Academic literature on the topic 'Private schools Archives Australia Management Case studies'

Purpose – The provision of school assets and associated services is essential for achieving a country's educational outcomes. Building and managing schools usually features large component of operation, multiple groups of stakeholders, relatively simple design and technical requirements and tight timeframes to be completed to meet the open date. Internationally, public-private partnerships (PPPs) were introduced as innovative delivery models to bring forward school projects. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the PPP experiences in the school sector focusing on the critical dimensions impacting on the viability of using PPPs for school development. Design/methodology/approach – Comparative case studies of two school PPP projects based in Australia and New Zealand were adopted as the main research method. Semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders were used as primary data collection method. Findings – By examining the procedural and organisational arrangements from a comparative perspective, the research finds that, for a successful school PPP, the followings are critical: sound business case development; size-adjusted and streamlined tendering process; localised private sector partner and streamlined finance; extensive stakeholder engagement; and effective governance and organisational structure and enhanced partnership. Originality/value – The findings provide practical implications for policy makers and public procuring authorities initiating school projects and private entities seeking investment opportunities. By implementing the strategies derived from this research and adjusting to their own social and economic environment, governments and industry would be at a better position to develop and manage schools using PPPs.

PurposeAn innovative technology called consciousness-based education (CBE) is being introduced in schools worldwide. The approach includes both an experiential and an intellectual component. However, research studies exploring learning in CBE are rare. The purpose of the paper is to explore how organizational learning takes place in schools, which adopt CBE in addition to their ordinary curriculum. Moreover, the ambition of the approach regarding quality is examined.Methodology/approachA multiple-case study has been carried out. Four schools using CBE have been studied: a private school in Fairfield, Iowa, USA; a governmentally funded free school in Skelmersdale, United Kingdom; an independent school in Melbourne, Australia, and a primary school in Lelystad, the Netherlands. In total, 26 in-depth interviews have been performed, mainly with teachers and students but also with principals and experts in the CBE pedagogy. In addition, three focus-group interviews with primary school pupils were conducted and observation during classes was included. The data were analyzed by the constant comparative technique from the grounded theory approach.FindingsCategories characterizing organizational learning in the CBE schools have been identified. These findings are related to theories of the learning organization, resulting in a framework depicting different components of learning.Research limitation/implicationThe study provides a framework illustrating organizational learning in schools that utilize CBE which affords an overview of the technology and can serve as a vantage point for further research. Since this is a qualitative case study, the effectiveness of the CBE approach and its impact on learning outcomes were not assessed, and the possibilities to generalize the findings are limited.Originality/valueCBE has not previously been studied from an organizational learning perspective.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review and explore the primary characteristics of the best papers, which have been selected by the Toulon-Verona Conference (TVC) Excellence in Services scientific committee for the period 2008-2016. Design/methodology/approach The study includes a review of the best papers (n = 51) selected by the TVC’s scientific committee from 2008 to 2016 and obtained through the TVC’s archives. The primary highlights of each paper include number of authors, authorship profile (i.e. lead author affiliation, gender, and geographic location), co-authors’ geographic locations, classification of the papers, research topics, varieties of research methods used, number of electronic downloads (as of June 2017), number of citations, and subject keywords. Coding sheet developed to ensure standardization, consistency and to ensure the relevant data were collected for the content analysis. Mixed methods analysis (analyze quantitative data qualitative and and vice versa) was used to provide descriptive statistics. Findings In total, 51 best papers have been selected by the TVC scientific committee and reflected 145 authors. Lead authors were from a total of 50 HEIs worldwide and one consultant (private sector). Six papers were self-authored while the 45 were multi-authored. The majority of the papers written by Italian authors (58.8 percent); followed by France, Greece, and Sweden (5.9 percent each); Australia, Portugal, Spain, and UK (4 percent each); Austria, Norway, Slovenia, and Vietnam (1.9 percent each). In total, 37 papers were classified as a research paper, 10 case studies, and 4 theoretical. Practical implications The analysis for the first time define methodological trends for the TVC’s best papers and suggest possible future research topic and methodological approach for research in the management field. Originality/value The findings are unique for the TVC conference, for the TQM’s special issue, which provide practical implications for researchers and conference organizers and contribute to the literature of analyzing published papers.

Bullying behaviour can have a negative impact on a child's physical and psychological health. Bullying in the classroom is a challenge for early-childhood educators. Preschool is the first place outside the home where children face social challenges when interacting with their classmates. Child-Friendly Class is the first step and part of the Children Friendly School (CSF) as a UNICEF program and an important Indonesian government policy to prevent the emergence of child bullying behaviour. This study aims to identify needs in the process of developing a Child-Friendly Classroom Management model to anticipate bullying behaviour. This research and development method uses an adaptation of the Rowntree model which includes three stages of the process and data collection techniques using interviews, questionnaires, and observation. The results of this study indicate that the preparation of an effective classroom management guidebook to create child-friendly classes needs to be followed up immediately. Several findings related to teachers' perceptions of classroom management, and child-friendly classes prove that child-friendly classes have not been implemented properly in PAUD institutions, with bullying behaviour still appearing in early childhood in PAUD institutions. PAUD teachers understand that it is important to implement classroom management but so far there has been no manual on how to manage effective classrooms as well as training related to the implementation of effective classroom management. The creation of child-friendly classes is believed to be able to help teachers suppress the emergence of bullying behaviour in early childhood. Keywords: Child-Friendly Classroom Management, Bullying Prevention, Early Childhood Education References: Allday, R. A., Hinkson-Lee, K., Hudson, T. M., Neilsen-Gatti, S., Kleinke, A., & Russel, C. S. (2012). Training General Educators to Increase Behavior-Specific Praise: Effects on Students with EBD. Behavioral Disorders, 37, 87–98. Alsaker, F. D., & Valkanover, S. (2012). The Bernese Program against Victimization in Kindergarten and Elementary School. New Directions for Youth Development, 2012(133), 15–28. https://doi.org/10.1002/yd.20004 Arseneault, L., Walsh, E., Trzesniewski, K., Newcombe, R., Caspi, A., & Moffitt, T. E. (2006). Bullying Victimization Uniquely Contributes to Adjustment Problems in Young Children: A Nationally Representative Cohort Study. PEDIATRICS, 118(1), 130–138. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2005-2388 Benedict, E., Horner, R. H., & Squires, J. (2007). Assessment and Implementation of Positive Behavior Support in Preschools. Topics in Early Childhood Special Education, 27, 174–192. Boz, Y. (2008). Turkish student teachers’ concerns about teaching. European Journal of Teacher Education, 31(4), 367–377. https://doi.org/10.1080/02619760802420693 Bradshaw, C. P., & Johnson, R. M. (2011). The Social Context of Bullying and Peer Victimization: An Introduction to the Special Issue. Journal of School Violence, 10(2), 107–114. https://doi.org/10.1080/15388220.2011.557145 Bradshaw, C. P., Sawyer, A. L., & O’Brennan, L. M. (2009). A Social Disorganization Perspective on Bullying-Related Attitudes and Behaviors: The Influence of School Context. American Journal of Community Psychology, 43(3–4), 204–220. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-009-9240-1 Bullock, J. R. (2002). Bullying among Children. Childhood Education, 78(3), 130–133. https://doi.org/10.1080/00094056.2002.10522721 Çobanoğlu, F., Ayvaz-Tuncel, Z., & Ordu, A. (2018). Child-friendly Schools: An Assessment of Secondary Schools. Universal Journal of Educational Research, 6(3), 466–477. https://doi.org/10.13189/ujer.2018.060313 Cothran, D. J., Kulinna, P. H., & Garrahy, D. A. (2003). “This is kind of giving a secret away...”: Students’ perspectives on effective class management. Teaching and Teacher Education, 19(4), 435–444. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0742-051X(03)00027-1 Cross, D., Monks, H., Hall, M., Shaw, T., Pintabona, Y., Erceg, E., Hamilton, G., Roberts, C., Waters, S., & Lester, L. (2011). Three‐year results of the Friendly Schools whole‐of‐school intervention on children’s bullying behaviour. British Educational Research Journal, 37(1), 105–129. https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920903420024 Cross, D., Pintabona, Y., Hall, M., Hamilton, G., & Erceg, E. (2004). Validated Guidelines for School-Based Bullying Prevention and Management. International Journal of Mental Health Promotion, 6(3), 34–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623730.2004.9721937 Cross, D., Runions, K. C., Shaw, T., Wong, J. W. Y., Campbell, M., Pearce, N., Burns, S., Lester, L., Barnes, A., & Resnicow, K. (2019). Friendly Schools Universal Bullying Prevention Intervention: Effectiveness with Secondary School Students. International Journal of Bullying Prevention, 1(1), 45–57. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42380-018-0004-z Evertson, C. M., & Weinstein, C. S. (2012). Handbook of Classroom Management: Research, Practice, and Contemporary Issues. Fox, B. H., Farrington, D. P., & Ttofi, M. M. (2012). Successful Bullying Prevention Programs: Influence of Research Design, Implementation Features, and Program Components. Research Design, 6, 10. Georgiou, S. N. (2008). Bullying and victimization at school: The role of mothers. The British Journal of Educational Psychology, 78 Pt 1, 109–125. Hammarberg, T. (1998). A School for Children with Rights. UNICEF International Child Development Centre. Hymel, S., & Swearer, S. M. (2015). Four decades of research on school bullying: An introduction. American Psychologist, 70(4), 293–299. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038928 Johansen, A., Little, S. G., & Akin-Little, A. (2011). An Examination of New Zealand Teachers’ Attributions and Perceptions of Behaviour, Classroom Management, and the Level of Formal Teacher Training Received in Behaviour Management. King, E. (2020). Implications for the child friendly schools policy within Cambodia’s cultural and primary school context. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 48(4), 375–388. https://doi.org/10.1080/1359866X.2019.1645811 Kirves, L., & Sajaniemi, N. (2012). Bullying in early educational settings. Early Child Development and Care,182(3–4), 383–400. https://doi.org/10.1080/03004430.2011.646724 MacSuga, A. S., & Simonsen, B. (2011). Increasing Teachers’ Use of Evidence-Based Classroom Management Strategies through Consultation: Overview and Case Studies. Beyond Behavior, 20, 4–12. Maida, P. (2006). Child-Friendly-School-Manual. UNICEF. Modipane, M., & Themane, M. (2014). Teachers’ social capital as a resource for curriculum development: Lessons learnt in the implementation of a Child-Friendly Schools programme. South African Journal of Education, 34(4), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.15700/201412052105 Monks, C. P., Smith, P. K., & Swettenham, J. (2005). Psychological correlates of peer victimisation in preschool: Social cognitive skills, executive function and attachment profiles. Aggressive Behavior, 31(6), 571–588. https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.20099 Olweus, D. (1994). Bullying at School: Basic Facts and Effects of a School Based Intervention Program. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 35(7), 1171–1190. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.1994.tb01229.x O’Neill, S. C., & Stephenson, J. (2011). Classroom behaviour management preparation in undergraduate primary teacher education in Australia: A web-based investigation. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 36(10). https://doi.org/10.14221/ajte.2011v36n10.3 O’Neill, S., & Stephenson, J. (2012). Does classroom management coursework influence pre-service teachers’ perceived preparedness or confidence? Teaching and Teacher Education, 28(8), 1131–1143. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2012.06.008 Osher, D., Kelly, D. L., Tolani-Brown, N., Shors, L., & Chen, C.-S. (2009). American Institutes for Research 1000 Thomas Jefferson Street , NW Washington, DC 20007-3835. 13. Perren, S., Stadelmann, S., & Von Klitzing, K. (2009). Child and family characteristics as risk factors for peer victimization in kindergarten. Swiss Journal of Educational Research, 36(1), 13–32. https://doi.org/10.24452/sjer.36.1.4806 Reinke, W. M., Lewis-Palmer, T., & Merrell, K. (2008). The Classroom Check-up: A Classwide Teacher Consultation Model for Increasing Praise and Decreasing Disruptive Behavior. School Psychology Review, 37(3), 315–332. PubMed. Repo, L., & Sajaniemi, N. (2015). Prevention of bullying in early educational settings: Pedagogical and organisational factors related to bullying. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 23(4), 461–475. https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293X.2015.1087150 Rigby, K. (2003). Consequences of Bullying in Schools. The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 48(9), 583–590. https://doi.org/10.1177/070674370304800904 Rowntree, D. (1994). Preparing Materials for Open, Distance and Flexible Learning: An Action Guide for Teachers and Trainers. Kogan Page. https://books.google.com.jm/books?id=6Tf1kH6MQZ0C Sainio, M., Veenstra, R., Huitsing, G., & Salmivalli, C. (2011). Victims and their defenders: A dyadic approach. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 35(2), 144–151. https://doi.org/10.1177/0165025410378068 Salmivalli, C. (2002). Is there an age decline in victimization by peers at school? Educational Research, 44(3), 269–277. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131880210135331 Saracho, O. (2016). Contemporary Perspectives on Research on Bullying and Victimization in Early Childhood Education. Information Age Publishing, Incorporated. https://books.google.co.id/books?id=dalCDQAAQBAJ Saracho, O. N. (2017). Bullying Prevention Strategies in Early Childhood Education. Early Childhood Education Journal, 45(4), 453–460. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-016-0793-y Sempowicz, T., & Hudson, P. (2011). Analysing Mentoring Dialogues for Developing a Preservice Teacher’s Classroom Management Practices. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 36(8). https://doi.org/10.14221/ajte.2011v36n8.4 Smith, J. D., Schneider, B. H., Smith, P. K., & Ananiadou, K. (2004). The Effectiveness of Whole-School Antibullying Programs: A Synthesis of Evaluation Research. School Psychology Review, 33, 547–560. Sourander, A., Ronning, J., Brunstein-Klomek, A., Gyllenberg, D., Kumpulainen, K., Niemelä, S., Helenius, H., Sillanmäki, L., Ristkari, T., Tamminen, T., Moilanen, I., Piha, J., & Almqvist, F. (2009). Childhood Bullying Behavior and Later Psychiatric Hospital and Psychopharmacologic Treatment. ARCH GEN PSYCHIATRY, 66(9), 9. Tauber, R. T. (2007). Classroom Management: Sound Theory and Effective Practice. Praeger Publishers. https://books.google.la/books?id=XiQFyR41kysC Ttofi, M. M., & Farrington, D. P. (2011). Effectiveness of school-based programs to reduce bullying: A systematic and meta-analytic review. Journal of Experimental Criminology, 7(1), 27–56. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-010-9109-1 Ttofi, M. M., & Farrington, D. P. (2012). Bullying prevention programs: The importance of peer intervention, disciplinary methods and age variations. Journal of Experimental Criminology, 8(4), 443–462. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-012-9161-0 Unal, Z., & Unal, A. (2012). The Impact of Years of Teaching Experience on the Classroom Management Approaches of Elementary School Teachers. International Journal of Instruction, 5, 41–60. UNICEF. (2007). Implementation Handbook for The Convention on The Rights of The Child (3th Edition). UNICEF. Vaillancourt, T., McDougall, P., Hymel, S., Krygsman, A., Miller, J., Stiver, K., & Davis, C. (2008). Bullying: Are researchers and children/youth talking about the same thing? International Journal of Behavioral Development, 32(6), 486–495. https://doi.org/10.1177/0165025408095553 Vlachou, M., Andreou, E., Botsoglou, K., & Didaskalou, E. (2011). Bully/Victim Problems Among Preschool Children: A Review of Current Research Evidence. Educational Psychology Review, 23(3), 329–358. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-011-9153-z Vlachou, M., Botsoglou, K., & Andreou, E. (2014). Bullying/Victimization in Preschool Children. https://doi.org/10.13140/2.1.5086.1764 Vreeman, R. C., & Carroll, A. E. (2007). A systematic review of school-based interventions to prevent bullying. Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 161 1, 78–88. Witvliet, M., Olthof, T., Hoeksma, J. B., Goossens, F. A., Smits, M. S. I., & Koot, H. M. (2010). 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IntroductionThis essay considers three design projects as microprotests. Reflecting on the ways design practice can generate spaces, sites and methods of protest, we use the concept of microprotest to consider how we, as designers ourselves, can protest by scaling down, focussing, slowing down and paying attention to the edges of our practice. Design microprotest is a form of design activism that is always collaborative, takes place within a community, and involves careful translation of a political conversation. While microprotest can manifest in any design discipline, in this essay we focus on visual communication design. In particular we consider the deep, reflexive practice of listening as the foundation of microprotests in visual communication design.While small in scale and fleeting in duration, these projects express rich and deep political engagements through conversations that create and maintain safe spaces. While many design theorists (Julier; Fuad-Luke; Clarke; Irwin et al.) have done important work to contextualise activist design as a broad movement with overlapping branches (social design, community design, eco-design, participatory design, critical design, and transition design etc.), the scope of our study takes ‘micro’ as a starting point. We focus on the kind of activism that takes shape in moments of careful design; these are moments when designers move politically, rather than necessarily within political movements. These microprotests respond to community needs through design more than they articulate a broad activist design movement. As such, the impacts of these microprotests often go unnoticed outside of the communities within which they take place. We propose, and test in this essay, a mode of analysis for design microprotests that takes design activism as a starting point but pays more attention to community and translation than designers and their global reach.In his analysis of design activism, Julier proposes “four possible conceptual tactics for the activist designer that are also to be found in particular qualities in the mainstream design culture and economy” (Julier, Introduction 149). We use two of these tactics to begin exploring a selection of attributes common to design microprotests: temporality – which describes the way that speed, slowness, progress and incompletion are dealt with; and territorialisation – which describes the scale at which responsibility and impact is conceived (227). In each of three projects to which we apply these tactics, one of us had a role as a visual communicator. As such, the research is framed by the knowledge creating paradigm described by Jonas as “research through design”.We also draw on other conceptualisations of design activism, and the rich design literature that has emerged in recent times to challenge the colonial legacies of design studies (Schultz; Tristan et al.; Escobar). Some analyses of design activism already focus on the micro or the minor. For example, in their design of social change within organisations as an experimental and iterative process, Lensjkold, Olander and Hasse refer to Deleuze and Guattari’s minoritarian: “minor design activism is ‘a position in co-design engagements that strives to continuously maintain experimentation” (67). Like minor activism, design microprotests are linked to the continuous mobilisation of actors and networks in processes of collective experimentation. However microprotests do not necessarily focus on organisational change. Rather, they create new (and often tiny) spaces of protest within which new voices can be heard and different kinds of listening can be done.In the first of our three cases, we discuss a representation of transdisciplinary listening. This piece of visual communication is a design microprotest in itself. This section helps to frame what we mean by a safe space by paying attention to the listening mode of communication. In the next sections we explore temporality and territorialisation through the design microprotests Just Spaces which documents the collective imagining of safe places for LBPQ (Lesbian, Bisexual, Pansexual, and Queer) women and non-binary identities through a series of graphic objects and Conversation Piece, a book written, designed and published over three days as a proposition for a collective future. A Representation of Transdisciplinary ListeningThe design artefact we present in this section is a representation of listening and can be understood as a microprotest emerging from a collective experiment that materialises firstly as a visual document asking questions of the visual communication discipline and its role in a research collaboration and also as a mirror for the interdisciplinary team to reflexively develop transdisciplinary perspectives on the risks associated with the release of environmental flows in the upper reaches of Hawkesbury Nepean River in NSW, Australia. This research project was funded through a Challenge Grant Scheme to encourage transdisciplinarity within the University. The project team worked with the Hawkesbury Nepean Catchment Management Authority in response to the question: What are the risks to maximising the benefits expected from increased environmental flows? Listening and visual communication design practice are inescapably linked. Renown American graphic designer and activist Sheila de Bretteville describes a consciousness and a commitment to listening as an openness, rather than antagonism and argument. Fiumara describes listening as nascent or an emerging skill and points to listening as the antithesis of the Western culture of saying and expression.For a visual communication designer there is a very specific listening that can be described as visual hearing. This practice materialises the act of hearing through a visualisation of the information or knowledge that is shared. This act of visual hearing is a performative process tracing the actors’ perspectives. This tracing is used as content, which is then translated into a transcultural representation constituted by the designerly act of perceiving multiple perspectives. The interpretation contributes to a shared project of transdisciplinary understanding.This transrepresentation (Fig. 1) is a manifestation of a small interaction among a research team comprised of a water engineer, sustainable governance researcher, water resource management researcher, environmental economist and a designer. This visualisation is a materialisation of a structured conversation in response to the question What are the risks to maximising the benefits expected from increased environmental flows? It represents a small contribution that provides an opportunity for reflexivity and documents a moment in time in response to a significant challenge. In this translation of a conversation as a visual representation, a design microprotest is made against reduction, simplification, antagonism and argument. This may seem intangible, but as a protest through design, “it involves the development of artifacts that exist in real time and space, it is situated within everyday contexts and processes of social and economic life” (Julier 226). This representation locates conversation in a visual order that responds to particular categorisations of the political, the institutional, the socio-economic and the physical in a transdisciplinary process that focusses on multiple perspectives.Figure 1: Transrepresentation of responses by an interdisciplinary research team to the question: What are the risks to maximising the benefits expected from increased environmental flows in the Upper Hawkesbury Nepean River? (2006) Just Spaces: Translating Safe SpacesListening is the foundation of design microprotest. Just Spaces emerged out of a collaborative listening project It’s OK! An Anthology of LBPQ (Lesbian, Bisexual, Pansexual and Queer) Women’s and Non-Binary Identities’ Stories and Advice. By visually communicating the way a community practices supportive listening (both in a physical form as a book and as an online resource), It’s OK! opens conversations about how LBPQ women and non-binary identities can imagine and help facilitate safe spaces. These conversations led to thinking about the effects of breaches of safe spaces on young LBPQ women and non-binary identities. In her book The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed presents Queer Feelings as a new way of thinking about Queer bodies and the way they use and impress upon space. She makes an argument for creating and imagining new ways of creating and navigating public and private spaces. As a design microprotest, Just Spaces opens up Queer ways of navigating space through a process Ahmed describes as “the ‘non-fitting’ or discomfort .... an opening up which can be difficult and exciting” (Ahmed 154). Just Spaces is a series of workshops, translated into a graphic design object, and presented at an exhibition in the stairwell of the library at the University of Technology Sydney. It protests the requirement of navigating heteronormative environments by suggesting ‘Queer’ ways of being in and designing in space. The work offers solutions, suggestions, and new ways of doing and making by offering design methods as tools of microprotest to its participants. For instance, Just Spaces provides a framework for sensitive translation, through the introduction of a structure that helps build personas based on the game Dungeons and Dragons (a game popular among certain LGBTQIA+ communities in Sydney). Figure 2: Exhibition: Just Spaces, held at UTS Library from 5 to 27 April 2018. By focussing the design process on deep listening and rendering voices into visual translations, these workshops responded to Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s idea of the “outsider within”, articulating the way research should be navigated in vulnerable groups that have a history of being exploited as part of research. Through reciprocity and generosity, trust was generated in the design process which included a shared dinner; opening up participant-controlled safe spaces.To open up and explore ideas of discomfort and safety, two workshops were designed to provide safe and sensitive spaces for the group of seven LBPQ participants and collaborators. Design methods such as drawing, group imagining and futuring using a central prototype as a prompt drew out discussions of safe spaces. The prototype itself was a small folded house (representative of shelter) printed with a number of questions, such as:Our spaces are often unsafe. We take that as a given. But where do these breaches of safety take place? How was your safe space breached in those spaces?The workshops resulted in tangible objects, made by the participants, but these could not be made public because of privacy implications. So the next step was to use visual communication design to create sensitive and honest visual translations of the conversations. The translations trace images from the participants’ words, sketches and notes. For example, handwritten notes are transcribed and reproduced with a font chosen by the designer based on the tone of the comment and by considering how design can retain the essence of person as well as their anonymity. The translations focus on the micro: the micro breaches of safety; the interactions that take place between participants and their environment; and the everyday denigrating experiences that LBPQ women and non-binary identities go through on an ongoing basis. This translation process requires precise skills, sensitivity, care and deep knowledge of context. These skills operate at the smallest of scales through minute observation and detailed work. This micro-ness translates to the potential for truthfulness and care within the community, as it establishes a precedent through the translations for others to use and adapt for their own communities.The production of the work for exhibition also occurred on a micro level, using a Risograph, a screenprinting photocopier often found in schools, community groups and activist spaces. The machine (ME9350) used for this project is collectively owned by a co-op of Sydney creatives called Rizzeria. Each translation was printed only five times on butter paper. Butter paper is a sensitive surface but difficult to work with making the process slow and painstaking and with a lot of care.All aspects of this process and project are small: the pieced-together translations made by assembling segments of conversations; zines that can be kept in a pocket and read intimately; the group of participants; and the workshop and exhibition spaces. These small spaces of safety and their translations make possible conversations but also enable other safe spaces that move and intervene as design microprotests. Figure 3: Piecing the translations together. Figure 4: Pulling the translation off the drum; this was done every print making the process slow and requiring gentleness. This project was and is about slowing down, listening and visually translating in order to generate and imagine safe spaces. In this slowness, as Julier describes “...the activist is working in a more open-ended way that goes beyond the materialization of the design” (229). It creates methods for listening and collaboratively generating ways to navigate spaces that are fraught with micro conflict. As an act of territorialisation, it created tiny and important spaces as a design microprotest. Conversation Piece: A Fast and Slow BookConversation Piece is an experiment in collective self-publishing. It was made over three days by Frontyard, an activist space in Marrickville, NSW, involved in community “futuring”. Futuring for Frontyard is intended to empower people with tools to imagine and enact preferred futures, in contrast to what design theorist Tony Fry describes as “defuturing”, the systematic destruction of possible futures by design. Materialised as a book, Conversation Piece is also an act of collective futuring. It is a carefully designed process for producing dialogues between unlikely parties using an image archive as a starting point. Conversation Piece was designed with the book sprint format as a starting point. Founded by software designer Adam Hyde, book sprints are a method of collectively generating a book in just a few days then publishing it. Book sprints are related to the programming sprints common in agile software development or Scrum, which are often used to make FLOSS (Free and Open Source Software) manuals. Frontyard had used these techniques in a previous project to develop the Non Cash Arts Asset Platform.Conversation Piece was also modeled on two participatory books made during sprints that focussed on articulating alternative futures. Collaborative Futures was made during Transmediale in 2009, and Futurish: Thinking Out Loud about Futures (2015).The design for Conversation Piece began when Frontyard was invited to participate in the Hobiennale in 2017, a free festival emerging from the “national climate of uncertainty within the arts, influenced by changes to the structure of major arts organisations and diminishing funding opportunities.” The Hobiennale was the first Biennale held in Hobart, Tasmania, but rather than producing a standard large art survey, it focussed on artist-run spaces and initiatives, emergant practices, and marginalised voices in the arts. Frontyard is not an artist collective and does not work for commissions. Rather, the response to the invitation was based on how much energy there was in the group to contribute to Hobiennale. At Frontyard one of the ways collective and individual energy is accounted for is using spoon theory, a disability metaphor used to describe the planning that many people have to do to conserve and ration energy reserves in their daily lives (Miserandino). As outlined in the glossary of Conversation Piece, spoon theory is:A way of accounting for our emotional or physical energy and therefore our ability to participate in activities. Spoon theory can be used to collaborate with care and avoid guilt and burn out. Usually spoon theory is applied at an individual level, but it can also be used by organisations. For example, Hobiennale had enough spoons to participate in the Hobiennale so we decided to give it a go. (180)To make to book, Frontyard invited visitors to Hobiennale to participate in a series of open conversations that began with the photographic archive of the organisation over the two years of its existence. During a prototyping session, Frontyard designed nine diagrams that propositioned ways to begin conversations by combining images in different ways. Figure 5: Diagram 9. Conversation Piece: p.32-33One of the purposes of the diagrams, and the book itself, was to bring attention to the micro dynamics of conversation over time, and to create a safe space to explore the implications of these. While the production process and the book itself is micro (ten copies were printed and immediately given away), the decisions made in regards to licensing (a creative commons license is used), distribution (via the Internet Archive) and content generation (through participatory design processes) the project’s commitment to open design processes (Van Abel, Evers, Klaassen and Troxler) mean its impact is unpredictable. Counter-logical to the conventional copyright of books, open design borrows its definition - and at times its technologies and here its methods - from open source software design, to advocate the production of design objects based on fluid and shared circulation of design information. The tension between the abundance produced by an open approach to making, and the attention to the detail of relationships produced by slowing down and scaling down communication processes is made apparent in Conversation Piece:We challenge ourselves at Frontyard to keep bureaucratic processes as minimal an open as possible. We don’t have an application or acquittal process: we prefer to meet people over a cup of tea. A conversation is a way to work through questions. (7)As well as focussing on the micro dynamics of conversations, this projects protests the authority of archives. It works to dismantle the hierarchies of art and publishing through the design of an open, transparent, participatory publishing process. It offers a range of propositions about alternative economies, the agency of people working together at small scales, and the many possible futures in the collective imaginaries of people rethinking time, outcomes, results and progress.The contributors to the book are those in conversation – a complex networks of actors that are relationally configured and themselves in constant change, so as Julier explains “the object is subject to constant transformations, either literally or in its meaning. The designer is working within this instability.” (230) This is true of all design, but in this design microprotest, Frontyard works within this instability in order to redirect it. The book functions as a series of propositions about temporality and territorialisation, and focussing on micro interventions rather than radical political movements. In one section, two Frontyard residents offer a story of migration that also serves as a recipe for purslane soup, a traditional Portuguese dish (Rodriguez and Brison). Another lifts all the images of hand gestures from the Frontyard digital image archive and represents them in a photo essay. Figure 6: Talking to Rocks. Conversation Piece: p.143ConclusionThis article is an invitation to momentarily suspend the framing of design activism as a global movement in order to slow down the analysis of design protests and start paying attention to the brief moments and small spaces of protest that energise social change in design practice. We offered three examples of design microprotests, opening with a representation of transdisciplinary listening in order to frame design as a way if interpreting and listening as well as generating and producing. The two following projects we describe are collective acts of translation: small, momentary conversations designed into graphic forms that can be shared, reproduced, analysed, and remixed. Such protests have their limitations. Beyond the artefacts, the outcomes generated by design microprotests are difficult to identify. While they push and pull at the temporality and territorialisation of design, they operate at a small scale. How design microprotests connect to global networks of protest is an important question yet to be explored. The design practices of transdisciplinary listening, Queer Feelings and translations, and collaborative book sprinting, identified in these design microprotests change the thoughts and feelings of those who participate in ways that are impossible to measure in real time, and sometimes cannot be measured at all. Yet these practices are important now, as they shift the way designers design, and the way others understand what is designed. By identifying the common attributes of design microprotests, we can begin to understand the way necessary political conversations emerge in design practice, for instance about safe spaces, transdisciplinarity, and archives. Taking a research through design approach these can be understood over time, rather than just in the moment, and in specific territories that belong to community. They can be reconfigured into different conversations that change our world for the better. References Ahmed, Sara. “Queer Feelings.” The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004. 143-167.Clarke, Alison J. "'Actions Speak Louder': Victor Papanek and the Legacy of Design Activism." Design and Culture 5.2 (2013): 151-168.De Bretteville, Sheila L. Design beyond Design: Critical Reflection and the Practice of Visual Communication. Ed. Jan van Toorn. Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Akademie Editions, 1998. 115-127.Evers, L., et al. Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers, 2011.Escobar, Arturo. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke UP, 2018.Fiumara, G.C. The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening. London: Routledge, 1995.Fuad-Luke, Alastair. Design Activism: Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World. London: Routledge, 2013.Frontyard Projects. 2018. Conversation Piece. Marrickville: Frontyard Projects. Fry, Tony. A New Design Philosophy: An Introduction to Defuturing. Sydney: UNSW P, 1999.Hanna, Julian, Alkan Chipperfield, Peter von Stackelberg, Trevor Haldenby, Nik Gaffney, Maja Kuzmanovic, Tim Boykett, Tina Auer, Marta Peirano, and Istvan Szakats. Futurish: Thinking Out Loud about Futures. Linz: Times Up, 2014. Irwin, Terry, Gideon Kossoff, and Cameron Tonkinwise. "Transition Design Provocation." Design Philosophy Papers 13.1 (2015): 3-11.Julier, Guy. "From Design Culture to Design Activism." Design and Culture 5.2 (2013): 215-236.Julier, Guy. "Introduction: Material Preference and Design Activism." Design and Culture 5.2 (2013): 145-150.Jonas, W. “Exploring the Swampy Ground.” Mapping Design Research. Eds. S. Grand and W. Jonas. Basel: Birkhauser, 2012. 11-41.Kagan, S. Art and Sustainability. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011.Lenskjold, Tau Ulv, Sissel Olander, and Joachim Halse. “Minor Design Activism: Prompting Change from Within.” Design Issues 31.4 (2015): 67–78. doi:10.1162/DESI_a_00352.Max-Neef, M.A. "Foundations of Transdisciplinarity." Ecological Economics 53.53 (2005): 5-16.Miserandino, C. "The Spoon Theory." <http://www.butyoudontlooksick.com>.Nicolescu, B. "Methodology of Transdisciplinarity – Levels of Reality, Logic of the Included Middle and Complexity." Transdisciplinary Journal of Engineering and Science 1.1 (2010): 19-38.Palmer, C., J. Gothe, C. Mitchell, K. Sweetapple, S. McLaughlin, G. Hose, M. Lowe, H. Goodall, T. Green, D. Sharma, S. Fane, K. Brew, and P. Jones. “Finding Integration Pathways: Developing a Transdisciplinary (TD) Approach for the Upper Nepean Catchment.” Proceedings of the 5th Australian Stream Management Conference: Australian Rivers: Making a Difference. Thurgoona, NSW: Charles Sturt University, 2008.Rodriguez and Brison. "Purslane Soup." Conversation Piece. Eds. Frontyard Projects. Marrickville: Frontyard Projects, 2018. 34-41.Schultz, Tristan, et al. "What Is at Stake with Decolonizing Design? A Roundtable." Design and Culture 10.1 (2018): 81-101.Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. New York: ZED Books, 1998. Van Abel, Bas, et al. Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive. Bis Publishers, 2014.Wing Sue, Derald. Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation. London: John Wiley & Sons, 2010. XV-XX.

IntroductionThe walking tour is an enduring feature of cities. Fuelled by a desire to learn more about the hidden and unknown spaces of the city, the walking tour has moved beyond its historical role as tourist attraction to play a key role in the transformation of urban space through gentrification. Conversely, the walking tour has a counter-history as part of a critical urban praxis. This article reflects on historical examples, as well as our own experience of conducting Field Trip, a critical geographical walking tour through an industrial precinct in Marrickville, a suburb of Sydney that is set to undergo rapid change as a result of high-rise residential apartment construction (Gibson et al.). This precinct, known as Carrington Road, is located on the unceded land of the Cadigal and Wangal people of the Eora nation who call the area Bulanaming.Drawing on a long history of philosophical walking, many contemporary writers (Solnit; Gros; Bendiner-Viani) have described walking as a practice that can open different ways of thinking, observing and being in the world. Some have focused on the value of walking to the study of place (Hall; Philips; Heddon), and have underscored its relationship to established research methods, such as sensory ethnography (Springgay and Truman). The work of Michel de Certeau pays particular attention to the relationship between walking and the city. In particular, the concepts of tactics and strategy have been applied in a variety of ways across cultural studies, cultural geography, and urban studies (Morris). In line with de Certeau’s thinking, we view walking as an example of a tactic – a routine and often unconscious practice that can become a form of creative resistance.In this sense, walking can be a way to engage in and design the city by opposing its structures, or strategies. For example, walking in a city such as Sydney that is designed for cars requires choosing alternative paths, redirecting flows of people and traffic, and creating custom shortcuts. Choosing pedestrianism in Sydney can certainly feel like a form of resistance, and we make the argument that Field Trip – and walking tours more generally – can be a way of doing this collectively, firstly by moving in opposite directions, and secondly, at incongruent speeds to those for whom the scale and style of strategic urban development is inevitable. How such tactical walking relates to the design of cities, however, is less clear. Walking is a generally described in the literature as an individual act, while the design of cities is, at its best participatory, and always involving multiple stakeholders. This reveals a tension between the practice of walking as a détournement or appropriation of urban space, and its relationship to existing built form. Field Trip, as an example of collective walking, is one such appropriation of urban space – one designed to lead to more democratic decision making around the planning and design of cities. Given the anti-democratic, “post-political” nature of contemporary “consultation” processes, this is a seemingly huge task (Legacy et al.; Ruming). We make the argument that Field Trip – and walking tours more generally – can be a form of collective resistance to top-down urban planning.By using an open-source wiki in combination with the Internet Archive, Field Trip also seeks to collectively document and make public the local knowledge generated by walking at the frontier of gentrification. We discuss these digital choices as oppositional practice, and consider the idea of tactical media (Lovink and Garcia; Raley) in order to connect knowledge sharing with the practice of walking.This article is structured in four parts. Firstly, we provide a historical introduction to the relationship between walking tours and gentrification of global cities. Secondly, we examine the significance of walking tours in Sydney and then specifically within Marrickville. Thirdly, we discuss the Field Trip project as a citizen-led walking tour and, finally, elaborate on its role as tactical media project and offer some conclusions.The Walking Tour and Gentrification From the outset, people have been walking the city in their own ways and creating their own systems of navigation, often in spite of the plans of officialdom. The rapid expansion of cities following the Industrial Revolution led to the emergence of “imaginative geographies”, where mediated representations of different urban conditions became a stand-in for lived experience (Steinbrink 219). The urban walking tour as mediated political tactic was utilised as far back as Victorian England, for reasons including the celebration of public works like the sewer system (Garrett), and the “othering” of the working class through upper- and middle-class “slum tourism” in London’s East End (Steinbrink 220). The influence of the Situationist theory of dérive has been immense upon those interested in walking the city, and we borrow from the dérive a desire to report on the under-reported spaces of the city, and to articulate alternative voices within the city in this project. It should be noted, however, that as Field Trip was developed for general public participation, and was organised with institutional support, some aspects of the dérive – particularly its disregard for formal structure – were unable to be incorporated into the project. Our responsibility to the participants of Field Trip, moreover, required the imposition of structure and timetable upon the walk. However, our individual and collective preparation for Field Trip, as well as our collective understanding of the area to be examined, has been heavily informed by psychogeographic methods that focus on quotidian and informal urban practices (Crosby and Searle; Iveson et al).In post-war American cities, walking tours were utilised in the service of gentrification. Many tours were organised by real estate agents with the express purpose of selling devalorised inner-city real estate to urban “pioneers” for renovation, including in Boston’s South End (Tissot) and Brooklyn’s Park Slope, among others (Lees et al 25). These tours focused on a symbolic revalorisation of “slum neighbourhoods” through a focus on “high culture”, with architectural and design heritage featuring prominently. At the same time, urban socio-economic and cultural issues – poverty, homelessness, income disparity, displacement – were downplayed or overlooked. These tours contributed to a climate in which property speculation and displacement through gentrification practices were normalised. To this day, “ghetto tours” operate in minority neighbourhoods in Brooklyn, serving as a beachhead for gentrification.Elsewhere in the world, walking tours are often voyeuristic, featuring “locals” guiding well-meaning tourists through the neighbourhoods of some of the world’s most impoverished communities. Examples include the long runningKlong Toei Private Tour, through “Bangkok’s oldest and largest slum”, or the now-ceased Jakarta Hidden Tours, which took tourists to the riverbanks of Jakarta to see the city’s poorest before they were displaced by gentrification.More recently, all over the world activists have engaged in walking tours to provide their own perspective on urban change, attempting to direct the gentrifier’s gaze inward. Whilst the most confrontational of these might be the Yuppie Gazing Tour of Vancouver’s historically marginalised Downtown Eastside, other tours have highlighted the deleterious effects of gentrification in Williamsburg, San Francisco, Oakland, and Surabaya, among others. In smaller towns, walking tours have been utilised to highlight the erasure of marginalised scenes and subcultures, including underground creative spaces, migrant enclaves, alternative and queer spaces. Walking Sydney, Walking Marrickville In many cities, there are now both walking tours that intend to scaffold urban renewal, and those that resist gentrification with alternative narratives. There are also some that unwittingly do both simultaneously. Marrickville is a historically working-class and migrant suburb with sizeable populations of Greek and Vietnamese migrants (Graham and Connell), as well as a strong history of manufacturing (Castles et al.), which has been undergoing gentrification for some time, with the arts playing an often contradictory role in its transformation (Gibson and Homan). More recently, as the suburb experiences rampant, financialised property development driven by global flows of capital, property developers have organised their own self-guided walking tours, deployed to facilitate the familiarisation of potential purchasers of dwellings with local amenities and ‘character’ in precincts where redevelopment is set to occur. Mirvac, Marrickville’s most active developer, has designed its own self-guided walking tour Hit the Marrickville Pavement to “explore what’s on offer” and “chat to locals”: just 7km from the CBD, Marrickville is fast becoming one of Sydney’s most iconic suburbs – a melting pot of cuisines, creative arts and characters founded on a rich multicultural heritage.The perfect introduction, this self-guided walking tour explores Marrickville’s historical architecture at a leisurely pace, finishing up at the pub.So, strap on your walking shoes; you're in for a treat.Other walking tours in the area seek to highlight political, ecological, and architectural dimension of Marrickville. For example, Marrickville Maps: Tropical Imaginaries of Abundance provides a series of plant-led walks in the suburb; The Warren Walk is a tour organised by local Australian Labor Party MP Anthony Albanese highlighting “the influence of early settlers such as the Schwebel family on the area’s history” whilst presenting a “political snapshot” of ALP history in the area. The Australian Ugliness, in contrast, was a walking tour organised by Thomas Lee in 2016 that offered an insight into the relationships between the visual amenity of the streetscape, aesthetic judgments of an ambiguous nature, and the discursive and archival potentialities afforded by camera-equipped smartphones and photo-sharing services like Instagram. Figure 1: Thomas Lee points out canals under the street of Marrickville during The Australian Ugliness, 2016.Sydney is a city adept at erasing its past through poorly designed mega-projects like freeways and office towers, and memorialisation of lost landscapes has tended towards the literary (Berry; Mudie). Resistance to redevelopment, however, has often taken the form of spectacular public intervention, in which public knowledge sharing was a key goal. The Green Bans of the 1970s were partially spurred by redevelopment plans for places like the Rocks and Woolloomooloo (Cook; Iveson), while the remaking of Sydney around the 2000 Olympics led to anti-gentrification actions such as SquatSpace and the Tour of Beauty, an “aesthetic activist” tour of sites in the suburbs of Redfern and Waterloo threatened with “revitalisation.” Figure 2: "Tour of Beauty", Redfern-Waterloo 2016. What marks the Tour of Beauty as significant in this context is the participatory nature of knowledge production: participants in the tours were addressed by representatives of the local community – the Aboriginal Housing Company, the local Indigenous Women’s Centre, REDWatch activist group, architects, designers and more. Each speaker presented their perspective on the rapidly gentrifying suburb, demonstrating how urban space is made an remade through processes of contestation. This differentiation is particularly relevant when considering the basis for Sydney-centric walking tours. Mirvac’s self-guided tour focuses on the easy-to-see historical “high culture” of Marrickville, and encourages participants to “chat to locals” at the pub. It is a highly filtered approach that does not consider broader relations of class, race and gender that constitute Marrickville. A more intense exploration of the social fabric of the city – providing a glimpse of the hidden or unknown spaces – uncovers the layers of social, cultural, and economic history that produce urban space, and fosters a deeper engagement with questions of urban socio-spatial justice.Solnit argues that walking can allow us to encounter “new thoughts and possibilities.” To walk, she writes, is to take a “subversive detour… the scenic route through a half-abandoned landscape of ideas and experiences” (13). In this way, tactical activist walking tours aim to make visible what cannot be seen, in a way that considers the polysemic nature of place, and in doing so, they make visible the hidden relations of power that produce the contemporary city. In contrast, developer-led walking tours are singularly focussed, seeking to attract inflows of capital to neighbourhoods undergoing “renewal.” These tours encourage participants to adopt the position of urban voyeur, whilst activist-led walking tours encourage collaboration and participation in urban struggles to protect and preserve the contested spaces of the city. It is in this context that we sought to devise our own walking tour – Field Trip – to encourage active participation in issues of urban renewal.In organising this walking tour, however, we acknowledge our own entanglements within processes of gentrification. As designers, musicians, writers, academics, researchers, venue managers, artists, and activists, in organising Field Trip, we could easily be identified as “creatives”, implicated in Marrickville’s ongoing transformation. All of us have ongoing and deep-rooted connections to various Sydney subcultures – the same subcultures so routinely splashed across developer advertising material. This project was borne out of Frontyard – a community not-just-art space, and has been supported by the local Inner West Council. As such, Field Trip cannot be divorced from the highly contentious processes of redevelopment and gentrification that are always simmering in the background of discussions about Marrickville. We hope, however, that in this project we have started to highlight alternative voices in those redevelopment processes – and that this may contribute towards a “method of equality” for an ongoing democratisation of those processes (Davidson and Iveson).Field Trip: Urban Geographical Enquiry as Activism Given this context, Field Trip was designed as a public knowledge project that would connect local residents, workers, researchers, and decision-makers to share their experiences living and working in various parts of Sydney that are undergoing rapid change. The site of our project – Carrington Road, Marrickville in Sydney’s inner-west – has been earmarked for major redevelopment in coming years and is quickly becoming a flashpoint for the debates that permeate throughout the whole of Sydney: housing affordability, employment accessibility, gentrification and displacement. To date, public engagement and consultation regarding proposed development at Carrington Road has been limited. A major landholder in the area has engaged a consultancy firm to establish a community reference group (CRG) the help guide the project. The CRG arose after public outcry at an original $1.3 billion proposal to build 2,616 units in twenty towers of up to 105m in height (up to thirty-five storeys) in a predominantly low-rise residential suburb. Save Marrickville, a community group created in response to the proposal, has representatives on this reference group, and has endeavoured to make this process public. Ruming (181) has described these forms of consultation as “post-political,” stating thatin a universe of consensual decision-making among diverse interests, spaces for democratic contest and antagonistic politics are downplayed and technocratic policy development is deployed to support market and development outcomes.Given the notable deficit of spaces for democratic contest, Field Trip was devised as a way to reframe the debate outside of State- and developer-led consultation regimes that guide participants towards accepting the supposed inevitability of redevelopment. We invited a number of people affected by the proposed plans to speak during the walking tour at a location of their choosing, to discuss the work they do, the effect that redevelopment would have on their work, and their hopes and plans for the future. The walking tour was advertised publicly and the talks were recorded, edited and released as freely available podcasts. The proposed redevelopment of Carrington Road provided us with a unique opportunity to develop and operate our own walking tour. The linear street created an obvious “circuit” to the tour – up one side of the road, and down the other. We selected speakers based on pre-existing relationships, some formed during prior rounds of research (Gibson et al.). Speakers included a local Aboriginal elder, a representative from the Marrickville Historical Society, two workers (who also gave tours of their workplaces), the Lead Heritage Adviser at Sydney Water, who gave us a tour of the Carrington Road pumping station, and a representative from the Save Marrickville residents’ group. Whilst this provided a number of perspectives on the day, regrettably some groups were unrepresented, most notably the perspective of migrant groups who have a long-standing association with industrial precincts in Marrickville. It is hoped that further community input and collaboration in future iterations of Field Trip will address these issues of representation in community-led walking tours.A number of new understandings became apparent during the walking tour. For instance, the heritage-listed Carrington Road sewage pumping station, which is of “historic and aesthetic significance”, is unable to cope with the proposed level of residential development. According to Philip Bennett, Lead Heritage Adviser at Sydney Water, the best way to maintain this piece of heritage infrastructure is to keep it running. While this issue had been discussed in private meetings between Sydney Water and the developer, there is no formal mechanism to make this expert knowledge public or accessible. Similarly, through the Acknowledgement of Country for Field Trip, undertaken by Donna Ingram, Cultural Representative and a member of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council, it became clear that the local Indigenous community had not been consulted in the development proposals for Carrington Road. This information, while not necessary secret, had also not been made public. Finally, the inclusion of knowledgeable local workers whose businesses are located on Carrington Road provided an insight into the “everyday.” They talked of community and collaboration, of site-specificity, the importance of clustering within their niche industries, and their fears for of displacement should redevelopment proceed.Via a community-led, participatory walking tour like Field Trip, threads of knowledge and new information are uncovered. These help create new spatial stories and readings of the landscape, broadening the scope of possibility for democratic participation in cities. Figure 3: Donna Ingram at Field Trip 2018.Tactical Walking, Tactical Media Stories connected to walking provide an opportunity for people to read the landscape differently (Mitchell). One of the goals of Field Trip was to begin a public knowledge exchange about Carrington Road so that spatial stories could be shared, and new readings of urban development could spread beyond the confines of the self-contained tour. Once shared, this knowledge becomes a story, and once remixed into existing stories and integrated into the way we understand the neighbourhood, a collective spatial practice is generated. “Every story is a travel story – a spatial practice”, says de Certeau in “Spatial Stories”. “In reality, they organise walks” (72). As well as taking a tactical approach to walking, we took a tactical approach to the mediation of the knowledge, by recording and broadcasting the voices on the walk and feeding information to a publicly accessible wiki. The term “tactical media” is an extension of de Certeau’s concept of tactics. David Garcia and Geert Lovink applied de Certeau’s concept of tactics to the field of media activism in their manifesto of tactical media, identifying a class of producers who amplify temporary reversals in the flow of power by exploiting the spaces, channels and platforms necessary for their practices. Tactical media has been used since the late nineties to help explain a range of open-source practices that appropriate technological tools for political purposes. While pointing out the many material distinctions between different types of tactical media projects within the arts, Rita Raley describes them as “forms of critical intervention, dissent and resistance” (6). The term has also been adopted by media activists engaged in a range of practices all over the world, including the Tactical Technology Collective. For Field Trip, tactical media is a way of creating representations that help navigate neighbourhoods as well as alternative political processes that shape them. In this sense, tactical representations do not “offer the omniscient point of view we associate with Cartesian cartographic practice” (Raley 2). Rather these representations are politically subjective systems of navigation that make visible hidden information and connect people to the decisions affecting their lives. Conclusion We have shown that the walking tour can be a tourist attraction, a catalyst to the transformation of urban space through gentrification, and an activist intervention into processes of urban renewal that exclude people and alternative ways of being in the city. This article presents practice-led research through the design of Field Trip. By walking collectively, we have focused on tactical ways of opening up participation in the future of neighbourhoods, and more broadly in designing the city. 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“There is nothing more public than privacy.” (Berlant and Warner, Sex) How did it come to this? How did it happen that a one-off, two-hour event at a public swimming pool in a suburb of outer Melbourne ignited international hate mail and generated media-fanned political anguish and debate about the proper use of public spaces? In 2010, women who attend a women’s only swim session on Sunday evenings at the Dandenong Oasis public swimming pool asked the pool management and the local council for permission to celebrate the end of Ramadan at the pool during the time of their regular swim session. The request was supported by the pool managers and the council and promoted by both as an opportunity for family and friends to get together in a spirit of multicultural learning and understanding. Responding to criticisms of the event as an unreasonable claim on public facilities by one group, the Mayor of the City of Greater Dandenong, Jim Memeti, rejected claims that this event discriminates against non-Muslim residents of the suburb. But here’s the rub. The event, to be held after hours at the pool, requires all participants older than ten years of age to follow a dress code of knee-length shorts and T-shirts. This is a suburban moment that is borne of but exceeds the local. It reflects and responds to a contemporary global conundrum of great political and theoretical significance—how to negotiate and govern the relations between multiculturalism, religion, gender, sexual freedom, and democracy. Specifically this event speaks to how multicultural democracy in the public sphere negotiates the public presence and expression of different cultural and religious frameworks related to gender and sexuality. This is demanding political stuff. Situated in the messy political and theoretical terrains of the relation between public space and the public sphere, this local moment called for political judgement about how cultural differences should be allowed to manifest in and through public space, giving consideration to the potential effects of these decisions on an inclusive multicultural democracy. The local authorities in Dandenong engaged in an admirable process of democratic labour as they puzzled over how to make decisions that were responsible and equitable, in the absence of a rulebook or precedents for success. Ultimately however this mode of experimental decision-making, which will become increasingly necessary to manage such predicaments in the future, was foreclosed by unwarranted and unhelpful media outrage. "Foreclosed" here stresses the preemptive nature of the loss; a lost opportunity for trialing approaches to governing cultural diversity that may fail, but might then be modified. It was condemned in advance of either success or failure. The role of the media rather than the discomfort of the local publics has been decisive in this event.This Multicultural SuburbDandenong is approximately 30 kilometres southeast of central Melbourne. Originally home to the Bunorong People of the Kulin nation, it was settled by pastoralists by the 1800s, heavily industrialised during the twentieth century, and now combines cultural diversity with significant social disadvantage. The City of Greater Dandenong is proud of its reputation as the most culturally and linguistically diverse municipality in Australia. Its population of approximately 138,000 comprises residents from 156 different language groups. More than half (56%) of its population was born overseas, with 51% from nations where English is not the main spoken language. These include Vietnam, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, India, China, Italy, Greece, Bosnia and Afghanistan. It is also a place of significant religious diversity with residents identifying as Buddhist (15 per cent) Muslim (8 per cent), Hindu (2 per cent) and Christian (52 per cent) [CGD]. Its city logo, “Great Place, Great People” evokes its twin pride in the placemaking power of its diverse population. It is also a brazen act of civic branding to counter its reputation as a derelict and dangerous suburb. In his recent book The Bogan Delusion, David Nichols cites a "bogan" website that names Dandenong as one of Victoria’s two most bogan areas. The other was Moe. (p72). The Sunday Age newspaper had already depicted Dandenong as one of two excessively dangerous suburbs “where locals fear to tread” (Elder and Pierik). The other suburb of peril was identified as Footscray.Central Dandenong is currently the site of Australia’s largest ever state sponsored Urban Revitalisation program with a budget of more than $290 million to upgrade infrastructure, that aims to attract $1billion in private investment to provide housing and future employment.The Cover UpIn September 2010, the Victorian and Civil and Administrative Appeals Tribunal (VCAT) granted the YMCA an exemption from the Equal Opportunity Act to allow a dress code for the Ramadan event at the Oasis swimming pool that it manages. The "Y" sees the event as “an opportunity for the broader community to learn more about Ramadan and the Muslim faith, and encourages all members of Dandenong’s diverse community to participate” (YMCA Ramadan). While pool management and the municipal council refer to the event as an "opening up" of the closed swimming session, the media offer a different reading of the VCAT decision. The trope of the "the cover up" has framed most reports and commentaries (Murphy; Szego). The major focus of the commentaries has not been the event per se, but the call to dress "appropriately." Dress codes however are a cultural familiar. They exist for workplaces, schools, nightclubs, weddings, racing and sporting clubs and restaurants, to name but a few. While some of these codes or restrictions are normatively imposed rather than legally required, they are not alien to cultural life in Australia. Moreover, there are laws that prohibit people from being meagerly dressed or naked in public, including at beaches, swimming pools and so on. The dress code for this particular swimming pool event was, however, perceived to be unusual and, in a short space of time, "unusual" converted to "social threat."Responses to media polls about the dress code reveal concerns related to the symbolic dimensions of the code. The vast majority of those who opposed the Equal Opportunity exemption saw it as the thin edge of the multicultural wedge, a privatisation of public facilities, or a denial of the public’s right to choose how to dress. Tabloid newspapers reported on growing fears of Islamisation, while the more temperate opposition situated the decision as a crisis of human rights associated with tolerating illiberal cultural practices. Julie Szego reflects this view in an opinion piece in The Age newspaper:the Dandenong pool episode is neither trivial nor insignificant. It is but one example of human rights laws producing outcomes that restrict rights. It raises tough questions about how far public authorities ought to go in accommodating cultural practices that sit uneasily with mainstream Western values. (Szego)Without enquiring into the women’s request and in the absence of the women’s views about what meaning the event held for them, most media commentators and their electronically wired audiences treated the announcement as yet another alarming piece of evidence of multicultural failure and the potential Islamisation of Australia. The event raised specific concerns about the double intrusion of cultural difference and religion. While the Murdoch tabloid Herald Sun focused on the event as “a plan to force families to cover up to avoid offending Muslims at a public event” (Murphy) the liberal Age newspaper took a more circumspect approach, reporting on its small vox pop at the Dandenong pool. Some people here referred to the need to respect religions and seemed unfazed by the exemption and the event. Those who disagreed thought it was important not to enforce these (dress) practices on other people (Carey).It is, I believe, significant that several employees of the local council informed me that most of the opposition has come from the media, people outside of Dandenong and international groups who oppose the incursion of Islam into non-Islamic settings. Opposition to the event did not appear to derive from local concern or opposition.The overwhelming majority of Herald Sun comments expressed emphatic opposition to the dress code, citing it variously as unAustralian, segregationist, arrogant, intolerant and sexist. The Herald Sun polled readers (in a self-selecting and of course highly unrepresentative on-line poll) asking them to vote on whether or not they agreed with the VCAT exemption. While 5.52 per cent (512 voters) agreed with the ruling, 94.48 per cent (8,760) recorded disagreement. In addition, the local council has, for the first time in memory, received a stream of hate-mail from international anti-Islam groups. Muslim women’s groups, feminists, the Equal Opportunity Commissioner and academics have also weighed in. According to local reports, Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne, Shahram Akbarzadeh, considered the exemption was “nonsense” and would “backfire and the people who will pay for it will be the Muslim community themselves” (Haberfield). He repudiated it as an example of inclusion and tolerance, labeling it “an effort of imposing a value system (sic)” (Haberfield). He went so far as to suggest that, “If Tony Abbott wanted to participate in his swimwear he wouldn’t be allowed in. That’s wrong.” Tasneem Chopra, chairwoman of the Islamic Women’s Welfare Council and Sherene Hassan from the Islamic Council of Victoria, both expressed sensitivity to the group’s attempt to establish an inclusive event but would have preferred the dress code to be a matter of choice rather coercion (Haberfield, "Mayor Defends Dandenong Pool Cover Up Order"). Helen Szoke, the Commissioner of the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, defended the pool’s exemption from the Law that she oversees. “Matters such as this are not easy to resolve and require a balance to be achieved between competing rights and obligations. Dress codes are not uncommon: e.g., singlets, jeans, thongs etc in pubs/hotels” (in Murphy). The civil liberties organisation, Liberty Victoria, supported the ban because the event was to be held after hours (Murphy). With astonishing speed this single event not only transformed the suburban swimming pool to a theatre of extra-local disputes about who and what is entitled to make claims on public space and publically funded facilities, but also fed into charged debates about the future of multiculturalism and the vulnerability of the nation to the corrosive effects of cultural and religious difference. In this sense suburbs like Dandenong are presented as sites that not only generate fear about physical safety but whose suburban sensitivities to its culturally diverse population represent a threat to the safety of the nation. Thus the event both reflects and produces an antipathy to cultural difference and to the place where difference resides. This aversion is triggered by and mediated in this case through the figure, rather than the (corpo)reality, of the Muslim woman. In this imagining, the figure of the Muslim woman is assigned the curious symbolic role of "cultural creep." The debates around the pool event is not about the wellbeing or interests of the Muslim women themselves, nor are broader debates about the perceived, culturally-derived restrictions imposed on Muslim women living in Australia or other western countries. The figure of the Muslim woman is, I would argue, simply the ground on which the debates are held. The first debate relates to social and public space, access to which is considered fundamental to freedom and participatory democracy, and in current times is addressed in terms of promoting inclusion, preventing exclusion and finding opportunities for cross cultural encounters. The second relates not to public space per se, but to the public sphere or the “sphere of private people coming together as a public” for political deliberation (Habermas 21). The literature and discussions dealing with these two terrains have remained relatively disconnected (Low and Smith) with public space referring largely to activities and opportunities in the socio-cultural domain and the public sphere addressing issues of politics, rights and democracy. This moment in Dandenong offers some modest leeway for situating "the suburb" as an ideal site for coalescing these disparate discussions. In this regard I consider Iveson’s provocative and productive question about whether some forms of exclusions from suburban public space may actually deepen the democratic ideals of the public sphere. Exclusions may in such cases be “consistent with visions of a democratically inclusive city” (216). He makes his case in relation to a dispute about the exclusion of men exclusion from a women’s only swimming pool in the Sydney suburb of Coogee. The Dandenong case is similarly exclusive with an added sense of exclusion generated by an "inclusion with restrictions."Diversity, Difference, Public Space and the Public SphereAs a prelude to this discussion of exclusion as democracy, I return to the question that opened this article: how did it come to this? How is it that Australia has moved from its renowned celebration and pride in its multiculturalism so much in evidence at the suburban level through what Ghassan Hage calls an “unproblematic” multiculturalism (233) and what others have termed “everyday multiculturalism” (Wise and Velayutham). Local cosmopolitanisms are often evinced through the daily rituals of people enjoying the ethnic cuisines of their co-residents’ pasts, and via moments of intercultural encounter. People uneventfully rub up against and greet each other or engage in everyday acts of kindness that typify life in multicultural suburbs, generating "reservoirs of hope" for democratic and cosmopolitan cities (Thrift 147). In today’s suburbs, however, the “Imperilled Muslim women” who need protection from “dangerous Muslim men” (Razack 129) have a higher discursive profile than ethnic cuisine as the exemplar of multiculturalism. Have we moved from pleasure to hostility or was the suburban pleasure in racial difference always about a kind of “eating the other” (bell hooks 378). That is to ask whether our capacity to experience diversity positively has been based on consumption, consuming the other for our own enrichment, whereas living with difference entails a commitment not to consumption but to democracy. This democratic multicultural commitment is a form of labour rather than pleasure, and its outcome is not enrichment but transformation (although this labour can be pleasurable and transformation might be enriching). Dandenong’s prized cultural precincts, "Little India" and the "Afghan bazaar" are showcases of food, artefacts and the diversity of the suburb. They are centres of pleasurable and exotic consumption. The pool session, however, requires one to confront difference. In simple terms we can think about ethnic food, festivals and handicrafts as cultural diversity, and the Muslim woman as cultural difference.This distinction between diversity and difference is useful for thinking through the relation between multiculturalism in public space and multicultural democracy of the public sphere. According to the anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, while a neoliberal sensibility supports cultural diversity in the public space, cultural difference is seen as a major cause of social problems associated with immigrants, and has a diminishing effect on the public sphere (14). According to Eriksen, diversity is understood as aesthetic, or politically and morally neutral expressions of culture that are enriching (Hage 118) or digestible. Difference, however, refers to morally objectionable cultural practices. In short, diversity is enriching. Difference is corrosive. Eriksen argues that differences that emerge from distinct cultural ideas and practices are deemed to create conflicts with majority cultures, weaken social solidarity and lead to unacceptable violations of human rights in minority groups. The suburban swimming pool exists here at the boundary of diversity and difference, where the "presence" of diverse bodies may enrich, but their different practices deplete and damage existing culture. The imperilled Muslim woman of the suburbs carries a heavy symbolic load. She stands for major global contests at the border of difference and diversity in three significant domains, multiculturalism, religion and feminism. These three areas are positioned simultaneously in public space and of the public sphere and she embodies a specific version of each in this suburban setting. First, there a global retreat from multiculturalism evidenced in contemporary narratives that describe multiculturalism (both as official policy and unofficial sensibility) as failed and increasingly ineffective at accommodating or otherwise dealing with religious, cultural and ethnic differences (Cantle; Goodhart; Joppke; Poynting and Mason). In the UK, Europe, the US and Australia, popular media sources and political discourses speak of "parallel lives,"immigrant enclaves, ghettoes, a lack of integration, the clash of values, and illiberal cultural practices. The covered body of the Muslim woman, and more particularly the Muslim veil, are now read as visual signs of this clash of values and of the refusal to integrate. Second, religion has re-emerged in the public domain, with religious groups and individuals making particular claims on public space both on the basis of their religious identity and in accord with secular society’s respect for religious freedom. This is most evident in controversies in France, Belgium and Netherlands associated with banning niqab in public and other religious symbols in schools, and in Australia in court. In this sense the covered Muslim woman raises concerns and indignation about the rightful place of religion in the public sphere and in social space. Third, feminism is increasingly invoked as the ground from which claims about the imperilled Muslim woman are made, particularly those about protecting women from their dangerous men. The infiltration of the Muslim presence into public space is seen as a threat to the hard won gains of women’s freedom enjoyed by the majority population. This newfound feminism of the public sphere, posited by those who might otherwise disavow feminism, requires some serious consideration. This public discourse rarely addresses the discrimination, violation and lack of freedom experienced systematically on an everyday basis by women of majority cultural backgrounds in western societies (such as Australia). However, the sexism of racially and religiously different men is readily identified and decried. This represents a significant shift to a dubious feminist register of the public sphere such that: “[w]omen of foreign origin, ...more specifically Muslim women…have replaced the traditional housewife as the symbol of female subservience” (Tissot 41–42).The three issues—multiculturalism, religion and feminism—are, in the Dandenong pool context, contests about human rights, democracy and the proper use of public space. Szego’s opinion piece sees the Dandenong pool "cover up" as an example of the conundrum of how human rights for some may curtail the human rights of others and lead us into a problematic entanglement of universal "rights," with claims of difference. In her view the combination of human rights and multiculturalism in the case of the Dandenong Pool accommodates illiberal practices that put the rights of "the general public" at risk, or as she puts it, on a “slippery slope” that results in a “watering down of our human rights.” Ideas that entail women making a claim for private time in public space are ultimately not good for "us."Such ideas run counter to the West's more than 500-year struggle for individual freedom—including both freedom of religion and freedom from religion—and for gender equality. Our public authorities ought to be pushing back hardest when these values are under threat. Yet this is precisely where they've been buckling under pressure (Szego)But a different reading of the relation between public and private space, human rights, democracy and gender freedom is readily identifiable in the Dandenong event—if one looks for it. Living with difference, I have already suggested, is a problem of democracy and the public sphere and does not so easily correspond to consuming diversity, as it demands engagement with cultural difference. In what remains, I explore how multicultural democracy in the public sphere and women’s rights in public and private realms relate, firstly, to the burgeoning promise of democracy and civility that might emerge in public space through encounter and exchange. I also point out how this moment in Dandenong might be read as a singular contribution to dealing with this global problematic of living with difference; of democracy in the public sphere. Public urban space has become a focus for speculation among geographers and sociologists in particular, about the prospects for an enhanced civic appreciation of living with difference through encountering strangers. Random and repetitious encounters with people from all cultures typify contemporary urban life. It remains an open question however as to whether these encounters open up or close down possibilities for conviviality and understanding, and whether they undo or harden peoples’ fears and prejudices. There is, however, at least in some academic and urban planning circles, some hope that the "throwntogetherness" (Massey) and the "doing" of togetherness (Laurier and Philo) found in the multicultural city may generate some lessons and opportunities for developing a civic culture and political commitment to living with difference. Alongside the optimism of those who celebrate the city, the suburb, and public spaces as forging new ways of living with difference, there are those such as Gill Valentine who wonder how this might be achieved in practice (324). Ash Amin similarly notes that city or suburban public spaces are not necessarily “the natural servants of multicultural engagement” (Ethnicity 967). Amin and Valentine point to the limited or fleeting opportunities for real engagement in these spaces. Moreover Valentine‘s research in the UK revealed that the spatial proximity found in multicultural spaces did not so much give rise to greater mutual respect and engagement, but to a frustrated “white self-segregation in the suburbs.” She suggests therefore that civility and polite exchange should not be mistaken for respect (324). Amin contends that it is the “micro-publics” of social encounters found in workplaces, schools, gardens, sports clubs [and perhaps swimming pools] rather than the fleeting encounters of the street or park, that offer better opportunities for meaningful intercultural exchange. The Ramadan celebration at the pool, with its dress code and all, might be seen more fruitfully as a purposeful event engaging a micro-public in which people are able to “break out of fixed relations and fixed notions” and “learn to become different” (Amin, Ethnicity 970) without that generating discord and resentment.Micropublics, Subaltern Publics and a Democracy of (Temporary) ExclusionsIs this as an opportunity to bring the global and local together in an experiment of forging new democratic spaces for gender, sexuality, culture and for living with difference? More provocatively, can we see exclusion and an invitation to share in this exclusion as a precursor to and measure of, actually existing democracy? Painter and Philo have argued that democratic citizenship is questionable if “people cannot be present in public spaces (streets, squares, parks, cinemas, churches, town halls) without feeling uncomfortable, victimized and basically ‘out of place’…" (Iveson 216). Feminists have long argued that distinctions between public and private space are neither straightforward nor gender neutral. For Nancy Fraser the terms are “cultural classifications and rhetorical labels” that are powerful because they are “frequently deployed to delegitimate some interests, views and topics and to valorize others” (73). In relation to women and other subordinated minorities, the "rhetoric of privacy" has been historically used to restrict the domain of legitimate public contestation. In fact the notion of what is public and particularly notions of the "public interest" and the "public good" solidify forms of subordination. Fraser suggests the concept of "subaltern counterpublics" as an alternative to notions of "the public." These are discursive spaces where groups articulate their needs, and demands are circulated formulating their own public sphere. This challenges the very meaning and foundational premises of ‘the public’ rather than simply positing strategies of inclusion or exclusion. The twinning of Amin’s notion of "micro-publics" and Fraser’s "counterpublics" is, I suggest, a fruitful approach to interpreting the Dandenong pool issue. It invites a reading of this singular suburban moment as an experiment, a trial of sorts, in newly imaginable ways of living democratically with difference. It enables us to imagine moments when a limited democratic right to exclude might create the sorts of cultural exchanges that give rise to a more authentic and workable recognition of cultural difference. I am drawn to think that this is precisely the kind of democratic experimentation that the YMCA and Dandenong Council embarked upon when they applied for the Equal Opportunity exemption. I suggest that by trialing, rather than fixing forever a "critically exclusive" access to the suburban swimming pool for two hours per year, they were in fact working on the practical problem of how to contribute in small but meaningful ways to a more profoundly free democracy and a reworked public sphere. In relation to the similar but distinct example of the McIver pool for women and children in Coogee, New South Wales, Kurt Iveson makes the point that such spaces of exclusion or withdrawal, “do not necessarily serve simply as spaces where people ‘can be themselves’, or as sites through which reified identities are recognised—in existing conditions of inequality, they can also serve as protected spaces where people can take the risk of exploring who they might become with relative safety from attack and abuse” (226). These are necessary risks to take if we are to avoid entrenching fear of difference in a world where difference is itself deeply, and permanently, entrenched.ReferencesAmin, Ash. “Ethnicity and the Multicultural City: Living with Diversity.” Environment and Planning A 34 (2002): 959–80.———. “The Good City.” Urban Studies 43 (2006): 1009–23.Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 547–66.Cantle, Ted. Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team. London, UK Home Office, 2001.Carey, Adam. “Backing for Pool Cover Up Directive.” The Age 17 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/backing-for-pool-coverup-directive-20100916-15enz.html›.Elder, John, and Jon Pierick. “The Mean Streets: Where the Locals Fear to Tread.” The Sunday Age 10 Jan. 2010. ‹http://www.theage.com.au/national/the-mean-streets-where-the-locals-fear-to-tread-20100109-m00l.html?skin=text-only›.Eriksen, Thomas Hyland. “Diversity versus Difference: Neoliberalism in the Minority Debate." The Making and Unmaking of Difference. Ed. Richard Rottenburg, Burkhard Schnepel, and Shingo Shimada. Bielefeld: Transaction, 2006. 13–36.Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25/26 (1990): 56–80.Goodhart, David. “Too Diverse.” Prospect 95 (2004): 30-37.Haberfield, Georgie, and Gilbert Gardner. “Mayor Defends Pool Cover-up Order.” Dandenong Leader 16 Sep. 2010 ‹http://dandenong-leader.whereilive.com.au/news/story/dandenong-oasis-tells-swimmers-to-cover-up/›.Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2001.Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Sydney: Pluto, 1998.hooks, bell. "Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance." Media and Cultural Studies Keyworks. Eds. Meenakshi Gigi and Douglas Kellner. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001. 366-380.Iveson, Kurt. "Justifying Exclusion: The Politics of Public Space and the Dispute over Access to McIvers Ladies' Baths, Sydney.” Gender, Place and Culture 10.3 (2003): 215–28.Joppke, Christian. “The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal State: Theory and Policy.” The British Journal of Sociology 55.2 (2004): 237–57.Laurier, Chris, and Eric Philo. “Cold Shoulders and Napkins Handed: Gestures of Responsibility.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31 (2006): 193–207.Low, Setha, and Neil Smith, eds. The Politics of Public Space. London: Routledge, 2006.Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005.Murphy, Padraic. "Cover Up for Pool Even at Next Year's Ramadan.” Herald Sun 23 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/cover-up-for-pool-event-during-next-years-ramadan/story-e6frf7kx-1225924291675›.Nichols, David. The Bogan Delusion. Melbourne: Affirm Press, 2011.Poynting, Scott, and Victoria Mason. "The New Integrationism, the State and Islamophobia: Retreat from Multiculturalism in Australia." International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 36 (2008): 230–46.Razack, Sherene H. “Imperilled Muslim Women, Dangerous Muslim Men and Civilised Europeans: Legal and Social Responses to Forced Marriages.” Feminist Legal Studies 12.2 (2004): 129–74.Szego, Julie. “Under the Cover Up." The Age 9 Oct. 2010. < http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/under-the-coverup-20101008-16c1v.html >.Thrift, Nigel. “But Malice Afterthought: Cities and the Natural History of Hatred.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (2005): 133–50.Tissot, Sylvie. “Excluding Muslim Women: From Hijab to Niqab, from School to Public Space." Public Culture 23.1 (2011): 39–46.Valentine, Gill. “Living with Difference: Reflections on Geographies of Encounter.” Progress in Human Geography 32.3 (2008): 323–37.Wise, Amanda, and Selveraj Velayutham, eds. Everyday Multiculturalism. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.YMCA. “VCAT Ruling on Swim Sessions at Dandenong Oasis to Open Up to Community During Ramadan Next Year.” 16 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.victoria.ymca.org.au/cpa/htm/htm_news_detail.asp?page_id=13&news_id=360›.

Historians have often been compared with detectives; searching for clues as evidence of a mystery they are seeking to solve. I would prefer an association with food, making history like a trained cook who blends particular ingredients, some fresh, some traditional, using specific methods to create an object that is consumed. There are primary sources, fresh and raw ingredients that you often have to go to great lengths to procure, and secondary sources, prepared initially by someone else. The same recipe may yield different meals, the same meal may provoke different responses. On a continuum of approaches to history and food, there are those who approach both as a scientific endeavour and, at the other end of the spectrum, those who make history and food as art. Brought together, it is possible to see cookbooks as history in at least two important ways; they give meaning to the past by representing culinary heritage and they are in themselves sources of history as documents and blueprints for experiences that can be interpreted to represent the past. Many people read cookbooks and histories with no intention of preparing the meal or becoming a historian. I do a little of both. I enjoy reading history and cookbooks for pleasure but, as a historian, I also read them interchangeably; histories to understand cookbooks and cookbooks to find out more about the past. History and the past are different of course, despite their use in the English language. It is not possible to relive the past, we can only interpret it through the traces that remain. Even if a reader had an exact recipe and an antique stove, vegetables grown from heritage seeds in similar conditions, eggs and grains from the same region and employed the techniques his or her grandparents used, they could not replicate their experience of a meal. Undertaking those activities though would give a reader a sense of that experience. Active examination of the past is possible through the processes of research and writing, but it will always be an interpretation and not a reproduction of the past itself. Nevertheless, like other histories, cookbooks can convey a sense of what was important in a culture, and what contemporaries might draw on that can resonate a cultural past and make the food palatable. The way people eat relates to how they apply ideas and influences to the material resources and knowledge they have. Used in this way, cookbooks provide a rich and valuable way to look at the past. Histories, like cookbooks, are written in the present, inspired and conditioned by contemporary issues and attitudes and values. Major shifts in interpretation or new directions in historical studies have more often arisen from changes in political or theoretical preoccupations, generated by contemporary social events, rather than the recovery of new information. Likewise, the introduction of new ingredients or methods rely on contemporary acceptance, as well as familiarity. How particular versions of history and new recipes promote both the past and present is the concern of this paper. My focus below will be on the nineteenth century, although a much larger study would reveal the circumstances that separated that period from the changes that followed. Until the late nineteenth century Australians largely relied on cookbooks that were brought with them from England and on their own private recipe collection, and that influenced to a large extent the sort of food that they ate, although of course they had to improvise by supplementing with local ingredients. In the first book of recipes that was published in Australia, The English and Australian Cookery Book that appeared in 1864, Edward Abbott evoked the ‘roast beef of old England Oh’ (Bannerman, Dictionary). The use of such a potent symbol of English identity in the nineteenth century may seem inevitable, and colonists who could afford them tended to use their English cookbooks and the ingredients for many years, even after Abbott’s publication. New ingredients, however, were often adapted to fit in with familiar culinary expectations in the new setting. Abbott often drew on native and exotic ingredients to produce very familiar dishes that used English methods and principles: things like kangaroo stuffed with beef suet, breadcrumbs, parsley, shallots, marjoram, thyme, nutmeg, pepper, salt, cayenne, and egg. It was not until the 1890s that a much larger body of Australian cookbooks became available, but by this time the food supply was widely held to be secure and abundant and the cultivation of exotic foods in Australia like wheat and sheep and cattle had established a long and familiar food supply for English colonists. Abbott’s cookbook provides a record of the culinary heritage settlers brought with them to Australia and the contemporary circumstances they had to adapt to. Mrs Beeton’s Cookery Book and Household Guide is an example of the popularity of British cookbooks in Australia. Beeton’s Kangaroo Tail Curry was included in the Australian cooking section of her household management (2860). In terms of structure it is important for historians as one of the first times, because Beeton started writing in the 1860s, that ingredients were clearly distinguished from the method. This actually still presents considerable problems for publishers. There is debate about whether that should necessarily be the case, because it takes up so much space on the page. Kangaroo Tail CurryIngredients:1 tail2 oz. Butter1 tablespoon of flour1 tablespoon of curry2 onions sliced1 sour apple cut into dice1 desert spoon of lemon juice3/4 pint of stocksaltMethod:Wash, blanch and dry the tail thoroughly and divide it at the joints. Fry the tail in hot butter, take it up, put it in the sliced onions, and fry them for 3 or 4 minutes without browning. Sprinkle in the flour and curry powder, and cook gently for at least 20 minutes, stirring frequently. Add the stock, apple, salt to taste, bring to the boil, stirring meanwhile, and replace the tail in the stew pan. Cover closely, and cook gently until tender, then add the lemon juice and more seasoning if necessary. Arrange the pieces of tail on a hot dish, strain the sauce over, and serve with boiled rice.Time: 2-3 hoursSufficient for 1 large dish. Although the steps are not clearly distinguished from each other the method is more systematic than earlier recipes. Within the one sentence, however, there are still two or three different sorts of tasks. The recipe also requires to some extent a degree of discretion, knowledge and experience of cooking. Beeton suggests adding things to taste, cooking something until it is tender, so experience or knowledge is necessary to fulfil the recipe. The meal also takes between two and three hours, which would be quite prohibitive for a lot of contemporary cooks. New recipes, like those produced in Delicious have recipes that you can do in ten minutes or half an hour. Historically, that is a new development that reveals a lot about contemporary conditions. By 1900, Australian interest in native food had pretty much dissolved from the record of cookbooks, although this would remain a feature of books for the English public who did not need to distinguish themselves from Indigenous people. Mrs Beeton’s Cookery Book and Household Guide gave a selection of Australian recipes but they were primarily for the British public rather than the assumption that they were being cooked in Australia: kangaroo tail soup was cooked in the same way as ox tail soup; roast wallaby was compared to hare. The ingredients were wallaby, veal, milk and butter; and parrot pie was said to be not unlike one made of pigeons. The novelty value of such ingredients may have been of interest, rather than their practical use. However, they are all prepared in ways that would make them fairly familiar to European tastes. Introducing something new with the same sorts of ingredients could therefore proliferate the spread of other foods. The means by which ingredients were introduced to different regions reflects cultural exchanges, historical processes and the local environment. The adaptation of recipes to incorporate local ingredients likewise provides information about local traditions and contemporary conditions. Starting to see those ingredients as a two-way movement between looking at what might have been familiar to people and what might have been something that they had to do make do with because of what was necessarily available to them at that time tells us about their past as well as the times they are living in. Differences in the level of practical cooking knowledge also have a vital role to play in cookbook literature. Colin Bannerman has suggested that the shortage of domestic labour in Australia an important factor in supporting the growth of the cookbook industry in the late nineteenth century. The poor quality of Australian cooking was also an occasional theme in the press during the same time. The message was generally the same: bad food affected Australians’ physical, domestic, social and moral well-being and impeded progress towards civilisation and higher culture. The idea was really that Australians had to learn how to cook. Colin Bannerman (Acquired Tastes 19) explains the rise of domestic science in Australia as a product of growing interest in Australian cultural development and the curse of bad cookery, which encouraged support for teaching girls and women how to cook. Domestic Economy was integrated into the Victorian and New South Wales curriculum by the end of the nineteenth century. Australian women have faced constant criticism of their cooking skills but the decision to teach cooking shouldn’t necessarily be used to support that judgement. Placed in a broader framework is possible to see the support for a modern, scientific approach to food preparation as part of both the elevation of science and systematic knowledge in society more generally, and a transnational movement to raise the status of women’s role in society. It would also be misleading not to consider the transnational context. Australia’s first cookery teachers were from Britain. The domestic-science movement there can be traced to the congress on domestic economy held in Manchester in 1878, at roughly the same time as the movement was gaining strength in Australia. By the 1890s domestic economy was widely taught in both British and Australian schools, without British women facing the same denigration of their cooking skills. Other comparisons with Britain also resulted from Australia’s colonial heritage. People often commented on the quality of the ingredients in Australia and said they were more widely available than they were in England but much poorer in quality. Cookbooks emerged as a way of teaching people. Among the first to teach cookery skills was Mina Rawson, author of The Antipodean Cookery Book and the Kitchen Companion first published in 1885. The book was a compilation of her own recipes and remedies, and it organised and simplified food preparation for the ordinary housewife. But the book also included directions and guidance on things like household tasks and how to cure diseases. Cookbooks therefore were not completely distinct from other aspects of everyday life. They offered much more than culinary advice on how to cook a particular meal and can similarly be used by historians to comment on more than food. Mrs Rawson also knew that people had to make do. She included a lot of bush foods that you still do not get in a lot of Australian meals, ingredients that people could substitute for the English ones they were used to like pig weed. By the end of the nineteenth century cooking had become a recognised classroom subject, providing early training in domestic service, and textbooks teaching Australians how to cook also flourished. Measurements became much more uniform, the layout of cookbooks became more standardised and the procedure was clearly spelled out. This allowed companies to be able to sell their foods because it also meant that you could duplicate the recipes and they could potentially taste the same. It made cookbooks easier to use. The audience for these cookbooks were mostly young women directed to cooking as a way of encouraging social harmony. Cooking was elevated in lots of ways at this stage as a social responsibility. Cookbooks can also be seen as a representation of domestic life, and historically this prescribed the activities of men and women as being distinct The dominance of women in cookbooks in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries attested to the strength of that idea of separate spheres. The consequences of this though has been debated by historians: whether having that particular kind of market and the identification that women were making with each other also provided a forum for women’s voices and so became quite significant in women’s politics at a later date. Cookbooks have been a strategic marketing device for products and appliances. By the beginning of the twentieth century food companies began to print recipes on their packets and to release their own cookbooks to promote their products. Davis Gelatine produced its first free booklet in 1904 and other companies followed suit (1937). The largest gelatine factory was in New South Wales and according to Davis: ‘It bathed in sunshine and freshened with the light breezes of Botany all year round.’ These were the first lavishly illustrated Australian cookbooks. Such books were an attempt to promote new foods and also to sell local foods, many of which were overproduced – such as milk, and dried fruits – which provides insights into the supply chain. Cookbooks in some ways reflected the changing tastes of the public, their ideas, what they were doing and their own lifestyle. But they also helped to promote some of those sorts of changes too. Explaining the reason for cooking, Isabella Beeton put forward an historical account of the shift towards increasing enjoyment of it. She wrote: "In the past, only to live has been the greatest object of mankind, but by and by comforts are multiplied and accumulating riches create new wants. The object then is to not only live but to live economically, agreeably, tastefully and well. Accordingly the art of cookery commences and although the fruits of the earth, the fowls of the air, the beasts of the field and the fish of the sea are still the only food of mankind, yet these are so prepared, improved and dressed by skill and ingenuity that they are the means of immeasurably extending the boundaries of human enjoyment. Everything that is edible and passes under the hands of cooks is more or less changed and assumes new forms, hence the influence of that functionary is immense upon the happiness of the household" (1249). Beeton anticipates a growing trend not just towards cooking and eating but an interest in what sustains cooking as a form of recreation. The history of cookbook publishing provides a glimpse into some of those things. The points that I have raised provide a means for historians to use cookbooks. Cookbooks can be considered in terms of what was eaten, by whom and how: who prepared the food, so to whom the books were actually directed? Clever books like Isabella Beeton’s were directed at both domestic servants and at wives, which gave them quite a big market. There are also changes in the inclusion of themes. Economy and frugality becomes quite significant, as do organisation and management at different times. Changes in the extent of detail, changes in authorship, whether it is women, men, doctors, health professionals, home economists and so on all reflect contemporary concerns. Many books had particular purposes as well, used to fund raise or promote a particular perspective, relate food reform and civic life which gives them a political agenda. Promotional literature produced by food and kitchen equipment companies were a form of advertising and quite significant to the history of cookbook publishing in Australia. Other themes include the influence of cookery school and home economics movements; advice on etiquette and entertaining; the influence of immigration and travel; the creation of culinary stars and authors of which we are all fairly familiar. Further themes include changes in ingredients, changes in advice about health and domestic medicine, and the impact of changes in social consciousness. It is necessary to place those changes in a more general historical context, but for a long time cookbooks have been ignored as a source of information in their own right about the period in which they were published and the kinds of social and political changes that we can see coming through. More than this active process of cooking with the books as well becomes a way of imagining the past in quite different ways than historians are often used to. Cookbooks are not just sources for historians, they are histories in themselves. The privileging of written and visual texts in postcolonial studies has meant other senses, taste and smell, are frequently neglected; and yet the cooking from historical cookbooks can provide an embodied, sensorial image of the past. From nineteenth century cookbooks it is possible to see that British foods were central to the colonial identity project in Australia, but the fact that “British” culinary culture was locally produced, challenges the idea of an “authentic” British cuisine which the colonies tried to replicate. By the time Abbot was advocating rabbit curry as an Australian family meal, back “at home” in England, it was not authentic Indian food but the British invention of curry power that was being incorporated into English cuisine culture. More than cooks, cookbook authors told a narrative that forged connections and disconnections with the past. They reflected the contemporary period and resonated with the culinary heritage of their readers. Cookbooks make history in multiple ways; by producing change, as the raw materials for making history and as historical narratives. References Abbott, Edward. The English and Australian Cookery Book: Cookery for the Many, as well as the Upper Ten Thousand. London: Sampson Low, Son & Marston, 1864. Bannerman, Colin. Acquired Tastes: Celebrating Australia’s Culinary History. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1998. Bannerman, Colin. "Abbott, Edward (1801–1869)." Australian Dictionary of Biography. National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. 21 May 2013. . Beeton, Isabella. Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. New Ed. London and Melbourne: Ward, Lock and Co. Ltd., n.d. (c. 1909). Davis Gelatine. Davis Dainty Dishes. Rev ed. Sydney: Davis Gelatine Organization, 1937. Rawson, Lance Mrs. The Antipodean Cookery Book and Kitchen Companion. Melbourne: George Robertson & Co., 1897.

IntroductionThis paper addresses two separate notions of embodiment – western maternal embodiment and art making as a form of embodied critical resistance. It takes as its subject breeder; my unpublished five minute video installation from 2012, which synthesises these two separate conceptual framings of embodiment as a means to visually and conceptually rupture dominant ideologies surrounding Australian motherhood. Emerging from a paradoxical landscape of fear, loathing and desire, breeder is my dark satirical take on ambivalent myths surrounding suburban Australian motherhood. Portraying my white, heavily pregnant body breeding, cooking and consuming pink, sugar-coated butterflies, breeder renders literal the Australian mother as both idealised nation-builder and vilified, self-indulgent abuser. A feminine reification of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Children, breeder attempts to make visible my own grapplings with maternal ambivalence, to complicate even further, the already strained position of motherhood within the Australian cultural imaginary. Employing the mediums of video and performance to visually manifest an ambivalent protagonist who displays both nurturing maternal ideals and murderous inclinations, breeder pushes contradictory maternal expectations to their breaking point and challengingly offers the following proposition: “This is what you want; but what you’ll get is so much more than you bargained for” (Grosz 136). Drawing upon critical, feminist theorising that challenges idealised views of motherhood; accounts of motherhood by mothers themselves; as well as my own personal grapplings with maternal expectations, this paper weaves reflexive writing with textual analysis to explore how an art-based methodology of embodied critical resistance can problematise representations of motherhood within Australia. By visualising the disjuncture between dominant representations of motherhood that have saturated Australian mainstream media since the late 1990s and the complex ambivalent reality of some women’s actual experiences of mothering, this paper discusses how breeder’s intimate portrayal of maternal domesticity at the limits of tolerability, critically resists socially acceptable mothering practices by satirising the cultural construct of motherhood as a means “to use it, deform it, and make it groan and protest” (Nietzsche qtd. in Gutting).Contradictory Maternal KnowledgeImages of motherhood are all around us; communicating ideals and stereotypes that tell us how mothers should feel, think and act. But these images and the concepts of motherhood that underpin them are full of contradictions. Cultural representations of the idealised and sometimes “yummy mummy” - middle class, attractive, healthy, sexy and heterosexual – (see Fraser; Johnson), contrast with depictions of “bad” mothers, leading to motherhood being simultaneously idealised and demonised within the popular press (Bullen et al.; McRobbie, Top Girls; McRobbie, In the Aftermath; McRobbie, Reflections on Feminism; Walkerdine et al.). Mothers own accounts of motherhood reflect these unsettling contradictions (Miller; Thomson et al.; Wilkinson). Claiming the maternal experience is both “heaven and hell” due to the daily experience of irreconcilable and contradictory feelings (Coward), mothers (myself included), silently struggle between feelings of extreme love and opposing feelings of failure, despair and hate as we get caught up in trying to achieve a set of ideals that promulgate standards of perfection that are beyond our reach. Surrounded by images of motherhood that do not resonate with the contradictory nature of the lived maternal experience, mothers are “torn in two” as we desperately try to reconcile or find absolution for maternal emotions that dominant cultural representations of motherhood render unacceptable. According to Roszika Parker, this complicated and contradictory experience where a mother has both loving and hating feelings for her child is that of maternal ambivalence; a form of exquisite suffering that oscillates between the overwhelming affect of blissful gratification and the raw edges of bitter resentment (Parker 1). As Parker states, maternal ambivalence refers to:Those fleeting (or not so fleeting) feelings of hatred for a child that can grip a mother, the moment of recoil from a much loved body, the desire to abandon, to smash the untouched plate of food in a toddler’s face, to yank a child’s arm while crossing the road, scrub too hard with a face cloth, change the lock on an adolescent or the fantasy of hurling a howling baby out of the window (5).However, it is not only feelings of hatred that stir up ambivalence in the mother, so too can the overwhelming intensity of love itself render the rush of ambivalence so surprising and so painful. Commenting on the extreme contradictory emotions that fill a mother and how not only excessive hatred, but excessive love can turn dangerously fatal, Parker turns to Simone De Beauvoir’s idea of “carnal plenitude”; that is, where the child elicits from the mother, the emotion of domination; where the child becomes the “other” who is both prey and double (30). For Parker, De Beauvoir’s “carnal plenitude” is imaged by mothers in a myriad of ways, from a desire to gobble up the child, to feelings of wanting to gather the child into a fatal smothering hug. Commenting on her own unsettling love/hate relationship with her child, Adrienne Rich describes her experiences of maternal ambivalences as “the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves and blissful gratification and tenderness” (363). Unable to come to terms with this paradox at the core of the unfolding process of motherhood, our culture defends itself against this illogical ambivalence in the mother by separating the good nurturing mother from the bad neglectful mother in an attempt to deny the fact that they are one and the same. Resulting in a culture that either denigrates or idealises mothers, we are constantly presented with images of the good perfect nurturing mother and her murderous alter ego; the bad fatal mother who neglects and smothers. This means that how a mother feels about mothering or the meaning it has for her, is heavily determined by cultural representations of motherhood. Arguing for a creative transformation of the maternal that breaches the mutual exclusivities that separate motherhood, I am called to action by Susan Rubin Suleiman, who writes (quoting psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch): “Mothers don’t write, they are written” (Suleiman 5). As a visual attempt to negotiate, translate and thus “write” my lived experience of Australian motherhood, breeder gives voice to the raw material of contradictory (and often taboo experiences) surrounding maternal embodiment and subjectivity. Hijacking and redeploying contradictory understandings and representations of Australian motherhood to push maternal ideals to their breaking point, breeder seeks to create a kind of “mother trouble” that challenges the disjuncture between dominant social constructions of motherhood designed to keep us assigned to our proper place. Viscerally embracing the reality that much of life with small children revolves around loss of control and disintegration of physical boundaries, breeder visually explores the complex and contradictory performances surrounding lived experiences of mothering within Australia to complicate even further the already strained position of western maternal embodiment.Situated Maternal KnowledgeOver the last decade and a half, women’s bodies and their capacity to reproduce have become centre stage in the unfolding drama of Australian economic policy. In 1999 fears surrounding dwindling birth-rates and less future tax revenue, led then Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett to address a number of exclusive private girls’ schools. Making Australia-wide headlines, Kennett urged these affluent young women to abandon their desire for a university degree and instead invited them to consider motherhood as the ultimate career choice (Dever). In 2004, John Howard’s Liberal government made headlines as they announced the new maternity allowance; a $3000 lump-sum financial incentive for women to leave work and have babies. Ending this announcement by urging the assembled gathering of mostly male reporters to go home and have “one for the Dad, one for the Mum and one for the Country” (Baird and Cutcher 103), Federal Treasurer Peter Costello made a last ditch effort to save Baby Boomers from their imminent pensionless doom. Failing to come to terms with the impending saturation of the retirement market without the appropriate tax payer support, the Liberal Government turned baby-making into the ultimate Patriotic act as they saw in women bodies, the key to prevent Australia’s looming economic crisis. However, not all women’s bodies were considered up to the job of producing the longed for “Good tax-paying Citizen” (Tyler). Kennett only visited exclusive private girls’ schools (Ferrier), headhunting only the highest calibre of affluent breeders. Blue-collar inter-mingling was to be adamantly discouraged. Costello’s 2004 “baby bonus” catch-cry not only caused international ire, but also implicitly relegated the duty of child-bearing patriotism to a normalised heterosexual, nuclear family milieu. Unwed or lesbian mothers need not apply. Finally, as government spokespeople repeatedly proclaimed that the new maternity allowance was not income tested, this suggested that the target nation-builder breeder demographic was the higher than average income earner. Let’s get it straight people – only highly skilled, high IQ’s, heterosexual, wedded, young, white women were required in this exclusive breeding program (see Allen and Osgood; Skeggs; Tyler). And if the point hadn’t already been made perfectly clear, newspaper tabloids, talkback radio and current affairs programs all over the country were recruited to make sure the public knew exactly what type of mother Australia was looking for. Out of control young, jobless single mothers hit the headlines as fears abounded that they were breeding into oblivion. An inherently selfish and narcissistic lot, you could be forgiven for thinking that Australia was running rampant with so-called bogan single mothers, who left their babies trapped in hot airless cars in casino carparks all over the country as they spent their multiple “baby bonus’” on booze, ciggies, LCD’s and gambling (see Milne; O’Connor; Simpson and Dowling). Sucking the economy dry as they leeched good tax-payer dollars from Centrelink, these undesirables were the mothers Australia neither needed nor wanted. Producing offspring relegated to the category of bludgerhood before they could even crawl, these mothers became the punching bag for the Australian cultural imaginary as newspaper headlines screamed “Thou Shalt Not Breed” (Gordon). Seen as the embodiment of horror regarding the ever out-of-control nature of women’s bodies, these undesirable mothers materialised out of a socio-political landscape that although idealised women’s bodies as Australia’s economic saviour, also feared their inability to be managed and contained. Hoarding their capacity to reproduce for their own selfish narcissistic desires, these white trash mothers became the horror par excellence within the Australian cultural imaginary as they were publically regarded as the vilified evil alter-ego of the good, respectable white affluent young mother Australian policy makers were after. Forums all over the country were inundated. “Yes,” the dominant voices seemed to proclaim: “We want to build our population. We need more tax-paying citizens. But we only want white, self-less, nurturing, affluent mothers. We want women who can breed us moral upstanding subjects. We do not want lazy good for nothing moochers.” Emerging from this paradoxical maternal landscape of fear, loathing and desire, breeder is a visual and performative manifestation of my own inability to come to terms with the idealisation and denigration of motherhood within Australia. Involving a profound recognition that the personal is still the political, I not only attempt to visually trace the relationship between popular Australian cultural formations and individual experiences, but also to visually “write” my own embodied grapplings with maternal ambivalence. Following the premise that “critique without resistance is empty and resistance without critique is blind” (Hoy 6), I find art practice to be a critically situated and embodied act that can openly resist the power of dominant ideologies by highlighting maternal corporeal transgressions. A creative destablising action, I utilise the mediums of video and performance within breeder to explore personal, historical and culturally situated expectations of motherhood within Australia as a means to subvert dominant ideologies of motherhood within the Australian cultural imaginary. Performing Maternal KnowledgeReworking Goya’s Romantic Gothic vision of fatherhood in Saturn Devouring His Children, breeder is a five minute two-screen video performance that puts an ironic twist to the “good” and “bad” myths of Australian motherhood. Depicting myself as the young white heavily pregnant protagonist breeding monarch butterflies in my suburban backyard, sugar-coating, cooking and then eating them, breeder uses an exaggerated kitsch aesthetic to render literal the Australian mother as both idealistic nation-builder and self-indulgent abuser. Selfishly hoarding my breeding potential for myself, luxuriating and devouring my “offspring” for my own pleasure and delight rather than for the common good, breeder simultaneously defies and is complicit with motherhood expectations within the suburban Australian imaginary. Filmed in my backyard in the southern suburbs of Perth, Western Australia, breeder manifests my own maternal ambivalence and deliberately complicates the dichotomous and strained position motherhood holds in western society. Breeder is presented as a two screen video installation. The left screen is a fast-paced, brightly coloured, jump-cut narrative with a pregnant protagonist (myself). It has three main scenes or settings: garden, kitchen and terrace. The right screen is a slow-moving flow of images that shows the entire monarch butterfly breeding cycle in detail; close ups of eggs slowly turning into caterpillars, caterpillars creating cocoons and the gradual opening of wings as butterflies emerge from cocoons. All the while, the metamorphic cycle is aided by the pregnant protagonist, who cares for them until she sets them free of their breeding cage. In the left screen, apricot roses, orange trees, yellow hibiscus bushes, lush green lawns, a swimming pool and an Aussie backyard garden shed are glimpsed as the pregnant protagonist runs, jumps and sneaks up on butterflies while brandishing a red-handled butterfly net; dressed in red high heels and a white lace frock. Bunnies with pink bows jump, dogs in pink collars bark and a very young boy dressed in a navy-blue sailor suit all make cameo appearances as large monarch butterflies are collected and placed inside a child’s cherry red insect container. In a jump-cut transition, the female protagonist appears in a stark white kitchen; now dressed in a bright pink and apricot floral apron and baby-pink hair ribbon tied in a bow in her blonde ponytail. Standing behind the kitchen bench, she carefully measures sugar into a bowl. She then adds pink food colouring into the crystal white sugar, turning it into a bright pink concoction. Cracking eggs and separating them, she whisks the egg whites to form soft marshmallow peaks. Dipping a paint brush into the egg whites, she paints the fluffy mixture onto the butterflies (now dead), which are laid out on a well-used metal biscuit tray. Using her fingers to sprinkle the bright pink sugar concoction onto the butterflies, she then places them into the oven to bake and stands back with a smile. In the third and final scene, the female protagonist sits down at a table in a garden terrace in front of French-styled doors. Set for high tea with an antique floral tea pot and cup, lace table cloth and petit fours, she pours herself a cup of tea. Adding a teaspoon of sugar, she stirs and then selects a strawberry tart from a three-tiered high-tea stand that holds brightly iced cupcakes, cherry friands, tiny lemon meringue pies, sweet little strawberry tarts and pink sugar coated butterflies. Munching her way through tarts, pies, friands and cupcakes, she finally licks her lips and fuchsia tipped fingers and then carefully chooses a pink sugar coated butterfly. Close ups of her crimson coated mouth show her licking the pink sugar-crumbs from lips and fingers as she silently devours the butterfly. Leaning back in chair, she smiles, then picks up a pink leather bound book and relaxes as she begins to read herself into the afternoon. Screen fades to black. ConclusionAs a mother I am all fragmented, contradictory; full of ambivalence, love, guilt and shame. After seventeen years and five children, you would think that I would be used to this space. Instead, it is a space that I battle to come to terms with each and every day. So how to strategically negotiate engrained codes of maternity and embrace the complexities of embodied maternal knowledge? Indeed, how to speak of the difficulties and incomparable beauties of the maternal without having those variously inflected and complex experiences turn into clichés of what enduring motherhood is supposed to be? Visually and performatively grappling with my own fallout from mothering ideals and expectations where sometimes all I feel I am left with is “a monster of selfishness and intolerance” (Rich 363), breeder materialises my own experiences with maternal ambivalence and my inability to reconcile or negotiate multiple contradictory identities into a single maternal position. Ashamed of my self, my body, my obsessions, my anger, my hatred, my rage, my laughter, my sorrow and most of all my oscillation between a complete and utter desire to kill each and every one of my children and an overwhelming desire to gobble them all up, I make art work that is embedded in the grime and grittiness of my everyday life as a young mother living in the southern suburbs of Western Australia. A life that is most often mundane, sometimes sad, embarrassing, rude and occasionally heartbreaking. A life filled with such simple joy and such complicated sorrow. A life that in reality, is anything but manageable and contained. Although this is my experience, I know that I am not the only one. As an artist I engage in the embodied and critically resistant practice of sampling from my “mother” identities in order to bring out multiple, conflictive responses that provocatively encourage new ways of thinking and acknowledging embodied maternal knowledge. Although claims abound that this results in a practice that is “too personal” or “too specific” (Liss xv), I do not believe that this in fact risks reifying essentialism. Despite much feminist debate over the years regarding essentialist/social constructivist positions, I would still rather use my body as a site of embodied knowledge then rhetorically give it up. Acting as a disruption and challenge to the concepts of idealised or denigrated maternal embodiment, the images and performances of motherhood in breeder then, are more than simple acknowledgements of the reality of the good and bad mother, or acts reclaiming an identity that they taught me to despise (Cliff) or rebelling against having to be a "woman" at all. Instead, breeder is a lucid and explicit declaration of intent that politely refuses to keep every maternal body in its place.References Allen, Kim, and Jane Osgood. “Young Women Negotiating Maternal Subjectivities: The Significance of Social Class.” Studies in the Maternal. 1.2 (2009). 30 July 2012 ‹www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk›.Almond, Barbara. The Monster Within. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.Baird, Marian, and Leanne Cutcher. “’One for the Father, One for the Mother and One for the Country': An Examination of the Construction of Motherhood through the Prism of Paid Maternity Leave.” Hecate 31.2 (2005): 103-113. 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Introduction This article explores the phenomenon of the Creative City in the context of Aberdeen, Scotland’s third-largest city. The common perception of Aberdeen is likely to revolve around its status, for the last 50 years, as Europe’s Oil & Gas Capital. However, for more than a decade Aberdeen’s city planners have sought to incorporate creativity and culture in their placemaking. The most visible expression of this was the unsuccessful 2013 bid to become the UK City of Culture 2017 (CoC), which was referred to as a “reality check” by Marie Boulton (BBC), the councillor charged with the culture portfolio. This article reviews and appraises subsequent policies and actions. It looks at Aberdeen’s history and its current Cultural Strategy and how events have supported or inhibited the reimagining of Aberdeen as a Creative and Cultural City. Landry’s “Lineages of the Creative City” tracks the rise in interest around culture and creative sectors and highlights that there is more to the creative city than economic growth, positing that a creative city is a holistic environment in which “ordinary people can make the extra-ordinary happen” (2). Comunian develops Landry’s concept of hard (infrastructural) assets and soft (people and activity) assets by introducing Complexity Theory to examine the interactions between the two. Comunian argues that a city should be understood as a complex adaptive system (CAS) and that the interconnectivity of consumption and production, micro and macro, and networks of actors must be incorporated into policy thinking. Creating physical assets without regard to what happens in and around them does not build a creative city. Aberdeen: Context and History Important when considering Aberdeen is its remoteness: 66 miles north of its closest city neighbour Dundee, 90 miles north of Edinburgh and 125 miles north-east of Glasgow. For Aberdonians travel is a necessity to connect with other cultural centres whether in Scotland, the UK, Europe, or further afield, making Aberdeen’s nearly 900-year-old port a key asset. Sitting at the mouth of the River Dee, which marks Aberdeen’s southern boundary, this key transport hub has long been central to Aberdeen’s culture giving rise to two of the oldest established businesses in the UK: the Port of Aberdeen (1136) and the Shore Porter’s Society (1498). Fishing and trade with Europe thrived and connections with the continent led to the establishment of Aberdeen’s first university: King’s College (Scotland’s third and the UK’s fifth) in 1495. A second, Marischal College, was established in 1593, joining forces with King’s in 1860 to become the University of Aberdeen. The building created in 1837 to house Marischal College is the second-largest granite building in the world (VisitAberdeenshire, Marischal) and now home to Aberdeen City Council (ACC). Robert Gordon University (RGU), awarded university status in 1992, grew out of an institution established in 1729 (RGU, Our History); this period marked the dawning of the Scottish Enlightenment when Aberdeen’s Wise Club were key to an intellectual discourse that changed western thinking (RSA). Gray’s School of Art, now part of RGU, was established in 1885, at the same time as Aberdeen Art Gallery which holds a collection of national significance (ACC, Art Gallery). Aberdeen’s northern boundary is marked by its second river, the River Don, which has also contributed to the city’s history, economics, and culture. For centuries, paper and woollen mills, including the world-famous Crombie, thrived on its banks and textile production was the city’s largest employer, with one mill employing 3,000 staff (P&J, Broadford). While the city and surrounds have been home to notable creatives, including writers Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Lord Byron; musicians Annie Lennox, Dame Evelyn Glennie, and Emeli Sandé; fashion designer Bill Gibb and dancer Michael Clark, it has struggled to attract and retain creative talent, and there is a familiar exodus of art school graduates to the larger and more accepted creative cities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and London. In 2013, at the time of the CoC bid, ACC recognised that creative industries graduates leaving the city was “a serious issue” (ACC, Cultural Mapping 1). The City of Culture Bid This recognition came at a time when ACC acknowledged that Aberdeen, with already low unemployment, required an influx of workforce. An ACC document (Cultural Mapping) cites Richard Florida’s proposal that a strong cultural offer attracts skilled workers to a city, adding that they “look for a lively cultural life in their choice of location” (7) and quoting an oil executive: “our poor city centre is often cited as a major obstacle in attracting people” (7). Changing the image of the city to attract new residents appears to have been a key motivation for the CoC bid. The CoC assessor noted this in their review of the bid, citing a report that 120,000 recruits were required in the city and agreeing that Aberdeen needed to “change perceptions of the city to retain and attract talent” (Regeneris 1). Aberdeen’s CoC bid was rejected at the first shortlisting stage, with feedback that the artistic vision “lacked depth” and “that cultural activity in the city was weaker than in several other bidding areas” (Regeneris 3). In an exploration of the bidding process, McGillivray and Turner highlight two factors which link to other concerns and feedback about the bid. Firstly, they compare Aberdeen’s choice of a Bid Manager from the business community with Paisley’s choice of one from their local arts sector in their bid for CoC 2021, which was successful in being shortlisted, highlighting different motivators behind the bids. Secondly, Aberdeen secured a bid team member from “Pafos’s bid to be 2017 European Capital of Culture (ECC), who subsequently played an important role” for Kalamata’s 2021 ECC bid (41), showing Aberdeen’s reluctance to develop local talent. A Decade of Investment ACC responded to the “reality check” with a series of investments in the hard assets of the city. Major refurbishment of two key buildings, the Music Hall and the Art Gallery, caused them both to be closed for several years, significantly diminishing the cultural offer in the city. The Music Hall re-opened in 2018 (Creative Scotland) and the Art Gallery in 2019 (McLean). In 2021, the extended and updated Art Gallery was named “Scotland’s building of the year” by the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland (RIAS) (Museums Association). Concurrent with this was the development of “Europe’s largest new events complex, TECA [now P&J live] part financed through a £370 million stock market bond issue” (InvestAberdeen). Another cultural asset of the city which has been undergoing a facelift since 2019 is Union Terrace Gardens (UTG), the green heart of the city centre, gifted to the public in 1877. The development of this asset has had a chequered history. In 2008 it had been awarded “funding from Aberdeen Council (£3 million), the Scottish Arts Council (£4.3M) and Scottish Enterprise (£2 million)” (Aberdeenvoice) to realise a new multi-disciplinary contemporary art centre to be called ‘Northern Light’ and housed in a purpose-designed building (Brizac Gonzalez). The project, led by Peacock Visual arts, a printmaking centre of excellence and gallery founded in 1974, had secured planning permission. It would host Peacock Visual Arts, City Moves dance company, and the ACC arts development team. It echoed similar cultural partnership approaches, such as Dundee Contemporary Arts, although notably without involvement from the universities. Three months later, a counterbid to radically re-think UTG as a vast new city square was proposed by oil tycoon Sir Ian Wood, who backed the proposal with £50 million of his own funds, requiring matching finance by the city and ownership of the Gardens passing to private hands. Resistance to these plans came from ‘Friends of UTG’, and a public consultation was held. ACC voted to adopt Wood’s plans and drop those of Peacock, but a change of administration in the local authority overturned Wood’s plans in August 2012. A significant portion of the funding granted to the Northern Lights project was consumed in the heated public debate and the remainder was lost to the city, as was the Wood money, providing a highly charged backdrop to the CoC bid and an unfortunate divide created between the business and culture sectors that is arguably still discernible in the city today. According to the Aberdeen & Grampian Chamber of Commerce (AGCC) 2022 Investment Tracker, the nearly complete UTG transformation has cost £28.3m. The AGCC trackers since 2016 provide a useful reference for a wider view of investment in the region over this period. During this period, ACC commissioned two festivals: Spectra (ACC, Culture Programme 5), a festival of light curated by a Manchester-based organisation, and NuArt (VisitAberdeenshire, Nuart), a street-art festival curated by a Stavanger-based team. Both festivals deliver large-scale public spectacles but have little impact on the development of the cultural sector in the city. The drivers of footfall, income generation, and tourism are key motivators for these festivals, supporting a prevailing narrative of cultural consumption over cultural production in the city, despite Regeneris’s concerns about “importing of cultural activity, which might not leave behind a cultural sector” (1) and ACC’s own published concerns (ACC, Cultural Mapping). It is important to note that in 2014 the oil and gas industry that brought prosperity to Aberdeen was severely impacted upon by a drop in price and revenue. Many jobs were lost, people left the city, and housing prices, previously inflated, fell dramatically. The attention of the authorities turned to economic regeneration of the city and in 2015, the Aberdeen City Region Deal (UK Gov), bringing £250m to the region, (REF) was signed between the UK Government, Scottish Government, ACC, Aberdeenshire Council, and Opportunity North East (ONE). ONE “is the private sector leader and catalyst for economic diversification in northeast Scotland” with board members from industry, enterprise, AGCC, the councils, the universities, the harbour, and NHS. ONE focuses on five ‘pillars’: Digital Technology, Energy, Life Sciences, Tourism and Food, and Drink & Agriculture. A Decade of Creativity and Cultural Development Aberdeen’s ambitious cultural capital infrastructure spending of the last decade has seen the creation or refurbishment of significant hard assets in the city. The development of people (Cohendet et al.), the soft assets that Landry and Comunian agree are essential to the complex system that is a Creative City, has also seen development over this time. In 2014, RGU commissioned a review of Creative Industries in the North East of Scotland. The report notes that: the cultural sector in the region is strong at the grass roots end, but less so the higher up the scale it goes. There is no producing theatre, and no signature events or assets, although the revitalised art gallery might provide an opportunity to address this. (Ekos 2) This was followed by an international conference at which other energy cities (Calgary, Houston, Perth, and Oslo) presented their culture strategies, providing useful comparators for Aberdeen and a second RGU report (RGU, Regenerating). A third report, (RGU, New North), set out a vision for the region’s cultural future. The reports recommend strategy, leadership, and vision in the development of the cultural and creative soft assets of the region and the need to create conditions for graduate and practitioner retention. Also in 2014, RGU initiated the Look Again Festival of Art and Design, an annual festival to address a gap in the city festival roster and meet a need arising from the closure of both Art Gallery and Music Hall for refurbishment. The first festival took place in 2015 with a weekend-long public event showcasing a series of thought-provoking installations and events which demonstrated a clear appetite amongst the public and partner organisations for more activity of this type. Between 2015 and 2019, the festivals grew from strength to strength and increased in size and ambition, “carving out a new creative community in Aberdeen” (Williams). The 2019 festival involved 119 creatives, the majority from the region, and created 62 paid opportunities. Look Again expanded and became a constant presence and vehicle for sectoral and skills development, supporting students, graduates, volunteers, and new collectives, focussing on social capital and the intangible creative community assets in the city. Creative practitioners were supported with a series of programmes such as ‘Cultivate’ (2018), funded by Creative Scotland, that provided mentoring to strengthen business sustainability and networking events to improve connectivity in the sector. Cultivate also provided an opportunity to undertake further research, and a survey of over 100 small and micro creative businesses presented a view of a tenacious sector, committed to staying in the region but lacking structured and tailored support. The project report noted consistent messages about the need for “a louder voice for the sector” and concluded that further work was needed to better profile, support, and connect the sector (Cultivate 15). Comunian’s work supports this call to give greater consideration to the interplay of the agents in the creation of a strong creative city. In 2019, Look Again’s evolving role in creative sector skills development was recognised when they became part of Gray’s School of Art. A partnership quickly formed with the newly created Entrepreneurship & Innovation Group (EIG), a team formed within RGU to drive entrepreneurial thinking across all schools of the university. Together, Look Again and EIG ran a Creative Accelerator which became a prototype for a validated Creative Entrepreneurship post-graduate short-course that has supported around 120 creative graduates and practitioners with tailored business skills, contextual thinking, and extended peer networks. Meanwhile, another Look Again collaboration with the newly re-opened Art Gallery provided pop-up design events that many of these small businesses took part in, connecting them with public-facing retail opportunities and, for some, acquisitions for the Gallery’s collection. Culture Aberdeen During this time and after a period of public consultation, a new collaborative group, ‘Culture Aberdeen’, emerged. Membership of the group includes many regional cultural and arts organisations including ACC, both universities, and Aberdeen Civic Forum, which seeks “to bring the voice and views of all communities to every possible level of decision making”. The group subsequently published Culture Aberdeen: A Culture Strategy for the City of Aberdeen 2018-2028, which was endorsed by ACC in their first Cultural Investment Impact Report. The strategy sets out a series of cultural ambitions including a bid to become a UNESCO Creative City, establishing an Aberdeen Biennale, and becoming a national centre of excellence for an (unspecified) artform. This collaboration brings a uniting vision to Aberdeen’s creative activity and places of culture and presents a more compelling identity as a creative city. It also begins to map to Comunian’s concept of CAS and establish a framework for realising the potential of hard assets by strategically envisioning and leading the agents, activities, and development of the city’s creative sector. Challenges for Delivery of the Strategy In delivering a strategy based on collaborative efforts, it is essential to have shared goals and strong governance “based on characteristics such as trust, shared values, implicit standards, collaboration, and consultation” (Butcher et al. 77). Situations like Aberdeen’s tentative bid for UNESO Creative City status, which began in late 2018 but was halted in early 2019, suggest that shared goals and clear governance may not be in place. Wishing to join other UNESCO cities across Scotland – Edinburgh (Literature), Glasgow (Music), and Dundee (Design) –, Aberdeen had set its sights on ‘City of Craft and Folk Art’; that title subsequently went to the city of Perth in 2022, limiting Aberdeen’s future hopes of securing UNESCO Creative City status. In 2022, Aberdeen is nearly halfway through its strategy timeline; to achieve its vision by 2028, the leadership recommended in 2014 needs to be established and given proper authority and backing. Covid-19 has been particularly disruptive for the strategy, arriving early in its implementation and lasting for two years during which collaborators have, understandably, had to attend to core business and crisis management. Picking up the threads of collaborative activity at the same time as ‘returning to normal’ will be challenging. The financial impacts of Covid-19 have also hit arts organisations and local councils particularly hard, creating survival challenges that displace future investment plans. The devastation caused to city centres across the UK as shops close and retail moves online is keenly felt in Aberdeen. Yet the pandemic has also seen the growth of pockets of new activity. With falling demand for business space resulting in more ‘meanwhile spaces’ and lower rents, practitioners have been able to access or secure spaces that were previously prohibitive. Deemouth Artists’ Studios, an artist-run initiative, has provided a vital locus of support and connectivity for creatives in the city, doubling in size over the past two years. ‘We Are Here Scotland’ arrived in response to the resurgent Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, as a Community Interest Company initiated in Aberdeen to support black creatives and creatives of colour across Scotland. Initiatives such as EP Spaces that re-purpose empty offices as studios have created a resource, albeit precarious, for scores of recent creative graduates, supporting an emerging creative community. The consequences of the pandemic for the decade of cultural investment and creative development are yet to be understood, but disrupted strategies are hard to rekindle. Culture Aberdeen’s ability to resolve or influence these factors is unclear. As a voluntary network without a cohesive role or formal status in the provision of culture in the city, and little funding and few staff to advocate on its behalf, it probably lacks the strength of leadership required. Nevertheless, work is underway to refresh the strategy in response to the post-pandemic needs of the city and culture, and the Creative Industries more broadly, are, once again, beginning to be seen as part of the solution to recovery as new narratives emerge. There is a strong desire in the city’s and region’s creative communities to nurture, realise, and retain emerging talent to authentically enrich the city’s culture. Since the 2013 failed CoC bid, much has been done to rekindle confidence and shine a light on the rich creative culture that exists in Aberdeen, and creative communities are gaining a new voice for their work. 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