Journal articles on the topic 'Scotland – Politics and government – 18th century'

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1

Raffe, Alasdair. "Wodrow's News: Correspondence and Politics in Early 18th‐Century Scotland *." Parliamentary History 41, no. 1 (February 2022): 135–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1750-0206.12611.

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Aguirre, Rodolfo. "The Indians and Major Studies in New Spain: Monarchical Politics, Debates, and Results." Social Sciences 10, no. 4 (March 25, 2021): 115. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/socsci10040115.

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This article studies some stages and debates about the access of New Spain’s Indians to major studies: The discussion about their mental capacity in the 16th century, the impulse of Carlos II to the indigenous nobility in the 17th century, or the reticence in the Royal University of Mexico and the Church to their acceptance in the 18th century. It also analyzes the responses given by the Crown to the interest of the Indians elites in superior studies, degrees and public positions, protected by their rights as free vassals of the kingdom and as nobles, comparable to the Spanish nobility. Despite the insistent resistance of sectors of the colonial government and society to the rise of Indians, they firmly defended, in the 18th century, the rights and privileges granted to them by the monarchy since the beginning of New Spain, thereby achieving their entry into the university, colleges, and clergy.
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Çirakman, Asli. "FROM TYRANNY TO DESPOTISM: THE ENLIGHTENMENT'S UNENLIGHTENED IMAGE OF THE TURKS." International Journal of Middle East Studies 33, no. 1 (February 2001): 49–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0020743801001039.

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This study aims to examine the way in which European writers of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries represented Ottoman government. The Ottoman Empire had a special place in European experience and thought. The Ottomans were geographically close to Western Europe, yet they were quite apart in culture and religion, a combination that triggered interest in Turkish affairs.1 Particularly important were political affairs. The Ottoman government inspired a variety of opinions among European travelers and thinkers. During the 18th century, the Ottomans lost their image as formidable and eventually ceased to provoke curiosity in the European public. They were no longer dreaded as the “public calamity”; nor were they greatly respected as the “most modern government” on earth. Rather, they were regarded as a dull and backward sort of people. From the 16th century to the 19th century, the European observers employed two similar, yet different, concepts to characterize the government of the Ottoman Empire. The concept of tyranny was widely used during the 16th and 17th centuries, whereas the concept of despotism was used to depict the regime of the Ottomans in the 18th century. The transition from the term “tyranny” to that of “despotism” in the 18th century indicates a radical change in the European images of the Ottoman Empire. Although both of these terms designate corrupt and perverse regimes in Western political thought, a distinction was made between tyranny and despotism, and it mattered crucially which term was applied to the Ottoman state. European observers of the empire gave special meanings to these key concepts over time. “Tyranny” allowed for both positive and negative features, whereas “despotism” had no redeeming features. Early modern Europeans emphasized both admirable and frightening aspects of Ottoman greatness. On the other hand, the concept of despotism was redefined as inherently Oriental in the 18th century and employed to depict the corruption and backwardness of the Ottoman government. This transformation was profoundly reflected in the beliefs of Europeans about the East. That is, 18th century thought on Ottoman politics contains a Eurocentric analysis of Oriental despotism that is absent from the discussions of Ottoman tyranny in earlier centuries.
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4

Paterson, Lindsay. "Scottish higher education and the Scottish parliament: the consequences of mistaken national identity." European Review 6, no. 4 (October 1998): 459–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1062798700003616.

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The creation of a Scottish parliament in 1999 will crystallize a cultural crisis for Scottish higher education. Scottish universities retained their autonomy after the 18th-century union between Scotland and England because the union was about high politics rather than the affairs of civil society and culture. Unlike in England, the universities developed in close relationship with Scottish agencies of the state during the 19th century, and these agencies also built up a system of non-university higher education colleges. In the 20th century, the universities (and later some of the colleges) sought to detach themselves from Scottish culture and politics, favouring instead a common British academic network. So the new constitutional settlement faces Scottish higher education institutions with an enforced allegiance to the Scottish nation that will sharply disrupt their 80-year interlude as outposts of the British polity.
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Apryshchenko, V. Yu, and N. A. Lagoshina. "Features of State Institutions of Ireland of XVIII Century." Nauchnyi dialog, no. 6 (June 29, 2020): 386–400. http://dx.doi.org/10.24224/2227-1295-2020-6-386-400.

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The expansion of Great Britain in the 18th century greatly strengthened its influence both on the European continent and throughout the world. The nearby existence of Catholic Ireland, which had developed trade and socio-political ties with European countries, threatened the national security of Great Britain and determined the religious orientation of restrictive politics. In the first half of the 18th century, political, economic and religious struggles both within Ireland and between the British and Irish led to the fact that Ireland actually turned into an English colony. There are still disputes among foreign scholars about the status of Ireland in the 18th century, since the powers of the parliament in Dublin were limited, and most of the country's population did not have civil and political rights. Nevertheless, in the 1760s, the Irish parliament implemented a number of bills in the field of social policy and local self-government, which indicates the significant independence of this legislative body. The legal status of the Irish state in the 18th century, its powers are compared with some widespread definitions of the term state are examined in the article.
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Lenman, Bruce. "Scots and Access to Spanish America from Before the Union to 1748." Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 38, no. 1 (May 2018): 73–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/jshs.2018.0234.

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This article begins with the idea that there was a vigorous political life in Scotland in the first half of the eighteenth century which could focus on issues other than Jacobitism or government patronage. The article focuses on the non-dynastic issues in Scottish politics that predated the Union and which carried on into the Westminster parliament to the accompaniment of considerable activism in Scotland, and a distinctive contribution from Scottish members of both houses of the legislature. The example here examined is the burning issue of securing commercial access to the forbidden lands of Spanish America. Studying it reveals very clearly that ‘The theme of Scotland's partial integration into the British state’ and the way in which it ‘was never wholly successful’, goes back to the very start of the eighteenth century.
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7

Griffin, Stephen M. "Bringing the State into Constitutional Theory: Public Authority and the Constitution." Law & Social Inquiry 16, no. 04 (1991): 659–710. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-4469.1991.tb00864.x.

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This article brings the state into constitutional theory by presenting a theory of the development of the American state from the late 19th century to the present. The focus of the theory is the ability of the national state to exercise sovereignty or public authority over civil society. The main thesis is that the Constitution did not establish a government with a level of public authority adequate to the requirements of a modem democratic state. The result was a mismatch between the demands of civil society and the competence of state institutions, causing a reorganization of the political institutions of civil society in the early 20th century and a crisis of public authority in the 1960s. The United States continues to experience the consequences of an imbalance between the state institutions established by an 18th-century constitution and 20th-century democratic politics.
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8

McCullough, Katie Louise. "Resolving the ‘Highland Problem’: The Highlands and Islands of Scotland and the European Union." Local Economy: The Journal of the Local Economy Policy Unit 33, no. 4 (June 2018): 421–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0269094218779516.

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Popular perception has historically constructed the Highlands and Islands of Scotland to be economically and socially backwards in comparison with the rest of the United Kingdom. As evoked in the phrase the ‘Highland Problem’, the area has been considered by outsiders to be beyond help and destined to remain in a state of underdevelopment and chronic depopulation. Despite the history of economic intervention in the area from the late 18th century onwards from private and government initiatives intended to alleviate poverty and bring wealth to the area, it was not until the 1980s with the implementation of sustained and tailored structural assistance from the European Union that emigration slowed and the population of the Highlands and Islands began to grow significantly. This economic success has largely been the result of not only a significant injection of capital but also the willingness of the EU to use local knowledge and collaborate with local agencies. This remarkable development, which is far from over, is being directly threatened by the Brexit phenomenon.
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9

Bowie, Karin, and Alasdair Raffe. "Politics, the People, and Extra-Institutional Participation in Scotland, c. 1603–1712." Journal of British Studies 56, no. 4 (September 27, 2017): 797–815. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2017.119.

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AbstractThis article examines popular political participation in early modern Scotland. In Scotland, some of the preconditions of public politics identified by recent scholars were less obviously present than in England or France. There was no culturally dominant metropolis or royal court; the volume of printed publications, though rising across the period, remained comparatively small. Because of these characteristics, historians of popular involvement in Scottish politics should pay particular attention to the traditional means of participation inherited from the medieval and Reformation periods. The article explores three forms of extra-institutional participation, each of which evolved out of formal, institutional political practices, but were deployed by ordinary Scots seeking to express their views. Protestations––formal statements of dissent from a statute or decision––developed in the courts, but were used in extramural contexts in the seventeenth century. Crowd demonstrations in towns took the place of traditional means of consultation, as urban government became increasingly oligarchical. And after congregational involvement in the appointment of parish ministers was legally instituted in 1690, significant numbers of small landowners and the landless poor claimed to have a say in the choice of their minister.
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Trąbski, Maciej. "Twierdze na straży lojalności. Brytyjskie fortyfikacje na terenie północnej Szkocji w pierwszej połowie XVIII w." Studia Historica Gedanensia 12, no. 1 (2021): 177–209. http://dx.doi.org/10.4467/23916001hg.21.032.15092.

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[Fortresses as a guarantee of loyalty. British fortifications in the area of northern Scotland in the first half of the 18th century] In the first half of the 18th century, the Scottish Highlands were a “wild and inaccessible” area, and from London’s perspective, they were at least uncertain as far as local inhabitants’ loyalty was concerned. The Highlands were controlled by clans, who cultivated social and economic traditions dating back to the mediaeval times. Despite it being anachronistic, this system made it possible to gather significant forces, not so well armed, but usually strongly motivated. Although some clan leaders quickly backed William of Orange, and what follows the Hanoverian dynasty, state forces were not able to control the whole area of the Highlands. What is more, strategic territories on the western coast and in Great Glen were occupied by pro‑Jacobean clans. Due to that fact, the authorities were forced to introduce military garrisons into the Highlands that were supposed to force all the inhabitants to be loyal to the government. However, soldiers had to stay in safe conditions so that they could defend themselves in case Scottish Jacobites attacked them, especially if the latter were backed by the regular French military forces. That is why the first fortress started to be built already during the uprising of 1689. Finally, up to 1745, 3 fortress and 4 fortified barrack complexes were erected in the area of the Highlands.
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11

АЙЗЕНШТАТ, М. П. "“CIVILIZATION” AND “BARBARITY” IN BRITAIN’S LITERARY PRACTICE FROM THE END OF 18th TO THE BEGINNING OF 19th CENTURY." Цивилизация и варварство, no. 11(11) (November 18, 2022): 308–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.21267/aquilo.2022.11.11.013.

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В статье автор анализирует литературную практику на основе материалов популярного либерального издания «Эдинбургского обозрения, или критического журнала». Это было издание, специально посвященное критическим обзорам книг, вышедших в Британии, Париже, Берлине и других городах мира. Их тематика охватывала широкий круг тем по политике, экономике, общественным пробле-мам и истории. Рецензии освещали либеральный взгляд на историю в контексте идей Просвещения. Авторы обзоров восприняли теоретическое осмысление исторического процесса шотландскими просветителями. Они предполага-ли, что все люди в своем развитии проходят одни и те же стадии: дикость, варварство и цивилизацию. В контексте идей о стадиях развития рецензенты рассматривали труды, где говорилось о путешествиях, встречах с иной культурой чиновников, миссионеров и военных. При несовершенстве предложенной схемы вслед за авторами книг рецензенты оценивали уровень развития народов и племен, населявших Африку, Америку и Азию. Как правило, они относили их к стадии дикости и варварства. Полагая, что британцы до-стигли высшего уровня — цивилизации, авторы ряда книг и рецензенты выдвигали планы по цивилизации этих народов. The author analyses the literary practice liberal edition “The Edinburgh review, or critical journal”. It was original special edition with review of books from Britain, Paris, Berlin and other towns of the world. Their problems spread all themes over economy, politics, civil problems, etc. and history from liberal opinions on them from enlightenment position. The authors of journal shared Scotland enlightenment’s theo-retical opinion about historical development. They thought all people gone same stages: savage, barbarity and civilization. From that opinion the authors analyzes books wrote about travels meeting with another culture. As the author of books reviewers thought the tribes and people of America, Asia and Africa were at the stages of savage and barbarity. And Britons as civilized nation should bring civilization to them.
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12

Saharuddin, Desmadi, Meirison Meirison, Inayatul Chusna, and Ade Sofyan Mulazid. "Capitulation and Siyasah Syar’iyah Al-Maliyah Impact on Economic Stability of the 18th & 19th Ottoman Turks." QIJIS (Qudus International Journal of Islamic Studies) 7, no. 2 (January 6, 2020): 329. http://dx.doi.org/10.21043/qijis.v7i2.4847.

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<p><em></em>Free trade and foreign investment that characterize the 21st Century trade and business model do not benefit all parties, particularly Islamic countries. Only those who have well-established economic system and large capital gain the most benefit. This condition had occurred during the Ottoman Khalifah. Therefore, this article aims to prove that free trade and foreign investment during the Ottoman, in the form of capitulation, brought negative impact on the Ottoman’s economy and politics. Capitulation is an agreement between the Ottoman and Western European countries that regulated economic and legal sectors by giving privilege to the European countries to come and trade in the Ottoman. The Ottoman became a free market place that eliminated the Islamic economic system. The Ottoman saw the agreement as its Siyasah Syar’iyah Al-Maliyah to protect the political sovereignty when facing European countries. Once the agreement benefited the Ottoman, later it caused economic political problems. The domestic industries faced difficulty when competing with foreign trades. The Ottoman government did not have full authority over the law and justice of the Europeans in the Ottoman. The capitulation that was expected by the Ottoman to protect its economy and politics had put the country under the domination of Western Europe. What happened to the Ottoman is proof that the free market is only beneficial to developed countries with active industries. Therefore, this historical fact should be reference for Islamic countries in conducting their foreign economic system.</p>
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13

Khruleva, I. Yu. "Western European Intellectual Practices of a New Type in Russian Everyday Life at Early 18th Century (case of Feofan Prokopovich)." MGIMO Review of International Relations 15, no. 6 (December 30, 2022): 166–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.24833/2071-8160-2022-6-87-166-178.

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The focus of this study is the views of Feofan Prokopovich, a unique Orthodox thinker whose world outlook was shaped by an obvious influence of the ideas of the Protestant and Catholic Enlightenment. Talking about the Enlightenment, modern historiography focuses on the versatility of the phenomenon, preferring to talk about the Enlightenment, including the religious or confessional Enlightenment, aimed at rethinking the role of religion and the church. The Religious Enlightenment was a pan-European phenomenon that embraced Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, and Orthodoxy, and grew out of the desire to create an intelligent religion free of superstition and serving society. The intellectual movement of the religious Enlightenment sought to reconcile the natural philosophy of the 17th-18th centuries with a religious worldview, while trying to overcome the extremes of religious fanaticism, on the one hand, and nihilism and godlessness, on the other. The process of forming a new intellectual environment is marked by the coexistence and mutual influence of the most diverse, sometimes poorly compatible traditions, their transformation and modification. Comprehensively arguing the need for unlimited autocracy in Russia, Feofan Prokopovich, nevertheless, actively used the discourse of the Enlightenment in his writings, discussing the problem of the origin of the state, the mode of government, the boundaries of the power of the monarch, the rights and duties of subjects. On the example of Feofan Prokopovich, we can talk about the emergence and rooting of intellectual practices of a new type in Russian everyday life. The integration of Western European ideas and practices into Russian culture was ambiguous, multifaceted and depended on their adaptation to the socio-political space of Russia. Being well acquainted with the works of European authors of the 17th early 18th centuries, he rather took on the formal side of their discussions on socio-political topics, adapted a conceptual glossary that was new for the Russian educated public, which opened up opportunities for talking about politics in a new way.
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Filinyuk, Anatoly. "Right-Bank Ukraine in the politics of Russia and Austria on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the eighteenth century." Scientific Papers of the Kamianets-Podilskyi National Ivan Ohiienko University. History 34 (December 29, 2021): 181–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.32626/2309-2254.2021-34.181-198.

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The purpose of the study is to fi nd out the place of Right-Bank Ukraine in the policy of Russia and Austria on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late eighteenth century. Th e methodological basis of the study is the approach of “cross” / “intertwined” history, which involves the study of long-term relationships, transfers, contacts and confl icts between states, societies, nations and cultures; the complex application of the principles of historicism, objectivity, systematics, as well the as comparative-historical, historical-chronological, analytical-synthetic and other methods helped to ensure the understanding and comprehensive disclosure of the little-studied topic. Th e scientifi c novelty of the work is that for the fi rst time through the prism of transnational, interconnected history the question of the place and role of the lands of Right-Bank Ukraine in the relations of tsarist Russia with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the 18th century and its foreign policy autocracy and the government of the Austrian Empire, oriented to the south-west and south of Europe, at the center of which was the Commonwealth. Th e urgency of the problem is evidenced by the fact that in both Russian and Polish historiography, the study of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth remains relevant, including at the last stage of its independent existence. In this regard, the need for Russians to be more fully aware of the repressiveness of the empire, the descendants of which they position themselves in both positive and negative terms, is urgent. Conclusions. The study has shown that due to the changes in interstate relations in Europe and the transformations of the geopolitical position of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late eighteenth century, caused by Russia’s victories in the wars against the Ottoman Empire, the focus of the foreign policy of the Russian autocracy and the imperial government of Austria were both the territory of Poland itself and the Right-Bank lands, which were part of it. Th e change in Russia’s foreign policy vector in the southwestern direction of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, and significant interest in the geopolitical opportunities of Right-Bank Ukraine led to its broad involvement in domestic and foreign policy in the context of relations between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Austria.
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15

Cruz, Miguel Dantas da. "Pombal and the Atlantic Empire: political impacts of the foundation of the Royal Treasury." Tempo 20 (2014): 1–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/tem-1980-542x-2014203621eng.

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The Pombaline government has a fairly consensual meaning. It encompasses a period marked by the gradual concentration of deciding faculties in the monarch and the leading ministers and by the general introduction of legislation designed to exert higher control over the civil society. It was also a time of cultural change as far as the political models were concerned. The corporative nature of the regime was definitely suppressed. However, the consolidation of power of the Crown in the second half of the 18th century is frequently left to be analyzed. There is still much to be learned about the particularities involved in this transformation, namely in regard to governing routines or practices. This study reexamines and discusses the centralization of the Pombaline politics. The study is especially concerned with the predicaments and resistances encountered by the process initiated by Carvalho e Melo. In order to meet this ambition I will address the coexistence of the Royal Treasury (Erário Régio) with the Boards of Royal Finance (Juntas da Real Fazenda) of Brazil, which together formed a cornerstone of the political reform and a gateway to the all-powerful minister intentions.
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Rerup, Lorenz. "Grundtvigs indflydelse på den tidlige danske nationalisme." Grundtvig-Studier 43, no. 1 (January 1, 1992): 20–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.7146/grs.v43i1.16073.

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Grundtvig’s Position in Early Danish NationalismBy Lorenz RerupThe article deals with Grundtvig’s important position in Early Danish nationalism, i.e., in the decades from about 1800 to 1830. The background is the Danish Monarchy from the prosperous years at the turn of the century to the disastrous war 1807-1814, the loss of Norway in 1814, and the following needy postwar time. After 1814 the Danish Monarchy consisted of the Kingdom of Denmark, the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, the North-Atlantic Islands (the Faeroes and Greenland) and some minor colonies. The ideology which integrated the higher ranks of these heterogeneous ethnic groups of the Monarchy into one society was a patriotism underlining peace and order in the realm, the importance of just government and - before 1807 - the protection provided by the Danish navy.The patriotism of the Monarchy was compatible with various feelings of identity which bred in different parts of it from about 1750. The Danes, living in an old kingdom, equipped with a written language, with a complete educational system, and with a history of their own, of course, had a feeling of a Danish identiy, as the German speaking population of the Duchies had a corresponding feeling of an identity of their own. Clashes of these different identities might happen but were not connected with political ideas. The state was run by the king, not by the people, and a public opinion about politics was not allowed - and was almost non-existent - before the announcement of the Advisory Estates Assemblies in 1831. Now nationalism spread and soon undermined the supranational Monarchy, which finally disintegrated in 1864.However, in the first decades of the 18th century and influenced by the ideas of Romanticism a few poets, first of all Grundtvig, developed a literary national movement without political aims. In the writings of these poets the Danes - the whole people - have a real chance to make history if they abandon their superficial life and revive the virtues and piety of the great periods in Danish history. Like political nationalists these poets propagate this kind of revival. Their attempt failed. People were still divided into a ’high’ and a ’broad’ culture and some decades had to pass until the latter one felt the need of an ideology in order to be integrated into society. Nevertheless, Grundtvig seems to be a kind of link between the patriotic ideology of the 18th and the political nationalism of the 19th century.
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Houston, R. A. "“Bustling Artisans”: Church Patronage at South Leith in the 1740s and 1750s." Albion 26, no. 1 (1994): 55–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/4052099.

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Political participation in eighteenth-century Scotland was the preserve of the few. A country of more than one and a half million people had less than 3,000 parliamentary electors in 1788. Scottish politics was orchestrated from Westminster by one or two powerful patrons and their northern clients—a fact summarized in book titles like The People Above and The Management of Scottish Society. The way Edinburgh danced to a London tune is well illustrated in the aftermath of the famous Porteous riots of 1736. After a government official was lynched the Westminster government leaned heavily on the city and its council. And the nation as a whole was kept under tight rein after the Jacobite rising of 1745-46.This does not mean that ordinary people could not participate in political life, broadly defined. Burgesses could influence their day-to-day lives through membership of their incorporations (guilds) and through serving as constables and in other town or “burgh” (borough) offices. Ecclesiastical posts in the presbyterian church administration—elders and deacons of kirk sessions—had also to be filled. Gordon Desbrisay estimates that approximately one in twelve eligible men would be required annually to serve on the town council and kirk session of Aberdeen in the second half of the seventeenth century. With a 60% turnover of personnel each year, distribution of office holding must have been extensive among the middling section of burgh society from which officials were drawn. For burgesses and non-burgesses alike, other avenues of expression were open. In periods when political consensus broke down or when sectional interests sought to prevail townspeople could resort to riot.
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Kondakov, Yuri E. "Documents on Freemasonry from the Archive of Archimandrite Photius (Spassky)." Herald of an archivist, no. 3 (2020): 676–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.28995/2073-0101-2020-3-676-691.

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The article introduces into scientific use an analytical note on Freemasonry addressed to Alexander I. In Europe in the 18th – 19th centuries, there was extensive anti-Masonic literature. In Russia, such works were rare. Reputedly, the greatest Russian extirpator of Freemasonry was Archimandrite Photius (Spassky). The ban of Masonic lodges in 1822 is attributed to his influence on Alexander I. Photius was one of the leaders of the social movement of the Russian Orthodox opposition. Among other objects of its criticism were the Masonic lodges. However, a consolidated anti-Masonic action failed to materialize. Now it has been made possible to explain the opposition’s restraint in its attitude to Freemasonry. Four volumes of documents belonging to archimandrite Photius have been found in the Russian State Historical Archive. These are the materials from 1817-1832. The collection includes personal documents of Photius, messages and letters of Metropolitan Seraphim (Glagolevsky), A.A. Arakcheev, A.S. Shishkov, Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov). Many of these documents were handed over to Emperor Alexander I and influenced his change of heart in the politics. An anonymous note on Freemasonry from the Photius collection is included in the article in its entirety as a rare example of an anti-Masonic message to the Emperor. The note gives a retrospective of the Masonic movement in Russia. It describes what influence the masons of the 18th century had on Freemasonry of the 19th century. Most mentioned Masonic leaders belonged to the “Rosicrucian” system of Freemasonry (Order of the Golden and Pink Cross). The author of the note assured the emperor that there were Rosicrucians in his inner circle. He named Senator I.V. Lopukhin, publisher and translator A.F. Labzin, R.A. Koshelev, and the tsar’s friend, Minister A.N. Golitsyn. Photius’s documents show that criticism of Freemasonry was not the focus of the Russian Orthodox opposition activities. Among the opposition there were people who shared the idea of a worldwide Masonic conspiracy: S.I. Smirnov, M.L. Magnitsky. In Archimandrite In the Photius’s documents references to Freemasonry are very rare. At the time of the opposition’s action in 1824, the issue of Freemasonry was no longer relevant, since Freemasonry was subjected to a government ban in 1822.
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Hoh, Anchi. "Xinjiang as Portrayed in Qing’s Historical Gazetteers Housed at the Library of Congress." Comparative Islamic Studies 7, no. 1-2 (September 20, 2012): 23–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/cis.v7i1-2.23.

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The author argues that to study the relationship between China and the Middle East it is unavoidable to form an understanding of the Xinjiang region as a bridge between the regions. Focusing on the expansion of China control of Xinjiang and the bordering regions of Central Asia during the Qianlong period (1736-95) and the signification of these regions from the 18th century to the present, this article demonstrates the fervent relationship between East Asia and the Middle East. Due to current political considerations, many contemporary studies focus only on the more recent separatist movements in the region and Xinjiang’s possible ties to terrorism. Hoh shows that it is essential to delve into the historical roots and landscape for any meaningful assessment of contemporary politics and society. Moreover, in dealing with the current Chinese government on Xinjiang related issues, it is imperative to study the relevant historical documents in order to form a full understanding of the current Chinese thinking. As an attempt to bridge this gap, this article emphasizes on Xinjiang’s regional development during the Qing dynasty, as well as the Qing’s attitude toward Xinjiang’s bordering countries in the historical Chinese documents. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of the Library of Congress.
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Ryazhev, Andrey S. "The Mufti Against the Governor: a Short Confrontation, 1790–1791." Journal of Frontier Studies 7, no. 1 (March 3, 2022): 247–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.46539/jfs.v7i1.378.

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The article focuses on the religious policy of the Russian Empire in the early modern period. The aim of the research is to study the mutual relations of the governor A.A. von Peutling and Muhammedjan Khuseinov, the first mufti of Russia and the head of the Orenburg Mohammedan Spiritual Assembly at the beginning of 1790s, which influenced the religious situation on the southern and south-eastern outskirts of Russia. The base of the study is the official correspondence of A.A. von Peutling that described the place of Muslim religious institutions in the Russian system of government. The research methodology is defined by the main interpretations of the Russian religious policy, found in the literature on Islam in Russia. The author identifies the reasons and causes of the official and interpersonal conflict between the governor and the mufti as well as emphasizes the significant independence of the mufti at the beginning of 1790s on the steppe frontier. It is revealed that at that time the mufti was a more significant figure than the governor from the viewpoint of the supreme power. The author concludes that, in general, the religious policy of the Russian Empire during the examined period was invariant, but the regional specifics and subjective factors determined significant differences in its implementation in the South-East compared to the Crimea (then) and the North Caucasus (later). The article is addressed to experts in the fields of history of religion and politics of Russia in the 18th century, religious scholars, students, masters and postgraduates of the relevant profile.
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Kidirniyazov, D. S. "THE PEOPLES OF THE NORTH CAUCASUS IN THE RELATIONS OF RUSSIA AND TURKEY IN THE 1770-1790 s." History, Archeology and Ethnography of the Caucasus 13, no. 3 (September 15, 2017): 24–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.32653/ch13324-34.

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The Küçük Kaynardzha Peace Treaty of 1774, which sanctioned joining of Kabardia and Ossetia to Russia and formal independence of the Kuban Nogais, once again confirmed that the solution of the question of the international legal status of the North Caucasus was the prerogative right of great powers and did not belong to the sphere of Russian-Caucasian relations. Since the 1770s, military lines in the form of fortification chains and some Cossack settlements were built in the region. Access to the Black Sea at the end of the 18th century and joining of the Crimea to Russia became important events in international life and politics. They raised the authority of Russia in Europe and at the same time heightened tensions with the Turkish Empire. The people’s liberation movement under Sheikh Mansur’s command caused a massive public outcry in the North Caucasus due to common goals of the local peoples in the liberation struggle. The Treaty of Jassy of 1791 only confirmed the terms of the peace treaty of 1774 without any new territorial changes in the region. During the period under consideration, the Russian authorities hardly took any actions in regards to the local peoples. The actions of the Russian administration in the region did not go beyond external control and encouragement of trade and economic ties between the local population and immigrants from the central provinces of Russia. The control was carried out by the military authorities actively introduced into the geographical area of the region (construction of fortresses, creation of new garrisons and places of deployment of Russian troops). The creation of the civil administration of the region (vicarious authority, government, police force) was also started.
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Fitzgerald, Timothy. "Japan, Religion, History, Nation." Religions 13, no. 6 (May 27, 2022): 490. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/rel13060490.

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I connect the invention of Japanese ‘religion’ since the Meiji era (1868–1912) with the invention of other modern imaginaries, particularly the Japanese Nation State and Japanese History. The invention of these powerful fictions in Japan was a specific, localised example of a global process. The real significance of this idea that religion has always existed in all times and places is that it normalises the idea of the non-religious secular as the arena of universal reason and progress. The invention of Japanese ‘religion’ had—and still has—a significant function in the wider, global context of colonial capital and the continual search for new ‘investment’ opportunities. Meiji Japan illustrates, in fascinating detail, a process of cognitive hegemony, and the way a globalising discourse on ‘progress’ transformed the plunder of colonial sites into a civilising mission. The idea that there is a universal type of practice, belief or institution called ‘religion’ as distinct from government, ‘politics’ or ‘science’ was not only new to Japan. It hardly existed in England or more widely in Protestant Europe and North America until the eighteenth or even 19th century. The idea of a secular constitutional nation state was only emergent in the late 18th century with the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. Most of Europe—including the colonial powers England and France—were still Christian confessional church states through most of the 19th century. The franchise was granted only to Christian men of substantial property, and denied to women, servants, wage labour, colonised subjects, and slaves. This critical, deconstructive narrative helps us to see more clearly the ideological function of the generic category of religion in the wider configuration of modern secular categories such as constitutional nation state, political economy, nature, history, and science. I also discuss the relation between History as a secular academic science, and the invention of ‘the Past’ in universal Time. I argue here that the invention of the Past by professional Historians has a significant role in transforming modern inventions such as ‘religion’ and the secular categories into the inherent and universal order of things, as though they have always been everywhere. I reveal this on-going process of ideological reproduction by close readings of some recent ‘histories of Japan’ and the way they uncritically construct ‘the Past’ in the terms of contemporary configurations.
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Servalli, Stefania, and Antonio Gitto. "Accounting and disciplinary methods in fishery management." Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal 34, no. 9 (October 7, 2021): 218–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/aaaj-07-2019-4095.

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PurposeThe purpose of this study is to contribute to the research related to “the interplay between accounting and the state, politics, and local authorities in the broad government and administration of food for sustainability of populations” (Sargiacomo et al., 2016). Considering contemporary examples and investigating the genealogy of an 18th-century reform of fishery management (the New Plan), the authors explore the role played by accounting and calculative practices when local authorities intervene using forms of discipline based on control systems that acted on commons (fish), people and space.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is historically grounded on archival research on a fish provisioning case during the 18th century in Ancona, an Italian town on the Adriatic coast. The investigation adopts an approach focussed on the use of disciplinary methods in the terms highlighted by Foucault. This perspective offers a lens capable of revealing the key role of accounting in a period when discipline became “general formulas of domination” (Foucault, 1977) and the Papal States were looking for food provisioning solutions (Foucault, 2007). The study highlights similarities with contemporary fishery management.FindingsThe paper shows that governability of fishery in a commons' logic is not limited by the properties of the good, but rather “it is achieved through the objects and instruments that are deployed to make it possible” (Johnsen, 2014, p. 429). It reveals forms assumed by economic calculation in different eras and their contribution in the art of governing realised by the state (Hoskin and Macve, 2016). The study unveils how accounting effectively operates using “naming and counting” activities (Ezzamel and Hoskin, 2002) based on a system of documents and accounting registers; these have a pivotal role in redefining fishery management and in keeping goods (fish) and people (fishermen) under control. The investigation also highlights the importance of properly quantifying data in fishery management, confirming the literature on the topic (Beddington et al., 2007, p. 1713). In contemporary situations, data refer to quantifying the fish stock in the sea and the consequent estimation of fish catch. In the historical investigation, although environmental protection was not an issue, quantification refers to the fish that entered the town of Ancona, whose estimation was the result of a new calculative approach adopted by local authorities facing fish needs. In addition, it offers early evidence of organised and rational-based control mechanisms that were the result of Enlightened ideas emerging in the Papal States context.Originality/valueDespite the fact that fish represent a fundamental good for governments to act on in response to a population's needs, there has been no attention paid to how governmental authorities have used disciplinary mechanisms to intervene in fishery management or the role played by accounting. This study's novelty is its investigation of fishery, using Foucauldian disciplinary methods to understand accounting's contribution in fishery governance. In addition, this investigation permits to unveil the role of accounting to support one of the main principles of the governance of commons that is represented by the congruence between rules and local conditions (Fennell, 2011, p. 11; Ostrom, 1990, p. 92).
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Pylypchuk, Oleh, Oleh Strelko, and Yuliia Berdnychenko. "PREFACE." History of science and technology 11, no. 2 (December 12, 2021): 271–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.32703/2415-7422-2021-11-2-271-273.

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The issue of the journal opens with an article dedicated to the formation of metrology as government regulated activity in France. The article has discussed the historical process of development of metrological activity in France. It was revealed that the history of metrology is considered as an auxiliary historical and ethnographic discipline from a social and philosophical point of view as the evolution of scientific approaches to the definition of individual units of physical quantities and branches of metrology. However, in the scientific literature, the little attention is paid to the process of a development of a centralized institutional metrology system that is the organizational basis for ensuring the uniformity of measurements. The article by Irena Grebtsova and Maryna Kovalska is devoted to the of the development of the source criticism’s knowledge in the Imperial Novorossiya University which was founded in the second half of the XIX century in Odesa. Grounding on a large complex of general scientific methods, and a historical method and source criticism, the authors identified the stages of the formation of source criticism in the process of teaching historical disciplines at the university, what they based on an analysis of the teaching activities of professors and associate professors of the Faculty of History and Philology. In the article, the development of the foundations of source criticism is considered as a complex process, which in Western European and Russian science was the result of the development of the theory and practice of everyday dialogue between scientists and historical sources. This process had a great influence on the advancement of a historical education in university, which was one of the important factors in the formation of source studies as a scientific discipline. The article by Tetiana Malovichko is devoted to the study of what changes the course of the probability theory has undergone from the end of the 19th century to our time based on the analysis of The Theory of Probabilities textbook by Vasyl P. Ermakov published in 1878. The paper contains a comparative analysis of The Probability Theory textbook and modern educational literature. The birth of children after infertility treatment of married couples with the help of assisted reproductive technologies has become a reality after many years of basic research on the physiology of reproductive system, development of oocyte’s in vitro fertilization methods and cultivation of embryos at pre-implantation stages. Given the widespread use of assisted reproductive technologies in modern medical practice and the great interest of society to this problem, the aim of the study authors from the Institute for Problems of Cryobiology and Cryomedicine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine was to trace the main stages and key events of assisted reproductive technologies in the world and in Ukraine, as well as to highlight the activities of outstanding scientists of domestic and world science who were at the origins of the development of this area. As a result of the work, it has been shown that despite certain ethical and social biases, the discovery of individual predecessor scientists became the basis for the efforts of Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe to ensure birth of the world's first child, whose conception occurred outside the mother's body. There are also historical facts and unique photos from our own archive, which confirm the fact of the first successful oocyte in vitro fertilization and the birth of a child after the use of assisted reproductive technologies in Ukraine. In the next article, the authors tried to consider and structure the stages of development and creation of the “Yermak”, the world's first Arctic icebreaker, and analyzed the stages of preparation and the results of its first expeditions to explore the Arctic. Systematic analysis of historical sources and biographical material allowed to separate and comprehensively consider the conditions and prehistory for the development and creation of “Yermak” icebreaker. Also, the authors gave an assessment to the role of Vice Admiral Stepan Osypovych Makarov in those events, and analyzed the role of Sergei Yulyevich Witte, Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev and Pyotr Petrovich Semenov-Tian-Shansky in the preparation and implementation of the first Arctic expeditions of the “Yermak”icebreaker. The authors of the following article considered the historical aspects of construction and operation of train ferry routes. The article deals with the analysis and systematization of the data on the historical development of train ferry routes and describes the background for the construction of train ferry routes and their advantages over other combined transport types. It also deals with the basic features of the train ferries operating on the main international train ferry routes. The study is concerned with both sea routes and routes across rivers and lakes. The article shows the role of train ferry routes in the improvement of a national economy, and in the provision of the military defense. An analysis of numerous artefacts of the first third of the 20th century suggests that the production of many varieties of art-and-industrial ceramics developed in Halychyna, in particular architectural ceramic plastics, a variety of functional ceramics, decorative tiles, ceramic tiles, facing tiles, etc. The artistic features of Halychyna art ceramics, the richness of methods for decorating and shaping it, stylistic features, as well as numerous art societies, scientific and professional associations, groups, plants and factories specializing in the production of ceramics reflect the general development of this industry in the first half of the century and represent the prerequisites the emergence of the school of professional ceramics in Halychyna at the beginning of the 20th century. The purpose of the next paper is to analyze the formation and development of scientific and professional schools of art-and-industrial ceramics of Halychyna in the late 19th – early 20th centuries. During the environmental crisis, electric transport (e-transport) is becoming a matter for scientific inquiry, a subject of discussion in politics and among public figures. In the program for developing the municipal services of Ukraine, priorities are given to the development of the infrastructure of ecological transport: trolleybuses, electric buses, electric cars. The increased attention to e-transport on the part of the scientific community, politicians, and the public actualizes the study of its history, development, features of operation, etc. The aim of the next study is to highlight little-known facts of the history of production and operation of MAN trolleybuses in Ukrainian cities, as well as to introduce their technical characteristics into scientific circulation. The types, specific design solutions of the first MAN trolleybus generation and the prerequisites for their appearance in Chernivtsi have been determined. Particular attention has been paid to trolleybuses that were in operation in Germany and other Western European countries from the first half of the 1930s to the early 1950s. The paper traces the stages of operation of the MAN trolleybuses in Chernivtsi, where they worked during 1939–1944 and after the end of the Second World War, they were transferred to Kyiv. After two years of operation in the Ukrainian capital, the trolleybuses entered the routes in Dnipropetrovsk during 1947–1951. The purpose of the article by authors from the State University of Infrastructure and Technologies of Ukraine is to thoroughly analyze unpaved roads of the late 18th – early 19th century, as well as the project of the first wooden trackway as the forerunner of the Bukovyna railways. To achieve this purpose, the authors first reviewed how railways were constructed in the Austrian Empire during 1830s – 1850s. Then, in contrast with the first railway networks that emerged and developed in the Austrian Empire, the authors made an analysis of the condition and characteristics of unpaved roads in Bukovyna. In addition, the authors considered the first attempt to create a wooden trackway as a prototype and predecessor of the Bukovyna railway.
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Woolf, D. R. "Puritans, Politics, and Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century BritainThe Road to Revolution: Scotland under Charles I, by Maurice Lee, Jr., Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985, xvi, 259 pp., cloth. $29.95 U.S.Serving God and Mammon: William Juxon, 1582-1663, Bishop of London, Lord High Treasurer of England, and Archbishop of Canterbury, by Thomas A. Mason, Newark: University of Delaware Press, London and Toronto: Associated University Presses: 1985, 205 pp., cloth. $29.50 U.S.Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm, and the Answer to the xix Propositions, by Michael Mendle, University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1985, x, 257 pp., cloth. $28.50 U.S.Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Barry Reay, London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1985,319 pp., cloth. $19.95.Schemes and Undertakings: a Study of English Politics in the Seventeenth Century, by Clayton Roberts, Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1985, vii, 333 pp., cloth. $35.00 U.S.Wallington’s World: a Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London, by Paul S. Seaver, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1985, ix, 258 pp., cloth. $29.50 U.S." Canadian Journal of History 21, no. 2 (August 1986): 215–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/cjh.21.2.215.

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Raath, Andries W. G. "From Chrysostom to Luther: The roots of magisterial office in Martyr Vermigli’s political theology." In die Skriflig/In Luce Verbi 39, no. 1 (July 30, 2005). http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/ids.v39i1.376.

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Peter Martyr Vermigli played a key role in developing and formulating the Reformational version of the political covenant for legitimating the political order. Three important perspectives shaped Vermigli’s covenantal views: first, St. John Chrysostom’s idea of political office; second, Luther’s work on the divine origin of magisterial government and third, Heinrich Bullinger’s commentaries on the Biblical covenant. These perspectives were integrated by Vermigli into an influential paradigm of covenantal politics. The impact of the ideas emanating from Vermigli’s theologico-political federalism was not limited to the 16th-century Reformation, but also exerted considerable influence on the development of political contractarianism in 17th - and 18th-century liberalism. In this contribution the emphasis is on Chrysostom’s and Luther’s contributions to Vermigli’s political theology.
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Cashman, Dorothy Ann. "“This receipt is as safe as the Bank”: Reading Irish Culinary Manuscripts." M/C Journal 16, no. 3 (June 23, 2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.616.

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Introduction Ireland did not have a tradition of printed cookbooks prior to the 20th century. As a consequence, Irish culinary manuscripts from before this period are an important primary source for historians. This paper makes the case that the manuscripts are a unique way of accessing voices that have quotidian concerns seldom heard above the dominant narratives of conquest, colonisation and famine (Higgins; Dawson). Three manuscripts are examined to see how they contribute to an understanding of Irish social and culinary history. The Irish banking crisis of 2008 is a reminder that comments such as the one in the title of this paper may be more then a casual remark, indicating rather an underlying anxiety. Equally important is the evidence in the manuscripts that Ireland had a domestic culinary tradition sited within the culinary traditions of the British Isles. The terms “vernacular”, representing localised needs and traditions, and “polite”, representing stylistic features incorporated for aesthetic reasons, are more usually applied in the architectural world. As terms, they reflect in a politically neutral way the culinary divide witnessed in the manuscripts under discussion here. Two of the three manuscripts are anonymous, but all are written from the perspective of a well-provisioned house. The class background is elite and as such these manuscripts are not representative of the vernacular, which in culinary terms is likely to be a tradition recorded orally (Gold). The first manuscript (NLI, Tervoe) and second manuscript (NLI, Limerick) show the levels of impact of French culinary influence through their recipes for “cullis”. The Limerick manuscript also opens the discussion to wider social concerns. The third manuscript (NLI, Baker) is unusual in that the author, Mrs. Baker, goes to great lengths to record the provenance of the recipes and as such the collection affords a glimpse into the private “polite” world of the landed gentry in Ireland with its multiplicity of familial and societal connections. Cookbooks and Cuisine in Ireland in the 19th Century During the course of the 18th century, there were 136 new cookery book titles and 287 reprints published in Britain (Lehmann, Housewife 383). From the start of the 18th to the end of the 19th century only three cookbooks of Irish, or Anglo-Irish, authorship have been identified. The Lady’s Companion: or Accomplish’d Director In the whole Art of Cookery was published in 1767 by John Mitchell in Skinner-Row, under the pseudonym “Ceres,” while the Countess of Caledon’s Cheap Receipts and Hints on Cookery: Collected for Distribution Amongst the Irish Peasantry was printed in Armagh by J. M. Watters for private circulation in 1847. The modern sounding Dinners at Home, published in London in 1878 under the pseudonym “Short”, appears to be of Irish authorship, a review in The Irish Times describing it as being written by a “Dublin lady”, the inference being that she was known to the reviewer (Farmer). English Copyright Law was extended to Ireland in July 1801 after the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland in 1800 (Ferguson). Prior to this, many titles were pirated in Ireland, a cause of confusion alluded to by Lehmann when she comments regarding the Ceres book that it “does not appear to be simply a Dublin-printed edition of an English book” (Housewife 403). This attribution is based on the dedication in the preface: “To The Ladies of Dublin.” From her statement that she had a “great deal of experience in business of this kind”, one may conclude that Ceres had worked as a housekeeper or cook. Cheap Receipts and Hints on Cookery was the second of two books by Catherine Alexander, Countess of Caledon. While many commentators were offering advice to Irish people on how to alleviate their poverty, in Friendly Advice to Irish Mothers on Training their Children, Alexander was unusual in addressing her book specifically to its intended audience (Bourke). In this cookbook, the tone is of a practical didactic nature, the philosophy that of enablement. Given the paucity of printed material, manuscripts provide the main primary source regarding the existence of an indigenous culinary tradition. Attitudes regarding this tradition lie along the spectrum exemplified by the comments of an Irish journalist, Kevin Myers, and an eminent Irish historian, Louis Cullen. Myers describes Irish cuisine as a “travesty” and claims that the cuisine of “Old Ireland, in texture and in flavour, generally resembles the cinders after the suttee of a very large, but not very tasty widow”, Cullen makes the case that Irish cuisine is “one of the most interesting culinary traditions in Europe” (141). It is not proposed to investigate the ideological standpoints behind the various comments on Irish food. Indeed, the use of the term “Irish” in this context is fraught with difficulty and it should be noted that in the three manuscripts proposed here, the cuisine is that of the gentry class and representative of a particular stratum of society more accurately described as belonging to the Anglo-Irish tradition. It is also questionable how the authors of the three manuscripts discussed would have described themselves in terms of nationality. The anxiety surrounding this issue of identity is abating as scholarship has moved from viewing the cultural artifacts and buildings inherited from this class, not as symbols of an alien heritage, but rather as part of the narrative of a complex country (Rees). The antagonistic attitude towards this heritage could be seen as reaching its apogee in the late 1950s when the then Government minister, Kevin Boland, greeted the decision to demolish a row of Georgian houses in Dublin with jubilation, saying that they stood for everything that he despised, and describing the Georgian Society, who had campaigned for their preservation, as “the preserve of the idle rich and belted earls” (Foster 160). Mac Con Iomaire notes that there has been no comprehensive study of the history of Irish food, and the implications this has for opinions held, drawing attention to the lack of recognition that a “parallel Anglo-Irish cuisine existed among the Protestant elite” (43). To this must be added the observation that Myrtle Allen, the doyenne of the Irish culinary world, made when she observed that while we have an Irish identity in food, “we belong to a geographical and culinary group with Wales, England, and Scotland as all counties share their traditions with their next door neighbour” (1983). Three Irish Culinary Manuscripts The three manuscripts discussed here are held in the National Library of Ireland (NLI). The manuscript known as Tervoe has 402 folio pages with a 22-page index. The National Library purchased the manuscript at auction in December 2011. Although unattributed, it is believed to come from Tervoe House in County Limerick (O’Daly). Built in 1776 by Colonel W.T. Monsell (b.1754), the Monsell family lived there until 1951 (see, Fig. 1). The house was demolished in 1953 (Bence-Jones). William Monsell, 1st Lord Emly (1812–94) could be described as the most distinguished of the family. Raised in an atmosphere of devotion to the Union (with Great Britain), loyalty to the Church of Ireland, and adherence to the Tory Party, he converted in 1850 to the Roman Catholic religion, under the influence of Cardinal Newman and the Oxford Movement, changing his political allegiance from Tory to Whig. It is believed that this change took place as a result of the events surrounding the Great Irish Famine of 1845–50 (Potter). The Tervoe manuscript is catalogued as 18th century, and as the house was built in the last quarter of the century, it would be reasonable to surmise that its conception coincided with that period. It is a handsome volume with original green vellum binding, which has been conserved. Fig. 1. Tervoe House, home of the Monsell family. In terms of culinary prowess, the scope of the Tervoe manuscript is extensive. For the purpose of this discussion, one recipe is of particular interest. The recipe, To make a Cullis for Flesh Soups, instructs the reader to take the fat off four pounds of the best beef, roast the beef, pound it to a paste with crusts of bread and the carcasses of partridges or other fowl “that you have by you” (NLI, Tervoe). This mixture should then be moistened with best gravy, and strong broth, and seasoned with pepper, thyme, cloves, and lemon, then sieved for use with the soup. In 1747 Hannah Glasse published The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy. The 1983 facsimile edition explains the term “cullis” as an Anglicisation of the French word coulis, “a preparation for thickening soups and stews” (182). The coulis was one of the essential components of the nouvelle cuisine of the 18th century. This movement sought to separate itself from “the conspicuous consumption of profusion” to one where the impression created was one of refinement and elegance (Lehmann, Housewife 210). Reactions in England to this French culinary innovation were strong, if not strident. Glasse derides French “tricks”, along with French cooks, and the coulis was singled out for particular opprobrium. In reality, Glasse bestrides both sides of the divide by giving the much-hated recipe and commenting on it. She provides another example of this in her recipe for The French Way of Dressing Partridges to which she adds the comment: “this dish I do not recommend; for I think it an odd jumble of thrash, by that time the Cullis, the Essence of Ham, and all other Ingredients are reckoned, the Partridges will come to a fine penny; but such Receipts as this, is what you have in most Books of Cookery yet printed” (53). When Daniel Defoe in The Complete English Tradesman of 1726 criticised French tradesmen for spending so much on the facades of their shops that they were unable to offer their customers a varied stock within, we can see the antipathy spilling over into other creative fields (Craske). As a critical strategy, it is not dissimilar to Glasse when she comments “now compute the expense, and see if this dish cannot be dressed full as well without this expense” at the end of a recipe for the supposedly despised Cullis for all Sorts of Ragoo (53). Food had become part of the defining image of Britain as an aggressively Protestant culture in opposition to Catholic France (Lehmann Politics 75). The author of the Tervoe manuscript makes no comment about the dish other than “A Cullis is a mixture of things, strained off.” This is in marked contrast to the second manuscript (NLI, Limerick). The author of this anonymous manuscript, from which the title of this paper is taken, is considerably perplexed by the term cullis, despite the manuscript dating 1811 (Fig. 2). Of Limerick provenance also, but considerably more modest in binding and scope, the manuscript was added to for twenty years, entries terminating around 1831. The recipe for Beef Stake (sic) Pie is an exact transcription of a recipe in John Simpson’s A Complete System of Cookery, published in 1806, and reads Cut some beef steaks thin, butter a pan (or as Lord Buckingham’s cook, from whom these rects are taken, calls it a soutis pan, ? [sic] (what does he mean, is it a saucepan) [sic] sprinkle the pan with pepper and salt, shallots thyme and parsley, put the beef steaks in and the pan on the fire for a few minutes then put them to cool, when quite cold put them in the fire, scrape all the herbs in over the fire and ornament as you please, it will take an hour and half, when done take the top off and put in some coulis (what is that?) [sic]. Fig. 2. Beef Stake Pie (NLI, Limerick). Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland. Simpson was cook to Lord Buckingham for at least a year in 1796, and may indeed have travelled to Ireland with the Duke who had several connections there. A feature of this manuscript are the number of Cholera remedies that it contains, including the “Rect for the cholera sent by Dr Shanfer from Warsaw to the Brussels Government”. Cholera had reached Germany by 1830, and England by 1831. By March 1832, it had struck Belfast and Dublin, the following month being noted in Cork, in the south of the country. Lasting a year, the epidemic claimed 50,000 lives in Ireland (Fenning). On 29 April 1832, the diarist Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin notes, “we had a meeting today to keep the cholera from Callan. May God help us” (De Bhaldraithe 132). By 18 June, the cholera is “wrecking destruction in Ennis, Limerick and Tullamore” (135) and on 26 November, “Seed being sown. The end of the month wet and windy. The cholera came to Callan at the beginning of the month. Twenty people went down with it and it left the town then” (139). This situation was obviously of great concern and this is registered in the manuscript. Another concern is that highlighted by the recommendation that “this receipt is as good as the bank. It has been obligingly given to Mrs Hawkesworth by the chief book keeper at the Bank of Ireland” (NLI, Limerick). The Bank of Ireland commenced business at St. Mary’s Abbey in Dublin in June 1783, having been established under the protection of the Irish Parliament as a chartered rather then a central bank. As such, it supplied a currency of solidity. The charter establishing the bank, however, contained a prohibitory clause preventing (until 1824 when it was repealed) more then six persons forming themselves into a company to carry on the business of banking. This led to the formation, especially outside Dublin, of many “small private banks whose failure was the cause of immense wretchedness to all classes of the population” (Gilbert 19). The collapse that caused the most distress was that of the Ffrench bank in 1814, founded eleven years previously by the family of Lord Ffrench, one of the leading Catholic peers, based in Connacht in the west of Ireland. The bank issued notes in exchange for Bank of Ireland notes. Loans from Irish banks were in the form of paper money which were essentially printed promises to pay the amount stated and these notes were used in ordinary transactions. So great was the confidence in the Ffrench bank that their notes were held by the public in preference to Bank of Ireland notes, most particularly in Connacht. On 27 June 1814, there was a run on the bank leading to collapse. The devastation spread through society, from business through tenant farmers to the great estates, and notably so in Galway. Lord Ffrench shot himself in despair (Tennison). Williams and Finn, founded in Kilkenny in 1805, entered bankruptcy proceedings in 1816, and the last private bank outside Dublin, Delacours in Mallow, failed in 1835 (Barrow). The issue of bank failure is commented on by writers of the period, notably so in Dickens, Thackery, and Gaskill, and Edgeworth in Ireland. Following on the Ffrench collapse, notes from the Bank of Ireland were accorded increased respect, reflected in the comment in this recipe. The receipt in question is one for making White Currant Wine, with the unusual addition of a slice of bacon suspended from the bunghole when the wine is turned, for the purpose of enriching it. The recipe was provided to “Mrs Hawkesworth by the chief book keeper of the bank” (NLI, Limerick). In 1812, a John Hawkesworth, agent to Lord CastleCoote, was living at Forest Lodge, Mountrath, County Laois (Ennis Chronicle). The Coote family, although settling in County Laois in the seventeenth century, had strong connections with Limerick through a descendent of the younger brother of the first Earl of Mountrath (Landed Estates). The last manuscript for discussion is the manuscript book of Mrs Abraham Whyte Baker of Ballytobin House, County Kilkenny, 1810 (NLI, Baker). Ballytobin, or more correctly Ballaghtobin, is a townland in the barony of Kells, four miles from the previously mentioned Callan. The land was confiscated from the Tobin family during the Cromwellian campaign in Ireland of 1649–52, and was reputedly purchased by a Captain Baker, to establish what became the estate of Ballaghtobin (Fig. 3) To this day, it is a functioning estate, remaining in the family, twice passing down through the female line. In its heyday, there were two acres of walled gardens from which the house would have drawn for its own provisions (Ballaghtobin). Fig. 3. Ballaghtobin 2013. At the time of writing the manuscript, Mrs. Sophia Baker was widowed and living at Ballaghtobin with her son and daughter-in-law, Charity who was “no beauty, but tall, slight” (Herbert 414). On the succession of her husband to the estate, Charity became mistress of Ballaghtobin, leaving Sophia with time on what were her obviously very capable hands (Nevin). Sophia Baker was the daughter of Sir John Blunden of Castle Blunden and Lucinda Cuffe, daughter of the first Baron Desart. Sophia was also first cousin of the diarist Dorothea Herbert, whose mother was Lucinda’s sister, Martha. Sophia Baker and Dorothea Herbert have left for posterity a record of life in the landed gentry class in rural Georgian Ireland, Dorothea describing Mrs. Baker as “full of life and spirits” (Herbert 70). Their close relationship allows the two manuscripts to converse with each other in a unique way. Mrs. Baker’s detailing of the provenance of her recipes goes beyond the norm, so that what she has left us is not just a remarkable work of culinary history but also a palimpsest of her family and social circle. Among the people she references are: “my grandmother”; Dorothea Beresford, half sister to the Earl of Tyrone, who lived in the nearby Curraghmore House; Lady Tyrone; and Aunt Howth, the sister of Dorothea Beresford, married to William St Lawrence, Lord Howth, and described by Johnathan Swift as “his blue eyed nymph” (195). Other attributions include Lady Anne Fitzgerald, wife of Maurice Fitzgerald, 16th knight of Kerry, Sir William Parsons, Major Labilen, and a Mrs. Beaufort (Fig. 4). Fig. 4. Mrs. Beauforts Rect. (NLI, Baker). Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland. That this Mrs. Beaufort was the wife of Daniel Augustus Beaufort, mother of the hydrographer Sir Francis Beaufort, may be deduced from the succeeding recipe supplied by a Mrs. Waller. Mrs. Beaufort’s maiden name was Waller. Fanny Beaufort, the elder sister of Sir Francis, was Richard Edgeworth’s fourth wife and close friend and confidante of his daughter Maria, the novelist. There are also entries for “Miss Herbert” and “Aunt Herbert.” While the Baker manuscript is of interest for the fact that it intersects the worlds of the novelist Maria Edgeworth and the diarist Dorothea Herbert, and for the societal references that it documents, it is also a fine collection of recipes that date back to the mid-18th century. An example of this is a recipe for Sligo pickled salmon that Mrs. Baker, nee Blunden, refers to in an index that she gives to a second volume. Unfortunately this second volume is not known to be extant. This recipe features in a Blunden family manuscript of 1760 as referred to in Anelecta Hibernica (McLysaght). The recipe has also appeared in Cookery and Cures of Old Kilkenny (St. Canices’s 24). Unlike the Tervoe and Limerick manuscripts, Mrs. Baker is unconcerned with recipes for “cullis”. Conclusion The three manuscripts that have been examined here are from the period before the famine of 1845–50, known as An Gorta Mór, translated as “the big hunger”. The famine preceding this, Bliain an Áir (the year of carnage) in 1740–1 was caused by extremely cold and rainy weather that wiped out the harvest (Ó Gráda 15). This earlier famine, almost forgotten today, was more severe than the subsequent one, causing the death of an eight of the population of the island over one and a half years (McBride). These manuscripts are written in living memory of both events. Within the world that they inhabit, it may appear there is little said about hunger or social conditions beyond the walls of their estates. Subjected to closer analysis, however, it is evident that they are loquacious in their own unique way, and make an important contribution to the narrative of cookbooks. Through the three manuscripts discussed here, we find evidence of the culinary hegemony of France and how practitioners in Ireland commented on this in comparatively neutral fashion. An awareness of cholera and bank collapses have been communicated in a singular fashion, while a conversation between diarist and culinary networker has allowed a glimpse into the world of the landed gentry in Ireland during the Georgian period. References Allen, M. “Statement by Myrtle Allen at the opening of Ballymaloe Cookery School.” 14 Nov. 1983. Ballaghtobin. “The Grounds”. nd. 13 Mar. 2013. ‹http://www.ballaghtobin.com/gardens.html›. Barrow, G.L. “Some Dublin Private Banks.” Dublin Historical Record 25.2 (1972): 38–53. Bence-Jones, M. A Guide to Irish Country Houses. London: Constable, 1988. Bourke, A. Ed. Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing Vol V. Cork: Cork UP, 2002. Craske, M. “Design and the Competitive Spirit in Early and Mid 18th Century England”, Journal of Design History 12.3 (1999): 187–216. Cullen, L. The Emergence of Modern Ireland. London: Batsford, 1981. Dawson, Graham. “Trauma, Memory, Politics. The Irish Troubles.” Trauma: Life Stories of Survivors. Ed. Kim Lacy Rogers, Selma Leydesdorff and Graham Dawson. New Jersey: Transaction P, 2004. De Bhaldraithe,T. Ed. Cín Lae Amhlaoibh. Cork: Mercier P, 1979. Ennis Chronicle. 12–23 Feb 1812. 10 Feb. 2013 ‹http://astheywere.blogspot.ie/2012/12/ennis-chronicle-1812-feb-23-feb-12.html› Farmar, A. E-mail correspondence between Farmar and Dr M. Mac Con Iomaire, 26 Jan. 2011. Fenning, H. “The Cholera Epidemic in Ireland 1832–3: Priests, Ministers, Doctors”. Archivium Hibernicum 57 (2003): 77–125. Ferguson, F. “The Industrialisation of Irish Book Production 1790-1900.” The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Vol. IV The Irish Book in English 1800-1891. Ed. J. Murphy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. Foster, R.F. Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change from 1970. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Gilbert, James William. The History of Banking in Ireland. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1836. Glasse, Hannah. The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by a Lady: Facsimile Edition. Devon: Prospect, 1983. Gold, C. Danish Cookbooks. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2007. Herbert, D. Retrospections of an Outcast or the Life of Dorothea Herbert. London: Gerald Howe, 1929. Higgins, Michael D. “Remarks by President Michael D. Higgins reflecting on the Gorta Mór: the Great famine of Ireland.” Famine Commemoration, Boston, 12 May 2012. 18 Feb. 2013 ‹http://www.president.ie/speeches/ › Landed Estates Database, National University of Galway, Moore Institute for Research, 10 Feb. 2013 ‹http://landedestates.nuigalway.ie/LandedEstates/jsp/family-show.jsp?id=633.› Lehmann, G. The British Housewife: Cookery books, cooking and society in eighteenth-century Britain. Totnes: Prospect, 1993. ---. “Politics in the Kitchen.” 18th Century Life 23.2 (1999): 71–83. Mac Con Iomaire, M. “The Emergence, Development and Influence of French Haute Cuisine on Public Dining in Dublin Restaurants 1900-2000: An Oral History”. Vol. 2. PhD thesis. Dublin Institute of Technology. 2009. 8 Mar. 2013 ‹http://arrow.dit.ie/tourdoc/12›. McBride, Ian. Eighteenth Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2009. McLysaght, E.A. Anelecta Hibernica 15. Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1944. Myers, K. “Dinner is served ... But in Our Culinary Dessert it may be Korean.” The Irish Independent 30 Jun. 2006. Nevin, M. “A County Kilkenny Georgian Household Notebook.” Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 109 (1979): 5–18. (NLI) National Library of Ireland. Baker. 19th century manuscript. MS 34,952. ---. Limerick. 19th century manuscript. MS 42,105. ---. Tervoe. 18th century manuscript. MS 42,134. Ó Gráda, C. Famine: A Short History. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2009. O’Daly, C. E-mail correspondence between Colette O’Daly, Assistant Keeper, Dept. of Manuscripts, National Library of Ireland and Dorothy Cashman. 8 Dec. 2011. Potter, M. William Monsell of Tervoe 1812-1894. Dublin: Irish Academic P, 2009. Rees, Catherine. “Irish Anxiety, Identity and Narrative in the Plays of McDonagh and Jones.” Redefinitions of Irish Identity: A Postnationalist Approach. Eds. Irene Gilsenan Nordin and Carmen Zamorano Llena. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010. St. Canice’s. Cookery and Cures of Old Kilkenny. Kilkenny: Boethius P, 1983. Swift, J. The Works of the Rev Dr J Swift Vol. XIX Dublin: Faulkner, 1772. 8 Feb. 2013. ‹http://www.google.ie/search?tbm=bks&hl=en&q=works+of+jonathan+swift+Vol+XIX+&btnG=› Tennison, C.M. “The Old Dublin Bankers.” Journal of the Cork Historical and Archeological Society 1.2 (1895): 36–9.
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De Oliveira, Ricardo. "POLÍTICA, DIPLOMACIA E O IMPÉRIO COLONIAL PORTUGUÊS NA PRIMEIRA METADE DO SÉCULO XVIII." História: Questões & Debates 36, no. 1 (June 30, 2002). http://dx.doi.org/10.5380/his.v36i0.2695.

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No princípio do século XVIII, o Império Português tinha reconhecidamente seu eixo no Atlântico, notadamente no Brasil. E, apesar de toda a fragilidade política de Portugal no cenário Europeu, foi possível sustentar a integridade do seu território no Velho Mundo e ainda ampliar e consolidar sobre os da América. Além de todas as concessões econômicas que mantinham a tutela inglesa como salvaguarda da política lusitana, a atuação de estadistas como José da Cunha Brochado, D. Luís da Cunha, Alexandre de Gusmão, o Conde da Tarouca e Sebastião José de Carvalho e Mello tornou possível para o Reino atravessar o século como monarquia soberana. Nesse artigo pretende-se analisar alguns aspectos da atuação e do pensamento desses homens, enfatizando a política e a diplomacia durante o governo D. João V. Abstract In the beginning of the 18th century, the Portuguese Empire notoriously had its axis on the Atlantic, especially on Brazil. In spite of all Portugal political fragility in the European context, it was possible to sustain the integrity of its territory in the Old World and to enlarge and consolidate the new ones in America. Besides all the economic concessions which kept the English tutorship as a safeguard to the Lusitanian politics, the performance of the statesmen such as D. Luís da Cunha, Alexandre de Gusmão, Conde da Tarouca and Sebastião José de Carvalho e Mello made possible for the Kingdom to go through the century as a sovereign monarchy. This article aims to analyze some aspects of the actions and thoughts of these men, emphasizing the politics and diplomacy during the government of D. João V.
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29

Kintzinger, Martin. "Historiography of the University. A New Field for an Old Topic in German Historical Scholarship = Historiografía sobre la Universidad. Un nuevo campo para un viejo tema en la Historia de la Universidad alemana." CIAN-Revista de Historia de las Universidades 20, no. 1 (June 28, 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.20318/cian.2017.3730.

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Abstract: There is no tradition nor genus of historiography within writing on university history in German historical research. In the Middle Ages there was no historiography of the institutionalized schools and the early universities. It began in the early modern period. From the beginning in the 17th century onwards, historiography of university mostly meant to tell about the own university and to underline its academic brilliance and, first of all, its political value for the government. In later 18th century the influence of enlightenment changed the argumentation and the politically enforced difference between academies and universities made the “identity” of universities more evident. Universities from then on did not understand themselves no longer primarily as instruments of government, but as places of scientific liberty and insofar partly of legal independence. There were conflicts and quarrels about in how far universities should just help to create educated officers for the government or open a field of independence for a “Freedom of science”. All conflict parties published their declarations, which can be used for the historiography of universities nowadays but did not intend to be understood as such. In the beginning of the 19th century the innovation of the modern university, founded by the ideas of Wilhelm of Humboldt in Prussia, and the promotion by the government, but as well the dependence from political support, set new conditions for the development of the universities and it made possible the beginning of an official historiography of university history. Until 1900 the discussion on the liberty of science and universities and their newly defined importance for the beginning nation-states as well as on the growing difference between historical and philosophical disciplines on the one hand, natural-scientific and even technical disciplines on the other hand became more and more important. Historiography of universities and their history was created, but from the beginning on focused on controversies. Rectorate-speeches became a new genus of historiography of universities and it was of great influence. It developed a comparative, modern approach on the history of universities, but was in the same time exploited as political argument in national politics and international conflicts and wartimes. Finally, the end of free discussion and academic discourse on the historiography of universities came with the beginning of the Nazi period in Germany. Modern learned and academic historiography of the history of universities from the middle of the 20th century onwards has got the chance to reestablish discussions on the history of universities from the Middle Ages to contemporary times and even in an international context, but did not yet find to a specific genus of historiography. Resumen: No hay tradición ni género de la historiografía dentro de la escritura de la historia de la universidad en la investigación histórica alemana. En la Edad Media no hay ninguna historiografía de los colegios institucionalizados ni de las primeras universidades. Esto comenzó en época moderna. Desde el principio en el siglo XVII en adelante, la historiografía de la universidad en su mayoría significaba relatar la historia de la propia universidad para subrayar su brillantez académica y, sobre todo, su valor político para el gobierno. A finales del siglo XVIII la influencia de la Ilustración cambia la argumentación y la diferencia impuesta políticamente entre academias y universidades hizo la “identidad” de las universidades más evidente. Universidades que, a partir de entonces, no se entienden a sí mismas ya primariamente como instrumentos de gobierno, sino como lugares de libertad científica y, en parte, de independencia legal. Hubo conflictos y disputas sobre si las universidades debían ayudar a crear los oficiales educados para el gobierno o abrir un campo independiente para la “libertad de la ciencia”. Todas las partes en conflicto publicaron sus declaraciones, que pueden ser utilizados por la historiografía de las universidades hoy en día, pero que no tienen la intención de entenderse como tal. En el comienzo del siglo XIX la innovación de la universidad moderna, fundada por las ideas de Guillermo de Humboldt en Prusia, y la promoción por parte del gobierno, pero a su vez, la dependencia del apoyo político, establecen nuevas condiciones para el desarrollo de las universidades que hicieron posible el inicio de una historiografía oficial de la historia de la universidad. Hasta 1900, el debate sobre la libertad de la ciencia y de las universidades y su importancia recientemente definida para el inicio de los Estados-nación, así como la creciente diferencia entre disciplinas históricas y filosóficas por un lado y científico-naturales e incluso técnicas por otro se volvió cada vez más importante. Una historia e historiografía de las universidades que desde el principio se ha centrado en las controversias. Los discursos de los rectores pasaron a ser un nuevo género muy influyente de la historiografía de las universidades. Se desarrolló un enfoque comparativo, versión moderna de la historia de las universidades, pero que fue al mismo tiempo explotado como argumento político en la política nacional y en los conflictos y tiempos de guerras internacionales. Por último, el final de la discusión libre y del discurso académico sobre la historiografía de las universidades vino con el inicio del período Nazi en Alemania. La historiografía sobre las universidades de mediados del siglo 20 en adelante ha tenido la oportunidad de restablecer los debates sobre la historia de las universidades de la Edad Media hasta la época contemporánea e incluso en el contexto internacional, pero aún no ha encontrado un género historiográfico específico.Keywords: scholarship and politics, confessionalization of universities, conflict of disciplines, utility of scholarship, primacy of disciplines.Palabras clave: universidad y políticas, confesionalidad de las universidades, conflicto de disciplinas, utilidad de la universidad, primacía de disciplinas.
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30

McNair, Brian. "Vote!" M/C Journal 10, no. 6 (April 1, 2008). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2714.

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The twentieth was, from one perspective, the democratic century — a span of one hundred years which began with no fully functioning democracies in existence anywhere on the planet (if one defines democracy as a political system in which there is both universal suffrage and competitive elections), and ended with 120 countries out of 192 classified by the Freedom House think tank as ‘democratic’. There are of course still many societies where democracy is denied or effectively neutered — the remaining outposts of state socialism, such as China, Cuba, and North Korea; most if not all of the Islamic countries; exceptional states such as Singapore, unapologetically capitalist in its economic system but resolutely authoritarian in its political culture. Many self-proclaimed democracies, including those of the UK, Australia and the US, are procedurally or conceptually flawed. Countries emerging out of authoritarian systems and now in a state of democratic transition, such as Russia and the former Soviet republics, are immersed in constant, sometimes violent struggle between reformers and reactionaries. Russia’s recent parliamentary elections were accompanied by the intimidation of parties and politicians who opposed Vladimir Putin’s increasingly populist and authoritarian approach to leadership. The same Freedom House report which describes the rise of democracy in the twentieth century acknowledges that many self-styled democracies are, at best, only ‘partly free’ in their political cultures (for detailed figures on the rise of global democracy, see the Freedom House website Democracy’s Century). Let’s not for a moment downplay these important qualifications to what can nonetheless be fairly characterised as a century-long expansion and globalisation of democracy, and the acceptance of popular sovereignty, expressed through voting for the party or candidate of one’s choice, as a universally recognised human right. That such a process has occurred, and continues in these early years of the twenty-first century, is irrefutable. In the Gaza strip, Hamas appeals to the legitimacy of a democratic election victory in its campaign to be recognised as the voice of the Palestinian people. However one judges the messianic tendencies and Islamist ideology of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it must be acknowledged that the Iranian people elected him, and that they have the power to throw him out of government next time they vote. That was never true of the Shah. The democratic resurgence in Latin America, taking in Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia among others has been a much-noted feature of international politics in recent times (Alves), presenting a welcome contrast to the dictatorships and death squads of the 1980s, even as it creates some uncomfortable dilemmas for the Bush administration (which must champion democratic government at the same time as it resents some of the choices people may make when they have the opportunity to vote). Since 9/11 a kind of democracy has expanded even to Afghanistan and Iraq, albeit at the point of a gun, and with no guarantees of survival beyond the end of military occupation by the US and its coalition allies. As this essay was being written, Pakistan’s state of emergency was ending and democratic elections scheduled, albeit in the shadow cast by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007. Democracy, then — imperfect and limited as it can be; grudgingly delivered though it is by political elites in many countries, and subject to attack and roll back at any time — has become a global universal to which all claim allegiance, or at least pay lip service. The scale of this transformation, which has occurred in little more than one quarter of the time elapsed since the Putney debates of 1647 and the English revolution first established the principle of the sovereignty of parliament, is truly remarkable. (Tristram Hunt quotes lawyer Geoffrey Robertson in the Guardian to the effect that the Putney debates, staged in St Mary’s church in south-west London towards the end of the English civil war, launched “the idea that government requires the consent of freely and fairly elected representatives of all adult citizens irrespective of class or caste or status or wealth” – “A Jewel of Democracy”, Guardian, 26 Oct. 2007) Can it be true that less than one hundred years ago, in even the most advanced capitalist societies, 50 per cent of the people — women — did not have the right to vote? Or that black populations, indigenous or migrant, in countries such as the United States and Australia were deprived of basic citizenship rights until the 1960s and even later? Will future generations wonder how on earth it could have been that the vast majority of the people of South Africa were unable to vote until 1994, and that they were routinely imprisoned, tortured and killed when they demanded basic democratic rights? Or will they shrug and take it for granted, as so many of us who live in settled democracies already do? (In so far as ‘we’ includes the community of media and cultural studies scholars, I would argue that where there is reluctance to concede the scale and significance of democratic change, this arises out of continuing ambivalence about what ‘democracy’ means, a continuing suspicion of globalisation (in particular the globalisation of democratic political culture, still associated in some quarters with ‘the west’), and of the notion of ‘progress’ with which democracy is routinely associated. The intellectual roots of that ambivalence were various. Marxist-leninist inspired authoritarianism gripped much of the world until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war. Until that moment, it was still possible for many marxians in the scholarly community to view the idea of democracy with disdain — if not quite a dirty word, then a deeply flawed, highly loaded concept which masked and preserved underlying social inequalities more than it helped resolve them. Until 1989 or thereabouts, it was possible for ‘bourgeois democracy’ to be regarded as just one kind of democratic polity by the liberal and anti-capitalist left, which often regarded the ‘proletarian’ or ‘people’s’ democracy prevailing in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba or Vietnam as legitimate alternatives to the emerging capitalist norm of one person, one vote, for constituent assemblies which had real power and accountability. In terms not very different from those used by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, belief in the value of democracy was conceived by this materialist school as a kind of false consciousness. It still is, by Noam Chomsky and others who continue to view democracy as a ‘necessary illusion’ (1989) without which capitalism could not be reproduced. From these perspectives voting gave, and gives us merely the illusion of agency and power in societies where capital rules as it always did. For democracy read ‘the manufacture of consent’; its expansion read not as progressive social evolution, but the universalisation of the myth of popular sovereignty, mobilised and utilised by the media-industrial-military complex to maintain its grip.) There are those who dispute this reading of events. In the 1960s, Habermas’s hugely influential Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere critiqued the manner in which democracy, and the public sphere underpinning it, had been degraded by public relations, advertising, and the power of private interests. In the period since, critical scholarly research and writing on political culture has been dominated by the Habermasian discourse of democratic decline, and the pervasive pessimism of those who see democracy, and the media culture which supports it, as fatally flawed, corrupted by commercialisation and under constant threat. Those, myself included, who challenged that view with a more positive reading of the trends (McNair, Journalism and Democracy; Cultural Chaos) have been denounced as naïve optimists, panglossian, utopian and even, in my own case, a ‘neo-liberal apologist’. (See an unpublished paper by David Miller, “System Failure: It’s Not Just the Media, It’s the Whole Bloody System”, delivered at Goldsmith’s College in 2003.) Engaging as they have been, I venture to suggest that these are the discourses and debates of an era now passing into history. Not only is it increasingly obvious that democracy is expanding globally into places where it never previously reached; it is also extending inwards, within nation states, driven by demands for greater local autonomy. In the United Kingdom, for example, the citizen is now able to vote not just in Westminster parliamentary elections (which determine the political direction of the UK government), but for European elections, local elections, and elections for devolved assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The people of London can vote for their mayor. There would by now have been devolved assemblies in the regions of England, too, had the people of the North East not voted against it in a November 2004 referendum. Notwithstanding that result, which surprised many in the New Labour government who held it as axiomatic that the more democracy there was, the better for all of us, the importance of enhancing and expanding democratic institutions, of allowing people to vote more often (and also in more efficient ways — many of these expansions of democracy have been tied to the introduction of systems of proportional representation) has become consensual, from the Mid West of America to the Middle East. The Democratic Paradox And yet, as the wave of democratic transformation has rolled on through the late twentieth and into the early twenty first century it is notable that, in many of the oldest liberal democracies at least, fewer people have been voting. In the UK, for example, in the period between 1945 and 2001, turnout at general elections never fell below 70 per cent. In 1992, the last general election won by the Conservatives before the rise of Tony Blair and New Labour, turnout was 78 per cent, roughly where it had been in the 1950s. In 2001, however, as Blair’s government sought re-election, turnout fell to an historic low for the UK of 59.4 per cent, and rose only marginally to 61.4 per cent in the most recent general election of 2005. In the US presidential elections of 1996 and 2000 turnouts were at historic lows of 47.2 and 49.3 per cent respectively, rising just above 50 per cent again in 2004 (figures by International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance). At local level things are even worse. In only the second election for a devolved parliament in Scotland (2003) turnout was a mere 48.5 per cent, rising to 50.5 in 2007. These trends are not universal. In countries with compulsory voting, they mean very little — in Australia, where voting in parliamentary elections is compulsory, turnout averages in the 90s per cent. In France, while turnouts for parliamentary elections show a similar downward trend to the UK and the UK, presidential contests achieve turnouts of 80-plus per cent. In the UK and US, as noted, the most recent elections show modest growth in turnout from those historic lows of the late 1990s and early Noughties. There has grown, nonetheless, the perception, commonplace amongst academic commentators as well as journalists and politicians themselves, that we are living through a ‘crisis’ of democratic participation, a dangerous decline in the tendency to vote in elections which undermines the legitimacy of democracy itself. In communication scholarship a significant body of research and publication has developed around this theme, from Blumler and Gurevitch’s Crisis of Public Communication (1996), through Barnett and Gaber’s Westminster Tales (2000), to more recent studies such as Lewis et al.’s Citizens or Consumers (2005). All presume a problem of some kind with the practice of democracy and the “old fashioned ritual” of voting, as Lewis et al. describe it (2). Most link alleged inadequacies in the performance of the political media to what is interpreted as popular apathy (or antipathy) towards democracy. The media are blamed for the lack of public engagement with democratic politics which declining turnouts are argued to signal. Political journalists are said to be too aggressive and hyper-adversarial (Lloyd), behaving like the “feral beast” spoken of by Tony Blair in his 2007 farewell speech to the British people as prime minister. They are corrosively cynical and a “disaster for democracy”, as Steven Barnett and others argued in the first years of the twenty first century. They are not aggressive or adversarial enough, as the propaganda modellists allege, citing what they interpret as supine media coverage of Coalition policy in Iraq. The media put people off, rather than turn them on to democracy by being, variously, too nice or too nasty to politicians. What then, is the solution to the apparent paradox represented by the fact that there is more democracy, but less voting in elections than ever before; and that after centuries of popular struggle democratic assemblies proliferate, but in some countries barely half of the eligible voters can be bothered to participate? And what role have the media played in this unexpected phenomenon? If the scholarly community has been largely critical on this question, and pessimistic in its analyses of the role of the media, it has become increasingly clear that the one arena where people do vote more than ever before is that presented by the media, and entertainment media in particular. There has been, since the appearance of Big Brother and the subsequent explosion of competitive reality TV formats across the world, evidence of a huge popular appetite for voting on such matters as which amateur contestant on Pop Idol, or X Factor, or Fame Academy, or Operatunity goes on to have a chance of a professional career, a shot at the big time. Millions of viewers of the most popular reality TV strands queue up to register their votes on premium phone lines, the revenue from which makes up a substantial and growing proportion of the income of commercial TV companies. This explosion of voting behaviour has been made possible by the technology-driven emergence of new forms of participatory, interactive, digitised media channels which allow millions to believe that they can have an impact on the outcome of what are, at essence, game and talent shows. At the height of anxiety around the ‘crisis of democratic participation’ in the UK, observers noted that nearly 6.5 million people had voted in the Big Brother UK final in 2004. More than eight million voted during the 2004 run of the BBC’s Fame Academy series. While these numbers do not, contrary to popular belief, exceed the numbers of British citizens who vote in a general election (27.2 million in 2005), they do indicate an enthusiasm for voting which seems to contradict declining rates of democratic participation. People who will never get out and vote for their local councillor often appear more than willing to pick up the telephone or the laptop and cast a vote for their favoured reality TV contestant, even if it costs them money. It would be absurd to suggest that voting for a contestant on Big Brother is directly comparable to the act of choosing a government or a president. The latter is recognised as an expression of citizenship, with potentially significant consequences for the lives of individuals within their society. Voting on Big Brother, on the other hand, is unmistakeably entertainment, game-playing, a relatively risk-free exercise of choice — a bit of harmless fun, fuelled by office chat and relentless tabloid coverage of the contestants’ strengths and weaknesses. There is no evidence that readiness to participate in a telephone or online vote for entertainment TV translates into active citizenship, where ‘active’ means casting a vote in an election. The lesson delivered by the success of participatory media in recent years, however — first reality TV, and latterly a proliferation of online formats which encourage user participation and voting for one thing or another — is that people will vote, when they are able and motivated to do so. Voting is popular, in short, and never more so, irrespective of the level of popular participation recorded in recent elections. And if they will vote in their millions for a contestant on X Factor, or participate in competitions to determine the best movies or books on Facebook, they can presumably be persuaded to do so when an election for parliament comes around. This fact has been recognised by both media producers and politicians, and reflected in attempts to adapt the evermore sophisticated and efficient tools of participatory media to the democratic process, to engage media audiences as citizens by offering the kinds of voting opportunities in political debates, including election processes, which entertainment media have now made routinely available. ITV’s Vote for Me strand, broadcast in the run-up to the UK general election of 2005, used reality TV techniques to select a candidate who would actually take part in the forthcoming poll. The programme was broadcast in a late night, low audience slot, and failed to generate much interest, but it signalled a desire by media producers to harness the appeal of participatory media in a way which could directly impact on levels of democratic engagement. The honourable failure of Vote for Me (produced by the same team which made the much more successful live debate shows featuring prime minister Tony Blair — Ask Tony Blair, Ask the Prime Minister) might be viewed as evidence that readiness to vote in the context of a TV game show does not translate directly into voting for parties and politicians, and that the problem in this respect — the crisis of democratic participation, such that it exists — is located elsewhere. People can vote in democratic elections, but choose not to, perhaps because they feel that the act is meaningless (because parties are ideologically too similar), or ineffectual (because they see no impact of voting in their daily lives or in the state of the country), or irrelevant to their personal priorities and life styles. Voting rates have increased in the US and the UK since September 11 2001, suggesting perhaps that when the political stakes are raised, and the question of who is in government seems to matter more than it did, people act accordingly. Meantime, media producers continue to make money by developing formats and channels on the assumption that audiences wish to participate, to interact, and to vote. Whether this form of participatory media consumption for the purposes of play can be translated into enhanced levels of active citizenship, and whether the media can play a significant contributory role in that process, remains to be seen. References Alves, R.C. “From Lapdog to Watchdog: The Role of the Press in Latin America’s Democratisation.” In H. de Burgh, ed., Making Journalists. London: Routledge, 2005. 181-202. Anderson, P.J., and G. Ward (eds.). The Future of Journalism in the Advanced Democracies. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007. Barnett, S. “The Age of Contempt.” Guardian 28 October 2002. http://politics.guardian.co.uk/media/comment/0,12123,820577,00.html>. Barnett, S., and I. Gaber. Westminster Tales. London: Continuum, 2001. Blumler, J., and M. Gurevitch. The Crisis of Public Communication. London: Routledge, 1996. Habermas, J. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989. Lewis, J., S. Inthorn, and K. Wahl-Jorgensen. Citizens or Consumers? What the Media Tell Us about Political Participation. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 2005. Lloyd, John. What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics. London: Constable, 2004. McNair, B. Journalism and Democracy: A Qualitative Evaluation of the Political Public Sphere. London: Routledge, 2000. ———. Cultural Chaos: News, Journalism and Power in a Globalised World. London: Routledge, 2006. Citation reference for this article MLA Style McNair, Brian. "Vote!." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/01-mcnair.php>. APA Style McNair, B. (Apr. 2008) "Vote!," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/01-mcnair.php>.
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31

McNair, Brian. "Vote!" M/C Journal 11, no. 1 (April 1, 2008). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.21.

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The twentieth was, from one perspective, the democratic century — a span of one hundred years which began with no fully functioning democracies in existence anywhere on the planet (if one defines democracy as a political system in which there is both universal suffrage and competitive elections), and ended with 120 countries out of 192 classified by the Freedom House think tank as ‘democratic’. There are of course still many societies where democracy is denied or effectively neutered — the remaining outposts of state socialism, such as China, Cuba, and North Korea; most if not all of the Islamic countries; exceptional states such as Singapore, unapologetically capitalist in its economic system but resolutely authoritarian in its political culture. Many self-proclaimed democracies, including those of the UK, Australia and the US, are procedurally or conceptually flawed. Countries emerging out of authoritarian systems and now in a state of democratic transition, such as Russia and the former Soviet republics, are immersed in constant, sometimes violent struggle between reformers and reactionaries. Russia’s recent parliamentary elections were accompanied by the intimidation of parties and politicians who opposed Vladimir Putin’s increasingly populist and authoritarian approach to leadership. The same Freedom House report which describes the rise of democracy in the twentieth century acknowledges that many self-styled democracies are, at best, only ‘partly free’ in their political cultures (for detailed figures on the rise of global democracy, see the Freedom House website Democracy’s Century). Let’s not for a moment downplay these important qualifications to what can nonetheless be fairly characterised as a century-long expansion and globalisation of democracy, and the acceptance of popular sovereignty, expressed through voting for the party or candidate of one’s choice, as a universally recognised human right. That such a process has occurred, and continues in these early years of the twenty-first century, is irrefutable. In the Gaza strip, Hamas appeals to the legitimacy of a democratic election victory in its campaign to be recognised as the voice of the Palestinian people. However one judges the messianic tendencies and Islamist ideology of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it must be acknowledged that the Iranian people elected him, and that they have the power to throw him out of government next time they vote. That was never true of the Shah. The democratic resurgence in Latin America, taking in Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia among others has been a much-noted feature of international politics in recent times (Alves), presenting a welcome contrast to the dictatorships and death squads of the 1980s, even as it creates some uncomfortable dilemmas for the Bush administration (which must champion democratic government at the same time as it resents some of the choices people may make when they have the opportunity to vote). Since 9/11 a kind of democracy has expanded even to Afghanistan and Iraq, albeit at the point of a gun, and with no guarantees of survival beyond the end of military occupation by the US and its coalition allies. As this essay was being written, Pakistan’s state of emergency was ending and democratic elections scheduled, albeit in the shadow cast by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007. Democracy, then — imperfect and limited as it can be; grudgingly delivered though it is by political elites in many countries, and subject to attack and roll back at any time — has become a global universal to which all claim allegiance, or at least pay lip service. The scale of this transformation, which has occurred in little more than one quarter of the time elapsed since the Putney debates of 1647 and the English revolution first established the principle of the sovereignty of parliament, is truly remarkable. (Tristram Hunt quotes lawyer Geoffrey Robertson in the Guardian to the effect that the Putney debates, staged in St Mary’s church in south-west London towards the end of the English civil war, launched “the idea that government requires the consent of freely and fairly elected representatives of all adult citizens irrespective of class or caste or status or wealth” – “A Jewel of Democracy”, Guardian, 26 Oct. 2007) Can it be true that less than one hundred years ago, in even the most advanced capitalist societies, 50 per cent of the people — women — did not have the right to vote? Or that black populations, indigenous or migrant, in countries such as the United States and Australia were deprived of basic citizenship rights until the 1960s and even later? Will future generations wonder how on earth it could have been that the vast majority of the people of South Africa were unable to vote until 1994, and that they were routinely imprisoned, tortured and killed when they demanded basic democratic rights? Or will they shrug and take it for granted, as so many of us who live in settled democracies already do? (In so far as ‘we’ includes the community of media and cultural studies scholars, I would argue that where there is reluctance to concede the scale and significance of democratic change, this arises out of continuing ambivalence about what ‘democracy’ means, a continuing suspicion of globalisation (in particular the globalisation of democratic political culture, still associated in some quarters with ‘the west’), and of the notion of ‘progress’ with which democracy is routinely associated. The intellectual roots of that ambivalence were various. Marxist-leninist inspired authoritarianism gripped much of the world until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war. Until that moment, it was still possible for many marxians in the scholarly community to view the idea of democracy with disdain — if not quite a dirty word, then a deeply flawed, highly loaded concept which masked and preserved underlying social inequalities more than it helped resolve them. Until 1989 or thereabouts, it was possible for ‘bourgeois democracy’ to be regarded as just one kind of democratic polity by the liberal and anti-capitalist left, which often regarded the ‘proletarian’ or ‘people’s’ democracy prevailing in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba or Vietnam as legitimate alternatives to the emerging capitalist norm of one person, one vote, for constituent assemblies which had real power and accountability. In terms not very different from those used by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, belief in the value of democracy was conceived by this materialist school as a kind of false consciousness. It still is, by Noam Chomsky and others who continue to view democracy as a ‘necessary illusion’ (1989) without which capitalism could not be reproduced. From these perspectives voting gave, and gives us merely the illusion of agency and power in societies where capital rules as it always did. For democracy read ‘the manufacture of consent’; its expansion read not as progressive social evolution, but the universalisation of the myth of popular sovereignty, mobilised and utilised by the media-industrial-military complex to maintain its grip.) There are those who dispute this reading of events. In the 1960s, Habermas’s hugely influential Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere critiqued the manner in which democracy, and the public sphere underpinning it, had been degraded by public relations, advertising, and the power of private interests. In the period since, critical scholarly research and writing on political culture has been dominated by the Habermasian discourse of democratic decline, and the pervasive pessimism of those who see democracy, and the media culture which supports it, as fatally flawed, corrupted by commercialisation and under constant threat. Those, myself included, who challenged that view with a more positive reading of the trends (McNair, Journalism and Democracy; Cultural Chaos) have been denounced as naïve optimists, panglossian, utopian and even, in my own case, a ‘neo-liberal apologist’. (See an unpublished paper by David Miller, “System Failure: It’s Not Just the Media, It’s the Whole Bloody System”, delivered at Goldsmith’s College in 2003.) Engaging as they have been, I venture to suggest that these are the discourses and debates of an era now passing into history. Not only is it increasingly obvious that democracy is expanding globally into places where it never previously reached; it is also extending inwards, within nation states, driven by demands for greater local autonomy. In the United Kingdom, for example, the citizen is now able to vote not just in Westminster parliamentary elections (which determine the political direction of the UK government), but for European elections, local elections, and elections for devolved assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The people of London can vote for their mayor. There would by now have been devolved assemblies in the regions of England, too, had the people of the North East not voted against it in a November 2004 referendum. Notwithstanding that result, which surprised many in the New Labour government who held it as axiomatic that the more democracy there was, the better for all of us, the importance of enhancing and expanding democratic institutions, of allowing people to vote more often (and also in more efficient ways — many of these expansions of democracy have been tied to the introduction of systems of proportional representation) has become consensual, from the Mid West of America to the Middle East. The Democratic Paradox And yet, as the wave of democratic transformation has rolled on through the late twentieth and into the early twenty first century it is notable that, in many of the oldest liberal democracies at least, fewer people have been voting. In the UK, for example, in the period between 1945 and 2001, turnout at general elections never fell below 70 per cent. In 1992, the last general election won by the Conservatives before the rise of Tony Blair and New Labour, turnout was 78 per cent, roughly where it had been in the 1950s. In 2001, however, as Blair’s government sought re-election, turnout fell to an historic low for the UK of 59.4 per cent, and rose only marginally to 61.4 per cent in the most recent general election of 2005. In the US presidential elections of 1996 and 2000 turnouts were at historic lows of 47.2 and 49.3 per cent respectively, rising just above 50 per cent again in 2004 (figures by International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance). At local level things are even worse. In only the second election for a devolved parliament in Scotland (2003) turnout was a mere 48.5 per cent, rising to 50.5 in 2007. These trends are not universal. In countries with compulsory voting, they mean very little — in Australia, where voting in parliamentary elections is compulsory, turnout averages in the 90s per cent. In France, while turnouts for parliamentary elections show a similar downward trend to the UK and the UK, presidential contests achieve turnouts of 80-plus per cent. In the UK and US, as noted, the most recent elections show modest growth in turnout from those historic lows of the late 1990s and early Noughties. There has grown, nonetheless, the perception, commonplace amongst academic commentators as well as journalists and politicians themselves, that we are living through a ‘crisis’ of democratic participation, a dangerous decline in the tendency to vote in elections which undermines the legitimacy of democracy itself. In communication scholarship a significant body of research and publication has developed around this theme, from Blumler and Gurevitch’s Crisis of Public Communication (1996), through Barnett and Gaber’s Westminster Tales (2000), to more recent studies such as Lewis et al.’s Citizens or Consumers (2005). All presume a problem of some kind with the practice of democracy and the “old fashioned ritual” of voting, as Lewis et al. describe it (2). Most link alleged inadequacies in the performance of the political media to what is interpreted as popular apathy (or antipathy) towards democracy. The media are blamed for the lack of public engagement with democratic politics which declining turnouts are argued to signal. Political journalists are said to be too aggressive and hyper-adversarial (Lloyd), behaving like the “feral beast” spoken of by Tony Blair in his 2007 farewell speech to the British people as prime minister. They are corrosively cynical and a “disaster for democracy”, as Steven Barnett and others argued in the first years of the twenty first century. They are not aggressive or adversarial enough, as the propaganda modellists allege, citing what they interpret as supine media coverage of Coalition policy in Iraq. The media put people off, rather than turn them on to democracy by being, variously, too nice or too nasty to politicians. What then, is the solution to the apparent paradox represented by the fact that there is more democracy, but less voting in elections than ever before; and that after centuries of popular struggle democratic assemblies proliferate, but in some countries barely half of the eligible voters can be bothered to participate? And what role have the media played in this unexpected phenomenon? If the scholarly community has been largely critical on this question, and pessimistic in its analyses of the role of the media, it has become increasingly clear that the one arena where people do vote more than ever before is that presented by the media, and entertainment media in particular. There has been, since the appearance of Big Brother and the subsequent explosion of competitive reality TV formats across the world, evidence of a huge popular appetite for voting on such matters as which amateur contestant on Pop Idol, or X Factor, or Fame Academy, or Operatunity goes on to have a chance of a professional career, a shot at the big time. Millions of viewers of the most popular reality TV strands queue up to register their votes on premium phone lines, the revenue from which makes up a substantial and growing proportion of the income of commercial TV companies. This explosion of voting behaviour has been made possible by the technology-driven emergence of new forms of participatory, interactive, digitised media channels which allow millions to believe that they can have an impact on the outcome of what are, at essence, game and talent shows. At the height of anxiety around the ‘crisis of democratic participation’ in the UK, observers noted that nearly 6.5 million people had voted in the Big Brother UK final in 2004. More than eight million voted during the 2004 run of the BBC’s Fame Academy series. While these numbers do not, contrary to popular belief, exceed the numbers of British citizens who vote in a general election (27.2 million in 2005), they do indicate an enthusiasm for voting which seems to contradict declining rates of democratic participation. People who will never get out and vote for their local councillor often appear more than willing to pick up the telephone or the laptop and cast a vote for their favoured reality TV contestant, even if it costs them money. It would be absurd to suggest that voting for a contestant on Big Brother is directly comparable to the act of choosing a government or a president. The latter is recognised as an expression of citizenship, with potentially significant consequences for the lives of individuals within their society. Voting on Big Brother, on the other hand, is unmistakeably entertainment, game-playing, a relatively risk-free exercise of choice — a bit of harmless fun, fuelled by office chat and relentless tabloid coverage of the contestants’ strengths and weaknesses. There is no evidence that readiness to participate in a telephone or online vote for entertainment TV translates into active citizenship, where ‘active’ means casting a vote in an election. The lesson delivered by the success of participatory media in recent years, however — first reality TV, and latterly a proliferation of online formats which encourage user participation and voting for one thing or another — is that people will vote, when they are able and motivated to do so. Voting is popular, in short, and never more so, irrespective of the level of popular participation recorded in recent elections. And if they will vote in their millions for a contestant on X Factor, or participate in competitions to determine the best movies or books on Facebook, they can presumably be persuaded to do so when an election for parliament comes around. This fact has been recognised by both media producers and politicians, and reflected in attempts to adapt the evermore sophisticated and efficient tools of participatory media to the democratic process, to engage media audiences as citizens by offering the kinds of voting opportunities in political debates, including election processes, which entertainment media have now made routinely available. ITV’s Vote for Me strand, broadcast in the run-up to the UK general election of 2005, used reality TV techniques to select a candidate who would actually take part in the forthcoming poll. The programme was broadcast in a late night, low audience slot, and failed to generate much interest, but it signalled a desire by media producers to harness the appeal of participatory media in a way which could directly impact on levels of democratic engagement. The honourable failure of Vote for Me (produced by the same team which made the much more successful live debate shows featuring prime minister Tony Blair — Ask Tony Blair, Ask the Prime Minister) might be viewed as evidence that readiness to vote in the context of a TV game show does not translate directly into voting for parties and politicians, and that the problem in this respect — the crisis of democratic participation, such that it exists — is located elsewhere. People can vote in democratic elections, but choose not to, perhaps because they feel that the act is meaningless (because parties are ideologically too similar), or ineffectual (because they see no impact of voting in their daily lives or in the state of the country), or irrelevant to their personal priorities and life styles. Voting rates have increased in the US and the UK since September 11 2001, suggesting perhaps that when the political stakes are raised, and the question of who is in government seems to matter more than it did, people act accordingly. Meantime, media producers continue to make money by developing formats and channels on the assumption that audiences wish to participate, to interact, and to vote. Whether this form of participatory media consumption for the purposes of play can be translated into enhanced levels of active citizenship, and whether the media can play a significant contributory role in that process, remains to be seen. References Alves, R.C. “From Lapdog to Watchdog: The Role of the Press in Latin America’s Democratisation.” In H. de Burgh, ed., Making Journalists. London: Routledge, 2005. 181-202. Anderson, P.J., and G. Ward (eds.). The Future of Journalism in the Advanced Democracies. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007. Barnett, S. “The Age of Contempt.” Guardian 28 October 2002. < http://politics.guardian.co.uk/media/comment/0,12123,820577,00.html >. Barnett, S., and I. Gaber. Westminster Tales. London: Continuum, 2001. Blumler, J., and M. Gurevitch. The Crisis of Public Communication. London: Routledge, 1996. Habermas, J. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989. Lewis, J., S. Inthorn, and K. Wahl-Jorgensen. Citizens or Consumers? What the Media Tell Us about Political Participation. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 2005. Lloyd, John. What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics. London: Constable, 2004. McNair, B. Journalism and Democracy: A Qualitative Evaluation of the Political Public Sphere. London: Routledge, 2000. ———. Cultural Chaos: News, Journalism and Power in a Globalised World. London: Routledge, 2006.
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32

Charles, Sally, and Hilary Nicoll. "Aberdeen, City of Culture?" M/C Journal 25, no. 3 (June 27, 2022). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2903.

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Introduction This article explores the phenomenon of the Creative City in the context of Aberdeen, Scotland’s third-largest city. The common perception of Aberdeen is likely to revolve around its status, for the last 50 years, as Europe’s Oil & Gas Capital. However, for more than a decade Aberdeen’s city planners have sought to incorporate creativity and culture in their placemaking. The most visible expression of this was the unsuccessful 2013 bid to become the UK City of Culture 2017 (CoC), which was referred to as a “reality check” by Marie Boulton (BBC), the councillor charged with the culture portfolio. This article reviews and appraises subsequent policies and actions. It looks at Aberdeen’s history and its current Cultural Strategy and how events have supported or inhibited the reimagining of Aberdeen as a Creative and Cultural City. Landry’s “Lineages of the Creative City” tracks the rise in interest around culture and creative sectors and highlights that there is more to the creative city than economic growth, positing that a creative city is a holistic environment in which “ordinary people can make the extra-ordinary happen” (2). Comunian develops Landry’s concept of hard (infrastructural) assets and soft (people and activity) assets by introducing Complexity Theory to examine the interactions between the two. Comunian argues that a city should be understood as a complex adaptive system (CAS) and that the interconnectivity of consumption and production, micro and macro, and networks of actors must be incorporated into policy thinking. Creating physical assets without regard to what happens in and around them does not build a creative city. Aberdeen: Context and History Important when considering Aberdeen is its remoteness: 66 miles north of its closest city neighbour Dundee, 90 miles north of Edinburgh and 125 miles north-east of Glasgow. For Aberdonians travel is a necessity to connect with other cultural centres whether in Scotland, the UK, Europe, or further afield, making Aberdeen’s nearly 900-year-old port a key asset. Sitting at the mouth of the River Dee, which marks Aberdeen’s southern boundary, this key transport hub has long been central to Aberdeen’s culture giving rise to two of the oldest established businesses in the UK: the Port of Aberdeen (1136) and the Shore Porter’s Society (1498). Fishing and trade with Europe thrived and connections with the continent led to the establishment of Aberdeen’s first university: King’s College (Scotland’s third and the UK’s fifth) in 1495. A second, Marischal College, was established in 1593, joining forces with King’s in 1860 to become the University of Aberdeen. The building created in 1837 to house Marischal College is the second-largest granite building in the world (VisitAberdeenshire, Marischal) and now home to Aberdeen City Council (ACC). Robert Gordon University (RGU), awarded university status in 1992, grew out of an institution established in 1729 (RGU, Our History); this period marked the dawning of the Scottish Enlightenment when Aberdeen’s Wise Club were key to an intellectual discourse that changed western thinking (RSA). Gray’s School of Art, now part of RGU, was established in 1885, at the same time as Aberdeen Art Gallery which holds a collection of national significance (ACC, Art Gallery). Aberdeen’s northern boundary is marked by its second river, the River Don, which has also contributed to the city’s history, economics, and culture. For centuries, paper and woollen mills, including the world-famous Crombie, thrived on its banks and textile production was the city’s largest employer, with one mill employing 3,000 staff (P&J, Broadford). While the city and surrounds have been home to notable creatives, including writers Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Lord Byron; musicians Annie Lennox, Dame Evelyn Glennie, and Emeli Sandé; fashion designer Bill Gibb and dancer Michael Clark, it has struggled to attract and retain creative talent, and there is a familiar exodus of art school graduates to the larger and more accepted creative cities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and London. In 2013, at the time of the CoC bid, ACC recognised that creative industries graduates leaving the city was “a serious issue” (ACC, Cultural Mapping 1). The City of Culture Bid This recognition came at a time when ACC acknowledged that Aberdeen, with already low unemployment, required an influx of workforce. An ACC document (Cultural Mapping) cites Richard Florida’s proposal that a strong cultural offer attracts skilled workers to a city, adding that they “look for a lively cultural life in their choice of location” (7) and quoting an oil executive: “our poor city centre is often cited as a major obstacle in attracting people” (7). Changing the image of the city to attract new residents appears to have been a key motivation for the CoC bid. The CoC assessor noted this in their review of the bid, citing a report that 120,000 recruits were required in the city and agreeing that Aberdeen needed to “change perceptions of the city to retain and attract talent” (Regeneris 1). Aberdeen’s CoC bid was rejected at the first shortlisting stage, with feedback that the artistic vision “lacked depth” and “that cultural activity in the city was weaker than in several other bidding areas” (Regeneris 3). In an exploration of the bidding process, McGillivray and Turner highlight two factors which link to other concerns and feedback about the bid. Firstly, they compare Aberdeen’s choice of a Bid Manager from the business community with Paisley’s choice of one from their local arts sector in their bid for CoC 2021, which was successful in being shortlisted, highlighting different motivators behind the bids. Secondly, Aberdeen secured a bid team member from “Pafos’s bid to be 2017 European Capital of Culture (ECC), who subsequently played an important role” for Kalamata’s 2021 ECC bid (41), showing Aberdeen’s reluctance to develop local talent. A Decade of Investment ACC responded to the “reality check” with a series of investments in the hard assets of the city. Major refurbishment of two key buildings, the Music Hall and the Art Gallery, caused them both to be closed for several years, significantly diminishing the cultural offer in the city. The Music Hall re-opened in 2018 (Creative Scotland) and the Art Gallery in 2019 (McLean). In 2021, the extended and updated Art Gallery was named “Scotland’s building of the year” by the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland (RIAS) (Museums Association). Concurrent with this was the development of “Europe’s largest new events complex, TECA [now P&J live] part financed through a £370 million stock market bond issue” (InvestAberdeen). Another cultural asset of the city which has been undergoing a facelift since 2019 is Union Terrace Gardens (UTG), the green heart of the city centre, gifted to the public in 1877. The development of this asset has had a chequered history. In 2008 it had been awarded “funding from Aberdeen Council (£3 million), the Scottish Arts Council (£4.3M) and Scottish Enterprise (£2 million)” (Aberdeenvoice) to realise a new multi-disciplinary contemporary art centre to be called ‘Northern Light’ and housed in a purpose-designed building (Brizac Gonzalez). The project, led by Peacock Visual arts, a printmaking centre of excellence and gallery founded in 1974, had secured planning permission. It would host Peacock Visual Arts, City Moves dance company, and the ACC arts development team. It echoed similar cultural partnership approaches, such as Dundee Contemporary Arts, although notably without involvement from the universities. Three months later, a counterbid to radically re-think UTG as a vast new city square was proposed by oil tycoon Sir Ian Wood, who backed the proposal with £50 million of his own funds, requiring matching finance by the city and ownership of the Gardens passing to private hands. Resistance to these plans came from ‘Friends of UTG’, and a public consultation was held. ACC voted to adopt Wood’s plans and drop those of Peacock, but a change of administration in the local authority overturned Wood’s plans in August 2012. A significant portion of the funding granted to the Northern Lights project was consumed in the heated public debate and the remainder was lost to the city, as was the Wood money, providing a highly charged backdrop to the CoC bid and an unfortunate divide created between the business and culture sectors that is arguably still discernible in the city today. According to the Aberdeen & Grampian Chamber of Commerce (AGCC) 2022 Investment Tracker, the nearly complete UTG transformation has cost £28.3m. The AGCC trackers since 2016 provide a useful reference for a wider view of investment in the region over this period. During this period, ACC commissioned two festivals: Spectra (ACC, Culture Programme 5), a festival of light curated by a Manchester-based organisation, and NuArt (VisitAberdeenshire, Nuart), a street-art festival curated by a Stavanger-based team. Both festivals deliver large-scale public spectacles but have little impact on the development of the cultural sector in the city. The drivers of footfall, income generation, and tourism are key motivators for these festivals, supporting a prevailing narrative of cultural consumption over cultural production in the city, despite Regeneris’s concerns about “importing of cultural activity, which might not leave behind a cultural sector” (1) and ACC’s own published concerns (ACC, Cultural Mapping). It is important to note that in 2014 the oil and gas industry that brought prosperity to Aberdeen was severely impacted upon by a drop in price and revenue. Many jobs were lost, people left the city, and housing prices, previously inflated, fell dramatically. The attention of the authorities turned to economic regeneration of the city and in 2015, the Aberdeen City Region Deal (UK Gov), bringing £250m to the region, (REF) was signed between the UK Government, Scottish Government, ACC, Aberdeenshire Council, and Opportunity North East (ONE). ONE “is the private sector leader and catalyst for economic diversification in northeast Scotland” with board members from industry, enterprise, AGCC, the councils, the universities, the harbour, and NHS. ONE focuses on five ‘pillars’: Digital Technology, Energy, Life Sciences, Tourism and Food, and Drink & Agriculture. A Decade of Creativity and Cultural Development Aberdeen’s ambitious cultural capital infrastructure spending of the last decade has seen the creation or refurbishment of significant hard assets in the city. The development of people (Cohendet et al.), the soft assets that Landry and Comunian agree are essential to the complex system that is a Creative City, has also seen development over this time. In 2014, RGU commissioned a review of Creative Industries in the North East of Scotland. The report notes that: the cultural sector in the region is strong at the grass roots end, but less so the higher up the scale it goes. There is no producing theatre, and no signature events or assets, although the revitalised art gallery might provide an opportunity to address this. (Ekos 2) This was followed by an international conference at which other energy cities (Calgary, Houston, Perth, and Oslo) presented their culture strategies, providing useful comparators for Aberdeen and a second RGU report (RGU, Regenerating). A third report, (RGU, New North), set out a vision for the region’s cultural future. The reports recommend strategy, leadership, and vision in the development of the cultural and creative soft assets of the region and the need to create conditions for graduate and practitioner retention. Also in 2014, RGU initiated the Look Again Festival of Art and Design, an annual festival to address a gap in the city festival roster and meet a need arising from the closure of both Art Gallery and Music Hall for refurbishment. The first festival took place in 2015 with a weekend-long public event showcasing a series of thought-provoking installations and events which demonstrated a clear appetite amongst the public and partner organisations for more activity of this type. Between 2015 and 2019, the festivals grew from strength to strength and increased in size and ambition, “carving out a new creative community in Aberdeen” (Williams). The 2019 festival involved 119 creatives, the majority from the region, and created 62 paid opportunities. Look Again expanded and became a constant presence and vehicle for sectoral and skills development, supporting students, graduates, volunteers, and new collectives, focussing on social capital and the intangible creative community assets in the city. Creative practitioners were supported with a series of programmes such as ‘Cultivate’ (2018), funded by Creative Scotland, that provided mentoring to strengthen business sustainability and networking events to improve connectivity in the sector. Cultivate also provided an opportunity to undertake further research, and a survey of over 100 small and micro creative businesses presented a view of a tenacious sector, committed to staying in the region but lacking structured and tailored support. The project report noted consistent messages about the need for “a louder voice for the sector” and concluded that further work was needed to better profile, support, and connect the sector (Cultivate 15). Comunian’s work supports this call to give greater consideration to the interplay of the agents in the creation of a strong creative city. In 2019, Look Again’s evolving role in creative sector skills development was recognised when they became part of Gray’s School of Art. A partnership quickly formed with the newly created Entrepreneurship & Innovation Group (EIG), a team formed within RGU to drive entrepreneurial thinking across all schools of the university. Together, Look Again and EIG ran a Creative Accelerator which became a prototype for a validated Creative Entrepreneurship post-graduate short-course that has supported around 120 creative graduates and practitioners with tailored business skills, contextual thinking, and extended peer networks. Meanwhile, another Look Again collaboration with the newly re-opened Art Gallery provided pop-up design events that many of these small businesses took part in, connecting them with public-facing retail opportunities and, for some, acquisitions for the Gallery’s collection. Culture Aberdeen During this time and after a period of public consultation, a new collaborative group, ‘Culture Aberdeen’, emerged. Membership of the group includes many regional cultural and arts organisations including ACC, both universities, and Aberdeen Civic Forum, which seeks “to bring the voice and views of all communities to every possible level of decision making”. The group subsequently published Culture Aberdeen: A Culture Strategy for the City of Aberdeen 2018-2028, which was endorsed by ACC in their first Cultural Investment Impact Report. The strategy sets out a series of cultural ambitions including a bid to become a UNESCO Creative City, establishing an Aberdeen Biennale, and becoming a national centre of excellence for an (unspecified) artform. This collaboration brings a uniting vision to Aberdeen’s creative activity and places of culture and presents a more compelling identity as a creative city. It also begins to map to Comunian’s concept of CAS and establish a framework for realising the potential of hard assets by strategically envisioning and leading the agents, activities, and development of the city’s creative sector. Challenges for Delivery of the Strategy In delivering a strategy based on collaborative efforts, it is essential to have shared goals and strong governance “based on characteristics such as trust, shared values, implicit standards, collaboration, and consultation” (Butcher et al. 77). Situations like Aberdeen’s tentative bid for UNESO Creative City status, which began in late 2018 but was halted in early 2019, suggest that shared goals and clear governance may not be in place. Wishing to join other UNESCO cities across Scotland – Edinburgh (Literature), Glasgow (Music), and Dundee (Design) –, Aberdeen had set its sights on ‘City of Craft and Folk Art’; that title subsequently went to the city of Perth in 2022, limiting Aberdeen’s future hopes of securing UNESCO Creative City status. In 2022, Aberdeen is nearly halfway through its strategy timeline; to achieve its vision by 2028, the leadership recommended in 2014 needs to be established and given proper authority and backing. Covid-19 has been particularly disruptive for the strategy, arriving early in its implementation and lasting for two years during which collaborators have, understandably, had to attend to core business and crisis management. Picking up the threads of collaborative activity at the same time as ‘returning to normal’ will be challenging. The financial impacts of Covid-19 have also hit arts organisations and local councils particularly hard, creating survival challenges that displace future investment plans. The devastation caused to city centres across the UK as shops close and retail moves online is keenly felt in Aberdeen. Yet the pandemic has also seen the growth of pockets of new activity. With falling demand for business space resulting in more ‘meanwhile spaces’ and lower rents, practitioners have been able to access or secure spaces that were previously prohibitive. Deemouth Artists’ Studios, an artist-run initiative, has provided a vital locus of support and connectivity for creatives in the city, doubling in size over the past two years. ‘We Are Here Scotland’ arrived in response to the resurgent Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, as a Community Interest Company initiated in Aberdeen to support black creatives and creatives of colour across Scotland. Initiatives such as EP Spaces that re-purpose empty offices as studios have created a resource, albeit precarious, for scores of recent creative graduates, supporting an emerging creative community. The consequences of the pandemic for the decade of cultural investment and creative development are yet to be understood, but disrupted strategies are hard to rekindle. Culture Aberdeen’s ability to resolve or influence these factors is unclear. As a voluntary network without a cohesive role or formal status in the provision of culture in the city, and little funding and few staff to advocate on its behalf, it probably lacks the strength of leadership required. Nevertheless, work is underway to refresh the strategy in response to the post-pandemic needs of the city and culture, and the Creative Industries more broadly, are, once again, beginning to be seen as part of the solution to recovery as new narratives emerge. There is a strong desire in the city’s and region’s creative communities to nurture, realise, and retain emerging talent to authentically enrich the city’s culture. Since the 2013 failed CoC bid, much has been done to rekindle confidence and shine a light on the rich creative culture that exists in Aberdeen, and creative communities are gaining a new voice for their work. Considerable investment has been made in hard cultural assets; however, continued investment in and commitment to the region’s soft assets is needed. This is the only way to ensure the sustainable local network of activity and practice that can provide the vibrant creative city atmosphere for which Aberdeen has the potential. References Aberdeen Civic Forum. 4 June 2022 <https://civicforumaberdeen.com/about/>. Aberdeen City Region Deal. 5 June 2022 <https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/city-deal-aberdeen-city-region>. Aberdeen Timelines. 24 Feb. 2022 <https://localhistories.org/a-timeline-of-aberdeen/> and <http://www.visitoruk.com/Aberdeen/13th-century-T339.html>. ACC. 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AGCC. 2022 Tracker. 3 Jun. 2022 <https://www.agcc.co.uk/images/Investment-Tracker-2022-Online-final.pdf>. ———. 2019 Tracker. 3 Jun. 2022 <https://www.agcc.co.uk/files/investment-tracker-2019.pdf>. ———. 2018 Tracker. 3 Jun. 2022 <https://www.agcc.co.uk/files/Investment-Tracker-Sep-2018.pdf>. ———. 2017 Tracker. 3 Jun. 2022 <https://www.agcc.co.uk/files/Investment-Tracker-Sep-2017.pdf>. ———. 2016 Tracker. 3 Jun. 2022 <https://www.agcc.co.uk/files/Investment-Tracker-Nov-2016.pdf>. BBC. “Aberdeen City of Culture Bid ‘Lacked Vision’.” 2013. 10 May 2022 <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-23371660>. Brisac Gonzalez. 6 June 2022 <http://www.brisacgonzalez.com/aberdeen1>. Butcher, John R., David J. Gilchrist, John Phillimore, and John Wanna. “Attributes of Effective Collaboration: Insights from Five Case Studies in Australia and New Zealand.” Policy Design and Practice 2.1 (2019). 19 Mar. 2022 <https://doi.org/10.1080/25741292.2018.1561815>. Cohendet, Patrick, David Grandadam, and Laurent Simon. “The Anatomy of the Creative City.” Industry and Innovation 17.1 (2010). 19 Mar. 2022 <https://doi.org/10.1080/13662710903573869>. Comunian, Roberta. “Rethinking the Creative City: The Role of Complexity, Networks and Interactions in the Urban Creative Economy.” Urban Studies 48.6 (2011) 1157-1179. Creative Scotland. “Cultivate: Look Again’s Creative Industries Development Programme in North East Scotland.” 24 Feb. 2022 <https://www.creativescotland.com/explore/read/stories/features/2019/cultivate-look-agains-creative-industries-development-programme-in-north-east-scotland>. ———. “Restored and Re-Imagined Aberdeen Music Hall to Open to the Public in December.” 2018. 19 Mar. 2022 <https://www.creativescotland.com/what-we-do/latest-news/archive/2018/10/restored-and-re-imagined-aberdeen-music-hall-to-open-to-the-public-in-december>. Cultivate. “Cultivate: Creative Industries in the North East.” 10 May 2022 <https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5bd1cecc8155121e0614281b/t/5ef49de0036c70345dabc378/1593089519746/ CULTIVATE_project+report+2018.pdf>. Culture Aberdeen. “A Cultural Strategy for the City of Aberdeen 2018-2028.” 24 Feb. 2022 <https://www.cultureaberdeen.org/>. Deemouth Artist Studios. 5 June 2022 <https://www.deemouthartiststudios.co.uk/>. Ekos. “Creative Industries in North East Scotland.”. 2014. 10 May 2022 <https://www3.rgu.ac.uk/download.cfm?downloadfile=6117EE60-FB84-11E3-80660050568D00BF&typename=dmFile&fieldname=filename>. EP Spaces. 5 June 2022 <https://www.craftscotland.org/community/opportunity/low-cost-studio-spaces-ep-spaces--978>. First Group. The First Group Timeline. 24 Feb. 2022 <https://www.firstgroupplc.com/about-firstgroup/our-history.aspx>. Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books 2002. Investaberdeen. “The UK’s Most Sustainable Venue.” 24 Feb. 2022 <https://investaberdeen.co.uk/flagship-projects/the-event-complex-aberdeen-(teca)>. Landry, Charles. “Lineages of the Creative City.” 24 Feb. 2022 <http://charleslandry.com/panel/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2013/03/Lineages-of-the-Creative-City.pdf>. McGillivray, David, and Turner, Daniel. Event Bidding: Politics, Persuasion and Resistance. Abingdon: Routledge 2018. McLean, Pauline. “Aberdeen Art Gallery Reopens after £34.6m Revamp.” BBC News, 2019. 24 Feb. 2022 <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-50263849>. Museums Association. “Aberdeen Art Gallery Wins Architecture Award.” 24 Feb. 2022 <https://www.museumsassociation.org/museums-journal/news/2021/11/aberdeen-art-gallery-wins-architecture-award/#>. Opportunity North East (ONE). 5 June 2022 <Who We Are | ONE (opportunitynortheast.com)>. P&J. “12 Pictures Show the ‘Golden Age’ of Broadford Works.” 2015. 24 Feb. 2022 <https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/news/591034/12-memorable-pictures-rolling-back-through-the-years-of-the-broadford-works/>. ———. History. 10 May 2022 <https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/titles/aberdeen-press-and-journal>. Peacock Visual Arts. 6 June 2022 <https://peacock.studio/>. Port of Aberdeen. 24 Feb. 2022 <http://aberdeen-harbour.co.uk/about-us/history/#:~:text=Aberdeen%20Harbour%20was%20established%20in,has%20spanned%20almost%20900%20years>. Regeneris Consulting. “Aberdeen: Initial Bid for UK City of Culture – Feedback Points: UK City of Culture 2017.” 3 June 2022 <https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/297184/response/736087/attach/3/2017%20pt%201.pdf>. RGU. “Creative Accelerator Programme.” 2019. 10 May 2022 <https://www.rgu.ac.uk/news/news-2019/1902-rgu-launches-accelerator-to-support-next-generation-of-creatives>. ———. "Our History." 24 Feb. 2022 <https://www.rgu.ac.uk/about/our-history>. ———. “Creating a New North.” 2014. 10 May 2022 <https://www3.rgu.ac.uk/file/creating-a-new-north-pdf-1-7-mb>. ———. “Regenerating Aberdeen: A Vision for a Thriving and Vibrant City Centre.” 2014. 10 May 2022 <https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/248420/regenerating-aberdeen-a-vision-for-a-thriving-and-vibrant-city-centre>. RSA. “The Scottish Enlightenment and the Aberdeen Wise Club.” 2020. 24 Feb. 2022 <The Scottish Enlightenment and the Aberdeen Wise Club - RSA (thersa.org)>. Scottish Government. Creative Industries Policy Statement. 2019. 10 May 2022 <https://www.gov.scot/publications/policy-statement-creative-industries/>. Shore Porters Society. 24 Feb. 2022 <https://www.scotland.org/about-scotland/facts/worlds-oldest-transport-business>. UK Government. “City Deal: Aberdeen City Region.” 6 June 2022 <https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https%3A%2F%2Fassets.publishing.service.gov.uk%2F government%2Fuploads%2Fsystem%2Fuploads%2Fattachment_data%2F file%2F576627%2FAberdeen_City_Region_Deal_.docx&wdOrigin=BROWSELINK>. University of Aberdeen. 3 June 2022 <https://www.abdn.ac.uk/about/history/our-history.php>. Visit Aberdeenshire. "Marischal College." 5 June 2022 <https://www.visitabdn.com/listing/marischal-college#:~:text=Marischal%20College%20is%20said%20to,more%20austere%20architecture%20(1837)>. Visit Aberdeenshire. "NuArt Aberdeen." 5 June 2022 <https://www.visitabdn.com/listing/nuart-aberdeen#:~:text=Originating%20in%20Norway%20in%202001,public%20art%20event%20to%20Aberdeen>. Williams, Eliza. “How the Look Again Festival Is Carving Out a New Creative Community in Aberdeen.” Creative Review (2019). 3 June 2022 <https://www.creativereview.co.uk/how-the-look-again-festival-is-carving-out-a-new-creative-community-in-aberdeen/>.
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33

Provençal, Johanne. "Ghosts in Machines and a Snapshot of Scholarly Journal Publishing in Canada." M/C Journal 11, no. 4 (July 1, 2008). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.45.

Full text
Abstract:
The ideas put forth here do not fit perfectly or entirely into the genre and form of what has established itself as the scholarly journal article. What is put forth, instead, is a juxtaposition of lines of thinking about the scholarly and popular in publishing, past, present and future. As such it may indeed be quite appropriate to the occasion and the questions raised in the call for papers for this special issue of M/C Journal. The ideas put forth here are intended as pieces of an ever-changing puzzle of the making public of scholarship, which, I hope, may in some way fit with both the work of others in this special issue and in the discourse more broadly. The first line of thinking presented takes the form of an historical overview of publishing as context to consider a second line of thinking about the current status and future of publishing. The historical context serves as reminder (and cause for celebration) that publishing has not yet perished, contrary to continued doomsday sooth-saying that has come with each new medium since the advent of print. Instead, publishing has continued to transform and it is precisely the transformation of print, print culture and reading publics that are the focus of this article, in particular, in relation to the question of the boundaries between the scholarly and the popular. What follows is a juxtaposition that is part of an investigation in progress. Presented first, therefore, is a mapping of shifts in print culture from the time of Gutenberg to the twentieth century; second, is a contemporary snapshot of the editorial mandates of more than one hundred member journals of the Canadian Association of Learned Journals (CALJ). What such juxtaposition is able to reveal is open to interpretation, of course. And indeed, as I proceed in my investigation of publishing past, present and future, my interpretations are many. The juxtaposition raises a number of issues: of communities of readers and the cultures of reading publics; of privileged and marginalised texts (as well as their authors and their readers); of access and reach (whether in terms of what is quantifiable or in a much more subtle but equally important sense). In Canada, at present, these issues are also intertwined with changes to research funding policies and some attention is given at the end of this article to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada and its recent/current shift in funding policy. Curiously, current shifts in funding policies, considered alongside an historical overview of publishing, would suggest that although publishing continues to transform, at the same time, as they say, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Republics of Letters and Ghosts in Machines Republics of Letters that formed after the advent of the printing press can be conjured up as distant and almost mythical communities of elite literates, ghosts almost lost in a Gutenberg galaxy that today encompasses (and is embodied in) schools, bookshelves, and digital archives in many places across the globe. Conjuring up ghosts of histories past seems always to reveal ironies, and indeed some of the most interesting ironies of the Gutenberg galaxy involve McLuhanesque reversals or, if not full reversals, then in the least some notably sharp turns. There is a need to define some boundaries (and terms) in the framing of the tracing that follows. Given that the time frame in question spans more than five hundred years (from the advent of Gutenberg’s printing press in the fifteenth century to the turn of the 21st century), the tracing must necessarily be done in broad strokes. With regard to what is meant by the “making public of scholarship” in this paper, by “making public” I refer to accounts historians have given in their attempts to reconstruct a history of what was published either in the periodical press or in books. With regard to scholarship (and the making public of it), as with many things in the history of publishing (or any history), this means different things in different times and in different places. The changing meanings of what can be termed “scholarship” and where and how it historically has been made public are the cornerstones on which this article (and a history of the making public of scholarship) turn. The structure of this paper is loosely chronological and is limited to the print cultures and reading publics in France, Britain, and what would eventually be called the US and Canada, and what follows here is an overview of changes in how scholarly and popular texts and publics are variously defined over the course of history. The Construction of Reading Publics and Print Culture In any consideration of “print culture” and reading publics, historical or contemporary, there are two guiding principles that historians suggest should be kept in mind, and, though these may seem self-evident, they are worth stating explicitly (perhaps precisely because they seem self-evident). The first is a reminder from Adrian Johns that “the very identity of print itself has had to be made” (2 italics in original). Just as the identity of print cultures are made, similarly, a history of reading publics and their identities are made, by looking to and interpreting such variables as numbers and genres of titles published and circulated, dates and locations of collections, and information on readers’ experiences of texts. Elizabeth Eisenstein offers a reminder of the “widely varying circumstances” (92) of the print revolution and an explicit acknowledgement of such circumstances provides the second, seemingly self-evident guiding principle: that the construction of reading publics and print culture must not only be understood as constructed, but also that such constructions ought not be understood as uniform. The purpose of the reconstructions of print cultures and reading publics presented here, therefore, is not to arrive at final conclusions, but rather to identify patterns that prove useful in better understanding the current status (and possible future) of publishing. The Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries—Boom, then Busted by State and Church In search of what could be termed “scholarship” following the mid-fifteenth century boom of the early days of print, given the ecclesiastical and state censorship in Britain and France and the popularity of religious texts of the 15th and 16th centuries, arguably the closest to “scholarship” that we can come is through the influence of the Italian Renaissance and the revival and translation (into Latin, and to a far lesser extent, vernacular languages) of the classics and indeed the influence of the Italian Renaissance on the “print revolution” is widely recognised by historians. Historians also recognise, however, that it was not long until “the supply of unpublished texts dried up…[yet for authors] to sell the fruits of their intellect—was not yet common practice before the late 16th century” (Febvre and Martin 160). Although this reference is to the book trade in France, in Britain, and in the regions to become the US and Canada, reading of “pious texts” was similarly predominant in the early days of print. Yet, the humanist shift throughout the 16th century is evidenced by titles produced in Paris in the first century of print: in 1501, in a total of 88 works, 53 can be categorised as religious, with 25 categorised as Latin, Greek, or Humanist authors; as compared to titles produced in 1549, in a total of 332 titles, 56 can be categorised as religious with 204 categorised as Latin, Greek, or Humanist authors (Febvre and Martin 264). The Seventeenth Century—Changes in the Political and Print Landscape In the 17th century, printers discovered that their chances of profitability (and survival) could be improved by targeting and developing a popular readership through the periodical press (its very periodicity and relative low cost both contributed to its accessibility by popular publics) in Europe as well as in North America. It is worthwhile to note, however, that “to the end of the seventeenth century, both literacy and leisure were virtually confined to scholars and ‘gentlemen’” (Steinberg 119) particularly where books were concerned and although literacy rates were still low, through the “exceptionally literate villager” there formed “hearing publics” who would have printed texts read to them (Eisenstein 93). For the literate members of the public interested not only in improving their social positions through learning, but also with intellectual (or spiritual or existential) curiosity piqued by forbidden books, it is not surprising that Descartes “wrote in French to a ‘lay audience … open to new ideas’” (Jacob 41). The 17th century also saw the publication of the first scholarly journals. There is a tension that becomes evident in the seventeenth century that can be seen as a tension characteristic of print culture, past and present: on the one hand, the housing of scholarship in scholarly journals as a genre distinct from the genre of the popular periodicals can be interpreted as a continued pattern of (elitist) divide in publics (as seen earlier between the oral and the written word, between Latin and the vernacular, between classic texts and popular texts); while, on the other hand, some thinkers/scholars of the day had an interest in reaching a wider audience, as printers always had, which led to the construction and fragmentation of audiences (whether the printer’s market for his goods or the scholar’s marketplace of ideas). The Eighteenth Century—Republics of Letters Become Concrete and Visible The 18th century saw ever-increasing literacy rates, early copyright legislation (Statute of Anne in 1709), improved printing technology, and ironically (or perhaps on the contrary, quite predictably) severe censorship that in effect led to an increased demand for forbidden books and a vibrant and international underground book trade (Darnton and Roche 138). Alongside a growing book trade, “the pulpit was ultimately displaced by the periodical press” (Eisenstein 94), which had become an “established institution” (Steinberg 125). One history of the periodical press in France finds that the number of periodicals (to remain in publication for three or more years) available to the reading public in 1745 numbered 15, whereas in 1785 this increased to 82 (Censer 7). With regard to scholarly periodicals, another study shows that between 1790 and 1800 there were 640 scientific-technological periodicals being published in Europe (Kronick 1961). Across the Atlantic, earlier difficulties in cultivating intellectual life—such as haphazard transatlantic exchange and limited institutions for learning—began to give way to a “republic of letters” that was “visible and concrete” (Hall 417). The Nineteenth Century—A Second Boom and the Rise of the Periodical Press By the turn of the 19th century, visible and concrete republics of letters become evident on both sides of the Atlantic in the boom in book publishing and in the periodical press, scholarly and popular. State and church controls on printing/publishing had given way to the press as the “fourth estate” or a free press as powerful force. The legislation of public education brought increased literacy rates among members of successive generations. One study of literacy rates in Britain, for example, shows that in the period from 1840–1870 literacy rates increased by 35–70 per cent; then from 1870–1900, literacy increased by 78–261 per cent (Mitch 76). Further, with the growth and changes in universities, “history, languages and literature and, above all, the sciences, became an established part of higher education for the first time,” which translated into growing markets for book publishers (Feather 117). Similarly the periodical press reached ever-increasing and numerous reading publics: one estimate of the increase finds the publication of nine hundred journals in 1800 jumping to almost sixty thousand in 1901 (Brodman, cited in Kronick 127). Further, the important role of the periodical press in developing communities of readers was recognised by publishers, editors and authors of the time, something equally recognised by present-day historians describing the “generic mélange of the periodical … [that] particularly lent itself to the interpenetration of language and ideas…[and] the verbal and conceptual interconnectedness of science, politics, theology, and literature” (Dawson, Noakes and Topham 30). Scientists recognised popular periodicals as “important platforms for addressing a non-specialist but culturally powerful public … [they were seen as public] performances [that] fulfilled important functions in making the claims of science heard among the ruling élite” (Dawson et al. 11). By contrast, however, the scholarly journals of the time, while also increasing in number, were becoming increasingly specialised along the same disciplinary boundaries being established in the universities, fulfilling a very different function of forming scholarly and discipline-specific discourse communities through public (published) performances of a very different nature. The Twentieth Century—The Tension Between Niche Publics and Mass Publics The long-existing tension in print culture between the differentiation of reading publics on the one hand, and the reach to ever-expanding reading publics on the other, in the twentieth century becomes a tension between what have been termed “niche-marketing” and “mass marketing,” between niche publics and mass publics. What this meant for the making public of scholarship was that the divides between discipline-specific discourse communities (and their corresponding genres) became more firmly established and yet, within each discipline, there was further fragmentation and specialisation. The niche-mass tension also meant that although in earlier print culture, “the lines of demarcation between men of science, men of letters, and scientific popularizers were far from clear, and were constantly being renegotiated” (Dawson et al 28), with the increasing professionalisation of academic work (and careers), lines of demarcation became firmly drawn between scholarly and popular titles and authors, as well as readers, who were described as “men of science,” as “educated men,” or as “casual observers” (Klancher 90). The question remains, however, as one historian of science asks, “To whom did the reading public go in order to learn about the ultimate meaning of modern science, the professionals or the popularizers?” (Lightman 191). By whom and for whom, where and how scholarship has historically been made public, are questions worthy of consideration if contemporary scholars are to better understand the current status (and possible future) for the making public of scholarship. A Snapshot of Scholarly Journals in Canada and Current Changes in Funding Policies The here and now of scholarly journal publishing in Canada (a growing, but relatively modest scholarly journal community, compared to the number of scholarly journals published in Europe and the US) serves as an interesting microcosm through which to consider how scholarly journal publishing has evolved since the early days of print. What follows here is an overview of the membership of the Canadian Association of Learned Journals (CALJ), in particular: (1) their target readers as identifiable from their editorial mandates; (2) their print/online/open-access policies; and (3) their publishers (all information gathered from the CALJ website, http://www.calj-acrs.ca/). Analysis of the collected data for the 100 member journals of CALJ (English, French and bilingual journals) with available information on the CALJ website is presented in Table 1 (below). A few observations are noteworthy: (1) in terms of readers, although all 100 journals identify a scholarly audience as their target readership, more than 40% of the journal also identify practitioners, policy-makers, or general readers as members of their target audience; (2) more than 25% of the journals publish online as well as or instead of print editions; and (3) almost all journals are published either by a Canadian university or, in one case, a college (60%) or a scholarly or professional society (31%). Table 1: Target Readership, Publishing Model and Publishers, CALJ Members (N=100) Journals with identifiable scholarly target readership 100 Journals with other identifiable target readership: practitioner 35 Journals with other identifiable target readership: general readers 18 Journals with other identifiable target readership: policy-makers/government 10 Total journals with identifiable target readership other than scholarly 43 Journals publishing in print only 56 Journals publishing in print and online 24 Journals publishing in print, online and open access 16 Journals publishing online only and open access 4 Journals published through a Canadian university press, faculty or department 60 Journals published by a scholarly or professional society 31 Journals published by a research institute 5 Journals published by the private sector 4 In the context of the historical overview presented earlier, this data raises a number of questions. The number of journals with target audiences either within or beyond the academy raises issues akin to the situation in the early days of print, when published works were primarily in Latin, with only 22 per cent in vernacular languages (Febvre and Martin 256), thereby strongly limiting access and reach to diverse audiences until the 17th century when Latin declined as the international language (Febvre and Martin 275) and there is a parallel to scholarly journal publishing and their changing readership(s). Diversity in audiences gradually developed in the early days of print, as Febvre and Martin (263) show by comparing the number of churchmen and lawyers with library collections in Paris: from 1480–1500 one lawyer and 24 churchmen had library collections, compared to 1551–1600, when 71 lawyers and 21 churchmen had library collections. Although the distinctions between present-day target audiences of Canadian scholarly journals (shown in Table 1, above) and 16th-century churchmen or lawyers no doubt are considerable, again there is a parallel with regard to changes in reading audiences. Similarly, the 18th-century increase in literacy rates, education, and technological advances finds a parallel in contemporary questions of computer literacy and access to scholarship (see Willinsky, “How,” Access, “Altering,” and If Only). Print culture historians and historians of science, as noted above, recognise that historically, while scholarly periodicals have increasingly specialised and popular periodicals have served as “important platforms for addressing a non-specialist but culturally powerful public…[and] fulfill[ing] important functions in making the claims of science heard among the ruling élite” (Dawson 11), there is adrift in current policies changes (and in the CALJ data above) a blurring of boundaries that harkens back to earlier days of print culture. As Adrian John reminded us earlier, “the very identity of print itself has had to be made” (2, italics in original) and the same applies to identities or cultures of print and the members of that culture: namely, the readers, the audience. The identities of the readers of scholarship are being made and re-made, as editorial mandates extend the scope of journals beyond strict, academic disciplinary boundaries and as increasing numbers of journals publish online (and open access). In Canada, changes in scholarly journal funding by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada (as well as changes in SSHRC funding for research more generally) place increasing focus on impact factors (an international trend) as well as increased attention on the public benefits and value of social sciences and humanities research and scholarship (see SSHRC 2004, 2005, 2006). There is much debate in the scholarly community in Canada about the implications and possibilities of the direction of the changing funding policies, not least among members of the scholarly journal community. As noted in the table above, most scholarly journal publishers in Canada are independently published, which brings advantages of autonomy but also the disadvantage of very limited budgets and there is a great deal of concern about the future of the journals, about their survival amidst the current changes. Although the future is uncertain, it is perhaps worthwhile to be reminded once again that contrary to doomsday sooth-saying that has come time and time again, publishing has not perished, but rather it has continued to transform. I am inclined against making normative statements about what the future of publishing should be, but, looking at the accounts historians have given of the past and looking at the current publishing community I have come to know in my work in publishing, I am confident that the resourcefulness and commitment of the publishing community shall prevail and, indeed, there appears to be a good deal of promise in the transformation of scholarly journals in the ways they reach their audiences and in what reaches those audiences. Perhaps, as is suggested by the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing (CCSP), the future is one of “inventing publishing.” References Canadian Association of Learned Journals. Member Database. 10 June 2008 ‹http://www.calj-acrs.ca/>. Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing. 10 June 2008. ‹http://www.ccsp.sfu.ca/>. Censer, Jack. The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment. London: Routledge, 1994. Darnton, Robert, Estienne Roche. Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1775–1800. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989. Dawson, Gowan, Richard Noakes, and Jonathan Topham. Introduction. Science in the Nineteenth-century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature. Ed. Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson, Richard Noakes, and Jonathan Topham. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 1–37. Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983 Feather, John. A History of British Publishing. New York: Routledge, 2006. Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800. London: N.L.B., 1979. Jacob, Margaret. Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. Hall, David, and Hugh Armory. The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Klancher, Jon. The Making of English Reading Audiences. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987. Kronick, David. A History of Scientific and Technical Periodicals: The Origins and Development of the Scientific and Technological Press, 1665–1790. New York: Scarecrow Press, 1961. ---. "Devant le deluge" and Other Essays on Early Modern Scientific Communication. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2004. Lightman, Bernard. Victorian Science in Context. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Mitch, David. The Rise of Popular Literacy in Victorian England: The Influence of Private choice and Public Policy. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1991. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Granting Council to Knowledge Council: Renewing the Social Sciences and Humanities in Canada, Volume 1, 2004. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Granting Council to Knowledge Council: Renewing the Social Sciences and Humanities in Canada, Volume 3, 2005. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Moving Forward As a Knowledge Council: Canada’s Place in a Competitive World. 2006. Steinberg, Sigfrid. Five Hundred Years of Printing. London: Oak Knoll Press, 1996. Willinsky, John. “How to be More of a Public Intellectual by Making your Intellectual Work More Public.” Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 3.1 (2006): 92–95. ---. The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. ---. “Altering the Material Conditions of Access to the Humanities.” Ed. Peter Trifonas and Michael Peters. Deconstructing Derrida: Tasks for the New Humanities. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 118–36. ---. If Only We Knew: Increasing the Public Value of Social-Science Research. New York: Routledge, 2000.
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Inglis, David. "On Oenological Authenticity: Making Wine Real and Making Real Wine." M/C Journal 18, no. 1 (January 20, 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.948.

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IntroductionIn the wine world, authenticity is not just desired, it is actively required. That demand comes from a complex of producers, distributors and consumers, and other interested parties. Consequently, the authenticity of wine is constantly created, reworked, presented, performed, argued over, contested and appreciated.At one level, such processes have clear economic elements. A wine deemed to be an authentic “expression” of something—the soil and micro-climate in which it was grown, the environment and culture of the region from which it hails, the genius of the wine-maker who nurtured and brought it into being, the quintessential characteristics of the grape variety it is made from—will likely make much more money than one deemed inauthentic. In wine, as in other spheres, perceived authenticity is a means to garner profits, both economic and symbolic (Beverland).At another level, wine animates a complicated intertwining of human tastes, aesthetics, pleasures and identities. Discussions as to the authenticity, or otherwise, of a wine often involve a search by the discussants for meaning and purpose in their lives (Grahm). To discover and appreciate a wine felt to “speak” profoundly of the place from whence it came possibly involves a sense of superiority over others: I drink “real” wine, while you drink mass-market trash (Bourdieu). It can also create reassuring senses of ontological security: in discovering an authentic wine, expressive of a certain aesthetic and locational purity (Zolberg and Cherbo), I have found a cherishable object which can be reliably traced to one particular place on Earth, therefore possessing integrity, honesty and virtue (Fine). Appreciation of wine’s authenticity licenses the self-perception that I am sophisticated and sensitive (Vannini and Williams). My judgement of the wine is also a judgement upon my own aesthetic capacities (Hennion).In wine drinking, and the production, distribution and marketing processes underpinning it, much is at stake as regards authenticity. The social system of the wine world requires the category of authenticity in order to keep operating. This paper examines how and why this has come to be so. It considers the crafting of authenticity in long-term historical perspective. Demand for authentic wine by drinkers goes back many centuries. Self-conscious performances of authenticity by producers is of more recent provenance, and was elaborated above all in France. French innovations then spread to other parts of Europe and the world. The paper reviews these developments, showing that wine authenticity is constituted by an elaborate complex of environmental, cultural, legal, political and commercial factors. The paper both draws upon the social science literature concerning the construction of authenticity and also points out its limitations as regards understanding wine authenticity.The History of AuthenticityIt is conventional in the social science literature (Peterson, Authenticity) to claim that authenticity as a folk category (Lu and Fine), and actors’ desires for authentic things, are wholly “modern,” being unknown in pre-modern contexts (Cohen). Consideration of wine shows that such a view is historically uninformed. Demands by consumers for ‘authentic’ wine, in the sense that it really came from the location it was sold as being from, can be found in the West well before the 19th century, having ancient roots (Wengrow). In ancient Rome, there was demand by elites for wine that was both really from the location it was billed as being from, and was verifiably of a certain vintage (Robertson and Inglis). More recently, demand has existed in Western Europe for “real” Tokaji (sweet wine from Hungary), Port and Bordeaux wines since at least the 17th century (Marks).Conventional social science (Peterson, Authenticity) is on solider ground when demonstrating how a great deal of social energies goes into constructing people’s perceptions—not just of consumers, but of wine producers and sellers too—that particular wines are somehow authentic expressions of the places where they were made. The creation of perceived authenticity by producers and sales-people has a long historical pedigree, beginning in early modernity.For example, in the 17th and 18th centuries, wine-makers in Bordeaux could not compete on price grounds with burgeoning Spanish, Portuguese and Italian production areas, so they began to compete with them on the grounds of perceived quality. Multiple small plots were reorganised into much bigger vineyards. The latter were now associated with a chateau in the neighbourhood, giving the wines connotations of aristocratic gravity and dignity (Ulin). Product-makers in other fields have used the assertion of long-standing family lineages as apparent guarantors of tradition and quality in production (Peterson, Authenticity). The early modern Bordelaise did the same, augmenting their wines’ value by calling upon aristocratic accoutrements like chateaux, coats-of-arms, alleged long-term family ownership of vineyards, and suchlike.Such early modern entrepreneurial efforts remain the foundations of the very high prestige and prices associated with elite wine-making in the region today, with Chinese companies and consumers particularly keen on the grand crus of the region. Globalization of the wine world today is strongly rooted in forms of authenticity performance invented several hundred years ago.Enter the StateAnother notable issue is the long-term role that governments and legislation have played, both in the construction and presentation of authenticity to publics, and in attempts to guarantee—through regulative measures and taxation systems—that what is sold really has come from where it purports to be from. The west European State has a long history of being concerned with the fraudulent selling of “fake” wines (Anderson, Norman, and Wittwer). Thus Cosimo III, Medici Grand Duke of Florence, was responsible for an edict of 1716 which drew up legal boundaries for Tuscan wine-producing regions, restricting the use of regional names like Chianti to wine that actually came from there (Duguid).These 18th century Tuscan regulations are the distant ancestors of quality-control rules centred upon the need to guarantee the authenticity of wines from particular geographical regions and sub-regions, which are today now ubiquitous, especially in the European Union (DeSoucey). But more direct progenitors of today’s Geographical Indicators (GIs)—enforced by the GATT international treaties—and Protected Designations of Origin (PDOs)—promulgated and monitored by the EU—are French in origin (Barham). The famous 1855 quality-level classification of Bordeaux vineyards and their wines was the first attempt in the world explicitly to proclaim that the quality of a wine was a direct consequence of its defined place of origin. This move significantly helped to create the later highly influential notion that place of origin is the essence of a wine’s authenticity. This innovation was initially wholly commercial, rather than governmental, being carried out by wine-brokers to promote Bordeaux wines at the Paris Exposition Universelle, but was later elaborated by State officials.In Champagne, another luxury wine-producing area, small-scale growers of grapes worried that national and international perceptions of their wine were becoming wholly determined by big brands such as Dom Perignon, which advertised the wine as a luxury product, but made no reference to the grapes, the soil, or the (supposedly) traditional methods of production used by growers (Guy). The latter turned to the idea of “locality,” which implied that the character of the wine was an essential expression of the Champagne region itself—something ignored in brand advertising—and that the soil itself was the marker of locality. The idea of “terroir”—referring to the alleged properties of soil and micro-climate, and their apparent expression in the grapes—was mobilised by one group, smaller growers, against another, the large commercial houses (Guy). The terroir notion was a means of constructing authenticity, and denouncing de-localised, homogenizing inauthenticity, a strategy favouring some types of actors over others. The relatively highly industrialized wine-making process was later represented for public consumption as being consonant with both tradition and nature.The interplay of commerce, government, law, and the presentation of authenticity, also appeared in Burgundy. In that region between WWI and WWII, the wine world was transformed by two new factors: the development of tourism and the rise of an ideology of “regionalism” (Laferté). The latter was invented circa WWI by metropolitan intellectuals who believed that each of the French regions possessed an intrinsic cultural “soul,” particularly expressed through its characteristic forms of food and drink. Previously despised peasant cuisine was reconstructed as culturally worthy and true expression of place. Small-scale artisanal wine production was no longer seen as an embarrassment, producing wines far more “rough” than those of Bordeaux and Champagne. Instead, such production was taken as ground and guarantor of authenticity (Laferté). Location, at regional, village and vineyard level, was taken as the primary quality indicator.For tourists lured to the French regions by the newly-established Guide Michelin, and for influential national and foreign journalists, an array of new promotional devices were created, such as gastronomic festivals and folkloric brotherhoods devoted to celebrations of particular foodstuffs and agricultural events like the wine-harvest (Laferté). The figure of the wine-grower was presented as an exemplary custodian of tradition, relatively free of modern capitalist exchange relations. These are the beginnings of an important facet of later wine companies’ promotional literatures worldwide—the “decoupling” of their supposed commitments to tradition, and their “passion” for wine-making beyond material interests, from everyday contexts of industrial production and profit-motives (Beverland). Yet the work of making the wine-maker and their wines authentically “of the soil” was originally stimulated in response to international wine markets and the tourist industry (Laferté).Against this background, in 1935 the French government enacted legislation which created theInstitut National des Appellations d’Origine (INAO) and its Appelation d’Origine Controlle (AOC) system (Barham). Its goal was, and is, to protect what it defines as terroir, encompassing both natural and human elements. This legislation went well beyond previous laws, as it did more than indicate that wine must be honestly labelled as deriving from a given place of origin, for it included guarantees of authenticity too. An authentic wine was defined as one which truly “expresses” the terroir from which it comes, where terroir means both soil and micro-climate (nature) and wine-making techniques “traditionally” associated with that area. Thus French law came to enshrine a relatively recently invented cultural assumption: that places create distinctive tastes, the value of this state of affairs requiring strong State protection. Terroir must be protected from the untrammelled free market. Land and wine, symbiotically connected, are de-commodified (Kopytoff). Wine is embedded in land; land is embedded in what is regarded as regional culture; the latter is embedded in national history (Polanyi).But in line with the fact that the cultural underpinnings of the INAO/AOC system were strongly commercially oriented, at a more subterranean level the de-commodified product also has economic value added to it. A wine worthy of AOC protection must, it is assumed, be special relative to wines un-deserving of that classification. The wine is taken out of the market, attributed special status, and released, economically enhanced, back onto the market. Consequently, State-guaranteed forms of authenticity embody ambivalent but ultimately efficacious economic processes. Wine pioneered this Janus-faced situation, the AOC system in the 1990s being generalized to all types of agricultural product in France. A huge bureaucratic apparatus underpins and makes possible the AOC system. For a region and product to gain AOC protection, much energy is expended by collectives of producers and other interested parties like regional development and tourism officials. The French State employs a wide range of expert—oenological, anthropological, climatological, etc.—who police the AOC classificatory mechanisms (Barham).Terroirisation ProcessesFrench forms of legal classification, and the broader cultural classifications which underpin them and generated them, very much influenced the EU’s PDO system. The latter uses a language of authenticity rooted in place first developed in France (DeSoucey). The French model has been generalized, both from wine to other foodstuffs, and around many parts of Europe and the world. An Old World idea has spread to the New World—paradoxically so, because it was the perceived threat posed by the ‘placeless’ wines and decontextualized grapes of the New World which stimulated much of the European legislative measures to protect terroir (Marks).Paxson shows how artisanal cheese-makers in the US, appropriate the idea of terroir to represent places of production, and by extension the cheeses made there, that have no prior history of being constructed as terroir areas. Here terroir is invented at the same time as it is naturalised, made to seem as if it simply points to how physical place is directly expressed in a manufactured product. By defining wine or cheese as a natural product, claims to authenticity are themselves naturalised (Ulin). Successful terroirisation brings commercial benefits for those who engage in it, creating brand distinctiveness (no-one else can claim their product expresses that particularlocation), a value-enhancing aura around the product which, and promotion of food tourism (Murray and Overton).Terroirisation can also render producers into virtuous custodians of the land who are opposed to the depredations of the industrial food and agriculture systems, the categories associated with terroir classifying the world through a binary opposition: traditional, small-scale production on the virtuous side, and large-scale, “modern” harvesting methods on the other. Such a situation has prompted large-scale, industrial wine-makers to adopt marketing imagery that implies the “place-based” nature of their offerings, even when the grapes can come from radically different areas within a region or from other regions (Smith Maguire). Like smaller producers, large companies also decouple the advertised imagery of terroir from the mundane realities of industry and profit-margins (Beverland).The global transportability of the terroir concept—ironic, given the rhetorical stress on the uniqueness of place—depends on its flexibility and ambiguity. In the French context before WWII, the phrase referred specifically to soil and micro-climate of vineyards. Slowly it started mean to a markedly wider symbolic complex involving persons and personalities, techniques and knowhow, traditions, community, and expressions of local and regional heritage (Smith Maguire). Over the course of the 20th century, terroir became an ever broader concept “encompassing the physical characteristics of the land (its soil, climate, topography) and its human dimensions (culture, history, technology)” (Overton 753). It is thought to be both natural and cultural, both physical and human, the potentially contradictory ramifications of such understanding necessitating subtle distinctions to ward off confusion or paradox. Thus human intervention on the land and the vines is often represented as simply “letting the grapes speak for themselves” and “allowing the land to express itself,” as if the wine-maker were midwife rather than fabricator. Terroir talk operates with an awkward verbal balancing act: wine-makers’ “signature” styles are expressions of their cultural authenticity (e.g. using what are claimed as ‘traditional’ methods), yet their stylistic capacities do not interfere with the soil and micro-climate’s natural tendencies (i.e. the terroir’sphysical authenticity).The wine-making process is a case par excellence of a network of humans and objects, or human and non-human actants (Latour). The concept of terroir today both acknowledges that fact, but occludes it at the same time. It glosses over the highly problematic nature of what is “real,” “true,” “natural.” The roles of human agents and technologies are sequestered, ignoring the inevitably changing nature of knowledges and technologies over time, recognition of which jeopardises claims about an unchanging physical, social and technical order. Harvesting by machine production is representationally disavowed, yet often pragmatically embraced. The role of “foreign” experts acting as advisors —so-called “flying wine-makers,” often from New World production cultures —has to be treated gingerly or covered up. Because of the effects of climate change on micro-climates and growing conditions, the taste of wines from a particular terroir changes over time, but the terroir imaginary cannot recognise that, being based on projections of timelessness (Brabazon).The authenticity referred to, and constructed, by terroir imagery must constantly be performed to diverse audiences, convincing them that time stands still in the terroir. If consumers are to continue perceiving authenticity in a wine or winery, then a wide range of cultural intermediaries—critics, journalists and other self-proclaiming experts must continue telling convincing stories about provenance. Effective authenticity story-telling rests on the perceived sincerity and knowledgeability of the teller. Such tales stress romantic imagery and colourful, highly personalised accounts of the quirks of particular wine-makers, omitting mundane details of production and commercial activities (Smith Maguire). Such intermediaries must seek to interest their audience in undiscovered regions and “quirky” styles, demonstrating their insider knowledge. But once such regions and styles start to become more well-known, their rarity value is lost, and intermediaries must find ever newer forms of authenticity, which in turn will lose their burnished aura when they become objects of mundane consumption. An endless cycle of discovering and undermining authenticity is constantly enacted.ConclusionAuthenticity is a category held by different sorts of actors in the wine world, and is the means by which that world is held together. This situation has developed over a long time-frame and is now globalized. Yet I will end this paper on a volte face. Authenticity in the wine world can never be regarded as wholly and simply a social construction. One cannot directly import into the analysis of that world assumptions—about the wholly socially constructed nature of phenomena—which social scientific studies of other domains, most notably culture industries, work with (Peterson, Authenticity). Ways of thinking which are indeed useful for understanding the construction of authenticity in some specific contexts, cannot just be applied in simplistic manners to the wine world. When they are applied in direct and unsophisticated ways, such an operation misses the specificities and particularities of wine-making processes. These are always simultaneously “social” and “natural”, involving multiple forms of complex intertwining of human actions, environmental and climatological conditions, and the characteristics of the vines themselves—a situation markedly beyond beyond any straightforward notion of “social construction.”The wine world has many socially constructed objects. But wine is not just like any other product. Its authenticity cannot be fabricated in the manner of, say, country music (Peterson, Country). Wine is never in itself only a social construction, nor is its authenticity, because the taste, texture and chemical elements of wine derive from complex human interactions with the physical environment. Wine is partly about packaging, branding and advertising—phenomena standard social science accounts of authenticity focus on—but its organic properties are irreducible to those factors. Terroir is an invention, a label put on to certain things, meaning they are perceived to be authentic. But the things that label refers to—ranging from the slope of a vineyard and the play of sunshine on it, to how grapes grow and when they are picked—are entwined with human semiotics but not completely created by them. A truly comprehensive account of wine authenticity remains to be written.ReferencesAnderson, Kym, David Norman, and Glyn Wittwer. “Globalization and the World’s Wine Markets: Overview.” Discussion Paper No. 0143, Centre for International Economic Studies. Adelaide: U of Adelaide, 2001.Barham, Elizabeth. “Translating Terroir: The Global Challenge of French AOC Labelling.” Journal of Rural Studies 19 (2003): 127–38.Beverland, Michael B. “Crafting Brand Authenticity: The Case of Luxury Wines.” Journal of Management Studies 42.5 (2005): 1003–29.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1992.Brabazon, Tara. “Colonial Control or Terroir Tourism? The Case of Houghton’s White Burgundy.” Human Geographies 8.2 (2014): 17–33.Cohen, Erik. “Authenticity and Commoditization in Tourism.” Annals of Tourism Research 15.3 (1988): 371–86.DeSoucey, Michaela. “Gastronationalism: Food Traditions and Authenticity Politics in the European Union.” American Sociological Review 75.3 (2010): 432–55.Duguid, Paul. “Developing the Brand: The Case of Alcohol, 1800–1880.” Enterprise and Society 4.3 (2003): 405–41.Fine, Gary A. “Crafting Authenticity: The Validation of Identity in Self-Taught Art.” Theory and Society 32.2 (2003): 153–80.Grahm, Randall. “The Soul of Wine: Digging for Meaning.” Wine and Philosophy: A Symposium on Thinking and Drinking. Ed. Fritz Allhoff. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. 219–24.Guy, Kolleen M. When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003.Hennion, Antoine. “The Things That Bind Us Together.”Cultural Sociology 1.1 (2007): 65–85.Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as a Process." The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Ed. Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. 64–91.Laferté, Gilles. “End or Invention of Terroirs? Regionalism in the Marketing of French Luxury Goods: The Example of Burgundy Wines in the Inter-War Years.” Working Paper, Centre d’Economie et Sociologie Appliquées a l’Agriculture et aux Espaces Ruraux, Dijon.Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard: Harvard UP, 1993.Lu, Shun and Gary A. Fine. “The Presentation of Ethnic Authenticity: Chinese Food as a Social Accomplishment.” The Sociological Quarterly 36.3 (1995): 535–53.Marks, Denton. “Competitiveness and the Market for Central and Eastern European Wines: A Cultural Good in the Global Wine Market.” Journal of Wine Research 22.3 (2011): 245–63.Murray, Warwick E. and John Overton. “Defining Regions: The Making of Places in the New Zealand Wine Industry.” Australian Geographer 42.4 (2011): 419–33.Overton, John. “The Consumption of Space: Land, Capital and Place in the New Zealand Wine Industry.” Geoforum 41.5 (2010): 752–62.Paxson, Heather. “Locating Value in Artisan Cheese: Reverse Engineering Terroir for New-World Landscapes.” American Anthropologist 112.3 (2010): 444–57.Peterson, Richard A. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.———. “In Search of Authenticity.” Journal of Management Studies 42.5 (2005): 1083–98.Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957.Robertson, Roland, and David Inglis. “The Global Animus: In the Tracks of World Consciousness.” Globalizations 1.1 (2006): 72–92.Smith Maguire, Jennifer. “Provenance and the Liminality of Production and Consumption: The Case of Wine Promoters.” Marketing Theory 10.3 (2010): 269–82.Trubek, Amy. The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir. Los Angeles: U of California P, 2008.Ulin, Robert C. “Invention and Representation as Cultural Capital.” American Anthropologist 97.3 (1995): 519–27.Vannini, Phillip, and Patrick J. Williams. Authenticity in Culture, Self and Society. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009.Wengrow, David. “Prehistories of Commodity Branding.” Current Anthropology 49.1 (2008): 7–34.Zolberg, Vera and Joni Maya Cherbo. Outsider Art: Contesting Boundaries in Contemporary Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.
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Dutton, Jacqueline. "Counterculture and Alternative Media in Utopian Contexts: A Slice of Life from the Rainbow Region." M/C Journal 17, no. 6 (November 3, 2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.927.

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Introduction Utopia has always been countercultural, and ever since technological progress has allowed, utopia has been using alternative media to promote and strengthen its underpinning ideals. In this article, I am seeking to clarify the connections between counterculture and alternative media in utopian contexts to demonstrate their reciprocity, then draw together these threads through reference to a well-known figure of the Rainbow Region–Rusty Miller. His trajectory from iconic surfer and Aquarian reporter to mediator for utopian politics and ideals in the Rainbow Region encompasses in a single identity the three elements underpinning this study. In concluding, I will turn to Rusty’s Byron Guide, questioning its classification as alternative or mainstream media, and whether Byron Bay is represented as countercultural and utopian in this long-running and ongoing publication. Counterculture and Alternative Media in Utopian Contexts Counterculture is an umbrella that enfolds utopia, among many other genres and practices. It has been most often situated in the 1960s and 1970s as a new form of social movement embodying youth resistance to the technocratic mainstream and its norms of gender, sexuality, politics, music, and language (Roszak). Many scholars of counterculture underscore its utopian impulses both in the projection of better societies where the social goals are achieved, and in the withdrawal from mainstream society into intentional communities (Yinger 194-6; McKay 5; Berger). Before exploring further the connections between counterculture and alternative media, I want to define the scope of countercultural utopian contexts in general, and the Rainbow Region in particular. Utopia is a neologism created by Sir Thomas More almost 500 years ago to designate the island community that demonstrates order, harmony, justice, hope and desire in the right balance so that it seems like an ideal land. This imaginary place described in Utopia (1516) as a counterpoint to the social, political and religious shortcomings of contemporary 16th century British society, has attracted accusations of heresy (Molner), and been used as a pejorative term, an insult to denigrate political projects that seem farfetched or subversive, especially during the 19th century. Almost every study of utopian theory, literature and practice points to a dissatisfaction with the status quo, which inspires writers, politicians, architects, artists, individuals and communities to rail against it (see for example Davis, Moylan, Suvin, Levitas, Jameson). Kingsley Widmer’s book Counterings: Utopian Dialectics in Contemporary Contexts reiterates what many scholars have stated when he writes that utopias should be understood in terms of what they are countering. Lyman Tower Sargent defines utopia as “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space” and utopianism as “social dreaming” (9), to which I would add that both indicate an improvement on the alternatives, and may indeed be striving to represent the best place imaginable. Utopian contexts, by extension, are those situations where the “social dreaming” is enhanced through human agency, good governance, just laws, education, and work, rather than being a divinely ordained state of nature (Schaer et al). In this way, utopian contexts are explicitly countercultural through their very conception, as human agency is required and their emphasis is on social change. These modes of resistance against dominant paradigms are most evident in attempts to realise textual projections of a better society in countercultural communal experiments. Almost immediately after its publication, More’s Utopia became the model for Bishop Vasco de Quiroga’s communitarian hospital-town Santa Fe de la Laguna in Michoacan, Mexico, established in the 1530s as a counterculture to the oppressive enslavement and massacres of the Purhépecha people by Nuno Guzmán (Green). The countercultural thrust of the 1960s and 1970s provided many utopian contexts, perhaps most readily identifiable as the intentional communities that spawned and flourished, especially in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand (Metcalf, Shared Lives). They were often inspired by texts such as Charles A. Reich’s The Greening of America (1970) and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975), and this convergence of textual practices and alternative lifestyles can be seen in the development of Australia’s own Rainbow Region. Located in northern New South Wales, the geographical area of the Northern Rivers that has come to be known as the Rainbow Region encompasses Byron Bay, Nimbin, Mullumbimby, Bangalow, Clunes, Dunoon, Federal, with Lismore as the region’s largest town. But more evocative than these place names are the “rivers and creeks, vivid green hills, fruit and nut farms […] bounded by subtropical beaches and rainforest mountains” (Wilson 1). Utopian by nature, and recognised as such by the indigenous Bundjalung people who inhabited it before the white settlers, whalers and dairy farmers moved in, the Rainbow Region became utopian through culture–or indeed counterculture–during the 1973 Aquarius Festival in Nimbin when the hippies of Mullumbimby and the surfers of Byron Bay were joined by up to 10,000 people seeking alternative ways of being in the world. When the party was over, many Aquarians stayed on to form intentional communities in the beautiful region, like Tuntable Falls, Nimbin’s first and largest such cooperative (Metcalf, From Utopian Dreaming to Communal Reality 74-83). In utopian contexts, from the Renaissance to the 1970s and beyond, counterculture has underpinned and alternative media has circulated the aims and ideals of the communities of resistance. The early utopian context of the Anabaptist movement has been dubbed as countercultural by Sigrun Haude: “During the reign of the Münster (1534-5) Anabaptists erected not only a religious but also a social and political counterculture to the existing order” (240). And it was this Protestant Reformation that John Downing calls the first real media war, with conflicting movements using pamphlets produced on the new technology of the Gutenberg press to disseminate their ideas (144). What is striking here is the confluence of ideas and practices at this time–countercultural ideals are articulated, published, and disseminated, printing presses make this possible, and utopian activists realise how mass media can be used and abused, exploited and censored. Twentieth century countercultural movements drew on the lessons learnt from historical uprising and revolutions, understanding the importance of getting the word out through their own forms of media which, given the subversive nature of the messages, were essentially alternative, according to the criteria proposed by Chris Atton: alternative media may be understood as a radical challenge to the professionalized and institutionalized practices of the mainstream media. Alternative media privileges a journalism that is closely wedded to notions of social responsibility, replacing an ideology of “objectivity” with overt advocacy and oppositional practices. Its practices emphasize first person, eyewitness accounts by participants; a reworking of the populist approaches of tabloid newspapers to recover a “radical popular” style of reporting; collective and antihierarchical forms of organization which eschew demarcation and specialization–and which importantly suggest an inclusive, radical form of civic journalism. (267) Nick Couldry goes further to point out the utopian processes required to identify agencies of change, including alternative media, which he defines as “practices of symbolic production which contest (in some way) media power itself–that is, the concentration of symbolic power in media institutions” (25). Alternative media’s orientation towards oppositional and contestatory practices demonstrates clear parallels between its ambitions and those of counterculture in utopian contexts. From the 1960s onwards, the upsurge in alternative newspaper numbers is commensurate with the blossoming of the counterculture and increased utopian contexts; Susan Forde describes it thus: “a huge resurgence in the popularity of publications throughout the ‘counter-culture’ days of the 1960s and 1970s” (“Monitoring the Establishment”, 114). The nexus of counterculture and alternative media in such utopian contexts is documented in texts like Roger Streitmatter’s Voices of Revolution and Bob Osterlag’s People’s Movements, People’s Press. Like the utopian newspapers that came out of 18th and 19th century intentional communities, many of the new alternative press served to educate, socialise, promote and represent the special interests of the founders and followers of the countercultural movements, often focusing on the philosophy and ideals underpinning these communities rather than the everyday events (see also Frobert). The radical press in Australia was also gaining ground, with OZ in Australia from 1963-1969, and then from 1967-1973 in London. Magazines launched by Philip Frazer like The Digger, Go-Set, Revolution and High Times, and university student newspapers were the main avenues for youth and alternative expression on the Vietnam war and conscription, gay and lesbian rights, racism, feminism and ecological activism (Forde, Challenging the News; Cock & Perry). Nimbin 1973: Rusty Miller and The Byron Express The 1973 Aquarius Festival of counterculture in Nimbin (12-23 May) was a utopian context that had an alternative media life of its own before it arrived in the Rainbow Region–in student publications like Tharnuka and newsletters distributed via the Aquarius Foundation. There were other voices that announced the coming of the Aquarius Festival to Nimbin and reported on its impact, like The Digger from Melbourne and the local paper, The Northern Star. During the Festival, the Nimbin Good Times first appeared as the daily bulletin and continues today with the original masthead drawn by the Festival’s co-organiser, Graeme Dunstan. Some interesting work has been done on this area, ranging from general studies of the Rainbow Region (Wilson; Munro-Clark) to articles analysing its alternative press (Ward & van Vuuren; Martin & Ellis), but to date, there has been no focus on the Rainbow Region’s first alternative newspaper, The Byron Express. Co-edited by Rusty Miller and David Guthrie, this paper presented and mediated the aims and desires of the Aquarian movement. Though short-lived, as only 7 issues were published from 15 February 1973 to September 1973, The Byron Express left a permanent printed vestige of the Aquarian counterculture movement’s activism and ideals from an independent regional perspective. Miller’s credentials for starting up the newspaper are clear–he has always been a trailblazer, mixing “smarts” with surfing and environmental politics. After graduating from a Bachelor of Arts in history from San Diego State College, he first set foot in Byron Bay during his two semesters with the inaugural Chapman College affiliated University of the Seven Seas in 1965-6. Returning to his hometown of Encinitas, he co-founded the Surf Research accessory company with legendary Californian surfer Mike Doyle, and launched Waxmate, the first specially formulated surf wax in 1967 (Davis, Witzig & James; Warshaw 217), selling his interest in the business soon after to spend a couple of years “living the counterculture life on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai” (Davis, Witzig & James), before heading back to Byron Bay via Bells Beach in 1970 (Miller & Shantz) and Sydney, where he worked as an advertising salesman and writer with Tracks surfing magazine (Martin & Ellis). In 1971, he was one of the first to ride the now famous waves of Uluwatu in Bali, and is captured with Steven Cooney in the iconic publicity image for Albe Falzon’s 1971 film, Morning Of The Earth. The champion surfer from the US knew a thing or two about counterculture, alternative media, advertising and business when he found his new utopian context in Byron Bay. Miller and Guthrie’s front-page editorial of the inaugural issue of The Byron Express, published on 15 February 1973, with the byline “for a higher shire”, expressed the countercultural (cl)aims of the publication. Land use, property development and the lack of concern that some people in Byron had for their impact on the environment and people of the region were a prime target: With this first issue of the Byron Express, we hope to explain that the area is badly in need of a focal point. The transitions of present are vast and moving fast. The land is being sold and resold. Lots of money is coming into the area in the way of developments […] caravan parts, hotels, businesses and real estate. Many of the trips incoming are not exactly “concerned” as to what long term effect such developments might have on the environment and its people. We hope to serve as a focus of concern and service, a centre for expression and reflection. We would ask your contributions in vocal and written form. We are ready for some sock it to ya criticism… and hope you would grab us upon the street to tell us how you feel…The mission of this alternative newspaper is thereby defined by the need for a “focal point” that inscribes the voices of the community in a freely accessible narrative, recorded in print for posterity. Although this first issue contains no mention of the Aquarius Festival, there were already rumours circulating about it, as organisers Graeme Dunstan and Johnny Allen had been up to Main Arm, Mullumbimby and Nimbin on reconnaissance missions beginning in September 1972. Instead, there was an article on “Mullumbimby Man–Close to the Land” by Nicholas Shand, who would go on to found the community-based weekly newspaper The Echo in 1986, then called The Brunswick Valley Echo and still going strong. Another by Bob McTavish asked whether there could be a better form of government; there was a surf story, and a soul food section with a recipe for honey meade entitled “Do you want to get out of it on 10 cents a bottle?” The second issue continues in much the same vein. It is not until the third issue comes out on 17 March 1973 that the Aquarius Festival is mentioned in a skinny half column on page four. And it’s not particularly promising: Arrived at Nimbin, sleepy hamlet… Office in disused R.S.L. rooms, met a couple of guys recently arrived, said nothing was being done. “Only women here, you know–no drive”. Met Joanne and Vi, both unable to say anything to be reported… Graham Dunstan (codenamed Superfest) and John Allen nowhere in sight. Allen off on trip overseas. Dunstan due back in a couple of weeks. 10 weeks to go till “they” all come… and to what… nobody is quite sure. This progress report provides a fascinating contemporary insight into the tensions–between the local surfies and hippies on one hand, and the incoming students on the other–around the organisation of the Aquarius Festival. There is an unbridled barb at the sexist comments made by the guys, implicit criticism of the absent organisers, obvious skepticism about whether anyone will actually come to the festival, and wonderment at what it will be like. Reading between the lines, we might find a feeling of resentment about not being privy to new developments in their own backyard. The final lines of the article are non-committal “Anyway, let’s see what eventuates when the Chiefs return.” It seems that all has been resolved by the fifth issue of 11 May, which is almost entirely dedicated to the Aquarius Festival with the front page headline “Welcome to the New Age”. But there is still an undertone of slight suspicion at what the newcomers to the area might mean in terms of property development: The goal is improving your fellow man’s mind and nourishment in concert with your own; competition to improve your day and the quality of the day for society. Meanwhile, what is the first thing one thinks about when he enters Byron and the area? The physical environment is so magnificent and all encompassing that it can actually hold a man’s breath back a few seconds. Then a man says, “Wow, this land is so beautiful that one could make a quid here.” And from that moment the natural aura and spells are broken and the mind lapses into speculative equations, sales projections and future interest payments. There is plenty of “love” though, in this article: “The gathering at Nimbin is the most spectacular demonstration of the faith people have in a belief that is possible (and possible just because they want it to be) to live in love, through love together.” The following article signed by Rusty Miller “A Town Together” is equally focused on love: “See what you could offer the spirit at Nimbin. It might introduce you to a style that could lead to LOVE.” The centre spread features photos: the obligatory nudes, tents, and back to nature activities, like planting and woodworking. With a text box of “random comments” including one from a Lismore executive: ‘I took my wife and kids out there last weekend and we had such a good time. Seems pretty organized and the town was loaded with love. Heard there is some hepatitis about and rumours of VD. Everyone happy.” And another from a land speculator (surely the prime target of Miller’s wrath): “Saw guys kissing girls on the street, so sweet, bought 200 acres right outside of town, it’s going to be valuable out there some day.” The interview with Johnny Allen as the centrepiece includes some pertinent commentary on the media and reveals a well-founded suspicion of the mediatisation of the Aquarius Festival: We have tried to avoid the media actually. But we haven’t succeeded in doing so. Part of the basic idea is that we don’t need to be sold. All the down town press can do is try and interpret you. And by doing that it automatically places it in the wrong sort of context. So we’ve tried to keep it to people writing about the festival to people who will be involved in it. It’s an involvement festival. Coopting The Byron Express as an “involved” party effects a fundamental shift from an external reporting newspaper to a kind of proponent or even propaganda for the Aquarius festival and its ideas, like so many utopian newspapers had done before. It is therefore perhaps inevitable that The Byron Express should disappear very soon after the Aquarius festival. Fiona Martin and Rhonda Ellis explain that Rusty Miller stopped producing the paper because he “found the production schedule exhausting and his readership too small to attract consistent advertising” (5). At any rate, there were only two more issues, one in June–with some follow up reporting of the festival–and another in September 1973, which was almost entirely devoted to environmentally focused features, including an interview with Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal). Byron Bay 2013: Thirty Years of Rusty’s Byron Guide What Rusty did next is fairly well known locally–surfing and teaching people how to surf and a bit of writing. When major local employer Walkers slaughterhouse closed in 1983, he and his wife, social geographer Tricia Shantz, were asked by the local council to help promote Byron Bay as a tourist destination, writing the first Byron guide in 1983-4. Incorporating essays by local personalities and dedicated visitors, the Byron guide perpetuates the ideal of environmental awareness, spiritual experimentation, and respect for the land and sea. Recent contributors have included philosopher Peter Singer, political journalist Kerry O’Brien, and writer John Ralston Saul, and Miller and Shantz always have an essay in there themselves. “People, Politics and Culture” is the new byline for the 2013 edition. And Miller’s opening essay mediates the same utopian desires and environmental community messages that he espoused from the beginning of The Byron Express: The name Byron Bay represents something that we constantly try to articulate. If one was to dream up a menu of situations and conditions to compose a utopia, Australia would be the model of the nation-state and Byron would have many elements of the actual place one might wish to live for the rest of their lives. But of course there is always the danger of excesses in tropical paradises especially when they become famous destinations. Australia is being held to ransom for the ideology that we should be slaves to money and growth at the cost of a degraded and polluted physical and social environment. Byron at least was/is a refuge against this profusion of the so-called real-world perception that holds profit over environment as the way we must choose for our future. Even when writing for a much more commercial medium, Miller retains the countercultural utopian spirit that was crystallised in the Aquarius festival of 1973, and which remains relevant to many of those living in and visiting the Rainbow Region. Miller’s ethos moves beyond the alternative movements and communities to infiltrate travel writing and tourism initiatives in the area today, as evidenced in the Rusty’s Byron Guide essays. By presenting more radical discourses for a mainstream public, Miller together with Shantz have built on the participatory role that he played in launching the region’s first alternative newspaper in 1973 that became albeit briefly the equivalent of a countercultural utopian gazette. Now, he and Shantz effectively play the same role, producing a kind of countercultural form of utopian media for Byron Bay that corresponds to exactly the same criteria mentioned above. Through their free publication, they aim to educate, socialise, promote and represent the special interests of the founders and followers of the Rainbow Region, focusing on the philosophy and ideals underpinning these communities rather than the everyday events. The Byron Bay that Miller and Shantz promote is resolutely utopian, and certainly countercultural if compared to other free publications like The Book, a new shopping guide, or mainstream media elsewhere. Despite this new competition, they are planning the next edition for 2015 with essays to make people think, talk, and understand the region’s issues, so perhaps the counterculture is still holding its own against the mainstream. References Atton, Chris. “What Is ‘Alternative’ Journalism?” Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism 4.3 (2003): 267-72. Berger, Bennett M. The Survival of a Counterculture: Ideological Work and Everyday Life among Rural Communards. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2004. Cock, Peter H., & Paul F. Perry. “Australia's Alternative Media.” Media Information Australia 6 (1977): 4-13. Couldry, Nick. “Mediation and Alternative Media, or Relocating the Centre of Media and Communication Studies.” Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy 103, (2002): 24-31. Davis, Dale, John Witzig & Don James. “Rusty Miller.” Encyclopedia of Surfing. 10 Nov. 2014 ‹http://encyclopediaofsurfing.com/entries/miller-rusty›. Downing, John. Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Davis, J.C. Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516-1700. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. Forde, Susan. Challenging the News: The Journalism of Alternative and Independent Media. Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2011. ---. “Monitoring the Establishment: The Development of the Alternative Press in Australia” Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy 87 (May 1998): 114-133. Frobert, Lucien. “French Utopian Socialists as the First Pioneers in Development.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 35 (2011): 729-49. Green, Toby. Thomas More’s Magician: A Novel Account of Utopia in Mexico. London: Phoenix, 2004. Goffman, Ken, & Dan Joy. Counterculture through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House. New York: Villard Books. 2004. Haude, Sigrun. “Anabaptism.” The Reformation World. Ed. Andrew Pettegree. London: Routledge, 2000. 237-256. Jameson, Fredric. Archeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso, 2005. Levitas, Ruth. Utopia as Method. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Martin, Fiona, & Rhonda Ellis. “Dropping In, Not Out: The Evolution of the Alternative Press in Byron Shire 1970-2001.” Transformations 2 (2002). 10 Nov. 2014 ‹http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_02/pdf/MartinEllis.pdf›. McKay, George. Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties. London: Verso, 1996. Metcalf, Bill. From Utopian Dreaming to Communal Reality: Cooperative Lifestyles in Australia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1995. ---. Shared Visions, Shared Lives: Communal Living around the Globe. Forres, UK: Findhorn Press, 1996. Miller, Rusty & Tricia Shantz. Turning Point: Surf Portraits and Stories from Bells to Byron 1970-1971. Surf Research. 2012. Molnar, Thomas. Utopia: The Perennial Heresy. London: Tom Stacey, 1972. Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. New York: Methuen, 1986. Munro-Clark, Margaret. Communes in Rural Australia: The Movement since 1970. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1986. Osterlag, Bob. People’s Movements, People’s Press: The Journalism of Social Justice Movements. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. New York: Anchor, 1969. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies 5.1 (1994): 1-37. Schaer, Roland, Gregory Claeys, and Lyman Tower Sargent, eds. Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World. New York: New York Public Library/Oxford UP, 2000. Streitmatter, Roger. Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America. Columbia: Columbia UP, 2001. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Ward, Susan, & Kitty van Vuuren. “Belonging to the Rainbow Region: Place, Local Media, and the Construction of Civil and Moral Identities Strategic to Climate Change Adaptability.” Environmental Communication 7.1 (2013): 63-79. Warshaw, Matt. The History of Surfing. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2011. Wilson, Helen. (Ed.). Belonging in the Rainbow Region: Cultural Perspectives on the NSW North Coast. Lismore, NSW: Southern Cross University Press, 2003. Widmer, Kingsley. Counterings: Utopian Dialectics in Contemporary Contexts. Ann Arbor, London: UMI Research Press, 1988. Yinger, J. Milton. Countercultures: The Promise and Peril of a World Turned Upside Down. New York: The Free Press, 1982.
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Page, John. "Counterculture, Property, Place, and Time: Nimbin, 1973." M/C Journal 17, no. 6 (October 1, 2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.900.

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Abstract:
Property as both an idea and a practice has been interpreted through the prism of a liberal, law and economics paradigm since at least the 18th century. This dominant (and domineering) perspective stresses the primacy of individualism, the power of exclusion, and the values of private commodity. By contrast, concepts of property that evolved out of the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s challenged this hegemony. Countercultural, or Aquarian, ideas of property stressed pre-liberal, long forgotten property norms such as sociability, community, inclusion and personhood, and contested a private uniformity that seemed “totalizing and universalizing” (Blomley, Unsettling 102). This paper situates what it terms “Aquarian property” in the context of emergent property theory in the 1960s and 1970s, and the propertied practices these new theories engendered. Importantly, this paper also grounds Aquarian ideas of property to location. As legal geographers observe, the law inexorably occurs in place as well as time. “Nearly every aspect of law is located, takes place, is in motion, or has some spatial frame of reference” (Braverman et al. 1). Property’s radical yet simultaneously ancient alter-narrative found fertile soil where the countercultural experiment flourished. In Australia, one such place was the green, sub-tropical landscape of the New South Wales Northern Rivers, home of the 1973 Australian Union of Student’s Aquarius Festival at Nimbin. The Counterculture and Property Theory Well before the “Age of Aquarius” entered western youth consciousness (Munro-Clark 56), and 19 years before the Nimbin Aquarius Festival, US legal scholar Felix Cohen defined property in seminally private and exclusionary terms. To the world: Keep off X unless you have my permission, which I may grant or withhold.Signed: Private citizenEndorsed: The state. (374) Cohen’s formula was private property at its 1950s apogee, an unambiguous expression of its centrality to post-war materialism. William Blackstone’s famous trope of property as “that sole and despotic dominion” had become self-fulfilling (Rose, Canons). Why had this occurred? What had made property so narrow and instrumentalist to a private end? Several property theorists identify the enclosure period in the 17th and 18th centuries as seminal to this change (Blomley, Law; Graham). The enclosures, and their discourse of improvement and modernity, saw ancient common rights swept away in favour of the liberal private right. Property diversity was supplanted by monotony, group rights by the individual, and inclusion by exclusion. Common property rights were rights of shared use, traditionally agrarian incidents enjoyed through community membership. However, for the proponents of enclosure, common rights stood in the way of progress. Thus, what was once a vested right (such as the common right to glean) became a “mere practice”, condemned by its “universal promiscuity” and perceptions of vagrancy (Buck 17-8). What was once sited to context, to village and parish, evolved into abstraction. And what had meaning for person and place, “a sense of self; […] a part of a tribe’ (Neeson 180), became a tradable commodity, detached and indifferent to the consequences of its adverse use (Leopold). These were the transformed ideas of property exported to so-called “settler” societies, where colonialists demanded the secure property rights denied to them at home. In the common law tradition, a very modern yet selective amnesia took hold, a collective forgetting of property’s shared and sociable past (McLaren). Yet, property as commodity proved to be a narrow, one-sided account of property, an unsatisfactory “half right” explanation (Alexander 2) that omits inconvenient links between ownership on the one hand, and self and place on the other. Pioneering US conservationist Aldo Leopold detected as much a few years before Felix Cohen’s defining statement of private dominance. In Leopold’s iconic A Sand County Almanac, he wrote presciently of the curious phenomenon of hardheaded farmers replanting selected paddocks with native wildflowers. As if foreseeing what the next few decades may bring, Leopold describes a growing resistance to the dominant property paradigm: I call it Revolt – revolt against the tedium of the merely economic attitude towards land. We assume that because we had to subjugate the land to live on it, the best farm is therefore the one most completely tamed. These […] farmers have learned from experience that the wholly tamed farm offers not only a slender livelihood but a constricted life. (188)By the early 1960s, frustrations over the constrictions of post-war life were given voice in dissenting property literature. Affirming that property is a social institution, emerging ideas of property conformed to the contours of changing values (Singer), and the countercultural zeitgeist sweeping America’s universities (Miller). Thus, in 1964, Charles Reich saw property as the vanguard for a new civic compact, an ambitious “New Property” that would transform “government largess” into a property right to address social inequity. For Joseph Sax, property scholar and author of a groundbreaking citizen’s manifesto, the assertion of public property rights were critical to the protection of the environment (174). And in 1972, to Christopher Stone, it seemed a natural property incident that trees should enjoy equivalent standing to legal persons. In an age when “progress” was measured by the installation of plastic trees in Los Angeles median strips (Tribe), jurists aspired to new ideas of property with social justice and environmental resonance. Theirs was a scholarly “Revolt” against the tedium of property as commodity, an act of resistance to the centuries-old conformity of the enclosures (Blomley, Law). Aquarian Theory in Propertied Practice Imagining new property ideas in theory yielded in practice a diverse Aquarian tenure. In the emerging communes and intentional communities of the late 1960s and early 1970s, common property norms were unwittingly absorbed into their ethos and legal structure (Zablocki; Page). As a “way out of a dead-end future” (Smith and Crossley), a generation of young, mostly university-educated people sought new ways to relate to land. Yet, as Benjamin Zablocki observed at the time, “there is surprisingly little awareness among present-day communitarians of their historical forebears” (43). The alchemy that was property and the counterculture was given form and substance by place, time, geography, climate, culture, and social history. Unlike the dominant private paradigm that was placeless and universal, the tenurial experiments of the counter-culture were contextual and diverse. Hence, to generalise is to invite the problematic. Nonetheless, three broad themes of Aquarian property are discernible. First, property ceased being a vehicle for the acquisition of private wealth; rather it invested self-meaning within a communitarian context, “a sense of self [as] a part of a tribe.” Second, the “back to the land” movement signified a return to the country, an interregnum in the otherwise unidirectional post-enclosure drift to the city. Third, Aquarian property was premised on obligation, recognising that ownership was more than a bundle of autonomous rights, but rights imbricated with a corresponding duty to land health. Like common property and its practices of sustained yield, Aquarian owners were environmental stewards, with inter-connected responsibilities to others and the earth (Page). The counterculture was a journey in self-fulfillment, a search for personal identity amidst the empowerment of community. Property’s role in the counterculture was to affirm the under-regarded notion of property as propriety; where ownership fostered well lived and capacious lives in flourishing communities (Alexander). As Margaret Munro-Clark observed of the early 1970s, “the enrichment of individual identity or selfhood [is] the distinguishing mark of the current wave of communitarianism” (33). Or, as another 1970s settler remarked twenty years later, “our ownership means that we can’t liquefy our assets and move on with any appreciable amount of capital. This arrangement has many advantages; we don’t waste time wondering if we would be better off living somewhere else, so we have commitment to place and community” (Metcalf 52). In personhood terms, property became “who we are, how we live” (Lismore Regional Gallery), not a measure of commoditised worth. Personhood also took legal form, manifested in early title-holding structures, where consensus-based co-operatives (in which capital gain was precluded) were favoured ideologically over the capitalist, majority-rules corporation (Munro-Clark). As noted, Aquarian property was also predominantly rural. For many communitarians, the way out of a soulless urban life was to abandon its difficulties for the yearnings of a simpler rural idyll (Smith and Crossley). The 1970s saw an extraordinary return to the physicality of land, measured by a willingness to get “earth under the nails” (Farran). In Australia, communities proliferated on the NSW Northern Rivers, in Western Australia’s southwest, and in the rural hinterlands behind Queensland’s Sunshine Coast and Cairns. In New Zealand, intentional communities appeared on the rural Coromandel Peninsula, east of Auckland, and in the Golden Bay region on the remote northwestern tip of the South Island. In all these localities, land was plentiful, the climate seemed sunny, and the landscape soulful. Aquarians “bought cheap land in beautiful places in which to opt out and live a simpler life [...] in remote backwaters, up mountains, in steep valleys, or on the shorelines of wild coastal districts” (Sargisson and Sargent 117). Their “hard won freedom” was to escape from city life, suffused by a belief that “the city is hardly needed, life should spring out of the country” (Jones and Baker 5). Aquarian property likewise instilled environmental ethics into the notion of land ownership. Michael Metzger, writing in 1975 in the barely minted Ecology Law Quarterly, observed that humankind had forgotten three basic ecological laws, that “everything is connected to everything else”, that “everything must go somewhere”, and that “nature knows best” (797). With an ever-increasing focus on abstraction, the language of private property: enabled us to create separate realities, and to remove ourselves from the natural world in which we live to a cerebral world of our own creation. When we act in accord with our artificial world, the disastrous impact of our fantasies upon the natural world in which we live is ignored. (796)By contrast, Aquarian property was intrinsically contextual. It revolved around the owner as environmental steward, whose duty it was “to repair the ravages of previous land use battles, and to live in accord with the natural environment” (Aquarian Archives). Reflecting ancient common rights, Aquarian property rights internalised norms of prudence, proportionality and moderation of resource use (Rose, Futures). Simply, an ecological view of land ownership was necessary for survival. As Dr. Moss Cass, the Federal environment minister wrote in the preface to The Way Out: Radical Alternatives in Australia, ‘”there is a common conviction that something is rotten at the core of conventional human existence.” Across the Tasman, the sense of latent environmental crisis was equally palpable, “we are surrounded by glistening surfaces and rotten centres” (Jones and Baker 5). Property and Countercultural Place and Time In the emerging discipline of legal geography, the law and its institutions (such as property) are explained through the prism of spatiotemporal context. What even more recent law and geography scholarship argues is that space is privileged as “theoretically interesting” while “temporality is reduced to empirical history” (Braverman et al. 53). This part seeks to consider the intersection of property, the counterculture, and time and place without privileging either the spatial or temporal dimensions. It considers simply the place of Nimbin, New South Wales, in early May 1973, and how property conformed to the exigencies of both. Legal geographers also see property through the theory of performance. Through this view, property is a “relational effect, not a prior ground, that is brought into being by the very act of performance” (Blomley, Performing 13). In other words, doing does not merely describe or represent property, but it enacts, such that property becomes a reality through its performance. In short, property is because it does. Performance theory is liberating (Page et al) because it concentrates not on property’s arcane rules and doctrines, nor on the legal geographer’s alleged privileging of place over time, but on its simple doing. Thus, Nicholas Blomley sees private property as a series of constant and reiterative performances: paying rates, building fences, registering titles, and so on. Adopting this approach, Aquarian property is described as a series of performances, seen through the prism of the legal practitioner, and its countercultural participants. The intersection of counterculture and property law implicated my family in its performative narrative. My father had been a solicitor in Nimbin since 1948; his modest legal practice was conducted from the side annexe of the School of Arts. Equipped with a battered leather briefcase and a trusty portable typewriter, like clockwork, he drove the 20 miles from Lismore to Nimbin every Saturday morning. I often accompanied him on his weekly visits. Forty-one years ago, in early May 1973, we drove into town to an extraordinary sight. Seen through ten-year old eyes, surreal scenes of energy, colour, and longhaired, bare-footed young people remain vivid. At almost the exact halfway point in my father’s legal career, new ways of thinking about property rushed headlong and irrevocably into his working life. After May 1973, dinnertime conversations became very different. Gone was the mundane monopoly of mortgages, subdivisions, and cottage conveyancing. The topics now ranged to hippies, communes, co-operatives and shared ownerships. Property was no longer a dull transactional monochrome, a lifeless file bound in pink legal tape. It became an idea replete with diversity and innovation, a concept populated with interesting characters and entertaining, often quirky stories. If property is a narrative (Rose, Persuasion), then the micro-story of property on the NSW Northern Rivers became infinitely more compelling and interesting in the years after Aquarius. For the practitioner, Aquarian property involved new practices and skills: the registration of co-operatives, the drafting of shareholder deeds that regulated the use of common lands, the settling of idealistic trusts, and the ever-increasing frequency of visits to the Nimbin School of Arts every working Saturday. For the 1970s settler in Nimbin, performing Aquarian property took more direct and lived forms. It may have started by reading the open letter that festival co-organiser Graeme Dunstan wrote to the Federal Minister for Urban Affairs, Tom Uren, inviting him to Nimbin as a “holiday rather than a political duty”, and seeking his support for “a community group of 100-200 people to hold a lease dedicated to building a self-sufficient community [...] whose central design principles are creative living and ecological survival” (1). It lay in the performances at the Festival’s Learning Exchange, where ideas of philosophy, organic farming, alternative technology, and law reform were debated in free and unstructured form, the key topics of the latter being abortion and land. And as the Festival came to its conclusion, it was the gathering at the showground, titled “After Nimbin What?—How will the social and environmental experiment at Nimbin effect the setting up of alternative communities, not only in the North Coast, but generally in Australia” (Richmond River Historical Society). In the days and months after Aquarius, it was the founding of new communities such as Co-ordination Co-operative at Tuntable Creek, described by co-founder Terry McGee in 1973 as “a radical experiment in a new way of life. The people who join us […] have to be prepared to jump off the cliff with the certainty that when they get to the bottom, they will be all right” (Munro-Clark 126; Cock 121). The image of jumping off a cliff is a metaphorical performance that supposes a leap into the unknown. While orthodox concepts of property in land were left behind, discarded at the top, the Aquarian leap was not so much into the unknown, but the long forgotten. The success of those communities that survived lay in the innovative and adaptive ways in which common forms of property fitted into registered land title, a system otherwise premised on individual ownership. Achieved through the use of outside private shells—title-holding co-operatives or companies (Page)—inside the shell, the norms and practices of common property were inclusively facilitated and performed (McLaren; Rose, Futures). In 2014, the performance of Aquarian property endures, in the dozens of intentional communities in the Nimbin environs that remain a witness to the zeal and spirit of the times and its countercultural ideals. Conclusion The Aquarian idea of property had profound meaning for self, community, and the environment. It was simultaneously new and old, radical as well as ancient. It re-invented a pre-liberal, pre-enclosure idea of property. For property theory, its legacy is its imaginings of diversity, the idea that property can take pluralistic forms and assert multiple values, a defiant challenge to the dominant paradigm. Aquarian property offers rich pickings compared to the pauperised private monotone. Over 41 years ago, in the legal geography that was Nimbin, New South Wales, the imaginings of property escaped the conformity of enclosure. The Aquarian age represented a moment in “thickened time” (Braverman et al 53), when dissenting theory became practice, and the idea of property indelibly changed for a handful of serendipitous actors, the unscripted performers of a countercultural narrative faithful to its time and place. References Alexander, Gregory. Commodity & Propriety: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought 1776-1970. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Aquarian Archives. "Report into Facilitation of a Rural Intentional Community." Lismore, NSW: Southern Cross University. Blomley, Nicholas. Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power. New York: Guildford Press, 1994. Blomley, Nicholas. Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property. New York: Routledge, 2004. Blomley, Nicholas. “Performing Property, Making the World.” Social Studies Research Network 2053656. 5 Aug. 2013 ‹http://ssrn.com/abstract=2053656›. Braverman, Irus, Nicholas Blomley, David Delaney, and Sandy Kedar. The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2014. Buck, Andrew. The Making of Australian Property Law. Sydney: Federation Press, 2006. Cock, Peter. Alternative Australia: Communities of the Future. London: Quartet Books, 1979. Cohen, Felix. “Dialogue on Private Property.” Rutgers Law Review 9 (1954): 357-387. Dunstan, Graeme. “A Beginning Rather than an End.” The Nimbin Good Times 27 Mar. 1973: 1. Farran, Sue. “Earth under the Nails: The Extraordinary Return to the Land.” Modern Studies in Property Law. Ed. Nicholas Hopkins. 7th edition. Oxford: Hart, 2013. 173-191. Graham, Nicole. Lawscape: Property, Environment, Law. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011. Jones, Tim, and Ian Baker. A Hard Won Freedom: Alternative Communities in New Zealand. Auckland: Hodder & Staughton, 1975. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac with Other Essays on Conservation from Round River. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966. Lismore Regional Gallery. “Not Quite Square: The Story of Northern Rivers Architecture.” Exhibition, 13 Apr. to 2 June 2013. McLaren, John. “The Canadian Doukhobors and the Land Question: Religious Communalists in a Fee Simple World.” Land and Freedom: Law Property Rights and the British Diaspora. Eds. Andrew Buck, John McLaren and Nancy Wright. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2001. 135-168. Metcalf, Bill. Co-operative Lifestyles in Australia: From Utopian Dreaming to Communal Reality. Sydney: UNSW Press, 1995. Miller, Timothy. The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1999. Munro-Clark, Margaret. Communes in Rural Australia: The Movement since 1970. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1986. Neeson, Jeanette M. Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Page, John. “Common Property and the Age of Aquarius.” Griffith Law Review 19 (2010): 172-196. Page, John, Ann Brower, and Johannes Welsh. “The Curious Untidiness of Property and Ecosystem Services: A Hybrid Method of Measuring Place.” Pace Environmental Law Rev. 32 (2015): forthcoming. Reich, Charles. “The New Property.” Yale Law Journal 73 (1964): 733-787. Richmond River Historical Society Archives. “After Nimbin What?” Nimbin Aquarius file, flyer. Lismore, NSW. Rose, Carol M. Property and Persuasion Essays on the History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership. Boulder: Westview, 1994. Rose, Carol M. “The Several Futures of Property: Of Cyberspace and Folk Tales, Emission Trades and Ecosystems.” Minnesota Law Rev. 83 (1998-1999): 129-182. Rose, Carol M. “Canons of Property Talk, or Blackstone’s Anxiety.” Yale Law Journal 108 (1998): 601-632. Sargisson, Lucy, and Lyman Tower Sargent. Living in Utopia: New Zealand’s Intentional Communities. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2004. Sax, Joseph L. Defending the Environment: A Strategy for Citizen Action. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971. Singer, Joseph. “No Right to Exclude: Public Accommodations and Private Property.” Nw. U.L.Rev. 90 (1995): 1283-1481. Smith, Margaret, and David Crossley, eds. The Way Out: Radical Alternatives in Australia. Melbourne: Lansdowne Press, 1975. Stone, Christopher. “Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects.” Southern Cal. L. Rev. 45 (1972): 450-501. Tribe, Laurence H. “Ways Not to Think about Plastic Trees: New Foundations for Environmental Law.” Yale Law Journal 83 (1973-1974): 1315-1348. Zablocki, Benjamin. Alienation and Charisma: A Study of Contemporary American Communes. New York: Free Press, 1980.
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37

Grandinetti, Justin Joseph. "A Question of Time: HQ Trivia and Mobile Streaming Temporality." M/C Journal 22, no. 6 (December 4, 2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1601.

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One of the commonplace and myopic reactions to the rise of televisual time-shifting via video-on-demand, DVD rental services, illegal downloads, and streaming media was to decree “the death of the communal television experience”. For many, new forms of watching television unconstrained by time-bound, regularly scheduled programming meant the demise of the predominant form of media liveness that existed commercially since the 1950s. Nevertheless, as time-shifting practices evolved, so have attendant notions of televisual temporality—including changing forms of liveness, shared experience, and the plastic and flexible nature of new viewing patterns (Bury & Li; Irani, Jefferies, & Knight; Turner; Couldry). Although these temporal conceptualisations are relevant to streaming media, in the few years since the launch of platforms such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, what it means “to stream” has rapidly expanded. Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, and TikTok allow users to record, share, and livestream their own content. Not only does social media add to the growing definition of streaming, but these streaming interactions are also predominately mobile (Munson; Droesch). Taken together, a live and social experience of time via audio-visual media is not lost but is instead reactivated through the increasingly mobile nature of streaming. In the following article, I examine how mobile streaming media practices are part of a construction of shared temporality that both draws upon and departs from conceptualisations of televisual and fixed streaming liveness. Accordingly, HQ Trivia—a mobile-specific streaming gameshow app launched in August 2017—demonstrates novel attempts at reimagining the temporally-bound live televisual experience while simultaneously offering new monetisation strategies via mobile streaming technologies. Through this example, I argue that pervasive Web-connectivity, streaming platforms, data collection, mobile devices, and mobile streaming practices form arrangements of valorisation that are temporally bound yet concomitantly mobile, allowing new forms of social cohesion and temporal control.A Brief History of Televisual TemporalityTime is at once something infinitely mysterious and inherently understood. As John Durham Peters concisely explains, “time lies at the heart of the meaning of our lives” (175). It is precisely due to the myriad ontological, phenomenological, and epistemological dimensions of time that the subject has long been the focus of critical inquiry. As part of the so-called spatial turn, Michel Foucault argues that theory formerly treated space as “the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Time, on the contrary, was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic” (70). While scholarly turns toward space and later mobility have shifted the emphasis of critical inquiry, time is not rendered irrelevant. For example, Doreen Massey defines spaces as the product of interrelations, as sphere of possibility and heterogeneous multiplicity, and as always under construction (9). Critical to these conceptualisations of space, then, is the element of time. Considering space not as a static container in which individual actors enter and leave but instead as a production of ongoing becoming demonstrates how space, mobility, and time are inexorably intertwined. Time, space, and mobility are also interrelated when it comes to conversations of power. Judy Wajcman and Nigel Dodd contend that temporal control is related to dynamics of power, in that the powerful are fast and the powerless slow (3). Questions of speed, mobility, and the control of time itself, however, require attention to the media that help construct time. Aspects of time may always escape human comprehension, yet, “Whatever time is, calendars and clocks measure, control, and constitute it” (Peters 176). Time is a sociotechnical construction, but temporal experience is bound up in more than just time-keeping apparatuses. Elucidated by Sarah Sharma, temporalities are not experienced as uniform time, but instead produced within larger economies of labor and temporal worth (8). To reach a more productive understanding of temporalities, Sharma offers power-chronography, which conceptualises time as experiential, political, and produced by social differences and institutions (15). Put another way, time is an experience structured by the social, economic, political, and technical toward forms of social cohesion and control.Time has always been central to the televisual. Though it is often placed in a genealogy with film, William Uricchio contends that early discursive imaginings and material experiments in television are more indebted to technologies such as the telegraph and telephone in promising live and simultaneous communication across distances (289-291). In essence, film is a technology of storage, related to 18th- and 19th-century traditions of conceptualising time as fragmented; the televisual is instead associated with the “contrasting notion of time conceived as a continuous present, as flow, as seamless” (Uricchio 295). Responding to Uricchio, Doron Galili asserts that the relationship between film and television is dialectical and not hierarchical. For Galili, the desire for simultaneity and storage oscillates—both are present, both remain separate from one another. It is the synthesis of simultaneity and storage that allows both to operate together as a technological and mediated vision of mastering time. Despite disagreements regarding how best to conceptualise early film and television, it is clear that the televisual furthered a desire for spatial and temporal coordination, liveness, and simultaneity.In recent years, forms of televisual “time-shifting” allow viewers to escape temporally-bound scheduling. In what is commonly periodised as TVIII, the proliferation of digital platforms, video-on-demand, legal and illegal downloads, and DVD players, and streaming media displaced more traditional forms of watching live television (Jenner 259). It is important to note that while streaming is often related to the televisual, the televisual-to-streaming shift is not a clean linear evolution. Televisual-style content persists in streaming, but streaming might be better defined as matrix media, where content is made available away from the television set (Jenner 260). Regardless, the rise of streaming media platforms such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime is commonly framed as part of televisual temporal disruption, as scholars note the growing plurality of televisual-type viewing options (Bury and Li 594). Further still, streaming platforms are often defined as television, a recent example occurring when Netflix CEO Reed Hastings called the service a “global Internet TV network” in 2016.The changing landscape of streaming and time-shifting notwithstanding, individuals remain aware of the viewing patterns of others, and this anticipation impacts the coordination and production of the collective television experience (Irani, Jeffries, and Knight 621). Related to this goal is how liveness connects viewers to shared social realities as they are occurring and helps to create a collective sense of time (Couldry 355-356). This shared experience of the social is still readily available in a time-shifted landscape, in that even shows released via an all-at-once format (for example, Netflix’s Stranger Things) can rapidly become a cultural phenomenon. Moreover, livestreaming has become commonplace as alternative to cable television for live events and sports, along with new uses for gaming and social media. As Graeme Turner notes, “if liveness includes a sense of the shrinking temporal gap between oneself and the rest of the world, as well as a palpable sense of immediacy, then this is something we can find as readily online as in television”. To this end, the claim that streaming media is harbinger of the “death of liveness” is far too simplistic. Liveness vis-à-vis streaming is not something that ceases to exist—shared temporal experiences simply occur in new forms.HQ TriviaOne such strategy to reactive a more traditional form of televisual liveness through streaming is to make streaming more social and mobile. Launched in August 2017, HQ Trivia (later retitled HQ Trivia and Words) requires users, known as HQties, to download the app and log in at 3.00 pm and 9.00 pm Eastern Standard Time to join a live gameshow. In each session, gameshow hosts ask a series of 12 single-elimination questions with three answer choices. Any users who successfully answer all 12 questions correctly split the prize pool for the show, which ranges from $250 to $250,000. Though these monetary prizes appear substantial, the per-person winnings paid out are often quite low based on the number winners splitting the pool. In the short time since its inception, HQ has had high and low audience participation numbers and has also spawned a myriad of imitators, including Facebook’s “Confetti” gameshow.Mobile streaming via trivia gameshows are a return to forms of televisual liveness and participation often disrupted by the flexible nature of streaming. HQ’s twice-a-day events require users to re-adapt to temporal constraints to play and participate. Just as intriguing is that “HQ sees its biggest user participation—and largest prizes—on Sundays, especially if games coincide with national events, such as holidays, sports games or award shows” (Alcantara). Though it is difficult to draw conclusions from this correlation, the fact that HQ garners more players and attention during events and holidays complicates notions of mobile trivia as a primary form of entertainment. It is possible, perhaps, that HQ is an evolution to the so-called second screen experience, in which a mobile device is used simultaneously with a television. As noted by Hye-Jin Lee and Mark Andrejevic, the rise of the second screen often enables real-time monitoring, customisation, and targeting that is envisioned by the promoters of the interactive commercial economy (41). Second screens are a way to reestablish live-viewing and, by extension, advertising through the importance of affective economies (46). Affect, or a preconscious structure of feeling, is critical to platform monetisation, in that the capture of big data requires an infrastructuralisation of desire—in streaming media often a desire for entertainment (Cockayne 6). Through affective capture, users become willing to repeat certain actions via love for and connection to a platform. Put another way, big data collection and processing is often the central monetisation strategy of platforms, but capturing this data requires first cultivating user attachment and repeat actions.To this end, many platforms operate by encouraging as much user engagement as possible. HQ certainly endeavors for strong affective investment by users (a video search for “HQ Trivia winner reactions” demonstrates the often-zealous nature of HQties, even when winning relatively low amounts of prize money). However, HQ departs from the typical platform streaming model in that engagement with the app is limited to two games per day. These comparatively diminutive temporal appointments have substantial implications for HQ’s strategies of valorisation, or the process of apprehending and making productive the user as laborer in new times and spaces (Franklin 13). Media theorists have long acknowledged the “work of watching” television, in which the televisual is “a real economic process, a value-creating process, and a metaphor, a reflection of value creation in the economy as a whole” (Jhally and Livant 125). Televisual monetisation is predominately based on the advertising model, which functions to accelerate the selling of commodities. This configuration of capital accumulation is enabled by a lineage of privatisation of broadcasting; television is heralded as a triumph of deregulation, but in practice is an oligopolistic, advertising-supported system of electronic media aided by government policies (Streeter 175). By contrast, streaming media accomplishes capitalistic accumulation through the collection, storage, and processing of big data via cloud infrastructure. Cloud infrastructure enables unprecedented storage and analytic capacity, and is heavily utilised in streaming media to compress and transmit data packets.Although the metaphor of the cloud situates user data as ephemeral and free, these infrastructures are better conceptualised as a “digital enclosure”, which invokes the importance of privatisation and commodification, as well as the materiality and spatiality of data collection (Andrejevic 297). As such, streaming monetisation is often achieved through the multitude of monetisation possibilities that occur through the collection of vast amounts of user data. Streaming and mobile streaming, then, are similar to the televisual in that these processes monetise the work of watching; yet, the ubiquitous data collection of streaming permits more efficient forms of computational commodification.Mobile streaming media continues the lineage of ubiquitous immaterial labor—a labor form that can, and commonly is, accomplished by “filling the cracks” of non-work time with content engagement and accompanying data collection. HQ Trivia, nevertheless, functions as a notable departure from this model in that company has made public claims that the platform will not utilise the myriad user identification and location data collected by the app. Instead, HQ has engaged in brand promotions that include Warner Brothers movies Ready Player One and Rampage, along with a brief Nike partnership (Feldman; Perry). Here, mobile and temporal valorisation occurs through monetisation strategies more akin to traditional televisual advertising than the techniques of big data collection often utilised by platforms. Whether or not eschewing the proclivity toward monetising user data for a more traditional form of brand promotion will yield rewards for HQ remains to be seen. Nonetheless, this return to more conventional televisual monetisation strategies sets HQ apart from many other applications that rely on data collection and subsequent sale of user data for targeted advertisements.Affective attachment and the transformation of leisure times through mobile devices is critical not just to value generation, but also to the relationship between mobile streaming and temporal and mobile control. As previously noted, Sharma elucidates that time is part of biopolitical forms of control, produced and experienced differently. Nick Couldry echoes these sentiments, in that there are rival forms of liveness stemming from a desire for connectivity, and that these “types of liveness are now pulling in different directions” (360). Despite common positionings, the relationship between television and streaming media is not a neat linear evolution—television, streaming, and mobile streaming continue to operate both side-by-side and in conjunction with one another. The experience of time, nevertheless, operates differently in these media forms. Explained by Wendy Chun, television structures temporality through steady streams of information, the condensation of time that demands response in crisis, and the most powerful moments of “touching the real” via catastrophe (74). New media differs by instead fostering crisis as the norm, in that “crises promise to move users from banal to the crucial by offering the experience of something like responsibility; something like the consequences and joys of ‘being in touch’” (Chun 75). New media crisis is often felt via reminders and other increasingly pervasive prompts that require an immediate user response. HQ differs from other forms of streaming and mobile streaming in that the plastic and flexible nature of viewing is replaced by mobile notifications and reminders that one must be ready for twice-daily games or risk losing a chance to win.In contributing to a sense of new media crisis, HQ fosters novel expectations for the mobile streaming subject. Through temporally-bound mobile livestreaming, “networked smart screens are the mechanism by which time and space will be both overcome and reanimated” as the “real world” is transformed into a magical landscape of mobile desire (Oswald and Packer 286). There is a double-edged element to this transformation, however, in that power of HQ Trivia is the ability to reanimate space through a promise that users are able to win substantial prize money only if one remembers to tune in at certain times. Within HQ Trivia, the much-emphasised temporal freedom of streaming time-shifting is eschewed for more traditional forms of televisual liveness; at the same time, smartphone technologies permit mobile on-the-go forms of engagement. Accordingly, a more traditional televisual simultaneity reemerges even as the spaces of streaming are untethered from the living room. It is in this reemphasis of liveness and sharedness that the user is simultaneously empowered vis-à-vis mobile devices and made mobile streaming subject through new temporal expectations and forms of monetisation.As mobile streaming becomes increasingly pervasive, new experimental applications jockey for user attention and time. HQ Trivia’s model of eschewing data collection for more traditional televisual monetisation represents attempts to recreate mobile media engagement not through individual isolated audio-visual practices, but instead through a live and mobile experience. Consequently, HQ Trivia and other temporally-bound gameshow apps demonstrate a reimagined live televisual experience, and, in turn, a monetisation of mobile engagement through affective investment.ReferencesAlcantara, Chris. “Diving into HQ Trivia: The Toughest Rounds, the Best Time to Play and How Some Users Beat the Odds.” The Washington Post 5 Mar. 2018. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/business/hq-trivia/?utm_term=.02dc389ae3a9>.Andrejevic, Mark. “Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure.” The Communication Review 10.4 (2007): 295-317.Bury, Rhiannon, and Johnson Li. “Is It Live or Is It Timeshifted, Streamed or Downloaded? Watching Television in the Era of Multiple Screens.” New Media & Society 17.4 (2013): 592-610.Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017.Cockayne, Daniel G. “Affect and Value in Critical Examinations of the Production and ‘Prosumption’ of Big Data.” Big Data & Society 3.2 (2016): 1-11.Couldry, Nick. “Liveness, ‘Reality,’ and the Mediated Habitus from Television to the Mobile Phone.” Communication Review 7.4 (2004): 353-361.Droesch, Blake. “More than Half of US Social Network Users Will Be Mobile-Only in 2019.” EMarketer 26 Apr. 2019. <http://www.emarketer.com/content/more-than-half-of-social-network-users-will-be-mobile-only-in-2019>.Franklin, Seb. Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015.Galili, Doron. “Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television and the Modern Mediascape, 1878—1939.” PhD dissertation. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2011.Irani, Lilly, Robin Jeffries, and Andrea Knight. “Rhythms and Plasticity: Television Temporality at Home.” Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 14.7 (2010): 621-632.Jenner, Mareike. “Is This TVIV? On Netflix, TVIII and Binge-Watching.” New Media & Society 18.2 (2014): 257-273.Jhally, Sut, and Bill Livant. “Watching as Working: The Valorization of Audience Consciousness.” Journal of Communication 36.3 (1986): 124-143.Lee, Hye-Jin, and Mark Andrejevic. “Second-Screen Theory: From Democratic Surround to the Digital Enclosure.” Connected Viewing: Selling, Streaming & Sharing Media in the Digital Age. Eds. Jennifer Holt and Kevin Sanson. New York: Routledge, 2014. 40-62.Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005.Munson, Ben. “More than Half of Global Video Views Start on Mobile.” Fierce Video 24 Sep. 2019. <https://www.fiercevideo.com/video/more-than-half-global-video-views-start-mobile-report-says>.Oswald, Kathleen, and Jeremy Packer. “Flow and Mobile Media.” Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks. Eds. Jeremy Packer and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley. New York: Routledge, 2012. 276-287.Perry, Erica. “Here's How HQ Trivia Is Finally Monetizing Its Massive Audience.” Social Media Week 29 Mar. 2018. <http://socialmediaweek.org/blog/2018/03/heres-how-hq-trivia-is-finally-monetizing-its-massive-audience/>.Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2016.Sharma, Sarah. In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke UP, 2014.Sterling, Greg. “Nearly 80 Percent of Social Media Time Now Spent on Mobile Devices.” Marketing Land 4 Apr. 2016. <http://marketingland.com/facebook-usage-accounts-1-5-minutes-spent-mobile-171561>.Streeter, Thomas. Selling the Air. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.Turner, Graeme. “'Liveness' and 'Sharedness' Outside the Box” Flow Journal 8 (2011). <https://www.flowjournal.org/2011/04/liveness-and-sharedness-outside-the-box/>.Uricchio, William. “Television's First Seventy-Five Years: The Interpretive Flexibility of a Medium in Transition.” The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies. Ed. Robert Kolker. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. 286-305.Wajcman, Judy, and Nigel Dodd. “Introduction: The Powerful Are Fast, The Powerless Are Slow.” The Sociology of Speed: Digital, Organizational, and Social Temporalities. Eds. Judy Wajcman and Nigel Dodd. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017. 1-12.
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38

Harrison, Karey. "Building Resilient Communities." M/C Journal 16, no. 5 (August 24, 2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.716.

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This paper will compare the metaphoric structuring of the ecological concept of resilience—with its roots in Holling's 1973 paper; with psychological concepts of resilience which followed from research—such as Werner, Bierman, and French and Garmezy and Streitman) published in the early 1970s. This metaphoric analysis will expose the difference between complex adaptive systems models of resilience in ecology and studies related to resilience in relation to climate change; compared with the individualism of linear equilibrium models of resilience which have dominated discussions of resilience in psychology and economics. By examining the ontological commitments of these competing metaphors, I will show that the individualistic concept of resilience which dominates psychological discussions of resilience is incompatible with the ontological commitments of ecological concepts of resilience. Because the ontological commitments of the concepts of ecological resilience on the one hand, and psychological resilience on the other, are so at odds with one another, it is important to be clear which concept of resilience is being evaluated for its adequacy as a concept. Having clearly distinguished these competing metaphors and their ontological commitments, this paper will show that it is the complex adaptive systems model of resilience from ecology, not the individualist concept of psychological resilience, that has been utilised by both the academic discussions of adaptation to climate change, and the operationalisation of the concept of resilience by social movements like the permaculture, ecovillage, and Transition Towns movements. Ontological Metaphors My analysis of ontological metaphors draws on insights from Kuhn's (114) account of gestalt perception in scientific paradigm shifts; the centrality of the role of concrete analogies in scientific reasoning (Masterman 77); and the theorisation of ontological metaphors in cognitive linguistics (Gärdenfors). Figure 1: Object Ontological commitments reflect the shared beliefs within a community about the sorts of things that exist. Our beliefs about what exists are shaped by our sensory and motor interactions with objects in the physical world. Physical objects have boundaries and surfaces that separate the object from not-the-object. Objects have insides and outsides, and can be described in terms of more-or-less fixed and stable “objective” properties. A prototypical example of an “object” is a “container”, like the example shown in Figure 1. Ontological metaphors allow us to conceive of “things” which are not objects as if they were objects by picking “out parts of our experience and treat them as [if they were] discrete entities or substances of a uniform kind” (Lakoff and Johnson 25). We use ontological metaphors when we imagine a boundary around a collection of things, such as the members of a team or trees in a forest, and conceive of them as being in a container (Langacker 191–97). We can then think of “things” like a team or forest as if they were a single entity. We can also understand processes and activities as if they were things with boundaries. Whether or not we characterise some aspect of our experience as a noun (a bounded entity) or as a verb (a process that occurs over time) is not determined by the nature of things in themselves, but by our understanding and interpretation of our experience (Langacker 233). In this paper I employ a technique that involves examining the details of “concrete images” from the source domains for metaphors employed in the social sciences to expose for analysis their ontological commitments (Harrison, “Politics” 215; Harrison, “Economics” 7). By examining the ontological metaphors that structure the resilience literature I will show how different conceptions of resilience reflect different beliefs and commitments about the sorts of “things” there are in the world, and hence how we can study and understand these “things.” Engineering Metaphors In his discussion of engineering resilience, Holling (“Engineering Vs. Ecological” 33) argues that this conception is the “foundation for economic theory”, and defined in terms of “resistance to disturbance and the speed of return to the equilibrium” or steady state of the system. Whereas Holling takes his original example of the use of the engineering concept of resilience from economics, Pendall, Foster, & Cowell (72), and Martin-Breen and Anderies (6) identify it as the concept of resilience that dominates the field of psychology. They take the stress loading of bridges to be the engineering source for the metaphor. Figure 2: Pogo stick animation (Source: Blacklemon 67, CC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pogoanim.gif). In order to understand this metaphor, we need to examine the characteristics of the source domain for the metaphor. A bridge can be “under tension, compression or both forces at the same time [and] experiences what engineers define as stress” (Matthews 3). In order to resist these forces, bridges need to be constructed of material which “behave much like a spring” that “strains elastically (deforms temporarily and returns to its original shape after a load has been removed) under a given stress” (Gordon 52; cited in Matthews). The pogostick shown in Figure 2 illustrates how a spring returns to its original size and configuration once the load or stress is removed. WGBH Educational Foundation provides links to simple diagrams that illustrate the different stresses the three main designs of bridges are subject to, and if you compare Computers & Engineering's with Gibbs and Bourne's harmonic spring animation you can see how both a bridge under live load and the pogostick in Figure 2 oscillate just like an harmonic spring. Subject to the elastic limits of the material, the deformation of a spring is proportional to the stress or load applied. According to the “modern theory of elasticity [...] it [is] possible to deduce the relation between strain and stress for complex objects in terms of intrinsic properties of the materials it is made of” (“Hooke’s Law”). When psychological resilience is characterised in terms of “properties of individuals [that] are identified in isolation” (Martin-Breen and Anderies 12); and in terms of “behaviours and attributes [of individuals] that allow people to get along with one another and to succeed socially” (Pendall, Foster, and Cowell 72), they are reflecting this engineering focus on the properties of materials. Martin-Breen and Anderies (42) argue that “the Engineering Resilience framework” has been informed by ontological metaphors which treat “an ecosystem, person, city, government, bridge, [or] society” as if it were an object—“a unified whole”. Because this concept of resilience treats individuals as “objects,” it leads researchers to look for the properties or characteristics of the “materials” which individuals are “made of”, which are either elastic and allow them to “bounce” or “spring” back after stress; or are fragile and brittle and break under load. Similarly, the Designers Institute (DINZ), in its conference on “Our brittle society,” shows it is following the engineering resilience approach when it conceives of a city or society as an object which is made of materials which are either “strong and flexible” or “brittle and fragile”. While Holling characterises economic theory in terms of this engineering metaphor, it is in fact chemistry and the kinetic theory of gases that provides the source domain for the ontological metaphor which structures both static and dynamic equilibrium models within neo-classical economics (Smith and Foley; Mirowski). However, while springs are usually made out of metals, they can be made out of any “material [that] has the required combination of rigidity and elasticity,” such as plastic, and even wood (in a bow) (“Spring (device)”). Gas under pressure turns out to behave the same as other springs or elastic materials do under load. Because both the economic metaphor based on equilibrium theory of gases and the engineering analysis of bridges under load can both be subsumed under spring theory, we can treat both the economic (gas) metaphor and the engineering (bridge) metaphor as minor variations of a single overarching (spring) metaphor. Complex Systems Metaphors Holling (“Resilience & Stability” 13–15) critiques equilibrium models, arguing that non-deterministic, complex, non-equilibrium and multi-equilibrium ecological systems do not satisfy the conditions for application of equilibrium models. Holling argues that unlike the single equilibrium modelled by engineering resilience, complex adaptive systems (CAS) may have multi or no equilibrium states, and be non-linear and non-deterministic. Walker and Salt follow Holling by calling for recognition of the “dynamic complexity of the real world” (8), and that “these [real world] systems are complex adaptive systems” (11). Martin-Breen and Anderies (7) identify the key difference between “systems” and “complex adaptive systems” resilience as adaptive capacity, which like Walker and Salt (xiii), they define as the capacity to maintain function, even if system structures change or fail. The “engineering” concept of resilience focuses on the (elastic) properties of materials and uses language associated with elastic springs. This “spring” metaphor emphasises the property of individual components. In contrast, ecological concepts of resilience examine interactions between elements, and the state of the system in a multi-dimensional phase space. This systems approach shows that the complex behaviour of a system depends at least as much on the relationships between elements. These relationships can lead to “emergent” properties which cannot be reduced to the properties of the parts of the system. To explain these relationships and connections, ecologists and climate scientists use language and images associated with landscapes such as 2-D cross-sections and 3-D topology (Holling, “Resilience & Stability” 20; Pendall, Foster, and Cowell 74). Figure 3 is based on an image used by Walker, Holling, Carpenter and Kinzig (fig. 1b) to represent possible states of ecological systems. The “basins” in the image rely on our understanding of gravitational forces operating in a 3-D space to model “equilibrium” states in which the system, like the “ball” in the “basin”, will tend to settle. Figure 3: (based on Langston; in Walker et al. fig. 1b) – Tipping Point Bifurcation Wasdell (“Feedback” fig. 4) adapted this image to represent possible climate states and explain the concept of “tipping points” in complex systems. I have added the red balls (a, b, and c to replace the one black ball (b) in the original which represented the state of the system), the red lines which indicate the path of the ball/system, and the black x-y axis, in order to discuss the image. Wasdell (“Feedback Dynamics” slide 22) takes the left basin to represents “the variable, near-equilibrium, but contained dynamics of the [current] glacial/interglacial period”. As a result of rising GHG levels, the climate system absorbs more energy (mostly as heat). This energy can force the system into a different, hotter, state, less amenable to life as we know it. This is shown in Figure 3 by the system (represented as the red ball a) rising up the left basin (point b). From the perspective of the gravitational representation in Figure 3, the extra energy in the basin operates like the rotation in a Gravitron amusement ride, where centrifugal force pushes riders up the sides of the ride. If there is enough energy added to the climate system it could rise up and jump over the ridge/tipping point separating the current climate state into the “hot earth” basin shown on the right. Once the system falls into the right basin, it may be stuck near point c, and due to reinforcing feedbacks have difficulty escaping this new “equilibrium” state. Figure 4 represents a 2-D cross-section of the 3-D landscape shown in Figure 3. This cross-section shows how rising temperature and greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations in a multi-equilibrium climate topology can lead to the climate crossing a tipping point and shifting from state a to state c. Figure 4: Topographic cross-section of possible climate states (derived from Wasdell, “Feedback” 26 CC). As Holling (“Resilience & Stability”) warns, a less “desirable” state, such as population collapse or extinction, may be more “resilient”, in the engineering sense, than a more desirable state. Wasdell (“Feedback Dynamics” slide 22) warns that the climate forcing as a result of human induced GHG emissions is in fact pushing the system “far away from equilibrium, passed the tipping point, and into the hot-earth scenario”. In previous episodes of extreme radiative forcing in the past, this “disturbance has then been amplified by powerful feedback dynamics not active in the near-equilibrium state [… and] have typically resulted in the loss of about 90% of life on earth.” An essential element of system dynamics is the existence of (delayed) reinforcing and balancing causal feedback loops, such as the ones illustrated in Figure 5. Figure 5: Pre/Predator model (Bellinger CC-BY-SA) In the case of Figure 5, the feedback loops illustrate the relationship between rabbit population increasing, then foxes feeding on the rabbits, keeping the rabbit population within the carrying capacity of the ecosystem. Fox predation prevents rabbit over-population and consequent starvation of rabbits. The reciprocal interaction of the elements of a system leads to unpredictable nonlinearity in “even seemingly simple systems” (“System Dynamics”). The climate system is subject to both positive and negative feedback loops. If the area of ice cover increases, more heat is reflected back into space, creating a positive feedback loop, reinforcing cooling. Whereas, as the arctic ice melts, as it is doing at present (Barber), heat previously reflected back into space is absorbed by now exposed water, increasing the rate of warming. Where negative feedback (system damping) dominates, the cup-shaped equilibrium is stable and system behaviour returns to base when subject to disturbance. [...]The impact of extreme events, however, indicates limits to the stable equilibrium. At one point cooling feedback loops overwhelmed the homeostasis, precipitating the "snowball earth" effect. […] Massive release of CO2 as a result of major volcanic activity […] set off positive feedback loops, precipitating runaway global warming and eliminating most life forms at the end of the Permian period. (Wasdell, “Topological”) Martin-Breen and Anderies (53–54), following Walker and Salt, identify four key factors for systems (ecological) resilience in nonlinear, non-deterministic (complex adaptive) systems: regulatory (balancing) feedback mechanisms, where increase in one element is kept in check by another element; modularity, where failure in one part of the system will not cascade into total systems failure; functional redundancy, where more than one element performs every essential function; and, self-organising capacity, rather than central control ensures the system continues without the need for “leadership”. Transition Towns as a Resilience Movement The Transition Town (TT) movement draws on systems modelling of both climate change and of Limits to Growth (Meadows et al.). TT takes seriously Limits to Growth modelling that showed that without constraints in population and consumption the world faces systems collapse by the middle of this century. It recommends community action to build as much capacity as possible to “maintain existence of function”—Holling's (“Engineering vs. Ecological” 33) definition of ecological resilience—in the face of failing economic, political and environmental systems. The Transition Network provides a template for communities to follow to “rebuild resilience and reduce CO2 emissions”. Rob Hopkins, the movements founder, explicitly identifies ecological resilience as its central concept (Transition Handbook 6). The idea for the movement grew out of a project by (2nd year students) completed for Hopkins at the Kinsale Further Education College. According to Hopkins (“Kinsale”), this project was inspired by Holmgren’s Permaculture principles and Heinberg's book on adapting to life after peak oil. Permaculture (permanent agriculture) is a design system for creating agricultural systems modelled on the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems (Mollison ix; Holmgren xix). Permaculture draws its scientific foundations from systems ecology (Holmgren xxv). Following CAS theory, Mollison (33) defines stability as “self-regulation”, rather than “climax” or a single equilibrium state, and recommends “diversity of beneficial functional connections” (32) rather than diversity of isolated elements. Permaculture understands resilience in the ecological, rather than the engineering sense. The Transition Handbook (17) “explores the issues of peak oil and climate change, and how when looked at together, we need to be focusing on the rebuilding of resilience as well as cutting carbon emissions. It argues that the focus of our lives will become increasingly local and small scale as we come to terms with the real implications of the energy crisis we are heading into.” The Transition Towns movement incorporate each of the four systems resilience factors, listed at the end of the previous section, into its template for building resilient communities (Hopkins, Transition Handbook 55–6). Many of its recommendations build “modularity” and “self-organising”, such as encouraging communities to build “local food systems, [and] local investment models”. Hopkins argues that in a “more localised system” feedback loops are tighter, and the “results of our actions are more obvious”. TT training exercises include awareness raising for sensitivity to networks of (actual or potential) ecological, social and economic relationships (Hopkins, Transition Handbook 60–1). TT promotes diversity of local production and economic activities in order to increase “diversity of functions” and “diversity of responses to challenges.” Heinberg (8) wrote the forward to the 2008 edition of the Transition Handbook, after speaking at a TotnesTransition Town meeting. Heinberg is now a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute (PCI), which was established in 2003 to “provide […] the resources needed to understand and respond to the interrelated economic, energy, environmental, and equity crises that define the 21st century [… in] a world of resilient communities and re-localized economies that thrive within ecological bounds” (PCI, “About”), of the sort envisioned by the Limits to Growth model discussed in the previous section. Given the overlapping goals of PCI and Transition Towns, it is not surprising that Rob Hopkins is now a Fellow of PCI and regular contributor to Resilience, and there are close ties between the two organisations. Resilience, which until 2012 was published as the Energy Bulletin, is run by the Post Carbon Institute (PCI). Like Transition Towns, Resilience aims to build “community resilience in a world of multiple emerging challenges: the decline of cheap energy, the depletion of critical resources like water, complex environmental crises like climate change and biodiversity loss, and the social and economic issues which are linked to these. […] It has [its] roots in systems theory” (PCI, “About Resilience”). Resilience.org says it follows the interpretation of Resilience Alliance (RA) Program Director Brian Walker and science writer David Salt's (xiii) ecological definition of resilience as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure.“ Conclusion This paper has analysed the ontological metaphors structuring competing conceptions of resilience. The engineering resilience metaphor dominates in psychological resilience research, but is not adequate for understanding resilience in complex adaptive systems. Ecological resilience, on the other hand, dominates in environmental and climate change research, and is the model of resilience that has been incorporated into the global permaculture and Transition Towns movements. References 2nd year students. Kinsale 2021: An Energy Descent Action Plan. Kinsale, Cork, Ireland: Kinsale Further Education College, 2005. 16 Aug. 2013 ‹http://transitionculture.org/wp-content/uploads/KinsaleEnergyDescentActionPlan.pdf>. Barber, Elizabeth. “Arctic Ice Continues to Thin, and Thin, European Satellite Reveals.” Christian Science Monitor 11 Sep. 2013. 25 Sep. 2013 ‹http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2013/0911/Arctic-ice-continues-to-thin-and-thin-European-satellite-reveals>. 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Molnar, Tamas. "Spectre of the Past, Vision of the Future – Ritual, Reflexivity and the Hope for Renewal in Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Climate Change Communication Film "Home"." M/C Journal 15, no. 3 (May 3, 2012). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.496.

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Abstract:
About half way through Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s film Home (2009) the narrator describes the fall of the Rapa Nui, the indigenous people of the Easter Islands. The narrator posits that the Rapa Nui culture collapsed due to extensive environmental degradation brought about by large-scale deforestation. The Rapa Nui cut down their massive native forests to clear spaces for agriculture, to heat their dwellings, to build canoes and, most importantly, to move their enormous rock sculptures—the Moai. The disappearance of their forests led to island-wide soil erosion and the gradual disappearance of arable land. Caught in the vice of overpopulation but with rapidly dwindling basic resources and no trees to build canoes, they were trapped on the island and watched helplessly as their society fell into disarray. The sequence ends with the narrator’s biting remark: “The real mystery of the Easter Islands is not how its strange statues got there, we know now; it's why the Rapa Nui didn't react in time.” In their unrelenting desire for development, the Rapa Nui appear to have overlooked the role the environment plays in maintaining a society. The island’s Moai accompanying the sequence appear as memento mori, a lesson in the mortality of human cultures brought about by their own misguided and short-sighted practices. Arthus-Bertrand’s Home, a film composed almost entirely of aerial photographs, bears witness to present-day environmental degradation and climate change, constructing society as a fragile structure built upon and sustained by the environment. Home is a call to recognise how contemporary practices of post-industrial societies have come to shape the environment and how they may impact the habitability of Earth in the near future. Through reflexivity and a ritualised structure the text invites spectators to look at themselves in a new light and remake their self-image in the wake of global environmental risk by embracing new, alternative core practices based on balance and interconnectedness. Arthus-Bertrand frames climate change not as a burden, but as a moment of profound realisation of the potential for change and humans ability to create a desirable future through hope and our innate capacity for renewal. This article examines how Arthus-Bertrand’s ritualised construction of climate change aims to remake viewers’ perception of present-day environmental degradation and investigates Home’s place in contemporary climate change communication discourse. Climate change, in its capacity to affect us globally, is considered a world risk. The most recent peer-reviewed Synthesis Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases has increased markedly since human industrialisation in the 18th century. Moreover, human activities, such as fossil fuel burning and agricultural practices, are “very likely” responsible for the resulting increase in temperature rise (IPPC 37). The increased global temperatures and the subsequent changing weather patterns have a direct and profound impact on the physical and biological systems of our planet, including shrinking glaciers, melting permafrost, coastal erosion, and changes in species distribution and reproduction patterns (Rosenzweig et al. 353). Studies of global security assert that these physiological changes are expected to increase the likelihood of humanitarian disasters, food and water supply shortages, and competition for resources thus resulting in a destabilisation of global safety (Boston et al. 1–2). Human behaviour and dominant practices of modernity are now on a path to materially impact the future habitability of our home, Earth. In contemporary post-industrial societies, however, climate change remains an elusive, intangible threat. Here, the Arctic-bound species forced to adapt to milder climates or the inhabitants of low-lying Pacific islands seeking refuge in mainland cities are removed from the everyday experience of the controlled and regulated environments of homes, offices, and shopping malls. Diverse research into the mediated and mediatised nature of the environment suggests that rather than from first-hand experiences and observations, the majority of our knowledge concerning the environment now comes from its representation in the mass media (Hamilton 4; Stamm et al. 220; Cox 2). Consequently the threat of climate change is communicated and constructed through the news media, entertainment and lifestyle programming, and various documentaries and fiction films. It is therefore the construction (the representation of the risk in various discourses) that shapes people’s perception and experience of the phenomenon, and ultimately influences behaviour and instigates social response (Beck 213). By drawing on and negotiating society’s dominant discourses, environmental mediation defines spectators’ perceptions of the human-nature relationship and subsequently their roles and responsibilities in the face of environmental risks. Maxwell Boykoff asserts that contemporary modern society’s mediatised representations of environmental degradation and climate change depict the phenomena as external to society’s primary social and economic concerns (449). Julia Corbett argues that this is partly because environmental protection and sustainable behaviour are often at odds with the dominant social paradigms of consumerism, economic growth, and materialism (175). Similarly, Rowan Howard-Williams suggests that most media texts, especially news, do not emphasise the link between social practices, such as consumerist behaviour, and their environmental consequences because they contradict dominant social paradigms (41). The demands contemporary post-industrial societies make on the environment to sustain economic growth, consumer culture, and citizens’ comfortable lives in air-conditioned homes and offices are often left unarticulated. While the media coverage of environmental risks may indeed have contributed to “critical misperceptions, misleading debates, and divergent understandings” (Boykoff 450) climate change possesses innate characteristics that amplify its perception in present-day post-industrial societies as a distant and impersonal threat. Climate change is characterised by temporal and spatial de-localisation. The gradual increase in global temperature and its physical and biological consequences are much less prominent than seasonal changes and hence difficult to observe on human time-scales. Moreover, while research points to the increased probability of extreme climatic events such as droughts, wild fires, and changes in weather patterns (IPCC 48), they take place over a wide range of geographical locations and no single event can be ultimately said to be the result of climate change (Maibach and Roser-Renouf 145). In addition to these observational obstacles, political partisanship, vested interests in the current status quo, and general resistance to profound change all play a part in keeping us one step removed from the phenomenon of climate change. The distant and impersonal nature of climate change coupled with the “uncertainty over consequences, diverse and multiple engaged interests, conflicting knowledge claims, and high stakes” (Lorenzoni et al. 65) often result in repression, rejection, and denial, removing the individual’s responsibility to act. Research suggests that, due to its unique observational obstacles in contemporary post-industrial societies, climate change is considered a psychologically distant event (Pawlik 559), one that is not personally salient due to the “perceived distance and remoteness [...] from one’s everyday experience” (O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole 370). In an examination of the barriers to behaviour change in the face of psychologically distant events, Robert Gifford argues that changing individuals’ perceptions of the issue-domain is one of the challenges of countering environmental inertia—the lack of initiative for environmentally sustainable social action (5). To challenge the status quo a radically different construction of the environment and the human-nature relationship is required to transform our perception of global environmental risks and ultimately result in environmentally consequential social action. Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Home is a ritualised construction of contemporary environmental degradation and climate change which takes spectators on a rite of passage to a newfound understanding of the human-nature relationship. Transformation through re-imagining individuals’ roles, responsibilities, and practices is an intrinsic quality of rituals. A ritual charts a subjects path from one state of consciousness to the next, resulting in a meaningful change of attitudes (Deflem 8). Through a lifelong study of African rituals British cultural ethnographer Victor Turner refined his concept of rituals in a modern social context. Turner observed that rituals conform to a three-phased processural form (The Ritual Process 13–14). First, in the separation stage, the subjects are selected and removed from their fixed position in the social structure. Second, they enter an in-between and ambiguous liminal stage, characterised by a “partial or complete separation of the subject from everyday existence” (Deflem 8). Finally, imbued with a new perspective of the outside world borne out of the experience of reflexivity, liminality, and a cathartic cleansing, subjects are reintegrated into the social reality in a new, stable state. The three distinct stages make the ritual an emotionally charged, highly personal experience that “demarcates the passage from one phase to another in the individual’s life-cycle” (Turner, “Symbols” 488) and actively shapes human attitudes and behaviour. Adhering to the three-staged processural form of the ritual, Arthus-Bertrand guides spectators towards a newfound understanding of their roles and responsibilities in creating a desirable future. In the first stage—the separation—aerial photography of Home alienates viewers from their anthropocentric perspectives of the outside world. This establishes Earth as a body, and unearths spectators’ guilt and shame in relation to contemporary world risks. Aerial photography strips landscapes of their conventional qualities of horizon, scale, and human reference. As fine art photographer Emmet Gowin observes, “when one really sees an awesome, vast place, our sense of wholeness is reorganised [...] and the body seems always to diminish” (qtd. in Reynolds 4). Confronted with a seemingly infinite sublime landscape from above, the spectator’s “body diminishes” as they witness Earth’s body gradually taking shape. Home’s rushing rivers of Indonesia are akin to blood flowing through the veins and the Siberian permafrost seems like the texture of skin in extreme close-up. Arthus-Bertrand establishes a geocentric embodiment to force spectators to perceive and experience the environmental degradation brought about by the dominant social practices of contemporary post-industrial modernity. The film-maker visualises the maltreatment of the environment through suggested abuse of the Earth’s body. Images of industrial agricultural practices in the United States appear to leave scratches and scars on the landscape, and as a ship crosses the Arctic ice sheets of the Northwest Passage the boat glides like the surgeon’s knife cutting through the uppermost layer of the skin. But the deep blue water that’s revealed in the wake of the craft suggests a flesh and body now devoid of life, a suffering Earth in the wake of global climatic change. Arthus-Bertrand’s images become the sublime evidence of human intervention in the environment and the reflection of present-day industrialisation materially altering the face of Earth. The film-maker exploits spectators’ geocentric perspective and sensibility to prompt reflexivity, provide revelations about the self, and unearth the forgotten shame and guilt in having inadvertently caused excessive environmental degradation. Following the sequences establishing Earth as the body of the text Arthus-Bertrand returns spectators to their everyday “natural” environment—the city. Having witnessed and endured the pain and suffering of Earth, spectators now gaze at the skyscrapers standing bold and tall in the cityscape with disillusionment. The pinnacles of modern urban development become symbols of arrogance and exploitation: structures forced upon the landscape. Moreover, the images of contemporary cityscapes in Home serve as triggers for ritual reflexivity, allowing the spectator to “perceive the self [...] as a distanced ‘other’ and hence achieve a partial ‘self-transcendence’” (Beck, Comments 491). Arthus-Bertrand’s aerial photographs of Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo fold these distinct urban environments into one uniform fusion of glass, metal, and concrete devoid of life. The uniformity of these cultural landscapes prompts spectators to add the missing element: the human. Suddenly, the homes and offices of desolate cityscapes are populated by none other than us, looking at ourselves from a unique vantage point. The geocentric sensibility the film-maker invoked with the images of the suffering Earth now prompt a revelation about the self as spectators see their everyday urban environments in a new light. Their homes and offices become blemishes on the face of the Earth: its inhabitants, including the spectators themselves, complicit in the excessive mistreatment of the planet. The second stage of the ritual allows Arthus-Bertrand to challenge dominant social paradigms of present day post-industrial societies and introduce new, alternative moral directives to govern our habits and attitudes. Following the separation, ritual subjects enter an in-between, threshold stage, one unencumbered by the spatial, temporal, and social boundaries of everyday existence. Turner posits that a subjects passage through this liminal stage is necessary to attain psychic maturation and successful transition to a new, stable state at the end of the ritual (The Ritual Process 97). While this “betwixt and between” (Turner, The Ritual Process 95) state may be a fleeting moment of transition, it makes for a “lived experience [that] transforms human beings cognitively, emotionally, and morally.” (Horvath et al. 3) Through a change of perceptions liminality paves the way toward meaningful social action. Home places spectators in a state of liminality to contrast geocentric and anthropocentric views. Arthus-Bertrand contrasts natural and human-made environments in terms of diversity. The narrator’s description of the “miracle of life” is followed by images of trees seemingly defying gravity, snow-covered summits among mountain ranges, and a whale in the ocean. Grandeur and variety appear to be inherent qualities of biodiversity on Earth, qualities contrasted with images of the endless, uniform rectangular greenhouses of Almeria, Spain. This contrast emphasises the loss of variety in human achievements and the monotony mass-production brings to the landscape. With the image of a fire burning atop a factory chimney, Arthus-Bertrand critiques the change of pace and distortion of time inherent in anthropocentric views, and specifically in contemporary modernity. Here, the flames appear to instantly eat away at resources that have taken millions of years to form, bringing anthropocentric and geocentric temporality into sharp contrast. A sequence showing a night time metropolis underscores this distinction. The glittering cityscape is lit by hundreds of lights in skyscrapers in an effort, it appears, to mimic and surpass daylight and thus upturn the natural rhythm of life. As the narrator remarks, in our present-day environments, “days are now the pale reflections of nights.” Arthus-Bertrand also uses ritual liminality to mark the present as a transitory, threshold moment in human civilisation. The film-maker contrasts the spectre of our past with possible visions of the future to mark the moment of now as a time when humanity is on the threshold of two distinct states of mind. The narrator’s descriptions of contemporary post-industrial society’s reliance on non-renewable resources and lack of environmentally sustainable agricultural practices condemn the past and warn viewers of the consequences of continuing such practices into the future. Exploring the liminal present Arthus-Bertrand proposes distinctive futurescapes for humankind. On the one hand, the narrator’s description of California’s “concentration camp style cattle farming” suggests that humankind will live in a future that feeds from the past, falling back on frames of horrors and past mistakes. On the other hand, the example of Costa Rica, a nation that abolished its military and dedicated the budget to environmental conservation, is recognition of our ability to re-imagine our future in the face of global risk. Home introduces myths to imbue liminality with the alternative dominant social paradigm of ecology. By calling upon deep-seated structures myths “touch the heart of society’s emotional, spiritual and intellectual consciousness” (Killingsworth and Palmer 176) and help us understand and come to terms with complex social, economic, and scientific phenomena. With the capacity to “pattern thought, beliefs and practices,” (Maier 166) myths are ideal tools in communicating ritual liminality and challenging contemporary post-industrial society’s dominant social paradigms. The opening sequence of Home, where the crescent Earth is slowly revealed in the darkness of space, is an allusion to creation: the genesis myth. Accompanied only by a gentle hum our home emerges in brilliant blue, white, and green-brown encompassing most of the screen. It is as if darkness and chaos disintegrated and order, life, and the elements were created right before our eyes. Akin to the Earthrise image taken by the astronauts of Apollo 8, Home’s opening sequence underscores the notion that our home is a unique spot in the blackness of space and is defined and circumscribed by the elements. With the opening sequence Arthus-Bertrand wishes to impart the message of interdependence and reliance on elements—core concepts of ecology. Balance, another key theme in ecology, is introduced with an allusion to the Icarus myth in a sequence depicting Dubai. The story of Icarus’s fall from the sky after flying too close to the sun is a symbolic retelling of hubris—a violent pride and arrogance punishable by nemesis—destruction, which ultimately restores balance by forcing the individual back within the limits transgressed (Littleton 712). In Arthus-Bertrand’s portrayal of Dubai, the camera slowly tilts upwards on the Burj Khalifa tower, the tallest human-made structure ever built. The construction works on the tower explicitly frame humans against the bright blue sky in their attempt to reach ever further, transgressing their limitations much like the ill-fated Icarus. Arthus-Bertrand warns that contemporary modernity does not strive for balance or moderation, and with climate change we may have brought our nemesis upon ourselves. By suggesting new dominant paradigms and providing a critique of current maxims, Home’s retelling of myths ultimately sees spectators through to the final stage of the ritual. The last phase in the rite of passage “celebrates and commemorates transcendent powers,” (Deflem 8) marking subjects’ rebirth to a new status and distinctive perception of the outside world. It is at this stage that Arthus-Bertrand resolves the emotional distress uncovered in the separation phase. The film-maker uses humanity’s innate capacity for creation and renewal as a cathartic cleansing aimed at reconciling spectators’ guilt and shame in having inadvertently exacerbated global environmental degradation. Arthus-Bertrand identifies renewable resources as the key to redeeming technology, human intervention in the landscape, and finally humanity itself. Until now, the film-maker pictured modernity and technology, evidenced in his portrayal of Dubai, as synonymous with excess and disrespect for the interconnectedness and balance of elements on Earth. The final sequence shows a very different face of technology. Here, we see a mechanical sea-snake generating electricity by riding the waves off the coast of Scotland and solar panels turning towards the sun in the Sahara desert. Technology’s redemption is evidenced in its ability to imitate nature—a move towards geocentric consciousness (a lesson learned from the ritual’s liminal stage). Moreover, these human-made structures, unlike the skyscrapers earlier in the film, appear a lot less invasive in the landscape and speak of moderation and union with nature. With the above examples Arthus-Bertrand suggests that humanity can shed the greed that drove it to dig deeper and deeper into the Earth to acquire non-renewable resources such as oil and coal, what the narrator describes as “treasures buried deep.” The incorporation of principles of ecology, such as balance and interconnectedness, into humanity’s behaviour ushers in reconciliation and ritual cleansing in Home. Following the description of the move toward renewable resources, the narrator reveals that “worldwide four children out of five attend school, never has learning been given to so many human beings” marking education, innovation, and creativity as the true inexhaustible resources on Earth. Lastly, the description of Antarctica in Home is the essence of Arthus-Bertrand’s argument for our innate capacity to create, not simply exploit and destroy. Here, the narrator describes the continent as possessing “immense natural resources that no country can claim for itself, a natural reserve devoted to peace and science, a treaty signed by 49 nations has made it a treasure shared by all humanity.” Innovation appears to fuel humankind’s transcendence to a state where it is capable of compassion, unification, sharing, and finally creating treasures. With these examples Arthus-Bertrand suggests that humanity has an innate capacity for creative energy that awaits authentic expression and can turn humankind from destroyer to creator. In recent years various risk communication texts have explicitly addressed climate change, endeavouring to instigate environmentally consequential social action. Home breaks discursive ground among them through its ritualistic construction which seeks to transform spectators’ perception, and in turn roles and responsibilities, in the face of global environmental risks. Unlike recent climate change media texts such as An Inconvenient Truth (2006), The 11th Hour (2007), The Age of Stupid (2009), Carbon Nation (2010) and Earth: The Operator’s Manual (2011), Home eludes simple genre classification. On the threshold of photography and film, documentary and fiction, Arthus-Bertrand’s work is best classified as an advocacy film promoting public debate and engagement with a universal concern—the state of the environment. The film’s website, available in multiple languages, contains educational material, resources to organise public screenings, and a link to GoodPlanet.info: a website dedicated to environmentalism, including legal tools and initiatives to take action. The film-maker’s approach to using Home as a basis for education and raising awareness corresponds to Antonio Lopez’s critique of contemporary mass-media communications of global risks. Lopez rebukes traditional forms of mediatised communication that place emphasis on the imparting of knowledge and instead calls for a participatory, discussion-driven, organic media approach, akin to a communion or a ritual (106). Moreover, while texts often place a great emphasis on the messenger, for instance Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, Leonardo DiCaprio in The 11th Hour, or geologist Dr. Richard Alley in Earth: The Operator’s Manual, Home’s messenger remains unseen—the narrator is only identified at the very end of the film among the credits. The film-maker’s decision to forego a central human character helps dissociate the message from the personality of the messenger which aids in establishing and maintaining the geocentric sensibility of the text. Finally, the ritual’s invocation and cathartic cleansing of emotional distress enables Home to at once acknowledge our environmentally destructive past habits and point to a hopeful, environmentally sustainable future. While The Age of Stupid mostly focuses on humanity’s present and past failures to respond to an imminent environmental catastrophe, Carbon Nation, with the tagline “A climate change solutions movie that doesn’t even care if you believe in climate change,” only explores the potential future business opportunities in turning towards renewable resources and environmentally sustainable practices. The three-phased processural form of the ritual allows for a balance of backward and forward-looking, establishing the possibility of change and renewal in the face of world risk. The ritual is a transformative experience. As Turner states, rituals “interrupt the flow of social life and force a group to take cognizance of its behaviour in relation to its own values, and even question at times the value of those values” (“Dramatic Ritual” 82). Home, a ritualised media text, is an invitation to look at our world, its dominant social paradigms, and the key element within that world—ourselves—with new eyes. It makes explicit contemporary post-industrial society’s dependence on the environment, highlights our impact on Earth, and reveals our complicity in bringing about a contemporary world risk. The ritual structure and the self-reflexivity allow Arthus-Bertrand to transform climate change into a personally salient issue. This bestows upon the spectator the responsibility to act and to reconcile the spectre of the past with the vision of the future.Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Dr. Angi Buettner whose support, guidance, and supervision has been invaluable in preparing this article. 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