intensity (whether, for instance, a thesis referred only once, or perhaps many times, to a given resource). Duplicates “were ignored.” He furthermore performed systematic searches in Consuls and in the Library of Congress (LC) online catalogue in order to establish, insofar as possible, into which assigned LC Classification class each resource fell, and whether it belonged to the holdings of the SCSU library. “Holdings,” as used here, includes physical resources owned, as well as those resources to which the library has licensed access. Not marked as either “held” or “not held” were: resources available online without restriction or charge, items not identified in either Consuls or the LC catalogue, and all government documents. Ages of cited resources were calculated based on the edition or version date actually given in a student’s citation, without any consideration of a possible earlier date of the original version of the publication or document concerned. Main Results – Format, age distribution, and journal frequency. The local citation analysis found that 53.2% of all cited resources were monographs, 7.8% were scholarly articles, 5.3% were contributed chapters in books, and 0.6% were dissertations or theses. Non-scholarly periodicals accounted for 15.7%, government documents for 6.7%, and freely available web documents for 4.1%. The remainder, approximately 6.5%, comprised archival papers, judicial documents, directories, interviews, posters, audiovisual materials, and 13 other formats. Cited resources, measured back from the date of acceptance of the citing thesis, ranged from 0 to 479 years old; the mode was 3 years, but the median was “25” (p. 170) or “26” (p. 177) years. Just over 70% (i.e., 2,500 cited resources) were more than ten years old. Almost one thousand of the cited resources were fifty or more years old. The 274 scholarly journal articles included in the references sections were spread over 153 distinct journal titles, of which 105 titles made only one appearance, and 136 titles three or fewer appearances. The mean was 1.8 appearances. Subject dispersal and language. Of the 2,084 cited resources for which LC classification was locatable, 51.5% had a classification other than history, i.e., other than class C, D, E, or F. Nearly two thirds (66.0%) of the cited scholarly journal articles had appeared in journals with a focus other than history. (Note: table 4 is incorrect, precisely reversing the actual ratio.) Of all cited items, 98.5% were in the English language. Half (27) of the non-English-language resources cited were in Korean, all cited in the same thesis. Books (i.e., monographs plus compilations from which contributed chapters were cited) accounted for 87.0% of foreign-language citations. More than four fifths of the examined theses (83.0%) cited not a single non-English-language resource. Local holdings. Of all 3,498 cited items, 3,022 could be coded as either “held” or “not held” by the SCSU library. Of the items so coded (not, as indicated on p. 180, of all cited items), scarcely two fifths (41.0%) belonged to the library’s holdings. The holdings percentage was highest (72.6%) for the 274 scholarly journal articles cited, followed by the 186 contributed chapters (50.0%), the 550 non-scholarly periodical items (49.5%), and the 1,861 monographs (46.8%). For other cited formats, the percentage was much lower, and in some cases, e.g., for the 55 archival and the 44 judicial documents, it was 0.0%. Of the 54 foreign-language resources cited, the institution’s library held only two. Conclusion – The investigator concludes that his study’s findings do indeed lend quantitative support to his two “hypotheses.” This outcome will surprise few, if any, librarians; it is in accord with what Koenig (1978) long ago saw as a matter of “intuition” and “all conventional wisdom,” something that many subsequent studies have confirmed. Sherriff accordingly recommends, firstly, that collections which strive to support historical research should, in matters of acquisition policy and budget allocation, take serious account of that field’s relatively strong dependence on monographs. Secondly, the data on age distribution carry obvious implications for librarians’ decision-making on matters such as de-accessioning and weeding, relegation to remote storage, and retrospective acquisitions. This finding should also be considered, for instance, in connection with preservation policy and the maintaining of special collections. He even suggests that librarians “need to teach students the value of reviewing literature historically and showing them how to do so effectively” (p. 177). Sherriff considers a number of further (tentative) conclusions to be warranted or suggested by the results of this study. First of all, that historical research is now characteristically an interdisciplinary matter, in the sense that it requires extensive access to information resources, including journals, which libraries have traditionally not classified as belonging to the discipline of history itself. For a library supporting such research, this phenomenon “has implications for matters including collection budgets, reference work, bibliographic instruction, and the location of collections and departmental libraries” (p. 168). It also means “that librarians working with history students and history collections need to be aware of the relevant resources in other disciplines. This can improve reference work, research assistance, and bibliographic instruction; it may also help the coordination of acquisitions across departmental lines” (p. 179). Secondly, one may conclude that “there is no ‘core’ collection of journals for history” (p. 178) which will be able to satisfy a large proportion of master’s students’ research needs. Thirdly, the fact that a library such as SCSU’s holds significantly less than half of what master’s students require for preparing their theses “may exercise a narrowing effect on students’ awareness of the existing literature on their topics” (p. 180), “increases the importance of departmental faculty, reference librarians, and subject specialist librarians drawing students’ attention to resources beyond the library’s catalogues and collections” (p. 180), and requires that the library give serious attention to effective document delivery arrangements. Finally, this study’s finding that only a small percentage of master’s students in history made use of non-English-language materials, but then in certain cases used them rather extensively (27 Korean items cited in one thesis, ten Italian in another, nine Spanish in yet another), suggests that acquisition, or at least proactive acquisition, of such materials needn’t be a priority, as long as, once again, the students concerned have easy access to efficient and affordable document delivery services. Sherriff does concede, however, that his finding could indicate “that students are unaware of relevant resources in other languages or are aware of them but lack the language skills necessary to use them” (p. 179).

Silicon Valley is the computer and microelectronics capital of America. To analysts from different academic disciplines and ideological persuasions, the economy of Silicon Valley has many faces. In the most romantic characterization, the Valley's astonishing success as home base for a myriad of companies that design, produce, and export computers, workstations, microchips, disk drives, and software is mainly a story about supremely—even belligerently—independent entrepreneurs. According to a second interpretation, the Valley is a full-fledged ‘industrial district’ on the north central Italian model, made up of a dense thicket of mostly small and medium-sized (but also some quite large) ‘flexible specialists’ that alternately cooperate and compete with one another, that are embedded in a local political economy with a shared culture and norms, and that may be well connected to the rest of the world but whose interfirm production relationships are thought to be highly localized. There is also a third perspective. Silicon Valley was created by, and remains profoundly dependent on, major multinational corporations and on the fiscal and regulatory support of the national government—especially in the ‘person’ of the US Department of Defense. The Valley is fundamentally a world headquarters of, or at least an important node within, global networks of big firms and their small firm subcontractors and suppliers, and, as such, is subject to the same contradictory tendencies toward concentration of power but decentralization of production that are coming to characterize the entire global market-based economic system. The three aspects of Silicon Valley's political economy—rampant entrepreneurship, an unusually high degree of interfirm circulation of engineering labor and other signs that have become associated with district-like behavior, and the visible hand of major corporations and their government—university partners in shaping the region into a base from which to manage operations that are executed beyond the Valley's domain—are in fact not mutually inconsistent. In this paper, however, I argue that the third constitutes the dominant tendency driving the reproduction of this vibrant regional economy, and has done since the years after World War 2.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate how the direct access to additive manufacturing (AM) systems impacts on education of future mechanical engineers, within a Master’s program at a top Italian University. Design/methodology/approach – A survey is specifically designed to assess the relevance of entry-level AM within the learning environment, as a tool for project development. The survey is distributed anonymously to three consecutive cohorts of students who attended the course of “computer-aided production (CAP)”, within the Master of Science Degree in Mechanical Engineering at Politecnico di Torino. The course includes a practical project, consisting in the design of a polymeric product with multiple components and ending with the production of an assembled prototype. The working assembly is fabricated by the students themselves, who operate a fused deposition modelling (FDM) machine, finish the parts and evaluate assemblability and functionality. The post-course survey covers diverse aspects of the learning process, such as: motivation, knowledge acquisition, new abilities and team-working skills. Responses are analyzed to evaluate students’ perception of the usefulness of additive technologies in learning product design and development. Among the projects, one representative case study is selected and discussed. Findings – Results of the research affirm a positive relationship of access to AM devices to perceived interest, motivation and ease of learning of mechanical engineering. Entry-level additive technologies offer a hands-on experience within academia, fostering the acquisition of technical knowledge. Research limitations/implications – The survey is distributed to more than 200 students to cover the full population of the CAP course over three academic years. The year the students participated in the CAP course is not tracked because the instructor was the same and there were no administrative differences. For this reason, the survey administration might be a limitation of the current study. In addition to this, no gender distinction is made because historically, the percentage of female students in Mechanical Engineering courses is about 10 per cent or lower. Although the answers to the survey are anonymous, only 37 per cent of the students gave a feedback. Thus, on the one hand, impact assessment is limited to a sample of about one-third of the complete population, but, on the other hand, the anonymity ensures randomization in the sample selection. Practical implications – Early exposure of forthcoming designers to AM tools can turn into a “think-additive” approach to product design, that is a groundbreaking conception of geometries and product functionalities, leading to the full exploitation of the possibilities offered by additive technologies. Social implications – Shared knowledge can act as a springboard for mass adoption of AM processes. Originality/value – The advantages of adopting AM technologies at different levels of education, for diverse educational purposes and disciplines, are well assessed in the literature. The innovative aspect of this paper is that the impact of AM is evaluated through a feedback coming directly from mechanical engineering students.

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> While public participation in scientific achievements has a long history, the last decades have seen more attention and an impressive increase in the number of involved people. Citizen science, the term used for denoting such an attitude, is a very diverse practice, encompassing various forms, depths, and aims of collaboration between scientists and citizen researchers and a broad range of scientific disciplines. Different classifications of citizen science projects exist based on the degrees of influence and contributions of citizens. Haklay, Mazumdar, and Wardlaw (2018) distinguish the citizen science projects in three different classes:</p> <ol><li>Long-running citizen science, which are the traditional ones, the projects similar to those run in the past (Koboriet al., 2016; Bonney et al., 2009)</li> <li>Citizen cyberscience, strictly connected with the use of technologies (Grey, 2009) and which can be subclassified in:<ol><li>volunteer computing, where citizens offer the unused computing resources of their computers;</li><li>volunteer thinking, where citizens offer their cognitive abilities for performing tasks difficult for machines;</li><li>passive sensing, where citizens use the sensors integrated into mobile computing devices to carry outautomatic sensing tasks.</li></ol></li> <li>Community science, involving a more significant commitment of citizens also in designing and planning theproject activities in a more egalitarian (if not bottom-up) approach between scientists and citizen scientists(Jepson &amp; Ladle, 2015; Nascimento, Guimarães Pereira, &amp; Ghezzi, 2014; Breen, Dosemagen, Warren, &amp;Lippincott, 2015), which can be divided into:<ol><li>participatory sensing, where citizens use the sensors integrated into mobile computing devices to carry outsensing tasks;</li><li>Do It Yourself (DIY) science, which implies participants create their scientific tools and methodology to carry out their researches; </li><li>civic science, “which is explicitly linked to community goals and questions the state of things” (Haklay et al., 2018).</li></ol></li></ol> <p>The work presented here is of interest of community scientists which voluntarily offer their time for the development of scientific projects. Many software tools have been developed in order to simplify the insertion of data into structured forms and the aggregation and analysis of the obtained data. In recent years, the growing availability of feature-rich and low-cost smartphones have boosted the development of innovative solutions for data collection using portable devices. In this field, ODK (OpenDataKit) is widely known. It is an open-source suite of tools focused on simplicity of use, which includes an Android application for data collection. We used ODK for the first applications we developed.</p><p>One of the applications we developed using ODK is Via Regina (http://www.viaregina.eu/app). The application aims to support slow tourism in Via Regina, which is a road that overlooks the west coast of Lake Como in Northern Italy. Over the centuries, Via Regina has been a critical trade and pilgrim route in Europe. Moreover, from this road, a compact system of slow mobility paths departs, which span the mountainous region at the border between Italy and Switzerland. This region is rich in culture, regarding history, art, architecture, cuisine and people’s lifestyle. Considering collecting data on Via Regina and the paths around it would enable to rediscover and promote its culture while enjoying the territory, an Interreg project named “The Paths of Regina” started. The application developed within this project allows collecting data in predefined types: historical and cultural, morphological, touristic, and critical. Moreover, while reporting a point of interest (POI), the application asks the name, the position (through GPS or an interactive map), a picture, and optionally a video and an audio record of it (Antonovic et al., 2015).</p><p>However, since ODK application can be used only on Android devices, we developed a cross-platform application to collect similar data for the same purpose. It is available on Android, iOS, and web (http://viaregina3.como.polimi.it/app/). The application is developed using Apache Cordova, which is a mobile application development framework that enables running the application in multiple platforms. Leaflet library is used for web mapping. The data is stored in NoSQL PouchDB and CouchDB database, which enables both online and offline data collection. While reporting a POI, the application asks for its type, the user’s rating, a comment, and a picture of it either uploaded from device’s storage or taken using the camera of the mobile device. In addition to being cross-platform, it has the advantage of displaying and enabling the query of POIs reported, compared to the ODK-based version (Brovelli, Kilsedar, &amp; Zamboni, 2016). Regarding citizen science, besides the citizens using these two applications, Iubilantes, a voluntary cultural organization, has been involved in the project as community scientists. Iubilantes created slow mobility paths to walk in and around Via Regina, using their experience gained through studying ancient paths while protecting and enhancing their assets since 1996.</p><p>Mobile data collection can also be used to compensate for the lack of reference data available for land cover validation. We developed the Land Cover Collector (https://github.com/kilsedar/land-cover-collector) application for this purpose, which collects data using the nomenclature of GlobeLand30. GlobeLand30 is the first global land cover map at 30-meter resolution, provided by National Geomatics Center of China, available for 2000 and 2010 (Chen et al., 2015). There are ten land cover classes in the GlobeLand30 dataset, which are: artificial surface, bare land, cultivated land, forest, grassland, permanent snow and ice, shrubland, tundra, water body, and wetland. The collected data will be used for validating GlobeLand30 (Kilsedar, Bratic, Molinari, Minghini, &amp; Brovelli, 2018). The data is licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0 and can be downloaded within the application in JSON format. The application is currently available in eight languages: English, Italian, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Portuguese, French and Spanish. The technologies used are the same as the cross-platform Via Regina application. As a result, it is available on Android, iOS, and web (https://landcover.como.polimi.it/collector/); and it supports display and query of the collected data. While reporting a POI, the application asks the land cover class of it, the user’s degree of certainty on the correctness of the stated class, photos in north, east, south and west directions, and the user’s comment. Three hands-on workshops were given to teach this application and various ways to validate GlobeLand30: the first on September 1, 2018 at the World Bank in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (in conjunction with the FOSS4G 2018 conference); the second on September 3, 2018 at the Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD) in Nairobi, Kenya; and the third on October 1, 2018 at the Delft University of Technology in Delft, Netherlands. The workshops, run by representatives of the project's principal investigators &amp;ndash; Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and the National Geomatics Center of China (China) &amp;ndash; were attended by a total of 100 people with a background in GIS and remote sensing. (Brovelli et al., 2018).</p><p>Nonetheless, there are no widely adopted cross-platform open-source solutions or systems for on-site surveys that address the problem of information silos: isolated databases, where the information is not adequately shared but rather remains sequestered within each system, which is an obstacle to using data mining to make productive use of data of multiple systems.</p><p> PSAB (Participatory Sensing App Builder) is a platform that provides an open-source and easy to use cross-platform solution for the creation of custom smartphone applications as well as web applications and catalog service for publishing the data and make them available to everyone. It takes advantage of established standards (like XLSForm for defining the structure of the form and DublinCore for exposing metadata) as well as less known yet effective solutions, like WQ (https://wq.io), a framework developed for building reusable software platforms for citizen science. These technologies have been merged, together with other software like Django, PyCSW, PostgreSQL, in a single solution, in order to assist the user during the entire process, from the definition of the form structure, to the creation of an ad-hoc application and the publication of the collected data, inside a flexible and open-source platform.</p><p> Users registered to PSAB are allowed to create a new application by filling a web form where they can upload their XLSForm files and submit the metadata describing the data to be collected. A new application for collecting data on the field is generated and accessible via web and Android (while iOS requires a particular setup), ready to be used online and offline. The creator of each application is also the administrator of it, which means he/she is allowed to add or ban users and modify or remove existing data. Data is automatically synchronized between all the users participating in the project.</p><p> In the presentation we will show the applications we developed, starting from the ODK-based ones and coming to the PSAB application builder, and our experience related to their usage.</p>

The paper will describe the challenges of creating and delivering Italian for Art Historians, a bespoke content-integrated language course created for ab-initio Italian language students in History of Art (the majority of whom first-time language learners), and The Role of Art in Italian Society, a second-year language module part of the Italian degree programme at the University of York. Main topic will be the illustration of experimental initiatives aimed to facilitate the acquisition of bespoke specialist language skills essential to the History of Art discipline (beginner level students), and the use of Italian Art as a tool to develop critical thinking skills in a much broader language learning context (advanced level students). The first part will illustrate the challenges faced by the language teacher when planning and delivering an interdisciplinary content-based language module that has to be fully integrated into an undergraduate degree programme. Particular focus will be given to the collaboration between an art historian and a language teacher and its vital role in the creation of bespoke Art-related language teaching material and how this plays a pivoting role in the module planning. A number of case-studies will illustrate the impact that the interdisciplinary nature of these courses had in the applied teaching practice, students’ engagement and classroom activities. In particular, how the integration between the module syllabus and other components of the respective undergraduate degree programmes has led students to experience a deeper engagement in the learning process. The paper will also present examples of technology-enhanced teaching (e.g. online personal portfolios, audio and video material) and data analysis on how these were deployed to enhance the quality of the student engagement with pertinent art-related assessment activities, student-teacher interaction and monitoring of student progress.

Nell’Università del Litorale, a Capodistria, sono riuniti 6 istituti e la lingua italiana è offerta nella forma di corsi presso tutte le facoltà (solo in quella di Studi Umanistici, però, costituisce la disciplina caratterizzante un corso di laurea). I corsi di studio organizzati su tre livelli di formazione: un corso di studio quadriennale, due corsi annuali e un corso di dottorato. Al primo livello, il corso di studio quadriennale “Italijanistika” (Bachelor Degree) consente l'apprendimento di una conoscenza adeguata della lingua, della letteratura e della comunicazione linguistica e interculturale italiana, con la possibilità di proseguire gli studi nei corsi di laurea di secondo livello con indirizzo pedagogico oppure linguistico. Al secondo livello, il primo corso di studio annuale “Italijanistika (pedagoški študijski program) - Master of Arts - in Italian Studies (pedagogical programme)”, ha l'obiettivo di formare laureati e laureate di I livello, provenienti da un corso di studio di carattere non pedagogico-didattico in italianistica. Il secondo corso di II livello annuale “Italijanistika - Master of Arts - in Italian Studies” è il percorso linguistico (linguistics) in cui si approfondisce la formazione nelle scienze letterarie.È presente, inoltre, il dottorato di ricerca (PhD) in “Jezik in medkulturnost” (Lingua e Interculturalità) in cui si approfondisce lo studio delle lingue (italiano, inglese, francese), della mediazione linguistica e della traduzione. L'Università del Litorale svolge un’importante funzione socioculturale (oltre che formativa) e rappresenta un ponte di ragguardevole rilievo tra la comunità italiana e quella slovena. A Summary of Italian-speaking population of the Slovenian Istria: the example of Univerza na Primorskem The Univerza na Primorskem of Capodistria University brings together six institutes and the Italian language is offered in the form of courses at all faculties (but only the Humanistic Studies, however, represents a degree course).The study courses are organized on three course levels: a 4 year course, two annual courses and a doctoral one. The first level, the 4 year course study “Italijanistika” (Bachelor Degree), provides the students an adequate knowledge of the Italian language, literature, linguistic and intercultural communication, in addition to the possibility to continue their studies in the second level degree courses with a pedagogical or linguistical address. The second level (the first annual course study) in “Italijanistika (pedagoški študijski program) - Master of Arts - in Italian Studies (pedagogical programme)”, aims to train first level graduates from a non-pedagogical-didactic course of study in Italian. The second course (the second annual level) “Italijanistika - Master of Arts - in Italian Studies” is linguistics in which literary sciences are deeply explored. There is also a research doctorate (PhD) in “Jezik in medkulturnost” (Language and Interculturality) in which an extensive study of foreign languages such as Italian, English and French, as well as Linguistic Mediation and Translation is deepened. Univerza na Primorskem plays an important socio-cultural (as well as educational) function and represents a bridge of considerable importance between the Italian and Slovenian communities.

SOMMARIO: 1. Premessa: l’Islam tra religione ed economia - 2. Dalla finanza al contratto islamico, tra vincolo e libertà: alla ricerca di una teoria generale dei contratti - 3. L’etica islamica dei contratti: divieto di ribà e divieto di ghàrar - 4. Operatività delle attività della banca islamica e contrattualistica commerciale Shari’ah Compliant - 5. I contratti di tipo partecipativo: “mudàraba” e “mushàraka” - 6. (segue) Tipologie di mudàraba - 7. Cenni conclusivi e prospettive future. The Prophet's Economy: Islamic Finance and the Religious Foundations of Islamic Law of Shari'ah Compliant Contracts ABSTRACT: The growing presence of Muslim believers in Europe has increasingly led to heated debates also at the doctrinal level. Legal and economic literature, particularly, has recently emphasised the importance that inclusive, effective and efficient financial regulation can have on the degree of integration of the Islamic communities present in non-Muslim contexts. Since the Shari'ah dictates a series of behavioural rules in different sectors of the believer’s life, the Koran and the narratives of the Prophet (hadith) offer a series of prescriptions also in economic matters. With the aim of outlining the religious and juridical reasoning of the so-called halal economic dimension, this paper first examines the economic principles of Islamic finance: the prohibition of ribà (interest), the prohibition of ghàrar (uncertainty) and that of maysìr (speculation). It then provides a recognition aimed at finding a general theory of Islamic contracts. Finally, it reconstructs the discipline of the mudàraba and musharàka participatory contracts. These two forms of contracts represent a product of Islamic finance widely used in banking-financial practice and considered by Islamic legal schools to be totally in conformity with the Word of Allah. They are therefore instruments of comparison particularly interesting as well as useful for the Italian legal system. They can represent a flywheel for the integration of Muslims in the social fabric, and at the same time, an antidote to the unstable European economic panorama.

«For a place to leave an impression on us, it must be made of time as well as space – of its past, its history, its culture» (Sciascia, 1987). Architecture is one the many disciplines which, due to their heteronomous nature, aspire to represent the past, present and future of a community. Just as the construction of buildings is not merely a response to a need, but rather an act that incorporates the concrete translation of desires and aspirations, so too do music, philosophy, and the figurative arts reflect contemporary themes in their evolution. The fragmentation of skills, the specialisation of knowledge, the rapid modification of the tools we work with, the digitalisation and hyperdevelopment of communication are all phenomena that have a substantial impact on the evolution of disciplines in a reciprocal interaction with the intangible values of a community – economic, social and cultural – as well as the material assets of the places where it expresses itself. Interpreting heteronomy as a condition in which an action is not guided by an autonomous principle that is intrinsic to the discipline, but rather determined by its interaction with external factors, a theoretical reflection on the evolution of the tools of knowledge and creation has the task of defining possible scenarios capable of tackling the risk of losing an ability to synthesise the relationships between the conditions that define the identity of architecture itself. The challenge of complexity is rooted in social, technological and environmental shifts: a challenge that involves space, a material resource, in its global scale and its human measure; and time, an immaterial resource, nowadays evaluated in terms of speed and flexibility, but also duration and permanence. These elements impact upon the project as a whole, as a combination of multiple forms of knowledge which, given their constant evolution, is subject to continuous comparison. The cultural debate has investigated at length the topic of art being forced to devote itself to heteronomy whilst also retaining a need for aesthetic autonomy. The risk of forgetting its own ontological status, of losing its own identity in the fragmentation and entropy of the contemporary world, finds an answer in the idea of design as a synthesis between an artistic idea and the social and environmental conditions in which it is places, configuring itself as an element capable of reconciling the antithetical drives towards an autonomous vision of the work, on the one hand, and a heteronomous one linked to its geographical, cultural, sociological and psychological characteristics, on the other. In the systemic and concerted working process so intrinsic to disciplines such as filmmaking and music – but also the visual arts or even philosophy – the act of designing is the expression of the relationship with a community of individuals whose actions are based on a role that is as social as it is technical, given that they act based on material and immaterial values of a public nature. If indeed the sciences – as Thomas Kuhn demonstrated in his writings on the scientific revolutions – cannot be understood without their historical dimension, then disciplines such as those addressed in this Dossier represent cultural phenomena that can only truly be understood in their entirety when considered in the context of their era and the many factors that fed into their creation. However, precisely as demonstrated by Kuhn’s theories (Kuhn, 1987), their evolution also consists of “scientific revolutions”: moments of disruption capable of changing the community’s attitude towards the discipline itself and, perhaps more importantly, its paradigms. Music, cinema, art, architecture and philosophy are all expressions of that which makes us human, in all its complexity: divided and confined to their own disciplinary fields, they are not capable of expressing the poetic quality of life and thus «making people feel and become aware of the aesthetic feeling» (Morin, 2019). Emanuele Coccia, an internationally renowned philosopher and associate professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, imagines a world in which everything you see is the product of an intentionality articulated by human, non-human and non-living actors. Design – not only anthropocentric design – is the most universal power in the world. Every living being can, in effect, design the world, but at the same time, every agent of matter can also design, and it is the interplay between these elements that creates a continuous metamorphosis of our environment. In other words, being alive is not a necessary condition for being a designer. The two anthropologists Alfred Gell and Philippe Descola, in their writings on Western society and nature, present contrasting views on the presence of the soul/animism in nature. The result is a sort of architecture of the landscape, in which nature itself is imbued with a sense of design intentionality that exists in a continuum with mankind. Edoardo Tresoldi, a young Italian sculptor, is one of the latest exponents of the heteronomy of architecture, which rejects the limiting confines of individual disciplines so as to imagine a transversal vision of the environment and its construction. Through the interplay of transparencies created with ephemeral metal structures, Tresoldi exalts the geometrical qualities of this raw material, going beyond the simple spatiotemporal dimension to establish a dialogue between place and the artistic representation thereof. Tresoldi recounts this journey of his through five themes: Place, because architecture in itself is markedly conditioned by its context, as is – in his case – art; Design, that is the act of envisaging the work, which is ultimately influenced by everything around us and our imagination; Time, as art is characterised by a potential interweaving, a continuity in the creative processes influenced by the history of the place; Material, or rather, materiality and the duality between the technical and artistic parts; and, finally, “What’s Next”, exploring the idea of what the future holds for us. On this last point, Tresoldi imagines his works further opening up to a diversified range of skills in a way that would also carve out new professional profiles for young people. Cristina Frosini, Director of the Milan Conservatory, with a contribution on music – «the supreme mystery of the sciences of man» (Lévi-Strauss, 2004) – offers reflections on a field with deep affinities with the discipline of architecture, with both sharing a strong relationship between composition and execution. The sheer vastness of musical expression, from the precision of the classical score to the freedom of interpretation exemplified by the conductor or the improvising jazz musician, sees the concepts of overall rhythm and melody, the homogeneity and identity of different instruments, and the circularity of the process as the key themes of music as a public art whose creative process has always been founded upon the relationship between technical factors and cultural factors. The contribution provided by Michele Guerra, an academic and professor of History of Cinema, confirms the words of Edgar Morin. «Nowadays, cinema is widely recognised as an art, and in my opinion, it is a tremendous polyphonic and polymorphous art that is capable of stimulating and integrating into itself the virtues of all the other arts: novel-writing, theatre, music, painting, scenography, photography. [...] it can be said that those who participate in the creation of a film are artisans, artists, who play an important role in the aesthetics of the film» (Morin, 2019). The work of the “cinematographic construction site” is driven by forces which, incorporating the status quo of the technical and material factors, lead to “an idea of imaginary metamorphosis” which reflects the aspirations of a society in its efforts to become contemporary. A concept of a heteronomous approach to “making” is also founded upon recognising the didactic value of the work, as emerges from Luigi Alini’s contribution on the figure of Vittorio Garatti – an intellectual first and architect second – whose pieces are the result of work that is as much immaterial as it is material, with an «experiential rather than mediatic» approach (Frampton, in Borsa and Carboni Maestri, 2018), as true architecture is expected to be. The heteronomy of architecture, much like that of other similar disciplines, is based on engagement on two fronts: an understanding of the relevant international scenarios and the definition of the project charter, with a view to conforming it so that it takes into account any changes, operates in continuity with and with an appreciation for history, and develops in harmony with the universality of the discipline and the teachings of its masters. Stimulating a dialogue between different cultural positions is a means to create the conditions for a degree of adherence to contemporaneity without compromising on a principle of historical continuity. In light of this, the contribution by Ferruccio Resta – the current Rector of the Politecnico di Milano – focuses on the varying cultural and intellectual positions that have animated the culture of the Politecnico over the years, representing a highly valuable heritage for the university. Nowadays, with the presence of certain indispensable premises such as sustainability and connectivity, technology seems to overwhelm the design process, outsourcing it to a sort of management of the engineering and component production aspects. Hence the need to reaffirm a “humanistic and human” dimension of the act of making, starting at the root by orienting the training processes in line with the words of historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari, who says: «Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching “the four Cs” – critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. More broadly, they believe, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasize general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, learn new things, and preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations». This need reopens the theme of the dualism between “art” and “discipline”, surpassing it in favour of a coexistence of terminology in that it is the quality of the design and the piece that define where it belongs. Reflecting on the foundations of the paths and tools employed in different disciplines – in light of the innovations that involve the project charter in terms not only of concepts, but also of instruments – means reflecting on the concept of “project culture”, understood as the ability to work through actions which combine different contributions, tackling complex problems by way of a conscious creative process. The ability to envisage the new – as is implicit in the etymology of the word “project” itself – and, at the same time, to interpret continuity in the sense of a coherent system of methods and values, is shared by the disciplines and skills brought together in the Dossier: dealing with culture, society, the city, the landscape and the environment all at once requires a multifaceted vision, an ability to read problems, but also a certain openmindedness towards opportunities, the management of complexities, control of the risks of drops in quality in service of concepts of efficiency based on numerical parameters and the standardisation of languages. A comparison of the various contributions and perspectives throws up a picture in which the importance of relationships, the search for what Eiffell defined «the secret laws of harmony», the disciplinary specificity of design as the ability to relate in order to «understand, criticise, transform» (Gregotti, 1981), the ability to distinguish that which is different by involving it in the transformation of design, all represent the foundations for the evolution of heteronomous disciplines in how they move beyond the notions of technique and context as passive referents which generate possibilities in line with the Rogersian reflection on pre-existing environmental elements as historical conditions for reference, critically taken on as determinants. Hence the validity of a “polytechnic” cultural approach that is not only capable of deploying tools and skills which can deal with the operating conditions to be found in a heteronomous context, but also of stimulating critical approaches oriented towards innovation and managing change with the perspective of a project as an opportunity – in the words of Franco Albini – for «experimentation and verification in relation to the progression of construction techniques, tools for investigation, knowledge in the various fields and in relation to the shifts in contemporary culture» (Albini, 1968). The need for a sense of humanism is strongly linked to the reintroduction of the concept of “beauty”, in its modern meaning, under which it shifts from a subjective value to a universal one. Hence the importance of the dialogue with disciplines that identify with the polytechnic mould – that is, one which has always been deeply attentive to the relationship between theory and practice, to the design of architecture as an action that is at once intellectual and technical. As such, starting from the assumption that «no theory can be pursued without hitting a wall that only practice can penetrate» (Deleuze and Foucault 1972; Deleuze, 2002; Foucault, 1977; Deleuze, 2007), it is now essential to promote the professional profiles of artists, musicians, philosophers, humanistic architects and so on who are capable of managing design as a synthesis of external factors, but also as an internal dialectic, as well as skills capable of creating culture understood as technical knowledge. Sometimes, faced with the difficulty of discerning an identity for disciplines, we attempt to draw a boundary that allows us to better understand their meaning and content. However, going on the points of view that have emerged in the Dossier, it seems more important than ever to «work on the boundaries of each field of knowledge», drawing upon a concept expressed by Salvatore Veca (Veca, 1979), making communication between fields a central value, interpreting relationships and connections, identifying the relational perspective as a fundamental aspect of the creative act. The position of architecture as an “art at the edge of the arts”1, as so often posited by Renzo Piano, allows for a reflection on its identity by placing it in a position that centralises rather than marginalises it. A concept of “edge” that touches upon the sociological viewpoint that distinguishes the “finite limit” (boundary) from the “area of interaction” (border) (Sennet, 2011; Sennet, 2018), in which the transformational yet constructive contact with the entities necessary for its realisation takes place. The heteronomy of architecture coincides with its “universality”, a concept that Alberto Campo Baeza (Campo Baeza, 2018) believes to represent the identity of architecture itself. Indeed, its dependence upon human life, the development of society, of its cultural growth, derives from a single and inalienable factor: its heteronomy, the necessary condition for a process as artistic as it is technical, tasked with expressing the values of a community over time and representing the “beautiful” rather than the “new”. A design practice based on – to borrow some concepts already expressed years ago by Edgar Morin – “contaminations that are necessary as well as possible”, on the contribution of “knowledge as an open system”, but above all, one aimed at working “against the continuities incapable of grasping the dynamics of change” (Morin, 1974), thus becomes an opportunity to develop a theory on the identity of the discipline itself, striking a balance between the technical and poetic spheres, but necessarily materialising in the finished work, lending substance to the «webs of intricate relationships that seek form» (Italo Calvino).

Following in the footsteps of the protagonists of the Italian architectural debate is a mark of culture and proactivity. The synthesis deriving from the artistic-humanistic factors, combined with the technical-scientific component, comprises the very root of the process that moulds the architect as an intellectual figure capable of governing material processes in conjunction with their ability to know how to skilfully select schedules, phases and actors: these are elements that – when paired with that magical and essential compositional sensitivity – have fuelled this profession since its origins. The act of X-raying the role of architecture through the filter of its “autonomy” or “heteronomy”, at a time when the hybridisation of different areas of knowledge and disciplinary interpenetration is rife, facilitates an understanding of current trends, allowing us to bring the fragments of a debate carved into our culture and tradition up to date. As such, heteronomy – as a condition in which an acting subject receives the norm of its action from outside itself: the matrix of its meaning, coming from ancient Greek, the result of the fusion of the two terms ἕτερος éteros “different, other” and νόμος nómos “law, ordinance” – suggests the existence of a dual sentiment now pervasive in architecture: the sin of self-reference and the strength of depending on other fields of knowledge. Difference, interpreted as a value, and the ability to establish relationships between different points of observation become moments of a practice that values the process and method of affirming architecture as a discipline. The term “heteronomy”, used in opposition to “autonomy”, has – from the time of Kant onwards – taken on a positive value connected to the mutual respect between reason and creativity, exact science and empirical approach, contamination and isolation, introducing the social value of its existence every time that it returns to the forefront. At the 1949 conference in Lima, Ernesto Nathan Rogers spoke on combining the principle of “Architecture is an Art” with the demands of a social dimension of architecture: «Alberti, in the extreme precision of his thought, admonishes us that the idea must be translated into works and that these must have a practical and moral purpose in order to adapt harmoniously ‘to the use of men’, and I would like to point out the use of the plural of ‘men’, society. The architect is neither a passive product nor a creator completely independent of his era: society is the raw material that he transforms, giving it an appearance, an expression, and the consciousness of those ideals that, without him, would remain implicit. Our prophecy, like that of the farmer, already contains the seeds for future growth, as our work also exists between heaven and earth. Poetry, painting, sculpture, dance and music, even when expressing the contemporary, are not necessarily limited within practical terms. But we architects, who have the task of synthesising the useful with the beautiful, must feel the fundamental drama of existence at every moment of our creative process, because life continually puts practical needs and spiritual aspirations at odds with one another. We cannot reject either of these necessities, because a merely practical or moralistic position denies the full value of architecture to the same extent that a purely aesthetic position would: we must mediate one position with the other» (Rogers, 1948). Rogers discusses at length the relationship between instinctive forces and knowledge acquired through culture, along with his thoughts on the role played by study in an artist’s training. It is in certain debates that have arisen within the “International Congresses of Modern Architecture” that the topic of architecture as a discipline caught between self-sufficiency and dependence acquires a certain centrality within the architectural context: in particular, in this scenario, the theme of the “autonomy” and “heteronomy” of pre-existing features of the environment plays a role of strategic importance. Arguments regarding the meaning of form in architecture and the need for liberation from heteronomous influences did not succeed in undermining the idea of an architecture capable of influencing the governing of society as a whole, thanks to an attitude very much in line with Rogers’ own writings. The idea of a project as the result of the fusion of an artistic idea and pre-existing features of an environment formed the translation of the push to coagulate the antithetical forces striving for a reading of the architectural work that was at once autonomous and heteronomous, as well as linked to geographical, cultural, sociological and psychological principles. The CIAM meeting in Otterlo was attended by Ignazio Gardella, Ernesto Nathan Rogers, Vico Magistretti and Giancarlo De Carlo as members of the Italian contingent: the architects brought one project each to share with the conference and comment on as a manifesto. Ernesto Nathan Rogers, who presented the Velasca Tower, and Giancarlo De Carlo, who presented a house in Matera in the Spine Bianche neighbourhood, were openly criticised as none of the principles established by the CIAM were recognisable in their work any longer, and De Carlo’s project represented a marked divergence from a consolidated method of designing and building in Matera. In this cultural condition, Giancarlo De Carlo – in justifying the choices he had made – even went so far as to say: «my position was not at all a flight from architecture, for example in sociology. I cannot stand those who, paraphrasing what I have said, dress up as politicians or sociologists because they are incapable of creating architecture. Architecture is – and cannot be anything other than – the organisation and form of physical space. It is not autonomous, it is heteronomous» (De Carlo, 2001). Even more so than in the past, it is not possible today to imagine an architecture encapsulated entirely within its own enclosure, autoimmune, averse to any contamination or relationships with other disciplinary worlds: architecture is the world and the world is the sum total of our knowledge. Architecture triggers reactions and phenomena: it is not solely and exclusively the active and passive product of a material work created by man. «We believed in the heteronomy of architecture, in its necessary dependence on the circumstances that produce it, in its intrinsic need to exist in harmony with history, with the happenings and expectations of individuals and social groups, with the arcane rhythms of nature. We denied that the purpose of architecture was to produce objects, and we argued that its fundamental role was to trigger processes of transformation of the physical environment that are capable of contributing to the improvement of the human condition» (De Carlo, 2001). Productive and cultural reinterpretations place the discipline of architecture firmly at the centre of the critical reconsideration of places for living and working. Consequently, new interpretative models continue to emerge which often highlight the instability of built architecture with the lack of a robust theoretical apparatus, demanding the sort of “technical rationality” capable of restoring the centrality of the act of construction, through the contribution of actions whose origins lie precisely in other subject areas. Indeed, the transformation of the practice of construction has resulted in direct changes to the structure of the nature of the knowledge of it, to the role of competencies, to the definition of new professional skills based on the demands emerging not just from the production system, but also from the socio-cultural system. The architect cannot disregard the fact that the making of architecture does not burn out by means of some implosive dynamic; rather, it is called upon to engage with the multiple facets and variations that the cognitive act of design itself implies, bringing into play a theory of disciplines which – to varying degrees and according to different logics – offer their significant contribution to the formation of the design and, ultimately, the work. As Álvaro Siza claims, «The architect is not a specialist. The sheer breadth and variety of knowledge that practicing design encompasses today – its rapid evolution and progressive complexity – in no way allow for sufficient knowledge and mastery. Establishing connections – pro-jecting [from Latin proicere, ‘to stretch out’] – is their domain, a place of compromise that is not tantamount to conformism, of navigation of the web of contradictions, the weight of the past and the weight of the doubts and alternatives of the future, aspects that explain the lack of a contemporary treatise on architecture. The architect works with specialists. The ability to chain things together, to cross bridges between fields of knowledge, to create beyond their respective borders, beyond the precarity of inventions, requires a specific education and stimulating conditions. [...] As such, architecture is risk, and risk requires impersonal desire and anonymity, starting with the merging of subjectivity and objectivity. In short, a gradual distancing from the ego. Architecture means compromise transformed into radical expression, in other words, a capacity to absorb the opposite and overcome contradiction. Learning this requires an education in search of the other within each of us» (Siza, 2008). We are seeing the coexistence of contrasting, often extreme, design trends aimed at recementing the historical and traditional mould of construction by means of the constant reproposal of the characteristics of “persistence” that long-established architecture, by its very nature, promotes, and at decrypting the evolutionary traits of architecture – markedly immaterial nowadays – that society promotes as phenomena of everyday living. Speed, temporariness, resilience, flexibility: these are just a few fragments. In other words, we indicate a direction which immediately composes and anticipates innovation as a characterising element, describing its stylistic features, materials, languages and technologies, and only later on do we tend to outline the space that these produce: what emerges is a largely anomalous path that goes from “technique” to “function” – by way of “form” – denying the circularity of the three factors at play. The threat of a short-circuit deriving from discourse that exceeds action – in conjunction with a push for standardisation aimed at asserting the dominance of construction over architecture, once again echoing the ideas posited by Rogers – may yet be able to finding a lifeline cast through the attempt to merge figurative research with technology in a balanced way, in the wake of the still-relevant example of the Bauhaus or by emulating the thinking of certain masters of modern Italian architecture who worked during that post-war period so synonymous with physical – and, at the same time, moral – reconstruction. These architectural giants’ aptitude for technical and formal transformation and adaptation can be held up as paradigmatic examples of methodological choice consistent with their high level of mastery over the design process and the rhythm of its phases. In all this exaltation of the outcome, the power of the process is often left behind in a haze: in the uncritical celebration of the architectural work, the method seems to dissolve entirely into the finished product. Technical innovation and disciplinary self-referentiality would seem to deny the concepts of continuity and transversality by means of a constant action of isolation and an insufficient relationship with itself: conversely, the act of designing, as an operation which involves selecting elements from a vast heritage of knowledge, cannot exempt itself from dealing in the variables of a functional, formal, material and linguistic nature – all of such closely intertwined intents – that have over time represented the energy of theoretical formulation and of the works created. For years, the debate in architecture has concentrated on the synergistic or contrasting dualism between cultural approaches linked to venustas and firmitas. Kenneth Frampton, with regard to the interpretative pair of “tectonics” and “form”, notes the existence of a dual trend that is both identifiable and contrasting: namely the predisposition to favour the formal sphere as the predominant one, rejecting all implications on the construction, on the one hand; and the tendency to celebrate the constructive matrix as the generator of the morphological signature – emphasised by the ostentation of architectural detail, including that of a technological matrix – on the other. The design of contemporary architecture is enriched with sprawling values that are often fundamental, yet at times even damaging to the successful completion of the work: it should identify the moment of coagulation within which the architect goes in pursuit of balance between all the interpretative categories that make it up, espousing the Vitruvian meaning, according to which practice is «the continuous reflection on utility» and theory «consists of being able to demonstrate and explain the things made with technical ability in terms of the principle of proportion» (Vitruvius Pollio, 15 BC). Architecture will increasingly be forced to demonstrate how it represents an applied and intellectual activity of a targeted synthesis, of a complex system within which it is not only desirable, but indeed critical, for the cultural, social, environmental, climatic, energy-related, geographical and many other components involved in it to interact proactively, together with the more spatial, functional and material components that are made explicit in the final construction itself through factors borrowed from neighbouring field that are not endogenous to the discipline of architecture alone. Within a unitary vision that exists parallel to the transcalarity that said vision presupposes, the technology of architecture – as a discipline often called upon to play the role of a collagen of skills, binding them together – acts as an instrument of domination within which science and technology interpret the tools for the translation of man’s intellectual needs, expressing the most up-to-date principles of contemporary culture. Within the concept of tradition – as inferred from its evolutionary character – form, technique and production, in their historical “continuity” and not placed in opposition to one other, make up the fields of application by which, in parallel, research proceeds with a view to ensuring a conforming overall design. The “technology of architecture” and “technological design” give the work of architecture its personal hallmark: a sort of DNA to be handed down to future generations, in part as a discipline dedicated to amalgamating the skills and expertise derived from other dimensions of knowledge. In the exercise of design, the categories of urban planning, composition, technology, structure and systems engineering converge, the result increasingly accentuated by multidisciplinary nuances in search of a sense of balance between the parts: a setup founded upon simultaneity and heteronomous logic in the study of variables, by means of translations, approaches and skills as expressions of multifaceted identities. «Architects can influence society with their theories and works, but they are not capable of completing any such transformation on their own, and end up being the interpreters of an overbearing historical reality under which, if the strongest and most honest do not succumb, that therefore means that they alone represent the value of a component that is algebraically added to the others, all acting in the common field» (Rogers, 1951). Construction, in this context, identifies the main element of the transmission of continuity in architecture, placing the “how” at the point of transition between past and future, rather than making it independent of any historical evolution. Architecture determines its path within a heteronomous practice of construction through an effective distinction between the strength of the principles and codes inherent to the discipline – long consolidated thanks to sedimented innovations – and the energy of experimentation in its own right. Architecture will have to seek out and affirm its own identity, its validity as a discipline that is at once scientific and poetic, its representation in the harmonies, codes and measures that history has handed down to us, along with the pressing duty of updating them in a way that is long overdue. The complexity of the architectural field occasionally expresses restricted forms of treatment bound to narrow disciplinary areas or, conversely, others that are excessively frayed, tending towards an eclecticism so vast that it prevents the tracing of any discernible cultural perimeter. In spite of the complex phenomenon that characterises the transformations that involve the status of the project and the figure of the architect themselves, it is a matter of urgency to attempt to renew the interpretation of the activity of design and architecture as a coherent system rather than a patchwork of components. «Contemporary architecture tends to produce objects, even though its most concrete purpose is to generate processes. This is a falsehood that is full of consequences because it confines architecture to a very limited band of its entire spectrum; in doing so, it isolates it, exposing it to the risks of subordination and delusions of grandeur, pushing it towards social and political irresponsibility. The transformation of the physical environment passes through a series of events: the decision to create a new organised space, detection, obtaining the necessary resources, defining the organisational system, defining the formal system, technological choices, use, management, technical obsolescence, reuse and – finally – physical obsolescence. This concatenation is the entire spectrum of architecture, and each link in the chain is affected by what happens in all the others. It is also the case that the cadence, scope and intensity of the various bands can differ according to the circumstances and in relation to the balances or imbalances within the contexts to which the spectrum corresponds. Moreover, each spectrum does not conclude at the end of the chain of events, because the signs of its existence – ruins and memory – are projected onto subsequent events. Architecture is involved with the entirety of this complex development: the design that it expresses is merely the starting point for a far-reaching process with significant consequences» (De Carlo, 1978). The contemporary era proposes the dialectic between specialisation, the coordination of ideas and actions, the relationship between actors, phases and disciplines: the practice of the organisational culture of design circumscribes its own code in the coexistence and reciprocal exploitation of specialised fields of knowledge and the discipline of synthesis that is architecture. With the revival of the global economy on the horizon, the dematerialisation of the working practice has entailed significant changes in the productive actions and social relationships that coordinate the process. Despite a growing need to implement skills and means of coordination between professional actors, disciplinary fields and sectors of activity, architectural design has become the emblem of the action of synthesis. This is a representation of society which, having developed over the last three centuries, from the division of social sciences that once defined it as a “machine”, an “organism” and a “system”, is now defined by the concept of the “network” or, more accurately, by that of the “system of networks”, in which a person’s desire to establish relationships places them within a multitude of social spheres. The “heteronomy” of architecture, between “hybridisation” and “contamination of knowledge”, is to be seen not only an objective fact, but also, crucially, as a concept aimed at providing the discipline with new and broader horizons, capable of putting it in a position of serenity, energy and courage allowing it to tackle the challenges that the cultural, social and economic landscape is increasingly throwing at the heart of our contemporary world.

From an interview with “Mr A”, executive producer and co-creator of the Getaway in Stockholm (GiS) films: Mr A: Yeah, when I tell my girlfriend, ‘You should watch this, it’s good, it’s a classic, it’s an old movie’ and she thinks it’s, like, the worst. And when I actually look at it and it is the worst, it is just a car chase … [Laughs] But you have to look a lot harder, to how it is filmed, you have to learn … Because, you can’t watch car racing for instance, because they are lousy at filming; you get no sensation of speed. If you watch the World Rally Championship it looks like they go two miles an hour. The hardest thing [of the whole thing] is capturing the speed … I want to engage with the notion of “speed” in terms of the necessary affects of automobility, but first I will give some brief background information on the Getaway in Stockholm series of films. Most of the information on the films is derived from the interview with Mr A carried out over dinner in Stockholm, October 2004. Contact was made via e-mail and I organised with the editors of Autosalon Magazine for an edited transcription to be published as an incentive to participate in the interview. Mr A’s “Tarantino-style” name is necessary because the films he makes with Mr X (co-creator) and a small unnamed group of others involve filming highly illegal acts: one or two cars racing through the streets of Stockholm evading police at sustained speeds well over 200 km/h. Due to a quirk in Swedish traffic law, unless they are caught within a certain time frame of committing driving offences or they actually admit to the driving offences, then they cannot be charged. The Swedish police are so keen to capture these renegade film makers that when they appeared on Efterlyst (pron: ef-de-list; the equivalent of “Sweden’s Most Wanted”) instead of the normal toll-free 1-800 number that viewers could phone to give tips, the number on the screen was the direct line to the chief of Stockholm’s traffic unit. The original GiS film (2000) was made as a dare. Mr A and some friends had just watched Claude Lelouch’s 1976 film C’était un Rendez-vous. Rumour has it that Lelouch had a ten-minute film cartridge and had seen how a gyro stabilised camera worked on a recent film. He decided to make use of it with his Ferrari. He mounted the camera to the bonnet and raced through the streets of Paris. In typical Parisian style at the end of the short nine minute film the driver parks and jumps from the Ferrari to embrace a waiting woman for their “rendezvous”. Shortly after watching the film someone said to Mr A, “you don’t do that sort of thing in Stockholm”. Mr A and Mr X set out to prove him wrong. Nearly all the equipment used in the filming of the first GiS film was either borrowed or stolen. The Porsche used in the film (like all the cars in the films) was lent to them. The film equipment consisted of, in Mr A’s words, a “big ass” television broadcast camera and a smaller “lipstick” camera stolen from the set of the world’s first “interactive” reality TV show called The Bar. (The Bar followed a group of people who all lived together in an apartment and also worked together in a bar. The bar was a “real” bar and served actual customers.) The first film was made for fun, but after Mr A and his associates received several requests for copies they decided to ramp up production to commercial levels. Mr A has a “real job” working in advertising; making the GiS films once a year is his main job with his advertising job being on a self-employed, casual basis. As a production team it is a good example of amateurs becoming semi-professionals within the culture industries. The GiS production team distributes one film per year under the guise of being a “documentary” which allows them to escape the wrath of Swedish authorities due to further legal quirks. Although they still sell DVDs from their Website, the main source of income comes from the sale of the worldwide distribution rights to British “powersports” specialist media company Duke Video. Duke also sells a digitally remastered DVD version of Rendezvous on their Website. As well as these legitimate distribution methods, copies of all six GiS films and Rendezvous are available on the internet through various peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. Mr A says there isn’t much he can do about online file sharing besides asking people to support the franchise if they like the films by buying the DVDs. There are a number of groups making films for car enthusiast using similar guerilla film production methods. However, most of the films are one-offs or do not involve cars driven at such radical speeds. An exception was another Swedish film maker who called himself “Ghostrider” and who produced similar films using a motorbike. Police apprehended a man who they alleged is “Ghostrider” in mid-2004 within the requisite timeframe of an offence that had been allegedly committed. The GiS films alongside these others exist within the automotive cultural industry. The automotive cultural industry is a term I am using to describe the overlap between the automotive industry and the cultural industries of popular culture. The films tap in to a niche market of car enthusiasts. There are many different types of car enthusiasts, everything from petite-bourgeois vintage-car restorers to moral panic-inducing street racers. Obviously the GiS films are targeted more towards the street racing end of the spectrum, which is not surprising because Sweden has a very developed underground street racing scene. A good example is the Stockholm-based “Birka Cup”: a quasi-professional multi-round underground street-racing tournament with 60,000 SEK (approx. AUD$11,000) prize money. The rules and rankings for the tournament are found on the tournament Website. To give some indication of what goes on at these events a short teaser video clip for the 2003 Birka Cup DVD is also available for download from the Website. The GiS films have an element of the exotic European-Other about them, not only because of the street-racing pedigree exemplified by the Birka Cup and similar underground social institutions (such as another event for “import” street racers called the “Stockholm Open”), but because they capture an excess within European car culture normally associated with exotic supercars or the extravagant speeds of cars driven on German autobahns or Italian autostradas. For example, the phrase “European Styling” is often used in Australia to sell European designed “inner-city” cars, such as the GM Holden Barina, a.k.a. the Vauxhall Corsa or the Opel Corsa. Cars from other regional manufacturing zones often do not receive such a specific regional identification; for example, cars built in Asian countries are described as “fully imported” rather than “Asian styling”. Tom O’Dell has noted that dominant conception of automobility in Sweden is different to that of the US. That is, “automobility” needs to be qualified with a national or local context and I assume that other national contexts in Europe would equally be just as different. However, in non-European, mainly post-colonial contexts, such as Australia, the term “European” is an affectation signaling something special. On a different axis, “excess” is directly expressed in the way the police are “captured” in the GiS films. Throughout the GiS series there is a strongly antagonist relation to the police. The initial pre-commercial version of the first GiS film had NWA’s “Fuck the Police” playing over the opening credits. Subsequent commercially-released versions of the film had to change the opening title music due to copyright infringement issues. The “bonus footage” material of subsequent DVDs in the series represents the police as impotent and foolish. Mr A describes it as a kind of “prank” played on police. His rationale is that they live out the fantasy that “everyone” wishes they could do to the police when they are pulled over for speeding and the like; as he puts it, “flipping the bird and driving off”. The police are rendered foolish and captured on film, which is an inversion of the normative traffic-cop-versus-traffic-infringer power relation. Mr A specifies the excess of European modernity to something specific to automobility, which is the near-universal condition of urbanity in most developed nations. The antagonism between the GiS drivers and the police is figured as a duel. The speed of the car(s) obviously exceeds what is socially and legally acceptable and therefore places the drivers in direct conflict with police. The speed captured on film is in part a product of this tension and gives speed a qualitative cultural dimension beyond a simple notion from rectilinear physics of speed as a rate of motion. The qualitative dimension of speed as been noted by Peter Wollen: Speed is not simply thrilling in itself, once sufficiently accelerated, but also enables us to enter exposed and unfamiliar situations, far removed from the zones of safety and normality – to travel into space, for instance, beyond the frontiers of the known. (106) Knowledge is subsumed by the dialect of road safety: “safety” versus “speed”. Knowledge takes on many forms and it is here that speed gains its complexity. In the high-school physics of rectilinear motion speed refers to a rate. Mr A discusses speed as a sensation (“thrill” in the language of Wollen) in the quote at the beginning of the essay. If the body develops sensations from affects and percepts (Deleuze and Guattari 179-83), then what are the affects and percepts that are developed by the body into the sensation of speed? The catchphrase for the GiS films is “Reality Beats Fiction By Far!” The “reality” at stake here is not only the actuality of cars traveling at high speeds within urban spaces, which in the vernacular of automotive popular culture is more “real” than Hollywood representations, but the “reality” of automobilised bodies engaging with and “getting away” from the police. Important here is that the police serve as the symbolic representatives of the governmental institutions and authorities that regulate and discipline populations to be automobilised road users. The police are principally symbolic because one’s road-user body is policed, to a large degree, by one’s self; that is, by the perceptual apparatus that enables us to judge traffic’s rates of movement and gestures of negotiation that are indoctrinated into habit. We do this unthinkingly as part of everyday life. What I want to suggest is that the GiS films tap into the part of our respective bodily perceptual and affective configurations that allow us to exist as road users. To explain this I need to go on a brief detour through “traffic” and its relation to “speed”. Speed serves a functional role within automobilised societies. Contrary to the dominant line from the road safety industry, the “speed limit” we encounter everyday on the road is not so much a limit, but a guide for the self-organisation of traffic. To think the “speed limit” as a limit allows authorities to imagine a particular movement-based threshold of perception and action that bestows upon drivers the ability to negotiate the various everyday hazard-events that constitute the road environment. This is a negative way to look at traffic and is typical of the (post)modernist preoccupation with incorporating contingency (“the accident”) into behavioural protocol and technical design (Lyotard 65-8). It is not surprising that the road safety industry is an exemplary institution of what Gilles Deleuze called the “control society”. The business of the road safety industry is the perpetual modulation of road user populations in a paradoxical attempt to both capture (forecast and study) the social mechanics of the accident-event while postponing its actualisation. Another way to look at traffic is to understand it as a self-organising system. Ilya Prigogine and Robert Herman modeled vehicle traffic as two flows – collective and individual – as a function of the concentration and speed of vehicles. At a certain tipping point the concentration of traffic is such that individual mobility is subsumed by the collective. Speed plays an important role both in the abstract sense of a legislated “speed limit” and as the emergent consistency of mobile road users distributed in traffic. That is, automotive traffic does not move at a constant speed, but nominally moves at a consistent speed. The rate and rhythms of traffic have a consistency that we all must become familiar with to successfully negotiate the everyday system of automobility. For example, someone simply walking becomes a “pedestrian” in the duration of automobilised time-space. Pedestrians must embody a similar sense of the rate of traffic as that perceived by drivers in the cars that constitute traffic. The pedestrian uses this sense of speed when negotiating traffic so as to cross the road, while the driver uses it to maintain a safe distance from the car in front and so on. The shared sense of speed demands an affective complicity of road-user bodies to allow them to seamlessly incorporate themselves into the larger body of traffic on a number of different registers. When road users do not comply with this shared sense of speed that underpins traffic they are met with horn blasts, rude figure gestures, abuse, violence and so on. The affects of traffic are accelerated in the body and developed by the body into the sensations and emotions of “road rage”. Road users must performatively incorporate the necessary dispositions for participating with other road users in traffic otherwise they disrupt the affective script (“habits”) for the production of traffic. When I screened the first GiS film in a seminar in Sweden the room was filled with the sound of horrified gasps. Afterwards someone suggested to me that they (the Swedes) were more shocked than I (an Australian) about the film. Why? Is it because I am a “hoon”? We had all watched the same images heard the same sounds, yet, the “speeds” were not equal. They had experienced the streets in the film as a part of traffic. Their bodies knew just how slow the car was meant to be going. The film captured and transmitted the affects of a different automobilised body. Audiences follow the driver “getting away” from those universally entrusted (at least on a symbolic level) with the governance of traffic – the police – while, for a short period, becoming a new body that gets away from the “practiced perception” (Massumi 189) of habits that normatively enable the production of traffic. What is captured in the film – the event of the getaway – has the potential to develop in the body of the spectator as the sensation of “speed” and trigger a getaway of the body. Acknowledgement I would like to acknowledge the generous funding from the Centre for Cultural Research and the College of Arts, Education and Social Sciences, University of Western Sydney, in awarding me the 2004 CCR CAESS Postgraduate International Scholarship, and the support from my colleagues at the Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden where I carried out this research as a doctoral exchange student. References Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on Control Societies”. Negotiations. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Graham Burchill and Hugh Tomlinson. London: Verso, 1994. Getaway in Stockholm series. 21 Oct. 2005 http://www.getawayinstockholm.com>. Lyotard, Jean François. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 1991. Massumi, Brian. “Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation”. Post-Contemporary Interventions. Eds. Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson. Durham, London: Duke UP, 2002. O’Dell, Tom. “Raggare and the Panic of Mobility: Modernity and Everyday Life in Sweden.” Car Culture. Ed. Daniel Miller. Oxford: Berg, 2001. 105-32. Prigogine, Ilya, and Robert Herman. “A Two-Fluid Approach to Town Traffic.” Science 204 (1979): 148-51. Wollen, Peter. “Speed and the Cinema.” New Left Review 16 (2002): 105–14. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Fuller, Glen. "The Getaway." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/07-fuller.php>. APA Style Fuller, G. (Dec. 2005) "The Getaway," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/07-fuller.php>.

Introduction The academic area known as food studies—incorporating elements from disciplines including anthropology, folklore, history, sociology, gastronomy, and cultural studies as well as a range of multi-disciplinary approaches—asserts that cooking and eating practices are less a matter of nutrition (maintaining life by absorbing nutrients from food) and more a personal or group expression of various social and/or cultural actions, values or positions. The French philosopher, Michel de Certeau agrees, arguing, moreover, that there is an urgency to name and unpick (what he identifies as) the “minor” practices, the “multifarious and silent reserve of procedures” of everyday life. Such practices are of crucial importance to all of us, as although seemingly ordinary, and even banal, they have the ability to “organise” our lives (48). Within such a context, the following aims to consider the influence and significance of an important (although largely unstudied) professional figure in rural and regional economic life: the country food preparer variously known as the local chef or cook. Such an approach is obviously framed by the concept of “cultural economy”. This term recognises the convergence, and interdependence, of the spheres of the cultural and the economic (see Scott 335, for an influential discussion on how “the cultural geography of space and the economic geography of production are intertwined”). Utilising this concept in relation to chefs and cooks seeks to highlight how the ways these figures organise (to use de Certeau’s term) the social and cultural lives of those in their communities are embedded in economic practices and also how, in turn, their economic contributions are dependent upon social and cultural practices. This initial mapping of the influence and significance of the rural and regional chef in one rural and regional area, therefore, although necessarily different in approach and content, continues the application of such converged conceptualisations of the cultural and economic as Teema Tairu’s discussion of the social, recreational and spiritual importance of food preparation and consumption by the unemployed in Finland, Guy Redden’s exploration of how supermarket products reflect shared values, and a series of analyses of the cultural significance of individual food products, such as Richard White’s study of vegemite. While Australians, both urban and rural, currently enjoy access to an internationally renowned food culture, it is remarkable to consider that it has only been during the years following the Second World War that these sophisticated and now much emulated ways of eating and cooking have developed. It is, indeed, only during the last half century that Australian eating habits have shifted from largely Anglo-Saxon influenced foods and meals that were prepared and eaten in the home, to the consumption of a wider range of more international and sophisticated foods and meals that are, increasingly, prepared by others and eaten outside the consumer’s residence. While a range of commonly cited influences has prompted this relatively recent revolution in culinary practice—including post-war migration, increasing levels of prosperity, widespread international travel, and the forces of globalisation—some of this change owes a debt to a series of influential individual figures. These tastemakers have included food writers and celebrity chefs; with early exponents including Margaret Fulton, Graham Kerr and Charmaine Solomon (see Brien). The findings of this study suggests that many restaurant chefs, and other cooks, have similarly played, and continue to take, a key role in the lives of not only the, necessarily, limited numbers of individuals who dine in a particular eatery or the other chefs and/or cooks trained in that establishment (Ruhlman, Reach), but also the communities in which they work on a much broader scale. Considering Chefs In his groundbreaking study, A History of Cooks and Cooking, Australian food historian Michael Symons proposes that those who prepare food are worthy of serious consideration because “if ‘we are what we eat’, cooks have not just made our meals, but have also made us. They have shaped our social networks, our technologies, arts and religions” (xi). Writing that cooks “deserve to have their stories told often and well,” and that, moreover, there is a “need to invent ways to think about them, and to revise our views about ourselves in their light” (xi), Symons’s is a clarion call to investigate the role and influence of cooks. Charles-Allen Baker-Clark has explicitly begun to address this lacunae in his Profiles from the Kitchen: What Great Cooks Have Taught Us About Ourselves and Our Food (2006), positing not only how these figures have shaped our relationships with food and eating, but also how these relationships impact on identities, culture and a range of social issues including those of social justice, spirituality and environmental sustainability. With the growing public interest in celebrities, it is perhaps not surprising that, while such research on chefs and/or cooks is still in its infancy, most of the existing detailed studies on individuals focus on famed international figures such as Marie-Antoine Carême (Bernier; Kelly), Escoffier (James; Rachleff; Sanger), and Alexis Soyer (Brandon; Morris; Ray). Despite an increasing number of tabloid “tell-all” surveys of contemporary celebrity chefs, which are largely based on mass media sources and which display little concern for historical or biographical accuracy (Bowyer; Hildred and Ewbank; Simpson; Smith), there have been to date only a handful of “serious” researched biographies of contemporary international chefs such as Julia Child, Alice Waters (Reardon; Riley), and Bernard Loiseux (Chelminski)—the last perhaps precipitated by an increased interest in this chef following his suicide after his restaurant lost one of its Michelin stars. Despite a handful of collective biographical studies of Australian chefs from the later-1980s on (Jenkins; O’Donnell and Knox; Brien), there are even fewer sustained biographical studies of Australian chefs or cooks (Clifford-Smith’s 2004 study of “the supermarket chef,” Bernard King, is a notable exception). Throughout such investigations, as well as in other popular food writing in magazines and cookbooks, there is some recognition that influential chefs and cooks have worked, and continue to work, outside such renowned urban culinary centres as Paris, London, New York, and Sydney. The Michelin starred restaurants of rural France, the so-called “gastropubs” of rural Britain and the advent of the “star-chef”-led country bed and breakfast establishment in Australia and New Zealand, together with the proliferation of farmer’s markets and a public desire to consume locally sourced, and ecologically sustainable, produce (Nabhan), has focused fresh attention on what could be called “the rural/regional chef”. However, despite the above, little attention has focused on the Australian non-urban chef/cook outside of the pages of a small number of key food writing magazines such as Australian Gourmet Traveller and Vogue Entertaining + Travel. Setting the Scene with an Australian Country Example: Armidale and Guyra In 2004, the Armidale-Dumaresq Council (of the New England region, New South Wales, Australia) adopted the slogan “Foodies thrive in Armidale” to market its main city for the next three years. With a population of some 20,000, Armidale’s main industry (in economic terms) is actually education and related services, but the latest Tourist Information Centre’s Dining Out in Armidale (c. 2006) brochure lists some 25 restaurants, 9 bistros and brasseries, 19 cafés and 5 fast food outlets featuring Australian, French, Italian, Mediterranean, Chinese, Thai, Indian and “international” cuisines. The local Yellow Pages telephone listings swell the estimation of the total number of food-providing businesses in the city to 60. Alongside the range of cuisines cited above, a large number of these eateries foreground the use of fresh, local foods with such phrases as “local and regional produce,” “fresh locally grown produce,” “the finest New England ingredients” and locally sourced “New England steaks, lamb and fresh seafood” repeatedly utilised in advertising and other promotional material. Some thirty kilometres to the north along the New England highway, the country town of Guyra, proclaimed a town in 1885, is the administrative and retail centre for a shire of some 2,200 people. Situated at 1,325 metres above sea level, the town is one of the highest in Australia with its main industries those of fine wool and lamb, beef cattle, potatoes and tomatoes. Until 1996, Guyra had been home to a large regional abattoir that employed some 400 staff at the height of its productivity, but rationalisation of the meat processing industry closed the facility, together with its associated pet food processor, causing a downturn in employment, local retail business, and real estate values. Since 2004, Guyra’s economy has, however, begun to recover after the town was identified by the Costa Group as the perfect site for glasshouse grown tomatoes. Perfect, due to its rare combination of cool summers (with an average of less than two days per year with temperatures over 30 degrees celsius), high winter light levels and proximity to transport routes. The result: 3.3 million kilograms of truss, vine harvested, hydroponic “Top of the Range” tomatoes currently produced per annum, all year round, in Guyra’s 5-hectare glasshouse: Australia’s largest, opened in December 2005. What residents (of whom I am one) call the “tomato-led recovery” has generated some 60 new local jobs directly related to the business, and significant flow on effects in terms of the demand for local services and retail business. This has led to substantial rates of renovation and building of new residential and retail properties, and a noticeably higher level of trade flowing into the town. Guyra’s main street retail sector is currently burgeoning and stories of its renewal have appeared in the national press. Unlike many similar sized inland towns, there are only a handful of empty shops (and most of these are in the process of being renovated), and new commercial premises have recently been constructed and opened for business. Although a small town, even in Australian country town terms, Guyra now has 10 restaurants, hotel bistros and cafés. A number of these feature local foods, with one pub’s bistro regularly featuring the trout that is farmed just kilometres away. Assessing the Contribution of Local Chefs and Cooks In mid-2007, a pilot survey to begin to explore the contribution of the regional chef in these two close, but quite distinct, rural and regional areas was sent to the chefs/cooks of the 70 food-serving businesses in Armidale and Guyra that I could identify. Taking into account the 6 returns that revealed a business had closed, moved or changed its name, the 42 replies received represented a response rate of 65.5per cent (or two thirds), representatively spread across the two towns. Answers indicated that the businesses comprised 18 restaurants, 13 cafés, 6 bistro/brasseries, 1 roadhouse, 1 takeaway/fast food and 3 bed and breakfast establishments. These businesses employed 394 staff, of whom 102 were chefs and/cooks, or 25.9 per cent of the total number of staff then employed by these establishments. In answer to a series of questions designed to ascertain the roles played by these chefs/cooks in their local communities, as well as more widely, I found a wide range of inputs. These chefs had, for instance, made a considerable contribution to their local economies in the area of fostering local jobs and a work culture: 40 (95 per cent) had worked with/for another local business including but not exclusively food businesses; 30 (71.4 per cent) had provided work experience opportunities for those aspiring to work in the culinary field; and 22 (more than half) had provided at least one apprenticeship position. A large number had brought outside expertise and knowledge with them to these local areas, with 29 (69 per cent) having worked in another food business outside Armidale or Guyra. In terms of community building and sustainability, 10 (or almost a quarter) had assisted or advised the local Council; 20 (or almost half) had worked with local school children in a food-related way; 28 (two thirds) had helped at least one charity or other local fundraising group. An extra 7 (bringing the cumulative total to 83.3 per cent) specifically mentioned that they had worked with/for the local gallery, museum and/or local history group. 23 (more than half) had been involved with and/or contributed to a local festival. The question of whether they had “contributed anything else important, helpful or interesting to the community” elicited the following responses: writing a food or wine column for the local paper (3 respondents), delivering TAFE teacher workshops (2 respondents), holding food demonstrations for Rotary and Lions Clubs and school fetes (5 respondents), informing the public about healthy food (3 respondents), educating the public about environmental issues (2 respondents) and working regularly with Meals on Wheels or a similar organisation (6 respondents, or 14.3 per cent). One respondent added his/her work as a volunteer driver for the local ambulance transport service, the only non-food related response to this question. Interestingly, in line with the activity of well-known celebrity chefs, in addition to the 3 chefs/cooks who had written a food or wine column for the local newspaper, 11 respondents (more than a quarter of the sample) had written or contributed to a cookbook or recipe collection. One of these chefs/cooks, moreover, reported that he/she produced a weblog that was “widely read”, and also contributed to international food-related weblogs and websites. In turn, the responses indicated that the (local) communities—including their governing bodies—also offer some support of these chefs and cooks. Many respondents reported they had been featured in, or interviewed and/or photographed for, a range of media. This media comprised the following: the local newspapers (22 respondents, 52.4 per cent), local radio stations (19 respondents, 45.2 per cent), regional television stations (11 respondents, 26.2 per cent) and local websites (8 respondents, 19 per cent). A number had also attracted other media exposure. This was in the local, regional area, especially through local Council publications (31 respondents, 75 per cent), as well as state-wide (2 respondents, 4.8 per cent) and nationally (6 respondents, 14.3 per cent). Two of these local chefs/cooks (or 4.8 per cent) had attracted international media coverage of their activities. It is clear from the above that, in the small area surveyed, rural and regional chefs/cooks make a considerable contribution to their local communities, with all the chefs/cooks who replied making some, and a number a major, contribution to those communities, well beyond the requirements of their paid positions in the field of food preparation and service. The responses tendered indicate that these chefs and cooks contributed regularly to local public events, institutions and charities (with a high rate of contribution to local festivals, school programs and local charitable activities), and were also making an input into public education programs, local cultural institutions, political and social debates of local importance, as well as the profitability of other local businesses. They were also actively supporting not only the future of the food industry as a whole, but also the viability of their local communities, by providing work experience opportunities and taking on local apprentices for training and mentorship. Much more than merely food providers, as a group, these chefs and cooks were, it appears, also operating as food historians, public intellectuals, teachers, activists and environmentalists. They were, moreover, operating as content producers for local media while, at the same time, acting as media producers and publishers. Conclusion The terms “chef” and “cook” can be diversely defined. All definitions, however, commonly involve a sense of professionalism in food preparation reflecting some specialist knowledge and skill in the culinary arts, as well as various levels of creativity, experience and responsibility. In terms of the specific duties that chefs and professional cooks undertake every day, almost all publications on the subject deal specifically with workplace related activities such as food and other supply ordering, staff management, menu planning and food preparation and serving. This is constant across culinary textbooks (see, for instance, Culinary Institute of America 2002) and more discursive narratives about the professional chef such as the bestselling autobiographical musings of Anthony Bourdain, and Michael Ruhlman’s journalistic/biographical investigations of US chefs (Soul; Reach). An alternative preliminary examination, and categorisation, of the roles these professionals play outside their kitchens reveals, however, a much wider range of community based activities and inputs than such texts suggest. It is without doubt that the chefs and cooks who responded to the survey discussed above have made, and are making, a considerable contribution to their local New England communities. It is also without doubt that these contributions are of considerable value, and valued by, those country communities. Further research will have to consider to what extent these contributions, and the significance and influence of these chefs and cooks in those communities are mirrored, or not, by other country (as well as urban) chefs and cooks, and their communities. Acknowledgements An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Engaging Histories: Australian Historical Association Regional Conference, at the University of New England, September 2007. I would like to thank the session’s participants for their insightful comments on that presentation. A sincere thank you, too, to the reviewers of this article, whose suggestions assisted my thinking on this piece. Research to complete this article was carried out whilst a Visiting Fellow with the Research School of Humanities, the Australian National University. References Armidale Tourist Information Centre. Dining Out in Armidale [brochure]. Armidale: Armidale-Dumaresq Council, c. 2006. Baker-Clark, C. A. 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