Academic literature on the topic 'Melbourne (Vic ) Social life and customs 21st century'

Introduction Fashion has long been associated with resistance movements across Asia and Australia, from the hand-spun cotton Khadi of Mahatma Gandhi’s freedom struggle to the traditional ankle length robe worn by Tibetans in the ‘White Wednesday Movement’ (Singh et al.; Yangzom). There are many reasons why fashion and activism have been interlinked. Fashion can serve as a form of nonverbal communication (Crane), which can convey activists’ grievances and concerns while symbolising solidarity (Doerr). It can provide an avenue to enact individual agency against repressive, authoritarian regimes (Yangzom; Doerr et al.). Fashion can codify a degree of uniformity within groups and thereby signal social identity (Craik), while also providing a means of building community (Barry and Drak). Fashion, therefore, offers activists the opportunity to develop the three characteristics which unite a social or environmental movement: a shared concern about an issue, a sense of social identity, and connections between individuals and groups. But while these fashion functions map onto movement characteristics, it remains unclear whether activists across the world deliberately include fashion into their protest action repertoires. This uncertainty exists partly because of a research and media focus on large scale, mass protests (Lester and Hutchins), where fashion characteristics are immediately visible and amenable to retrospective interpretation. This focus helps explain the rich volume of research examining the manifestation of fashion in past protests, such as the black, red, and yellow colours worn during the 1988 Aboriginal Long March of Freedom, Justice, and Hope (Maynard Dress; Coghlan), and the pink anti-Trump ‘pussyhats’ (Thompson). However, the protest events used to identify these fashion characteristics are a relatively small proportion of actions used by environmental activists (Dalton et al.; Gulliver et al.), which include not only rallies and marches, but also information evenings, letter writing sessions, and eco-activities such as tree plantings. This article aims to respond to Barnard’s (Looking) call for more empirical work on what contemporary cultural groups visually do with what they wear (see also Gerbaudo and Treré) via a content analysis of 36,676 events promoted on Facebook by 728 Australian environmental groups between 2010 and 2019. The article firstly reports findings from an analysis of this dataset to identify how fashion manifests in environmental activism, building on research demonstrating the role of protest-related nonverbal communications, such as protest signage (Bloomfield and Doolin), images (Kim), and icons, slogans, and logos (Goodnow). The article then considers what activists may seek to achieve through incorporating fashion into their action repertoire, and whether this suggests solidarity with activists seeking to effect environmental change across the wider Asian region. Fashion Activism Fashion is created through a particular assemblage of clothes, accessories, and hairstyles (Barry and Drak), which in turn forms a prevailing custom or style of dress (Craik). It is a cultural practice, providing ‘real estate’ (Benda 7) for an individual to express their social roles (Craik) and political identity (Behnke). Some scholars argue that fashion became overtly political during the 1960s and 70s, as social movements politicised appearance (Edwards). This has only increased in relevance with the rise of far right, populist, and authoritarian regimes, whose sub-cultures enact politicised identities through their distinct fashion characteristics (Gaugele and Titton; Gaugele). Fashion can therefore play an important role in protest movements, as “political subjectivities, political authority, political power and discipline are rendered visible, and thereby real, by the way fashion co-establishes them” (Behnke 3). Across the literature scholars have identified two primary avenues by which fashion and activism are connected. The first of these relates to activism targeting the fashion industry. This type of activism is found in both Asia and Australia, and promotes sustainable consumption choices such as buying used goods and transforming existing items (Chung and Yim), as well as highlighting garment worker exploitation within the fashion industry (Khan and Richards). The second avenue is called ‘fashion activism’: the use of fashion to intentionally signal a message seeking to evoke social and/or political change (Thompson). In this conceptualisation, clothing is used to signify a particular message (Crane). An example of this type of fashion activism is the ‘SlutWalk’, a protest where participants deliberately wore outfits described as slutty or revealing as a response to victim-blaming of women who had experienced sexual assault (Thompson). A key element of fashion activism thus appears to be its message intentionality. Clothes are specifically utilised to convey a message, such as a grievance about victim-blaming, which can then be incorporated into design features displayed on t-shirts, pins, and signs both on the runway and in protest events (Titton). However, while this ‘sender/receiver’ model of fashion communication (Barnard, Fashion as) can be compelling for activists, it is complex in practice. A message receiver can never have full knowledge of what message the sender seeks to signify through a particular clothing item, nor can the message sender predict how a receiver will interpret that message. Particular arrangements of clothing only hold communicative power when they are easily interpreted and related to the movement and its message, usually only intelligible to a specific culture or subculture (Goodnow). Even within that subculture it remains problematic to infer a message from a particular style of dress, as demonstrated in examples where dress is used to imply sexual consent; for example, in rape and assault cases (Lennon et al.). Given the challenges of interpreting fashion, do activists appear to use the ‘real estate’ (Benda 7) afforded by it as a protest tool? To investigate this question a pre-existing dataset of 36,676 events was analysed to ascertain if, and how, environmental activism engages with fashion (a detailed methodology is available on the OSF). Across this dataset, event categories, titles, and descriptions were reviewed to collate events connecting environmental activism to fashion. Three categories of events were found and are discussed in the next section: street theatre, sustainable fashion practices, and disruptive protest. Street Theatre Street theatre is a form of entertainment which uses public performance to raise awareness of injustices and build support for collective action (Houston and Pulido). It uses costumes as a vehicle for conveying messages about political issues and for making demands visible, and has been utilised by protesters across Australia and Asia (Roces). Many examples of street theatre were found in the dataset. For example, Extinction Rebellion (XR) consistently promoted street theatre events via sub-groups such as the ‘Red Rebels’ – a dedicated team of volunteers specialising in costumed street theatre – as well as by inviting supporters to participate in open street theatre events, such as in the ‘Halloween Dead Things Disco’. Dressed as spooky skeletons (doot, doot) and ghosts, we'll slide and shimmy down Sydney's streets in a supernatural style, as we bring attention to all the species claimed by the Sixth Mass Extinction. These street theatre events appeared to prioritise spectacle rather than disruption as a means to attract attention to their message. The Cairns and Far North Environment Centre ‘Climate Action Float’, for example, requested that attendees: Wear blue and gold or dress as your favourite reef animal, solar panel, maybe even the sun itself!? Reef & Solar // Blue & Gold is the guiding theme but we want your creativity take it from there. Most groups used street theatre as one of a range of different actions organised across a period of time. However, Climacts, a performance collective which uses ‘spectacle and satire to communicate the urgency of the climate and biodiversity crisis’ (Climacts), utilised this tactic exclusively. Their Climate Guardians collective used distinctive angel costumes to perform at the Climate Conference of Parties 26, and in various places around Australia (see images on their Website). Fig. 1: Costumed protest against Downer EDI's proposed work on the Adani coalmine; Image by John Englart (CC BY-SA 2.0). Sustainable Fashion Practices The second most common type of event which connected fashion with activism were those promoting sustainable fashion practices. While much research has highlighted the role of activism in raising awareness of problems related to the fashion industry (e.g. Hirscher), groups in the dataset were primarily focussed on organising activities where supporters communally created their own fashion items. The most common of these was the ‘crafternoon’, with over 260 separate crafternoon events identified in the dataset. These events brought activists together to create protest-related kit such as banners, signs, and costumes from recycled or repurposed materials, as demonstrated by Hume Climate Action Now’s ‘Crafternoon for Climate’ event: Come along on Sunday arvo for a relaxed arvo making posters and banners for upcoming Hume Climate Action Now events… Bring: Paints, textas, cardboard, fabric – whatever you’ve got lying around. Don’t have anything? That’s cool, just bring yourself. Events highlighting fashion industry problems were less frequent and tended to prioritise sharing of information about the fashion industry rather than promoting protests. For example, Transition Town Vincent held a ‘Slowing Down Fast Fashion – Transition Town Vincent Movie Night’ while the Green Embassy promoted the ‘Eco Fashion Week’. This event, held in 2017, was described as Australia’s only eco-fashion week, and included runway shows, music, and public talks. Other events also focussed on public talks, such as a Conservation Council of ACT event called ‘Green Drinks Canberra October 2017: Summer Edwards on the fashion industry’ and a panel discussion organised by a group called SEE-Change entitled ‘The Sustainable Wardrobe’. Disruptive Protest and T-Shirts Few events in the dataset mentioned elements of fashion outside of street theatre or sustainable fashion practices, with only one organisation explicitly connecting fashion with activism in its event details. This group – Australian Youth Climate Coalition – organised an event called ‘Activism in Fashion: Tote Bags, T-shirts and Poster Painting!’, which asked: How can we consistently be involved in campaigning while life can be so busy? Can we still be loud and get a message across without saying a word? The iconic 21st century activist "t-shirt and tote-bag" combination is hard to miss these days! Unlike street theatre and sustainable fashion practices, fashion appeared to be a consideration for only a small number of disruptive protests promoted by environmental groups in Australia. XR Brisbane sought to organise a fashion parade during the 2019 Rebellion Week, while XR protesters in Melbourne stripped down to underwear for a march through Melbourne city arcades (see also Turbet). Few common fashion elements appeared consistently on individual activists participating in events, and these were limited to accessories, such as ‘Stop Adani’ earrings, or t-shirts sold for fundraising and promotional purposes. Indeed, t-shirts appeared to be the most promoted clothing item in the dataset, continuing a long tradition of their use in protests (e.g. Maynard, Blankets). Easy to create, suitable for displaying both text and imagery, t-shirts sharing anti-coal messages featured predominantly in the Stop Adani campaign, while yellow t-shirts were a common item in Knitting Nanna’s anti-coal seam gas mining protests. Fig. 2: Stop Adani earrings and t-shirts; Image by John Englart (CC BY-SA 2.0). The Role of Fashion in Environmental Activism As these findings demonstrate, fashion appears to be deliberately utilised in environmental activism primarily through street theatre and the promotion of sustainable fashion practices. While fewer examples of fashion in disruptive protest were found and no consistent fashion assemblage was identified, accessories and t-shirts were utilised by many groups. What may activists be seeking to achieve through incorporating fashion via street theatre and sustainable fashion practices? Some scholars have argued that incorporating fashion into protest allows activists to signal political dissent against authoritarian control. For example, Yanzoom noted that by utilising fashion as a means of communication, Tibetan activists were able to embody their political goals despite repression of speech and movement by political powerholders. However, a consistent fashion repertoire across protests in this Australian dataset was not found. The opportunities afforded by protected protest rights in Australia and absence of violent police repression of disruptive protests may be one explanation why distinctive dress such as the masks and black attire of Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters did not manifest in the dataset. Other scholars have observed that fashion sub-cultures also developed partly to express anti-establishment politics, such as the punk movement in the 1970s. Radical clothing accessorised by symbols, bright hair colours, body piercings, and heavy-duty books signalled opposition to the dominant political ideology (Craik). However, none of these purposes appeared to play a role in Australian environmental activism either. Instead, it appears that Maynard’s contention that Australian protest fashion barely deviates from everyday dress remains true today. Fashion within the events promoted in this large empirical dataset retained the ‘prevalence of everyday clothing’ (Maynard, Dress 111). The lack of a clearly discernible single protest fashion style within the dataset may be related to the shortcomings of the sender/receiver model of fashion communication. As Barnard (Fashion Statements) argued, fashion is not always used as a vehicle for conveying messages, but also as a platform for constructing and reproducing identity. Indeed, a multiplicity of researchers have noted how fashion acts as a signal of what social groups individuals belong to (see Roach-Higgins and Eicher). Activist groups have a variety of goals, which not only include promoting environmental change but also mobilising more people to join their cause (Gulliver et al., Understanding). Stereotyping can hinder achievement of these goals. It has been demonstrated, for example, that individuals who hold negative stereotypes of ‘typical’ activists are less likely to want to associate with them, and less likely to adopt their behaviours (Bashir et al.). Accordingly, some activist groups have been shown to actively promote dress associated with other identity groups, specifically to challenge cultural constructions of environmental activist stereotypes (see also Roces). For example, Bloomfield and Doolins’s study of the NZ anti-GE group MAdGE (Mothers against Genetic Engineering in Food and the Environment) demonstrated how visual protest artifacts conveyed the protesters’ social identity as mothers and customers rather than environmental activists, claiming an alternative cultural mandate for challenging the authority of science (see also Einwohner et al.). The data suggest that Australian activists are seeking to avoid this stereotype as well. The absence of a consistent fashion promoted within the dataset may reflect awareness of problematic stereotypes that activists may be then deliberately seeking to avoid. Maynard (Dress), for example, has noted how the everyday dress of Australian protesters serves to deflect stereotypical labelling of participants. This strategy is also mirrored by the changing nature of groups within the Australian environmental movement. The event database demonstrates that an increasing number of environmental groups are emerging with names highlighting non-stereotypical environmental identities: groups such as ‘Engineers Declare’ and ‘Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action’. Beyond these identity processes, the frequent use of costumed street theatre protest suggests that activists recognise the value of using fashion as a vehicle for communicating messages, despite the challenges of interpretation described above. Much of the language used to promote street theatre in the Facebook event listings suggests that these costumes were deliberately designed to signify a particular meaning, with individuals encouraged to dress up to be ‘a vehicle for myth and symbol’ (Lavender 11). It may be that costumes are also utilised in protest due to their suitability as an image event, convenient for dissemination by mass media seeking colourful and engaging imagery (Delicath and Deluca; Doerr). Furthermore, costumes, as with text or colours presented on t-shirts, may offer activists an avenue to clearly convey a visual message which is more resistant to stereotyping. This is especially relevant given that fashion can be re-interpreted and misinterpreted by audiences, as well as reframed and reinterpreted by the media (Maynard, Dress). While the prevalence of costumed performance and infrequent mentions of fashion in the dataset may be explained by stereotype avoidance and messaging clarity, sustainable fashion practices were more straightforward in intent. Groups used multiple approaches to educate audiences about sustainable fashion, whether through fostering sustainable fashion practices or raising awareness of fashion industry problems. In this regard, fashion in protest in Australia closely resembles Asian sustainable fashion activism (see e.g. Chon et al. regarding the Singaporean context). In particular, the large number of ‘crafternoons’ suggests their importance as sites of activism and community building. Craftivism – acts such as quilting banners, yarn bombing, and cross stitching feminist slogans – are used by many groups to draw attention to social, political and environmental issues (McGovern and Barnes). This type of ‘creative activism’ (Filippello) has been used to challenge aesthetic and political norms across a variety of contested socio-political landscapes. These activities not only develop activism skills, but also foster community (Barry and Drak). For environmental groups, these community building events can play a critical role in sustaining and supporting ongoing environmental activism (Gulliver et al., Understanding) as well as demonstrating solidarity with workers across Asia experiencing labour injustices linked to the fashion industry (Chung and Yim). Conclusion Studies examining protest fashion demonstrate that clothing provides a canvas for sharing protest messages and identities in both Asia and Australia (Benda; Yangzom; Craik). However, despite the fashion’s utility as communication tool for social and environmental movements, empirical studies of how fashion is used by activists in these contexts remain rare. This analysis demonstrates that Australian environmental activists use fashion in their action repertoire primarily through costumed street theatre performances and promoting sustainable fashion practices. By doing so they may be seeking to use fashion as a means of conveying messages, while avoiding stereotypes that can demobilise supporters and reduce support for their cause. Furthermore, sustainable fashion activism offers opportunities for activists to achieve multiple goals: to subvert the fast fashion industry, to provide participation avenues for new activists, to help build activist communities, and to express solidarity with those experiencing fast fashion-related labour injustices. These findings suggest that the use of fashion in protest actions can move beyond identity messaging to also enact sustainable practices while co-opting and resisting hegemonic ideas of consumerism. By integrating fashion into the vibrant and diverse actions promoted by environmental movements across Australia and Asia, activists can construct and perform identities while fostering the community bonds and networks from which movements demanding environmental change derive their strength. Ethics Approval Statement This study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the University of Queensland (2018000963). Data Availability A detailed methodology explaining how the dataset was constructed and analysed is available on the Open Science Framework: <https://osf.io/sq5dz/?view_only=9bc0d3945caa443084361f10b6720589>. References Barnard, Malcolm. “Fashion as Communication Revisited.” Popular Communication 18.4 (2020): 259–271. ———. “Fashion Statements: Communication and Culture.” Fashion Statements. Eds. Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz. Routledge, 2010. ———. “Looking Sharp: Fashion Studies.” The Handbook of Visual Culture. Eds. Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017. Barry, Ben, and Daniel Drak. “Intersectional Interventions into Queer and Trans Liberation: Youth Resistance against Right-Wing Populism through Fashion Hacking.” Fashion Theory – Journal of Dress Body and Culture 23.6 (2019): 679–709. Bashir, Nadia Y., et al. “The Ironic Impact of Activists: Negative Stereotypes Reduce Social Change Influence.” European Journal of Social Psychology 43.7 (2013): 614–626. Behnke, Andreas. The International Politics of Fashion: Being Fab in a Dangerous World. Routledge, 2016. Benda, Camille. Dressing the Resistance: The Visual Language of Protest. Chronicle Books, 2021. Bloomfield, Brian P., and Bill Doolin. “Symbolic Communication in Public Protest over Genetic Modification: Visual Rhetoric, Symbolic Excess, and Social Mores.” Science Communication 35.4 (2013): 502–527. Chon, H., et al. “Designing Resilience: Mapping Singapore’s Sustainable Fashion Movements.” Design Culture(s) Conference. La Sapienza University of Rome, 16-19 June 2020. <https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/18742/1/DCs-Designing%20Resilience.pdf>. Chung, Soojin, and Eunhyuk Yim. “Fashion Activism for Sustainability on Social Media.” The Research Journal of the Costume Culture 28.6 (2020): 815–829 Coghlan, Jo. “Dissent Dressing: The Colour and Fabric of Political Rage.” M/C Journal 22.1 (2019). Craik, Jennifer. Fashion: The Key Concepts. Berg Publishers, 2009. Crane, Diana. Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing. U of Chicago P, 2012. Dalton, Russell J., et al. “The Environmental Movement and the Modes of Political Action.” Comparative Political Studies 36.7 (2003): 743–772. Delicath, John W., and Kevin Michael Deluca. “Image Events, the Public Sphere, and Argumentative Practice: The Case of Radical Environmental Groups.” Argumentation 17.3 (2003): 315–333. Doerr, Nicole. “Fashion in Social Movements.” Protest Cultures. Eds. Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Martin Klimke, and Joachim Scharloth. 2016. ———. “Toward a Visual Analysis of Social Movements, Conflict, and Political Mobilization.” Advances in the Visual Analysis of Social Movements. Eds. Nicole Doerr, Alice Mattoni, and Simon Teune. Emerald Group, 2013. Edwards, Tim. Fashion in Focus: Concepts, Practices and Politics. Routledge, 2010. Einwohner, Rachel L., et al. “Engendering Social Movements: Cultural Images and Movement Dynamics.” Gender & Society 14.5 (2000): 679–699. Filippello, Roberto. “Fashion Statements in a Site of Conflict.” Fashion Theory – Journal of Dress Body and Culture (2022): 1–31. Gaugele, Elke. “The New Obscurity in Style. Alt-Right Faction, Populist Normalization, and the Cultural War on Fashion from the Far Right.” Fashion Theory – Journal of Dress Body and Culture 23.6 (2019): 711–731. Gaugele, Elke, and Monica Titton. “Letter from the Editors: Fashion as Politics: Dressing Dissent.” Fashion Theory – Journal of Dress Body and Culture 23.6 (2019): 615–618. Gerbaudo, Paolo, and Emiliano Treré. “In Search of the ‘We’ of Social Media Activism: Introduction to the Special Issue on Social Media and Protest Identities.” Information, Communication & Society 18.8 (2015): 865–871. Goodnow, Trischa. “On Black Panthers, Blue Ribbon, & Peace Signs: The Function of Symbols in Social Campaigns.” Visual Communication Quarterly 13.3 (2006): 166-179. Gulliver, Robyn E., et al. “The Characteristics, Activities and Goals of Environmental Organizations Engaged in Advocacy within the Australian Environmental Movement.” Environmental Communication 14.5 (2020): 614–627. ———. “Understanding the Outcomes of Climate Change Campaigns in the Australian Environmental Movement.” Case Studies in the Environment 3.1 (2019): 1-9. Hirscher, Anja Lisa. “Fashion Activism Evaluation and Application of Fashion Activism Strategies to Ease Transition towards Sustainable Consumption Behaviour.” Research Journal of Textile and Apparel 17.1 (2013): 23–38. Houston, Donna, and Laura Pulido. “The Work of Performativity: Staging Social Justice at the University of Southern California.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20.4 (2002): 401–424. Khan, Rimi, and Harriette Richards. “Fashion in ‘Crisis’: Consumer Activism and Brand (Ir)responsibility in Lockdown.” Cultural Studies 35.2 (2021): 432–443. Kim, Tae Sik. “Defining the Occupy Movement: Visual Analysis of Facebook Profile Images Posted by Local Occupy Movement Groups.” Visual Communication Quarterly 22.3 (2015): 174–186. Lavender, Andy. “Theatricalizing Protest: The Chorus of the Commons.” Performance Research 24.8 (2019): 4–11. Lennon, Theresa L., et al. “Is Clothing Probative of Attitude or Intent? Implications for Rape and Sexual Harassment Cases.” From Law & Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice 11.2 (1993): 39–43. Lester, Libby, and Brett Hutchins. “The Power of the Unseen: Environmental Conflict, the Media and Invisibility.” Media, Culture and Society 34.7 (2012): 847–863. Loscialpo, Flavia. “‘I Am an Immigrant’: Fashion, Immigration and Borders in the Contemporary Trans-Global Landscape.” Fashion Theory – Journal of Dress Body and Culture 23.6 (2019): 619–653. Maynard, Margaret. Blankets: The Visible Politics of Indigenous Clothing in Australia. Berg, 2002. ———. “Dress for Dissent: Reading the Almost Unreadable.” Journal of Australian Studies 30.89 (2006): 103–112. McGovern, Alyce, and Clementine Barnes. “Visible Mending, Street Stitching, and Embroidered Handkerchiefs: How Craftivism Is Being Used to Challenge the Fashion Industry.” International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 11.2 (2022): 87–101. Repo, Jemima. “Feminist Commodity Activism: The New Political Economy of Feminist Protest.” International Political Sociology 14.2 (2020): 215–232. Roach-Higgins, Mary Ellen, and Joanne B. Eicher. “Dress and Identity.” Clothing and Textiles Research Journal 10.4 (1992): 1–8. Roces, Mina. “Dress as Symbolic Resistance in Asia.” International Quarterly for Asian Studies 53.1 (2022): 5–14. Stuart, Avelie, et al. “‘I Don’t Really Want to Be Associated with the Self-Righteous Left Extreme’: Disincentives to Participation in Collective Action.” Journal of Social and Political Psychology 6.1 (2018): 242–270. Thompson, Charles J. “College Students’ Fashion Activism in the Age of Trump.” The Routledge Companion to Fashion Studies. Eds. Eugenia Paulicelli, Veronica Manlow, and Elizabeth Wissinger. Routledge, 2021. Titton, Monica. “Afterthought: Fashion, Feminism and Radical Protest.” Fashion Theory – Journal of Dress Body and Culture 23.6 (2019): 747–756. Tulloch, Carol. The Birth of Cool: Style Narratives of the African Diaspora. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016. Turbet, Hanna Mills. “‘We Are Overexposed’: Climate Activists Strip, March through City Streets.” The Age, 12 Oct. 2019. <https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/we-are-overexposed-climate-activists-strip-march-through-city-streets-20191012-p5301f.html>. Von Busch, Otto. “Engaged Design and the Practice of Fashion Hacking: The Examples of Giana Gonzalez and Dale Sko.” Fashion Practice 1.2 (2009): 163–185. Yangzom, Dicky. “Clothing and Social Movements: Tibet and the Politics of Dress.” Social Movement Studies 15.6 (2016): 622–633.

Introduction Most developed countries, including Australia, have a strong focus on national, state and local strategies for emergency management and response in the face of disasters and crises. This framework can include coping with catastrophic dislocation, service disruption, injury or loss of life in the face of natural disasters such as major fires, floods, earthquakes or other large-impact natural events, as well as dealing with similar catastrophes resulting from human actions such as bombs, biological agents, cyber-attacks targeting essential services such as communications networks, or other crises affecting large populations. Emergency management frameworks for crisis and disaster response are distinguished by their focus on the domestic context for such events; that is, how to manage and assist the ways in which civilian populations, who are for the most part inexperienced and untrained in dealing with crises and disasters, are able to respond and behave in such situations so as to minimise the impacts of a catastrophic event. Even in countries like Australia that demonstrate a strong public commitment to cultural pluralism and social cohesion, ethno-cultural diversity can be seen as a risk or threat to national security and values at times of political, natural, economic and/or social tensions and crises. Australian government policymakers have recently focused, with increasing intensity, on “community resilience” as a key element in countering extremism and enhancing emergency preparedness and response. In some sense, this is the result of a tacit acknowledgement by government agencies that there are limits to what they can do for domestic communities should such a catastrophic event occur, and accordingly, the focus in recent times has shifted to how governments can best help people to help themselves in such situations, a key element of the contemporary “resilience” approach. Yet despite the robustly multicultural nature of Australian society, explicit engagement with Australia’s cultural diversity flickers only fleetingly on this agenda, which continues to pursue approaches to community resilience in the absence of understandings about how these terms and formations may themselves need to be diversified to maximise engagement by all citizens in a multicultural polity. There have been some recent efforts in Australia to move in this direction, for example the Australian Emergency Management Institute (AEMI)’s recent suite of projects with culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities (2006-2010) and the current Australia-New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee-supported project on “Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism” (Grossman and Tahiri), which I discuss in a longer forthcoming version of this essay (Grossman). Yet the understanding of ethno-cultural identity and difference that underlies much policy thinking on resilience remains problematic for the way in which it invests in a view of the cultural dimensions of community resilience as relic rather than resource – valorising the preservation of and respect for cultural norms and traditions, but silent on what different ethno-cultural communities might contribute toward expanded definitions of both “community” and “resilience” by virtue of the transformative potential and existing cultural capital they bring with them into new national and also translocal settings. For example, a primary conclusion of the joint program between AEMI and the Australian Multicultural Commission is that CALD communities are largely “vulnerable” in the context of disasters and emergency management and need to be better integrated into majority-culture models of theorising and embedding community resilience. This focus on stronger national integration and the “vulnerability” of culturally diverse ethno-cultural communities in the Australian context echoes the work of scholars beyond Australia such as McGhee, Mouritsen (Reflections, Citizenship) and Joppke. They argue that the “civic turn” in debates around resurgent contemporary nationalism and multicultural immigration policies privileges civic integration over genuine two-way multiculturalism. This approach sidesteps the transculturational (Ortiz; Welsch; Mignolo; Bennesaieh; Robins; Stein) aspects of contemporary social identities and exchange by paying lip-service to cultural diversity while affirming a neo-liberal construct of civic values and principles as a universalising goal of Western democratic states within a global market economy. It also suggests a superficial tribute to cultural diversity that does not embed diversity comprehensively at the levels of either conceptualising or resourcing different elements of Australian transcultural communities within the generalised framework of “community resilience.” And by emphasising cultural difference as vulnerability rather than as resource or asset, it fails to acknowledge the varieties of resilience capital that many culturally diverse individuals and communities may bring with them when they resettle in new environments, by ignoring the question of what “resilience” actually means to those from culturally diverse communities. In so doing, it also avoids the critical task of incorporating intercultural definitional diversity around the concepts of both “community” and “resilience” used to promote social cohesion and the capacity to recover from disasters and crises. How we might do differently in thinking about the broader challenges for multiculturalism itself as a resilient transnational concept and practice? The Concept of Resilience The meanings of resilience vary by disciplinary perspective. While there is no universally accepted definition of the concept, it is widely acknowledged that resilience refers to the capacity of an individual to do well in spite of exposure to acute trauma or sustained adversity (Liebenberg 219). Originating in the Latin word resilio, meaning ‘to jump back’, there is general consensus that resilience pertains to an individual’s, community’s or system’s ability to adapt to and ‘bounce back’ from a disruptive event (Mohaupt 63, Longstaff et al. 3). Over the past decade there has been a dramatic rise in interest in the clinical, community and family sciences concerning resilience to a broad range of adversities (Weine 62). While debate continues over which discipline can be credited with first employing resilience as a concept, Mohaupt argues that most of the literature on resilience cites social psychology and psychiatry as the origin for the concept beginning in the mid-20th century. The pioneer researchers of what became known as resilience research studied the impact on children living in dysfunctional families. For example, the findings of work by Garmezy, Werner and Smith and Rutter showed that about one third of children in these studies were coping very well despite considerable adversities and traumas. In asking what it was that prevented the children in their research from being negatively influenced by their home environments, such research provided the basis for future research on resilience. Such work was also ground-breaking for identifying the so-called ‘protective factors’ or resources that individuals can operationalise when dealing with adversity. In essence, protective factors are those conditions in the individual that protect them from the risk of dysfunction and enable recovery from trauma. They mitigate the effects of stressors or risk factors, that is, those conditions that predispose one to harm (Hajek 15). Protective factors include the inborn traits or qualities within an individual, those defining an individual’s environment, and also the interaction between the two. Together, these factors give people the strength, skills and motivation to cope in difficult situations and re-establish (a version of) ‘normal’ life (Gunnestad). Identifying protective factors is important in terms of understanding the particular resources a given sociocultural group has at its disposal, but it is also vital to consider the interconnections between various protective mechanisms, how they might influence each other, and to what degree. An individual, for instance, might display resilience or adaptive functioning in a particular domain (e.g. emotional functioning) but experience significant deficits in another (e.g. academic achievement) (Hunter 2). It is also essential to scrutinise how the interaction between protective factors and risk factors creates patterns of resilience. Finally, a comprehensive understanding of the interrelated nature of protective mechanisms and risk factors is imperative for designing effective interventions and tailored preventive strategies (Weine 65). In short, contemporary thinking about resilience suggests it is neither entirely personal nor strictly social, but an interactive and iterative combination of the two. It is a quality of the environment as much as the individual. For Ungar, resilience is the complex entanglements between “individuals and their social ecologies [that] will determine the degree of positive outcomes experienced” (3). Thinking about resilience as context-dependent is important because research that is too trait-based or actor-centred risks ignoring any structural or institutional forces. A more ecological interpretation of resilience, one that takes into a person’s context and environment into account, is vital in order to avoid blaming the victim for any hardships they face, or relieving state and institutional structures from their responsibilities in addressing social adversity, which can “emphasise self-help in line with a neo-conservative agenda instead of stimulating state responsibility” (Mohaupt 67). Nevertheless, Ungar posits that a coherent definition of resilience has yet to be developed that adequately ‘captures the dual focus of the individual and the individual’s social ecology and how the two must both be accounted for when determining the criteria for judging outcomes and discerning processes associated with resilience’ (7). Recent resilience research has consequently prompted a shift away from vulnerability towards protective processes — a shift that highlights the sustained capabilities of individuals and communities under threat or at risk. Locating ‘Culture’ in the Literature on Resilience However, an understanding of the role of culture has remained elusive or marginalised within this trend; there has been comparatively little sustained investigation into the applicability of resilience constructs to non-western cultures, or how the resources available for survival might differ from those accessible to western populations (Ungar 4). As such, a growing body of researchers is calling for more rigorous inquiry into culturally determined outcomes that might be associated with resilience in non-western or multicultural cultures and contexts, for example where Indigenous and minority immigrant communities live side by side with their ‘mainstream’ neighbours in western settings (Ungar 2). ‘Cultural resilience’ considers the role that cultural background plays in determining the ability of individuals and communities to be resilient in the face of adversity. For Clauss-Ehlers, the term describes the degree to which the strengths of one’s culture promote the development of coping (198). Culturally-focused resilience suggests that people can manage and overcome stress and trauma based not on individual characteristics alone, but also from the support of broader sociocultural factors (culture, cultural values, language, customs, norms) (Clauss-Ehlers 324). The innate cultural strengths of a culture may or may not differ from the strengths of other cultures; the emphasis here is not so much comparatively inter-cultural as intensively intra-cultural (VanBreda 215). A culturally focused resilience model thus involves “a dynamic, interactive process in which the individual negotiates stress through a combination of character traits, cultural background, cultural values, and facilitating factors in the sociocultural environment” (Clauss-Ehlers 199). In understanding ways of ‘coping and hoping, surviving and thriving’, it is thus crucial to consider how culturally and linguistically diverse minorities navigate the cultural understandings and assumptions of both their countries of origin and those of their current domicile (Ungar 12). Gunnestad claims that people who master the rules and norms of their new culture without abandoning their own language, values and social support are more resilient than those who tenaciously maintain their own culture at the expense of adjusting to their new environment. They are also more resilient than those who forego their own culture and assimilate with the host society (14). Accordingly, if the combination of both valuing one’s culture as well as learning about the culture of the new system produces greater resilience and adaptive capacities, serious problems can arise when a majority tries to acculturate a minority to the mainstream by taking away or not recognising important parts of the minority culture. In terms of resilience, if cultural factors are denied or diminished in accounting for and strengthening resilience – in other words, if people are stripped of what they possess by way of resilience built through cultural knowledge, disposition and networks – they do in fact become vulnerable, because ‘they do not automatically gain those cultural strengths that the majority has acquired over generations’ (Gunnestad 14). Mobilising ‘Culture’ in Australian Approaches to Community Resilience The realpolitik of how concepts of resilience and culture are mobilised is highly relevant here. As noted above, when ethnocultural difference is positioned as a risk or a threat to national identity, security and values, this is precisely the moment when vigorously, even aggressively, nationalised definitions of ‘community’ and ‘identity’ that minoritise or disavow cultural diversities come to the fore in public discourse. The Australian evocation of nationalism and national identity, particularly in the way it has framed policy discussion on managing national responses to disasters and threats, has arguably been more muted than some of the European hysteria witnessed recently around cultural diversity and national life. Yet we still struggle with the idea that newcomers to Australia might fall on the surplus rather than the deficit side of the ledger when it comes to identifying and harnessing resilience capital. A brief example of this trend is explored here. From 2006 to 2010, the Australian Emergency Management Institute embarked on an ambitious government-funded four-year program devoted to strengthening community resilience in relation to disasters with specific reference to engaging CALD communities across Australia. The program, Inclusive Emergency Management with CALD Communities, was part of a wider Australian National Action Plan to Build Social Cohesion, Harmony and Security in the wake of the London terrorist bombings in July 2005. Involving CALD community organisations as well as various emergency and disaster management agencies, the program ran various workshops and agency-community partnership pilots, developed national school education resources, and commissioned an evaluation of the program’s effectiveness (Farrow et al.). While my critique here is certainly not aimed at emergency management or disaster response agencies and personnel themselves – dedicated professionals who often achieve remarkable results in emergency and disaster response under extraordinarily difficult circumstances – it is nevertheless important to highlight how the assumptions underlying elements of AEMI’s experience and outcomes reflect the persistent ways in which ethnocultural diversity is rendered as a problem to be surmounted or a liability to be redressed, rather than as an asset to be built upon or a resource to be valued and mobilised. AEMI’s explicit effort to engage with CALD communities in building overall community resilience was important in its tacit acknowledgement that emergency and disaster services were (and often remain) under-resourced and under-prepared in dealing with the complexities of cultural diversity in emergency situations. Despite these good intentions, however, while the program produced some positive outcomes and contributed to crucial relationship building between CALD communities and emergency services within various jurisdictions, it also continued to frame the challenge of working with cultural diversity as a problem of increased vulnerability during disasters for recently arrived and refugee background CALD individuals and communities. This highlights a common feature in community resilience-building initiatives, which is to focus on those who are already ‘robust’ versus those who are ‘vulnerable’ in relation to resilience indicators, and whose needs may require different or additional resources in order to be met. At one level, this is a pragmatic resourcing issue: national agencies understandably want to put their people, energy and dollars where they are most needed in pursuit of a steady-state unified national response at times of crisis. Nor should it be argued that at least some CALD groups, particularly those from new arrival and refugee communities, are not vulnerable in at least some of the ways and for some of the reasons suggested in the program evaluation. However, the consistent focus on CALD communities as ‘vulnerable’ and ‘in need’ is problematic, as well as partial. It casts members of these communities as structurally and inherently less able and less resilient in the context of disasters and emergencies: in some sense, as those who, already ‘victims’ of chronic social deficits such as low English proficiency, social isolation and a mysterious unidentified set of ‘cultural factors’, can become doubly victimised in acute crisis and disaster scenarios. In what is by now a familiar trope, the description of CALD communities as ‘vulnerable’ precludes asking questions about what they do have, what they do know, and what they do or can contribute to how we respond to disaster and emergency events in our communities. A more profound problem in this sphere revolves around working out how best to engage CALD communities and individuals within existing approaches to disaster and emergency preparedness and response. This reflects a fundamental but unavoidable limitation of disaster preparedness models: they are innately spatially and geographically bounded, and consequently understand ‘communities’ in these terms, rather than expanding definitions of ‘community’ to include the dimensions of community-as-social-relations. While some good engagement outcomes were achieved locally around cross-cultural knowledge for emergency services workers, the AEMI program fell short of asking some of the harder questions about how emergency and disaster service scaffolding and resilience-building approaches might themselves need to change or transform, using a cross-cutting model of ‘communities’ as both geographic places and multicultural spaces (Bartowiak-Théron and Crehan) in order to be more effective in national scenarios in which cultural diversity should be taken for granted. Toward Acknowledgement of Resilience Capital Most significantly, the AEMI program did not produce any recognition of the ways in which CALD communities already possess resilience capital, or consider how this might be drawn on in formulating stronger community initiatives around disaster and threats preparedness for the future. Of course, not all individuals within such communities, nor all communities across varying circumstances, will demonstrate resilience, and we need to be careful of either overgeneralising or romanticising the kinds and degrees of ‘resilience capital’ that may exist within them. Nevertheless, at least some have developed ways of withstanding crises and adapting to new conditions of living. This is particularly so in connection with individual and group behaviours around resource sharing, care-giving and social responsibility under adverse circumstances (Grossman and Tahiri) – all of which are directly relevant to emergency and disaster response. While some of these resilient behaviours may have been nurtured or enhanced by particular experiences and environments, they can, as the discussion of recent literature above suggests, also be rooted more deeply in cultural norms, habits and beliefs. Whatever their origins, for culturally diverse societies to achieve genuine resilience in the face of both natural and human-made disasters, it is critical to call on the ‘social memory’ (Folke et al.) of communities faced with responding to emergencies and crises. Such wellsprings of social memory ‘come from the diversity of individuals and institutions that draw on reservoirs of practices, knowledge, values, and worldviews and is crucial for preparing the system for change, building resilience, and for coping with surprise’ (Adger et al.). Consequently, if we accept the challenge of mapping an approach to cultural diversity as resource rather than relic into our thinking around strengthening community resilience, there are significant gains to be made. For a whole range of reasons, no diversity-sensitive model or measure of resilience should invest in static understandings of ethnicities and cultures; all around the world, ethnocultural identities and communities are in a constant and sometimes accelerated state of dynamism, reconfiguration and flux. But to ignore the resilience capital and potential protective factors that ethnocultural diversity can offer to the strengthening of community resilience more broadly is to miss important opportunities that can help suture the existing disconnects between proactive approaches to intercultural connectedness and social inclusion on the one hand, and reactive approaches to threats, national security and disaster response on the other, undermining the effort to advance effectively on either front. This means that dominant social institutions and structures must be willing to contemplate their own transformation as the result of transcultural engagement, rather than merely insisting, as is often the case, that ‘other’ cultures and communities conform to existing hegemonic paradigms of being and of living. In many ways, this is the most critical step of all. A resilience model and strategy that questions its own culturally informed yet taken-for-granted assumptions and premises, goes out into communities to test and refine these, and returns to redesign its approach based on the new knowledge it acquires, would reflect genuine progress toward an effective transculturational approach to community resilience in culturally diverse contexts.References Adger, W. Neil, Terry P. Hughes, Carl Folke, Stephen R. Carpenter and Johan Rockström. “Social-Ecological Resilience to Coastal Disasters.” Science 309.5737 (2005): 1036-1039. ‹http://www.sciencemag.org/content/309/5737/1036.full> Bartowiak-Théron, Isabelle, and Anna Corbo Crehan. “The Changing Nature of Communities: Implications for Police and Community Policing.” Community Policing in Australia: Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) Reports, Research and Policy Series 111 (2010): 8-15. Benessaieh, Afef. “Multiculturalism, Interculturality, Transculturality.” Ed. A. Benessaieh. Transcultural Americas/Ameriques Transculturelles. Ottawa: U of Ottawa Press/Les Presses de l’Unversite d’Ottawa, 2010. 11-38. Clauss-Ehlers, Caroline S. “Sociocultural Factors, Resilience and Coping: Support for a Culturally Sensitive Measure of Resilience.” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 29 (2008): 197-212. Clauss-Ehlers, Caroline S. “Cultural Resilience.” Encyclopedia of Cross-Cultural School Psychology. Ed. C. S. Clauss-Ehlers. New York: Springer, 2010. 324-326. Farrow, David, Anthea Rutter and Rosalind Hurworth. Evaluation of the Inclusive Emergency Management with Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) Communities Program. Parkville, Vic.: Centre for Program Evaluation, U of Melbourne, July 2009. ‹http://www.ag.gov.au/www/emaweb/rwpattach.nsf/VAP/(9A5D88DBA63D32A661E6369859739356)~Final+Evaluation+Report+-+July+2009.pdf/$file/Final+Evaluation+Report+-+July+2009.pdf>.Folke, Carl, Thomas Hahn, Per Olsson, and Jon Norberg. “Adaptive Governance of Social-Ecological Systems.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 30 (2005): 441-73. ‹http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.energy.30.050504.144511>. Garmezy, Norman. “The Study of Competence in Children at Risk for Severe Psychopathology.” The Child in His Family: Children at Psychiatric Risk. Vol. 3. Eds. E. J. Anthony and C. Koupernick. New York: Wiley, 1974. 77-97. Grossman, Michele. “Resilient Multiculturalism? Diversifying Australian Approaches to Community Resilience and Cultural Difference”. Global Perspectives on Multiculturalism in the 21st Century. Eds. B. E. de B’beri and F. Mansouri. London: Routledge, 2014. Grossman, Michele, and Hussein Tahiri. Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism. Canberra: Australia-New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee, forthcoming 2014. Grossman, Michele. “Cultural Resilience and Strengthening Communities”. Safeguarding Australia Summit, Canberra. 23 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.safeguardingaustraliasummit.org.au/uploader/resources/Michele_Grossman.pdf>. Gunnestad, Arve. “Resilience in a Cross-Cultural Perspective: How Resilience Is Generated in Different Cultures.” Journal of Intercultural Communication 11 (2006). ‹http://www.immi.se/intercultural/nr11/gunnestad.htm>. Hajek, Lisa J. “Belonging and Resilience: A Phenomenological Study.” Unpublished Master of Science thesis, U of Wisconsin-Stout. Menomonie, Wisconsin, 2003. Hunter, Cathryn. “Is Resilience Still a Useful Concept When Working with Children and Young People?” Child Family Community Australia (CFA) Paper 2. Melbourne: Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2012.Joppke, Christian. "Beyond National Models: Civic Integration Policies for Immigrants in Western Europe". West European Politics 30.1 (2007): 1-22. Liebenberg, Linda, Michael Ungar, and Fons van de Vijver. “Validation of the Child and Youth Resilience Measure-28 (CYRM-28) among Canadian Youth.” Research on Social Work Practice 22.2 (2012): 219-226. Longstaff, Patricia H., Nicholas J. Armstrong, Keli Perrin, Whitney May Parker, and Matthew A. Hidek. “Building Resilient Communities: A Preliminary Framework for Assessment.” Homeland Security Affairs 6.3 (2010): 1-23. ‹http://www.hsaj.org/?fullarticle=6.3.6>. McGhee, Derek. The End of Multiculturalism? Terrorism, Integration and Human Rights. Maidenhead: Open U P, 2008.Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton U P, 2000. Mohaupt, Sarah. “Review Article: Resilience and Social Exclusion.” Social Policy and Society 8 (2009): 63-71.Mouritsen, Per. "The Culture of Citizenship: A Reflection on Civic Integration in Europe." Ed. R. Zapata-Barrero. Citizenship Policies in the Age of Diversity: Europe at the Crossroad." Barcelona: CIDOB Foundation, 2009: 23-35. Mouritsen, Per. “Political Responses to Cultural Conflict: Reflections on the Ambiguities of the Civic Turn.” Ed. P. Mouritsen and K.E. Jørgensen. Constituting Communities. Political Solutions to Cultural Conflict, London: Palgrave, 2008. 1-30. Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Trans. Harriet de Onís. Intr. Fernando Coronil and Bronislaw Malinowski. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 1995 [1940]. Robins, Kevin. The Challenge of Transcultural Diversities: Final Report on the Transversal Study on Cultural Policy and Cultural Diversity. Culture and Cultural Heritage Department. Strasbourg: Council of European Publishing, 2006. Rutter, Michael. “Protective Factors in Children’s Responses to Stress and Disadvantage.” Annals of the Academy of Medicine, Singapore 8 (1979): 324-38. Stein, Mark. “The Location of Transculture.” Transcultural English Studies: Fictions, Theories, Realities. Eds. F. Schulze-Engler and S. Helff. Cross/Cultures 102/ANSEL Papers 12. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009. 251-266. Ungar, Michael. “Resilience across Cultures.” British Journal of Social Work 38.2 (2008): 218-235. First published online 2006: 1-18. In-text references refer to the online Advance Access edition ‹http://bjsw.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2006/10/18/bjsw.bcl343.full.pdf>. VanBreda, Adrian DuPlessis. Resilience Theory: A Literature Review. Erasmuskloof: South African Military Health Service, Military Psychological Institute, Social Work Research & Development, 2001. Weine, Stevan. “Building Resilience to Violent Extremism in Muslim Diaspora Communities in the United States.” Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict 5.1 (2012): 60-73. Welsch, Wolfgang. “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today.” Spaces of Culture: City, Nation World. Eds. M. Featherstone and S. Lash. London: Sage, 1999. 194-213. Werner, Emmy E., and Ruth S. Smith. Vulnerable But Invincible: A Longitudinal Study of\ Resilience and Youth. New York: McGraw Hill, 1982. NotesThe concept of ‘resilience capital’ I offer here is in line with one strand of contemporary theorising around resilience – that of resilience as social or socio-ecological capital – but moves beyond the idea of enhancing general social connectedness and community cohesion by emphasising the ways in which culturally diverse communities may already be robustly networked and resourceful within micro-communal settings, with new resources and knowledge both to draw on and to offer other communities or the ‘national community’ at large. In effect, ‘resilience capital’ speaks to the importance of finding ‘the communities within the community’ (Bartowiak-Théron and Crehan 11) and recognising their capacity to contribute to broad-scale resilience and recovery.I am indebted for the discussion of the literature on resilience here to Dr Peta Stephenson, Centre for Cultural Diversity and Wellbeing, Victoria University, who is working on a related project (M. Grossman and H. Tahiri, Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism, forthcoming 2014).

IntroductionThe role, function, and future of the Western public intellectual have been highly contested over the last three decades. The dominant discourse, which predicts the decline of the public intellectual, asserts the institutionalisation of their labour has eroded their authority to speak publicly to power on behalf of others; and that the commodification of intellectual performance has transformed them from sages, philosophers, and men of letters into trivial media entertainers, pundits, and ideologues. Overwhelmingly the crisis debates link the demise of the public intellectual to shifts in public culture, which was initially conceptualised as a literary and artistic space designed to liberate the awareness of citizens through critique and to reflect upon “the chronic and persistent issues of life, meaning and representation” (McGuigan 430). This early imagining of public culture as an exclusively civilising space, however, did not last and Jurgen Habermas documented its decline in response to the commodification and politicisation of culture in the 20th century. Yet, as social activism continued to flourish in the public sphere, Habermas re-theorised public culture as a more pluralistic site which simultaneously accommodates “uncritical populism, radical subversion and critical intervention” (436) and operates as both a marketplace and a “site of communicative rationality, mutual respect and understanding (McGuigan 434). The rise of creative industries expanded popular engagement with public culture but destabilised the authority of the public intellectual. The accompanying shifts also affected the function of the curator, who, like the intellectual, had a role in legislating and arbitrating knowledge, and negotiating and authorising meaning through curated exhibitions of objects deemed sacred and significant. Jennifer Barrett noted the similarities in the two functions when she argued in Museums and the Public Sphere that, because museums have an intellectual role in society, curators have a public intellectual function as they define publics, determine modes of engagement, and shape knowledge formation (150). The resemblance between the idealised role of the intellectual and the curator in enabling the critique that emancipates the citizen means that both functions have been affected by the atomisation of contemporary society, which has exposed the power effects of the imposed coherency of authoritative and universal narratives. Indeed, just as Russell Jacoby, Allan Bloom, and Richard Posner predicted the death of the intellectual, who could no longer claim to speak in universal terms on behalf of others, so museums faced their own crisis of relevancy. Declining visitor numbers and reduced funding saw museums reinvent themselves, and in moving away from their traditional exclusive, authoritative, and nation building roles—which Pierre Bourdieu argued reproduced the “existing class-based culture, education and social systems” (Barrett 3)—museums transformed themselves into inclusive and diverse sites of co-creation with audiences and communities. In the context of this change the curator ceased to be the “primary producer of knowledge” (Barrett 13) and emerged to reproduce “contemporary culture preoccupations” and constitute the “social imagery” of communities (119). The modern museum remains concerned with explaining and interrogating the world, but the shift in curatorial work is away from the objects themselves to a focus upon audiences and how they value the artefacts, knowledge, and experiences of collective shared memory. The change in curatorial practices was driven by what Peter Vergo called a new “museology” (Barrett 2), and according to Macdonald this term assumes that “object meanings are contextual rather than inherent” or absolute and universal (2). Public intellectuals and curators, as the custodians of ideas and narratives in the contemporary cultural industries, privilege audience reception and recognise that consumers and/or citizens engage with public culture for a variety of reasons, including critique, understanding, and entertainment. Curators, like public intellectuals, also recognise that they can no longer assume the knowledge and experience of their audience, nor prescribe the nature of engagement with ideas and objects. Instead, curators and intellectuals emerge as negotiators and translators of cultural meaning as they traverse the divides in public culture, sequestering ideas and cultural artefacts and constructing narratives that engage audiences and communities in the process of re-imagining the past as a way of providing new insights into contemporary challenges.Methodology In exploring the idea that the public intellectual acts as a curator of ideas as he or she defines and privileges the discursive spaces of public culture, this paper begins by providing an overview of the cultural context of the contemporary public intellectual which enables comparisons between intellectual and curatorial functions. Second, this paper analyses a random sample of the content of books, newspaper and magazine articles, speeches, and transcripts of interviews drawn from The Australian, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sydney Institute, the ABC, The Monthly, and Quadrant published or broadcast between 1996 and 2007, in order to identify the key themes of the History Wars. It should be noted that the History War debates were extensive, persistent, and complex—and as they unfolded over a 13-year period they emerged as the “most powerful” and “most disputed form of public intellectual work” (Carter, Ideas 9). Many issues were aggregated under the trope of the History Wars, and these topics were subject to both popular commentary and academic investigation. Furthermore, the History Wars discourse was produced in a range of mediums including popular media sources, newspaper and magazine columns, broadcasts, blogs, lectures, and writers’ forums and publications. Given the extent of this discourse, the sample of articles which provides the basis for this analysis does not seek to comprehensively survey the literature on the History Wars. Rather this paper draws upon Foucault’s genealogical qualitative method, which exposes the subordinated discontinuities in texts, to 1) consider the political context of the History War trope; and 2) identify how intellectuals discursively exhibited versions of the nation’s identity and in the process made visible the power effects of the past. Public Intellectuals The underlying fear of the debates about the public intellectual crisis was that the public intellectual would no longer be able to act as the conscience of a nation, speak truth to power, or foster the independent and dissenting public debate that guides and informs individual human agency—a goal that has lain at the heart of the Western intellectual’s endeavours since Kant’s Sapere aude. The late 20th century crisis discourse, however, primarily mourned the decline of a particular form of public authority attached to the heroic universal intellectual formation made popular by Emile Zola at the end of the 19th century, and which claimed the power to hold the political elites of France accountable. Yet talk of an intellectual crisis also became progressively associated with a variety of general concerns about globalising society. Some of these concerns included fears that structural shifts in the public domain would lead to the impoverishment of the cultural domain, the end of Western civilisation, the decline of the progressive political left, and the end of universal values. It was also expected that the decline in intellectuals would also enable the rise of populism, political conservatism, and anti-intellectualism (Jacoby Bloom; Bauman; Rorty; Posner; Furedi; Marquand). As a result of these fears, the function of the intellectual who engages publicly was re-theorised. Zygmunt Bauman suggested the intellectual was no longer the legislator or arbiter of taste but the negotiator and translator of ideas; Michel Foucault argued that the intellectual could be institutionally situated and still speak truth to power; and Edward Said insisted the public intellectual had a role in opening up possibilities to resolve conflict by re-imagining the past. In contrast, the Australian public intellectual has never been declared in crisis or dead, and this is probably because the nation does not have the same legacy of the heroic public intellectual. Indeed, as a former British colony labelled the “working man’s paradise” (White 4), Australia’s intellectual work was produced in “institutionalised networks” (Head 5) like universities and knowledge disciplines, political parties, magazines, and unions. Within these networks there was a double division of labour, between the abstraction of knowledge and its compartmentalisation, and between the practical application of knowledge and its popularisation. As a result of this legacy, a more organic, specific, and institutionalised form of intellectualism emerged, which, according to Head, limited intellectual influence and visibility across other networks and domains of knowledge and historically impeded general intellectual engagement with the public. Fears about the health and authority of the public intellectual in Australia have therefore tended to be produced as a part of Antonio Gramsci’s ideological “wars of position” (Mouffe 5), which are an endless struggle between cultural and political elites for control of the institutions of social reproduction. These struggles began in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s over language and political correctness, and they reappeared in the 1990s as the History Wars. History Wars“The History Wars” was a term applied to an ideological battle between two visions of the Australian nation. The first vision was circulated by Australian Labor Party Prime Minister Paul Keating, who saw race relations as central to 21st century global Australia and began the process of dealing with the complex and divisive Indigenous issues at home. He established the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation in 1991; acknowledged in the 1992 Redfern speech that white settlers were responsible for the problems in Indigenous communities; and commissioned the Bringing Them Home report, which was completed in 1997 and concluded that the mandated removal of Indigenous children from their families and communities throughout the 20th century had violated their human rights and caused long-term and systemic damage to Indigenous communities.The second vision of Australia was circulated by Liberal Prime Minister John Howard, who, after he came to power in 1996, began his own culture war to reconstruct a more conservative vision of the nation. Howard believed that the stories of Indigenous dispossession undermined confidence in the nation, and he sought to produce a historical view of the past grounded in “Judeo-Christian ethics, the progressive spirit of the enlightenment and the institutions and values of British culture” (“Sense of Balance”). Howard called for a return to a narrative form that valorised Australia’s achievements, and he sought to instil a more homogenised view of the past and a coherent national identity by reviewing high school history programs, national museum appointments, and citizenship tests. These two political positions framed the subsequent intellectual struggles over the past. While a number of issues were implicated in the battle, generally, left commentators used the History Wars as a way to circulate certain ideas about morality and identity, including 1) Australians needed to make amends for past injustices to Indigenous Australians and 2) the nation’s global identity was linked to how they dealt with Australia’s first people. In contrast, the political right argued 1) the left had misrepresented and overstated the damage done to Indigenous communities and rewritten history; 2) stories about Indigenous abuse were fragmenting the nation’s identity at a time when the nation needed to build a coherent global presence; and 3) no apology was necessary, because contemporary Australians did not feel responsible for past injustices. AnalysisThe war between these two visions of Australia was fought in “extra-curricular sites,” according to Stuart Macintyre, and this included newspaper columns, writers’ festivals, broadcast interviews, intellectual magazines like The Monthly and Quadrant, books, and think tank lectures. Academics and intellectuals were the primary protagonists, and they disputed the extent of colonial genocide; the legitimacy of Indigenous land rights; the impact of the Stolen Generation on the lives of modern Indigenous citizens; and the necessity of a formal apology as a part of the reconciliation process. The conflicts also ignited debates about the nature of history, the quality of public debates in Australia, and exposed the tensions between academics, public intellectuals, newspaper commentators and political elites. Much of the controversy played out in the national forums can be linked to the Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families report Stolen Generation inquiry and report, which was commissioned by Keating but released after Howard came to office. Australian public intellectual and professor of politics Robert Manne critiqued the right’s response to the report in his 2001 Quarterly Essay titled “In Denial: The Stolen Generation and The Right”. He argued that there was a right-wing campaign in Australia that sought to diminish and undermine justice for Aboriginal people by discounting the results of the inquiry, underestimating the numbers of those affected, and underfunding the report’s recommendations. He spoke of the nation’s shame and in doing so he challenged Australia’s image of itself. Manne’s position was applauded by many for providing what Kay Schaffer in her Australian Humanities Review paper called an “effective antidote to counter the bitter stream of vitriol that followed the release of the Bringing Them Home report”. Yet Manne also drew criticism. Historian Bain Attwood argued that Manne’s attack on conservatives was polemical, and he suggested that it would be more useful to consider in detail what drives the right-wing analysis of Indigenous issues. Attwood also suggested that Manne’s essay had misrepresented the origins of the narrative of the Stolen Generation, which had been widely known prior to the release of the Stolen Generation report.Conservative commentators focused upon challenging the accuracy of those stories submitted to the inquiry, which provided the basis for the report. This struggle over factual details was to characterise the approach of historian Keith Windschuttle, who rejected both the numbers of those stolen from their families and the degree of violence used in the settlement of Australia. In his 2002 book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847 he accused left-wing academics of exaggerating the events of Aboriginal history in order to further their own political agenda. In particular, he argued that the extent of the “conflagration of oppression and conflict” which sought to “dispossess, degrade, and devastate the Aboriginal people” had been overstated and misrepresented and designed to “create an edifice of black victimhood and white guilt” (Windschuttle, Fabrication 1). Manne responded to Windschuttle’s allegations in Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, arguing that Windschuttle arguments were “unpersuasive and unsupported either by independent research or even familiarity with the relevant secondary historical literature” (7) and that the book added nothing to the debates. Other academics like Stephen Muecke, Marcia Langton and Heather Goodall expressed concerns about Windschuttle’s work, and in 2003 historians Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark published The History Wars, which described the implications of the politicisation of history on the study of the past. At the same time, historian Bain Attwood in Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History argued that the contestation over history was eroding the “integrity of intellectual life in Australia” (2). Fractures also broke out between writers and historians about who was best placed to write history. The Australian book reviewer Stella Clarke wrote that the History Wars were no longer constructive discussions, and she suggested that historical novelists could colonise the territory traditionally dominated by professional historians. Inga Clendinnen wasn’t so sure. She wrote in a 2006 Quarterly Essay entitled “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?” that, while novelists could get inside events through a process of “applied empathy,” imagination could in fact obstruct the truth of reality (20). Discussion The History Wars saw academics engage publicly to exhibit a set of competing ideas about Australia’s identity in the nation’s media and associated cultural sites, and while the debates initially prompted interest they eventually came to be described as violent and unproductive public conversations about historical details and ideological positions. Indeed, just as the museum curator could no longer authoritatively prescribe the cultural meaning of artefacts, so the History Wars showed that public intellectuals could not adjudicate the identity of the nation nor prescribe the nature of its conduct. For left-wing public intellectuals and commentators, the History Wars came to signify the further marginalisation of progressive politics in the face of the dominant, conservative, and increasingly populist constituency. Fundamentally, the battles over the past reinforced fears that Australia’s public culture was becoming less diverse, less open, and less able to protect traditional civil rights, democratic freedoms, and social values. Importantly for intellectuals like Robert Manne, there was a sense that Australian society was less able or willing to reflect upon the moral legitimacy of its past actions as a part of the process of considering its contemporary identity. In contrast right-wing intellectuals and commentators argued that the History Wars showed how public debate under a conservative government had been liberated from political correctness and had become more vibrant. This was the position of Australian columnist Janet Albrechtsen who argued that rather than a decline in public debate there had been, in fact, “vigorous debate of issues that were once banished from the national conversation” (91). She went on to insist that left-wing commentators’ concerns about public debate were simply a mask for their discomfort at having their views and ideas challenged. There is no doubt that the History Wars, while media-orchestrated debates that circulated a set of ideological positions designed to primarily attract audiences and construct particular views of Australia, also raised public awareness of the complex issues associated with Australia’s Indigenous past. Indeed, the Wars ended what W.E.H Stanner had called the “great silence” on Indigenous issues and paved the way for Kevin Rudd’s apology to Indigenous people for their “profound grief, suffering and loss”. The Wars prompted conversations across the nation about what it means to be Australian and exposed the way history is deeply implicated in power surely a goal of both intellectual debate and curated exhibitions. ConclusionThis paper has argued that the public intellectual can operate like a curator in his or her efforts to preserve particular ideas, interpretations, and narratives of public culture. The analysis of the History Wars debates, however, showed that intellectuals—just like curators —are no longer authorities and adjudicators of the nation’s character, identity, and future but cultural intermediaries whose function is not just the performance or exhibition of selected ideas, objects, and narratives but also the engagement and translation of other voices across different contexts in the ongoing negotiation of what constitutes cultural significance. ReferencesAlbrechtsen, Janet. “The History Wars.” The Sydney Papers (Winter/Spring 2003): 84–92. Attwood, Bain. Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005.Bauman, Zygmunt. Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post Modernity and Intellectuals. Cambridge, CAMBS: Polity, 1987. Barrett, Jennifer. Museums and the Public Sphere. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2010. Bloom, Allan. Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.Bourdieu. P. Distinctions: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984. Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Commonwealth of Australia. 1997.Carter, David. Introduction. The Ideas Market: An Alternative Take on Australia’s Intellectual Life. Ed. David Carter. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2004. 1–11.Clendinnen, Inga. True Stories. Sydney: ABC Books, 1999.Clendinnen, Inga. “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?” Quarterly Essay 23 (2006): 1–82. Foucault, Michel, and Giles Deleuze. Intellectuals and Power Language, Counter Memory and Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. and trans. David Bouchard. New York: Cornell UP, 1977. Gratton, Michelle. “Howard Claims Victory in National Culture Wars.” The Age 26 Jan. 2006. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/pm-claims-victory-in-culture-wars/2006/01/25/1138066861163.html›.Head, Brian. “Introduction: Intellectuals in Australian Society.” Intellectual Movements and Australian Society. Eds. Brian Head and James Waller. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1988. 1–44.Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, and Marc Silberman. “Critical Theory, Public Sphere and Culture: Jürgen Habermas and His Critics.” New German Critique 16 (Winter 1979): 89–118.Howard, John. “A Sense of Balance: The Australian Achievement in 2006.” National Press Club. Great Parliament House, Canberra, ACT. 25 Jan. 2006. ‹http://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/browse.php?did=22110›.Howard, John. “Standard Bearer in Liberal Culture.” Address on the 50th Anniversary of Quadrant, Sydney, 3 Oct. 2006. The Australian 4 Oct. 2006. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/john-howard-standard-bearer-in-liberal-culture/story-e6frg6zo-1111112306534›.Jacoby, Russell. The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe. New York: The Noonday Press, 1987.Keating, Paul. “Keating’s History Wars.” Sydney Morning Herald 5 Sep. 2003. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/05/1062549021882.html›.Macdonald, S. “Expanding Museum Studies: An Introduction.” Ed. S. Macdonald. A Companion to Museum Studies. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. 1–12. Macintyre, Stuart, and Anna Clarke. The History Wars. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2003. ———. “The History Wars.” The Sydney Papers (Winter/Spring 2003): 77–83.———. “Who Plays Stalin in Our History Wars? Sydney Morning Herald 17 Sep. 2003. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/16/1063625030438.html›.Manne, Robert. “In Denial: The Stolen Generation and the Right.” Quarterly Essay 1 (2001).———. WhiteWash: On Keith Windshuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Melbourne. Black Ink, 2003.Mark, David. “PM Calls for End to the History Wars.” ABC News 28 Aug. 2009.McGuigan, Jim. “The Cultural Public Sphere.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 8.4 (2005): 427–43.Mouffe, Chantal, ed. Gramsci and Marxist Theory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979. Melleuish, Gregory. The Power of Ideas: Essays on Australian Politics and History. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009.Rudd, Kevin. “Full Transcript of PM’s Apology Speech.” The Australian 13 Feb. 2008. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/full-transcript-of-pms-speech/story-e6frg6nf-1111115543192›.Said, Edward. “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals.” ABC Alfred Deakin Lectures, Melbourne Town Hall, 19 May 2001. Schaffer, Kay. “Manne’s Generation: White Nation Responses to the Stolen Generation Report.” Australian Humanities Review (June 2001). 5 June 2015 ‹http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-June-2001/schaffer.html›. Shanahan, Dennis. “Howard Rallies the Right in Cultural War Assault.” The Australian 4 Oct. 2006. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/howard-rallies-right-in-culture-war-assault/story-e6frg6nf-1111112308221›.Wark, Mackenzie. “Lip Service.” The Ideas Market: An Alternative Take on Australia’s Intellectual Life. Ed. David Carter. Carlton, VIC: Melbourne UP, 2004. 259–69.White, Richard. Inventing Australia Images and Identity 1688–1980. Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1981. Windschuttle, Keith. The Fabrication of Australian History, Volume One: Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847. Sydney: McCleay, 2002. ———. “Why There Was No Stolen Generation (Part One).” Quadrant Online (Jan–Feb 2010). 6 Aug. 2015 ‹https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2010/01-02/why-there-were-no-stolen-generations/›.

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires. — William Arthur WardIntroductionThe first documented use of the term Mentor can be traced back to the 8th century BC poem by Homer entitled Odyssey (Hay, Gerber and Minichiello). Although this original representation of Mentor is contested in the literature (Colley), historically the term mentor has evolved to imply a wise and trusted other who advises, teaches, protects and supports someone younger who is inexperienced and not so knowledgeable with the ways of the world. The mentor within a 21st century construct still aligns to this historical portrayal, however the evolution of society, the influence of technology, the growth of entrepreneurship, and a greater understanding of the impact of our interactions with others has forced us to consider mentoring in contemporary ways. As such, popular culture, through books, film and images, provide many impressions of the mentor and what it means to mentor in both historical and contemporary circumstances. Similarly, popular culture provides us with a variety of impressions of the teacher. Throughout old and new history, teaching is considered to be a honourable profession, one that is complex and involves specific skills and knowledge to be effective (Marsh). Society has high expectations of teachers as they are entrusted with shaping the future generation (Parkay). Although the levels of respect and trust of teachers changes within different cultural circumstances, society allows teachers to be one of the most influential figures in a child’s life. Popular film often picks up on this theme and portrays teachers as inspirational figures, pillars of society and those that can have a major influence over the development of the student’s in their care. Within the brief story that a film provides, teachers are more often than not, positioned as a ‘mentor type’ figure to the students entrusted in their care, who guides and supports them to become who they want to be. This paper explores the constructs of the mentor and mentorship through a popular culture lens. Culture is broadly described as the “bricks and mortar of our most commonplace understandings” (Willis 185) and our understandings are shaped by what we see, hear and do. The paper is framed by and seeks to answer the following question: To what extent is the teacher as mentor portrayed in popular film a realistic image? Accordingly this paper will examine the rise of the teacher as mentor and determine what images are portrayed through the medium of film. In order to answer the question, the paper will briefly examine current literature for the characteristics and roles of mentors and teachers. The paper will then delve into the way that teachers are portrayed in film and will be followed by an examination of a selection of films that portray teachers as mentors. A comparison will be made between the characteristics of mentors and the characteristics that the movie teachers display. Analysis through the use of reader-response theory will provide insight into the extent of the reality of the teacher as mentor that are portrayed. Mentors and Teachers: A Review of Selected Literature Mentoring consists of a series of interactions that can be of a social, intellectual or emotional nature (Lentz and Allen). Mentoring can be described as a helping relationship whereby two or more people work together in order to achieve personal and professional goals (Johnson and Ridley). Effective mentoring is also known to be mutually beneficial to all participants (Ambrosetti, Knight and Dekkers). When scanning the literature there are a number of common descriptors that are used consistently to situate the interactions a mentor undertakes: supporter, guide, advisor, teacher, protector and counselor (Sundli; Hall et al.). Such descriptors indicate that a mentor performs a series of roles that change according to the needs of those being mentored (Ambrosetti and Dekkers). If the mentor has a series of roles to perform, then it is logical that the mentee also will also have a number of roles to play, however these are lnot well documented in the literature. The roles that both mentors and mentees play during a relationship can be identified and underpinned through the three dimensions of mentoring: the relationship itself, the developmental needs of the participants and the integration of the context in which the mentoring is situated (Ambrosetti, Knight and Dekkers). The interactions that a mentor engages in with a mentee span over a number of dimensions and are often reactive in nature. The three dimensions of mentoring can assist in describing a mentor and the roles they play. The relational dimension includes such roles as supporter, protector, friend and counselor. The roles of guide, teacher/trainer, collaborator, facilitator and reflector can be classified as developmental whereas being a role model can be both a developmental role and contextual role (230). There are a number of characteristics that are common to a mentor. Johnson and Ridley summarize them to include the following traits: exuding warmth, listening actively, showing unconditional regard, tolerating idealization, embracing humor, not expecting perfection, being trustworthy, having interpersonal competence, respecting another’s values and not being jealous of the mentee (43-62). The above list of traits are personal and often linked to personality, thus can be connected explicitly to the relational dimension of mentoring. The possession (or non-possession) of such traits can impact on the interactions that occur within mentorship. Accordingly it can be assumed that the characteristics, in conjunction with the roles that mentors play, that not everyone is suited to the role of mentor. Most people have experienced schooling at some stage in their life and is therefore familiar with the role of a teacher. Teaching is one most well known professions and can be described as a “creative act in which teachers continually shape and reshape lessons, events and the experiences of their students”(Parkay 45). The role of a teacher is to teach both knowledge and skills to their learners in order to prepare them as citizens for the future. More specifically, the role of the teacher is to design and deliver learning experiences that cater for and challenge the learners, that develop skills and knowledge both inside and outside of the classroom, and help them become confident, creative and responsible citizens. Despite this important role, the image of teachers is split between two types: one that is bitter, spiteful and egocentric, and the other being caring, accepting and reflective (Connell). We remember teachers according to such categories. The types of characteristics that teachers hold are extensive, however the following encompasses those that are key within the literature. Teachers generally have compassion, empathy and a caring nature. They can be flexible, creative, personable, humorous, positive, knowledgeable, motivational and dependable. Teachers are often well organised people, fair minded and resourceful (Howell). When examining the characteristics of teachers and the traits of mentors, similarities can be seen indicating that a particular type of person may be more suited to being a teacher and/or mentor. Teachers as Mentors in Film Teachers seem to be a popular subject of feature films. Films such as Goodbye Mr Chips (1939), Blackboard Jungle (1955) and To Sir with Love (1967) provide us with insight into the way teachers are portrayed in society and the role they play. Film however, has the specific ability to shape the cultural understanding we develop and allows us to make comparisons to our own experiences and those that are played out in fictional circumstances (Delamarter). While there are some films that provide a negative portrayal of teachers, generally they provide a view that teachers are positive influences on the students in their care.A search of the World Wide Web about the teacher as mentor brings up a treasure trove of film titles that span from the 1930s to the present day. Despite such a choice of titles, the following films have been selected to examine in this paper: Dead Poets Society (1989), Dangerous Minds (1995), Freedom Writers (2007) and the Harry Potter series of films (2001-2011). Selection of these films was based on the following two criteria: 1) they occurred within in a school setting and 2) are embedded within a contemporary theme of struggle where rebellion and/or other teenage angst are highlighted. Reader-response theory will underpin the analysis of the teachers in each of the films selected, so that an answer to the earlier posed question can be illuminated. Broadly speaking, reader-response theory is concerned with how readers, or in this case viewers, “make meaning from their experience with the text” (Beach 1). There are many perspectives on reader-response theory and how one might focus upon when responding to a text. In this instance the author will highlight the transaction that occurs between the reader, the text and the context. The transactions will include the social, cultural, experiential, psychological and textual viewpoints (Beach 8). Firstly, each film will be briefly described. This will be followed by an analysis of the teachers portrayed in the films. Dead Poets Society (1989) is set at a conservative secondary boys academy in the late 1950s and focuses on a group of students completing their senior year. Mr Keating is a new English teacher who uses unconventional teaching methods in the classroom. He inspires his students to ‘seize the day’ and ‘make your lives extraordinary’ and does this through the teaching of poetry. He encourages them to stand on desks during his lessons and to throw out tradition. It is Keating’s messages to his students to question what they believe that permeates the film and inspires his students to pursue what they want to do and become. The film Dangerous Minds (1995) is set in a low socio-economic area, where un-privilege and protecting yourself is a way of life. The teacher in this film is new and young, but is an ex US Marine. The class the film centres on is a difficult one to teach. This teacher uses unorthodox methods to gain the attention and trust of her students. The film makes a point to show us that she makes particular effort to relate the curriculum to the students’ interests in order to engage them in learning. Emphasis is also on the fact that she takes an interest in the students and many become her ‘personal projects’ and helping them to realize who they can become. Freedom Writers (2007) is set in the years directly following the Los Angeles riots of 1992 whereby issues of racism, segregation and inequality along with the changing view of the world is the focus. The students in the classrooms of this film are from diverse backgrounds and un-trusting of the education system. Their teacher is new and young and her first attempts to earn their trust fail until she begins to get to know the students and make links between what is being taught to their own lives. She inspires her class to learn tolerance, apply themselves and pursue further education. In the Harry Potter (2001-2011) series of films, there are several teachers who make an impact upon the young wizards. Although set in a fantasy world, the audience is treated to both inspirational teachers looking to nurture, protect and develop their charges, and teachers who are painted as egocentric and suspicious. Inspirational teachers include Dumbledore and McGonagall who offer subtle life lessons, specific skills and knowledge and protect the young wizards from danger. Egocentric and somewhat suspicious teachers include Snape and Quirrell who look to thwart the wizard’s time at school, however they too offer subtle life lessons to their students. The theme of good versus evil is paramount throughout the film series and the teachers are aligned with this theme.Teachers as Mentors – An AnalysisAlthough only a brief description of each film has been offered, the teachers as mentors to their students is the focus. Mr Keating (Dead Poets Society) and LouAnne Johnson (Dangerous Minds) are both described as unorthodox as they each use teaching methods that are frowned upon by others. However their purposeful and different teaching methods draw their students into their lessons so that life learning can occur. In each film, the unorthodox teaching touches the students in ways unknown to them before and in both cases the students demonstrate intellectual and personal growth. The unorthodox methods provide an avenue for a different relationship that is far from the traditional. In some scenes friendship is hinted at where guiding and supporting the students towards their hopes and dreams is highlighted. Aspects of mentoring can be seen through relational, developmental and contextual domains as the students are supported, guided and provided explicit role modeling. The young teacher in Freedom Writers, Erin Gruwell, uses a teaching approach that includes taking time to get to know her students. This approach, like Keating and Johnson, provides the opportunity to tweak the curriculum to the interests of the students and thus engage them in academic learning. They teach skills and knowledge in ways which relate to the students’ lives and interests. They guide, support the students towards the unfamiliar and facilitate opportunities for success. They help them to set goals and make them realise that they have a future and can be successful in their lives. The transformations that occur due to the teaching approaches used by the teachers cause their students admire and want to be like them. In Harry Potter, teachers Dumbledore and McGonagall are wise in years and life experience. They offer wisdom, protection and guidance to the young wizards throughout the series. These teachers, like Keating, Johnson and Gruwell, are role models in that they represent what life can be like and how best to achieve that life. Snape and Quirell also take an interest in their students, but represent an alternative view of life and learning. The difference between the four Harry Potter teachers can be drilled down to the traits of effective teachers. Two of which emulate the traits and two whom do not readily display any of the traits. Dumbledore and McGonagall can be considered as teacher mentors whereas Snape and Quirell cannot. In each film the student can be seen as central to the teacher as mentor and this in turn influences the way in which they behave. The teachers in these films pass on life lessons through their teaching. Throughout the films the teachers are guiding, supporting, befriending, protecting and training their charges. Interactions that occur between the teachers and the students are followed by a reflective phase by the teachers, whereby solutions to problems are sought or self-realisation occurs. In many instances the films show the teacher learning from the student and thus learning their own life lessons through reflection. From a social and cultural perspective, what is portrayed within the storylines are often close to the reality of what is expected from teachers. In many instances these lead towards a stereotyping of who teachers are and how they behave. However, from an experiential point of view, our expectations of the actions that teachers undertake do not usually take such form. In reality, teachers are busy people with a complex job to do (Connell) and often do not have time to take personal interest in all of their students individually. The teachers within the films chosen seem to have one class to prepare for, whereas in reality, a school teacher will have many classes to consider. Psychologically, some teachers and the style they embrace appeal to a particular a type of student or group of students. In the case of Dead Poets Society, Dangerous Minds and Freedom Writers, the storyline painted the students as those needing a particular type of teacher, someone who would save them from their circumstance and visa versa. The textual perspective was well highlighted by the teachers in the Harry Potter films as the viewer expects to see teachers with rather unusual but interesting teaching styles. However the text (within all films) included insight into mentor characteristics such as warmth, humour, tolerance, respect and unconditional regards. Generally, the films examined highlight two different types of teachers, challenging the categories written about by Connell. The first type of teacher highlighted was one who was seen as being more contemporary. One who is individual, unorthodox, and maybe a little rebellious; this teacher highlights that you need to be ‘different’ to make a difference. The second type was one who aligns to the traditional form of teacher; one who uses their knowledge, wisdom and life experience to break through to their student. Each of the films were underpinned by the relationship, the developmental needs and the context in which the narrative was played out, however the relationship between the students and the teacher was highlighted as being central to the storyline. Thus films of this nature often portray teachers as those who help their students in the emotional sense rather than the intellectual sense (Delamarter). Conclusion Several understandings about the teacher as mentor have been brought to light through the examination of the teacher as mentor in film. Firstly, in revisiting the mentoring definitions offered within this paper, it can be said that the teachers highlighted in the discussed films were mentoring their students in a way unique to the relationship developed between teacher and student. In each instance the teacher worked with their students to identify teaching approaches that would be successful in the context in which they were situated. Each film demonstrated that the teachers were committed to creating a relationship that met the developmental needs of their students. Interestingly, it was observed that the relationships were mutually beneficial in that the teachers grew along with the students with many coming to realisations about themselves through reflection and self thought. Secondly, the teachers within the films were portrayed as playing several important roles within their students’ lives. The teachers were role models inside and outside of the classroom. Each film’s storyline positioned the teacher as an influential other, whether they be portrayed as rebellious and unorthodox, evil and suspicious or inspirational and wise. The teachers in these films can be considered as mentors as they were supporting, guiding, protecting and nurturing the students to become better versions of themselves. However, the question that this article sought to answer was: to what extent is the teacher as mentor portrayed in popular film a realistic image? In looking back at the image the teacher in society and the role that they play in developing citizens of the future, it can be said the image presented has slivers of realism. In the real world, teachers must conform to society’s expectations, educational policies and codes of professionalism. Professional relationships with students do not encompass them in behave a student as a ‘personal project’, although catering to their needs is encouraged within the curriculum. It would be thought that if teachers did not encourage their students to be the best they can be, then they would not be doing their job. Many figures throughout our cultural history have been viewed as a mentor due to the role they play and how these roles align to societal beliefs and values. Thus, the portrayal of mentors and mentorship through a popular culture lens provides insight into our understanding about what mentorship is and how this may develop in the future. Both in the past and present, teachers are seen as inspirational figures and pillars of society, and are often considered a mentor by default. Films portray teachers in a variety of fashions, however there are many films that subtly position the teacher as a mentor to their students and it is this that this article has focused on. ReferencesAmbrosetti, Angelina, and John Dekkers. “The Interconnectedness of the Roles of Mentors and Mentees in Pre-Service Teacher Education Mentoring Relationships.” Australian Journal of Teacher Education 35.6 (2010): 42-55.Ambrosetti, Angelina, Bruce Allen Knight, and John Dekkers. “Maximizing the Potential of Mentoring: A Framework for Pre-Service Teacher Education.” Mentoring and Tutoring: Partnership in Learning 22.3 (2014): 224-39.Beach, Richard. A Teacher’s Response to Reader-Response Theories. Illinois: National Council Teachers of English, 1993.Blackboard Jungle. Directed by Richard Brooks. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1955.Colley, Helen. “Righting Rewritings of the Myth of Mentor: A Critical Perspective on Career Guidance Mentoring.” British Journal of Guidance & Counselling 29.2 (2001): 177-197.Connell, Raewyn. “Teachers.” Education, Change and Society. Eds. Raewyn Connell, Anthony Welch, Margaret Vickers, Dennis Foley, Nigel Bagnall, Debra Hayes, Helen Proctor, Arathi Sriprakash, and Craig Campbell. South Melbourne: Oxford, 2013. 261-275.Dangerous Minds. Directed by John N. Smith. Hollywood Pictures/Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Films/Via Rosa Productions, 1995.Dead Poets Society. Directed by Peter Weir. Touchstone Pictures/Silver Screen Partners IV, 1989.Delamater, Jeremy. “Avoiding Practice Shock: Using Teacher Movies to Realign Pre-Service Teachers’ Expectations of Teaching.” Australian Journal of Teacher Education 40.2 (2015): 1-14.Freedom Writers. Directed by Richard LaGravenese. Paramount Pictures, 2007.Goodbye Mr Chips. Directed by Sam Wood. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Denham Studios, 1939.Hall, Kendra M., Rani Jo Draper, Leigh K. Smith, and Robert V. Bullough. “More than a Place to Teach: Exploring the Perceptions of the Roles and Responsibilities of Mentor Teachers.” Mentoring and Tutoring: Partnership in Learning 16.3 (2008): 328-45.Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Directed by Chris Columbus. Heyday Films/1492 Pictures, 2001.Hay, Terence, Rod Gerber, and Victor Minichiello. “Mentorship: A Review of the Concept.” Unicorn 25.2 (1999): 84-95.Howell, Jennifer. Teaching and Learning: Building Effective Pedagogies. South Melbourne, Vic.: Oxford University Press, 2014.Lentz, Elizabeth, and Tammy D. Allen. “Reflections on Naturally Occurring Mentoring Relationships.” The Blackwell Handbook of Mentoring: A Multiple Perspectives Approach. Eds. Tammy D. Allen and Lillian T. Eby. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. 159-162.Johnson, W. Brad, and Charles R. Ridley. The Elements of Mentoring. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Marsh, Colin. Becoming a Teacher: Knowledge Skills and Issues. 5th ed. Frenchs Forest Pearson, 2010.Parkay, Forrest W. Becoming a Teacher. 9th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.Sundli, Liv. “Mentoring: A New Mantra for Education?” Teaching and Teacher Education 23 (2007): 201-14.To Sir with Love. Directed by James Clavell. Columbia British Productions, 1967.Willis, Paul. “Shop-Floor Culture, Masculinity and the Wage Form.” Working Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory. Eds. John Clarke, Chas Critcher, and Richard Johnson. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2007. 185-200.

According to Oscar Wilde, the problem with socialism was that it took up too many evenings. Wilde’s aphorism alludes to a major issue that bedevils all attempts to influence the public sphere: the fact that public activities encroach unduly on citizens’ valuable time. In the 21st century, the dilemma of how to deal with “too many evenings” is one that many citizen journalists face as they give their own time to public pursuits. This paper will look at the development of the public citizen and what it means to be a citizen journalist with reference to some of the writer’s own experiences in the field. The paper will conclude with an examination of future possibilities. While large media companies change their change their focus from traditional news values, citizen journalism can play a stronger role in public life as long as it grasps some of the opportunities that are available. There are substantial compensations available to citizen journalists for the problems presented by Wilde’s evenings. The quote from Wilde is borrowed from Albert Hirschman’s Shifting Involvements, which among other things, is an examination of the disappointments of public action. Hirschman noted how it was a common experience for beginners who engage in public action to find that takes up more time than expected (96). As public activity encroaches not only on time devoted to private consumption but also on to the time devoted to the production of income, it can become a costly pursuit which may cause a sharp reaction against the “practice of citizenship” (Hirschman 97). Yet the more stimuli about politics people receive, the greater the likelihood is they will participate in politics and the greater the depth of their participation (Milbrath & Goel 35). People with a positive attraction to politics are more likely to receive stimuli about politics and participate more (Milbrath & Goel 36). Active citizenship, it seems, has its own feedback loops. An active citizenry is not a new idea. The concepts of citizen and citizenship emerged from the sophisticated polity established in the Greek city states about 2,500 years ago. The status of a citizen signified that the individual had the right to full membership of, and participation in, an independent political society (Batrouney & Goldlust 24). In later eras that society could be defined as a kingdom, an empire, or a nation state. The conditions for a bourgeois public sphere were created in the 13th century as capitalists in European city states created a traffic in commodities and news (Habermas 15). A true public sphere emerged in the 17th century with the rise of the English coffee houses and French salons where people had the freedom to express opinions regardless of their social status (Habermas 36). In 1848, France held the first election under universal direct suffrage (for males) and the contemporary slogan was that “universal suffrage closes the era of revolutions” (Hirschman 113). Out of this heady optimism, the late 19th century ushered in the era of the “informed citizen” as voting changed from a social and public duty to a private right – a civic obligation enforceable only by private conscience (Schudson). These concepts live on in the modern idea that the model voter is considered to be a citizen vested with the ability to understand the consequences of his or her choice (Menand 1). The internet is a new knowledge space which offers an alternative reading of the citizen. In Pierre Lévy’s vision of cyberculture, identity is no longer a function of belonging, it is “distributed and nomadic” (Ross & Nightingale 149). The Internet has diffused widely and is increasingly central to everyday life as a place where people go to get information (Dutton 10). Journalism initially prospered on an information scarcity factor however the technology of the Internet has created an information rich society (Tapsall & Varley 18). But research suggests that online discussions do not promote consensus, are short-lived with little impact and end up turning into “dialogues of the deaf” (Nguyen 148). The easy online publishing environment is a fertile ground for rumours, hoaxes and cheating games to circulate which risk turning the public sphere into a chaotic and anarchic space (Nguyen 148). The stereotypical blogger is pejoratively dismissed as “pajama-clad” (Papandrea 516) connoting a sense of disrespect for the proper transmission of ideas. Nevertheless the Internet offers powerful tools for collaboration that is opening up many everyday institutions to greater social accountability (Dutton 3). Recent research by the 2007 Digital Futures project shows 65 percent of respondents consider the Internet “to be a very important or extremely important source of information” (Cowden 76). By 2006, Roy Morgan was reporting that three million Australians were visiting online news site each month (Cowden.76). Crikey.com.au, Australia’s first online-only news outlet, has become a significant independent player in the Australia mediascape claiming over 5,000 subscribers by 2005 with three times as many non-paying “squatters” reading its daily email (Devine 50). Online Opinion has a similar number of subscribers and was receiving 750,000 page views a month by 2005 (National Forum). Both Crikey.com.au and Online Opinion have made moves towards public journalism in an attempt to provide ordinary people access to the public sphere. As professional journalists lose their connection with the public, bloggers are able to fill the public journalism niche (Simons, Content Makers 208). At their best, blogs can offer a “more broad-based, democratic involvement of citizens in the issues that matter to them” (Bruns 7). The research of University of North Carolina journalism professor Philip Meyer showed that cities and towns with public journalism-oriented newspapers led to a better educated local public (Simons, Content Makers 211). Meyer’s idea of good public journalism has six defining elements: a) the need to define a community’s sense of itself b) devotion of time to issues that demand community attention c) devotion of depth to the issues d) more attention to the middle ground e) a preference for substance over tactics and f) encouraging reciprocal understanding (Meyer 1). The objective of public journalism is to foster a greater sense of connection between the community and the media. It can mean journalists using ordinary people as sources and also ordinary people acting as journalists. Jay Rosen proposed a new model based on journalism as conversation (Simons, Content Makers 209). He believes the technology has now overtaken the public journalism movement (Simons, Content Makers 213). His own experiments at pro-am Internet open at assignment.net have had mixed results. His conclusion was that it wasn’t easy for people working voluntarily on the Internet to report on big stories together nor had they “unlocked” the secret of successful pro-am methods (Rosen). Nevertheless, the people formerly known as the audience, as Rosen called them, have seized the agenda. The barriers to entry into journalism have disappeared. Blogging has made Web publishing easy and the social networks are even more user friendly. The problem today is not getting published but finding an audience. And as the audience fragments, the issue will become finding a niche. One such niche is local political activism. The 2007 Australian federal election saw many online sites actively promoting citizen journalism. Most prominent was Youdecide2007 at Queensland University of Technology, funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) in partnership with SBS, Online Opinion and the Brisbane Institute. Site co-editor Graham Young said the site’s aim was to use citizen journalists to report on their own electorates to fill the gap left by fewer journalists on the ground, especially in less populated areas (Young). While the site’s stated aim was to provide a forum for a seat-by-seat coverage and provide “a new perspective on national politics” (Youdecide2007), the end result was significantly skewed by the fact that the professional editorial team was based in Brisbane. Youdecide2007 published 96 articles in its news archive of which 59 could be identified as having a state-based focus. Figure 1 shows 62.7% of these state-based stories were about Queensland. Figure 1: Youdecide2007 news stories identifiable by state (note: national stories are omitted from this table): State Total no. of stories %age Qld 37 62.7 NSW 8 13.6 Vic 6 10.2 WA 3 5.1 Tas 2 3.4 ACT 2 3.4 SA 1 1.6 Modern election campaigns are characterised by a complex and increasingly fragmented news environment and the new media are rapidly adding another layer of complexity to the mix (Norris et al. 11-12). The slick management of national campaigns are is counter-productive to useful citizen journalism. According to Matthew Clayfield from the citizen journalism site electionTracker.net, “there are very few open events which ordinary people could cover in a way that could be described as citizen journalism” (qtd. in Hills 2007). Similar to other systems, the Australian campaign communication empowers the political leaders and media owners at the expense of ordinary party members and citizens (Warhurst 135). However the slick modern national “on message” campaign has not totally replaced old-style local activity. Although the national campaign has superimposed upon the local one and displaced it from the focus of attention, local candidates must still communicate their party policies in the electorate (Warhurst 113). Citizen journalists are ideally placed to harness this local communication. A grassroots approach is encapsulated in the words of Dan Gillmor who said “every reporter should realise that, collectively, the readers know more than they do about what they write about” (qtd. in Quinn & Quinn-Allan 66). With this in mind, I set out my own stall in citizen journalism for the 2007 Australian federal election with two personal goals: to interview all my local federal Lower House candidates and to attend as many public election meetings as possible. As a result, I wrote 19 election articles in the two months prior to the election. This consisted of 9 news items, 6 candidate interviews and 4 reports of public meetings. All the local candidates except one agreed to be interviewed. The local Liberal candidate refused to be interviewed despite repeated requests. There was no reason offered, just a continual ignoring of requests. Liberal candidates were also noticeably absent from most candidate forums I attended. This pattern of non-communicative behaviour was observed elsewhere (Bartlett, Wilson). I tried to turn this to my advantage by turning their refusal to talk into a story itself. For those that were prepared to talk, I set the expectation that the entire interview would be on the record and would be edited and published on my blog site. As a result, all candidates asked for a list of questions in advance which I supplied. Because politicians devote considerable energy and financial resources to ensure the information they impart to citizens has an appropriate ‘spin’ on it, (Negrine 10) I reserved the right to ask follow-up questions on any of their answers that required clarification. For the interviews themselves, I followed the advice of Spradley’s principle by starting with a conscious attitude of near-total ignorance, not writing the story in advance, and attempting to be descriptive, incisive, investigative and critical (Alia 100). After I posted the results of the interview, I sent a link to each of the respondents offering them a chance to clarify or correct any inaccuracies in the interview statements. Defamation skirts the boundary between free speech and reputation (Pearson 159) and a good working knowledge of the way defamation law affects journalists (citizen or otherwise) is crucial, particularly in dealing with public figures. This was an important consideration for some of the lesser known candidates as Google searches on their names brought my articles up within the top 20 results for each of the Democrat, Green and Liberal Democratic Party candidates I interviewed. None of the public meetings I attended were covered in the mainstream media. These meetings are the type of news Jan Schaffer of University of Maryland’s J-Lab saw as an ecological niche for citizen journalists to “create opportunities for citizens to get informed and inform others about micro-news that falls under the radar of news organisations who don’t have the resources” (Schaffer in Glaser). As Mark Bahnisch points out, Brisbane had three daily newspapers and a daily state based 7.30 Report twenty years ago which contrasts with the situation now where there’s no effective state parliamentary press gallery and little coverage of local politics at all (“State of Political Blogging”). Brisbane’s situation is not unique and the gaps are there to be exploited by new players. While the high cost of market entry renders the “central square” of the public sphere inaccessible to new players (Curran 128) the ease of Web access has given the citizen journalists the chance to roam its back alleys. However even if they fill the voids left by departing news organisations, there will still be a large hole in the mediascape. No one will be doing the hardhitting investigative journalism. This gritty work requires great resources and often years of time. The final product of investigative journalism is often complicated to read, unentertaining and inconclusive (Bower in Negrine 13). Margaret Simons says that journalism is a skill that involves the ability to find things out. She says the challenge of the future will be to marry the strengths of the newsroom and the dirty work of investigative journalism with the power of the conversation of blogs (“Politics and the Internet”). One possibility is raised by the Danish project Scoop. They offer financial support to individual journalists who have good ideas for investigative journalism. Founded by the Danish Association for Investigative Journalism and funded by the Danish Foreign Ministry, Scoop supports media projects across the world with the only proviso being that a journalist has to have an agreement with an editor to publish the resulting story (ABC Media Report). But even without financial support, citizens have the ability to perform rudimentary investigative journalism. The primary tool of investigative journalism is the interview (McIlwane & Bowman 260). While an interview can be arranged by anyone with access to a telephone or e-mail, it should not be underestimated how difficult a skill interviewing is. According to American journalist John Brady, the science of journalistic interviewing aims to gain two things, trust and information (Brady in White 75). In the interviews I did with politicians during the federal election, I found that getting past the “spin” of the party line to get genuine information was the toughest part of the task. There is also a considerable amount of information in the public domain which is rarely explored by reporters (Negrine 23). Knowing how to make use of this information will become a critical success factor for citizen journalists. Corporate journalists use databases such as Lexis/Nexis and Factiva to gain background information, a facility unavailable to most citizen journalists unless they are either have access through a learning institution or are prepared to pay a premium for the information. While large corporate vendors supply highly specialised information, amateurs can play a greater role in the creation and transmission of local news. According to G. Stuart Adam, journalism contains four basic elements: reporting, judging, a public voice and the here and now (13). Citizen journalism is capable of meeting all four criteria. The likelihood is that the future of communications will belong to the centralised corporations on one hand and the unsupervised amateur on the other (Bird 36). Whether the motive to continue is payment or empowerment, the challenge for citizen journalists is to advance beyond the initial success of tactical actions towards the establishment as a serious political and media alternative (Bruns 19). Nguyen et al.’s uses and gratification research project suggests there is a still a long way to go in Australia. While they found widespread diffusion of online news, the vast majority of users (78%) were still getting their news from newspaper Websites (Nguyen et al. 13). The research corroborates Mark Bahnisch’s view that “most Australians have not heard of blogs and only a tiny minority reads them (quoted in Simons, Content Makers 219). The Australian blogosphere still waits for its defining Swiftboat incident or Rathergate to announce its arrival. But Bahnisch doesn’t necessarily believe this is a good evolutionary strategy anyway. Here it is becoming more a conversation than a platform “with its own niche and its own value” (Bahnisch, “This Is Not America”). As far as my own experiments go, the citizen journalism reports I wrote gave me no financial reward but plenty of other compensations that made the experience richly rewarding. It was important to bring otherwise neglected ideas, stories and personalities into the public domain and the reports helped me make valuable connections with public-minded members of my local community. They were also useful practice to hone interview techniques and political writing skills. Finally the exercise raised my own public profile as several of my entries were picked up or hyperlinked by other citizen journalism sites and blogs. Some day, and probably soon, a model will be worked out which will make citizen journalism a worthwhile economic endeavour. In the meantime, we rely on active citizens of the blogosphere to give their evenings freely for the betterment of the public sphere. References ABC Media Report. “Scoop.” 2008. 17 Feb. 2008 http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2008/2151204.htm#transcript>. Adam, G. Notes towards a Definition of Journalism: Understanding an Old Craft as an Art Form. St Petersburg, Fl.: Poynter Institute, 1993. Alia, V. “The Rashomon Principle: The Journalist as Ethnographer.” In V. Alia, B. Brennan, and B. Hoffmaster (eds.), Deadlines and Diversity: Journalism Ethics in a Changing World. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 1996. Bahnisch, M. “This Is Not America.” newmatilda.com 2007. 17 Feb. 2008 http://www.newmatilda.com/2007/10/04/not-america>. Bahnisch, M. “The State of Political Blogging.” Larvatus Prodeo 2007. 17 Feb. 2008 http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/09/30/the-state-of-political-blogging/>. Bartlett, A. “Leaders Debate.” The Bartlett Diaries 2007. 19 Feb. 2008 http://andrewbartlett.com/blog/?p=1767>. Batrouney, T., and J. Goldlust. Unravelling Identity: Immigrants, Identity and Citizenship in Australia. Melbourne: Common Ground, 2005. Bird, R. “News in the Global Village.” The End of the News. Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 2005. Bruns, A. “News Blogs and Citizen Journalism: New Directions for e-Journalism.” In K. Prasad (ed.), E-Journalism: New Directions in Electronic News Media. New Delhi: BR Publishing, 2008. 2 Feb. 2008 http://snurb.info/files/News%20Blogs%20and%20Citizen%20Journalism.pdf>. Cowden, G. “Online News: Patterns, Participation and Personalisation.” Australian Journalism Review 29.1 (July 2007). Curran, J. “Rethinking Media and Democracy.” In J. Curran and M. Gurevitch (eds.), Mass Media and Society. 3rd ed. London: Arnold, 2000. Devine, F. “Curse of the Blog.” Quadrant 49.3 (Mar. 2005). Dutton, W. Through the Network (of Networks) – The Fifth Estate. Oxford Internet Institute, 2007. 6 April 2007 http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/dutton/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/ 5th-estate-lecture-text.pdf>. Glaser, M. “The New Voices: Hyperlocal Citizen’s Media Sites Want You (to Write!).” Online Journalism Review 2004. 16 Feb. 2008 http://ojr.org/ojr/glaser/1098833871.php>. Habermas, J. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989 [1962]. Hills, R. “Citizen Journos Turning Inwards.” The Age 18 Nov. 2007. 17 Feb. 2008 http://www.theage.com.au/news/federal-election-2007-news/citizen-journos- turning-inwards/2007/11/17/1194767024688.html>. Hirschman, A, Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1982. Hunter, C. “The Internet and the Public Sphere: Revitalization or Decay?” Virginia Journal of Communication 12 (2000): 93-127. Killenberg, G., and R. Dardenne. “Instruction in News Reporting as Community Focused Journalism.” Journalism & Mass Communication Educator 52.1 (Spring 1997). McIlwane, S., and L. Bowman. “Interviewing Techniques.” In S. Tanner (ed.), Journalism: Investigation and Research. Sydney: Longman, 2002. Menand, L. “The Unpolitical Animal: How Political Science Understands Voters.” The New Yorker 30 Aug. 2004. 17 Feb. 2008 http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/08/30/040830crat_atlarge>. Meyer, P. Public Journalism and the Problem of Objectivity. 1995. 16 Feb. 2008 http://www.unc.edu/%7Epmeyer/ire95pj.htm>. Milbrath, L., and M. Goel. Political Participation: How and Why Do People Get Involved in Politics? Chicago: Rand McNally M, 1975. National Forum. “Annual Report 2005.” 6 April 2008 http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/documents/reports/ annual_report_to_agm_2005.pdf>. Negrine, R. The Communication of Politics. London: Sage, 1996. Nguyen, A. “Journalism in the Wake of Participatory Publishing.” Australian Journalism Review 28.1 (July 2006). Nguyen, A., E. Ferrier, M. Western, and S. McKay. “Online News in Australia: Patterns of Use and Gratification.” Australian Studies in Journalism 15 (2005). Norris, P., J. Curtice, D. Sanders, M. Scammell, and H. Setemko. On Message: Communicating the Campaign. London: Sage, 1999. Papandrea, M. “Citizen Journalism and the Reporter’s Privilege.” Minnesota Law Review 91 (2007). Pearson, M. The Journalist’s Guide to Media Law. 2nd ed. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2004. Quinn, S., and D. Quinn-Allan. “User-Generated Content and the Changing News Cycle.” Australian Journalism Review 28.1 (July 2006). Rosen, J. “Assignment Zero: Can Crowds Create Fiction, Architecture and Photography?” Wired 2007. 6 April 2008 http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2007/07/assignment_zero_all>. Ross, K., and V. Nightingale. Media Audiences: New Perspectives. Maidenhead, Berkshire: Open UP, 2003. Schaffer, J. “Citizens Media: Has It Reached a Tipping Point.” Nieman Reports 59.4 (Winter 2005). Schudson, M. Good Citizens and Bad History: Today’s Political Ideals in Historical Perspective. 1999. 17 Feb. 2008 http://www.mtsu.edu/~seig/paper_m_schudson.html>. Simons, M. The Content Makers. Melbourne: Penguin, 2007. Simons, M. “Politics and the Internet.” Keynote speech at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival, 14 Sep. 2007. Tapsall, S., and C. Varley (eds.). Journalism: Theory in Practice. South Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2001. Warhurst, J. “Campaign Communications in Australia.” In F. Fletcher (ed.), Media, Elections and Democracy, Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1991. White, S. Reporting in Australia. 2nd ed. Melbourne: MacMillan, 2005. Wilson, J. “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Electorate.” Youdecide2007 2007. 19 Feb. 2008 http://www.youdecide2007.org/content/view/283/101/>. Young, G. “Citizen Journalism.” Presentation at the Australian Blogging Conference, 28 Sep. 2007. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Barry, Derek. "Wilde’s Evenings: The Rewards of Citizen Journalism." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/09-barry.php>. APA Style Barry, D. (Apr. 2008) "Wilde’s Evenings: The Rewards of Citizen Journalism," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/09-barry.php>.

According to Oscar Wilde, the problem with socialism was that it took up too many evenings. Wilde’s aphorism alludes to a major issue that bedevils all attempts to influence the public sphere: the fact that public activities encroach unduly on citizens’ valuable time. In the 21st century, the dilemma of how to deal with “too many evenings” is one that many citizen journalists face as they give their own time to public pursuits. This paper will look at the development of the public citizen and what it means to be a citizen journalist with reference to some of the writer’s own experiences in the field. The paper will conclude with an examination of future possibilities. While large media companies change their change their focus from traditional news values, citizen journalism can play a stronger role in public life as long as it grasps some of the opportunities that are available. There are substantial compensations available to citizen journalists for the problems presented by Wilde’s evenings. The quote from Wilde is borrowed from Albert Hirschman’s Shifting Involvements, which among other things, is an examination of the disappointments of public action. Hirschman noted how it was a common experience for beginners who engage in public action to find that takes up more time than expected (96). As public activity encroaches not only on time devoted to private consumption but also on to the time devoted to the production of income, it can become a costly pursuit which may cause a sharp reaction against the “practice of citizenship” (Hirschman 97). Yet the more stimuli about politics people receive, the greater the likelihood is they will participate in politics and the greater the depth of their participation (Milbrath & Goel 35). People with a positive attraction to politics are more likely to receive stimuli about politics and participate more (Milbrath & Goel 36). Active citizenship, it seems, has its own feedback loops. An active citizenry is not a new idea. The concepts of citizen and citizenship emerged from the sophisticated polity established in the Greek city states about 2,500 years ago. The status of a citizen signified that the individual had the right to full membership of, and participation in, an independent political society (Batrouney & Goldlust 24). In later eras that society could be defined as a kingdom, an empire, or a nation state. The conditions for a bourgeois public sphere were created in the 13th century as capitalists in European city states created a traffic in commodities and news (Habermas 15). A true public sphere emerged in the 17th century with the rise of the English coffee houses and French salons where people had the freedom to express opinions regardless of their social status (Habermas 36). In 1848, France held the first election under universal direct suffrage (for males) and the contemporary slogan was that “universal suffrage closes the era of revolutions” (Hirschman 113). Out of this heady optimism, the late 19th century ushered in the era of the “informed citizen” as voting changed from a social and public duty to a private right – a civic obligation enforceable only by private conscience (Schudson). These concepts live on in the modern idea that the model voter is considered to be a citizen vested with the ability to understand the consequences of his or her choice (Menand 1). The internet is a new knowledge space which offers an alternative reading of the citizen. In Pierre Lévy’s vision of cyberculture, identity is no longer a function of belonging, it is “distributed and nomadic” (Ross & Nightingale 149). The Internet has diffused widely and is increasingly central to everyday life as a place where people go to get information (Dutton 10). Journalism initially prospered on an information scarcity factor however the technology of the Internet has created an information rich society (Tapsall & Varley 18). But research suggests that online discussions do not promote consensus, are short-lived with little impact and end up turning into “dialogues of the deaf” (Nguyen 148). The easy online publishing environment is a fertile ground for rumours, hoaxes and cheating games to circulate which risk turning the public sphere into a chaotic and anarchic space (Nguyen 148). The stereotypical blogger is pejoratively dismissed as “pajama-clad” (Papandrea 516) connoting a sense of disrespect for the proper transmission of ideas. Nevertheless the Internet offers powerful tools for collaboration that is opening up many everyday institutions to greater social accountability (Dutton 3). Recent research by the 2007 Digital Futures project shows 65 percent of respondents consider the Internet “to be a very important or extremely important source of information” (Cowden 76). By 2006, Roy Morgan was reporting that three million Australians were visiting online news site each month (Cowden.76). Crikey.com.au, Australia’s first online-only news outlet, has become a significant independent player in the Australia mediascape claiming over 5,000 subscribers by 2005 with three times as many non-paying “squatters” reading its daily email (Devine 50). Online Opinion has a similar number of subscribers and was receiving 750,000 page views a month by 2005 (National Forum). Both Crikey.com.au and Online Opinion have made moves towards public journalism in an attempt to provide ordinary people access to the public sphere. As professional journalists lose their connection with the public, bloggers are able to fill the public journalism niche (Simons, Content Makers 208). At their best, blogs can offer a “more broad-based, democratic involvement of citizens in the issues that matter to them” (Bruns 7). The research of University of North Carolina journalism professor Philip Meyer showed that cities and towns with public journalism-oriented newspapers led to a better educated local public (Simons, Content Makers 211). Meyer’s idea of good public journalism has six defining elements: a) the need to define a community’s sense of itself b) devotion of time to issues that demand community attention c) devotion of depth to the issues d) more attention to the middle ground e) a preference for substance over tactics and f) encouraging reciprocal understanding (Meyer 1). The objective of public journalism is to foster a greater sense of connection between the community and the media. It can mean journalists using ordinary people as sources and also ordinary people acting as journalists. Jay Rosen proposed a new model based on journalism as conversation (Simons, Content Makers 209). He believes the technology has now overtaken the public journalism movement (Simons, Content Makers 213). His own experiments at pro-am Internet open at assignment.net have had mixed results. His conclusion was that it wasn’t easy for people working voluntarily on the Internet to report on big stories together nor had they “unlocked” the secret of successful pro-am methods (Rosen). Nevertheless, the people formerly known as the audience, as Rosen called them, have seized the agenda. The barriers to entry into journalism have disappeared. Blogging has made Web publishing easy and the social networks are even more user friendly. The problem today is not getting published but finding an audience. And as the audience fragments, the issue will become finding a niche. One such niche is local political activism. The 2007 Australian federal election saw many online sites actively promoting citizen journalism. Most prominent was Youdecide2007 at Queensland University of Technology, funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) in partnership with SBS, Online Opinion and the Brisbane Institute. Site co-editor Graham Young said the site’s aim was to use citizen journalists to report on their own electorates to fill the gap left by fewer journalists on the ground, especially in less populated areas (Young). While the site’s stated aim was to provide a forum for a seat-by-seat coverage and provide “a new perspective on national politics” (Youdecide2007), the end result was significantly skewed by the fact that the professional editorial team was based in Brisbane. Youdecide2007 published 96 articles in its news archive of which 59 could be identified as having a state-based focus. Figure 1 shows 62.7% of these state-based stories were about Queensland. Figure 1: Youdecide2007 news stories identifiable by state (note: national stories are omitted from this table): State Total no. of stories %age Qld 37 62.7 NSW 8 13.6 Vic 6 10.2 WA 3 5.1 Tas 2 3.4 ACT 2 3.4 SA 1 1.6 Modern election campaigns are characterised by a complex and increasingly fragmented news environment and the new media are rapidly adding another layer of complexity to the mix (Norris et al. 11-12). The slick management of national campaigns are is counter-productive to useful citizen journalism. According to Matthew Clayfield from the citizen journalism site electionTracker.net, “there are very few open events which ordinary people could cover in a way that could be described as citizen journalism” (qtd. in Hills 2007). Similar to other systems, the Australian campaign communication empowers the political leaders and media owners at the expense of ordinary party members and citizens (Warhurst 135). However the slick modern national “on message” campaign has not totally replaced old-style local activity. Although the national campaign has superimposed upon the local one and displaced it from the focus of attention, local candidates must still communicate their party policies in the electorate (Warhurst 113). Citizen journalists are ideally placed to harness this local communication. A grassroots approach is encapsulated in the words of Dan Gillmor who said “every reporter should realise that, collectively, the readers know more than they do about what they write about” (qtd. in Quinn & Quinn-Allan 66). With this in mind, I set out my own stall in citizen journalism for the 2007 Australian federal election with two personal goals: to interview all my local federal Lower House candidates and to attend as many public election meetings as possible. As a result, I wrote 19 election articles in the two months prior to the election. This consisted of 9 news items, 6 candidate interviews and 4 reports of public meetings. All the local candidates except one agreed to be interviewed. The local Liberal candidate refused to be interviewed despite repeated requests. There was no reason offered, just a continual ignoring of requests. Liberal candidates were also noticeably absent from most candidate forums I attended. This pattern of non-communicative behaviour was observed elsewhere (Bartlett, Wilson). I tried to turn this to my advantage by turning their refusal to talk into a story itself. For those that were prepared to talk, I set the expectation that the entire interview would be on the record and would be edited and published on my blog site. As a result, all candidates asked for a list of questions in advance which I supplied. Because politicians devote considerable energy and financial resources to ensure the information they impart to citizens has an appropriate ‘spin’ on it, (Negrine 10) I reserved the right to ask follow-up questions on any of their answers that required clarification. For the interviews themselves, I followed the advice of Spradley’s principle by starting with a conscious attitude of near-total ignorance, not writing the story in advance, and attempting to be descriptive, incisive, investigative and critical (Alia 100). After I posted the results of the interview, I sent a link to each of the respondents offering them a chance to clarify or correct any inaccuracies in the interview statements. Defamation skirts the boundary between free speech and reputation (Pearson 159) and a good working knowledge of the way defamation law affects journalists (citizen or otherwise) is crucial, particularly in dealing with public figures. This was an important consideration for some of the lesser known candidates as Google searches on their names brought my articles up within the top 20 results for each of the Democrat, Green and Liberal Democratic Party candidates I interviewed. None of the public meetings I attended were covered in the mainstream media. These meetings are the type of news Jan Schaffer of University of Maryland’s J-Lab saw as an ecological niche for citizen journalists to “create opportunities for citizens to get informed and inform others about micro-news that falls under the radar of news organisations who don’t have the resources” (Schaffer in Glaser). As Mark Bahnisch points out, Brisbane had three daily newspapers and a daily state based 7.30 Report twenty years ago which contrasts with the situation now where there’s no effective state parliamentary press gallery and little coverage of local politics at all (“State of Political Blogging”). Brisbane’s situation is not unique and the gaps are there to be exploited by new players. While the high cost of market entry renders the “central square” of the public sphere inaccessible to new players (Curran 128) the ease of Web access has given the citizen journalists the chance to roam its back alleys. However even if they fill the voids left by departing news organisations, there will still be a large hole in the mediascape. No one will be doing the hardhitting investigative journalism. This gritty work requires great resources and often years of time. The final product of investigative journalism is often complicated to read, unentertaining and inconclusive (Bower in Negrine 13). Margaret Simons says that journalism is a skill that involves the ability to find things out. She says the challenge of the future will be to marry the strengths of the newsroom and the dirty work of investigative journalism with the power of the conversation of blogs (“Politics and the Internet”). One possibility is raised by the Danish project Scoop. They offer financial support to individual journalists who have good ideas for investigative journalism. Founded by the Danish Association for Investigative Journalism and funded by the Danish Foreign Ministry, Scoop supports media projects across the world with the only proviso being that a journalist has to have an agreement with an editor to publish the resulting story (ABC Media Report). But even without financial support, citizens have the ability to perform rudimentary investigative journalism. The primary tool of investigative journalism is the interview (McIlwane & Bowman 260). While an interview can be arranged by anyone with access to a telephone or e-mail, it should not be underestimated how difficult a skill interviewing is. According to American journalist John Brady, the science of journalistic interviewing aims to gain two things, trust and information (Brady in White 75). In the interviews I did with politicians during the federal election, I found that getting past the “spin” of the party line to get genuine information was the toughest part of the task. There is also a considerable amount of information in the public domain which is rarely explored by reporters (Negrine 23). Knowing how to make use of this information will become a critical success factor for citizen journalists. Corporate journalists use databases such as Lexis/Nexis and Factiva to gain background information, a facility unavailable to most citizen journalists unless they are either have access through a learning institution or are prepared to pay a premium for the information. While large corporate vendors supply highly specialised information, amateurs can play a greater role in the creation and transmission of local news. According to G. Stuart Adam, journalism contains four basic elements: reporting, judging, a public voice and the here and now (13). Citizen journalism is capable of meeting all four criteria. The likelihood is that the future of communications will belong to the centralised corporations on one hand and the unsupervised amateur on the other (Bird 36). Whether the motive to continue is payment or empowerment, the challenge for citizen journalists is to advance beyond the initial success of tactical actions towards the establishment as a serious political and media alternative (Bruns 19). Nguyen et al.’s uses and gratification research project suggests there is a still a long way to go in Australia. While they found widespread diffusion of online news, the vast majority of users (78%) were still getting their news from newspaper Websites (Nguyen et al. 13). The research corroborates Mark Bahnisch’s view that “most Australians have not heard of blogs and only a tiny minority reads them (quoted in Simons, Content Makers 219). The Australian blogosphere still waits for its defining Swiftboat incident or Rathergate to announce its arrival. But Bahnisch doesn’t necessarily believe this is a good evolutionary strategy anyway. Here it is becoming more a conversation than a platform “with its own niche and its own value” (Bahnisch, “This Is Not America”). As far as my own experiments go, the citizen journalism reports I wrote gave me no financial reward but plenty of other compensations that made the experience richly rewarding. It was important to bring otherwise neglected ideas, stories and personalities into the public domain and the reports helped me make valuable connections with public-minded members of my local community. They were also useful practice to hone interview techniques and political writing skills. Finally the exercise raised my own public profile as several of my entries were picked up or hyperlinked by other citizen journalism sites and blogs. Some day, and probably soon, a model will be worked out which will make citizen journalism a worthwhile economic endeavour. In the meantime, we rely on active citizens of the blogosphere to give their evenings freely for the betterment of the public sphere. References ABC Media Report. “Scoop.” 2008. 17 Feb. 2008 < http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2008/2151204.htm#transcript >. Adam, G. Notes towards a Definition of Journalism: Understanding an Old Craft as an Art Form. St Petersburg, Fl.: Poynter Institute, 1993. Alia, V. “The Rashomon Principle: The Journalist as Ethnographer.” In V. Alia, B. Brennan, and B. Hoffmaster (eds.), Deadlines and Diversity: Journalism Ethics in a Changing World. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 1996. Bahnisch, M. “This Is Not America.” newmatilda.com 2007. 17 Feb. 2008 < http://www.newmatilda.com/2007/10/04/not-america >. Bahnisch, M. “The State of Political Blogging.” Larvatus Prodeo 2007. 17 Feb. 2008 < http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/09/30/the-state-of-political-blogging/ >. Bartlett, A. “Leaders Debate.” The Bartlett Diaries 2007. 19 Feb. 2008 < http://andrewbartlett.com/blog/?p=1767 >. Batrouney, T., and J. Goldlust. Unravelling Identity: Immigrants, Identity and Citizenship in Australia. Melbourne: Common Ground, 2005. Bird, R. “News in the Global Village.” The End of the News. Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 2005. Bruns, A. “News Blogs and Citizen Journalism: New Directions for e-Journalism.” In K. Prasad (ed.), E-Journalism: New Directions in Electronic News Media. New Delhi: BR Publishing, 2008. 2 Feb. 2008 < http://snurb.info/files/News%20Blogs%20and%20Citizen%20Journalism.pdf >. Cowden, G. “Online News: Patterns, Participation and Personalisation.” Australian Journalism Review 29.1 (July 2007). Curran, J. “Rethinking Media and Democracy.” In J. Curran and M. Gurevitch (eds.), Mass Media and Society. 3rd ed. London: Arnold, 2000. Devine, F. “Curse of the Blog.” Quadrant 49.3 (Mar. 2005). Dutton, W. Through the Network (of Networks) – The Fifth Estate. Oxford Internet Institute, 2007. 6 April 2007 < http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/dutton/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/ 5th-estate-lecture-text.pdf >. Glaser, M. “The New Voices: Hyperlocal Citizen’s Media Sites Want You (to Write!).” Online Journalism Review 2004. 16 Feb. 2008 < http://ojr.org/ojr/glaser/1098833871.php >. Habermas, J. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989 [1962]. Hills, R. “Citizen Journos Turning Inwards.” The Age 18 Nov. 2007. 17 Feb. 2008 < http://www.theage.com.au/news/federal-election-2007-news/citizen-journos- turning-inwards/2007/11/17/1194767024688.html >. Hirschman, A, Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1982. Hunter, C. “The Internet and the Public Sphere: Revitalization or Decay?” Virginia Journal of Communication 12 (2000): 93-127. Killenberg, G., and R. Dardenne. “Instruction in News Reporting as Community Focused Journalism.” Journalism & Mass Communication Educator 52.1 (Spring 1997). McIlwane, S., and L. Bowman. “Interviewing Techniques.” In S. Tanner (ed.), Journalism: Investigation and Research. Sydney: Longman, 2002. Menand, L. “The Unpolitical Animal: How Political Science Understands Voters.” The New Yorker 30 Aug. 2004. 17 Feb. 2008 < http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/08/30/040830crat_atlarge >. Meyer, P. Public Journalism and the Problem of Objectivity. 1995. 16 Feb. 2008 < http://www.unc.edu/%7Epmeyer/ire95pj.htm >. Milbrath, L., and M. Goel. Political Participation: How and Why Do People Get Involved in Politics? Chicago: Rand McNally M, 1975. National Forum. “Annual Report 2005.” 6 April 2008 < http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/documents/reports/ annual_report_to_agm_2005.pdf >. Negrine, R. The Communication of Politics. London: Sage, 1996. Nguyen, A. “Journalism in the Wake of Participatory Publishing.” Australian Journalism Review 28.1 (July 2006). Nguyen, A., E. Ferrier, M. Western, and S. McKay. “Online News in Australia: Patterns of Use and Gratification.” Australian Studies in Journalism 15 (2005). Norris, P., J. Curtice, D. Sanders, M. Scammell, and H. Setemko. On Message: Communicating the Campaign. London: Sage, 1999. Papandrea, M. “Citizen Journalism and the Reporter’s Privilege.” Minnesota Law Review 91 (2007). Pearson, M. The Journalist’s Guide to Media Law. 2nd ed. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2004. Quinn, S., and D. Quinn-Allan. “User-Generated Content and the Changing News Cycle.” Australian Journalism Review 28.1 (July 2006). Rosen, J. “Assignment Zero: Can Crowds Create Fiction, Architecture and Photography?” Wired 2007. 6 April 2008 < http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2007/07/assignment_zero_all >. Ross, K., and V. Nightingale. Media Audiences: New Perspectives. Maidenhead, Berkshire: Open UP, 2003. Schaffer, J. “Citizens Media: Has It Reached a Tipping Point.” Nieman Reports 59.4 (Winter 2005). Schudson, M. Good Citizens and Bad History: Today’s Political Ideals in Historical Perspective. 1999. 17 Feb. 2008 < http://www.mtsu.edu/~seig/paper_m_schudson.html >. Simons, M. The Content Makers. Melbourne: Penguin, 2007. Simons, M. “Politics and the Internet.” Keynote speech at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival, 14 Sep. 2007. Tapsall, S., and C. Varley (eds.). Journalism: Theory in Practice. South Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2001. Warhurst, J. “Campaign Communications in Australia.” In F. Fletcher (ed.), Media, Elections and Democracy, Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1991. White, S. Reporting in Australia. 2nd ed. Melbourne: MacMillan, 2005. Wilson, J. “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Electorate.” Youdecide2007 2007. 19 Feb. 2008 < http://www.youdecide2007.org/content/view/283/101/ >. Young, G. “Citizen Journalism.” Presentation at the Australian Blogging Conference, 28 Sep. 2007.