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1

Nusir, Muneer, Ali Louati, Hassen Louati, Usman Tariq, Raed Abu Zitar, Laith Abualigah, and Amir H. Gandomi. "Design Research Insights on Text Mining Analysis: Establishing the Most Used and Trends in Keywords of Design Research Journals." Electronics 11, no. 23 (November 28, 2022): 3930. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/electronics11233930.

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Design research topics attract exponentially more attention and consideration among researchers. This study is the first research article that endeavors to analyze selected design research publications using an advanced approach called “text mining”. This approach speculates its results depending on the existence of a research term (i.e., keywords), which can be more robust than other methods/approaches that rely on contextual data or authors’ perspectives. The main aim of this research paper is to expand knowledge and familiarity with design research and explore future research directions by addressing the gaps in the literature; relying on the literature review, it can be stated that the research area in the design domain still not built-up a theory, which can unify the field. In general, text mining with these features allows increased validity and generalization as compared to other approaches in the literature. We used a text mining technique to collect data and analyzed 3553 articles collected in 10 journals using 17,487 keywords. New topics were investigated in the domain of design concepts, which included attracting researchers, practitioners, and journal editorial boards. Such issues as co-innovation, ethical design, social practice design, conceptual thinking, collaborative design, creativity, and generative methods and tools were subject to additional research. On the other hand, researchers pursued topics such as collaborative design, human-centered design, interdisciplinary design, design education, participatory design, design practice, collaborative design, design development, collaboration, design theories, design administration, and service/product design areas. The key categories investigated and reported in this paper helped in determining what fields are flourishing and what fields are eroding.
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Palamar, Nataly I. "PRAISE AS A SUBJECT OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH." Alfred Nobel University Journal of Philology 2, no. 22 (2021): 158–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.32342/2523-4463-2021-2-22-14.

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The article considers the features of the phenomenon of praise as a subject of research in various disciplines; the connection of praise with philosophy, psychology, sociology and linguistics is analyzed; such sections of psychology as pedagogical, social and management psychology and the influence of praise on them are considered in detail; the linguistic character of praise in German and Ukrainian is determined; the conclusion on the complex analysis of the phenomenon of praise in the field of linguistics, genealogy and linguistics of the text is made. At the current stage, language development and change are often the subject of interdisciplinary research. This also applies to praise. It was seen as a phenomenon of philosophy that regarded it as a direct projection of good and defined it as a natural ability to characterize the object of interest. Praise as a psychological phenomenon is defined in the form of information about the opportuneness of the act and positive assessment. Praise embodies an important element of psychology – motivation, which appears as an incentive element to action. We consider praise from a linguistic point of view in the form of sincere approval, expression of positive attitude to the addressee, his actions, deeds, personal characteristics (thoughts, qualities), objects and things belonging to the interests or activities of the addressee so as to psychologically and emotionally affect the addressee and its stimulation to further activity in this direction. The study of a complex and multifaceted phenomenon of praise requires taking into consideration different approaches to its comprehension. Features of the cognitive processes of human consciousness have become the subject of study of humanities, including philosophy, psychology and sociology. Philosophy appears here with a combination of questions about good and evil, the relationship between man and the world, which have served as topics for discussion since ancient times. Psychology considers the features and patterns of human behavior, thinking, states and qualities of man. The proposed research considers praise as primarily a linguistic concept in the framework of pragmalinguistics and text linguistics. Each of these disciplines expands and enriches research and in general represents a single set of sciences. For this reason, the need for a brief analysis of the problem of praise in terms of liberal sciences has arisen. The connection between philosophy and the concept of praise is easy to trace. The implementation of praise requires, first of all, an object that should be characterized in accordance with the general evaluative ethical categories of “good” and “evil”. Things, concepts, actions, which are classified as “good”, deserve praise. What belongs to the category of “good” and what to “evil”, the definition of these concepts, their characteristics – is one of the issues of philosophy, which has caused debate since ancient times. To bring about praise as a speech action, certain mental processes of a person, which help them to know and characterize the object of attention, are important. These include: feelings, perception, thinking, imagination, and so on. The formation of praise is based on significant psycho-emotional principles inherent in man. An important element of praise is the stimulus. Motivation in praise is one of the incentive tools of psychology. The way of implementation of praise depends on a person’s psychological features. It helps in the field of education and upbringing, forms interpersonal relationships and helps to improve the results of work in public life. Alongside with research in the fields of philosophy and psychology, praise is also studied by linguistics. The linguistic nature of praise forms the basis of the proposed research, because the object of study is embodied primarily through specific language tools. Linguistic explorations of praise can be traced within studies of many native and foreign linguists, who have examined it in various aspects and areas of implementation. The purpose of the proposed article is a multifaceted approach and analysis of praise, in order to determine the research paradigm. Accordingly, the objectives of the article were as follows: to consider praise as a subject of various disciplines; analyze the relationship of praise with philosophy, psychology, sociology and pragmatics; determine the significance of the theory of speech acts, speech genres and text linguistics for the studied phenomenon. The following methods were used in the study: “analysis through synthesis” method, which contributed to the knowledge and awareness of the phenomenon of praise, the variety of its manifestations in different sciences; descriptive analysis made it possible to describe praise in each of the considered disciplines. As a result of the analysis, the following conclusions can be drawn: for the proposed research, it is interesting to study the praise in terms of linguistics and pragmatics. An analysis of previous studies of this phenomenon in other languages has led to the conclusion that praise can be expressed by a speech act, or a speech genre, or even be represented by a type of text. Consequently, such versatility of praise determines its complex, multifaceted analysis using two approaches – linguo-pragmatic and rhetorical-stylistic.
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Mamina, R. I., and E. E. Yelkina. "Digital Humanities: Is it a New Science or a Set of Models and Practices of the Global Network Project?" Discourse 6, no. 4 (October 28, 2020): 22–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.32603/2412-8562-2020-6-4-22-38.

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Introduction. Digital Humanities (DH), formed in the mid-20th century, represent a dynamic direction of social and humanitarian disciplines that use computer technology in research and education. The actuality of the paper is to determine trends in the development of Social Science and Humanities in the digital age: hybridization of Humanities, transformation of subject and research goals, predominance of instrumental interdisciplinary in the methododogy of research. Despite the active growth of institutions, technologies, models and practices of Digital Humanities, researchers do not have a unity of views on this direction. The objectives of the study are to analyze approaches to the definition of the concept, typology and basic characteristics of DH. Scientific novelty is expressed in the proposed typologiy of paradigms, models and practices of this direction. The paper defines theoretical status of DH.Methodology and sources. The paper uses Philosophical methodology for comparative analysis of the developing models (paradigms), including text analysis, quantitative research, digitization of image collections, Humanities Computer Science, as well as digital socio-humanitarian models and practices, such as Digital Philosophy, Digital History, Digital Social Research, Digital Self-Presentation, “Art and Science”, and others. Taken together, they represent the implementation of DH as the Global Network Project realization. The research is carried out on the material of Russian and foreign textbooks on Digital Humanities, scientific publications, and websites.Results and discussion. The paper presents an analysis of the DH development stages, provides justification for the concept and its main aspects. Analysis of approaches to the definition of DH reveals the main trends: a) DH represent a new interdisciplinary research direction that use information technology in traditional humanitarian fields to achieve meaningful goals; b) DH represent the ways of modeling and producing innovations. Their essential characteristics are: methodological and instrumental interdisciplinary and commercialization of innovations, transformation of the criteria of science (objectivity of knowledge, loss of disciplinary boundaries. The DH research typology criteria are defined according to basic paradigms, subject areas, research goals, and major institutions. An analysis of the main types of digital research is presented. The problem of the ambivalence of digital technologies used in DH is considered as the main risks: a) for the Humanities - “loss of focus” (technologization of language leads to the technologization of the memory of society; b) for a human (as a result of the predominance of the network forms of communication, the highest value for a person - freedom of choice and the meaning of being may be lost); c) for society (transformation of human communications into network forms of sociality).Conclusion. The expansion of digital technologies use in scientific research, education, culture, in general – and in the Humanities, in particular, is due to the global technological trends of the fourth industrial revolution. According to experts, the definition of “digital” in various areas of Digital Humanities does not express their essence, but characterizes the “computing” technologies used in the Social and Humanitarian knowledge. Accordingly, they do not represent independent scientific disciplines, but are models and practices that use information technology as instruments to solve the objectives of the Humanities and exchange knowledge and methods between scientists, engineers, designers, and students. In general, those changes characterize the process of the new science image development in the network society.
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Karadakis, Kostas, and Maria Manus Painchaud. "Esport Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities: Perspectives from Subject Matter Experts." Athens Journal of Sports 9, no. 2 (May 12, 2022): 79–100. http://dx.doi.org/10.30958/ajspo.9-2-2.

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Esport is a growing form of entertainment because of technological advancements, increased online gaming participation and competition, and technology access. Esport shares traditional sport characteristics, with players, spectators, competition, and entertainment. As the esport industry continues to grow, career offerings in esport-specific and traditional positions has demonstrated an increase in need for trained and prepared individuals. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to identify the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA) an individual seeking employment in the esport industry should possess. Subject matter experts were interviewed to identify the KSAs one should possess for an esport career. Ten themes appeared: Business Acumen & Strategic Approach; Human Relations Skills; Relationship Management; Effective Communication; Technology Management; Legal and Ethical Practices; Research and Creative Problem Solving; Global and Cultural Orientation; Leadership; and Critical Evaluation and Analytical Skills. Additionally, esport specific KSAs and competencies aligned with three broad organization categories: people, structure, and goals. Traditional workplace knowledge is required as well as discipline specific knowledge. There is an expectation with industry evolution, functional areas (domains) within esport will continue to emerge. Lifelong learning skills, passion, and a desire to acquire advanced knowledge will be integral to success and sustainability of an esport career. Keywords: esport knowledge, skills, abilities, employment
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Bush, Ruth A., Alexa Pérez, Tanja Baum, Caroline Etland, and Cynthia D. Connelly. "A systematic review of the use of the electronic health record for patient identification, communication, and clinical support in palliative care." JAMIA Open 1, no. 2 (July 6, 2018): 294–303. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jamiaopen/ooy028.

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Abstract Objectives Globally, healthcare systems are using the electronic health record (EHR) and elements of clinical decision support (CDS) to facilitate palliative care (PC). Examination of published results is needed to determine if the EHR is successfully supporting the multidisciplinary nature and complexity of PC by identifying applications, methodology, outcomes, and barriers of active incorporation of the EHR in PC clinical workflow. Methods A systematic review using Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. The data sources PubMed, CINAL, EBSCOhost, and Academic Search Premier were used to identify literature published 1999–2017 of human subject peer-reviewed articles in English containing original research about the EHR and PC. Results The search returned 433 articles, 30 of which met inclusion criteria. Most studies were feasibility studies or retrospective cohort analyses; one study incorporated prospective longitudinal mixed methods. Twenty-three of 30 (77%) were published after 2014. The review identified five major areas in which the EHR is used to support PC. Studies focused on CDS to: identify individuals who could benefit from PC; electronic advanced care planning (ACP) documentation; patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) such as rapid, real-time pain feedback; to augment EHR PC data capture capabilities; and to enhance interdisciplinary communication and care. Discussion Beginning in 2015, there was a proliferation of articles about PC and EHRs, suggesting increasing incorporation of and research about the EHR with PC. This review indicates the EHR is underutilized for PC CDS, facilitating PROMs, and capturing ACPs.
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Hrbáček, Jiří, Martin Kučera, Zdeněk Hodis, and Martin Dosedla. "ICT in Technical Subjects." International Journal of Information and Communication Technologies in Education 3, no. 1 (June 1, 2014): 5–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ijicte-2014-0001.

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Abstract ICT have currently spread almost into all areas of human interests. These technologies accompany us during our rest and entertainment and enable fast and easy communication across vast distances. Moreover, they are used in education and science and control systems around us allowing easier design and construction of these systems. However, they cannot be taken as the only one perfect and best technology. Our research and experience in education of technical subjects shows that they cannot replace the work with real systems and models. In fact, no simulation or animation, even the most perfect one, can fully replace reality. Nevertheless, reality properly completed with animations or simulations offers many possibilities that were previously unthinkable. It is very important in education to show proper interdisciplinary relationships which are the true image of the real world. Also, it is essential for pupils and students to acquaint themselves with the practical problems from their practice. They have accustomed to computer design and project and assembly documentation and they understand technical documentation. Further, they have realized that these are direct images of real systems and they have learned to create and use them. At our department, we have focused on those issues. Students profit from acquired knowledge and skills in one subject that can be used in other subjects. This contribution aims to summarize up to now experience and show some practical results of research that have been conducted.
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Berko, Andriy, Dmytro Polivenok, and Tetiana Shestakevych. "Information systems for automating work flows: a comparative analysis." Vìsnik Nacìonalʹnogo unìversitetu "Lʹvìvsʹka polìtehnìka". Serìâ Ìnformacìjnì sistemi ta merežì 13 (July 15, 2023): 243–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.23939/sisn2023.13.243.

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Workflow is a sequence of repeated and controlled steps aimed at completing a specific task or work. The urgency of the task of optimizing such works contributed to the development of methods and means of operations research to optimize such processes for the needs of various subject areas. Information technologies to support such workflow are workflow engines that enable faster automation, ensure compliance with norms and standards, formalize business processes, improve communication, etc. The workflow management systems are divided into the following categories: automation using robotics, intelligent integration platforms, intelligent business process management systems, open-source engines, the cloud-supported, as well as data flow processing systems. For a more detailed analysis, it is advisable to choose the following engines and services: built-in, cloud-oriented, and those to support both scenarios (jBPM, Camunda, Zeebe, Amazon Step Functions). It is appropriate to define evaluation criteria and compare such workflow automation systems to form further recommendations regarding their selection and application. Such criteria are development activity, stability and history of commercial use, versioning support, standards support, support for timers and asynchronous execution, support for human-oriented and manual tasks, integration with other solutions, monitoring and logging, scaling, cloud support, the possibility of scanning in private infrastructure, the presence of a visual interface, the convenience of local development and testing, open source code, the necessary programming for implementation and cost. A comparison of advantages and disadvantages can be used to decide on a workflow automation system.
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Mirchev, Martin, Iskra Mircheva, and Albena Kerekovska. "The Academic Viewpoint on Patient Data Ownership in the Context of Big Data: Scoping Review." Journal of Medical Internet Research 22, no. 8 (August 18, 2020): e22214. http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/22214.

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Background The ownership of patient information in the context of big data is a relatively new problem, which is not yet fully recognized by the medical academic community. The problem is interdisciplinary, incorporating legal, ethical, medical, and aspects of information and communication technologies, requiring a sophisticated analysis. However, no previous scoping review has mapped existing studies on the subject. Objective This study aims to map and assess published studies on patient data ownership in the context of big data as viewed by the academic community. Methods A scoping review was conducted based on the 5-stage framework outlined by Arksey and O’Malley and further developed by Levac, Colquhoun, and O’Brien. The organization and reporting of results of the scoping review were conducted according to PRISMA-ScR (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses and its extensions for Scoping Reviews). A systematic and comprehensive search of 4 scientific information databases, PubMed, ScienceDirect, Scopus, and Springer, was performed for studies published between January 2000 and October 2019. Two authors independently assessed the eligibility of the studies and the extracted data. Results The review included 32 eligible articles authored by academicians that correspond to 3 focus areas: problem (ownership), area (health care), and context (big data). Five major aspects were studied: the scientific area of publications, aspects and academicians’ perception of ownership in the context of big data, proposed solutions, and practical applications for data ownership issues in the context of big data. The aspects in which publications consider ownership of medical data are not clearly distinguished but can be summarized as ethical, legal, political, and managerial. The ownership of patient data is perceived primarily as a challenge fundamental to conducting medical research, including data sales and sharing, and to a lesser degree as a means of control, problem, threat, and opportunity also in view of medical research. Although numerous solutions falling into 3 categories, technology, law, and policy, were proposed, only 3 real applications were discussed. Conclusions The issue of ownership of patient information in the context of big data is poorly researched; it is not addressed consistently and in its integrity, and there is no consensus on policy decisions and the necessary legal regulations. Future research should investigate the issue of ownership as a core research question and not as a minor fragment among other topics. More research is needed to increase the body of knowledge regarding the development of adequate policies and relevant legal frameworks in compliance with ethical standards. The combined efforts of multidisciplinary academic teams are needed to overcome existing gaps in the perception of ownership, the aspects of ownership, and the possible solutions to patient data ownership issues in the reality of big data.
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Cichosz, Mariusz. "Individual, family and environment as the subject of research in social pedagogy – development and transformations." Papers of Social Pedagogy 7, no. 2 (January 28, 2018): 6–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.5604/01.3001.0010.8133.

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The cognitive specificity of social pedagogy is its interest in the issues related to social conditionings of human development and, respectively, the specific social conditionings of the upbringing process. The notion has been developed in various directions since the very beginning of the discipline, yet the most clearly visible area seems to be the functioning of individuals, families and broader environment. Simultaneously, it is possible to observe that the issues have been entangled in certain socio-political conditions, the knowledge of which is substantial for the reconstruction and identification of the research heritage of social pedagogy. All these interrelationships allowed to distinguish particular stages of development of social pedagogy. Contemporarily, it is a discipline with descent scientific achievements which marks out and indicates new perspectives both in the field of educational practice and the theory of social activity. Social pedagogy, similarly to other areas (subdisciplines) of pedagogy, deals with the notion of upbringing in a certain aspect – in a certain problem inclination. It specializes in social and environmental conditionings of the upbringing process. It is the thread of the social context of upbringing what proves to be the crucial, basic and fundamental determinant of upbringing and, thus, decisive factor for human development. This notion was always present in the general pedagogical thought however, its organized and rationalized character surfaced only when the social pedagogy was distinguished as a separate, systematic area of pedagogy. It occurred in Poland only at the beginning of the 19th century. From the very beginning the creators and precursors of this subdiscipline pointed out its relatively wide range. It has been the notion of individual – social conditionings of human development, yet, social pedagogists were interested in human at every stage of their lives i.e. childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. Another area of interest were the issues related to family as the most important “place” of human development and, in this respect, the issues connected with institutions undertaking various activities: help, care, support and animation. Finally, the scope of interest included issues related to the environment as the place where the upbringing process is supposed to realize and realizes. Since the very beginning of social pedagogy these have been the prominent threads for exploration. At the same time it ought to be stated that these threads have always been interwoven with various social-political conditions both with regards to their interpretation as well as possible and planned educational practice. Therefore social pedagogy and its findings must be always “read” in the context of social-political conditions which accompanied the creation of a given thought or realization of some educational practice. As these conditions have constantly been undergoing certain transformations one may clearly distinguish particular stages of development of social pedagogy. The stages reflect various approaches to exploring and describing the above-mentioned areas of this discipline. Following the assumptions regarding the chronology of social pedagogy development and the three distinguished stages of development, it seems worthwhile to study how the issues related to an individual, family and environment were shaped at these stages. The first stage when the social psychology was arising was mainly the time of Helena Radlińska’s activities as well as less popular and already forgotten Polish pedagogists – precursors of this discipline such as: Anna Chmielewska, Irena Jurgielewiczowa, Zofia Gulińska or Maria Korytowska. In that period social pedagogists mainly dealt with individuals, families and the functioning of environments in the context of educational activities aimed at arousing national identity and consciousness. However, their work did no focus on indicating the layers of threats and deficits in functioning of individuals, social groups or families but on the possibilities to stimulate their development and cultural life. Therefore social pedagogy of those times was not as strongly related to social work as it currently is but dealt mainly with educational work. The classic example of such approach in the research carried out in the social pedagogy of that time may be the early works by Helena Radlińska who undertook the narrow field of cultural-educational work targeted to all categories of people. The works described such issues as the organization of libraries, organizing extra-school education (H. Orsza, 1922, H. Orsza-Radlińska, 1925). It ought to be stated that this kind of work was regarded as public and educational work, whereas currently it exists under the name of social work. Frequently quoted works related to the issues of arising social pedagogy were also the works by Eustachy Nowicki e.g. “Extra-school education and its social-educational role in the contemporary Polish life” from 1923 or the works by Stefania Sempołowska, Jerzy Grodecki or Jadwiga Dziubińska. Such an approach and tendencies are clearly visible in a book from 1913 (a book which has been regarded by some pedagogists as the first synthetic presentation of social pedagogy). It is a group work entitled “Educational work – its tasks, methods and organization” (T. Bobrowski, Z. Daszyńska-Golińska, J. Dziubińska, Z. Gargasa, M. Heilperna, Z. Kruszewska, L. Krzywicki, M. Orsetti, H. Orsza, St. Posner, M. Stępkowski, T. Szydłowski, Wł. Weychert-Szymanowska, 1913). The problem of indicated and undertaken research areas and hence, the topics of works realized by the social pedagogists of that times changed immediately after regaining independence and before World War II. It was the time when the area of social pedagogists interests started to include the issues of social inequality, poverty and, subsequently, the possibility of helping (with regards to the practical character of social pedagogy). The research works undertaken by social pedagogists were clearly of diagnostic, practical and praxeological character. They were aimed at seeking the causes of these phenomena with simultaneous identification and exploration of certain environmental factors as their sources. A classic example of such a paper – created before the war – under the editorial management of H. Radlińska was the work entitled “Social causes of school successes and failures” from 1937 (H. Radlińska, 1937). Well known are also the pre-war works written by the students of H. Radlińska which revealed diagnostic character such as: “The harm of a child” by Maria Korytowska (1937) or “A child of Polish countryside” edited by M. Librachowa and published in Warsaw in 1934 (M. Librachowa, 1934). Worthwhile are also the works by Czesław Wroczyński from 1935 entitled “Care of an unmarried mother and struggle against abandoning infants in Warsaw” or the research papers by E. Hryniewicz, J. Ryngmanowa and J. Czarnecka which touched upon the problem of neglected urban and rural families and the situation of an urban and rural child – frequently an orphaned child. As it may be inferred, the issues of poverty, inefficient families, single-parent families remain current and valid also after the World War II. These phenomena where nothing but an outcome of various war events and became the main point of interest for researchers. Example works created in the circle of social pedagogists and dealing with these issues may be two books written in the closest scientific environment of Helena Radlińska – with her immense editorial impact. They are “Orphanage – scope and compensation” (H. Radlińska, J. Wojtyniak, 1964) and “Foster families in Łódź” (A. Majewska, 1948), both published immediately after the war. Following the chronological approach I adopted, the next years mark the beginning of a relative stagnation in the research undertaken in the field of social pedagogy. Especially the 50’s – the years of notably strong political indoctrination and the Marxist ideological offensive which involved building the so called socialist educational society – by definition free from socio-educational problems in public life. The creation and conduction of research in this period was also hindered due to organizational and institutional reasons. The effect of the mentioned policy was also the liquidation of the majority of social sciences including research facilities – institutes, departments and units. An interesting and characteristic description of the situation may be the statement given by Professor J. Auletner who described the period from the perspective of development of social policy and said that: “During the Stalinist years scientific cultivation of social policy was factually forbidden”. During the period of real socialism it becomes truly difficult to explore the science of social policy. The name became mainly the synonym of the current activity of the state and a manifestation of struggles aimed at maintaining the existing status quo. The state authorities clearly wanted to subdue the science of social activities of the state […]. During the real socialism neither the freedom for scientific criticism of the reality nor the freedom of research in the field of social sciences existed. It was impossible (yet deliberated) to carry out a review of poverty and other drastic social issues” (J. Auletner, 2000). The situation changes at the beginning of the 60’s (which marks the second stage of development of social pedagogy) when certain socio-political transformations – on the one hand abandoning the limitation of the Stalinist period (1953 – the death of Stalin and political thaw), on the other – reinforcement of the idea of socialist education in social sciences lead to resuming environmental research. It was simultaneously the period of revival of Polish social pedagogy with regards to its institutional dimension as well as its ideological self-determination (M. Cichosz, 2006, 2014). The issues of individuals, families and environments was at that time explored with regards to the functioning of educational environments and in the context of exploring the environmental conditionings of the upbringing process. Typical examples here may be the research by Helena Izdebska entitled “The functioning of a family and childcare tasks” (H. Izdebska, 1967) and “The causes of conflicts in a family” (H. Izdebska, 1975) or research conducted by Anna Przecławska on adolescents and their participation in culture: “Book, youth and cultural transformations” (A. Przecławska, 1967) or e.g. “Cultural diversity of adolescents against upbringing problems” (A. Przecławska, 1976). A very frequent notion undertaken at that time and remaining within the scope of the indicated areas were the issues connected with organization and use of free time. This may be observed through research by T. Wujek: “Homework and active leisure of a student” (T. Wujek, 1969). Another frequently explored area was the problem of looking after children mainly in the papers by Albin Kelm or Marian Balcerek. It is worthwhile that the research on individuals, families or environments were carried out as part of the current pedagogical concepts of that time like: parallel education, permanent education, lifelong learning or the education of adults, whereas, the places indicated as the areas of human social functioning in which the environmental education took place were: family, school, housing estate, workplace, social associations. It may be inferred that from a certain (ideological) perspective at that time we witnessed a kind of modeling of social reality as, on the one hand particular areas were diagnosed, on the other – a desired (expected) model was built (designed) (with respect to the pragmatic function of practical pedagogy). A group work entitled “Upbringing and environment” edited by B. Passini and T. Pilch (B. Passini, T. Pilch, 1979) published in 1979 was a perfect illustration of these research areas. It ought to be stated that in those years a certain model of social diagnosis proper for undertaken social-pedagogical research was reinforced (M. Deptuła, 2005). Example paper could be the work by I. Lepalczyk and J. Badura entitled: “Elements of pedagogical diagnostics” (I. Lepalczyk, J. Badura, 1987). Finally, the social turning point in the 80’s and 90’s brought new approaches to the research on individuals, families and environments which may be considered as the beginning of the third stage of the development of social pedagogy. Breaking off the idea of socialist education meant abandoning the specific approach to research on the educational environment previously carried out within a holistic system of socio-educational influences (A. Przecławska, w. Theiss, 1995). The issues which dominated in the 90’s and still dominate in social pedagogy with regards to the functioning of individuals, families and local environments have been the issues connected with social welfare and security as well as education of adults. Research papers related to such approach may be the work by Józefa Brągiel: “Upbringing in a single-parent family” from 1990; the work edited by Zofia Brańka “The subjects of care and upbringing” from 2002 or a previous paper written in 1998 by the same author in collaboration with Mirosław Szymański “Aggression and violence in modern world” published in 1999 as well as the work by Danuta Marzec “Childcare at the time of social transformations” from 1999 or numerous works by St. Kawula, A. Janke. Also a growing interest in social welfare and social work is visible in the papers by J. Brągiel and P. Sikora “Social work, multiplicity of perspectives, family – multiculturalism – education” from 2004, E. Kanwicz and A. Olubiński: “Social activity in social welfare at the threshold of 21st century” from 2004 or numerous works on this topic created by the circles gathered around the Social Pedagogy Faculty in Łódź under the management of E. Marynowicz-Hetka. Current researchers also undertake the issues related to childhood (B. Smolińska-Theiss, 2014, B. Matyjas, 2014) and the conditionings of the lives of seniors (A. Baranowska, E. Kościńska, 2013). Ultimately, among the presented, yet not exclusive, research areas related to particular activities undertaken in human life environment (individuals, families) and fulfilled within the field of caregiving, social welfare, adult education, socio-cultural animation or health education one may distinguish the following notions:  the functioning of extra-school education institutions, most frequently caregiving or providing help such as: orphanage, residential home, dormitory, community centre but also facilities aimed at animating culture like youth cultural centres, cultural centres, clubs etc.,  the functioning of school, the realization of its functions (especially educational care), fulfilling and conditioning roles of student/teacher, the functioning of peer groups, collaboration with other institutions,  the functioning (social conditionings) of family including various forms of families e.g. full families, single-parent families, separated families, families at risk (unemployment) and their functioning in the context of other institutions e.g. school,  social pathologies, the issues of violence and aggression, youth subcultures,  participation in culture, leisure time, the role of media,  the functioning of the seniors – animation of activities in this field,  various dimensions of social welfare, support, providing help, the conditionings of functioning of such jobs as the social welfare worker, culture animator, voluntary work. It might be concluded that the issues connected with individuals, families and environment have been the centre of interest of social pedagogy since the very beginning of this discipline. These were the planes on which social pedagogists most often identified and described social life – from the perspective of human participation. On the course of describing the lives of individuals, families and broader educational environments social pedagogists figured out and elaborated on particular methods and ways of diagnosing social life. Is it possible to determine any regularities or tendencies in this respect? Unquestionably, at the initial stage of existence of this discipline, aimed at stimulating national consciousness and subsequent popularization of cultural achievements through certain activities – social and educational work, social pedagogists built certain models of these undertakings which were focused on stimulating particular social activity and conscious participation in social life. The issues concerning social diagnosis, though not as significant as during other stages, served these purposes and hence were, to a certain extent, ideologically engaged. The situation changed significantly before and shortly after the World War II. Facing particular conditions of social life – increase in many unfavourable phenomena, social pedagogists attempted to diagnose and describe them. It seems to have been the period of clear shaping and consolidation of the accepted model of empirical research in this respect. The model was widely accepted as dominating and has been developed in Polish social pedagogy during the second and subsequent stages of developing of this discipline. Practical and praxeological character of social pedagogy became the main direction of this development. Consequently, social diagnosis realized and undertaken with regard to social pedagogy was associated with the idea of a holistic system of education and extra-school educational influences and related educational environments. Therefore, the more and more clearly emphasized goal of environmental research – forecasting, was associated with the idea of building holistic, uniform educational impacts. After the systemic transformation which occurred in Poland in the 90’s, i.e. the third stage of social pedagogy development, abandoning the previous ideological solutions, environmental research including diagnosis was reassociated with social life problems mainly regarding social welfare and security. Individuals, families and environment have been and still seem to be the subject of research in the field of social pedagogy in Poland. These research areas are structurally bound with its acquired paradigm – of a science describing transformations of social life and formulating a directive of practical conduct regarding these transformations. A question arouses about the development of social pedagogy as the one which charts the direction of transformations of practices within the undertaken research areas. If it may be considered as such, then it would be worthwhile to enquire about the directions of the accepted theoretical acknowledgments. On the one hand we may observe a relatively long tradition of specifically elaborated and developed concepts, on the other – there are still new challenges ahead. Observing the previous and current development of Polish social pedagogy it may be inferred that its achievements are not overextensive with regards to the described and acquired theoretical deliberations. Nevertheless, from the very beginning, it has generated certain, specific theoretical solutions attempting to describe and explain particular areas of social reality. Especially noteworthy is the first period of the existence of this discipline, the period of such social pedagogists like i.a. J.W. Dawid, A. Szycówna, I. Moszczeńska or Helena Radlińska. The variety of the reflections with typically philosophical background undertaken in their works (e.g. E. Abramowski) is stunning. Equally involving is the second stage of development of social pedagogy i.e. shortly after the World War II, when Polish social pedagogy did not fully break with the heritage of previous philosophical reflections (A. Kamiński, R. Wroczyński) yet was developed in the Marxist current. A question arouses whether the area of education and the projects of its functioning of that time were also specific with regards to theory (it seems to be the problem of the whole Socialist pedagogy realised in Poland at that time). The following years of development of this discipline, especially at the turn of 80’s and 90’s was the period of various social ideas existing in social pedagogy – the influences of various concepts and theories in this field. The extent to which they were creatively adapted and included in the current of specific interpretations still requires detailed analysis, yet remains clearly visible. Another important area is the field of confronting the theories with the existing and undertaken solutions in the world pedagogy. A. Radziewicz-Winnicki refers to the views of the representatives of European and world social thought: P. Bourdieu, U. Beck, J. Baudrillard, Z. Bauman and M. Foucault, and tries to identify possible connections and relationships between these ideas and social pedagogy: “the ideas undertaken by the mentioned sociologists undoubtedly account for a significant source of inspiration for practical reflection within social pedagogy. Therefore, it is worthwhile to suggest certain propositions of their application in the field of the mentioned subdiscipline of pedagogy” (Radziewicz-Winnicki 2008). The contemporary social pedagogy in Poland constantly faces numerous challenges. W. Theiss analysed the contemporary social pedagogy with regards to its deficiencies but also the challenges imposed by globalisation and wrote: “Modern social pedagogy focuses mainly on the narrow empirical research and narrow practical activity and neglects research in the field of theory functioning separately from the realms of the global (or globalising) world or pays insufficient attention to these problems. It leads to a certain self-marginalisation of our discipline which leaves us beyond the current of main socio-educational problems of modern times. In this respect, it seems worthwhile and necessary to carry out intensive conceptual and research work focused on e.g. the following issues:  metatheory of social pedagogy and its relationship with modern trends in social sciences;  the concepts of human and the world, the concepts of the hierarchy of values;  the theory of upbringing, the theory of socialization, the theory of educational environment;  a conceptual key of the modern reality; new terms and new meanings of classical concepts;  socio-educational activities with direct and indirect macro range e.g. balanced development and its programmes, global school, intercultural education, inclusive education, professional education of emigrants”. Considering the currently undertaken research in this field and the accepted theoretical perspectives it is possible to indicate specific and elaborated concepts. They fluctuate around structural spheres of social pedagogy on the axis: human – environment – environmental transformations. It accounts for an ontological sphere of the acknowledged concepts and theories. Below, I am enumerating the concepts which are most commonly discussed in social pedagogy with regards to the acquired and accepted model. Currently discussed theoretical perspectives (contexts) in social pedagogy and the concepts within. I. The context of social personal relationships  social participation, social presence;  social communication, interaction;  reciprocity. II. The context of social activities (the organization of environment)  institutionalisation;  modernization;  urbanization. III. The context of environment  space;  place;  locality. The socially conditioned process of human development is a process which constantly undergoes transformations. The pedagogical description of this process ought to include these transformations also at the stage of formulating directives of practical activities – the educational practice. It is a big challenge for social pedagogy to simultaneously do not undergo limitations imposed by current social policy and response to real social needs. It has been and remains a very important task for social pedagogy.
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Renon, Anne-Lyse. "Graphic design and research in social sciences: Jacques Bertin and the Laboratoire de Graphique." Abstracts of the ICA 1 (July 15, 2019): 1–2. http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/ica-abs-1-311-2019.

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<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> The contemporary rise of data visualization and imaging technologies in all areas of knowledge now places design and visuality at the heart of research and its communication, with fundamental implications for scientific epistemology. Jacques Bertin's Laboratoire de Graphique (LG) of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in France, is a privileged entry for this study, since it was a major player in this movement, at the crossroads of graphic innovation and social sciences as they reinvented themselves in the second half of the twentieth century.</p><p>This intervention aims to explore a black box of research in the humanities and social sciences, according to two approaches, that of the interdisciplinary collaborations and that more experimental of the graphic design and formatting of information. By design we mean as all the processes from graphical display of data, to CHI, new methods of scientific representation.</p><p>This laboratory was created and directed by the cartographer and semiologist Jacques Bertin from 1954 to 2000 at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Études and, under the impetus of Fernand Braudel, at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), is considered as a forerunner of productions and reflections on graphic research in the social sciences. His work articulates an unprecedented production of images, visualization of data and scientific research, forming the subject of a fundamental treatise, Graphical Semiology (1967). The intervention will trace the largely unknown history of this laboratory, will pinpoint the contributions and the intellectual trajectory of its graphic experiments and collaborations.</p><p>Indeed, while the activities related to the LG's cartographic research are relatively well known, its interactions with history, statistics, sociology, anthropology, urbanism, literature and the decorative arts remain unexplored.</p><p>Jacques Bertin, in <i>Semiology of graphics</i> (1967), highlighted the concept of « visual variables » to build a general rhetoric of visual representation: background shape orientation grain color, etc.</p><p>The paradox of these visual variables is the desire to achieve an objectivity of representation, while taking into account the ”aesthetic“ part of the data. This graphic rhetoric developed by Bertin has influenced many works and disciplines, becoming almost standard, convention, rules. In this session we propose to discuss the relationship between design and visual variables in the contemporary visual display of information.</p><p>We will start by presenting the two complementary funds of archives of the Laboratoire de Graphique the NAs and the BnF, allowing a genetic analysis of the origin of certain concepts of Bertin to give an account of the process of their elaboration.</p><p>We will present collaborations, content, and processes to produce a story that is at once aesthetic, social, economic, and political. We will measure the evolution of scientific imaginaries, the values and uses of representation methods and graphic communication tools, their epistemological scope into 4 thematics:</p><ol><li>The Life of the Graphic Lab: Pathways, Collaborations and Practices at EHESS. Collaboration Braudel-Bertin,creation of the visual identity of the EHESS, practices and conceptualization of the place of graphic research in the social sciences. Bertin heritage in current research programs</li><li>The graphic semiotics of Jacques Bertin: genesis and effects, including in contemporary digital humanities (statistics,big data, cultural analytics). Visual variable and Display of information as the starting point of a research, fieldworks</li><li>The expressivity and plasticity of graphic work: the representation of geographical and human territory. Contribution of the experimental work of the Graphical Laboratory to cartography; materialization of the instrumental design and graphic knowledge in the uses and materiality of the cards from the point of view of the plastic creation and the patrimonial conservation. Objectivity and visual display: relationships between graphics and fact in scientific demonstration</li><li>Graphical semiology in contemporary research, from graphic semiology to information design; pedagogical and epistemological issues of graphic semiology; dissemination of the work of the Laboratoire de Graphique and impact on the field of design and different disciplines in the international context. « Redesigning » the concepts of Bertin: how new data processing tools can contribute?</li></ol><p>The new convergences between design and research will be mobilized to question the place devolved to design in the visual and instrumental construction of contemporary scientific practices and knowledge. This will stimulate a dynamic and a collective experience of interdisciplinary discovery of uses of these methods and tools in heritage context.</p>
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Matvieieva, Liliia, Sergii Smokov, and Maksym Korniienko. "HATE CRIMES: INTERNATIONAL, REGIONAL, ECONOMIC, AND NATIONAL ASPECTS." Baltic Journal of Economic Studies 8, no. 3 (September 30, 2022): 125–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.30525/2256-0742/2022-8-3-125-133.

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The subject of this study is the scientific and practical problems of defining the definition of "hate crime" in international, regional and domestic legal systems. General scientific, interdisciplinary and special scientific methods were used in the process of research. Thus, logical and systematic methods allowed us to select and analyze the information on the topic of research. Specific sociological method allowed to determine the social determinants of the existence of this type of crime. The formal-legal method allowed us to trace the level of institutionalization of hate crimes and formulate definitions of legal concepts and categories. The comparative legal method allowed for a comparison of international, regional and national legislation on combating intolerance and combating hate crimes. The purpose of this article is to identify the key areas for the formation of an active legal policy aimed at increasing the capacity to combat hate crimes. Analysis of experience in combating intolerance and discrimination and the development of proposals for improving domestic legislation. The main stages of the formation, development and legalization of hate crimes are highlighted. Such crimes in the modern world are considered to be the most dangerous type of criminal acts. Factors associated with the acquisition of the character of hate crime as an acute social problem since the second half of the 20th century are named. The main recommendations of modern human rights institutions regarding the fight against these crimes are considered. The most important guarantees of prevention of any human discrimination in the future, which are reflected in the international agreements on human rights and enshrined in the constitutions of modern states, are analyzed. The practice of the European Court of Human Rights in this direction is considered. The legal regulation of hate crimes in the national legislation of Ukraine is analyzed. It is emphasized that the main directions of implementation of domestic legal policy in the field of combating discrimination are carried out in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution of Ukraine, sectoral legislation and international obligations of Ukraine. Statistical data characterizing the level of hate crimes in the national legal system is presented. The characteristics of hate crimes are studied. It is emphasized that the motive itself is of key importance in establishing the corpus delicti and the correct qualification of hate crimes. It was concluded that the list of aggravating circumstances for hate crimes should be clearly defined at the national legislative level, which would avoid ambiguous interpretations of the wording contained in the articles of the Criminal Code of Ukraine providing for punishment for crimes committed on the grounds of intolerance. It was stressed that an effective response to hate crimes is necessary in order to prevent such crimes from becoming a serious public threat. In the opinion of the authors, such a problem can be solved through legal education of Ukrainian society and the formation of a culture of tolerant and respectful attitudes toward all people. It is the duty of a modern state to ensure the adoption of appropriate national legislation, the collection of statistical data, and the thorough investigation and prosecution of hate crimes.
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Lisoň, M., and A. Vaško. "Constitution of police sciences in the Slovak Republic." Law Enforcement Review 5, no. 3 (October 2, 2021): 137–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.52468/2542-1514.2021.5(3).137-155.

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The subject. The authors create an instrumental apparatus that saturates existing and emerging data needs in the theory constituting process and thus create preconditions for police practice development.The methodology. The research is based on the content analyses of final research reports, the object of which is police proceedings and the subject is police reality,The purpose. The authors substantiate the following hypothesis. The source of the development of knowledge in police practice and the development of police theory is a permanent solution to the philosophical contradiction between police theory and police practice, with police practice being the defining aspect of this contradictory unity. The need and areas of scientific knowledge of activities in the police proceedings structure are therefore determined by police practice.The main results. By verifying police practice, the authors confirm the necessary obligatory interaction between theory and practice, which is predominantly determined by the achieved research outputs and their acceptance. At the same time, they respect that systematically processed knowledge from applied research can show the character of a theory. In accordance with their knowledge, consisting of a system of knowledge presented by the achieved outputs from scientific research, evaluation and explanation of phenomena registered in the purposeful implementation of activities in the structure of police proceedings (research object). The term police action can be understood as a synthetic term for a holistic grasp of the police activity and its bodies. The activity of police and security authorities means: a special form of professional service for the state, self-governing as well as commercial organizations and, last but not least, citizens. It contains a set of executive, organizational, management and other activities that have the character of official interventions, official acts, other official activities and other measures. They are carried out in accordance with the rule of law and ethical principles of civil democratic society, preventive and, where necessary, repressive methods of police work. Their aim is to protect the fundamental human rights of citizens and society from crime and other anti-social activities. They define the identity of these phenomena through the subject (optics) of research, systematically defining the police reality by the process parameters, their determinants and constructs of specific police activities. In the Slovak Republic, the authors of this paper participate in the performance of tasks related to the constitution of police sciences. The outputs of applied research offer a system of scientific knowledge about police reality. With the dialectical approach, in relation to the examined activities in the structure of police proceedings, they define the reasons related to the assumption of the existence of links among the elements of police reality, or they reveal their objective absence. By identifying systems, the authors create a model of these purposefully implemented activities with properties characterizing their behaviour. At the same time, they respect that the strategic form of the parameters of this model is expressed by the achieved set intentions and goals of certain specific activities. Determining them is a concentrated expression of this will. The basic context in their work (participation in the process of constituting police sciences), determining the meaning and mission, is a specific subject accepted by them. This is the police reality, an objective fact that the theory of police sciences examines and uses to explain existing and emerging objects. Therefore, their activity in the process of constituting police sciences corresponds to changes in social processes. When creating their instruments (conceptual system, categories, theoretical models, forms of thinking), they combine it with the explanation of new approaches related to the development and advancement of policing processes, characterized by openness and possibilities of social control in their purposeful implementation. This confirms that this process forms a system. Its design shows relative stability and closeness. They do not include any inputs in its content, just those that are foreseen and anticipated. In this context, they realize that the interdisciplinary of concepts enriches the view of constituted police science. For the police sciences , the abstractness and generality of statements from other scientific disciplines is not a starting point, but already the result of research into specific systems (disposition of knowledge), significantly contributing to increase effectiveness of their scientific work. In the conditions of the Slovak Republic, the police sciences are constituted as practical, social and security sciences. Therefore, the authors of this paper accept that the theoretical and methodological development of police sciences requires them to be confronted and independently dealt with the current state in the theory and methodology of science in the early 21st century, to be sensitive to the current development of the overall scientific atmosphere and independently and critically. In this process, the meaningfulness of their scientific work is evident. This corresponds to the registered needs for the transfer of scientific knowledge into police practice.Conclusions. From these findings it is clear that in the current stage of development of the Slovak Republic, the process of constituting police sciences forms a structured system with to the point management. Its successful completion is also determined by the results of a constructive discussion, the authors participated in with this presented knowledge.
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Furman, Oksana, and Andriy Hirniak. "The essential definitions of modular-developmental interaction of teacher and students in the educational process." Psihologìâ ì suspìlʹstvo 3, no. 81 (September 1, 2020): 53–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.35774/pis2020.03.053.

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Today there is an urgent strategic task of qualitative essential change of the existing educational model of secondary and higher education in the multi-problematic context of highly politicized, declarative and formalized reforming of the national education system during the decades of Ukraine’s independence, which giving priority to information-technical resources, academic and intellectual competence successes of students, does not focus on the processes of multifunctional, primarily widely involved and fully balanced, psychocultural development of individuals, groups, and teams. This methodologically oriented study argues that the modern trends of innovative development of society, ethnocultural prospects of the Ukrainian nation and systemic psychodidactic requirements meets A.V. Furman’s modular-developmental system, which as a complex socially-scientific project is implemented for more than a quarter of a century in the field of domestic education by a team of scientists, managers, researchers and practitioners. It theoretically, projectly, methodically and practically implements a more effective than the existing one technostructure of organization and logic-semantic content of the educational process due to the balanced implementation of ideas of culture and development, the requirements of mentality, spirituality, development, modularity and most importantly – its qualitatively different psychological-pedagogical, program-methodical, educationally-bookish, psycho-artistic and expert-diagnostic support. In the effective dimension, it is substantiated that this author’s educational system guarantees a Quaternary metasystemic effect, namely: a) causes at the level of the institution an innovative-psychological climate appearance of productive cooperation of all organizers, teachers and participants by a number of its interdependent basic parameters (according to O.Ye. Furman’s theory, it is psychological influence and its classes, educational communication and its aspects as types of exchange, polymotivation and spheres of conditions of its development, positive-harmonious Self-concept and its components); b) determines at the level of group (joint-academic) educational interaction the formation of such a psychocultural polydialogical space, which has an essentially new restructuring of the educational process, by the format of coverage the advanced human experience – socio-cultural-psychological and by structural structure – modular and multi-parametric; c) allows at the level of interpersonal contact between the mentor and successor to reflect still closed to the conscious ability of each of them the semantic components of their real, purely interself, modular-developmental interaction (normatively set for each stage of the educational cycle invariants of psychological-pedagogical content, portions of educational-subject content as fragments of the state educational standard, newly created sets of methodical-means content of a separate discipline, etc.); d) all this ultimately actualizes in the psycho-spiritual sphere of a personal world of a pupil, a student the best sensory and mental, social and volitional, existential and action, reflexive and creative potential of diverse development and self-improvement during his passing the holistic modular-development cycle in its central link – gradual implementation of personal educational activity. It is reflexively concluded that the logic-semantic core of the investigated here educational system is the concept of developmental interaction (A.V. Furman, O.Ye. Furman (Humeniuk), A.N. Hirnyak, etc.), which has the perspective with the efforts of the current scientific school representatives to become a full-fledged original theory. For the time being, this methodological research outlines the attributive features of the new educational model in terms of both scientific-design support and psycho-artistic implementation in everyday life the optimal psychosocial influences of participants in innovative learning on each other, as well as psychodidactic conditions for achieving proper efficiency and quality of parity educational activity in the classroom are highlighted. In addition, it is established as a product of pure thinking of named system’s author – an updated intelligence map of 36 categorical concepts of modular-developmental education, which has at least five-segment heuristics. Naturally, the lion’s share of the proposed scientific text is devoted to the logic-essential definition of ten basic categories of this innovative educational model, which in semantic complementarity reflect its fundamental theoretical framework and complex research optics of interdisciplinary (mostly socio-humanitarian) cognition.
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KRISBAI, Raluca. "Teodora Popescu (Editor). Cognitive approaches to contemporary media. New Castle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021. Pp. i-xi, 1-210. ISBN: 978-1-5275-6953-9." Journal of Linguistic and Intercultural Education 14, no. 2 (December 15, 2021): 187–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.29302/jolie.2021.14.2.11.

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The book entitled Cognitive approaches to contemporary media offers a valuable insight into modern developments in cognitive linguistics, which can contribute to the advancement of both research and practice in the field. The purpose of this edited volume is to deliver fresh insights into the metaphorical language used in the current media from a cognitive-linguistic perspective. Considering the manipulative framings of reality in which mass media can engage at present, investigations into how figurative language functions may be valuable in order to instruct audiences and to improve their decoding skills to prevent deception and bias. The overall research methodology draws on well-established approaches to the analysis of metaphors, such as Pragglejaz method (2007), the MIPVU technique (2010), the critical metaphor analysis framework (Charteris-Black 2004) and multimodal metaphor analysis theory (Forceville 2009). Both quantitative and qualitative analyses of corpora were conducted, as well as word frequency and concordance searches using AntCoc and ConcAppor #LancsBox software. The book is a compilation of ten contributions by Romanian researchers in the field of cognitive linguistics, and is structured into three main parts. Part One consists of three chapters that focus on the metaphors that are used in business journalese. The chapter by Crina-Maria Herțeg, ‘The conceptualisation of the MARKET in English and Romanian. A corpus-based approach’, focuses on MARKET metaphors in English and Romanian that were obtained from two sizeable corpora of Romanian and British journalese, each consisting of around 600,000 words, and representing business articles that were amassed during the period between 2012 and 2016. Herțeg conducted a corpus-based contrastive investigation to underline the similarities and differences in the ways in which the market is conceptualised in both the Romanian and the English languages. The author explores lexical, semantic and cultural differences, as well as intersecting cognitive categories, and compares and contrasts a series of conceptual metaphors, such as LABOUR MARKET IS WAR and LABOUR MARKET IS COMPETITION. Further subcategories of MARKET IS A LIVING ORGANISM, such as the MARKET IS AN ANIMAL metaphors, were identified in various instances of BEAR and BULL MARKETS. Chapter Two, authored by Andra Ursa and entitled ‘A comparative study of business metaphors in English, French and Romanian economic discourse in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic’ presents a comparative inquiry into newspaper articles in three European languages that were published during July 2020, all focusing on economic issues of wider interest. The chapter investigates the conceptual metaphors employed in the media discourse to help readers to comprehend different facets related to the workings of their national economies. The author conducted both automatic (using AntConc software) and manual analyses to identify and catalogue the metaphors. The results revealed that the three economies under investigation were typically conceptualised in terms of war, objects, human beings or organisms, with a high recurrence of the metaphor ECONOMY IS A SICK PERSON, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ursa revealed that there appeared to be a tendency towards metaphorical expressions indicating that the economy was in a state of war in both the French and the British corpora, which was encountered less frequently in the Romanian articles. The third chapter, ‘Conceptualisations of economic relations between the US and China’ by Andra Corpade, presents how economic relationships amongst countries are envisioned in the written media. The most important cognitive categories that the author noted were COMPETITION IS A RACE, COMPANIES ARE INSTRUMENTS OF DOMINATION, COMPETITION IS WAR, ORGANISATIONS ARE PEOPLE/THINKING ENTITIES and COUNTRIES ARE PEOPLE. Of these, the most frequent pertained to COMPETITION IS WAR, as the author found a wide range of exponents included in the semantic field of WAR. The second part of the book consists of three chapters grouped according to the subject matter of health and illness in metaphorical concepts within the specific context of the new coronavirus. Teodora Popescu’s chapter, ‘Waging war against COVID-19. A case study of Romanian metaphorical conceptualisations of the novel coronavirus’, delves into cognitive metaphors pertaining to the coronavirus, as determined using a corpus of almost 67,000 words from the Romanian nation-wide broadsheet Adevărul (‘The Truth’), which was compiled during the period from September to October 2020. The most important categories identified were FIGHTING COVID-19 IS FIGHTING A WAR, COVID-19 IS A MURDERER, COVID-19 IS COLLECTIVE SUFFERING, LACK OF DISEASE TREATMENT/RESTRICTIONS OBSERVANCE IS LACK OF CONTROL, LOCKDOWN IS DETENTION, LOCKDOWN IS DEPRESSION and COVID-19 IS A SHAM. Recurrent instances of emotional conceptualisations of the pandemic were identified, including EMOTIONAL STATE IS HARM CAUSED BY PREDATORY ANIMALS, which alludes to people’s all-encompassing dissatisfaction generated by the lockdown, accounting for the generalised discontent and frustration in Romanian society, coupled with deep scepticism with regard to the medical system and political rulers. Chapter Five, entitled ‘Conceptual metaphors in medical journalese’ by Oana-Elena Stoica, emphasises the function of conceptual metaphors in medical communication, specifically in the mass media, and considers how they are used with a view to having maximum impact on the reader. The author identified the following categories: TREATING ILLNESS IS FIGHTING A WAR, DISEASES AND VIRUSES ARE ENEMIES, FOOD ADDITIVES ARE ENEMIES, A PROBLEM IS A BODY OF WATER, THE HUMAN BODY IS A FRIEND, THE HUMAN BODY IS A MACHINE, LONG-TERM PURPOSEFUL CHANGE IS A JOURNEY and A HEALTHY LIFESTYLE IS A FRIEND. Stoica maintained that medical language can be somewhat vague and abstract, as well as relatively difficult to comprehend; consequently, metaphors can contribute greatly to clarifying or mitigating distressing issues for readers. The sixth chapter, Adela Natalia Neciu’s ‘THE HEALTHCARE SYSTEM IS A BODY. A case study of metaphorical conceptualisations – the case of Sweden’, scrutinises the metaphorical conceptualisations derived from a progress report on the implementation of the principles of value-based healthcare (VBHC) in Sweden, as documented by health economists, healthcare providers and policymakers. Neciu identified 11 categories, namely SYSTEMS ARE BUILDINGS, PROBLEMS ARE ENEMIES/DEALING WITH A PROBLEM IS FIGHTING A WAR, COUNTRIES ARE PEOPLE, IDEAS ARE OBJECTS, INFORMATION IS MONEY, SYSTEMS ARE PERSONS/PEOPLE, ORGANISATIONS ARE PEOPLE/THINKING ENTITIES, LAWS ARE CONTAINERS, INFORMATION IS A MOVING OBJECT, INFORMATION IS A SUBSTANCE and BUILDINGS ARE PEOPLE. The chapter by Gabriela-Corina Șanta (Câmpean), ‘COVID-19 in journalese. A case study of health, lifestyle, and political agenda domains’, examines the impact of COVID-19 on a number of domains in daily life: POLITICAL AGENDA, ECONOMY, HEALTH, EDUCATION and LIFESTYLE. The network of multidirectional relationships presented by the author are characteristic of the state of affairs that we have witnessed. Șanta concludes by explaining that institutions, companies and countries across the world are perceived as being endowed with human features. Furthermore, all the concepts except EDUCATION were assigned human characteristics; hence, they could be mapped according to their interconnectedness. She further asserted that political leaders have determined finding appropriate mechanisms for putting an end to the virus that has affected all areas of our lives to be a priority. Part Three consists of three contributions addressing multimodal metaphors in films. The eighth chapter, written by Diana Emanuela Tîrnăvean and entitled ‘Metaphors in fiction films. A discourse analysis of “Before I Wake”’ presents an investigation of the verbal, pictorial and gestural metaphors that contribute to creating the identity of the central characters and which chart the central hero’s evolutionary journey via the compelling metaphor of change. This transformation is artfully embodied throughout the film as we witness the transitional life phases of a butterfly. On one hand, Tîrnăvean aims to detect, interpret and decipher the pictorial, gestural and verbo-visual metaphors; on the other, she conducts an exploration of the hero’s quest, which is that of becoming a mother to the orphaned Cody. Chapter Nine, ‘Myth and metaphor in “The Matrix” trilogy’ by Adina Botaș, presents an inquiry into the multimodal metaphors pertaining to the central character, Neo, which can be found in this trilogy. Botaș focuses on three major myths that can be traced in the films’ narratives, namely Alice’s Wonderland, the Bible archetype and the myth of conspiracy. Accordingly, the multimodal metaphors investigated in the study materialised as concurrent expressions of diverse maximally consistent metaphors. The author explains that mappable traits are indicative of various metaphor scenarios, such as NEO IS THE SAVIOUR and NEO IS ALICE IN WONDERLAND from the vantage points of both the theological myth (references to the passion of Jesus Christ) and the conspiracy myth (correlations with an occult society working against humankind). Chapter Ten, authored by Bianca Moisi and entitled ‘The multimodal metaphor in film: A case study of “The Shack”’, provides an analysis of how cinematography exploits metaphors, beginning with the assumption that the development of metaphorical language is concurrent with the development of human thought processes. Moreover, Moisi explores metaphors that are representative of the postmodern individual; that is, those that are shaped by individuals’ intrinsic awareness of gender, emotion, religion and their very existence. Moisi identifies various conceptual categories, such as STATES ARE CONTAINERS (with the subcatrgory THE HUMAN HEART IS A BUILDING/PHYSICAL CONSTRUCTION), ANGER IS A RAVAGED PLACE, DEPRESSION IS A PERSON, POSITIVE EXPERIENCE IS LIGHT/WARMTH (and subsequently, NEGATIVE EXPERIENCE IS DARKNESS/COLDNESS), POSITIVE EXPERIENCE IS SPRING (and accordingly, GOD IS A WOMAN/GOD IS A MOTHER, NEGATIVE EXPERIENCE IS WINTER) and LOVE IS A BOND/LOVE IS A UNITY OF PARTS, amongst others. Moisi ultimately demonstrates the evolution of metaphor from the classical perspective to a postmodern understanding, which revisits and reinvents ancient myths via the use of cinematography. In conclusion, the edited collection Cognitive approaches to contemporary media provides a novel perspective on the metaphorical language that is used in present-day society’s mass media, and will be a valuable contribution to the field as it is both informative and captivating for the general audience and specialists alike.
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Popescu, Teodora. "Farzad Sharifian, (Ed.) The Routledge Handbook of language and culture. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015. Pp. xv-522. ISBN: 978-0-415-52701-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-79399-3 (ebk)7." JOURNAL OF LINGUISTIC AND INTERCULTURAL EDUCATION 12, no. 1 (April 30, 2019): 163–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.29302/jolie.2019.12.1.12.

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The Routledge Handbook of language and culture represents a comprehensive study on the inextricable relationship between language and culture. It is structured into seven parts and 33 chapters. Part 1, Overview and historical background, by Farzad Sharifian, starts with an outline of the book and a synopsis of research on language and culture. The second chapter, John Leavitt’s Linguistic relativity: precursors and transformations discusses further the historical development of the concept of linguistic relativity, identifying different schools’ of thought views on the relation between language and culture. He also tries to demystify some misrepresentations held towards Boas, Sapir, and Whorf’ theories (pp. 24-26). Chapter 3, Ethnosyntax, by Anna Gladkova provides an overview of research on ethnosyntax, starting from the theoretical basis laid by Sapir and Whorf and investigates the differences between a narrow sense of ethnosyntax, which focuses on cultural meanings of various grammatical structures and a broader sense, which emphasises the pragmatic and cultural norms’ impact on the choice of grammatical structures. John Leavitt presents in the fourth chapter, titled Ethnosemantics, a historical account of research on meaning across cultures, introducing three traditions, i.e. ‘classical’ ethnosemantics (also referred to as ethnoscience or cognitive anthropology), Boasian cultural semantics (linguistically inspired anthropology) and Neohumboldtian comparative semantics (word-field theory, or content-oriented Linguistics). In Chapter 5, Goddard underlines the fact that ethnopragmatics investigates emic (or culture-internal) approaches to the use of different speech practices across various world languages, which accounts for the fact that there exists a connection between the cultural values or norms and the speech practices peculiar to a speech community. One of the key objectives of ethnopragmatics is to investigate ‘cultural key words’, i.e. words that encapsulate culturally construed concepts. The concept of ‘linguaculture’ (or languaculture) is tackled in Risager’s Chapter 6, Linguaculture: the language–culture nexus in transnational perspective. The author makes reference to American scholars that first introduced this notion, Paul Friedrich, who looks at language and culture as a single domain in which verbal aspects of culture are mingled with semantic meanings, and Michael Agar, for whom culture resides in language while language is loaded with culture. Risager himself brought forth a new global and transnational perspective on the concept of linguaculture, i.e. the use of language (linguistic practice) is seen as flows in people’s social networks and speech communities. These flows enhance as people migrate or learn new languages, in permanent dynamics. Lidia Tanaka’s Chapter 7, Language, gender, and culture deals with research on language, gender, and culture. According to her, the language-gender relationship has been studied by researchers from various fields, including psychology, linguistics, and anthropology, who mainly consider gender as a construct that preserves inequalities in society, with the help of language, too. Tanaka lists diachronically different approaches to language and gender, focusing on three specific ones: gender stereotyped linguistic resources, semantically, pragmatically or lexically designated language features (including register) and gender-based spoken discourse strategies (talking-time imbalances or interruptions). In Chapter 8, Language, culture, and context, Istvan Kecskes delves into the relationship between language, culture, and context from a socio-cognitive perspective. The author considers culture to be a set of shared knowledge structures that encapsulate the values, norms, and customs that the members of a society have in common. According to him, both language and context are rooted in culture and carriers of it, though reflecting culture in a different way. Language encodes past experience with different contexts, whereas context reflects present experience. The author also provides relevant examples of formulaic language that demonstrate the functioning of both types of context, within the larger interplay between language, culture, and context. Sara Miller’s Chapter 9, Language, culture, and politeness reviews traditional approaches to politeness research, with particular attention given to ‘discursive approach’ to politeness. Much along the lines of the previous chapter, Miller stresses the role of context in judgements of (im)polite language, maintaining that individuals represent active agents who challenge and negotiate cultural as well as linguistic norms in actual communicative contexts. Chapter 10, Language, culture, and interaction, by Peter Eglin focuses on language, culture and interaction from the perspective of the correspondence theory of meaning. According to him, abstracting language and culture from their current uses, as if they were not interdependent would not lead to an understanding of words’ true meaning. David Kronenfeld introduces in Chapter 11, Culture and kinship language, a review of research on culture and kinship language, starting with linguistic anthropology. He explains two formal analytic definitional systems of kinship terms: the semantic (distinctions between kin categories, i.e. father vs mother) and pragmatic (interrelations between referents of kin terms, i.e. ‘nephew’ = ‘child of a sibling’). Chapter 12, Cultural semiotics, by Peeter Torop deals with the field of ‘semiotics of culture’, which may refer either to methodological instrument, to a whole array of methods or to a sub-discipline of general semiotics. In this last respect, it investigates cultures as a form of human symbolic activity, as well as a system of cultural languages (i.e. sign systems). Language, as “the preserver of the culture’s collective experience and the reflector of its creativity” represents an essential component of cultural semiotics, being a major sign system. Nigel Armstrong, in Chapter 13, Culture and translation, tackles the interrelation between language, culture, and translation, with an emphasis on the complexities entailed by translation of culturally laden aspects. In his opinion, culture has a double-sided dimension: the anthropological sense (referring to practices and traditions which characterise a community) and a narrower sense, related to artistic endeavours. However, both sides of culture permeate language at all levels. Chapter 14, Language, culture, and identity, by Sandra Schecter tackles several approaches to research on language, culture, and identity: social anthropological (the limits at play in the social construction of differences between various groups of people), sociocultural (the interplay between an individual’s various identities, which can be both externally and internally construed, in sociocultural contexts), participatory-relational (the manner in which individuals create their social–linguistic identities). Patrick McConvell, in Chapter 15, Language and culture history: the contribution of linguistic prehistory reviews research in this field where historical linguistic evidence is exploited in the reconstruction and understanding of prehistoric cultures. He makes an account of research in linguistic prehistory, with a focus on proto- and early Indo-European cultures, on several North American language families, on Africa, Australian, and Austronesian Aboriginal languages. McConvell also underlines the importance of interdisciplinary research in this area, which greatly benefits from studies in other disciplines, such as archaeology, palaeobiology, or biological genetics. Part four starts with Ning Yu’s Chapter 16, Embodiment, culture, and language, which gives an account of theory and research on the interplay between language, culture, and body, as seen from the standpoint of Cultural Linguistics. Yu presents a survey of embodiment (in embodied cognition research) from a multidisciplinary perspective, starting with the rather universalistic Conceptual Metaphor Theory. On the other hand, Cultural Linguistics has concentrated on the role played by culture in shaping embodied language, as various cultures conceptualise body and bodily experience in different ways. Chapter 17, Culture and language processing, by Crystal Robinson and Jeanette Altarriba deals with research in the field of how culture influence language processing, in particular in the case of bilingualism and emotion, alongside language and memory. Clearly, the linguistic and cultural character of each individual’s background has to be considered as a variable in research on cognition and cognitive processing. Frank Polzenhagen and Xiaoyan Xia, in Chapter 18, Language, culture, and prototypicality bring forth a survey of prototypicality across different disciplines, including cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology. According to them, linguistic prototypes play a critical part in social (re-)cognition, as they are socially diagnostic and function as linguistic identity markers. Moreover, individuals may develop ‘culturally blended concepts’ as a result of exposure to several systems of conceptual categorisation, especially in the case of L2 learning (language-contact or culture-contact situations). In Chapter 19, Colour language, thought, and culture, Don Dedrick investigates the issue of the colour words in different languages and how these influence cognition, a question that has been addressed by researchers from various disciplines, such as anthropology, linguistics, cognitive psychology, or neuroscience. He cannot but observe the constant debate in this respect, and he argues that it is indeed difficult to reach consensus, as colour language occasionally reveals effects of language on thought and, at other times, it is impervious to such effects. Chapter 20, Language, culture, and spatial cognition, by Penelope Brown concentrates on conceptualisations of space, providing a framework for thinking about and referring to objects and events, along with more abstract notions such as time, number, or kinship. She lists three frames of reference used by languages in order to refer to spatial relations, i.e. a) an ‘absolute’ coordinate system, like north, south, east, west; b) a ‘relative’ coordinate system envisaged from the body’s standpoint; and c) an intrinsic, object-centred coordinate system. Chris Sinha and Enrique Bernárdez focus on, in Chapter 21, Space, time, and space–time: metaphors, maps, and fusions, research on linguistic and cultural concepts of time and space, starting with the seminal Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), which they denounce for failing to situate space–time mapping within the broader patterns of culture and world perspective. Sinha and Bernárdez further argue that although it is possible in all cultures for individuals to experience and discuss about events in terms of their duration and succession, the specific words and concepts they use to refer to temporal landmarks temporal and duration are most of the time language and culture specific. Chapter 22, Culture and language development, by Laura Sterponi and Paul Lai provides an account of research on the interplay between culture and language acquisition. They refer to two widely accepted perspectives in this respect: a developmental mechanism inherent in human beings and a set of particular social contexts in which children are ‘initiated’ into the cultural meaning systems. Both perspectives define culture as “both related to the psychological make-up of the individual and to the socio-historical contexts in which s/he is born and develops”. Anna Wierzbicka presents, in Chapter 23, Language and cultural scripts discusses representations of cultural norms which are encoded in language. She contends that the system of meaning interpretation developed by herself and her colleagues, i.e. Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), may easily be used to capture and convey cultural scripts. Through NSM cross-cultural experiences can be captured in a thorough manner by using a reduced number of conceptual primes which seem to exist in all languages. Chapter 24, Culture and emotional language, by Jean-Marc Dewaele brings forth the issue of the relationship between language, culture, and emotion, which has been researched by cultural and cognitive psychologists and applied linguists alike, although with some differences in focus. He considers that within this context, it is important to see differences between emotion contexts in bilinguals, since these may lead to different perceptions of the self. He infers that generally, culture revolves around the experience and communication of emotions, conveyed through linguistic expression. The fifth part starts with Chapter 25, Language and culture in sociolinguistics, by Meredith Marra, who underlines that culture is a central concept in Interactional Sociolinguistics, where language is considered as social interaction. In linguistic interaction, culture, and especially cultural differences are deemed as a cause of potential miscommunication. Mara also remarks that the paradigm change in sociolinguistics, from Interactional Sociolinguistics to social constructionism reshaped ‘culture’ into a more dynamic as well as less rigid concept. Claudia Strauss’ Chapter 26, Language and culture in cognitive anthropology deals with the relationship between human society and human thought/thinking. The author contends that cognitive anthropologists may be subdivided into two groups, i.e. ones that are concerned with the process of thinking (cognition-in-practice scholars), and the others focusing on the product of thinking or thoughts (concerned with shared cultural understandings). She goes on to explore how different approaches to cognitive anthropology have counted on units of language, i.e. lexical items and their meanings, along with larger chunks of discourse, as information, which may represent learned cultural schemata. Part VI starts with Chapter 27, Language and culture in second language learning, by Claire Kramsch, in which she makes a survey of the definition of ‘culture’ in foreign language learning and its evolution from a component of literature and the arts to a more comprehensive purport, that of culturally appropriate use of language, along with an appropriate use of sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic norms. According to her, in the postmodern era, communication is not only mere transmission of information, it represents construal and positioning of the self and of self-identity. Chapter 28, Writing across cultures: ‘culture’ in second language writing studies, by Dwight Atkinson focuses on the usefulness of culture in second-language writing (SLW). He reviews several approaches to the issue: contrastive rhetoric (dealing with the impact of first-language patterns of text organisation on writers in a second language), or even alternate notions, like‘ cosmopolitanism’, ‘critical multiculturalism’, and hybridity, as of late native culture is becoming irrelevant or at best far less significant. Ian Malcolm tackles, in Chapter 29, Language and culture in second dialect learning, the issue of ‘standard’ Englishes (e.g., Standard American English, Standard Australian English) versus minority ‘non-standard’ speakers of English. He deplores the fact that in US specialist literature, speaking the ‘non-standard’ variety of English was associated with cognitive, cultural, and linguistic insufficiency. He further refers to other specialists who have demonstrated that ‘non-standard’ varieties can be just as systematic and highly structured as the standard variety. Chapter 30, Language and culture in intercultural communication, by Hans-Georg Wolf gives an account of research in intercultural education, focusing on several paradigms, i.e. the dominant one, investigating successful functioning in intercultural encounters, the minor one, exploring intercultural understanding and the ‘deconstructionist, and or postmodernist’. He further examines different interpretations of the concepts associated with intercultural communication, including the functionalist school, the intercultural understanding approach and a third one, the most removed from culture, focusing on socio-political inequalities, fluidity, situationality, and negotiability. Andy Kirkpatrick’s Chapter 31, World Englishes and local cultures gives a synopsis of research paradigm from applied linguistics which investigates the development of Englishes around the world, through processes like indigenisation or nativisation of the language. Kirkpatrick discusses the ways in which new Englishes accommodate the culture of the very speech community which develops them, e.g. adopting lexical items to express to express culture-specific concepts. Speakers of new varieties could use pragmatic norms rooted in cultural values and norms of the specific new speech community which have not previously been associated with English. Moreover, they can use these new Englishes to write local literatures, often exploiting culturally preferred rhetorical norms. Part seven starts with Chapter 32, Cultural Linguistics, by Farzad Sharifian gives an account of the recent multidisciplinary research field of Cultural Linguistics, which explores the relationship between language and cultural cognition, particularly in the case of cultural conceptualisations. Sharifian also brings forth illustrations of how cultural conceptualisations may be linguistically encoded. The last chapter, A future agenda for research on language and culture, by Roslyn Frank provides an appraisal of Cultural Linguistics as a prospective path for research in the field of language and culture. She states that ‘Cultural Linguistics could potentially create a paradigm that “successfully melds together complementary approaches, e.g., viewing language as ‘a complex adaptive system’ and bringing to bear upon it concepts drawn from cognitive science such as ‘distributed cognition’ and ‘multi-agent dynamic systems theory’.” She further asserts that Cultural Linguistics has the potential to function as “a bridge that brings together researchers from a variety of fields, allowing them to focus on problems of mutual concern from a new perspective” and most likely unveil new issues (as well as solutions) which have not been evident so far. In conclusion, the Handbook will most certainly serve as clear and coherent guidelines for scholarly thinking and further research on language and culture, and also open up new investigative vistas in each of the areas tackled.
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Satur, Roberto Vilmar, and Emeide Nóbrega Duarte. "COMPETÊNCIA EM INFORMAÇÃO DOS PROFISSIONAIS NEGOCIADORES NA ATUAÇÃO NOS MERCADOS INTERNACIONAIS // PROFESSIONAL NEGOTIATORS' INFORMATION LITERACY IN THE INTERNATIONAL MARKET PERFORMANCE." Convergências em Ciência da Informação 2, no. 1 (June 17, 2019): 66–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.33467/conci.v2i1.10803.

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A informação e o conhecimento são as principais necessidades e recursos para as pessoas conviverem em sociedade e atuarem estratégica e profissionalmente no mercado em um contexto de evolução constante das Tecnologias da Informação e da Comunicação e/ou Tecnologias Digitais da Informação (TICs/TDIs) e de excesso de informações, na denominada Sociedade da Informação e do Conhecimento. Investiga a Competência em Informação dos negociadores brasileiros que atuam no mercado internacional, levando em conta o contexto da interculturalidade no mercado em que atuam. O objetivo geral é analisar as competências em informação de que o profissional negociador precisa para atuar nos mercados internacionais. Apresenta, teoricamente, a relação da Gestão da Informação e do Conhecimento com a Competência em Informação e sua interligação com as Negociações Internacionais e a atuação dos profissionais negociadores. Trata-se de um estudo de natureza qualiquantitativa e aplicado, para cujo desenvolvimento foi utilizado o modelo de Competência em Informação de Bruce que foi base para elaborar o instrumento de coleta dos dados aplicado aos negociadores internacionais brasileiros que atuam no mercado. Depois de aplicados, os questionários foram validados e utilizados na análise dos resultados. Para esta análise, utilizaram-se softwares como o Excel e o SPSS, e a partir dos resultados obtidos, fez-se a análise. Esses resultados também consideraram duas entrevistas feitas com experts da área. Confirma que, como a informação é o principal recurso que o negociador internacional emprega para atuar, e as TICs/TDIs são ferramentas importantes para isso, ele deve ter Competência em Informação e não se limitar a ser um usuário da informação. Mostra, ainda, que a maioria dos negociadores internacionais sabem usar bem as TICs/TDIs, encontrar e usar fontes de informação e deflagrar processos de busca e controle da informação. Demonstraram que preferem o arquivamento em meios eletrônicos ou combinados (eletrônicos e físicos) e conhecem os conteúdos mais relevantes do chamado conhecimento de base para atuar na área. Fazem análise crítica da informação, transformam-na em conhecimento e o expandem com novas ideias e são criativos. Além disso, usam, de forma sábia, a informação e o conhecimento, não só em seu benefício, mas também em benefício de outros, impactando positivamente as pessoas envolvidas. Tiveram mestres inspiradores em sua profissão e ensinam a outras pessoas que queiram atuar na área. Apresenta, além do perfil dos negociadores e do resultado de sua Competência em Informação, a proposta de um modelo de Competência de Informação para esses negociadores e temas relevantes para Cursos de Formação na área, visando formar profissionais negociadores competentes e mais preparados para atuarem no mercado atual, em que prevalece a chamada Sociedade da Informação. Como considerações finais, afirma que os profissionais negociadores internacionais são trabalhadores do conhecimento e não tão somente usuários da informação. São competentes em informação levando em conta todas as categorias de Bruce, e são trabalhadores do conhecimento que atuam na Sociedade da Informação. Traz contribuições para a profissão do negociador e para a Ciência da Informação e demonstra o quanto essa Ciência tem espaço para crescer sendo interdisciplinar ou aplicada às demais áreas. Information and knowledge are the main needs and resources for people to live in society to use them strategically and professionally in the market in a context of constant evolution of Communications and Information Technology (CIT), or Digital Information and communication technologies (Digital ICTs) and excessive information in the so-called Information Society or Knowledge Society. The professionals who work can no longer be limited to being users of information, therefore, they must be competent in relation to this subject. In this thesis, we investigated the information literacy (IL) of Brazilian international negotiators working in the international market, considering this context of interculturality in the market they are in. The main objective of the study is to analyse the IL that the professional negotiator needs to work in the international markets. Initially it presents the theoretical relationship of Information Management and Knowledge with Information Literacy and the interconnection of these with the international negotiations the performance of negotiating professionals. It is a qualitative and applied study, which was development under the Bruce’s model and its seven categories. This model was the basis for elaborating the data collection instrument which was applied to Brazilian international negotiators operating in the market. After being applied, the questionnaires were validated and used in the analysis of the results. In this analysis, software such as Excel and SPSS were used in order to analyses the data and its results. The analysis also considered two interviews with experts in the field. The research established that, since information is the main resource that the international negotiator uses in his/her job, and the CIT / Digital ICTs are important tools. The negotiator must have information literacy and, therefore, he/she should not be limited to being an information user. The study also showed that most of the international negotiators surveyed know the CIT / Digital ICTs, they know how to find and use information sources, deflagrate their search processes and control them. On the control of information, they demonstrated that they prefer archiving in electronic or combined media (electronic and physical) and know the most relevant contents of the so-called basic knowledge to work in the area. They critically analyse information, transform it into knowledge and expand it with new and creative ideas. In addition, they wisely use information and knowledge not only for their benefit, but also for the benefit of others, making a positive impacting in the people involved. And since they have had inspiring teachers in their profession, as a retribution, they teach other people who want to work in the area. In addition to the profile of the negotiators and the result of their IL, the thesis proposes an IL model for these negotiators and points out relevant themes to Training Courses, aiming to form competent snd better prepared professional negotiators to work in the current market, in which the so-called information society prevails. As a final remark, it states that international professional negotiators are knowledge workers and not just information users. They are information proficient taking into account all Bruce’s categories, knowledge workers who labour in the Information Society. This study brings contributions to the profession of the negotiator and the Information Science as it demonstrates how much this Science has space to grow being either interdisciplinary or applied to the other areas.
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Tanska, Lyudmyla. "Stage as a universe of human communicative activity." National Academy of Managerial Staff of Culture and Arts Herald, no. 4 (December 30, 2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.32461/2226-3209.4.2021.250245.

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The purpose of the article. The research is connected with the definition of culturological bases of synthetic image formation in the system of modern communication and opening of stage space as a communicative phenomenon in the context of the transformation of spectacular cultural practices of the XX century. The research methodology consists of theoretical and interpretive models of comparative and systematic approaches to the definition of stage space as cultural integrity. The scientific novelty of the work is to reveal the peculiarities of cultural creation of stage space in the twentieth century, when artists turned to previous systems of artistic reflection, figurative distinctions of the stage in culture. Emphasis is placed on the relevance of the study of the communicative properties of the stage in cultural construction. The stage can be remote, virtual, chamber, monumental. However, the scene from the category of subject-spatial dimension passes into another dimension - time. On the stage you can not break the unity of time and space, the stage is the unity of action and event, and also presents a certain space-time - chronotope, human image, an image of the day. Conclusions. The revival of the pre-cultural, pre-civilization in the broad progressive sense of the word world of the stage becomes the basis for a polymorphic definition of the communicative dimension of the stage as such. Stage space in the modern dimension requires a comprehensive interdisciplinary study, which focuses on discursive analysis, phenomenological and aesthetic studies of the categories "stage", "act", "action", "event", "creativity", etc. The article only raises the issue of interdisciplinary research tools. Further elaboration of the problem field requires separate investigations. Keywords: culture, universe, scene, action, event, chronotope, scenics.
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Mania, Karolina. "Legal Technology: Assessment of the Legal Tech Industry’s Potential." Journal of the Knowledge Economy, January 28, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13132-022-00924-z.

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AbstractThe use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the sector of legal services has resulted in the emergence of a new category of services known as legal technology (legal tech). This article aims at defining the current state of research concerning the matter, confirming its interdisciplinary nature and examining the level of its popularity. The strategy assumed for the article has influenced the order and sequence of the topics covered starting from an introduction to legal technology together with analysis of the context of the definition of the term (legal tech) (“Introduction” section), through a detailed discussion of the methodology of systematic literature review, its results and an appraisal of the popularity of the notions (“Materials and Methods” and “Bibliometric Analysis” sections), the application of the thematic analysis method (“Thematic Analysis of the Reference Repository” section), Google Trends analysis (“Analysis of the Popularity of the Terms ‘Legal Technology’ or ‘Legal Tech’ (Google Trends)” section), and finally the conclusions (“Conclusions” section). The research methodology covers a systematic literature review, quantitative bibliometric analysis, the thematic analysis method, and — complementarily — popularity analysis performed using the Google Trends analytical tool. The article confirms the multidisciplinary nature of legal technology as a subject matter, indicating the thematic categories corresponding with the notion under investigation. It contains a description of the geographical segmentation and difference in that regard at a global level. The author has verified the presence of publications on legal technology and shown that the future of the legal services sector lies in an interdisciplinary juxtaposition of the classic legal sciences with entirely new areas, i.e. IT, artificial intelligence, and data analysis.
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Batorowska, Hanna. "The Information Science Context of Safety Culture." Przegląd Biblioteczny, December 30, 2019, 32–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.36702/pb.424.

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Objective – The aim of the article is to show the interdisciplinary nature of security and information sciences and the relationships that exist between them in the area of threats generated by digital civilisation. Attention was paid to the importance of selected components of the information security culture in shaping the security culture. It has been pointed out that these components are a permanent subject of information science research. Method – A method of analysis and criticism of the literature was used. Results – Information technology as a discipline dealing, among others, with the functioning of people in the world of information (e.g. individual and group information management, information literacy obligations, information needs and behaviour – also in everyday life, information culture) supports research in the field of security sciences (especially human safety) conducted in the context of the development of technical civilisation and communication. Threats that the information society generates require studies, e.g. in the field of personal, social, health and ecological security (protection of the infosphere against information overload and humans against information stress). As part of these problems, theoretical and empirical research is undertaken, which is also dealt with by information science researchers. The combination of scientific reflection undertaken by specialists in both areas is indispensable in order to be able to see in the information security culture a common research subject enabling the diagnosis of various aspects of the broadly understood information culture.
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DeWaters, Jan, and Bhavana Kotla. "Using an open-ended socio-technical design challenge for entrepreneurship education in a first-year engineering course." Frontiers in Education 8 (May 10, 2023). http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2023.1198161.

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Engineering graduates must be prepared with sound technical knowledge and a range of 21st century competencies and professional skills such as creativity, interdisciplinary collaboration, communication, and innovation to successfully solve today’s complex, global problems. Equally important is a deep appreciation of the degree to which technological solutions are situated within the context of human and natural environments. Despite calls from the National Academy of Engineering and several professional organizations to broaden engineering education to embrace these skills, most engineering programs persistently focus on the importance of technical skills. This paper describes an open-ended team-based design challenge that integrates entrepreneurial-minded (EM) skill development into an interdisciplinary first-year engineering course that approaches engineering from a socio-technical perspective. The challenge was implemented in two simultaneous first-year classes (n = 49), with the goal of fostering students’ broad professional skills and their appreciation of the links between engineering technologies and societal context. The action research study used a quasi-experimental design with convenience sampling and no control group to explore students’ self-perceived entrepreneurial-minded (EM) skills development. Data were collected with a retrospective questionnaire comprised of a series of 5-point Likert-type questions that asked students to assess the development of their EM skills in all three areas of the EM framework: Exhibit Curiosity, Establish Connections, and Create Value (the “3C” framework). Results indicate that students felt they developed EM skills in all three areas of the 3C Framework, with more fully developed skills in the Establish Connections and Create Value categories. Overall, this study suggests the effectiveness of using open-ended, socio-technical engineering design challenges for developing skills that will better prepare students to work collaboratively on complex and interdisciplinary problems they will face in their professional careers.
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Olga, Oleksiuk. "Interdisciplinarity as form of fundamentalisation of higher art education: faceted approach." Musical Art in the Educological Discourse, no. 5 (2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.28925/2518-766x.2020.5.1.

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The interdisciplinarity of art education lies in the universality of the influence of art on all human cognitive processes and the ability to embody artistically any theme and plot that excites a person — an artist and a recipient. The origins of interdisciplinarity as a scientific paradigm are involved in the theory of communication. Interdisciplinarity is based on scientific semantics: interdisciplinarity plays a syntactic role, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, it helps to build semantic connections in schemes and transitions between different subject areas. A promising strategic direction is to increase the cultural intensity of all disciplines. Simplified practical use of art as an illustration, “figurative confirmation” of life phenomena ignores its high purpose. Practitioners pay attention to the use of interactive teaching methods: discussion, round table, method of projects, synectics, inversion, etc. In the implementation of research projects of students, we use phenomenological dialogue / polylogue. The use of this method creates conditions for analysis, reflection and self-assessment of students in the organization of their educational activities. The facet approach is an important area of modernization of the university and corresponds to the innovative nature of science. The transition from interdisciplinary integration in the classroom to interdisciplinary integration with project forms of education is the main condition for building an innovative model for the development of art education.
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Rayu Syabanayretin, Muhammad Fachri Rabbani, and Maman Suherman. "Studi Fenomenologi Komunikasi Sosial Pengamen di Kota Bandung." Bandung Conference Series: Public Relations 2, no. 1 (January 18, 2022). http://dx.doi.org/10.29313/bcspr.v2i1.567.

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Abstract. The phenomenon of busking is one of the sosial problems in urban areas, especially in the city of Bandung and communication is the main human activity. By communicating, humans can mingle with each other. The reality of buskers is one of the sosial problems in big cities. Most people live as street singers because of poverty, but there are also many street singers who are based on their own desires and make their main capital to earn a living.The purpose of this study is to find out the motives of the busker subject in response to sosial communication,know the meaning of singing for the subject and to find out the communication experience of research subjects in response to sosial communication.This researcher uses a qualitative method with a phenomenological study approach. The technique of collecting data was carried out by in-depth interviews, observations, and documentation. The result of this research is that the subject's motives for becoming buskers in the Bandung City area are divided into 4 categories, namely economic motives, hobby motives, learning motives, and own desire motives. This motive is also an impulse from oneself that is caused by the needs that he wants to fulfill himself or the needs of his family. The meaning of the group’s musicians is divided into 3, namely homogeneous, partial, and artificial, so the meaning of busking for research subjects is as individuals who have responsibilities to themselves and their families, individuals who try to get rid of dependence, and individuals who always try to have social relations on the streets. The research subject's experience of social communication in responding to social communication is twofold. namely social communication that takes place in the form of individual communication to other music singers and social communication that takes place in the form of individual communication to parents and siblings. Abstrak. Fenomena pengamen merupakan salah satu masalah sosial di perkotaan khusus nya di kota Bandung dan Komunikasi adalah aktivitas pokok manusia. Dengan berkomunikasi manusia bisa saling berbaur. Realita pengamen yakni salah satu masalah sosial di kota-kota besar. Kebanyakan orang hidup sebagai pengamen di karenakan oleh kemiskinan, akan tetapi banyak juga pengamen yang didasari oleh keinginan sendiri dan di jadikan modal utama ia mencari nafkah. Tujuan dari penelitian ini ingin mengetahui motif subjek pengamen dalam menanggapi komunikasi sosial, mengetahui makna mengamen bagi subjek dan untuk mengetahui pengalaman komunikasi subjek penelitian dalam menanggapi komunikasi sosial. Peneliti ini menggunakan metode kualitatif dengan pendekatan studi fenomenologi. Teknik pengumpulan data yang dilakukan dengan wawancara mendalam, observasi, dan dokumentasi. Hasil dari penelitian ini adalah motif subjek menjadi pengamen di wilayah Kota Bandung di bagi menjadi 4 kategori, yaitu motif ekonomi, motif hobi, motif keinginan belajar, dan motif keinginan sendiri. Motif ini juga merupakan dorongan dari diri sendiri yang di timbulkan karena kebutuhan yang ingin dipenuhi oleh dirinya sendiri atau kebutuhan keluarga. Makna kelompok pemusik terbagi menjadi 3, yaitu makna homogen, makna parsial, dan makna artifisial, jadi makna pengamen subjek penelitian adalah sebagai individu yang mempunyai tanggung jawab pada diri nya sendiri dan keluarganya, individu yang berusaha untuk melepaskan ketergantungan, dan individu yang selalu berusaha memiliki relasi sosial dalam di jalanan. Pengalaman komunikasi sosial subjek penelitian dalam menanggapi komunikasi sosial ada dua. yaitu komunikasi sosial yang berlangsung dalam bentuk komunikasi individual terhadap pengamen musik lainnya dan komunikasi sosal yang berlangsung dalam bentuk komunikasi individual terhadap orang tua dan saudara.
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Morrow, Elizabeth, Teodor Zidaru, Fiona Ross, Cindy Mason, Kunal D. Patel, Melissa Ream, and Rich Stockley. "Artificial intelligence technologies and compassion in healthcare: A systematic scoping review." Frontiers in Psychology 13 (January 17, 2023). http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.971044.

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BackgroundAdvances in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, together with the availability of big data in society, creates uncertainties about how these developments will affect healthcare systems worldwide. Compassion is essential for high-quality healthcare and research shows how prosocial caring behaviors benefit human health and societies. However, the possible association between AI technologies and compassion is under conceptualized and underexplored.ObjectivesThe aim of this scoping review is to provide a comprehensive depth and a balanced perspective of the emerging topic of AI technologies and compassion, to inform future research and practice. The review questions were: How is compassion discussed in relation to AI technologies in healthcare? How are AI technologies being used to enhance compassion in healthcare? What are the gaps in current knowledge and unexplored potential? What are the key areas where AI technologies could support compassion in healthcare?Materials and methodsA systematic scoping review following five steps of Joanna Briggs Institute methodology. Presentation of the scoping review conforms with PRISMA-ScR (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews). Eligibility criteria were defined according to 3 concept constructs (AI technologies, compassion, healthcare) developed from the literature and informed by medical subject headings (MeSH) and key words for the electronic searches. Sources of evidence were Web of Science and PubMed databases, articles published in English language 2011–2022. Articles were screened by title/abstract using inclusion/exclusion criteria. Data extracted (author, date of publication, type of article, aim/context of healthcare, key relevant findings, country) was charted using data tables. Thematic analysis used an inductive-deductive approach to generate code categories from the review questions and the data. A multidisciplinary team assessed themes for resonance and relevance to research and practice.ResultsSearches identified 3,124 articles. A total of 197 were included after screening. The number of articles has increased over 10 years (2011, n = 1 to 2021, n = 47 and from Jan–Aug 2022 n = 35 articles). Overarching themes related to the review questions were: (1) Developments and debates (7 themes) Concerns about AI ethics, healthcare jobs, and loss of empathy; Human-centered design of AI technologies for healthcare; Optimistic speculation AI technologies will address care gaps; Interrogation of what it means to be human and to care; Recognition of future potential for patient monitoring, virtual proximity, and access to healthcare; Calls for curricula development and healthcare professional education; Implementation of AI applications to enhance health and wellbeing of the healthcare workforce. (2) How AI technologies enhance compassion (10 themes) Empathetic awareness; Empathetic response and relational behavior; Communication skills; Health coaching; Therapeutic interventions; Moral development learning; Clinical knowledge and clinical assessment; Healthcare quality assessment; Therapeutic bond and therapeutic alliance; Providing health information and advice. (3) Gaps in knowledge (4 themes) Educational effectiveness of AI-assisted learning; Patient diversity and AI technologies; Implementation of AI technologies in education and practice settings; Safety and clinical effectiveness of AI technologies. (4) Key areas for development (3 themes) Enriching education, learning and clinical practice; Extending healing spaces; Enhancing healing relationships.ConclusionThere is an association between AI technologies and compassion in healthcare and interest in this association has grown internationally over the last decade. In a range of healthcare contexts, AI technologies are being used to enhance empathetic awareness; empathetic response and relational behavior; communication skills; health coaching; therapeutic interventions; moral development learning; clinical knowledge and clinical assessment; healthcare quality assessment; therapeutic bond and therapeutic alliance; and to provide health information and advice. The findings inform a reconceptualization of compassion as a human-AI system of intelligent caring comprising six elements: (1) Awareness of suffering (e.g., pain, distress, risk, disadvantage); (2) Understanding the suffering (significance, context, rights, responsibilities etc.); (3) Connecting with the suffering (e.g., verbal, physical, signs and symbols); (4) Making a judgment about the suffering (the need to act); (5) Responding with an intention to alleviate the suffering; (6) Attention to the effect and outcomes of the response. These elements can operate at an individual (human or machine) and collective systems level (healthcare organizations or systems) as a cyclical system to alleviate different types of suffering. New and novel approaches to human-AI intelligent caring could enrich education, learning, and clinical practice; extend healing spaces; and enhance healing relationships.ImplicationsIn a complex adaptive system such as healthcare, human-AI intelligent caring will need to be implemented, not as an ideology, but through strategic choices, incentives, regulation, professional education, and training, as well as through joined up thinking about human-AI intelligent caring. Research funders can encourage research and development into the topic of AI technologies and compassion as a system of human-AI intelligent caring. Educators, technologists, and health professionals can inform themselves about the system of human-AI intelligent caring.
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Bengtsson, Mariette, Ann-Britt Ivarsson Ekedahl, and Karin Sjöström. "Errors linked to medication management in nursing homes: an interview study." BMC Nursing 20, no. 1 (April 29, 2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12912-021-00587-2.

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Abstract Background The number of errors in medication management in nursing homes is increasing, which may lead to potentially life-threatening harm. Few studies on this subject are found in the municipal nursing home setting, and causes need to be identified. The aim of this study was to explore perceptions of errors connected to medication management in nursing homes by exploring the perspective of first-line registered nurses, registered nurses, and non-licensed staff involved in the care of older persons. Methods A qualitative research approach was applied based on semi-structured interviews with 21 participants at their workplaces: Seven in each of the occupational categories of first-line registered nurses, registered nurses, and non-licensed staff. Subcategories were derived from transcribed interviews by content analysis and categorized according to the Man, Technology, and Organization concept of error causation, which is as a framework to identify errors. Results Mistakes in medication management were commonly perceived as a result of human shortcomings and deficiencies in working conditions such as the lack of safe tools to facilitate and secure medication management. The delegation of drug administration to non-licensed staff, the abandonment of routines, carelessness, a lack of knowledge, inadequate verbal communication between colleagues, and a lack of understanding of the difficulties involved in handling the drugs were all considered as risk areas for errors. Organizational hazards were related to the ability to control the delegation, the standard of education, and safety awareness among staff members. Safety issues relating to technology involved devices for handling prescription cards and when staff were not included in the development process of new technological aids. A lack of staff and the lack of time to act safely in the care of the elderly were also perceived as safety hazards, particularly with the non-licensed staff working in nursing homes. Conclusions The staff working in nursing homes perceive that the risks due to medication management are mainly caused by human limitations or technical deficiencies. Organizational factors, such as working conditions, can often facilitate the occurrence of malpractice. To minimize mistakes, care managers need to have a systemwide perspective on safety issues, where organizational issues are essential.
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Cham, Karen, and Jeffrey Johnson. "Complexity Theory." M/C Journal 10, no. 3 (June 1, 2007). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2672.

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Complex systems are an invention of the universe. It is not at all clear that science has an a priori primacy claim to the study of complex systems. (Galanter 5) Introduction In popular dialogues, describing a system as “complex” is often the point of resignation, inferring that the system cannot be sufficiently described, predicted nor managed. Transport networks, management infrastructure and supply chain logistics are all often described in this way. In socio-cultural terms “complex” is used to describe those humanistic systems that are “intricate, involved, complicated, dynamic, multi-dimensional, interconnected systems [such as] transnational citizenship, communities, identities, multiple belongings, overlapping geographies and competing histories” (Cahir & James). Academic dialogues have begun to explore the collective behaviors of complex systems to define a complex system specifically as an adaptive one; i.e. a system that demonstrates ‘self organising’ principles and ‘emergent’ properties. Based upon the key principles of interaction and emergence in relation to adaptive and self organising systems in cultural artifacts and processes, this paper will argue that complex systems are cultural systems. By introducing generic principles of complex systems, and looking at the exploration of such principles in art, design and media research, this paper argues that a science of cultural systems as part of complex systems theory is the post modern science for the digital age. Furthermore, that such a science was predicated by post structuralism and has been manifest in art, design and media practice since the late 1960s. Complex Systems Theory Complexity theory grew out of systems theory, an holistic approach to analysis that views whole systems based upon the links and interactions between the component parts and their relationship to each other and the environment within they exists. This stands in stark contrast to conventional science which is based upon Descartes’s reductionism, where the aim is to analyse systems by reducing something to its component parts (Wilson 3). As systems thinking is concerned with relationships more than elements, it proposes that in complex systems, small catalysts can cause large changes and that a change in one area of a system can adversely affect another area of the system. As is apparent, systems theory is a way of thinking rather than a specific set of rules, and similarly there is no single unified Theory of Complexity, but several different theories have arisen from the natural sciences, mathematics and computing. As such, the study of complex systems is very interdisciplinary and encompasses more than one theoretical framework. Whilst key ideas of complexity theory developed through artificial intelligence and robotics research, other important contributions came from thermodynamics, biology, sociology, physics, economics and law. In her volume for the Elsevier Advanced Management Series, “Complex Systems and Evolutionary Perspectives on Organisations”, Eve Mitleton-Kelly describes a comprehensive overview of this evolution as five main areas of research: complex adaptive systems dissipative structures autopoiesis (non-equilibrium) social systems chaos theory path dependence Here, Mitleton-Kelly points out that relatively little work has been done on developing a specific theory of complex social systems, despite much interest in complexity and its application to management (Mitleton-Kelly 4). To this end, she goes on to define the term “complex evolving system” as more appropriate to the field than ‘complex adaptive system’ and suggests that the term “complex behaviour” is thus more useful in social contexts (Mitleton-Kelly). For our purpose here, “complex systems” will be the general term used to describe those systems that are diverse and made up of multiple interdependent elements, that are often ‘adaptive’, in that they have the capacity to change and learn from events. This is in itself both ‘evolutionary’ and ‘behavioural’ and can be understood as emerging from the interaction of autonomous agents – especially people. Some generic principles of complex systems defined by Mitleton Kelly that are of concern here are: self-organisation emergence interdependence feedback space of possibilities co-evolving creation of new order Whilst the behaviours of complex systems clearly do not fall into our conventional top down perception of management and production, anticipating such behaviours is becoming more and more essential for products, processes and policies. For example, compare the traditional top down model of news generation, distribution and consumption to the “emerging media eco-system” (Bowman and Willis 14). Figure 1 (Bowman & Willis 10) Figure 2 (Bowman & Willis 12) To the traditional news organisations, such a “democratization of production” (McLuhan 230) has been a huge cause for concern. The agencies once solely responsible for the representation of reality are now lost in a global miasma of competing perspectives. Can we anticipate and account for complex behaviours? Eve Mitleton Kelly states that “if organisations are understood as complex evolving systems co-evolving as part of a social ‘ecosystem’, then that changed perspective changes ways of acting and relating which lead to a different way of working. Thus, management strategy changes, and our organizational design paradigms evolve as new types of relationships and ways of working provide the conditions for the emergence of new organisational forms” (Mitleton-Kelly 6). Complexity in Design It is thus through design practice and processes that discovering methods for anticipating complex systems behaviours seem most possible. The Embracing Complexity in Design (ECiD) research programme, is a contemporary interdisciplinary research cluster consisting of academics and designers from architectural engineering, robotics, geography, digital media, sustainable design, and computing aiming to explore the possibility of trans disciplinary principles of complexity in design. Over arching this work is the conviction that design can be seen as model for complex systems researchers motivated by applying complexity science in particular domains. Key areas in which design and complexity interact have been established by this research cluster. Most immediately, many designed products and systems are inherently complex to design in the ordinary sense. For example, when designing vehicles, architecture, microchips designers need to understand complex dynamic processes used to fabricate and manufacture products and systems. The social and economic context of design is also complex, from market economics and legal regulation to social trends and mass culture. The process of designing can also involve complex social dynamics, with many people processing and exchanging complex heterogeneous information over complex human and communication networks, in the context of many changing constraints. Current key research questions are: how can the methods of complex systems science inform designers? how can design inform research into complex systems? Whilst ECiD acknowledges that to answer such questions effectively the theoretical and methodological relations between complexity science and design need further exploration and enquiry, there are no reliable precedents for such an activity across the sciences and the arts in general. Indeed, even in areas where a convergence of humanities methodology with scientific practice might seem to be most pertinent, most examples are few and far between. In his paper “Post Structuralism, Hypertext & the World Wide Web”, Luke Tredennick states that “despite the concentration of post-structuralism on text and texts, the study of information has largely failed to exploit post-structuralist theory” (Tredennick 5). Yet it is surely in the convergence of art and design with computation and the media that a search for practical trans-metadisciplinary methodologies might be most fruitful. It is in design for interactive media, where algorithms meet graphics, where the user can interact, adapt and amend, that self-organisation, emergence, interdependence, feedback, the space of possibilities, co-evolution and the creation of new order are embraced on a day to day basis by designers. A digitally interactive environment such as the World Wide Web, clearly demonstrates all the key aspects of a complex system. Indeed, it has already been described as a ‘complexity machine’ (Qvortup 9). It is important to remember that this ‘complexity machine’ has been designed. It is an intentional facility. It may display all the characteristics of complexity but, whilst some of its attributes are most demonstrative of self organisation and emergence, the Internet itself has not emerged spontaneously. For example, Tredinnick details the evolution of the World Wide Web through the Memex machine of Vannevar Bush, through Ted Nelsons hypertext system Xanadu to Tim Berners-Lee’s Enquire (Tredennick 3). The Internet was engineered. So, whilst we may not be able to entirely predict complex behavior, we can, and do, quite clearly design for it. When designing digitally interactive artifacts we design parameters or co ordinates to define the space within which a conceptual process will take place. We can never begin to predict precisely what those processes might become through interaction, emergence and self organisation, but we can establish conceptual parameters that guide and delineate the space of possibilities. Indeed this fact is so transparently obvious that many commentators in the humanities have been pushed to remark that interaction is merely interpretation, and so called new media is not new at all; that one interacts with a book in much the same way as a digital artifact. After all, post-structuralist theory had established the “death of the author” in the 1970s – the a priori that all cultural artifacts are open to interpretation, where all meanings must be completed by the reader. The concept of the “open work” (Eco 6) has been an established post modern concept for over 30 years and is commonly recognised as a feature of surrealist montage, poetry, the writings of James Joyce, even advertising design, where a purposive space for engagement and interpretation of a message is designated, without which the communication does not “work”. However, this concept is also most successfully employed in relation to installation art and, more recently, interactive art as a reflection of the artist’s conscious decision to leave part of a work open to interpretation and/or interaction. Art & Complex Systems One of the key projects of Embracing Complexity in Design has been to look at the relationship between art and complex systems. There is a relatively well established history of exploring art objects as complex systems in themselves that finds its origins in the systems art movement of the 1970s. In his paper “Observing ‘Systems Art’ from a Systems-Theroretical Perspective”, Francis Halsall defines systems art as “emerging in the 1960s and 1970s as a new paradigm in artistic practice … displaying an interest in the aesthetics of networks, the exploitation of new technology and New Media, unstable or de-materialised physicality, the prioritising of non-visual aspects, and an engagement (often politicised) with the institutional systems of support (such as the gallery, discourse, or the market) within which it occurs” (Halsall 7). More contemporarily, “Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970”, at Tate Modern, London, focuses upon systems artists “rejection of art’s traditional focus on the object, to wide-ranging experiments al focus on the object, to wide-ranging experiments with media that included dance, performance and…film & video” (De Salvo 3). Artists include Andy Warhol, Richard Long, Gilbert & George, Sol Lewitt, Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman. In 2002, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New York, held an international exhibition entitled “Complexity; Art & Complex Systems”, that was concerned with “art as a distinct discipline offer[ing] its own unique approache[s] and epistemic standards in the consideration of complexity” (Galanter and Levy 5), and the organisers go on to describe four ways in which artists engage the realm of complexity: presentations of natural complex phenomena that transcend conventional scientific visualisation descriptive systems which describe complex systems in an innovative and often idiosyncratic way commentary on complexity science itself technical applications of genetic algorithms, neural networks and a-life ECiD artist Julian Burton makes work that visualises how companies operate in specific relation to their approach to change and innovation. He is a strategic artist and facilitator who makes “pictures of problems to help people talk about them” (Burton). Clients include public and private sector organisations such as Barclays, Shell, Prudential, KPMG and the NHS. He is quoted as saying “Pictures are a powerful way to engage and focus a group’s attention on crucial issues and challenges, and enable them to grasp complex situations quickly. I try and create visual catalysts that capture the major themes of a workshop, meeting or strategy and re-present them in an engaging way to provoke lively conversations” (Burton). This is a simple and direct method of using art as a knowledge elicitation tool that falls into the first and second categories above. The third category is demonstrated by the ground breaking TechnoSphere, that was specifically inspired by complexity theory, landscape and artificial life. Launched in 1995 as an Arts Council funded online digital environment it was created by Jane Prophet and Gordon Selley. TechnoSphere is a virtual world, populated by artificial life forms created by users of the World Wide Web. The digital ecology of the 3D world, housed on a server, depends on the participation of an on-line public who accesses the world via the Internet. At the time of writing it has attracted over a 100,000 users who have created over a million creatures. The artistic exploration of technical applications is by default a key field for researching the convergence of trans-metadisciplinary methodologies. Troy Innocent’s lifeSigns evolves multiple digital media languages “expressed as a virtual world – through form, structure, colour, sound, motion, surface and behaviour” (Innocent). The work explores the idea of “emergent language through play – the idea that new meanings may be generated through interaction between human and digital agents”. Thus this artwork combines three areas of converging research – artificial life; computational semiotics and digital games. In his paper “What Is Generative Art? Complexity Theory as a Context for Art Theory”, Philip Galanter describes all art as generative on the basis that it is created from the application of rules. Yet, as demonstrated above, what is significantly different and important about digital interactivity, as opposed to its predecessor, interpretation, is its provision of a graphical user interface (GUI) to component parts of a text such as symbol, metaphor, narrative, etc for the multiple “authors” and the multiple “readers” in a digitally interactive space of possibility. This offers us tangible, instantaneous reproduction and dissemination of interpretations of an artwork. Conclusion: Digital Interactivity – A Complex Medium Digital interaction of any sort is thus a graphic model of the complex process of communication. Here, complexity does not need deconstructing, representing nor modelling, as the aesthetics (as in apprehended by the senses) of the graphical user interface conveniently come first. Design for digital interactive media is thus design for complex adaptive systems. The theoretical and methodological relations between complexity science and design can clearly be expounded especially well through post-structuralism. The work of Barthes, Derrida & Foucault offers us the notion of all cultural artefacts as texts or systems of signs, whose meanings are not fixed but rather sustained by networks of relationships. Implemented in a digital environment post-structuralist theory is tangible complexity. Strangely, whilst Philip Galanter states that science has no necessary over reaching claim to the study of complexity, he then argues conversely that “contemporary art theory rooted in skeptical continental philosophy [reduces] art to social construction [as] postmodernism, deconstruction and critical theory [are] notoriously elusive, slippery, and overlapping terms and ideas…that in fact [are] in the business of destabilising apparently clear and universal propositions” (4). This seems to imply that for Galanter, post modern rejections of grand narratives necessarily will exclude the “new scientific paradigm” of complexity, a paradigm that he himself is looking to be universal. Whilst he cites Lyotard (6) describing both political and linguistic reasons why postmodern art celebrates plurality, denying any progress towards singular totalising views, he fails to appreciate what happens if that singular totalising view incorporates interactivity? Surely complexity is pluralistic by its very nature? In the same vein, if language for Derrida is “an unfixed system of traces and differences … regardless of the intent of the authored texts … with multiple equally legitimate meanings” (Galanter 7) then I have heard no better description of the signifiers, signifieds, connotations and denotations of digital culture. Complexity in its entirety can also be conversely understood as the impact of digital interactivity upon culture per se which has a complex causal relation in itself; Qvortups notion of a “communications event” (9) such as the Danish publication of the Mohammed cartoons falls into this category. Yet a complex causality could be traced further into cultural processes enlightening media theory; from the relationship between advertising campaigns and brand development; to the exposure and trajectory of the celebrity; describing the evolution of visual language in media cultures and informing the relationship between exposure to representation and behaviour. In digital interaction the terms art, design and media converge into a process driven, performative event that demonstrates emergence through autopoietic processes within a designated space of possibility. By insisting that all artwork is generative Galanter, like many other writers, negates the medium entirely which allows him to insist that generative art is “ideologically neutral” (Galanter 10). Generative art, like all digitally interactive artifacts are not neutral but rather ideologically plural. Thus, if one integrates Qvortups (8) delineation of medium theory and complexity theory we may have what we need; a first theory of a complex medium. Through interactive media complexity theory is the first post modern science; the first science of culture. References Bowman, Shane, and Chris Willis. We Media. 21 Sep. 2003. 9 March 2007 http://www.hypergene.net/wemedia/weblog.php>. Burton, Julian. “Hedron People.” 9 March 2007 http://www.hedron.com/network/assoc.php4?associate_id=14>. Cahir, Jayde, and Sarah James. “Complex: Call for Papers.” M/C Journal 9 Sep. 2006. 7 March 2007 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/journal/upcoming.php>. De Salvo, Donna, ed. Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970. London: Tate Gallery Press, 2005. Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1989. Galanter, Phillip, and Ellen K. Levy. Complexity: Art & Complex Systems. SDMA Gallery Guide, 2002. Galanter, Phillip. “Against Reductionism: Science, Complexity, Art & Complexity Studies.” 2003. 9 March 2007 http://isce.edu/ISCE_Group_Site/web-content/ISCE_Events/ Norwood_2002/Norwood_2002_Papers/Galanter.pdf>. Halsall, Francis. “Observing ‘Systems-Art’ from a Systems-Theoretical Perspective”. CHArt 2005. 9 March 2007 http://www.chart.ac.uk/chart2005/abstracts/halsall.htm>. Innocent, Troy. “Life Signs.” 9 March 2007 http://www.iconica.org/main.htm>. Johnson, Jeffrey. “Embracing Complexity in Design (ECiD).” 2007. 9 March 2007 http://www.complexityanddesign.net/>. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962. Mitleton-Kelly, Eve, ed. Complex Systems and Evolutionary Perspectives on Organisations. Elsevier Advanced Management Series, 2003. Prophet, Jane. “Jane Prophet.” 9 March 2007 http://www.janeprophet.co.uk/>. Qvortup, Lars. “Understanding New Digital Media.” European Journal of Communication 21.3 (2006): 345-356. Tedinnick, Luke. “Post Structuralism, Hypertext & the World Wide Web.” Aslib 59.2 (2007): 169-186. Wilson, Edward Osborne. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: A.A. Knoff, 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Cham, Karen, and Jeffrey Johnson. "Complexity Theory: A Science of Cultural Systems?." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/08-cham-johnson.php>. APA Style Cham, K., and J. Johnson. (Jun. 2007) "Complexity Theory: A Science of Cultural Systems?," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/08-cham-johnson.php>.
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Burns, Alex. "Oblique Strategies for Ambient Journalism." M/C Journal 13, no. 2 (April 15, 2010). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.230.

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Alfred Hermida recently posited ‘ambient journalism’ as a new framework for para- and professional journalists, who use social networks like Twitter for story sources, and as a news delivery platform. Beginning with this framework, this article explores the following questions: How does Hermida define ‘ambient journalism’ and what is its significance? Are there alternative definitions? What lessons do current platforms provide for the design of future, real-time platforms that ‘ambient journalists’ might use? What lessons does the work of Brian Eno provide–the musician and producer who coined the term ‘ambient music’ over three decades ago? My aim here is to formulate an alternative definition of ambient journalism that emphasises craft, skills acquisition, and the mental models of professional journalists, which are the foundations more generally for journalism practices. Rather than Hermida’s participatory media context I emphasise ‘institutional adaptiveness’: how journalists and newsrooms in media institutions rely on craft and skills, and how emerging platforms can augment these foundations, rather than replace them. Hermida’s Ambient Journalism and the Role of Journalists Hermida describes ambient journalism as: “broad, asynchronous, lightweight and always-on communication systems [that] are creating new kinds of interactions around the news, and are enabling citizens to maintain a mental model of news and events around them” (Hermida 2). His ideas appear to have two related aspects. He conceives ambient journalism as an “awareness system” between individuals that functions as a collective intelligence or kind of ‘distributed cognition’ at a group level (Hermida 2, 4-6). Facebook, Twitter and other online social networks are examples. Hermida also suggests that such networks enable non-professionals to engage in ‘communication’ and ‘conversation’ about news and media events (Hermida 2, 7). In a helpful clarification, Hermida observes that ‘para-journalists’ are like the paralegals or non-lawyers who provide administrative support in the legal profession and, in academic debates about journalism, are more commonly known as ‘citizen journalists’. Thus, Hermida’s ambient journalism appears to be: (1) an information systems model of new platforms and networks, and (2) a normative argument that these tools empower ‘para-journalists’ to engage in journalism and real-time commentary. Hermida’s thesis is intriguing and worthy of further discussion and debate. As currently formulated however it risks sharing the blind-spots and contradictions of the academic literature that Hermida cites, which suffers from poor theory-building (Burns). A major reason is that the participatory media context on which Hermida often builds his work has different mental models and normative theories than the journalists or media institutions that are the target of critique. Ambient journalism would be a stronger and more convincing framework if these incorrect assumptions were jettisoned. Others may also potentially misunderstand what Hermida proposes, because the academic debate is often polarised between para-journalists and professional journalists, due to different views about institutions, the politics of knowledge, decision heuristics, journalist training, and normative theoretical traditions (Christians et al. 126; Cole and Harcup 166-176). In the academic debate, para-journalists or ‘citizen journalists’ may be said to have a communitarian ethic and desire more autonomous solutions to journalists who are framed as uncritical and reliant on official sources, and to media institutions who are portrayed as surveillance-like ‘monitors’ of society (Christians et al. 124-127). This is however only one of a range of possible relationships. Sole reliance on para-journalists could be a premature solution to a more complex media ecology. Journalism craft, which does not rely just on official sources, also has a range of practices that already provides the “more complex ways of understanding and reporting on the subtleties of public communication” sought (Hermida 2). Citizen- and para-journalist accounts may overlook micro-studies in how newsrooms adopt technological innovations and integrate them into newsgathering routines (Hemmingway 196). Thus, an examination of the realities of professional journalism will help to cast a better light on how ambient journalism can shape the mental models of para-journalists, and provide more rigorous analysis of news and similar events. Professional journalism has several core dimensions that para-journalists may overlook. Journalism’s foundation as an experiential craft includes guidance and norms that orient the journalist to information, and that includes practitioner ethics. This craft is experiential; the basis for journalism’s claim to “social expertise” as a discipline; and more like the original Linux and Open Source movements which evolved through creative conflict (Sennett 9, 25-27, 125-127, 249-251). There are learnable, transmissible skills to contextually evaluate, filter, select and distil the essential insights. This craft-based foundation and skills informs and structures the journalist’s cognitive witnessing of an event, either directly or via reconstructed, cultivated sources. The journalist publishes through a recognised media institution or online platform, which provides communal validation and verification. There is far more here than the academic portrayal of journalists as ‘gate-watchers’ for a ‘corporatist’ media elite. Craft and skills distinguish the professional journalist from Hermida’s para-journalist. Increasingly, media institutions hire journalists who are trained in other craft-based research methods (Burns and Saunders). Bethany McLean who ‘broke’ the Enron scandal was an investment banker; documentary filmmaker Errol Morris first interviewed serial killers for an early project; and Neil Chenoweth used ‘forensic accounting’ techniques to investigate Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer. Such expertise allows the journalist to filter information, and to mediate any influences in the external environment, in order to develop an individualised, ‘embodied’ perspective (Hofstadter 234; Thompson; Garfinkel and Rawls). Para-journalists and social network platforms cannot replace this expertise, which is often unique to individual journalists and their research teams. Ambient Journalism and Twitter Current academic debates about how citizen- and para-journalists may augment or even replace professional journalists can often turn into legitimation battles whether the ‘de facto’ solution is a social media network rather than a media institution. For example, Hermida discusses Twitter, a micro-blogging platform that allows users to post 140-character messages that are small, discrete information chunks, for short-term and episodic memory. Twitter enables users to monitor other users, to group other messages, and to search for terms specified by a hashtag. Twitter thus illustrates how social media platforms can make data more transparent and explicit to non-specialists like para-journalists. In fact, Twitter is suitable for five different categories of real-time information: news, pre-news, rumours, the formation of social media and subject-based networks, and “molecular search” using granular data-mining tools (Leinweber 204-205). In this model, the para-journalist acts as a navigator and “way-finder” to new information (Morville, Findability). Jaron Lanier, an early designer of ‘virtual reality’ systems, is perhaps the most vocal critic of relying on groups of non-experts and tools like Twitter, instead of individuals who have professional expertise. For Lanier, what underlies debates about citizen- and para-journalists is a philosophy of “cybernetic totalism” and “digital Maoism” which exalts the Internet collective at the expense of truly individual views. He is deeply critical of Hermida’s chosen platform, Twitter: “A design that shares Twitter’s feature of providing ambient continuous contact between people could perhaps drop Twitter’s adoration of fragments. We don’t really know, because it is an unexplored design space” [emphasis added] (Lanier 24). In part, Lanier’s objection is traceable back to an unresolved debate on human factors and design in information science. Influenced by the post-war research into cybernetics, J.C.R. Licklider proposed a cyborg-like model of “man-machine symbiosis” between computers and humans (Licklider). In turn, Licklider’s framework influenced Douglas Engelbart, who shaped the growth of human-computer interaction, and the design of computer interfaces, the mouse, and other tools (Engelbart). In taking a system-level view of platforms Hermida builds on the strength of Licklider and Engelbart’s work. Yet because he focuses on para-journalists, and does not appear to include the craft and skills-based expertise of professional journalists, it is unclear how he would answer Lanier’s fears about how reliance on groups for news and other information is superior to individual expertise and judgment. Hermida’s two case studies point to this unresolved problem. Both cases appear to show how Twitter provides quicker and better forms of news and information, thereby increasing the effectiveness of para-journalists to engage in journalism and real-time commentary. However, alternative explanations may exist that raise questions about Twitter as a new platform, and thus these cases might actually reveal circumstances in which ambient journalism may fail. Hermida alludes to how para-journalists now fulfil the earlier role of ‘first responders’ and stringers, in providing the “immediate dissemination” of non-official information about disasters and emergencies (Hermida 1-2; Haddow and Haddow 117-118). Whilst important, this is really a specific role. In fact, disaster and emergency reporting occurs within well-established practices, professional ethics, and institutional routines that may involve journalists, government officials, and professional communication experts (Moeller). Officials and emergency management planners are concerned that citizen- or para-journalism is equated with the craft and skills of professional journalism. The experience of these officials and planners in 2005’s Hurricane Katrina in the United States, and in 2009’s Black Saturday bushfires in Australia, suggests that whilst para-journalists might be ‘first responders’ in a decentralised, complex crisis, they are perceived to spread rumours and potential social unrest when people need reliable information (Haddow and Haddow 39). These terms of engagement between officials, planners and para-journalists are still to be resolved. Hermida readily acknowledges that Twitter and other social network platforms are vulnerable to rumours (Hermida 3-4; Sunstein). However, his other case study, Iran’s 2009 election crisis, further complicates the vision of ambient journalism, and always-on communication systems in particular. Hermida discusses several events during the crisis: the US State Department request to halt a server upgrade, how the Basij’s shooting of bystander Neda Soltan was captured on a mobile phone camera, the spread across social network platforms, and the high-velocity number of ‘tweets’ or messages during the first two weeks of Iran’s electoral uncertainty (Hermida 1). The US State Department was interested in how Twitter could be used for non-official sources, and to inform people who were monitoring the election events. Twitter’s perceived ‘success’ during Iran’s 2009 election now looks rather different when other factors are considered such as: the dynamics and patterns of Tehran street protests; Iran’s clerics who used Soltan’s death as propaganda; claims that Iran’s intelligence services used Twitter to track down and to kill protestors; the ‘black box’ case of what the US State Department and others actually did during the crisis; the history of neo-conservative interest in a Twitter-like platform for strategic information operations; and the Iranian diaspora’s incitement of Tehran student protests via satellite broadcasts. Iran’s 2009 election crisis has important lessons for ambient journalism: always-on communication systems may create noise and spread rumours; ‘mirror-imaging’ of mental models may occur, when other participants have very different worldviews and ‘contexts of use’ for social network platforms; and the new kinds of interaction may not lead to effective intervention in crisis events. Hermida’s combination of news and non-news fragments is the perfect environment for psychological operations and strategic information warfare (Burns and Eltham). Lessons of Current Platforms for Ambient Journalism We have discussed some unresolved problems for ambient journalism as a framework for journalists, and as mental models for news and similar events. Hermida’s goal of an “awareness system” faces a further challenge: the phenomenological limitations of human consciousness to deal with information complexity and ambiguous situations, whether by becoming ‘entangled’ in abstract information or by developing new, unexpected uses for emergent technologies (Thackara; Thompson; Hofstadter 101-102, 186; Morville, Findability, 55, 57, 158). The recursive and reflective capacities of human consciousness imposes its own epistemological frames. It’s still unclear how Licklider’s human-computer interaction will shape consciousness, but Douglas Hofstadter’s experiments with art and video-based group experiments may be suggestive. Hofstadter observes: “the interpenetration of our worlds becomes so great that our worldviews start to fuse” (266). Current research into user experience and information design provides some validation of Hofstadter’s experience, such as how Google is now the ‘default’ search engine, and how its interface design shapes the user’s subjective experience of online search (Morville, Findability; Morville, Search Patterns). Several models of Hermida’s awareness system already exist that build on Hofstadter’s insight. Within the information systems field, on-going research into artificial intelligence–‘expert systems’ that can model expertise as algorithms and decision rules, genetic algorithms, and evolutionary computation–has attempted to achieve Hermida’s goal. What these systems share are mental models of cognition, learning and adaptiveness to new information, often with forecasting and prediction capabilities. Such systems work in journalism areas such as finance and sports that involve analytics, data-mining and statistics, and in related fields such as health informatics where there are clear, explicit guidelines on information and international standards. After a mid-1980s investment bubble (Leinweber 183-184) these systems now underpin the technology platforms of global finance and news intermediaries. Bloomberg LP’s ubiquitous dual-screen computers, proprietary network and data analytics (www.bloomberg.com), and its competitors such as Thomson Reuters (www.thomsonreuters.com and www.reuters.com), illustrate how financial analysts and traders rely on an “awareness system” to navigate global stock-markets (Clifford and Creswell). For example, a Bloomberg subscriber can access real-time analytics from exchanges, markets, and from data vendors such as Dow Jones, NYSE Euronext and Thomson Reuters. They can use portfolio management tools to evaluate market information, to make allocation and trading decisions, to monitor ‘breaking’ news, and to integrate this information. Twitter is perhaps the para-journalist equivalent to how professional journalists and finance analysts rely on Bloomberg’s platform for real-time market and business information. Already, hedge funds like PhaseCapital are data-mining Twitter’s ‘tweets’ or messages for rumours, shifts in stock-market sentiment, and to analyse potential trading patterns (Pritchett and Palmer). The US-based Securities and Exchange Commission, and researchers like David Gelernter and Paul Tetlock, have also shown the benefits of applied data-mining for regulatory market supervision, in particular to uncover analysts who provide ‘whisper numbers’ to online message boards, and who have access to material, non-public information (Leinweber 60, 136, 144-145, 208, 219, 241-246). Hermida’s framework might be developed further for such regulatory supervision. Hermida’s awareness system may also benefit from the algorithms found in high-frequency trading (HFT) systems that Citadel Group, Goldman Sachs, Renaissance Technologies, and other quantitative financial institutions use. Rather than human traders, HFT uses co-located servers and complex algorithms, to make high-volume trades on stock-markets that take advantage of microsecond changes in prices (Duhigg). HFT capabilities are shrouded in secrecy, and became the focus of regulatory attention after several high-profile investigations of traders alleged to have stolen the software code (Bray and Bunge). One public example is Streambase (www.streambase.com), a ‘complex event processing’ (CEP) platform that can be used in HFT, and commercialised from the Project Aurora research collaboration between Brandeis University, Brown University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. CEP and HFT may be the ‘killer apps’ of Hermida’s awareness system. Alternatively, they may confirm Jaron Lanier’s worst fears: your data-stream and user-generated content can be harvested by others–for their gain, and your loss! Conclusion: Brian Eno and Redefining ‘Ambient Journalism’ On the basis of the above discussion, I suggest a modified definition of Hermida’s thesis: ‘Ambient journalism’ is an emerging analytical framework for journalists, informed by cognitive, cybernetic, and information systems research. It ‘sensitises’ the individual journalist, whether professional or ‘para-professional’, to observe and to evaluate their immediate context. In doing so, ‘ambient journalism’, like journalism generally, emphasises ‘novel’ information. It can also inform the design of real-time platforms for journalistic sources and news delivery. Individual ‘ambient journalists’ can learn much from the career of musician and producer Brian Eno. His personal definition of ‘ambient’ is “an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint,” that relies on the co-evolution of the musician, creative horizons, and studio technology as a tool, just as para-journalists use Twitter as a platform (Sheppard 278; Eno 293-297). Like para-journalists, Eno claims to be a “self-educated but largely untrained” musician and yet also a craft-based producer (McFadzean; Tamm 177; 44-50). Perhaps Eno would frame the distinction between para-journalist and professional journalist as “axis thinking” (Eno 298, 302) which is needlessly polarised due to different normative theories, stances, and practices. Furthermore, I would argue that Eno’s worldview was shaped by similar influences to Licklider and Engelbart, who appear to have informed Hermida’s assumptions. These influences include the mathematician and game theorist John von Neumann and biologist Richard Dawkins (Eno 162); musicians Eric Satie, John Cage and his book Silence (Eno 19-22, 162; Sheppard 22, 36, 378-379); and the field of self-organising systems, in particular cyberneticist Stafford Beer (Eno 245; Tamm 86; Sheppard 224). Eno summed up the central lesson of this theoretical corpus during his collaborations with New York’s ‘No Wave’ scene in 1978, of “people experimenting with their lives” (Eno 253; Reynolds 146-147; Sheppard 290-295). Importantly, he developed a personal view of normative theories through practice-based research, on a range of projects, and with different creative and collaborative teams. Rather than a technological solution, Eno settled on a way to encode his craft and skills into a quasi-experimental, transmittable method—an aim of practitioner development in professional journalism. Even if only a “founding myth,” the story of Eno’s 1975 street accident with a taxi, and how he conceived ‘ambient music’ during his hospital stay, illustrates how ambient journalists might perceive something new in specific circumstances (Tamm 131; Sheppard 186-188). More tellingly, this background informed his collaboration with the late painter Peter Schmidt, to co-create the Oblique Strategies deck of aphorisms: aleatory, oracular messages that appeared dependent on chance, luck, and randomness, but that in fact were based on Eno and Schmidt’s creative philosophy and work guidelines (Tamm 77-78; Sheppard 178-179; Reynolds 170). In short, Eno was engaging with the kind of reflective practices that underpin exemplary professional journalism. He was able to encode this craft and skills into a quasi-experimental method, rather than a technological solution. Journalists and practitioners who adopt Hermida’s framework could learn much from the published accounts of Eno’s practice-based research, in the context of creative projects and collaborative teams. In particular, these detail the contexts and choices of Eno’s early ambient music recordings (Sheppard 199-200); Eno’s duels with David Bowie during ‘Sense of Doubt’ for the Heroes album (Tamm 158; Sheppard 254-255); troubled collaborations with Talking Heads and David Byrne (Reynolds 165-170; Sheppard; 338-347, 353); a curatorial, mentor role on U2’s The Unforgettable Fire (Sheppard 368-369); the ‘grand, stadium scale’ experiments of U2’s 1991-93 ZooTV tour (Sheppard 404); the Zorn-like games of Bowie’s Outside album (Eno 382-389); and the ‘generative’ artwork 77 Million Paintings (Eno 330-332; Tamm 133-135; Sheppard 278-279; Eno 435). Eno is clearly a highly flexible maker and producer. Developing such flexibility would ensure ambient journalism remains open to novelty as an analytical framework that may enhance the practitioner development and work of professional journalists and para-journalists alike.Acknowledgments The author thanks editor Luke Jaaniste, Alfred Hermida, and the two blind peer reviewers for their constructive feedback and reflective insights. References Bray, Chad, and Jacob Bunge. “Ex-Goldman Programmer Indicted for Trade Secrets Theft.” The Wall Street Journal 12 Feb. 2010. 17 March 2010 ‹http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703382904575059660427173510.html›. Burns, Alex. “Select Issues with New Media Theories of Citizen Journalism.” M/C Journal 11.1 (2008). 17 March 2010 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/30›.———, and Barry Saunders. “Journalists as Investigators and ‘Quality Media’ Reputation.” Record of the Communications Policy and Research Forum 2009. Eds. Franco Papandrea and Mark Armstrong. Sydney: Network Insight Institute, 281-297. 17 March 2010 ‹http://eprints.vu.edu.au/15229/1/CPRF09BurnsSaunders.pdf›.———, and Ben Eltham. “Twitter Free Iran: An Evaluation of Twitter’s Role in Public Diplomacy and Information Operations in Iran’s 2009 Election Crisis.” Record of the Communications Policy and Research Forum 2009. Eds. Franco Papandrea and Mark Armstrong. Sydney: Network Insight Institute, 298-310. 17 March 2010 ‹http://eprints.vu.edu.au/15230/1/CPRF09BurnsEltham.pdf›. Christians, Clifford G., Theodore Glasser, Denis McQuail, Kaarle Nordenstreng, and Robert A. White. Normative Theories of the Media: Journalism in Democratic Societies. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Clifford, Stephanie, and Julie Creswell. “At Bloomberg, Modest Strategy to Rule the World.” The New York Times 14 Nov. 2009. 17 March 2010 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/business/media/15bloom.html?ref=businessandpagewanted=all›.Cole, Peter, and Tony Harcup. Newspaper Journalism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2010. Duhigg, Charles. “Stock Traders Find Speed Pays, in Milliseconds.” The New York Times 23 July 2009. 17 March 2010 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/business/24trading.html?_r=2andref=business›. Engelbart, Douglas. “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, 1962.” Ed. Neil Spiller. Cyber Reader: Critical Writings for the Digital Era. London: Phaidon Press, 2002. 60-67. Eno, Brian. A Year with Swollen Appendices. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. Garfinkel, Harold, and Anne Warfield Rawls. Toward a Sociological Theory of Information. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008. Hadlow, George D., and Kim S. Haddow. Disaster Communications in a Changing Media World, Butterworth-Heinemann, Burlington MA, 2009. Hemmingway, Emma. Into the Newsroom: Exploring the Digital Production of Regional Television News. Milton Park: Routledge, 2008. Hermida, Alfred. “Twittering the News: The Emergence of Ambient Journalism.” Journalism Practice 4.3 (2010): 1-12. Hofstadter, Douglas. I Am a Strange Loop. New York: Perseus Books, 2007. Lanier, Jaron. You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. London: Allen Lane, 2010. Leinweber, David. Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2009. Licklider, J.C.R. “Man-Machine Symbiosis, 1960.” Ed. Neil Spiller. Cyber Reader: Critical Writings for the Digital Era, London: Phaidon Press, 2002. 52-59. McFadzean, Elspeth. “What Can We Learn from Creative People? The Story of Brian Eno.” Management Decision 38.1 (2000): 51-56. Moeller, Susan. Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death. New York: Routledge, 1998. Morville, Peter. Ambient Findability. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Press, 2005. ———. Search Patterns. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Press, 2010.Pritchett, Eric, and Mark Palmer. ‘Following the Tweet Trail.’ CNBC 11 July 2009. 17 March 2010 ‹http://www.casttv.com/ext/ug0p08›. Reynolds, Simon. Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984. London: Penguin Books, 2006. Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. London: Penguin Books, 2008. Sheppard, David. On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno. London: Orion Books, 2008. Sunstein, Cass. On Rumours: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009. Tamm, Eric. Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Colour of Sound. New York: Da Capo Press, 1995. Thackara, John. In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World. Boston, MA: The MIT Press, 1995. Thompson, Evan. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Science of Mind. Boston, MA: Belknap Press, 2007.
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Lopez, Mario. "From Bride to Care Worker?" M/C Journal 10, no. 3 (June 1, 2007). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2662.

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Introduction This paper explores some specific conjunctions that tie together two nations, Japan and the Philippines. Over the past 30 years both have become entwined as a transfer of people, cultures and societies have connected and formed some interesting developments. Relations between both countries have been highly influenced through the deployment of State intervention (historically colonial and post-colonial), as well as through actors’ initiatives, leading to the development of a complex network that links both countries. It is in these relations that I would like to locate a transition between two stages in Japan-Philippine relations. I argue, this is a transition, where marriages of one kind (international marriages), the bonding of social actors from two distinct cultural spheres, gives way to another form of marriage. This transition locates the term marriage as part of an ongoing process and a discursive realm in a larger ‘affective complex’ that has developed. In this paper, I focus on this term ‘affective complex’ as it offers some interesting avenues in order to understand the continuing development of relations between Japan and the Philippines. By ‘affective complex’ I refer to the ‘cultural responses’ that people use in reaction to situations in which they find themselves which are not mediated by language. I suggest that this complex is a product of a specific encounter that exists between two nations as understood and mediated by Japanese actors’ positionings vis-à-vis foreign resident Filipinos. In tracing a moment between Japan and the Philippines, I delineate emerging properties that currently allude to a transition in relations between both countries. I would like to show that the properties of this transition are creating an emergent phenomena, a complex? This is developing through interactions between human actors whose trajectories as transnational migrants and permanent foreign residents are coming under the scrutiny of Japanese State forces in a heavily contested discursive field. This paper focuses upon the nature of the complex that entwines both countries and examines Japan’s particular restructuring of parts of its workforce in an attempt to include foreign migrants. To do this I first offer an outline of my fieldwork and then delineate the complex that ties both countries within present theoretical boundaries. This paper is based on fieldwork which deals with the theme of International Marriages between Japanese and Filipino couples. In the field I have observed the different ways in which Filipinos or Japanese with a connection to the Philippines orientate themselves within Japanese society vis-à-vis the Philippines. For the purpose of this paper, I will focus exclusively on a particular moment in my field: a care-giver course run privately with approval and recognition from local government. This course was offered exclusively for Filipino nationals with permanent residency and a high level of Japanese. As part of a larger field, a number of overlapping themes and patterns were present within the attitudes of those participating in the course. These were cultural responses that social actors carry with them which constitute part of an ‘affective complex’, its gradual emergence and unfolding. To further locate this fieldwork and its theoretical boundaries, I also position this research within current understandings of complexity. Chesters and Welsh have referred to a complex system as being a non-linear, non-deterministic system. However, from my perspective, these parameters are insufficient if institutions, organisations and human actors exhibit linear and deterministic properties (properties that discursively capture, locate and define elements in a system). In my research, I am dealing with actors, in this case Filipinos who are seen first as recipients and then as providers of welfare services. Japanese actors act as suppliers of a service both to long-term residents and to the State. In this case the following question arises: whose ‘complexes’ may be defined by a mixture of both these parameters and how can it be possible to take into account relationships whose existence cuts across them? Could a complex not be any number of these terrains which have emerged through encounters between two countries? Marriage could be a starting point for complexes that can come under scrutiny at a higher level, that of the State forces. In addition, a study of complexity in the Social Sciences focuses on how structures form rather than by focusing on any prior structured existence. Any focus on a complex system is to analyze holistic multiple elements in order to descriptively locate structures, what they penetrate, and what they are penetrated by. Human actors’ actions, strategies and expectations merge under the influence of these structures, while simultaneously influencing them. As elements interact, emergent phenomena (properties that emerge at a higher level) show a system that is process dependent, organic, and always evolving (Arthur 109). Locating Affect Deleuze and Guattari refined the discursive realm to emphasise how spaces of creation, dialogue and the casting of influence are affective, institutional and State-influenced. Within these spaces I locate the existence of ‘affective complexes’ which are discursively constructed and deployed by local actors. I will to argue that international marriages have laid a groundwork in which ‘affect’ itself has become a catalyst, re-orientating perceptions of and toward Filipinos. Following Deleuze, we can understand ‘affect’ as an intensity which, to repeat, is an expression of human relationships not mediated directly through language (Rodriguez). However, I want to suggest ‘affect’ also comes under the scrutiny of, and is discursively appealed to by, State forces as ‘affective capital’. When I refer to ‘affective capital’ I mean the potential labour discursively constructed. This construction is then “projected and tapped” in response to the changing nature of Japan’s labour market – in particular, the shortage of care-givers. This construction itself exists as an ongoing management strategy that deals with certain foreign nationals in Japan. Here, in response to the transformations of service work, ‘affective capital’ is the commoditised value of care inherent the discourse. It is the kernel of ‘affective labour’. This was very clear in my fieldwork, wherein Filipinos were targeted exclusively as the recipients of training in the health-care sector based on an understanding of the form of ‘affect’ that they possess. In this context, ‘affect’ adds intensity to meaning and is used in a wide range of cultural contexts, yet its very essence eludes description, especially when that essence as used by ‘active agents’ may be misconstrued in its deployment or discursively captured. Returning to the Deleuzian interpretation of ‘affect’, it could be interpreted as the outcome of encounters between actors and as such, a ‘mode’ in which becoming can initiate possibilities. I refer to ‘affect’, the deployment of shared, performed, communicated non-verbal ‘content’, as a powerful tool and an essential component in everyday habituated practice. In other areas of my field (not included in this discussion), ‘affect’ deployed by both actors, husband and wife, within and beyond the family, manifests itself as a mode of being. This at times adds to the location of actors’ intentions, be they spoken or performative. In this sense, locating the ‘affect’ in my research has meant observing the way in which Filipinos negotiate the availability of life strategies and opportunities available to them. At the same time, ‘affect’ is also produced by Japanese actors realigning themselves vis-à-vis both foreign actors and social change, as well as by effectuating strategies to emergent situations in Japan such as care management. ‘Affective capital’ is an inherent long-term strategy which has its roots in the cultural resources at the disposal of non-Japanese partners who, over the years, in the short and long term put to use discursively produced ‘affect’. ‘Affect’, produced in reactions to situations, encounters and events, can work in favour of long-term residents who do not have access to the same conditions Japanese may find in the labour sector. From encounters in my fieldwork, the location of ‘affect’ is an asset not just within immediate relationships, but as a possible expression of strategies that have arisen in response to the recognition of reactionary elements in Japanese society. By reactionary elements I refer to the way in which a complex may realign itself when ‘interfered’ with at another level, that of the State. The Japanese State is facing labour shortages in certain sectors due to social change, therefore they must secure other potential sources of labour. Appropriation of human resources locally available has become one Japanese State solution for this labour shortage. As such, ‘affect’ is brought into the capitalist fold in response to labor shortages in the Health Sector. Background The Philippines is a prime example of a nomad nation, where an estimated eight million of the population currently work or live overseas while remitting home (Phillippines Overseas Employment Agency). Post-colonial global conditions in the Asia Pacific region have seen the Philippines cater to external national situations in order to participate in the global labour market. These have been in the form of flows of labour and capital outsourced to those economies which are entangled with the Philippines. In this context, marriage between both countries has come to be made up almost exclusively of Japanese men with Filipina women (Suzuki). These marriages have created nascent partnerships that have formed links within homes in both countries and supported the creation of a complex system tying together both nations. Yet, in the entanglement of what seems to be two economies of desire, some interesting observations can be drawn from what I consider to be the by-products of these marriages. Yet what does this have to do with a marriage? First, I would like to put forward that certain international marriages may have developed within the above discursive framework and, in the case of the Philippines and Japan, defined certain characteristics that I will explain in more detail. Over the past 20 years, Filipinos who came to Japan on entertainment visas or through encounters with Japanese partners in the Philippines have deployed discursively constructed ‘affective capital’ in strategies to secure relationships and a position in both societies. These strategies may be interpreted as being knowledgeable, creative and possessive of the language necessary for negotiating long-term dialogues, not only with partners and surrounding family, but also with Japanese society. These deployments also function as an attempt to secure additional long term benefits which include strengthening ties to the Philippines through increasing a Japanese spouse’s involvement and interest in the Philippines. It is here that Filipinos’ ‘affect’ may be traced back to a previous deployment of categories that influences local Japanese actors’ decisions in offering a course exclusively for Filipino residents. This offers the first hint as to why only Filipinos were targeted. In Japan, secure permanent work for resident Filipinos can be, at times, difficult even when married to a partner with a stable income. The reality of remitting home to support family members and raising a family in Japan is a double burden which cannot be met solely by the spouse’s salary. This is an issue which means actors (in this case, partners) recourse to their ‘affective capital’ in order to secure means towards a livelihood. In this context, marriages have acted as a primary medium entangling both countries. Yet changes in Japan are re-locating ‘possible’ resources that are rationalised as a surplus from these primary encounters. Shifts in Japan’s social landscape have over the past 10 years led to an increasing awareness of the high stakes involved in care for the ageing and invalid in Japanese society. With over 21% of the population now over 65, the care industry has seen a surge in demand for labour, of which there is currently a shortfall (Statistics Bureau Japan). With the Philippines having strategically relocated its economy to accommodate demands for the outsourcing of health care workers and nurses overseas, Japan, realigning its economy to domestic change, has shown a new type of interest (albeit reluctant) in the Philippines. In 2005, changes and reforms to Japan’s Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act successfully curtailed the flow of Filipinos applying to Japan to work as entertainers. This was in part due to pressure from the interventionary power of the U.S: in 2006 the U.S. State department published the Trafficking in Persons Report, which stipulated that Japan had yet to comply in improving the situation of persons trafficked to Japan (U.S. State Department). This watershed reform has become a precursor to the Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement ratified by Japan and the Philippines to promote the ‘trans-border flow of goods, person, services and capital between Japan and the Philippines (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and has now temporarily realigned both economies into a new relationship. Under the terms ‘movement of natural persons’, Filipino candidates for qualified nurses and certified care workers would be allowed a stay of up to three years as nurses, or four for certified care workers (Ministry of Foreign Affairs). Nonetheless, this lip service in showing openness to admit a new category of Filipino is the continuation of a mode of ‘servicing’ within the Japanese nation, albeit under the guise of ‘care work’, and rests upon the capitalist rationalisation of hired workers for Japan’s tertiary sectors. The Philippines, a nation which is positively export-orientated in terms of its human resources in response to care inequalities that exist between nations at a global level (Parreñas 12-30), is now responding to the problematic issue of care that has become a serious concern in Japan. Fieldwork To place these issues in context I want to locate the above issues within a part of my present fieldwork. In 2006, I participated in a privately funded non-profit venture set up for Filipino residents with the aim of training them to be care-givers. The course was validated and acknowledged by the local prefectural government and primarily limited to a group of 20 participants who paid approximately sixty thousand yen ($485) for the three month course including training and text books. One Filipina acquaintance enthusiastically introduced me to the retired bank manager who had set up a fund for the three month care-giver course for Filipina residents. Through interviews with the course providers, one underlying theme in the planning of the course was clear: the core idea that Filipinos have a predisposition to care for the elderly, reflecting Filipino social values no longer existent in Japan. In particular, two Japanese words employed to reflect these views – ‘omoiyari’ (思いやり), meaning “compassion” or “considerateness” and ‘yasashisa’ (優しさ) meaning “kindness toward others” – were reiterated throughout the course as a requisite for dealing with the elderly or those in need of care. One core presupposition underlining the course was that the Philippines still cherishes values which are on the decline in Japan, offering a care ethos based on Christian values ready for deployment in such work. I believe this marks a transition point in how both countries’ relations are moving away from ‘entertainment-based’ care to ‘care within an institutional setting’, such as private nursing homes or hospitals. In both cases, ‘care’ (as it is ironically known in both industries, the deployment of hospitality and attendance), operates as a dynamic of desire within a social field which orientates how residents (i.e. foreign female residents with permanent residency) are used. Yet, why would the Philippines be such an attractor? It is not difficult to see how ‘affect’ is discursively rationalised and deployed and projected onto Philippine society. This ‘affect’ acts as an attractor and belongs to an ‘imagined’ cultural repertoire that Japan has created in response to its turbulent marriage to the Philippines. In this sense, the care course promoted this ‘caring affective side’ of Filipinas here in Japan, and provided a dynamic engagement for potential negotiation, persuasion and tension between ‘local actors’ (course providers and participants) who come under the direct remit of the Japanese State (care institutions, hospitals and nursing homes). I say “tension”, as to date only a handful (three women out of a total of sixty) of those who participated in the course have taken up employment in the care industry. As one participant, a divorcee, commented, the reluctance to seek work as a qualified care worker resided in an economic framework, she says: this is a useful investment, but I don’t know if I can do this work full time to live off and support my families…but it is another arrow in my bow if the situation changes. Yet, for another woman, care work was an extension of something that they were familiar with. She jokingly added with a sigh of resignation: Oh well, this is something we are used to, after all we did nothing but care for our papa-san (husband)! When I discussed these comments with an N.G.O. worker connected to the course she pessimistically summed up what she thought by saying: The problem of care in Japan was until very recently an issue of unpaid work that women have had to bear. In a sense, looking after the aged living at home has been a traditional way to treat people with respect. Yet, here in Japan we have experienced an excessively long period whereby it was de facto that when a woman married into someone’s family, she would care for the husband and his family. Now, this isn’t an individual problem anymore, it’s a societal one. Care is now becoming an institutional practice which is increasing paid work, yet the State works on the assumption that this is low paid work for people who have finished raising their children; hard labour for low wages. All the women have graduated and are licensed to work, yet at 1000 yen (U.S. $8) an hour for psychologically demanding hard labour they will not work, or start and finish realising the demands. Travelling between locations also is also unpaid, so at the most in one day they will work 2-3 hours. It is the worst situation possible for those who choose to work. The above opinion highlights the ambiguities that exist in the constant re-alignment of offering work to foreign residents in the effort to help integrate people into Japan’s tertiary ‘care sector’ in response to the crisis of a lack of manpower. To date most women who trained on this course have not pursued positions within the health sector. This indicates a resistance to the social beliefs that continue to categorise female foreign residents for gendered care work. Through three successive batches of students (sixty women in total) the president, staff and companies who participated in this pilot scheme have been introduced to Filipino residents in Japanese society. In one respect, this has been an opportunity for the course providers to face those who have worked, or continue to work at night. Yet, even this exposure does not reduce the hyper-feminisation of care; rather, it emphasises positions. One male coordinator brazenly mentioned the phrase ashi wo aratte hoshii, meaning ‘we want to give them a clean break’. This expression is pregnant with the connotation that these women have been involved in night work have done or still participate in. These categorisations still do not shake themselves free from previous classifications of female others located in Japanese society; the ongoing legacy that locates Filipinos in a feminised discursive space. As Butler has elucidated, ‘cultural inscriptions’ and ‘political forces with strategic interests’ work to keep the ‘body bounded and constituted’ (Butler 175). It is possible to see that this care course resides within a continuously produced genealogy that tries to constitute bodies. This resides under the rubric of a dominant fantasy that locates the Philippines in Japan as a source of caring and hospitality. Now, those here are relocated under a restructuring industry outsourcing work to those located in the lower tiers of the labour sector. Why other nationals have not been allowed to participate in the course is, I stress, a testimony to this powerful discourse. Major national and international media coverage of both the course and company and those women who found employment has also raised interest in the curious complex that has arisen from this dynamic, including a series of specials aired on Japanese television by NHK (NHK Kaigo no Jinzai ga Nigete iku). This is very reminiscent of a ‘citationary’ network where writings, news items and articles enter into a perpetuating relationship that foments and bolsters the building up of a body of work (Said) to portray Japan’s changing circumstances. As seen from a traced genealogy, initial entanglements between two nations, in conjunction with societal change in Japan, have created a specific moment in both countries’ trajectories. Here, we can see an emergent phenomena and the relocation of a discursive structure. An affective complex can be located that marks a shift in how foreign residents are perceived and on what terms they can participate or contribute to Japanese society. Within this structure, ‘care’ is relocated – or, rather, trapped – and extracted as labour surplus that resides in an antagonistic relationship of domination highlighting how a specific moment existing between two countries can be ‘structured’ by needs in the ‘engaging’ country, in this case Japan. Non-linear elements in a complex system that contest how discursive practices in Japanese society locate foreign residents, within the rubric of an ‘imagined’ ethos of compassion and kindness that emanates from outside of Japan, seem to display ‘affective’ qualities. Yet, are these not projected categories deployed to continue to locate migrant labour (be they permanent or temporary residents) within an ongoing matrix that defines what resources can be discursively produced? However, these categories do not take into account the diverse structures of experience that both Japanese nationals and Filipino nationals experience in Japan (Suzuki). Conclusion In this paper I have briefly delineated a moment which rests between specific trajectories that tie two nations. A complex of marriages brought about within a specific historic post-colonial encounter has contributed to feminising the Philippines: firstly, for women in marriages, and now secondly for ‘potential resources’ available to tackle societal problems in Japan. As I have argued a discursively produced ‘affective complex’ is an authorising source of otherness and could be part of a precursor complex which is now discursively relocating human resources within one country (Japan) as a ‘reluctant source’ of labour, while entering into a new discursive mode of production that shapes attitudes toward others. I also suggest that there is a very specific complex at work here which follows an as of yet faint trajectory that points to the re-organisation of a relationship between Japan and the Philippines. Yet, there are linear elements (macro-level forces rooted in the Japanese State’s approach to care vis-à-vis the Philippines) operating at the fundamental core of this care-giver course that are being constantly challenged and cut across by non-linear elements, that is, human actors and their ambivalence as the beneficiaries/practitioners of such practices. This is the continued feminisation of a highly gendered dynamic that locates labour as and when it sees fit, but through the willing coercion of local agents, with an interest in mediating services through and for the State, for the welfare of the Nation. The desiring-machine that brings together Japan and the Philippines is also one that continues to locate the potential in foreign actors located within Japan’s institutional interpellation for its care market. Within these newly emergent relationships, available political and social capital is being reshaped and imagined in reaction to social change in Japan. By exploring two entangled nations situated within global capitalist production in the twenty-first century, my research points towards new ways of looking at emerged complexes (international marriages) that precludes the reconfigurations of ongoing emerging complexes that discursively locate residents as caregivers, who fall under the jurisdiction and glare of political powers, government subjects and State forces. References Artur, W. Brian. “Complexity and the Economy.” Science 284.2 (1999): 107-109. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 2006. Chester, Graeme, and Ian Welsh. “Complexity and Social Movement(s): Process and Emergence in Planetary Action Systems.” Theory, Culture & Society 22.5 (2005): 187-211. Deleuze, Giles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Japan). Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement Press Statement. 29 Nov. 2004. 29 Mar. 2007 http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/philippine/joint0411.html>. NHK Kaigo no Jinzai ga Nigete iku. 介護の人材が逃げて行く (“Care Workers Are Fleeing.”) Televised 11 Mar. 2007. 29 Mar. 2007 http://www.nhk.or.jp/special/onair/070311.html>. Parreñas, Rachel Salazar. Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005. Philippines Overseas Employment Agency. “Stock Estimates of Filipinos Overseas.” 2 May 2007 http://www.poea.gov.ph/html/statistics.html>. Rodriguez, Encarnación Gutiérrez. “Reading Affect – On the Heterotopian Spaces of Care and Domestic Work in Private Households.” Forum: Qualitative Social Research 8 (2007). 2 May 2007 http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/2-07/07-2-11-e.pdf>. Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 1995. Statistics Bureau and Statistical Research and Training Institute. Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (Philippines). 2005. 2 May 2007 http://www.poea.gov.ph/docs/STOCK%20ESTIMATE%202004.xls>. Suzuki, Nobue. “Inside the Home: Power and Negotiation in Filipina-Japanese Marriages.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 33.4 (2004): 481-506. “Trafficking in Persons Report.” U.S. State Department. 2006. 29 Apr. 2007. http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/66086.pdf>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Lopez, Mario. "From Bride to Care Worker?: On Complexes, Japan and the Philippines." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/04-lopez.php>. APA Style Lopez, M. (Jun. 2007) "From Bride to Care Worker?: On Complexes, Japan and the Philippines," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/04-lopez.php>.
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28

Livingstone, Randall M. "Let’s Leave the Bias to the Mainstream Media: A Wikipedia Community Fighting for Information Neutrality." M/C Journal 13, no. 6 (November 23, 2010). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.315.

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Abstract:
Although I'm a rich white guy, I'm also a feminist anti-racism activist who fights for the rights of the poor and oppressed. (Carl Kenner)Systemic bias is a scourge to the pillar of neutrality. (Cerejota)Count me in. Let's leave the bias to the mainstream media. (Orcar967)Because this is so important. (CuttingEdge)These are a handful of comments posted by online editors who have banded together in a virtual coalition to combat Western bias on the world’s largest digital encyclopedia, Wikipedia. This collective action by Wikipedians both acknowledges the inherent inequalities of a user-controlled information project like Wikpedia and highlights the potential for progressive change within that same project. These community members are taking the responsibility of social change into their own hands (or more aptly, their own keyboards).In recent years much research has emerged on Wikipedia from varying fields, ranging from computer science, to business and information systems, to the social sciences. While critical at times of Wikipedia’s growth, governance, and influence, most of this work observes with optimism that barriers to improvement are not firmly structural, but rather they are socially constructed, leaving open the possibility of important and lasting change for the better.WikiProject: Countering Systemic Bias (WP:CSB) considers one such collective effort. Close to 350 editors have signed on to the project, which began in 2004 and itself emerged from a similar project named CROSSBOW, or the “Committee Regarding Overcoming Serious Systemic Bias on Wikipedia.” As a WikiProject, the term used for a loose group of editors who collaborate around a particular topic, these editors work within the Wikipedia site and collectively create a social network that is unified around one central aim—representing the un- and underrepresented—and yet they are bound by no particular unified set of interests. The first stage of a multi-method study, this paper looks at a snapshot of WP:CSB’s activity from both content analysis and social network perspectives to discover “who” geographically this coalition of the unrepresented is inserting into the digital annals of Wikipedia.Wikipedia and WikipediansDeveloped in 2001 by Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales and academic Larry Sanger, Wikipedia is an online collaborative encyclopedia hosting articles in nearly 250 languages (Cohen). The English-language Wikipedia contains over 3.2 million articles, each of which is created, edited, and updated solely by users (Wikipedia “Welcome”). At the time of this study, Alexa, a website tracking organisation, ranked Wikipedia as the 6th most accessed site on the Internet. Unlike the five sites ahead of it though—Google, Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube (owned by Google), and live.com (owned by Microsoft)—all of which are multibillion-dollar businesses that deal more with information aggregation than information production, Wikipedia is a non-profit that operates on less than $500,000 a year and staffs only a dozen paid employees (Lih). Wikipedia is financed and supported by the WikiMedia Foundation, a charitable umbrella organisation with an annual budget of $4.6 million, mainly funded by donations (Middleton).Wikipedia editors and contributors have the option of creating a user profile and participating via a username, or they may participate anonymously, with only an IP address representing their actions. Despite the option for total anonymity, many Wikipedians have chosen to visibly engage in this online community (Ayers, Matthews, and Yates; Bruns; Lih), and researchers across disciplines are studying the motivations of these new online collectives (Kane, Majchrzak, Johnson, and Chenisern; Oreg and Nov). The motivations of open source software contributors, such as UNIX programmers and programming groups, have been shown to be complex and tied to both extrinsic and intrinsic rewards, including online reputation, self-satisfaction and enjoyment, and obligation to a greater common good (Hertel, Niedner, and Herrmann; Osterloh and Rota). Investigation into why Wikipedians edit has indicated multiple motivations as well, with community engagement, task enjoyment, and information sharing among the most significant (Schroer and Hertel). Additionally, Wikipedians seem to be taking up the cause of generativity (a concern for the ongoing health and openness of the Internet’s infrastructures) that Jonathan Zittrain notably called for in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. Governance and ControlAlthough the technical infrastructure of Wikipedia is built to support and perhaps encourage an equal distribution of power on the site, Wikipedia is not a land of “anything goes.” The popular press has covered recent efforts by the site to reduce vandalism through a layer of editorial review (Cohen), a tightening of control cited as a possible reason for the recent dip in the number of active editors (Edwards). A number of regulations are already in place that prevent the open editing of certain articles and pages, such as the site’s disclaimers and pages that have suffered large amounts of vandalism. Editing wars can also cause temporary restrictions to editing, and Ayers, Matthews, and Yates point out that these wars can happen anywhere, even to Burt Reynold’s page.Academic studies have begun to explore the governance and control that has developed in the Wikipedia community, generally highlighting how order is maintained not through particular actors, but through established procedures and norms. Konieczny tested whether Wikipedia’s evolution can be defined by Michels’ Iron Law of Oligopoly, which predicts that the everyday operations of any organisation cannot be run by a mass of members, and ultimately control falls into the hands of the few. Through exploring a particular WikiProject on information validation, he concludes:There are few indicators of an oligarchy having power on Wikipedia, and few trends of a change in this situation. The high level of empowerment of individual Wikipedia editors with regard to policy making, the ease of communication, and the high dedication to ideals of contributors succeed in making Wikipedia an atypical organization, quite resilient to the Iron Law. (189)Butler, Joyce, and Pike support this assertion, though they emphasise that instead of oligarchy, control becomes encapsulated in a wide variety of structures, policies, and procedures that guide involvement with the site. A virtual “bureaucracy” emerges, but one that should not be viewed with the negative connotation often associated with the term.Other work considers control on Wikipedia through the framework of commons governance, where “peer production depends on individual action that is self-selected and decentralized rather than hierarchically assigned. Individuals make their own choices with regard to resources managed as a commons” (Viegas, Wattenberg and McKeon). The need for quality standards and quality control largely dictate this commons governance, though interviewing Wikipedians with various levels of responsibility revealed that policies and procedures are only as good as those who maintain them. Forte, Larco, and Bruckman argue “the Wikipedia community has remained healthy in large part due to the continued presence of ‘old-timers’ who carry a set of social norms and organizational ideals with them into every WikiProject, committee, and local process in which they take part” (71). Thus governance on Wikipedia is a strong representation of a democratic ideal, where actors and policies are closely tied in their evolution. Transparency, Content, and BiasThe issue of transparency has proved to be a double-edged sword for Wikipedia and Wikipedians. The goal of a collective body of knowledge created by all—the “expert” and the “amateur”—can only be upheld if equal access to page creation and development is allotted to everyone, including those who prefer anonymity. And yet this very option for anonymity, or even worse, false identities, has been a sore subject for some in the Wikipedia community as well as a source of concern for some scholars (Santana and Wood). The case of a 24-year old college dropout who represented himself as a multiple Ph.D.-holding theology scholar and edited over 16,000 articles brought these issues into the public spotlight in 2007 (Doran; Elsworth). Wikipedia itself has set up standards for content that include expectations of a neutral point of view, verifiability of information, and the publishing of no original research, but Santana and Wood argue that self-policing of these policies is not adequate:The principle of managerial discretion requires that every actor act from a sense of duty to exercise moral autonomy and choice in responsible ways. When Wikipedia’s editors and administrators remain anonymous, this criterion is simply not met. It is assumed that everyone is behaving responsibly within the Wikipedia system, but there are no monitoring or control mechanisms to make sure that this is so, and there is ample evidence that it is not so. (141) At the theoretical level, some downplay these concerns of transparency and autonomy as logistical issues in lieu of the potential for information systems to support rational discourse and emancipatory forms of communication (Hansen, Berente, and Lyytinen), but others worry that the questionable “realities” created on Wikipedia will become truths once circulated to all areas of the Web (Langlois and Elmer). With the number of articles on the English-language version of Wikipedia reaching well into the millions, the task of mapping and assessing content has become a tremendous endeavour, one mostly taken on by information systems experts. Kittur, Chi, and Suh have used Wikipedia’s existing hierarchical categorisation structure to map change in the site’s content over the past few years. Their work revealed that in early 2008 “Culture and the arts” was the most dominant category of content on Wikipedia, representing nearly 30% of total content. People (15%) and geographical locations (14%) represent the next largest categories, while the natural and physical sciences showed the greatest increase in volume between 2006 and 2008 (+213%D, with “Culture and the arts” close behind at +210%D). This data may indicate that contributing to Wikipedia, and thus spreading knowledge, is growing amongst the academic community while maintaining its importance to the greater popular culture-minded community. Further work by Kittur and Kraut has explored the collaborative process of content creation, finding that too many editors on a particular page can reduce the quality of content, even when a project is well coordinated.Bias in Wikipedia content is a generally acknowledged and somewhat conflicted subject (Giles; Johnson; McHenry). The Wikipedia community has created numerous articles and pages within the site to define and discuss the problem. Citing a survey conducted by the University of Würzburg, Germany, the “Wikipedia:Systemic bias” page describes the average Wikipedian as:MaleTechnically inclinedFormally educatedAn English speakerWhiteAged 15-49From a majority Christian countryFrom a developed nationFrom the Northern HemisphereLikely a white-collar worker or studentBias in content is thought to be perpetuated by this demographic of contributor, and the “founder effect,” a concept from genetics, linking the original contributors to this same demographic has been used to explain the origins of certain biases. Wikipedia’s “About” page discusses the issue as well, in the context of the open platform’s strengths and weaknesses:in practice editing will be performed by a certain demographic (younger rather than older, male rather than female, rich enough to afford a computer rather than poor, etc.) and may, therefore, show some bias. Some topics may not be covered well, while others may be covered in great depth. No educated arguments against this inherent bias have been advanced.Royal and Kapila’s study of Wikipedia content tested some of these assertions, finding identifiable bias in both their purposive and random sampling. They conclude that bias favoring larger countries is positively correlated with the size of the country’s Internet population, and corporations with larger revenues work in much the same way, garnering more coverage on the site. The researchers remind us that Wikipedia is “more a socially produced document than a value-free information source” (Royal & Kapila).WikiProject: Countering Systemic BiasAs a coalition of current Wikipedia editors, the WikiProject: Countering Systemic Bias (WP:CSB) attempts to counter trends in content production and points of view deemed harmful to the democratic ideals of a valueless, open online encyclopedia. WP:CBS’s mission is not one of policing the site, but rather deepening it:Generally, this project concentrates upon remedying omissions (entire topics, or particular sub-topics in extant articles) rather than on either (1) protesting inappropriate inclusions, or (2) trying to remedy issues of how material is presented. Thus, the first question is "What haven't we covered yet?", rather than "how should we change the existing coverage?" (Wikipedia, “Countering”)The project lays out a number of content areas lacking adequate representation, geographically highlighting the dearth in coverage of Africa, Latin America, Asia, and parts of Eastern Europe. WP:CSB also includes a “members” page that editors can sign to show their support, along with space to voice their opinions on the problem of bias on Wikipedia (the quotations at the beginning of this paper are taken from this “members” page). At the time of this study, 329 editors had self-selected and self-identified as members of WP:CSB, and this group constitutes the population sample for the current study. To explore the extent to which WP:CSB addressed these self-identified areas for improvement, each editor’s last 50 edits were coded for their primary geographical country of interest, as well as the conceptual category of the page itself (“P” for person/people, “L” for location, “I” for idea/concept, “T” for object/thing, or “NA” for indeterminate). For example, edits to the Wikipedia page for a single person like Tony Abbott (Australian federal opposition leader) were coded “Australia, P”, while an edit for a group of people like the Manchester United football team would be coded “England, P”. Coding was based on information obtained from the header paragraphs of each article’s Wikipedia page. After coding was completed, corresponding information on each country’s associated continent was added to the dataset, based on the United Nations Statistics Division listing.A total of 15,616 edits were coded for the study. Nearly 32% (n = 4962) of these edits were on articles for persons or people (see Table 1 for complete coding results). From within this sub-sample of edits, a majority of the people (68.67%) represented are associated with North America and Europe (Figure A). If we break these statistics down further, nearly half of WP:CSB’s edits concerning people were associated with the United States (36.11%) and England (10.16%), with India (3.65%) and Australia (3.35%) following at a distance. These figures make sense for the English-language Wikipedia; over 95% of the population in the three Westernised countries speak English, and while India is still often regarded as a developing nation, its colonial British roots and the emergence of a market economy with large, technology-driven cities are logical explanations for its representation here (and some estimates make India the largest English-speaking nation by population on the globe today).Table A Coding Results Total Edits 15616 (I) Ideas 2881 18.45% (L) Location 2240 14.34% NA 333 2.13% (T) Thing 5200 33.30% (P) People 4962 31.78% People by Continent Africa 315 6.35% Asia 827 16.67% Australia 175 3.53% Europe 1411 28.44% NA 110 2.22% North America 1996 40.23% South America 128 2.58% The areas of the globe of main concern to WP:CSB proved to be much less represented by the coalition itself. Asia, far and away the most populous continent with more than 60% of the globe’s people (GeoHive), was represented in only 16.67% of edits. Africa (6.35%) and South America (2.58%) were equally underrepresented compared to both their real-world populations (15% and 9% of the globe’s population respectively) and the aforementioned dominance of the advanced Westernised areas. However, while these percentages may seem low, in aggregate they do meet the quota set on the WP:CSB Project Page calling for one out of every twenty edits to be “a subject that is systematically biased against the pages of your natural interests.” By this standard, the coalition is indeed making headway in adding content that strategically counterbalances the natural biases of Wikipedia’s average editor.Figure ASocial network analysis allows us to visualise multifaceted data in order to identify relationships between actors and content (Vego-Redondo; Watts). Similar to Davis’s well-known sociological study of Southern American socialites in the 1930s (Scott), our Wikipedia coalition can be conceptualised as individual actors united by common interests, and a network of relations can be constructed with software such as UCINET. A mapping algorithm that considers both the relationship between all sets of actors and each actor to the overall collective structure produces an image of our network. This initial network is bimodal, as both our Wikipedia editors and their edits (again, coded for country of interest) are displayed as nodes (Figure B). Edge-lines between nodes represents a relationship, and here that relationship is the act of editing a Wikipedia article. We see from our network that the “U.S.” and “England” hold central positions in the network, with a mass of editors crowding around them. A perimeter of nations is then held in place by their ties to editors through the U.S. and England, with a second layer of editors and poorly represented nations (Gabon, Laos, Uzbekistan, etc.) around the boundaries of the network.Figure BWe are reminded from this visualisation both of the centrality of the two Western powers even among WP:CSB editoss, and of the peripheral nature of most other nations in the world. But we also learn which editors in the project are contributing most to underrepresented areas, and which are less “tied” to the Western core. Here we see “Wizzy” and “Warofdreams” among the second layer of editors who act as a bridge between the core and the periphery; these are editors with interests in both the Western and marginalised nations. Located along the outer edge, “Gallador” and “Gerrit” have no direct ties to the U.S. or England, concentrating all of their edits on less represented areas of the globe. Identifying editors at these key positions in the network will help with future research, informing interview questions that will investigate their interests further, but more significantly, probing motives for participation and action within the coalition.Additionally, we can break the network down further to discover editors who appear to have similar interests in underrepresented areas. Figure C strips down the network to only editors and edits dealing with Africa and South America, the least represented continents. From this we can easily find three types of editors again: those who have singular interests in particular nations (the outermost layer of editors), those who have interests in a particular region (the second layer moving inward), and those who have interests in both of these underrepresented regions (the center layer in the figure). This last group of editors may prove to be the most crucial to understand, as they are carrying the full load of WP:CSB’s mission.Figure CThe End of Geography, or the Reclamation?In The Internet Galaxy, Manuel Castells writes that “the Internet Age has been hailed as the end of geography,” a bold suggestion, but one that has gained traction over the last 15 years as the excitement for the possibilities offered by information communication technologies has often overshadowed structural barriers to participation like the Digital Divide (207). Castells goes on to amend the “end of geography” thesis by showing how global information flows and regional Internet access rates, while creating a new “map” of the world in many ways, is still closely tied to power structures in the analog world. The Internet Age: “redefines distance but does not cancel geography” (207). The work of WikiProject: Countering Systemic Bias emphasises the importance of place and representation in the information environment that continues to be constructed in the online world. This study looked at only a small portion of this coalition’s efforts (~16,000 edits)—a snapshot of their labor frozen in time—which itself is only a minute portion of the information being dispatched through Wikipedia on a daily basis (~125,000 edits). Further analysis of WP:CSB’s work over time, as well as qualitative research into the identities, interests and motivations of this collective, is needed to understand more fully how information bias is understood and challenged in the Internet galaxy. The data here indicates this is a fight worth fighting for at least a growing few.ReferencesAlexa. “Top Sites.” Alexa.com, n.d. 10 Mar. 2010 ‹http://www.alexa.com/topsites>. Ayers, Phoebe, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yates. How Wikipedia Works: And How You Can Be a Part of It. San Francisco, CA: No Starch, 2008.Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.Butler, Brian, Elisabeth Joyce, and Jacqueline Pike. Don’t Look Now, But We’ve Created a Bureaucracy: The Nature and Roles of Policies and Rules in Wikipedia. Paper presented at 2008 CHI Annual Conference, Florence.Castells, Manuel. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.Cohen, Noam. “Wikipedia.” New York Times, n.d. 12 Mar. 2010 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/info/wikipedia/>. Doran, James. “Wikipedia Chief Promises Change after ‘Expert’ Exposed as Fraud.” The Times, 6 Mar. 2007 ‹http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article1480012.ece>. Edwards, Lin. “Report Claims Wikipedia Losing Editors in Droves.” Physorg.com, 30 Nov 2009. 12 Feb. 2010 ‹http://www.physorg.com/news178787309.html>. Elsworth, Catherine. “Fake Wikipedia Prof Altered 20,000 Entries.” London Telegraph, 6 Mar. 2007 ‹http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1544737/Fake-Wikipedia-prof-altered-20000-entries.html>. Forte, Andrea, Vanessa Larco, and Amy Bruckman. “Decentralization in Wikipedia Governance.” Journal of Management Information Systems 26 (2009): 49-72.Giles, Jim. “Internet Encyclopedias Go Head to Head.” Nature 438 (2005): 900-901.Hansen, Sean, Nicholas Berente, and Kalle Lyytinen. “Wikipedia, Critical Social Theory, and the Possibility of Rational Discourse.” The Information Society 25 (2009): 38-59.Hertel, Guido, Sven Niedner, and Stefanie Herrmann. “Motivation of Software Developers in Open Source Projects: An Internet-Based Survey of Contributors to the Linex Kernel.” Research Policy 32 (2003): 1159-1177.Johnson, Bobbie. “Rightwing Website Challenges ‘Liberal Bias’ of Wikipedia.” The Guardian, 1 Mar. 2007. 8 Mar. 2010 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/mar/01/wikipedia.news>. Kane, Gerald C., Ann Majchrzak, Jeremaih Johnson, and Lily Chenisern. A Longitudinal Model of Perspective Making and Perspective Taking within Fluid Online Collectives. Paper presented at the 2009 International Conference on Information Systems, Phoenix, AZ, 2009.Kittur, Aniket, Ed H. Chi, and Bongwon Suh. What’s in Wikipedia? Mapping Topics and Conflict Using Socially Annotated Category Structure. Paper presented at the 2009 CHI Annual Conference, Boston, MA.———, and Robert E. Kraut. Harnessing the Wisdom of Crowds in Wikipedia: Quality through Collaboration. Paper presented at the 2008 Association for Computing Machinery’s Computer Supported Cooperative Work Annual Conference, San Diego, CA.Konieczny, Piotr. “Governance, Organization, and Democracy on the Internet: The Iron Law and the Evolution of Wikipedia.” Sociological Forum 24 (2009): 162-191.———. “Wikipedia: Community or Social Movement?” Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements 1 (2009): 212-232.Langlois, Ganaele, and Greg Elmer. “Wikipedia Leeches? The Promotion of Traffic through a Collaborative Web Format.” New Media & Society 11 (2009): 773-794.Lih, Andrew. The Wikipedia Revolution. New York, NY: Hyperion, 2009.McHenry, Robert. “The Real Bias in Wikipedia: A Response to David Shariatmadari.” OpenDemocracy.com 2006. 8 Mar. 2010 ‹http://www.opendemocracy.net/media-edemocracy/wikipedia_bias_3621.jsp>. Middleton, Chris. “The World of Wikinomics.” Computer Weekly, 20 Jan. 2009: 22-26.Oreg, Shaul, and Oded Nov. “Exploring Motivations for Contributing to Open Source Initiatives: The Roles of Contribution, Context and Personal Values.” Computers in Human Behavior 24 (2008): 2055-2073.Osterloh, Margit and Sandra Rota. “Trust and Community in Open Source Software Production.” Analyse & Kritik 26 (2004): 279-301.Royal, Cindy, and Deepina Kapila. “What’s on Wikipedia, and What’s Not…?: Assessing Completeness of Information.” Social Science Computer Review 27 (2008): 138-148.Santana, Adele, and Donna J. Wood. “Transparency and Social Responsibility Issues for Wikipedia.” Ethics of Information Technology 11 (2009): 133-144.Schroer, Joachim, and Guido Hertel. “Voluntary Engagement in an Open Web-Based Encyclopedia: Wikipedians and Why They Do It.” Media Psychology 12 (2009): 96-120.Scott, John. Social Network Analysis. London: Sage, 1991.Vego-Redondo, Fernando. Complex Social Networks. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.Viegas, Fernanda B., Martin Wattenberg, and Matthew M. McKeon. “The Hidden Order of Wikipedia.” Online Communities and Social Computing (2007): 445-454.Watts, Duncan. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003Wikipedia. “About.” n.d. 8 Mar. 2010 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About>. ———. “Welcome to Wikipedia.” n.d. 8 Mar. 2010 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page>.———. “Wikiproject:Countering Systemic Bias.” n.d. 12 Feb. 2010 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Countering_systemic_bias#Members>. Zittrain, Jonathan. The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2008.
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29

Ibrahim, Yasmin. "Commodifying Terrorism." M/C Journal 10, no. 3 (June 1, 2007). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2665.

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Abstract:
Introduction Figure 1 The counter-Terrorism advertising campaign of London’s Metropolitan Police commodifies some everyday items such as mobile phones, computers, passports and credit cards as having the potential to sustain terrorist activities. The process of ascribing cultural values and symbolic meanings to some everyday technical gadgets objectifies and situates Terrorism into the everyday life. The police, in urging people to look out for ‘the unusual’ in their normal day-to-day lives, juxtapose the everyday with the unusual, where day-to-day consumption, routines and flows of human activity can seemingly house insidious and atavistic elements. This again is reiterated in the Met police press release: Terrorists live within our communities making their plans whilst doing everything they can to blend in, and trying not to raise suspicions about their activities. (MPA Website) The commodification of Terrorism through uncommon and everyday objects situates Terrorism as a phenomenon which occupies a liminal space within the everyday. It resides, breathes and co-exists within the taken-for-granted routines and objects of ‘the everyday’ where it has the potential to explode and disrupt without warning. Since 9/11 and the 7/7 bombings Terrorism has been narrated through the disruption of mobility, whether in mid-air or in the deep recesses of the Underground. The resonant thread of disruption to human mobility evokes a powerful meta-narrative where acts of Terrorism can halt human agency amidst the backdrop of the metropolis, which is often a metaphor for speed and accelerated activities. If globalisation and the interconnected nature of the world are understood through discourses of risk, Terrorism bears the same footprint in urban spaces of modernity, narrating the vulnerability of the human condition in an inter-linked world where ideological struggles and resistance are manifested through inexplicable violence and destruction of lives, where the everyday is suspended to embrace the unexpected. As a consequence ambient fear “saturates the social spaces of everyday life” (Hubbard 2). The commodification of Terrorism through everyday items of consumption inevitably creates an intertextuality with real and media events, which constantly corrode the security of the metropolis. Paddy Scannell alludes to a doubling of place in our mediated world where “public events now occur simultaneously in two different places; the place of the event itself and that in which it is watched and heard. The media then vacillates between the two sites and creates experiences of simultaneity, liveness and immediacy” (qtd. in Moores 22). The doubling of place through media constructs a pervasive environment of risk and fear. Mark Danner (qtd. in Bauman 106) points out that the most powerful weapon of the 9/11 terrorists was that innocuous and “most American of technological creations: the television set” which provided a global platform to constantly replay and remember the dreadful scenes of the day, enabling the terrorist to appear invincible and to narrate fear as ubiquitous and omnipresent. Philip Abrams argues that ‘big events’ (such as 9/11 and 7/7) do make a difference in the social world for such events function as a transformative device between the past and future, forcing society to alter or transform its perspectives. David Altheide points out that since September 11 and the ensuing war on terror, a new discourse of Terrorism has emerged as a way of expressing how the world has changed and defining a state of constant alert through a media logic and format that shapes the nature of discourse itself. Consequently, the intensity and centralisation of surveillance in Western countries increased dramatically, placing the emphasis on expanding the forms of the already existing range of surveillance processes and practices that circumscribe and help shape our social existence (Lyon, Terrorism 2). Normalisation of Surveillance The role of technologies, particularly information and communication technologies (ICTs), and other infrastructures to unevenly distribute access to the goods and services necessary for modern life, while facilitating data collection on and control of the public, are significant characteristics of modernity (Reiman; Graham and Marvin; Monahan). The embedding of technological surveillance into spaces and infrastructures not only augment social control but also redefine data as a form of capital which can be shared between public and private sectors (Gandy, Data Mining; O’Harrow; Monahan). The scale, complexity and limitations of omnipresent and omnipotent surveillance, nevertheless, offer room for both subversion as well as new forms of domination and oppression (Marx). In surveillance studies, Foucault’s analysis is often heavily employed to explain lines of continuity and change between earlier forms of surveillance and data assemblage and contemporary forms in the shape of closed-circuit television (CCTV) and other surveillance modes (Dee). It establishes the need to discern patterns of power and normalisation and the subliminal or obvious cultural codes and categories that emerge through these arrangements (Fopp; Lyon, Electronic; Norris and Armstrong). In their study of CCTV surveillance, Norris and Armstrong (cf. in Dee) point out that when added to the daily minutiae of surveillance, CCTV cameras in public spaces, along with other camera surveillance in work places, capture human beings on a database constantly. The normalisation of surveillance, particularly with reference to CCTV, the popularisation of surveillance through television formats such as ‘Big Brother’ (Dee), and the expansion of online platforms to publish private images, has created a contradictory, complex and contested nature of spatial and power relationships in society. The UK, for example, has the most developed system of both urban and public space cameras in the world and this growth of camera surveillance and, as Lyon (Surveillance) points out, this has been achieved with very little, if any, public debate as to their benefits or otherwise. There may now be as many as 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain (cf. Lyon, Surveillance). That is one for every fourteen people and a person can be captured on over 300 cameras every day. An estimated £500m of public money has been invested in CCTV infrastructure over the last decade but, according to a Home Office study, CCTV schemes that have been assessed had little overall effect on crime levels (Wood and Ball). In spatial terms, these statistics reiterate Foucault’s emphasis on the power economy of the unseen gaze. Michel Foucault in analysing the links between power, information and surveillance inspired by Bentham’s idea of the Panopticon, indicated that it is possible to sanction or reward an individual through the act of surveillance without their knowledge (155). It is this unseen and unknown gaze of surveillance that is fundamental to the exercise of power. The design and arrangement of buildings can be engineered so that the “surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action” (Foucault 201). Lyon (Terrorism), in tracing the trajectory of surveillance studies, points out that much of surveillance literature has focused on understanding it as a centralised bureaucratic relationship between the powerful and the governed. Invisible forms of surveillance have also been viewed as a class weapon in some societies. With the advancements in and proliferation of surveillance technologies as well as convergence with other technologies, Lyon argues that it is no longer feasible to view surveillance as a linear or centralised process. In our contemporary globalised world, there is a need to reconcile the dialectical strands that mediate surveillance as a process. In acknowledging this, Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have constructed surveillance as a rhizome that defies linearity to appropriate a more convoluted and malleable form where the coding of bodies and data can be enmeshed to produce intricate power relationships and hierarchies within societies. Latour draws on the notion of assemblage by propounding that data is amalgamated from scattered centres of calculation where these can range from state and commercial institutions to scientific laboratories which scrutinise data to conceive governance and control strategies. Both the Latourian and Deleuzian ideas of surveillance highlight the disparate arrays of people, technologies and organisations that become connected to make “surveillance assemblages” in contrast to the static, unidirectional Panopticon metaphor (Ball, “Organization” 93). In a similar vein, Gandy (Panoptic) infers that it is misleading to assume that surveillance in practice is as complete and totalising as the Panoptic ideal type would have us believe. Co-optation of Millions The Metropolitan Police’s counter-Terrorism strategy seeks to co-opt millions where the corporeal body can complement the landscape of technological surveillance that already co-exists within modernity. In its press release, the role of civilian bodies in ensuring security of the city is stressed; Keeping Londoners safe from Terrorism is not a job solely for governments, security services or police. If we are to make London the safest major city in the world, we must mobilise against Terrorism not only the resources of the state, but also the active support of the millions of people who live and work in the capita. (MPA Website). Surveillance is increasingly simulated through the millions of corporeal entities where seeing in advance is the goal even before technology records and codes these images (William). Bodies understand and code risk and images through the cultural narratives which circulate in society. Compared to CCTV technology images, which require cultural and political interpretations and interventions, bodies as surveillance organisms implicitly code other bodies and activities. The travel bag in the Metropolitan Police poster reinforces the images of the 7/7 bombers and the renewed attempts to bomb the London Underground on the 21st of July. It reiterates the CCTV footage revealing images of the bombers wearing rucksacks. The image of the rucksack both embodies the everyday as well as the potential for evil in everyday objects. It also inevitably reproduces the cultural biases and prejudices where the rucksack is subliminally associated with a specific type of body. The rucksack in these terms is a laden image which symbolically captures the context and culture of risk discourses in society. The co-optation of the population as a surveillance entity also recasts new forms of social responsibility within the democratic polity, where privacy is increasingly mediated by the greater need to monitor, trace and record the activities of one another. Nikolas Rose, in discussing the increasing ‘responsibilisation’ of individuals in modern societies, describes the process in which the individual accepts responsibility for personal actions across a wide range of fields of social and economic activity as in the choice of diet, savings and pension arrangements, health care decisions and choices, home security measures and personal investment choices (qtd. in Dee). While surveillance in individualistic terms is often viewed as a threat to privacy, Rose argues that the state of ‘advanced liberalism’ within modernity and post-modernity requires considerable degrees of self-governance, regulation and surveillance whereby the individual is constructed both as a ‘new citizen’ and a key site of self management. By co-opting and recasting the role of the citizen in the age of Terrorism, the citizen to a degree accepts responsibility for both surveillance and security. In our sociological imagination the body is constructed both as lived as well as a social object. Erving Goffman uses the word ‘umwelt’ to stress that human embodiment is central to the constitution of the social world. Goffman defines ‘umwelt’ as “the region around an individual from which signs of alarm can come” and employs it to capture how people as social actors perceive and manage their settings when interacting in public places (252). Goffman’s ‘umwelt’ can be traced to Immanuel Kant’s idea that it is the a priori categories of space and time that make it possible for a subject to perceive a world (Umiker-Sebeok; qtd. in Ball, “Organization”). Anthony Giddens adapted the term Umwelt to refer to “a phenomenal world with which the individual is routinely ‘in touch’ in respect of potential dangers and alarms which then formed a core of (accomplished) normalcy with which individuals and groups surround themselves” (244). Benjamin Smith, in considering the body as an integral component of the link between our consciousness and our material world, observes that the body is continuously inscribed by culture. These inscriptions, he argues, encompass a wide range of cultural practices and will imply knowledge of a variety of social constructs. The inscribing of the body will produce cultural meanings as well as create forms of subjectivity while locating and situating the body within a cultural matrix (Smith). Drawing on Derrida’s work, Pugliese employs the term ‘Somatechnics’ to conceptualise the body as a culturally intelligible construct and to address the techniques in and through which the body is formed and transformed (qtd. in Osuri). These techniques can encompass signification systems such as race and gender and equally technologies which mediate our sense of reality. These technologies of thinking, seeing, hearing, signifying, visualising and positioning produce the very conditions for the cultural intelligibility of the body (Osuri). The body is then continuously inscribed and interpreted through mediated signifying systems. Similarly, Hayles, while not intending to impose a Cartesian dichotomy between the physical body and its cognitive presence, contends that the use and interactions with technology incorporate the body as a material entity but it also equally inscribes it by marking, recording and tracing its actions in various terrains. According to Gayatri Spivak (qtd. in Ball, “Organization”) new habits and experiences are embedded into the corporeal entity which then mediates its reactions and responses to the social world. This means one’s body is not completely one’s own and the presence of ideological forces or influences then inscribe the body with meanings, codes and cultural values. In our modern condition, the body and data are intimately and intricately bound. Outside the home, it is difficult for the body to avoid entering into relationships that produce electronic personal data (Stalder). According to Felix Stalder our physical bodies are shadowed by a ‘data body’ which follows the physical body of the consuming citizen and sometimes precedes it by constructing the individual through data (12). Before we arrive somewhere, we have already been measured and classified. Thus, upon arrival, the citizen will be treated according to the criteria ‘connected with the profile that represents us’ (Gandy, Panoptic; William). Following September 11, Lyon (Terrorism) reveals that surveillance data from a myriad of sources, such as supermarkets, motels, traffic control points, credit card transactions records and so on, was used to trace the activities of terrorists in the days and hours before their attacks, confirming that the body leaves data traces and trails. Surveillance works by abstracting bodies from places and splitting them into flows to be reassembled as virtual data-doubles, and in the process can replicate hierarchies and centralise power (Lyon, Terrorism). Mike Dee points out that the nature of surveillance taking place in modern societies is complex and far-reaching and in many ways insidious as surveillance needs to be situated within the broadest context of everyday human acts whether it is shopping with loyalty cards or paying utility bills. Physical vulnerability of the body becomes more complex in the time-space distanciated surveillance systems to which the body has become increasingly exposed. As such, each transaction – whether it be a phone call, credit card transaction, or Internet search – leaves a ‘data trail’ linkable to an individual person or place. Haggerty and Ericson, drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage, describe the convergence and spread of data-gathering systems between different social domains and multiple levels (qtd. in Hier). They argue that the target of the generic ‘surveillance assemblage’ is the human body, which is broken into a series of data flows on which surveillance process is based. The thrust of the focus is the data individuals can yield and the categories to which they can contribute. These are then reapplied to the body. In this sense, surveillance is rhizomatic for it is diverse and connected to an underlying, invisible infrastructure which concerns interconnected technologies in multiple contexts (Ball, “Elements”). The co-opted body in the schema of counter-Terrorism enters a power arrangement where it constitutes both the unseen gaze as well as the data that will be implicated and captured in this arrangement. It is capable of producing surveillance data for those in power while creating new data through its transactions and movements in its everyday life. The body is unequivocally constructed through this data and is also entrapped by it in terms of representation and categorisation. The corporeal body is therefore part of the machinery of surveillance while being vulnerable to its discriminatory powers of categorisation and victimisation. As Hannah Arendt (qtd. in Bauman 91) had warned, “we terrestrial creatures bidding for cosmic significance will shortly be unable to comprehend and articulate the things we are capable of doing” Arendt’s caution conveys the complexity, vulnerability as well as the complicity of the human condition in the surveillance society. Equally it exemplifies how the corporeal body can be co-opted as a surveillance entity sustaining a new ‘banality’ (Arendt) in the machinery of surveillance. Social Consequences of Surveillance Lyon (Terrorism) observed that the events of 9/11 and 7/7 in the UK have inevitably become a prism through which aspects of social structure and processes may be viewed. This prism helps to illuminate the already existing vast range of surveillance practices and processes that touch everyday life in so-called information societies. As Lyon (Terrorism) points out surveillance is always ambiguous and can encompass genuine benefits and plausible rationales as well as palpable disadvantages. There are elements of representation to consider in terms of how surveillance technologies can re-present data that are collected at source or gathered from another technological medium, and these representations bring different meanings and enable different interpretations of life and surveillance (Ball, “Elements”). As such surveillance needs to be viewed in a number of ways: practice, knowledge and protection from threat. As data can be manipulated and interpreted according to cultural values and norms it reflects the inevitability of power relations to forge its identity in a surveillance society. In this sense, Ball (“Elements”) concludes surveillance practices capture and create different versions of life as lived by surveilled subjects. She refers to actors within the surveilled domain as ‘intermediaries’, where meaning is inscribed, where technologies re-present information, where power/resistance operates, and where networks are bound together to sometimes distort as well as reiterate patterns of hegemony (“Elements” 93). While surveillance is often connected with technology, it does not however determine nor decide how we code or employ our data. New technologies rarely enter passive environments of total inequality for they become enmeshed in complex pre-existing power and value systems (Marx). With surveillance there is an emphasis on the classificatory powers in our contemporary world “as persons and groups are often risk-profiled in the commercial sphere which rates their social contributions and sorts them into systems” (Lyon, Terrorism 2). Lyon (Terrorism) contends that the surveillance society is one that is organised and structured using surveillance-based techniques recorded by technologies, on behalf of the organisations and governments that structure our society. This information is then sorted, sifted and categorised and used as a basis for decisions which affect our life chances (Wood and Ball). The emergence of pervasive, automated and discriminatory mechanisms for risk profiling and social categorising constitute a significant mechanism for reproducing and reinforcing social, economic and cultural divisions in information societies. Such automated categorisation, Lyon (Terrorism) warns, has consequences for everyone especially in face of the new anti-terror measures enacted after September 11. In tandem with this, Bauman points out that a few suicidal murderers on the loose will be quite enough to recycle thousands of innocents into the “usual suspects”. In no time, a few iniquitous individual choices will be reprocessed into the attributes of a “category”; a category easily recognisable by, for instance, a suspiciously dark skin or a suspiciously bulky rucksack* *the kind of object which CCTV cameras are designed to note and passers-by are told to be vigilant about. And passers-by are keen to oblige. Since the terrorist atrocities on the London Underground, the volume of incidents classified as “racist attacks” rose sharply around the country. (122; emphasis added) Bauman, drawing on Lyon, asserts that the understandable desire for security combined with the pressure to adopt different kind of systems “will create a culture of control that will colonise more areas of life with or without the consent of the citizen” (123). This means that the inhabitants of the urban space whether a citizen, worker or consumer who has no terrorist ambitions whatsoever will discover that their opportunities are more circumscribed by the subject positions or categories which are imposed on them. Bauman cautions that for some these categories may be extremely prejudicial, restricting them from consumer choices because of credit ratings, or more insidiously, relegating them to second-class status because of their colour or ethnic background (124). Joseph Pugliese, in linking visual regimes of racial profiling and the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in the aftermath of 7/7 bombings in London, suggests that the discursive relations of power and visuality are inextricably bound. Pugliese argues that racial profiling creates a regime of visuality which fundamentally inscribes our physiology of perceptions with stereotypical images. He applies this analogy to Menzes running down the platform in which the retina transforms him into the “hallucinogenic figure of an Asian Terrorist” (Pugliese 8). With globalisation and the proliferation of ICTs, borders and boundaries are no longer sacrosanct and as such risks are managed by enacting ‘smart borders’ through new technologies, with huge databases behind the scenes processing information about individuals and their journeys through the profiling of body parts with, for example, iris scans (Wood and Ball 31). Such body profiling technologies are used to create watch lists of dangerous passengers or identity groups who might be of greater ‘risk’. The body in a surveillance society can be dissected into parts and profiled and coded through technology. These disparate codings of body parts can be assembled (or selectively omitted) to construct and represent whole bodies in our information society to ascertain risk. The selection and circulation of knowledge will also determine who gets slotted into the various categories that a surveillance society creates. Conclusion When the corporeal body is subsumed into a web of surveillance it often raises questions about the deterministic nature of technology. The question is a long-standing one in our modern consciousness. We are apprehensive about according technology too much power and yet it is implicated in the contemporary power relationships where it is suspended amidst human motive, agency and anxiety. The emergence of surveillance societies, the co-optation of bodies in surveillance schemas, as well as the construction of the body through data in everyday transactions, conveys both the vulnerabilities of the human condition as well as its complicity in maintaining the power arrangements in society. Bauman, in citing Jacques Ellul and Hannah Arendt, points out that we suffer a ‘moral lag’ in so far as technology and society are concerned, for often we ruminate on the consequences of our actions and motives only as afterthoughts without realising at this point of existence that the “actions we take are most commonly prompted by the resources (including technology) at our disposal” (91). References Abrams, Philip. Historical Sociology. Shepton Mallet, UK: Open Books, 1982. Altheide, David. “Consuming Terrorism.” Symbolic Interaction 27.3 (2004): 289-308. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. London: Faber & Faber, 1963. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Fear. 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Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Hubbard, Phil. “Fear and Loathing at the Multiplex: Everyday Anxiety in the Post-Industrial City.” Capital & Class 80 (2003). Latour, Bruno. Science in Action. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1987 Lyon, David. The Electronic Eye – The Rise of Surveillance Society. Oxford: Polity Press, 1994. ———. “Terrorism and Surveillance: Security, Freedom and Justice after September 11 2001.” Privacy Lecture Series, Queens University, 12 Nov 2001. 16 April 2007 http://privacy.openflows.org/lyon_paper.html>. ———. “Surveillance Studies: Understanding Visibility, Mobility and the Phonetic Fix.” Surveillance and Society 1.1 (2002): 1-7. Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA). “Counter Terrorism: The London Debate.” Press Release. 21 June 2006. 18 April 2007 http://www.mpa.gov.uk.access/issues/comeng/Terrorism.htm>. Pugliese, Joseph. “Asymmetries of Terror: Visual Regimes of Racial Profiling and the Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in the Context of the War in Iraq.” Borderlands 5.1 (2006). 30 May 2007 http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol15no1_2006/ pugliese.htm>. Marx, Gary. “A Tack in the Shoe: Neutralizing and Resisting the New Surveillance.” Journal of Social Issues 59.2 (2003). 18 April 2007 http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/tack.html>. Moores, Shaun. “Doubling of Place.” Mediaspace: Place Scale and Culture in a Media Age. Eds. Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy. Routledge, London, 2004. Monahan, Teri, ed. Surveillance and Security: Technological Politics and Power in Everyday Life. Routledge: London, 2006. Norris, Clive, and Gary Armstrong. The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV. Oxford: Berg, 1999. O’Harrow, Robert. No Place to Hide. New York: Free Press, 2005. Osuri, Goldie. “Media Necropower: Australian Media Reception and the Somatechnics of Mamdouh Habib.” Borderlands 5.1 (2006). 30 May 2007 http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol5no1_2006 osuri_necropower.htm>. Rose, Nikolas. “Government and Control.” British Journal of Criminology 40 (2000): 321–399. Scannell, Paddy. Radio, Television and Modern Life. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Smith, Benjamin. “In What Ways, and for What Reasons, Do We Inscribe Our Bodies?” 15 Nov. 1998. 30 May 2007 http:www.bmezine.com/ritual/981115/Whatways.html>. Stalder, Felix. “Privacy Is Not the Antidote to Surveillance.” Surveillance and Society 1.1 (2002): 120-124. Umiker-Sebeok, Jean. “Power and the Construction of Gendered Spaces.” Indiana University-Bloomington. 14 April 2007 http://www.slis.indiana.edu/faculty/umikerse/papers/power.html>. William, Bogard. The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Wood, Kristie, and David M. Ball, eds. “A Report on the Surveillance Society.” Surveillance Studies Network, UK, Sep. 2006. 14 April 2007 http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/library/data_protection/ practical_application/surveillance_society_full_report_2006.pdf>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ibrahim, Yasmin. "Commodifying Terrorism: Body, Surveillance and the Everyday." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/05-ibrahim.php>. APA Style Ibrahim, Y. (Jun. 2007) "Commodifying Terrorism: Body, Surveillance and the Everyday," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/05-ibrahim.php>.
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30

Colvin, Neroli. "Resettlement as Rebirth: How Effective Are the Midwives?" M/C Journal 16, no. 5 (August 21, 2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.706.

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“Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them [...] life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” (Garcia Marquez 165) Introduction The refugee experience is, at heart, one of rebirth. Just as becoming a new, distinctive being—biological birth—necessarily involves the physical separation of mother and infant, so becoming a refugee entails separation from a "mother country." This mother country may or may not be a recognised nation state; the point is that the refugee transitions from physical connectedness to separation, from insider to outsider, from endemic to alien. Like babies, refugees may have little control over the timing and conditions of their expulsion. Successful resettlement requires not one rebirth but multiple rebirths—resettlement is a lifelong process (Layton)—which in turn require hope, imagination, and energy. In rebirthing themselves over and over again, people who have fled or been forced from their homelands become both mother and child. They do not go through this rebirthing alone. A range of agencies and individuals may be there to assist, including immigration officials, settlement services, schools and teachers, employment agencies and employers, English as a Second Language (ESL) resources and instructors, health-care providers, counsellors, diasporic networks, neighbours, church groups, and other community organisations. The nature, intensity, and duration of these “midwives’” interventions—and when they occur and in what combinations—vary hugely from place to place and from person to person, but there is clear evidence that post-migration experiences have a significant impact on settlement outcomes (Fozdar and Hartley). This paper draws on qualitative research I did in 2012 in a regional town in New South Wales to illuminate some of the ways in which settlement aides ease, or impede, refugees’ rebirth as fully recognised and participating Australians. I begin by considering what it means to be resilient before tracing some of the dimensions of the resettlement process. In doing so, I draw on data from interviews and focus groups with former refugees, service providers, and other residents of the town I shall call Easthaven. First, though, a word about Easthaven. As is the case in many rural and regional parts of Australia, Easthaven’s population is strongly dominated by Anglo Celtic and Saxon ancestries: 2011 Census data show that more than 80 per cent of residents were born in Australia (compared with a national figure of 69.8 per cent) and about 90 per cent speak only English at home (76.8 per cent). Almost twice as many people identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander as the national figure of 2.5 per cent (Australian Bureau of Statistics). For several years Easthaven has been an official “Refugee Welcome Zone”, welcoming hundreds of refugees from diverse countries in Africa and the Middle East as well as from Myanmar. This reflects the Department of Immigration and Citizenship’s drive to settle a fifth of Australia’s 13,750 humanitarian entrants a year directly in regional areas. In Easthaven’s schools—which is where I focused my research—almost all of the ESL students are from refugee backgrounds. Defining Resilience Much of the research on human resilience is grounded in psychology, with a capacity to “bounce back” from adverse experiences cited in many definitions of resilience (e.g. American Psychological Association). Bouncing back implies a relatively quick process, and a return to a state or form similar to that which existed before the encounter with adversity. Yet resilience often requires sustained effort and significant changes in identity. As Jerome Rugaruza, a former UNHCR refugee, says of his journey from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Australia: All the steps begin in the burning village: you run with nothing to eat, no clothes. You just go. Then you get to the refugee camp […] You have a little bread and you thank god you are safe. Then after a few years in the camp, you think about a future for your children. You arrive in Australia and then you learn a new language, you learn to drive. There are so many steps and not everyone can do it. (Milsom) Not everyone can do it, but a large majority do. Research by Graeme Hugo, for example, shows that although humanitarian settlers in Australia face substantial barriers to employment and initially have much higher unemployment rates than other immigrants, for most nationality groups this difference has disappeared by the second generation: “This is consistent with the sacrifice (or investment) of the first generation and the efforts extended to attain higher levels of education and English proficiency, thereby reducing the barriers over time.” (Hugo 35). Ingrid Poulson writes that “resilience is not just about bouncing. Bouncing […] is only a reaction. Resilience is about rising—you rise above it, you rise to the occasion, you rise to the challenge. Rising is an active choice” (47; my emphasis) I see resilience as involving mental and physical grit, coupled with creativity, aspiration and, crucially, agency. Dimensions of Resettlement To return to the story of 41-year-old Jerome Rugaruza, as related in a recent newspaper article: He [Mr Rugaruza] describes the experience of being a newly arrived refugee as being like that of a newborn baby. “You need special care; you have to learn to speak [English], eat the different food, create relationships, connections”. (Milsom) This is a key dimension of resettlement: the adult becomes like an infant again, shifting from someone who knows how things work and how to get by to someone who is likely to be, for a while, dependent on others for even the most basic things—communication, food, shelter, clothing, and social contact. The “special care” that most refugee arrivals need initially (and sometimes for a long time) often results in their being seen as deficient—in knowledge, skills, dispositions, and capacities as well as material goods (Keddie; Uptin, Wright and Harwood). As Fozdar and Hartley note: “The tendency to use a deficit model in refugee resettlement devalues people and reinforces the view of the mainstream population that refugees are a liability” (27). Yet unlike newborns, humanitarian settlers come to their new countries with rich social networks and extensive histories of experience and learning—resources that are in fact vital to their rebirth. Sisay (all names are pseudonyms), a year 11 student of Ethiopian heritage who was born in Kenya, told me with feeling: I had a life back in Africa [her emphasis]. It was good. Well, I would go back there if there’s no problems, which—is a fact. And I came here for a better life—yeah, I have a better life, there’s good health care, free school, and good environment and all that. But what’s that without friends? A fellow student, Celine, who came to Australia five years ago from Burundi via Uganda, told me in a focus group: Some teachers are really good but I think some other teachers could be a little bit more encouraging and understanding of what we’ve gone through, because [they] just look at you like “You’re year 11 now, you should know this” […] It’s really discouraging when [the teachers say] in front of the class, “Oh, you shouldn’t do this subject because you haven’t done this this this this” […] It’s like they’re on purpose to tell you “you don’t have what it takes; just give up and do something else.” As Uptin, Wright and Harwood note, “schools not only have the power to position who is included in schooling (in culture and pedagogy) but also have the power to determine whether there is room and appreciation for diversity” (126). Both Sisay and Celine were disheartened by the fact they felt some of their teachers, and many of their peers, had little interest in or understanding of their lives before they came to Australia. The teachers’ low expectations of refugee-background students (Keddie, Uptin, Wright and Harwood) contrasted with the students’ and their families’ high expectations of themselves (Brown, Miller and Mitchell; Harris and Marlowe). When I asked Sisay about her post-school ambitions, she said: “I have a good idea of my future […] write a documentary. And I’m working on it.” Celine’s response was: “I know I’m gonna do medicine, be a doctor.” A third girl, Lily, who came to Australia from Myanmar three years ago, told me she wanted to be an accountant and had studied accounting at the local TAFE last year. Joseph, a father of three who resettled from South Sudan seven years ago, stressed how important getting a job was to successful settlement: [But] you have to get a certificate first to get a job. Even the job of cleaning—when I came here I was told that somebody has to go to have training in cleaning, to use the different chemicals to clean the ground and all that. But that is just sweeping and cleaning with water—you don’t need the [higher-level] skills. Simple jobs like this, we are not able to get them. In regional Australia, employment opportunities tend to be limited (Fozdar and Hartley); the unemployment rate in Easthaven is twice the national average. Opportunities to study are also more limited than in urban centres, and would-be students are not always eligible for financial assistance to gain or upgrade qualifications. Even when people do have appropriate qualifications, work experience, and language proficiency, the colour of their skin may still mean they miss out on a job. Tilbury and Colic-Peisker have documented the various ways in which employers deflect responsibility for racial discrimination, including the “common” strategy (658) of arguing that while the employer or organisation is not prejudiced, they have to discriminate because of their clients’ needs or expectations. I heard this strategy deployed in an interview with a local businesswoman, Catriona: We were advertising for a new technician. And one of the African refugees came to us and he’d had a lot of IT experience. And this is awful, but we felt we couldn't give him the job, because we send our technicians into people's houses, and we knew that if a black African guy rocked up at someone’s house to try and fix their computer, they would not always be welcomed in all—look, it would not be something that [Easthaven] was ready for yet. Colic-Peisker and Tilbury (Refugees and Employment) note that while Australia has strict anti-discrimination legislation, this legislation may be of little use to the people who, because of the way they look and sound (skin colour, dress, accent), are most likely to face prejudice and discrimination. The researchers found that perceived discrimination in the labour market affected humanitarian settlers’ sense of satisfaction with their new lives far more than, for example, racist remarks, which were generally shrugged off; the students I interviewed spoke of racism as “expected,” but “quite rare.” Most of the people Colic-Peisker and Tilbury surveyed reported finding Australians “friendly and accepting” (33). Even if there is no active discrimination on the basis of skin colour in employment, education, or housing, or overt racism in social situations, visible difference can still affect a person’s sense of belonging, as Joseph recounts: I think of myself as Australian, but my colour doesn’t [laughs] […] Unfortunately many, many Australians are expecting that Australia is a country of Europeans … There is no need for somebody to ask “Where do you come from?” and “Do you find Australia here safe?” and “Do you enjoy it?” Those kind of questions doesn’t encourage that we are together. This highlights another dimension of resettlement: the journey from feeling “at home” to feeling “foreign” to, eventually, feeling at home again in the host country (Colic-Peisker and Tilbury, Refugees and Employment). In the case of visibly different settlers, however, this last stage may never be completed. Whether the questions asked of Joseph are well intentioned or not, their effect may be the same: they position him as a “forever foreigner” (Park). A further dimension of resettlement—one already touched on—is the degree to which humanitarian settlers actively manage their “rebirth,” and are allowed and encouraged to do so. A key factor will be their mastery of English, and Easthaven’s ESL teachers are thus pivotal in the resettlement process. There is little doubt that many of these teachers have gone to great lengths to help this cohort of students, not only in terms of language acquisition but also social inclusion. However, in some cases what is initially supportive can, with time, begin to undermine refugees’ maturity into independent citizens. Sharon, an ESL teacher at one of the schools, told me how she and her colleagues would give their refugee-background students lifts to social events: But then maybe three years down the track they have a car and their dad can drive, but they still won’t take them […] We arrive to pick them up and they’re not ready, or there’s five fantastic cars in the driveway, and you pick up the student and they say “My dad’s car’s much bigger and better than yours” [laughs]. So there’s an expectation that we’ll do stuff for them, but we’ve created that [my emphasis]. Other support services may have more complex interests in keeping refugee settlers dependent. The more clients an agency has, the more services it provides, and the longer clients stay on its books, the more lucrative the contract for the agency. Thus financial and employment imperatives promote competition rather than collaboration between service providers (Fozdar and Hartley; Sidhu and Taylor) and may encourage assumptions about what sorts of services different individuals and groups want and need. Colic-Peisker and Tilbury (“‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Resettlement”) have developed a typology of resettlement styles—“achievers,” “consumers,” “endurers,” and “victims”—but stress that a person’s style, while influenced by personality and pre-migration factors, is also shaped by the institutions and individuals they come into contact with: “The structure of settlement and welfare services may produce a victim mentality, leaving members of refugee communities inert and unable to see themselves as agents of change” (76). The prevailing narrative of “the traumatised refugee” is a key aspect of this dynamic (Colic-Peisker and Tilbury, “‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Resettlement”; Fozdar and Hartley; Keddie). Service providers may make assumptions about what humanitarian settlers have gone through before arriving in Australia, how they have been affected by their experiences, and what must be done to “fix” them. Norah, a long-time caseworker, told me: I think you get some [providers] who go, “How could you have gone through something like that and not suffered? There must be—you must have to talk about this stuff” […] Where some [refugees] just come with the [attitude] “We’re all born into a situation; that was my situation, but I’m here now and now my focus is this.” She cited failure to consider cultural sensitivities around mental illness and to recognise that stress and anxiety during early resettlement are normal (Tilbury) as other problems in the sector: [Newly arrived refugees] go through the “happy to be here” [phase] and now “hang on, I’ve thumped to the bottom and I’m missing my own foods and smells and cultures and experiences”. I think sometimes we’re just too quick to try and slot people into a box. One factor that appears to be vital in fostering and sustaining resilience is social connection. Norah said her clients were “very good on the mobile phone” and had links “everywhere,” including to family and friends in their countries of birth, transition countries, and other parts of Australia. A 2011 report for DIAC, Settlement Outcomes of New Arrivals, found that humanitarian entrants to Australia were significantly more likely to be members of cultural and/or religious groups than other categories of immigrants (Australian Survey Research). I found many examples of efforts to build both bonding and bridging capital (Putnam) in Easthaven, and I offer two examples below. Several people told me about a dinner-dance that had been held a few weeks before one of my visits. The event was organised by an African women’s group, which had been formed—with funding assistance—several years before. The dinner-dance was advertised in the local newspaper and attracted strong interest from a broad cross-section of Easthaveners. To Debbie, a counsellor, the response signified a “real turnaround” in community relations and was a big boon to the women’s sense of belonging. Erica, a teacher, told me about a cultural exchange day she had organised between her bush school—where almost all of the children are Anglo Australian—and ESL students from one of the town schools: At the start of the day, my kids were looking at [the refugee-background students] and they were scared, they were saying to me, "I feel scared." And we shoved them all into this tiny little room […] and they had no choice but to sit practically on top of each other. And by the end of the day, they were hugging each other and braiding their hair and jumping and playing together. Like Uptin, Wright and Harwood, I found that the refugee-background students placed great importance on the social aspects of school. Sisay, the girl I introduced earlier in this paper, said: “It’s just all about friendship and someone to be there for you […] We try to be friends with them [the non-refugee students] sometimes but sometimes it just seems they don’t want it.” Conclusion A 2012 report on refugee settlement services in NSW concludes that the state “is not meeting its responsibility to humanitarian entrants as well as it could” (Audit Office of New South Wales 2); moreover, humanitarian settlers in NSW are doing less well on indicators such as housing and health than humanitarian settlers in other states (3). Evaluating the effectiveness of formal refugee-centred programs was not part of my research and is beyond the scope of this paper. Rather, I have sought to reveal some of the ways in which the attitudes, assumptions, and everyday practices of service providers and members of the broader community impact on refugees' settlement experience. What I heard repeatedly in the interviews I conducted was that it was emotional and practical support (Matthews; Tilbury), and being asked as well as told (about their hopes, needs, desires), that helped Easthaven’s refugee settlers bear themselves into fulfilling new lives. References Audit Office of New South Wales. Settling Humanitarian Entrants in New South Wales—Executive Summary. May 2012. 15 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.audit.nsw.gov.au/ArticleDocuments/245/02_Humanitarian_Entrants_2012_Executive_Summary.pdf.aspx?Embed=Y>. Australian Bureau of Statistics. 2011 Census QuickStats. Mar. 2013. 11 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/getproduct/census/2011/quickstat/0>. Australian Survey Research. Settlement Outcomes of New Arrivals—Report of Findings. Apr. 2011. 15 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.immi.gov.au/media/publications/research/_pdf/settlement-outcomes-new-arrivals.pdf>. Brown, Jill, Jenny Miller, and Jane Mitchell. “Interrupted Schooling and the Acquisition of Literacy: Experiences of Sudanese Refugees in Victorian Secondary Schools.” Australian Journal of Language and Literacy 29.2 (2006): 150-62. Colic-Peisker, Val, and Farida Tilbury. “‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Resettlement: The Influence of Supporting Services and Refugees’ Own Resources on Resettlement Style.” International Migration 41.5 (2004): 61-91. ———. Refugees and Employment: The Effect of Visible Difference on Discrimination—Final Report. Perth: Centre for Social and Community Research, Murdoch University, 2007. Fozdar, Farida, and Lisa Hartley. “Refugee Resettlement in Australia: What We Know and Need To Know.” Refugee Survey Quarterly 4 Jun. 2013. 12 Aug. 2013 ‹http://rsq.oxfordjournals.org/search?fulltext=fozdar&submit=yes&x=0&y=0>. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. Love in the Time of Cholera. London: Penguin Books, 1989. Harris, Vandra, and Jay Marlowe. “Hard Yards and High Hopes: The Educational Challenges of African Refugee University Students in Australia.” International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education 23.2 (2011): 186-96. Hugo, Graeme. A Significant Contribution: The Economic, Social and Civic Contributions of First and Second Generation Humanitarian Entrants—Summary of Findings. Canberra: Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 2011. Keddie, Amanda. “Pursuing Justice for Refugee Students: Addressing Issues of Cultural (Mis)recognition.” International Journal of Inclusive Education 16.12 (2012): 1295-1310. Layton, Robyn. "Building Capacity to Ensure the Inclusion of Vulnerable Groups." Creating Our Future conference, Adelaide, 28 Jul. 2012. Milsom, Rosemarie. “From Hard Luck Life to the Lucky Country.” Sydney Morning Herald 20 Jun. 2013. 12 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/national/from-hard-luck-life-to-the-lucky-country-20130619-2oixl.html>. Park, Gilbert C. “’Are We Real Americans?’: Cultural Production of Forever Foreigners at a Diversity Event.” Education and Urban Society 43.4 (2011): 451-67. Poulson, Ingrid. Rise. Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia, 2008. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Sidhu, Ravinder K., and Sandra Taylor. “The Trials and Tribulations of Partnerships in Refugee Settlement Services in Australia.” Journal of Education Policy 24.6 (2009): 655-72. Tilbury, Farida. “‘I Feel I Am a Bird without Wings’: Discourses of Sadness and Loss among East Africans in Western Australia.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 14.4 (2007): 433-58. ———, and Val Colic-Peisker. “Deflecting Responsibility in Employer Talk about Race Discrimination.” Discourse & Society 17.5 (2006): 651-76. Uptin, Jonnell, Jan Wright, and Valerie Harwood. “It Felt Like I Was a Black Dot on White Paper: Examining Young Former Refugees’ Experience of Entering Australian High Schools.” The Australian Educational Researcher 40.1 (2013): 125-37.
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31

Edmundson, Anna. "Curating in the Postdigital Age." M/C Journal 18, no. 4 (August 10, 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1016.

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It seems nowadays that any aspect of collecting and displaying tangible or intangible material culture is labeled as curating: shopkeepers curate their wares; DJs curate their musical selections; magazine editors curate media stories; and hipsters curate their coffee tables. Given the increasing ubiquity and complexity of 21st-century notions of curatorship, the current issue of MC Journal, ‘curate’, provides an excellent opportunity to consider some of the changes that have occurred in professional practice since the emergence of the ‘digital turn’. There is no doubt that the internet and interactive media have transformed the way we live our daily lives—and for many cultural commentators it only makes sense that they should also transform our cultural experiences. In this paper, I want to examine the issue of curatorial practice in the postdigital age, looking some of the ways that curating has changed over the last twenty years—and some of the ways it has not. The term postdigital comes from the work of Ross Parry, and is used to references the ‘tipping point’ where the use of digital technologies became normative practice in museums (24). Overall, I contend that although new technologies have substantially facilitated the way that curators do their jobs, core business and values have not changed as the result of the digital turn. While, major paradigm shifts have occurred in the field of professional curatorship over the last twenty years, these shifts have been issue-driven rather than a result of new technologies. Everyone’s a Curator In a 2009 article in the New York Times, journalist Alex Williams commented on the growing trend in American consumer culture of labeling oneself a curator. “The word ‘curate’,’’ he observed, “has become a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded, who seem to paste it onto any activity that involves culling and selecting” (1). Williams dated the origins of the popular adoption of the term ‘curating’ to a decade earlier; noting the strong association between the uptake and the rise of the internet (2). This association is not surprising. The development of increasingly interactive software such as Web 2.0 has led to a rapid rise in new technologies aimed at connecting people and information in ways that were previously unimaginable. In particular the internet has become a space in which people can collect, store and most importantly share vast quantities of information. This information is often about objects. According to sociologist Jyri Engeström, the most successful social network sites on the internet (such as Pinterest, Flickr, Houzz etc), use discrete objects, rather than educational content or interpersonal relationships, as the basis for social interaction. So objects become the node for inter-personal communication. In these and other sites, internet users can find, collate and display multiple images of objects on the same page, which can in turn be connected at the press of a button to other related sources of information in the form of text, commentary or more images. These sites are often seen as the opportunity to virtually curate mini-exhibitions, as well as to create mood boards or sites of virtual consumption. The idea of curating as selective aesthetic editing is also popular in online markets places such as Etsy where numerous sellers offer ‘curated’ selections from home wares, to prints, to (my personal favorite) a curated selection of cat toys. In all of these exercises there is an emphasis on the idea of connoisseurship. As part of his article on the new breed of ‘curators’, for example, Alex Williams interviewed Tom Kalendrain, the Fashion Director of a leading American department store, which had engaged in a collaboration with Scott Schuman of the fashion blog, the Sartorialist. According to Kalendrain the store had asked Schuman to ‘curate’ a collection of clothes for them to sell. He justified calling Schuman a curator by explaining: “It was precisely his eye that made the store want to work with him; it was about the right shade of blue, about the cut, about the width of a lapel” (cited in Williams 2). The interview reveals much about current popular notions of what it means to be a curator. The central emphasis of Kalendrain’s distinction was on connoisseurship: exerting a privileged authoritative voice based on intimate knowledge of the subject matter and the ability to discern the very best examples from a plethora of choices. Ironically, in terms of contemporary museum practice, this is a model of curating that museums have consciously been trying to move away from for at least the last three decades. We are now witnessing an interesting disconnect in which the extra-museum community (represented in particular by a postdigital generation of cultural bloggers, commentators and entrepreneurs) are re-vivifying an archaic model of curating, based on object-centric connoisseurship, just at the point where professional curators had thought they had successfully moved on. From Being about Something to Being for Somebody The rejection of the object-expert model of curating has been so persuasive that it has transformed the way museums conduct core business across all sectors of the institution. Over the last thirty to forty years museums have witnessed a major pedagogical shift in how curators approach their work and how museums conceptualise their core values. These paradigmatic and pedagogical shifts were best characterised by the museologist Stephen Weil in his seminal article “From being about something to being for somebody.” Weil, writing in the late 1990s, noted that museums had turned away from traditional models in which individual curators (by way of scholarship and connoisseurship) dictated how the rest of the world (the audience) apprehended and understood significant objects of art, science and history—towards an audience centered approach where curators worked collaboratively with a variety of interested communities to create a pluralist forum for social change. In museum parlance these changes are referred to under the general rubric of the ‘new museology’: a paradigm shift, which had its origins in the 1970s; its gestation in the 1980s; and began to substantially manifest by the 1990s. Although no longer ‘new’, these shifts continue to influence museum practices in the 2000s. In her article, “Curatorship as Social Practice’” museologist Christina Kreps outlined some of the developments over recent decades that have challenged the object-centric model. According to Kreps, the ‘new museology’ was a paradigm shift that emerged from a widespread dissatisfaction with conventional interpretations of the museum and its functions and sought to re-orient itself away from strongly method and technique driven object-focused approaches. “The ‘new museum’ was to be people-centered, action-oriented, and devoted to social change and development” (315). An integral contributor to the developing new museology was the subjection of the western museum in the 1980s and ‘90s to representational critique from academics and activists. Such a critique entailed, in the words of Sharon Macdonald, questioning and drawing attention to “how meanings come to be inscribed and by whom, and how some come to be regarded as ‘right’ or taken as given” (3). Macdonald notes that postcolonial and feminist academics were especially engaged in this critique and the growing “identity politics” of the era. A growing engagement with the concept that museological /curatorial work is what Kreps (2003b) calls a ‘social process’, a recognition that; “people’s relationships to objects are primarily social and cultural ones” (154). This shift has particularly impacted on the practice of museum curatorship. By way of illustration we can compare two scholarly definitions of what constitutes a curator; one written in 1984 and one from 2001. The Manual of Curatorship, written in 1994 by Gary Edson and David Dean define a curator as: “a staff member or consultant who is as specialist in a particular field on study and who provides information, does research and oversees the maintenance, use, and enhancement of collections” (290). Cash Cash writing in 2001 defines curatorship instead as “a social practice predicated on the principle of a fixed relation between material objects and the human environment” (140). The shift has been towards increased self-reflexivity and a focus on greater plurality–acknowledging the needs of their diverse audiences and community stakeholders. As part of this internal reflection the role of curator has shifted from sole authority to cultural mediator—from connoisseur to community facilitator as a conduit for greater community-based conversation and audience engagement resulting in new interpretations of what museums are, and what their purpose is. This shift—away from objects and towards audiences—has been so great that it has led some scholars to question the need for museums to have standing collections at all. Do Museums Need Objects? In his provocatively titled work Do Museums Still Need Objects? Historian Steven Conn observes that many contemporary museums are turning away from the authority of the object and towards mass entertainment (1). Conn notes that there has been an increasing retreat from object-based research in the fields of art; science and ethnography; that less object-based research seems to be occurring in museums and fewer objects are being put on display (2). The success of science centers with no standing collections, the reduction in the number of objects put on display in modern museums (23); the increasing phalanx of ‘starchitect’ designed museums where the building is more important than the objects in it (11), and the increase of virtual museums and collections online, all seems to indicate that conventional museum objects have had their day (1-2). Or have they? At the same time that all of the above is occurring, ongoing research suggests that in the digital age, more than ever, people are seeking the authenticity of the real. For example, a 2008 survey of 5,000 visitors to living history sites in the USA, found that those surveyed expressed a strong desire to commune with historically authentic objects: respondents felt that their lives had become so crazy, so complicated, so unreal that they were seeking something real and authentic in their lives by visiting these museums. (Wilkening and Donnis 1) A subsequent research survey aimed specifically at young audiences (in their early twenties) reported that: seeing stuff online only made them want to see the real objects in person even more, [and that] they felt that museums were inherently authentic, largely because they have authentic objects that are unique and wonderful. (Wilkening 2) Adding to the question ‘do museums need objects?’, Rainey Tisdale argues that in the current digital age we need real museum objects more than ever. “Many museum professionals,” she reports “have come to believe that the increase in digital versions of objects actually enhances the value of in-person encounters with tangible, real things” (20). Museums still need objects. Indeed, in any kind of corporate planning, one of the first thing business managers look for in a company is what is unique about it. What can it provide that the competition can’t? Despite the popularity of all sorts of info-tainments, the one thing that museums have (and other institutions don’t) is significant collections. Collections are a museum’s niche resource – in business speak they are the asset that gives them the advantage over their competitors. Despite the increasing importance of technology in delivering information, including collections online, there is still overwhelming evidence to suggest that we should not be too quick to dismiss the traditional preserve of museums – the numinous object. And in fact, this is precisely the final argument that Steven Conn reaches in his above-mentioned publication. Curating in the Postdigital Age While it is reassuring (but not particularly surprising) that generations Y and Z can still differentiate between virtual and real objects, this doesn’t mean that museum curators can bury their heads in the collection room hoping that the digital age will simply go away. The reality is that while digitally savvy audiences continue to feel the need to see and commune with authentic materially-present objects, the ways in which they access information about these objects (prior to, during, and after a museum visit) has changed substantially due to technological advances. In turn, the ways in which curators research and present these objects – and stories about them – has also changed. So what are some of the changes that have occurred in museum operations and visitor behavior due to technological advances over the last twenty years? The most obvious technological advances over the last twenty years have actually been in data management. Since the 1990s a number of specialist data management systems have been developed for use in the museum sector. In theory at least, a curator can now access the entire collections of an institution without leaving their desk. Moreover, the same database that tells the curator how many objects the institution holds from the Torres Strait Islands, can also tell her what they look like (through high quality images); which objects were exhibited in past exhibitions; what their prior labels were; what in-house research has been conducted on them; what the conservation requirements are; where they are stored; and who to contact for copyright clearance for display—to name just a few functions. In addition a curator can get on the internet to search the online collection databases from other museums to find what objects they have from the Torres Strait Islands. Thus, while our curator is at this point conducting the same type of exhibition research that she would have done twenty years ago, the ease in which she can access information is substantially greater. The major difference of course is that today, rather than in the past, the curator would be collaborating with members of the original source community to undertake this project. Despite the rise of the internet, this type of liaison still usually occurs face to face. The development of accessible digital databases through the Internet and capacity to download images and information at a rapid rate has also changed the way non-museum staff can access collections. Audiences can now visit museum websites through which they can easily access information about current and past exhibitions, public programs, and online collections. In many cases visitors can also contribute to general discussion forums and collections provenance data through various means such as ‘tagging’; commenting on blogs; message boards; and virtual ‘talk back’ walls. Again, however, this represents a change in how visitors access museums but not a fundamental shift in what they can access. In the past, museum visitors were still encouraged to access and comment upon the collections; it’s just that doing so took a lot more time and effort. The rise of interactivity and the internet—in particular through Web 2.0—has led many commentators to call for a radical change in the ways museums operate. Museum analyst Lynda Kelly (2009) has commented on the issue that: the demands of the ‘information age’ have raised new questions for museums. It has been argued that museums need to move from being suppliers of information to providing usable knowledge and tools for visitors to explore their own ideas and reach their own conclusions because of increasing access to technologies, such as the internet. Gordon Freedman for example argues that internet technologies such as computers, the World Wide Web, mobile phones and email “… have put the power of communication, information gathering, and analysis in the hands of the individuals of the world” (299). Freedman argued that museums need to “evolve into a new kind of beast” (300) in order to keep up with the changes opening up to the possibility of audiences becoming mediators of information and knowledge. Although we often hear about the possibilities of new technologies in opening up the possibilities of multiple authors for exhibitions, I have yet to hear of an example of this successfully taking place. This doesn’t mean, however, that it will never happen. At present most museums seem to be merely dipping their toes in the waters. A recent example from the Art Gallery of South Australia illustrates this point. In 2013, the Gallery mounted an exhibition that was, in theory at least, curated by the public. Labeled as “the ultimate people’s choice exhibition” the project was hosted in conjunction with ABC Radio Adelaide. The public was encouraged to go online to the gallery website and select from a range of artworks in different categories by voting for their favorites. The ‘winning’ works were to form the basis of the exhibition. While the media spin on the exhibition gave the illusion of a mass curated show, in reality very little actual control was given over to the audience-curators. The public was presented a range of artworks, which had already been pre-selected from the standing collections; the themes for the exhibition had also already been determined as they informed the 120 artworks that were offered up for voting. Thus, in the end the pre-selection of objects and themes, as well as the timing and execution of the exhibition remained entirely in the hand of the professional curators. Another recent innovation did not attempt to harness public authorship, but rather enhanced individual visitor connections to museum collections by harnessing new GPS technologies. The Streetmuseum was a free app program created by the Museum of London to bring geotagged historical street views to hand held or portable mobile devices. The program allowed user to undertake a self-guided tour of London. After programing in their route, users could then point their device at various significant sites along the way. Looking through their viewfinder they would see a 3D historic photograph overlayed on the live site – allowing user not only to see what the area looked like in the past but also to capture an image of the overlay. While many of the available tagging apps simply allow for the opportunity of adding more white noise, allowing viewers to add commentary, pics, links to a particular geo tagged site but with no particular focus, the Streetmuseum had a well-defined purpose to encourage their audience to get out and explore London; to share their archival photograph collection with a broader audience; and to teach people more about London’s unique history. A Second Golden Age? A few years ago the Steven Conn suggested that museums are experiencing an international ‘golden age’ with more museums being built and visited and talked about than ever before (1). In the United States, where Conn is based, there are more than 17,500 accredited museums, and more than two million people visit some sort of museum per day, averaging around 865 million museum visits per year (2). However, at the same time that museums are proliferating, the traditional areas of academic research and theory that feed into museums such as history, cultural studies, anthropology and art history are experiencing a period of intense self reflexivity. Conn writes: At the turn of the twenty-first century, more people are going to more museums than at any time in the past, and simultaneously more scholars, critics, and others are writing and talking about museums. The two phenomena are most certainly related but it does not seem to be a happy relationship. Even as museums enjoy more and more success…many who write about them express varying degrees of foreboding. (1) There is no doubt that the internet and increasingly interactive media has transformed the way we live our daily lives—it only makes sense that it should also transform our cultural experiences. At the same time Museums need to learn to ride the wave without getting dumped into it. The best new media acts as a bridge—connecting people to places and ideas—allowing them to learn more about museum objects and historical spaces, value-adding to museum visits rather than replacing them altogether. As museologust Elaine Gurian, has recently concluded, the core business of museums seems unchanged thus far by the adoption of internet based technology: “the museum field generally, its curators, and those academic departments focused on training curators remain at the core philosophically unchanged despite their new websites and shiny new technological reference centres” (97). Virtual life has not replaced real life and online collections and exhibitions have not replaced real life visitations. Visitors want access to credible information about museum objects and museum exhibitions, they are not looking for Wiki-Museums. Or if they are are, they are looking to the Internet community to provide that service rather than the employees of state and federally funded museums. Both provide legitimate services, but they don’t necessarily need to provide the same service. In the same vein, extra-museum ‘curating’ of object and ideas through social media sites such as Pinterest, Flikr, Instagram and Tumblr provide a valuable source of inspiration and a highly enjoyable form of virtual consumption. But the popular uptake of the term ‘curating’ remains as easily separable from professional practice as the prior uptake of the terms ‘doctor’ and ‘architect’. An individual who doctors an image, or is the architect of their destiny, is still not going to operate on a patient nor construct a building. While major ontological shifts have occurred within museum curatorship over the last thirty years, these changes have resulted from wider social shifts, not directly from technology. This is not to say that technology will not change the museum’s ‘way of being’ in my professional lifetime—it’s just to say it hasn’t happened yet. References Cash Cash, Phillip. “Medicine Bundles: An Indigenous Approach.” Ed. T. Bray. The Future of the Past: Archaeologists, Native Americans and Repatriation. New York and London: Garland Publishing (2001): 139-145. Conn, Steven. Do Museums Still Need Objects? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Edson, Gary, and David Dean. The Handbook for Museums. New York and London: Routledge, 1994. Engeström, Jyri. “Why Some Social Network Services Work and Others Don’t — Or: The Case for Object-Centered Sociality.” Zengestrom Apr. 2005. 17 June 2015 ‹http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2005/04/why-some-social-network-services-work-and-others-dont-or-the-case-for-object-centered-sociality.html›. Freedman, Gordon. “The Changing Nature of Museums”. Curator 43.4 (2000): 295-306. Gurian, Elaine Heumann. “Curator: From Soloist to Impresario.” Eds. Fiona Cameron and Lynda Kelly. Hot Topics, Public Culture, Museums. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. 95-111. Kelly, Lynda. “Museum Authority.” Blog 12 Nov. 2009. 25 June 2015 ‹http://australianmuseum.net.au/blogpost/museullaneous/museum-authority›. Kreps, Christina. “Curatorship as Social Practice.” Curator: The Museum Journal 46.3 (2003): 311-323. ———, Christina. Liberating Culture: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Museums, Curation, and Heritage Preservation. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Macdonald, Sharon. “Expanding Museum Studies: An Introduction.” Ed. Sharon MacDonald. A Companion to Museum Studies. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2011. Parry, Ross. “The End of the Beginning: Normativity in the Postdigital Museum.” Museum Worlds: Advances in Research 1 (2013): 24-39. Tisdale, Rainey. “Do History Museums Still Need Objects?” History News (2011): 19-24. 18 June 2015 ‹http://aaslhcommunity.org/historynews/files/2011/08/RaineySmr11Links.pdf›. Suchy, Serene. Leading with Passion: Change Management in the Twenty-First Century Museum. Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2004. Weil, Stephen E. “From Being about Something to Being for Somebody: The Ongoing Transformation of the American Museum.” Daedalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 128.3 (1999): 229–258. Wilkening, Susie. “Community Engagement and Objects—Mutually Exclusive?” Museum Audience Insight 27 July 2009. 14 June 2015 ‹http://reachadvisors.typepad.com/museum_audience_insight/2009/07/community-engagement-and-objects-mutually-exclusive.html›. ———, and Erica Donnis. “Authenticity? It Means Everything.” History News (2008) 63:4. Williams, Alex. “On the Tip of Creative Tongues.” New York Times 4 Oct. 2009. 4 June 2015 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/fashion/04curate.html›.
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32

Probyn, Elspeth. "Indigestion of Identities." M/C Journal 2, no. 7 (October 1, 1999). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1791.

Full text
Abstract:
Do we eat what we are, or are we what we eat? Do we eat or are we eaten? In less cryptic terms, in eating, do we confirm our identities, or are our identities reforged, and refracted by what and how we eat? In posing these questions, I want to shift the terms of current debates about identity. I want to signal that the study of identity may take on new insights when we look at how we are or want to be in terms of what, how, and with whom we eat. If the analysis of identity has by and large been conducted through the optic of sex, it may well be that in western societies we are witnessing a shift away from sex as the sovereign signifier, or to put it more finely, the question of what we are is a constantly morphing one that mixes up bodies, appetites, classes, genders and ethnicities. It must be said that the question of identity and subjectivity has been so well trodden in the last several decades that the possibility of any virgin territory is slim. Bombarded by critiques of identity politics, any cultural critic still interested in why and how individuals fabricate themselves must either cringe before accusations of sociological do-gooding (and defend the importance of the categories of race, class, sex, gender and so forth), or face the endless clichés that seemingly support the investigation of identity. The momentum of my investigation is carried by a weak wager, by which I mean that the areas and examples I study cannot be overdetermined by a sole axis of investigation. My point of departure is basic: what if we were to think identities in another dimension, through the optic of eating and its associated qualities: hunger, greed, shame, disgust, pleasure, etc? While the connections suggested by eating are diverse and illuminating, interrogating identity through this angle brings its own load of assumptions and preconceptions. One of the more onerous aspects of 'writing about food' is the weight of previous studies. The field of food is a well traversed one, staked out by influential authors concerned with proper anthropological, historical and sociological questions. They are by and large attracted to food for its role in securing social categories and classifications. They have left a legacy of truisms, such as Lévi-Strauss's oft-stated maxim that food is good to think with1, or Brillat-Savarin's aphorism, 'tell me what you eat: I will tell you what you are' (13). In turn, scientific idioms meet up with the buzzing clichés that hover about food. These can be primarily grouped around the notion that food is fundamental, that we all eat, and so on. Indeed, buffeted by the winds of postmodernism that have permeated public debates, it seems that there is a popular acceptance of the fact that identities are henceforth difficult, fragmented, temporary, unhinged by massive changes to modes of employment and the economy, re-formations of family, and the changes in the gender and sexual order. Living with and through these changes on a daily basis, it is no wonder that food and eating has been popularly reclaimed as a 'fundamental' issue, as the last bastion of authenticity in our lives. To put it another way, and in the terms that guide me, eating is seen as immediate -- it is something we all have to do; and it is a powerful mode of mediation, of joining us with others. What, how, and where we eat has emerged as a site of considerable social concern: from the fact that most do not eat en famille, that we increasingly eat out and through drive-in fast food outlets (in the US, 50% of the food budget is spent on eating outside the home), to the worries about genetically altered food and horror food -- mad cows, sick chickens, square tomatoes. Eating performs different connections and disconnections. Increasingly the attention to what we eat is seen as immediately connecting us, our bodies, to large social questions. At a broad level, this can be as diffuse as the winds that some argue spread genetically modified seed stock from one region to another. Or it can be as individually focussed as the knowledge that others are starving as we eat. This connection has long haunted children told 'to eat up everything on your plate because little children are starving in Africa', and in more evolved terms has served as a staple of forms of vegetarianism and other ethical forms of eating. From the pictures of starving children staring from magazine pages, the spectre of hunger is now broadcast by the Internet, exemplified in the Hunger Site where 'users are met by a map of the world and every 3.6 seconds, a country flashes black signifying a death due to hunger'. Here eating is the subject of a double articulation: the recognition of hunger is presumed to be a fundamental capacity of individuals, and our feelings are then galvanised into painless action: each time a user clicks on the 'hunger' button one of the sponsors donates a cup and a half of food. As the site explains, 'our sponsors pay for the donations as a form of advertising and public relations'. Here, the logic is that hunger is visceral, that it is a basic human feeling, which is to say that it is understood as immediate, and that it connects us in a basic way to other humans. That advertising companies know that it can also be a profitable form of meditation, transforming 'humans' into consumers is but one example of how eating connects us in complex ways to other people, to products, to new formulations of identity, and in this case altruism (the site has been called 'the altruistic mouse')2. Eating continually interweaves individual needs, desires and aspirations within global economies of identities. Of course the interlocking of the global and the local has been the subject of much debate over the last decade. For instance, in his recent book on globalisation, John Tomlinson uses 'global food and local identity' as a site through which to problematise these terms. It is clear that changes in food processing and transportation technologies have altered our sense of connection to the near and the far away, allowing us to routinely find in our supermarkets and eat products that previously would have been the food stuff of the élite. These institutional and technological changes rework the connections individuals have to their local, to the regions and nations in which they live. As Tomlinson argues, 'globalisation, from its early impact, does clearly undermine a close material relationship between the provenance of food and locality' (123). As he further states, the effects have been good (availability and variety), and bad (disrupting 'the subtle connection between climate, season, locality and cultural practice'). In terms of what we can now eat, Tomlinson points out that 'the very cultural stereotypes that identify food with, say, national culture become weakened' (124). Defusing the whiff of moralism that accompanies so much writing about food, Tomlinson argues that these changes to how we eat are not 'typically experienced as simply cultural loss or estrangement but as a complex and ambiguous blend: of familiarity and difference, expansion of cultural horizons and increased perceptions of vulnerability, access to the "world out there" accompanied by penetration of our own private worlds, new opportunities and new risks' (128). For the sake of my own argument his attention to the increased sense of vulnerability is particularly important. To put it more strongly, I'd argue that eating is of interest for the ways in which it can be a mundane exposition of the visceral nature of our connectedness, or distance from each other, from ourselves, and our social environment: it throws into relief the heartfelt, the painful, playful or pleasurable articulations of identity. To put it more clearly, I want to use eating and its associations in order to think about how the most ordinary of activities can be used to help us reflect on how we are connected to others, and to large and small social issues. This is again to attend to the immediacy of eating, and the ways in which that immediacy is communicated, mediated and can be put to use in thinking about culture. The adjective 'visceral' comes to mind: 'of the viscera', the inner organs. Could something as ordinary as eating contain the seeds of an extraordinary reflection, a visceral reaction to who and what we are becoming? In mining eating and its qualities might we glimpse gut reactions to the histories and present of the cultures within which we live? As Emily Jenkins writes in her account of 'adventures in physical culture', what if we were to go 'into things tongue first. To see how they taste' (5). In this sense, I want to plunder the visceral, gut levels revealed by that most boring and fascinating of topics: food and eating. In turn, I want to think about what bodies are and do when they eat. To take up the terms with which I started, eating both confirms what and who we are, to ourselves and to others, and can reveal new ways of thinking about those relations. To take the most basic of facts: food goes in, and then broken down it comes out of the body, and every time this happens our bodies are affected. While in the usual course of things we may not dwell upon this process, that basic ingestion allows us to think of our bodies as complex assemblages connected to a wide range of other assemblages. In eating, the diverse nature of where and how different parts of ourselves attach to different aspects of the social becomes clear, just as it scrambles preconceptions about alimentary identities. Of course, we eat according to social rules, in fact we ingest them. 'Feed the man meat', the ads proclaim following the line of masculinity inwards; while others draw a line outwards from biology and femininity into 'Eat lean beef'. The body that eats has been theorised in ways that seek to draw out the sociological equations about who we are in terms of class and gender. But rather than taking the body as known, as already and always ordered in advance by what and how it eats, we can turn such hypotheses on their head. In the act of ingestion, strict divisions get blurred. The most basic fact of eating reveals some of the strangeness of the body's workings. Consequently it becomes harder to capture the body within categories, to order stable identities. This then forcefully reminds us that we still do not know what a body is capable of, to take up a refrain that has a long heritage (from Spinoza to Deleuze to feminist investigations of the body). As Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd argue in terms of this idea, 'each body exists in relations of interdependence with other bodies and these relations form a "world" in which individuals of all kinds exchange their constitutive parts -- leading to the enrichment of some and the demise of others (e.g. eating involves the destruction of one body at the same time as it involves the enhancement of the other)' (101). I am particularly interested in how individuals replay equations between eating and identity. But that phrase sounds impossibly abstracted from the minute instances I have in mind. From the lofty heights, I follow the injunction to 'look down, look way down', to lead, as it were, with the stomach. In this vein, I begin to note petty details, like the fact of recently discovering breakfast. From a diet of coffee (now with a milk called 'Life') and cigarettes, I dutifully munch on fortified cereal that provides large amounts of folate should I be pregnant (and as I eat it I wonder am I, should I be?3). Spurred on by articles sprinkled with dire warnings about what happens to women in Western societies, I search out soy, linseed and other ingredients that will help me mimic the high phytoestrogen diet of Japanese women. Eating cereal, I am told, will stave off depression, especially with the addition of bananas. Washed down with yoghurt 'enhanced' with acidophilius and bifidus to give me 'friendly' bacteria that will fight against nasty heliobacter pylori, I am assured that I will even lose weight by eating breakfast. It's all a bit much first thing in the morning when the promise of a long life seems like a threat. The myriad of printed promises of the intricate world of alimentary programming serve as an interesting counterpoint to the straightforward statements on cigarette packages. 'Smoking kills' versus the weak promises that eating so much of such and such a cereal 'is a good source of soy phytoestrogenes (isolfavones) that are believed to be very beneficial'. Apart from the unpronounceable ingredients (do you really want to eat something that you can't say?), the terms of the contract between me and the cereal makers is thin: that such and such is 'believed to be beneficial'? While what in fact they may benefit is nebulous, it gets scarier when they specify that 'a diet rich in folate may reduce the risk of birth defects such as spina bifida'. The conditional tense wavers as I ponder the way spina bifida is produced as a real possibility. There is of course a long history to the web of nutritional messages that now surrounds us. In her potted teleology of food messages, Sue Thompson, a consultant dietitian, writes that in the 1960s, the slogan was 'you are what you eat'. Then in the 1970s and 1980s, the idea was that food was bad for you. In her words, 'it became a time of "Don't eat" and "bad foods". Now, happily, 'we are moving into a time of appreciating the health benefits of food' (Promotional release by the Dairy Farmers, 1997). As the new battle ground for extended enhanced life, eating takes on fortified meaning. Awed by the enthusiasm, I am also somewhat shocked by the intimacy of detail. I can handle descriptions of sex, but the idea of discussing the ways in which you 'are reducing the bacterial toxins produced from small bowel overgrowth' (Thompson), is just too much. Gut level intimacy indeed. However, eating is intimate. But strangely enough except for the effusive health gurus, and the gossip about the eating habits of celebrities, normally in terms of not-eating, we tend not to publicly air the fact that we all operate as 'mouth machines' (to take Noëlle Châtelet's term). To be blunt about it, 'to eat, is to connect ... the mouth and the anus' (Châtelet 34). We would, with good reason, rather not think about this; it is an area of conversation reserved for our intimates. For instance, in relationships the moment of broaching the subject of one's gut may mark the beginning of the end. So let us stay for the moment at the level of the mouth machine, and the ways it brings together the physical fact of what goes in, and the symbolic production of what comes out: meanings, statements, ideas. To sanitise it further, I want to think of the mouth machine as a metonym4 for the operations of a term that has been central to cultural studies: 'articulation'. Stuart Hall's now classic definition states that 'articulation refers to the complex set of historical practices by which we struggle to produce identity or structural unity out of, on top of, complexity, difference, contradiction' (qtd. in Grossberg, "History" 64). While the term has tended to be used rather indiscriminately -- theorists wildly 'articulate' this or that -- its precise terms are useful. Basically it refers to how individuals relate themselves to their social contexts and histories. While we are all in some sense the repositories of past practices, through our actions we 'articulate', bridge and connect ourselves to practices and contexts in ways that are new to us. In other terms, we continually shuttle between practices and meanings that are already constituted and 'the real conditions' in which we find ourselves. As Lawrence Grossberg argues, this offers 'a nonessentialist theory of agency ... a fragmented, decentered human agent, an agent who is both "subject-ed" by power and capable of acting against power' ("History" 65). Elsewhere Grossberg elaborates on the term, arguing that 'articulation is the production of identity on top of difference, of unities out of fragments, of structures across practices' (We Gotta Get Out 54). We are then 'articulated' subjects, the product of being integrated into past practices and structures, but we are also always 'articulating' subjects: through our enactment of practices we reforge new meanings, new identities for ourselves. This then reveals a view of the subject as a fluctuating entity, neither totally voluntaristic, nor overdetermined. In more down to earth terms, just because we are informed by practices not of our own making, 'that doesn't mean we swallow our lessons without protest' (Jenkins 5). The mouth machine takes in but it also spits out. In these actions the individual is constantly connecting, disconnecting and reconnecting. Grossberg joins the theory of articulation to Deleuze and Guattari's notion of rhizomes. In real and theoretical terms, a rhizome is a wonderful entity: it is a type of plant, such as a potato plant or an orchid, that instead of having tap roots spreads its shoots outwards, where new roots can sprout off old. Used as a figure to map out social relations, the rhizome allows us to think about other types of connection. Beyond the arboreal, tap root logic of, say, the family tree which ties me in lineage to my forefathers, the rhizome allows me to spread laterally and horizontally: as Deleuze puts it, the rhizome is antigenealogical, 'it always has multiple entryways' compelling us to think of how we are connected diversely, to obvious and sometimes not so obvious entities (35). For Grossberg the appeal of joining a theory of articulation with one inspired by rhizomes is that it combines the 'vertical complexity' of culture and context, with the 'wild realism' of the horizontal possibilities that connect us outward. To use another metaphor dear to Deleuze and Guattari, this is to think about the spread of rhizomatic roots, the 'lines of flight' that break open seemingly closed structures, including those we call ourselves: 'lines of flight disarticulate, open up the assemblage to its exterior, cutting across and dismantling unity, identity, centers and hierarchies' (qtd. in Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out 58). In this way, bodies can be seen as assemblages: bits of past and present practice, openings, attachments to parts of the social, closings and aversion to other parts. The tongue as it ventures out to taste something new may bring back fond memories, or it may cause us to recoil in disgust. As Jenkins writes, this produces a fascinating 'contradiction -- how the body is both a prison and a vehicle for adventure' (4). It highlights the fact that the 'body is not the same from day to day. Not even from minute to minute ... . Sometimes it seems like home, sometimes more like a cheap motel near Pittsburgh' (7). As we ingest we mutate, we expand and contract, we change, sometimes subtly, sometimes violently. The openings and closings of our bodies constantly rearranges our dealings with others, as Jenkins writes, the body's 'distortions, anxieties, ecstasies and discomforts all influence a person's interaction with the people who service it'. In more theoretical terms, this produces the body as 'an articulated plane whose organisation defines its own relations of power and sites of struggle', which 'points to the existence of another politics, a politics of feeling' (Grossberg, "History" 72). These theoretical considerations illuminate the interest and the complexity of bodies that eat. The mouth machine registers experiences, and then articulates them -- utters them. In eating, we may munch into whole chains of previously established connotations, just as we may disrupt them. For instance, an email arrives, leaving traces of its rhizomatic passage zapping from one part of the world to another, and then to me. Unsolicited, it sets out a statement from a Dr. Johannes Van Vugt in San Francisco who on October 11, 1999, National Coming Out Day in the US, began an ongoing 'Fast for Equal Rights for persons who are gay, lesbian and other sexual orientation minorities'. Yoking his fast with the teachings of Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Dr. Van Vugt says he is fasting to 'call on you to choose love, not fear, and to do something about it'. The statement also reveals that he previously fasted 'to raise awareness and funds for African famine relief for which he received a Congressional commendation'. While personally I don't give much for his chances of getting a second commendation, this is an example of how the mouth machine closed still operates to articulate identities and politics to wildly diverging sites. While there is something of an arboreal logic to fasting for awareness of famine, the connection between not eating and anti-homophobic politics is decidedly rhizomatic. Whether or not it succeeds in its aim, and one of the tenets of a rhizomatic logic is that the points of connection cannot be guaranteed in advance, it does join the mouth with sex with the mouth with homophobic statements that it utters. There is then a sort of 'wild realism' at work here that endeavours to set up new assemblages of bodies, mouths and politics. From fasting to writing, what of the body that writes of the body that eats? In Grossberg's argument, the move to a rhizomatic field of analysis promises to return cultural theory to a consideration of 'the real'. He argues that such a theory must be 'concerned with particular configurations of practices, how they produce effects and how such effects are organized and deployed' (We Gotta Get Out 45). However, it is crucial to remember that these practices do not exist in a pure state in culture, divorced from their representations or those of the body that analyses them. The type of 'wild realism' that Grossberg calls for, as in Deleuze's 'new empiricism' is both a way of seeing the world, and offers it anew, illuminates otherly its structures and individuals' interaction with them. Following the line of the rhizome means that we must 'forcibly work both on semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows', Guattari goes on to argue that 'there is no tripartition between a field of reality, the world, a field of representation, the book, and a field of subjectivity, the author. But an arrangement places in connection certain multiplicities taken from each of these orders' (qtd. in Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out 48). In terms of the possibilities offered by eating, these theoretical and conceptual arguments direct us to other ways of thinking about identity as both digestion and as indigestible. Bodies eat into culture. The mouth machine is central to the articulation of different orders, but so too is the tongue that sticks out, that draws in food, objects and people. Analysed along multiple alimentary lines of flight, in eating we constantly take in, chew up and spit out identities. Footnotes 1. As Barbara Santich has recently pointed out, Lévi-Strauss's point was made in relation to taboos on eating totem animals in traditional societies and wasn't a general comment on the connection between eating and thinking (4). 2. The sponsors of the Hunger Site include 0-0.com, a search engine, Proflowers.com, and an assortment of other examples of this new form of altruism (such as GreaterGood.com which advertises itself as a 'shop to benefit your favorite cause'), and 'World-Wide Recipes', which features a 'virtual restaurant'. 3. The pregnant body is of course one of the most policed entities in our culture, and pregnant friends report on the anxieties that are produced about what will go into the future child's body. 4. While Châtelet writes that thinking about the eating body 'throws her into full metaphor ... joining, for example the nutritional mouth and the lover's mouth' (8), I have tried to avoid the tug of metaphor. Of course, the seduction of metaphor is great, and there are copious examples of the metaphorisation of eating in regards to consumption, ingestion, reading and writing. However, as I've argued elsewhere (Probyn, Outside Belongings), I prefer to focus on the 'work' (or as Le Doeuff would say, 'le faire des images') that Deleuze and Guattari's terms accomplish as ways of modelling the social. This is a particularly crucial (if here underdeveloped) point in terms of my present project, where I seek to analyse the ways in which eating may reproduce an awareness of the visceral nature of social relations. That said, and as my valued colleague Melissa Hardie has often pointed out, my text is littered with metaphor. References Brillat-Savarin, Jean-Anthelme. The Physiology of Taste. Trans. Anne Drayton. Penguin, 1974. Châtelet, Noëlle. Le Corps a Corps Culinaire. Paris: Seuil, 1977. Deleuze, Gilles. "Rhizome versus Trees." The Deleuze Reader. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1973. Gatens, Moira, and Genevieve Lloyd. Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. Grossberg, Lawrence. "History, Politics and Postmodernism: Stuart Hall and Cultural Studies." Journal of Communication Inquiry 10.2 (1986): 61-77. ---. We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. New York and London: Routledge,1992. Le Doeuff, Michèle. L'Étude et le Rouet. Paris: Seuil, 1989. Jenkins, Emily. Tongue First: Adventures in Physical Culture. London: Virago, 1999. Probyn, Elspeth. Outside Belongings. New York and London: Routledge, 1996. ---. Sexing the Self. Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies. New York and London: Routledge, 1993. Santich, Barbara. "Research Notes." The Centre for the History of Food and Drink Newsletter. The University of Adelaide, September 1999. Thompson, Sue. Promotional pamphlet for the Dairy Farmers' Association. 1997. Tomlinson, John. Globalization and Culture. Oxford: Polity Press, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Elspeth Probyn. "The Indigestion of Identities." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/indigestion.php>. Chicago style: Elspeth Probyn, "The Indigestion of Identities," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 7 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/indigestion.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Elspeth Probyn. (1999) The indigestion of identities. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(7). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/indigestion.php> ([your date of access]).
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33

Sarı, Simay, and Onur Mengi. "The Role of Creative Placemaking." M/C Journal 25, no. 3 (June 27, 2022). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2899.

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Abstract:
Introduction The evolution of creative city paradigm in the last three decades has dramatically changed the notion of placemaking and the meaning of art and design for urban development in the creative and cultural economy context. Very recently, a spontaneously emerging art district has been exploited by policy actions in many cities, resulting in its presence on the global stage at the UNESCO Creative City Network. The two most common approaches that drive art and design-based development policies are seen in the creative city approach and community development approach (Evans; Murdoch III et al.). The creative city approach aims to contribute to economic development by focussing on the economic role of art and design (Florida; Murdoch III et al.). The community development approach, on the other hand, is seen as an important factor for social benefit and democratic development (Murdoch III et al.; Grodach; Markusen and Gadwa). Grassroots arts movements and community arts organisations, in the community development approach, support the arts as a low-income community involvement and development initiative (Murdoch III et al.). According to Grodach, public spaces and art and design spaces have three main roles in community development, and are built on local assets to increase community engagement, interaction, and participation. Despite the vast range of economic considerations in the current literature, it remains unclear how creative placemaking through arts, crafts, and design operates in the context of creative cities. Particularly, there is a need for a more comprehensive perspective of how creative placemaking contributes to art district development. Economic competition among creative cities has increased, especially since neoliberal policies diffused to the urban agenda. The city of Izmir, located in the Aegean coast of Turkey, being one of the world's top 130 cities (Tekeli), contributes to globalisation of the region and occupies a unique position in Turkey’s democratic history. Regarding the global arena, Izmir has reformulated its governmental structure in the making of places, with particular neighbourhoods seeking to increase their attractiveness to the creative class, support the creative industries, and to become a ‘Creative City’. Since the Culture and Art Workshop in 2009, when the Izmir Metropolitan Municipality established a creative city vision to serve as a high point in a democratic era, in particular involving elements of culture and creativity of importance for local and global actors, there has been a series of programs with different design strategies and governance mechanisms, such as the design projects (e.g. Izmir Sea Project and Izmir History Project, and History Design Workshop), formations (e.g. establishment of Izmir Mediterranean Academy with branches of history, design, ecology, culture, and arts in 2013), events and organisations (e.g. Good Design Izmir in 2016, 5th World Design Talks by the World Design Organization [WDO] in 2018), and applications for candidacy (e.g. for the World Design Capital title 2020, and UNESCO Creative Cities Network in 2019). The purpose of this article is to explore the drivers for art and design-based development in the urban environment through the lens of creative placemaking, and how this is practiced by creative class grassroots initiatives in cities such as Izmir, Turkey, which was shortlisted in the Creative City Network competition in 2019. The methodology is built on 1) a framework analysis through the research on art and design districts and the utilisation of creative placemaking, and 2) a field study exploring the creative placemaking drivers in an emerging art district, Darağaç, in Izmir. The field study is composed of site visits, visual mappings, the use of snowball sampling to reach the creative class, and structured interviews. The framework analysis findings suggest a set of creative placemaking drivers for art and design-based developments, and the case study findings present implications for future policies for integration of localised initiatives into the creative city framework. Framework Analysis The practice of creative cities applies one-size-fits-all strategies based on tangible and intangible characteristics to attract talent and support economic growth, whereas creative placemaking offers some crucial approaches to contribute to a locale's success and involvement in larger-scale plans. Therefore, placemaking appears as a phenomenological process that explains a sense of place, attachments, and, more broadly, the interaction between a region and its inhabitants (Mengi and Guaralda). The term ‘creative placemaking’ was first used by economist Ann Markusen and art consultant Anne Gadwa in the 2010 White Paper of the National Endowment for the Arts, as a solution when cities, suburbs, and small towns are faced with structural changes and displacement. Creative placemaking aims to revitalise space and economic development with creative initiatives. Markusen and Gadwa argue that creative placemaking provides gains in areas such as innovative products and services, livability, diversity, jobs, and income opportunities. Creative placemaking is also defined as a community-participatory tool to strengthen and enrich the identity of a place as well as development of a place. Community identity enables local assets to build trust and relationships (Kelkar et al.) while exploiting social and civic fabric that brings out the local character and narratives (Borrup). Moreover, Redaelli formulates creative placemaking as an innovative way of thinking for solving community problems that utilises the creative power of art and artists. From an economic perspective, Gallagher et al. point out that creative placemaking can happen in communities of any size and uses art and cross-sector collaboration to benefit the space. Creative placemaking through cross-sector collaboration is directly related to political ideology, social division, community size, resource limitations, and capacity of arts organisations. The theoretical discussion derived from the literature enables us to reconsider the use of creative placemaking approaches for creative city strategies and provides a framework that brings the most significant drivers of creative placemaking, especially for art and design-based strategies in urban environments (Table 1). Drivers Indicators Creative Practices Products Artworks Events Festivals Cultural Production Local Assets Local Knowledge Context Listening & Gathering Stories Knowledge & Skill Exchange Creativity Exchange Experiential Learning Community Involvement Co-Creation Collaboration Creative Placemakers Artists Designers Craftspeople Resident of the Community Local Audience Virtual Platform Archive/Publications Creativity Productivity Collectivity Spatial Environment Neighbourhood Streets Place Identity Digital Hub Atelier Digital Studio/Maker Space Art Galleries Exhibition Spaces Art Equipment Maker/Supplier Meeting Place/Third Place Institutional Support Networking Platform for Dialogue Space for Exhibition Publicity Public Fund Private Fund Philanthropists Sponsorship Education Institutions Art Institutions Art Organisations Non-Government Organisations Government Table 1: Major drivers of creative placemaking. Creative Practices, as the first driver, aim to describe tangible outputs such as products, works of art, events, and festivals. Wyckoff defines projects and activities involving art, culture, and creative thinking as the driving forces of creative placemaking to create collective memory. In this regard, Mutero et al. emphasise the importance of listening and gathering stories, in which it associates definitions such as community, local knowledge, and context. Describing community participation as a tool to improve the development of a place, Kelkar et al. mention that it helps to change the perception of the community. In this context, it creates trust and relationships while building community identity and sense of belonging. Creative Placemakers, as the second driver, represent actors in creative placemaking. One of the six drivers suggested by Markusen and Gadwa for creating a successful place are the creative initiators. Borrup, on the other hand, underlines the role of crucial actors, named as creative placemakers, such as city planners, developers, artists, local policy makers. neighbourhood residents, and local audiences, who also take part in creative practices guided by artists, designers, and craftspeople. According to Gaumer et al. and Schupbach, local actors must be involved as partners to realise more effective successful creative placemaking practices. Similarly, Kelkar et al. argue that the relationships that are built on the collaborative nature of involving actors transform productivity and create social capital. Spatial Environment, as the third driver, focusses on the spaces of creative practices. Spatial environments can be referred to at different scales, such as the digital hubs, ateliers, maker spaces, and event areas such as art galleries and exhibition areas that bring creative placemakers together and enable them to produce together. According to Ellery et al., such spaces enhance the use of public spaces while providing a sense of aesthetics, security, and community. Wyckoff lists drivers of creative placemaking as art spaces where artistic, cultural, and creative projects take place, work and living spaces for the creative class, art, culture, and entertainment activities. Institutional Support, as the fourth driver, underlines the expectations of creative placemakers from institutions. The institutional support through networking provides a platform for creative placemakers to establish dialogue as well as opportunities for exhibition areas and performances. The importance of the support of institutions and organisations such as the public sector, private sector, NGOs, and sponsors are essential to creative placemaking practices. Particularly, cross-sector partnership between institutions such as education institutions, art institutions, art organisations, non-government organisations, and government plays an important role in art and design-based development (Markusen and Gadwa; Borrup). Emergence of Darağaç as an Art District Creative places are found at various scales, such as regions, districts, hubs, and studios, and constitute the very integral part of the creative city formation. They represent a high culture ground on which artists and designers can design, make, and exhibit art. The secret of the successful transformation of creative places lies in the spontaneity of their development. The spontaneously emerging creative places are found as the result of a bottom-up approach where the resident involvement in this transformation strengthens the bond between local people and the place. Spontaneous developments are visible where cultural producers come together to attract like-minded producers (Zukin & Braslow). Examples of this phenomenon include New York City's SoHo neighbourhood, Beijing's 798 Arts District, Kreuzberg in Berlin, and the Temple Bar district in Dublin (Goldenberg-Miller et al.). The development of a spontaneous art and design district starts with the coming together of artists, designers, and cultural workers to form a network. Factors strengthening the network and contributing to the success of the region include community perception, information exchange within the community, and working and living together (Kumer). Darağaç has very recently emerged as an art district in Umurbey neighbourhood in Izmir. Known formerly as an industrial zone, it now hosts small industries and artists. Darağaç Art District, home to pre-Republican era factories operated by non-Muslim minorities and nineteenth-century two-storey workers' residences, was developed in the twentieth century as an industrial zone hosting Şark Sanayi Electric Factory, İzmir Cotton Fabric Factory, and Sümerbank Basma Industry (Kayın qtd. in Pasin et al.). A small group of artists from Izmir settled in the region in 2013, in rented former workers' residences serving as studios and residences, and shortly afterwards the district started to attract more artists and designers (Darağaç Collective). Surrounded by inert and functionless industrial buildings, Darağaç Art District still maintains its industrial identity as well as hosting those on low incomes and providing artists with opportunity to live and produce (Kocaer). There has been an increasing dialogue established between the original inhabitants, mostly craftspeople, and the artists, especially after 2 craftspeople and 13 artists opened their first exhibitions in June 2016 (Darağaç Collective). Since then, Darağaç has evolved to an “art district”, home to many projects and national and international artists. This has greatly shaped the physical environment and neighbourhood identity in the Darağaç Art District (fig. 1). Fig. 1: The integration of artworks or installations with the physical environment and neighbourhood identity in the Darağaç Art District. (Source: Kanal.) For Yavuzcezzar, the main purpose of Darağaç is to provide a space or a common discourse for young artists to exhibit their works. Darağaç Art District hosts interdisciplinary art works covering painting, photography, sculpture, installation, video, and performance (Yavuzcezzar). Also, Children's Meetings held in Darağaç Art District aim to increase the engagement of children in the neighbourhood through culture and arts (Darağaç Collective). Kılınç et al. explain the three main factors contributing to the development of the Darağaç Art District: site specificity; collaborative art practice; and close personal relationships established between neighbours. The site specificity factor is defined as the expansion of production towards the street and the inert lots in the district, replacing the existing spatial configurations in the neighbourhood, which do not meet the needs of the artists. Collaborative art practice is defined as the exchange between local people and artists. Kılınç et al. argue that the productive roles of artists and craftspeople have enabled them to establish a cooperation. The third factor is the close relationship established between neighbours through the Darağaç Collective Association in 2020 (Kılınç et al.). This has been visible in one of the most influential projects, ‘Darağaç Bostan’, in Darağaç (fig. 2). Fig. 2: Co-creation efforts in the Darağaç Art District. (Source: Culture Civic.) The case of Darağaç illustrates a unique case of a spontaneously emerged art district and underlines the importance of creative placemaking drivers for bottom-up creative city strategies. The area has been a democratic space via meetings, exhibitions, and workshops (fig. 3). Fig. 3: Knowledge-sharing practices in the Darağaç Art District. (Source: Darağaç.) The Case of Darağaç The case study consists of site visits, visual mappings, use of snowball sampling for reaching the artists and craftspeople, and structured interviews, and discusses the major drivers of creative placemaking and how they are practiced in Darağaç in Izmir. First Studies The first site visit to the Darağaç Art District was conducted in November 2020. At the time, there were a total of 13 artists and over 30 craftspeople located in the area (fig. 4). Following this, the pilot survey was conducted in February 2021, with a total of six participants, four artists, and two craftspeople from Darağaç Art District. All six participants were interviewed face-to-face, and each survey took approximately 15-20 minutes. After feedback from the pilot study participants, several changes were made in the final version of the survey. The following image illustrates the spatial clustering of craftspeople and artists residing in the neighbourhood who participated in the study (fig. 4). Fig. 4: Darağaç Survey Map. The Survey and Findings The four above-mentioned main drivers of creative placemaking, namely creative practices, creative placemakers, spatial environment, and institutional support, were addressed by Likert-scale questions. In the framework of the previously identified creative placemaking drivers, the survey was carried out to collect the opinions of the art district residents and draw conclusions. The participants were classified into three categories: artists, designers, and craftspeople. The first part of the survey is composed of general questions (age, gender, field of study, etc.) to give an overall idea of the participants. In the following four sections, it was aimed to measure the major drivers of creative placemaking, categorised as creative practices, creative placemakers, spatial environment, and institutional support. The fifth part examined the spatiality of art and design-based development in Darağaç in terms of economic, environmental, cultural, and social aspects. The survey was conducted between February and March 2021 in Darağaç Art District. All the art district residents were contacted and the rate of return of surveys was approximately 50%. 58% of the participants were resident in the neighbourhood, 42% were non-resident. 42% of participants reported that they used shared workspaces; 58% used individual workspaces. According to the survey results, the driving forces that most contribute to the development of the region are creative practices (art and craft works), creative placemakers (artists, designers, and craftspeople), and spatial environment (place identity), followed by institutional support from public, private, and non-governmental organisations, respectively (fig. 5). Fig. 5: Contributions of drivers to creative placemaking in Darağaç. It seems that the interaction and collaboration grouped under creative practice contribute significantly to the development of Darağaç, closely followed by knowledge and skill exchange and the presence of art and design events, and, lastly, by the final products. Considering the role of placemakers in the spontaneous development of Darağaç, an art district, the findings reveal that artists make the greatest contribution, followed by designers and craftspeople, while the impact of the residents as placemakers is relatively low. The results for the place-based inspirations for creative placemakers show that the spatiality of placemaking has a considerable effect on the texture of the neighbourhood. For the placemakers in the district, the pre-existence of artists, designers, and craftspeople in Darağaç was one of the main reasons for locating there. The neighbourhood’s cultural and historical value and the communication with the local community have equal importance in terms of their contribution to the spontaneous development. Finally, we examine institutional support as the final driver, which falls behind the other three, as seen in fig. 5. Only 38% of the participants reported that they were able to collaborate with an institution before, while only 38% managed to receive financial support. According to the results, the main three actors supporting the grassroots activities through collaborations are art organisations, universities, and municipalities. The results also show that the financial support through funding comes mainly from the existing associations and public authorities. Evaluation The results obtained from the case study show that cultural exchange has been the most influential factor in art and design-based development. Regarding the creative placemaking drivers, dialogue between the residents of the neighborhood has considerably increased as they share and exchange knowledge and skills since the art district development spontaneously started. Changing perceptions of the neighborhood residents through time and their growing relationship with art, design, and crafts have greatly contributed to the emergence of an art district. When we examine the art and design-based development, it is visible that the neighbourhood has evolved to a more attractive and atmospheric space for art and design practices. The results underline the role of solidarity and sense of belonging for strengthening the community engagement. We can also argue that the adaptive reuse of vacant spaces and the design of possible exhibition spaces have dramatically changed the identity of the space. However, the economic impacts of spontaneous art and design-based development have remained moderate with regard to the creation of auxiliary sectors to the production process, creating new jobs and income opportunities and having a self-sufficient economy. Conclusion Since 2010, the placemaking process has been more sensitive, with the help of increased human input and indication of co-creation tactics through creative placemaking. Creative placemaking has been reshaped along the creative city policies and strategies. Before the conceptualisation of creative placemaking, many authors (see Jones; Weitz; Wositzsky), had referred to the link between art and community development, and highlighted how artists, art societies and local communities are positively affected by using art as a tool for the community. Within this context, this article provides a relatively more comprehensive approach to art and design-based development within the framework of creative placemaking for the creative cities of today. It examines and categorises the creative placemaking components, and explores how these components work and how they contribute to spontaneous art district development through the case of Darağaç, Izmir, in Turkey, a place where artists, designers, and craftspeople live and produce together. Culture and creativity as significant tools for economic development and urban renewal are found in many of the recent planning strategies (Codignola). The creative economy, cultural tourism, and creative placemaking have encouraged communities to use art for economic benefit (Gallagher et al.). According to Grodach, art and design spaces can contribute to tourism by attracting visitors from the immediate environment while providing employment opportunities to local artists and thus contributing to individual well-being and local economic development. Although this does not have the power to eliminate problems such as displacement, unemployment, and social exclusion, it makes a great contribution to urban inequality (Grodach). The four main drivers, creative practices, creative placemakers, spatial environment, and institutional support, all play a significant role in the emergence of Darağaç as an art district. The most influential driver, that of creative practices, highlights the importance of art and design production and events and festivals as creative practices, indicating a high concentration of local assets and tacit knowledge. Secondly, placemakers have a considerable importance in the spontaneous transformation from an industrial zone to an art district with regard to craftspeople’s and designers’ living and work environments. Also, their collective attitude towards the local residents in the area seems to have significantly contributed to this development through skill exchange, community involvement, and co-creation. Thirdly, the spatial environment, originating in the 1930s, and the available amenities have a great influence on the identity formation of the district. Lastly, the available institutional support underlines the strong role of art and design in economic development. However, Darağaç Art District has yet to receive sufficient support from the institutions, and tries to sustain its organic structure by operating as a self-sufficient entity. In further studies, additional drivers must be examined on an individual basis to arrive at policy suggestions, due to the strategic importance of building a feeling of place in the attraction and retention of creative talent. For the policy recommendations, it is important that the current urban agenda should present a combination of characteristics derived from the framework of creative placemaking for building better and more habitable creative places, rather than focussing solely on the more visible economic and physical urban goals. 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34

Goggin, Gerard. "Innovation and Disability." M/C Journal 11, no. 3 (July 2, 2008). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.56.

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Abstract:
Critique of Ability In July 2008, we could be on the eve of an enormously important shift in disability in Australia. One sign of change is the entry into force on 3 May 2008 of the United Nations convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which will now be adopted by the Rudd Labor government. Through this, and other proposed measures, the Rudd government has indicated its desire for a seachange in the area of disability. Bill Shorten MP, the new Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Children’s Services has been at pains to underline his commitment to a rights-based approach to disability. In this inaugural speech to Parliament, Senator Shorten declared: I believe the challenge for government is not to fit people with disabilities around programs but for programs to fit the lives, needs and ambitions of people with disabilities. The challenge for all of us is to abolish once and for all the second-class status that too often accompanies Australians living with disabilities. (Shorten, “Address in reply”; see also Shorten, ”Speaking up”) Yet if we listen to the voices of people with disability, we face fundamental issues of justice, democracy, equality and how we understand the deepest aspects of ourselves and our community. This is a situation that remains dire and palpably unjust, as many people with disabilities have attested. Elsewhere I have argued (Goggin and Newell) that disability constitutes a systemic form of exclusion and othering tantamount to a “social apartheid” . While there have been improvements and small gains since then, the system that reigns in Australia is still fundamentally oppressive. Nonetheless, I would suggest that through the rise of the many stranded movements of disability, the demographic, economic and social changes concerning impairment, we are seeing significant changes in how we understand impairment and ability (Barnes, Oliver and Barton; Goggin and Newell, Disability in Australia; Snyder, Brueggemann, and Garland-Thomson; Shakespeare; Stiker). There is now considerable, if still incomplete, recognition of disability as a category that is constituted through social, cultural, and political logics, as well as through complex facets of impairment, bodies (Corker and Shakespeare), experiences, discourses (Fulcher), and modes of materiality and subjectivity (Butler), identity and government (Tremain). Also there is growing awareness of the imbrication of disability and other categories such as sex and gender (Fine and Asch; Thomas), race, age, culture, class and distribution of wealth (Carrier; Cole; Davis, Bending over Backwards, and Enforcing Normalcy; Oliver; Rosenblum and Travis), ecology and war (Bourke; Gerber; Muir). There are rich and wide-ranging debates that offer fundamental challenges to the suffocating grip of the dominant biomedical model of disability (that conceives disability as individual deficit — for early critiques see: Borsay; Walker), as well as the still influential and important (if at times limiting) social model of disability (Oliver; Barnes and Mercer; Shakespeare). All in all,there have been many efforts to transform the social and political relations of disability. If disability has been subject to considerable examination, there has not yet been an extended, concomitant critique of ability. Nor have we witnessed a thoroughgoing recognition of unmarked, yet powerful operations of ability in our lives and thought, and the potential implications of challenging these. Certainly there have been important attempts to reframe the relationship between “ability” and “disability” (for example, see Jones and Mark). And we are all familiar with the mocking response to some neologisms that seek to capture this, such as the awkward yet pointed “differently-abled.” Despite such efforts we lack still a profound critique of ability, an exploration of “able”, the topic that this special issue invites us to consider. If we think of the impact and significance of “whiteness”, as a way to open up space for how to critically think about and change concepts of race; or of “masculinity” as a project for thinking about gender and sexuality — we can see that this interrogation of the unmarked category of “able” and “ability” is much needed (for one such attempt, see White). In this paper I would like to make a small contribution to such a critique of ability, by considering what the concept of innovation and its contemporary rhetorics have to offer for reframing disability. Innovation is an important discourse in contemporary life. It offers interesting possibilities for rethinking ability — and indeed disability. And it is this relatively unexplored prospect that this paper seeks to explore. Beyond Access, Equity & Diversity In this scene of disability, there is attention being given to making long over-due reforms. Yet the framing of many of these reforms, such as the strengthening of national and international legal frameworks, for instance, also carry with them considerable problems. Disability is too often still seen as something in need of remediation, or special treatment. Access, equity, and anti-discrimination frameworks offer important resources for challenging this “special” treatment, so too do the diversity approaches which have supplemented or supplanted them (Goggin and Newell, “Diversity as if Disability Mattered”). In what new ways can we approach disability and policies relevant to it? In a surprisingly wide range of areas, innovation has featured as a new, cross-sectoral approach. Innovation has been a long-standing topic in science, technology and economics. However, its emergence as master-theme comes from its ability to straddle and yoke together previously diverse fields. Current discussions of innovation bring together and extend work on the information society, the knowledge economy, and the relationships between science and technology. We are now familiar for instance with arguments about how digital networked information and communications technologies and their consumption are creating new forms of innovation (Benkler; McPherson; Passiante, Elia, and Massari). Innovation discourse has extended to many other unfamiliar realms too, notably the area of social and community development, where a new concept of social innovation is now proposed (Mulgan), often aligned with new ideas of social entrepreneurship that go beyond earlier accounts of corporate social responsibility. We can see the importance of innovation in the ‘creative industries’ discourses and initiatives which have emerged since the 1990s. Here previously distinct endeavours of arts and culture have become reframed in a way that puts their central achievement of creativity to the fore, and recognises its importance across all sorts of service and manufacturing industries, in particular. More recently, theorists of creative industries, such as Cunningham, have begun to talk about “social network markets,” as a way to understand the new hybrid of creativity, innovation, digital technology, and new economic logics now being constituted (Cunningham and Potts). Innovation is being regarded as a cardinal priority for societies and their governments. Accordingly, the Australian government has commissioned a Review of The National Innovation System, led by Dr Terry Cutler, due to report in the second half of 2008. The Cutler review is especially focussed upon gaps and weaknesses in the Australian innovation system. Disability has the potential to figure very strongly in this innovation talk, however there has been little discussion of disability in the innovation discourse to date. The significance of disability in relation to innovation was touched upon some years ago, in a report on Disablism from the UK Demos Foundation (Miller, Parker and Gillinson). In a chapter entitled “The engine of difference: disability, innovation and creativity,” the authors discuss the area of inclusive design, and make the argument for the “involvement of disabled people to create a stronger model of user design”:Disabled people represented a market of 8.6 million customers at the last count and their experiences aren’t yet feeding through into processes of innovation. But the role of disabled people as innovators can and should be more active; we should include disabled people in the design process because they are good at it. (57) There are two reasons given for this expertise of disabled people in design. Firstly, “disabled people are often outstanding problem solvers because they have to be … life for disabled people at the moment is a series of challenges to be overcome” (57). Secondly, “innovative ideas are more likely to come from those who have a new or different angle on old problems” (57). The paradox in this argument is that as life becomes more equitable for people with disabilities, then these ‘advantages’ should disappear” (58). Accordingly, Miller et al. make a qualified argument, namely that “greater participation of disabled people in innovation in the short term may just be the necessary trigger for creating an altogether different, and better, system of innovation for everyone in the future” (58). The Demos Disablism report was written at a time when rhetorics of innovation were just beginning to become more generalized and mainstream. This was also at a time in the UK, when there was hope that new critical approaches to disability would see it become embraced as a part of the diverse society that Blair’s New Labor Britain had been indicating. The argument Disablism offers about disability and innovation is in some ways a more formalized version of vernacular theory (McLaughlin, 1996). In the disability movement we often hear, with good reason, that people with disability, by dint of their experience and knowledge are well positioned to develop and offer particular kinds of expertise. However, Miller et al. also gesture towards a more generalized account of disability and innovation, one that would intersect with the emerging frameworks around innovation. It is this possibility that I wish to take up and briefly explore here. I want to consider the prospects for a fully-fledged encounter between disability and innovation. I would like to have a better sense of whether this is worth pursuing, and what it would add to our understanding of both disability and innovation? Would the disability perspective be integrated as a long-term part of our systems of innovation rather than, as Miller et al. imply, deployed temporarily to develop better innovation systems? What pitfalls might be bound up with, or indeed be the conditions of, such a union between disability and innovation? The All-Too-Able User A leading area where disability figures profoundly in innovation is in the field of technology — especially digital technology. There is now a considerable literature and body of practice on disability and digital technology (Annable, Goggin, and Stienstra; Goggin and Newell, Digital Disability; National Council on Disability), however for my purposes here I would like to focus upon the user, the abilities ascribed to various kinds of users, and the user with disability in particular. Digital technologies are replete with challenges and opportunities; they are multi-layered, multi-media, and global in their manifestation and function. In Australia, Britain, Canada, the US, and Europe, there have been some significant digital technology initiatives which have resulted in improved accessibility for many users and populations (Annable, Goggin, and Stienstra; National Council on Disability) . There are a range of examples of ways in which users with disability are intervening and making a difference in design. There is also a substantial body of literature that clarifies why we need to include the perspective of the disabled if we are to be truly innovative in our design practices (Annable, Goggin and Stienstra; Goggin and Newell, “Disability, Identity and Interdependence”). I want to propose, however, that there is merit in going beyond recognition of the role of people with disability in technology design (vital and overlooked as it remains), to consider how disability can enrich contemporary discourses on innovation. There is a very desirable cross-over to be promoted between the emphasis on the user-as-expert in the sphere of disability and technology, and on the integral role of disability groups in the design process, on the one hand, and the rise of the user in digital culture generally, on the other. Surprisingly, such connections are nowhere near as widespread and systematic as they should be. It may be that contemporary debates about the user, and about the user as co-creator, or producer, of technology (Haddon et al.; von Hippel) actually reinstate particular notions of ability, and the able user, understood with reference to notions of disability. The current emphasis on the productive user, based as it is on changing understandings of ability and disability, provides rich material for critical revision of the field and those assumptions surrounding ability. It opens up possibilities for engaging more fully with disability and incorporating disability into the new forms and relations of digital technology that celebrate the user (Goggin and Newell, Digital Disability). While a more detailed consideration of these possibilities require more time than this essay allows, let us consider for a moment the idea of a genuine encounter between the activated user springing from the disability movement, and the much feted user in contemporary digital culture and theories of innovation. People with disability are using these technologies in innovative ways, so have much to contribute to wider discussions of digital technology (Annable, Goggin and Stienstra). The Innovation Turn Innovation policy, the argument goes, is important because it stands to increase productivity, which in turn leads to greater international competitiveness and economic benefit. Especially with the emergence of capitalism (Gleeson), productivity has strong links to particular notions of which types of production and produce are valued. Productivity is also strongly conditioned by how we understand ability and, last in a long chain of strong associations, how we as a society understand and value those kinds of people and bodies believed to contain and exercise the ordained and rewarded types of ability, produce, and productivity. Disability is often seen as antithetical to productivity (a revealing text on the contradictions of disability and productivity is the 2004 Productivity Commission Review of the Disability Discrimination Act). When we think about the history of disability, we quickly realize that productivity, and by extension, innovation, are strongly ideological. Ideological, that is, in the sense that these fields of human endeavour and our understanding of them are shaped by power relations, and are built upon implicit ‘ableist’ assumptions about productivity. In this case, the power relations of disability go right to the heart of the matter, highlighting who and what are perceived to be of value, contributing economically and in other ways to society, and who and what are considered as liabilities, as less valued and uneconomical. A stark recent example of this is the Howard government workplace and welfare reforms, which further disenfranchised, controlled, and impoverished people with disability. If we need to rethink our ideas of productivity and ability in the light of new notions of disability, then so too do we need to rethink our ideas about innovation and disability. Here the new discourses of innovation may actually be useful, but also contain limited formulations and assumptions about ability and disability that need to be challenged. The existing problems of a fresh approach to disability and innovation can be clearly observed in the touchstones of national science and technology “success.” Beyond One-Sided Innovation Disability does actually feature quite prominently in the annals of innovation. Take, for instance, the celebrated case of the so-called “bionic ear” (or cochlear implant) hailed as one of Australia’s great scientific inventions of the past few decades. This is something we can find on display in the Powerhouse Museum of Technology and Design, in Sydney. Yet the politics of the cochlear implant are highly controversial, not least as it is seen by many (for instance, large parts of the Deaf community) as not involving people with disabilities, nor being informed by their desires (Campbell, also see “Social and Ethical Aspects of Cochlear Implants”). A key problem with the cochlear implant and many other technologies is that they are premised on the abolition or overcoming of disability — rather than being shaped as technology that acknowledges and is informed by disabled users in their diverse guises. The failure to learn the lessons of the cochlear implant for disability and innovation can be seen in the fact that we are being urged now to band together to support the design of a “bionic eye” by the year 2020, as a mark of distinction of achieving a great nation (2020 Summit Initial Report). Again, there is no doubting the innovation and achievement in these artefacts and their technological systems. But their development has been marked by a distinct lack of consultation and engagement with people with disabilities; or rather the involvement has been limited to a framework that positions them as passive users of technology, rather than as “producer/users”. Further, what notions of disability and ability are inscribed in these technological systems, and what do they represent and symbolize in the wider political and social field? Unfortunately, such technologies have the effect of reproducing an ableist framework, “enforcing normalcy” (Davis), rather than building in, creating and contributing to new modes of living, which embrace difference and diversity. I would argue that this represents a one-sided logic of innovation. A two-sided logic of innovation, indeed what we might call a double helix (at least) of innovation would be the sustained, genuine interaction between different users, different notions of ability, disability and impairment, and the processes of design. If such a two-sided (or indeed many-sided logic) is to emerge there is good reason to think it could more easily do so in the field of digital cultures and technologies, than say, biotechnology. The reason for this is the emphasis in digital communication technologies on decentralized, participatory, user-determined governance and design, coming from many sources. Certainly this productive, democratic, participatory conception of the user is prevalent in Internet cultures. Innovation here is being reshaped to harness the contribution and knowledge of users, and could easily be extended to embrace pioneering efforts in disability. Innovating with Disability In this paper I have tried to indicate why it is productive for discourses of innovation to consider disability; the relationship between disability and innovation is rich and complex, deserving careful elaboration and interrogation. In suggesting this, I am aware that there are also fundamental problems that innovation raises in its new policy forms. There are the issues of what is at stake when the state is redefining its traditional obligations towards citizens through innovation frameworks and discourses. And there is the troubling question of whether particular forms of activity are normatively judged to be innovative — whereas other less valued forms are not seen as innovative. By way of conclusion, however, I would note that there are now quite basic, and increasingly accepted ways, to embed innovation in design frameworks, and while they certainly have been adopted in the disability and technology area, there is much greater scope for this. However, a few things do need to change before this potential for disability to enrich innovation is adequately realized. Firstly, we need further research and theorization to clarify the contribution of disability to innovation, work that should be undertaken and directed by people with disability themselves. Secondly, there is a lack of resources for supporting disability and technology organisations, and the development of training and expertise in this area (especially to provide viable career paths for experts with disability to enter the field and sustain their work). If this is addressed, the economic benefits stand to be considerable, not to mention the implications for innovation and productivity. Thirdly, we need to think about how we can intensify existing systems of participatory design, or, better still, introduce new user-driven approaches into strategically important places in the design processes of ICTs (and indeed in the national innovation system). Finally, there is an opportunity for new approaches to governance in ICTs at a general level, informed by disability. New modes of organising, networking, and governance associated with digital technology have attracted much attention, also featuring recently in the Australia 2020 Summit. Less well recognised are new ideas about governance that come from the disability community, such as the work of Queensland Advocacy Incorporated, Rhonda Galbally’s Our Community, disability theorists such as Christopher Newell (Newell), or the Canadian DIS-IT alliance (see, for instance, Stienstra). The combination of new ideas in governance from digital culture, new ideas from the disability movement and disability studies, and new approaches to innovation could be a very powerful cocktail indeed.Dedication This paper is dedicated to my beloved friend and collaborator, Professor Christopher Newell AM (1964-2008), whose extraordinary legacy will inspire us all to continue exploring and questioning the idea of able. 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