Journal articles on the topic 'Learning object review instrument (LORI)'

In this research, improving on the quality of Reusable Learning Objects (RLOs) on a Peer-To-Peer (P2P) network is considered. The RLO was first redesigned to have a fundamentally inherent pedagogical structure, which gave it an immediate foundational level of quality in terms of opportunities related to reusability. Applying the Learning Object Review Instrument 1.5 (LORI 1.5) demonstrated that some of the elements are inherent in this new RLO design, so there was no need to constantly have such features evaluated with LORI. A modified LORI was therefore developed in order to evaluate the remaining features of the RLO. The research identified these remaining elements to produce a Review Rubric for scoring the RLO’s quality. In addition, an algorithm is given which considers one or more subject-matter experts as part of a review process. Utilizing the subject-matter experts in a P2P network involved the creation of special nodes to ensure data integrity and post-availability of the review scores for RLOs. The research concludes that the redesigned RLOs along with the corresponding Review Rubric and scoring algorithm produces a system suitable for a P2P network, where for the first time, RLOs can be shared of assured quality to promote eLearning within P2P networks.

The COVID-19 pandemic has an impact on the learning process in all educational units, including higher educational units. This situation requires educators to be more creative and innovative in using learning media to transform knowledge and skills to their students. This study aims to describe the validity of interactive learning media based on articulate storyline 3 in the theory and practice of football coaching. This research included development research by adopting the ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation) model. The data collection instrument used a questionnaire that referred to the LORI (Learning Object Review Instrument) standard. The LORI standard consists of nine aspects of assessment, namely content quality, direction of learning objectives, feedback and adaptation, motivation, display design, interaction use, accessibility, development capabilities, and standard fulfillment. The data analysis technique used is descriptive quantitative and qualitative. The results showed that the level of feasibility/validity of the learning media named D-MENBOLA or digitalization of football learning media based on articulate storyline 3 iss declared very feasible/very valid. Based on these result, D-MENBOLA can then be used in the theory and practice of football coaching as one of the innovative learning media.

Open educational resources (OER) can contribute to democratize education by providing effective learning experiences with lower costs. Nevertheless, the massive amount of resources currently available in OER repositories makes it difficult for teachers and learners to find relevant and high-quality content, which is hindering OER use and adoption. Recommender systems that use data related to the pedagogical quality of the OER can help to overcome this problem. However, studies analyzing the usefulness of these data for generating OER recommendations are very limited and inconclusive. This article examines the usefulness of using pedagogical quality scores for generating OER recommendations in OER repositories by means of a user study that compares the following four different recommendation approaches: a traditional content-based recommendation technique, a quality-based non-personalized recommendation technique, a hybrid approach that combines the two previous techniques, and random recommendations. This user study involved 53 participants and 400 OER whose quality was evaluated by reviewers using the Learning Object Review Instrument (LORI). The main finding of this study is that pedagogical quality scores can enhance traditional content-based OER recommender systems by allowing them to recommend OER with more quality without detriment to relevance.

The use of digital learning materials through e-learning is expected to give students experience to be able to learn themselves in the industrial era 4.0. This study aims to formulate an evaluation method for digital learning materials that is relevant to the development model used. A qualitative approach with an evaluative design through in-depth analysis is applied to student research reports, specifically research on the development of digital learning materials. The formative evaluation method chosen and the reasons for the selection were analyzed and the results were discussed in a focus group discussion. The sample was taken from the results of research by prospective teacher. Expert review was conducted to test the validity of the content and test the design. Content validity test can be done qualitatively or quantitatively by applying Lawshe, Aiken, or Gregory techniques. The design test was carried out with a black-box test. White-box testing is very rarely implemented and is recommended when developing using a programming language. One-to-one and small group tests were conducted using think aloud, cognitive walk through, or heuristics techniques. The results of the analysis found that the formative evaluation methods of teaching materials needed were expert review, one-to-one, small group, and field evaluation. Furthermore, for field tests, inquiry methods can be applied with various techniques, such as learning object review instrument (LORI), user experience questionnaire (UEQ), or system usability scale (SUS).

Despite the efforts made, there is still an alarming difference between the digital competence that teachers have and the one they should have in order to develop their students' digital competence. The lack of teacher training in safe and responsible use of ICT is a special cause for concern. Online courses in MOOC format meet all the required conditions to offer a possible solution to the unavoidable and urgent need for initial and in-service teacher training in this area of digital competence. However, there is currently no evidence in the literature on the effectiveness of these courses for this purpose. This study examines the instructional effectiveness of courses in MOOC format for teacher training in the safe and responsible use of ICT by analysing three different official courses. The courses were analysed using three different methods: a questionnaire to measure participants’ perceptions, pre-tests and post-tests to measure the knowledge acquired, and LORI (Learning Object Review Instrument) to measure the quality of digital educational resources created by the participants. The results suggest that online courses in MOOC format are an effective way to train teachers in the safe and responsible use of ICT, and that these courses can enable the development of digital competence in the area of content creation. A pesar de los esfuerzos realizados, aún existe una alarmante diferencia entre la competencia digital que tienen los profesores y la que deberían tener para desarrollar la competencia digital en sus alumnos. De especial preocupación es la carencia de formación del profesorado en uso seguro y responsable de las TIC. Los cursos en línea con formato MOOC reúnen todas las condiciones necesarias para ofrecer una posible solución a la ineludible y apremiante necesidad de formación inicial y continua del profesorado en esta área de la competencia digital. Sin embargo, no existe actualmente evidencia en la literatura sobre la efectividad de estos cursos para tal cometido. Este estudio examina la efectividad instruccional de los cursos con formato MOOC para la formación del profesorado en el uso seguro y responsable de las TIC mediante el análisis de tres cursos oficiales diferentes. Estos se analizaron empleando tres instrumentos diferentes: un cuestionario para medir la percepción de los participantes, pre-tests y pos-tests para medir los conocimientos adquiridos y el instrumento LORI (Learning Object Review Instrument) para medir la calidad de recursos educativos digitales creados por los participantes. Los resultados sugieren que los cursos en línea con formato MOOC constituyen una forma efectiva de formar al profesorado en el uso seguro y responsable de las TIC, y que estos cursos pueden ayudar al desarrollo de la competencia digital en el área de creación de contenidos.

A Educação Patrimonial conscientiza cidadãos da importância da preservação do patrimônio, estimulando seus sensos de pertencimento e responsabilidade. Este volta-se para o serious game "Anjos Azuis", que explora a ludicidade, imersão, dinâmica, familiaridade com jogos e outras vantagens de games para o ensino. Foi desenvolvido usando o framework DPE (Design, Play, Experience); e validado pelas metodologias LORI (Learning Objects Review Instrument) e EgameFlow, envolvendo 46 crianças e 3 pedagogas. Em etapa pós-avaliação, foi implementada uma versão mobile, com exploração de áudio para os textos de composição do “Anjos Azuis”, comandos orientados a touch screen e plays automáticos, a fim de melhorar a acessibilidade para alunos não alfabetizados. Hoje o “Anjos Azuis” instrumentaliza iniciativa governamental municipal de educação para segurança pública.

Pada tahun 2020 Politeknik Negeri Padang melakukan perancangan program belajar daring melalui pengembangan Sistem Pembelajaran Daring (SPADA). SPADA Jurusan Administrasi Niaga menyediakan semua fasilitas yang dibutuhkan dalam satu akun SPADA tanpa memerlukan aplikasi tambahan. Tujuan penelitian ini adalah untuk mengetahui keefektifan SPADA Jurusan Administrasi Niaga sebagai media pembelajaran daring pada mahasiswa tingkat satu T.A 2021/2022 Program Studi Administrasi Bisnis Politeknik Negeri Padang. Metode penelitian yang digunakan merupakan metode kuantitatif dengan analisis bersifat deskriptif. Metode pengumpulan data menggunakan kuesioner melalui google form yang dikembangkan dari teori Review Object Instrument (LORI). Hasil dari penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa setiap indikator penilian SPADA memiliki rata-rata skor yang berbeda, namun dapat disimpulkan bahwa semua fasilitas yang dihadirkan SPADA sebagai penunjang pembelajaran daring pada mahasiswa dinyatakan efektif.

This study investigates the effect of feedback types presented in learning object (LO) development tutorials on the quality of pre-service teachers’ LOs and their choices of feedback types in authoring LOs. Results indicate that video feedback presented in the tutorials is the most effective feedback representation type, based on overall scores on the learning object review instrument and feedback quality of the LOs developed by the pre -service teachers. However, interaction between feedback types presented in the tutorial and pre -service teachers’ actual use of feedback in authoring LOs was not meaningful. The implications are discussed.Keywords: Pre-service teacher, learning object, authoring, feedback type, feedback preferences.

The aim of this study was to analyze the need for developing appropriate science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (STEAM) assessment instruments (vaild, practical and effective) to improve students’ creative thinking skills. The instruments that have been used in education units have not been fully able to encourage students to think at a higher level in building conceptual understanding and solving their own problems. This study used qualitative descriptive study based on a literature review of the STEAM-based assessment instrument as an effort to improve students’ creative thinking skills. The research subjects were educators and fourth grade students of SD Negeri 2 Tulusrejo, Pekalongan District, East Lampung. The research object was creative thinking ability, assessment instrument, and STEAM. The data collection instrument used an interview guide. Questionnaire. An assessment instrument needed to support the learning process in the education unit to improve students’ creative thinking skills. The finding indicated that educators had not fully used assessment instruments that could improve students’ creative thinking skills. Besides, educators needed a STEAM-based assessment instrument that was appropriate to the level of the learner. Thus, it can be concluded that STEAM-based instruments to improve students' creative thinking skills in elementary schools must be developed.

Purpose This paper provides a research-based approach for evaluating resources for transitioning to teaching online. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses Davies’ (2011) discussion of technological literacy; Koehler and Mishra’s (2009) Technology, Pedagogy and Content Knowledge (TPACK); Leacock and Nesbit’s (2011) Learning Object Review Instrument; and Reynolds and Leeder’s (2018) expanded notion of “technology stewardship” to underpin an approach that educators can use to evaluate educational resources for transitioning to teaching online. Findings This paper introduces and applies an approach focused on evaluating the source of a given educational resource, as well as how it can be implemented. Research limitations/implications This paper synthesizes frameworks relating to qualities of educational technologies and frameworks relating to qualities of educators, and introduces two criteria for evaluating resources for transitioning to distance learning. Practical implications This paper provides readily applicable criteria for evaluating resources in a time of emergency distance learning. Social implications This approach enables educators to evaluate resources in a time of emergency distance learning. Originality/value The synthesis of four approaches to evaluating educational technologies, and applying the approach to four resources that have emerged to address COVID-19-related instructional needs.

El presente trabajo fue sobre materiales educativos digitales y los parámetros de calidad que deben de cumplir para ser utilizados por los docentes. El objetivo de la investigación fue determinar la selección de los materiales educativos conforme a criterios que les permitan asegurarse que se cumple con los parámetros de calidad que garanticen la mejora continua y calidad de los materiales educativos digitales utilizados. La muestra fue constituida por 80 docentes que imparten clases a nivel superior adscritos a diversos planes de pregrado. Se les aplicaron los instrumentos Learning Object Review Instrument y la norma de Unidad de Normalización Española 71362 Calidad de los materiales educativos digitales. Los resultados indicaron que no todos los docentes toman en cuenta algunos parámetros de calidad. Se concluye que es necesario considerar la aplicación de algunos parámetros mínimos para asegurar que los materiales digitales cumplen con la calidad requerida en el ámbito universitario.

Abstract: The problem in this study is the low ability of students in reviewing literary work, especially movies. This is due to the less precise learning method taught by the teachers during the learning process and tend to be boring, so a lot of students are not interested in reviewing literary work subject. This study aims to describe students’ ability in reviewing movie. The model used in this study is demonstration model. Population of this research is all students of class VIII at SMP Swasta Pangeran Antasari Medan academic year 2014/2015 with sample of 24 students. The instrument used is an objective test (multiple choices) and giving commentary based on film that has been played. The object of this research is the answer sheets of students, which assessed from the movie review aspect and intrinsic and extrinsic elements of the movie. Review aspect consists of the ability of reviewing the movie, determining the strengths and weaknesses of the movie, the storyline, the conclusion, and the characters in the movie. The results of the study prove that students’ ability in reviewing the movie is classified as good. In terms of percentages, there are 12 students or 50% who get score classified as very good, 7 students or 29.2% classified as good, 5 students or 20.8%, classified as fair. The mean score they get is 77. Thus, the ability in reviewing Cahaya dari Timur movie by students of class VIII-II SMP Swasta Pangeran Antasari classified as good. Keywords: Ability, Reviewing, Movie, Demonstration, Model

ABSTRACT The background of this research is the low learning achievement of students in mathematics based on interview data. This study aims to improve the learning achievement of fifth grade students of SDN 1 Jahiang by using the course review horay (CRH) type cooperative learning model. This type of research is a quantitative pre-experimental research method design in the form of one-group pretest-posttest design. The research subject was grade V SDN 1 Jahiang according to 11 students. The object of the research is the mathematics learning achievement of the volume building volume material using the course review horay (CRH) type cooperative learning model. The instrument used in this study was a test. The results showed that the CRH type of cooperative learning model can improve mathematics learning achievement volume of class V room SDN 1 Jahiang seen from the pretest average value of students who were not given treatment, namely 24.55 while students who were given treatment or group posttest namely 88.18. There is a significant difference between the results of student achievement before treatment and after treatment treatment. Keywords: Learning Achievement and Cooperative Learning Model Course Review Horay (CRH) Type ABSTRAK Latar belakang penelitian ini adalah masih rendahnya prestasi belajar peserta didik pada mata pelajaran matematika berdasarkan data wawancara. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk meningkatkan prestasi belajar peserta didik kelas V SDN 1 Jahiang dengan menggunakan model pembelajaran kooperatif tipe course review horay (CRH). Jenis penelitian ini adalah kuantitatif metode penelitian pre-eksperimental designs bentuk one-group pretest-posttest design. Subjek penelitian adalah kelas V SDN 1 Jahiang yang berjumlah 11 peserta didik. Objek penelitian adalah prestasi belajar matemtaika materi volume bangun ruang dengan menggunakan model pembelajaran pembelajaran kooperatif tipe course review horay (CRH). Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa penerapan model pembelajaran kooperatif tipe CRH dapat meningkatkan prestasi belajar matematika materi volume bangun ruang kelas V SDN 1 Jahiang dilihat dari nilai rata-rata pretest pada peserta didik yang tidak diberikan perlakuan yaitu 24,55 sedangkan untuk peserta didik yang diberikan perlakuan atau group posttest yaitu 88,18. Terlihat adanya perbedaan yang signifikan antara hasil prestasi peserta didik sebelum diberikan perlakuan dan sesudah diberikan perlakuan. Kata Kunci: Prestasi Belajar dan Model Pembelajaran Kooperatif Tipe Course Review Horay (CRH)

The purpose is to reveal the assessment questions to review the percentage and suitability of that. The method used is a descriptive method of document analysis. The object is the mid-semester assessment of math class VI in one of the elementary schools in Cibeureum District, Tasikmalaya City. Data collection techniques through interviews and documentation studies. The instrument used is guidelines analysis sheets, a rubric / matrix based on Bloom's taxonomy and interview guidelines. Data analysis includes the stages of data collection, reduction, presentation and drawing conclusions. The results revealed that 80% questions were in accordance with the operational verb indicators at the cognitive level of C2 (understanding). The percentage of questions obtained is 100% of the total questions at the cognitive level C2 (understanding). From the responses of educators, it was obtained: (1) not paying attention to the preparation of learning assessments based on cognitive levels and tending to refer to operational verbs at the level of basic competence, (2) teacher tend to be have difficulty solving problems based on Higher Order Thinking Skills in mid -semester assessments.

  The goal of this article consists in assessment of possibilities of using board games in the process of learning foreign languages. The object of this research is gamification in learning foreign languages, the subject is the educational potential of board games in teaching foreign languages to adolescents and adults. The relevance of this work lies in finding the new forms of integration of educational process and practical activity. The author notes an important advantage of communication in foreign language during the game over other forms of educational communication in shifting the focus of students’ attention and perception of foreign language as an instrument for achieving the goals of the game, rather than an end in itself. Special attention is given to variability of implementation of each game and ways of adapting to the educational goals, level of attainment, and allocated time. Based on the general scientific methods, such as literature searches, analysis and synthesis, classification, as well as empirical methods, such as experiment, observation and comparison, the  author provides methodological substantiation and review of the eight board games; seven of them are intended for learning any foreign language, not Spanish alone, which is taken as an example in this research. The article carries out classification of board games and gives comparative characteristic of the two types of games used in the educational process. The acquired results are of a practical nature and can be applied in teaching foreign languages on any level or stage of education. All methodologies were tested in learning Spanish language at the university in non-linguistic specialties, and demonstrated high effectiveness.  

Increasing preoccupations and interest manifested for the Romanian language as a foreign language compose a focused and clear expression in the volume “Romanian as a foreign language. Methodology and cultural applicability”, launched at the Turku University publishing house, Finland (2018). The editors, Paul Nanu (Department of Romanian Language and Culture, University of Turku, Finland) and Emilia Ivancu (Department of Romanian Studies of the Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznań, Poland) with this volume, continue a series of activities dedicated to the promotion of the Romanian language and culture outside the country borders. This volume brings together a collection of articles, previously announced and briefly presented at a round table organized by the two Romanian lectors, as a section of the International Conference “Dialogue of cultures between tradition and modernity”, (Philological Research and Multicultural Dialogue Centre, Department of Philology, Faculty of History and Philology, “1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia). The thirteen authors who sign the articles are teachers of Romanian as a foreign language, either in the country or abroad. The challenge launched by the organisers pointed both at the teaching methods of Romanian as a foreign language – including the authors’ reflections upon the available textbooks (Romanian language textbooks) and the cultural implications of this perspective on the Romanian language. It is probably no accident that the first article of the aforementioned volume – “Particularities of teaching Romanian as a foreign language for the preparatory year. In quest of “the ideal textbook’’ (Cristina Sicoe, University of the West, Timișoara) – brings a strict perspective upon that what should be, from the author’s point of view, “the ideal textbook”. The fact that it does not exist, and has little chances ever to exist, could maybe be explained by the multitude of variables which appear in practice, within the didactic triangle composed by teacher – student – textbook. The character of the variables is the result of particular interactions established between the components of the triad. A concurrent direction is pointed out by the considerations that make the object of the second article, “To a new textbook of Romanian language as a foreign language’’ (Ana-Maria Radu-Pop, University of the West, Timișoara). While the previous article was about an ideal textbook for foreign students in the preparatory year of Romanian, this time, the textbook in question has another target group, namely Erasmus students and students from Centres of foreign languages. Considering that this kind of target group “forms a distinct category”, the author pleads for the necessity of editing adequate textbooks with a part made of themes, vocabulary, grammar and a part made of culture and civilization – the separation into parts belongs to the author – that should consider the needs of this target group, their short stay in Romania (three months to one year) and, last but not least, the students’ poor motivation. These distinctive notes turn the existent RFL textbooks[1] in that which the author calls “level crossings”, which she explains in a humorous manner[2]. Since the ideal manual seems to be in no hurry to appear, the administrative-logistic implications of teaching Romanian as a foreign language (for the preparatory year) should be easier to align with the standards of efficiency. This matter is addressed by Mihaela Badea and Cristina Iridon from the Oil & Gas University of Ploiești, in the article “Administrative/logistic difficulties of teaching RFL. Case study”. Starting from a series of practical experiences, the authors are purposing to suggest “several ideas to improve existent methodologies of admitting foreign students and to review the ARACIS criteria from March 2017, regarding external evaluation of the ‘Romanian as a foreign language’ study programme”. Among other things, an external difficulty is highlighted (common to all universities in the country), namely the permission to register foreign students until the end of the first semester of the academic year, meaning around the middle of February. The authors punctually describe the unfortunate implications of this legal aspect and the regrettable consequences upon the quality of the educational act. They suggest that the deadline for admitting foreign students not exceed the 1st of December of every academic year. The list of difficulties in teaching Romanian as a foreign language is extremely long, reaching sensitive aspects from an ethical perspective of multiculturalism. This approach belongs to Constantin Mladin from Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, Macedonia, who writes about “The role of the ethical component in the learning process of a foreign language and culture. The Macedonian experience”. Therefore, we are moving towards the intercultural competences which, as the author states, are meant to “adequately and efficiently round the acquired language competences”. In today’s Macedonian society, that which the author refers to, a society claimed to be multiethnic, multilingual and pluriconfessional, the emotional component of an intercultural approach needs a particular attention. Thus, reconfigurations of the current didactic model are necessary. The solution proposed and successfully applied by Professor Constantin Mladin is that of shaking the natural directions in which a foreign language and culture is acquired: from the source language/culture towards the target language/culture. All this is proposed in the context in which the target group is extremely heterogeneous and its “emotional capacity of letting go of the ethnocentric attitudes and perceptions upon otherness” seem to lack. When speaking about ‘barriers’, we often mean ‘difficulty’. The article written by Silvia Kried Stoian and Loredana Netedu from the Oil & Gas University of Ploiești, called “Barriers in the intercultural communication of foreign students in the preparatory year”, is the result of a micro-research done upon a group of 37 foreign students from 10 different countries/cultural spaces, belonging to different religions (plus atheists), speakers of different languages. From the start, there are many differences to be reconciled in a way reasonable enough to reduce most barriers that appear in their intercultural communication. Beneficial and obstructive factors – namely communication barriers – coexist in a complex communicational environment, which supposes identifying and solving the latter, in the aim of softening the cultural shock experienced within linguistic and cultural immersion. Several solutions are recommended by the two authors. An optimistic conclusion emerges in the end, namely the possibility that the initial inconvenient of the ethnical, linguistic and cultural heterogeneity become “an advantage in learning the Romanian language and acquiring intercultural communication”. Total immersion (linguistic and cultural), as well as the advantage it represents as far as exposure to language is concerned, is the subject of the article entitled “Cultural immersion and exposure to language”, written by Adina Curta (“1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia). Considered to be a factor of rapid progress and effectiveness of acquisition, exposure to language that arises from the force of circumstances could be extended to that what may be named orchestrated exposure to language. This phrase is consented to reunite two types of resources, “a category of statutory resources, which are the CEFRL suggestions, and a category of particular resources, which should be the activities proposed by the organizers of the preparatory year of RFL”. In this respect, we are dealing with several alternating roles of the teacher who, besides being an expert, animator, facilitator of the learning process or technician, also becomes a cultural and linguistic coach, sending to the group of immersed students a beneficial message of professional and human polyvalence. A particular experience is represented by teaching the Romanian language at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. This experience is presented by Nicoleta Neșu in the article “The Romanian language, between mother tongue and ethnic language. Case study”. The particular situation is generated by the nature of the target group, a group of students coming, on the one hand, from Romanian families, who, having lived in Italy since early childhood, have studied in the Italian language and are now studying the Romanian language (mother tongue, then ethnic language) as L1, and, on the other hand, Italian mother tongue students who study the Romanian language as a foreign language. The strategies that are used and the didactic approach are constantly in need of particularization, depending on the statute that the studied language, namely the Romanian language, has in each case. In the area of teaching methodology for Romanian as a foreign language, suggestions and analyses come from four authors, namely Eliana-Alina Popeți (West University of Timișoara), “Teaching the Romanian language to students from Romanian communities from Serbia. Vocabulary exercise”, Georgeta Orian (“1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia) “The Romanian language in the rhythm of dance and hip-hop music”, Coralia Telea (“1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia), “Explanation during the class of Romanian as a foreign language” and Emilia Ivancu (Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznań, Poland), “Romanian (auto)biographic discourse or the effect of literature upon learning RFL”. The vocabulary exercise proposed to the students by Eliana-Alina Popeți is a didactic experiment through which the author checked the hypothesis according to which a visual didactic material eases the development of vocabulary, especially since the textual productions of the students, done through the technique that didactics calls “reading images”, were video recorded and submitted to mutual evaluation as well as to self-evaluation of grammar, coherence and pronunciation. The role of the authentic iconographic document is attested in the didactics of modern languages, as the aforementioned experiment confirms once again the high coefficient of interest and attention of the students, as well as the vitality and authenticity of interaction within the work groups. It is worth mentioning that these students come from the Serbian Republic and are registered in the preparatory year at the Faculty of Letters, History and Theology of the West University of Timișoara. Most of them are speakers of different Romanian patois, only found on the territory of Serbia. The activity consisted of elaborating written texts starting from an image (a postcard reproducing a portrait of the Egyptian artist Eman Osama), imagining a possible biography of the character. In the series of successful authentic documents in teaching-learning foreign languages, there is also the song. The activities described by Georgeta Orian were undertaken either with Erasmus students from the preparatory year at the “1 Decembrie 1989” University of Alba Iulia, or with Polish students (within the Department of Romanian Studies in Poznań), having high communication competences (B1-B2, or even more). There were five activities triggered by Romanian songs, chosen by criteria of sympathy with the interests of the target group: youngsters, late teenagers. The stake was “a more pleasant and, sometimes, a more useful learning process”, mostly through discovery, through recourse to musical language, which has the advantage of breaking linguistic barriers in the aim of creating a common space in which the target language, a language of “the other”, becomes the instrument of speaking about what connects us. The didactic approach, when it comes to Romanian as a foreign language taught to students of the preparatory year cannot avoid the extremely popular method of the explanation. Its story is told by Coralia Telea. With a use of high scope, the explanation steps in in various moments and contexts: for transmitting new information, for underlining mechanisms generating new rules, in evaluation activities (result appreciation, progress measurements). Still, the limits of this method are not left out, among which the risk of the teachers to annoy their audience if overbidding this method. Addressing (Polish) students from the Master’s Studies Program within the Romania Philology at the Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznań, Emilia Ivancu crosses, through her article, the methodological dimensions of teaching Romanian as a foreign language, entering the curricular territory of the problematics in question by proposing an optional course entitled Romanian (auto)biographic discourse”. Approaching contact with the Romanian language as a foreign language at an advanced level, the stakes of the approach and the proposed contents differ, obviously, from the ones only regarding the creation and development of the competence of communication in the Romanian Language. The studied texts have been grouped into correspondence/epistolary discourse, diaries, memoires and (auto)biography as fiction. Vasile Alecsandri, Sanda Stolojan, Paul Goma, Neagoe Basarab, Norman Manea, Mircea Eliade are just a few of the writers concerned, submitted to discussions with the help of a theoretical toolbox, offered to the students as recordings of cultural broadcasts, like Profesioniștii or Rezistența prin cultură etc. The consequences of this complex approach consisted, on the one hand, of the expansion of the readings for the students and, on the other hand, in choosing to write dissertations on these topics. A “tangible” result of Emilia Ivancu’s course is the elaboration of a volume entitled România la persoana întâi, perspective la persoana a treia (Romania in the first person, perspectives in the third person), containing seven articles written by Polish Master’s students. Master’s theses, a PhD thesis, several translations into the Polish language are also “fruits” of the initiated course. Of all these, the author extracted several conclusions supporting the merits and usefulness of her initiative. The volume ends with a review signed by Adina Curta (1 Decembrie 1918 University of Alba Iulia), “The Romanian language, a modern, wanted language. Iuliana Wainberg-Drăghiciu – Textbook of Romanian language as a foreign language”. The textbook elaborated by Iuliana Wainberg-Drăghiciu (“1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia) respects the CEFRL suggestions, points at the communicative competences (linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic) described for levels A1 and A2, has a high degree of accessibility through a trilingual dictionary (Romanian-English-French) which it offers to foreign students and through the phonetic transcription of new vocabulary units.

The Routledge Handbook of language and culture represents a comprehensive study on the inextricable relationship between language and culture. It is structured into seven parts and 33 chapters. Part 1, Overview and historical background, by Farzad Sharifian, starts with an outline of the book and a synopsis of research on language and culture. The second chapter, John Leavitt’s Linguistic relativity: precursors and transformations discusses further the historical development of the concept of linguistic relativity, identifying different schools’ of thought views on the relation between language and culture. He also tries to demystify some misrepresentations held towards Boas, Sapir, and Whorf’ theories (pp. 24-26). Chapter 3, Ethnosyntax, by Anna Gladkova provides an overview of research on ethnosyntax, starting from the theoretical basis laid by Sapir and Whorf and investigates the differences between a narrow sense of ethnosyntax, which focuses on cultural meanings of various grammatical structures and a broader sense, which emphasises the pragmatic and cultural norms’ impact on the choice of grammatical structures. John Leavitt presents in the fourth chapter, titled Ethnosemantics, a historical account of research on meaning across cultures, introducing three traditions, i.e. ‘classical’ ethnosemantics (also referred to as ethnoscience or cognitive anthropology), Boasian cultural semantics (linguistically inspired anthropology) and Neohumboldtian comparative semantics (word-field theory, or content-oriented Linguistics). In Chapter 5, Goddard underlines the fact that ethnopragmatics investigates emic (or culture-internal) approaches to the use of different speech practices across various world languages, which accounts for the fact that there exists a connection between the cultural values or norms and the speech practices peculiar to a speech community. One of the key objectives of ethnopragmatics is to investigate ‘cultural key words’, i.e. words that encapsulate culturally construed concepts. The concept of ‘linguaculture’ (or languaculture) is tackled in Risager’s Chapter 6, Linguaculture: the language–culture nexus in transnational perspective. The author makes reference to American scholars that first introduced this notion, Paul Friedrich, who looks at language and culture as a single domain in which verbal aspects of culture are mingled with semantic meanings, and Michael Agar, for whom culture resides in language while language is loaded with culture. Risager himself brought forth a new global and transnational perspective on the concept of linguaculture, i.e. the use of language (linguistic practice) is seen as flows in people’s social networks and speech communities. These flows enhance as people migrate or learn new languages, in permanent dynamics. Lidia Tanaka’s Chapter 7, Language, gender, and culture deals with research on language, gender, and culture. According to her, the language-gender relationship has been studied by researchers from various fields, including psychology, linguistics, and anthropology, who mainly consider gender as a construct that preserves inequalities in society, with the help of language, too. Tanaka lists diachronically different approaches to language and gender, focusing on three specific ones: gender stereotyped linguistic resources, semantically, pragmatically or lexically designated language features (including register) and gender-based spoken discourse strategies (talking-time imbalances or interruptions). In Chapter 8, Language, culture, and context, Istvan Kecskes delves into the relationship between language, culture, and context from a socio-cognitive perspective. The author considers culture to be a set of shared knowledge structures that encapsulate the values, norms, and customs that the members of a society have in common. According to him, both language and context are rooted in culture and carriers of it, though reflecting culture in a different way. Language encodes past experience with different contexts, whereas context reflects present experience. The author also provides relevant examples of formulaic language that demonstrate the functioning of both types of context, within the larger interplay between language, culture, and context. Sara Miller’s Chapter 9, Language, culture, and politeness reviews traditional approaches to politeness research, with particular attention given to ‘discursive approach’ to politeness. Much along the lines of the previous chapter, Miller stresses the role of context in judgements of (im)polite language, maintaining that individuals represent active agents who challenge and negotiate cultural as well as linguistic norms in actual communicative contexts. Chapter 10, Language, culture, and interaction, by Peter Eglin focuses on language, culture and interaction from the perspective of the correspondence theory of meaning. According to him, abstracting language and culture from their current uses, as if they were not interdependent would not lead to an understanding of words’ true meaning. David Kronenfeld introduces in Chapter 11, Culture and kinship language, a review of research on culture and kinship language, starting with linguistic anthropology. He explains two formal analytic definitional systems of kinship terms: the semantic (distinctions between kin categories, i.e. father vs mother) and pragmatic (interrelations between referents of kin terms, i.e. ‘nephew’ = ‘child of a sibling’). Chapter 12, Cultural semiotics, by Peeter Torop deals with the field of ‘semiotics of culture’, which may refer either to methodological instrument, to a whole array of methods or to a sub-discipline of general semiotics. In this last respect, it investigates cultures as a form of human symbolic activity, as well as a system of cultural languages (i.e. sign systems). Language, as “the preserver of the culture’s collective experience and the reflector of its creativity” represents an essential component of cultural semiotics, being a major sign system. Nigel Armstrong, in Chapter 13, Culture and translation, tackles the interrelation between language, culture, and translation, with an emphasis on the complexities entailed by translation of culturally laden aspects. In his opinion, culture has a double-sided dimension: the anthropological sense (referring to practices and traditions which characterise a community) and a narrower sense, related to artistic endeavours. However, both sides of culture permeate language at all levels. Chapter 14, Language, culture, and identity, by Sandra Schecter tackles several approaches to research on language, culture, and identity: social anthropological (the limits at play in the social construction of differences between various groups of people), sociocultural (the interplay between an individual’s various identities, which can be both externally and internally construed, in sociocultural contexts), participatory-relational (the manner in which individuals create their social–linguistic identities). Patrick McConvell, in Chapter 15, Language and culture history: the contribution of linguistic prehistory reviews research in this field where historical linguistic evidence is exploited in the reconstruction and understanding of prehistoric cultures. He makes an account of research in linguistic prehistory, with a focus on proto- and early Indo-European cultures, on several North American language families, on Africa, Australian, and Austronesian Aboriginal languages. McConvell also underlines the importance of interdisciplinary research in this area, which greatly benefits from studies in other disciplines, such as archaeology, palaeobiology, or biological genetics. Part four starts with Ning Yu’s Chapter 16, Embodiment, culture, and language, which gives an account of theory and research on the interplay between language, culture, and body, as seen from the standpoint of Cultural Linguistics. Yu presents a survey of embodiment (in embodied cognition research) from a multidisciplinary perspective, starting with the rather universalistic Conceptual Metaphor Theory. On the other hand, Cultural Linguistics has concentrated on the role played by culture in shaping embodied language, as various cultures conceptualise body and bodily experience in different ways. Chapter 17, Culture and language processing, by Crystal Robinson and Jeanette Altarriba deals with research in the field of how culture influence language processing, in particular in the case of bilingualism and emotion, alongside language and memory. Clearly, the linguistic and cultural character of each individual’s background has to be considered as a variable in research on cognition and cognitive processing. Frank Polzenhagen and Xiaoyan Xia, in Chapter 18, Language, culture, and prototypicality bring forth a survey of prototypicality across different disciplines, including cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology. According to them, linguistic prototypes play a critical part in social (re-)cognition, as they are socially diagnostic and function as linguistic identity markers. Moreover, individuals may develop ‘culturally blended concepts’ as a result of exposure to several systems of conceptual categorisation, especially in the case of L2 learning (language-contact or culture-contact situations). In Chapter 19, Colour language, thought, and culture, Don Dedrick investigates the issue of the colour words in different languages and how these influence cognition, a question that has been addressed by researchers from various disciplines, such as anthropology, linguistics, cognitive psychology, or neuroscience. He cannot but observe the constant debate in this respect, and he argues that it is indeed difficult to reach consensus, as colour language occasionally reveals effects of language on thought and, at other times, it is impervious to such effects. Chapter 20, Language, culture, and spatial cognition, by Penelope Brown concentrates on conceptualisations of space, providing a framework for thinking about and referring to objects and events, along with more abstract notions such as time, number, or kinship. She lists three frames of reference used by languages in order to refer to spatial relations, i.e. a) an ‘absolute’ coordinate system, like north, south, east, west; b) a ‘relative’ coordinate system envisaged from the body’s standpoint; and c) an intrinsic, object-centred coordinate system. Chris Sinha and Enrique Bernárdez focus on, in Chapter 21, Space, time, and space–time: metaphors, maps, and fusions, research on linguistic and cultural concepts of time and space, starting with the seminal Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), which they denounce for failing to situate space–time mapping within the broader patterns of culture and world perspective. Sinha and Bernárdez further argue that although it is possible in all cultures for individuals to experience and discuss about events in terms of their duration and succession, the specific words and concepts they use to refer to temporal landmarks temporal and duration are most of the time language and culture specific. Chapter 22, Culture and language development, by Laura Sterponi and Paul Lai provides an account of research on the interplay between culture and language acquisition. They refer to two widely accepted perspectives in this respect: a developmental mechanism inherent in human beings and a set of particular social contexts in which children are ‘initiated’ into the cultural meaning systems. Both perspectives define culture as “both related to the psychological make-up of the individual and to the socio-historical contexts in which s/he is born and develops”. Anna Wierzbicka presents, in Chapter 23, Language and cultural scripts discusses representations of cultural norms which are encoded in language. She contends that the system of meaning interpretation developed by herself and her colleagues, i.e. Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), may easily be used to capture and convey cultural scripts. Through NSM cross-cultural experiences can be captured in a thorough manner by using a reduced number of conceptual primes which seem to exist in all languages. Chapter 24, Culture and emotional language, by Jean-Marc Dewaele brings forth the issue of the relationship between language, culture, and emotion, which has been researched by cultural and cognitive psychologists and applied linguists alike, although with some differences in focus. He considers that within this context, it is important to see differences between emotion contexts in bilinguals, since these may lead to different perceptions of the self. He infers that generally, culture revolves around the experience and communication of emotions, conveyed through linguistic expression. The fifth part starts with Chapter 25, Language and culture in sociolinguistics, by Meredith Marra, who underlines that culture is a central concept in Interactional Sociolinguistics, where language is considered as social interaction. In linguistic interaction, culture, and especially cultural differences are deemed as a cause of potential miscommunication. Mara also remarks that the paradigm change in sociolinguistics, from Interactional Sociolinguistics to social constructionism reshaped ‘culture’ into a more dynamic as well as less rigid concept. Claudia Strauss’ Chapter 26, Language and culture in cognitive anthropology deals with the relationship between human society and human thought/thinking. The author contends that cognitive anthropologists may be subdivided into two groups, i.e. ones that are concerned with the process of thinking (cognition-in-practice scholars), and the others focusing on the product of thinking or thoughts (concerned with shared cultural understandings). She goes on to explore how different approaches to cognitive anthropology have counted on units of language, i.e. lexical items and their meanings, along with larger chunks of discourse, as information, which may represent learned cultural schemata. Part VI starts with Chapter 27, Language and culture in second language learning, by Claire Kramsch, in which she makes a survey of the definition of ‘culture’ in foreign language learning and its evolution from a component of literature and the arts to a more comprehensive purport, that of culturally appropriate use of language, along with an appropriate use of sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic norms. According to her, in the postmodern era, communication is not only mere transmission of information, it represents construal and positioning of the self and of self-identity. Chapter 28, Writing across cultures: ‘culture’ in second language writing studies, by Dwight Atkinson focuses on the usefulness of culture in second-language writing (SLW). He reviews several approaches to the issue: contrastive rhetoric (dealing with the impact of first-language patterns of text organisation on writers in a second language), or even alternate notions, like‘ cosmopolitanism’, ‘critical multiculturalism’, and hybridity, as of late native culture is becoming irrelevant or at best far less significant. Ian Malcolm tackles, in Chapter 29, Language and culture in second dialect learning, the issue of ‘standard’ Englishes (e.g., Standard American English, Standard Australian English) versus minority ‘non-standard’ speakers of English. He deplores the fact that in US specialist literature, speaking the ‘non-standard’ variety of English was associated with cognitive, cultural, and linguistic insufficiency. He further refers to other specialists who have demonstrated that ‘non-standard’ varieties can be just as systematic and highly structured as the standard variety. Chapter 30, Language and culture in intercultural communication, by Hans-Georg Wolf gives an account of research in intercultural education, focusing on several paradigms, i.e. the dominant one, investigating successful functioning in intercultural encounters, the minor one, exploring intercultural understanding and the ‘deconstructionist, and or postmodernist’. He further examines different interpretations of the concepts associated with intercultural communication, including the functionalist school, the intercultural understanding approach and a third one, the most removed from culture, focusing on socio-political inequalities, fluidity, situationality, and negotiability. Andy Kirkpatrick’s Chapter 31, World Englishes and local cultures gives a synopsis of research paradigm from applied linguistics which investigates the development of Englishes around the world, through processes like indigenisation or nativisation of the language. Kirkpatrick discusses the ways in which new Englishes accommodate the culture of the very speech community which develops them, e.g. adopting lexical items to express to express culture-specific concepts. Speakers of new varieties could use pragmatic norms rooted in cultural values and norms of the specific new speech community which have not previously been associated with English. Moreover, they can use these new Englishes to write local literatures, often exploiting culturally preferred rhetorical norms. Part seven starts with Chapter 32, Cultural Linguistics, by Farzad Sharifian gives an account of the recent multidisciplinary research field of Cultural Linguistics, which explores the relationship between language and cultural cognition, particularly in the case of cultural conceptualisations. Sharifian also brings forth illustrations of how cultural conceptualisations may be linguistically encoded. The last chapter, A future agenda for research on language and culture, by Roslyn Frank provides an appraisal of Cultural Linguistics as a prospective path for research in the field of language and culture. She states that ‘Cultural Linguistics could potentially create a paradigm that “successfully melds together complementary approaches, e.g., viewing language as ‘a complex adaptive system’ and bringing to bear upon it concepts drawn from cognitive science such as ‘distributed cognition’ and ‘multi-agent dynamic systems theory’.” She further asserts that Cultural Linguistics has the potential to function as “a bridge that brings together researchers from a variety of fields, allowing them to focus on problems of mutual concern from a new perspective” and most likely unveil new issues (as well as solutions) which have not been evident so far. In conclusion, the Handbook will most certainly serve as clear and coherent guidelines for scholarly thinking and further research on language and culture, and also open up new investigative vistas in each of the areas tackled.

<p class="3">The constant technological development in education, and the potentiality of the resources offered by Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), are challenges faced by teaching institutions in Brazil, especially by those institutions, which by the very nature of their services intend to provide distance education courses. In such a scene, one sees the use of technology as a tool to give support and to take part in the process of teaching activities, such as the Virtual Learning Objects (VLOs), which offer an opportunity to contribute to the teaching and learning process. Considering this, the present work aims at analyzing the VLOs used in the distance education courses of Economic Sciences and of Accounting at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (Federal University of Santa Catarina), under the quality criteria indicated by the Learning Object Review Instrument (LORI) methodology proposed by Nesbit, Belfer, and Vargo (2002), Nesbit, Belfer, and Leacock (2004), and Leacock &amp; Nesbit (2007), in order to learn how to better take profit of efforts and resources.</p>

AbstractA well-known challenge for deformation monitoring is the spatial discretization, i.e. the choice of monitoring points at which measurements are to be taken. Well-chosen monitoring points employ prior knowledge to yield a significant amount of information about a certain aspect of the monitored object. However, the choice of such a set of points is typically made to be practically expedient or left to the measurement instrument itself. We aim to derive adaptive discretization strategies that implicitly incorporate domain knowledge about the monitored object via a cycle of interaction and learning. In those strategies, previous measurements impact the locations of subsequent ones. We formulate the choice of monitoring points as a decision theoretical problem and review the framework of reinforcement learning which formalizes the problem of deriving optimal sequential decisions under uncertainty. Iterative algorithms produce solution schemes for this optimal control task. We benchmark the performance of reinforcement learning and compare its results to random, pseudorandom, and numerically designed discretization strategies on several geodetically motivated examples. Advantages, disadvantages, and practical feasibility of the approach are evaluated and reveal a significant boost in efficiency of the data collection scheme compared to classical approaches.

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(U of Texas, San Antonio, USA), English language learners left behind in Arizona: the nullification of accommodations in the intersection of federal and state policies. Bilingual Research Journal (Tempe, AZ, USA) 29.1 (2005), 1–29.05–457Zareva, Alla (Northern Arizona U, USA; Alla.Zareva@nau.ed), Models of lexical knowledge assessment of second language learners of English at higher levels of language proficiency. System (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 33.4 (2005), 547–562.05–458Zareva, Alla (Northern Arizona U, Flagstaff; Alla.Zareva@nau.edu), Paula Schwanenflugel & Yordanka Nikolova, Relationship between lexical competence and language proficiency: variable sensitivity. Studies in Second Language Acquisition (Cambridge, UK) 27.4 (2005), 567–595.

As the students of English Department, the students should be able in doing grammarwell, in this case Possessive Pronoun. The purpose of this research was to find out the students’ability in applying Possessive Pronoun and their common problem in applying PossessivePronoun in writing sentences at 1st semester FKIP UNILAK Pekanbaru. The type of the researchwas mixed method in type of explanatory design. The number of population was 105 students, theresearcher took 53 students as sample of the 1st semester FKIP UNILAK Pekanbaru selected bysimple random sampling. In collecting the data the researcher used two instrument, test andinterview. The form of test was essay test. The interview is held to support the data. In analyzingthe data, the researcher used SPSS in descriptive statistics. The result of the analysis showedthat the average score of 1st semester student in applying Possessive Pronoun was 52.98.Meanwhile for the median is 48, the mode is 20. The score of Standard Deviation is 27.93,Variance is 780.25, and Range is 84. According to the Z-Score, it can be seen that 41.5%students’ ability was higher than average and 58.5% students ability was below the average. Itcan be seen that students’ ability in applying Possessive Pronoun was low. For the commonproblem, based on the test, students still mixed up between Possessive Pronoun and PossessiveAdjectives. Students used wrong pattern in using Possessive Pronoun, in which they still useSubject or Object Pronoun. Based on interview, students did not understand clearly aboutPossessive Pronoun, also they have difficulties in learning Possessive Pronoun, for the reason ofabsence of review the lesson. In conclusion, students’ ability in applying Possessive Pronouncorresponds with their common problem.

During a pandemic, the priority is the need for security from exposure to the virus. However, although safety is a particular concern, the fulfillment of psychological needs (recreation) must still be considered with various forms of entertainment. One of them is art entertainment or art tourism. Performing arts and culture tourism can be a recreational selection with a memorable impression and is also useful for cultural learning. An angklung music performance that is popular in Indonesia is Saung Angklung Udjo (SAU), Saung which means small house, angklung is a traditional bamboo musical instrument from West Java and Udjo is the name of the owner. The appropriate business strategy is required to survive in the slump during the pandemic. The study aimed to determine the strategy of performing arts and cultural performances in Saung Mang Udjo, West Java, during the Covid-19 pandemic. This study used a qualitative method with a Literature review model exploring detailed information from SAU management. Data collection by in-depth interviews, observations, and documentation were performed online. The study object is Saung Mang Udjo (SAU), Bandung, West Java. The study was performed from March-to April 2021. The results obtained show that the business strategy applied by SAU management combines a cost leadership strategy and a differentiation strategy. It provides different, unique, and modern products without leaving the attractive concept of traditional Indonesian culture, which consumers like at the lowest possible competitive prices. It also implements health protocol policies, following a special certification for tourism businesses, i.e., (CHSE) Cleanliness, Health, Safety, Environment Sustainability. A product differentiation strategy should emphasize the creativity of SAU management in making various kinds of innovative products during the pandemic that are interesting and fun, supported by friendly, skilled, insightful employees, which are more attractive to consumers than other competing products. Online marketing is prioritized during the pandemic by utilizing various media platforms.

Indigenous cross-cultural training has been around since the 1980s. It is often seen as a way to increase the skills and competency of staff engaged in providing service to Indigenous clients and customers, teaching Indigenous students within universities and schools, or working with Indigenous communities (Fredericks and Bargallie, “Indigenous”; “Which Way”). In this article we demonstrate how such training often exposes power, whiteness, and concepts of an Indigenous “other”. We highlight how cross-cultural training programs can potentially provide a setting in which non-Indigenous participants can develop a deeper realisation of how their understandings of the “other” are formed and enacted within a “white” social setting. Revealing whiteness as a racial construct enables people to see race, and “know what racism is, what it is not and what it does” (Bargallie, 262). Training participants can use such revelations to develop their racial literacy and anti-racist praxis (Bargallie), which when implemented have the capacity to transform inequitable power differentials in their work with Indigenous peoples and organisations.What Does the Literature Say about Cross-Cultural Training? An array of names are used for Indigenous cross-cultural training, including cultural awareness, cultural competency, cultural responsiveness, cultural safety, cultural sensitivity, cultural humility, and cultural capability. Each model takes on a different approach and goal depending on the discipline or profession to which the training is applied (Hollinsworth). Throughout this article we refer to Indigenous cross-cultural training as “cultural competence” or “cultural awareness” and discuss these in relation to their application within higher education institutions. While literature on health and human services programs in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and other nation states provide clear definitions of terms such as “cultural safety”, cultural competence or cultural awareness is often lacking a concise and consistent definition.Often delivered as a half day or a one to two-day training course, it is unrealistic to think that Indigenous cultural competence can be achieved through one’s mere attendance and participation. Moreover, when courses centre on “cultural differences” and enable revelations about those differences they are in danger of presenting idealised notions of Indigeneity. Cultural competence becomes a process through which an Indigenous “other” is objectified, while very little is offered by way of translating knowledge and skills into practice when working with Indigenous peoples.What this type of learning has the capacity to do is oversimplify and reinforce racism and racist stereotypes of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous cultures. What is generally believed is that if non-Indigenous peoples know more about Indigenous peoples and cultures, relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples will somehow improve. The work of Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson is vital to draw on here, when she asks, has the intellectual investment in defining our cultural differences resulted in the valuing of our knowledges? Has the academy become a more enlightened place in which to work, and, more important, in what ways have our communities benefited? (xvii)What is revealed in a range of studies – whether centring on racism and discrimination or the ongoing disparities across health, education, incarceration, employment, and more – is that despite forty plus years of training focused on understanding cultural differences, very little has changed. Indigenous knowledges continue to be devalued and overlooked. Everyday and structural racisms shape everyday experiences for Indigenous employees in Australian workplaces such as the Australian Public Service (Bargallie) and the Australian higher education sector (Fredericks and White).As the literature demonstrates, the racial division of labour in such institutions often leaves Indigenous employees languishing on the lower rungs of the employment ladder (Bargallie). The findings of an Australian university case study, discussed below, highlights how power, whiteness, and concepts of “otherness” are exposed and play out in cultural competency training. Through their exposure, we argue that better understandings about Indigenous Australians, which are not based on culture difference but personal reflexivity, may be gained. Revealing What Was Needed in the Course’s Foundation and ImplementationThis case study is centred within a regional Australian university across numerous campuses. In 2012, the university council approved an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander strategy, which included a range of initiatives, including the provision of cross-cultural training for staff. In developing the training, a team explored the evidence as it related to university settings (Anning; Asmar; Butler and Young; Fredericks; Fredericks and Thompson; Kinnane, Wilks, Wilson, Hughes and Thomas; McLaughlin and Whatman). This investigation included what had been undertaken in other Australian universities (Anderson; University of Sydney) and drew on the recommendations from earlier research (Behrendt, Larkin, Griew and Kelly; Bradley, Noonan, Nugent and Scales; Universities Australia). Additional consultation took place with a broad range of internal and external stakeholders.While some literature on cross-cultural training centred on the need to understand cultural differences, others exposed the problems of focusing entirely on difference (Brach and Fraser; Campinha-Bacote; Fredericks; Spencer and Archer; Young). The courses that challenged the centrality of cultural difference explained why race needed to be at the core of its training, highlighting its role in enabling discussions of racism, bias, discrimination and how these may be used as means to facilitate potential individual and organisational change. This approach also addressed stereotypes and Eurocentric understandings of what and who is an Indigenous Australian (Carlson; Gorringe, Ross and Forde; Hollinsworth; Moreton-Robinson). It is from this basis that we worked and grew our own training program. Working on this foundational premise, we began to separate content that showcased the fluidity and diversity of Indigenous peoples and refrained from situating us within romantic notions of culture or presenting us as an exotic “other”. In other words, we embraced work that responded to non-Indigenous people’s objectified understandings and expectations of us. For example, the expectation that Indigenous peoples will offer a Welcome to Country, performance, share a story, sing, dance, or disseminate Indigenous knowledges. While we recognise that some of these cultural elements may offer enjoyment and insight to non-Indigenous people, they do not challenge behaviours or the nature of the relationships that non-Indigenous people have with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (Bargallie; Fredericks; Hollinsworth; Westwood and Westwood; Young).The other content which needed separating were the methods that enabled participants to understand and own their standpoints. This included the use of critical Indigenous studies as a form of analysis (Moreton-Robinson). Critical race theory (Delgado and Stefancic) was also used as a means for participants to interrogate their own cultural positionings and understand the pervasive nature of race and racism in Australian society and institutions (McLaughlin and Whatman). This offered all participants, both non-Indigenous and Indigenous, the opportunity to learn how institutional racism operates, and maintains discrimination, neglect, abuse, denial, and violence, inclusive of the continued subjugation that exists within higher education settings and broader society.We knew that the course needed to be available online as well as face-to-face. This would increase accessibility to staff across the university community. We sought to embed critical thinking as we began to map out the course, including the theory in the sections that covered colonisation and the history of Indigenous dispossession, trauma and pain, along with the ongoing effects of federal and state policies and legislations that locates racism at the core of Australian politics. In addition to documenting the ongoing effects of racism, we sought to ensure that Indigenous resistance, agency, and activism was highlighted, showing how this continues, thus linking the past to the contemporary experiences of Indigenous peoples.Drawing on the work of Bargallie we wanted to demonstrate how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples experience racism through systems and structures in their everyday work with colleagues in large organisations, such as universities. Participants were asked to self-reflect on how race impacts their day-to-day lives (McIntosh). The final session of the training focused on the university’s commitment to “Closing the Gap” and its Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP). The associated activity involved participants working individually and in small groups to discuss and consider what they could contribute to the RAP activities and enact within their work environments. Throughout the training, participants were asked to reflect on their personal positioning, and in the final session they were asked to draw from these reflections and discuss how they would discuss race, racism and reconciliation activities with the governance of their university (Westwood and Westwood; Young).Revelations in the Facilitators, Observers, and Participants’ Discussions? This section draws on data collected from the first course offered within the university’s pilot program. During the delivery of the in-person training sessions, two observers wrote notes while the facilitators also noted their feelings and thoughts. After the training, the facilitators and observers debriefed and discussed the delivery of the course along with the feedback received during the sessions.What was noticed by the team was the defensive body language of participants and the types of questions they asked. Team members observed how there were clear differences between the interest non-Indigenous participants displayed when talking about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and a clear discomfort when they were asked to reflect on their own position in relation to Indigenous people. We noted that during these occasions some participants crossed their arms, two wrote notes to each other across the table, and many participants showed discomfort. When the lead facilitator raised this to participants during the sessions, some expressed their dislike and discomfort at having to talk about themselves. A couple were clearly unhappy and upset. We found this interesting as we were asking participants to reflect and talk about how they interpret and understand themselves in relation to Indigenous people and race, privilege, and power.This supports the work of DiAngelo who explains that facilitators can spend a lot of time trying to manage the behaviour of participants. Similarly, Castagno identifies that sometimes facilitators of training might overly focus on keeping participants happy, and in doing so, derail the hard conversations needed. We did not do either. Instead, we worked to manage the behaviours expressed and draw out what was happening to break the attempts to silence racial discussions. We reiterated and worked hard to reassure participants that we were in a “safe space” and that while such discussions may be difficult, they were worth working through on an individual and collective level.During the workshop, numerous emotions surfaced, people laughed at Indigenous humour and cried at what they witnessed as losses. They also expressed anger, defensiveness, and denial. Some participants revelled in hearing answers to questions that they had long wondered about; some openly discussed how they thought they had discovered a distant Aboriginal relative. Many questions surfaced, such as why hadn’t they ever been told this version of Australian history? Why were we focusing on them and not Aboriginal people? How could they be racist when they had an Aboriginal friend or an Aboriginal relative?Some said they felt “guilty” about what had happened in the past. Others said they were not personally responsible or responsible for the actions of their ancestors, questioning why they needed to go over such history in the first place? Inter-woven within participants’ revelations were issues of racism, power, whiteness, and white privilege. Many participants took a defensive stance to protect their white privilege (DiAngelo). As we worked through these issues, several participants started to see their own positionality and shared this with the group. Clearly, the revelation of whiteness as a racial construct was a turning point for some. The language in the group also changed for some participants as revelations emerged through the interrogation and unpacking of stories of racism. Bargallie’s work exploring racism in the workplace, explains that “racism”, as both a word and theme, is primarily absent in conversations amongst non-Indigenous colleagues. Despite its entrenchment in the dialogue, it is rarely, if ever addressed. In fact, for many non-Indigenous people, the fear of being accused of racism is worse than the act of racism itself (Ahmed; Bargallie). We have seen this play out within the media, sport, news bulletins, and more. Lentin describes the act of denying racism despite its existence in full sight as “not racism”, arguing that its very denial is “a form of racist violence” (406).Through enhancing racial literacy, Bargallie asserts that people gain a better understanding of “what racism is, what racism is not and how race works” (258). Such revelations can work towards dismantling racism in workplaces. Individual and structural racism go hand-in-glove and must be examined and addressed together. This is what we wanted to work towards within the cultural competency course. Through the use of critical Indigenous studies and critical race theory we situated race, and not cultural difference, as central, providing participants with a racial literacy that could be used as a tool to challenge and dismantle racism in the workplace.Revelations in the Participant Evaluations?The evaluations revealed that our intention to disrupt the status quo in cultural competency training was achieved. Some of the discussions were difficult and this was reflected in the feedback. It was valuable to learn that numerous participants wanted to do more through group work, conversations, and problem resolution, along with having extra reading materials. This prompted our decision to include extra links to resource learning materials through the course’s online site. We also opted to provide all participants with a copy of the book Indigenous Australia for Dummies (Behrendt). The cost of the book was built into the course and future participants were thankful for this combination of resources.One unexpected concern raised by participants was that the course should not be “that hard”, and that we should “dumb down” the course. We were astounded considering that many participants were academics and we were confident that facilitators of other mandatory workplace training, for example, staff Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO), Fire Safety, Risk Management, Occupational Health and Safety, Discrimination and more, weren’t asked to “dumb down” their content. We explained to the participants what content we had been asked to deliver and knew their responses demonstrated white fragility. We were not prepared to adjust the course and dumb it down for white understandings and comfortabilities (Leonardo and Porter).Comments that were expected included that the facilitators were “passionate”, “articulate”, demonstrated “knowledge” and effectively “dealt with issues”. A couple of the participants wrote that the facilitators were “aggressive” or “angry”. This however is not new for us, or new to other Aboriginal women. We know Aboriginal women are often seen as “aggressive” and “angry”, when non-Indigenous women might be described as “passionate” or “assertive” for saying exactly the same thing. The work of Aileen Moreton-Robinson in Australia, and the works of numerous other Aboriginal women provide evidence of this form of racism (Fredericks and White; Bargallie; Bond). Internationally, other Indigenous women and women of colour document the same experiences (Lorde). Participants’ assessment of the facilitators is consistent with the racism expressed through racial microaggression outside of the university, and in other organisations. This is despite working in the higher education sector, which is normally perceived as a more knowledgeable and informed environment. Needless to say, we did not take on these comments.The evaluations did offer us the opportunity to adjust the course and make it stronger before it was offered across the university where we received further evaluation of its success. Despite this, the university decided to withdraw and reallocate the money to the development of a diversity training course that would cover all equity groups. This meant that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples would be covered along with sexual diversity, gender, disability, and people from non-English speaking backgrounds. The content focused on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples was reduced to one hour of the total course. Including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in this way is not based on evidence and works to minimise Indigenous Australians and their inherent rights and sovereignty to just another “equity group”. Conclusion We set out to develop and deliver a cross-cultural course that was based on evidence and a foundation of 40 plus years’ experience in delivering such training. In addition, we sought a program that would align with the university’s Reconciliation Action Plan and the directions being undertaken in the sector and by Universities Australia. Through engaging participants in a process of critical thinking centring on race, we developed a training program that successfully fostered self-reflection and brought about revelations of whiteness.Focusing on cultural differences has proven ineffective to the work needed to improve the lives of Indigenous Australian peoples. Recognising this, our discussions with participants directly challenged racist and negative stereotypes, individual and structural racism, prejudices, and white privilege. By centring race over cultural difference in cultural competency training, we worked to foster self-revelation within participants to transform inequitable power differentials in their work with Indigenous peoples and organisations. The institution’s disbandment and defunding of the program however is a telling revelation in and of itself, highlighting the continuing struggle and importance of placing additional pressure on persons, institutions, and organisations to implement meaningful structural change. ReferencesAhmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press, 2012.Anderson, Ian. “Advancing Indigenous Health through Medical Education”. 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Introduction Discourses of queer youth suicide regularly represent non-heterosexual young men as vulnerable and as victims who are inherently without strategies for coping with adversity (qv. Rasmussen; Marshall; Driver 3). Alternatively, queer youth are sometimes marked as fundamentally resilient, as avid users of tools of resilience and community such as the internet (Smith & Gray 74; Wexler et al. 566; Hillier & Harrison; Bryson & McIntosh). In the latter approach, protective factors are typically presented as specific to queer youth (e.g., Russell 10), therefore also minoritising and essentialising resilience. Both approaches ignore the diversity of queer young lives and the capacity for a subject to be both vulnerable and resilient—concepts which need to be unpacked if we are to further our understanding of minority lives. Significantly, both approaches also ignore the fact that growing up occurs in a series of transitions, cultural encounters and circumstantial changes. Queer (LGBT) youth are neither all victims and vulnerable, nor are they all self-reliant and resilient. Recent research has indicated that non-heterosexual youth continue to have a higher rate of suicide and self-harm (Cover, Queer Youth Suicide), although this is by no means indicative that vast numbers of LGBTI require support, intervention or preventative measures throughout all aspects of the transition into adult life. This article has two objectives, both of which are best addressed together in order to come at an understanding as how best to frame approaches to queer youth suicide as an ongoing social concern. Firstly, to ask what human, psychological and subjective ‘resilience’ might be said to mean in the context of public discourses of queer youth suicidality, and secondly to ask what a concept of ‘resilience’ does for queer youth identity in terms of relationality. Neither objective, of course, can be met alone in a short article—the purpose here is to open thinking on the topic in ways that question normative assumptions about the conditions of queer youth in the context of liveable lives and the positioning of resilience as reliant on normative accounts of identity. The article begins with a brief overview of the different uses of resilience in the context of broad social representations of queer youth. It goes on to discuss the It Gets Better video site which aimed to produce resilience among predominantly bullied queer youth by ‘imparting hope’. Some remarks on the relationship between identity, sexuality, sociality and resilience will conclude. Resilience and the Queer Youth Subject Developed by Crawford Holling in the 1970s, the concept of resilience was used to describe the capacity of a system to “absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables” (Holling 14). In terms of ecology and the physical sciences, the notion of resilience operates within an assumption that future events will not be known but will be unexpected, thereby requiring a capacity to accommodate those events whatever form they take (21). When later used in the psychological sciences, the term resilience likewise assumes disruption and uncertainty in lived experience, requiring a resilient subject to be capable in both learning and adaptation. In the context of queer youth, resilience, then, can be applied to mean an adaptation to new situations which exacerbate vulnerability to suicidality for those who are positioned to seek escape from intolerable emotional pain or the perception of life as unliveable (Cover, Queer Youth Suicide 10, 148). Resilience in this use presumes that, for example, bullying has a detrimental causal relationship with suicidality when it newly occurs if the subject does not have the capacity to adapt and incorporate it into everyday life. Bullying, however, is generally related to suicide only by virtue of its ongoingness rather than it being a sudden shift in social relations. Striking about much of the discourse of resilience in the psychological sciences is that the concept of resilience presumes a unitary subject who is a subject prior to relationality and sociality (e.g. Leipold & Greve; Singh et al.; Smith & Gray). Resilience is thus seen as a capacity to cope with adversity as if adversity arises prior to the subject rather than being a form of relationality that conditions the subject. In that context, the queer youth subject is understood in essentialist terms, whereby sexual subjectivity is represented simultaneously as both a norm and abnormal, and is a factor of subjectivity that is understood to pre-exist sociality. That is, the queer youth subject is queer before relationality with others, thereby before the kinds of relationalities that might demand resilience. An alternative is to understand queer youth not as vulnerable because they are queer, but as subjects constituted in the (inequitably distributed) precarity of corporeal life in sociality, and thereby already formed in (inequitably distributed) resilience to the sorts of shifts, changes and adversities that shift one from an experience of vulnerability to an experience of a life that is unliveable (Butler, Precarious Life; Frames of War). Approaching queer youth suicide from a perspective not of risk but through the simultaneous fostering and critique of resilience opens the possibility of providing solutions that aid younger persons to resist suicidality as a flight from intolerable pain without articulating the self as inviolable and thereby losing the ethical value of the recognition of vulnerability. The question, then, is whether such critique can be found in sites of resilience discourse in relation to queer youth. Queer Youth and It Gets Better The video blogging site It Gets Better (http://www.itgetsbetter.org) was begun by columnist Dan Savage in response to a spate of reported queer student suicides in September/October 2010 in the United States. The site hosts more than a thousand video contributions, many from queer adults who seek to provide hope for younger persons by showing that queer adulthood is markedly different from the experiences of harassment, bullying, loneliness or surveillance experienced by queer youth in school and family environments. This is among the first widely-available communicative media form to address directly queer youth on issues related to suicide, and the first to draw on lived experiences as a means by which to provide resources for queer youth resilience. The fact that these experiences are related through video-logs (vlogs) provides the texts with a greater sense of authenticity and a framework which often addresses youth directly on the topic of suicidality (Cover, Queer Youth Suicide). Savage’s intention was to produce resilience in queer youth by imparting ‘hope for young people facing harassment’ and to create ‘a personal way for supporters everywhere to tell LGBT youth that … it does indeed get better’ (http://www.itgetsbetter.org/pages/about-it-gets-better-project/). Hope, in this context, is represented as the core attribute of queer youth resilience. The tag-line of the site is: Many LGBT youth can’t picture what their lives might be like as openly gay adults. They can’t imagine a future for themselves. So let’s show them what our lives are like, let’s show them what the future may hold in store for them (http://www.itgetsbetter.org/). Hope for the future is frequently presented as hope for an end to school days. In the primary video of the site, Dan Savage’s partner Terry describes his school experiences: My school was pretty miserable … I was picked on mercilessly in school. People were really cruel to me. I was bullied a lot. Beat up, thrown against walls and lockers and windows; stuffed into bathroom stalls. . . . Honestly, things got better the day I left highschool. I didn’t see the bullies every day, I didn’t see the people who harassed me every day, I didn’t have to see the school administrators who would do nothing about it every day. Life instantly got better (http://www.itgetsbetter.org/pages/about-it-gets-better-project/) Such comments present a picture of school life in which the institutional norms of secondary schools that depend so heavily on surveillance, discriminative norms, economies of secrecy and disclosure permit bullying and ostracisation to flourish and become, then, the site of hopelessness in what to many appears at the time as a period of never-ending permanency. Indeed, teen-aged life has often been figured in geographic terms as a kind of hopeless banishment from the realities that are yet to come: Eve Sedgwick referred to that period as ‘that long Babylonian exile known as queer childhood’ (4). The emphatic focus on the institutional environment of highschool rather than family, rural towns, closetedness, religious discourse or feelings of isolation is remarkably important in changing the contemporary way in which the social situation of queer youth suicide has been depicted. The discourse of the It Gets Better project and contributions makes ‘school’ its object—a site that demands resilience of its queer students as the remedy to the detrimental effects of bullying. Here, however, resilience is not depicted as adaptability but the strength to tolerate and, effectively, ‘wait out’, a bullying environment. The focus on bullying that frames the dialogue on queer youth suicide and youth resilience in the It Gets Better videos is the product of a mid-2000s shift in focus to the effects of bullying on LGBT youth in place of critiques of heterosexism, sexual identity, coming out and physical violence (Fodero), regularly depicting bullying as directly causal of suicide (Kim & Leventhal 151; Espelage & Swearer 157; Hegna & Wichstrøm 35). Bullying, in these representations, is articulated as that which is, on the one hand, preventable through punitive institutional policies and, on the other, as an ineradicable fact of living through school years. It is, in the latter depiction, that experience for which younger LGBT persons must manage their own resistance. In depicting school as the site of anti-queer bullying, the It Gets Better project represents queer youth as losing hope of escape from the intolerable pain of bullying in its persistence and repetition. However, the site’s purpose is to show that escape from the school environment to what is regularly depicted as a neoliberal, white and affluent representation of queer adulthood, founded on conservative coupledom (Cover, “Object(ives) of Desire”), careers, urban living, and relative wealth—depictions somewhat different from the reality of diverse queer lives. The shift from the school-bullying in queer youth to the liberal stability of queer adulthood is figured in the It Gets Better discourse as not only possible but as that which should be anticipated. It is in that anticipation that resilience is articulated in a way which calls upon queer youth to manage their own resiliency by having or performing hopefulness. Representing hope as the performative element in queer youth resilience has precedence as a suicide prevention strategy. Hopelessness is a key factor in much of the contemporary academic discussion of suicide risk in general and is often used as a predictor for recognising suicidal behaviour (Battin 13), although it is also particularly associated with suicidality and queer teenagers. Hopelessness is usually understood as despair or desperateness, the lack of expectation of a situation or goal one desires or feels one should desire. For Holden and colleagues, hopelessness is counter to social desirability, which is understood as the capacity to describe oneself in terms by which society judges a person as legitimate or desirable (Holden, Mendonca & Serin 500). Psychological and psychiatric measurement techniques frequently rely on Aaron T. Beck’s Hopelessness Scale, which utilises a twenty-question true/false survey designed to measure feelings about the future, expectation and self-motivation in adults over the age of seventeen years as a predictor of suicidal behaviour. Beck and colleagues attempted to provide an objective measurement for hopelessness rather than leave it treated as a diffuse and vague state of feeling in patients with depression. The tool asks a series of questions, most about the future, presenting a score on whether or not the answers given were true or false. Questions include: ‘I might as well give up because I can’t make things better for myself’; ‘I can’t imagine what my life would be like in ten years’; ‘My future seems dark to me’; and ‘All I can see ahead of me is unpleasantness rather than pleasantness’. Responding true to these indicates hopelessness. Responding false to some of the following also indicates hopelessness: ‘I can look forward to more good times than bad times’; and ‘When things are going badly, I am helped by knowing they can’t stay that way forever’ (Beck). While these questions and the scale are not used uncritically, the relationship between the discursive construction through the questions of what constitutes hopelessness and the aims of the It Gets Better videos are notably comparable. The objective, then, of the videos is to provide evidence and, perhaps, instil hope that would allow such questions to be answered differently, particularly to be able to give a true response to the last question above. Hallway Allies liaison support group, which operates across university campuses and high schools to prevent bullying, stated in this representative way in the introduction to their video contribution: ‘Remember to keep your head up, highschool doesn’t last forever’ (http://www.itgetsbetter.org/video /entry/5wwozgwyruy/). Or, as Rebecca in the introductory statement of another video contribution put it: You may be feeling like this pain will last forever, like you have no control, it’s dark, oppressive and feels like there is no end. I know – I get it. but I promise … hang in there and you’ll find it … Wait – you’ll see – it gets better! (http://www.itgetsbetter.org/video/entry/wxymqzw3oqy/). As can be seen, such video examples respond to a discourse of hopelessness aligned with the framework exemplified by Beck’s scale, prompting queer youth audiences of these videos to imagine a future for themselves, to understand hope in temporal terms of future wellbeing, and to know that the future does not necessarily hold the same kinds of unpleasantness as experienced in the everyday high school environment. Sexual Identity, Resilience and the Normative Lifecycle In the It Gets Better framework, resilience is produced in the knowledge of a queer life that is linear and patterned through stages in relation to institutional forms of belonging (and non-belonging). That is, a queer life is represented as one which undergoes the hardship of being bullied in school, of leaving that institutional environment for a queer adulthood that is built on a myth of safety, pleasure, success and a distinctive break from the environment of the past (as if the psyche or the self is re-produced anew in a phase of a queer lifecycle). Working within a queer theoretical and cultural understanding of identity, sexual subjectivity can be understood as constituted in social and cultural formations. Overturning the previously-held liberal notion of power as the power which represses sex and sexualities, Foucault’s History of Sexuality provided queer theory with an argument in which power, as deployed through discourse and discursive formations, produces the coherent sexual subject. This occurs historically and only in specific periods. In Foucault’s analysis, homosexual identities become conceivable in the Nineteenth Century as a result of specific juridical, medical and criminal discourses (85). From a Foucauldian perspective, there is no subject driven by an inner psyche or a pre-determined desire (as in psychoanalysis). Instead, such subjectivity occurs in and through the power/knowledge network of discourse as it writes or scripts the subject into subjectivity. Canonical queer theorist Judith Butler has been central in extending Foucault’s analysis in ways which are pragmatic for understanding queer youth in the context of growing up and transitioning into adulthood. Her theory of performativity has usefully complexified the ways in which we can understand sexual identity and allowed us to overcome the core assumption in much queer youth research that heterosexual and homosexual identities are natural, mutually-exclusive and innate; instead, allowing us to focus on how the process of subject formation for youth is implicated in the tensions and pressures of a range of cultural, social, organisational and communicative encounters and engagements. Butler projects the most useful post-structuralist discussion of subjectivity by suggesting that the subject is constituted by repetitive performances in terms of the structure of signification that produces retroactively the illusion of an inner subjective core (Butler, Gender Trouble 143). Queer identity becomes a normative ideal rather than a descriptive feature of experience, and is the resultant effect of regimentary discursive practices (16, 18). The non-heterosexual subject, then, is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are formed as recognisable identity performances in the context, here, of a set of lifecycle expectations built through a vulnerable queer childhood, being bullied, attaining hope, leaving school and fruition in queer adulthood. Resilience, in the It Gets Better discourse, then, is seen to be produced in understanding the stages of a normative queer life. An issue emerges for how queer youth suicide is understood within this particular formation that posits non-heterosexuality as the problematic source of suicidality emerges in the assumption that the vulnerability to suicidal behaviours for queer youth is the result singularly of sexuality, rather than looking to the fact that sexuality is one facet of identity – an important and sometimes fraught one for adolescents in general – located within a complex of other formations of identity and selfhood. This is part of what Diana Fuss has identified as the “synecdochical tendency to see only one part of a subject’s identity (usually the most visible part) and to make that part stand for the whole” (116). This ignores the opportunity to think through the conditions of queer youth in terms of the interaction between different facets of identity (such as gender and ethnicity, but also personal experience), different contexts in which identity is performed and different institutional settings that vary in response and valuation of non-normative aspects of subjectivity, thereby allowing a vulnerability not to be an attribute of being a queer youth, but to be understood as produced across a nuanced and complex array of factors. While the very concept of resilience invokes both an individualisation of the subject and a disciplinary regime of pastoral care (Foucault, Abnormal), queer youth in the It Gets Better discourse of hope are depicted multiply as: Inherently vulnerable and lacking resilience as a result of an essentialist notion of sexual orientation.Constituted in a relationality within a schooling environment that is conditioned by bullying as the primary expression of diverse socialityFinding resilience only through a self-managed and self-articulated expression of ‘hope’ that is to be produced in the knowledge that there is an ‘escape’ from a school environment. What the discourse of that which we might refer to as “resilient hopefulness” does is represent queer youth reductively as inherently non-resilient. It ignores the multiple expressions of sexual identity, the capacity to respond to suicidality through a critique of normative sexual subjectivity, and the capabilities of queer youth to develop meaningful relationships across all sexual possibilities that are, themselves, forms of resilience or at least mitigations of vulnerability. At the same time, “resilient hopefulness” is produced within a context in which a normative sociality of bullying culture is expressed as timeless and unchangeable (rather than historical and institutional), thereby requiring queer younger persons to undertake the task of managing vulnerability, risk, resilience and identity as an individualised responsibility outside of communities of care. Whether the presentation of a normative lifecycle is genuinely a preventative measure for queer youth suicidality is that which suicidologists and practitioners must test, although one might argue at this stage that resilience is better produced through a broader appeal to social diversity rather than the regimentation of a queer life that must ‘wait in hope’ for a liveability that may never come. References Battin, Margaret Pabst. Ethical Issues in Suicide. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1995. Beck, Aaron T., Arlene Weissman, Larry Trexler, and David Lester. “The Measurement of Pessimism: The Hopelessness Scale” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 42.6 (1974): 861–865. Bryson, Mary K., and Lori B. MacIntosh. “Can We Play ‘Fun Gay’?: Disjuncture and Difference, and the Precarious Mobilities of Millennial Queer Youth Narratives.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 23.1 (2010): 101-124. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London & New York: Routledge, 1990. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life. London: Verso, 2004. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London and New York: Verso, 2009. Cover, Rob. “Object(ives) of Desire: Romantic Coupledom versus Promiscuity, Subjectivity and Sexual Identity.”Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 24.2 (2010): 251-263. Cover, Rob. Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives? London: Ashgate, 2012. Driver, Susan. “Introducing Queer Youth Cultures.” Queer Youth Cultures. Ed. Susan Driver. Albany, NY: SUNY Press (2008). 1-18. Espelage, Dorothy L., and Susan M. Swearer. “Addressing Research Gaps in the Intersection between Homophobia and Bullying.” School Psychology Review 37.2 (2008): 155–159. Fodero, Lisa. “Teen Violinist Dies after Student Internet Lark.” The Age, 1 Oct. 2010. 1 Oct. 2010 ‹http://www.theage.com.au/world/>. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. London: Penguin, 1990. Foucault, Michel. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975. Eds. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salmoni. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2004. Fuss, Diana. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature & Difference. New York and London: Routledge, 1989. Hegna, Kristinn, and Lars Wichstrøm. “Suicide Attempts among Norwegian Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youths: General and Specific Risk Factors.” Acta Sociologica 50.1 (2007): 21–37. Hillier, Lynne, and Lyn Harrison. “Building Realities Less Limited than Their Own: Young People Practising Same-Sex Attraction on the Internet.” Sexualities 10.1 (2007): 82-100. Holden, Ronald R., James C. Mendonca and Ralph C. Serin. “Suicide, Hopelessness, and social desirability: A Test of an Interactive Model.” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 57.4 (1989): 500–504. Holling, C. S. “Resilience and Stabity of Ecological Systems.” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4 (1973): 1-23. Kim, Young Shin, and Bennett Leventhal. “Bullying and Suicide. A Review.” International Journal of Adolescent Medical Health 20.2 (2008): 133–154. Leipold, Bernhard, and Werner Greve. “Resilience: A Conceptual Bridge between Coping and Development.” European Psychologist 14.1 (2009): 40-50. Marshall, Daniel. “Popular Culture, the ‘Victim’ Trope and Queer Youth Analytics.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 23.1 (2010): 65-86. Rasmussen, Mary Lou. Becoming Subjects: Sexualities and Secondary Schooling. New York: Routledge, 2006. Russell, Stephen T. “Beyond Risk: Resilience in the Lives of Sexual Minority Youth.” Journal of Gay & Lesbian Issues in Education 2.3 (2005): 5-18. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel.” GLQ 1.1 (1993): 1–14. Singh, Anneliese A., Danica G. Hays, and Larel S. Watson. “Strength in the Face of Adversity: Resilience Strategies of Transgender Individuals.” Journal of Counseling & Development 89.1 (2011): 20-27. Smith, Mark. S., and Susan W. Gray. “The Courage to Challenge: A New Measure of Hardiness in LGBT Adults.” Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services 21.1 (2009): 73-89. Wexler, Lisa Marin, Gloria DiFluvio, and Tracey K. Burke. “Resilience and Marginalized Youth: Making a Case for Personal and Collective Meaning-Making as Part of Resilience Research in Public Health.” Social Science & Medicine 69.4 (2009): 565-570.

Machines that fit the human environment instead of forcing humans to enter theirs will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods. Mark Weiser on ubiquitous computing (21st Century Computer 104) In 2007, a forum entitled HCI 2020: Human Values in a Digital Age sought to address the questions: What will our world be like in 2020? Digital technologies will continue to proliferate, enabling ever more ways of changing how we live. But will such developments improve the quality of life, empower us, and make us feel safer, happier and more connected? Or will living with technology make it more tiresome, frustrating, angst-ridden, and security-driven? What will it mean to be human when everything we do is supported or augmented by technology? (Harper et al. 10) The forum came as a response to, what many call, post-PC technological developments; developments that seek to engulf our lives in digital technologies which in their various forms are meant to support and augment our everyday lives. One of these developments has been the project of ubiquitous computing along with its kin project, tangible computing. Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) made its appearance in the late 1980s in the labs of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) as the “third wave” in computing, following those of the mainframe and personal computing (Weiser, Open House 2). Mark Weiser, who coined the term, along with his collaborators at Xerox PARC, envisioned a “new technological paradigm” which would leave behind the traditional one-to-one relationship between human and computer, and spread computation “ubiquitously, but invisibly, throughout the environment” (Weiser, Gold and Brown 693). Since then, the field has grown and now counts several peer-reviewed journals, conferences, and academic and industrial research centres around the world, which have set out to study the new “post-PC computing” under names such as Pervasive Computing, Ambient Intelligence, Tangible Computing, The Internet of Things, etc. Instead of providing a comprehensive account of all the different ubicomp incarnations, this paper seeks to focus on the early projects and writings of some of ubicomp’s most prominent figures and tease out, as a way of critique, the origins of some of its romantic promises. From the outset, ubiquitous computing was heavily informed by a human-centred approach that sought to shift the focus from the personal computer back to its users. On the grounds that the PC has dominated the technological landscape at the expense of its human counterparts, ubiquitous computing promised a different human-machine interaction, with “machines that fit the human environment instead of forcing humans to enter theirs” (104, my italics) placing the two in opposite and antagonistic terrains. The problem comes about in the form of interaction between people and machines … So when the two have to meet, which side should dominate? In the past, it has been the machine that dominates. In the future, it should be the human. (Norman 140) Within these early ubicomp discourses, the computer came to embody a technological menace, the machine that threatened the liberal humanist value of being free and in control. For example, in 1999 in a book that was characterized as “the bible of ‘post-PC’ thinking” by Business Week, Donald Norman exclaimed: we have let ourselves to be trapped. … I don’t want to be controlled by a technology. I just want to get on with my life, … So down with PC’s; down with computers. All they do is complicate our lives. (72) And we read on the website of MIT’s first ubicomp project Oxygen: For over forty years, computation has centered about machines, not people. We have catered to expensive computers, pampering them in air-conditioned rooms or carrying them around with us. Purporting to serve us, they have actually forced us to serve them. Ubiquitous computing then, in its early incarnations, was presented as the solution; the human-centred, somewhat natural approach, which would shift the emphasis away from the machine and bring control back to its legitimate owner, the liberal autonomous human subject, becoming the facilitator of our apparently threatened humanness. Its promise? An early promise of regressive augmentation, I would say, since it promised to augment our lives, not by changing them, but by returning us to a past, better world that the alienating PC has supposedly displaced, enabling us to “have more time to be more fully human” (Weiser and Brown). And it sought to achieve this through the key characteristic of invisibility, which was based on the paradox that while more and more computers will permeate our lives, they will effectively disappear. Ubicomp’s Early Romantic Promises The question of how we can make computers disappear has been addressed in computer research in various ways. One of the earliest and most prominent of these is the approach, which focuses on the physicality of the world seeking to build tangible interfaces. One of the main advocates of this approach is MIT’s Tangible Media Group, led by Professor Hiroshi Ishii. The group has been working on their vision, which they call “Tangible Bits,” for almost two decades now, and in 2009 they were awarded the “Lasting Impact Award” at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) for their metaDesk platform, presented in 1997 (fig.1), which explores the coupling of everyday physical objects with digital information (Ullmer and Ishii). Also, in 2004 in a special paper titled “Bottles: A Transparent Interface as a Tribute to Mark Weiser”, Ishii presented once again an early project he and his group developed in 1999, and for which they were personally commented by Weiser himself. According to Ishii, bottles (fig. 2)—a system which comprises three glass bottles “filled with music” each representing a different musical instrument, placed on a Plexiglas “stage” and controlled by their physical manipulation (moving, opening or closing them)—no less, “illustrates Mark Weiser’s vision of the transparent (or invisible) interface that weaves itself into the fabric of everyday life” (1299). Figure 1: metaDesk platform (MIT Tangible Media Group) Figure 2: musicBottles (MIT Tangible Media Group) Tangible computing was based on the premise that we inhabit two worlds: the physical world and cyberspace, or as Ishii and Ullmer put it, the world of atoms and the world of bits claiming that there is gap between these two worlds that left us “torn between these parallel but disjoint spaces” (1). This agreed with Weiser’s argument that cyberspace, and specifically the computer, has taken centre stage leaving the real world—the real people, the real interactions—in the background and neglected. Tangible computing then sought to address this problem by "bridging the gaps between both cyberspace and the physical environment" (1). As Ishii and Ullmer wrote in 1997: The aim of our research is to show concrete ways to move beyond the current dominant model of GUI [Graphic User Interface] bound to computers with a flat rectangular display, windows, a mouse, and a keyboard. To make computing truly ubiquitous and invisible, we seek to establish a new type of HCI that we call "Tangible User Interfaces" (TUIs). TUIs will augment the real physical world by coupling digital information to everyday physical objects and environments. (2) “Our intention is to take advantage of natural physical affordances to achieve a heightened legibility and seamlessness of interaction between people and information” (2). In his earlier work computer scientist Paul Dourish turned to phenomenology and the concept of embodiment in order to develop an understanding of interaction as embodied. This was prior to his recent work with cultural anthropologist Bell where they examined the motivating mythology of ubiquitous computing along with the messiness of its lived experience (Dourish and Bell). Dourish, in this earlier work observed that one of the common critical features early tangible and ubiquitous computing shared is that “they both attempt to exploit our natural familiarity with the everyday environment and our highly developed spatial and physical skills to specialize and control how computation can be used in concert with naturalistic activities” (Context-Aware Computing 232). They then sought to exploit this familiarity in order to build natural computational interfaces that fit seamlessly within our everyday, real world (Where the Action Is 17). This idea of an existing set of natural tactile skills appears to come hand-in-hand with a nostalgic, romantic view of an innocent, simple, and long gone world that the early projects of tangible and ubiquitous computing sought to revive; a world where the personal computer not only did not fit, an innocent world in fact displaced by the personal computer. In 1997, Ishii and Ullmer wrote about their decision to start their investigations about the “future of HCI” in the museum of the Collection of Historic Scientific Instruments at Harvard University in their efforts to get inspired by “the aesthetics and rich affordances of these historical scientific instruments” concerned that, “alas, much of this richness has been lost to the rapid flood of digital technologies” (1). Elsewhere Ishii explained that the origin of his idea to design a bottle interface began with the concept of a “weather forecast bottle;” an idea he intended to develop as a present for his mother. “Upon opening the weather bottle, she would be greeted by the sound of singing birds if the next day’s weather was forecasted to be clear” (1300). Here, we are introduced to a nice elderly lady who has opened thousands of bottles while cooking for her family in her kitchen. This senior lady; who is made to embody the symbolic alignment between woman, the domestic and nature (see Soper, Rose, Plumwood); “has never clicked a mouse, typed a URL, nor booted a computer in her life” (Ishii 1300). Instead, “my mother simply wanted to know the following day’s weather forecast. Why should this be so complicated?” (1300, my italics). Weiser also mobilised nostalgic sentiments in order to paint a picture of what it would be to live with ubiquitous computing. So, for example, when seeking a metaphor for ubiquitous computing, he proposed “childhood – playful, a building of foundations, constant learning, a bit mysterious and quickly forgotten by adults” (Not a Desktop 8). He viewed the ubicomp home as the ideal retreat to a state of childhood; playfully reaching out to the unknown, while being securely protected and safely “at home” (Open House). These early ideas of a direct experience of the world through our bodily senses along with the romantic view of a past, simple, and better world that the computer threatened and that future technological developments promised, could point towards what Leo Marx has described as America’s “pastoral ideal”, a force that, according to Marx, is ingrained in the American view of life. Balancing between primitivism and civilisation, nature and culture, the pastoral ideal “is an embodiment of what Lovejoy calls ‘semi-primitivism’; it is located in a middle ground somewhere ‘between’, yet in a transcendent relation to, the opposing forces of civilisation and nature” (Marx 23). It appears that the early advocates of tangible and ubiquitous computing sought to strike a similar balance to the American pastoral ideal; a precarious position that managed to reconcile the disfavour and fear of Europe’s “satanic mills” with an admiration for the technological power of the Industrial Revolution, the admiration for technological development with the bucolic ideal of an unspoiled and pure nature. But how was such a balance to be achieved? How could the ideal middle state be achieved balancing the opposing forces of technological development and the dream of the return to a serene pastoral existence? According to Leo Marx, for the European colonisers, the New World was to provide the answer to this exact question (101). The American landscape was to become the terrain where old and new, nature and technology harmonically meet to form a libertarian utopia. Technology was seen as “‘naturally arising’ from the landscape as another natural ‘means of happiness’ decreed by the Creator in his design of the continent. So, far from conceding that there might be anything alien or ‘artificial’ about mechanization, technology was seen as inherent in ‘nature’; both geographic and human” (160). Since then, according to Marx, the idea of the “return” to a new Golden Age has been engrained in the American culture and it appears that it informs ubiquitous computing’s own early visions. The idea of a “naturally arising” technology which would facilitate our return to the once lost garden of security and nostalgia appears to have become a common theme within ubiquitous computing discourses making appearances across time and borders. So, for example, while in 1991 Weiser envisioned that ubiquitous technologies will make “using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods” (21st Century Computer 11), twelve years later Marzano writing about Philip’s vision of Ambient Intelligence promised that “the living space of the future could look more like that of the past than that of today” (9). While the pastoral defined nature in terms of the geographical landscape, early ubiquitous computing appeared to define nature in terms of the objects, tools and technologies that surround us and our interactions with them. While pastoral America defined itself in contradistinction to the European industrial sites and the dirty, smoky and alienating cityscapes, within those early ubiquitous computing discourses the role of the alienating force was assigned to the personal computer. And whereas the personal computer with its “grey box” was early on rejected as the modern embodiment of the European satanic mills, computation was welcomed as a “naturally arising” technological solution which would infuse the objects which, “through the ages, … are most relevant to human life—chairs, tables and beds, for instance, … the objects we can’t do without” (Marzano 9). Or else, it would infuse the—newly constructed—natural landscape fulfilling the promise that when the “world of bits” and the “world of atoms” are finally bridged, the balance will be restored. But how did these two worlds come into existence? How did bits and atoms come to occupy different and separate ontological spheres? Far from being obvious or commonsensical, the idea of the separation between bits and atoms has a history that grounds it to specific times and places, and consequently makes those early ubiquitous and tangible computing discourses part of a bigger story that, as documented (Hayles) and argued (Agre), started some time ago. The view that we inhabit the two worlds of atoms and bits (Ishii and Ullmer) was endorsed by both early ubiquitous and tangible computing, it was based on the idea of the separation of computation from its material instantiation, presenting the former as a free floating entity able to infuse our world. As we saw earlier, tangible computing took the idea of this separation as an unquestionable fact, which then served as the basis for its research goals. As we read in the home page of the Tangible Media Group’s website: Where the sea of bits meets the land of atoms, we are now facing the challenge of reconciling our dual citizenship in the physical and digital worlds. "Tangible Bits" is our vision of Human Computer Interaction (HCI): we seek a seamless coupling of bits and atoms by giving physical form to digital information and computation (my italics). The idea that digital information does not have to have a physical form, but is given one in order to achieve a coupling of the two worlds, not only reinforces the view of digital information as an immaterial entity, but also places it in a privileged position against the material world. Under this light, those early ideas of augmentation or of “awakening” the physical world (Ishii and Ullmer 3) appear to be based on the idea of a passive material world that can be brought to life and become worthy and meaningful through computation, making ubiquitous computing part of a bigger and more familiar story. Restaging the dominant Cartesian dualism between the “ensouled” subject and the “soulless” material object, the latter is rendered passive, manipulable, and void of agency and, just like Ishii’s old bottles, it is performed as a mute, docile “empty vessel” ready to carry out any of its creator’s wishes; hold perfumes and beverages, play music, or tell the weather. At the same time, computation was presented as the force that could breathe life to a mundane and passive world; a free floating, somewhat natural, immaterial entity, like oxygen (hence the name of MIT’s first ubicomp project), like the air we breathe that could travel unobstructed through any medium, our everyday objects and our environment. But it is interesting to see that in those early ubicomp discourses computation’s power did not extend too far. While computation appeared to be foregrounded as a powerful, almost magic, entity able to give life and soul to a soulless material world, at the same time it was presented as controlled and muted. The computational power that would fill our lives, according to Weiser’s ubiquitous computing, would be invisible, it wouldn’t “intrude on our consciousness” (Weiser Not a Desktop 7), it would leave no traces and bring no radical changes. If anything, it would enable us to re-establish our humanness and return us to our past, natural state promising not to change us, or our lives, by introducing something new and unfamiliar, but to enable us to “remain serene and in control” (Weiser and Brown). In other words, ubiquitous computing, as this early story goes, would not be alienating, complex, obtrusive, or even noticeable, for that matter, and so, at the end of this paper, we come full circle to ubicomp’s early goals of invisibility with its underpinnings of the precarious pastoral ideal. This short paper focused on some of ubicomp’s early stories and projects and specifically on its promise to return us to a past and implicitly better world that the PC has arguably displaced. By reading these early promises of, what I call, regressive augmentation through Marx’s work on the “pastoral ideal,” this paper sought to tease out, in order to unsettle, the origins of some of ubicomp’s romantic promises. References Agre, P. E. Computation and Human Experience. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Dourish, P. “Seeking a Foundation for Context-Aware Computing.” Human–Computer Interaction 16.2-4 (2001): 229-241. ———. Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. Dourish, P. and Genevieve Bell. Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2011.Grimes, A., and R. Harper. “Celebratory Technology: New Directions for Food Research in HCI.” In CHI’08, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, 2008. 467-476. Harper, R., T. Rodden, Y. Rogers, and A. Sellen (eds.). Being Human: Human-Computer Interaction in the Year 2020. Microsoft Research, 2008. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/Cambridge/projects/hci2020/downloads/BeingHuman_A3.pdf›. Hayles, K. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Ishii, H. “Bottles: A Transparent Interface as a Tribute to Mark Weiser.” IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems 87.6 (2004): 1299-1311. Ishii, H., and B. Ullmer. “Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms.” In CHI ’97, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, 1997. 234-241. Marx, L. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. 35th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Marzano, S. “Cultural Issues in Ambient Intelligence”. In E. Aarts and S. Marzano (eds.), The New Everyday: Views on Ambient Intelligence. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2003. Norman, D. The Invisible Computer: Why Good Oroducts Can Fail, the Personal Computer Is So Complex, and Information Appliances Are the Solution. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. Plumwood, V. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London, New York: Routledge, 1993. Rose, G. Feminism and Geography. Cambridge: Polity, 1993. Soper, K. “Naturalised Woman and Feminized Nature.” In L. Coupe (ed.), The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism. London: Routledge, 2000. Ullmer, B., and H. Ishii. “The metaDESK: Models and Prototypes for Tangible User Interfaces.” In UIST '97, Proceedings of the 10th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. New York: ACM, 1997. 223-232. Weiser, M. “The Computer for the 21st Century." Scientific American 265.3 (1991): 94-104. ———. “The Open House.” ITP Review 2.0, 1996. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://makingfurnitureinteractive.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/wholehouse.pdf›. ———. “The World Is Not a Desktop." Interactions 1.1 (1994): 7-8. Weiser, M., and J.S. Brown. “The Coming Age of Calm Technology.” 1996. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.johnseelybrown.com/calmtech.pdf›. Weiser, M., R. Gold, and J.S. Brown. “The Origins of Ubiquitous Computing at PARC in the Late 80s.” Pervasive Computing 38 (1999): 693-696.

There is a moment in Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth devised to expose the sheer audacity of fossil fuel lobby groups in the United States. In their attempts to address significant scientific consensus and growing public concern over climate change, these groups are resorting to what Gore’s film suggests are grotesque distortions of fact. A particular example highlighted in the film is the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s (CPE—a lobby group funded by ExxonMobil) “pro” energy industry advertisement: “Carbon dioxide”, the ad states. “They call it pollution, we call it life.” While on the one hand employing rhetoric against the “inconvenient truth” that carbon dioxide emissions are ratcheting up the Earth’s temperature, these advertisements also pose a question – though perhaps unintended – that is worth addressing. Where does life reside? This is not an issue of essentialism, but relates to the claims, materials and technologies through which life as a political object emerges. The danger of entertaining the vested interests of polluting industry in a discussion of climate change and its biopolitics is countered by an imperative to acknowledge the ways in which multiple positions in the climate change debate invoke and appeal to ‘life’ as the bottom line, or inviolable interest, of their political, social or economic work. In doing so, other questions come to the fore that a politics of climate change framed in terms of moral positions or competing values will tend to overlook. These questions concern the manifold practices of life that constitute the contemporary terrain of the political, and the actors and instruments put in this employ. Who speaks for life? And who or what produces it? Climate change as a matter of concern (Latour) has gathered and generated a host of experts, communities, narratives and technical devices all invested in the administration of life. It is, as Malcom Bull argues, “the paradigmatic issue of the new politics,” a politics which “draws people towards the public realm and makes life itself subject to the caprices of state and market” (2). This paper seeks to highlight the politics of life that have emerged around climate change as a public issue. It will argue that these politics appear in incremental and multiple ways that situate an array of actors and interests as active in both contesting and generating the terms of life: what life is and how we come to know it. This way of thinking about climate change debates opposes a prevalent moralistic framework that reads the practices and discourses of debate in terms of oppositional positions alone. While sympathies may flow in varying directions, especially when it comes to such a highly charged and massively consequential issue as climate change, there is little insight to be had from charging the CPE (for example) with manipulating consumers, or misrepresenting well-known facts. Where new and more productive understandings open up is in relation to the fields through which these gathering actors play out their claims to the project of life. These fields, from the state, to the corporation, to the domestic sphere, reveal a complex network of strategies and devices that seek to secure life in constantly renovated terms. Life Politics Biopolitical scholarship in the wake of Foucault has challenged life as a pre-given uncritical category, and sought to highlight the means through which it is put under question and constituted through varying and composing assemblages of practitioners and practices. Such work regards the project of human well-being as highly complex and technical, and has undertaken to document this empirically through close attention to the everyday ecologies in which humans are enmeshed. This is a political and theoretical project in itself, situating political processes in micro, as well as macro, registers, including daily life as a site of (self) management and governance. Rabinow and Rose refer to biopolitical circuits that draw together and inter-relate the multiple sites and scales operative in the administration of life. These involve not just technologies, rationalities and regimes of authority and control, but also politics “from below” in the form of rights claims and community formation and agitation (198). Active in these circuits, too, are corporate and non-state interests for whom the pursuit of maximising life’s qualities and capabilities has become a concern through which “market relations and shareholder value” are negotiated (Rabinow and Rose 211). As many biopolitical scholars argue, biopower—the strategies through which biopolitics are enacted—is characteristic of the “disciplinary neo-liberalism” that has come to define the modern state, and through which the conduct of conduct is practiced (Di Muzio 305). Foucault’s concept of governmentality describes the devolution of state-based disciplinarity and sovereignty to a host of non-state actors, rationalities and strategies of governing, including the self-managing subject, not in opposition to the state, but contributing to its form. According to Bratich, Packer and McCarthy, everyday life is thus “saturated with governmental techniques” (18) in which we are all enrolled. Unlike regimes of biopolitics identified with what Agamben terms “thanopolitics”—the exercise of biopower “which ultimately rests on the power of some to threaten the death of others” (Rabinow and Rose 198), such as the Nazi’s National Socialism and other eugenic campaigns—governmental arts in the service of “vitalist” biopolitics (Rose 1) are increasingly diffused amongst all those with an “interest” in sustaining life, from organisations to individuals. The integration of techniques of self-governance which ask the individual to work on themselves and their own dispositions with State functions has broadened the base by which life is governed, and foregrounded an unsettled terrain of life claims. Rose argues that medical science is at the forefront of these contemporary biopolitics, and to this effect “has […] been fully engaged in the ethical questions of how we should live—of what kinds of creatures we are, of the kinds of obligations that we have to ourselves and to others, of the kinds of techniques we can and should use to improve ourselves” (20). Asking individuals to self-identify through their medical histories and bodily specificities, medical cultures are also shaping new political arrangements, as communities connected by shared genetics or physical conditions, for instance, emerge, evolve and agitate according to the latest medical knowledge. Yet it is not just medicine that provokes ethical work and new political forms. The environment is a key site for life politics that entails a multi-faceted discourse of obligations and entitlements, across fields and scales of engagement. Calculating Environments In line with neo-liberal logic, environmental discourse concerned with ameliorating climate change has increasingly focused upon the individual as an agent of self-monitoring, to both facilitate government agendas at a distance, and to “self-fashion” in the mode of the autonomous subject, securing against external risks (Ong 501). Climate change is commonly represented as such a risk, to both human and non-human life. A recent letter published by the Royal Australasian College of Physicians in two leading British medical journals, named climate change as the “biggest global health threat of the twenty-first century” (Morton). As I have argued elsewhere (Potter), security is central to dominant cultures of environmental governance in the West; these cultures tie sustainability goals to various and interrelated regimes of monitoring which attach to concepts of what Clark and Stevenson call “the good ecological citizen” (238). Citizenship is thus practiced through strategies of governmentality which call on individuals to invest not just in their own well-being, but in the broader project of life. Calculation is a primary technique through which modern environmental governance is enacted; calculative strategies are seen to mediate risk, according to Foucault, and consequently to “assure living” (Elden 575). Rationalised schemes for self-monitoring are proliferating under climate change and the project of environmentalism more broadly, something which critics of neo-liberalism have identified as symptomatic of the privatisation of politics that liberal governmentality has fostered. As we have seen in Australia, an evolving policy emphasis on individual practices and the domestic sphere as crucial sites of environmental action – for instance, the introduction of domestic water restrictions, and the phasing out of energy-inefficient light bulbs in the home—provides a leading discourse of ethico-political responsibility. The rise of carbon dioxide counting is symptomatic of this culture, and indicates the distributed fields of life management in contemporary governmentality. Carbon dioxide, as the CPE is keen to point out, is crucial to life, but it is also—in too large an amount—a force of destruction. Its management, in vitalist terms, is thus established as an effort to protect life in the face of death. The concept of “carbon footprinting” has been promoted by governments, NGOs, industry and individuals as a way of securing this goal, and a host of calculative techniques and strategies are employed to this end, across a spectrum of activities and contexts all framed in the interests of life. The footprinting measure seeks to secure living via self-policed limits, which also—in classic biopolitical form—shift previously private practices into a public realm of count-ability and accountability. The carbon footprint, like its associates the ecological footprint and the water footprint, has developed as a multi-faceted tool of citizenship beyond the traditional boundaries of the state. Suggesting an ecological conception of territory and of our relationships and responsibilities to this, the footprint, as a measure of resource use and emissions relative to the Earth’s capacities to absorb these, calculates and visualises the “specific qualities” (Elden 575) that, in a spatialised understanding of security, constitute and define this territory. The carbon footprint’s relatively simple remit of measuring carbon emissions per unit of assessment—be that the individual, the corporation, or the nation—belies the ways in which life is formatted and produced through its calculations. A tangled set of devices, practices and discourses is employed to make carbon and thus life calculable and manageable. Treading Lightly The old environmental adage to “tread lightly upon the Earth” has been literalised in the metaphor of the footprint, which attempts both to symbolise environmental practice and to directly translate data in order to meaningfully communicate necessary boundaries for our living. The World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report 2008 exemplifies the growing popularity of the footprint as a political and poetic hook: speaking in terms of our “ecological overshoot,” and the move from “ecological credit to ecological deficit”, the report urges an attendance to our “global footprint” which “now exceeds the world’s capacity to regenerate by about 30 per cent” (1). Angela Crombie’s A Lighter Footprint, an instruction manual for sustainable living, is one of a host of media through which individuals are educated in modes of footprint calculation and management. She presents a range of techniques, including carbon offsetting, shifting to sustainable modes of transport, eating and buying differently, recycling and conserving water, to mediate our carbon dioxide output, and to “show […] politicians how easy it is” (13). Governments however, need no persuading from citizens that carbon calculation is an exercise to be harnessed. As governments around the world move (slowly) to address climate change, policies that instrumentalise carbon dioxide emission and reduction via an auditing of credits and deficits have come to the fore—for example, the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme and the Chicago Climate Exchange. In Australia, we have the currently-under-debate Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, a part of which is the Australian Emissions Trading Scheme (AETS) that will introduce a system of “carbon credits” and trading in a market-based model of supply and demand. This initiative will put a price on carbon dioxide emissions, and cap the amount of emissions any one polluter can produce without purchasing further credits. In readiness for the scheme, business initiatives are forming to take advantage of this new carbon market. Industries in carbon auditing and off-setting services are consolidating; hectares of trees, already active in the carbon sequestration market, are being cultivated as “carbon sinks” and key sites of compliance for polluters under the AETS. Governments are also planning to turn their tracts of forested public land into carbon credits worth billions of dollars (Arup 7). The attachment of emission measures to goods and services requires a range of calculative experts, and the implementation of new marketing and branding strategies, aimed at conveying the carbon “health” of a product. The introduction of “food mile” labelling (the amount of carbon dioxide emitted in the transportation of the food from source to consumer) in certain supermarkets in the United Kingdom is an example of this. Carbon risk analysis and management programs are being introduced across businesses in readiness for the forthcoming “carbon economy”. As one flyer selling “a suite of carbon related services” explains, “early action will give you the edge in understanding and mitigating the risks, and puts you in a prime position to capitalise on the rewards” (MGI Business Solutions Worldwide). In addition, lobby groups are working to ensure exclusions from or the free allocation of permits within the proposed AETS, with degrees of compulsion applied to different industries – the Federal Government, for instance, will provide a $3.9 billion compensation package for the electric power sector when the AETS commences, to enable their “adjustment” to this carbon regime. Performing Life Noortje Mares provides a further means of thinking through the politics of life in the context of climate change by complicating the distinction between public and private interest. Her study of “green living experiments” describes the rise of carbon calculation in the home in recent years, and the implementation of technologies such as the smart electricity meter that provides a constantly updating display of data relating to amounts and cost of energy consumed and the carbon dioxide emitted in the routines of domestic life. Her research tracks the entry of these personal calculative regimes into public life via internet forums such as blogs, where individuals notate or discuss their experiences of pursing low-carbon lifestyles. On the one hand, these calculative practices of living and their public representation can be read as evidencing the pervasive neo-liberal governmentality at work in contemporary environmental practice, where individuals are encouraged to scrupulously monitor their domestic cultures. The rise of auditing as a technology of self, and more broadly as a technique of public accountability, has come under fire for its “immunity-granting role” (Charkiewicz 79), where internal audits become substituted for external compliance and regulation. Mares challenges this reading, however, by demonstrating the ways in which green living experiments “transform everyday material practices into practices of public involvement” that (118) don’t resolve or pin down relations between the individual, the non-human environment, and the social, or reveal a mappable flow of actions and effects between the public realm and the home. The empirical modes of publicity that these individuals employ, “the careful recording of measurements and the reliable descriptions of sensory observation, so as to enable ‘virtual witnessing’ by wider audiences”, open up to much more complex understandings than one of calculative self-discipline at work. As “instrument[s] of public involvement” (120), the experiments that Mares describe locate the politics of life in the embodied socio-material entanglements of the domestic sphere, in arrangements of humans and non-human technologies. Such arrangements, she suggests, are ontologically productive in that they introduce “not only new knowledge, but also new entities […] to society” (119), and as such these experiments and the modes of calculation they employ become active in the composition of reality. Recent work in economic sociology and cultural studies has similarly contended that calculation, far from either a naturalised or thoroughly abstract process, relies upon a host of devices, relations, and techniques: that is, as Gay Hawkins explains, calculative processes “have to be enacted” (108). Environmental governmentality in the service of securing life is a networked practice that draws in a host of actors, not a top-down imposition. The institution of carbon economies and carbon emissions as a new register of public accountability, brings alternative ways to calculate the world into being, and consequently re-calibrates life as it emerges from these heterogeneous arrangements. All That Gathers Latour writes that we come to know a matter of concern by all the things that gather around it (Latour). This includes the human, as well as the non-human actors, policies, practices and technologies that are put to work in the making of our realities. Climate change is routinely represented as a threat to life, with predicted (and occurring) species extinction, growing numbers of climate change refugees, dispossessed from uninhabitable lands, and the rise of diseases and extreme weather scenarios that put human life in peril. There is no doubt, of course, that climate change does mean death for some: indeed, there are thanopolitical overtones in inequitable relations between the fall-out of impacts from major polluting nations on poorer countries, or those much more susceptible to rising sea levels. Biosocial equity, as Bull points out, is a “matter of being equally alive and equally dead” (2). Yet in the biopolitical project of assuring living, life is burgeoning around the problem of climate change. The critique of neo-liberalism as a blanketing system that subjects all aspects of life to market logic, and in which the cynical techniques of industry seek to appropriate ethico-political stances for their own material ends, are insufficient responses to what is actually unfolding in the messy terrain of climate change and its biopolitics. What this paper has attempted to show is that there is no particular purchase on life that can be had by any one actor who gathers around this concern. Varying interests, ambitions, and intentions, without moral hierarchy, stake their claim in life as a constantly constituting site in which they participate, and from this perspective, the ways in which we understand life to be both produced and managed expand. This is to refuse either an opposition or a conflation between the market and nature, or the market and life. It is also to argue that we cannot essentialise human-ness in the climate change debate. For while human relations with animals, plants and weathers may make us what we are, so too do our relations with (in a much less romantic view) non-human things, technologies, schemes, and even markets—from carbon auditing services, to the label on a tin on the supermarket shelf. As these intersect and entangle, the project of life, in the new politics of climate change, is far from straightforward. References An Inconvenient Truth. Dir. Davis Guggenheim. Village Roadshow, 2006. Arup, Tom. “Victoria Makes Enormous Carbon Stocktake in Bid for Offset Billions.” The Age 24 Sep. 2009: 7. Bratich, Jack Z., Jeremy Packer, and Cameron McCarthy. “Governing the Present.” Foucault, Cultural Studies and Governmentality. Ed. Bratich, Packer and McCarthy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. 3-21. Bull, Malcolm. “Globalization and Biopolitics.” New Left Review 45 (2007): 12 May 2009 . < http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2675 >. Charkiewicz, Ewa. “Corporations, the UN and Neo-liberal Bio-politics.” Development 48.1 (2005): 75-83. Clark, Nigel, and Nick Stevenson. “Care in a Time of Catastrophe: Citizenship, Community and the Ecological Imagination.” Journal of Human Rights 2.2 (2003): 235-246. Crombie, Angela. A Lighter Footprint: A Practical Guide to Minimising Your Impact on the Planet. Carlton North, Vic.: Scribe, 2007. Di Muzio, Tim. “Governing Global Slums: The Biopolitics of Target 11.” Global Governance. 14.3 (2008): 305-326. Elden, Stuart. “Governmentality, Calculation and Territory.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25 (2007): 562-580. Hawkins, Gay. The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006. Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?: From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 225-248. Mares, Noortje. “Testing Powers of Engagement: Green Living Experiments, the Ontological Turn and the Undoability and Involvement.” European Journal of Social Theory 12.1 (2009): 117-133. MGI Business Solutions Worldwide. “Carbon News.” Adelaide. 2 Aug. 2009. Ong, Aihwa. “Mutations in Citizenship.” Theory, Culture and Society 23.2-3 (2006): 499-505. Potter, Emily. “Footprints in the Mallee: Climate Change, Sustaining Communities, and the Nature of Place.” Landscapes and Learning: Place Studies in a Global World. Ed. Margaret Somerville, Kerith Power and Phoenix de Carteret. Sense Publishers. Forthcoming. Rabinow, Paul, and Nikolas Rose. “Biopower Today.” Biosocieties 1 (2006): 195-217. Rose, Nikolas. “The Politics of Life Itself.” Theory, Culture and Society 18.6 (2001): 1-30. World Wildlife Fund. Living Planet Report 2008. Switzerland, 2008.