Journal articles on the topic 'Degree Name: Master of Environmental Studies'

Introduction: Identifying highly cited articles helps researchers find the most important areas, effective authors in the field, pioneer countries and frequently used journals. This study aimed to review the 100 most highly cited articles published in telemedicine journals.Material and Methods: The list of the telemedicine journals was found by searching the “master journal list” of the Web of Science database. Then, the name of each journal was searched separately in the “Publication Name” section of the same database and the results were sorted based on the “times cited” order. The first 100 articles that received the most citations were selected. The journal name, study type and study field were extracted from the final articles.Results: The top 100 highly cited articles were published in the Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare (n=54, 53.5%), Telemedicine and e-Health (n=45, 44.5%) and International Journal of Telemedicine and Applications (n=2, 2%). Most of the highly cited articles were review studies (n=55, 54%) and almost one-third of the reviewed articles were conducted on general telemedicine (n=28, 28%).Conclusion: This study revealed that some characteristics such as review studies, studies on general telemedicine, and studies being published in the oldest telemedicine journals were more likely used and cited.

In the contemporary public health workforce environment, public health social workers (PHSW) bring integrated skills, from both fields, to meet the needs of vulnerable and underserved populations. They receive training in their Master of Public Health/Master of Social Work dual-degree programs, such as the one at New Mexico State University, which serves the U.S./Mexico border region. During their studies, dual-degree students are equipped to address health and human service issues at the micro, mezzo, and macro levels and complete field experience and practicum hours in their communities. Along with practical skills, these students learn culturally responsive/humble ways of being with communities of color and marginalized individuals. After graduation, these emerging career PHSWs enter the workforce in a variety of settings: nonprofit, educational, government, primary care, and more. In this article, the field of public health social work is described in its historic and present forms, followed by PHSWs’ utility to the U.S./Mexico border region, in particular. Finally, we make the call to action for future career PHSWs to engage with this integrated, dynamic, innovative field, and its unique combination of community- and individual-based services and rewards.

The question discussed in this article is whether Romance philology as didactic matter is still present in Polish university curricula and does it really represent main Romance languages. Some departments of Romance philology have separate curricula for French, Italian or Spanish, the others teach only French. The current trend seems to prefer practical subjects like professional translation or teaching foreign languages rather than historical linguistics or serious literary studies. Nevertheless, a solution could be found to preserve philological profile at master degree courses, by creating an optional curriculum containing, for example, historical lexicology and lexicography as well as translation of ancient literature, especially medieval and renaissance works.

Abstract A two-category taxonomic classification and a methodology for field description are proposed to aid in consistent identification and interpretation of humus forms for ecosystem research, surveys, and management. The classification uses the nomenclature principles of the U.S. soil taxonomy and the master organic horizon designations of the Canadian system of soil classification. It includes humus form taxa that have been recognized in Europe and North America. Recognized taxa are defined on the basis of observable and easily measurable morphological properties. Three taxa, Mor, Moder, and Mull, are recognized at the order level and are differentiated according to the type of F horizon and the relative prominence of organic-enriched A horizons. These reflect principal differences in the nature and rate of decomposition processes. Names of the 16 taxa at the lower, group level are created by adding formative elements to the name of the order. For example, groups of the Mor order are differentiated according to the relative thickness of F and H horizons (Hemimors and Humimors); degree of humification in the H horizon (Resimors); content of decaying wood (Lignomors); and moisture regime (Hydromors, Fibrimors, and Mesimors). Phases can be formed for any taxon to recognize important morphological properties that deviate from the taxonomic differentiae. Keys to the recognized taxa and descriptions of representative humus form profiles for each group are provided to assist in identification. Methods for describing, sampling, and surveying humus forms are presented to facilitate field examinations and subsequent studies.

World-wide, Integrated Pest Management (IPM) has been considered one of the eco-friendly and powerful tools to manage crop pests. In Nepal, it has been adopted for more than two decades with its highest success in various crops. As dissemination and up-scaling tools to this approach, Farmers Field School (FFS) is being launched in numerous farming communities. The basic notion of initiation of this program was to mitigate and combat the negative consequence created by chemical pesticides while controlling insect pests in crops. In Nepal, it started in 1997 through a FAO Technical Cooperation Project (TCP). This article summarizes IPM activities ever since TCP to Second Phase of IPM Program (2008-2013) launched by the Government of Nepal with the support of Norwegian government. Until, 2012/013, altogether 3772 FFSs were conducted by PPD and FAO initiatives and 99751 farmers graduated in IPM Program, while 1175 farmers trained as IPM FFS Facilitators. More than 5000 farmers groups benefited from yearlong IPM FFS. Medium level agricultural technicians, government Officers from different disciplines and 25 participants from Council for Vocational Education and Training Centre (CTEVT) were trained as IPM Master Facilitators. IPM policy and participatory system of IPM product certification system were drafted however; they could not be finalized during the project period. Support for Master Degree studies and Bachelor degree mini-thesis were provided to students of various Agriculture Education Institution. Curricula developed for yearlong IPM FFS in different crops were adopted by CTEVT and other Institute in their academic programs. In the the later phase of project, emphasis was towards the institutionalization of the outcomes into regular program of the Government with a modified approach of bio pesticide production, plant clinics and networking. The program ignited and stressed largely on the socio-technical empowerment to the farmers and technicians. Initiation on the marketing of IPM products was also one of the outputs. This should be linked with increasing use of bio pesticides to the healthy food production so that environmentally damaging chemical pesticides may be reduced from the country.

This research aimed to examine the level of knowledge of master and doctorate students regarding scientific research ethics and the frequency of scientific deception identification in scientific publications. The research was conducted using descriptive methods. The group under examination consisted of 112 randomly chosen students who pursued their postgraduate degree in physical education and sports fields. The validity and reliability were determined in the framework of this study. Item total correlation and factor analyses were conducted for the construct validity of the assessment tool. The Alpha Coefficient, which was calculated for the scale reliability as .96, indicated the scale is valid and reliable. The Shapiro-Wilks test was also conducted to determine whether the data were normally distributed. Because the data did not exhibit a normal distribution, a non-parametric Mann-Whitney U test was utilised. “Writing more than one article using the same data”, “citing without providing a reference”, “reporting findings that are only consistent with expectations”, “publishing someone else’s ideas without providing references as if they are one’s own”, “presenting the same research in more than one conference or symposium”, and “publishing the same research in more than one journal” are the most non-ethical behaviours perceived in scientific research. All of the participants indicated that “presenting falsified findings of research and publishing someone else’s research with own name” represent non-ethical behaviours. According to the research results, “citing without providing a reference” and “writing more than one article using the same data” were the most unethical behaviours identified in scientific studies.

AbstractMany psychiatric disorders are influenced by genetic factors, but the genetic components of complex diseases may not follow clear inheritance patterns. Although the patients may share a common clinical phenotype, the cause of the syndrome may consist of a heterogeneous collection of both genetic and/or environmental components. One method to minimize genetic heterogeneity in studies of complex disorders is to select a very homogenous study population. The average number of families with the same last name, when corrected for population size, is an excellent marker for the degree of homogeneity. We used surname analysis to evaluate the homogeneity of the Portuguese population of Madeira, comparing it with previous data on the homogeneity of populations of mainland Portugal, the Azores, and both rural and urban US populations. The average number of families with the same last name corrected for population size was 33.84 in Madeira, 30.88 in the Azores, and 21.42 in Coimbra (mainland Portugal) compared with 1.13 in rural and 0.38 in urban United States. This surname analysis supports the premise that the Portuguese population is a highly homogenous population, with the highest homogeneity in Madeira and the Azores, making it a good study population for molecular genetic analyses.

This paper presents a study on the development of Indonesian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers’ intercultural capability in an overseas study program and its impacts on classroom English Language teaching practices. By using narrative inquiry as a research methodology, this study draws on the stories of two Indonesian EFL teachers’ experiences of intercultural learning during the master's degree program overseas. Data were gathered through semi-structured individual interviews with Indonesian EFL teachers who have completed Master of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) studies in Australia. Findings show that communication and cultural disequilibrium in an overseas study program plays a crucial role in the development of EFL teachers’ intercultural capability to enable them to develop their attributes from ethnocentrism to ethnorelativism. The findings also reveal that although the teachers become interculturally capable, the overseas study program does not necessarily contribute to their oral English skill development. As a further result, this study reveals that the development of the teachers’ intercultural capability affects their subsequent classroom English teaching practices in a way that they begin to employ dialogical communication and interaction by reflecting on their past experiences.

3D printing (3DP) is regarded as an innovation that contributes to automation in civil engineering and offers benefits in design, greenness, and efficiency. It is necessary to objectively analyze the current status and challenges associated with 3DP and identify future research directions to properly understand its construction applications. Previous research has focused more on the technical dimension of 3DP; however, the nontechnical dimension of the technology may hinder its implementation and thus must be paid particular attention to. This study presents a systematic review of the existing literature from both technical and nontechnical dimensions by combining quantitative and qualitative studies. The quantitative study was conducted using scientometric methods. The qualitative study analyzed information, including the technical research status and nontechnical challenges and trends. Two aspects of technical research status are presented, including materials and processes. In addition, nontechnical challenges and trends from the economic, environmental, social, and legislative aspects are proposed. This study provides a comprehensive agenda to advance 3DP in construction and proposes research interests, challenges, and future topics. It is intended to help construction practitioners systematically master existing processes and materials and assess the application degree and necessity of 3DP.

AbstractObjective:The aim of this study was to assess the validity and reliability of a self-administered nutrition knowledge (NK) questionnaire for Italian university students.Design:The NK questionnaire included ninety questions on experts’ nutritional recommendations, nutritional content of food, health aspects of food and diets, relationship between diet and diseases, and proper food choices. It was administered to the same population under the same conditions on two different occasions with a time interval of 3 weeks between the two administrations.Setting:The survey was carried out at the University of Parma (Italy) during the 2018–2019 academic year.Participants:Data were collected for 132 bachelor and master degree students attending the University of Parma, either attending or not nutrition classes during their studies (19–30 years, 29·5 % males, 57·6 % with an academic nutrition background).Results:The questionnaire revealed high overall internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s α > 0·8) and a good temporal stability with high correlation of the total score (r = 0·835, P < 0·001). Moreover, it showed a good ability to discriminate between subjects with potentially different NK.Conclusions:This NK questionnaire proved to be a reliable, valid and easy-to-use tool for assessing the NK of Italian university students, either with or without nutrition background.

Vaccination is a key strategy to prevent the pandemic caused by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). This study aims to investigate the willingness of Chinese adults to be vaccinated against COVID-19 and further explore the factors that may affect their willingness. We used a self-design anonymous questionnaire to conduct an online survey via the Sojump. A total of 1009 valid questionnaires were analyzed. The age of the participants ranged from 18 to 74. Among them, 609 (60.4%, 95%CI: 57.4–63.4%) were willing to receive the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) vaccine. Logistic regression analysis results showed that the age of 30–49 (OR = 2.042, 95%CI: 1.098–3.799), universities and colleges education (OR = 1.873, 95% CI = 1.016–3.451), master degree or above education (OR = 1.885, 95%CI = 1.367–2.599), previous influenza vaccination history (OR = 2.176, 95%CI: 1.474–3.211), trust in the effectiveness of the vaccine (OR = 6.419, 95%CI: 3.717–11.086), and close attention to the latest news of the vaccine (OR = 1.601, 95%CI: 1.046–2.449) were facilitative factors that affected their willingness to be vaccinated. More than half of the adults in China would be willing to receive a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. Middle-aged people with higher education, those who had been vaccinated against influenza, and those who believed that COVID-19 vaccine was effective and paid close attention to it were more willing to be vaccinated. Our findings can provide reference for the implementation of vaccination and the prevention of COVID-19 in China. More studies are needed after the vaccine is launched.

It is to define its relationship with the partners during the formation and registration process of S Company Is a legal document prepared and also refers to the minute of the angle corresponding to the MOA 360 minute mark. Each minute represents 1/60 of a degree, just like the minutes of an hour. When shooting, even a small angle can cause you to miss the mark, so it is important to adjust your MOA to a precise angle or fine for a minute. Stands for Memorandum of Association, which refers to articles of association. They help protect and build your business and help establish the company's identity, work ethic and goals. The MOA's first duty is to obtain the patient's personal information before proceeding with the medical journey. Once the MOA collects the patient's information, he will begin transferring the patient to the doctor's office. At this point, the doctor may begin to perform medical procedures. Memorandum of Association (MOA) with its partners defines a company relationship. Is a Memorandum of Association (MOA) To define its relationship with partners Formation of limited liability company And is a legal document prepared during the registration process. The Military Operation Area (MOA) is a Class A aircraft designated to distinguish or differentiate certain hazardous military operations from IFR traffic and to identify VFR traffic carrying these operations. A company is also involved in a business or industrial organization is In order to operate a law firm Created by a group of individuals. They vary between private and public companies. Both have different ownership structures, Terms and conditions include financial statement requirements. The document containing Rules governing the internal management of a company and the regulations are called the article of the association. Select the document type as the consolidation document and select the year the attachment was filed. Pay the fee and request a certified copy. Memorandum of Association (MoA) Memorandum of Association articles there are the following subcategories: This subdivision refers to the name of the company. Company name should not be synonymous with any existing company. Also, if it is a private company, the last word should be the private company.

Konstantin Yuryevich Kalinovich (b. 1959), an artist and illustrator who demonstrates exclusive techniques and a high degree of detail in the field of printed graphics, is the owner of a large number of international awards, prestigious art prizes and the title of Corresponding Member of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers of the United Kingdom (1992). K.Yu. Kalinovich’s professionalism is also convincingly manifested in small forms — in the art of ex-libris. The artist’s formation as an etcher began in the Leningrad period of his studies in the experimental lithographic workshop of the Leningrad Institute of Civil Engineering under the guidance of G.P. Pakharevsky, and then continued at the Faculty of Graphics of the Ivan Fyodorov Ukrainian Polygraphic Institute. The creative heritage of A. Brunovsky and personal acquaintance with the Slovak master had a great influence on the formation of the individual graphic style. The artist’s bookplates, made in etching, are often homages in memory of old masters: the images created by H. Bosch, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, A. Dürer, H. Avercamp, J. Vermeer, and Rembrandt excite and inspire him to visual interpretation. The chosen range of artistic means is miniature, synthesis, printmaking as an independent expression of ex-libris. The technique is etching, less often watercolor, gouache. The type is a plot bookplate with the preserved function of belonging to a private library and the implementation of the customer’s idea. To the depth, picturesqueness and wide tonal range of etching, the artist adds original technical features: a dial from an old clock is selected as an etching board, and details of the clock mechanism are involved in the image base, correcting and warping the format and field of the etching with blind impressions. The plot echoing with the great artists and the meticulous thoroughness of K.Yu. Kalinovich’s technique generate original stories about the joy and pain of being, framed by a high form of appreciation for the art of the past. In the works of Kalinovich, the involvement in the composed metaphysical world, the visual images of which are fantastically realistic, monstrously attractive and historically filled, is clearly accentuated. The homage to the old artists’ art in Kalinovich’s bookplates is his world, forcing the viewers to reach for a magnifying glass so as not to miss a single line, while mastering the knowledge of the world art history.

<p class="Default" align="center">Abstrak</p><p class="Default">Program Studi Ilmu Perpustakaan di Indonesia merupakan salah satu bidang pendidikan yang sedang berkembang sesuai dengan tuntutan perkembangan teknologi informasi dewasa ini. Sekalipun bidang pendidikan ini sudah cukup tua namun penamaan dan penempatan bidang pendidikan ini pada fakultas tidak sama antara satu Perguruan Tinggi dengan yang lainnya. Profesi pustakawan yang akan dihasilkan dari lulusan bidang pendidikan ilmu perpustakaan, masih merupakan profesi yang tak banyak diminati dibandingkan profesi lainnya. Namun demikian, sejak dibukanya bidang pendidikan ini di UIN Sumatera Utara, minat calon mahasiswa untuk belajar di program studi Ilmu Perpustakaan meningkat dari tahun ke tahun. Karena itu, penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menggali data tentang faktor-faktor yang mendorong mahasiswa memilih program studi Ilmu perpustakaan di Univesitas Islam Negeri Sumatera Utara Medan. Dengan menggunakan tehnik pengumpulan data <em>Focused Group Discussion</em> (FGD), penelitian ini menemukan bahwa ada empat faktor yang mendorong mahasiswa memilih program studi Ilmu Perpustakaan diri sendiri, orangtua, kerabat dan teman. Dalam hal karir, sebagian besar mahasiswa ingin melanjutkan studi untuk mendapatkan peluang kerja menjadi dosen pada Ilmu Perpustakaan. Hambatan-hambatan yang dihadapi oleh mahasiswa meliputi keterbatasan dalam sarana dan prasarana dan keterbatasan kemampuan Bahasa asing. Karena itu, mahasiswa berharap agar program studi melakukan update kurikulum untuk menyesuaikan dengan perkembangan baru dalam ilmu perpustakaan dengan implementasi teknologi informasi dan menyelenggarakan program-program pelatihan dalam bahasa asing dan IT.</p><p class="Default"> </p><p class="Default" align="center"><em>Abstract</em></p><p class="Default"><em>The School of Library and Information Science is one of the growing field of studies in Indonesia. The growth of this school is in line with the recent development of information technology. Although this education has long been in existence in the history, the name and the positioning under certain faculty differs from one university to another. Although study shows that the profession of librarian in Indonesia gains less interest from the society compared to other profession, the interest of student to study at LIS program at UIN Sumatera Utara has been increased since the beginning of its opening. This study aims at investigating factors that determine the students to choose Library and Information Science Department at UIN Sumatera Utara Medan. Using survey and Focused Group Discussion techniques, this study found that there are four factors encouraging students to study at LIS program, they are self- motivation, parents, other family members and friend supports. In terms of career, most students want to pursue their studies to a master degree to obtain better profession in LIS program instead of working as information specialists or librarians. Regarding the obstacles they face during the period of their study at LIS program, students maintain that lack of laboratory and lack of adequate resources in have made their learning difficult. Therefore, they expect for the school to provide more trainings in hard and soft skills, especially in foreign languages and IT while updating the curricula to keep up to date with new trends in LIS. </em></p><p class="Default"><em> </em></p>

This article analyzes the current state and prospects of mainstreaming sustainable tourism in the basic educational programs of Russian universities, as well as identifying obstacles to the expansion of research topics in the field of sustainable tourism in Russia. The overview of Russian works in the field of sustainable tourism demonstrates that the most studied are natural, environmental aspects of sustainable tourism development in terms of long-term interests of society, while the social and economic dimensions of sustainable development of tourism are presented by a limited number of fragmented works. This situation in the domestic tourism science greatly contrasts with the ways of international tourism research in this area, where can be found a more balanced mix of studies, as the share of socio-economic research in the total volume of works on sustainable tourism is much higher. A significant lack of research on the socio-economic aspects of sustainable tourism development is established by content analysis of domestic and foreign publications, and by their comparative analysis. Thematic focus of international projects on sustainable tourism in Russia is also analyzed to arrive to some indicative conclusions. The only comprehensive project in the field of sustainable tourism is currently under way between the Russian State University of Tourism and Service and Telemark University College (Norway), and in many ways it is still the first and only one. The main reason for the observed bias in domestic research, according to the author, is a strong starting position of natural sciences in comparison to social onesl. Another reason may be the rigidity of domestic tourism researchers of the humanitarian and economic profile in relation to the issues of sustainability, when Russian economists and specialists in humanities are under the influence of more successful researches in natural science and they underestimate the whole palette of concepts and approaches of socio-economic nature, relevant to the issues of sustainable tourism, and that is the reason why they are mentally limited to just the recognition and enumeration of the most obvious and basic socio-economic aspects of sustainable tourism (such as local employment, infrastructure development, replenishment of local budgets, integration into the world economy), and do no not go further, do not proceed with conducting specific studies within broader and more concrete settings of sustainability issues. The issues of sustainable tourism in domestic tourist education are even less represented than in science. Over the past few years, only six Russian universities as part of their basic educational programs offered individual subjects to study sustainable tourism. To this can indirectly be added another dozen or so universities that offer disciplines in eco-tourism, and about two dozen universities offering courses on sustainable development, including some problems of tourism development. And only one university in Russia offers modules in sustainable tourism at the Master level, and that institution delivers three subjrects on sustainable tourism. It seems that the main problem in the Russian tourist education in the context of sustainable tourism is in some sense too &#34;respectful&#34; attitude to the subject of sustainable tourism, when it is believed that students should &#34;grow&#34; up to some level to get acquainted with this concept at a Master degree course of studies. In Europe, the concept of susyainable tourism is more culturaland widespread, and it is brought to bachelors just in more simple words and then at the Master level it is just taught with a higher academic rigor. This approach is in general culturally and professionally more productive. The second advantage of the European way of teaching sustainable tourism is that there is a much greater linkage between the concept and the context of small businesses, in other words sustainable developed not necessarily linked to the context of destination development and planning. Therefore, sustainable tourism is quite often studied in business schools. In his publication the author tries to draw the attention of the national scientific community to the problem of conceptual and epistemological backwardness of the Russian tourism science in comparison to the international tourism science when it comes to sustainable tourism issues. Present deficiencies in socio-economic research and educational programs can be eliminated within a few years if the national scientific and educational communities duly appreciate the whole range of issues of sustainable tourism and the promising outlook for research and educational programs in this field.

The article examines the features of legal education at leading universities in the United States and Canada as an experience for the Lviv University. Legal education at the University of Lviv dates back to January 20, 1661, when King of the Commonwealth Jan II Casimir issued a decree on the opening of a university in Lviv, which allowed to teach Roman and canon law. Consequently, this year we celebrate the 360th anniversary of the Lviv University as well as the Faculty of Law. It is noted that Roman law is the basis of many modern branches of law. The famous Roman jurist Celsius claimed: «Ius est ars boni et aegui» («Law is the art of good and justice»). So, where is law, there is justice, that is, a constant and definite will that gives everyone the right they deserve. Without justice, there can be no state, no smallest group of people, not even a small household. The perfection of the Roman legal system for many centuries has shown an example of how legal systems should be formed. Even direct borrowings from Roman law are allowed, of course, taking into account the national characteristics of each state, including Ukraine. It should be noted that Roman law has been and remains an important area of research since the establishment of the Faculty of Law of the Lviv University. His teachers in their works highlighted how Roman law became one of the components of modern European law. Legal education remains one of the important components of the domestic system of higher education, given the ongoing reforms in the state of political, legal, judicial systems, the development of market relations in the economy. Educational and scientific approaches to the teaching of law in various universities in the United States and Canada, which have managed to form a legal basis for better mastering and implementation of new methods for teaching law, are studied. In different countries, to obtain a degree in law, a student must immediately enter the first year of university in this specialty. To enter most universities, students only need to provide a high school diploma. In the United States, on the other hand, education is structured differently. The legal education system and law in the United States are regarded as a professional-academic field, which is equivalent to the master’s programs of most universities in the world. This means that students can enter universities in law only after obtaining a bachelor's degree. In addition, law schools in the United States are part of private and public universities. They give students the opportunity to earn a Juris Doctor (J. D.) degree. The Juris Doctor program lasts three years (full-time training) or four years (extramural studies). The most difficult stage of studying is the first course through specialized subjects, exams as well as the method of Socrates, which is used in teaching law to students. The Socrates method encourages many international students to study law at US universities. This method helps students to develop unique legal thinking and easily master the practical skills of a lawyer. The contribution to the development of legal education of Lviv lawyers is shown, the tendencies of forming the tradition of teaching law at the Lviv University in a comparative context with the USA and Canada, where higher legal education is the basis of education of civil servants, are revealed. Legal education aims at a comprehensive training of professionals – professionals in the field of jurisprudence, able to correctly interpret and apply the law, understand the position of law in all the intricacies of a particular life situation, make decisions based solely on the letter and spirit of the law, exercise their abilities and powers for the individual, society, state. Therefore, legal education today, in the context of modernization of the entire higher school, requires special attention in order to identify a set of issues related to the quality of training of lawyers, organizational and substantive aspects of the teaching process, the financial condition of higher education institutions.

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> In 2013, the Hungarian Government opened a scholarship programme called Stipendium Hungaricum for foreign students to study in the Hungarian higher education. Within this scholarship, students coming from non-European Union countries complete full studies at both bachelor and master levels in Hungarian universities. Three years ago, the first international students financed by Stipendium Hungaricum arrived to the Department of Cartography and Geoinformatics of ELTE Eötvös Loránd University to study cartography and geoinformatics at master level. Since then the success of the programme constantly encourages students to choose our degree program.</p><p>Teaching GIS for “beginners”, i.e. for those who finished their studies in other areas and are new in our field, is not easy for its multidisciplinary nature. Teaching Z generation might be a challenge for modern issues of generation gap. Teaching international students from very different countries is also not easy because of very different professional backgrounds and exercises, studying habits and language skills, in some cases. Teaching GIS for foreign students is a combination of these aspects and led us to develop new methodological and pedagogical approaches in order to reach success both for students and professors.</p><p>On this poster, we present one of our solutions: the “Geoinformatic and Cartographic Project” work. It is a large, complex practical subject for second year students, which needs all the previous studies of the first year and much of individual work and creativity. Students work driven by professors, but mostly individually. The topic is mapping environmental conditions of Vác, a charming small town at the bank of the Danube, 20&amp;thinsp;km to the North from Budapest.</p><p>Students work in pairs. This is comfortable for sharing the tasks not only in the field work but in the lab work too, while they can also show their individual skills. For completing the task they need to do some theoretical research and they have to get familiar with the tools (noise meter, thermometer, solar radiation device, GPS) and specific software (ArcGIS, Qgis; Global Mapper; graphic software eg. OCAD, Corel Draw; Open Layers, etc.). They have to cope with real life situations during data collecting and have to learn timing their work. The semester ends with an oral presentation of the results with data analysis.</p><p>The project has five phases: <i>Phase 1</i>: Preparation; <i>Phase 2</i>: Research; <i>Phase 3</i>: Field work; <i>Phase 4</i>: Lab work; Phase 5: Analysis and documentation</p><p>Results of the geoinformatic work are a complex environmental database with data on temperature, humidity, solar radiation and noise pollution; a series of thematic maps created from the collected data; and an interactive web site where users can consult the thematic maps and read the analysis of the data.</p><p>For the cartographic part of the project, students also prepare a hard copy touristic map of the town. This task needs touristic data collecting (including research, taking notes and pictures in the field work). The result is an independently edited and designed touristic map in the style of a city map.</p><p>In the poster, we would like to present the step-by-step workflow of the Geoinformatic and Cartographic Project (the phases in detail) with the resulting geodatabases, thematic maps and websites. We believe these are the steps that bring the students to the same level of GI knowledge, that facilitate them to work together in a team, and encourages them to lead sub-tasks, opens their imagination and to figure out their own ideas. A project work like this provides professional experience, strengthens problem-solving skills and gives self-confidence for the future GIS experts.</p></p>

The global pandemic of sarcopenia, skeletal muscle loss and weakness, which prevails in up to 50% of older adults is increasing worldwide due to the expansion of aging populations. It is now striking young and midlife adults as well because of sedentary lifestyle and increased intake of unhealthy food (e.g., western diet). The lockdown measures and economic turndown associated with the current outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) are likely to increase the prevalence of sarcopenia by promoting sedentarism and unhealthy patterns of eating. Sarcopenia has multiple detrimental effects including falls, hospitalization, disability, and institutionalization. Although a few pharmacological agents (e.g., bimagrumab, sarconeos, and exercise mimetics) are being explored in different stages of trials, not a single drug has been approved for sarcopenia treatment. Hence, research has focused on testing the effect of nutraceuticals, such as bee products, as safe treatments to prevent and/or treat sarcopenia. Royal jelly, propolis, and bee pollen are common bee products that are rich in highly potent antioxidants such as flavonoids, phenols, and amino acids. These products, in order, stimulate larval development into queen bees, promote defenses of the bee hive against microbial and environmental threats, and increase royal jelly production by nurse bees. Thanks to their versatile pharmacological activities (e.g., anti-aging, anti-inflammatory, anticarcinogenic, antimicrobial, etc.), these products have been used to treat multiple chronic conditions that predispose to muscle wasting such as hypertension, diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular disorder, and cancer, to name a few. They were also used in some evolving studies to treat sarcopenia in laboratory animals and, to a limited degree, in humans. However, a collective understanding of the effect and mechanism of action of these products in skeletal muscle is not well-developed. Therefore, this review examines the literature for possible effects of royal jelly, bee pollen, and propolis on skeletal muscle in aged experimental models, muscle cell cultures, and humans. Collectively, data from reviewed studies denote varying levels of positive effects of bee products on muscle mass, strength, and function. The likely underlying mechanisms include amelioration of inflammation and oxidative damages, promotion of metabolic regulation, enhancement of satellite stem cell responsiveness, improvement of muscular blood supply, inhibition of catabolic genes, and promotion of peripheral neuronal regeneration. This review offers suggestions for other mechanisms to be explored and provides guidance for future trials investigating the effects of bee products among people with sarcopenia.

Este estudo versa sobre o papel da educação escolarizada para a emancipação social na perspectiva dos sujeitos da Educação de Jovens e Adultos (EJA). Com o intuito de compreender a relação entre educação escolarizada e emancipação social, utilizou-se da análise de mosaicos elaborados pelos sujeitos da pesquisa. Portanto, foram usados como referencial teórico os estudos sobre trajetória de vida, relacionando os conceitos de habitus e campos de Bourdieu (1989, 2007, 2011) e emancipação social na perspectiva de Freire (1980, 2006, 2013) e Adorno (1995). Os dados coletados pertencem às pesquisas realizadas durante o mestrado (de 2018 a 2020), sobretudo, com o mosaico. Por meio dessa atividade, foram analisadas as seguintes categorias: desenvolvimento da pessoa humana, protagonismo, participação crítica na sociedade e no mundo do trabalho. Percebeu-se a importância da escolarização para a vida dos sujeitos da EJA, nos campos familiar, laboral e social, em níveis e necessidades diferentes.Palavras-chave: Educação escolarizada; Emancipação social; EJA.Education and social emancipation in the life story of EJA subjectsABSTRACTThis study presents the role of school education for social emancipation from the perspective of the subjects of Youth and Adult Education (EJA). In order to understand the relationship between school education and social emancipation, we analysed the mosaics that were elaborated by the research subjects. For this understanding, the studies of the life trajectory categories were used as a theoretical framework, relating the concepts of habitus and fields, with Bourdieu (1989, 2007 and 2011) and social emancipation from the perspective of Freire (1980, 2006 and 2013) and we bring some considerations from Adorno (1995). He collected data belong to the researches carried out during the master degree (2018-2020), especially with the mosaic. By means of this activity, the following categories were analyzed: human development, protagonism, critical participation in society and in the working world. The importance of schooling for the lives of EJA subjects was perceived in the family, work and social fields at different levels and needs.Keywords: School education; Social emancipation; EJA.Educación y emancipación social en la trayectoria de vida de los individuos EJARESUMENEste estudio presenta el papel de la educación escolar para la emancipación social desde la perspectiva de los individuos de Educación de Jóvenes y Adultos (EJA). Para comprender la relación entre educación escolar y emancipación social se utilizó el análisis de mosaicos elaborados por los sujetos de investigación. Para esta comprensión, se utilizaron como marco teórico los estudios de las categorías de trayectorias de vida, relacionando los conceptos de habitus y campos, con Bourdieu (1989, 2007 y 2011) y la emancipación social desde la perspectiva de Freire (1980, 2006 y 2013). y traemos algunas consideraciones de Adorno (1995). Los datos recogidos pertenecen a investigaciones realizadas durante el máster (2018 a 2020), especialmente con el mosaico. A través de esta actividad se analizaron las siguientes categorías: desarrollo humano, protagonismo, participación crítica en la sociedad y en el mundo del trabajo. La importancia de la escolarización para la vida de los sujetos de EJA se percibió en el ámbito familiar, laboral y social en diferentes niveles y necesidades. Palabras clave: Educación escolar; Emancipación social; EJA.

Трехуровневая система подготовки кадров по селекции, семеноводству и биотехнологии в ФГБОУ ВО РГАУ – МСХА имени К.А. Тимирязева включает базовую и основательную подготовку выпускников бакалавриата к профессиональной деятельности в государственных и частных организациях селекционного профиля, а также к углубленному обучению в магистратуре и аспирантуре по научной специальности «Селекция, семеноводство и биотехнология». В университете по селекционному профилю одновременно обучаются 160–200 студентов бакалавриата по направлению «Селекция, генетика и биотехнология садовых культур», «Генетика и селекция сельскохозяйственных культур», 40–60 студентов магистратуры по программам «Технологии ускоренной селекции растений» и «Селекция и генетика растений» в рамках двух направлений «Садоводство» и «Агрономия». Четырехлетняя образовательная программа бакалавриата представлена общеобразовательными дисциплинами, читаемыми на 1–2 курсах, с 3 курса начинается блок специальных дисциплин, формирующих профессиональные компетенции селекционеров. Общий объем профильных дисциплин и практик (учебной и производственной) в составе образовательной программы бакалавриата (без учета смежных агрономических дисциплин) составляет 70 зачетных единиц, или 30% от всего объема образовательной программы. Теоретические знания и практические навыки, приобретаемые студентами бакалавриата, позволяют выпускникам уверенно представлять себя на рынке труда или продолжить углубленное обучение в магистратуре. Двухлетние магистерские программы включают преимущественно дисциплины, формирующие профессиональные компетенции выпускника, а научно-исследовательская работа в рамках производственной практики, занимающей 40 зач.ед., или 1/3 от общей трудоемкости образовательной программы магистратуры, позволяет магистрантам развивать свои профессиональные навыки в любой из интересующих его областей науки и практики, к примеру, в области молекулярной селекции, культуры клеток и тканей, генетической инженерии или традиционной селекции. В университете реализуется цикл дополнительных образовательных программ для повышения квалификации специалистов разного уровня в области селекции и семеноводства. Реализуют образовательные программы профессионалы-практики на развитой материально-технической базе университета, оснащенной современным оборудованием, и на базе ведущих партнерских Федеральных исследовательских центров. Educational programs in breeding, seed production and biotechnology in the FSBEI of Higher Education Russian Timiryazev State Agrarian University includes basic training of bachelor's graduates for professional activities in public and private breeding organizations, as well as for in-depth training in master's and postgraduate studies in the «Breeding, seed production and biotechnology». At the university, 160–200 undergraduate students are studying at the specialization of «Breeding, genetics and biotechnology of horticultural crops», «Genetics and breeding of agricultural crops», 40–60 master's students in the programs «Technologies of accelerated plant breeding» and «Plants Breeding and genetics' within the framework of two directions «Horticulture» and «Agronomy». The four-year educational program of the bachelor's degree is represented by general educational disciplines taught in the 1st–2nd year, the block of special disciplines that form the professional competencies of breeders begins from the 3rd year. The total volume of specialized disciplines and practices (educational and industrial) as part of the undergraduate educational program, excluding related agronomic disciplines, is 70 credits or 30% of the entire volume of the educational program. The theoretical knowledge and practical skills acquired by undergraduate students allow graduates to confidently represent themselves in the labor market or continue in-depth studies in the master's program. Two-year master's programs include mainly disciplines that form the professional competencies of the graduate, and research work within the framework of industrial practice, which occupies 40 credits or 1/3 of the total labor intensity of the educational program of the master's program, allows master students to develop their professional skills in any of the areas of science and practice that are of interest to them, for example, in the field of molecular breeding, cell and tissue culture, genetic engineering or traditional breeding and seed technologies. The university is implementing a cycle of additional educational programs to improve the skills of specialists of various levels in the field of breeding and seed production. The implementation of educational programs is carried out by professional practitioners using equipped with modern equipment facilities of University and Federal Research Centers.

The results of complex studies of the basins of the small rivers Dzhuryn, Gnizna, Nichlava, from the point of view of the transformation of natural complexes, the introduction of optimal forms of nature use and effective systems of nature protection for the effective management of the process of ecological, social and economic development are highlighted. Land use optimization models of basin systems have been developed, and an integrated network of nature conservation areas and protected and recreational facilities has been substantiated. The conducted comparative analysis of hydro-ecological, nature protection and land use parameters made it possible to establish. The problems of nature management and nature protection in the river basin are closely related. Analysis of the structure of nature use, the ratio of ecologically safe and ecologically dangerous forms within the upper, middle and lower reaches of river valleys demonstrates the degree of balanced nature use and the effectiveness of nature protection regimes. The development of the materials of the monograph took place in the process of field research by the authors as part of data collection for writing candidate and master theses. In addition, the authors rely on their own publications in scientific periodicals and approbation of materials in reports at scientific forums on the problems of nature management and nature protection in the basins of the small rivers Dzhuryn, Nichlava, and Gnizna. Special attention is paid to small rivers, because they perform extremely important functions in the formation of the hydrological regime of surface waters, directly influencing the system of relations with the local population, being in natural resource relations with them. Small rivers are the only water arteries in settlements, performing economic, recreation and health, aesthetic, climate-regulatory functions. Their general condition is derived from the peculiarities of interaction of local communities with the natural environment, which is based on the principles of productive life of people in harmony with nature. Achieving harmonious relationships primarily depends on the level of ecological culture of citizens, their tolerant and responsible attitude towards nature. The small rivers of Western Podillia: Dzhuryn, Gnizna, Nichlava were considered in a comparative analysis with the aim of highlighting general and individual deviations of basic parameters from their normative values, substantiating measures for their optimization. The object of the research is the basins of small rivers of Western Podillia: Dzhuryn, Gnizna, Nichlava. The subject is a comparative analysis of hydrogeoecological and nature protection parameters of anthropogenic influence on their basins. The general similarity of the natural and climatic conditions of the territory, the proximity of the location does not guarantee the similarity of anthropogenic loads on river basins. The conducted comparative analysis of hydroecological and nature protection parameters of river basins demonstrated. low forest coverage of the territories, which will contribute to increased soil erosion, a specific water and wind regime, less intensive assimilation of greenhouse gases, etc. The indicators of the protection of river basins differ significantly, but all of them are significantly inferior to the optimal value within 10.5%. The indicators of plowing of river basins differ significantly. They are significantly higher than the normative ones by approximately 2 times. The negative consequences of excessive plowing are manifested in increased erosion processes, activation of surface runoff into the river washed humus horizon with mineral, organic fertilizers, toxic chemicals, which definitely manifests itself in the deterioration of water quality. The high built-up area of the Nichlava river basin has a negative impact on the growth of pollution by domestic sewage, solid household waste, the absence of water protection zones within the boundaries of settlements, etc. In general, we have reason to claim that the river landscapes are highly economically developed due to the dominance of anthropogenic lands, on almost 2/3 of the area. Accordingly, the indices of anthropogenic transformation of natural lands by economic activity are high. Key words: small river, Western Podillia, Gnizna, Dzhuryn, Nichlava.

In my last editorial I was contemplating living the new and unexpected experience of life with Covid 19. Six months ago, was a time for contemplation. We were all entering into an event of major historical significance. The world has experienced epidemics before, and we had only to turn to the works of writers such as Camus to realise how recurrent human behaviour is. We tend so often to be caught by surprise despite the lessons that are so readily available to us through reference to history. The Spanish ‘flu epidemic of 1919 was the obvious benchmark to which we could turn. Following hot on the heels of the Great War of 1914-1918 it was responsible for more casualties than occurred in the war to end all wars (50 million). It infected 500 million people worldwide. After just over ten months we are a long, long way from those sorts of figures. As of 12th November, 51,975,458 case of infection have been reported. Deaths attributed to the virus number 1,281,309 worldwide. Of course, what makes Covid 19 so significant is not simply that it should have happened, but that it is the first pandemic in this era of globalisation which we have entered only comparatively recently. Some might remember the SARS epidemic which affected mainly people in Asia. As indicated by its name, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV-2), it was very similar initially in its effects. Yet, after first emerging in 2002, it was eradicated less than two years later. It seems that this was achieved largely by what has been called simple public health measures. This involved “testing people with symptoms (fever and respiratory problems), isolating and quarantining suspected cases, and restricting travel.” These same measures of course have been implemented in most countries following the virus’ spread to Italy early in 2020. However, the fact that different nations have responded differently and also experienced very different outcomes should be of considerable interest as we consider the whole concept of a global threat and global responses. The ten worst affected countries currently are in order: Contry; Confirmed Cases; Deaths United States; 10,460,302; 244,421 India; 8,684,039; 128,165 Brazil; 5,749,007; 163,406 France; 1,865,538; 42,535 Russia; 1,836,960; 31,593 Spain; 1,417,709; 40,105 Argentina; 1,273,343; 34,531 United Kingdom; 1,256,725; 50,365 Colombia; 1,165,326; 33,312 Italy; 1,028,424; 42,953 They are dominated by the advanced economies of the northern hemisphere. The countries who have previously experienced the SARS epidemic in Asia have fared comparatively lightly. Bearing in mind that statistics of this nature may not be strictly comparable given variation in the criteria used and the methods of sourcing and collecting this information, it is still interesting to hypothesise why outcomes can differ so much. Explanations might include reference to the environments in which people live – physical space, climate and availability of sophisticated health care systems to name a few – or they might dwell on the culture of those involved, their willingness to follow instructions imposed upon them, the importance of competing objectives that might make prioritising health and physical wellness less of a priority. Whatever the case, satisfactory explanations are more likely to involve some interactions involving measures of both the individuals and the environments within which they live. Any attempt to explain or understand human behaviour needs to consider a variety of factors and knowing how to take account of them is an important part of the skill base that scholars of international and comparative studies bring with them. Such skills and knowledge are more important in a globalised world than they have ever been. Yet such skills may be becoming harder to achieve, precisely because of some of the effects of processes associated with globalisation. I would recommend to you a recent documentary produced by Netflix and widely available on YouTube. “The Social Dilemma” is an examination of the use of social media and in particular focuses on the relationship between the growing addiction amongst young people to the use of smartphones and, specifically their social media programmes, and the rising levels of concern about deteriorating mental health and wellbeing among the world’s youth. It draws a relationship between the psychological disorder of narcissism and the failure of phone obsessed young people to experience real human to human interaction, with a related increase in aggressive bullying and dysfunctional behaviour. Thus, the results of experiencing interactions and personal validation through the proxy world of social media, rather than face to face, is a dehumanisation of the individual and leads to a distorted experience of the world in simple dichotomies of a single view, right or wrong. So, whatever the continuing effects of the pandemic, as these continue to unfold, it will be important that we continue to build our understanding of other people in their own worlds. We need to avoid the trap of believing that our own world is the only world and the right world. However smart artificial intelligence becomes, a screen is only two dimensional and it is the extra dimensions that enable us to grow as humans and cope with the complexity and challenges of our own unique worlds. One of the less helpful trends of our globalised digitised world, has been the pursuit and glorification of the cult of celebrity. One of the difficulties of that celebrity status is it is frequently awarded on the basis of undeserving and irrelevant characteristics such as, acting ability, physical beauty or sporting reputation. Yet many seem to feel that this status entitles them to pontificate or attempt to influence others in areas that have nothing to do with their expertise. Ricky Gervais, in his chairing of the 2020 golden globes award, brought a refreshing dose of reality in advising the celebrities who were to receive awards: You are in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg. So, if you win, come up accept your little award. Thank your agent and your God and **** off. OK? It is in that spirit of willingness to learn from the work of a range of colleagues working in a range of places and professional situations around the world, I commend to you the contributions to be found in the following pages. To start the ball rolling, we have a report from Hairui Liu, Wei Shen and Peter Hastie on the application of a curriculum model which was developed in the US and has since gained some popularity in a number of settings around the world. The origins of sport education came from a realisation that, in too many situations, physical education had failed to excite the same degree of enthusiasm among school pupils as could often be observed when they involved themselves in sport. The model thus extends the skill/technique focus which is found in many traditional physical education settings, to include more of the dimensions of sport – formal competition, affiliation, festivity experienced over a season. They concluded that, within this Chinese university context, the students achieved a higher level of performance and more enthusiastic engagement when the model was adopted as a basis for their learning. Our second article moves from an education setting to a contemporary sport science framework, the world of professional sport and one of the higher levels of competition in the world – the English Championship. Rhys Carr, Rich Mullen and Morgan Williams monitored the running intensity of players throughout a season. In particular they questioned the demands for high intensity running when playing in a 4-4-2 formation and implementing a high press strategy, such as adopted by Liverpool in their highly successful 2019 English Premiership season. They concluded that, for players in the centre forward and wide midfield positions, the demands created were impossible to maintain for an entire match. They were then able to draw out some practical and tactical implications for managers and their support staff, relating to substitution strategy and the physical match preparation of players in these positions and with these strategic responsibilities. Our third article involves an exploration of the perpetual discomfort many of us feel as educators when we compare the practice of sport against the ideals we hold for it. As professionals in the field, many of us are driven by our belief in what sport can offer. Yet the modern commodification of sport, coupled with the excessive need to win as a motive that exceeds all others, consistently produces behaviours and outcomes which we seek to disassociate from our professional practices. The article by Irantzu Ibanez, Ana Zuazagoitia, Ibon Echeazarra, Luis Maria Zulaika and Iker Ros is set in the context of the Basque region of Spain and explores the values held by students in their pre-service training with regard to the practice of extracurricular sport. The students show an awareness of the mismatch between their ideals of extracurricular sport as an educational experience and the influence on current practices that comes from the way in which sport is conducted in the society at large. The authors conclude with a plea for greater alignment between the practice of sport in schools and teh educational values that should guide it. Our final contribution is from South Africa where Lesego Phetlhe, Heather Morris- Eyton and Alliance Kubayi report on the concerns of football (soccer) coaches in Guateng province. It is clear that these coaches, in common with others around the world, suffer a degree of stress in their chosen occupation. The sources of this stress are to be found in the nature of the complex tasks they are expected to manage, as well as in the always challenging job of managing the players for whom they are responsible. To this can be added the difficult environmental conditions they are faced with, as well as the inevitable concern with having to produce results for the players and their team. Their research has produced some useful guidelines for administrators that can facilitate the jobs of the coaches and lead to benefits in enhanced performances and results. Finally, in our book review, Luiz Uehara evaluates Jorge Knijnik’s thoughtful analysis of the impact of the 2014 world cup on Brazil. From both author and reviewer, it is possible to feel the pride and passion in their nation of birth and its special contribution to the world’s most popular game. It is my privilege to recommend the work of these international scholars to you. I leave you the reader with the hope that in introducing our next volume, I will be able to celebrate with you more positive news about the progress of the pandemic and its implications for international and comparative sport and physical education. John Saunders Brisbane, November 2020

We’ll have trouble now!The Archaeological Society of Jutland was founded on Sunday, 11 March 1951. As with most projects with which P.V Glob was involved, this did not pass off without drama. Museum people and amateur archaeologists in large numbers appeared at the Museum of Natural History in Aarhus, which had placed rooms at our disposal. The notable dentist Holger Friis, the uncrowned king of Hjørring, was present, as was Dr Balslev from Aidt, Mr and Mrs Overgaard from Holstebro Museum, and the temperamental leader of Aalborg Historical Museum, Peter Riismøller, with a number of his disciples. The staff of the newly-founded Prehistoric Museum functioned as the hosts, except that one of them was missing: the instigator of the whole enterprise, Mr Glob. As the time for the meeting approached, a cold sweat broke out on the foreheads of the people present. Finally, just one minute before the meeting was to start, he arrived and mounted the platform. Everything then went as expected. An executive committee was elected after some discussion, laws were passed, and then suddenly Glob vanished again, only to materialise later in the museum, where he confided to us that his family, which included four children, had been enlarged by a daughter.That’s how the society was founded, and there is not much to add about this. However, a few words concerning the background of the society and its place in a larger context may be appropriate. A small piece of museum history is about to be unfolded.The story begins at the National Museum in the years immediately after World War II, at a time when the German occupation and its incidents were still terribly fresh in everyone’s memory. Therkel Mathiassen was managing what was then called the First Department, which covered the prehistoric periods.Although not sparkling with humour, he was a reliable and benevolent person. Number two in the order of precedence was Hans Christian Broholm, a more colourful personality – awesome as he walked down the corridors, with his massive proportions and a voice that sounded like thunder when nothing seemed to be going his way, as quite often seemed to be the case. Glob, a relatively new museum keeper, was also quite loud at times – his hot-blooded artist’s nature manifested itself in peculiar ways, but his straight forward appearance made him popular with both the older and the younger generations. His somewhat younger colleague C.J. Becker was a scholar to his fingertips, and he sometimes acted as a welcome counterbalance to Glob. At the bottom of the hierarchy was the student group, to which I belonged. The older students handled various tasks, including periodic excavations. This was paid work, and although the salary was by no means princely, it did keep us alive. Student grants were non-existent at the time. Four of us made up a team: Olfert Voss, Mogens Ørsnes, Georg Kunwald and myself. Like young people in general, we were highly discontented with the way our profession was being run by its ”ruling” members, and we were full of ideas for improvement, some of which have later been – or are being – introduced.At the top of our wish list was a central register, of which Voss was the strongest advocate. During the well over one hundred years that archaeology had existed as a professional discipline, the number of artefacts had grown to enormous amounts. The picture was even worse if the collections of the provincial museums were taken into consideration. We imagined how it all could be registered in a card index and categorised according to groups to facilitate access to references in any particular situation. Electronic data processing was still unheard of in those days, but since the introduction of computers, such a comprehensive record has become more feasible.We were also sceptical of the excavation techniques used at the time – they were basically adequate, but they badly needed tightening up. As I mentioned before, we were often working in the field, and not just doing minor jobs but also more important tasks, so we had every opportunity to try out our ideas. Kunwald was the driving force in this respect, working with details, using sections – then a novelty – and proceeding as he did with a thoroughness that even his fellow students found a bit exaggerated at times, although we agreed with his principles. Therkel Mathiassen moaned that we youngsters were too expensive, but he put up with our excesses and so must have found us somewhat valuable. Very valuable indeed to everyon e was Ejnar Dyggve’s excavation of the Jelling mounds in the early 1940s. From a Danish point of view, it was way ahead of its time.Therkel Mathiassen justly complained about the economic situation of the National Museum. Following the German occupation, the country was impoverished and very little money was available for archaeological research: the total sum available for the year 1949 was 20,000 DKK, which corresponded to the annual income of a wealthy man, and was of course absolutely inadequate. Of course our small debating society wanted this sum to be increased, and for once we didn’t leave it at the theoretical level.Voss was lucky enough to know a member of the Folketing (parliament), and a party leader at that. He was brought into the picture, and between us we came up with a plan. An article was written – ”Preserve your heritage” (a quotation from Johannes V. Jensen’s Denmark Song) – which was sent to the newspaper Information. It was published, and with a little help on our part the rest of the media, including radio, picked up the story.We informed our superiors only at the last minute, when everything was arranged. They were taken by surprise but played their parts well, as expected, and everything went according to plan. The result was a considerable increase in excavation funds the following year.It should be added that our reform plans included the conduct of exhibitions. We found the traditional way of presenting the artefacts lined up in rows and series dull and outdated. However, we were not able to experiment within this field.Our visions expressed the natural collision with the established ways that comes with every new generation – almost as a law of nature, but most strongly when the time is ripe. And this was just after the war, when communication with foreign colleagues, having been discontinued for some years, was slowly picking up again. The Archaeological Society of Jutland was also a part of all this, so let us turn to what Hans Christian Andersen somewhat provocatively calls the ”main country”.Until 1949, only the University of Copenhagen provided a degree in prehistoric archaeology. However, in this year, the University of Aarhus founded a chair of archaeology, mainly at the instigation of the Lord Mayor, Svend Unmack Larsen, who was very in terested in archaeology. Glob applied for the position and obtained it, which encompassed responsibility for the old Aarhus Museum or, as it was to be renamed, the Prehistoric Museum (now Moesgaard Museum).These were landmark events to Glob – and to me, as it turned out. We had been working together for a number of years on the excavation of Galgebakken (”Callows Hill”) near Slots Bjergby, Glob as the excavation leader, and I as his assistant. He now offered me the job of museum curator at his new institution. This was somewhat surprising as I had not yet finished my education. The idea was that I was to finish my studies in remote Jutland – a plan that had to be given up rather quickly, though, for reasons which I will describe in the following. At the same time, Gunner Lange-Kornbak – also hand-picked from the National Museum – took up his office as a conservation officer.The three of us made up the permanent museum staff, quickly supplemented by Geoffrey Bibby, who turned out to be an invaluable colleague. He was English and had been stationed in the Faeroe Islands during the war, where he learned to speak Danish. After 1945 he worked for some years for an oil company in the Gulf of Persia, but after marrying Vibeke, he settled in her home town of Aarhus. As his academic background had involved prehistoric cultures he wanted to collaborate with the museum, which Glob readily permitted.This small initial flock governed by Glob was not permitted to indulge inidleness. Glob was a dynamic character, full of good and not so good ideas, but also possessing a good grasp of what was actually practicable. The boring but necessary daily work on the home front was not very interesting to him, so he willingly handed it over to others. He hardly noticed the lack of administrative machinery, a prerequisite for any scholarly museum. It was not easy to follow him on his flights of fancy and still build up the necessary support base. However, the fact that he in no way spared himself had an appeasing effect.Provincial museums at that time were of a mixed nature. A few had trained management, and the rest were run by interested locals. This was often excellently done, as in Esbjerg, where the master joiner Niels Thomsen and a staff of volunteers carried out excavations that were as good as professional investigations, and published them in well-written articles. Regrettably, there were also examples of the opposite. A museum curator in Jutland informed me that his predecessor had been an eager excavator but very rarely left any written documentation of his actions. The excavated items were left without labels in the museum store, often wrapped in newspapers. However, these gave a clue as to the time of unearthing, and with a bit of luck a look in the newspaper archive would then reveal where the excavation had taken place. Although somewhat exceptional, this is not the only such case.The Museum of Aarhus definitely belonged among the better ones in this respect. Founded in 1861, it was at first located at the then town hall, together with the local art collection. The rooms here soon became too cramped, and both collections were moved to a new building in the ”Mølleparken” park. There were skilful people here working as managers and assistants, such as Vilhelm Boye, who had received his archaeological training at the National Museum, and later the partners A. Reeh, a barrister, and G.V. Smith, a captain, who shared the honour of a number of skilfully performed excavations. Glob’s predecessor as curator was the librarian Ejler Haugsted, also a competent man of fine achievements. We did not, thus, take over a museum on its last legs. On the other hand, it did not meet the requirements of a modern scholarly museum. We were given the task of turning it into such a museum, as implied by the name change.The goal was to create a museum similar to the National Museum, but without the faults and shortcomings that that museum had developed over a period of time. In this respect our nightly conversations during our years in Copenhagen turned out to be useful, as our talk had focused on these imperfections and how to eradicate them.We now had the opportunity to put our theories into practice. We may not have succeeded in doing so, but two areas were essentially improved:The numerous independent numbering systems, which were familiar to us from the National Museum, were permeating archaeological excavation s not only in the field but also during later work at the museum. As far as possible this was boiled down to a single system, and a new type of report was born. (In this context, a ”report” is the paper following a field investigation, comprising drawings, photos etc. and describing the progress of the work and the observations made.) The instructions then followed by the National Museum staff regarding the conduct of excavations and report writing went back to a 19th-century protocol by the employee G.V. Blom. Although clear and rational – and a vast improvement at the time – this had become outdated. For instance, the excavation of a burial mound now involved not only the middle of the mound, containing the central grave and its surrounding artefacts, but the complete structure. A large number of details that no one had previously paid attention to thus had to be included in the report. It had become a comprehensive and time-consuming work to sum up the desultory notebook records in a clear and understandable description.The instructions resulting from the new approach determined a special records system that made it possible to transcribe the notebook almost directly into a report following the excavation. The transcription thus contained all the relevant information concerning the in vestigation, and included both relics and soil layers, the excavation method and practical matters, although in a random order. The report proper could then bereduced to a short account containing references to the numbers in the transcribed notebook, which gave more detailed information.As can be imagined, the work of reform was not a continuous process. On the contrary, it had to be done in our spare hours, which were few and far between with an employer like Glob. The assignments crowded in, and the large Jutland map that we had purchased was as studded with pins as a hedge hog’s spines. Each pin represented an inuninent survey, and many of these grew into small or large excavations. Glob himself had his lecture duties to perform, and although he by no means exaggerated his concern for the students, he rarely made it further than to the surveys. Bibby and I had to deal with the hard fieldwork. And the society, once it was established, did not make our lives any easier. Kuml demanded articles written at lightning speed. A perusal of my then diary has given me a vivid recollection of this hectic period, in which I had to make use of the evening and night hours, when the museum was quiet and I had a chance to collect my thoughts. Sometimes our faithful supporter, the Lord Mayor, popped in after an evening meeting. He was extremely interested in our problems, which were then solved according to our abilities over a cup of instant coffee.A large archaeological association already existed in Denmark. How ever, Glob found it necessary to establish another one which would be less oppressed by tradition. Det kongelige nordiske Oldsskriftselskab had been funded in 1825 and was still influenced by different peculiarities from back then. Membership was not open to everyone, as applications were subject to recommendation from two existing members and approval by a vote at one of the monthly lecture meetings. Most candidates were of course accepted, but unpopular persons were sometimes rejected. In addition, only men were admitted – women were banned – but after the war a proposal was brought forward to change this absurdity. It was rejected at first, so there was a considerable excitement at the January meeting in 1951, when the proposal was once again placed on the agenda. The poor lecturer (myself) did his best, although he was aware of the fact that just this once it was the present and not the past which was the focus of attention. The result of the voting was not very courteous as there were still many opponents, but the ladies were allowed in, even if they didn’t get the warmest welcome.In Glob’s society there were no such restrictions – everyone was welcome regardless of sex or age. If there was a model for the society, it was the younger and more progressive Norwegian Archaeological Society rather than the Danish one. The main purpose of both societies was to produce an annual publication, and from the start Glob’s Kuml had a closer resemblance to the Norwegian Viking than to the Danish Aarbøger for nordisk Oldkyndighed og Historie. The name of the publication caused careful consideration. For a long time I kept a slip of paper with different proposals, one of which was Kuml, which won after having been approved by the linguist Peter Skautrup.The name alone, however, was not enough, so now the task became to find so mething to fill Kuml with. To this end the finds came in handy, and as for those, Glob must have allied him self with the higher powers, since fortune smiled at him to a considerable extent. Just after entering upon his duties in Aarhus, an archaeological sensation landed at his feet. This happened in May 1950 when I was still living in the capital. A few of us had planned a trip to Aarhus, partly to look at the relics of th e past, and partly to visit our friend, the professor. He greeted us warmly and told us the exciting news that ten iron swords had been found during drainage work in the valley of lllerup Aadal north of the nearby town of Skanderborg. We took the news calmly as Glob rarely understated his affairs, but our scepticism was misplaced. When we visited the meadow the following day and carefully examined the dug-up soil, another sword appeared, as well as several spear and lance heads, and other iron artefacts. What the drainage trench diggers had found was nothing less than a place of sacrifice for war booty, like the four large finds from the 1800s. When I took up my post in Aarhus in September of that year I was granted responsibility for the lllerup excavation, which I worked on during the autumn and the following six summers. Some of my best memories are associated with this job – an interesting and happy time, with cheerful comradeship with a mixed bunch of helpers, who were mainly archaeology students. When we finished in 1956, it was not because the site had been fully investigated, but because the new owner of the bog plot had an aversion to archaeologists and their activities. Nineteen years later, in 1975, the work was resumed, this time under the leadership of Jørgen Ilkjær, and a large amount of weaponry was uncovered. The report from the find is presently being published.At short intervals, the year 1952 brought two finds of great importance: in Februar y the huge vessel from Braa near Horsens, and in April the Grauballe Man. The large Celtic bronze bowl with the bulls’ heads was found disassembled, buried in a hill and covered by a couple of large stones. Thanks to the finder, the farmer Søren Paaske, work was stopped early enough to leave areas untouched for the subsequent examination.The saga of the Grauballe Man, or the part of it that we know, began as a rumour on the 26th of April: a skeleton had been found in a bog near Silkeborg. On the following day, which happened to be a Sunday, Glob went off to have a look at the find. I had other business, but I arrived at the museum in the evening with an acquaintance. In my diary I wrote: ”When we came in we had a slight shock. On the floor was a peat block with a corpse – a proper, well-preserved bog body. Glob brought it. ”We’ll be in trouble now.” And so we were, and Glob was in high spirits. The find created a sensation, which was also thanks to the quick presentation that we mounted. I had purchased a tape recorder, which cost me a packet – not a small handy one like the ones you get nowadays, but a large monstrosity with a steel tape (it was, after all, early days for this device) – and assisted by several experts, we taped a number of short lectures for the benefit of the visitors. People flocked in; the queue meandered from the exhibition room, through the museum halls, and a long way down the street. It took a long wait to get there, but the visitors seemed to enjoy the experience. The bog man lay in his hastily – procured exhibition case, which people circled around while the talking machine repeatedly expressed its words of wisdom – unfortunately with quite a few interruptions as the tape broke and had to be assembled by hand. Luckily, the tape recorders now often used for exhibitions are more dependable than mine.When the waves had died down and the exhibition ended, the experts examined the bog man. He was x-rayed at several points, cut open, given a tooth inspection, even had his fingerprints taken. During the autopsy there was a small mishap, which we kept to ourselves. However, after almost fifty years I must be able to reveal it: Among the organs removed for investigation was the liver, which was supposedly suitable for a C-14 dating – which at the time was a new dating method, introduced to Denmark after the war. The liver was sent to the laboratory in Copenhagen, and from here we received a telephone call a few days later. What had been sent in for examination was not the liver, but the stomach. The unfortunate (and in all other respects highly competent) Aarhus doctor who had performed the dissection was cal1ed in again. During another visit to the bogman’s inner parts he brought out what he believed to be the real liver. None of us were capable of deciding th is question. It was sent to Copenhagen at great speed, and a while later the dating arrived: Roman Iron Age. This result was later revised as the dating method was improved. The Grauballe Man is now thought to have lived before the birth of Christ.The preservation of the Grauballe Man was to be conservation officer Kornbak’s masterpiece. There were no earlier cases available for reference, so he invented a new method, which was very successful. In the first volumes of Kuml, society members read about the exiting history of the bog body and of the glimpses of prehistoric sacrificial customs that this find gave. They also read about the Bahrain expeditions, which Glob initiated and which became the apple of his eye. Bibby played a central role in this, as it was he who – at an evening gathering at Glob’s and Harriet’s home in Risskov – described his stay on the Persian Gulf island and the numerous burial mounds there. Glob made a quick decision (one of his special abilities was to see possibilities that noone else did, and to carry them out successfully to everyone’s surprise) and in December 1952 he and Bibby left for the Gulf, unaware of the fact that they were thereby beginning a series of expeditions which would continue for decades. Again it was Glob’s special genius that was the decisive factor. He very quickly got on friendly terms with the rulers of the small sheikhdoms and interested them in their past. As everyone knows, oil is flowing plentifully in those parts. The rulers were thus financially powerful and some of this wealth was quickly diverted to the expeditions, which probably would not have survived for so long without this assistance. To those of us who took part in them from time to time, the Gulf expeditions were an unforgettable experience, not just because of the interesting work, but even more because of the contact with the local population, which gave us an insight into local manners and customs that helped to explain parts of our own country’s past which might otherwise be difficult to understand. For Glob and the rest of us did not just get close to the elite: in spite of language problems, our Arab workers became our good friends. Things livened up when we occasionally turned up in their palm huts.Still, co-operating with Glob was not always an easy task – the sparks sometimes flew. His talent of initiating things is of course undisputed, as are the lasting results. He was, however, most attractive when he was in luck. Attention normally focused on this magnificent person whose anecdotes were not taken too seriously, but if something went wrong or failed to work out, he could be grossly unreasonable and a little too willing to abdicate responsibility, even when it was in fact his. This might lead to violent arguments, but peace was always restored. In 1954, another museum curator was attached to the museum: Poul Kjærum, who was immediately given the important task of investigating the dolmen settlement near Tustrup on Northern Djursland. This gave important results, such as the discovery of a cult house, which was a new and hitherto unknown Stone Age feature.A task which had long been on our mind s was finally carried out in 1955: constructing a new display of the museum collections. The old exhibitio n type consisted of numerous artefacts lined up in cases, accompaied ony by a brief note of the place where it was found and the type – which was the standard then. This type of exhibition did not give much idea of life in prehistoric times.We wanted to allow the finds to speak for themselves via the way that they were arranged, and with the aid of models, photos and drawings. We couldn’t do without texts, but these could be short, as people would understand more by just looking at the exhibits. Glob was in the Gulf at the time, so Kjærum and I performed the task with little money but with competent practical help from conservator Kornbak. We shared the work, but in fairness I must add that my part, which included the new lllerup find, was more suitable for an untraditional display. In order to illustrate the confusion of the sacrificial site, the numerous bent swords and other weapons were scattered a.long the back wall of the exhibition hall, above a bog land scape painted by Emil Gregersen. A peat column with inlaid slides illustrated the gradual change from prehistoric lake to bog, while a free-standing exhibition case held a horse’s skeleton with a broken skull, accompanied by sacrificial offerings. A model of the Nydam boat with all its oars sticking out hung from the ceiling, as did the fine copy of the Gundestrup vessel, as the Braa vessel had not yet been preserved. The rich pictorial decoration of the vessel’s inner plates was exhibited in its own case underneath. This was an exhibition form that differed considerably from all other Danish exhibitions of the time, and it quickly set a fashion. We awaited Glob’s homecoming with anticipation – if it wasn’t his exhibition it was still made in his spirit. We hoped that he would be surprised – and he was.The museum was thus taking shape. Its few employees included Jytte Ræbild, who held a key position as a secretary, and a growing number of archaeology students who took part in the work in various ways during these first years. Later, the number of employees grew to include the aforementioned excavation pioneer Georg Kunwald, and Hellmuth Andersen and Hans Jørgen Madsen, whose research into the past of Aarhus, and later into Danevirke is known to many, and also the ethnographer Klaus Ferdinand. And now Moesgaard appeared on the horizon. It was of course Glob’s idea to move everything to a manor near Aarhus – he had been fantasising about this from his first Aarhus days, and no one had raised any objections. Now there was a chance of fulfilling the dream, although the actual realisation was still a difficult task.During all this, the Jutland Archaeological Society thrived and attracted more members than expected. Local branches were founded in several towns, summer trips were arranged and a ”Worsaae Medal” was occasionally donated to persons who had deserved it from an archaeological perspective. Kuml came out regularly with contributions from museum people and the like-minded. The publication had a form that appealed to an inner circle of people interested in archaeology. This was the intention, and this is how it should be. But in my opinion this was not quite enough. We also needed a publication that would cater to a wider public and that followed the same basic ideas as the new exhibition.I imagined a booklet, which – without over-popularsing – would address not only the professional and amateur archaeologist but also anyone else interested in the past. The result was Skalk, which (being a branch of the society) published its fir t issue in the spring of 1957. It was a somewhat daring venture, as the financial base was weak and I had no knowledge of how to run a magazine. However, both finances and experience grew with the number of subscribers – and faster than expected, too. Skalk must have met an unsatisfied need, and this we exploited to the best of our ability with various cheap advertisements. The original idea was to deal only with prehistoric and medieval archaeology, but the historians also wanted to contribute, and not just the digging kind. They were given permission, and so the topic of the magazine ended up being Denmark’s past from the time of its first inhabitant s until the times remembered by the oldest of us – with the odd sideways leap to other subjects. It would be impossible to claim that Skalk was at the top of Glob’s wish list, but he liked it and supported the idea in every way. The keeper of national antiquities, Johannes Brøndsted, did the same, and no doubt his unreserved approval of the magazine contributed to its quick growth. Not all authors found it easy to give up technical language and express themselves in everyday Danish, but the new style was quickly accepted. Ofcourse the obligations of the magazine work were also sometimes annoying. One example from the diary: ”S. had promised to write an article, but it was overdue. We agreed to a final deadline and when that was overdue I phoned again and was told that the author had gone to Switzerland. My hair turned grey overnight.” These things happened, but in this particular case there was a happy ending. Another academic promised me three pages about an excavation, but delivered ten. As it happened, I only shortened his production by a third.The 1960s brought great changes. After careful consideration, Glob left us to become the keeper of national antiquities. One important reason for his hesitation was of course Moesgaard, which he missed out on – the transfer was almost settled. This was a great loss to the Aarhus museum and perhaps to Glob, too, as life granted him much greater opportunities for development.” I am not the type to regret things,” he later stated, and hopefully this was true. And I had to choose between the museum and Skalk – the work with the magazine had become too timeconsuming for the two jobs to be combined. Skalk won, and I can truthfully say that I have never looked back. The magazine grew quickly, and happy years followed. My resignation from the museum also meant that Skalk was disengaged from the Jutland Archaeological Society, but a close connection remained with both the museum and the society.What has been described here all happened when the museum world was at the parting of the ways. It was a time of innovation, and it is my opinion that we at the Prehistoric Museum contributed to that change in various ways.The new Museum Act of 1958 gave impetus to the study of the past. The number of archaeology students in creased tremendously, and new techniques brought new possibilities that the discussion club of the 1940s had not even dreamt of, but which have helped to make some of the visions from back then come true. Public in terest in archaeology and history is still avid, although to my regret, the ahistorical 1960s and 1970s did put a damper on it.Glob is greatly missed; not many of his kind are born nowadays. He had, so to say, great virtues and great fault s, but could we have done without either? It is due to him that we have the Jutland Archaeological Society, which has no w existed for half a century. Congr tulat ion s to the Society, from your offspring Skalk.Harald AndersenSkalk MagazineTranslated by Annette Lerche Trolle

To meet increasing demands from industry, governments and the public for highly qualified personnel in the growing environmental industry, the Faculty of Engineering at the University of New Brunswick has developed a multi-disciplinary Master of Engineering in environmental studies program. This program provides students a broad exposure in environmental studies, yet allows them to concentrate in specialized engineering disciplines. A student will complete the degree requirement by taking 30 credit hours of approved courses consisted of mandatory Common Courses and Technical Electives. Guest lectures by industry and real-life projects are among the salient features of this program.

The Faculty of Engineering at University of New Brunswick has developed a Master of Engineering (M.Eng.) degree program with concentration in environmental studies for graduate students in Civil Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Forestry Engineering, Geology and Geomatics Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. One of the common courses of this graduate program is a newly-developed multidisciplinary course of Advanced Topics in Environmental Design Engineering. The objective of this course is to provide students with broad exposure of topics in environmental design engineering through lectures, case studies, field trips and projects. The lectures consist of 10 in-class modules delivered by industrial and academic guest lecturers in various technical fields of environmental engineering. This course covers multi-disciplinary topics including: Pollution and Pollution Control, Advanced Energy Systems, Renewable Energy, Life Cycle Assessment, Environmental Impact Assessment and Environmental Management, Sustainable Development. This course has been available to graduate students since 2003.

Abstract Background The Master of Public Health (MPH) is a common graduate-level professional degree that is offered by Canadian Universities. To date, few studies have examined competency-based MPH education in Canada. Objective To examine the degree to which MPH programs' course descriptions align with the Public Health Agency of Canada's (PHAC) core competency categories in order to identify strengths and training gaps in such programs across Canada. Methods A content analysis of MPH programs in Canada was conducted from July 2019 to November 2019. A sampling frame of programs was obtained from a list from the PHAC website. Program information, including mandatory and elective course descriptions was extracted from each program's website and analyzed in NVivo 12. Course descriptions were independently categorized by two researchers into one or more of the seven categories of the core competencies outlined by PHAC. Results We identified 18 universities with MPH programs with 267 courses across Canada. Thematic analysis revealed that 100% of programs had coursework that addressed the “Public Health Sciences” and “Assessment and Analysis” categories; 93% addressed “Policy and Program Planning, Implementation, and Evaluation”; 67% addressed each of “Communication,” “Leadership,” and “Partnerships, Collaboration, and Advocacy”; and only 56% had course descriptions addressing “Diversity and Inclusiveness.” Conclusions We find that Canadian MPH programs may lack course offerings addressing core competency categories relating to diversity and inclusiveness, communication, and leadership. Our findings were limited in scope as we relied on program Web sites; thus, further research should explore course content in more depth than this course description analysis allowed and identify ways to close the MPH curricular gaps we identified. Key messages Further research should be conducted to determine if the current model of competency education in Canada is successfully guiding MPH programs in meeting local and international workforce demands. Continued discussion is needed to raise the importance of MPH competency-based education in Canada.

Abstract In this scientific paper, thermochemical conversion of redwood (RW) was studied. Using the thermogravimetric analysis' technique (TGA), the thermal behavior of RW samples was examined at four heating rates ranging from 5 to 20 K min−1 in inert atmosphere between 300 and 900 K. Two main objectives have been set for this study; the first one was the determination of the kinetic decomposition parameters of RW (Pinus sylvestris L.), and the second one was the study of the variation of characteristic parameters from the TG-DTG curves of the main RW's components, such as; cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. The kinetic analysis was performed using three isoconversional methods (Vyazovkin (VYA), Friedman (FR) and Flynn-Wall-Ozawa (FWO)), Avrami theory method and the Integral master-plots (Z(x)/Z(0.5)) method to estimate activation energy (E a ), reaction order (n), pre-exponential factor (A) and model kinetic (f(x)) for the thermal decomposition of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin components. The DTG and TG curves showed that three stages identify the thermal decomposition of RW, the first stage corresponds to the decomposition of hemicellulose and the second stage corresponds to the cellulose, while the third stage corresponds to the lignin's decomposition. For the range of conversion degree (x) investigated (0.1 ≤ x ≤ 0.7), the mean values of apparent activation energies for RW biomass were 127.60–130.65 KJ mol−1, 173.74–176.48 KJ mol−1 and 197.21–200.36 KJ mol−1 for hemicellulose, cellulose and lignin, respectively. Through varied temperatures from 550 to 600 K for hemicellulose, from 600 to 650 K for cellulose and from 750 to 800 K for lignin, the corresponding mean values of reaction order (n) were 0.200 for hemicellulose, 0.209 for cellulose and 0.047 for lignin. The pre-exponential factor's average values for three components of RW ranges from 0.08 × 1012 s−1 to 2.5 × 1012 s−1 (A hemicellulose = 1.09 × 1012 s−1), 0.10 × 1014 s−1 to 0.28 × 1014 s−1 (A cellulose = 0.17 × 1014 s−1) and 3.07 × 1016 s−1 to 3.69 × 1016 s−1 (A lignin = 3.33 × 1016 s−1), respectively. The experimental data of RW had overlapped the D 4, D 2 and F 3 in the conversion degree of 10–30%, 30–55% and 55–70% for the three components, respectively.

Objectives A key goal of schools and programs of public health is to prepare graduates for careers in the public health workforce after graduation, but are they achieving this goal? We assessed how the employment outcomes of students earning public health degrees are collected and described in the literature. Methods Using the Kirkpatrick model of training evaluation as a framework, we conducted a 6-step scoping review: (1) formulating the research question, (2) identifying relevant studies, (3) selecting studies, (4) charting the data, (5) collating and summarizing the results, and (6) consulting stakeholders. We included articles published from January 1, 1993, through July 4, 2020, that provided data on employment status, employment sector/industry, job function, or salary of public health graduates. We excluded articles that were not written in English and were about dual-degree (ie, doctor of medicine–master of public health) students. We found and reviewed 630 articles. Results We found 33 relevant articles. Most articles focused on a single school and combined multiple graduating classes, focused on subspecializations of public health, or focused on graduates’ satisfaction with their curriculum but not employment outcomes. Data were inconsistently categorized, and studies were difficult to compare. Conclusions Research on public health graduates’ employment outcomes is scarce and does not follow consistent protocols. New standards should be adopted to systematize the collection of data on employment outcomes of public health graduates.

Human papillomavirus (HPV) is the most common genital tract virus infection and can cause genital warts and cervical cancer. This multicenter study examined HPV information sources, vaccine hesitancy, and the association between the two variables. An online survey of HPV information sources and vaccine hesitancy was conducted among Chinese medical students. The World Health Organization (WHO) Vaccine Hesitancy 3Cs model was used to evaluate reasons for respondents' vaccine hesitancy. A probit model was used to investigate the association between vaccine information sources and vaccine hesitancy. The reported rate of vaccine hesitancy was 62.36%. Convenience was the primary factor for vaccine hesitancy in medical students, and 19% used a single source to obtain vaccine information. A multivariate analysis revealed that master degree and above were 33% less likely to be hesitant about the HPV vaccine than first grade students. Respondents receiving HPV information through doctor were 8% less likely to report vaccine hesitancy than those receiving information from other information channels. HPV vaccine hesitancy requires more attention. Future studies could examine whether increasing vaccination locations and dissemination of information about the safety and effectiveness of HPV vaccines as well as using Internet media would help reduce medical students' vaccine hesitancy and expand HPV vaccine coverage.

As global temperatures rise and our planet faces the ever growing consequences of climate change, sustainability practices (especially among corporations) are more important than ever before. More specifically, proactive strategies and shifts in organizational culture should be at the forefront of corporate environmental strategies. Research has shown that environmental values and awareness impact the degree to which business managers or employees implement proactive environmental policies, engage in corporate social responsibility ( and make overall eth ical decisions. Thus, it is important for those in the business field to possess environmental and prosocial values, which may then translate into their decisions or priorities as an employee. Studies on value formation have proven that values are formed early on and during transitional periods of a person s life (such as college), and subsequently becomeharder to change over time. Therefore, some scholars argue for the implementation of sustainability, CSR, and ethics in business education. Some universities and Master of Business Administration (programs have created courses, institutes, and specialized programs to promote these topics, but none have fully introduced sustainability as a requirement for business students. Using a comprehensive literature review, this paper highlights the need for a mandatory integration of sustainability and social impact curriculum into U.S. undergraduate business education. Additionally, this research contains implications for universities and encourages them to reev aluate the purpose and learning objectives ofbusiness education in our changing world.

The investigation is a detailed work of more than five years than the author has dedicated to the use of the television and other mass media to contribute to solve some of problematic of the environmental education and the medio.ambiente in the Cuban province of Camagüey and was defended like thesis in option to the title of Masters in Sciences, in the Pedagogical University Enrique Jose Varona, of the city of Havana, with satisfactory results. The newness of the investigation is in the proposal of a set of spots with the objective to develop the environmental education, by means of the routes formal and nonformal, from main the problematic ones that consider in the Strategy of Medio.ambiente and Environmental Education of the Republic of Cuba and the province of Camagüey. In the project psicopedagogical, philosophical and sociological foundations were applied that allowed to pedagogizar spots so that they do not constitute pure publicity, but that is managed by means of them to transform the thought and the way of performance of the children and young people, as well as of the town in general sense. In the materials that were designed they considered the ecosystems and species that greater degree of affectation they had and which as well they presented/displayed relation with the programs of scholastic Geography which they were distributed in the different levels from education of Cuba. La investigación es el fruto de un detallado trabajo de más de cinco años que el autor ha dedicado al empleo de la televisión y otros medios de comunicación para contribuir a resolver algunas de las problemáticas de la educación ambiental y el medio ambiente en la provincia cubana de Camagüey y fue defendida como tesis en opción al título de Master en Ciencias, en la Universidad Pedagógica Enrique José Varona, de la ciudad de La Habana, con resultados satisfactorios. La novedad de la investigación radica en la propuesta de un conjunto de spots con el objetivo de desarrollar la educación ambiental, mediante las vías formal y no formal, a partir de las principales problemáticas que se plantean en la Estrategia de Medio Ambiente y Educación Ambiental de la República de Cuba y de la provincia de Camagüey. En el proyecto se aplicaron fundamentos psicopedagógicos, filosóficos y sociológicos que permitieron pedagogizar los spots para que no constituyan pura publicidad, sino que se logre mediante ellos transformar el pensamiento y el modo de actuación de los niños y jóvenes, así como del pueblo en sentido general. En los materiales que se diseñaron se tuvieron en cuenta los ecosistemas y especies que mayor grado de afectación tenían y que a su vez presentaran relación con los programas de la Geografía escolar que se impartían en los diferentes niveles de enseñanza de Cuba. La investigación fue estructurada en dos capítulos, uno referente a la fundamentación teórico conceptual metodológica para el empleo de la televisión en la educación ambiental y particularmente los spots y el otro dedicado fundamentalmente a la selección, diseño y utilización de los referidos spots, así como el análisis de los instrumentos aplicados para valorar la efectividad e impacto del proyecto en los niños, jóvenes y pueblo en general. El proyecto es aplicable en cualquier territorio pues la variante consideró la publicación o salida al aire de los spots en los canales territoriales, televisoras locales e incluso en las videocaseteras que se utilizan en los centros escolares para la enseñanza.

PurposeThe paper innovates on the existing literature by assessing the gender gap in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) tertiary education enrolment and career choice in a small country setting and by extending on Master and Meltzoff (2016) theoretical framework to provide a holistic explanation of the gender disparity through a mix of personal, environmental and behavioural factors. The study first probes into the existence of potential gender disparity in STEM tertiary enrolment in Mauritius. Second, in contrast with existing studies where selective factors are used to measure the gender gap in STEM education, this paper investigates into a combination of personal, environmental and behavioural factors that may influence participation in STEM education and career.Design/methodology/approachThe study uses a survey of 209 undergraduates enroled in the main public university and investigates into the existence of a gender gap in STEM tertiary education enrolment and the reasons behind this disparity. Consistent with the theoretical model, the empirical analysis also investigates into the work environment (which cannot be measured from the survey), via semi-structured interviews of 15 women in STEM professions.FindingsThe logit regression results first reveal the existence of a gender disparity in the choice of STEM-related degrees. The probability of a female student to enrol in a STEM degree is lower than that of a male student, after controlling for all the personal, environmental and behavioural factors. The most important set of reasons influencing the student's STEM degree choice are self-efficacy and the student's academic performance in STEM subjects at secondary school level. The findings also demonstrate that young women are relatively more likely to choose STEM degrees than their male counterparts when they are supported by their family, school and teachers. There is further evidence of lower participation of women in STEM professions as well as significant challenges which women in STEM careers face compared to their male colleagues.Originality/valueThis study adopts a holistic framework to assess the factors that hinder women's participation in STEM tertiary education and career in Mauritius.

Cross-cultural differences and their effects on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) perceptions and expectations may be a source of risks and opportunities for managers of multinational or international companies. Moving from this assumption, this paper focuses on the relatively underdeveloped topic of CSR in Eastern European, post- Communist countries, with the aim to compare how CSR is perceived and affect consumers’ behaviours in Albania (EU candidate only in March 2020) compared to Germany and Italy. Through an empirical study of CSR perceptions of Albanian master degree students in comparison with their German and Italian colleagues, we found, first, that Albanian students share with their Western counterparts a perception of firm duties encompassing the economic, legal, environmental, and voluntariness dimensions; second, that for Albanian students a firm behaves in a socially responsible manner to the extent it acts responsibly toward the environment and achieves economic success; third, that they have stronger expectations in terms of CSR and more positive attitudes toward responsible buying than Western European students. Overall, our study suggests that cultural differences affect CSR perceptions and expectations, which, in turn, influence the purchasing behaviours. Thus, from a cross-cultural management perspective, managers need to be aware of these differences, assess their potential impact on stakeholders’ behaviours and attitudes toward a firm, identify risks and opportunities, and finally decide their strategic responses.

Discussions of the economic theory of planned obsolescence—the purposeful embedding of redundancy into the functionality or other aspect of a product—in the 1980s and 1990s often focused on the impact of such a design strategy on manufacturers, consumers, the market, and, ultimately, profits (see, for example, Bulow; Lee and Lee; Waldman). More recently, assessments of such shortened product life cycles have included calculations of the environmental and other costs of such waste (Claudio; Kondoh; Unruh). Commonly utilised examples are consumer products such as cars, whitegoods and small appliances, fashion clothing and accessories, and, more recently, new technologies and their constituent components. This discourse has been adopted by those who configure workers as human resources, and who speak both of skills (Janßen and Backes-Gellner) and human capital itself (Chauhan and Chauhan) being made obsolete by market forces in both predictable and unplanned ways. This includes debate over whether formal education can assist in developing the skills that make their possessors less liable to become obsolete in the workforce (Dubin; Holtmann; Borghans and de Grip; Gould, Moav and Weinberg). However, aside from periodic expressions of disciplinary angst (as in questions such as whether the Liberal Arts and other disciplines are becoming obsolete) are rarely found in discussions regarding higher education. Yet, higher education has been subsumed into a culture of commercial service provision as driven by markets and profit as the industries that design and deliver consumer goods. McKelvey and Holmén characterise this as a shift “from social institution to knowledge business” in the subtitle of their 2009 volume on European universities, and the recent decade has seen many higher educational institutions openly striving to be entrepreneurial. Despite some debate over the functioning of market or market-like mechanisms in higher education (see, for instance, Texeira et al), the corporatisation of higher education has led inevitably to market segmentation in the products the sector delivers. Such market segmentation results in what are called over-differentiated products, seemingly endless variations in the same product to attempt to increase consumption and attendant sales. Milk is a commonly cited example, with supermarkets today stocking full cream, semi-skimmed, skimmed, lactose-free, soy, rice, goat, GM-free and ‘smart’ (enriched with various vitamins, minerals and proteins) varieties; and many of these available in fresh, UHT, dehydrated and/or organic versions. In the education market, this practice has resulted in a large number of often minutely differentiated, but differently named, degrees and other programs. Where there were once a small number of undergraduate degrees with discipline variety within them (including the Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science awards), students can now graduate with a named qualification in a myriad of discipline and professional areas. The attempt to secure a larger percentage of the potential client pool (who are themselves often seeking to update their own skills and knowledges to avoid workforce obsolescence) has also resulted in a significant increase in the number of postgraduate coursework certificates, diplomas and other qualifications across the sector. The Masters degree has fractured from a research program into a range of coursework, coursework plus research, and research only programs. Such proliferation has also affected one of the foundations of the quality and integrity of the higher education system, and one of the last bastions of conventional practice, the doctoral degree. The PhD as ‘Gold-Standard’ Market Leader? The Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) is usually understood as a largely independent discipline-based research project that results in a substantial piece of reporting, the thesis, that makes a “substantial original contribution to knowledge in the form of new knowledge or significant and original adaptation, application and interpretation of existing knowledge” (AQF). As the highest level of degree conferred by most universities, the PhD is commonly understood as indicating the height of formal educational attainment, and has, until relatively recently, been above reproach and alteration. Yet, whereas universities internationally once offered a single doctorate named the PhD, many now offer a number of doctoral level degrees. In Australia, for example, candidates can also complete PhDs by Publication and by Project, as well as practice-led doctorates in, and named Doctorates of/in, Creative Arts, Creative Industries, Laws, Performance and other ‘new’ discipline areas. The Professional Doctorate, introduced into Australia in the early 1990s, has achieved such longevity that it now has it’s own “first generation” incarnations in (and about) disciplines such as Education, Business, Psychology and Journalism, as well as a contemporary “second generation” version which features professionally-practice-led Mode 2 knowledge production (Maxwell; also discussed in Lee, Brennan and Green 281). The uniquely Australian PhD by Project in the disciplines of architecture, design, business, engineering and education also includes coursework, and is practice and particularly workplace (or community) focused, but unlike the above, does not have to include a research element—although this is not precluded (Usher). A significant number of Australian universities also currently offer a PhD by Publication, known also as the PhD by Published Papers and PhD by Published Works. Introduced in the 1960s in the UK, the PhD by Publication there is today almost exclusively undertaken by academic staff at their own institutions, and usually consists of published work(s), a critical appraisal of that work within the research context, and an oral examination. The named degree is rare in the USA, although the practice of granting PhDs on the basis of prior publications is not unknown. In Australia, an examination of a number of universities that offer the degree reveals no consistency in terms of the framing policies except for the generic Australian Qualifications Framework accreditation statement (AQF), entry requirements and conditions of candidature, or resulting form and examination guidelines. Some Australian universities, for instance, require all externally peer-refereed publications, while others will count works that are self-published. Some require actual publications or works in press, but others count works that are still at submission stage. The UK PhD by Publication shows similar variation, with no consensus on purpose, length or format of this degree (Draper). Across Australia and the UK, some institutions accept previously published work and require little or no campus participation, while others have a significant minimum enrolment period and count only work generated during candidature (see Brien for more detail). Despite the plethora of named degrees at doctoral level, many academics continue to support the PhD’s claim to rigor and intellectual attainment. Most often, however, these arguments cite tradition rather than any real assessment of quality. The archaic trappings of conferral—the caps, gowns and various other instruments of distinction—emphasise a narrative in which it is often noted that doctorates were first conferred by the University of Paris in the 12th century and then elsewhere in medieval Europe. However, challenges to this account note that today’s largely independently researched thesis is a relatively recent arrival to educational history, being only introduced into Germany in the early nineteenth century (Bourner, Bowden and Laing; Park 4), the USA in a modified form in the mid-nineteenth century and the UK in 1917 (Jolley 227). The Australian PhD is even more recent, with the first only awarded in 1948 and still relatively rare until the 1970s (Nelson 3; Valadkhani and Ville). Additionally, PhDs in the USA, Canada and Denmark today almost always incorporate a significant taught coursework element (Noble). This is unlike the ‘traditional’ PhD in the UK and Australia, although the UK also currently offers a number of what are known there as ‘taught doctorates’. Somewhat confusingly, while these do incorporate coursework, they still include a significant research component (UKCGE). However, the UK is also adopting what has been identified as an American-inflected model which consists mostly, or largely, of coursework, and which is becoming known as the ‘New Route British PhD’ (Jolley 228). It could be posited that, within such a competitive market environment, which appears to be driven by both a drive for novelty and a desire to meet consumer demand, obsolescence therefore, and necessarily, threatens the very existence of the ‘traditional’ PhD. This obsolescence could be seen as especially likely as, alongside the existence of the above mentioned ‘new’ degrees, the ‘traditional’ research-based PhD at some universities in Australia and the UK in particular is, itself, also in the process of becoming ‘professionalised’, with some (still traditionally-framed) programs nevertheless incorporating workplace-oriented frameworks and/or experiences (Jolley 229; Kroll and Brien) to meet professionally-focused objectives that it is acknowledged cannot be met by producing a research thesis alone. While this emphasis can be seen as operating at the expense of specific disciplinary knowledge (Pole 107; Ball; Laing and Brabazon 265), and criticised for that, this workplace focus has arisen, internationally, as an institutional response to requests from both governments and industry for training in generic skills in university programs at all levels (Manathunga and Wissler). At the same time, the acknowledged unpredictability of the future workplace is driving a cognate move from discipline specific knowledge to what have been described as “problem solving and knowledge management approaches” across all disciplines (Gilbert; Valadkhani and Ville 2). While few query a link between university-level learning and the needs of the workplace, or the motivating belief that the overarching role of higher education is the provision of professional training for its client-students (see Laing and Brabazon for an exception), it also should be noted that a lack of relevance is one of the contributors to dysfunction, and thence to obsolescence. The PhD as Dysfunctional Degree? Perhaps, however, it is not competition that threatens the traditional PhD but, rather, its own design flaws. A report in The New York Times in 2007 alerted readers to what many supervisors, candidates, and researchers internationally have recognised for some time: that the PhD may be dysfunctional (Berger). In Australia and elsewhere, attention has focused on the uneven quality of doctoral-level degrees across institutions, especially in relation to their content, rigor, entry and assessment standards, and this has not precluded questions regarding the PhD (AVCC; Carey, Webb, Brien; Neumann; Jolley; McWilliam et al., "Silly"). It should be noted that this important examination of standards has, however, been accompanied by an increase in the awarding of Honorary Doctorates. This practice ranges from the most reputable universities’ recognising individuals’ significant contributions to knowledge, culture and/or society, to wholly disreputable institutions offering such qualifications in return for payment (Starrs). While generally contested in terms of their status, Honorary Doctorates granted to sports, show business and political figures are the most controversial and include an award conferred on puppet Kermit the Frog in 1996 (Jeffries), and some leading institutions including MIT, Cornell University and the London School of Economics and Political Science are distinctive in not awarding Honorary Doctorates. However, while distracting, the Honorary Doctorate itself does not answer all the questions regarding the quality of doctoral programs in general, or the Doctor of Philosophy in particular. The PhD also has high attrition rates: 50 per cent or more across Australia, the USA and Canada (Halse 322; Lovitts and Nelson). For those who remain in the programs, lengthy completion times (known internationally as ‘time-to-degree’) are common in many countries, with averages of 10.5 years to completion in Canada, and from 8.2 to more than 13 years (depending on discipline) in the USA (Berger). The current government performance-based funding model for Australian research higher degrees focuses attention on timely completion, and there is no doubt that, under this system—where universities only receive funding for a minimum period of candidature when those candidates have completed their degrees—more candidates are completing within the required time periods (Cuthbert). Yet, such a focus has distracted from assessment of the quality and outcomes of such programs of study. A detailed survey, based on the theses lodged in Australian libraries, has estimated that at least 51,000 PhD theses were completed in Australia to 2003 (Evans et al. 7). However, little attention has been paid to the consequences of this work, that is, the effects that the generation of these theses has had on either candidates or the nation. There has been no assessment, for instance, of the impact on candidates of undertaking and completing a doctorate on such facets of their lives as their employment opportunities, professional choices and salary levels, nor any effect on their personal happiness or levels of creativity. Nor has there been any real evaluation of the effect of these degrees on GDP, rates of the commercialisation of research, the generation of intellectual property, meeting national agendas in areas such as innovation, productivity or creativity, and/or the quality of the Australian creative and performing arts. Government-funded and other Australian studies have, however, noted for at least a decade both that the high numbers of graduates are mismatched to a lack of market demand for doctoral qualifications outside of academia (Kemp), and that an oversupply of doctorally qualified job seekers is driving wages down in some sectors (Jones 26). Even academia is demanding more than a PhD. Within the USA, doctoral graduates of some disciplines (English is an often-cited example) are undertaking second PhDs in their quest to secure an academic position. In Australia, entry-level academic positions increasingly require a scholarly publishing history alongside a doctoral-level qualification and, in common with other quantitative exercises in the UK and in New Zealand, the current Excellence in Research for Australia research evaluation exercise values scholarly publications more than higher degree qualifications. Concluding Remarks: The PhD as Obsolete or Retro-Chic? Disciplines and fields are reacting to this situation in various ways, but the trend appears to be towards increased market segmentation. Despite these charges of PhD dysfunction, there are also dangers in the over-differentiation of higher degrees as a practice. If universities do not adequately resource the professional development and other support for supervisors and all those involved in the delivery of all these degrees, those institutions may find that they have spread the existing skills, knowledge and other institutional assets too thinly to sustain some or even any of these degrees. This could lead to the diminishing quality (and an attendant diminishing perception of the value) of all the higher degrees available in those institutions as well as the reputation of the hosting country’s entire higher education system. As works in progress, the various ‘new’ doctoral degrees can also promote a sense of working on unstable ground for both candidates and supervisors (McWilliam et al., Research Training), and higher degree examiners will necessarily be unfamiliar with expected standards. Candidates are attempting to discern the advantages and disadvantages of each form in order to choose the degree that they believe is right for them (see, for example, Robins and Kanowski), but such assessment is difficult without the benefit of hindsight. Furthermore, not every form may fit the unpredictable future aspirations of candidates or the volatile future needs of the workplace. The rate with which everything once new descends from stylish popularity through stages of unfashionableness to become outdated and, eventually, discarded is increasing. This escalation may result in the discipline-based research PhD becoming seen as archaic and, eventually, obsolete. Perhaps, alternatively, it will lead to newer and more fashionable forms of doctoral study being discarded instead. 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Abstract Introduction Congenital heart diseases (CHD) represent abnormalities of cardiovascular structure or function present at birth. The degree of knowledge of parents of children with CHD determines the quality of care and the quality of life of their children. Several studies have shown that parents’ knowledge is still lacking. Objectives This study aims to translate and validate in Italian the Leuven Knowledge Questionnaire for Congenital Heart Disease (LKQCHD) and to assess the knowledge of parents of children with CHD about heart defect, treatments, preventive measures, opportunities for physical activity and reproductive problems of their children. Methods Translation and validation of the questionnaire were performed using a multistep method: forward translation, backward translation, and pilot testing. Five experts in CHD were included for the validation of the questionnaire. The sample consisted of fifty-four pairs of parents of children with CHD. Parents were contacted by telephone; knowledge was assessed using an electronic questionnaire. Results Five items were found to have an Item Content Validity Index (I-CVI) of 0.6, 2 of 0.5, and 2 of 0.2. The Scale ContentValidity Index (S-CVI) was found to be 0.80. Regarding parental knowledge, the results show that almost all parents are able to correctly state the name of the diagnosis and the description and location of the heart defect. However, parental knowledge has important gaps; in particular, parents are less informed about the most characteristic sign of endocarditis, the possibility of contracting endocarditis more than once in a lifetime, and risk factors. Parental knowledge also seems to be lacking regarding symptoms suggesting worsening health status in their children. Conclusions The Italian version of the LKQCHD has proved to be a valid tool to measure the level of knowledge of parents of children with CHD, allowing to identify in which areas it is necessary to improve the education addressed to parents. Key messages • Assessing the knowledge of parents of children with CHD allows to improve their education. • The Italian version of the LKQCHD is a valid tool to measure the level of knowledge of parents of children with CHD.

Rata-rata penyelesaian masa studi program magister Sekolah Pascasarjana di Institut Pertanian Bogor kurang dari dua tahun (17,5%). Oleh karena itu, faktor-faktor yang mempengaruhi baik dari aspek internal maupun eksternal perlu dikaji. Faktor internal berasal dari dalam diri mahasiswa yang meliputi kemampuan akademik dan motivasi. Faktor eksternal mencakup faktor lingkungan dan pembimbing saat menyelesaikan tugas akhir. Pengambilan data dan informasi menggunakan instumen kuesioner yang terstruktur terhadap lulusan program magister. Analisis menggunakan analisis deskriptif, analisis faktor, dan regresi linier berganda. Penyelesaian masa studi meliputi faktor-faktor kualitas pembimbingan, pelayanan dan lingkungan, kemampuan mahasiswa, motivasi, responsif serta gelar dan prestis. Analisis lebih lanjut menunjukkan penyelesaian masa studi sangat terkait dengan faktor-faktor eksternal yang berasal dari luar seperti layanan pendidikan dan faktor lingkungan, di antaranya lingkungan kampus yang bersih dan hijau, lingkungan belajar yang tenang dan nyaman. Responsif terhadap feedback dari pembimbing untuk segera memperbaiki tesis secara intens dan tepat waktu merupakan faktor internal.Kata kunci: masa studi, perguruan tinggi, eksternal, internal, analisis faktor Factors on completing study of master students in graduate schoolAbstractCompletion of the final assignment of the Postgraduate school master's program at the Institut Pertanian Bogor on average less than two years (17,5%). This is the purpose of the research, namely to see the factors that influence the completion of the final task. The factors that influence the study period consist of internal and external factors. Internal factors originating from within the student themselves include academic ability and motivation. External factors come from outside such as environmental factors and mentors when completing the final task. Retrieval of data and information in this study using a structured questionnaire instrument for graduates of the Institute Pertanian Bogor University's Graduate School Masters program. The analysis uses descriptive analysis, factor analysis, and multiple linear regression. Completion of the study period includes factors of coaching quality, service, and environment, student ability, motivation, responsiveness and degree, and prestige. Further analysis shows that the completion of studies is closely related to external factors originating from outside such as education services and environmental factors, including a clean and green campus environment, a quiet and comfortable learning environment. Responsiveness to feedback from the counselor to immediately correct the thesis in an intense and timely manner is internal.Keywords: complete a study, postgraduate, external, internal, factor analysis

Fifty years after the introduction of Communication studies into Spanish universities, this article presents the results of a descriptive investigation of on-campus university education in Advertising and Public Relations in Spain, with the dual aim of gaining an understanding of how it is formally, and what and how it is taught. A total of 1,815 teaching guides amounting to 10,224 ECTS credits were compiled for the 41 degree courses taught in 38 training centers. The data collected in coding sheets were statistically analyzed and grouped into 57 variables. The results highlight the majority of private initiatives in university education in this area, and the scarce internationalization with only token use of English in teaching. We observe a significant relative presence of cross-cutting content between Communication and other areas, as well as a clear predominance of Advertising training over Public Relations. The most relevant specialized areas are creativity, and advertising and digital marketing. In teaching, a greater weight of practical activities is observed compared with traditional theoretical or master classes. The evaluation of students is also more based on practical work rather than written tests or examinations on theoretical knowledge. These latter aspects confirm the footprint left by the Bologna Plan and the regulations it drove, although the methodological renovation it advocated has yet to be fully achieved. Resumen Tras cumplirse 50 años de la incorporación de los estudios de Comunicación a la universidad española, en este artículo se recogen los resultados de una investigación descriptiva acerca de la formación universitaria presencial de grado sobre Publicidad y Relaciones Públicas en España, con el doble objetivo de conocer cómo se caracteriza formalmente, y qué y cómo se enseña. Se recopilaron 1.815 guías docentes correspondientes a 10.224 créditos ECTS de las 41 titulaciones de grado que se imparten en 38 centros de formación, tras lo cual se procedió al análisis estadístico de los datos recogidos en las fichas de codificación, que se agruparon en 57 variables. Se concluye, por una parte, el mayoritario peso de la iniciativa privada en la formación universitaria de esta área, y la escasa internacionalización en cuanto al testimonial uso del inglés en la docencia. Respecto a los campos temáticos abordados, se constata su carácter generalista, con un porcentaje destacado de contenidos transversales de Comunicación y de otras áreas no comunicológicas, así como un claro predominio de la formación publicitaria sobre la de Relaciones Públicas, siendo los campos especializados más relevantes la creatividad, por un lado, y la Publicidad y el Marketing Digital, por otro. En la docencia se observa un mayor peso de las actividades de tipo práctico frente a la tradicional clase teórica o magistral. La evaluación del estudiante también está más basada en prácticas, más que en pruebas escritas o exámenes sobre conocimientos teóricos. Estos últimos aspectos corroboran el poso que ha dejado el Plan Bolonia y las normativas a él debidas, aunque no se haya alcanzado plenamente la renovación metodológica que preconizaba.

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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Redden, G. “Packaging the Gifts of Nation.” M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999) accessed 10 September 2008 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/gifts.php. Riley, N. Appetite For Life: The Biography of Julia Child. New York: Doubleday, 1977. Ruhlman, M. The Soul of a Chef. New York: Viking, 2001. Ruhlman, M. The Reach of a Chef. New York: Viking, 2006. Sanger, M. B. Escoffier: Master Chef. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1976. Scott, A. J. “The Cultural Economy of Cities.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 212 (1997) 323–39. Simpson, N. Gordon Ramsay: The Biography. London: John Blake, 2006. Smith, G. Nigella Lawson: A Biography. London: Andre Deutsch, 2005. Symons, M. A History of Cooks and Cooking. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2004. Tairu, T. “Material Food, Spiritual Quest: When Pleasure Does Not Follow Purchase.” M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999) accessed 10 September 2008 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/pleasure.php. White, R. 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According to Taylor et al. (2001), dialogue can be defined "as a tool for effective and mutually rewarding interpersonal communication" (p. 267) and refers to “any negotiated exchange of ideas and opinions” (Kent & Taylor, 1998, p. 325), whereby all parties in a relationship strive to engage in an honest, open and ethically communicative give and take (Bortree & Seltzer, 2009). From a public relations perspective, dialogue is a necessary tool to build an effective relationship with the public (Kent & Taylor, 1998). Dialogical strategies therefore serve to build and maintain dynamic and lasting relationships with publics (Kent & Taylor, 1998). Field of application/theoretical foundation: Many studies investigating the dialogical strategies of organizations on the Internet refer in terms of their theoretical foundation to the preliminary work of Kent and Taylor (1998) and Taylor et al. (2001) (e. g. Bortree & Seltzer, 2009; Yang & Taylor, 2010). Kent and Taylor (1998) developed five dimensions, so-called “principles of dialogue” (Taylor et al., 2001, p. 269), which can be utilized by organizations in their strategically designed websites in order to engage in dialogical relationships Among these principles are: Ease of interface: This point refers to the usability of a site which is a prerequisite for online dialogue. If visitors do not have an easy time navigating a site and finding information, they will not have a positive experience at the website and may not use it again. Usefulness of information: This principle is relevant because it clarifies the reason for visiting a website. Visitors turn to a site when it provides them with information that is useful, trustworthy, and of lasting value. Conservation of visitors: The goal of websites should be to keep visitors on their own site and not to encourage them to visit other sites, e. g. through advertisements. Generation of return visits: A relationship can only be established by users who are encouraged to return and visit the website on a regular basis. Dialogic loop: Websites have to offer two-way communication (interactivity) in order to be fully dialogic. Other studies adapted the theoretical framework and modified it for application to different research objects such as social media platforms (Bortree & Seltzer, 2009; Yang & Taylor, 2010). For instance, the study by Bortree & Seltzer (2009) extended it by adding organization engagement as a new strategy, since organizations can also encourage dialogue via posts on their own sites (e. g. walls and discussion boards). Besides the dialogic strategies, their outcomes are often identified and coded as well. Example studies: Bortree & Seltzer (2009); Cho et al. (2014); Reber & Kim (2006); Taylor et al. (2001); Waters et al. (2009); Waters & Jamal (2011); Yang & Taylor (2010) Information on Bortree & Seltzer, 2009 Authors: Denise Sevick Bortree & Trent Seltzer, 2009 Research objective: “This study sought to determine to what degree advocacy organizations are utilizing dialogic strategies on their social networking profiles as well as the degree to which these strategies are related to actual dialogic outcomes” (p. 317). Objective of analysis: 50 Facebook profiles of environmental advocacy groups Timeframe of analysis: – Information about variables Variable name/definition: Dialogic strategies Level of analysis: Facebook page Values: - Links to organization homepage - Number of advertisements on a site - Use of applications - Ease of donations - Join now option - Offers of regular information through email - Profile sharing - Content sharing - Organization comments in dialogic spaces (i. e. wall and discussion boards) Scale of measurement: Nominal (Present/absent) Reliability: Intercoder reliability according to Scott’s Pi: .61 to .87 Codebook: – Variable name/definition: Outcomes of dialogic communication Level of analysis: Facebook page Values: - User posts (number of user posts on wall and discussion board) - Network activity (number of user posts in one week) - User responses to others (number of user posts in response to inquiries by the organization or others) - Organization response to users (number of organization posts in response to user inquiries) - Network extensiveness (total number of friends or fans) - Network growth (one week increase in number of friends or fans) Scale of measurement: Metric Reliability: Intercoder reliability according to Holsti: 90 % - 100 % Codebook: – Information onYang & Taylor, 2010 Authors: Aimei Yang & Maureen Taylor, 2010 Research questions: How do Chinese ENGOs’ websites incorporate features that facilitate interaction? How do Chinese ENGOs’ websites provide information to key stakeholders (members, volunteers, general public, and the media)? How do Chinese ENGOs’ websites incorporate relationship-building features? Object of analysis: 68 Chinese ENGO’s websites Timeframe of analysis: – Information about variable Level of analysis: Website features Values: - Ease of interaction (site map, major link to rest of site, search engine box) - Usefulness of information to members/volunteers (details of how to become affiliated, how to contribute money, links (email, telephone) to organization leaders, chat room/BBS/Blog, links to affiliate websites) - Usefulness of information to general public (tips of how to practice environmentally friendly activities in everyday life, tips of how to lead a healthy life, games and other entertainment function) - Usefulness of information to the media (press release room/search engine, FAQ section aimed at media, news published or aired about the organization, editorial stories written by organization staff, organization-in-action photos/stories, downloadable graphics/video/other material, organization fact sheets, organization logos for use in publication, clearly stated position on policy issues, organization perspective on current issues/trends, annual reports/financial) - Relationship-building (opportunity for user-response, opportunity to vote on issues, survey to voice opinion on issues, offers regular information through email, positing calendar of events) - Mission statement (statement of mission/organization value/goals from amoral authority perspective, statement of mission/organization value/goals from a grassroots perspective) Scale of measurement: Nominal (1 = absence; 2 = linked through at least three levels of hyperlinks from the front page; 3 = linked through at least two levels of hyperlinks from the front page; 4 = placed on the front page) Reliability: Intercoder reliability according to Scott’s Pi: .77 to 1.00 (M = .84) Codebook: – References Bortree, D. S., & Seltzer, T. (2009). Dialogic strategies and outcomes: An analysis of environmental advocacy groups’ Facebook profiles. Public Relations Review, 35(3), 317–319. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2009.05.002 Cho, M., Schweickart, T., & Haase, A. (2014). Public engagement with nonprofit organizations on Facebook. Public Relations Review, 40(3), 565–567. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2014.01.008 Kent, M. L., Taylor, M. (1998). Building dialogic relationships through the World Wide Web. Public Relations Review, 24(3), 321-334. Reber, B. H., & Kim, J. K. (2006). How activist groups use websites in media relations: Evaluating online press rooms. Journal of Public Relations Research, 18(4), 313–333. https://doi.org/10.1207/s1532754xjprr1804_2 Taylor, M., Kent, M. L., & White, W. J. (2001). How activist organizations are using the Internet to build relationships. Public Relations Review, 27(3), 263–284. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0363-8111(01)00086-8 Waters, R. D., Burnett, E., Lamm, A., & Lucas, J. (2009). Engaging stakeholders through social networking: How nonprofit organizations are using Facebook. Public Relations Review, 35(2), 102–106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2009.01.006 Waters, R. D., & Jamal, J. Y. (2011). Tweet, tweet, tweet: A content analysis of nonprofit organizations’ Twitter updates. Public Relations Review, 37(3), 321–324. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2011.03.002 Yang, A., & Taylor, M. (2010). Relationship-building by Chinese ENGOs’ websites: Education, not activation. Public Relations Review, 36(4), 342–351. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2010.07.001

Introduction The term ‘resilience’ is on everyone’s lips - from politicians to community service providers to the seemingly endless supply of self-help gurus. The concept is undergoing a renaissance of sorts in contemporary Western society; but why resilience now? One possible explanation is that individuals and their communities are experiencing increased and intensified levels of adversity and hardship, necessitating the accumulation and deployment of ‘more resilience’. Whilst a strong argument could made that this is in fact the case, it would seem that the capacity to survive and thrive has been a feature of human survival and growth long before we had a name for it. Rather than an inherent characteristic, trait or set of behaviours of particularly ‘resilient’ individuals or groups, resilience has come to be viewed more as a common and everyday capacity, expressed and expressible by all people. Having researched the concept for some time now, we believe that we are only marginally closer to understanding this captivating but ultimately elusive concept. What we are fairly certain of is that resilience is more than basic survival but less than an invulnerability to adversity, resting somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. Given the increasing prevalence of populations affected by war and other disasters, we are certain however that efforts to better understand the accumulative dynamics of resilience, are now, more than ever, a vital area of public and academic concern. In our contemporary world, the concept of resilience is coming to represent a vital conceptual tool for responding to the complex challenges emerging from broad scale movements in climate change, rural and urban migration patterns, pollution, economic integration and other consequences of globalisation. In this article, the phenomenon of human resilience is defined as the cumulative build-up of both particular kinds of knowledge, skills and capabilities as well as positive affects such as hope, which sediment over time as transpersonal capacities for self-preservation and ongoing growth (Wilson). Although the accumulation of positive affect is crucial to the formation of resilience, the ability to re-imagine and utilise negative affects, events and environmental limitations, as productive cultural resources, is a reciprocal and under-researched aspect of the phenomenon. In short, we argue that resilience is the protective shield, which capacitates individuals and communities to at least deal with, and at best, overcome potential challenges, while also facilitating the realisation of hoped-for objects and outcomes. Closely tied to the formation of resilience is the lived experience of hope and hoping practices, with an important feature of resilience related to the future-oriented dimensions of hope (Parse). Yet it is important to note that the accumulation of hope, as with resilience, is not headed towards some state of invulnerability to adversity; as presumed to exist in the foundational period of psychological research on the construct (Garmezy; Werner and Smith; Werner). In contrast, we argue that the positive affective experience of hopefulness provides individuals and communities with a means of enduring the present, while the future-oriented dimensions of hope offer them an instrument for imagining a better future to come (Wilson). Given the complex, elusive and non-uniform nature of resilience, it is important to consider the continued relevance of the resilience concept. For example, is resilience too narrow a term to describe and explain the multiple capacities, strategies and resources required to survive and thrive in today’s world? Furthermore, why do some individuals and communities mobilise and respond to a crisis; and why do some collapse? In a related discussion, Ungar (Constructionist) posed the question, “Why keep the term resilience?” Terms like resilience, even strengths, empowerment and health, are a counterpoint to notions of disease and disorder that have made us look at people as glasses half empty rather than half full. Resilience reminds us that children survive and thrive in a myriad of ways, and that understanding the etiology of health is as, or more, important than studying the etiology of disease. (Ungar, Constructionist 91) This productive orientation towards health, creativity and meaning-making demonstrates the continued conceptual and existential relevance of resilience, and why it will remain a critical subject of inquiry now and into the future. Early Psychological Studies of Resilience Definitions of resilience vary considerably across disciplines and time, and according to the theoretical context or group under investigation (Harvey and Delfabro). During the 1970s and early 1980s, the developmental literature on resilience focused primarily on the “personal qualities” of “resilient children” exposed to adverse life circumstances (Garmezy Vulnerability; Masten; Rutter; Werner). From this narrow and largely individualistic viewpoint, resilience was defined as an innate “self-righting mechanism” (Werner and Smith 202). Writing from within the psychological tradition, Masten argued that the early research on resilience (Garmezy Vulnerability; Werner and Smith) regularly implied that resilient children were special or remarkable by virtue of their invulnerability to adversity. As research into resilience progressed, researchers began to acknowledge the ordinariness or everydayness of resilience-related phenomena. Furthermore, that “resilience may often derive from factors external to the child” (Luthar; Cicchetti and Becker 544). Besides the personal attributes of children, researchers within the psychological sciences also began to explore the effects of family dynamics and impacts of the broader social environment in the development of resilience. Rather than identifying which child, family or environmental factors were resilient or resilience producing, they turned their attention to how these underlying protective mechanisms facilitated positive resilience outcomes. As research evolved, resilience as an absolute or unchanging attribute made way for more relational and dynamic conceptualisations. As Luthar et al noted, “it became clear that positive adaptation despite exposure to adversity involves a developmental progression, such that new vulnerabilities and/or strengths often emerge with changing life circumstances” (543-44). Accordingly, resilience came to be viewed as a dynamic process, involving positive adaptations within contexts of adversity (Luthar et al. 543). Although closer to the operational definition of resilience argued for here, there remain a number of definitional concerns and theoretical limitations of the psychological approach; in particular, the limitation of positive adaptation to the context of significant adversity. In doing so, this definition fails to account for the subjective experience and culturally located understandings of ‘health’, ‘adversity’ and ‘adaptation’ so crucial to the formation of resilience. Our major criticism of the psychodynamic approach to resilience relates to the construction of a false dichotomy between “resilient” and “non-resilient” individuals. This dichotomy is perpetuated by psychological approaches that view resilience as a distinct construct, specific to “resilient” individuals. In combating this assumption, Ungar maintained that this bifurcation could be replaced by an understanding of mental health “as residing in all individuals even when significant impairment is present” (Thicker 352). We tend to agree. In terms of economic resilience, we must also be alert to similar false binaries that place the first and low-income world into simple, apposite positions of coping or not-coping, ‘having’ or ‘not-having’ resilience. There is evidence to indicate, for example, that emerging economies fared somewhat better than high-income nations during the global financial crisis (GFC). According to Frankel and Saravelos, several low-income nations attained better rates of gross domestic product GDP, though the impacts on the respective populations were found to be equally hard (Lane and Milesi-Ferretti). While the reasons for this are broad and complex, a study by Kose and Prasad found that a broad set of policy tools had been developed that allowed for greater flexibility in responding to the crisis. Positive Affect Despite Adversity An emphasis on deficit, suffering and pathology among marginalised populations such as refugees and young people has detracted from culturally located strengths. As Te Riele explained, marginalised young people residing in conditions of adversity are often identified within “at-risk” discourses. These social support frameworks have tended to highlight pathologies and antisocial behaviours rather than cultural competencies. This attitude towards marginalised “at risk” young people has been perpetuated by psychotherapeutic discourse that has tended to focus on the relief of suffering and treatment of individual pathologies (Davidson and Shahar). By focusing on pain avoidance and temporary relief, we may be missing opportunities to better understand the productive role of ‘negative’ affects and bodily sensations in alerting us to underlying conditions, in need of attention or change. A similar deficit approach is undertaken through education – particularly civics – where young people are treated as ‘citizens in waiting’ (Collin). From this perspective, citizenship is something that young people are expected to ‘grow into’, and until that point, are seen as lacking any political agency or ability to respond to adversity (Holdsworth). Although a certain amount of internal discomfort is required to promote change, Davidson and Shahar noted that clinical psychotherapists still “for the most part, envision an eventual state of happiness – both for our patients and for ourselves, described as free of tension, pain, disease, and suffering” (229). In challenging this assumption, they asked, But if desiring-production is essential to what makes us human, would we not expect happiness or health to involve the active, creative process of producing? How can one produce anything while sitting, standing, or lying still? (229) A number of studies exploring the affective experiences of migrants have contested the embedded psychological assumption that happiness or well-being “stands apart” from experiences of suffering (Crocker and Major; Fozdar and Torezani; Ruggireo and Taylor; Tsenkova, Love, Singer and Ryff). A concern for Ahmed is how much the turn to happiness or happiness turn “depends on the very distinction between good and bad feelings that presume bad feelings are backward and conservative and good feelings are forward and progressive” (Happiness 135). Highlighting the productive potential of unhappy affects, Ahmed suggested that the airing of unhappy affects in their various forms provides people with “an alternative set of imaginings of what might count as a good or at least better life” (Happiness 135). An interesting feature of refugee narratives is the paradoxical relationship between negative migration experiences and the reporting of a positive life outlook. In a study involving former Yugoslavian, Middle Eastern and African refugees, Fozdar and Torezani investigated the “apparent paradox between high-levels of discrimination experienced by humanitarian migrants to Australia in the labour market and everyday life” (30), and the reporting of positive wellbeing. The interaction between negative experiences of discrimination and reports of wellbeing suggested a counter-intuitive propensity among refugees to adapt to and make sense of their migration experiences in unique, resourceful and life-affirming ways. In a study of unaccompanied Sudanese youth living in the United States, Goodman reported that, “none of the participants displayed a sense of victimhood at the time of the interviews” (1182). Although individual narratives did reflect a sense of victimisation and helplessness relating to the enormity of past trauma, the young participants viewed themselves primarily as survivors and agents of their own future. Goodman further stated that the tone of the refugee testimonials was not bitter: “Instead, feelings of brotherliness, kindness, and hope prevailed” (1183). Such response patterns among refugees and trauma survivors indicate a similar resilience-related capacity to positively interpret and derive meaning from negative migration experiences and associated emotions. It is important to point out that demonstrations of resilience appear loosely proportional to the amount or intensity of adverse life events experienced. However, resilience is not expressed or employed uniformly among individuals or communities. Some respond in a resilient manner, while others collapse. On this point, an argument could be made that collapse and breakdown is a built-in aspect of resilience, and necessary for renewal and ongoing growth. Cultures of Resilience In a cross continental study of communities living and relying on waterways for their daily subsistence, Arvanitakis is involved in a broader research project aiming to understand why some cultures collapse and why others survive in the face of adversity. The research aims to look beyond systems of resilience, and proposes the term ‘cultures of resilience’ to describe the situated strategies of these communities for coping with a variety of human-induced environmental challenges. More specifically, the concept of ‘cultures of resilience’ assists in explaining the specific ways individuals and communities are responding to the many stresses and struggles associated with living on the ‘front-line’ of major waterways that are being impacted by large-scale, human-environment development and disasters. Among these diverse locations are Botany Bay (Australia), Sankhla Lake (Thailand), rural Bangladesh, the Ganges (India), and Chesapeake Bay (USA). These communities face very different challenges in a range of distinctive contexts. Within these settings, we have identified communities that are prospering despite the emerging challenges while others are in the midst of collapse and dispersion. In recognising the specific contexts of each of these communities, the researchers are working to uncover a common set of narratives of resilience and hope. We are not looking for the ’magic ingredient’ of resilience, but what kinds of strategies these communities have employed and what can they learn from each other. One example that is being pursued is a community of Thai rice farmers who have reinstated ceremonies to celebrate successful harvests by sharing in an indigenous rice species in the hope of promoting a shared sense of community. These were communities on the cusp of collapse brought on by changing economic and environmental climates, but who have reversed this trend by employing a series of culturally located practices. The vulnerability of these communities can be traced back to the 1960s ‘green revolution’ when they where encouraged by local government authorities to move to ‘white rice’ species to meet export markets. In the process they were forced to abandoned their indigenous rice varieties and abandon traditional seed saving practices (Shiva, Sengupta). Since then, the rice monocultures have been found to be vulnerable to the changing climate as well as other environmental influences. The above ceremonies allowed the farmers to re-discover the indigenous rice species and plant them alongside the ‘white rice’ for export creating a more robust harvest. The indigenous species are kept for local consumption and trade, while the ‘white rice’ is exported, giving the farmers access to both the international markets and income and the local informal economies. In addition, the indigenous rice acts as a form of ‘insurance’ against the vagaries of international trade (Shiva). Informants stated that the authorities that once encouraged them to abandon indigenous rice species and practices are now working with the communities to re-instigate these. This has created a partnership between the local government-funded research centres, government institutions and the farmers. A third element that the informants discussed was the everyday practices that prepare a community to face these challenges and allow it recover in partnership with government, including formal and informal communication channels. These everyday practices create a culture of reciprocity where the challenges of the community are seen to be those of the individual. This is not meant to romanticise these communities. In close proximity, there are also communities engulfed in despair. Such communities are overwhelmed with the various challenges described above of changing rural/urban settlement patterns, pollution and climate change, and seem to have lacked the cultural and social capital to respond. By contrasting the communities that have demonstrated resilience and those that have not been overwhelmed, it is becoming increasingly obvious that there is no single 'magic' ingredient of resilience. What exist are various constituted factors that involve a combination of community agency, social capital, government assistance and structures of governance. The example of the rice farmers highlights three of these established practices: working across formal and informal economies; crossing localised and expert knowledge as well as the emergence of everyday practices that promote social capital. As such, while financial transactions occur that link even the smallest of communities to the global economy, there is also the everyday exchange of cultural practices, which is described elsewhere by Arvanitakis as 'the cultural commons': visions of hope, trust, shared intellect, and a sense of safety. Reflecting the refugee narratives citied above, these communities also report a positive life outlook, refusing to see themselves as victims. There is a propensity among members of these communities to adapt an outlook of hope and survival. Like the response patterns among refugees and trauma survivors, initial research is confirming a resilience-related capacity to interpret the various challenges that have been confronted, and see their survival as reason to hope. Future Visions, Hopeful Visions Hope is a crucial aspect of resilience, as it represents a present- and future-oriented mode of situated defence against adversity. The capacity to hope can increase one’s powers of action despite a complex range of adversities experienced in everyday life and during particularly difficult times. The term “hope” is commonly employed in a tokenistic way, as a “nice” rhetorical device in the mind-body-spirit or self-help literature or as a strategic instrument in increasingly empty domestic and international political vocabularies. With a few notable exceptions (Anderson; Bloch; Godfrey; Hage; Marcel; Parse; Zournazi), the concept of hope has received only modest attention from within sociology and cultural studies. Significant increases in the prevalence of war and disaster-affected populations makes qualitative research into the lived experience of hope a vital subject of academic interest. Parse observed among health care professionals a growing attention to “the lived experience of hope”, a phenomenon which has significant consequences for health and the quality of one’s life (vvi). Hope is an integral aspect of resilience as it can act as a mechanism for coping and defense in relation to adversity. Interestingly, it is during times of hardship and adversity that the phenomenological experience of hope seems to “kick in” or “switch on”. With similarities to the “taken-for-grantedness” of resilience in everyday life, Anderson observed that hope and hoping are taken-for-granted aspects of the affective fabric of everyday life in contemporary Western culture. Although the lived experience of hope, namely, hopefulness, is commonly conceptualised as a “future-oriented” state of mind, the affectivity of hope, in the present moment of hoping, has important implications in terms of resilience formation. The phrase, the “lived deferral of hope” is an idea that Wilson has developed elsewhere which hopefully brings together and holds in creative tension the two dominant perspectives on hope as a lived experience in the present and a deferred, future-oriented practice of hoping and hopefulness. Zournazi defined hope as a “basic human condition that involves belief and trust in the world” (12). She argued that the meaning of hope is “located in the act of living, the ordinary elements of everyday life” and not in “some future or ideal sense” (18). Furthermore, she proposed a more “everyday” hope which “is not based on threat or deferral of gratification”, but is related to joy “as another kind of contentment – the affirmation of life as it emerges and in the transitions and movements of our everyday lives and relationships” (150). While qualitative studies focusing on the everyday experience of hope have reinvigorated academic research on the concept of hope, our concept of “the lived deferral of hope” brings together Zournazi’s “everyday hope” and the future-oriented dimensions of hope and hoping practices, so important to the formation of resilience. Along similar lines to Ahmed’s (Happy Objects) suggestion that happiness “involves a specific kind of intentionality” that is “end-orientated”, practices of hope are also intentional and “end-orientated” (33). If objects of hope are a means to happiness, as Ahmed wrote, “in directing ourselves towards this or that [hope] object we are aiming somewhere else: toward a happiness that is presumed to follow” (Happy Objects 34), in other words, to a hope that is “not yet present”. It is the capacity to imagine alternative possibilities in the future that can help individuals and communities endure adverse experiences in the present and inspire confidence in the ongoingness of their existence. Although well-intentioned, Zournazi’s concept of an “everyday hope” seemingly ignores the fact that in contexts of daily threat, loss and death there is often a distinct lack of affirmative or affirmable things. In these contexts, the deferral of joy and gratification, located in the future acquisition of objects, outcomes or ideals, can be the only means of getting through particularly difficult events or circumstances. One might argue that hope in hopeless situations can be disabling; however, we contend that hope is always enabling to some degree, as it can facilitate alternative imaginings and temporary affective relief in even in the most hopeless situations. Hope bears similarity to resilience in terms of its facilities for coping and endurance. Likewise the formation and maintenance of hope can help individuals and communities endure and cope with adverse events or circumstances. The symbolic dimension of hope capacitates individuals and communities to endure the present without the hoped-for outcomes and to live with the uncertainty of their attainment. In the lives of refugees, for example, the imaginative dimension of hope is directly related to resilience in that it provides them with the ability to respond to adversity in productive and life-affirming ways. For Oliver, hope “provides continuity between the past and the present…giving power to find meaning in the worst adversity” (in Parse 16). In terms of making sense of the migration and resettlement experiences of refugees and other migrants, Lynch proposed a useful definition of hope as “the fundamental knowledge and feeling that there is a way out of difficulty, that things can work out” (32). As it pertains to everyday mobility and life routes, Parse considered hope to be “essential to one’s becoming” (32). She maintained that hope is a lived experience and “a way of propelling self toward envisioned possibilities in everyday encounters with the world” (p. 12). Expanding on her definition of the lived experience of hope, Parse stated, “Hope is anticipating possibilities through envisioning the not-yet in harmoniously living the comfort-discomfort of everydayness while unfolding a different perspective of an expanding view” (15). From Nietzsche’s “classically dark version of hope” (in Hage 11), Parse’s “positive” definition of hope as a propulsion to envisaged possibilities would in all likelihood be defined as “the worst of all evils, for it protracts the torment of man”. Hage correctly pointed out that both the positive and negative perspectives perceive hope “as a force that keeps us going in life” (11). Parse’s more optimistic vision of hope as propulsion to envisaged possibilities links nicely to what Arvanitakis described as an ‘active hope’. According to him, the idea of ‘active hope’ is not only a vision that a better world is possible, but also a sense of agency that our actions can make this happen. Conclusion As we move further into the 21st century, humankind will be faced with a series of traumas, many of which are as yet unimagined. To meet these challenges, we, as a global collective, will need to develop specific capacities and resources for coping, endurance, innovation, and hope, all of which are involved the formation of resilience (Wilson 269). Although the accumulation of resilience at an individual level is important, our continued existence, survival, and prosperity lie in the strength and collective will of many. As Wittgenstein wrote, the strength of a thread “resides not in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres” (xcv). If resilience can be accumulated at the level of the individual, it follows that it can be accumulated as a form of capital at the local, national, and international levels in very real and meaningful ways. 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IntroductionFor many, north is an abstract point on a compass, an arrow that tells you which way to hold up a map. Though scientifically defined according to the magnetic north pole, and/or the earth’s axis of rotation, these facts are not necessarily discernible to the average person. Perhaps for this reason, the Oxford English Dictionary begins with reference to the far more mundane and accessible sun and features of the human body, in defining north as; “in the direction of the part of the horizon on the left-hand side of a person facing the rising sun” (OED Online). Indeed, many of the words for ‘north’ around the world are etymologically linked to the left hand side (for example Cornish clēth ‘north, left’). We shall see later that even in English, many speakers conceptualise ‘north’ in an egocentric way. Other languages define ‘north’ in opposition to an orthogonal east-west axis defined by the sun’s rising and setting points (see, e.g., the extensive survey of Brown).Etymology aside, however, studies such as Brown’s presume a set of four cardinal directions which are available as primordial ontological categories which may (or may not) be labelled by the languages of the world. If we accept this premise, the fact that a word is translated as ‘north’ is sufficient to understand the direction it describes. There is good reason to reject this premise, however. We present data from three languages among which there is considerable variance in how the words translated as ‘north’ are typically used and understood. These languages are Kuuk Thaayorre (an Australian Aboriginal language spoken on Cape York Peninsula), Marshallese (an Oceanic language spoken in the Republic of the Marshall Islands), and Dhivehi (an Indo-Aryan language spoken in the Maldives). Lastly, we consider the results of an experiment that show Australian English speakers tend to interpret the word north according to the orientation of their own bodies and the objects they manipulate, rather than as a cardinal direction as such.‘North’ in Kuuk ThaayorreKuuk Thaayorre is a Pama-Nyungan language spoken on the west coast of Australia’s Cape York Peninsula in the community of Pormpuraaw. The Kuuk Thaayorre words equivalent to north, south, east and west (hereafter, ‘directionals’) are both complex and frequently used. They are complex in the sense that they combine with prefixes and suffixes to form dozens of words which indicate not only the direction involved, but also the degree of distance, whether there is motion from, towards, to a fixed point, or within a bounded area in that location, proximity to the local river, and more. The ubiquity of these words is illustrated by the fact that the most common greeting formula involves one person asking nhunt wanthan pal yan? ‘where are you going’ and the other responding, for example, ngay yuurriparrop yan ‘I’m going a long way southwards towards the river’, or ngay iilungkarruw yan ‘I’m coming from the northwest’. Directional terms are strewn liberally throughout Kuuk Thaayorre speech. They are employed in the description of both large-scale and small-scale spaces, whether giving directions to a far-off town, asking another person to ‘move a little to the north’, or identifying the person ‘to the east’ of another in a photograph. Likewise, directional gestures are highly frequent, sometimes augmenting the information given in the speech stream, sometimes used in the absence of spoken directions, and other times redundantly duplicating the information given by a directional word.The forms and meanings of directional words are described in detail in Gaby (Gaby 344–52). At the core of this system are six directional roots referring to the north and south banks of the nearby Edward River as well as two intersecting axes. One of these axes is equivalent to the east—west axis familiar to English speakers, and is defined by the apparent diurnal trajectory of the sun. (At a latitude of 14 degrees 54 minutes south, the Kuuk Thaayorre homeland sees little variation in the location of sunrise and sunset through the year.) While the poles of the second axis are translated by the English terms north and south, from a Western perspective this axis is skewed such that Kuuk Thaayorre -ungkarr ‘~north’ lies approximately 35 degrees west of magnetic north. Rather than being defined by magnetic or polar north, this axis aligns with the local coastline. This is true even when the terms are used at inland locations where there is no visual access to the water or parallel sand ridges. How Kuuk Thaayorre speakers apply this system to environments further removed from this particular stretch of coast—especially in the presence of a differently-oriented coast—remains a topic for future research.‘North’ in MarshalleseMarshallese is the language of the people of the Marshall Islands, an expansive archipelago consisting of 22 inhabited atolls and three inhabited non-atoll islands located in the Northern Pacific. The Marshallese have a long history as master navigators, a skill necessary to keep strong links between far-flung and disparate islands (Lewis; Genz).Figure 1: The location of the Marshall IslandsAs with other Pacific languages (e.g. Palmer; Ross; François), Marshallese deploys a complex system of geocentric references. Cardinal directions are historically derived from the Pacific trade winds, reflecting the importance of these winds for navigation and wayfinding. The etymologies of the Marshallese directions are shown in Table 1 below. The terms given in this table are in the Ralik dialect, spoken in the western Marshall Islands. The terms used in the Ratak (eastern) dialect are related, but slightly different in form. See Schlossberg for more detailed discussion. Etymologies originally sourced from Bender et al. and Ross.Table 1: Marshallese cardinal direction words with etymological source semantics EastWestNorthSouthNoun formrearrilik iōn̄ rōkEtymology‘calm shore (of islet)’‘rough shore (of islet)’‘windy season’; ‘season of northerly winds’‘dry season’; ‘season of southerly winds’Verb modifier formtatonin̄a rōn̄aEtymology‘up(wind)’‘down(wind)’‘windy season’; ‘season of northerly winds’‘dry season’; ‘season of southerly winds’As with many other Oceanic languages, Marshallese has three domains of spatial language use: the local domain, the inshore-maritime domain and the navigational domain. Cardinal directions are the sole strategy employed in the navigational domain, which occurs when sailing on the open ocean. In the inshore-maritime domain, which applies when sailing on the ocean or lagoon in sight of land, a land-sea axis is used (The question of whether, in fact, these directions form axes as such is considered further below). Similarly, when walking around an island, a calm side-rough side (of island) axis is employed. In both situations, either the cardinal north-south axis or east-west axis is used to form a secondary cross-axis to the topography-based axis. The cardinal axis parallel to the calm-rough or land-sea axis is rarely used. When the island is not oriented perfectly perpendicular to one of the cardinal axes, the cardinal axes rotate such that they are perpendicular to the primary axis. This can result in the orientation of iōn̄ ‘north’ being quite skewed away from ‘true’ north. An example of how the cardinal and topographic axes prototypically work is exemplified in Figure 2, which shows Jabor, an islet in Jaluit Atoll in the south-west Marshalls.Figure 2: The geocentric directional system of Jabor, Jaluit AtollWhile cartographic cardinal directions comprise two perpendicular axes, this is not the case for many Marshallese. The clearest evidence for this is the directional system of Kili Island, a small non-atoll island approximately 50km west of Jaluit Atoll. The directional system of Kili is similar to that of Jabor, with one notable exception; the iōn̄-rōk ‘north-south’ and rear-rilik ‘east-west’ axes are not perpendicular but rather parallel (Figure 3) The rear-rilik axis takes precedence and the iōn̄-rōk axis is rarely used, showing the primacy of the east-west axis on Kili. This is a clear indication that the Western abstraction of crossed cardinal axes is not in play in the Marshall Islands; the iōn̄-rōk and rear-rilik axes can function completely independently of one another.Figure 3: Geocentric system of spatial reference on KiliSpringdale is a small city in north-west of the landlocked state of Arkansas. It hosts the largest number of expatriate Marshallese in the United States. Of 26 participants in an object placement task, four respondents were able to correctly identify the four cardinal points (Schlossberg). Aside from some who said they simply did not know others gave a variety of answers, including that iōn̄, rōk, rilik and rear only exist in the Marshall Islands. Others imagined a canonical orientation derived from their home atoll and transposed this onto their current environment; one person who was facing the front door in their house in Springdale reported that they imagined they were in their house in the Marshall Islands, where when oriented towards the door, they were facing iōn̄ ‘north’, thus deriving an orientation with respect to a Marshallese cardinal direction. Aside from the four participants who identified the directions correctly, a further six participants responded in a consistent—if incorrect—way, i.e. although the directions were not correctly identified, the responses were consistent with the conceptualisation of crossed cardinal axes, merely that the locations identified were rotated from their true referents. This leaves 16 of the 26 participants (62%) who did not display evidence of having a conceptual system of two crossed cardinal axes.If one were to point in a direction and say ‘this is north’, most Westerners would easily be able to identify ‘south’ by pointing in the opposite direction. This is not the case with Marshallese speakers, many of whom are unable to do the same if given a Marshallese cardinal direction and asked to name its opposite (cf. Schlossberg). This demonstrates that for many Marshallese, each of these cardinal terms do not form axes at all, but rather are four unique locally-anchored points.‘North’ in DhivehiDhivehi is spoken in the Maldives, an archipelago to the southwest of India and Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean (see Figure 4). Maldivians have a long history of sailing on the open waters, in order to fish and to trade. Traditionally, much of the adult male population would spend long periods of time on such voyages, riding the trade winds and navigating by the stars. For Maldivians, uturu ‘north’ is a direction of safety—the long axis of the Maldivian archipelago runs north to south, and so by sailing north, one has the best possible chance of reaching another island or (eventually) the mainlands of India or Sri Lanka.Figure 4: Location of the MaldivesIt is perhaps unsurprising, then, that many Maldivians are well attuned to the direction denoted by uturu ‘north’, as well as to the other cardinal directions. In an object placement task performed by 41 participants in Laamu Atoll, 32 participants (78%) correctly placed a plastic block ‘to the north’ (uturaṣ̊) of another block when instructed to do so (Lum). The prompts dekonaṣ̊ ‘to the south’ and huḷangaṣ̊ ‘to the west’ yielded similarly high rates of correct responses, though as many as 37 participants (90%) responded correctly to the prompt iraṣ̊ ‘to the east’—this is perhaps because the term for ‘east’ also means ‘sun’ and is strongly associated with the sunrise, whereas the terms for the other cardinal directions are comparatively opaque. However, the path of the sun is not the only environmental cue that shapes the use of Dhivehi cardinal directions. As in Kuuk Thaayorre and Marshallese, cardinal directions in Dhivehi are often ‘calibrated’ according to the orientation of local coastlines. In Fonadhoo, for example, which is oriented northeast to southwest, the system of cardinal directions is rotated about 45 degrees clockwise: uturu ‘north’ points to what is actually northeast and dekona/dekunu ‘south’ to what is actually southwest (i.e., along the length of the island), while iru/iramati ‘east’ and huḷangu ‘west’ are perpendicular to shore (see Figure 5). However, despite this rotated system being in use, residents of Fonadhoo often comment that these are not the ‘real’ cardinal directions, which are determined by the path of the sun.Figure 5: Directions in Fonadhoo, Laamu Atoll, MaldivesIn addition to the four cardinal directions, Dhivehi possesses four intercardinal directions, which are compound terms: iru-uturu ‘northeast’, iru-dekunu ‘southeast’, huḷangu-uturu ‘northwest’, and huḷangu-dekunu ‘southwest’. Yet even a system of eight compass points is not sufficient for describing directions over long distances, especially on the open sea where there are no landmarks to refer to. A system of 32 ‘sidereal’ compass directions (see Figure 6), based on the rising and setting points of stars in the night sky, is available for such purposes—for example, simāgu īran̊ ‘Arcturus rising’ points ENE or 67.5°, while simāgu astamān̊ ‘Arcturus setting’ points WNW or 292.5°. (These Dhivehi names for the sidereal directions are borrowings from Arabic, and were probably introduced by Arab seafarers in the medieval period, see Lum 174-79). Eight sidereal directions coincide with the basic (inter)cardinal directions of the solar compass described earlier. For example, gahā ‘Polaris’ in the sidereal compass corresponds exactly with uturu ‘north’ in the solar compass. Thus Dhivehi has both a sidereal ‘north’ and a solar ‘north’, though the latter is sometimes rotated according to local topography. However, the system of sidereal compass directions has largely fallen out of use, and is known only to older and some middle-aged men. This appears to be due to the diversification of the Maldivian economy in recent decades along with the modernisation of Maldivian fishing vessels, including the introduction of GPS technology. Nonetheless, fishermen and fishing communities use solar compass directions much more frequently than other groups in the Maldives (Lum; Palmer et al.), and some of the oldest men still use sidereal compass directions occasionally.Figure 6: Dhivehi sidereal compass with directions in Thaana script (used with kind permission of Abdulla Rasheed and Abdulla Zuhury)‘North’ in EnglishThe traditional definition of north in terms of Magnetic North or Geographic North is well known to native English speakers and may appear relatively straightforward. In practice, however, the use and interpretation of north is more variable. English speakers generally draw on cardinal directions only in restricted circumstances, i.e. in large-scale geographical or navigational contexts rather than, for example, small-scale configurations of manipulable objects (Majid et al. 108). Consequently, most English speakers do not need to maintain a mental compass to keep track of North at all times. So, if English speakers are generally unaware of where North is, how do they perform when required to use it?A group of 36 Australian English speakers participated in an experimental task where they were presented with a stimulus object (in this case, a 10cm wide cube) while facing S72ºE (Poulton). They were then handed another cube and asked to place it next to the stimulus cube in a particular direction (e.g. ‘put this cube to the north of that cube’). Participants completed a total of 48 trials, including each of the four cardinal directions as target, as well as expressions such as behind, in front of and to the left of. As shown in Figure 7, participants’ responses were categorised in one of three ways: correct, near-correct, or incorrect.Figure 7: Possible responses to prompt of north: A = correct, B = near-correct (aligned with the side of stimulus object closest to north), C = incorrect.Every participant placed their cube in alignment with the axes of the stimulus object (i.e. responses B and C in Figure 7). Orientation to Magnetic/Geographic North was thus insufficient to override the local cues of the task at hand. The 9% of participants showed some awareness of the location of Magnetic/Geographic North, however, by making the near-correct response type B. No participants who behaved in such a way expressed certainty in their responses, however. Most commonly, they calculated the rough direction concerned by triangulating with local landmarks such as nearby roads, or the location of Melbourne’s CBD (as verbally expressed both during the task and during an informal interview afterwards).The remaining 91% of participants’ responses were entirely incorrect. Of these, 13.2% involved similar thought processes as the near-correct responses, but did not result in the identification of the closest side of the stimulus to the instructed direction. However, 77.8% of the total participants interpreted north as the far side of the stimulus. While such responses were classified incorrect on the basis of Magnetic or Geographic North, they were consistent with one another and correct with respect to an alternative definition of English north in terms of the participant’s own body. One of the participants alludes to this alternative definition, asking “Do you mean my North or physical North?”. We refer to this alternative definition as Relative North. Relative North is not bound to any given point on the Earth or a derivation of the sun’s position; instead, it is entirely bound to the perceiver’s own orientation. This equates the north direction with forward and the other cardinals’ points are derived from this reference point (see Figure 8). Map-reading practices likely support the development of the secondary, Relative sense of North.Figure 8: Relative North and the Relative directions derived from itConclusionWe have compared the words closest in meaning to the English word north in four entirely unrelated languages. In the Australian Aboriginal language Kuuk Thaayorre, the ‘north’ direction aligns with the local coast, pointing in a direction 35 degrees west of Magnetic North. In Marshallese, the compass direction corresponding to ‘north’ is different for each island, being defined in opposition to an axis running between the ocean and lagoon sides of that island. The Dhivehi ‘north’ direction may be defined either in opposition to the (sun-based) east-west axis, calibrated to the configuration of the local island, as in Marshallese, or defined in terms of Polaris, the Pole star. In all these cases, though, the system of directions is anchored by properties of the external environment. English speakers, by contrast, are shown to—at least some of the time—define north with reference to their own embodied perspective, as the direction extending outwards from the front of their bodies. These findings demonstrate that, far from being universal, ‘north’ is a culture-specific category. As such, great care must be taken when translating or drawing equivalencies between these concepts across languages.ReferencesBender, Byron W., et al. “Proto-Micronesian Reconstructions: I.” Oceanic Linguistics 42.1 (2003): 1–110.Brown, Cecil H. “Where Do Cardinal Direction Terms Come From?” Anthropological Linguistics 25.2 (1983): 121–161. François, Alexandre. “Reconstructing the Geocentric System of Proto-Oceanic.” Oceanic Linguistics 43.1 (2004): 1–31. Gaby, Alice R. A Grammar of Kuuk Thaayorre. Vol. 74. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2017.Genz, Joseph. “Complementarity of Cognitive and Experiential Ways of Knowing the Ocean in Marshallese Navigation.” Ethos 42.3 (2014): 332–351.Lewis, David Henry. We, the Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific. 2nd ed. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1994. Lum, Jonathon. "Frames of Spatial Reference in Dhivehi Language and Cognition." PhD Thesis. Melbourne: Monash University, 2018. Majid, Asifa, et al. “Can Language Restructure Cognition? The Case for Space.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8.3 (2004): 108–114.OED Online. “North, Adv., Adj., and N.” Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. <http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/view/Entry/128325>.Palmer, Bill. “Absolute Spatial Reference and the Grammaticalisation of Perceptually Salient Phenomena.” Representing Space in Oceania: Culture in Language and Mind. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, 2002. 107–133. ———, et al. "“Sociotopography: The Interplay of Language, Culture, and Environment.” Linguistic Typology 21.3 (2017). DOI:10.1515/lingty-2017-0011.Poulton, Thomas. “Exploring Space: Frame-of-Reference Selection in English.” Honours Thesis. Melbourne: Monash University, 2016.Ross, Malcolm D. “Talking about Space: Terms of Location and Direction.” The Lexicon of Proto-Oceanic: The Culture and Environment of Ancestral Oceanic Society: The Physical Environment. Eds. Malcolm D. Ross, Andrew Pawley, and Meredith Osmond. Vol. 2. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, 2003. 229–294. Schlossberg, Jonathan. Atolls, Islands and Endless Suburbia: Spatial Reference in Marshallese. PhD thesis. Newcastle: University of Newcastle, in preparation.

Obscured in contemporary climate change discourse is the fact that under even the most serious mitigation scenarios being envisaged it will be virtually impossible to avoid runaway ecosystem collapse; so great is the momentum of global greenhouse build-up (Anderson and Bows). And under even the best-case scenario, two-degree warming, the ecological, social, and economic costs are proving to be much deeper than first thought. The greenhouse genie is out of the bottle, but the best that appears to be on offer is a gradual transition to the pro-growth, pro-consumption discourse of “ecological modernisation” (EM); anything more seems politically unpalatable (Barry, Ecological Modernisation; Adger et al.). Here, I aim to account for how cheaply EM has managed to allay ecology. To do so, I detail the operations of the co-optive, definitional strategy which I call the “high-ground” strategy, waged by a historic bloc of actors, discourses, and institutions with a common interest in resisting radical social and ecological critique. This is not an argument about climate laggards like the United States and Australia where sceptic views remain near the centre of public debate. It is a critique of climate leaders such as the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands—nations at the forefront of the adoption of EM policies and discourses. With its antecedent in sustainable development discourse, by emphasising technological innovation, eco-efficiency, and markets, EM purports to transcend the familiar dichotomy between the economy and the environment (Hajer; Barry, ‘Towards’). It rebuts the 1970s “limits to growth” perspective and affirms that “the only possible way out of the ecological crisis is by going further into the process of modernisation” (Mol qtd. in York and Rosa 272, emphasis in original). Its narrative is one in which the “dirty and ugly industrial caterpillar transforms into an ecological butterfly” (Huber, qtd. in Spaargaren and Mol). How is it that a discourse notoriously quiet on endless growth, consumer culture, and the offshoring of dirty production could become the cutting edge of environmental policy? To answer this question we need to examine the discursive and ideological effects of EM discourse. In particular, we must analyse the strategies that work to continually naturalise dominant institutions and create the appearance that they are fit to respond to climate change. Co-opting Environmental Discourse Two features characterise state environmental discourse in EM nations: an almost universal recognition of the problem, and the reassurance that present institutions are capable of addressing it. The key organs of neoliberal capitalism—markets and states—have “gone green”. In boardrooms, in advertising and public relations, in governments, and in international fora, climate change is near the top of the agenda. While EM is the latest form of this discourse, early hints can be seen in President Nixon’s embrace of the environment and Margaret Thatcher’s late-1980s green rhetoric. More recently, David Cameron led a successful Conservative Party “detoxification” program with an ostentatious rhetorical strategy featuring the electoral slogan, “Vote blue, go green” (Carter). We can explain this transformation with reference to a key shift in the discursive history of environmental politics. The birth of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s and 70s brought a new symbolic field, a new discourse, into the public sphere. Yet by the 1990s the movement was no longer the sole proprietor of its discourse (Eder 203). It had lost control of its symbols. Politicians, corporations, and media outlets had assumed a dominant role in efforts to define “what climate change was and what it meant for the world” (Carvalho and Burgess 1464). I contend that the dramatic rise to prominence of environmental issues in party-political discourse is not purely due to short-term tactical vote-winning strategy. Nor is it the case that governments are finally, reluctantly waking up to the scientific reality of ecological degradation. Instead, they are engaged in a proactive attempt to redefine the contours of green critique so as to take the discourse onto territory in which established interests already control the high ground. The result is the defusing of the oppositional element of political ecology (Dryzek et al. 665–6), as well as social critique in general: what I term the gentrification of climate change. If we view environmentalism as, at least partially, a cultural politics in which contested definitions of problem is the key political battleground, we can trace how dominant interests have redefined the contours of climate change discourse. We can reveal the extent to which environmentalism, rather than being integrated into capitalism, has been co-opted. The key feature of this strategy is to present climate change as a mere aberration against a background of business-as-usual. The solutions that are presented are overwhelmingly extensions of existing institutions: bringing CO2 into the market, the optimistic development of new techno-scientific solutions to climate problems, extending regulatory regimes into hitherto overlooked domains. The agent of this co-optive strategy is not the state, industry, capital, or any other manifest actor, but a “historic bloc” cutting across divisions between society, politics, and economy (Laclau and Mouffe 42). The agent is an abstract coalition that is definable only to the extent that its strategic interests momentarily intersect at one point or another. The state acts as a locus, but the bloc is itself not reducible to the state. We might also think of the agent as an assemblage of conditions of social reproduction, in which dominant social, political, and economic interests have a stake. The bloc has learned the lesson that to be a player in a definitional battle one must recognise what is being fought over. Thus, exhortations to address climate change and build a green economy represent the first stage of the definitional battle for climate change: an attempt to enter the contest. In practical terms, this has manifest as the marking out of a self-serving division between action and inaction. Articulated through a binary modality climate change becomes something we either address/act on/tackle—or not. Under such a grammar even the most meagre efforts can be presented as “tackling climate change.” Thus Kevin Rudd was elected in 2007 on a platform of “action on climate change”, and he frequently implored that Australia would “do its bit” on climate change during his term. Tony Blair is able to declare that “tackling climate change… need not limit greater economic opportunity” and mean it in all sincerity (Barry, ‘Towards’ 112). So deployed, this binary logic minimises climate change to a level at which existing institutions are validated as capable of addressing the “problem,” and the government legitimised for its moral, green stand. The Hegemonic Articulation of Climate Change The historic bloc’s main task in the high-ground strategy is to re-articulate the threat in terms of its own hegemonic discourse: market economics. The widely publicised and highly influential Stern Review, commissioned by the British Government, is the standard-bearer of how to think about climate change from an economic perspective. It follows a supremely EM logic: economy and ecology have been reconciled. The Review presents climate change, famously, as “the greatest market failure the world has ever seen” (Stern et al. viii). The structuring horizon of the Stern Review is the correction of this failure, the overcoming of what is perceived to be not a systemic problem requiring a reappraisal of social institutions, but an issue of carbon pricing, technology policy, and measures aimed at “reducing barriers to behavioural change”. Stern insists that “we can be ‘green’ and grow. Indeed, if we are not ‘green’, we will eventually undermine growth, however measured” (iv). He reassures us that “tackling climate change is the pro-growth strategy for the longer term, and it can be done in a way that does not cap the aspirations for growth of rich or poor countries” (viii). Yet Stern’s seemingly miraculous reconciliation of growth with climate change mitigation in fact implies a severe degree of warming. The Stern Review aims to stabilise carbon dioxide equivalent concentrations at 550ppm, which would correspond to an increase of global temperature of 3-4 degrees Celsius. As Foster et al. note, this scenario, from an orthodox economist who is perceived as being pro-environment, is ecologically unsustainable and is viewed as catastrophic by many scientists (Foster, Clark, and York 1087–88). The reason Stern gives for not attempting deeper cuts is that they “are unlikely to be economically viable” (Stern et al. 231). In other words, the economy-ecology articulation is not a meeting of equals. Central to the policy prescriptions of EM is the marketising of environmental “bads” like carbon emissions. Carbon trading schemes, held in high esteem by moderate environmentalists and market economists alike, are the favoured instruments for such a task. Yet, in practice, these schemes can do more harm than good. When Prime Minister Kevin Rudd tried to legislate the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme as a way of addressing the “greatest moral challenge of our generation” it represented Australia’s “initial foray into ecological modernisation” (Curran 211). Denounced for its weak targets and massive polluter provisions, the Scheme was opposed by environmental groups, the CSIRO, and even the government’s own climate change advisor (Taylor; Wilkinson). While the Scheme’s defenders claimed it was as a step in the right direction, these opponents believed it would hurt more than help the environment. A key strategy in enshrining a particular hegemonic articulation is the repetition and reinforcement of key articulations in a way which is not overtly ideological. As Spash notes of the Stern Review, while it does connect to climate change such issues as distributive justice, value and ethical conflicts, intergenerational issues, this amounts to nothing but lip service given the analysis comes pre-formed in an orthodox economics mould. The complex of interconnected issues raised by climate change is reduced to the impact of carbon control on consumption growth (see also Swyngedouw and While, Jonas, and Gibbs). It is as if the system of relations we call global capitalism—relations between state and industry, science and technology, society and nature, labour and capital, North and South—are irrelevant to climate change, which is nothing but an unfortunate over-concentration of certain gases. In redrawing the discursive boundaries in this way it appears that climate change is a temporary blip on the path to a greener prosperity—as if markets and capitalism merely required minor tinkering to put them on the green-growth path. Markets are constituted as legitimate tools for managing climate change, in concert with regulation internalised within neoliberal state competition (While, Jonas, and Gibbs 81). The ecology-economy articulation both marketises “green,” and “greens” markets. Consonant with the capitalism-environment articulation is the prominence of the sovereign individual. Both the state and the media work to reproduce subjects largely as consumers (of products and politics) rather than citizens, framing environmental responsibility as the responsibility to consume “wisely” (Carvalho). Of course, what is obscured in this “self-greening” discourse is the culpability of consumption itself, and of a capitalist economy based on endless consumption growth, exploitation of resources, and the pursuit of new markets. Greening Technology EM also “greens” technology. Central to its pro-growth ethos is the tapering off of ecosystem impacts through green technologies like solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal. While green technologies are preferable to dependence upon resource-intensive technologies of oil and coal, that they may actually deliver on such promises has been shown to be contingent upon efficiency outstripping economic growth, a prospect that is dubious at best, especially considering the EM settlement is one in which any change to consumption practices is off the agenda. As Barry and Paterson put it, “all current experience suggests that, in most areas, efficiency gains per unit of consumption are usually outstripped by overall increases in consumption” (770). The characteristic ideological manoeuvre of foregrounding non-representative examples is evident here: green technologies comprise a tiny fraction of all large-scale deployed technologies, yet command the bulk of attention and work to cast technology generally in a green light. It is also false to assume that green technologies do not put their own demands on material resources. Deploying renewables on the scale that is required to address climate change demands enormous quantities of concrete, steel, glass and rare earth minerals, and vast programs of land-clearing to house solar and wind plants (Charlton 40). Further, claims that economic growth can become detached from ecological disturbance are premised on a limited basket of ecological indicators. Corporate marketing strategies are driving this green-technology articulation. While a single advertisement represents an appeal to consume an individual commodity, taken collectively advertising institutes a culture of consumption. Individually, “greenwash” is the effort to spin one company’s environmental programs out of proportion while minimising the systemic degradation that production entails. But as a burgeoning social institution, greenwash constitutes an ideological apparatus constructing industry as fundamentally working in the interests of ecology. In turn, each corporate image of pristine blue skies, flourishing ecosystems, wind farms, and solar panels constitutes a harmonious fantasy of green industry. As David Mackay, chief scientific advisor to the UK Government has pointed out, the political rhetoric of green technology lulls people into a false sense of security (qtd. in Charlton 38). Again, a binary logic works to portray greener technologies—such as gas, “clean coal”, and biomass combustion—as green. Rescuing Legitimacy There are essentially two critical forces that are defused in the high-ground strategy’s definitional project. The first is the scientific discourse which maintains that the measures proposed by leading governments are well below what is required to reign in dangerous climate change. This seems to be invisible not so much because it is radical but because it is obscured by the uncertainties in which climate science is couched, and by EM’s noble-sounding rhetoric. The second is the radical critique which argues that climate change is a classic symptom of an internal contradiction of a capitalist economy seeking endless growth in a finite world. The historic bloc’s successful redefinition strategy appears to jam the frequency of serious, scientifically credible climate discourse, yet at the level of hegemonic struggle its effects range wider. In redefining climate change and other key signifiers of green critique – “environment”, “ecology”, “green”, “planet”—it expropriates key properties of its antagonist. Were it not that climate change is now defined on the cheery, reassuring ground of EM discourse, the gravity of the alarming—rather than alarmist (Risbey)—scientific discourse may just have offered radical critique the ammunition it needed to provoke society into serious deliberations over its socioeconomic path. Radical green critique is not in itself the chief enemy of the historic bloc. But it is a privileged element within antagonistic discourse and reinforces the critical element of the feminist, civil rights, and student movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In this way ecology has tended to act as a nodal point binding general social critique: all of the other demands began to be inscribed with the green critique, just as the green critique became a metaphor for all of the others (Laclau). The metaphorical value of the green critique not only relates to the size and vibrancy of the movement—the immediate visibility of ecological destruction stood as a powerful symbol of the kernel of antagonistic politics: a sense that society had fundamentally gone awry. While green critique demands that progress should be conditional upon ecology, EM professes that progress is already green (Eder 217n). Thus the great win achieved by the high-ground strategy is not over radical green critique per se but over the shifting coalition that threatens its legitimacy. As Stavrakakis observes, what is novel about green discourse is nothing essential to the signifiers it deploys, but the way that a common signifier comes to stand in and structure the field as a whole – to serve as a nodal point. It has a number of signifiers: environmental sustainability, social justice, grassroots democracy, and peace and non-violence, all of which are “quilted” around the master-signifiers of “ecology”, “green”, or “planet”. While these master-signifiers are not unique to green ideology, what is unique is that they stand at the centre. But the crucial point to note about the green signifier at the heart of political ecology is that its value is accorded, in large part, through its negation of the dominant ideology. That is to say, it is not that green ideology stands as merely another way of mapping the social; rather, the master-signifier "green" contains an implicit refutation of the dominant social order. That “green” is now almost wholly evacuated of its radical connotations speaks to the effectiveness of the redefinitional effort.The historic bloc is aided in its efforts by the complexity of climate change. Such opacity is characteristic of contemporary risks, whose threats are mostly “a type of virtual reality, real virtuality” (Beck 213). The political struggle then takes place at the level of meaning, and power is played out in a contest to fix the definitions of key risks such as climate change. When relations of (risk) definition replace relations of production as the site of the effects of power, a double mystification ensues and shifts in the ground on which the struggle takes place may go unnoticed. Conclusion By articulating ecology with markets and technology, EM transforms the threat of climate change into an opportunity, a new motor of neoliberal legitimacy. The historic bloc has co-opted environmentalist discourse to promote a gentrified climate change which present institutions are capable of managing: “We are at the fork in the road between order and catastrophe. Stick with us. We will get you through the crisis.” The sudden embrace of the environment by Nixon and by Thatcher, the greening of Cameron’s Conservatives, the Garnaut and Stern reports, and the Australian Government’s foray into carbon trading all have their more immediate policy and political aims. Yet they are all consistent with the high-ground definitional strategy, professing no contraction between sustainability and the present socioeconomic order. Undoubtedly, EM is vastly preferable to denial and inaction. It may yet open the doors to real ecological reform. But in its present form, its preoccupation is the legitimation crisis threatening dominant interests, rather than the ecological crisis facing us all. References Adger, W. Neil, Tor A. Benjaminsen, Katrina Brown, and Hanne Svarstad. ‘Advancing a Political Ecology of Global Environmental Discourses.’ Development and Change 32.4 (2001): 681–715. Anderson, Kevin, and Alice Bows. “Beyond ‘Dangerous’ Climate Change: Emission Scenarios for a New World.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 369.1934 (2010): 20–44. Barry, John, and Matthew Paterson. “Globalisation, Ecological Modernisation and New Labour.”Political Studies 52.4 (2004): 767–84. Barry, John. “Ecological Modernisation.” Debating the Earth : the Environmental Politics Reader. Ed. John S. Dryzek & David Schlosberg. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. ——-. “Towards a Model of Green Political Economy: From Ecological Modernisation to Economic Security.” Global Ecological Politics. Ed. John Barry and Liam Leonard. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing, 2010. 109–28. Beck, Ulrich. “Risk Society Revisited.” The Risk Society and Beyond: Critical Issues for Social Theory. Ed. Barbara Adam, Ulrich Beck, & Joost Van Loon. London: SAGE, 2000. Carter, Neil. “Vote Blue, Go Green? Cameron’s Conservatives and the Environment.” The Political Quarterly 80.2 (2009): 233–42. Carvalho, Anabela. “Ideological Cultures and Media Discourses on Scientific Knowledge: Re-reading News on Climate Change.” Public Understanding of Science 16.2 (2007): 223–43. Carvalho, Anabela, and Jacquelin Burgess. “Cultural Circuits of Climate Change in UK Broadsheet Newspapers, 1985–2003.” Risk analysis 25.6 (2005): 1457–69. Charlton, Andrew. “Choosing Between Progress and Planet.” Quarterly Essay 44 (2011): 1. Curran, Giorel. “Ecological Modernisation and Climate Change in Australia.” Environmental Politics 18.2: 201-17. Dryzek, John. S., Christian Hunold, David Schlosberg, David Downes, and Hans-Kristian Hernes. “Environmental Transformation of the State: The USA, Norway, Germany and the UK.” Political studies 50.4 (2002): 659–82. Eder, Klaus. “The Institutionalisation of Environmentalism: Ecological Discourse and the Second Transformation of the Public Sphere.” Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology. Ed. Scott Lash, Bronislaw Szerszynski, & Brian Wynne. 1996. 203–23. Foster, John Bellamy, Brett Clark, and Richard York. “The Midas Effect: a Critique of Climate Change Economics.” Development and Change 40.6 (2009): 1085–97. Hajer, Maarten. The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Laclau, Ernesto. On Populist Reason. London: Verso, 2005. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso, 1985. Risbey, J. S. “The New Climate Discourse: Alarmist or Alarming?” Global Environmental Change18.1 (2008): 26–37. Spaargaren, Gert, and Arthur P.J. Mol, “Sociology, Environment, and Modernity: Ecological Modernization as a Theory of Social Change.” Society and Natural Resources 5.4 (1992): 323-44. Spash, Clive. L. “Review of The Economics of Climate Change (The Stern Review).”Environmental Values 16.4 (2007): 532–35. Stavrakakis, Yannis. “Green Ideology: A Discursive Reading.” Journal of Political Ideologies 2.3 (1997): 259–79. Stern, Nicholas et al. Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change. Vol. 30. London: HM Treasury, 2006. Swyngedouw, Erik. “Apocalypse Forever? Post-political Populism and the Spectre of Climate Change.” Theory, Culture & Society 27.2-3 (2010): 213–32. Taylor, Lenore. “Try Again on Carbon: Garnaut.” The Australian 17 Apr. 2009: 1. While, Aidan, Andrew E.G. Jonas, and David Gibbs. “From Sustainable Development to Carbon Control: Eco-state Restructuring and the Politics of Urban and Regional Development.”Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35.1 (2010): 76–93. Wilkinson, Marian. “Scientists on Attack over Rudd Emissions Plan.” Sydney Morning Herald Apr. 15 2009: 1. York, Richard, and Eugene Rosa. “Key Challenges to Ecological Modernization theory.”Organization & Environment 16.1 (2003): 273-88.

Introduction This article situates the dark as a liminal and creative space of experimentation where tensions are generative and people tinker with emerging technologies to create alternative futures. Darkness need not mean chaos and fear of violence – it can mean privacy and protection. We define dark as an experimental space based upon uncertainties rather than computational knowns (Bridle) and then demonstrate via a case study of cryptocurrencies the contribution of dark and liminal social spaces to future(s)-making. Cryptocurrencies are digital cash systems that use decentralised (peer-to-peer) networking to enable irreversible payments (Maurer, Nelms, and Swartz). Cryptocurrencies are often clones or variations on the ‘original’ Bitcoin payment systems protocol (Trump et al.) that was shared with the cryptographic community through a pseudonymous and still unknown author(s) (Nakamoto), creating a founder mystery. Due to the open creation process, a new cryptocurrency is relatively easy to make. However, many of them are based on speculative bubbles that mirror Bitcoin, Ethereum, and ICOs’ wealth creation. Examples of cryptocurrencies now largely used for speculation due to their volatility in holding value are rampant, with online clearing houses competing to trade hundreds of different assets from AAVE to ZIL. Many of these altcoins have little to no following or trading volume, leading to their obsolescence. Others enjoy immense popularity among dedicated communities of backers and investors. Consequently, while many cryptocurrency experiments fail or lack adoption and drop from the purview of history, their constant variation also contributes to the undertow of the future that pulls against more visible surface waves of computational progress. The article is structured to first define how we understand and leverage ‘dark’ against computational cultures. We then apply thematic and analytical tactics to articulate future-making socio-technical experiments in the dark. Based on past empirical work of the authors (Maddox "Netnography") we focus on crypto-cultures’ complex emancipatory and normative tensions via themes of construction, disruption, contention, redirection, obsolescence, and iteration. Through these themes we illustrate the mutation and absorption of dark experimental spaces into larger social structures. The themes we identify are not meant as a complete or necessarily serial set of occurrences, but nonetheless contribute a new vocabulary for students of technology and media to see into and grapple with the dark. Embracing the Dark: Prework & Analytical Tactics for Outside the Known To frame discussion of the dark here as creative space for alternative futures, we focus on scholars who have deeply engaged with notions of socio-technical darkness. This allows us to explore outside the blinders of computational light and, with a nod to Sassen, dig in the shadows of known categories to evolve the analytical tactics required for the study of emerging socio-technical conditions. We understand the Dark Web to usher shifting and multiple definitions of darkness, from a moral darkness to a technical one (Gehl). From this work, we draw the observation of how technologies that obfuscate digital tracking create novel capacities for digital cultures in spaces defined by anonymity for both publisher and user. Darknets accomplish this by overlaying open internet protocols (e.g. TCP/IP) with non-standard protocols that encrypt and anonymise information (Pace). Pace traces concepts of darknets to networks in the 1970s that were 'insulated’ from the internet’s predecessor ARPANET by air gap, and then reemerged as software protocols similarly insulated from cultural norms around intellectual property. ‘Darknets’ can also be considered in ternary as opposed to binary terms (Gehl and McKelvey) that push to make private that which is supposed to be public infrastructure, and push private platforms (e.g. a Personal Computer) to make public networks via common bandwidth. In this way, darknets feed new possibilities of communication from both common infrastructures and individual’s platforms. Enabling new potentials of community online and out of sight serves to signal what the dark accomplishes for the social when measured against an otherwise unending light of computational society. To this point, a new dark age can be welcomed insofar it allows an undecided future outside of computational logics that continually define and refine the possible and probable (Bridle). This argument takes von Neumann’s 1945 declaration that “all stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control” (in Bridle 21) as a founding statement for computational thought and indicative of current society. The hope expressed by Bridle is not an absence of knowledge, but an absence of knowing the future. Past the computational prison of total information awareness within an accelerating information age (Castells) is the promise of new formations of as yet unknowable life. Thus, from Bridle’s perspective, and ours, darkness can be a place of freedom and possibility, where the equality of being in the dark, together, is not as threatening as current privileged ways of thinking would suggest (Bridle 15). The consequences of living in a constant glaring light lead to data hierarchies “leaching” (Bridle) into everything, including social relationships, where our data are relationalised while our relations are datafied (Maddox and Heemsbergen) by enforcing computational thinking upon them. Darkness becomes a refuge that acknowledges the power of unknowing, and a return to potential for social, equitable, and reciprocal relations. This is not to say that we envision a utopian life without the shadow of hierarchy, but rather an encouragement to dig into those shadows made visible only by the brightest of lights. The idea of digging in the shadows is borrowed from Saskia Sassen, who asks us to consider the ‘master categories’ that blind us to alternatives. According to Sassen (402), while master categories have the power to illuminate, their blinding power keeps us from seeing other presences in the landscape: “they produce, then, a vast penumbra around that center of light. It is in that penumbra that we need to go digging”. We see darkness in the age of digital ubiquity as rejecting the blinding ‘master category’ of computational thought. Computational thought defines social/economic/political life via what is static enough to predict or unstable enough to render a need to control. Otherwise, the observable, computable, knowable, and possible all follow in line. Our dig in the shadows posits a penumbra of protocols – both of computational code and human practice – that circle the blinding light of known digital communications. We use the remainder of this short article to describe these themes found in the dark that offer new ways to understand the movements and moments of potential futures that remain largely unseen. Thematic Resonances in the Dark This section considers cryptocultures of the dark. We build from a thematic vocabulary that has been previously introduced from empirical examples of the crypto-market communities which tinker with and through the darkness provided by encryption and privacy technologies (Maddox "Netnography"). Here we refine these future-making themes through their application to events surrounding community-generated technology aimed at disrupting centralised banking systems: cryptocurrencies (Maddox, Singh, et al.). Given the overlaps in collective values and technologies between crypto-communities, we find it useful to test the relevance of these themes to the experimental dynamics surrounding cryptocurrencies. We unpack these dynamics as construction, rupture and disruption, redirection, and the flip-sided relationship between obsolescence and iteration leading to mutation and absorption. This section provides a working example for how these themes adapt in application to a community dwelling at the edge of experimental technological possibilities. The theme of construction is both a beginning and a materialisation of a value field. It originates within the cyberlibertarians’ ideological stance towards using technological innovations to ‘create a new world in the shell of the old’ (van de Sande) which has been previously expressed through the concept of constructive activism (Maddox, Barratt, et al.). This libertarian ideology is also to be found in the early cultures that gave rise to cryptocurrencies. Through their interest in the potential of cryptography technologies related to social and political change, the Cypherpunks mailing list formed in 1992 (Swartz). The socio-cultural field surrounding cryptocurrencies, however, has always consisted of a diverse ecosystem of vested interests building collaborations from “goldbugs, hippies, anarchists, cyberpunks, cryptographers, payment systems experts, currency activists, commodity traders, and the curious” (Maurer, Nelms, and Swartz 262). Through the theme of construction we can consider architectures of collaboration, cooperation, and coordination developed by technically savvy populations. Cryptocurrencies are often developed as code by teams who build in mechanisms for issuance (e.g. ‘mining’) and other controls (Conway). Thus, construction and making of cryptocurrencies tend to be collective yet decentralised. Cryptocurrencies arose during a time of increasing levels of distrust in governments and global financial instability from the Global Financial Crisis (2008-2013), whilst gaining traction through their usefulness in engaging in illicit trade (Saiedi, Broström, and Ruiz). It was through this rupture in the certainties of ‘the old system’ that this technology, and the community developing it, sought to disrupt the financial system (Maddox, Singh, et al.; Nelms et al.). Here we see the utility of the second theme of rupture and disruption to illustrate creative experimentation in the liminal and emergent spaces cryptocurrencies afford. While current crypto crazes (e.g. NFTs, ICOs) have their detractors, Cohen suggests, somewhat ironically, that the momentum for change of the crypto current was “driven by the grassroots, and technologically empowered, movement to confront the ills perceived to be powered and exacerbated by market-based capitalism, such as climate change and income inequality” (Cohen 739). Here we can start to envision how subterranean currents that emerge from creative experimentations in the dark impact global social forces in multifaceted ways – even as they are dragged into the light. Within a disrupted environment characterised by rupture, contention and redirection is rife (Maddox "Disrupting"). Contention and redirection illustrate how competing agendas bump and grind to create a generative tension around a deep collective desire for social change. Contention often emerges within an environment of hacks and scams, of which there are many stories in the cryptocurrency world (see Bartlett for an example of OneCoin, for instance; Kavanagh, Miscione, and Ennis). Other aspects of contention emerge around how the technology works to produce (mint) cryptocurrencies, including concern over the environmental impact of producing cryptocurrencies (Goodkind, Jones, and Berrens) and the production of non-fungible tokens for the sale of digital assets (Howson). Contention also arises through the gendered social dynamics of brogramming culture skewing inclusive and diverse engagement (Bowles). Shifting from the ideal of inclusion to the actual practice of crypto-communities begs the question of whose futures are being made. Contention and redirections are also evidenced by ‘hard forks’ in cryptocurrency. The founder mystery resulted in the gifting of this technology to a decentralised and leaderless community, materialised through the distributed consensus processes to approve software updates to a cryptocurrency. This consensus system consequently holds within it the seeds for governance failures (Trump et al.), the first of which occurred with the ‘hard forking’ of Bitcoin into Bitcoin cash in 2017 (Webb). Hard forks occur when developers and miners no longer agree on a proposed change to the software: one group upgraded to the new software while the others operated on the old rules. The resulting two separate blockchains and digital currencies concretised the tensions and disagreements within the community. This forking resulted initially in a shock to the market value of, and trust in, the Bitcoin network, and the dilution of adoption networks across the two cryptocurrencies. The ongoing hard forks of Bitcoin Cash illustrate the continued contention occurring within the community as crypto-personalities pit against each other (Hankin; Li). As these examples show, not all experiments in cryptocurrencies are successful; some become obsolete through iteration (Arnold). Iteration engenders mutations in the cultural framing of socio-technical experiments. These mutations of meaning and signification then facilitate their absorption into novel futures, showing the ternary nature of how what happens in the dark works with what is known by the light. As a rhetorical device, cryptocurrencies have been referred to as a currency (a payment system) or a commodity (an investment or speculation vehicle; Nelms et al. 21). However, new potential applications for the underlying technologies continue emerge. For example, Ethereum, the second-most dominant cryptocurrency after Bitcoin, now offers smart contract technology (decentralised autonomous organisations, DAO; Kavanagh, Miscione, and Ennis) and is iterating technology to dramatically reduce the energy consumption required to mine and mint the non-fungible tokens (NFTs) associated with crypto art (Wintermeyer). Here we can see how these rhetorical framings may represent iterative shifts and meaning-mutation that is as pragmatic as it is cultural. While we have considered here the themes of obsolescence and iteration threaded through the technological differentiations amongst cryptocurrencies, what should we make of these rhetorical or cultural mutations? This cultural mutation, we argue, can be seen most clearly in the resurgence of Dogecoin. Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency launched in 2013 that takes its name and logo from a Shiba Inu meme that was popular several years ago (Potts and Berg). We can consider Dogecoin as a playful infrastructure (Rennie) and cultural product that was initially designed to provide a low bar for entry into the market. Its affordability is kept in place by the ability for miners to mint an unlimited number of coins. Dogecoin had a large resurgence of value and interest just after the meme-centric Reddit community Wallstreetbets managed to drive the share price of video game retailer GameStop to gain 1,500% (Potts and Berg). In this instance we see the mutation of a cryptocurrency into memecoin, or cultural product, for which the value is a prism to the wild fluctuations of internet culture itself, linking cultural bubbles to financial ones. In this case, technologies iterated in the dark mutated and surfaced as cultural bubbles through playful infrastructures that intersected with financial systems. The story of dogecoin articulates how cultural mutation articulates the absorption of emerging techno-potentials into larger structures. Conclusion From creative experiments digging in the dark shadows of global socio-economic forces, we can see how the future is formed beneath the surface of computational light. Yet as we write, cryptocurrencies are being absorbed by centralising and powerful entities to integrate them into global economies. Examples of large institutions hoarding Bitcoin include the crypto-counterbalancing between the Chinese state through its digital currency DCEP (Vincent) and Facebook through the Libra project. Vincent observes that the state-backed DCEP project is the antithesis of the decentralised community agenda for cryptocurrencies to enact the separation of state and money. Meanwhile, Facebook’s centralised computational control of platforms used by 2.8 billion humans provide a similarly perverse addition to cryptocurrency cultures. The penumbra fades as computational logic shifts its gaze. Our thematic exploration of cryptocurrencies highlights that it is only in their emergent forms that such radical creative experiments can dwell in the dark. They do not stay in the dark forever, as their absorption into larger systems becomes part of the future-making process. The cold, inextricable, and always impending computational logic of the current age suffocates creative experimentations that flourish in the dark. Therefore, it is crucial to tend to the uncertainties within the warm, damp, and dark liminal spaces of socio-technical experimentation. References Arnold, Michael. "On the Phenomenology of Technology: The 'Janus-Faces' of Mobile Phones." Information and Organization 13.4 (2003): 231-56. Bartlett, Jamie. 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Borders seem to be dropping all around us. Interdisciplinary university curricula, international free trade, wireless broadband technologies—these and many other phenomena suggest a steady decline in the rigidity and quantity of borders delimiting social interactions. In response to this apparent loss of borders, critical scholars might point out that university hiring practices remain discipline-bound, international tariffs are widespread, and technological access is uneven. But even as this critical response points out the limited extent of border-loss, it still affirms the weakening of these borders. Since the 9/11 tragedy, the world has witnessed much fortification of national and cultural borders through essentializing discourses (epitomized by America’s “us versus them” response to terror). But can critical scholars, as affirmative as they are of the dissolution and the crossing of borders, also support the building of exclusionary national and cultural borders? More importantly, can this reasoning responsibly emerge from a postmodern or postcolonial perspective that both favors marginalized voices and recognizes the routinely violent excesses of nationalism? By considering the practice of hybridity within the context of international capitalism, I will argue that maintaining the “conditions of possibility” for hybridity, and thus, maintaining the possibility of resistance to essentializing discourses, requires the strategic reinforcement of national and cultural borders. Border-Crossing as Hybrid Practice The most critical aspect of hybridity in relation to culture is the hybrid’s position as border-crosser. Postmodern theory typically affirms individual instances of border-crossing, but its overall project in regards to boundaries is more comprehensive. Henri Giroux writes: …postmodernism constitutes a general attempt to transgress the borders sealed by modernism, to proclaim the arbitrariness of all boundaries, and to call attention to the sphere of culture as a shifting social and historical construction. (Border 55) The figure of the hybrid emerges in postcolonial discourses as the embodiment of this postmodern critique of borders. Hybrid identities such as Gloria Anzaldua’s “mestiza consciousness”—a hybrid of white, Indian, and Mexican identities—creates the possibility of resisting oppression because such multiplicity disavows the reductive and essentializing binaries that colonizers employ to maintain power (Anzaldua 892). By embracing these hybrid identities, colonized people thus affirm cultural differences in ways that resist essentialism and which conceive of these differences in ways that “are not identified with backwardness” (Martín-Barbero 352). In studying the border-crossing work of critical intellectual Paulo Freire, Giroux claims that border-crossing offers the hybrid the “opportunity for new subject positions, identities, and social relations that can produce resistance to and relief from the structures of domination and oppression” (“Paulo” 18). Prior to these claims, postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha wrote that the “third space” of hybridity surfaces as an “ambivalence” toward colonial authority and as a “strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal” (34). But what if we take seriously Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s claim in their book, Empire, that postcolonial theory, with its acclaim of the subversive potential of the hybrid, is “entirely insufficient for theorizing contemporary global power”? Or what if we admit that, unfortunately, the postcolonial hybrid is nowhere near as successful or as efficient a border-crosser as corporations have become, corporations which have made their own successful ‘runs for the borders’ by colonizing the markets of nations across the globe? In what forms can the ambivalence and disavowal identified by Bhabha emerge when cultures are now being colonized, not by other cultures, but by the influence of corporations? In the context of this new state of empire, Hardt and Negri warn that traditional hybridity becomes “an empty gesture … or worse, these gestures risk reinforcing imperial power rather than challenging it” (216–17). But in a world where “the freedom of self-fashioning is often indistinguishable from the powers of an all-encompassing control,” how can scholars approve a program of aggressive national self-fashioning (Hardt 216)? Stanley Fish suggests one answer. In Professional Correctness, Fish states that only enterprises “bent on suicide” would fail to establish their “distinctiveness.” He writes: An enterprise acquires an identity by winning a space at the table of enterprises …. Within the space that has been secured, all questions, including questions on basic concepts, remain open. Nor are the boundaries between enterprises fixed and impermeable; negotiations on the borders go on continually, and at times border skirmishes can turn into large-scale territorial disputes (19) If we substitute the word “nations” or “cultures” here for “enterprises,” Fish’s text reminds us that the building of national and cultural borders is always at best a temporary event, and that ‘openness’ is only available within a “space that has [previously] been secured.” Although nations may risk many things when they resist colonization, cultural fixity is not one of them. Cultures can thus maintain distinctiveness from other cultures without giving up their aspirations to hybridity. Pragmatically, Fish might say, one needs to secure a space at the table before one can negotiate. Essentialist border-building is just such a pragmatic effort. Building Borders That Disavow Cultural turf and national turf are inseparable. In the idealistic American view of culture as a “melting pot,” cultural identity relinquishes its substance to a greater national identity. Especially in the wake of 9/11, nationalistic maintenance of identity has prompted a host of culturally-focused turf disputes ranging from the bombing of mosques to the deliberate dumping of French champagne. Such disputes reveal cultural antagonisms that emerge from essentializing discourses. In his speech to the United Nations only two months after the September 11th attack, President George W. Bush explicitly connected the willingness of countries to form a coalition against terror (and thus to accept the essentializing “us versus them” mentality) with the ability to maintain secure borders by stating “Some nations want to play their part in the fight against terror, but tell us they lack the means to enforce their laws and control their borders” (n.pag.). Clear and manageable borders are presented here as stabilizing influences that enable the war against terror. By maintaining Western economic and political interests, these borders appear to delimit a space most unlike the subversive hybrid space that Bhabha imagines. Although essentializing discourses naturally seem to threaten the space of hybridity, it is important here to recall Bhabha’s definition of hybridity as a “strategic reversal of the process of domination” (emphasis added). Gayatri Spivak reminds us that “it’s the idea of strategy that has been forgotten” in current critiques of essentialism (5). In fact, essentialism, properly situated, can be used as a strategy against essentialism. While Spivak warns that a “strategic use of essentialism can turn into an alibi for proselytizing academic essentialisms,” she more forcefully claims that the “strategic use of a positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest” is “something one cannot not use”; a strategy that is “unavoidably useful” (4, 5). For Spivak, the critical qualities of a strategic essentialism are its “self-conscious” use (i.e. its “scrupulously visible political interest”) and its ongoing “critique of the ‘fetish-character’” of its own master terms (3–4). Three short examples will serve to highlight this strategic use of border-building in service of “scrupulously visible political interests.” While Russians may have the distinction of being the first to turn a candy bar’s name (“Snickers”) into a swear word, there have been no more visible borders that disavow multinational capitalism than those in France. Predictably, the key sites of struggle are the traditional repositories of French high culture: art, language, and food. One highly visible effort in this struggle is the ten per cent cinema tax (which, based on American dominance in the industry, affects mainly American films), the revenue from which is used to subsidize French filmmaking. Also, the controversial 1997 Toubon Law built borders by establishing fines and even prison sentences for refusal to use French language in venues such as advertising; as did the 1999 “dismantling” of a McDonald’s restaurant by José Bové, a French sheep farmer protesting U.S. sanctions, the WTO, and “Americanization” in general (Gordon 23, 35). Two nations that erected “borders of disavowal” in regards to the war on terror are Turkey and the Philippines. In March of 2003, even after being offered $6 billion in aid from the U.S., Turkey refused to allow 62,000 U.S. troops to be deployed in Turkey to facilitate the war in Iraq (Lee). While Turkey did allow the U.S. the use of airbases for certain purposes, the refusal to allow U.S. troops to cross the Turkey-Iraq border marked a significant site of cultural resistance. Even after the Philippines accepted a $78 billion increase in military aid from the U.S. to fight terrorism, public outcry there forced the U.S. to remove its “active” military presence since it violated a portion of the Philippines’s constitution that banned combat by foreign soldiers on its soil. (Klein). Also significant here is the degree to which the negotiation of national and cultural borders is primarily a negotiation of capital. As The Nation reported: For [Philippine President Arroyo], the global antiterrorist campaign is first and foremost a business proposition, and she made this very clear when she emerged from her meeting with President Bush in Washington in November and boasted to Filipino reporters that "it's $4.6 billion, and counting.” (Bello) All of these examples reinforce cultural and national borders in order to resist domination by capital. In French Foreign Minister Védrine’s words, the “desire to preserve cultural diversity in the world is in no way a sign of anti-Americanism but of antihegemonism, a refusal of impoverishment” (qtd. in Gordon 30). This “refusal of impoverishment” is the accomplishment of identities that refuse to supplant culture with capital. As these examples show, borders need not simply reinforce existing power relations, but are sites of resistance as well. But Is This Turf Really Cultural? Can one legitimately refer to the examples of Turkey and the Philippines, as well as the web of forces that structure the interactions of all nations in a system of multinational capitalism, as being “cultural”? If the subtitle of Fredric Jameson’s book, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, does not suggest strongly enough the particularly cultural turf of these systems, Jameson makes this explicit when he states that we have witnessed . . . a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life—from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself—can be said to have become ”cultural.” (48). One of Jameson’s basic arguments in his second chapter is that “every position on postmodernism in culture . . . is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today” (3). I would like to transpose this statement somewhat by asserting that every position on culture in postmodernism is necessarily a political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism. Therefore, actions that negotiate cultural turf and modify national identities can be methods of influencing the contours of multinational capitalism. In other words, strategic border-building maintains the space of hybridity because it seeks to disavow the dominance of cultural turf by capital. Without such protectionist and essentializing efforts, the conditions of possibility for hybrid identities would be at the mercy of market forces. The pragmatic use of essentialism as a mode of resistance is a move one can imagine Fish would approve of, and that Hardt and Negri hint at the necessity of when they state: The creative forces that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges. The struggles to contest and subvert Empire, as well as those to construct a real alternative, will thus take place on the imperial terrain itself. (xv) Essentialism is admittedly one of the “creative forces that sustain Empire.” The dangers of struggling “on the imperial terrain itself” lie in not retaining the critical self-consciousness of one’s own strategies that Spivak argues for, and in not remaining mindful of the histories of genocide and tyranny that have accompanied much modern nationalism. In constructing a “counter-Empire,” cultures can resist both the seductions of aggressive nationalism and the homogenizing forces of multinational capitalism. The turf of hybridity provides a space from which to launch this counter-Empire, but this space may only exist between cultural identities, not between multiple versions of a homogenized consumer identity maintained by corporate influence. Nations should neither be afraid to rebuild self-consciously their cultural borders nor to act strategically to maintain their distinctiveness, despite postmodern theory’s acclamation of the dissolution of borders and political appeals for global solidarity against the terrorist ‘Other.’ In order to establish resistance in the context of international capitalism, the strategic disavowal necessary to hybridity may need to emerge as a disavowal of hybridity itself. Works Cited Anzaldua, Gloria. “Borderlands/La Frontera.” Literary Theory, An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2001. 887–902. Bello, Waldo. “A ‘Second Front’ in the Philippines.” The Nation 18 Mar. 2002. 16 Feb. 2004. <http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020318&s=bello>. Bhabha, Homi. K. “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817.” The Postcolonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, et al. New York: Routledge, 1995. 29–35. Bush, George W. “President Bush Speaks to United Nations.” The White House. 11 Jan. 2004. <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/11/20011110-3.php>. Fish, Stanley. Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Giroux, Henry. Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education. New York: Routledge, 1992. ---. “Paulo Freire and the Politics of Postcolonialism.” JAC 12.1 (1992): 15–26. Gordon, Philip H., and Sophie Meunier. “Globalization and French Cultural Identity.”French Politics, Culture, and Society 19.1 (2001): 22–41. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. Klein, Naomi. “Mutiny in Manila.” The Nation 1 Sep. 2003. 16 Feb. 2004. <http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030901&s=klein>. Lee, Matthew. “Turkey’s Refusal Stuns U.S.” Common Dreams News Center. 1 Mar. 2003. 12 Jan. 2004. <http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0301-10.htm>. Martín-Barbero, Jésus. “The Processes: From Nationalisms to Transnationals.” Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. Ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. 351–84. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York: Routledge, 1993. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mason's, Eric D. "Border-Building" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/03-border-building.php>. APA Style Mason's, E. (2004, Mar17). Border-Building. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/03-border-building.php>

It all started with a tweet. On the afternoon of 2 June 2013, Professor Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico (UNM) and visiting instructor at New York University (NYU), tweeted out a message that would go on to generate a significant social media controversy. Addressing aspiring doctoral program applicants, Miller wrote:Dear obese PhD applicants: if you didn’t have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won't have the willpower to do a dissertation #truthThe response to Miller’s tweet was swift and fiery. Social media users began engaging with him on Twitter, and in the early hours of the controversy Miller defended the tweet. When one critic described his message as “judgmental,” Miller replied that doing a dissertation is “about willpower/conscientiousness, not just smarts” (Trotter). The tweet above, now screen captured, was shared widely and debated by journalists, Fat Acceptance activists, and academic social media users. Within hours Miller had deleted the tweet and replaced it with two new ones:My sincere apologies to all for that idiotic, impulsive, and badly judged tweet. It does not reflect my true views, values, or standards andObviously my previous tweet does not represent the selection policies of any university, or my own selection criteriaHe then made his Twitter account private. The captured image, however, continued to spread. Across social media, users began to circulate a campaign that called for Miller to be formally disciplined (Trotter). There was also widespread talk about potential lawsuits from prospective students who were not selected for admission at UNM (Kirby). Indeed, the Fat Chick Sings blogger Jeanette DePatie offered her own advice to Miller: #findagoodlawyer.Soon after the controversy emerged a response appeared on UNM’s website in the form of a video statement by Professor Jane Ellen Smith, the Chair of the UNM Psychology Department. Smith reiterated that Miller’s statements did not reflect the “policies and admissions standards of UNM”. She also stated that Miller had defended his actions by claiming the tweet was part of a “research project” where he would deliberately send out provocative messages in order to measure the public response to them. This claim was met with incredulity by a number of bloggers and columnists, and was later determined to be incorrect in an Institutional Review Board inquiry at UNM, which concluded Miller’s tweets were “self-promotional” in nature. Following a formal investigation, the UNM committee found no evidence that Miller had discriminated against overweight students. It did however pass a motion of censure that included a number of restrictions, including prohibiting Miller from sitting on any graduate admission committee at UNM.The #truth about Fat PhDs?Readers may be wondering why Miller’s tweet continues to matter as I write this article in 2015. It is my belief that the tweet is important insofar as it affords an insight into the cultural scene that surrounds the fat body in higher education. The vigorous debate generated by Miller’s tweet offers researchers a diverse array of media texts that are available to help build a more comprehensive picture of fat embodiment within higher education.Looking at the tweet in the cold light of day it is difficult to imagine any logical links one might infer between a person’s carbohydrate consumption and their ability to excel in doctoral education. And there’s the rub. Of course Miller’s tweet does not represent a careful evaluation of the properties of doctoral willpower. In order to make sense of the tweet we need to understand the ways cultural assumptions about fatness operate. For decades now, researchers have documented the existence of anti-fat attitudes (Crandall & Martinez). Increasingly, scholars and Fat Acceptance activists have described a “thinness norm” that is reproduced across contemporary Western cultures, which discerns normatively slender bodies as “both healthy and beautiful” (Eller 220) and those whose bodies depart from this norm, as “socially acceptable targets for shaming and hate speech” (Eller 220). In order to be intelligible Miller’s tweet relies on a number of deeply entrenched cultural meanings attributed to fatness and fat people.The first is that body-size is primarily a matter of self-control. Although Critical Fat Studies researchers have argued for some time that body weight is determined by complex interactions between the biological and environmental, the belief that a large body size is caused by limited self-control remains prevalent. This in turn supports a host of cultural connotations, which tend to constitute fat people as “lazy, gluttonous, greedy, immoral, uncontrolled, stupid, ugly and lacking in willpower” (Farrell 4).In light of the above, Miller’s message ought to be read as a moral one. I have paraphrased its logic as such: if you [the fat doctoral student] lack the willpower to discipline your body into normatively desired slimness, you will also likely lack the strength of character required to discipline your body-mind into producing a doctoral dissertation. The sad irony here is that, if anything, the attitudes that might hamper fat students from pursuing a doctoral education would be those espoused in Miller’s own tweet. As Critical Fat Studies researchers have illuminated, the anti-fat attitudes the tweet reproduces generate challenging higher education climates for fat people to navigate (Pausé, Express Yourself 6).Indeed, while Miller’s tweet is one case that arose to media prominence, there is evidence that it sits inside a wider pattern of weight discrimination within higher education. For example, Caning and Mayer (“Obesity: Its Possible”, “Obesity: An Influence”) found that despite similar high school performances, ‘obese’ students were less likely to be accepted to elite universities, than their non-obese peers. In a more recent US-based study, Burmeister and colleagues found evidence of weight bias in graduate school admissions. In particular, they found that higher body mass index (BMI) applicants received fewer post-interview offers into psychology graduate programs than other students (920), and this relationship appeared to be stronger for female applicants (920). This picture is supported by a study by Swami and Monk, who examined weight bias against women in a hypothetical scenario about university acceptance. In this study, 198 volunteers in the UK were asked to identify the women they were most and least likely to select for a place at university. Swami and Monk found that participants were biased against fat women, a finding which the authors interpreted as evidence of broader public beliefs about body size and access to higher education.In my examination of the media scene surrounding the Miller case I observed that most commentators associated the tweet with a particular affective formation – shame. Miller’s actions were widely described as “fat-shaming” (Bennet-Smith; Ingeno; Martin; Trotter; Walsh) with Miller himself often referred to simply as the “fat-shaming professor” (King; ThinkTank). In this article I wish to consider the affective-political dimensions of Miller’s tweet, by focusing on one digital community’s response to it: Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs. In following this path I am building on the work of other researchers who have considered fat activisms and Web 2.0 (Pausé, Express Yourself); fat visual activism (Gurrieri); and the emotional politics of fat acceptance blogging (Kargbo; Bronstein).Imaging Alternatives: Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDsBy 3 June 2013 – just one day after Miller’s tweet was published – New Zealand-based academic Cat Pausé had created the Tumblr Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs. This was billed as a photo-blog about “being fatlicious in academia”. Writing on her Friend of Marilyn blog, Pausé explained the rationale behind the Tumblr:I decided that what I wanted to do was to highlight all the amazing fat individuals who are in graduate school, or have completed graduate school – to provide a visual repository … and to celebrate the amazing work being done by these rad fatties!Pausé sent out calls for participants on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook, and emailed a Fat Studies listserv. She asked submitters to send “a photo, along with their name, degree, and awarding institution” (Pausé Express Yourself, 6). Images were submitted thick and fast. Twenty-three were published in the first day of the project, and twenty in the second. At the time of writing, just over 150 images had been submitted, the most recent being November 2013.The Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs project ought to be understood as part the turn away from the textual toward the digital in fat activist movements (Kargbo). This has seen a growth in online communities that are interested in developing “counter-images in response to the fat body’s position as the abject, excluded Other of the socially acceptable body” (Kargbo 162). Examples include a multitude of Fatshion photo-blogs, Tumblrs like Exciting Fat People or the Stocky Bodies image library, which responds to the limited diversity of visual representations of fat people in the mainstream media (Gurrieri).For this article, I have read the images on the Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs Tumblr in order to gain an impression about the affective-political work accomplished by this collective of self-identified fat academic bodies. As I indicated earlier, much of the commentary following Miller’s tweet characterised it as an attempt to ‘shame’ fat doctoral students. As Elspeth Probyn has identified, shame frequently manifests itself on the body “most experiences of shame make you want to disappear, to hide away and to cover yourself” (Probyn 329). I suggest that the core work of the Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs Tumblr is to address the spectre of shame Miller’s tweet projects with visibility, rather than it’s opposite. This visibility also enables the project to proliferate a host of different ways of (feeling about) being fat and doctoral.The first image posted on the Tumblr is Pausé’s own. She is pictured smiling at the 2007 graduation ceremony where she received her own PhD, surrounded by fellow graduates in academic regalia. Her image is followed by many others, mostly white women, who attest to the academic attainments of fat individuals. My first impression as I scrolled through the Tumblr was to note that many of the images (51) referenced scenes of graduation, where subjects wore robes, caps or posed with higher degree certificates. Many more were the kinds of photographs that one might expect to be taken at an academic event. Together, these images attest to the viability of the living, breathing doctoral body - a particularly relevant response given Miller’s tweet. This work to legitimate the fat doctoral body was also accomplished through the submission of two historical photographs of Albert Einstein, a figure who is neither living nor breathing, but highly unlikely to be described as lacking academic ability or willpower.As I read through the Tumblr subsequent times, I noticed that many of the submitters offered images that challenge stereotypical representations of the fat body. As a number of writers have noted, fat people tend to be visually represented as “solitary, lonely figures whose expressions are downcast and dejected” (Gurrieri 202). That is if they aren’t already decapitated in the visual convention of the “headless fatty” used across news media (Kargbo 160). Like the Stocky Bodies project, the Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs Tumblr facilitated a more diverse and less pathologising representation of fat (doctoral) embodiment.Across the images there is little evidence of the downcast eyes of shame and dejection that Miller’s tweet seems to invite of aspiring fat doctoral candidates. Scrolling through the Tumblr one encounters images of fat people singing, swimming, creating art, playing sport, smoking, smiling, dressing up, and making music. A number of images (12) emphasise the social nature of fat doctoral life, by picturing multiple subjects at once, some holding hands, others posing with colleagues, loved ones, and a puppy. Another category of submissions took a playful stance vis-à-vis some representational conventions of imaging fatness. Where portrayals of the fat body from side or rear angles, or images of fat people eating and drinking typically code an affective scene of disgust (Gurrieri), a number of images on the Tumblr appear to reinscribe these scenes with new meaning. Viewers are offered pictures of smiling and contented fat graduates unashamed to eat and drink, or be represented from ‘unflattering’ angles.Furthermore, a number of images offered alternatives to the conventional representation of the fat subject as ugly and sexually unattractive by posing in glamorous shots bubbling with allure and desire. In one memorable picture, blogger and educator Virgie Tovar is snapped wearing a “sex instructor” badge and laughs while holding two sex toys.Reading across the images it becomes clear that the Tumblr offers a powerful response to the visual convention of representing the solitary, lonely fat person. Rather than presenting isolated fat doctoral students the act of holding the images together generates a sense of fat higher education community, as Kargbo notes:A single image posted online amidst vast Internet ephemera is just a fleeting document of a moment in a stranger’s life. But in the plural, as one scrolls through hundreds of images eager to hit the ‘next’ button for what will be a repetition of the same, the image takes on a new function: it becomes an insistent testament to the liveness of fat embodiment in the present. (164)Obesity Timebomb blogger Charlotte Cooper (2013) commented on the significance of the project: “It is pretty amazing to see the names and faces as I scroll through Fuck yeah! Fat PhDs. Many of us are friends and collaborators and the site represents a new community of power.”Concluding Thoughts: Fat Embodiment and Higher Education CulturesThis article has examined a cultural event that that saw the figure of the fat doctoral student rise to international media prominence in 2013. I have argued that while Miller’s tweet can be read as illustrative of the affective scene of shame that surrounds the fat body in higher education, the images offered by the Fuck Yeah! photo submitters work to re-negotiate implication in social discourses of abjection. Indeed, the images assert that alternative ways of feeling about being fat and doctoral remain viable. Fat students can be contented, ambivalent, sultry, pissed off, passionate and proud – and Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs provides submitters with a platform to perform a wide array of these affects. This is not to say that shame is shut out of the project, or the lives of submitters’ altogether. Instead, I am suggesting that the Tumblr generates a more open field of possibilities, providing “a space for re-imagining new forms of attachments and identifications.” (Kargbo 171). Critics might argue that this Tumblr is not particularly novel when set in the context of a range of fat photo-blogs that have sprung up across the Internet in recent years. I would argue, however, that when we consider the kinds of questions Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs might ask of university cultures, and the prompts it offers to higher education researchers, the Tumblr can be seen to make an important contribution. I am in agreement with Kargbo (2013) when she argues that fat photo-blogs “have the potential to alter the conditions of visual reception and perception”. That is, through their “codes and conventions, styles of lighting and modes of address, photographs literally show us how to relate to another person” (Singer 602). When read together, the Fuck Yeah! images insist that a different kind of relationship to fat PhDs is possible, one that exceeds the shaming visible in Miller’s tweet. Ultimately then, the Tumblr is a call to take fat doctoral students seriously, not as problems in need of fixing, but as a diverse group of scholars who make important contributions to the academy and beyond.I would like to use the occasion of concluding this article to call for further conversations about fat embodiment and higher education cultures. The area is significantly under-researched, with higher education scholars largely failing to engage with the material and affective experiences of fat embodiment. Indeed, I would argue that if nothing else, this paper has demonstrated that public scenes of knowledge creation have done a much more comprehensive job of analysing the intersection of ‘fat + university’ than academic books and articles to date. While not offering an exhaustive sketch, I would like to gesture toward some areas that might contribute to a future research agenda. For example, researchers might begin to approach the experience of living, working and studying as a fat person in the contemporary university. Such research might examine whose body the university is imagined and designed for, as well as the campus climate experienced by fat individuals. Researchers might consider how body size could become a part of broader conversations about embodiment and privilege in higher education, alongside race, ability, gender identity, and other categories of social difference.Thinking about the intersection of ‘fat + university’ would also involve tracing possibilities. For example, what role do university campuses play as spaces of fat activism and solidarity? And, what is the contribution made by Critical Fat Studies as a newly established interdisciplinary field of inquiry?Taken together, I hope the questions I have raised in this article demonstrate that the intersection of ‘fat’ and higher education cultures represents a rich and valuable area that warrants further inquiry.ReferencesBennet-Smith, Meredith. “Geoffrey Miller, Visiting NYU Professor, Slammed for Fat-Shaming Obese PhD Candidates.” 6 Apr. 2013. The Huffington Post. ‹http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/04/geoffrey-miller-fat-shaming-nyu-phd_n_3385641.html›.Bronstein, Carolyn. “Fat Acceptance Blogging, Female Bodies and the Politics of Emotion.” Feral Feminisms 3 (2015): 106-118. Burmeister, Jacob, Allison Kiefner, Robert Carels, and Dara Mushner-Eizenman. “Weight Bias in Graduate School Admissions.” Obesity 21 (2013): 918-920.Canning, Helen, and Jean Mayer. “Obesity: Its Possible Effect on College Acceptance.” The New England Journal of Medicine 275 (1966): 1172-1174. Canning, Helen, and Jean Mayer. “Obesity: An Influence on High School Performance.” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 20 (1967): 352-354. Cooper, Charlotte. “The Curious Case of Dr. Miller and His Tweet.” Obesity Timebomb 4 June 2013. ‹http://obesitytimebomb.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-curious-case-of-dr-miller-and-his.html›.Crandall, Christian, and Rebecca Martinez. “Culture, Ideology, and Antifat Attitudes.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 22 (1996): 1165-1176.DePatie, Jeanette. “Dear Dr. Terrible Your Bigotry Is Showing...” The Fat Chick Sings 2 June 2013. ‹http://fatchicksings.com/2013/06/02/dear-dr-terrible-your-bigotry-is-showing/›.Eller, G.M. “On Fat Oppression.” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 24 (2014): 219-245. Farrell, Amy. Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture. New York: NYU Press, 2011. Gurrieri, Lauren. “Stocky Bodies: Fat Visual Activism.” Fat Studies 2 (2013): 197-209. Ingeno, Lauren. “Fat-Shaming in Academe.” Inside Higher Ed 4 June 2013. Kargbo, Majida. “Toward a New Relationality: Digital Photography, Shame, and the Fat Subject.” Fat Studies 2 (2013): 160-172.King, Barbara. “The Fat-Shaming Professor: A Twitter-Fueled Firestorm.” Cosmos & Culture 13.7 (2013) Kirby, Marianne. “How Not to Twitter: Dr. Geoffrey Miller's 140 Fat-Hating Characters of Infamy.” XoJane 5 June 2013. ‹http://www.xojane.com/issues/professor-geoffrey-miller›.Martin, Adam. “NYU Professor Immediately Regrets Fat-Shaming Potential Students.” New York Magazine June 2013. ‹http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/06/nyu-professor-immediately-regrets-fat-shaming.html›.Pausé, Cat. “On That Tweet – Fat Discrimination in the Education Sector.” Friend of Marilyn 5 June 2013. ‹http://friendofmarilyn.com/2013/06/05/on-that-tweet-fat-discrimination-in-the-education-sector/›.Pausé, Cat. “Express Yourself: Fat Activism in the Web 2.0 Age.” The Politics of Size: Perspectives from the Fat-Acceptance Movement. Ed. Ragen Chastain. New York: ABC-CLIO, 2015. 1-8. Probyn, Elspeth. “Everyday Shame.” Cultural Studies 18.2-3 (2004): 328-349. Singer, T. Benjamin. “From the Medical Gaze to Sublime Mutations: The Ethics of (Re)viewing Non-Normative Body Images.” The Transgender Studies Reader. Eds. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle. New York: Routledge, 2013. 601-620. Swami, Viren, and Rachael Monk. “Weight Bias against Women in a University Acceptance Scenario.” Journal of General Psychology 140.1 (2013): 45-56.Sword, Helen. “The Writer’s Diet.” ‹http://writersdiet.com/WT.php?home›.ThinkTank. “'Fat Shaming Professor' Gives RIDICULOUS Excuse – Check This Out (Update).” ThinkTank 8 July 2013. ‹https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ey9TkG18-o›.Trotter, J.K. “How Twitter Schooled an NYU Professor about Fat-Shaming.” The Atlantic Wire 2013. ‹http://www.thewire.com/national/2013/06/how-twitter-schooled-nyu-professor-about-fat-shaming/65833/›.Walsh, Michael. “NYU Visiting Professor Insults the Obese Ph.D.s with ‘Impulsive’ Tweet.” New York Daily News 2013.

In August 2017, a white supremacist rally marketed as “Unite the Right” was held in Charlottesville, Virginia. In participation were members of the alt-right, including neo-nazis, white nationalists, neo-confederates, and other hate groups (Atkinson). The rally swiftly erupted in violence between white supremacists and counter protestors, culminating in the death of a counter-protester named Heather Heyer, who was struck by a car driven by white supremacist James Alex Fields, and leaving dozens injured. Terry McQuliffe, the Governor of Virginia, declared a state of emergency on August 12, and the world watched while white supremacists boldly marched in clothing emblazoned with symbols ranging from swastikas to a cartoon frog (Pepe), with flags featuring the nation of “Kekistan”, and carrying tiki torches chanting, “You Will Not Replace Us... Jews Will Not Replace Us”.The purpose of this essay is not, however, to examine the Internet symbols that circulated during the Unite the Right rally but rather to hone in on a specific moment that illustrates a key part of Internet culture that was often overlooked during analysis of the events that occurred during the riots: a documentary filmmaker, C. J. Hunt, was at the rally to record footage for a project on the removal of Confederate monuments. While there, he saw a rally-goer dressed in the white polo t-shirt and khaki pants uniform of the white nationalist group Vanguard America. The rally-goer, a young white man, was being chased by a counter-protester. He began to scream and beg for mercy, and even went as far as stripping off his clothing and denying that he really believed in any of the group’s ideology. In the recording by Hunt, who asks why he was there and why he was undressing, the young white man responded that shouting white power is “fun”, and that he was participating in the event because he, quote, “likes to be offensive” (Hunt).As Hunt notes in a piece for GQ reflecting on his experience at the rally, as soon as the man was cut off from his group and confronted, the runaway racist’s demeanor immediately changed when he had to face the consequences of his actions. Trolls often rely on the safety and anonymity of online forums and digital spaces where they are often free from having to face the consequences of their actions, and for the runaway racist, things became real very quickly when he was forced to own up to his hateful actions. In a way, many members of these movements seem to want politics without consequence for themselves, but with significant repercussions for others. Milo Yiannopoulos, a self-professed “master troll”, built an entire empire worth millions of dollars off of what the far-right defends as ironic hate speech and a form of politics without consequences reserved only for the privileged white men that gleefully engage in it. The runaway racist and Yiannopoulos are borne out of an Internet culture that is built on being offensive, on trolling, and “troll” itself being an aspirational label and identity, but also more importantly, a political aesthetic.In this essay, I argue that trolling itself has become a kind of political aesthetic and identity, and provide evidence via examples like hoaxes, harassment campaigns, and the use of memes to signal to certain online populations and extremist groups in violent attacks. First coined by Walter Benjamin in order to explain a fundamental component of using art to foster consent and compliance in fascist regimes, the term since then has evolved to encompass far more than just works of art. Benjamin’s original conception of the term is in regard to a creation of a spectacle that prevents the masses from recognizing their rights – in short, the aestheticization of politics is not just about the strategies of the fascist regimes themselves but says more about the subjects within them. In the time of Benjamin’s writing, the specific medium was mass propaganda through the newly emerging film industry and other forms of art (W. Benjamin). To Benjamin, these aesthetics served as tools of distracting to make fascism more palatable to the masses. Aesthetic tools of distraction serve an affective purpose, revealing the unhappy consciousness of neoreactionaries (Hui), and provide an outlet for their resentment.Since political aesthetics are concerned with how cultural products like art, film, and even clothing reflect political ideologies and beliefs (Sartwell; McManus; Miller-Idriss), the objects of analysis in this essay are part of the larger visual culture of the alt-right (Bogerts and Fielitz; Stanovsky). Indeed, aesthetic aspects of political systems shift their meaning over time, or are changed and redeployed with transformed effect (Sartwell). In this essay, I am applying the concept of the aestheticization of politics by analyzing how alt-right visual cultures deploy distraction and dissimulation to advance their political agenda through things like trolling campaigns and hoaxes. By analyzing these events, their use of memes, trolling techniques, and their influence on mainstream culture, what is revealed is the influence of trolling on political culture for the alt-right and how the alt-right then distracts the rest of the public (McManus).Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Troll?Large scale analyses of disinformation and extremist content online tends to examine how certain actors are connected, what topics emerge and how these are connected across platforms, and the ways that disinformation campaigns operate in digital environments (Marwick and Lewis; Starbird; Benkler et al.). Masculine and white-coded technology gave rise to male-dominated digital spaces (R. Benjamin), with trolling often being an issue faced by non-normative users of the Internet and their communities (Benjamin; Lumsden and Morgan; Nakamura; Phillips, Oxygen). Creating a kind of unreality where it is difficult to parse out truth from lies, fiction from non-fiction, the troll creates cultural products, and by hiding behind irony and humor confuses onlookers and is removed from any kind of reasonable blame for their actions. Irony has long been a rhetorical strategy used in politics, and the alt right has been no exception (Weatherby), but for our current sociopolitical landscape, trolling is a political strategy that infuses irony into politics and identity.In the digital era, political memes and internet culture are pervasive components of the spread of hate speech and extremist ideology on digital platforms. Trolling is not an issue that exists in a vacuum – rather, trolls are a product of greater mainstream culture that encourages and allows their behaviors (Phillips, This Is Why; Fichman and Sanfilippo; Marwick and Lewis). Trolls, and meme culture in general, have often been pointed to as being part of the reason for the rise of Trump and fascist politics across the world in recent years (Greene; Lamerichs et al.; Hodge and Hallgrimsdottir; Glitsos and Hall). Although criticism has been expressed about how impactful memes were in the election of Donald Trump, political memes have had an impact on the ways that trolling went from anonymous jerks on forums to figures like Yiannapoulos who built entire careers off of trolling, creating empires of hate (Lang). These memes that are often absurd and incomprehensible to those who are not a part of the community that they come from aim to cheapen, trivialize, and mock social justice movements like Black Lives Matter, feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, and others.But the history of trolling online goes as far back as the Internet itself. “Trolling” is just a catch all term to describe online behaviors meant to antagonize, to disrupt online conversations, and to silence other users (Cole; Fichman and Sanfilippo). As more and more people started moving online and engaging in participatory culture, trolling continued to evolve from seemingly harmless jokes like the “Rick Roll” to targeted campaigns meant to harass women off of social media platforms (Lumsden and Morgan; Graham). Trolling behaviors are more than just an ugly part of the online experience, but are also a way for users to maintain the borders of their online community - it’s meant to drive away those who are perceived to be outsiders not just from the specific forum, but the Internet itself (Graham). With the rise of modern social media platforms, trolling itself is also a part of the political landscape, creating a “toxic counterpublic” that combines irony with a kind of earnestness to spread and inject their beliefs into mainstream political discourse (Greene). As a mode of information warfare, these subversive rhetorical strategies meant to contradict or reverse existing political and value systems have been used throughout history as a political tactic (Blackstock).The goal of trolling is not just to disrupt conversations, but to lead to chaos via confusion about the sincerity and meaning of messages and visuals, and rather than functioning as a politics of outrage (on the part of the adherents), it is a politics of being as outrageous as possible. As a part of larger meme culture, the aesthetics of trolls and their outrageous content manage to operate under the radar by being able to excuse their behaviors and rhetoric as just “trolling” or “joking”. This ambiguity points to trolling on the far right as a political strategy and identity to absolve them of blame or accusations of what their real intentions are. Calling them “trolls” hides the level of sophistication and vast levels of influence that they had on public opinion and discourse in the United States (Geltzer; Starks et al.; Marwick and Lewis). We no longer live in a world apart from the troll’s influence and immune from their toxic discourse – rather, we have long been under the bridge with them.Co-Opted SymbolsOne of the most well-known examples of trolling as a political aesthetic and tactic may be the OK hand sign used by the Christchurch shooter. The idea that the OK hand sign was a secretly white supremacist symbol started as a hoax on 4chan. The initial 2017 hoax purported that the hand sign was meant to stand for “White Power”, with the three fingers representing the W and the circle made with the index finger and thumb as the P (Anti-Defamation League, “Okay Hand Gesture”). The purpose of perpetuating the hoax was to demonstrate that (a) they were being watched and (b) that the mainstream media is stupid and gullible enough to believe this hoax. Meant to incite confusion and to act as a subversive strategy, the OK hand sign was then actually adopted by the alt-right as a sort of meme to not just perpetuate the hoax, but to signal belonging to the larger group (Allyn). Even though the Anti-Defamation League initially listed it as not being a hate symbol and pointed out the origins of the hoax (Anti-Defamation League, “No, the ‘OK’ Gesture Is Not a Hate Symbol”), they then switched their opinion when the OK hand sign was being flashed by white supremacists, showing up in photographs at political events, and other social media content. In fact, the OK hand sign is also a common element in pictures of Pepe the Frog, who is a sort of “alt right mascot” (Tait; Glitsos and Hall), but like the OK hand sign, Pepe the Frog did not start as an alt-right mascot and was co-opted by the alt-right as a mode of representation.The confusion around the actual meaning behind the hand symbol points to how the alt-right uses these modes of representation in ways that are simultaneously an inside joke and a real expression of their beliefs. For instance, the Christchurch shooter referenced a number of memes and other rhetoric typical of 4chan and 8chan communities in his video and manifesto (Quek). In the shooter’s manifesto and video, the vast amounts of content that point to the trolling and visual culture of the alt-right are striking – demonstrating how alt-right memes not only make this violent ideology accessible, but are cultural products meant to be disseminated and ultimately, result in some kind of action (DeCook).The creation and co-optation of symbols by the alt-right like the OK hand sign are not just memes, but a form of language created by extremists for extremists (Greene; Hodge and Hallgrimsdottir). The shooter’s choice of including this type of content in his manifesto as well as certain phrases in his live-streamed video indicate his level of knowledge of what needed to be done for his attack to get as much attention as possible – the 4chan troll is the modern-day bogeyman, and parts of the manifesto have been identified as intentional traps for the mainstream media (Lorenz).Thus, the Christchurch shooter and trolling culture are linked, but referring to the symbols in the manifesto as being a part of “trolling” culture misses the deeper purpose – chaos, through the outrage spectacle, is the intended goal, particularly by creating arguments about the nature and utility of online trolling behavior. The shooter encouraged other 8chan users to disseminate his posted manifesto as well as to share the video of the attack – and users responded by immortalizing the event in meme format. The memes created celebrated the shooter as a hero, and although Facebook did remove the initial livestream video, it was reuploaded to the platform 1.2 million times in the first 24 hours, attempting to saturate the online platform with so many uploads that it would cause confusion and be difficult to remove (Gramenz). Some users even created gifs or set the video to music from the Doom video game soundtrack – a video game where the player is a demon slayer in an apocalyptic world, further adding another layer of symbolism to the attack.These political aesthetics – spread through memes, gifs, and “fan videos” – are the perfect vehicles for disseminating extremist ideology because of what they allow the alt-right to do with them: hide behind them, covering up their intentions, all the while adopting them as signifiers for their movement. With the number of memes, symbols, and phrases posted in his manifesto and spoken aloud in his mainstream, perhaps the Christchurch shooter wanted the onus of the blame to fall on these message board communities and the video games and celebrities referenced – in effect, it was “designed to troll” (Lorenz). But, there is a kernel of truth in every meme, post, image, and comment – their memes are a part of their political aesthetic, thus implicit and explicit allusions to the inner workings of their ideology are present. Hiding behind hoaxes, irony, edginess, and trolling, members of the alt-right and other extremist Internet cultures then engage in a kind of subversion that allows them to avoid taking any responsibility for real and violent attacks that occur as a result of their discourse. Antagonizing the left, being offensive, and participating in this outrage spectacle to garner a response from news outlets, activists, and outsiders are all a part of the same package.Trolls and the Outrage SpectacleThe confusion and the chaos left behind by these kinds of trolling campaigns and hoaxes leave many to ask: How disingenuous is it? Is it meant for mere shock value or is it really reflective of the person’s beliefs? In terms of the theme of dissimulation for this special issue, what is the real intent, and under what pretenses should these kinds of trolling behaviors be understood? Returning to the protestor who claimed “I just like to be offensive”, the skepticism from onlookers still exists: why go so far as to join an alt-right rally, wearing the uniform of Identity Evropa (now the American Identity Movement), as a “joke”?Extremists hide behind humor and irony to cloud judgments from others, begging the question of can we have practice without belief? But, ultimately, practice and belief are intertwined – the regret of the Runaway Racist is not because he suddenly realized he did not “believe”, but rather was forced to face the consequences of his belief, something that he as a white man perhaps never really had to confront. The cultural reach of dissimulation, in particular hiding true intent behind the claim of “irony”, is vast - YouTuber Pewdiepie claimed his use of racial and anti-Semitic slurs and putting on an entire Ku Klux Klan uniform in the middle of a video were “accidental” only after considerable backlash (Picheta). It has to be noted, however, that Pewdiepie is referenced in the manifesto of the Christchurch shooter – specifically, the shooter yelled during his livestream “subscribe to Pewdiepie”, (Lorenz). Pewdiepie and many other trolls, once called out for their behavior, and regardless of their actual intent, double down on their claims of irony to distract from the reality of their behaviors and actions.The normalization of this kind of content in mainstream platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and even Instagram show how 4chan and alt-right Internet culture has seeped out of its borders and exists everywhere online. This “coded irony” is not only enabled rhetorically due to irony’s slippery definition, but also digitally via these online media (Weatherby). The aesthetics of the troll are present in every single platform and are disseminated everywhere – memes are small cultural units meant to be passed on (Shifman), and although one can argue it was not memes alone that resulted in the rise of the alt-right and the election of Donald Trump, memes are a part of the larger puzzle of the political radicalization process. The role of the Internet in radicalization is so powerful and insidious because of the presentation of content – it is funny, edgy, ironic, offensive, and outrageous. But these behaviors and attitudes are not just appealing to some kind of adolescent-like desire to push boundaries of what is and is not socially acceptable and/or politically incorrect (Marwick and Lewis), and calling it such clouds people’s perceptions of their level of sophistication in shaping political discourse.Memes and the alt-right are a noted phenomenon, and these visual cultures created by trolls on message boards have aided in the rise of the current political situation worldwide (Hodge and Hallgrimsdottir). We are well in the midst of a type of warfare based on not weapons and bodies, but information and data - in which memes and other elements of the far right’s political aesthetic play an important role (Molander et al.; Prier; Bogerts and Fielitz). The rise of the online troll as a political player and the alt-right are merely the logical outcomes of these systems.ConclusionThe alt-right’s spread was possible because of the trolling cultures and aesthetics of dissimulation created in message boards that predate 4chan (Kitada). The memes and inflammatory statements made by them serve multiple purposes, ranging from an intention to incite outrage among non-members of the group to signal group belonging and identity. In some odd way, if people do not understand the content, the content actually speaks louder and, in more volumes, that it would if its intent was more straightforward – in their confusion, people give these trolling techniques more attention and amplification in their attempt to make sense of them. Through creating confusion, distraction, and uncertainty around the legitimacy of messages, hand signs, and even memes, the alt-right has elevated the aestheticization of politics to a degree that Walter Benjamin could perhaps not have predicted in his initial lament about the distracted masses of fascist regimes (McManus). The political dimensions of trolling and the cognitive uncertainty that it creates is a part of its goal. Dismissing trolls is no longer an option, but also regarding them as sinister political operatives may be overblowing their significance. In the end, “ironic hate speech” is still hate speech, and by couching their extremist ideology in meme format they make their extremist beliefs more palatable -- and nobody is completely immune to their strategies.ReferencesAllyn, Bobby. “The ‘OK’ Hand Gesture Is Now Listed as a Symbol of Hate.” NPR 2019. <https://www.npr.org/2019/09/26/764728163/the-ok-hand-gesture-is-now-listed-as-a-symbol-of-hate>.Anti-Defamation League. “No, the ‘OK’ Gesture Is Not a Hate Symbol.” Anti-Defamation League. 10 Dec. 2017 <https://www.adl.org/blog/no-the-ok-gesture-is-not-a-hate-symbol>.———. “Okay Hand Gesture.” Anti-Defamation League. 28 Feb. 2020 <https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/okay-hand-gesture>.Atkinson, David C. “Charlottesville and the Alt-Right: A Turning Point?” Politics, Groups, and Identities 6.2 (2018): 309-15.Benjamin, Ruha. Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity, 2019.Benjamin, Walter. 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Social virtual spaces proliferate on the contemporary Internet and some 80% of Internet users may now be regularly visiting them (Daniel). In the following discussion, I shall discuss one such social space—a multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) called Second Life (SL as it is referred to by residents)—and argue that complex and dialogic links exist between the offline user and her/his online representative, the avatar.I shall begin by presenting a brief overview of relevant theoretical concepts drawn largely from symbolic interactionist theorists. I shall then discuss where we might situate the avatar within the wider context of persona studies and explore the complexity involved in developing a sense of self via an avatar (or persona). Finally, I shall draw on my own experience in SL to illustrate the two-way nature of the processes under discussion.Mirrors and SelvesWhen one looks into a mirror, the mirror’s silver backing (the tain) allows a view of self and surroundings reflected back. Yet even in this case, our reflection has subtle and fascinating differences, it is not quite exactly “us.” Explanations for the effect this has on us come from various theoretical perspectives. For example, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan writes that very young children experience in play the relation “between the movements assumed in the image and the reflected environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality it reduplicates” (2). The word “virtual” suggests a gap between the child’s performance and the exhibition of that performance in the mirror. Lacan contends that the child itself does not perceive this gap, but rather mistakes the image for the thing itself—a méconnaissance that ensures we accept the mirror image as “us.” The tain is thus simultaneously restrictive, because it has a limited field of view, and enabling, because it provides one of our first experiences of our self as other.From a symbolic interaction perspective, C. H. Cooley develops the mirror analogy in his Looking Glass Self concept. For Cooley, the self develops in relation to how we imagine we look to others and we learn to see others as our “mirror.” Our reflection in their perceptions requires us to imagine how we appear to others and then how they judge our appearance. Finally, we develop a sense of ourselves based on that judgement. Thus, others with whom we interact reflect us back to ourselves and we view our self from the viewpoint of others whose signs we learn to interpret. Two consequences arise. First, we could receive different reflections back from different individuals. Second, we become habituated to a gap between performance of self, its reception, and the reflection of that performance back to us.Erving Goffman’s work on self-presentation and interaction rituals offers further dimensions to understanding this process, stressing the importance of impression management to monitor inconsistencies in performance of the self as it appears to others. For Goffman, this management occurs both before the performance as we prepare ourselves in the back stage, and on the front stage as we perform for our audience. Social interaction is thus a performance, governed by social rules and rituals understood by both audience and performer. The dialectic relationship between performance and its reception introduces an element of intentionality to the performance itself. When the performance is not well received, for example, its reflection back to the performer may lead to adjustments in the performance to correct flaws brought about by failure to appropriately follow the rules of interaction. Through interaction with others, therefore, we learn dramaturgically appropriate roles and performances and we come to understand the nuances involved in successful enactment. The “audience” for whom we perform may be either internalised or actual. In either case, the image that we see in the mirror, and the image we imagine reflected back is both “us” and something more. But it is unhelpful to think of the internalised and actual as dichotomous.All three models so far discussed intuit a space between performance and reflection, suggesting that we experience our self through “symbols, language, social structures, and situated variables of social interaction” (Waskul and Lust 338-39) rather than directly. Even our image in an actual mirror extends, then, beyond the tain by which the glass is backed because we overlay what we see in the mirror with social nuances arising outside of the image-reflection dyad. Rather than consider this image a reflection of “us,” it is helpful to think of it as a persona—the personality (or presence) that a person adopts and presents to other people. It may be “our” persona in that it is linked to a physical person, but, as noted above, it may also be contextually multiple and variously mediated through social interaction and symbols such as dress.To explore more fully the interplay between person and persona I shall now introduce online contexts as sites of reflection, beginning with a brief discussion of the avatar as persona.Online MirrorsMarshall argues that contemporary culture exhibits an expansive world of online persona creation with individuals increasingly engaging in self-branding (Personifying). Although Marshall does not discuss MUVEs, his observation is equally applicable to such environments. In MUVEs, as in the online contexts Barbour and Marshall discuss, persona creation is a process of strategic intentionality whereby we present a chosen aspect from among the many to be found in us all. In MUVES the vehicle for that creation is the avatar. The avatar is an individual’s embodiment in virtual space, an extension of self through which the user experiences the virtual world (Behm-Morawitz). Just as the persona permits us “to explore the masks of identity” (Marshall, Personifying 380), the avatar offers opportunities for exploration and experimentation. For Marshall the persona in the public on-line world is constructed by media and communication systems and enacted through individual intention and agency (Personifying). The avatar is similarly constructed and enacted. Both persona and avatar are mutable and, as Marshall suggests in relation to persona, part of a specular economy manifesting an increasing consciousness of self-presentation and others’ perceptions (Specular). I do not think it overstated to indicate these similarities with the composite term “avatar-persona.”The graphical object-body is the vehicle whereby MUVE users experience interacting with others and with their environment (Messinger et al.). They experience their avatar self as if it were their actual self (Behm-Morawitz). Our virtual experiences are grounded in, and inextricably linked to, our physicality. One’s “presence” with one’s avatar may facilitate and be uniquely linked to avatar influence on the offline self (Behm-Morawitz). In this sense “presence”—the sense of being actually present and being recognised as present by others there—may bridge both sides of the screen. This two-way transfer is analogous to the person’s capacity to move others into action noted by Marshall (Personifying). Further, as some research has shown, the representation of self through an avatar not only effects online behaviour but actually may also have continued effects on offline behaviour and avatars may come to change who we are in both online and offline environments (Yee and Bailenson).Marshall (Specular) argues that the online and mobile media screen as mirror produces persona and that the mirror as a surface reflects and allows one to be seen and to interrelate or communicate with others. The MUVE also acts as a virtual mirror screen within which the avatar-persona operates. The avatar-persona is the virtual analogue of the mirror persona discussed in relation to Lacan and symbolic interaction formulations. I turn now to how these processes and interconnections manifest in SL in order to explore the complexities inherent in the interplay of self, avatar-persona and other.SL is a three dimensional virtual world where “everyone you see is a real person and every place you visit is built by people just like you” (http://secondlife.com/whatis/?lang=en-US). SL “residents” (as they refer to themselves) engage in role-playing games in-world, co-create content with other residents, and indulge in a huge variety of social activities including sexual and/or affective relationships with other residents. SL is an immersive social environment offering sophisticated graphical building tools, avatar appearance modification potentials, and both synchronous (real time) and asynchronous (delayed) avatar-to-avatar communication for residents who are geographically located in all parts of the offline world.In MUVEs, one sees the avatar-persona as a third person. In SL this is due to the potential for 360-degree camera views of the avatar, ensuring that our avatar becomes the object of our view, placing us in a position both of an active I controlling an avatar and a distanced other watching that self move and speak (Zhao). These dynamics raise interesting questions about interaction, self-presentation, and self-construction (Gottschalk), the answers to which represent a continuum between two far from mutually exclusive poles. On the one hand, research based on SL (see for example work by Messinger et al., or Martey and Consalvo) has shown that, despite an almost limitless potential for modification, most avatars are idealised representations of their creator’s offline selves. Given this correlation between online and offline manifestations, I suggest that the avatar operates more like a mirror that is not wholly restricted by the tain.On the other hand, writers such as Sherry Turkle have argued (before the existence of MUVEs) that the Internet permits multiplicity and mutability in subjectivity. In a contemporary context social virtual worlds provide “a free ‘potential space’ where real individuals—qua avatars—can and do attempt to create an alternative reality. Here they simultaneously concretize their individualistic fantasies […] and enact aspects of their selves they did not know exist, were too embarrassed to admit, or always wanted to master” (Gottschalk 521-22). SL permits hybridity of identity, plasticity of form, and multiplicity of avatars, ensuring fluid and chimerical possibilities (Morie and Verhulsdonck) for single or multiple avatar-persona per offline self. Residents frequently switch between avatar-persona to suit particular needs or social contexts. In this respect, SL is less a mirror than a kaleidoscope, where changing patterns emerge with a turn of the lens.In neither case is the process one-way. “When people define the virtual as real, it becomes real in its consequences, and the reciprocal effects between the self and the avatar extend to more central aspects of one’s life as well” (Gottschalk 513). Avatars are distinct selves, not just conduits for offline identities. They socially manifest a projective identity or identities that are influential intersections of offline people and online representations situated within socially performed dramaturgical selves (Martey and Consalvo).Cunningham writes that “[a]fter virtual reality, ‘reality’ is not the same, but has been altered by the bleeding of both ‘worlds’ into each other, by their mutual inseparability” (16). In this mutual inseparability a dialogic interaction occurs between offline self and avatar-persona. Both engage in a continuous interaction and active negotiation between the parties. It is in this dialogic that we find the eventual outcome of a mirror without a tain. The mirror’s “glass” no longer requires its tain for reflection because the dialogic between offline self and avatar-persona is maintained by the process of creation, performance, reception and exhibition as all parties operate under the gaze of others outside their individual dialogic. Other SL residents also see the avatar-persona, just as the offline creator interacts with others in physical space outside SL.Symbolic interactionist perspectives assist in understanding the reflexive processes through which individuals come to see themselves as objects of their own and others’ gaze(s) (Aspling). As object to one’s self and to others, self and avatar have already rehearsed a performance in their own view before permitting others to see that performance and reflect it back. Watching others respond to our avatar-persona provides feedback for self-representation and communication patterns (Gottschalk). Just as a curator assembles and presents an exhibition, our avatar image is “returned” to us subtly changed, re-presented to us at one step removed from its creation, rearranged in the judgement of the other, and manifesting the imagined reception by its viewer. This expands the self’s repertoire beyond SL, continuing to inform us offline and online (Gottschalk).The avatar-persona stimulates objective and rational observation of oneself, generating the “observing ego” (Gottschalk 514-515). Crucially, however, the avatar is more than just a placeholder for the self. The avatar is a site for self-making in its own right because it informs our offline life. In this way, the avatar may force us to partake in our own self-construction by taking “the role of the other,” another who is in fact both a persona and a person (Waskul and Lust 349-350). My own experience in SL further illustrates these ideas.Self-Representation—One Avatar’s Experience“Choices about avatar appearance can be understood as social performances that communicate both social and individual identities” (Martey and Consalvo 166). Although SL purports to confer on its residents near total control over all aspects of appearance and in-world identity, as in the offline world personal appearance in SL involves situated, bodily practices that are both discursively practical and function as a collection of codes that communicate to other users.I first learned of SL in 2007. Then, as now, it was depicted as a world of limitless possibilities. My first experience of avatar life was, however, somewhat disappointing. Entering the first stage in the avatar creation process and hopeful of creating an androgynous avatar, I was given only two default choices—male or female. Reflecting my offline self, I chose to make my first avatar female. I chose a name that was not gender-specific but that had personal meaning to me. Once in-world, and realising that I could drastically modify my avatar’s body shape, I set about making the avatar as androgynous as I could. The body modification was challenging, but not impossible. The avatar appearance modifiers were not fine grained enough to make the face authentically androgynous however. To circumvent this drawback I decided to make my avatar a “Furry”. Furries are anthropomorphic animal avatars with human figures and animal heads, hands, feet and tails. An animal head for my avatar-persona allowed me to avoid gender specificity.Thinking that I had successfully met my goal, I next ventured into the social spaces of SL. The first thing another avatar said to me was “So are you a boy or a girl in real life?” I evaded the question then, and continued to evade similar questions for three months. During that time I was frequently derided for my reluctance to gender identify. Although the sociologist in me found this fascinating, the almost constant questioning began to impact upon my enjoyment of SL. Eventually after one particularly nasty attack (called “griefing” in SL) my avatar was left so badly distorted that I decided to “retire” it. Examining my reaction, I was surprised to find that the remorselessly unpleasant reaction to my avatar had generated the bleeding between worlds referred to by Cunningham—my performance was exhibited back to me in unfavourable terms. I was upset. I had chosen a name for the avatar, an animal identity, and a personality that all had RL significance for me.My experience underscored for me a point Martey and Consalvo make. Avatar identity is self-constructed, they argue, within the constraints of the offline user’s goals, (I wanted to create and live in an androgynous avatar) the interface used to create the online appearance (the SL viewer interface was not sophisticated enough for me to easily do this, nor did it give me a third choice for the gender of my avatar), and the social systems of the virtual space (there was clearly an expectation that I was not meeting by refusing to disclose my offline sex). The bleed back was enough to generate decisions by my offline self multiple times in the three-month life of that avatar. My avatar self had not met with favourable audience reaction because I had refused to comply with dramaturgical propriety by disclosing my offline sex and had failed to create a fictional offline identity to get around the issue. My fault lay in not sufficiently aligning how my avatar looked and acted with its offline correlate because I refused to disclose any actual or false offline correlate. In dramaturgical terms, I refused to interact with audience reception thus stepping outside the interaction order.ConclusionI have argued that one develops a sense of self in interaction with others through actual and conceptual mirroring. The process can occur in many contexts, even in the absence of a co-present other because we internalise the other’s view. We bring these dynamics with us to online settings. Using SL as an example, I suggested that online the mistaken singularity of self and reflection noted by Lacan becomes multiple in the way a kaleidoscope generates multiple patterns when turned by the user. SL’s visuality and its potential for three-dimensional viewing of one’s avatar encourages a looking-glass-self approach to identity—a re-presentation of the self-object as we imagine others see it. We achieve identity in the eyes of multiple others, including seeing our avatar self as object. Avatar-residents in SL may act as mirrors to the offline self, but interactions are multiply complex, blurring the boundaries between online and offline experience(s), between offline person and online avatar-persona and between avatars and other avatar-residents. Impression management, interactional dynamics, and strategic self-representation render the avatar-persona one facet of the offline self rather than its entirety. Audience reaction comes not only from other avatar residents, but also from the offline self responding to that reaction and their own understanding of dramaturgical propriety. SL is a place where avatar-personas are fashioned in liminal boundaries between interaction between the self and its avatar/other (Waskul and Lust) as well as clarifying the interactions between self and others. Like other online contexts, SL is a mirror without a tain. In its specular economy, reflectivity is unbounded, an endlessly recombinant field of self-other interactions, a kaleidoscope of potential.ReferencesAspling, Fredrik. “The Private and the Public in Online Presentations of the Self: A Critical Development of Goffman’s Dramaturgical Perspective.” Stockholm’s Universitet, 2011.Barbour, Kim, and David Marshall. “The Academic Online: Constructing Persona through the World Wide Web.” First Monday 17.9 (2012). 13 May 2014 ‹ http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/vew/3969/3292 ›.Behm-Morawitz, Elizabeth. “Mirrored Selves: The Influence of Self-Presence in a Virtual World on Health, Appearance, and Well-Being.” Computers in Human Behavior 29 (2013): 119-128.Cooley, Charles Horton. Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Scribner’s, 1964.Cunningham, Kim. “Virtually Transformed: Second Life’s Implications for the Status of the Body.” 102nd American Sociological Association Annual Meeting. 2006.Daniel, John. “The Self Set Free.” Therapy Today 19.8 (2008).Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor, 1959.Gottschalk, Simon. “The Presentation of Avatars in Second Life: Self and Interaction in Social Virtual Spaces.” Symbolic Interaction 33.4 (2010).Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. London and New York: Routledge, 1977.Marshall, David. “Personifying Agency: The Public-Persona-Place-Issue Continuum.” Celebrity Studies 4.3 (2013): 369-371.Marshall, David. “The Specular Economy.” Society 47 (2010): 498-502.Martey, Rosa Mikael, and Mia Consalvo. “Performing the Looking-Glass Self: Avatar Appearance and Group Identity in Second Life.” Popular Communication 9.3 (2011): 165-80.Messinger, Paul R., et al. “On the Relationship between My Avatar and Myself.” Journal of Virtual Worlds Research 1.1 (2008): 1-17.Morie, Jacquelyn Ford, and Gustav Verhulsdonck. “Body/Persona/Action! Emerging Non-Anthropomorphic Communication and Interaction in Virtual Worlds.” Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology. ACM, 2008.Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Touchstone, 1995.Waskul, Dennis, and Matt Lust. “Role-Playing and Playing Roles: The Person, Player, and Persona in Fantasy Role-Playing.” Symbolic Interaction 27.3 (2004): 333-56.Yee, N., and J. Bailenson. “The Proteus Effect: The Effect of Transformed Self-Representation on Behavior.” Human Communication Research 33.3 (2007): 271-290.Zhao, Shanyang. “The Digital Self: Through the Looking Glass of Telecopresent Others.” Symbolic Interaction 28.3 (2005): 387-405.

The past two decades have seen the publication of at least half a dozen books that consider the part that fairs, circuses, sideshows and freakshows play in the continuing cultural labour to define, categorise and control the human body, including Robert Bogdan’s Freakshow, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies, and her edited collection Freakery, and Rachel Adams’s Sideshow USA. These writers cast the freakshow as a theatre of culture, worthy of critical attention precisely because of the ways in which it has provided a popular forum for staging, solidifying and transforming ideas about the body and bodily difference, and because of its prominence in the project of modernity (Garland-Thomson “From Wonder to Error” 2-13). They point to the theatrical mechanisms by which the freakshow maps cultural anxieties about corporeal difference across ‘suitable’ bodies. For, as Bogdan (3) says, being a freak is far more than a fact of biology. The freak personae that populate the Western cultural imaginary—the fat lady, the bearded lady, the hermaphrodite and the geek—can only be produced by a performative isolation, manipulation and exaggeration of the peculiar characteristics of particular human bodies. These peculiarities have to be made explicit, in Rebecca Schneider’s (1) terms; the horror-inducing tropes of the savage, the bestial and the monstrous have to be cast across supposedly suitable and compliant flesh. The scopic mechanisms of the freakshow as a theatre, as a cabinet of corporeal curiosities in which spectators are excited, amazed and edified by the spectacle of the extraordinary body, thus support the specific forms of seeing and looking by which freak bodies are produced. It would, however, be a mistake to suggest that the titillating threat of this face-to-face encounter with the Levinasian other fully destabilises the space between signifier and signified, between the specific body and the symbolic framework in which it sits. In a somewhat paradoxical cultural manoeuvre, the ableist, sexist and racist symbolic frameworks of the freakshow unfold according to what Deleuze and Guattari (178) would call a logic of sameness. The roles, relationships and representational mechanisms of the freakshow—including the ‘talkers’ that frame the spectator’s engagement with the extraordinary body of the freak—in fact function to delineate “degrees of deviance” (178) or difference from an illusory bodily norm. So configured, the monstrous corporeality of the freak is also monstrously familiar, and is made more so by the freak spectacle’s frequent emphasis on the ways in which non-normative bodies accommodate basic functions such as grooming and eating. In such incarnations, the scenography and iconography of the freakshow in fact draws spectators into performative (mis)recognitions that manage the difference of other bodies by positioning them along a continuum that confirms the stability of the symbolic order, and the centrality of the able, white, male self in this symbolic order. Singular, specific, extraordinary bodies are subject to what might, in a Levinasian paradigm, be called the violence of categorisation and comprehension (“Is Ontology Fundamental?” 9). The circumstances of the encounter reduce the radical, unreadable difference of the other, transporting them “into the horizon of knowledge” (“Transcendence and Height” 12), and transforming them into something that serves the dominant cultural logic. In this sense, Petra Kuppers suggests, “the psychic effects of the freak spectacle have destabilizing effects, assaulting the boundaries of firm knowledge about self, but only to strengthen them again in cathartic effect” (45). By casting traits they abhor across the freak body (Garland-Thomson Extraordinary Bodies 55-56), spectators become complicit in this abhorrence; comforted, cajoled and strangely pleasured by a sense of distance from what they desire not to be. The subversive potential of the prodigious body evaporates (Garland-Thomson “From Wonder to Error” 3; Extraordinary Bodies 78). An evaporation more fully effected, writers on the freakshow explain, as the discursive construct of the freak was drawn into the sphere of medical spectacle in the late nineteenth century. As the symbolic framework for understanding disabled bodies ‘advances’ from the freak, the monster and the mutant to the medical specimen (Garland-Thomson “From Wonder to Error” 13; Extraordinary Bodies 70, 78-80; Synder and Mitchell 370-373; Stephens 492), the cultural trajectory away from extraordinary bodies with the capacity to expand the classes and categories of the human is complete. The medical profession finally fulfils the cultural compulsion to abstract peculiar bodily characteristics into symptoms, and, as Foucault says in The Birth of the Clinic, these symptoms become surveillable, and controllable, within an objective schema of human biology. Physical differences and idiosyncrasies are “enclosed within the singularity of the patient, in that region of ‘subjective symptoms’ that—for the doctor—defines not only the mode of knowledge, but the world of objects to be known” (xi). The freak body becomes no more than an example of human misfortune, to be examined, categorised and cared for by medical experts behind closed doors, and the freakshow fades from the stage of popular culture (Garland-Thomson Extraordinary Bodies 70). There can, of course, be no denying the need to protect people with disabilities from exploitation at the service of a cultural fetish that enacts a compulsion to define and control bodily difference. However, recent debates in disability, cultural and performance studies have been characterised by the desire to reconsider the freakshow as a site for contesting some of the cultural logics it enacts. Theorists like Synder and Mitchell argue that medical discourse “disarms the [disabled] body of its volatile potency” (378), in the process denying people with disabilities a potentially interesting site to contest the cultural logics by which their bodies are defined. The debate begins with Bogdan’s discussion of the ways in which well-meaning disability activists may, in their desire to protect people with disabilities from exploitative practices and producers, have overlooked the fact that freakshows provided people with disabilities a degree of independence and freedom otherwise impossible (280-81). After all, as disabled performer Mat Fraser says in his documentary Born Freak, The Victorian marvels found fame and some fortune, and this actually raised the visibility, even the acceptability, of disabled people in general during a time when you could be attacked on the streets just for looking different. These disabled performers found independence and commanded respect.… If I had been born a hundred years ago, given the alternatives of—what? living the life of a village monster or idiot or being poked or prodded for cataloguing by medical types—there’s no doubt about it, I would have wanted to be in show business. (Born Freak) This question of agency extends to discussion of whether disabled performers like Fraser can, by consciously appropriating the figures, symbols and scenography of the freakshow, start to deconstruct the mechanisms by which this contested sphere of cultural practice has historically defined them, confronting spectators with their own complicity in the construction of the freak. In her analysis of Coney Island’s Sideshows by the Seashore, Elizabeth Stephens reflects on this contemporary sideshow’s capacity to reclaim the political currency of the freak. For Stephens, sideshows are sites in which norms about the body, its limits and capabilities, are theatricalized and transformed into spectacle, but, in which, for this very reason, they can also be contested. Non-normative bodies are not simply exhibited or put on display on the sideshow stage, but are rather performed as the unstable—indeed, destabilising—product of the dynamic interrelationship between performer, audience and theatrical space. (486) Theorists like Stephens (487) point to disabled performers who manipulate the scopic and discursive mechanisms of the sideshow, street performance and circus, setting them against more or less personal accounts of the way their bodies have historically been seen, to disrupt the modes of subjection the freak spectacle makes possible and precipitate a crisis in prescribed categories of meaning. Stephens (485-498) writes of Mat Fraser, who reperformed the historical personal of the short-armed Sealo the Sealboy, and Jennifer Miller, who reperformed the persona of Zenobia the bearded lady, at Sideshows by the Seashore. Sharon Mazer (257-276) writes of Katy Dierlam, who donned a Dolly Dimples babydoll dress to reperform the clichéd fat lady figure Helon Melon, again at Sideshows by the Seashore, counterposing Melon’s monstrous obesity with comments affirming her body’s potent humanity, and quotes from feminist scholars and artists such as Suzy Orbach, Karen Finley and Annie Sprinkle. Sharon Synder and David Mitchell (383) write of Mary Duffy, who reperforms the armless figure of the Venus de Milo. These practices constitute performative interventions into the cultural sphere, aligned with a broader set of contemporary performance practices which contest the symbolic frameworks by which racial and gender characteristics are displayed on the popular stage in similar ways. Their confrontational performance strategies recall, for instance, the work of American performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who reappropriates colonial and pop cultural figurations of the racialised body in works like Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit…, in which he and Coco Fusco cast themselves as two caged savages. In such works, Gómez-Peña and his collaborators use parallel performance strategies to engage the “spectacle of the Other-as-freak” (297). “The idea is to exaggerate the features of fear and desire in the Anglo imagination and ‘spectacularize’ our ‘extreme identities’, so to speak, with the clear understanding that these identities have been invented by the surgery of the global media” (297) Gómez-Peña says. These remobilisations of the monstrous operate within the paradigm of the explicit, a term Schneider coined a decade ago to describe the performance art practices of women who write the animalised, sexualised characteristics with which they are symbolically aligned across their own corporeally ‘suitable’ bodies, replaying their culturally assigned identities “with a voluble, ‘in your face’ vengeance” (100), “a literal vengeance” (109). Such practices reclaim the destablising potential of the freak spectacle, collapsing, complicating or exploding the space between signifier and signified to show that the freak is a discursive construct (22-23), and thus for Schneider, following Benjamin, threatening the whole symbolic system with collapse (2, 6). By positioning their bodies as a ground that manifestly fails to ground the reality they represent, these performers play with the idea that the reality of the freak is really just part of the order of representation. There is nothing behind it, nothing beyond it, nothing up the magician’s sleeve—identity is but a sideshow hall of mirrors in which the ‘blow off’ is always a big disappointment. Bodies marked by disability are not commodified, or even clearly visible, in the Western capitalist scopic economy in the same way as Schneider’s women performers. Nevertheless, disabled performers still use related strategies to reclaim a space for what Schneider calls a postmodern politics of transgression (4), exposing “the sedimented layers of signification themselves” (21), rather than establishing “an originary, true or redemptive body” (21) beneath. The contestational logic of these modes of practice notwithstanding, Stephens (486) notes that performers still typically cite a certain ambivalence about their potential. There are, after all, specific risks for people with disabilities working in this paradigm that are not fully drawn out in the broader debate about critical reappropriation of racist and sexist imagery in performance art. Mobilisations of the freak persona are complicated by the performer’s own corporeal ‘suitability’ to that persona, by the familiar theatrical mechanisms of recognition and reception (which can remain undertheorised in meta-level considerations of the political currency of the freakshow in disability and cultural—rather than performance—studies), and by a dominant cultural discourse that insists on configuring disability as an individual problem detached from the broader sphere of identity politics (Sandahl 598-99). In other words, the territory that still needs to be addressed in this emergent field of practice is the ethics of reception, and the risk of spectatorial (mis)recognitions that reduce the political potency of the freak spectacle. The main risk, of course, is that mobilisations of the freak persona may still be read by spectators as part of the phenomenon they are trying to challenge, the critical counterpositions failing to register, or failing to disrupt fully the familiar scopic and discursive framework. More problematically, the counterpositions themselves may be reduced by spectators to a rhetorical device that distances them from the corporeal reality of the encounter with the other, enabling them to interpret or explain the experience of disability as a personal experience by which an individual comes to accommodate their problems. Whilst the human desire to construct narrative and psychological contexts for traumatic experience cannot be denied, Carrie Sandahl (583) notes that there is a risk that the encounter with the disabled body will be interpreted as part of the broader phenomenon Synder and Mitchell describe in Narrative Prosthesis, in which disability is little more than a metaphor for the problems people have to get past in life. In this interpretative paradigm, disability enters a discursive and theoretical terrain that fails to engage fully the lived experience of the other. Perhaps most problematically, mobilisations of the freak persona may be read as one more manifestation of the distinctively postmodern desire to break free from the constraints of culturally condoned identity categories. This desire finds expression in the increasingly prevalent cultural phenomenon of voluntary enfreakment, in which people voluntarily differentiate, or queer their own experience of self. As Fraser says when he finds out that a company of able-bodied freaks is competing with him for audiences at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, “[t]he irony is, these days, everyone is trying to get in on our act” (Born Freak). In a brave new world where everybody wants to be a freak, activist artists “must be watchful”, Gómez-Peña warns, “for we can easily get lost in the funhouse of virtual mirrors, epistemological inversions, and distorted perceptions” (288). The reclamation of disability as a positive metaphor for a more dispersed set of human differences in the spectacle of daily life (287-98), and in theoretical figurations of feminist philosophy that favour the grotesque, the monstrous and the mechanical (Haraway Simians, Cyborgs and Women; Braidotti Nomadic Subjects), raises questions for Garland-Thomson (“Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory” 9) and Sandahl (581-83). If “disability serves as a master trope for difference,” Sandahl says, then anybody can adopt it “…to serve as a metaphor expressing their own outsider status, alienation and alterity, not necessarily the social, economic and political concerns of actual disabled people” (583). The work of disabled performers can disappear into a wider sphere of self-differentiated identities, which threatens to withdraw ‘disability’ as a politically useful category around which a distinctive group of people can generate an activist politics. To negotiate these risks, disabled performers need to work somewhere between a specific, minoritarian politics and a universal, majoritarian politics, as Sedgwick describes in Epistemology of the Closet (91; cf. Garland-Thompson “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory” 5; cf. Stephens 493). Performers need to make their experience of otherness explicit, so that their corporeal specificity is not abstracted into a symbolic system that serves the dominant cultural logic. Performers need to contextualise this experience in social terms, so that it is not isolated from the sphere of identity politics. But performers cannot always afford to allow the freak persona to become one more manifestation of the myriad idiosyncratic identities that circulate in the postmodern popular imaginary. It is by negotiating these risks that performers encourage spectators to experience—if only fleetingly, and provisionally—a relationship to the other that is characterised not by generalisation, domestication and containment (Levinas “Substitution” 80, 88), but by respect for the other’s radical alterity, by vulnerability, and, in Derrida’s reformation of Levinasian ethics, by a singular, reciprocal and undecidable responsibility towards the other (Derrida 60-70). This is what Levinas would call an ethical relationship, in which the other exists, but as an excess, a class of being that can be recognised but never seized by comprehension (“Is Ontology Fundamental?” 7, “Transcendence and Height” 17), or sublimated as a category of, or complement to, the same (13, “Meaning and Sense” 51). Mat Fraser’s mobilisation of Sealo the Sealboy is one of the most engaging examples of the way disabled performers negotiate the complexities of this terrain. On his website, Fraser says he has always been aware of the power of confrontational presentations of his own body, and has found live forms that blur the boundaries between freakshow, sideshow and conventional theatre the best forums for “the more brutal and confrontational aspect of my investigation into disability’s difficult interface with mainstream cultural concerns” (MatFraser.co.uk). Fraser’s appropriation of Sealo was born of a fascination with the historical figure of Stanley Berent. “Stanley Berent was an American freakshow entertainer from the 1940s who looked like me,” Fraser says. “He had phocomelia. That’s the medical term for my condition. It literally means seal-like limbs. Berent’s stage name was Sealo the Sealboy” (Born Freak). Fraser first restaged Sealo after a challenge from Dick Zigun, founder of the modern Sideshows by the Seashore. He restaged Berant’s act, focused on Berant’s ability to do basic things like shaving and sawing wood with his deformed hands, for the sideshow’s audiences. While Fraser had fun playing the character on stage, he says he felt a particular discomfort playing the character on the bally platform used to pull punters into the sideshow from the street outside. “There is no powerful dynamic there,” Fraser laments. “It’s just ‘come look at the freak’” (Born Freak). Accordingly, after a season at Sideshows by the Seashore, Fraser readapted the experience as a stage play, Sealboy: Freak, in which Sealo is counterposed with the character Tam, “a modern disabled actor struggling to be seen as more than a freak” (Born Freak). This shift in the theatrical mechanisms by which he stages the freak gives Fraser the power to draw contemporary, politically correct spectators at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival into the position of sideshow gawkers, confronting them with their own fascination with his body. A potent example is a post-audition scene, in which Tam says I read this book once that said that the mainstream will only see a disabled performer in the same way they view a performing seal. Very clever, but just mimicry. No. No it can’t be like that anymore. We’ve all moved on. People are no longer more fascinated by how I do things, rather than what I say. I am an actor, not a fucking freak. (Born Freak) But, as Tam says this, he rolls a joint, and spectators are indeed wrapped up in how he does it, hardly attending to what he says. What is interesting about Fraser’s engagement with Sealo in Sealboy: Freak is the way he works with a complicated—even contradictory—range of presentational strategies. Fraser’s performance becomes explicit, expositional and estranging by turns. At times, he collapses his own identity into that of the freak, the figure so stark, so recognisable, so much more harshly drawn than its real-life referent, that it becomes a simulacrum (cf. Baudrillard 253-282), exceeding and escaping the complications of the human corporeality beneath it. Fraser allows spectators to inhabit the horror, and the humour, his disabled identity has historically provoked, reengaging the reactions they hide in everyday life. And, perhaps, if they are an educated audience at the Fringe, applauding themselves for their own ability to comprehend the freak, and the crudity of sideshow display. However, self-congratulatory comprehension of the freak persona is interrupted by the discomforting encounter with Tam, suspending—if only provisionally—spectators’ ability to reconcile this reaction with their credentials as a politically correct audience. What a closer look at mobilisations of the freak in performances such as Fraser’s demonstrates is that manipulating the theatrical mechanisms of the stage, and their potential to rapidly restructure engagement with the extraordinary body, enables performers to negotiate the risk of (mis)recognition embedded in the face-to-face encounter between self and spectator. So configured, the stage can become a site for contesting the cultural logic by which the disabled body has historically been defined. It can challenge spectators to experience—if fleetingly—the uncertainties of the face-to-face encounter with the extraordinary body, acknowledging this body’s specificity, without immediately being able to abstract, domesticate or abdicate responsibility for it—or abdicate responsibility for their own reaction to it. Whilst spectators’ willingness to reflect further on their complicity in the construction of the other remains an open and individual question, these theatrical manipulations can at least increase the chance that the cathartic effect of the encounter with the so-called freak will be disrupted or deferred. References Adams, Rachel. Sideshow USA: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination. Chicago, IL: University of Chigaco Press, 2001. Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precision of Simulacra”. Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation. Ed. Brian Wallis. Boston, MA: David R. Godine, 1984, 253-282. Born Freak. Dir. Paul Sapin. Written Paul Sapin and Mat Fraser. Planet Wild for Channel 4 UK, 2001. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Thought. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994. Bogdan, Robert. Freakshow: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Fraser, Mat. “Live Art”. MatFraser.co.uk. n.date. 30 April 2008 ‹http://www.matfraser.co.uk/live_art.php›. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception. Trans. AM Sheridan Smith. London: Routledge, 1976. Garland-Thomson, Rosmarie. “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory”. NSWA Journal 14.3 (2002): 1-33. ———. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1997. ———. “Introduction: From Wonder to Error—A Genealogy of Freak Discourse”. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. Ed. Rosmarie Garland-Thomspon. New York, NY and London: New York University Press, 1996. Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. “Culture-in-extremis: Performing Against the Cultural Backdrop of the Mainstream Bizarre”. The Performance Studies Reader. Ed. Henry Bial. London and New York: Routledge, 2004, 287-298. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women. New York, NY: Routledge, 1991. Kuppers, Petra. Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge. New York, NY: Routledge, 2004. Levinas, Emmanuel. “Is Ontology Fundamental?”. Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Ed. Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 1-10. ———. “Transcendence and Height”. Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Ed. Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 11-31. ———. “Meaning and Sense”. Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Ed. Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 33-64. ———. “Substitution”. Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Ed. Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 79-95. Mazer, Sharon. “‘She’s so fat…’ Facing the Fat Lady at Coney Island’s Sideshows by the Seashore”. Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression. Ed. Jana Evens Braziel and Kathryn LeBesco. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001, 257-276. Sandahl, Carrie. “Black Man, Blind Man: Disability Identity Politics and Performance”. Theatre Journal 56 (2004): 597-602. Schneider, Rebecca. The Explicit Body in Performance. New York, NY and London: Routledge, 1997. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990. Snyder, Sharon L. and David T Mitchell. “Re-engaging the Body: Disability Studies and the Resistance to Embodiment”. Public Culture, 13.3 (2001): 367-389. ———. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Stephens, Elizabeth. “Cultural Fixations of the Freak Body: Coney Island and the Postmodern Sideshow”. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 20.4 (2006): 485-498. Acknowledgements An earlier version of this paper was presented at “Extreme States: Issues of Scale—Political, Performative, Emotional”, the Australasian Association for Drama Theatre and Performance Studies Annual Conference 2007.

Conurbation [f. CON- + L. urb- and urbs city + -ation] An aggregation of urban areas. (OED) Beyond the urban, further and lower even than the suburban, lies the con-urban. The conurban: with the urban, partaking of the urbane, lying against but also perhaps pushing against or being contra the urban. Conurbations stretch littorally from Australian cities, along coastlines to other cities, joining cities through the passage of previously outlying rural areas. Joining the dots between cities, towns, and villages. Providing corridors between the city and what lies outside. The conurban is an accretion, an aggregation, a piling up, or superfluity of the city: Greater London, for instance. It is the urban plus, filling the gaps between cities, as Los Angeles oozing urbanity does for the dry, desert areas abutting it (Davis 1990; Soja 1996). I wish to propose that the conurban imaginary is a different space from its suburban counterpart. The suburban has provided a binary opposition to what is not the city, what lies beneath its feet, outside its ken. Yet it is also what is greater than the urban, what exceeds it. In modernism, the city and its denizens define themselves outside what is arrayed around the centre, ringing it in concentric circles. In stark relief to the modernist lines of the skyscraper, contrasting with the central business district, central art galleries and museums, is to be found the masses in the suburbs. The suburban as a maligned yet enabling trope of modernism has been long revalued, in the art of Howard Arkeley, and in photography of suburban Gothic. It comes as no surprise to read a favourable newspaper article on the Liverpool Regional Art Gallery, in Sydney's Western Suburbs, with its exhibition on local chicken empires, Liverpool sheds, or gay and lesbians living on the city fringe. Nor to hear in the third way posturing of Australian Labor Party parliamentarian Mark Latham, the suburbs rhetorically wielded, like a Victa lawn mover, to cut down to size his chardonnay-set inner-city policy adversaries. The politics of suburbia subtends urban revisionism, reformism, revanchism, and recidivism. Yet there is another less exhausted, and perhaps exhaustible, way of playing the urban, of studying the metropolis, of punning on the city's proper name: the con-urban. World cities, as Saskia Sassen has taught us, have peculiar features: the juxtaposition of high finance and high technology alongside subaltern, feminized, informal economy (Sassen 1998). The Australian city proudly declared to be a world city is, of course, Sydney while a long way from the world's largest city by population, it is believed to be the largest in area. A recent newspaper article on Brisbane's real estate boom, drew comparisons with Sydney only to dismiss them, according to one quoted commentator, because as a world city, Sydney was sui generis in Australia, fairly requiring comparison with other world cities. One form of conurbanity, I would suggest, is the desire of other settled areas to be with the world city. Consider in this regard, the fate of Byron Bay a fate which lies very much in the balance. Byron Bay is sign that circulates in the field of the conurban. Craig MacGregor has claimed Byron as the first real urban culture outside an Australian city (MacGregor 1995). Local residents hope to keep the alternative cultural feel of Byron, but to provide it with a more buoyant economic outlook. The traditional pastoral, fishing, and whaling industries are well displaced by niche handicrafts, niche arts and craft, niche food and vegetables, a flourishing mind, body and spirit industry, and a booming film industry. Creative arts and cultural industries are blurring into creative industries. The Byron Bay area at the opening of the twenty-first century is attracting many people fugitive from the city who wish not to drop out exactly; rather to be contra wishes rather to be gently contrary marked as distinct from the city, enjoying a wonderful lifestyle, but able to persist with the civilizing values of an urban culture. The contemporary figure of Byron Bay, if such a hybrid chimera may be represented, wishes for a conurbanity. Citizens relocate from Melbourne, Canberra, and Sydney, seeking an alternative country and coastal lifestyle and, if at all possible, a city job (though without stress) (on internal migration in Australia see Kijas 2002): Hippies and hip rub shoulders as a sleepy town awakes (Still Wild About Byron, (Sydney Morning Herald, 1 January 2002). Forerunners of Byron's conurbanity leave, while others take their place: A sprawling $6.5 million Byron Bay mansion could be the ultimate piece of memorabilia for a wealthy fan of larrikin Australian actor Paul Hogan (Hoges to sell up at Byron Bay, Illawarra Mercury, 14 February 2002). The ABC series Seachange is one key text of conurbanity: Laura Gibson has something of a city job she can ply the tools of her trade as a magistrate while living in an idyllic rural location, a nice spot for a theme park of contemporary Australian manners and nostalgia for community (on Sea Change see Murphy 2002). Conurban designates a desire to have it both ways: cityscape and pastoral mode. Worth noting is that the Byron Shire has its own independent, vibrant media public sphere, as symbolized by the Byron Shire Echo founded in 1986, one of the great newspapers outside a capital city (Martin & Ellis 2002): <http://www.echo.net.au>. Yet the textual repository in city-based media of such exilic narratives is the supplement to the Saturday broadsheet papers. A case in point is journalist Ruth Ostrow, who lives in hills in the Byron Shire, and provides a weekly column in the Saturday Australian newspaper, its style gently evocative of just one degree of separation from a self-parody of New Age mores: Having permanently relocated to the hills behind Byron Bay from Sydney, it's interesting for me to watch friends who come up here on holiday over Christmas… (Ostrow 2002). The Sydney Morning Herald regards Byron Bay as another one of its Northern beaches, conceptually somewhere between Palm Beach and Pearl Beach, or should one say Pearl Bay. The Herald's fascination for Byron Bay real estate is coeval with its obsession with Sydney's rising prices: Byron Bay's hefty price tags haven't deterred beach-lovin' boomers (East Enders, Sydney Morning Herald 17 January 2002). The Australian is not immune from this either, evidence 'Boom Times in Byron', special advertising report, Weekend Australia, Saturday 2 March 2002. And plaudits from The Financial Review confirm it: Prices for seafront spots in the enclave on the NSW north coast are red hot (Smart Property, The Financial Review, 19 January 2002). Wacky North Coast customs are regularly covered by capital city press, the region functioning as a metonym for drugs. This is so with Nimbin especially, with regular coverage of the Nimbin Mardi Grass: Mardi Grass 2001, Nimbin's famous cannabis festival, began, as they say, in high spirits in perfect autumn weather on Saturday (Oh, how they danced a high old time was had by all at the Dope Pickers' Ball, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 May 2001). See too coverage of protests over sniffer dogs in Byron Bay in Easter 2001 showed (Peatling 2001). Byron's agony over its identity attracts wider audiences, as with its quest to differentiate itself from the ordinariness of Ballina as a typical Aussie seaside town (Buttrose 2000). There are national metropolitan audiences for Byron stories, readers who are familiar with the Shire's places and habits: Lismore-reared Emma Tom's 2002 piece on the politics of perving at King's beach north of Byron occasioned quite some debate from readers arguing the toss over whether wanking on the beach was perverse or par for the course: Public masturbation is a funny old thing. On one hand, it's ace that some blokes feel sexually liberated enough to slap the salami any old time… (Tom 2002). Brisbane, of course, has its own designs upon Byron, from across the state border. Brisbane has perhaps the best-known conurbation: its northern reaches bleed into the Sunshine Coast, while its southern ones salute the skyscrapers of Australia's fourth largest city, the Gold Coast (on Gold Coast and hinterland see Griffin 2002). And then the conburbating continues unabated, as settlement stretches across the state divide to the Tweed Coast, with its mimicking of Sanctuary Cove, down to the coastal towns of Ocean Shores, Brunswick Heads, Byron, and through to Ballina. Here another type of infrastructure is key: the road. Once the road has massively overcome the topography of rainforest and mountain, there will be freeway conditions from Byron to Brisbane, accelerating conurbanity. The caf is often the short-hand signifier of the urban, but in Byron Bay, it is film that gives the urban flavour. Byron Bay has its own International Film Festival (held in the near-by boutique town of Bangalow, itself conurban with Byron.), and a new triple screen complex in Byron: Up north, film buffs Geraldine Hilton and Pete Castaldi have been busy. Last month, the pair announced a joint venture with Dendy to build a three-screen cinema in the heart of Byron Bay, scheduled to open mid-2002. Meanwhile, Hilton and Castaldi have been busy organising the second Byron All Screen Celebration Film Festival (BASC), after last year's inaugural event drew 4000 visitors to more than 50 sessions, seminars and workshops. Set in Bangalow (10 minutes from Byron by car, less if you astral travel)… (Cape Crusaders, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 February 2002). The film industry is growing steadily, and claims to be the largest concentration of film-makers outside of an Australian capital city (Henkel 2000 & 2002). With its intimate relationship with the modern city, film in its Byron incarnation from high art to short video, from IMAX to multimedia may be seen as the harbinger of the conurban. If the case of Byron has something further to tell us about the transformation of the urban, we might consider the twenty-first century links between digital communications networks and conurbanity. It might be proposed that telecommunications networks make it very difficult to tell where the city starts and ends; as they interactively disperse information and entertainment formerly associated with the cultural institutions of the metropolis (though this digitization of urbanity is more complex than hyping the virtual suggest; see Graham & Marvin 1996). The bureau comes not just to the 'burbs, but to the backblocks as government offices are closed in country towns, to be replaced by online access. The cinema is distributed across computer networks, with video-on-demand soon to become a reality. Film as a cultural form in the process of being reconceived with broadband culture (Jacka 2001). Global movements of music flow as media through the North Coast, with dance music culture and the doof (Gibson 2002). Culture and identity becomes content for the information age (Castells 1996-1998; Cunningham & Hartley 2001; OECD 1998; Trotter 2001). On e-mail, no-one knows, as the conceit of internet theory goes, where you work or live; the proverbial refashioning of subjectivity by the internet affords a conurbanity all of its own, a city of bits wherever one resides (Mitchell 1995). To render the digital conurban possible, Byron dreams of broadband. In one of those bizarre yet recurring twists of Australian media policy, large Australian cities are replete with broadband infrastructure, even if by 2002 city-dwellers are not rushing to take up the services. Telstra's Foxtel and Optus's Optus Vision raced each other down streets of large Australian cities in the mid-1990s to lay fibre-coaxial cable to provide fast data (broadband) capacity. Cable modems and quick downloading of video, graphics, and large files have been a reality for some years. Now the Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) technology is allowing people in densely populated areas close to their telephone exchanges to also avail themselves of broadband Australia. In rural Australia, broadband has not been delivered to most areas, much to the frustration of the conurbanites. Byron Bay holds an important place in the history of the internet in Australia, because it was there that one of Australia's earliest and most important internet service providers, Pegasus Network, was established in the late 1980s. Yet Pegasus relocated to Brisbane in 1993, because of poor quality telecommunications networks (Peters 1998). As we rethink the urban in the shadow of modernity, we can no longer ignore or recuse ourselves from reflecting upon its para-urban modes. As we deconstruct the urban, showing how the formerly pejorative margins actually define the centre the suburban for instance being more citified than the grand arcades, plazas, piazzas, or malls; we may find that it is the conurban that provides the cultural imaginary for the urban of the present century. Work remains to be done on the specific modalities of the conurban. The conurban has distinct temporal and spatial coordinates: citizens of Sydney fled to Manly earlier in the twentieth century, as they do to Byron at the beginning of the twenty-first. With its resistance to the transnational commercialization and mass culture that Club Med, McDonalds, and tall buildings represent, and with its strict environment planning regulation which produce a litigious reaction (and an editorial rebuke from the Sydney Morning Herald [SMH 2002]), Byron recuperates the counter-cultural as counterpoint to the Gold Coast. Subtle differences may be discerned too between Byron and, say, Nimbin and Maleny (in Queensland), with the two latter communities promoting self-sufficient hippy community infused by new agricultural classes still connected to the city, but pushing the boundaries of conurbanity by more forceful rejection of the urban. Through such mapping we may discover the endless attenuation of the urban in front and beyond our very eyes; the virtual replication and invocation of the urban around the circuits of contemporary communications networks; the refiguring of the urban in popular and elite culture, along littoral lines of flight, further domesticating the country; the road movies of twenty-first century freeways; the perpetuation and worsening of inequality and democracy (Stilwell 1992) through the action of the conurban. Cities without bounds: is the conurban one of the faces of the postmetropolis (Soja 2000), the urban without end, with no possibility for or need of closure? My thinking on Byron Bay, and the Rainbow Region in which it is situated, has been shaped by a number of people with whom I had many conversations during my four years living there in 1998-2001. My friends in the School of Humanities, Media, and Cultural Studies, Southern Cross University, Lismore, provided focus for theorizing our ex-centric place, of whom I owe particular debts of gratitude to Baden Offord (Offord 2002), who commented upon this piece, and Helen Wilson (Wilson 2002). Thanks also to an anonymous referee for helpful comments. References Buttrose, L. (2000). Betray Byron at Your Peril. Sydney Morning Herald 7 September 2000. Castells, M. (1996-98). The Information Age. 3 vols. Blackwell, Oxford. Cunningham, S., & Hartley, J. (2001). Creative Industries from Blue Poles to Fat Pipes. Address to the National Humanities and Social Sciences Summit, National Museum of Canberra. July 2001. Davis, M. (1990). City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. Verso, London. Gibson, C. (2002). Migration, Music and Social Relations on the NSW Far North Coast. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Graham, S., and Marvin, S. (1996). 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Thirdspace: journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Blackwell, Cambridge, Mass. Stilwell, F. (1992). Understanding Cities and Regions: Spatial Political Economy. Pluto Press, Sydney. Sydney Morning Herald (SMH). (2002). Byron Should Fix its own Money Mess. Editorial. 5 April. Tom, E. (2002). Flashing a Problem at Hand. The Weekend Australian, Saturday 12 January. Trotter, R. (2001). Regions, Regionalism and Cultural Development. Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics and Programs. Ed. Tony Bennett and David Carter. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 334-355. Wilson, H., ed. (2002). Fleeing the City. Special Issue of Transformations journal, no. 2. < http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Links http://www.echo.net.au http://www.smh.com.au/news/0104/14/national/national3.html http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformations/journal/issue2/issue.htm Citation reference for this article MLA Style Goggin, Gerard. "Conurban" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/conurban.php>. Chicago Style Goggin, Gerard, "Conurban" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/conurban.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Goggin, Gerard. (2002) Conurban. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/conurban.php> ([your date of access]).