Journal articles on the topic 'Jessie HARLEY'

Leaders of the Harlem Renaissance – intellectuals such as Jessie Faucet, Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. DuBois – hoped to gain respect for African Americans through participation in emblems of high culture such as poetry, novels, serious plays, and the highest of all classical music genres: the symphony.1 They encouraged artists to mine folk themes for use in new, elevating works, transforming ‘indigenous’ materials into uplifting examples of high cultural resonance. Artists themselves, however, were ambivalent about privileging ‘high’ art, and especially so when making and writing about music. Indeed, as Samuel Floyd has argued, the most vibrant music to come out of the Harlem Renaissance took the form of blues, boogie woogie, and hot jazz, found in venues such as clubs, juke joints, rent parties, and stage shows (Floyd 1990, pp. 5–6).

Racial passing practice is the act of passing or disguising as white by mulattoes, and it became a phenomenon during Harlem Renaissance. Harlem Renaissance is an era when African American culture related to arts, literature, and music were greatly celebrated. This era can also be said as the most glamorous and happiest moment for African Americans since the antebellum era. Using two of the prominent racial passing narratives during Harlem Renaissance: Passing by Nella Larsen and Plum Bun by Jessie Fauset, this research aims to find the depiction of racial passing practice in the two narratives in order to get deeper understanding of the issue. This research is under American Studies paradigm of Post-nationalist to take into account the minorities’ perspective in understanding America. The minorities’ perspective in this context is from African American’s mixed raced descents (mulattoes). As the focus of this research is historical phenomenon, this research also applies New Historicism as an approach. Based on the analysis, racial passing practice was a reaction from white’s domination through Jim Crow laws, and African Americans considered racial passing practice as a form of both “fooling the white folks” and a betrayal to their “true people”. Keywords: Racial Passing, Mulattoes, Harlem Renaissance, Jim Crow, New Historicism

American scholarship on the Harlem Renaissance has, until recently, been strongly U.S.-centric, but the work of many of the important writers of the New Negro-era has an international dimension, as writers attempted to place the African American struggle for political and civil rights and cultural authority in larger, often global, contexts. Recent scholarship has revealed that the term, “Harlem Renaissance,” used as a rubric to characterize the flowering of black culture-building and political activism in the first years of the 20th century is something of a misnomer.

IntroductionGwendolyn Bennett (1902-81) is often mentioned in books that discuss the harlem renaissance, and some of her poems Occasionally appear in poetry anthologies; but much of her career has been overlooked. Along with many of her friends, including Jessie Redmond Fauset, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen, Bennett was featured at the National Urban League's Civic Club Dinner in March 1924, an event that would later be “widely hailed as a ‘coming out party’ for young black artists, writers, and intellectuals whose work would come to define the Harlem Renaissance” (McHenry 383n100). In the next five years Bennett published over forty poems, short stories, and reviews in leading African American magazines and anthologies, such as Cullen's Caroling Dusk (1927) and William Stanley Braithwaite's Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1927; she created magazine cover art that adorned two leading African American periodicals, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races and the National Urban League's Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life; she worked as an editor or assistant editor of several magazines, including Opportunity, Black Opals, and Fire!; and she wrote a renowned literary column, “The Ebony Flute.” Many scholars, such as Cary Wintz, Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson, and Elizabeth McHenry, recognized the importance of Bennett's column to the Harlem Renaissance in their respective studies, but their emphasis on a larger Harlem Renaissance discussion did not afford a detailed examination of her column.

In its persistent indirections, its tendency to both shape and ornament social space, gossip (chatting, girl talk) can be sculptural. Sometimes, coalescing around a particular figure, a Harvey Weinstein or a David France, the power of this chatter becomes partially institutionally “visible,” although often it recedes from display. Works by Carolyn Lazard, Wu Tsang, Jessica Vaughn, and Hannah Black make use of the sculptural power of chat, and its specific evasion of a certain mode of political speech.

“What have we who are slaves and blacks to do with Art?” asked DuBois in his 1926 essay “Criteria of Negro Art.” In an era of lynching, art hardly seemed appropriate for political struggle. Nevertheless, DuBois and his colleagues at the Crisis risked making connections between lynching and art by putting aesthetics to democratic use even as the theatricality of ritualized violence gave lynching an aesthetic dimension. Starting with DuBois's manifesto and reading in reverse chronological order every issue of the Crisis to its first issue in 1910, this article re-creates a critical narrative that traces the development of aesthetic theory among African American writers associated with the NAACP's national magazine. Contextualizing DuBois's work in the Crisis with fiction by Jessie Fauset and Walter White, I examine an alternative aesthetics that relies on propaganda to assail the ugliness of race relations. (RC)

In the period from January 1920 to December 1921 a cooperation between Jessie Fauset, Augustus Dill and W.E.B. Du Bois resulted in the publication of a periodical called “The Brownies’ Book” (TBB) the first publication for North American black, and not white (colored people) children and young people. The creation of “The Brownies' Book” (TBB) was a pioneering event in African American literature in general and, more specifically, in the field of African American children's literature, as it was the first periodical composed and published by African Americans for black children who, until then, searched in vain for material that included a perspective on their experience and history. This article argues that the TBBs were one of the harbingers of the movement called the Harlem Renaissance, constituting a children's literary materialization of the path towards the emergence of what the philosopher Alain Locke called the New Negro. What was being formulated was both the deconstruction of stereotypes associated with blacks and the active projection/creation of a positive identification with their local and ancestral community. This paper seeks to identify the post-WWI discursive strategies and practices of de-racialization proposed for “the children of the sun”, as W.E.B. Du Bois called them, in order to stop seeing themselves “through the eyes of others” (Du Bois, 1903).

When Harley Granville Barker was invited to stage a theatre season in New York following the outbreak of the First World War, senior figures within British politics seized on it as an opportunity to promote the British war effort in the United States. It was, however, Barker's impromptu decision to extend his stay and tour Euripides’ The Trojan Women to major colleges on the East Coast that saw him come close to realizing this goal. Through an examination of the production, the discourse that surrounded it, and the changing diplomatic relations between Britain and the USA, Philippa Burt explores in this article the extent to which Barker used Euripides as a propaganda tool through which to engage and educate the largely isolationist North American public. At the same time, she argues that Barker challenged the propaganda machine by refusing to perpetuate the dominant nationalistic and xenophobic narratives and, instead, intended a condemnation of all war. Philippa Burt is a lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her previous publications include numerous articles and a chapter on Barker's work with choruses in the forthcoming The Great European Stage Directors, Vol. 4: Reinhardt, Jessner, Barker (Bloomsbury Methuen).

To write of Philip Jessup means to survey the history of the teaching of international law in the United States throughout the last half century; to cover all important events concerning the birth of international organizations on the morrow of the Second World War; to visit the halls of the General Assembly and the Security Council; to attend meetings of the American Society of International Law and the Institute of International Law, where he so frequently took the floor to shed light on their debates; to attend sittings of the International Court of Justice in the years 1960-1969. I could hardly undertake this task; there are others much more qualified to do so. What I wish to do is to recall him as a great jurist I knew and a delightful human being; in short, a judge and a great friend whom I learned to admire.

The global history of knowledge which has developed in recent years is focused on what we know and how we know it. The analysis of global knowledge transfer not only depends on individuals and institutions that made the circulation of information possible, but also on the way documents were intentionally stored and organized. However, the question of how archives, libraries, and other repositories reorganized knowledge, connected disconnected events, and developed techniques of record keeping in a colonial situation has hardly been answered. European central archives are the better known side of information and communication processes, but the aspect of interconnectedness and mutuality in these processes is usually neglected. The main purpose of this paper is to explore the overseas part of the colonial archive, not the European center. As a case study, two Latin American local archives are chosen, the Franciscan Archive in Caracas and the Jesuit Archive in Buenos Aires. The archiving processes in both repositories clarify specific colonial archival genres and archival habits in oversea territories. With exemplary archive inventories as essential organizational tools and instruments for safekeeping we can develop a better understanding of how knowledge was created and how local governance was conceptualized.

The article is an attempt to interpret a hardly known collection of poems by Walenty Bartoszewski, a Jesuit in Vilnius, published in reaction to the outbreak of the plague in Vilnius in the years 1629–1632, which constitutes the testimony of increased religiousness in the face of an epidemic. In the article, the author of the collection is presented, as well as his poetic oeuvre. Also, a brief description of the social background of those events is given. Then, other texts from the 16th–18th centuries, concerned with the topic of the epidemic are characterized. They include sermons, secular works, religious songs and prayers. The main part of the article is devoted to the interpretation of the collection by Bartoszewski in the context of the most important aspects of the volume „Bezoar z łez ludzkich czasu powietrza morowego” [Bezoar of Human Tears Shed at the Time of the Plague], which include: the manifestation of religiousness at the beginning of the 18th century, the realities of the epidemic depicted in lyrics, the vision of God and Christ, ways of protecting the faithful against the plague, and the intercession of the Mother of God.

AbstractBy the end of the sixteenth century, the Society of Jesus was redefining its ever-growing organization. Starting with the generals Mercurian and Acquaviva, the order attempted to leave behind the open spaces devoted to retired forms of prayer so as to put the full weight of the institution on its practical ministries. However, such an advance against contemplative prayer did not lack challenges. The present work aims to rescue a hardly studied critical prose in the midst of those changes: the case of the Spanish Jesuit Francisco de Ribera. This article suggests that Salamanca's professor used his words to defend contemplative prayer. For this purpose, he utilized a device of great scope in the Catholic universe during the Counter-Reformation: the hagiographic narrative. It is proposed here that the vita appears as a mechanism of dispute not only outside but also inside Roman Catholicism. In this sense, the hagiography was a platform of debate within the order. Far from being a purely repetitive text, Ribera's biography of the Castilian visionary and reformer Teresa of Ávila shows the exaltation of a form of prayer that he gladly projected to the group of all believers and especially to the Society of Jesus.

While slightly unconventional, the earnest request of Indiana Republican Sen. Dan Quayle's six-year-old daughter (Conconi, 1985, p. B3) is nothing new to Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole (R-Kan.). Indeed, Majority Whip Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) has said that the senators Dole must lead are “like children lining up in the elementary school classroom asking when they can go to the bathroom” (Granat, 1983, p. 1429). They are all impatient, and they all want their way.When Quayle was elected in 1980 no one suggested that it would be a 9-to-5 job. And it has not been. Late night sessions, filibusters, endless quorum calls, repeated and repetitive votes numbering in the hundreds, crowded schedules, and yes, even the plaintive request of a six-year-old daughter conspire to make life difficult for a senator. On this particular night, Quayle could make his daughter's performance. Not so much because of the note she had sent to Dole, but because Dole and other Republican senators were scheduled to roast Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and then quickly return to the House to hear President Reagan report on his Geneva summit meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev.As majority leader, Dole must play to at least five closely related constituencies and overcome numerous obstacles to succeed. He must represent Reagan. He must represent his Republican Party colleagues. He must protect the interests of the 22 Republican Senate seats at risk in the 1986 election—including his own. He must represent and to some extent promote the interests of the entire Senate. And, of course, he must represent the people of Kansas. It need hardly be added that the interests of these constituencies frequently conflict.

German voyages of ‘discovery’ and field research in that part of Africa which, politically or linguistically, has been subject to Portuguese influence in past centuries, and still is so—an area which therefore corresponds for the most part (and also sufficiently so) to present-day Angola—has so far received only sporadic attention in corresponding historical writings. Nor for the most part have they been taken into account as ethnographic sources, language barriers above all being responsible for this. This is hardly because they are negligible in terms of either their numbers or the information they contain. In the last third of the nineteenth century especially, west-central Africa, in which Portuguese had been a lingua franca for centuries, became a special area of attraction for German travelers. Admittedly, the published results are far from even. One, Augspurger's, is interesting above all for the early date of his report. The scientific reputation of others, like the Jaspert brothers, is extremely dubious. For yet others, like Baum and Jessen, ethnographic documentation was of only marginal interest. The greater part of Wilhelm's sketches have been lost.On the other hand, one cannot write knowledgeably about the Loango coast without consulting Brun's and Pechuël-Loesche's reports. Any statement on northeast Angola in the last quarter of the nineteenth century will lose in value if one fails to use Pogge, Lux, Buchner, and Schütt. Studies on the Kisama without Mattenklodt or on the Cokwe without Baumann's great monograph would at best be a skeleton, at worst a distortion, in the context of what is possible.

This paper provides an assessment of the relative importance of economic, political and ideological factors in the creation and development of ‘Thatcherite’ policies, not necessarily of ‘Thatcherism’ more broadly, through a detailed consideration of two key policy areas; privatization and industrial relations. Such detailed analysis is necessary to overcome a major weakness in the existing literature. There is no doubt that the accounts of ‘Thatcherism’ offered by Hall, Jessop et al., Taylor and Gamble are more convincing than those which concentrate almost exclusively on one explanatory variable. However, all these more inclusive explanations suffer from another problem; their treatment of some of the major areas of ‘Thatcherite’ policy change is superficial and not convincing. The detailed case studies indicate that Britain's continuing relative economic decline provided the crucial context within which both privatization and industrial relations policy were developed. However, the overall shape of the policies and, even more crucially, the detailed provisions, were strongly affected by strategic political judgements taken by politicians; most of them fairly short-term and concerned with the electoral consequences of actions. The Thatcher Cabinets were also responding to political events, like the ‘Winter of Discontent’, over which they had no control. ‘New Right’ ideology played a role, but it was hardly the driving force behind policy which the analysis of Wolfe and others suggests. New Right ideology was a tool rather than a blueprint. The article concludes that a full explanation of the origins and development of ‘Thatcherite’ policies should: acknowledge the dialectical nature of the relationship between structure and agency; recognize that any explanation must be multi-dimensional; but accept the necessity of specific case-by-case analysis.

In his famous essay on von Ranke‘s history of the Popes, Thomas Babington Macaulay remarked that the ‘ignorant enthusiast whom the Anglican Church makes an enemy… the Catholic Church makes a champion’. ‘Place Ignatius Loyola at Oxford. He is certain to become the head of a formidable secession. Place John Wesley at Rome. He is certain to be the first General of a new Society devoted to the interests and honour of the Church.’ Macaulay’s general argument that Roman Catholicism ‘unites in herself all the strength of establishment, and all the strength of dissent’, depends for its force on his comparison of the Catholic Regular Orders with the popular preachers of Nonconformity. As the son of a leader of the Clapham Sect, his witness in the matter has its interest for scholars of the Evangelical Revival, and has been echoed by Ronald Knox in his parallel between Wesley and the seventeenth-century Jesuit, Paolo Segneri, who walked barefoot 800 miles a year to preach missions in the dioceses of northern Italy. More recently the comparison has been drawn again by Owen Chadwick, with the judgement that the ‘heirs of the Counter-Reformation sometimes astound by likeness of behaviour to that found in the heirs of the Reformation’, and Chadwick’s volume on the eighteenth-century Popes contains some fascinating material on the resemblances between the religion of the peoples of England and of Italy. An historian of Spanish Catholicism has compared the Moravians and the mission preachers of eighteenth-century Spain, not least in their rejection of modern commercialism, while an American scholar has traced some of the parallels between nineteenth-century Protestant and Catholic revivalism in the United States. Not that Wesleyan historians have been attracted to study the great movements of revival religion in the Catholic countries in Wesley’s lifetime—a neglect which is hardly surprising. One point of origin of the Evangelical revival was among refugees from Roman Catholic persecution, and for all the popular confusion, encouraged by men like Bishop Lavington, between Methodists and Papists, and for all Wesley’s belief in religious toleration and tenderness for certain Catholic saints and devotional classics, he was deeply hostile to the Roman Catholic Church, as David Hempton has recently shown. Yet there are many points of likeness as well as difference between the enthusiasts of Protestant and Catholic Europe, and both these need to be declared if Catholics and Protestants are ever to attempt to write an ecumenical history.

Background:Osteoarthritis (OA) is the leading cause of chronic disability worldwide, affecting 12% of the population, and yet we still do not have a disease-modifying treatment. Cartilage breakdown is the hallmark of OA, and patients suffer from pain and loss of joint function/independence, severely affecting quality of life. Therefore, there is a huge unmet clinical need.Receptor tyrosine kinase–like orphan receptor 2 (ROR2) is a non-canonical WNT receptor that regulates the planar cell polarity pathway, controlling limb outgrowth during development. During skeletal development, chondrocytes require ROR2 to undergo hypertrophy throughout the process of endochondral bone formation1. Loss of function mutations in humans causes Recessive Robinow Syndrome, leading to limb shortening and brachydactyly2,3.Although absent from healthy adult articular cartilage, our initial studies identified high expression levels of ROR2 in chondrocytes from patients with OA, suggesting a role in the disease processObjectives:To test the potential of ROR2 blockade as a disease-modifying treatment for OA.Methods:Human cartilage organoid model in nude mice, menisco-ligament injury (MLI) model of OA in mice, behavioural studies, in vitro studies in cells.Results:ROR2/WNT5A signaling was increased in osteoarthritic cartilage. Blocking ROR2 was sufficient to induce articular chondrogenesis and suppress expression of aggrecanases in a mesenchymal stem cell line, and to support cartilage formation in a human cartilage organoid model in nude mice using primary chondrocytes from patients with OA.In the MLI model of OA, blocking ROR2 in therapeutic regime using atelocollagen-conjugated siRNA resulted in reduced cartilage destruction and in rapid and sustained pain relief. Due to the limited expression pattern of ROR2 in adulthood, no systemic or local toxicity were expected, nor were any observed4.With the current technology, ROR2 blockade requires intra-articular (IA) injections of siRNA conjugated to atelocollagen every 5 days. Preliminary efficacy data of potentially longer-acting ROR2 blockers are promising.The mechanism of action of ROR2 blockade was independent of modulation of canonical WNT signaling.ROR2/WNT5A promoted nuclear localization of YAP, which required both Rho and G-proteins. YAP signaling downstream of ROR2 also required Rho, but not G-proteins. YAP and TEAD inhibition was required, but not sufficient, for the chondrogenic effect of blocking ROR2. Therefore, additional, yet unknown mechanisms must be involved downstream of ROR2.Conclusion:ROR2 blockade has potential as a disease-modifying treatment for OA, resulting in cartilage protection and rapid and sustained pain relief in a murine model. This will be crucial for clinical success of any treatment for OA and promote patient compliance.Our current siRNA-atelocollagen based technology requires IA injections too frequently to be acceptable for patients. We are developing ROR2 blockade which can be administered systemically or IA not more often than every 3 months - work funded by FOREUM.References:[1]DeChiara, T. M. et al. Ror2, encoding a receptor-like tyrosine kinase, is required for cartilage and growth plate development. Nat. Genet.24, 271–4 (2000).[2]Bokhoven, H. Van, Celli, J. & Kayserili, H. Mutation of the gene encoding the ROR2 tyrosine kinase causes autosomal recessive Robinow syndrome. Nature25, 423–426 (2000).[3]Afzal, A., Rajab, A., Fenske, C. & Oldridge, M. Recessive Robinow syndrome, allelic to dominant brachydactyly type B, is caused by mutation of ROR2. Nature25, 419–422 (2000).[4]Thorup, A.-S. et al. ROR2 blockade as a therapy for osteoarthritis. Sci. Transl. Med.12, eaax3063 (2020).Acknowledgements:We gratefully acknowledge funding support of this work by the Medical College of St Bartholomew’s Hospital Trust, the William Harvey Research Foundation, FOREUM foundation for research in rheumatology (1016807), the MRC (MR/L022893/1, MR/N010973/1, MR/P026362/1, MR/K013076/1), Versus Arthritis (21515, 20886, 21621, 20859), and the DFG Emmy-Noether program (BE4328/5-1).Disclosure of Interests:Anne-Sophie Thorup: None declared, Danielle Strachan: None declared, Sara Caxaria: None declared, Blandine Poulet: None declared, Bethan Thomas: None declared, Suzanne Eldridge: None declared, Giovanna Nalesso: None declared, James Whiteford: None declared, Costantino Pitzalis: None declared, Thomas Aigner: None declared, Roger Corder: None declared, Jessica Bertrand: None declared, Francesco Dell’Accio Consultant of: Samumed and UCB

Background:While several outcome measures have been studied for use in clinical studies of psoriatic arthritis, little is known about thresholds of meaning such as minimal clinically important improvement (MCII).Objectives:To investigate the distribution of scores for candidate outcome measures for pragmatic trials in PsA and to calculate the MCII for each outcome measure.Methods:We performed a longitudinal cohort study within the Psoriatic Arthritis Research Consortium (PARC), a multi-center study based in the US. Patients completed validated PROs (patient reported outcomes) and rheumatologists completed skin, joint, enthesis and dactylitis scores at therapy initiation and follow up 12-16 weeks later. In addition, patients completed a global assessment of response at the follow up visit, categorizing their status as improved, stayed the same, or worsened and then ratied the importance of the change on a scale from 0-7.1We then calculated and plotted the change in each of the following measures: Routine Assessment of Patient Index Data (RAPID3), clinical Disease Activity of Psoriatic Arthritis (cDAPSA), Patient Reported Outcome Measure Information System (PROMIS) Global Health short form (10a) physical health (PH) subscore, patient pain assessment, patient global assessment (0-10 NRS), and physician global assessments (0-10 NRS) of the joints and overall. We calculated the MCII as the mean change in score (with 95% confidence interval) among patients who reported improvement and rated the level of improvement as “almost none/hardly at all” or “a little important.” Additionally, we calculated Spearman’s correlation coefficients between the measures and the global assessment of response.Results:Among 148 unique patients, 233 therapy change visits were eligible for analysis. The average age was 52.5 years, 52% were female and mean BMI was 29.6. Baseline RAPID3 was 11.1 (SD 6), cDAPSA 17.9 (SD 13.9), PROMIS PH 42 (SD 8), patient global 4.2 (SD 2.5), TJC 5.9 (SD 7.5), and SJC 2.9 (SD 4.5). TNFi comprised 61% of drug initiations, 21% were IL17i and the remainder were other biologics and oral systemic therapies. At follow up, 63 (27%) patients rated themselves as improved whereas 103 (44%) stayed the same and 67 (29%) reported worsening. The mean change in each measure by patient-reported response (improved, stayed the same, or worsened) are shown in Figures 1A & B. In general, the mean score increased from ‘improved’ to ‘worsened’ as expected (with the exception of PROMIS PH which declines given a different direction of scoring). The MCII for each measure was as follows: RAPID3 -1.8 (-4.1 to 0.5), Patient Global -0.6 (-1.6 to 0.4), Physician Global -1 (-1.9 to -0.1), cDAPSA -5.7 (-9.8 to -1.7), and PROMIS PH 1.9 (-2.1 to 5.8). Correlation for each measure with the global assessment of response were: RAPID3 0.48, Patient Global 0.37, Physician Global 0.39, cDAPSA 0.51, and PROMIS PH 0.39.Figure 1A. Distribution of change (median, IQR) in RAPID3, Physician Global, Patient Global, PROMIS10a physical therapy by patient reported response.Conclusion:This is the first study to test thresholds of meaning for these particular measures in PsA. The MCII values are relatively low for all outcome measures. This may be related to the relatively low disease activity at baseline but is consistent with patients seen in clinical practice initiating therapy.2References:[1]Ward MM et al. J Clinical Epi 2014;2Ward MM et al. J Clinical Epi 2015Figure 2B. Distribution of change (median, IQR) in clinical DAPSA by patient reported response.Disclosure of Interests:Alexis Ogdie Grant/research support from: Pfizer, Novartis, Consultant of: Abbvie, Amgen, BMS, Celgene, Corrona, Janssen, Lilly, Pfizer, Novartis, M Elaine Husni Grant/research support from: Pfizer, Consultant of: AbbVie, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Janssen, Novartis, Regeneron, and UCB, Jose Scher Consultant of: Novartis, Janssen, UCB, Sanofi., Ethan Craig: None declared, Soumya Reddy Grant/research support from: AmgenCelgeneAbbvie, Consultant of: AmgenPfizerNovartisJaansenUCB, Jessica A. Walsh Grant/research support from: AbbVie, Pfizer, Janssen, Consultant of: AbbVie, Novartis, Eli Lilly and Company, UCB

The purpose of this article is to analyze the so-called human capital theory and to clarify the concept of public good, as well as the frequency of the expression "public" in the Declarations adopted at the Regional Conferences of Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2008 and 2018. For this, in methodological terms, this article analyzes documents from certain International Organizations (UNESCO, World Bank and OECD) and seeks theoretical support in Reinhart Koselleck's History of Concepts and other authors such as Roger Dale, Susan Robertson, Bob Jessop, Stephen Gill, Paul Samuelson , Karl Polanyi and Pierre Bourdieu.ResumoO presente artigo tem o objetivo de analisar a chamada teoria do capital humano e precisar o conceito de bem público, bem como a frequência da expressão “público” nas Declarações aprovadas nas Conferências Regionais de Educação Superior na América Latina e Caribe, em 2008 e 2018. Para isto, em termos metodológicos, o presente artigo analisa documentos de determinadas Organizações Internacionais (UNESCO, Banco Mundial e OCDE) e busca apoio na História dos Conceitos de Reinhart Koselleck e em autores como Roger Dale, Bob Jessop, Stephen Gill, Paul Samuelson, Karl Polanyi, Pierre Bourdieu.Keywords: Public good, Human capital theory, Commodification, Education, CRES 2008 and CRES 2018.Palavras-chave: Bem público, Teoria do capital humano, Mercadorização, Educação, CRES 2008 e CRES 2018.ReferencesALVES, Giovanni. O que é o precariado? Blog da Boitempo. Extraído de <https://blogdaboitempo.com.br/2013/07/22/o-que-e-o-precariado/>, 22 Jul 2013, acesso em 28 fev 2019.ARENDT, Hannah. A crise na educação. In: Entre o passado e o futuro. Tradução: Mauro W. Barbosa de Almeida. 3ª reimpressão da 5ª ed. de 2000. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2005.AUDITORIA CIDADÃ DA DÍVIDA. Dividômetro: quanto pagamos (juros e amortizações) – dívida pública federal. Auditoria Cidadã da Dívída. Extraído de <https://auditoriacidada.org.br/>. Acesso em 28 fev. 2019.AZEVEDO, M. L. N.. Transnacionalização e mercadorização da Educação Superior: examinando alguns efeitos colaterais do capitalismo acadêmico (sem riscos) no Brasil - A expansão privado-mercantil. Revista Internacional de Educação Superior - RIESup, v. 1, p. 86-102, 2015.AZEVEDO, M. L. N. O Novo Regime Fiscal: a retórica da intransigência, o constrangimento da oferta de bens públicos e o comprometimento do PNE 2014-2024. Tópicos Educacionais, v. 1, p. 234-258, 2016.AZEVEDO, M. L. N. Regionalismo, regionalização e regionalidade: da integração pela paz à Estratégia Europa 2020. In: BARREYRO, Gladys Beatriz; HIZUME, Gabriela de Camargo. (Orgs.). Regionalismos e Inter-Regionalismos na Educação Superior: projetos, propostas e influências entre a América Latina e a Europa. 1ed. Cascavel-PR: EDUNIOESTE, 2018, v. 1, p. 65-88.AZEVEDO, M. L. N. 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Paris: Hatier, 1989.CAPUL, Jean-Yves; GARNIER, Olivier. Pratique de l'économie e des Sciences Sociales: de A a Z. Paris: Hatier, 1996.CERVO, Amado Luiz. Conceitos em Relações Internacionais. Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional. 51 (2): 8-25, 2008.CRES. Declaración de la Conferencia Regional de Educación Superior para América Latina y el Caribe - CRES 2008. Extraído de <www.iesalc.unesco.org.ve>. Acesso em junho 2008.DALE, Roger. Globalização e educação: demonstrando a existência de uma "Cultura Educacional Mundial Comum" ou localizando uma "Agenda Globalmente Estruturada para a Educação"?. Educação & Sociedade, ago. 2004, vol. 25, no. 87, p.423-460. ISSN 0101-7330.DIAS, M. A. R. Dez anos de antagonismo nas políticas sobre Ensino Superior em nível internacional. Educação e Sociedade, Campinas, vol. 25, nº. 88, p. 893-914, Especial - Out. 2004.DIAS, M. A. R. A universidade no século XXI: do conflito ao diálogo de divilizações. Documento on line: 2007. 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Introduction: Curriculum integration is critical to medical education. It represents a constant challenge for teachers since there is no shared concept about what it means, what is to be included, and the dynamics of operationalization. Objectives: To promote and implement the integration of a human semiology curriculum module (medical clinic, pediatrics, diagnostic imaging, psychology and health informatics) through interactive methodologies; to evaluate the students perception of the module. Methods: Action research involved 76 teachers and 125 third-year medical students. Monthly meetings were held between the coordinators. Discussions focused on monitoring and following-up on implementation of interactive methodologies and reviewing integration of theory and practice. Also included were the implementation of a joint discussion of clinical cases, a holistic view of the patient and presenting problems. Collaboration and communication between teachers, joint classes, integrated evaluation of the process of learning and teaching in small groups. In addition, training workshops were held for the use of a Moodle platform by teachers for page construction of Curriculum Module. The evaluation of students' perceptions was performed through a voluntary and anonymous questionnaire with open questions (qualitative). All 125 students answered the questionnaire. A five-point Likert scale was used with a midpoint indicating intermediate or nullity, domain of discordance (values 1 and 2) and domain of cordance (4 and 5). The analysis of the data was made comparing their results with those obtained in the tests of the previous year. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (version 17.0, SPSS®, Chicago, IL, USA). Results: Data analysis showed that there was a positive impact after the integration between the subjects and the introduction of interactive methodologies in the course. Give the data for this statement here. There was a significant improvement in performance, both theoretical and practical, as measured by the scores obtained by the students, when compared to the students of the previous year (p <0.001). On the other hand, in open questions, students still mentioned heterogeneity among teachers and in the evaluation. They students also commented on, the need for a continuous effort to improve and maintain the integration and adjust their workload. Conclusion: The evaluation analysis supported the need to continue to implement teacher development, joint planning and the continuity of the articulation process. The integration of interactive methodologies was shown to improve student performance compared to the previous class in a Semiology Curricular Module.ResumoIntrodução: A integração do currículo é fundamental para a formação médica. Representa, todavia, um constante desafio para os professores envolvidos, visto que não há uniformidade sobre o conceito, sobre a necessidade de inclusão de atividades integradas, e mesmo sobre sua operacionalização. Objetivos: Promover a integração da unidade curricular (UC) de semiologia humana (clínica médica, pediatria, diagnóstico por imagem, psicologia e informática em saúde) através da implantação de metodologias interativas, e avaliar a percepção dos estudantes do módulo de semiologia humana, após a implementação destas metodologias. Métodos: Utilizou-se pesquisa-ação, envolvendo 76 professores e 125 estudantes da 3ª série do curso médico. Para a integração da UC foram realizadas: reuniões mensais entre os coordenadores para implementação e acompanhamento das metodologias interativas, que consistiram de integração da teoria com a prática, implantação de discussão conjunta de casos clínicos, visão holística do paciente e de seus problemas, colaboração e comunicação entre os professores, aulas conjuntas, avaliação integrada com o processo de aprendizagem e ensino em pequenos grupos. Além disso, foram realizadas oficinas de capacitação para uso da plataforma Moodle pelos professores e construção de página com as atividades da UC. A avaliação da percepção dos estudantes sobre a UC foi realizada através de questionário voluntário e anônimo e de questões abertas (qualitativa). Todos os estudantes responderam ao questionário. Foi utilizada a escala de Likert de cinco pontos com um ponto médio manifestando situação intermediária ou de nulidade, domínio de discordância (valores 1 e 2) e domínio de concordância (4 e 5). A análise do desempenho destes alunos da 3ª série do curso de medicina foi feita comparando-se os seus resultados com os obtidos nas provas do ano anterior. Na análise estatística foi utilizado o Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (versão 17.0, SPSS®, Chicago, IL, EUA). Resultados: A análise conjunta das categorias do questionário demonstrou que houve impacto positivo após a integração entre as disciplinas e a introdução de metodologias interativas no curso. Houve melhora significante do desempenho, tanto teórico quanto prático, avaliado pelas notas obtidas pelos alunos, quando comparado aos alunos do ano anterior (p<0,001). Por outro lado, nas questões abertas, os alunos ainda referiram heterogeneidade entre os professores e na avaliação, necessidade de um esforço contínuo para melhorar e manter a integração, bem como adequar a carga horária, considerada insuficiente. Conclusão: A análise da avaliação evidenciou a necessidade de implementar o desenvolvimento docente, o planejamento conjunto e a continuidade do processo de articulação. A utilização das metodologias interativas contribuiu para a integração da Unidade Curricular de semiologia.ResumenIntroducción: La integración del currículo es fundamental para la formación médica. Sin embargo, representa un constante desafío para los profesores involucrados, ya que no hay uniformidad sobre el concepto, sobre la necesidad de inclusión de actividades integradas, y incluso sobre su operacionalización. Objetivos: Promover la integración de la unidad curricular (UC) de semiología humana (clínica médica, pediatría, diagnóstico por imagen, psicología e informática en salud) a través de la implantación de metodologías interactivas, y evaluar la percepción de los estudiantes del módulo de semiología humana, después de la aplicación de estas metodologías. Métodos: Se utilizó investigación-acción, involucrando a 76 profesores y 125 estudiantes de la 3ª serie del curso médico. Para la integración de la UC se realizaron: reuniones mensuales entre los coordinadores para implementación y seguimiento de las metodologías interactivas, que consistieron en la integración de la teoría con la práctica, implantación de discusión conjunta de casos clínicos, visión holística del paciente y de sus problemas, colaboración y comunicación entre los profesores, clases conjuntas, evaluación integrada con el proceso de aprendizaje y enseñanza en pequeños grupos. Además se realizaron talleres de capacitación para uso de la plataforma Moodle por los profesores y construcción de página con las actividades de la UC. La evaluación de la percepción de los estudiantes sobre la UC se realizó a través de un cuestionario voluntario y anónimo y de cuestiones abiertas (cualitativa). Todos los estudiantes respondieron al cuestionario. Se utilizó la escala de Likert de cinco puntos con un punto medio manifestando situación intermedia o de nulidad, dominio de discordancia (valores 1 y 2) y dominio de concordancia (4 y 5). El análisis del desempeño de estos alumnos de la 3ª serie del curso de medicina se hizo comparando sus resultados con los obtenidos en las pruebas del año anterior. En el análisis estadístico se utilizó el Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (versión 17.0, SPSS®, Chicago, IL, EE.UU.). Resultados: El análisis conjunto de las categorías del cuestionario demostró que hubo impacto positivo tras la integración entre las disciplinas y la introducción de metodologías interactivas en el curso. Se observó una mejora significativa del rendimiento, tanto teórico como práctico, evaluado por las notas obtenidas por los alumnos, en comparación con los alumnos del año anterior (p <0,001). Por otro lado, en las cuestiones abiertas, los alumnos todavía refirieron heterogeneidad entre los profesores y en la evaluación, necesidad de un esfuerzo continuo para mejorar y mantener la integración, así como adecuar la carga horaria, considerada insuficiente. Conclusión: El análisis de la evaluación evidenció la necesidad de implementar el desarrollo docente, la planificación conjunta y la continuidad del proceso de articulación. La utilización de las metodologías interactivas contribuyó a la integración de la Unidad Curricular de semiología.Keywords: Semiology, Medical education, Student, Methodology.Palavras-chave: Semiologia, Educação médica, Estudante, Metodologia.Palabras clave: Semiología, Educación médica, Estudiante, Metodología.ReferencesALMEIDA, Maria José de. Gestão da escola médica: crítica e autocrítica. Rev Bras Educ Med, 32 (2):202-9, março, 2008.BATALDEN, Paul; DAVIDOFF, Frank. Teaching quality improvement: the devil is in the details. 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Sobre a pesquisa-ação na educação e as armadilhas do praticismo - Revista Brasileira de Educação, v. 11, n. 33, set./dez, 2006.MULLER, Jessica H.; JAIN, Sharad; LOESER, Helen; IRBY, David M. Lessons learned about integrating a medical school curriculum: perceptions of students, faculty and curriculum leaders. Med Educ, 42(8), p.778-85, agosto, 2008.PERERA, Jennifer; LEE, Nagarajah; WIN, Khin; PERERA, Joachim; WIJESURIYA, Lionel. Formative feedback to students: the mismatch between faculty perceptions and student expectations, Medical Teacher, 30 (4): 395-399, 2008.PRIDEAUX, David; ASH, Julie K. Integrated learning. In: DENT, John A.; HARDEN, Ronald M. A practical guide for medical teachers. 4. ed. London: Elsevier, p.183-189, 2013.PUCCINI, Rosana Fiorini; SAMPAIO, Lucia de Oliveira; BATISTA, Nildo Alves. A Formação médica na Unifesp – excelência e compromisso social. São Paulo: Editora Unifesp, 2008, 312p.STEINERT Yvonne; MANN, Karen; CENTENO, Angel; DOLMANS, Diana; SPENCER, John; GELULA, Mark; DAVID, Prideaux. A systematic review of faculty development initiatives designed to improve teaching effectiveness in medical education: BEME Guide No. 8. Med Teach, 28(6): 497-526, September, 2006.TINTO, Vincent. Stages of student departure. Reflections on the longitudinal character of student leaving. Journal of Higher Education, 59(4): 438-455, Jul-Aug, 1998. Conteúdo online disponível em: http://www.edu.plymouth.ac.uk/resined/actionresearch/arhome.htm, acesso em 2006. WATER-ADAMS. Action research in education - Conteúdo online disponível em: http://www.edu.plymouth.ac.uk/resined/actionresearch/arhome.htm, acesso em 2006.

Reusable learning objects are short, self-contained, digital learning activities that can be valuable tools for sharing information. This 4-page fact sheet provides a brief synopsis of what reusable learning objects are and how to create them for use in an educational setting. Written by Jessica L. Gouldthorpe, Amy Harder, T. Grady Roberts, and Nicole Stedman, and published by the UF Department of Agricultural Education and Communication, April 2013. http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/wc140

In the heady expansion of capital’s productive capacity during the post-war period, E.P. Thompson wondered optimistically at potentials accruing to humanity by accelerating automation. He asked, “If we are to have enlarged leisure, in an automated future, the problem is not ‘how are men going to be able to consume all these additional time-units of leisure?’ but ‘what will be the capacity for experience of the men who have this undirected time to live?’” (Thompson 36). Indeed, linear and economistic variants of Marxian materialism have long emphasised that the socialisation of production by the use of machinery will eventually free us from work. At the very least, the underemployment produced by the automation of pivotal labour roles is supposed to create a political subject capable of agitating successfully against bourgeois and capitalist hegemony. But contrary to these prognostications, the worker of 2019 is caught up in a process of generalising work far beyond what is considered necessary by tradition, or at least the convention of what David Harvey calls “embedded liberalism” (11). As Anne Helen Peterson wrote in a recent Buzzfeed article,even the trends millennials have popularized — like athleisure — speak to our self-optimization. Yoga pants might look sloppy to your mom, but they’re efficient: you can transition seamlessly from an exercise class to a Skype meeting to child pickup. We use Fresh Direct and Amazon because the time they save allows us to do more work. (Peterson)For the work-martyr, activity in its broadest Aristotelian sense is evaluated by and subordinated to the question of efficiency and productivity. Occupations of time that were once considered external to “work” as matters of “life” (to use Kathi Weeks’s vocabulary) are reconceived as waste when not deployed in the service of value-generation (Weeks 15).The point here, then, is to provide some answers for why the decrease in socially-necessary labour time in an age of automation has not coincided with the Thompsonian expansion of free time. The current dilemma of the neoliberal “work-martyr” is traceable to the political responses generated by crises in production during the depression and the stagflationary disaccumulation of the 1960s-70s, and the major victory in the “battle for ideas” was the transformation of the political subject into human capital. This “intensely constructed and governed” suite of possible values is tasked, according to Wendy Brown, “with improving and leveraging its competitive positioning and with enhancing its (monetary and nonmonetary) portfolio value across all of its endeavours and ventures” (Brown 10). Connecting the creation of this subject in relation to personal or free time is important partly because of time’s longstanding importance to philosophies of subjectivity. But more to the point, the focus on time is important because it serves to demonstrate the economic foundations of the incursion of capitalist governance into the most private domains of existence. Against the criticism of Marx’s ‘abstract’ theory of value, one can see that the laws of capitalist accumulation make their mark in all parts of contemporary human being, including temporality. By tracing the emergence of afterwork as the unpaid continuation of the accumulation of value, one can show how each subject increasingly ‘lives’ capital. This marks a turning point in political economy. When work spills over a temporal limit, its relationship to reproduction is finally blurred to the point of indistinction. What this means for value-creation in 2019 is something in urgent need of critique.State ReproductionAccording to the Marxian theory, labour’s minimum cost is abstractly determined by the price of the labourer’s necessities. Once they have produced enough objects of value to cover these costs, the rest of their work is surplus value in the hands of the capitalist. The capitalist’s aim, then, is to extend the overall working-day for as long beyond the minimum as possible. Theoretically, the full 24 hours of the day may be used. The rise of machine production in the 19th century allowed the owners to make this theory a reality. The only thing that governed the extension of work-time was the physical minimum of labour-power’s reproduction (Marx 161). But this was on the provision that all the labourer’s “free” time was to be spent regrouping their energies. Anything in excess of this was a privilege: time wasted that could have been spent in the factory. “If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself”, says Marx, “he robs the capitalist” (162).This began to change with the socialisation of the work process and the increase in technical proficiency that labour demanded in early 20th-century industry. With the changes in the sophistication of the manufacture process, the labourer came to be factored in the production process less as an “appendage of the machine” and more as a collection of decisive skills. Fordism based itself around the recognition that capital itself was “dependent on a family-based reproduction” (Weeks 27). In Ford’s America, the sense that work’s intensity might supplant losses in the working day propelled owners of production to recognise the economic need of ensuring a robust culture of social reproduction. In capital’s original New Deal, Ford provided an increase in wages (the Five Dollar Day) in exchange for a rise in productivity (Dalla Costa v). To preserve the increased rhythm of industrial production required more than a robust wage, however. It required “the formation of a physically efficient and psychologically disciplined working class” (Dalla Costa 2). Companies began to hire sociologists to investigate how workers spent their spare time (Dalla Costa 8). They led the charge in a what we might call the first “anthropological revolution” of the American 20th century, whereby the improved wage of the worker was underpinned by the economisation of their reproduction. This was enabled by the cheapening of social necessities (and thus a reduction in socially-necessary labour time) in profound connection to the development of household economy on the backs of unpaid female labour (Weeks 25).This arrangement between capital and labour persisted until 1929. When the inevitable crisis came, however, wages faltered, and many workers joined the ranks of the unemployed. Unable to afford even the basics of their own reproduction, the working-class looked to the state. They created political and social pressure through marches, demonstrations, attacks on shops and the looting of supply trucks (Dalla Costa 40). The state held out against them, but the crisis in production eventually reached such a point of intensity that the government was forced to intervene. Hoover instituted the Emergency Relief Act and Financial Reconstruction Corporation in 1932. This was expanded the following year by FDR’s New Deal, transforming Emergency Relief into a federal institution and creating the Civil Works Association to stimulate the job market (Dalla Costa 63). The security of the working class was decisively linked to the state through the wage guarantees, welfare measures and even the legal guarantee of collective bargaining.For the most part, the state’s intervention in social reproduction took the pressure off industry by ensuring that the workforce would remain able to handle its burdens and that the unemployed would remain employable. It guaranteed a minimum wage for the employed to ensure that demand didn’t collapse, and provided care outside the workforce to women, children and the elderly.Once the state took responsibility for reproduction, however, it immediately became interested in how free time could be made efficient and cost effective. Abroad, they noted the example of European statist and corporativist approaches. Roosevelt sent a delegation to Europe to study the various measures taken by fascist and United Front governments to curb the effects of economic crisis (Dogliani 247). Among these was Mussolini’s OND (Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro) which sought to accumulate the free time of workers to the ends of production. Part of this required the responsibilisation of the broader community not only for regeneration of labour-power but the formation of a truly fascist political subject.FDR’s social reform program was able to reproduce this at home by following the example of workers’ community organisation during the depression years. Throughout the early ‘30s, self-help cooperatives, complete with “their own systems of payment in goods or currency” emerged among the unemployed (Dalla Costa 61). Black markets in consumer goods and informal labour structures developed in all major cities (Dalla Costa 34). Subsistence goods were self-produced in a cottage industry of unpaid domestic labour by both men and women (Dalla Costa 71). The paragon of self-reproducing communities was urbanised black Americans, whose internal solidarity had saved lives throughout the depression. The state took notice of these informal economies of production and reproduction, and started to incorporate the possibility of community engineering into their national plan. Roosevelt convened the Civilian Conservation Corps to absorb underemployed elements of the American workforce and recover consumer demand through direct state sponsorship (wages) (Dogliani, 247). The Committee of Industrial Organisation was transformed into a “congress” linking workers directly to the state (Dalla Costa 74). Minium wages were secured in the supreme court in 1937, then hiked in 1938 (78). In all, the state emerged at this time as a truly corporativist entity- the guarantor of employment and of class stability. From Social Reproduction to Human Capital InvestmentSo how do we get from New Deal social engineering to yoga pants? The answer is deceptively simple. The state transformed social reproduction into a necessary part of the production process. But this also meant that it was instrumentalised. The state only had to fund its workforce’s reproduction so long as this guaranteed productivity. After the war, this was maintained by a form of “embedded liberalism” which sought to provide full employment, economic growth and welfare for its citizens while anchoring the international economy in the Dollar’s gold-value. However, by providing stable increases in “relative value” (wages), this form of state investment incentivised capital flight and its spectacular consequent: deindustrialisation. The “embedded liberalism” of the state-capital-labour compromise began to breakdown with a new crisis of accumulation (Harvey 11-12). The relocation of production to non-union states and decolonised globally-southern sites of hyper-exploitation led to an ‘urban crisis’ in the job market. But as capitalist expansion carried on abroad, inflation kept dangerous pace with the rate of unemployment. This “stagflation” put irresistible pressure on the post-war order. The Bretton-Woods policy of maintaining fixed interest rates while pinning the dollar to gold was abandoned in 1971 and exchange rates were floated all over the world (Harvey 12). The spectre of a new crisis loomed, but one which couldn’t be resolved by the simple state sponsorship of production and reproduction.While many solutions were offered in place of this, one political vision singled out the state’s intervention into reproduction as the cause of the crisis. The ‘neoliberal’ political revolution began at the level of individual groups of capitalist agitants seeking governmental influence in a crusade against communism. It was given its first run on the historical pitch in Chile as part of the CIA-sponsored Pinochet revanchism, and then imported to NYC to deal with the worsening urban crisis of the 1970s. Instead of focusing on production (which required state intervention to proceed without crisis), neoliberal theory promulgated a turn to monetisation and financialisation. The rule of the New York banks after they forced the City into near-bankruptcy in 1975 prescribed total austerity in order to make good on its debts. The government was forced by capital itself to withdraw from investment in the reproduction of its citizens and workers. This was generalised to a federal policy as Reagan sought to address the decades-long deficit during the early years of his presidential term. Facilitating the global flow of finance and the hegemony of supranational institutions like the IMF, the domestic labour force now became beholden to an international minimum of socially-necessary labour time. At the level of domestic labour, the reduction of labour’s possible cost to this minimum had dramatic consequences. International competition allowed the physical limitations of labour to, once again, vanish from sight. Removed from the discourse of reproduction rights, the capitalist edifice was able to focus on changing the ratio of socially necessary labour to surplus. The mechanism that enabled them to do so was competition among the workforce. With the opening of the world market, capital no longer had to worry about the maintenance of domestic demand.But competition was not sufficient to pull off so grand a feat. What was required was a broader “battle of ideas”; the second anthropological revolution of the American century. The protections that workers had relied upon since the Fordist compromise and the corporativist solution eroded as the new “class-power” of the bourgeoisie levelled neoliberal assaults against associated labour (Harvey 23). While unions were gradually disempowered to fight the inevitable tide of deindustrialisation and capital flight, individual workers were coddled by a stream of neoliberal propaganda promising “Freedom” to those who would leave the stifling atmosphere of collective association. The success of this double enervation crippled union power, and the capitalist could rely increasingly on internal workplace wage stratification to regulate labour at an enterprise level (Dalla Costa 25). Incentive structures transformed labour rights into privileges; imagining old entitlements as concessions from above. In the last thirty years, the foundation of worker protections at large has, according to Brown, become illegible (Brown 38).Time and ValueThe reduction of time needed to produce has not coincided with an expansion of free time. The neoliberal anthropological revolution has wormed its way into the depth of the individual subject’s temporalising through a dual assault on labour conditions and propaganda. The privatisation of reproduction means that its necessary minimum is once again the subject of class struggle. Time spent unproductively outside the workplace now not only robs the capitalist, but the worker. If an activity isn’t a means to increase one’s “experience” (the vector of employability), it is time poorly spent. The likelihood of being hired for a job, in professional industries especially, is dependent on your ability to outperform others not only in your talents and skills, but in your own exploitability. Brown points out that the groups traditionally defined by the “middle strata … works more hours for less pay, fewer benefits, less security, and less promise of retirement or upward mobility than at any time in the past century” (Brown 28-29).This is what is meant by the transformation of workers into ‘human capital’. As far as the worker is concerned, the capitalist no longer purchases their labour-power: they purchase the sum of their experiences and behaviours. A competitive market has emerged for these personality markers. As a piece of human capital, one must expend one’s time not only in reproduction, but the production of their own surplus value. Going to a play adds culture points to your brand; speaking a second language gives you a competitive edge; a robust Instagram following is the difference between getting or missing out on a job. For Jess Whyte, this means that the market is now able to govern in place of the state. It exercises a command over people’s lives in and out of the workplace “which many an old tyrannical state would have envied” (Whyte 20).There is a question here of change and continuity. A survey of the 20th century shows that the reduction of ‘socially necessary labour time’ does not necessarily mean a reduction in time spent at work. In fact, the minimum around which capitalist production circulates is not worktime but wages. It is only at the political level that the working class prevented capital from pursuing this minimum. With the political victory of neoliberalism as a “restoration of class power” to the bourgeoisie, however, this minimum becomes a factor at the heart of all negotiations between capital and labour. The individual labourer lying at the heart of the productive process is reduced to his most naked form: human capital. This capital must spend all its time productively for its own benefit. Mundane tasks are avoidable, as stipulated by the piece of human capital sometimes known as Anne Helen Peterson, if they “wouldn’t make my job easier or my work better”. People are never really after-work under neoliberalism; their spare time is structurally adjusted into auxiliary labour. Competition has achieved what the state could never have dreamed of: a total governance of spare hours. This governance unites journalists tweeting from bed with Amazon workers living where they work, not to mention early-career academics working over a weekend to publish an article in an online journal that is not even paying them. These are all ways in which the privatisation of social reproduction transforms afterwork into unpaid overtime.ReferencesBrown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015.Dalla Costa, Maria. Family, Welfare, and the State: Between Progressivism and the New Deal. Brooklyn: Common Notions, 2015.Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.Engels, Friedrich, and Karl Marx. The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. R.C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978.Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production. Vol. 1 and 2. Trans. E. Aveling and E. Untermann. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics of World Literature, 2013.Peterson, Anne Helen. “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.” Buzzfeed. 10 Oct. 2019 <https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work>.Postone, Moishe. Time, Labour and Social Domination. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.Thompson, E.P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” In Stanley Aronowitz and Michael J. Roberts, eds., Class: The Anthology. Hoboken: Wiley, 2018.Wang, Jackie. Carceral Capitalism. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2018.Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke UP, 2011.Whyte, Jessica. “The Invisible Hand of Friedrich Hayek: Submission and Spontaneous Order.” Political Theory (2017): 1-29.

As a mode of open access public self-expression, blogs are one form of the unfolding massification of culture (Lovink). Though widely varied in content and style, they are characterised by a reverse chronological diary-like format, often produced by a single author, and often intimately expressive of that author’s thoughts and experiences. The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of blogs as a space for the detailed and on-going expression of the day to day experiences of sufferers of serious illness. We might traditionally consider the experience of illness as absolutely private, but illness, along with the process of recovery, retains a social and cultural aspect (Kleinman et al). A growing body of literature has recognised that the Internet has become a significant space for the recovery work that accompanies the diagnosis of serious illness (Orgad; Pitts; Hardey). Empowerment and agency are often emphasised in this literature, particularly in terms of the increased access to information and support groups, but also in the dynamic performances of self enabled by different forms of online communication and Web production. I am particularly interested in the ongoing shifts in the accessibility of “private” personal experience enabled by blog culture. Although there are thousands of others like them, three “illness blogs” have recently caught my attention for their candidness, completeness and complexity, expressing in vivid depth and detail individual lives transformed by serious illness. The late US journalist and television producer Leroy Sievers maintained a high profile blog, My Cancer, and weekly podcast on the National Public Radio website until his death from metastasised colon cancer in August 2008. Sievers used his public profile and the infrastructure of the NPR website to both detail his personal experience and bring together a community of people also affected by cancer or moved by his thoughts and experiences. The blogger Brainhell came to my attention through blogsphere comments and tributes when he died in February 2008. Spanning more than four years, Brainhell’s witty and charming blog attracted a significant audience and numerous comments, particularly toward the end of his life as the signs of his deteriorating motor system as a result of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS, or “Lou Gherig’s disease”) riddled his intimate posts. Another blog of interest to me here, called Humanities Researcher, incorporates academic Stephanie Trigg’s period of illness and recovery from breast cancer within a pre-existing and ongoing blog about the intersection between professional and personal life. As I had crossed paths with Trigg while at Melbourne University, I was always interested in her blog. But her diagnosis with breast cancer and subsequent accounts of tests, the pain and debilitation of treatment and recovery within her blog also offer valuable insight into the role of online technologies in affecting experiences of illness and for the process of recovery.The subject matter of illness blogs revolves around significant personal transformations as a result of serious illness or trauma: transformations of everyday life, of body and emotional states, relationships, physical appearance, and the loss or recovery of physical ability. It is not my intention in this brief analysis to overgeneralise on the basis of some relatively limited observations. However, many blogs written in response to illness stand out for what they reveal about the shifting location or locatability of self, experience and the events of ongoing illness and thus how we can conceptualise the inherent “privacy” of illness as personal experience. Self-expression here is encompassing of the possibilities through which illness can be experienced – not as representation of that experience, a performance of a disembodied self (though these notions have their merits) – but an expressive element of the substance of the illness as it is experienced over time, as it affects the bodies, thoughts, events and relationships of individuals moving toward a state of full recovery or untimely death. Locating Oneself OnlineMany authors currently examining the role of online spaces in the lives of sufferers of serious illness see online communication as providing a means for configuring experience as a meaningful and coherent story, and thus conferring, or we could say recovering, a sense of agency amidst a tumultuous and ongoing battle with serious illness (Orgad, Pitts). In her study of breast cancer discussion forums, message boards and websites, Orgad (4) notes their role in regaining “the fundamentals disturbed by cancer” (see also Bury). Well before the emergence of online spaces, the act or writing has been seen as “a crucial affirmation of living, a statement against fearfulness, invisibility and silence” (Orgad, 67; Lorde, 61). For many decades scientists have asserted that “brief structured writing sessions can significantly improve mental and physical health for some groups of people” (Singer and Singer 485). The Internet has provided an infrastructure for bringing personal experiences of illness into the public realm, enabling a new level of visibility. Much of the work on illness and the Internet focuses on the liberatory and empowering act of story telling and “disembodied” self-expression. Discussion forums and cancer websites enable the formation of patient led “discourse communities” (Wuthnow). Online spaces such as discussion forums help their participants gain a foothold within a world they share with other sufferers, building communities of practice (Wegner) around specific forms of illness. In this way, these forms of self-expression and communication enable the sufferer of serious illness to counter the modes by which they are made “subjects”, in the Foucauldian sense, of medical discourse. All illness narratives are defined and constructed socially, and are infused with relations of power (Sontag; Foucault, Birth of the Clinic). Forms of online communication have shifted productive practice from professions to patients. Blogs, like discussion forums, websites, email lists etc., have come to play a central role in this contemporary shift. When Lovink (6) describes blogs as a “technology of the self” he points to their role in “self-fashioning”. Blogs written about and in the context of personal illness are a perfect example of this inclination to speak the truth of oneself in the confessional mode of modern culture borne of the church, science and talkshow television. For Foucault (Technologies of the Self, 17), technologies of the self: Permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, immortality. Likewise, as a central concept for understanding Internet identity, the notion of performance (eg, Turkle) highlights the creativity with which illness bloggers may present their role as cancer patient in online spaces, perhaps as an act of resistance to “subjectifying” medical discourses and practices. Many bloggers wrest semiotic power through regular discussion of the language of pathology and medical knowledge, treatment processes and drugs. In the early stages of her treatment, Trigg plays with the new vocabulary, searching for etiologies and making her own semantic connections: I’ve learnt two new words. “Spiculated” describes the characteristic shape of a carcinoma on an ultrasound or x-ray. …The other word is at the other end of the spectrum of linguistic beauty: “lumpectomy”. It took me quite a while to realise that this was not really any different from partial mastectomy; or local excision. It’s an example of the powerful semantic connotations of words to realise that these phrases name the same processes: a long cut, and then the extraction of the diseased tissue (Humanities Researcher, 14 Oct. 2006).Partly due to the rarity of his illness, Brainhell goes through weeks of waiting for a diagnosis, and posts prolifically in an attempt to test out self-diagnoses. Amidst many serious and humorous posts analysing test results and discussing possible diagnoses Brainhell reflects on his targeted use of the blog: I am a word person. I think in sentences. I often take complex technical problems at work and describe them to myself in words. A story helps me understand things better. This blog has become a tool for me to organize my own thoughts about the Mystery Condition. (Brainhell, 6 Jan. 2004)The emancipatory potential of blog writing, however, can be easily overstated. While it is valuable to note and celebrate the performative potential of online production, and its “transformative” role as a technology of the self, it is easy to fall back on an unproblematic distinction between the actual and the virtual, the experience of illness, and its representation in online spaces. Textual expression should always refer us to the extra-textual practices that encompass it without imposing an artificial hierarchy of online and offline, actual experience and representation. As with other forms of online communication and production, the blog culture that has emerged around forms of serious illness plays a significant role in transforming our concepts of the relationship between online and offline spaces. In his My Cancer blog, Sievers often refers to “Cancer World”. He notes, for example, the many “passing friends” he makes in Cancer World through the medical staff and other regular patients at the radiation clinic, and refers to the equipment that sustains his life as the accoutrements of this world. His blog posts revolved around an articulation of the intricacies of this “world” that is in some ways a means of making sense of that world, but is also expressive of it. Sievers tries to explain the notion of Cancer World as a transformation of status between insider & outsider: “once we cross over into Cancer World, we become strangers in a strange land. What to expect, what to hope for, what to fear – none of those are clear right now” (My Cancer, 30 June 2008). Part of his struggle with the illness is also with the expression of himself as encompassed by this new “world” of the effects and activities of cancer. In a similar way, in her Humanities Researcher blog Trigg describes in beautiful detail the processes, routines and relationships formed during radiation treatment. I see these accounts of the textures of cancer spaces as lying at the point of juncture between expression and experience, not as a disembodied, emancipatory realm free from the fetters of illness and the everyday “real” self, but always encompassed by, and encompassing them, and in this way shifting what might be understood to remain “private” in personal experience and self-expression. Blogs as Public Diary Axel Bruns (171), following Matthew Rothenberg, characterises blogs as an accessible technological extension of the personal home page, gaining popularity in the late 1990s because they provided more easy to use templates and web publishing tools than earlier webpage applications. Personalised self expression is a defining element. However, the temporal quality of the reverse chronological, timestamped entry is equally significant for Bruns (171). Taking a broader focus to Bruns, who is most interested in the potential democratisation of media in news related blogs, Lovink sees the experimentation with a “public diary” format as fundamental, signalling their “productive contradiction between public and private” (Lovink 6). A diary may be written for posterity but it is primarily a secretive mode of communication. While blogs may mirror the temporal form of a diary, their intimate focus on self-expression of experience, thoughts and feelings, they do so in a very different communicative context.Despite research suggesting that a majority of bloggers report that they post primarily “for themselves” (Lenhart and Fox) – meaning that they do not deliberately seek a broad audience or readership – the step of making experiences and thoughts so widely accessible cannot be overlooked in any account of blogging. The question of audience or readership, for example, concerns Trigg in her Humanities Researcher blog: The immediacy of a blog distinguishes it from a journal or diary. I wrote for myself, of course, but also for a readership I could measure and chart and hear from, sometimes within minutes of posting. Mostly I don’t know who my readers are, but the kindness and friendship that come to me through the blog gave me courage to write about the intimacies of my treatment; and to chart the emotional upheaval it produced. (Trigg)In their ability to produce a comprehensive expression of the events, experiences, thoughts and feelings of an individual, blogs differ to other forms of online communication such as discussion forums or email lists. Illness blogs are perhaps an extreme example, an open mode of self-expression often arising abruptly in reaction to a life transforming diagnosis and tracking the process of recovery or deterioration, usually ending with remission or death. Brainhell’s blog begins with MRI results, and a series of posts about medical examination and self-examination regarding his mystery condition: So the MRI shows there is something on my brain that is not supposed to be there. The doctor thinks it is not a tumor. That would be good news. …As long as you are alive and have someone to complain to, you ain’t bad off. I am alive and I am complaining about a mystery spot on my brain, and lazy limbs. (Brainhell, 24 Dec. 2003)Brainhell spent many weeks documenting his search for a diagnosis, and continued writing up to his final deterioration and death in 2008. His final posts convey his physical deterioration in truncated sentences, spelling errors and mangled words. In one post he expresses his inability to wake his caregiver and to communicate his distress and physical discomfort at having to pee: when he snorted on waking, i shrieked and he got me up. splayed uncomfortably in the wc as he put dry clothes on me, i was gifted with his words: “you choose this, not me. you want to make it hard, what can i do?” (Brainhell, 13 Jan. 2008). The temporal and continuous format of the blog traverses the visceral, corporeal transformations of body and thought over time. The diary format goes beyond a straightforward narrative form in being far more experiential and even experimental in its self-reflective expression of the events of daily life, thoughts, feelings and states of being. Its public format bears directly on its role in shaping the communicative context in which that expression takes place, and thus to an extent shapes the experience of the illness itself. Nowhere does the expressive substance of the blog so fully encompass the possibilities through which the illness could be experienced than in the author’s death. At this point the blog feels like it is more than a catalogue, dialogue or self-presentation of a struggle with illness. It may take on the form of a memorial (see for example Tom’s Road to Recovery) – a recovery of the self expressed in the daily physical demise, through data maintained in the memory of servers. Ultimately the blog stands as a complex trace of the life lived within its posts. Brainhell’s lengthy blog exemplifies this quite hauntingly. Revealing the Private in Public Blogs exemplify a further step in the transformation of notions of public and private brought about by information and screen technologies. McQuire (103) refers to contemporary screen and Internet culture as “a social setting in which personal identity is subject to new exigencies”. Reality television, such as Big Brother, has promoted “a new mode for the public viewing of private life” (McQuire 114) contributing to the normalisation of open access to personal, intimate revelations, actions and experiences. However, privacy is “an elusive concept” that relates as much to information and property as to self-expression and personal experience (McCullagh). That is, what we consider private to an individual is itself constituted by our variable categories of personal information, material or immaterial possessions, or what counts as an expression of personal experience. Some analysts of online storytelling in the context of illness recognise the unsustainability of the distinction between public and private, but nonetheless rely on the notion of a continuum upon which activities or events could be considered as experienced in a public or private space (Orgad, 129-133). One of the characteristics of a blog, unlike other forms of online communication such as chat, discussion forums and email, is its predominantly public and openly accessible form. Though many illness bloggers do not seem to seek anonymity or hold back in allowing massive access to their self-expression and personal experience, a tension always seems to be there in the background. Identification through the proper name simply implies potential broader effects of blog writing, a pairing of the personal expressions with the person who expresses them in broader daily interactions and relationships. As already “public” figures, Stephanie Trigg and Leroy Sievers choose to forego anonymity, while Brainhell adopted his alias from the beginning and guarded his anonymity carefully. Each of these bloggers, however, shows signs of grappling with the public character of their site, and the interaction between the blog and their everyday life and relationships. In his etiquette page, Brainhell seems unclear about his readership, noting that his blog is for “friends and soul-mates, and complete strangers too”, but that he has not shared it with his family or all of his friends. He goes on to say: You may not have been invited but you are still welcome here. I made it public so that anyone could read it. Total strangers are welcome. Invited friends are welcome. But of those invited friends, I ask you to ask me before you out me as the blog author, or share the blog with other people who already know me. (Brainhell, 18 Feb. 2004) After his death Ratty took steps to continue to maintain his anonymity, vetting many comments and deleting others to “honor BH’s wishes as he outline in ‘Ettiquett for This Blog”’ (Brainhell, 2 Feb. 2008). In Leroy Sievers’ blog, one post exploring the conflict raised by publicly “sharing” his experiences provoked an interesting discussion. He relays a comment sent to him by a woman named Cherie: I have stage four colorectal cancer with liver mets. This is a strange journey, one I am not entirely sure I can share with my loved ones. I am scared it might rob them of the hope I see in their eyes. The hope which I sometimes don’t believe in. (My Cancer, 26 July 2006) Sievers struggles with this question: “How do you balance the need to talk about what is happening to you with the tears of a close friend when you tell him or her the truth? There’s no simple answer.” The blog, in this sense, seems to offer a more legitimate space for the ongoing, detailed expression of these difficult and affective, and traditionally private experiences. In some posts the privacy of the body and bodily experiences is directly challenged or re-negotiated. Stephanie Trigg was concerned with the effect of the blog on her interactions with colleagues. But another interesting dilemma presents itself to her when she is describing the physical effects of cancer, surgery and radiation treatment on her breast, and forces herself to hold back from comparing with the healthy breast: “it's not a medical breast, so I can't write about it here” (Humanities Researcher, 10 Jan. 2007). One prostate cancer blogger, identified as rdavisjr, seems to have no difficulties expressing the details of a physical intrusion on his “privacy” in the far more open forum of his blog: The pull-around ceiling mounted screen was missing (laundry?), so Kelly was called into the room and told to make a screen with a bed sheet. So here I am with one woman sticking her finger up my ass, while another woman is standing in front of the door holding an outstretched bed sheet under her chin (guess she wanted a view!)The screen was necessary to ensure my privacy in the event someone accidentally came into the room, something they said was a common thing. Well, Kelly peering over that sheet was hardly one of my more private moments in life! (Prostate Cancer Journal, 23 Feb. 2001). ConclusionWhatever emancipatory benefits may be found in expressing the most intimate of experiences and events of a serious illness online, it is the creative act of the blog as self-expression here, in its visceral, comprehensive, continuous timestamped format that dismantles the sense of privacy in the name of recovery. The blog is not the public face of private personal experience, but expressive of the life encompassed by that illness, and encompassing its author’s ongoing personal transformation. The blogs discussed here are not alone in demonstrating these practices. The blog format itself may soon evolve or disappear. Nonetheless, the massification enabled by Internet technologies and applications will continue to transform the ways in which personal experience may be considered private. ReferencesBruns, Axel. 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London: Routledge, 2008. McCullagh, Karen. “Blogging: Self Presentation and Privacy.” Information and Communications Technology Law 17.1 (2008): 3-23. McQuire, Scott. “From Glass Architecture to Big Brother: Scenes from a Cultural History of Transparency.” Cultural Studies Review 9.1 (2003): 103-123.Orgad, Shani. Storytelling Online: Talking Breast Cancer on the Internet. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Pitts, Victoria. “Illness and Internet Empowerment: Writing and Reading Breast Cancer in Cyberspace.” Health 8.1 (2004): 33-59.Rothenberg, Matthew. “Weblogs, Metadata, and the Semantic Web”, paper presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, Toronto, 16 Oct. 2003. ‹http://aoir.org/members/papers42/rothenberg_aoir.pdf›.Singer, Jessica, and George H.S. Singer. “Writing as Physical and Emotional Healing: Findings from Clinical Research.” Handbook of Research on Writing: History, Society, School, Individual, Text. Ed. Charles Bazerman. 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Alex Abou-Chebl, MD Michael Abraham, MD Joseph E. Acker, III, EMT-P, MPH Robert Adams, MD, MS, FAHA Eric Adelman, MD Opeolu Adeoye, MD DeAnna L. Adkins, PhD Maria Aguilar, MD Absar Ahmed, MD Naveed Akhtar, MD Rufus Akinyemi, MBBS, MSc, MWACP, FMCP(Nig) Karen C. Albright, DO, MPH Felipe Albuquerque, MD Andrei V. Alexandrov, MD Abdulnasser Alhajeri, MD Latisha Ali, MD Nabil J. Alkayed, MD, PhD, FAHA Amer Alshekhlee, MD, MSc Irfan Altafullah, MD Arun Paul Amar, MD Pierre Amarenco, MD, FAHA, FAAN Sepideh Amin-Hanjani, MD, FAANS, FACS, FAHA Catherine Amlie-Lefond, MD Aaron M. Anderson, MD David C. Anderson, MD, FAHA Sameer A. Ansari, MD, PhD Ken Arai, PhD Agnieszka Ardelt, MD, PhD Juan Arenillas, MD PhD William Armstead, PhD, FAHA Jennifer L. Armstrong-Wells, MD, MPH Negar Asdaghi, MD, MSc, FRCPC Nancy D. Ashley, APRN,BC, CEN,CCRN,CNRN Stephen Ashwal, MD Andrew Asimos, MD Rand Askalan, MD, PhD Kjell Asplund, MD Richard P. Atkinson, MD, FAHA Issam A. 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We take as our subject what many would deem a waste of good celluloid: the degraded cultural form of the stoner film. Stoner films plot the experiences of the wasted (those intoxicated on marijuana) as they exhibit wastefulness—excessiveness, improvidence, decay—on a number of fronts. Stoners waste time in constantly hunting for pot and in failing to pursue more productive activity whilst wasted. Stoners waste their minds, both literally, if we believe contested studies that indicate marijuana smoking kills brains cells, and figuratively, in rendering themselves cognitively impaired. Stoners waste their bodies through the dangerous practice of smoking and through the tendency toward physical inertia. Stoners waste money on marijuana firstly, but also on such sophomoric accoutrements as the stoner film itself. Stoners lay waste to convention in excessively seeking pleasure and in dressing and acting outrageously. And stoners, if the scatological humour of so many stoner films is any index, are preoccupied with bodily waste. Stoners, we argue here, waste whiteness as well. As the likes of Jesse and Chester (Dude, Where’s My Car?), Wayne and Garth (Wayne’s World), Bill and Ted (Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure) and Jay and Silent Bob (Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back) make clear, whiteness looms large in stoner films. Yet the genre, we argue, disavows its own whiteness, in favour of a post-white hybridity that lavishly squanders white privilege. For all its focus on whiteness, filmic wastedness has always been an ethnically diverse and ambiguous category. The genre’s origins in the work of Cheech Marin, a Chicano, and Tommy Chong, a Chinese-European Canadian, have been buttressed in this regard by many African American contributions to the stoner oeuvre, including How High, Half Baked and Friday, as well as by Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, and its Korean-American and Indian-American protagonists. Cheech and Chong initiated the genre with the release of Up in Smoke in 1978. A host of films have followed featuring protagonists who spend much of their time smoking and seeking marijuana (or—in the case of stoner films such as Dude, Where’s My Car? released during the height of the War on Drugs—acting stoned without ever being seen to get stoned). Inspired in part by the 1938 anti-marijuana film Reefer Madness, and the unintended humour such propaganda films begat amongst marijuana smokers, stoner films are comedies that satirise both marijuana culture and its prohibition. Self-consciously slapstick, the stoner genre excludes more serious films about drugs, from Easy Rider to Shaft, as well as films such as The Wizard of Oz, Yellow Submarine, the Muppet movies, and others popular amongst marijuana smokers because of surreal content. Likewise, a host of films that include secondary stoner characters, such as Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Wooderson in Dazed and Confused, are commonly excluded from the genre on the grounds that the stoner film, first and foremost, celebrates stonerism, that is “serious commitment to smoking and acquiring marijuana as a lifestyle choice.” (Meltzer). Often taking the form of the “buddy film,” stoner flicks generally feature male leads and frequently exhibit a decidedly masculinist orientation, with women, for the most part reduced to little more than the object of the white male gaze.The plot, such as it is, of the typical stoner film concerns the search for marijuana (or an accessory, such as junk food) and the improbable misadventures that ensue. While frequently represented as resourceful and energetic in their quest for marijuana, filmic stoners otherwise exhibit ambivalent attitudes toward enterprise that involves significant effort. Typically represented as happy and peaceable, filmic stoners rarely engage in conflict beyond regular clashes with authority figures determined to enforce anti-drug laws, and other measures that stoners take to be infringements upon happiness. While Hollywood’s stoners thus share a sense of entitlement to pleasure, they do not otherwise exhibit a coherent ideological orthodoxy beyond a certain libertarian and relativistic open-mindedness. More likely to take inspiration from comic book heroes than Aldous Huxley or Timothy Leary, stoners are most often portrayed as ‘dazed and confused,’ and could be said to waste the intellectual tradition of mind expansion that Leary represents. That stoner films are, at times, misunderstood to be quintessentially white is hardly suprising. As a social construct that creates, maintains and legitimates white domination, whiteness manifests, as one of its most defining features, an ability to swallow up difference and to insist upon, at critical junctures, a universal subjectivity that disallows for difference (hooks 167). Such universalising not only sanctions co-optation of ethnic cultural expression, it also functions to mask whiteness’s existence, thus reinforcing its very power. Whiteness, as Richard Dyer argues, is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. It obfuscates itself and its relationship to the particular traits it is said to embody—disinterest, prudence, temperance, rationality, bodily restraint, industriousness (3). Whiteness is thus constructed as neither an ethnic nor racial particularity, but rather the transcendence of such positionality (Wiegman 139). While non-whites are raced, to be white is to be “just human” and thus to possess the power to “claim to speak for the commonality of humanity” whilst denying the accrual of any particular racial privilege (Dyer 2). In refuting its own advantages—which are so wide ranging (from preferential treatment in housing loans, to the freedom to fail without fear of reflecting badly on other whites) that they are, like whiteness itself, both assumed and unproblematic—whiteness instantiates individualism, allowing whites to believe that their successes are in no way the outcome of systematic racial advantage, but rather the product of individual toil (McIntosh; Lipsitz). An examination of the 1978 stoner film Up in Smoke suggests that whatever the ethnic ambiguity of the figure of the stoner, the genre of the stoner film is all about the wasting of whiteness. Up in Smoke opens with two alternating domestic scenes. We first encounter Pedro De Pacas (Cheech Marin) in a cluttered and shadowy room as his siblings romp affectionately upon his back, waking him from his slumber on the couch. Pedro rises, stepping into a bowl of cereal on the floor. He stumbles to the bathroom, where, sleepy and disoriented, he urinates into the laundry hamper. The chaos of Pedro’s disrupted sleep is followed in the film by a more metaphoric awakening as Anthony Stoner (Tommy Chong) determines to leave home. The scene takes place in a far more orderly, light and lavish room. The space’s overpowering whiteness is breached only by the figure of Anthony and his unruly black hair, bushy black beard, and loud Hawaiian shirt, which vibrates with colour against the white walls, white furnishings and white curtains. We watch as Anthony, behind an elaborate bar, prepares a banana protein shake, impassively ignoring his parents, both clothed in all-white, as they clutch martini glasses and berate their son for his lack of ambition. Arnold Stoner [father]: Son, your mother and me would like for you to cozy up to the Finkelstein boy. He's a bright kid, and, uh... he's going to military school, and remember, he was an Eagle Scout. Tempest Stoner [mother]: Arnold…Arnold Stoner: [shouts over/to his wife] Will you shut up? We’re not going to have a family brawl!Tempest Stoner: [continues talking as her husband shouts]…. Retard.Arnold Stoner: [to Anthony] We've put up with a hell of a lot.[Anthony starts blender] Can this wait? ... Build your goddamn muscles, huh? You know, you could build your muscles picking strawberries.You know, bend and scoop... like the Mexicans. Shit, maybe I could get you a job with United Fruit. I got a buddy with United Fruit. ... Get you started. Start with strawberries, you might work your way up to these goddamn bananas! When, boy? When...are you going to get your act together?Anthony: [Burps]Tempest Stoner: Gross.Arnold Stoner: Oh, good God Almighty me. I think he's the Antichrist. Anthony, I want to talk to you. [Anthony gathers his smoothie supplements and begins to walk out of the room.] Now, listen! Don't walk away from me when I'm talking to you! You get a goddamn job before sundown, or we're shipping you off to military school with that goddamn Finkelstein shit kid! Son of a bitch!The whiteness of Anthony’s parents is signified so pervasively and so strikingly in this scene—in their improbable white outfits and in the room’s insufferably white décor—that we come to understand it as causative. The rage and racism of Mr. Stoner’s tirade, the scene suggests, is a product of whiteness itself. Given that whiteness achieves and maintains its domination via both ubiquity and invisibility, what Up in Smoke accomplishes in this scene is notable. Arnold Stoner’s tortured syntax (“that goddamn Finkelstein shit kid”) works to “mak[e] whiteness strange” (Dyer 4), while the scene’s exaggerated staging delineates whiteness as “a particular – even peculiar – identity, rather than a presumed norm” (Roediger, Colored White 21). The belligerence of the senior Stoners toward not only their son and each other, but the world at large, in turn, functions to render whiteness intrinsically ruthless and destructive. Anthony’s parents, in all their whiteness, enact David Roediger’s assertion that “it is not merely that ‘Whiteness’s is oppressive and false; it is that ‘Whiteness’s is nothing but oppressive and false” (Toward the Abolition 13).Anthony speaks not a word during the scene. He communicates only by belching and giving his parents the finger as he leaves the room and the home. This departure is significant in that it marks the moment when Anthony, hereafter known only as “Man,” flees the world of whiteness. He winds up taking refuge in the multi-hued world of stonerism, as embodied in the scene that follows, which features Pedro emerging from his home to interact with his Chicano neighbours and to lovingly inspect his car. As a lowrider, a customised vehicle that “begin[s] with the abandoned materials of one tradition (that of mainstream America), … [and is] … then transformed and recycled . . . into new and fresh objects of art which are distinctly Chicano,” Pedro’s car serves as a symbol of the cultural hybridisation that Man is about to undergo (quoted in Ondine 141).As Man’s muteness in the presence of his parents suggests, his racial status seems tentative from the start. Within the world of whiteness, Man is the subaltern, silenced and denigrated, finding voice only after he befriends Pedro. Even as the film identifies Man as white through his parental lineage, it renders indeterminate its own assertion, destabilising any such fixed or naturalised schema of identity. When Man is first introduced to Pedro’s band as their newest member, James, the band’s African American bass player, looks at Man, dressed in the uniform of the band, and asks: “Hey Pedro, where’s the white dude you said was playing the drums?” Clearly, from James’s point of view, the room contains no white dudes, just stoners. Man’s presumed whiteness becomes one of the film’s countless gags, the provocative ambiguity of the casting of a Chinese-European to play a white part underscored in the film by the equally implausible matter of age. Man, according to the film’s narrative, is a high school student; Chong was forty when the film was released. Like his age, Man’s whiteness is never a good fit. That Man ultimately winds up sleeping on the very couch upon which we first encounter Pedro suggests how radical and final the break with his dubious white past is. The “Mexicans” whom his father would mock as fit only for abject labour are amongst those whom Man comes to consider his closest companions. In departing his parents’ white world, and embracing Pedro’s dilapidated, barrio-based world of wastedness, Man traces the geographies narrated by George Lipsitz in The Possessive Investment in Whiteness. Historically, Lipsitz argues, the development of affluent white space (the suburbs) was made possible by the disintegration of African American, Chicano and other minority neighbourhoods disadvantaged by federal, state, and corporate housing, employment, health care, urban renewal, and education policies that favoured whites over non-whites. In this sense, Man’s flight from his parents’ home is a retreat from whiteness itself, and from the advantages that whiteness conveys. In choosing the ramshackle, non-white world of stonerism, Man performs an act of racial treachery. Whiteness, Lipsitz contends, has “cash value,” and “is invested in, like property, but it is also a means of accumulating property and keeping it from others,” which allows for “intergenerational transfers of inherited wealth that pass on the spoils of discrimination to succeeding generations” (vii-viii). Man’s disavowal of the privileges of whiteness is a reckless refusal to accept this racial birthright. Whiteness is thus wasted upon Man because Man wastes his whiteness. Given the centrality of prudence and restraint to hegemonic constructions of whiteness, Man’s willingness to squander the “valuable asset” that is his white inheritance is especially treasonous (Harris 1713). Man is the prodigal son of whiteness, a profligate who pours down the drain “the wages of whiteness” that his forbearers have spent generations accruing and protecting (Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness). His waste not only offends the core values which whiteness is said to comprise, it also denigrates whiteness itself by illuminating the excess of white privilege, as well as the unarticulated excess of meanings that hover around whiteness to create the illusion of transcendence and infinite variety. Man’s performance, like all bad performances of whiteness, “disrupt[s] implicit understandings of what it means to be white” (Hartigan 46). The spectre of seeing white domination go ‘up in smoke’—via wasting, as opposed to hoarding, white privilege—amounts to racial treason, and helps not only to explicate why whites in the film find stonerism so menacing, but also to explain the paradox of “pot [making] the people who don’t smoke it even more paranoid than the people who do” (Patterson). While Tommy Chong’s droll assertion that "what makes us so dangerous is that we're harmless" ridicules such paranoia, it ultimately fails to account for the politics of subversive squandering of white privilege that characterise the stoner film (“Biographies”). Stoners in Up in Smoke, as in most other stoner films, are marked as non-white, through association with ethnic Others, through their rejection of mainstream ideas about work and achievement, and/or through their lack of bodily restraint in relentlessly seeking pleasure, in dressing outrageously, and in refusing to abide conventional grooming habits. Significantly, the non-white status of the stoner is both voluntary and deliberate. While stonerism embraces its own non-whiteness, its Otherness is not signified, primarily, through racial cross-dressing of the sort Eric Lott detects in Elvis, but rather through race-mixing. Stoner collectivity practices an inclusivity that defies America’s historic practice of racial and ethnic segregation (Lott 248). Stonerism further reveals its unwillingness to abide constrictive American whiteness in a scene in which Pedro and Man, both US-born Americans, are deported. The pair are rounded up along with Pedro’s extended family in a raid initiated when Pedro’s cousin “narcs” on himself to la migra (the Immigration and Naturalization Service) in order to get free transport for his extended family to his wedding in Tijuana. Pedro and Man return to the US as unwitting tricksters, bringing back to the US more marijuana than has ever crossed the Mexican-US border at one time, fusing the relationship between transnationalism and wastedness. The disrespect that stoners exhibit for pregnable US borders contests presumed Chicano powerlessness in the face of white force and further affronts whiteness, which historically has mobilised itself most virulently at the threat of alien incursion. Transgression here is wilful and playful; stoners intend to offend normative values and taste through their actions, their dress, and non-white associations as part of the project of forging a new hybridised, transnational subjectivity that threatens to lay waste to whiteness’s purity and privilege. Stoners invite the scrutiny of white authority with their outrageous attire and ethnically diverse composition, turning the “inevitability of surveillance” (Borrie 87) into an opportunity to enact their own wastedness—their wasted privilege, their wasted youth, their wasted potential—before a gaze that is ultimately confounded and threatened by the chaotic hybridity with which it is faced (Hebdige 26). By perpetually displaying his/her wasted Otherness, the stoner makes of him/herself a “freak,” a label cops use derisively throughout Up in Smoke to denote the wasted without realising that stoners define themselves in precisely such terms, and, by doing so, obstruct whiteness’s assertion of universal subjectivity. Pedro’s cousin Strawberry (Tom Skerritt), a pot dealer, enacts freakishness by exhibiting a large facial birthmark and by suffering from Vietnam-induced Post Traumatic Stress disorder. A freak in every sense of the word, Strawberry is denied white status by virtue of physical and mental defect. But Strawberry, as a stoner, ultimately wants whiteness even less than it wants him. The defects that deny him membership in the exclusive “club” that is whiteness prove less significant than the choice he makes to defect from the ranks of whiteness and join with Man in the decision to waste his whiteness wantonly (“Editorial”). Stoner masculinity is represented as similarly freakish and defective. While white authority forcefully frustrates the attempts of Pedro and Man to “score” marijuana, the duo’s efforts to “score” sexually are thwarted by their own in/action. More often than not, wastedness produces impotence in Up in Smoke, either literally or figuratively, wherein the confusion and misadventures that attend pot-smoking interrupt foreplay. The film’s only ostensible sex scene is unconsummated, a wasted opportunity for whiteness to reproduce itself when Man sleeps through his girlfriend’s frenzied discussion of sex. During the course of Up in Smoke, Man dresses as a woman while hitchhiking, Pedro mistakes Man for a woman, Man sits on Pedro’s lap when they scramble to change seats whilst being pulled over by the police, Man suggests that Pedro has a “small dick,” Pedro reports liking “manly breasts,” and Pedro—unable to urinate in the presence of Sgt. Stedenko—tells his penis that if it does not perform, he will “put [it] back in the closet.” Such attenuations of the lead characters’ masculinity climax in the penultimate scene, in which Pedro, backed by his band, performs “Earache My Eye,” a song he has just composed backstage, whilst adorned in pink tutu, garter belt, tassle pasties, sequined opera mask and Mickey Mouse ears: My momma talkin’ to me tryin’ to tell me how to liveBut I don't listen to her cause my head is like a sieveMy daddy he disowned me cause I wear my sister's clothesHe caught me in the bathroom with a pair of pantyhoseMy basketball coach he done kicked me off the teamFor wearing high heeled sneakers and acting like a queen“Earache My Eye” corroborates the Othered natured of stonerism by marking stoners, already designated as non-white, as non-straight. In a classic iteration of a bad gender performance, the scene rejects both whiteness and its hegemonic partners-in-crime, heterosexuality and normative masculinity (Butler 26). Here stoners waste not only their whiteness, but also their white masculinity. Whiteness, and its dependence upon “intersection … [with] interlocking axes [of power such as] gender … [and] sexuality,” is “outed” in this scene (Shome 368). So, too, is it enfeebled. In rendering masculinity freakish and defective, the film threatens whiteness at its core. For if whiteness can not depend upon normative masculinity for its reproduction, then, like Man’s racial birthright, it is wasted. The stoner’s embodiment of freakishness further works to emphasise wasted whiteness by exposing just how hysterical whiteness’s defense of its own normativity can be. Up in Smoke frequently inflates not only the effects of marijuana, but also the eccentricities of those who smoke it, a strategy which means that much of the film’s humour turns on satirising hegemonic stereotypes of marijuana smokers. Equally, Cheech Marin’s exaggerated “slapstick, one-dimensional [portrayal] of [a] Chicano character” works to render ridiculous the very stereotypes his character incarnates (List 183). While the film deconstructs processes of social construction, it also makes extensive use of counter-stereotyping in its depictions of characters marked as white. The result is that whiteness’s “illusion of [its] own infinite variety” is contested and the lie of whiteness as non-raced is exposed, helping to explain the stoner’s decision to waste his/her whiteness (Dyer 12; 2). In Up in Smoke whiteness is the colour of straightness. Straights, who are willing neither to smoke pot nor to tolerate the smoking of pot by others/Others, are so comprehensively marked as white in the film that whiteness and straightness become isomorphic. As a result, the same stereotypes are mobilised in representing whiteness and straightness: incompetence, belligerence, hypocrisy, meanspiritedness, and paranoia, qualities that are all the more oppressive because virtually all whites/straights in the film occupy positions of authority. Anthony’s spectacularly white parents, as we have seen, are bigoted and dominating. Their whiteness is further impugned by alcohol, which fuels Mr. Stoner’s fury and Mrs. Stoner’s unintelligibility. That the senior Stoners are drunk before noon works, of course, to expose the hypocrisy of those who would indict marijuana use while ignoring the social damage alcohol can produce. Their inebriation (revealed as chronic in the DVD’s outtake scenes) takes on further significance when it is configured as a decidedly white attribute. Throughout the film, only characters marked as white consume alcohol—most notably, the judge who is discovered to be drinking vodka whist adjudicating drug charges against Pedro and Man—therefore dislodging whiteness’s self-construction as temperate, and suggesting just how wasted whiteness is. While stonerism is represented as pacific, drunkenness is of a piece with white/straight bellicosity. In Up in Smoke, whites/straights crave confrontation and discord, especially the angry, uptight, and vainglorious narcotics cop Sgt. Stedenko (Stacey Keech) who inhabits so many of the film’s counter-stereotypes. While a trio of white cops roughly apprehend and search a carload of innocent nuns in a manner that Man describes as “cold blooded,” Stedenko, unawares in the foreground, gives an interview about his plans for what he hopes will be the biggest border drug bust in US history: “[Reporter:] Do you expect to see any violence here today? [Sgt. Stedenko:] I certainly hope so.” Stedenko’s desire to act violently against stoners echoes mythologies of white regeneration in the Old West, wherein whiteness refurbished itself through violent attacks on Native Americans, whose wasteful cultures failed to make “civilised” use of western lands (Slotkin 565).White aggression is relentlessly depicted in the film, with one important exception: the instance of the stoned straight. Perhaps no other trope is as defining of the genre, as is the scene wherein a straight person accidentally becomes stoned. Up in Smoke offers several examples, most notably the scene in which a motorcycle cop pulls over Pedro and Man as they drive a van belonging to Pedro’s Uncle Chuey. In a plot twist requiring a degree of willing suspension of disbelief that even wasted audiences might find a stretch, the exterior shell of the van, unbeknownst to Pedro and Man, is made entirely of marijuana which has started to smoulder around the exhaust pipe. The cop, who becomes intoxicated whilst walking through the fumes, does not hassle Pedro and Man, as expected, but instead asks for a bite of their hot dog and then departs happily, instructing the duo to “have a nice day.” In declining, or perhaps simply forgetting, to exercise his authority, the cop demonstrates the regenerative potential not of violent whiteness but rather of hybrid wastedness. Marijuana here is transformative, morphing straight consciousness into stoner consciousness and, in the process, discharging all the uptight, mean-spirited, unnecessary, and hence wasteful baggage of whiteness along the way. While such a utopian potential for pot is both upheld and satirised in the film, the scene amounts to far more than an inconsequential generic gag, in that it argues for the disavowal of whiteness via the assumption of the voluntary Otherness that is stonerism. Whiteness, the scene suggests, can be cast off, discarded, wasted and thus surmounted. Whites, for want of a better phrase, simply need to ‘just say no’ to whiteness in order to excrete the brutality that is its necessary affliction and inevitable result. While Up in Smoke laudably offers a powerful refusal to horde the assets of whiteness, the film fails to acknowledge that ‘just saying no’ is, indeed, one of whiteness’s exclusive privileges, since whites and only whites possess the liberty to refuse the advantages whiteness bestows. Non-whites possess no analogical ability to jettison the social constructions to which they are subjected, to refuse the power of dominant classes to define their subjectivity. Neither does the film confront the fact that Man nor any other of Up in Smoke’s white freaks are disallowed from re-embracing their whiteness, and its attendant value, at any time. However inchoate the film’s challenge to racial privilege, Up in Smoke’s celebration of the subversive pleasures of wasting whiteness offers a tentative, if bleary, first step toward ‘the abolition of whiteness.’ Its utopian vision of a post-white hybridised subjectivity, however dazed and confused, is worthy of far more serious contemplation than the film, taken at face value, might seem to suggest. Perhaps Up in Smoke is a stoner film that should also be viewed while sober. ReferencesBill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Dir. Stephen Herek. Orion Pictures Corporation, 1989.“Biographies”. 10 June 2010 ‹http://www.cheechandchongfans.com/biography.html›. Borrie, Lee. "Wild Ones: Containment Culture and 1950s Youth Rebellion”. Diss. University of Canterbury, 2007.Butler, Judith. "Critically Queer”. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1.1 (1993): 17-32.Chavoya, C. Ondine. “Customized Hybrids: The Art of Ruben Ortiz Torres and Lowriding in Southern California”. CR: The New Centennial Review 4.2 (2004): 141-84.Clerks. Dir. Kevin Smith. Miramax Films, 1994. Dazed and Confused. Dir. Richard Linklater. Cineplex Odeon Films, 1993. Dude, Where’s My Car? Dir. Danny Leiner. Twentieth Century Fox, 2000.Dyer, Richard. White: Essays on Race and Culture. London: Routledge, 1997.“Editorial: Abolish the White Race—By Any Means Necessary”. Race Traitor 1 (1993). 9 June 2010 ‹http://racetraitor.org/abolish.html›.Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Dir. Amy Heckerling. Universal Pictures, 1982.Friday. Dir. F. Gary Gray. New Line Cinema, 1995.Half Baked. Dir. Tamra Davis. Universal Pictures, 1998.Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Dir. Danny Leiner. New Line Cinema, 2004.Harris, Cheryl. “Whiteness as Property”. Harvard Law Review 106 (1993): 1707-1791. Hartigan, John Jr. “Objectifying ‘Poor Whites and ‘White Trash’ in Detroit”. White Trash: Race and Class in America. Eds. Matt Wray, and Annalee Newitz. NY: Routledge, 1997. 41-56.Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen, 1979.hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.How High. Dir. Jesse Dylan. Universal Pictures, 2001.Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit fromIdentity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2006. List, Christine. "Self-Directed Stereotyping in the Films of Cheech Marin”. Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance. Ed. Chon A. Noriega. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992. 183-94.Lott, Eric. “Racial Cross-Dressing and the Construction of American Whiteness”. The Cultural Studies Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Simon During. London: Routledge, 1999. 241-55.McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”. 10 June 2010 ‹http://www.case.edu/president/aaction/UnpackingTheKnapsack.pdf›.Meltzer, Marisa. “Leisure and Innocence: The Eternal Appeal of the Stoner Movie”. Slate 26 June 2007. 10 Aug. 2010 ‹http://www.slate.com/id/2168931›.Toni Morrison. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.Patterson, John. “High and Mighty”. The Guardian 7 June 2008. 10 June 2010 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2008/jun/07/2›.Roediger, David. Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Rev. ed. London: Verso Books, 1999.———. Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Class and Politics. London: Verso Books, 1994.Shome, Raka. “Outing Whiteness”. Critical Studies in Media Communication 17.3 (2000): 366-71.Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1973.Up in Smoke. Dir. Lou Adler. Paramount Pictures, 1978.Wayne’s World. Dir. Penelope Spheeris. Paramount Pictures, 1992.Wiegman, Robyn. “Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity”. boundary 2 26.3 (1999): 115-50.

IntroductionIn 2017, both the disability community and popular culture are using the term “inspiration porn” to describe one form of discrimination against people with disability. ABC’s Speechless, “a sitcom about a family with a son who has a disability, (has) tackled why it’s often offensive to call people with disabilities ‘inspirational’” (Wanshel). The reasons why inspiration porn is considered to be discriminatory have been widely articulated online by people with disability. Amongst them is Carly Findlay, a disabled writer, speaker, and appearance activist, who has written that:(inspiration porn) shows non-disabled people doing good deeds for disabled people—feeding them chips at McDonald’s—’serving us all lessons in kindness’: or taking them to the high school dance. These stories usually always go viral. The person with disability probably never gave their permission for the photo or story to be used in a meme or told to the media (Findlay).The definition and dynamics of inspiration porn as illustrated in this quote will be expanded upon in this paper’s critical analysis of captions. Here, the term captions is used to describe both writing found on memes and on Facebook posts (created by a “poster”), and the comments written below these posts (created by “commenters”). Facebook threads underneath posts about people with disability both “reflect and create” (Barnes, Mercer and Shakespeare 202) current societal attitudes towards disability. That is, such threads not only illustrate negative societal attitudes towards disability, but can also perpetuate these attitudes by increasing people’s exposure to them. This paper will focus on a specific case study of inspiration porn on Facebook—the crowning of a student with autism as prom king—and consider both the conflict of whether people’s kind words are patronising use of language, as well as the concerns of over-disclosure used in this thread.What Is Inspiration Porn?The genesis of the term inspiration porn is commonly attributed to the late Stella Young, a disabled woman who was an advocate for people with disability. However, the term has been traced to a blog post written in February 2012 (bear). Anecdotal evidence from Lisa Harris, a disability consultant and advocate with over 20 years’ disability education experience, suggests that the term was blogged about as far back as 2006 on Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg’s Webpage Disability and Representation (Harris). However, it was Young who popularised the term with her 2012 article We’re Not Here for Your Inspiration and 2014 TED Talk I’m Not Your Inspiration, Thank You Very Much. Young defined inspiration porn as “an image of a person with a disability, often a kid, doing something completely ordinary—like playing, or talking, or running, or drawing a picture, or hitting a tennis ball—carrying a caption like ‘your excuse is invalid’ or ‘before you quit, try’”.It is worth noting that the use of the word porn has been considered controversial in this context. Yet it can be argued that the perception of the person with disability having achieved something great gives the person without disability a hit of positive “inspired” emotion. In this way, such inspiration could be termed as porn as it serves the purpose of fulfilling the “pornographic” self-gratification of people without disability.The term inspiration porn has historically been used in disability studies in two ways. Firstly, it has been used to describe the “ableist gaze” (Davis), which is when a person with disability is ‘seen’ through the eyes of someone without disability. Indeed, just as the “male gaze” (Mulvey) is implicit in sexualised porn, so too the “ableist gaze” is implicit in inspiration porn. Secondly, it has been used to highlight the lack of power experienced by people with disability in cultural representation (Barnes, Mercer, and Shakespeare 201). This study is a good example of the latter—it is not uncommon for people with disability to be refuted when they speak out against the inherent discrimination found within captions of (intended) kindness on Facebook threads.Inspiration porn is also a form of “objectification” (Perry) of people with disability, and is based on stereotypes (Haller and Zhang 22) about disability held by people without disability. According to Dr. Paul Sinclair, a disability scholar with 15 years’ experience in disability education, objectification and stereotyping are essential factors to understanding inspiration porn as discrimination:when a person with disability engages in their daily life, it is possible that a person without disability sees them as inspirational by superimposing his/her stereotypical perception of, or understanding about, people with disability onto the identity of the person, as a human being.Such objectification and stereotyping of people with disability is evident across various media captioning. This is particularly so in social media which often includes memes of images with “inspiring” captions—such as the ones Young highlighted as clear examples of inspiration porn, which “feature the Hamilton quote (‘The only disability in life is a bad attitude’)”. Another example of this kind of captioning is found in news items such as the 2015 article Disabled Teen Crowned Homecoming Queen in Awesome Way as featured in the article USA Today (Saggio). This article described how a student not identified as having a disability gave her homecoming queen crown to a student with a disability and captioned the YouTube clip of these students with, “High school senior [Name] was hoping she’d be crowned homecoming queen. She has cerebral palsy and has never felt like she fit in at school. What happened during the crowning ceremony will warm your heart” (Saggio). The fact that the young woman was pleased with getting the crown does not mitigate the objectifying dynamics of inspiration porn present within this example. Captioning such as this both creates and reflects some of the existing attitudes—including charity and its appeal to emotionality—that perpetuate inspiration porn.Measuring Inspiration Porn with Sentiment AnalysisThe challenge for the researcher analysing Facebook threads is how to meaningfully interpret the captions’ numerous contexts. The methodology of this research used a quantitative approach to gather numerical data about selected Facebook captions. This paper discusses data gained from a sentiment analysis (Pang and Lee; Thelwall et al.; Driscoll) of these captions within the contexts of my own and other researchers’ analyses of inspiration porn, as well as the perspectives of people with disability.The sentiment analysis was conducted using SentiStrength, a software tool that extracts both positive and negative sentiment strengths “from short informal electronic text” (Thelwall et al., 2545), and ranks it “on a numerical scale” (Driscoll 3). Sentiment analysis and SentiStrength are useful, but not perfect, tools with which to analyse Facebook captions. For example, SentiStrength determines two scales: a positive emotion measurement scale ranging from +1 (neutral) to +5 (most positive), and a negative emotion measurement scale ranging from –1 (neutral) to –5 (most negative). It calculates the positive and negative scores concurrently rather than averaging them out in order to acknowledge that captions can and do express mixed emotion (Driscoll 5).News articles about people with disability attending proms and comparable events, such as the homecoming queen example described above, are often criticised by disability activists for perpetuating inspiration porn (Mort; Findlay; Brown). Based on this criticism, sentiment analysis was used in this research to measure the emotional strength of captions—particularly their possible use of patronising language—using the Autism Speaks Facebook post as a case study. The post featured an image of a high school student with autism who had been crowned prom king.The Autism Speaks Facebook page was set up to fund “research into the causes, prevention, treatments and a cure for autism; increas(e) awareness of autism spectrum disorders; and advocat(e) for the needs of individuals with autism and their families” (Autism Speaks). The location of the prom was not specified; however, Autism Speaks is based in New York. This particular Facebook page was selected for this study based on criticism that Autism Speaks receives from disability advocates. One of the major critiques is that “(its) advertising depends on offensive and outdated rhetoric of fear and pity, presenting the lives of autistic people as tragic burdens on our families and society” (Boycott Autism Speaks). Autism Speaks has also been described as a problematic example of an organisation that “dictate(s) how disability should be perceived and dealt with. Often without input of disabled people either in the design or implementation of these organizations” (crippledscholar). This article goes on to state that “charities always frame what they do as positive and helpful even when the people who are the intended recipients disagree.”The prom king post included a photo of a young man with autism after he was crowned. He was standing beside a woman who wasn’t identified. The photo, posted by the young man’s aunt on the Autism Speaks Facebook page, included a status update that read:My autistic nephew won PROM KING today! Just so you all know, having a disability doesn’t hold you back if you don’t let it! GO [NAME]. #AutismAwareness (Autism Speaks)The following caption from the comment thread of the same Facebook post is useful as an example of how SentiStrength works. The caption read:Tears of Joy! Thank you for posting!!! Wow this gives me hope for his and my son’s and everyone’s special wonderful child nephew and niece! Way cool!However, because SentiStrength does not always accurately detect and measure sarcasm or idiomatic language usage, ”Tears” (the only negatively interpreted word in this caption) has been scored as –4, while the overall positive sentiment was scored as 3. Therefore, the final SentiStrength score of this caption was 3, –4, thereby demonstrating both the utility and limitations of SentiStrength as a sentiment analysis tool. This is useful to understand when analysing the data it produces.When analysing the entire thread, the sentiment analysis results across 238 captions, showed that 2 was the average strength of positive emotion, and that –1.16 was the average strength of negative emotion. The following section will analyse how a specific caption chosen from the most positively-scored captions from these data indicates that inspiration porn is possibly evident within.Use of Language: Kind, or Patronising?This discussion analyses the use of language in one caption from this thread, focusing on the way it likely demonstrated the ableist gaze. The caption was the most positive one from these data as scored by SentiStrength (5, –1) and read, ”CONGRATULATIONS SWEETIE!!!”. While it is noted that basing this analysis primarily on one caption provides limited insight into the dynamics of inspiration porn, this analysis forms a basis from which to consider other “inspirational” Facebook posts about people with disability. As well as this caption, this discussion will also draw upon other examples mentioned in this paper—from the homecoming queen article in USA Today to another caption on the Autism Speaks thread—to illustrate the dynamics of inspiration porn.On the surface, this congratulatory caption seems like a kind thing to post. However, inspiration porn has been identified in this analysis based on the caption’s effusive use of punctuation coupled with use of capital letters and the word “sweetie”. The excitement depicted through use of multiple exclamation marks and capital letters implies that the commenter has a personal connection with the prom king, which is a possibility. However, this possibility becomes less feasible when the caption is considered within the context of other captions that display not dissimilar use of language, as well as some that also display intimate emojis, such as grin faces and love heart eyes. Further, when this use of language is used with any consistency across a thread and is not coupled with textual information that implies a personal connection between the commenter/s and the prom king, it could be interpreted as patronising, condescending and/or infantilising. In addition, “sweetie” is a term of endearment commonly used in conversation with a romantic partner, child, or someone the speaker/writer knows intimately. While, again, it is possible that these commenters knew the prom king intimately, a more likely possibility is that he was being written to by strangers, yet using language that implied he was close to them—which would then have the same patronising connotations as above. It can therefore be argued that there is a strong possibility that this heightened use of intimate and emotional language was chosen based on his autism diagnosis.The conclusion drawn above is based in part on contextual similarities between the Autism Speaks post and its associated thread, and the aforementioned homecoming queen news article. In the former, it is likely that the young prom king was congratulated effusively because of his autism diagnosis. Similarly, in the latter article, the young woman was crowned not because she was named homecoming queen, but because the crown was given to her because of her diagnosis of cerebral palsy. As both gestures appear to have been based on others’ perceptions of these individuals’ disabilities rather than on their achievements, they are both likely to be patronising gestures.Over-DisclosureIn addition to use of language, another noteworthy issue in the captions thread on the Autism Speaks Facebook page was that many of them were from parents disclosing the diagnosis of their child. One example of this was a post from a mother that read (in part):I’ll be over here worried & concerned with the other 9,999 & ½ things to deal with, keeping up with new therapies, current therapy, we came in progress from any past therapies, meltdowns, dietary restrictions, educational requirements, The joy and difficulties of not just learning a new word but actually retaining that word, sleep, being hit, keeping him from hitting himself, tags on clothes etc. etc. [sic] (Autism Speaks)The above commenter listed a number of disability-specific issues that she experienced while raising her son who has autism. The context for her caption was a discussion, unrelated to the original post, that had sparked underneath a sub-thread regarding whether the use of person-first language (“person with autism”) or identity-first language (“Autistic person”) was best when referring to someone with autism. The relationship between inspiration porn and this intimately negative post about someone with disability is that both types of post are examples of the “ableist gaze”: inspiration porn demonstrates an exaggerated sense of positivity based on someone’s disability, and this post demonstrates disregard for the privacy of the person being posted about—perhaps due to his disability. The ease with which this negative comparison (over-disclosure) can be made between ‘inspirational’ and ‘negative’ posts illustrates in part why inspiration porn is a form of discrimination—intentional or otherwise.Furthermore, some of the children who were disclosed about on the main thread were too young to be asked consent, and it is unclear whether those who were old enough had the capacity to provide informed consent. Research has found that online over-disclosure in general is a matter of concern.The specific practice of online over-disclosure from parents about their children—with or without disability—has been raised by Leaver (151), “what happens before young people have the agency, literacy or skills to take the reins of their own selves online? Parents, guardians, loved ones and others inevitably set the initial identity parameters for young people online.” Over-disclosure is therefore also an issue that concerns people with disability, and the people closest to them.There exists both anecdotal evidence and academic research regarding online over-disclosure about people with disability. The research states that when people with physical disability disclose online, they employ strategic approaches that involve the degree to which they disclose (Furr, Carreiro, and McArthur). This suggests that there are complex factors to consider around such disclosure. Also relevant is that the practice of over-disclosure about another person’s disability, regardless of whether that disclosure is made by a close family member, has been critiqued by people (Findlay; Stoltz) within the disability community: “would you publicly share this information about your other children, an aging parent, or yourself?” (Stoltz). Finally, the practice of disability over-disclosure by anyone other than the person themselves supports the understanding that inspiration porn is not about the “object” of inspiration; rather, it serves to give pleasure (and/or pain) to the objectifier.ConclusionInspiration porn via the ableist gaze is discriminatory because it focuses on a (societally) undesirable trait in a way that serves the “gazer” at the expense of the “gazed-at”. That is, people with disability are objectified and exploited in various ways that can initially appear to be positive to people without disability. For example, when someone with disability posts or is posted about on Facebook, a person without disability might then add a caption—possibly with good intentions—that serves as their “inspired” response to what it “must” be like to have a disability. It can be argued that such captions, whether on news articles or when framing social media images, therefore either reflect or create existing social inequalities—and possibly do both.In continuing to use the term inspiration porn to describe one form of discrimination against people with disability, both the disability community and popular culture are contributing to an important narrative that scholarship needs to continue to address. Indeed, the power imbalance that is celebrated within inspiration porn is in some ways more insidious than malicious discrimination against people with disability, because it is easier to mistake as kindness. The research sample presented in this paper supports the countless expressions of anecdotal evidence given by people with disability that this “kindness” is inspiration porn; a damaging expression of the ableist gaze.ReferencesAutism Speaks. Facebook 21 May 2017 <https://www.facebook.com/autismspeaks>.Barnes, Colin, Geof Mercer, and Tom Shakespeare. Exploring Disability. Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1999.bear, romham a. “Inspiration Porn.” radical access mapping project 7 Apr. 2014. 21 May 2017 <https://radicalaccessiblecommunities.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/inspiration-porn/>.The Autistic Self Advocacy Network, et al. “Why Boycott.” Boycott Autism Speaks, 6 Jan. 2014. 21 May 2017 <http://www.boycottautismspeaks.com/why-boycott-1.html>.Brown, Lydia X.Z. “Disabled People Are Not Your Feel-Good Back-Pats.” Autistic Hoya 11 Feb. 2016. 21 May 2017 <http://www.autistichoya.com/2016/02/disabled-people-are-not-your-feel-good-back-pats.html>.Crippledscholar. “Inspiration Porn Is Not Progress, It’s a New Kind of Oppression.” crippledscholar 5 May 2015. 21 May 2017 <https://crippledscholar.com/2015/05/05/inspiration-porn-is-not-progress-its-a-new-kind-of-oppression/>.Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London: Verso, 1995.Driscoll, Beth. “Sentiment Analysis and the Literary Festival Audience.” Continuum 29.6 (2015): 861–873.Findlay, Carly. “Inspiration and Objectification of People with Disability – A Resource for Teachers and Parents.” Tune into Radio Carly 5 Feb. 2017. 21 May 2017 <http://carlyfindlay.blogspot.com.au/2017/02/inspiration-and-objectification-of.html>.Findlay, Carly. “When Parents Overshare Their Children’s Disability.” Sydney Morning Herald 23 July 2015. 21 May 2017 <http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/news-and-views/opinion/when-parents-overshare-their-childrens-disability-20150724-gijtw6.html>.Furr, June B., Alexis Carreiro, and John A. McArthur. “Strategic Approaches to Disability Disclosure on Social Media.” Disability & Society 31.10 (2016): 1353–1368.Haller, Beth, and Lingling Zhang. “Stigma or Empowerment? What Do Disabled People Say about Their Representation in News and Entertainment Media?” Review of Disability Studies: An International Journal 9.4 (2014).Harris, Lisa. “Genesis of Term ‘Inspiration Porn’?” Letter. 5 Oct. 2016.Leaver, Tama. “Born Digital? Presence, Privacy, and Intimate Surveillance.” Re-Orientation: Translingual Transcultural Transmedia. Studies in Narrative, Language, Identity, and Knowledge. Eds. John Hartley and Weigou Qu. Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 2015. 23 May 2017 <https://www.academia.edu/11736307/Born_Digital_Presence_Privacy_and_Intimate_Surveillance>.Mulvey, Laura. “Narrative Cinema and Visual Pleasure.” Visual and Other Pleasures. 1975.Mort, Mike. “Pity and the Prom.” Disabled Identity 9 May 2016. 21 May 2017 <https://disabledidentity.wordpress.com/2016/04/27/pity-and-the-prom/>.Pang, Bo, and Lillian Lee. “Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis.” Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval 2.1-2 (2008): 1–135.Perry, David M. “How ‘Inspiration Porn’ Reporting Objectifies People with Disabilities.” The Establishment 25 Feb. 2016. 23 May 2017 <https://theestablishment.co/how-inspiration-porn-reporting-objectifies-people-with-disabilities-db30023e3d2b>.Saggio, Jessica. “Disabled Teen Crowned Homecoming Queen in Awesome Way.” USA Today 13 Nov. 2015. 21 May 2017 <https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/humankind/2015/11/13/disabled-teen-crowned-homecoming-queen-awesome-way/75658376/>.Sinclair, Paul. “Inspiration Porn: Email Interview.” Letter. 21 Oct 2016.Stoltz, Melissa. “Parents of Children with Disabilities: Are We Speaking with or for a Community?” Two Thirds of the Planet 22 Jan. 2016. 21 May 2017 <http://www.twothirdsoftheplanet.com/parents-disability/>.Thelwall, Mike, et al. “Sentiment Strength Detection in Short Informal Text.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 61.12 (2010): 2544–2558.Wanshel, Elyse. “This Show Just Schooled Everyone on ‘Inspiration Porn’.” Huffington Post 16 Jan. 2017. 21 May 2017 <http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/speechless-disability-porn_us_5877ddf6e4b0e58057fdc342>.Young, Stella. “I’m Not Your Inspiration, Thank You Very Much.” TED Talk Apr. 2014. 21 May 2017 <https://www.ted.com/talks/stella_young_i_m_not_your_inspiration_thank_you_very_much>.Young, Stella. “We’re Not Here for Your Inspiration.” ABC Ramp Up 1 July 2012. 21 May 2017 <http://www.abc.net.au/rampup/articles/2012/07/02/3537035.htm>.

I spent more than two years in Bangladesh and lived through several incarnations—as a volunteer for aid organisations, an expatriate socialite, a bidesi (foreigner) trying to live sodesi (locally)—before becoming an ethnographer and, simultaneously, a lover and fighter of my adopted country. During the winter of my second lifetime I was sexually assaulted and at the beginning of my third lifetime, I recounted the experience at an academic conference in Dhaka. Smitten by the possibility that personal revelation could overcome cross-cultural barriers, I read A Night Out to compel others to sympathise and share, perhaps even loosen the somewhat restricted discussion of sexual intimidation in Bangladesh. Yet the response to A Night Out was quiet, absorbed by the static of courtesy, and taught me that disclosure alone cannot transcend differences to reach a space of mutual understanding. Later, when I posted A Night Out online, I observed the continued and changing capacity of revelation to evoke responses from people across genders and cultures. This article argues that the impact of revelation, although difficult to quantify, is never static and depends significantly on context: first, by describing autoethnography, a way of writing about other cultures that connects the "autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social and political" (Ellis xix), in the "Before" section to give background to A Night Out; secondly, the "After" section considers the various responses to the story and discusses it as "both a process and a product" of cultural research (xix). Before A Night Out Switching lives between Australia and Bangladesh has shown me the value of cultural research that deconstructs traditional conceptions of the "Western" and "Eastern" worlds. In terms of the representations of women, those in the East are too often prescribed the characteristics of ignorance, poverty, illiteracy, domesticity, maternity, and victimization, while the Western woman is depicted as modern, educated, in control of her body and sexuality (Gandhi 86). As a researcher, ultimately, of the life stories of Bangladeshi women, I sought to decrease the misconceptions surrounding those who were, like me, never only "West" or "East", influenced but never solely defined by their culture. Autoethnography is a method of cultural research that makes connections between "individual experience and social processes" in ways that emphasise the essential falsity of cultural categories (Sparkes 217). To transcend these boundaries of people, place and time, autoethnographers make use of narrative, believing it to be "the best way to understand the human experience" because it is "the way humans understand their own lives" (Richardson 218). As a writer, I likewise believe that narrative provides a way to make sense of or negotiate one's place in relation to any space or group of people. In particular, telling personal stories "bears fruit" of "reaching out to others," provoking their own stories and emotional responses, thereby becoming an effective cultural research method (Four Arrows 106). I remember my admiration for the Bangladeshi writer Shabnam Nadiya, who in Woman Alone describes her isolating experiences of sexual molestation as a girl and, later, the realisation via the writing of Taslima Nasrin that "it happened everywhere, everyday ... to anyone" (2008). For Nadiya, self-reflexivity created a "bridge" between the interior practise of reading and the exterior "everyday lived life" of communal experience and identity (2008). While connections on such an intimate scale may be difficult or unwelcome, making them is significant as "the process of revolution itself" (Ware 239). Inspired by Nadiya to write a piece with enough emotional power to reach over the public space of the conference room, my revelation concerned one of my own experiences as a woman in Bangladesh. A Night Out I was never afraid of my city at night. The time I liked Dhaka best was when the day wore down to dusk and the sky looked like it had been brushed clean. When I lived near Dhanmondi Lake I would walk through the drab hues of the surrounding park with its concrete paths and dusty trees that stretched their reflections across the pond-green water. The park was always crowded with raucous wallahs (vendors) and power walking women in bright dresses, yet even so I was the focus of attention, haunted by exclamations of "Koto lomba!" (How tall!) until my shadows became longer than myself in the quartzy light, and I was not so noticeable. When I moved to the Newmarket area I would spend the twilight hours sitting barefoot on my balcony in a voluminous housedress, watching Dhaka's night stage. Children played games on the rooftop of the lower apartment block opposite, women unhooked lines of fresh laundry and groups of friends would chat or play guitar. Even when the evening azan growled from the megaphones of nearby mosques there was activity on the street below, figures moving under the marigold glare of the sodium streetlights or, in winter, stretching nets across the street for badminton matches. Rickshawallahs rang their bells to the call of the crows and there was always an obnoxious motorist laying into his car horn. I felt more a part of my neighbourhood at this distance than when I became, eight floors down, the all-too-visible spectacle of the only foreigner in the district. The flat, my only source of solitude in Dhaka, was in a peaceful building set at the end of a road that turned three corners before coming to a blind halt. Walking its length day and night to reach the main thoroughfare, I got to know the road well. A few old bungalows remained, with comfortably decaying verandas behind wrought-ironwork and the shade of banana trees. Past the first corner the road became an entry for Dhaka College and the high school opposite; houses gave way to walls papered with adverts, a cluster of municipal bins surrounded by litter and wooden shacks that served cha (tea) and fried snacks. I was on friendly terms with the grey-haired wallah who stalked the area daily with his vegetable cart and one betel-chewing woman who sorted the neighbourhood rubbish. Once I neared the college attention from the chawallahs and students became more harassing than friendly, but I continued to walk to and from my house and most of the time, I walked alone. When solitude turns oppressive, the solution is to open all windows and doors and let air and friends in. One evening I invited Mia and Farad, both journalists and wine-drinkers, who arrived before sunset and stayed almost til midnight. We all knew the later it became the harder it would be for Mia to reach her home across the city. A call to one of the less dodgy cab companies proved us right—there were no taxis available in the area. It would be better, said Farad, to walk to the main road and hail a cab from there. Reluctant to end the evening at the elevator, I locked my door and joined my friends on the walk out to Mipur Road, which even at midnight stirred with the occasional activity of tradesmen and drivers. After a few attempts, Farad flagged down a cab, negotiated a fare and recorded the driver's number. It was part of the safety training Mia and I had imbibed as foreigners over the years. Other examples included "Never buy spices from the sacks at the market" and "Never wear gold necklaces while riding rickshaws." "I should catch my bus," Farad announced after Mia's departure. "But you've left your books in my house," I replied. "I thought you were coming back to get them." Farad was incredibly sexy with his brooding face and shaggy black beard and I had hoped more time would reveal reciprocal interest. From one writer to another it was not a suggestive line, but I was too shy to be more explicit with my male friends in Bangladesh, who treated me as one of the boys and silenced me sometimes with their unexpectedly conservative views of women. Farad considered my comment. "I'll collect them later, or we can meet at the university in a few days. Do you need to catch a rickshaw to your door?" "I don't have any taka on me," I said, "and it's not far." I was, after all, in my own street, not being chauffeured home by a bleary-eyed driver. "Thanks for coming! Abar dekha hobe (see you again)." "Goodnight," Farad replied and as he turned to leave I saw him grin into his beard, amused by my tipsy pronunciation. Fatigue dropped heavily on my shoulders as I strolled back down the road. My flat, with its small clean bed and softly purring ceiling fans, seemed far away at the end of the alley. It was very quiet, as quiet as home when I used to walk through the city to the train station after late night shifts on the suicide hotline. The dim light in the street exposed its emptiness. The stalls along the road had shut hours earlier and the only movement came from a middle-aged man taking his exercise, swinging his arms widely from side to side as he strode home. As I turned the first corner of the alley, another man approached me from behind. I glanced at him, probably because he had glanced at me. "Are you OK?" he asked. "Fine." "What is your country?" "Look," I said, unaccountably feeling my heart rate increase, "I'm sorry, but I don't want to talk now." "No problem, no problem," he assured me, spreading his hands and smiling, displaying two charming rows of teeth. "Relax. You're very nice." My instinct was to smile back. We walked past the waste piles that had been emptied from the bins, ready for sorting. The woman I exchanged greetings with worked here on most days and instructed me on how to wear my orna (scarf) when it wasn't placed correctly over my chest. I wondered now where she slept at night. Calculating the closeness of my friend seemed less like idle speculation when the man who was walking beside me stepped directly into my path. He was tall and lean and wore a dark blue shirt. His face gleamed, as if he had been sweating during the day and had not washed off the residue. It occurred to me to twist past him and walk faster, maybe even run. I considered how fast and how far I could go in my thongs and wondered if I should kick them off, and then start to run. "No problem," the man repeated, holding out his hands again, placing them tightly behind my neck. He pulled me towards the wall as he forced me back by moving closer. Instant wetness struck me as I felt the concrete—my pelvic floor had made the first start of surprise. The strong hands moved quickly from my neck to my breasts. "I just want to…" said the man, squeezing both breasts like he was selecting fruit. He added, "You're very nice." I was wearing the only remotely attractive bra I owned, purchased from the supermarket on Dhanmondi 27. The cups, moulded from black synthetic lace, made my chest stick out in jaunty cones like a 1950s sex-bomb and the underwire dug into my chest. Clothes can be armour, yet in this case had depleted my self-preservation. I stood quite still, thinking only of what might happen next. I was against a wall in an alleyway at midnight, with no-one around except the man who was groping me. Finally I reacted, though it was not the reaction I would have guessed at my most objective self. Cowgirls get the blues, rough beasts slouch to be born and six foot one kick-boxing world travelling feminists scream like frightened cats with the shock of even minor violation. And certain men, I learned on my night out, chuckle at the distress they cause and then run away. After A Night Out The personal and public impacts of A Night Out proved to be cumulative over time and throughout retellings. When I read the piece at the Dhaka conference I was set to unleash the "transformative and efficacious potential" that autoethnography legendarily contains (Spry 712), though if my revelation achieved anything close to such a transformation, it was unclear. A female academic who had been chatting with me before my presentation, left the room directly after it. The students, mainly female undergraduates, had no questions to ask about any aspect of my paper. Whatever reactions my audience felt, if any, were not discussed. After my presentation, the male convenor privately expressed his regret over my experience and related more horrific examples. Sexual harassment of women is prevalent in Bangladesh yet so too is the culture of blaming the victim and denying the crime (cf. Lodhi; Mudditt; Nadiya), an attitude reflected through the use of the term "Eve Teasing," which assigns the provocative role to the woman and normalises the aggressive or sexual actions of the perpetrator (Kabeer 149). The response of this liberal and thoughtful man to my revelation was the only one that was articulated. By this measurement, A Night Out had failed to make the desired impact. One of the greatest reasons for this was the tension between the personal motivation behind my revelation and the public impact I had optimistically expected. A Night Out omits the reactions of my community immediately after my assault, when I was chastised for walking alone at such at late hour and for failing to defend myself, particularly given my size. In my street, gossip spread that I had not been groped but mugged, a less lecherous so perhaps more acceptable offense. I read A Night Out partly to gain some retrospective acknowledgement of my experience and in my determination I defied the complexities of a conservative country…[in which] women do not live alone, do not have male friends, do not travel by themselves or smoke cigarettes publicly and most definitely [...] do not talk or write about sexual topics. In Dhaka these things matter and 'decent women' are supposed to play by the rules. (Deen 35) Although I observed this conservatism to varying degrees in Bangladesh, I know that when women play outside the rules, negotiating cultural norms becomes a process of "alliance and conflict" that requires sensitivity to practise (Akhter 22)—a sensitivity that is difficult to grasp. The career of Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin illustrates this: credited with opening doors of feminist discussion "that had been shuttered by genteel conservatism, by niceness, by ignorance and denial" (Nadiya), Nasrin diminished this effect and alienated her audience through subsequent "shock tactics and sensationalism" (Deen 56). Although my revelation had also alienated my audience, it was not the impact I had hoped for. While Linda Park-Fuller celebrates autoethnographic performance as a "transgressive act—a revealing of what has been kept hidden, a speaking of what has been silenced" (26), the conference experience made me realise the significance of cultural context to the impact of revelation. I considered recasting A Night Out in a setting that was more intimate than academic, to an audience prepared for the content and united by achieving a specific outcome, where responses could be given privately if desired. I would also have to shift my role from defiant storyteller to one who welcomed all types of feedback. By posting A Night Out online as a Facebook note, I not only fulfilled the requirements above but made the story accessible to a large audience of men and women of diverse cultural backgrounds, including Bangladeshi. The written replies I received were easier to decipher than the faces after the conference presentation. Among the responses, some from people I did not know at all, many conveyed their appreciation for the description of Bangladesh. Others commented on the risk I took in walking down the road at night and suggested ways I could defend myself in future. I was told I was tough to write the account and was invited to share more of my experiences. One friend in Bangladesh shared my note with others and wrote to describe the reaction of a female friend of his who was "terribly shocked" by what I had written about my breasts, more than my attraction to Farad or the sexual assault itself. This anonymous respondent's "pure cultural shock", which my conference audience may also have felt, was better communicated through the Facebook retelling of A Night Out, although I am unable to interpret the silence of the other Bangladeshi women I sent the note to. While the responses I received indicated my revelation had made some impact in its online context, I could not help being especially touched when a male friend wrote, "And as a Bangladeshi I feel sorry for [your trouble]." It is one matter to write up a personal experience and another to have it make a public impact. As my first reading of A Night Out shows, autoethnographic revelation contains the potential to alienate as well as to create sympathy with an audience. Combined with the second, more private and accessible, distribution of A Night Out, this "Before" and "After" analysis shows the evolution of the revelation's impact on my audience as well as myself, over time and within different cultural contexts, in the academic, social and online arenas. Although my experience confirms the impact autoethnography can make as a form of cultural research, it can only be strengthened by continued attempts to seek a balance between the projections and inflections of culture, self and audience. It is not only in the telling but in the re-telling that personal revelations will gather and continue to give impact, which is why I now present A Night Out to a new audience in a new context and await your new responses. References Akhter, Farida. Seeds of Movements: On Women's Issues In Bangladesh. Dhaka: Narigrantha Prabartana, 2007. Deen, Hanifa. Broken Bangles. New Delhi: Penguin, 1998. Ellis, Carolyn. The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography. Walnut Creek: AltaMira P, 2004. Four Arrows. The Authentic Dissertation: Alternate Ways of Knowing, Research, and Representation. London: Routledge, 2008. Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1998. Kabeer, Naila. Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought. London: Verso, 1994. Lodhi, Muhamad. "Reply." Unheard Voice: All Things Bangladesh. 25 Jun. 2011. 5 Oct. 2011 ‹http://unheardvoice.net/blog/2011/06/24/silence/#comments›. Mudditt, Jessica. "Mugged, Dragged and Scarred: Harrowing Tales from Foreigners In Dhaka." The Independent Digital 23 Aug. 2011: 1-2. Nadiya, Shabnam. "Woman Alone." The Daily Star—Features. 29 Sep. 2008. 5 Oct. 2011 ‹http://www.thedailystar.net/suppliments/2008/eid_special/woman.htm›. Park-Fuller, Linda. "Performing Absence: The Staged Personal Narrative as Testimony." Text and Performance Quarterly 20 (2000): 20–42. Richardson, Laurel. "Narrative Sociology." Representation in Ethnography. Ed. John Van Maanen, Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1995. 198–221. Sparkes, Andrew C. "Autoethnography: Self-Indulgence or Something More?" Ethnographically Speaking: Autoethnography, Literature and Aesthetics. Eds. Arthur Bochner and Carolyn Ellis. Walnut Creek: AltaMira, 2002. 209–32. Spry, Tami. "Performing Autoethnography: An Embodied Methodological Praxis." Qualitative Inquiry 7.6 (2001): 706–32. Ware, Vron. Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History. London: Verso, 1992.

According to The Betoota Advocate (Parker), a CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) paper has recently established that “it takes roughly seven minutes on average for a vegan to tell you that they’re vegan” (qtd. in Harrington et al. 135). For such a statement to have currency as a joke means that it is grounded in a shared experience of being vegan on the one hand, and of encountering vegans on the other. Why should vegans feel such a need to justify themselves? I recognise the observation as being true of me, and this article is one way to explore this perspective: writing to find out what I currently only intuit. As Richardson notes (516), writing is “a way of ‘knowing’—a method of discovery and analysis. By writing in different ways, we discover new aspects of our topic and our relationship to it. Form and content are inseparable” (qtd. in Wall 151).Autoethnography, the qualitative research methodology used for this article, is etymologically derived from Greek to indicate a process for exploring the self (autos) and the cultural (“ethno” from ethnos—nation, tribe, people, class) using a shared, understood, approach (“graphy” from graphia, writing). It relies upon critical engagement with and synthesising of the personal. In Wall’s words, this methodological analysis of human experience “says that what I know matters” (148). The autoethnographic investigation (Riggins; Sparkes) reported here interrogates the experience of “being judged” as a vegan: firstly, by myself; secondly, by other vegans; and ultimately by the wider society. As Ellis notes, autoethnography is “research, writing, story and method that connect the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social and political. Autoethnographic forms feature concrete action, emotion, embodiment, self-consciousness, and introspection” (xix).Introspection is important because researchers’ stories of their observations are interwoven with self-reflexive critique and analysis: “illustrative materials are meant to give a sense of what the observed world is really like, while the researcher’s interpretations are meant to represent a more detached conceptualization of that reality” (Strauss and Corbin 22). Leaving aside Gans’s view that this form of enquiry represents the “climax of the preoccupation with self […] an autobiography written by sociologists” (542), an autoethnography generally has the added advantage of protecting against Glendon and Stanton’s concern that interpretive studies “are often of too short a duration to be able to provide sufficiently large samples of behaviour” (209). In my case, I have twelve years of experience of identifying as a vegan to draw upon.My experience is that being vegan is a contested activity with a significant range of variation that partly reflects the different initial motivations for adopting this increasingly mainstream identity. Greenebaum notes that “ethical vegans differentiate between those who ‘eat’ vegan (health vegans) and those who ‘live’ vegan (ethical vegans)”, going on to suggest that these differences create “hierarchies and boundaries between vegans” (131). As Greenebaum acknowledges, there is sometimes a need to balance competing priorities: “an environmental vegan […] may purchase leather products over polyvinyl chloride (PVC), thinking that leather is a better choice for the environment” (130). Harrington et al. similarly critique vegan motivations as encompassing “a selfless pursuit for those who cared for other beings (animals)” to “a concern about impacts that affect all humans (environment), and an interest mostly in the self (individual health …)” (144). Wright identifies a fourth group of vegans: those searching for a means of dietary inclusivity (2). I have known Orthodox Jewish households that have adopted veganism because it is compatible with keeping Kosher, while many strict Hindus are vegan and some observant Muslims may also follow suit, to avoid meat that is not Halal certified.The Challenge of the EverydayAlthough my initial vegan promptings were firmly at the selfish end of an altruism spectrum, my experience is that motivation is not static. Being a vegan for any reason increasingly primes awareness of more altruistic motivations “at the intersection of a diversity of concerns [… promoting] a spread and expansion of meaning to view food choices holistically” (Harrington et al. 144). Even so, everyday life offers a range of temptations and challenges that require constant juggling and, sometimes, a string of justifications: to oneself, and to others. I identify as a bit of a bad vegan, and not simply because I embrace the possibility that “honey is a gray area” (Greenebaum, quoting her participant Jason, 139). I’m also flexible around wine, for example, and don’t ask too many questions about whether the wine I drink is refined using milk, or egg-shells or even (yuk!) fish bladders. The point is, there are an infinite number of acid tests as to what constitutes “a real vegan”, encouraging inter-vegan judgmentality. Some slight definitional slippage aligns with Singer and Mason’s argument, however, that vegans should avoid worrying about “trivial infractions of the ethical guidelines […] Personal purity isn’t really the issue. Not supporting animal abuse – and persuading others not to support it – is. Giving people the impression that it is virtually impossible to be vegan doesn’t help animals at all” (Singer and Mason 258–9).If I were to accept a definition of non-vegan, possibly because I have a leather handbag among other infractions, that would feel inauthentic. The term “vegan” helpfully labels my approach to food and drink. Others also find it useful as a shorthand for dietary preferences (except for the small but significant minority who muddle veganism with being gluten free). From the point of view of dietary prohibitions I’m a particularly strict vegan, apart from honey. I know people who make exceptions for line-caught fish, or the eggs from garden-roaming happy chooks, but I don’t. I increasingly understand the perspectives of those who have a more radical conception of veganism than I do, however: whose vision and understanding is that “behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The ‘absent referent’ is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product [… keeping] something from being seen as having been someone” (Adams 14). The concept of the global suffering of animals inherent in the figures: “31.1 billion each year, 85.2 million each day, 3.5 million each hour, 59,170 each minute” (Adams dedication) is appalling; as well as being an under-representation of the current situation since the globe has had almost two further decades of population growth and rising “living standards”.Whatever the motivations, it’s easy to imagine that the different branches of veganism have more in common than divides them. Being a vegan of any kind helps someone identify with other variations upon the theme. For example, even though my views on animal rights did not motivate my choice to become vegan, once I stopped seeing other sentient creatures as a handy food source I began to construct them differently. I gradually realised that, as a species, we were committing the most extraordinary atrocities on a global scale in treating animals as disposable commodities without rights or feelings. The large-scale production of what we like to term “meat and poultry” is almost unadulterated animal suffering, whereas the by-catch (“waste products”) of commercial fishing represents an extraordinary disregard of the rights to life of other creatures and, as Cole and Morgan note, “The number of aquatic animals slaughtered is not recorded, their individual deaths being subsumed by aggregate weight statistics” (135). Even if we did accept that humans have the right to consume some animals some of the time, should the netting of a given weight of edible fish really entail the death of many, many time more weight of living creatures that will be “wasted”: the so-called by-catch? Such wanton destruction has increasingly visible impacts upon complex food chains, and the ecosystems that sustain us all.The Vegan Threat to the Status QuoExamining the evidence for the broader community being biased against vegetarians and vegans, MacInnis and Hodson identify that these groups are “clear targets of relatively more negative attitudes” (727) towards them than other minority groups. Indeed, “only drug addicts were evaluated more negatively than vegetarians and vegans” (726). While “vegans were evaluated more negatively than vegetarians” (732), there was a hierarchy in negative evaluations according to the underlying motivation for someone adopting veganism or vegetarianism. People motivated by personal health received the least negative evaluations from the general population followed by those who were motivated by the environment. The greatest opprobrium was reserved for vegans who were motivated by animal rights (732). MacInnis and Hodson reason that this antipathy is because “vegetarians and vegans represent strong threats to the status quo, given that prevailing cultural norms favour meat-eating” (722). Also implied here is that fact that eating meat is itself a cultural norm associated with masculinity (Rothgerber).Adams’s work links the unthinking, normative exploitation of animals to the unthinking, normative exploitation of women, a situation so aligned that it is often expressed through the use of a common metaphor: “‘meat’ becomes a term to express women’s oppression, used equally by patriarchy and feminists, who say that women are ‘pieces of meat’” (2002, 59). Rothberger further interrogates the relationship between masculinity and meat by exploring gender in relation to strategies for “meat eating justification”, reflecting a 1992 United States study that showed, of all people reporting that they were vegetarian, 68% were women and 32% men (Smart, 1995). Rothberger’s argument is that:Following a vegetarian diet or deliberately reducing meat intake violates the spirit of Western hegemonic masculinity, with its socially prescribed norms of stoicism, practicality, seeking dominance, and being powerful, strong, tough, robust and invulnerable […] Such individuals have basically cast aside a relatively hidden male privilege—the freedom and ability to eat without criticism and scrutiny, something that studies have shown women lack. (371)Noting that “to raise concerns about the injustices of factory farming and to feel compelled by them would seem emotional, weak and sensitive—feminine characteristics” (366), Rothberger sets the scene for me to note two items of popular culture which achieved cut-through in my personal life. The evidence for this is, in terms of all the pro-vegan materials I encounter, these were two of a small number that I shared on social media. In line with Rothberger’s observations, both are oppositional to hegemonic masculinity:one represents a feminised, mother and child exchange that captures the moment when a child realises the “absent referent” of the dead animal in the octopus on his plate—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrU03da2arE;while the other is a sentimentalised and sympathetic recording of cattle luxuriating in their first taste of pastureland after a long period of confinement—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huT5__BqY_U.Seeing cows behaving like pets does call attention to the artificial distinction between “companion animals” and other animals. As Cole and Stewart note, “the naming of other animals is useful for human beings, while it is dangerous, and frequently lethal, for other animals. This is because the words we use to name other animals are saturated with common sense knowledge claims about those animals that legitimate their habitual use for humans” (13). Thus a cat, in Western culture, has a very different life trajectory to a cow. Adams notes the contrary case where the companion animal is used as a referent for a threatened human:Child sexual abusers often use threats and/or violence against companion animals to achieve compliance from their victims. Batterers harm or kill a companion animal as a warning to their partner that she could be next; as a way of further separating her from meaningful relationships; to demonstrate his power and her powerlessness. (Adams 57)For children who are still at a stage where animals are creatures of fascination and potential friends, who may be growing up with Charlotte’s Web (White) or Peter Rabbit (Potter), the mental gymnastics of suspending identification with these fellow creatures are harder because empathy and imagination are more active and the ingrained habit of eating without thinking has not had so long to develop. Indeed, children often understand domestic animals as “members of the family”, as illustrated by an interview with Kani, a 10-year old participant in one of my research projects. “In the absence of her extended family overseas, Kani adds her pets to [the list of] those with whom she shares her family life: ‘And my mum and my uncle and then our cat Dobby. I named it [for Harry Potter’s house elf] ...and the goldfish. The goldfish are Twinkle, Glitter, Glow and Bobby’” (Green and Stevenson). Such perceptions may well filter through to children having a different understanding of animals-as-food, even though Cole and Stewart note that “children enter into an adult culture habituated to [the] banal conceptualization of other animals according to their (dis)utilities” (21).Evidence-Based VeganismThose M/C Journal readers who know me personally will understand that one reason why I embrace the “bad vegan” label, is that I’m no more obviously a pin-up for healthy veganism than I am for ethical or environmental veganism. In particular, my BMI (Body Mass Index) is significantly outside the “healthy” range. Even so, I attribute a dramatic change in my capacity for stamina-based activity to my embrace of veganism. A high-speed recap of the evidence would include: in 2009 I embarked on a week-long 500km Great Vic bike ride; in 2012 I successfully completed a Machu Picchu trek at high altitude; by 2013 I was ready for my first half marathon (reprised in 2014, and 2017); in 2014 I cycled from Surfers’ Paradise to Noosa—somewhat less successfully than in my 2009 venture, but even so; in 2016 I completed the Oxfam 50km in 24 hours (plus a half hour, if I’m honest); and in 2017 I completed the 227km Portuguese Camino; in 2018 I jogged an average of over 3km per day, every day, up until 20 September... Apart from indicating that I live an extremely fortunate life, these activities seem to me to demonstrate that becoming vegan in 2007 has conferred a huge health benefit. In particular, I cannot identify similar metamorphoses in the lives of my 50-to-60-something year-old empty-nester friends. My most notable physical feat pre-veganism was the irregular completion of Perth’s annual 12km City-to-Surf fun run.Although I’m a vegan for health reasons, I didn’t suddenly wake up one day and decide that this was now my future: I had to be coaxed and cajoled into looking at my food preferences very differently. This process entailed my enrolling in a night school-type evening course, the Coronary Health Improvement Program: 16 x 3 hour sessions over eight weeks. Its sibling course is now available online as the Complete Health Improvement Program. The first lesson of the eight weeks convincingly demonstrated that what is good for coronary health is also good for health in general, which I found persuasive and reassuring given the propensity to cancer evident in my family tree. In the generation above me, my parents each had three siblings so I have a sample of eight immediate family to draw upon. Six of these either have cancer at the moment, or have died from cancer, with the cancers concerned including breast (1), prostate (2), lung (1), pancreas (1) and brain (1). A seventh close relative passed away before her health service could deliver a diagnosis for her extraordinarily elevated eosinophil levels (100x normal rates of that particular kind of white blood cell: potentially a blood cancer, I think). The eighth relative in that generation is my “bad vegan” uncle who has been mainly plant-based in his dietary choices since 2004. At 73, he is still working three days per week as a dentist and planning a 240 km trek in Italy as his main 2019 holiday. That’s the kind of future I’m hoping for too, when I grow up.And yet, one can read volumes of health literature without stumbling upon Professor T. Colin Campbell’s early research findings via his work on rodents and rodent cells that: “nutrition [was] far more important in controlling cancer promotion than the dose of the initiating carcinogen” and that “nutrients from animal-based foods increased tumor development while nutrients from plant-based foods decreased tumor development” (66, italics in original). Plant was already an eminent scientist at the point where she developed breast cancer, but she noted her amazement at learning “precisely how much has been discovered already [that] has not filtered through to the public” (18). The reason for the lack of visible research in this area is not so much its absence, but more likely its political sensitivity in an era of Big Food. As Harrington et al.’s respondent Samantha noted, “I think the meat lobby’s much bigger than the vegetable lobby” (147). These arguments are addressed in greater depth in Green et al.My initiating research question—Why do I feel the need to justify being vegan?—can clearly be answered in a wide variety of ways. Veganism disrupts the status quo: it questions both the appropriateness of humanity’s systematic torturing of other species for food, and the risks that those animal-based foods pose for the long-term health of human populations. It offends many vested interests from Big Food to accepted notions of animal welfare to the conventional teachings of the health industry. Identifying as a vegan represents an outcome of one or more of a wide range of motivations, some of which are more clearly self-serving (read “bad”); while others are more easily identified as altruistic (read “good”). After a decade or more of personal experimentation in this space, I’m proud to identify as a “bad vegan”. It’s been a great choice personally and, I hope, for some other creatures whose planet I share.ReferencesAdams, Carol. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum, 1990.Campbell, T. Colin, and Thomas M. Cambell. The China Study: Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health. Dallas: BenBella Books, 2005.Cole, Matthew, and Karen Morgan. “Vegaphobia: Derogatory Discourses of Veganism and the Reproduction of Speciesism in UK National Newspaper.” British Journal of Sociology 62 (2011): 134–53.———, and Kate Stewart. Our Children and Other Animals: The Cultural Construction of Human-Animal Relations in Childhood. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.Ellis, Carolyn. The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography. Oxford: Altamira Press, 2004.Gans, Herbert J. “Participant Observation in the Era of ‘Ethnography’.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 28.5 (1999): 540–48.Glendon, A. Ian, and Neville Stanton. “Perspectives on Safety Culture.” Safety Science 34.1-3 (2000): 193–214.Green, Lelia, Leesa Costello, and Julie Dare. “Veganism, Health Expectancy, and the Communication of Sustainability.” Australian Journal of Communication 37.3 (2010): 87–102.———, and Kylie Stevenson. “A Ten-Year-Old’s Use of Creative Content to Construct an Alternative Future for Herself.” M/C Journal 20.1 (2017). 13 Apr. 2019 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1211>.Greenebaum, Jessica. (2012). “Veganism, Identity and the Quest for Authenticity.” Food, Culture and Society 15.1 (2012): 129–44.Harrington, Stephen, Christie Collis, and OzgurDedehayir. “It’s Not (Just) about the F-ckin’ Animals: Why Veganism Is Changing, and Why That Matters.” Alternative Food Politics: From the Margins to the Mainstream. Eds. Michelle Phillipov and Katherine Kirkwood. New York: Routledge, 2019. 135–50.MacInnes, Cara. C., and Gordon Hodson. “It Ain’t Easy Eating Greens: Evidence of Bias Toward Vegetarians and Vegans from Both Source and Target.” Group Processes and Intergroup Relations 20.6 (2015): 721–44.Parker, Errol. “Study Finds the Easiest Way to Tell If Someone Is Vegan Is to Wait until They Inevitably Tell You.” The Betoota Advocate 2017. 10 Apr. 2019 <https://www.betootaadvocate.com/humans-of-betoota/study-finds-easiest-way-tell-someone-vegan-wait-inevitably-tell/>.Plant, Jane A. Your Life in Your Hands: Understand, Prevent and Overcome Breast Cancer and Ovarian Cancer. 4th ed. London: Virgin Books, 2007.Potter, Beatrix. The Tale of Peter Rabbit. London: Frederick Warne and Co, 1902.Richardson, Laurel. “Writing: A Method of Inquiry.” Handbook of Qualitative Research. Eds. Norman K. Denzon and Yvonne S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1994. 516–29.Riggins, Stephen Harold. “Fieldwork in the Living Room: An Autoethnographic Essay.” The Socialness of Things: Essays on the Socio-Semiotics of Objects. Ed. Stephen Harold Riggins. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994. 101–50.Rothgerber, Hank. “Real Men Don’t Eat (Vegetable) Quiche: Masculinity and the Justification of Meat Consumption.” Psychology of Men and Masculinity 14 (1994): 363–75.Singer, Peter, and Jim Mason. The Ethics of What We Eat. Melbourne: Text Publishing Company.Smart, Joanne. “The Gender Gap.” Vegetarian Times 210 (1995): 74–81.Sparkes, Andrew C. “Autoethnography: ‘Self-Indulgence or Something More?’” Ethnographically Speaking: Auto-Ethnography, Literature and Aesthetics. Eds. Arthur P. Bochner and Carolyn C. Ellis. Oxford: Altamira Press, 2002. 209–32.Strauss, Anselm, and Juliet Corbin. Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory Procedures and Techniques. London: Sage, 1990.Wall, Sarah. “An Autoethnography on Learning about Autoethnography.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 5 (2006): 146–60.White, Elwyn B. Charlotte’s Web. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952.Wright, Laura. The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals and Gender in the Age of Terror. Athens: U of Georgia Press, 2015.

We are our own subjects. How our subjectivity becomes entangled in the lives of others is and has always been our topic. (Denzin 27)This article reflects on the process of disclosing the ethnographic self, particularly in relation to the use of e-mails and social networking sites, such as Facebook. Previous work has examined virtual ethnography as the main research method or its place within a mixed method approach (Orgad; Hine, Virtual Ethnography; Fay; Greschke). My focus lies on the voluntary and involuntary intertwining of physical ethnographic work (i.e. going to a specific location to immerse oneself in a culture) and the virtual relations formed with informants in the course of such fieldwork. Connecting with informants on Facebook has brought a new dimension to the active approach of impression management that is encouraged in traditional texts on ethnography and participant observation (Hammersley and Atkinson; Taylor and Bogdan; Ellen). Examples are drawn from my experience of three phases of geographically located fieldwork for my thesis on Spanish- and English-language media and the Cuban-American community in Miami, Florida, and from online “repercussions” of my physical presence in the field.In an ideal (research) world, the process of immersing oneself in a culture, studying and understanding its values, dynamics and symbolism is paired with professional and personal distance and reflexivity. Most of the time, the reality of fieldwork does not adhere to this ideal (Kleinman and Copp). Data collection does not take place in a void. On the contrary, it is a personal, emotional, embodied and challenging experience in which the researcher’s persona is highly involved: “If informants are people and have rights that affect ethical practice, ethnographers are also human and have identities that affect research practice” (Brewer 99).The researcher’s identity has a strong influence on the research process, but the same holds true the other way around. Ethnographic encounters have an effect on the ethnographer’s sense of identity or sense of self. The researcher’s identity, just like the informant’s, is ever-changing and in a constant process of negotiation that continues throughout the ethnographic experience. As Sarah Pink (47) points out, individuals not only position themselves and their identity in relation to others, but also in relation to objects and discourses (see also: Miller).Therefore the process of relating to the field does not end with physically removing oneself from it (Coffey). Dealing, relating and “coming to terms” with the field and those we encounter is much more complex. The assumption made that the researcher would not be influenced by this, meaning that the field has no impact whatsoever on the one collecting data, has been challenged severely, often by feminist scholars among others, over the past decades (Hey; Roberts; Berger).Establishing and positioning oneself and one’s role in the field can be a daunting process (Lindner). It can be informed by fears of acceptance, uncertainties about conventions not (fully) understood yet and the underlying dynamics one still hopes to uncover. The process of role(s) and identity negotiation of the researcher in the field goes on when writing the field, going through field notes and making sense of what we have experienced (Okely). So even though strict temporal and spatial boundaries might never have existed to the extent ethnography textbooks would have us believe, the use of e-mails and social networking sites have brought the field even closer to home. I have structured the following reflections on disclosing the ethnographic self in face-to-face conversations, that is, exposures made while being physically present in the field, and those taking place online. However, it is worth remembering that this is an artificial distinction as they are clearly interlinked and can overlap in time. Disclosure in Face-to-Face ConversationsWith establishing and negotiating one’s identity in the field and fieldwork relations comes the question of how much to disclose of oneself. How much should informants know about me? There are obvious ethical requirements: Every researcher should be clear about scope and aim of the research project, institutional affiliations, the way data will be stored and used (Mauthner et al.). But beyond that, how much of myself do I have to expose? What stands in the way of a straight-forward answer is the undefined nature of relationships of those we meet in the field: “Fieldwork relationships are at once professional and personal, yet not necessarily readily characterized as either”(Coffey 39).Arguably, there is not one right way to proceed, as it depends on the kind of field the researcher is finding herself in, her personality, role, identity and the type of relationship she wishes to establish with informants. The process of relationship-building to the field as a whole as constructed in the ethnographer’s mind and to individuals in the field is of course ongoing and very likely to evolve and change over time. This applies not only to the relationships built but also to the researcher’s sense of self and how he or she relates to those encountered in the field. It is partly in and through these encounters that the researcher’s understanding of self is influenced, shaped and negotiated on a continual basis. During three phases of fieldwork in 2006, 2007 and 2008 I interviewed over 40 Hispanic journalists, media executives and active members of the Cuban-American community in Miami, Florida. How much was I willing to disclose of myself during these encounters and subsequent e-mail exchanges? Should I correct informants when they wrongly assumed I was British because I was based at a British institution? Do they need to know why I have chosen to research this particular topic and them as a group, why I was based at a Scottish university and what brought me to the U.K. in the first place? The answers were no secrets, but neither was I comfortable to share them with all informants I met in the field. Gender and age-related dynamics came into play here with the majority of interviewees being male and significantly older than me (Easterday). At times, I was uneasy when it came to talking about myself. While I defined the majority of my initial relations as mostly, though not entirely, professional, some interviewees did have a different take on this. In particular, I felt that one interviewee who after the interview started asking me personal questions about my move to Scotland, clearly overstepped an invisible line, although it would have been perfectly alright from my perspective to ask him questions similar, though different in tone, within the context of an interview. A further aspect of disclosure within the context of ethnographic work is the open discussion of the research process with informants. Although this can be very fruitful, it can also be source of scorn and end in closed doors, especially in the highly polarised field I was researching: Once interviews were finished, some interviewees would ask whom I had interviewed previously—maybe just out of interest, maybe to go on and suggest future interviewees. I had never considered in detail what kind of reactions interviewees might have by my naming of previous contacts because for one, reactions had so far been positive and secondly, all interviewees had some understanding of what research entails and that I would naturally want to speak to as many people and as many “sides” as possible. In one particular case, though, the interviewee showed clear disapproval of my talking to a journalist at a well-known Miami-based newspaper. At the time, I did not take this minor condemnation very seriously, but in retrospect it turned out that this interviewee could have been a valuable source for further information and contacts. It taught me that it is wise to hold my cards closer to my chest in such a sensitive environment. This does not mean, however, that secrecy and constant striving towards a neutral position is always the best way to proceed, nor a believable position to hold as Kloos (511) found out: “One of the clergymen in Eastern Flevoland asked me once: ‘Do you have any opinions of your own?’”Virtual Exposure and DisclosurePrevious studies underlined that relationships forged and maintained online mirror offline everyday-life contacts, interests, concerns and vice versa. (Castells; Miller and Slater) For ethnographers whose informants have ready Internet access, this can bring significant advantages as well as challenges. Contacting informants whom I had heard about but not yet met in person by e-mail proved an extremely useful approach. An e-mail allowed me to say a few words about myself and introduce my research project. If there was no response to the e-mail, I was much more comfortable to call the person at this stage—rather than before an e-mail had been sent. E-mails proved a very successful way in contacting informants, thanking people after the interview and exchanging further information that had been touched upon in conversation. What surprised me, however, was that e-mails were also used by interviewees to contact me months after I had been in touch with them and had physically left the field. On a couple of occasions, interviewees sent me information that they thought was essential for my research or, in fact, asked me to fill out a questionnaire and comment on matters relating to my research topic. My role in the field and my relation to informants had turned from researcher to research participant, or interviewee in this case.While e-mails offer a rather controlled environment when approaching informants, other information about the researcher might be more unpredictable and harder to control or manage. I sometimes found myself wondering what information about me informants would find when they Googled my name. How would they combine and make sense of their offline construction of me as a researcher with my virtual persona? And to which extent is impression management in the context of social networking sites feasible and perhaps to be recommended? Of course these questions do not solely apply in a research context. However, it is worth considering them in an effort of understanding the dynamics which underlie the research process. Even though my research methodology included an online component, such as the monitoring of selected blogs and discussion forums, the majority of the data was gathered in clearly defined periods of physical ethnographic work. The relationship that evolved via e-mails and on Facebook outside of fieldwork phases were initiated by informants. I could obviously have ignored these contacts, however, as someone involved in media research I thought it strange and discourteous not to respond or accept informants as “Friends,” while seeking them out offline.Disclosing (personal) information on Facebook can become a risky business due to the diverse relationship of the people merged through Facebook’s list of “Friends.” Facebook does not force users to define or distinguish between different types of relationships. In my role as a researcher, I have always been highly uneasy to put on detailed information about “What’s on my Mind,” the facility Facebook offers for bringing others up to date on what is happening in one’s life. Reporting to my “Friends,” including informants, that most of my time was spent struggling with the data I had gathered in the field, could undermine their view of me as a researcher and a person worth talking to. Apart from that, there were obvious faux-pas that I needed to avoid online. Joining a Ernesto “Che” Guevara Fan group—like wearing a ‘Che’ T-shirt or pin – is not a smart move when trying to build a relationship with Cuban exiles. But even expressing fairly main-stream political opinion did not seem a good idea. Without being aware of it at the time, I was trying to perform a “stable research self,” as opposed to a fragmented, continuously changing and relationally constructed one. Following Geertz’s line of thought, I furthermore hoped that “the natives” had a similar perspective to mine and would perceive me as the balanced, neutral researcher that I was trying to be (Geertz).Arguably, Facebook allows for personal information and entries to be hidden from some contacts. It gives users the option to group contacts, thereby specifying who gets to see what kind of information. However, all contacts can see all contacts, to allow for networking to take place. Given the politically-charged and polarised nature of the community I was researching—and keeping in mind the incident recounted above, with one informant disapproving of me talking to a certain journalist and subsequently breaking up all communication—being connected with some people can have unwelcome side-effects for the research process.Personal and intercultural variations when reading and making sense of social networking sites are a further aspect worth noting in this context. Dalsgaard (10-12) underlines the hierarchical nature which characterises the practical use of the Internet and often mirrors offline power constellations. Unlike earlier celebration of the horizontal communication devoid of power structures, Internet interaction reproduces and adds further stratifications and “forms of ranking—some hierarchical, some not”. This also holds true for the number of contacts on a social networking site:Networks consist of nodes, and in the ‘Facebook society’, every person is a node. But there are differences between nodes. Some are more central than others and function as the hub for many more transactions. Some may only have ten ‘connections’ or ‘friends’, while others may have several hundreds – notwithstanding that there is qualitative difference between relationships, that not all relationships are personal, that many ‘friends’ are perhaps what we would normally call acquaintances and so on. (Dalsgaard 10)Drawing on Goffman, Dalsgaard (12) argues that popularity on social networking sites, has a symbolic or performance-orientated character, as it can be safely assumed that not every contact is “an important relationship built on long-term mutual exchange of greetings, gifts, favours, opinions and so on.”Even the number of friends and contacts can be understood as disclosing something about ourselves. How many people from the field and from outside the field are on my list of contacts? Who is there and who is not? Which relations are not included, pursued online, kept secret or ignored? Concerns of how individual informants would read my Facebook profile have left me feeling uneasy while keeping my activities to a minimum. However, secrecy, inactivity—which is in a way an attempt of the impossible act of non-performance or disappearance, can be just as harmful as disclosure. During the time of research I kept wondering whether someone working towards a doctorate in communication studies should know how to “work” Facebook. My wariness of disclosing too much of myself, aspects of my identity that would threaten my performance as a “stable researcher self,” held other parts of my fragmented identity captive and disclosed. In a way, I was happy with the relational construction of myself as the doctoral researcher in face-to-face encounters, but online encounters, not initiated by myself, had a different quality to them. They led me to struggle with the authentic, stable and singular self that Facebook encourages people to present to the outside world.Concluding RemarksManaging and handling acts of disclosure in geographically located fieldwork has been explored in great depth in recent scholarship. Voluntary and involuntary disclosure of the researcher’s fragmented identity in the context of social networking sites is a new phenomenon, and an unexpected challenge for those who did not see virtual ethnography as part of their main methodology. Similar to the fading dichotomy of public/private, e-mails and social networking sites have torn down the temporal and spatial boundaries fieldwork and the performance of the ethnographic self has been associated with. For the researcher who is connected with informants on Facebook, or other social networking sites, this can mean an ongoing performance of the researcher’s role; a continuous relating and positioning to those encountered in the field. This process might fade out with the end of a project, turning the informant into an acquaintance, friend or someone who happens to be our “Friend” on Facebook but has little further impact on our life and sense of self. When researching a group of people with ready access to digital media, virtual ethnography should possibly be part of the mix from the start. Hine (Virtual Methods 8) has pointed out that defining what exactly ethnography entails is problematic in itself. Immersing oneself in the field can take many different forms. Ethnography as a method is flexible enough to encompass encountering informants on social networking sites. In itself, it is worth noting who is online, who is not and what kind of interaction the informant is looking for. However, gathering this type of information raises ethical questions about the research process. In my case, geographically located field work was considered and approved by the university’s ethics committee, but online encounters—outside the chosen methodology—were not covered. Dealings with research participants were therefore institutionally endorsed within temporal and spatial limits and this indisputably contributed to my sense of a professional research self. Being contacted by informants on a social networking site, significantly challenges this framework and clouds the terms of reference. Whose rules apply? Or are there no rules? Observing participants’ profiles as an add-on to previously collected data, though tempting it may be, seems not a good option. But then informants might monitor the researcher’s profile for their own purposes, be it general curiosity, entertainment, or simply an enjoyable free-time activity. Once again, traditional roles of researcher and researched are easily reversed in the online encounter. For the time being, ethical guidelines generally assume a situation in which the researcher in some form is seeking out the researched, not the other way around. With the proliferation of social networking sites and online encounters, standard institutional ethical protocols fall short here.Nonetheless, online encounters between researcher and researched also bear potential. Asymmetric power structures can shift with the informant being able to contact, construct the researcher and disclose aspects of the researcher’s identity, or rather online persona, on their own terms and in a less controlled environment. As the incidence recounted above shows, this can entail a role reversal which blurs the lines between researcher and researched and underlines the performative and relational aspect of self. Furthermore, this indicates a much more flexible approach to roles of the researcher and informant which allow for mutual disclosing and exchanging—if both parties are willing to let this happen. On the other hand, this potential shift in power does not absolve the researcher from the responsibility inherent in the research process. As with other aspects of ethnographic work, “there can be no set formulae, only broad guidelines, sensitive to specific cases” (Okely 32). The unexplored terrain and ongoing experimentation of integrating social networking sites into everyday life call for a heightened sense of reflexivity and ethical awareness in the research process.ReferencesBerger, Peter L. Invitation to Sociology. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966.Brewer, John. Ethnography. Buckingham: Open UP, 2000.Castells, Manuel. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. 1, The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.Coffey, Amanda. 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Judith Okely and Helen Callaway. London: Routledge, 1992. 1-28.Orgad, Shani. “How Can Researchers Make Sense of the Issues Involved in Collecting and Interpreting Online and Offline Data?” Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method. Ed. Annette N. Markham and Nancy K. Baym. London: Sage. 33–53.Pink, Sarah. Doing Visual Ethnography. London: Sage, 2007.Roberts, Brian. Getting the Most out of the Research Experience: What Every Researcher Needs to Know. London: Sage, 2007.Taylor, Steven and Robert Bogdan, Introduction to Qualitative Methods: A Phenomenological Approach to the Social Sciences. New York: Wiley, 1975.AcknowledgementsI would like to thank my supervisors Prof. Philip Schlesinger, Prof. Raymond Boyle and Dr. Myra Macdonald for their advice throughout this project. My gratitude also to the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland for funding fieldwork in 2007 and 2008. Finally, a big thank you to the editors and reviewers of M/C Journal for their insightful comments.