Journal articles on the topic 'STP GROUP HOUSING'

To explore syringe access patterns and implications for HIV prevention programming, data from qualitative interviews (n=120) with injection drug users (IDU) and an evaluation of a satellite syringe-exchange program (SEP) were used. Three patterns were identified: IDUs who stockpile supplies to meet their own needs and to provide secondary distribution to friends and drug-using associates; IDUs who keep a several-days supply of syringes available, primarily for their own use; and IDUs who usually obtain equipment at the time of obtaining drugs, in some cases unsterile equipment from other injectors. The first two types of injectors are typically in stable housing, while the last group are generally in unstable housing. This analysis highlights the very direct link between adequate housing and safer injection practices for HIV prevention, and points to the need to advocate more broadly on behalf of IDUs for appropriate housing, harm-reduction and social services.

The future abolition of stall and tether systems has meant that, increasingly, producers are opting for group housing systems. Generally sows are fed a restricted concentrate ration during pregnancy at levels which do not induce satiety, leading to increased feeding motivation and competition between penmates for food. Feed competition can lead to compromised production in less dominant individuals. A possible solution would be to feed ad libituma lower energy diet which would restrict voluntary food intake (VFI) so that large undesirable weight gains would not be encountered. Brouns.(1993) found that diets containing 60% unmolassed sugar beet pulp (SBP) were capable of restricting intake to match energy requirements. Recently there has been heightened interest in the use of prolific strains of Chinese pigs such as the Meishan to develop commercial crossbreeds. Chinese breeds are reported to be capable of utilising dietary fibre to a greater extent than European breeds which would make the Meishan a more suitable option for an ad libhigh fibre feed system.

The future abolition of stall and tether systems has meant that, increasingly, producers are opting for group housing systems. Generally sows are fed a restricted concentrate ration during pregnancy at levels which do not induce satiety, leading to increased feeding motivation and competition between penmates for food. Feed competition can lead to compromised production in less dominant individuals. A possible solution would be to feed ad libituma lower energy diet which would restrict voluntary food intake (VFI) so that large undesirable weight gains would not be encountered. Brouns.(1993) found that diets containing 60% unmolassed sugar beet pulp (SBP) were capable of restricting intake to match energy requirements. Recently there has been heightened interest in the use of prolific strains of Chinese pigs such as the Meishan to develop commercial crossbreeds. Chinese breeds are reported to be capable of utilising dietary fibre to a greater extent than European breeds which would make the Meishan a more suitable option for an ad libhigh fibre feed system.

This study was conducted to examine the effects of a plant extract mixture, a microencapsulated product composed of eugenol and garlic tincture (PE), on intestinal health in broilers under necrotic enteritis (NE) challenge. A total of 960 d-old mixed-sex Cobb 500 chicks were randomly distributed to 48-floor pens housing 20 birds per pen. Six treatments were applied: UC, unchallenged control; CC, challenged control; PE, challenged group plus PE; AM, challenged group plus antimicrobial (AM); FAP, challenged group plus a full dose of AM with PE; HAP, challenged group plus a half dose of AM with PE in starter, grower and finisher phases. Birds in the challenged groups were inoculated with Eimeria spp. on d 9 and Clostridiumperfringens on d 14. On d 16, the CC group had increased serum fluorescein isothiocyanate dextran (FITC-d), reduced villus surface area, goblet cell number, upregulated CLDN1, JAM2 genes and reduced microbial diversity compared to the UC group (p < 0.05). Birds fed PE had reduced FITC-d, increased goblet cell number and Bifidobacterium compared to the CC group (p < 0.05). Birds fed PE had reduced CLDN5 expression in male birds, and Bacteroides spp. in female birds than CC group (p < 0.05). These findings suggest that PE supplementation mitigates the effect of NE by improving the intestinal health of birds.

Social interaction and empathy play critical roles in determining the emotional well-being of humans. Stress-related depression and anxiety can be exacerbated or mitigated depending on specific social conditions. Although rodents are well known to exhibit emotional contagion and consolation behavior, the effects of group housing on stress-induced phenotypes in both males and females are not well established. Here, we investigated how the presence of stressed or unstressed conspecifics within a cage impact depression-related phenotypes. We housed male and female C57BL/6J mice in same-sex groups and subjected them to either gentle handling (GH) or the daily administration of corticosterone (CORT) for 10 days. The GH and CORT treatment groups were divided into cages of unmixed (GH or CORT) and mixed (GH and CORT) treatments. Depression-related phenotypes were measured using the forced swim test (FST) and sucrose preference test (SPT). We found that mixed housing alters FST behavior in a sex-specific manner. Male mice given chronic corticosterone (CORT) that were housed in the same cage as gently handled animals (GH) exhibited increased immobility, whereas GH females housed with CORT females demonstrated the opposite effect. This study underscores the importance of social housing conditions when evaluating stress-induced behavioral phenotypes and suggests that mixed cages of GH and CORT animals yield the greatest difference between treatment groups. The latter finding has important implications for identifying therapeutics capable of rescuing stress-induced behavioral deficits in the FST.

Leptin administration into the hindbrain, and specifically the nucleus of the solitary tract, increases phosphorylated signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (pSTAT3), a marker of leptin receptor activation, in hypothalamic nuclei known to express leptin receptors. The ventromedial nucleus of the hypothalamus (VMH) shows the greatest response, with a threefold increase in pSTAT3. This experiment tested the importance of VMH leptin receptor-expressing neurons in mediating weight loss caused by fourth ventricle (4V) leptin infusion. Male Sprague-Dawley rats received bilateral VMH 75-nL injections of 260 ng/μL of leptin-conjugated saporin (Lep-Sap) or blank-saporin (Blk-Sap). After 23 days they were fitted with 4V infusion cannulas and 1 wk later adapted to housing in a calorimeter before they were infused with 0.9 μg leptin/day for 14 days. There was no effect of VMH Lep-Sap on weight gain or glucose clearance before leptin infusion. Leptin inhibited food intake and respiratory exchange ratio in Blk-Sap but not Lep-Sap rats. Leptin had no effect on energy expenditure or brown adipose tissue temperature of either group. Inguinal and epididymal fat were significantly reduced in leptin-treated Blk-Sap rats, but the response was greatly attenuated in Lep-Sap rats. VMH pSTAT3 was increased in leptin-treated Blk-Sap but not Lep-Sap rats. These results support the concept that leptin-induced weight loss results from an integrated response across different brain areas. They also support previous reports that VMH leptin receptors do not play a significant role in maintaining energy balance in basal conditions but limit weight gain during positive energy balance.

This study evaluated the potential of monoglyceride blend (MG) and buffered formic acid (FA) as alternatives to antibiotics in the performance and intestinal health of broilers under clinical necrotic enteritis (NE) challenge. A total of 544 as-hatched Ross 308 broiler chicks were randomly distributed to 32-floor pens housing 17 birds per pen. The four treatments were: NC—non-additive control; ZBS—antibiotic group supplemented with zinc bacitracin and salinomycin; MG—additive MG supplementation in the starter phase only; and MGFA—additive MG in starter phase and FA in grower and finisher phases. All birds were challenged with Eimeria spp. and Clostridium perfringens. Results showed that the NC group had lower BWG and higher FCR than the ZBS group in the grower and overall period (p < 0.05). The NC group had higher NE-caused mortality (days 14 to 17) than the ZBS group (p < 0.05). Birds fed MG had lower NE-caused mortality than the NC group (p < 0.05). Birds fed MG had upregulated jejunal tight junction protein1 (TJP1) and immunoglobulin (IgG) on day 16 and improved gross energy digestibility on day 24 than the NC group (p < 0.05). These findings suggest that supplementation of MG may improve intestinal health and protect birds from clinical NE occurrence.

Purpose This paper is motivated by a concern about the ability of the average Malaysian income to catch up with the rapidly increasing house prices in Peninsular Malaysia. Financial innovation in financial system now regards houses as a financial asset and speculation vehicle. Therefore, a house purchase is made to acquire not merely a necessity but also a financial asset which can generate future returns. Given the problems in the housing market, this paper aims to examine the determinants of house prices in Malaysia, including those such as income, population, foreign inflow and speculation. Design/methodology/approach This study adopts panel data analyses, namely, the fixed effect model (FEM) and the pooled mean group (PMG), and uses data at state level in quarterly frequency, spanning from 2005Q1 to 2013Q4. Findings Based on the results of FEM, these determinants influence house prices significantly. Moreover, the PMG results suggest that there is convergence in the model, which are indicated by the significant and negative sign of the error correction term. In conclusion, the rapidly increasing house price is not caused by speculation activities in the housing market. More precisely, Malaysian income is capable of catching up with the increasing house prices. Practical implications As income remains to be one of the major drivers in influencing Malaysian house price, Malaysian Government shall continue the policies of supply low cost houses to the low-income groups and My First Home Scheme (SRP) by offering less stringent rules in applying house loan for the first-time house buyers. Originality/value This study used the actual data of foreign housing purchase obtained from Malaysia Valuation and Property Services Department to represent foreign inflow; therefore, the results will reflect the impact of foreign inflow in a better manner.

Software Requirements Prioritization (SRP) is one of the crucial processes in software requirements engineering. It presents a challenging task to decide among the pool of requirements and the variance of the stakeholder’s needs in prioritizing requirements. Semi-automated requirements prioritization is implemented in both manual and automatic processes. When prioritizing requirements, these aspects such as importance, time, cost and risk, should be taken into account. The emergence of machine learning is advancing to improve and automate the SRP process whereby decision making can be performed with minimal human intervention. Incorporating machine learning approaches in prioritization techniques can be implemented in the ranking process and classifying the priority group of the software requirements. A Semi-Automated Requirements Prioritization framework (SARiP), which implements semi-automatic process in requirements prioritization is proposed. SARiP concentrates on the areas related to prediction of requirements priority group and ranks requirements using classification tree and ranking algorithm. SARiP has been successfully evaluated in the government sector domain by the i-Tegur team from the Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Housing and Local Government of Malaysia (KPKT). 80% of the participants agreed that SARiP is extremely likely to help the participants in prioritizing the requirements for their projects. All participants agreed that SARiP is reliable and useful. Recording the requirements and results for the prioritization will be considered for future work and traceability function will be included to trace the requirements changes.

The paper find out the regularities of physical and physiological development of the replacement young pigs, bred at different housing technologies. The experiment was conducted in OOO “SVK” Krasnogvardeyskiy district (industrial technology) and “SHP Svobodny trud” (traditional technology) of Novoselytsya districts of Stavropol Territory. In order to conduct the experiment on the basis of analogues, the Company selected bipedal pigs (50% large white (CB) + 50% Landrace (L)) aged one month. Each group had 25 pigs. In order to study the development of reproductive organs at the age of 6 and 8 months, a control slaughter of experimental animals was carried out (3 pigs from each group). The live body weight of 6-month-old pigs in OOO “SVK” averaged 110 kg, while in OOO “SHP “Svobodnyy trud” the animals weight was 67-70 kg. At the age of 8 months, the weight of animals in “SHP “Svobodnyy trud” was 103-110 kg, and in OOO “SVK” - 145-150 kg. At the age of 180 days the animal reproductive organs were at the initial stage of development. Only primary follicles of 0.1-0.3 cm in diameter were observed in ovaries weighing 3.1-3.5 g. The bipedal hybrids grown on the intensive technology were inferior to the pigs with the traditional technology of breeding for the development of reproductive organs. They had a lower uterine weight by 9.1%, ovarian weight by 12.9%, and the length of uterine and ovarian horns by 10.9 and 8.6%, respectively. Repair pigs grown according to the traditional technology had ovaries weighing 9.2 g and had fresh yellow bodies. When growing guinea pigs under industrial technology, the rejection of first-pigs amounted to 63.6%, while in the case of animals grown under traditional technology, this indicator was within 26.6%.

Accumulating evidence indicates that cold exposure changes the composition of the gut microbiota and reduces intestinal immunity in early postweaning livestock. However, little is known about the effects of drinking warm water (WW) on gut microbiota during winter. In this study, we investigated the effects of drinking WW in winter on the growth performance and gut microbiota structure of rabbits raised in poorly insulated housing from the early postweaning period (day 46) to the subadult period (day 82). The average daily gain and feed conversion ratio in rabbits drinking WW were significantly improved compared to those of the rabbits drinking cold water (CW) during 47–58 days. In addition, rabbits drinking WW had a significantly decreased the risk of diarrhea during 71–82 days. 16S rRNA sequence analysis revealed that the alpha diversity of the cecal microbiota was not significantly different between the WW and CW groups, but significantly increased with age. The relative abundance of cecal microorganisms, such as Coprococcus spp. was considerably increased at day 70 in the group drinking WW. Correlation analysis indicated that Coprococcus spp. was negatively associated with pro-inflammatory factors. In conclusion, our results suggest that drinking WW has a positive effect on growth performance and gut microbiota in rabbits during the early postweaning stage in winter.

The research studied the effects of dietary supplementation with Camelina sativa fresh forage on the chemical and fatty acid composition of milk and Caciotta cheese, and its sensory properties. Twenty Ionica goats were randomly assigned to the following two groups (n = 10): the control received a traditional forage mixture (Avena sativa, 70%; Vicia sativa, 20%; Trifolium spp., 10%), while the experimental group was given Camelina sativa fresh forage (CAM). All of the dams grazed on pasture and received a commercial feed (500 g/head/day) at housing. The milk from the CAM group showed a higher (p < 0.05) content of dry matter, fat, lactose and concentrations of C6:0, C11:0, C14:0, C18:2 n-6, CLA and PUFA, while lower (p < 0.05) amounts of C12:0, C18:0 and saturated long chain FA (SLCFA). The Caciotta cheese from the CAM group showed a greater (p < 0.05) content of n-6 FA and n-6/n-3 ratio, although close to four, thus resulting adequate under the nutritional point of view. The overall liking, odour, taste, hardness, solubility and “goaty” flavour were better (p < 0.05) in the CAM cheeses. Further investigation would be advisable in order to evaluate the effect of feeding Camelina forage obtained from different phenological stages, and the application of ensiling techniques.

The effect of Lactobacillus spp.-based probiotic candidates on Salmonella enterica serovar Enteritidis (SE) colonization was evaluated in two separate experiments. In each experiment, sixty-one day-of-hatch female turkey poults were obtained from a local hatchery. In both experiments, poults were challenged via oral gavage with 104 cfu/poult of SE and randomly allocated to one of two groups (n = 30 poults): (1) the positive control group and (2) the probiotic treated group. Heated brooder batteries were used for housing each group separately and poults were allowed ad libitum access to water and unmedicated turkey starter feed. 1 h following the SE challenge, poults were treated with 106 cfu/poult of probiotic culture via oral gavage or phosphate-buffered saline （PBS）to control groups. A total of 24 h post-treatment, poults were euthanized and the ceca and cecal tonsils from twenty poults were collected aseptically for SE recovery. In both trials, a significant reduction in the incidence and log10 cfu/g of SE were observed in poults treated with the probiotic when compared with control poults (p ≤ 0.05). The results of the present study suggest that the administration of this lactic acid-producing bacteria (LAB)-based probiotic 1 h after an SE challenge can be useful in reducing the cecal colonization of this pathogen in neonatal poults.

Murine models are widely used to explore host-microbe interactions because of the challenges and limitations inherent to human studies. However, microbiome studies in murine models are not without their nuances. Inter-individual variations in gut microbiota are frequent even in animals housed within the same room. We therefore sought to find an efficient and effective standard operating procedure (SOP) to minimize these effects to improve consistency and reproducibility in murine microbiota studies. Mice were housed in a single room under specific-pathogen free conditions. Soiled cage bedding was routinely mixed weekly and distributed among all cages from weaning (three weeks old) until the onset of the study. Females and males were separated by sex and group-housed (up to five mice/cage) at weaning. 16S rRNA gene analyses of fecal samples showed that this protocol significantly reduced pre-study variability of gut microbiota amongst animals compared to other conventional measures used to normalize microbiota when large experimental cohorts have been required. A significant and consistent effect size was observed in gut microbiota when mice were switched from regular chow to purified diet in both sexes. However, sex and aging appeared to be independent drivers of gut microbial assemblage and should be taken into account in studies of this nature. In summary, we report a practical and effective pre-study SOP for normalizing the gut microbiome of murine cohorts that minimizes inter-individual variability and resolves co-housing problems inherent to male mice. This SOP may increase quality, rigor, and reproducibility of data acquisition and analysis.

Background. This study aimed to develop a classification for the sagittal root positioning (SRP) of mandibular anterior teeth in terms of their anterior buccal bone for use before placing immediate implants. Methods. A retrospective review of CBCT images was conducted on 150 patients (75 males and 75 females; mean age: 47.5 years) who met the inclusion criteria. The root position of the tooth samples was classified as buccal, middle, or lingual types according to their respective sagittal position and subtypes a, b, c, or d, according to the morphology of their osseous housing. Results. The frequencies of the root positions of each classified group of the sample teeth were as follows: 14% buccal type, 77% middle type, and 8% lingual type; 18.0% subtype a, 4.33% subtype b, 75.55% subtype c, and 2.11% subtype d. As a complementary procedure for data collection, the sagittal position of the apex was classified into Class I (buccally angulated apex: 4.6%), Class II (apex with no angulation: 78.2%), Class III (lingually angulated apex: 0.7%) and Class IV (exposed root: 16.3%). In addition, the results of the examination of the buccal undercut showed that in 1.6%, 32.0%, and 66.3% of the sample teeth, the undercut was located coronally, medially, and apically, respectively. Conclusion. Considering these results, the newly proposed SRP classification system can be used to study the mandibular anterior buccal bone morphology as a diagnostic tool for immediate implant treatment.

Abstract Background Facial expression is an important non-verbal way of expressing the person’s emotional state. If the process of perceiving facial features is impaired, the ability to recognize the emotional state of others is degraded, which may make it difficult to maintain interpersonal and social communications. Many studies have reported on the association between deficit of facial emotion perception (FEP) and the social functioning in schizophrenia. Therefore, we developed visual scanpath pattern analysis based FEP enhancement training program in schizophrenia. Methods We enrolled patients visited and admitted Gongju National Hospital and those lived in shared housing facilities for rehabilitation from Sep 2018 to May 2019. 128 patients attended to FEP training program as open, blind and randomized-controlled cross-over design. Both FEP training and mock programs were provided twice a week for a month treatment period with a 4-week washout period between treatment periods. Primary outcome was results of heatmaps based on visual scanpath patterns. Results Among 128 patients, 121 completed the study and 7 was dropped out. In FEP training group, their visual scanpath pattern somewhat closer to normal than mock group. When they had an efforts to perceive the emotion of face pictures, FEP training group tended to scan the face pictures more broadly including eye rims, middle of forehead and sided of the mouth in addition to eyes, nose and mouth whereas mock group tended to gaze eyes, nose and mouth intensively. Discussion This FEP training program may improve the ability to integrate facial expression cues through visual scanpath pattern changes in schizophrenia patients. Acknowledgement: This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) (Grant number NRF-2016R1E1A2A01953732 & 2018R1E1A2A02059043).

Diseases of gastrointestinal parasites remain a major public health concern. This study was aimed at determining the occurrence of gastrointestinal parasites among patients attending designated tuberculosis clinics in Rivers State, Nigeria. The clinics included Chest clinic, Rumuigbo, General hospital, Ahoada and Meridian hospital. The study was conducted between July 2020 and August 2021. Stool and blood samples were collected from 1288 participants and examined for the presence of ova, cysts, oocyst and trophozoites of gastrointestinal parasites using formol-ether concentration and Modified Ziehl-Neelsen staining techniques. ELISA was used to examine the blood samples for the presence of Cryptosporidium spp. and Giardia lamblia. Out of the 1288 patients examined, 580 (45%) were infected and this was statistically significant (p<0.05). Gastrointestinal parasites identified included Ancyclostoma spp., Ascaris lumbricoides, Cryptosporidium spp, Entamoeba histolytica, and Giardia lamblia. Cryptosporidium spp. was the most prevalent (p<0.05). Females had a higher prevalence (55.9%) than males (44.1%), and the age group 11-20 years were most infected. The occurrence of gastrointestinal parasite infection was higher in the wet season (p<0.05). Sources of drinking water and housing types were risk factors that had a significant influence on the infection (p<0.05). The gastrointestinal parasite was not influenced by the occupation, as well as the educational levels of the participants. The study showed that tuberculosis patients were more infected than non-tuberculosis patients, and occurrence was higher in rural areas than in urban areas; both were significant (p<0.05). Detection of Giardia lamblia and Cryptosporidium using non-ELISA and ELISA techniques were not statistically significant (p>0.05). The study showed a higher prevalence of infection; therefore, there is a need to enhance health education on the mode of transmission of gastrointestinal parasites and improve on personal and environmental hygiene of tuberculosis patients and the population as a whole; to reduce the occurrence of infection

This study aims to study how the effect of adding rice husk additives to the characteristics of ceramic membranes with various variations of membrane-forming component composition in terms of surface morphology and pore size of the membrane produced. This research is expected to be used by the community as an alternative treatment of river water into clean water. In this study, the variables studied were the composition of the membrane constituent namely clay, iron powder and rice husk as an additives. The ceramic membrane was designed in the form of a tube, made from a mixture of clay, iron powder and rice husk with a diameter of 5 cm, an outer diameter of 6 cm, a thickness of 1 cm and a length of 25 cm. Housing membrane was made of glass fiber with an outer diameter of 9 cm, an inner diameter of 8.5 cm and a length of 30 cm. Making ceramic membranes were from clay, iron powder and rice husk with a ratio of 87.5%, 2.5%, 10%, 77.5%, 2.5%, 20% and 77.5%, 2.5%, 15%. The river water was treated by flowing to the complete separation process. It was taken every 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, 60 minutes, 75 minutes, 90 minutes. Every sampling, the permeate volume was determined. Permeat events were analyzed for chemical parameters in the form of iron (Fe), Manganese (Mn) and Zinc (Zn). Based on the SEM-EDS analysis on the ceramic membrane produced shows that the membrane was classified in the microfiltration membrane group with a random and asymmetrical pore size and structure. According to the BET analysis on ceramic membranes shows that the best ceramic membrane produced in this study is C ceramic membrane with a clay composition of 87.5%; 10% of rice husk; and 2.5% of iron powder with a pore size of 2.8 μm and a large surface area of ​​45.38 m2/g. The difference in pressure of 2 bars gives the best results in reducing levels of contaminant compounds contained in river water with a percentage of Fe reduction of 92.18%, Mn of 89.23%, and Zn of 99.80%.

Individual identification of beef cattle is not new to the Canadian beef industry, as traceback systems played a pivotal role in the eradication of bovine tuberculosis in the 1940s and 1950s and brucellosis in the 1970s and 1980s. Recent concerns over animal health (e.g., bovine spongiform encephaolopathy), export markets, product consistency, meat quality (e.g., tenderness, marbling) and safety (e.g., Escherichia. coli 0157:H7, Salmonella spp.) make reestablishment of a traceback system a logical approach to assuring consumer confidence in Canadian beef. Originally, simple Kurl-lockTM ear tags with a unique number were used to trace individuals back to their herd of origin. Although useful for addressing disease concerns, this system did not lend itself to compiling additional information (e.g., growth performance, animal health, breeding programs, carcass quality) for use in management or marketing decisions. More sophisticated electronic identification systems can readily interface with computers and make information management an even more pivotal component of beef production. Several electronic identification systems (e.g., bar codes, radio frequency identification, read–write systems) are being assessed for their effectiveness for identifying individual cattle under production conditions. In research applications, this technology has the potential for individual animals to become the experimental unit under group housing conditions. By combining electronic identification technology with devices that measure physiological (e.g., temperature, pH, body weight, feed intake) parameters, researchers will be able to collect data in natural production environments that were previously only obtainable under controlled experimental conditions with a limited number of animals. Key words: Electronic identification, beef, traceback, radio frequency identification

Dose–response experiments characterize the relationship between infectious agents and their hosts. These experiments are routinely used to estimate the minimum effective infectious dose for an infectious agent, which is most commonly characterized by the dose at which 50 per cent of challenged hosts become infected—the ID 50 . In turn, the ID 50 is often used to compare between different agents and quantify the effect of treatment regimes. The statistical analysis of dose–response data typically makes the assumption that hosts within a given dose group are independent. For social animals, in particular avian species, hosts are routinely housed together in groups during experimental studies. For experiments with non-infectious agents, this poses no practical or theoretical problems. However, transmission of infectious agents between co-housed animals will modify the observed dose–response relationship with implications for the estimation of the ID 50 and the comparison between different agents and treatments. We derive a simple correction to the likelihood for standard dose–response models that allows us to estimate dose–response and transmission parameters simultaneously. We use this model to show that: transmission between co-housed animals reduces the apparent value of the ID 50 and increases the variability between replicates leading to a distinctive all-or-nothing response; in terms of the total number of animals used, individual housing is always the most efficient experimental design for ascertaining dose–response relationships; estimates of transmission from previously published experimental data for Campylobacter spp. in chickens suggest that considerable transmission occurred, greatly increasing the uncertainty in the estimates of dose–response parameters reported in the literature. Furthermore, we demonstrate that accounting for transmission in the analysis of dose–response data for Campylobacter spp. challenges our current understanding of the differing response of chickens with respect to host-age and in vivo passage of bacteria. Our findings suggest that the age-dependence of transmissibility between hosts—rather than their susceptibility to colonization—is the mechanism behind the ‘lag-phase’ reported in commercial flocks, which are typically found to be Campylobacter free for the first 14–21 days of life.

Background Leishmaniasis is an emerging infectious disease reported in the north and south of Thailand of which patients with HIV/AIDS are a high risk group for acquiring the infection. A lack of information regarding prevalence, and the risk association of Leishmania infection among asymptomatic immunocompetent hosts needs further investigation. Information on potential vectors and animal reservoirs in the affected areas is also important to control disease transmission. Methods An outbreak investigation and a cross-sectional study were conducted following one index case of cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) caused by L. martiniquensis in an immunocompetent male patient reported in August 2015, Chiang Rai Province, Thailand. From September to November 2015, a total of 392 participants at two study areas who were related to the index case, 130 students at a semi-boarding vocational school and 262 hill tribe villagers in the patient’s hometown, were recruited in this study. The nested internal transcribed spacer 1-PCR (ITS1-PCR) was performed to detect Leishmania DNA in buffy coat, and nucleotide sequencing was used to identify species. Antibody screening in plasma was performed using the Direct Agglutination Test (DAT), and associated risk factors were analyzed using a standardized questionnaire. Captured sandflies within the study areas were identified and detected for Leishmania DNA using nested ITS1-PCR. Moreover, the animal reservoirs in the study areas were also explored for Leishmania infection. Results Of 392 participants, 28 (7.1%) were positive for Leishmania infection of which 1 (4.8%) was L. martiniquensis, 12 (57.1%) were L. orientalis and 8 (38.1%) were Leishmania spp. Of 28, 15 (53.6%) were DAT positive. None showed any symptoms of CL or visceral leishmaniasis. Risk factors were associated with being female (adjusted odds ratio, AOR 2.52, 95%CI 1.01–6.26), increasing age (AOR 1.05, 95%CI 1.02–1.08), having an animal enclosure in a housing area (AOR 3.04, 95%CI 1.13–8.22), being exposed to termite mounds (AOR 3.74, 95%CI 1.11–12.58) and having domestic animals in a housing area (AOR 7.11, 95%CI 2.08–24.37). At the semi-boarding vocational school, six Sergentomyia gemmea samples were PCR positive for DNA of L. orientalis and one S. gemmea was PCR positive for DNA of L. donovani/L. infantum. Additionally, one Phlebotomus stantoni was PCR positive for DNA of L. martiniquensis, and one black rat (Rattus rattus) was PCR positive for DNA of L. martiniquensis. Conclusion This information could be useful for monitoring Leishmania infection among immunocompetent hosts in affected areas and also setting up strategies for prevention and control. A follow-up study of asymptomatic individuals with seropositive results as well as those with positive PCR results is recommended.

<p>Animal nutrition has been severely challenged by the ban on antimicrobials as growth promoters. This has fostered the study of alternative methods to avoid colonisation by pathogenic bacteria as well as to improve the growth of animals and feed conversion efficiency. These new options should not alter the normal intestinal microbiota, or affect it as little as possible. The use of probiotics, which are live microorganisms that beneficially affect the host by improving its intestinal microbial balance, can be seen as a promising way to achieve that goal. In this study, New Zealand White rabbits were fed diets containing an autochthonous probiotic of Enterococcus spp., with the strains EaI, EfaI and EfaD, and Escherichia coli, with the strains ECI 1, ECI 2 and ECD, during a 25-d trial, to evaluate the impact of the probiotic on the faecal microbiota, including population dynamics and antimicrobial resistance profiles. A control group of rabbits, which was fed a diet containing a commonly used mixture of antimicrobials (colistin, oxytetracycline, and valnemulin), was also studied. To assess the colonisation ability of the mentioned probiotic, the faecal microbiota of the rabbits was characterised up to 10 d after the administration had ended. Isolates of enterococci and E. coli were studied for phylogenetic relationships using enterobacterial repetitive intergenic consensus (ERIC-PCR) and pulse-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), respectively. Although partially affected by an unexpected clinical impairment suffered by the rabbits in the experimental group, our results showed the following. The difference between the growth rate of the animals treated with antimicrobials and those fed the probiotic was not statistically significant (P&gt; 0.05). The competitive exclusion product was present in the faecal samples in a large proportion, but stopped being recovered by culture as soon as the administration ended and the housing conditions were changed. Multidrug-resistant strains of enterococci and E. coli were more commonly recovered from faecal samples of animals fed diets containing antimicrobials, than from rabbits fed diets with our probiotic formula. The use of E. coli probiotics to prevent infection by enteropathogenic strains must be carefully considered due to the possible occurrence of gastrointestinal signs. On the other hand, enterococci strains may be more effective, but lack the long-term colonisation ability.</p>

Abstract According to the 2020 census, the African American (AA) population reached almost 47 million habitants, comprising 14% of the total United States (U.S) population. Data has shown that amongst all racial and ethnic groups in the U.S, AA men have the highest incidences of cancer, and AA men and women have the highest death rate and worst survival for most malignancies. Historically, AAs face worse outcomes and illness compared to Whites. AAs have higher rates of lung cancer (LC), yet, are less likely to fulfill LC screening eligibility criteria. Black women, on the other hand, are almost twice as likely as White to die from breast cancer. Social determinants of health (SDH) heavily impact the health outcomes in this population. We sought to explore the differences in SDH between African Americans/Black and Whites. Survey data were obtained from the AAMC biannual Consumer Survey of Health Care Access. There were 53,523 subjects included from 2010to 2019. A chi-square comparison was conducted between Black, Hispanic, White, and other races with subsequent multivariate analysis. Numerical values were summarized as mean plus standard deviation and compared using ANOVA. A total of 5,245 participants self-identified as African American or Black. The largest group of AA participants were 25-34 years (21.7% ) versus ≥ 65 years for whites (23.3%). Most AA respondents were female, single, college graduates, employed full time and had private insurance. During the most recent medical care visit, AA reported higher rates than Whites for concerns about housing stability OR 2.37(1.52,3.69) and food insecurity OR 1.70 (1.08,2.69). Compared with Whites, AA reported significantly higher experiences of unfair treatment due to age OR 1.15 (1.01,1.30), race OR 1.62 (1.42,1.87), language OR 1.39 (1.20,1.59), culture OR 1.29 (1.11,1.50), and religion OR 1.47 (1.26,1.71). Disparities in social determinants of health have a quantifiable impact on the experiences within health care of the AA population. Perceived racial discrimination by the AA communities can negatively impact this vulnerable population's cancer diagnosis and care, widening disparities that have been present for decades. Citation Format: Coral Olazagasti, Idalid Franco, Fay Osman, Narjust Duma. Assessing disparities in social determinants of health between African Americans/Black and Whites [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 15th AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2022 Sep 16-19; Philadelphia, PA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2022;31(1 Suppl):Abstract nr B104.

Abstract Background: Twenty three percent of adults in Los Angeles County report difficulty in accessing medical care. This is particularly troubling when faced with cancer. Approximately 1 in 3 Latinos will face cancer in their lifetime. Yet they have the highest number of uninsured of any group. There is a lack of culturally and linguistically sensitive support for these patients confronted with a cancer diagnosis. This contributes to increasing health disparities because of lack of compliance with treatment, failure to follow up with care, lack of transportation which contribute to cancer disparity. The Ronnie Lippin Cancer Support and Navigation program at USC provides linguistic and culturally sensitive public health education and cancer information and customized evidence-based research and resources to cancer patients and caregivers living in Los Angeles County. Methods: During 2019-2021 we provided health education, cancer information and resources, patient navigation and liaison services to cancer patients in Los Angeles County. Services included explaining medical lingo using easy to understand terminology in Spanish and English. We connected patients to support groups, mental health services, nutrition, and physical activity programs and provided health and wellness related information. Also resources for wigs, housing, and welfare assistance. We helped to answer frequently asked questions about cancer treatment and accompanied patients to major medical appointments in person or remotely during the pandemic. We reminded patients of their appointments and next steps. The program provided Spanish/English bilingual services and identified resources in Korean, Mandarin and Tagalog, to meet patient needs. Results: We provided services to 383 individuals between 2019-2021. Of these, the majority were females, with most ranging between 40-64 years of age. Although the majority where of Hispanic/Latino descent, we also serviced African Americans and Asian populations. Individuals served were categorized in four groups for services: previvors (individual at risk for cancer who have genetic predispositions and are taking prophylactic actions to reduce their risk or are undergoing cancer screening tests) and survivors, in active treatment at all stages, and survivors no longer in treatment. Those in end of life or hospice care were the fourth group. Cancer types varied from lung, breast, prostate, brain, cervical, liver, uterine, testicular, and colorectal among other. Patients mostly spoke Spanish and had language challenges. Patient navigators helped patients understand treatment instructions, provided health information to support health and mental health wellness. Conclusion: The program proved to be very effective at serving patients. However, more support is needed in Mandarin for Chinese community. Marketing and outreach strategies need focus on males, Asians and African Americans to increase participation. Printed educational materials and online resources are needed in Mandarin and Korean. We provide recommendations and lessons learned. Citation Format: Ghecemy Lopez, Elena Nieves, Rosa Barahona, Lourdes A. Baezconde-Garbanati. The Ronnie Lippin Cancer Support and Navigation Program: Serving cancer patients in culturally and language specific ways [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 15th AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2022 Sep 16-19; Philadelphia, PA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2022;31(1 Suppl):Abstract nr B025.

Background: Age is an important non-modifiable risk factor for stroke. Stroke rates double every decade after age 55. Social isolation (SI) exacerbates behavioural deficits, slows functional recovery and worsens histological injury after stroke in young animals, primarily by increasing the inflammatory response. However, the inflammatory response differs in aging, and whether the detrimental effects of SI are seen in aged animals is unknown. We hypothesize that acute and chronic post stroke SI will worsen stroke pathology and recovery in aged mice and pair housing (PH) will reverse these effects. Methods: Eighteen-month-old male C57BL/6 mice were pair housed (PH) for two weeks prior to stroke and randomly assigned to various housing conditions immediately after stroke. Behavioral analysis was done weekly starting at day 7. Mice were sacrificed either at 72 hours or 4 weeks after 60-minute right MCAO or sham surgery (n=9-10/group). Results: Mice isolated after stroke (ST-ISO) mice had significantly greater hemispheric infarct volume and neurological deficit scores (p<.05. n=13/group) than pair-housed (PH) stroke mice at 72 hours. SI mice that were isolated immediately after stroke showed significantly higher plasma IL-6 levels compared to PH sham (P<.001, n=13/group ) or PH stroke mice (P<.05) after 72 hour, but levels were similar by 4 weeks post-stroke (n=9-14/group). No change in tissue atrophy was seen after 4 weeks, however a significant interaction [F (1, 28) = 259.6, P<0.001] between housing and stroke was found in the Novel Object Recognition Task (NORT) at day 14. PH led to increased expression of Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and myelin basic protein (MBP) by IHC and western blot (n=5/group for IHC and n= 4/ western blot). Conclusions: Social isolation immediately after stroke led to enhanced injury acutely. Despite similar infarcts at 4 weeks, SI mice had delayed behavioral recovery. Pair housing led to increased expression of BDNF and myelin protein expression. Therefore, the beneficial effects of pair housing may be related to BDNF and MBP expression and enhanced recovery after injury in aged animals.

PurposeBudget constraints faced by social housing projects (SHPs) developers can lead to poor value delivery to the end-users. Without a structured method to guide the decision-making processes during product development, SHP often fails to meet user needs and aspirations. Function analysis (FA) is an essential step in a value management (VM) study. Still, FA practice in SHP has been treated with secondary importance. This paper aims to propose a method for improving FA practice in the VM process for a Brazilian SHP to achieve optimum benefits.Design/methodology/approachThe research followed Design Science Research (DSR) in a specific single case study context, focusing on solving practical problems while contributing to theory. The method has 11 steps and guides a complete VM exercise. Its development was based on prior VM research. Focus group meetings were held to get feedback about the initial method's version to increase its relevancy and applicability in the studied context.FindingsThe proposed method suggests that scarce financial resources in SHP do not necessarily lead to low-value delivery and low-design quality. When FA is fully implemented, opportunities for cost reallocations to enhance value are identified.Originality/valueVM prior research in construction has not provided a specific method for improving FA practice for social housing developers to enhance value in the context of scarce financial resources.

Background and Purpose: Social isolation (SI) has been linked epidemiologically with high rates of morbidity and mortality following stroke. Clinically, social support and coping strategies have been shown to be significant factors in caregiver’s health-related quality of life. In order to discover the biological mechanisms underlying the benefits of social interaction the development of pre-clinical animal models are needed. The goal of our study was to examine the effect of post stroke pair housing and SI in different behavioral paradigms, which can be used as a validated model to assess chronic functional recovery. Methods: C57BL/6 male mice (8-12 weeks) were paired for 14 days before 60 min of transient intraluminal middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) or sham surgery (n=8-10/group) and randomly assigned to six different housing conditions: 1. Stroke isolated (STiso), 2. Stroke pair housed (PH) with sham, 3. Stroke PH with stroke and their respective sham controls (Gps 4, 5, and 6). Behavioral assessments (3 Chamber sociability task, tail suspension test and sucrose consumption test), were performed at 42 days (Cohort 1) or every 7Th day for 6 weeks (Cohort 2). Brain atrophy was calculated using cresyl violet staining and blood samples were collected for interleukin-6 (IL-6) measurements. Results: Post stroke PH mice, either with sham or stroke partner showed significantly higher (p<0.05) sociability after MCAO. In the 2nd cohort, a two-factor interaction ‘group versus days’ showed a significant difference between post stroke SI and PH groups (F 3,24 = 5.41; p< 0.01, RM ANOVA with Bonferroni correction). Post stroke SI mice showed reduced sucrose consumption (p<0.05) and increased immobility (p<0.05) indicating a depressive phenotype. Post stroke SI mice had significantly more tissue loss (40.8 ± 1.3% in SI vs. 17.5 ± 1.5% in PH; p<0.001) and showed higher levels of IL-6, a biomarker of social stress and inflammation. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that post stroke isolation reduces sociability and exacerbates depressive behavior, whereas pair housing aids early functional recovery. Moreover, the sociability (“empathy”) task can be a useful model for chronic post stroke behavioral recovery.

Diabetes worsens stroke outcomes and cognitive function, but the underlying reasons are not understood. Long-term experimental studies had been limited by greater mortality in diabetic cohorts. Recent studies suggested circadian rhythms may modulate brain ischemia and hence mortality/recovery. The goal of this study was to determine the impact of stroke timing and housing light cycle conditions on survival and cognitive outcomes in control and diabetic rats. Methods: Control (C) and diabetic (D) male rats (n=7/group) were randomly grouped into normal light cycle (NLC 6 am/6 pm) or reverse light cycle (RLC 12 am/12 pm) starting at 4 w of age. At 12 w of age, rats were subjected to 60 min middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO, night stroke in NLC and morning stroke in RLC). A battery of behavioral tests was performed up to W8 post-stroke to assess motor, cognitive, and psychosocial status. Results: (Table). RLC conditions improved stroke surgery mortality and long-term survival in diabetic animals. Pre- and post-stroke body weight gain was affected only in the NLC/D group. High mortality in the NLC/D prevented 2x2 comparisons at W8 but suggested the worst performance the in NLC/D cohort. Comparisons of C and D rats in RLC showed a decline in recognition memory in both groups over time with trends for worse performance in diabetic animals. There was no difference in aversive learning or anxiety status. Conclusions: These results suggest that the light cycle and timing of MCAO affect the circadian rhythm, overall health state, and cognitive outcomes, especially in diabetes. RLC experiments may refine and improve the long-term studies in comorbid disease models.

Introduction: The availability of social services resources and stroke prevalence vary by geography. We assessed whether distributions of resources relevant to stroke survivors were clustered around areas of highest stroke prevalence in Ohio and if this varied by rurality. Methods: Census tract (CT) level self-reported stroke prevalence estimates (CDC PLACES-2019 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System) was linked with sociodemographic and rurality data (2019 American Community Survey) and geographic density of resources in Ohio (2020 findhelp—search engine connecting individuals to a network of area social services). Resources were grouped into categories: housing, in-home, financial, transportation, education, and therapy. Negative binomial regression models estimated mean number of resources within 25 miles of a CT centroid and quartiles of stroke prevalence for each resource group and stratified by rurality status (rural, urban, and suburban). Models were sequentially adjusted for total population and CT level demographics. Results: The highest stroke prevalence quartile was associated with fewer resources within 25 miles compared to the lowest quartile overall (Prevalence Ratios (PR): 0.57-0.98), but this varied by rurality with the most pronounced disparity in rural CT ( p <0.05 for all resource categories). Rural CTs with the highest quartile stroke prevalence had fewer housing PR: 0.49 (95% CI: 0.32, 0.75), in-home PR: 0.31 (0.20, 0.49), and therapy PR: 0.23 (0.13, 0.43) resources compared to those with the lowest quartile stroke prevalence. Rural disparities became null after adjustment for federal poverty limit (FPL), supporting FPL as a mediator of this association. Conclusions: The inverse link between stroke prevalence and resource availability in rural Ohio is likely explained by geographic differences in poverty. Stroke-specific resource-related interventions are likely needed and should consider the role poverty.

The Orchidaceae is one of the most diverse vascular plant families in the Neotropics and the most diverse in Panama. The number of species is triple that of other well-represented families of angiosperms such as Rubiaceae, Fabaceae and Poaceae. Despite its importance in terms of diversity, the latest checklist was published ten years ago and the latest in-depth taxonomic treatments were published in 1949 and 1993. The accumulation of information over the years and the need to update the nomenclature and to clarify taxonomic concepts made necessary the publication of an up-dated checklist of the Orchidaceae of Panama. This checklist was completed by studying specimens strictly collected in Panama and vouchered in herbaria. Species are presented alphabetically with their synonyms and herbarium vouchers. The data were analyzed to explain the patterns of geographic distribution, most diverse taxa, endemism, exotic species and relationships with other nearby floras. The checklist contains 1365 species (including two natural hybrids and three subspecies) in four subfamilies, 16 tribes, 27 subtribes and 187 genera. Four exotic species were recorded. A total of 296 (21.7%) species are endemic. Epidendroideae is the most diverse group housing more than 90% of species. The most diverse subtribes are Pleurothallidinae (30 genera, 405 spp.), Laeliinae (16 genera, 292 spp.), Oncidiinae (29 genera, 157 spp.) and Maxillariinae (18 genera, 132 spp.). The most diverse genera are: Epidendrum (206 spp.), Stelis (88 spp.), Lepanthes (66 spp.) and Pleurothallis (54 spp.). Nomenclatural changes are proposed in Maxillariella, Pleurothallis, Specklinia, Stelis and Trichocentrum. Many areas remain unexplored for orchids, and we estimate that much work remains to complete a floristic treatment that reveals more realistic data on the orchid flora that Panama harbors. This checklist is an important initial step toward the development of an illustrated treatment of the Orchidaceae of Panama.

Introduction: Social Isolation (SI) is a risk factor for a wide array of psychological disorders. SI significantly enhances the incidence of developing neurological diseases, including stroke within the elderly population. Recent studies have shown microRNA (miRNA) signatures in the brain and the circulation are altered in social defeat models and under stressful environmental conditions. Although SI has shown to influence post-stroke recovery, potential targetable interventions to mitigate these inflammatory events are limited. Hypothesis: Post-stroke SI influences temporally distinct miRNA networks in the brain that regulate acute microglial activation and contribute to chronic depressive phenotypes. Methods: Aged (18-20 month) C57BL/6 male mice were subjected to 60-minute middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) followed by reperfusion. Mice were randomly assigned to either continued pair housing (PH), or SI three days after a 60-minute MCAO. Mice were euthanized at post-stroke SI Day 1, 4, and 27 and ipsilateral hemispheres were collected for miRNA sequencing and downstream analysis. Behavioral tests and brain cell analysis using flow cytometry were performed using independent experimental cohorts. Results: The top 10 differentially expressed miRNAs were identified in SI vs. PH mice across three time points (FC ≥ 1.5, FDR adjusted P <0.05, n=4/group). Interactional network analysis revealed miR-466i-3p, miR-10a-5p, and miR-10b-5p as pivotal nodes that regulated the expression of the largest subset of genes involved in microglial-specific immune activation and chronic depression after stroke at SI D4 and D27, respectively. Flow cytometry analysis showed that microglia are significantly activated at post-stroke SI Day 4, as assessed by the downregulation of microglia-specific homeostatic protein purinergic receptor P2RY12 ( P <0.05, n=7-8/group) and interestingly, chronic SI induced depressive-like behaviors in aged stroke mice; consistent with our miRNA-based pathway analysis. Conclusion: This is the first comprehensive miRNA expression profiling study using NGS technique in aging, stroke, and SI. Our data revealed that SI-specific miRNAs are involved in microglial activation and chronic depression in aged mice.

Introduction: MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of short non-coding RNAs that have been identified as a powerful interventional tool for many diseases, including stroke. Very recent studies have found that microRNAs also mediate aspects of social interaction. Social environments can directly influence miRNA expression, which then triggers a plethora of downstream gene changes. Social isolation (SI) impairs stroke recovery and leads to inflammation. We hypothesize that miRNAs are involved in the detrimental effects of post-stroke social isolation. Methods: Eighteen-month-old male C57BL/6 mice were pair housed (PH) for two weeks prior to stroke and randomly assigned to various housing conditions (ST-ISO or ST-PH) immediately after stroke (ST). Mice were sacrificed either at 3, 7 or 14 days after 60-minute right MCAO or sham surgery (n=4-6/group) and perilesional frontal cortex was isolated for miRNA analysis. Total RNA was isolated using either Qiagen miRNeasy® Mini Kit/ miRVANA miRNA isolation kit (Ambion, Life technologies). Whole miRNOme analysis of total RNA isolated from brain tissue was performed using miRCURY LNA TM Universal RT microRNA. Post-treatment with an ‘in vivo ready’ antagomir of miR-141-3p (7mg/kg i.v/day x 3 days; n=4/group) was given through lateral tail veins. Results: Using whole miRNOme analysis of approx. 800 miRNA, we found miR-141-3p was a unique miRNA whose expression was significantly upregulated in a time dependent manner up to day 14 after stroke. The post treatment with an ‘in vivo ready’ antogomir of miR-141-3p reduced the isolation-induced increase in miR-141-3p to levels almost equal to that of pair-housed controls. Post- treatment significantly reduced mortality (by 21% as compared to -ve control) and sensory motor deficits after stroke. mRNA targets analysis study using qPCR confirmed the significant (p<0.05 vs Neg Control ) upregulation of target several genes like arg-1, ccl22 and TGFbr1, markers of M2 type microglial activation, after antogomir treatment. Summary: The present data suggests the unique role of miR-141-3p in post stroke isolation. Temporal expression profiling studies suggest its validation as a potential targets. Post treatment data confirms the in vivo feasibility of miRNA modulation after stroke.

Currently, there is an increase in the group of consumers looking for poultry products obtained from the organic housing system, who pay attention to the relationship between diet and health. The research material consisted of breast muscles of organic chickens that were marinated for 24 hours with acid marinades: acid whey (n=30) and lemon juice (n=30). Acid whey was used in the study as a new ingredient in comparison to the traditional ingredient of marinades (lemon juice). The control group (n=30) were non-marinated breast muscles. The physicochemical parameters (marinade absorption, pH, Water Holding Capacity, colour L*a*b*, shear force, chemical composition) and microbiological (mesophilic aerobic bacteria, Pseudomonas spp., coli group, lactic acid bacteria) ones of breast muscles were evaluated immediately after marinating, as well as after grilling treatment. The sensory evaluation was also conducted. Raw breast muscles marinated using whey, in comparison with those marinated with lemon juice, were characterized by (p<0,05) a higher absorption of the marinade, lower saturation of the redness (a*), better tenderness measured by the shear force (N) and higher ash content. Also, after heat treatment, marinated breast muscles maintained a better (p<0,05) tenderness and juiciness and higher ash content. The study has shown that acid whey can be used as a new marinade in organic chicken meat marinades, as it causes a reduction in the redness saturation, higher ash content, improvement of tenderness and juiciness and increase in the microbiological safety of the product. The use of acid whey meets the expectations of consumers for the use of natural food additives that have a positive impact on human health.

Chicken egg yolk antibodies (IgYs) are extensively used for immunotherapy and immunodiagnostic purposes. Oral immunotherapy with specific IgYs is established as an efficient alternative to traditional antibiotic therapy in human and animals. Storing immunized eggs in refrigerator for a period of time could provide an inexpensive and convenient source of large volumes of specific antibodies. This study investigated the storage stability of anti- Salmonella Typhimurium IgYs in immunized quail egg yolks at 4°C over a period of more than 6 months. Salmonella spp.-free female Japanese quails (Coturnix coturnix japonica) were intramuscularly immunized whit Salmonella Typhimurium whole bacterial suspension (1.0×109 CFU/ml) emulsified with Freund adjuvants. During a period of 10 days after final immunization, eggs from each group were collected, randomized and stored at 4°C over a period of 200 days. Egg yolk IgY titer and specificity were determined using ELISA technique. S. Typhimurium specific IgY antibodies were detected in immunized quails and were significantly higher than the control group which confirmed the immunization procedure. Eggs from immunized quails can be collected and stored in 4°C refrigerator over a period of 2 months without any concern about the antibody degradation. After 80 days of storage at 4°C, although lower antibody titer was obtained in comparison to the first of study, anti-S. Typhimurium IgY level remained stable up to the 6 months without more significant declining. This trend will provide economical sources of polyclonal antibodies through reducing the number of immunized animals, management expenses and housing costs.

Abstract Background and Aims Hypertension is one of the major health problems contributing to the development of cardiovascular diseases. In contrast to essential hypertension, which often displays complex pathogenesis due to multifactorial aetiology, several monogenic forms of hypertension are caused by mutations in genes associated with renal salt handling. Thus, studies on monogenic forms of hypertension could hold potential for novel therapeutic approaches for essential hypertension. Recently, increasing numbers of studies have demonstrated the alteration of the gut microbiome in pathological states including hypertension. These observations suggest the involvement of the intestinal microbiome in the development and/or maintenance of hypertension. A reciprocal congenic strain of Milan hypertensive rat (NA rat), harbouring a missense mutation in the gene encoding the alpha subunit of the membrane-skeletal protein adducin (Add1), develops hypertension starting from 3 months after birth. Preliminary studies on NA rats and its littermate Milan normotensive (MN) rats showed diverse expression patterns of renal sodium transporters/ion channels in two strains of rats, indicating a putative role of altered renal salt handling on the enhanced blood pressure in NA rats (unpublished data). Based on this background, the aim of this study was to investigate a possible connection between the gut microbiome and blood pressure phenotypes in these two strains. Furthermore, we evaluated whether the exchange of faeces between the two strains could transfer the phenotypes through the gut microbiome. Finally, mechanisms underlying the altered phenotype after microbiome exchange were investigated. Method Hypertensive NA rats and normotensive MN rats were subjected to ‘homogenization (HOM)’ of the microbiome after birth, which consisted of the exchange of bedding containing faeces from either strain, followed by co-housing of MN and NA rats in the same cage (MN-HOM and NA-HOM groups). For the baseline (BSL) condition, rats were homogenized within the same strain (MN-BSL and NA-BSL). At the age of 5 months, blood pressure measurement was performed using a non-invasive tail-cuff BP-2000 Blood Pressure Analysis system. Faeces from each rat were collected for microbiota metataxonomic analysis using next generation sequencing of 16S ribosome encoding DNA. At the end of the treatment, rats were sacrificed for the collections of blood and organs to assess the expressions of genes involved in renal salt reabsorption. Results Systolic blood pressure (SBP) in MN-BSL was averaged at 143.6 mmHg, while NA-BSL showed average SBP 163.3 mmHg, confirming the hypertensive phenotype in NA rats at baseline (P&lt;0.001). Interestingly, MN-HOM showed a significantly enhanced SBP compared to MN-BSL, reaching 153.5 mmHg (P = 0.005). On the other hand, the average SBP of NA-HOM was163.7 mmHg, indicating that homogenization did not significantly impact blood pressure in NA rats. Although the MN-HOM group showed significantly increased SBP compared with MN-BSL group, the average SBP of MN-HOM was still significantly lower than both the NA-BSL and NA-HOM groups. Different gut microbiota compositions were observed in the two strains of rats at baseline, and HOM altered both. Conclusion We have demonstrated that the hypertensive phenotype in NA rats was transferred to normotensive MN rats through the exchange of gut microbiota, indicating that the intestinal microbiota and/or metabolites derived therefrom could eventually modulate blood pressure. Further studies including immunoblotting as well as uremic toxin analyses are required to unveil the molecular mechanisms by which the gut microbiome modulates blood pressure.

Wicker handicraft entrepreneurship is a unique world-famous small-scale forest-based cottage industry of indigenous people of Kashmir Himalaya which plays a prominent role in livelihood security, socioeconomic development, traditional handcraftsmanship and rural industrialization in the region. The study investigated the economic contribution, income inequality mitigation and determinant socioeconomic factors of wicker handicraft entrepreneurship in Pulwama district of J&K UT. Multistage random sampling technique was employed to select the sample of 100 wicker handicraft entrepreneurs. Data were collected through structured interviews and focus group discussions. Both descriptive and analytical statistics were used in data analysis. Results revealed that collection of withies from Parrotia jacquemontiana, Cotoneaster baciliaris, Indigofera pulchella and Salix spp. was 61.71 t/year for manufacture of 43514 wicker handicrafts/year which generated an income of 5953470/year. Wicker handicraft income contributes 66.97%, whereas farm and non-farm income accounts 23.46% and 9.58% of total household income, respectively. Gini coefficient was 21.85 when wicker handicraft income was considered and 53.14 when it was ignored which indicated that the wicker handicraft income have stronger equalizing effect on local income distribution. Regression analysis showed that all explanatory variables jointly accounted 81.50% (R2=0.815) variation on wicker handicraft income. Among socioeconomic factors, education, family composition, housing status, subsequent occupation and gross annual income were key determinants influencing significantly (p<0.05) the wicker handicraft income. To achieve the socioeconomic development and livelihood diversification objectives, policy must be directed towards the rural industrialization through wicker handicraft entrepreneurship.

AbstractSwine dysentery (SD) caused by pathogenic Brachyspira spp. is an economic challenge for the swine industry. In research settings, experimental reproduction of swine dysentery typically relies on intragastric inoculation which has shown variable success. This project aimed to improve the consistency of the experimental inoculation protocol used for swine dysentery in our laboratory. Over six experiments, we evaluated the influence of group housing in inoculated pigs using a frozen-thawed broth culture of strongly hemolytic B. hyodysenteriae strain D19 (Trial A), compared the relative virulence of B. hyodysenteriae strains D19 and G44 (Trial B), compared inoculum volumes (50 mL vs 100 mL) for G44 and B. hampsonii 30446 (Trial C), and performed three independent trials evaluating intragastric inoculation using different oral inoculation methods: oral feed balls (Trial D), and oral syringe bolus of 100 mL (Trial E) or 300 mL (Trial F). Intragastric inoculation with a fresh broth culture of B. hyodysenteriae strain G44 resulted in a shorter incubation period and a higher proportionate duration of mucohemorrhagic diarrhea (MMHD) compared to D19. Intragastric inoculation with either 50 or 100 mL of B. hampsonii 30446 or B. hyodysenteriae (G44) were statistically equivalent. Oral inoculation with 100 mL or 300 mL also yielded similar results to intragastric inoculation but was more expensive due to the additional work and supplies associated with syringe training. Our future research will use intragastric inoculation with 100 mL of a fresh broth culture containing B. hyodysenteriae strain G44 as it yields a high incidence of mucohaemorrhagic diarrhea with a reasonable cost.

SummaryThis study evaluated the effect of an enzyme blend (xylanase, amylase and protease; XAP) in combination with a direct fed microbial (DFM) containing three strains of Bacillus spp. on intestinal histology, immune response and performance of broilers. Four dietary treatments were tested in a 2 × 2 factorial trial, including two levels of challenge (without or with coccidial infection), two levels of feed additive (with or without XAP and DFM). Diets were fed ad libitum to male Cobb500 broilers in mash feeds from 1–21 days of age, with eight replicate pens per treatment within brooder-batteries with raised wire floors and built up litter, housing six birds per pen. A mild challenge was introduced by oral gavage at day five to the challenged birds, using a six-fold concentration of coccidial vaccine. A high fibre basal diet formulated with rye and wheat middlings was used to further increase the challenge. Body weight and feed intake were measured and feed conversion ratio (FCR) was calculated during starter (1–12 d), grower (12–21 d) and overall 1–21 days. Intestinal morphology and immune response parameters were measured on day 12 and 21. Compared to the unchallenged groups, the coccidial challenge reduced (P < 0.05) body weight gain (BWG), increased FCR, reduced villus height and increased crypt depth. The challenged birds had increased pro-inflammatory cytokines (IL-6, IL-1β; P < 0.05) in the intestine as well as higher levels of acute phase proteins (APP, haemopexin and α−1-acid glycoprotein) in the plasma and circulating heterophils. XAP + DFM supplementation improved BWG, reduced FCR and increased energy efficiency compared to the non-supplemented groups. The combination of XAP and DFM reduced inflammatory responses such as APP compared to the challenged control group and maintained performance to a comparable level seen in the unchallenged control. The data indicate that XAP enzymes in combination with Bacillus-based DFM may reduce the damage and performance losses induced by coccidial challenge.

Natural history collections (NHC) are guardians of biodiversity (Lane 1996) and essential to understand the natural world and its evolutionary processes. They hold samples of morphological and genetic heritages of living and extinct biotas, helping to reconstruct the timeline of life over the centuries (Gardner 2014). Primary data from specimens in NHC are crucial elements for research in many areas of biological sciences, considered the “bricks” of systematics and therefore one of the pillars for evolutionary studies (Troudet 2018). For this reason, studies carried out in NHC are essential for the development of the scientific knowledge and are pivotal for the scientific-technological progress of a nation (Camargo 2015). The digitization and availability of primary data on biodiversity from NHC represents a inexpensive, practical and secure means of exchanging information, allowing collaboration between institutions and researchers. In this sense, initiatives such as the Sistema de Informação sobre a Biodiversidade Brasileira (SiBBr), a country-level branch of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) platform, aim to encourage and establish ways for the informatization of biological collections and their type specimens. Known for housing one of the largest and oldest collections of insects in the world focused on Neotropical fauna, the Entomological Collection of the Museu Nacional of Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (MNRJ) had more than 3,000 primary types and approximately 12,005,000 specimens, of which about 96% were lost in the tragic fire occurred at the institution on September 2, 2018. The SiBBr project was active in that collection from 2016 to 2019 and enabled the digitization and preservation of data from the type material of many insect orders, including the charismatic dragonflies (order Odonata). Due to the end of the agreement between SiBBr and the Museu Nacional, most of the obtained primary data are pending full curation and, therefore, are not yet available to the public and researchers. The MNRJ housed the biggest and most important collection of dragonflies among all Central and South American institutions. It assembled most of the physical records of neotropical dragonfly fauna gathered over the last 80 years, many of which are of undescribed taxa. Unfortunately, almost all material was permanently lost. This study aims to gather, analyze and publicize primary data of the type material of dragonflies housed in the MNRJ, ensuring the preservation of its history, as well as providing data on the taxonomy and diversity of this marvelous group of insects. A total of 11 families, 50 genera and 131 species were recorded, belonging to the suborders Anisoptera and Zygoptera with distributional records widespread in South America. The MNRJ housed 105 holotypes of dragonflies' nomina representing 11.7% of the richness of the Brazilian Odonata fauna (901 spp.), a country with the highest number of species of the biosphere. The impact of the loss of this collection to studies of these insects is unprecedented, since some enigmatic and monotypic genera such as Brasiliogomphus, Fluminagrion and Roppaneura lost 100% of their type series, while others most diverse such as Lauromacromia, Oxyagrion and Neocordulia lost 50%, 35% and 31% of their holotypes. Therefore, due to the registration and preservation of primary biodiversity data, this work reiterates the importance of curating and digitizing biological scientific collections. Furthermore, it shows extreme relevance for preserving information on existing biodiversity permanently and providing support for future research. Digitization and interconnecting digital extended specimen data proves to be one of the main and most effective ways to protect NHC heritage and their primary data against catastrophic events.

‘Historiographic Metafiction’ (HM) is a literary term first coined by creative writing academic Linda Hutcheon in 1988, and which refers to the postmodern practice of a fiction author inserting imagined--or illegitimate--characters into narratives that are intended to be received as authentic and historically accurate, that is, ostensibly legitimate. Such adventurous and bold authorial strategies frequently result in “novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (Hutcheon, A Poetics 5). They can be so entertaining and engaging that the overtly intertextual, explicitly inventive work of biographical HM can even change the “hegemonic discourse of history” (Nunning 353) for, as Philippa Gregory, the author of HM novel The Other Boleyn Girl (2001), has said regarding this genre of creative writing: “Fiction is about imagined feelings and thoughts. History depends on the outer life. The novel is always about the inner life. Fiction can sometimes do more than history. It can fill the gaps” (University of Sussex). In a way, this article will be filling one of the gaps regarding HM.Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) is possibly the best known cinematic example of HM, and this film version of the 1986 novel by Winston Groom particularly excels in seamlessly inserting images of a fictional character into verified history, as represented by well-known television newsreel footage. In Zemeckis’s adaptation, gaps were created in the celluloid artefact and filled digitally with images of the actor, Tom Hanks, playing the eponymous role. Words are often deemed less trustworthy than images, however, and fiction is considered particularly unreliable--although there are some exceptions conceded. In addition to Gregory’s novel; Midnight’s Children (1980) by Salman Rushdie; The Name of the Rose (1983) by Umberto Eco; and The Flashman Papers (1969-2005) by George MacDonald Fraser, are three well-known, loved and lauded examples of literary HM, which even if they fail to convince the reader of their bona fides, nevertheless win a place in many hearts. But despite the genre’s popularity, there is nevertheless a conceptual gap in the literary theory of Hutcheon given her (perfectly understandable) inability in 1988 to predict the future of e-publishing. This article will attempt to address that shortcoming by exploring the potential for authors of HM e-novels to use hyperlinks which immediately direct the reader to fact providing webpages such as those available at the website Wikipedia, like a much speedier (and more independent) version of the footnotes in Fraser’s Flashman novels.Of course, as Roland Barthes declared in 1977, “the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture” (146) and, as per any academic work that attempts to contribute to knowledge, a text’s sources--its “quotations”--must be properly identified and acknowledged via checkable references if credibility is to be securely established. Hence, in explaining the way claims to fact in the HM novel can be confirmed by independently published experts on the Internet, this article will also address the problem Hutcheon identifies, in that for many readers the entirety of the HM novel assumes questionable authenticity, that is, the novel’s “meta-fictional self-reflexivity (and intertextuality) renders their claims to historical veracity somewhat problematic, to say the least” ("Historiographic Metafiction: Parody", 3). This article (and the PhD in creative writing I am presently working on at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia) will possibly develop the concept of HM to a new level: one at which the Internet-connected reader of the hyperlinked e-novel is made fully (and even instantly) aware of those literary elements of the narrative that are legitimate and factual as distinct from those that are fictional, that is, illegitimate. Furthermore, utilising examples from my own (yet-to-be published) hyperlinked HM e-novel, this article demonstrates that such hyperlinking can add an ironic sub-text to a fictional character’s thoughts and utterances, through highlighting the reality concerning their mistaken or naïve beliefs, thus creating HM narratives that serve an entertainingly complex yet nevertheless truly educational purpose.As a relatively new and under-researched genre of historical writing, HM differs dramatically from the better known style of standard historical or biographical narrative, which typically tends to emphasise mimesis, the cataloguing of major “players” in historical events and encyclopaedic accuracy of dates, deaths and places. Instead, HM involves the re-contextualisation of real-life figures from the past, incorporating the lives of entirely (or, as in the case of Gregory’s Mary Boleyn, at least partly) fictitious characters into their generally accepted famous and factual activities, and/or the invention of scenarios that gel realistically--but entertainingly--within a landscape of well-known and well-documented events. As Hutcheon herself states: “The formal linking of history and fiction through the common denominators of intertextuality and narrativity is usually offered not as a reduction, as a shrinking of the scope and value of fiction, but rather as an expansion of these” ("Intertextuality", 11). Similarly, Gregory emphasises the need for authors of HM to extend themselves beyond the encyclopaedic archive: “Archives are not history. The trouble with archives is that the material is often random and atypical. To have history, you have to have a narrative” (University of Sussex). Functionally then, HM is an intertextual narrative genre which serves to communicate to a contemporary audience an expanded story or stories of the past which present an ultimately more self-reflective, personal and unpredictable authorship: it is a distinctly auteurial mode of biographical history writing for it places the postmodern author’s imaginative “signature” front and foremost.Hutcheon later clarified that the quest for historical truth in fiction cannot possibly hold up to the persuasive powers of a master novelist, as per the following rationale: “Fact is discourse-defined: an event is not” ("Historiographic Metafiction", 843). This means, in a rather simplistic nutshell, that the new breed of HM novel writer is not constrained by what others may call fact: s/he knows that the alleged “fact” can be renegotiated and redefined by an inventive discourse. An event, on the other hand, is responsible for too many incontrovertible consequences for it to be contested by her/his mere discourse. So-called facts are much easier for the HM writer to play with than world changing events. This notion was further popularised by Ansgar Nunning when he claimed the overtly explicit work of HM can even change the “hegemonic discourse of history” (353). HM authors can radically alter, it seems, the way the reader perceives the facts of history especially when entertaining, engaging and believable characters are deliberately devised and manipulated into the narrative by the writer. Little wonder, then, that Hutcheon bemoans the unfortunate reality that for many readers the entirety of a HM work assumes questionable “veracity” due to its author’s insertion of imaginary and therefore illegitimate personages.But there is an advantage to be found in this, the digital era, and that is the Internet’s hyperlink. In our ubiquitously networked electronic information age, novels written for publication as e-books may, I propose, include clickable links on the names of actual people and events to Wikipedia entries or the like, thus strengthening the reception of the work as being based on real history (the occasional unreliability of Wikipedia notwithstanding). If picked up for hard copy publication this function of the HM e-novel can be replicated with the inclusion of icons in the printed margins that can be scanned by smartphones or similar gadgets. This small but significant element of the production reinforces the e-novel’s potential status as a new form of HM and addresses Hutcheon’s concern that for HM novels, their imaginative but illegitimate invention of characters “renders their claims to historical veracity somewhat problematic, to say the least” ("Historiographic Metafiction: Parody", 3).Some historic scenarios are so little researched or so misunderstood and discoloured by the muddy waters of time and/or rumour that such hyperlinking will be a boon to HM writers. Where an obscure facet of Australian history is being fictionalised, for example, these edifying hyperlinks can provide additional background information, as Glenda Banks and Martin Andrew might have wished for when they wrote regarding Bank’s Victorian goldfields based HM novel A Respectable Married Woman. This 2012 printed work explores the lives of several under-researched and under-represented minorities, such as settler women and Aboriginal Australians, and the author Banks lamented the dearth of public awareness regarding these peoples. Indeed, HM seems tailor-made for exposing the subaltern lives of those repressed individuals who form the human “backdrop” to the lives of more famous personages. Banks and Andrew explain:To echo the writings of Homi K. Bhaba (1990), this sets up a creative site for interrogating the dominant, hegemonic, ‘normalised’ master narratives about the Victorian goldfields and ‘re-membering’ a marginalised group - the women of the goldfields, the indigenous [sic], the Chinese - and their culture (2013).In my own hyperlinked short story (presently under consideration for publishing elsewhere), which is actually a standalone version of the first chapter of a full-length HM e-novel about Aboriginal Australian activists Eddie Mabo and Chicka Dixon and the history of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra, entitled The Bullroarers, I have focussed on a similarly under-represented minority, that being light-complexioned, mixed race Aboriginal Australians. My second novel to deal with Indigenous Australian issues (see Starrs, That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance), it is my first attempt at writing HM. Hopefully avoiding overkill whilst alerting readers to those Wikipedia pages with relevance to the narrative theme of non-Indigenous attitudes towards light-complexioned Indigenous Australians, I have inserted a total of only six hyperlinks in this 2200-word piece, plus the explanatory foreword stating: “Note, except where they are well-known place names or are indicated as factual by the insertion of Internet hyperlinks verifying such, all persons, organisations, businesses and places named in this text are entirely fictitious.”The hyperlinks in my short story all take the reader not to stubs but to well-established Wikipedia pages, and provide for the uninformed audience the following near-unassailable facts (i.e. events):The TV program, A Current Affair, which the racist character of the short story taken from The Bullroarers, Mrs Poulter, relies on for her prejudicial opinions linking Aborigines with the dealing of illegal drugs, is a long-running, prime-time Channel Nine production. Of particular relevance in the Wikipedia entry is the comment: “Like its main rival broadcast on the Seven Network, Today Tonight, A Current Affair is often considered by media critics and the public at large to use sensationalist journalism” (Wikipedia, “A Current Affair”).The Aboriginal Tent Embassy, located on the lawns opposite the Old Parliament House in Canberra, was established in 1972 and ever since has been the focus of Aboriginal Australian land rights activism and political agitation. In 1995 the Australian Register of the National Estate listed it as the only Aboriginal site in Australia that is recognised nationally for representing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their political struggles (Wikipedia, “The Aboriginal Tent Embassy”).In 1992, during an Aboriginal land rights case known as Mabo, the High Court of Australia issued a judgment constituting a direct overturning of terra nullius, which is a Latin term meaning “land belonging to no one”, and which had previously formed the legal rationale and justification for the British invasion and colonisation of Aboriginal Australia (Wikipedia, “Terra Nullius”).Aboriginal rights activist and Torres Strait Islander, Eddie Koiki Mabo (1936 to 1992), was instrumental in the High Court decision to overturn the doctrine of terra nullius in 1992. In that same year, Eddie Mabo was posthumously awarded the Australian Human Rights Medal in the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Awards (Wikipedia, “Eddie Mabo”).The full name of what Mrs Poulter blithely refers to as “the Department of Families and that” is the Australian Government’s Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (Wikipedia, “The Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs”).The British colonisation of Australia was a bloody, murderous affair: “continuous Aboriginal resistance for well over a century belies the ‘myth’ of peaceful settlement in Australia. Settlers in turn often reacted to Aboriginal resistance with great violence, resulting in numerous indiscriminate massacres by whites of Aboriginal men, women and children” (Wikipedia, “History of Australia (1788 - 1850)”).Basically, what is not evidenced empirically with regard to the subject matter of my text, that is, the egregious attitudes of non-Indigenous Australians towards Indigenous Australians, can be extrapolated thanks to the hyperlinks. This resonates strongly with Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s assertion in 2012 that those under-represented by mainstream, patriarchal epistemologies need to be engaged in acts of “reclaiming, reformulating and reconstituting” (143) so as to be re-presented as authentic identities in these HM artefacts of literary research.Exerting auteurial power as an Aboriginal Australian author myself, I have sought to imprint on my writing a multi-levelled signature pertaining to my people’s under-representation: there is not just the text I have created but another level to be considered by the reader, that being my careful choice of Wikipedia pages to hyperlink certain aspects of the creative writing to. These electronic footnotes serve as politically charged acts of “reclaiming, reformulating and reconstituting” Aboriginal Australian history, to reuse the words of Smith, for when we Aboriginal Australian authors reiterate, when we subjugated savages wrestle the keyboard away from the colonising overseers, our readers witness the Other writing back, critically. As I have stated previously (see Starrs, "Writing"), receivers of our words see the distorted and silencing master discourse subverted and, indeed, inverted. Our audiences are subjectively repositioned to see the British Crown as the monster. The previously presumed rational, enlightened and civil coloniser is instead depicted as the author and perpetrator of a violently racist, criminal discourse, until, eventually, s/he is ultimately eroded and made into the Other: s/he is rendered the villainous, predatory savage by the auteurial signatures in revisionist histories such as The Bullroarers.Whilst the benefit in these hyperlinks as electronic educational footnotes in my short story is fairly obvious, what may not be so obvious is the ironic commentary they can make, when read in conjunction with the rest of The Bullroarers. Although one must reluctantly agree with Wayne C. Booth’s comment in his classic 1974 study A Rhetoric of Irony that, in some regards, “the very spirit and value [of irony] are violated by the effort to be clear about it” (ix), I will nevertheless strive for clarity and understanding by utilizing Booth’s definition of irony “as something that under-mines clarities, opens up vistas of chaos, and either liberates by destroying all dogmas or destroys by revealing the inescapable canker of negation at the heart of every affirmation” (ix). The reader of The Bullroarers is not expecting the main character, Mrs Poulter, to be the subject of erosive criticism that destroys her “dogmas” about Aboriginal Australians--certainly not so early in the narrative when it is unclear if she is or is not the protagonist of the story--and yet that’s exactly what the hyperlinks do. They expose her as hopelessly unreliable, laughably misinformed and yes, unforgivably stupid. They reveal the illegitimacy of her beliefs. Perhaps the most personally excoriating of these revelations is provided by the link to the Wikipedia entry on the Australian Government’s Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, which is where her own daughter, Roxy, works, but which Mrs Poulter knows, gormlessly, as “the Department of Families and that”. The ignorant woman spouts racist diatribes against Aboriginal Australians without even realising how inextricably linked she and her family, who live at the deliberately named Boomerang Crescent, really are. Therein lies the irony I am trying to create with my use of hyperlinks: an independent, expert adjudication reveals my character, Mrs Poulter, and her opinions, are hiding an “inescapable canker of negation at the heart of every affirmation” (Booth ix), despite the air of easy confidence she projects.Is the novel-reading public ready for these HM hyperlinked e-novels and their potentially ironic sub-texts? Indeed, the question must be asked: can the e-book ever compete with the tactile sensations a finely crafted, perfectly bound hardcover publication provides? Perhaps, if the economics of book buying comes into consideration. E-novels are cheap to publish and cheap to purchase, hence they are becoming hugely popular with the book buying public. Writes Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, a successful online publisher and distributor of e-books: “We incorporated in 2007, and we officially launched the business in May 2008. In our first year, we published 140 books from 90 authors. Our catalog reached 6,000 books in 2009, 28,800 in 2010, 92,000 in 2011, 191,000 in 2012 and as of this writing (November 2013) stands at over 250,000 titles” (Coker 2013). Coker divulged more about his company’s success in an interview with Forbes online magazine: “‘It costs essentially the same to pump 10,000 new books a month through our network as it will cost to do 100,000 a month,’ he reasons. Smashwords book retails, on average, for just above $3; 15,000 titles are free” (Colao 2012).In such a burgeoning environment of technological progress in publishing I am tempted to say that yes, the time of the hyperlinked e-novel has come, and to even predict that HM will be a big part of this new wave of postmodern literature. The hyperlinked HM e-novel’s strategy invites the reader to reflect on the legitimacy and illegitimacy of different forms of narrative, possibly concluding, thanks to ironic electronic footnoting, that not all the novel’s characters and their commentary are to be trusted. Perhaps my HM e-novel will, with its untrustworthy Mrs Poulter and its little-known history of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy addressed by gap-filling hyperlinks, establish a legitimising narrative for a people who have traditionally in white Australian society been deemed the Other and illegitimate. Perhaps The Bullroarers will someday alter attitudes of non-Indigenous Australians to the history and political activities of this country’s first peoples, to the point even, that as Nunning warns, we witness a change in the “hegemonic discourse of history” (353). If that happens we must be thankful for our Internet-enabled information age and its concomitant possibilities for hyperlinked e-publications, for technology may be separated from the world of art, but it can nevertheless be effectively used to recreate, enhance and access that world, to the extent texts previously considered illegitimate achieve authenticity and veracity.ReferencesBanks, Glenda. A Respectable Married Woman. Melbourne: Lacuna, 2012.Banks, Glenda, and Martin Andrew. “Populating a Historical Novel: A Case Study of a Practice-led Research Approach to Historiographic Metafiction.” Bukker Tillibul 7 (2013). 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://bukkertillibul.net/Text.html?VOL=7&INDEX=2›.Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press, 1977.Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974.Colao, J.J. “Apple’s Biggest (Unknown) Supplier of E-books.” Forbes 7 June 2012. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2012/06/07/apples-biggest-unknown-supplier-of-e-books/›.Coker, Mark. “Q & A with Smashwords Founder, Mark Coker.” About Smashwords 2013. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹https://www.smashwords.com/about›.Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver, San Diego: Harcourt, 1983.Forrest Gump. Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Paramount Pictures, 1994.Fraser, George MacDonald. The Flashman Papers. Various publishers, 1969-2005.Groom, Winston. Forrest Gump. NY: Doubleday, 1986.Gregory, Philippa. The Other Boleyn Girl. UK: Scribner, 2001.Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, 2nd ed. Abingdon, UK: Taylor and Francis, 1988.---. “Intertextuality, Parody, and the Discourses of History: A Poetics of Postmodernism History, Theory, Fiction.” 1988. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://ieas.unideb.hu/admin/file_3553.pdf›.---. “Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History.” Eds. P. O’Donnell and R.C. Davis, Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction. Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins UP, 1989. 3-32.---. “Historiographic Metafiction.” Ed. Michael McKeon, Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. 830-50.Nunning, Ansgar. “Where Historiographic Metafiction and Narratology Meet.” Style 38.3 (2004): 352-75.Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Jonathan Cape, 1980.Starrs, D. Bruno. That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! Saarbrücken, Germany: Just Fiction Edition (paperback), 2011; Starrs via Smashwords (e-book), 2012.---. “Writing Indigenous Vampires: Aboriginal Gothic or Aboriginal Fantastic?” M/C Journal 17.4 (2014). 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/834›.Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies. London & New York: Zed Books, 2012.University of Sussex. “Philippa Gregory Fills the Historical Gaps.” University of Sussex Alumni Magazine 51 (2012). 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.scribd.com/doc/136033913/University-of-Sussex-Alumni-Magazine-Falmer-issue-51›.Wikipedia. “A Current Affair.” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Current_Affair›.---. “Aboriginal Tent Embassy.” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Tent_Embassy›.---. “Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs.” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Families,_Housing,_Community_Services_and_Indigenous_Affairs›.---. “Eddie Mabo.” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Mabo›.---. “History of Australia (1788 – 1850).” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Australia_(1788%E2%80%931850)#Aboriginal_resistance›.---. “Terra Nullius.” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_nullius›.

Our capacity to tell stories is a skill that can be considered both natural and learned. Storytelling and oral history are parts of all human societies, and we seek to understand ourselves and each other through our stories. Our individual and collective memories collide in our stories, and reconcile to construct what Kansteiner calls our "collectively shared representations of the past" (182). It is our personal narratives that are the building blocks to public understanding, and as Harter, Japp and Beck maintain in Narratives, Health and Healing, "narrative is a fundamental human way of giving meaning to experience" (3). Adding to this idea of narrative as way of illuminating meaning, Goodall posits narrative as also being a way of knowing and as a research methodology, stating "narrative provides us with a range of forms and styles for discovering meaning and communicating it to readers through stories. It is an epistemology" (13). This re-imaging and re-purposing of narrative and storytelling has the capacity to significantly influence and shift the ways in which cultural and social research is carried out. This emerging approach can also influence the ways we understand the experiences of marginalised groups, and consequently how we respond to issues around social inclusion through policy and community based solutions. For researchers personal stories and narratives have the capacity to illuminate the nuances of broad issues; this potential also means that seemingly intractable social problems are given a human face with which to engage. It is in this way that personal narratives energise public narratives and shape our ways of thinking and collective understandings (Harter et al. 4). This paper investigates a digital storytelling project conducted in late 2009 with a group of Forgotten Australians in the months leading up to the public apology in the Australian Parliament, and how the personal stories of the participants brought to life previous research about the marginalisation of individuals who had experienced out-of-home care as children. This paper also explores how the endemic, institutionalised abuse of a group of people was translated to the broader community and galvanised support through the impact of their personal stories. Digital Storytelling As a dynamic practice storytelling, in all its forms, must be nurtured and developed if it is to contribute to the lives of individuals and communities. The number of storytelling, and in particular digital storytelling, initiatives and projects in Australia has increased rapidly since the early 2000s, and are utilised by various public and community organisations for a variety of reasons. Digital technology has had a profound impact on the ability for "ordinary" people to tell their stories, and research has identified the potential of digital storytelling in these contexts to assist in the representation of multiple voices and viewpoints in society through inclusive processes of co-creation (cf. see Burgess; Hartley, Uses and "TV"; Klaebe and Burgess). The storytelling project that forms the basis for this paper used some traditional written storytelling practices but was mainly concerned with digital storytelling. Digital stories are generally a two to four minute multi-media story that uses photographs, film and drawings to convey a personal story which the author narrates in their own voice over the series of images. Much has been, and continues to be written, about digital storytelling as a site of participatory culture and as a means of improving digital literacy in pockets of the community traditionally absent in the realm of digital citizenship (cf. Hartley, Uses; Hartley and McWilliam; Burgess; Meadows; Lundby). As Hartley points out digital storytelling has become such a compelling medium in which to record stories in communities because it "fills a gap between everyday cultural practice and professional media" (Uses 122). As a means of creating narratives digital storytelling has proven to be a significant mode, due in part to its ability to reach a large number of people relatively easily. The rise of digital storytelling partially mirrors the broad shift towards more participatory online culture that privileges user generated content and ordinary voices over official content. The origins of digital storytelling lie in a response to the absence of "ordinary" voices in mainstream media and policy making and grew with the increasing affordability of digital technology. The potential for social inclusion and participation along with the promise of self-representation is implicit in the discourse surrounding digital storytelling. "The ability to express oneself in digital media and in the case of digital storytelling using digital video editing, has become a central literary for full participation in society" (Lambert 85). Social Inclusion in an Australian context is defined by the Australian Government as all Australians feeling valued and having "the opportunity to participate fully in the life of our society. Achieving this vision means that all Australians will have the resources, opportunities and capability to" learn, work, engage in the community and have a voice (Social Inclusion Unit). The aims articulated by Lambert in the previous paragraph and the philosophy of social inclusion and the belief that individual stories have the capacity to impact on national agendas and policy lay at the heart of the digital storytelling project outlined later in this paper. The Forgotten Australians As cohort the Forgotten Australians are defined as individuals who were removed from their families, or were orphaned or child immigrants from the United Kingdom. These children were placed in institutions where they suffered abuse or neglect between 1930 and 1970, and it is estimated that up approximately 500,000 children were placed in out of home care during this time. In November 2009 the Australian Parliament delivered a bi-partisan apology to the Forgotten Australians for the pain and suffering they experienced in church and state run institutions. The stories of the Forgotten Australians were beginning to make their way into the consciousness of the Australian public in the lead up to the apology through documentaries on the national broadcasting service and stories in the mainstream media. Like most large groups the demographic of the Forgotten Australians is diverse, within those who identify as part of this group are successful and well-known Australians, along with ordinary Australians many of whom have struggled significantly as a direct result of their childhood experiences. Those involved in this project were considered to be individuals who were quite profoundly marginalised in mainstream society. A number lived with mental illness, the majority lacked stable housing and all had been severely emotionally, physically and sexually abused during their time in State or Church run institutions as children. The apology to the Forgotten Australians was preceded many years of advocacy and activism by community groups and individuals. They utilised personal stories, the digitisation of records and as the apology drew closer a number of digital storytelling projects to bring the personal narratives into the public arena in the hope of affecting change. Stories from these projects were broadcast across a variety of platforms such as YouTube, the websites for the major advocacy groups and community organisations and more recently the National Library Australia website. The stories differed from site to site and served different functions depending on the place from which they were disseminated. Hildebrand identifies the role of YouTube as a site for the intersection of personal experience, popular culture and historical narratives, and, as such, a vehicle for cultural memory "allow[ing] users to seek out the media texts that have shaped them and that would otherwise be forgotten in 'objective' histories" (54). YouTube videos relevant to the Forgotten Australians ranged from locally made stories and documentation, news items and presentations recorded by major organisations, but uploaded by individuals, and also those posted by these institutions themselves. A notable feature of all of these contributions is their role in the representation of witnesses' stories. In the case of reports on Forgotten Australians from major news organisations the commentary they attracted was largely from those who identified as fellow forgotten Australians attesting to—and corroborating—the interviewees' stories. Whether they were posted by survivors themselves or by mainstream media or other institutions, they exhibited a unity around a particular will to memory: setting the record straight through testimony. Here, the clips and posts were characterised by the provision of information as evidence for the assertion of cultural trauma as a shared experience and focus of identification (Adkins et al. 15). Storytelling functions as one of our most powerful forms for experiencing, expressing, and enacting sorrow and pain...it is pivotal in the process of sense making, allowing individuals to cope with chaotic, equivocal, and confusing conditions of everyday life, including illness and suffering. (152) Advocacy and community groups such as CLAN were focused on creating a sense of community amongst survivors with no story or artefact too small or insignificant to be included, which differed slightly from the agenda of the National Library of Australia—the institution of public memory that has been most closely involved in recording and disseminating the stories of the Forgotten Australians. The Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants Oral History Project conducted by the National Library Australia was one of the recommendations of the two Senate Community Affairs References Committee reports following the Senate Inquiries and receives funding from the Commonwealth Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs. According to the National Library Australia website, this oral history project will run for three years and aims to document a rounded history of the experiences of the children in institutional care and the lifelong impact of these experiences on their lives and their families. This project will also interview a selection of advocates, and allied professionals including welfare officers, employees of institutions and administrators. (Project Team) In many important ways the purposes served in this project were those of the governments—previous and present, which was to capture and keep the stories, memories, documents and artefacts, and to share the officially selected stories with the rest of the nation, and those stories would support and affirm the government's roadmap for moving on from the apology. These digital storytelling projects, to varying degrees and levels of impact, served to provide the public with the personal narratives behind the issue being presented in the media and by advocacy groups as a large scale issue concerning hundreds of thousands of victims. Although the sheer size of the numbers of children affected was confronting, it was the personal stories that created a momentum towards the public apology. The findings of both Senate Inquiries recommended a formal apology; however this did not occur until the individual experiences of the Forgotten Australians were translated and represented in narratives and, through this, the construction of a sense of cultural memory resulting in formal recognition. Many Australians were sceptical about the importance of a public apology to the Forgotten Australians, as they had been of the apology to the Stolen Generation in 2008. To be a genuine act of reconciliation an apology requires the act of listening as much as speaking, fittingly Prime Minister Rudd quoted predominantly from personal oral history testimonies that had been collected over the years and that were of public record, but had not been digitally accessible to all, as many stories now are in the Bringing Them Home report. The Case Study In August 2009 I was funded by the Australasian Centre for Interactive Design (ACID) to conduct a series of digital storytelling and writing workshops in conjunction with Micah Projects, a community building and social justice organisation based in Brisbane. Micah delivers services for people experiencing homelessness, runs programmes for young mothers and is responsible for the Historical Abuse Network which is a network servicing the Forgotten Australians. After some discussion with the CEO of Micah it was decided that the clients involved with the Historical Abuse Network would benefit most from this project. Many of the participants had been involved in the 2003 senate inquiry into the treatment of children in institutional care. In the intervening years they had told the story of their abuse many times in official contexts and provided statements of harm for the inquiry. However, for this project we wanted to encourage the participants to create stories that allowed them some agency in their own lives rather, to re-claim some of their story from the official framework of abuse, and to use digital storytelling as a tool for this. The participants were between 45 and 65 in age, and were divided equally between women and men. There were a number of complexities inherent in this project, some of which were specific to this particular cohort and some specific to all marginalised individuals and groups. The most significant problem arose out the expectation that the "authors" will bring with them photographs and keepsakes from their lives to use in the stories. Many of the participants did not have photographs of their childhoods or of their families; some did not know how old they were (in many institutions all birthdays were celebrated on a single day, and consequently most lost track of their age and birth date) or had not had contact with their biological family for decades and as a result had few keepsakes. These hallmarks of legitimate biography were absent from their pasts and their presents. The combination of these factors meant that for many the ability to create a coherent narrative about their life or to feel ownership over their life had been seriously compromised. However, it became apparent that by using sounds and images in the digital story the technology was able to create a materiality out of memory for the participants. As it became clearer that the foundation of the stories was memory rather than a narrative arc, the more it became imperative to embrace the fragmentation, inconsistency and incoherence of the memories, and to incorporate these aspects into the digital stories. Instead of being easy to follow or emotionally satisfying narratives, some of the stories had much more in common with what is referred to in psychology and health frameworks as "chaos narratives". A chaos narrative has a sense of disconnected events characterised by a lack of closure and the presence of day-to-day uncertainty (Harter 4). Often such stories seem too incoherent to be told and too painful to be heard by others, as was certainly the case with some of the stories created for this project. Conclusion The Finding a Voice digital storytelling project led by Professor Jo Tacchi aligns with the aims of this project in its social innovation, and the role of storytelling and voice as having the genuine potential to impact on the understanding of poverty and disadvantage. Tacchi states that it "is an approach that allows those who are living in conditions that might constitute 'poverty' to tell those who are not what this experience is like, in their own words. Such an approach might challenge our 'expert' conceptions of poverty itself" (170), and confront mainstream or approved versions of social issues. Carabas posits that the agency embedded in the narrative act reforms or reframes the meanings of events through counter narratives and the act of telling transformed personal and social suffering. Those who had been objects of other's reports started to tell their own stories and rewrite official history in the first person singular (154). For the Forgotten Australians, those involved in this project and in similar ones the opportunity to tell their stories in their own words allowed them to push past the detached, impersonal representation of their experiences. Instead they could re-position the debate to being about individuals and the effect of government policy on their lives, and in doing so agitate for a formal apology. Storytelling and narrative as a research methodology, and as a way of knowing, is continuing to be refined by social and cultural researchers and by community organisations. Despite the emerging and nebulous nature of this field one thing is clear: our human desire to tell stories has the ability to be harnessed to build narratives which create understanding and insight and consequently demand that as communities and nations we respond to injustice and disadvantage accordingly. References Adkins, Barbara, Donna Hancox, and Helen Klaebe. "The Role of the Internet and Digital Technologies in the Struggle for Recognition of the Forgotten Australians." Proceedings of the A Decade in Internet Time: OII Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society, 21-24 September 2011. Oxford U of Oxford, 2011: 1-23. Burgess, Jean. "Hearing Ordinary Voices: Cultural Studies, Vernacular Creativity and Digital Storytelling." Continuum 20.2 (2006): 201-14. Carabas, Teodora, and Lynn Harter. "State-Induced Illness and Forbidden Stories: The Role of Storytelling in Healing, Individual and Social Traumas in Romania." Narratives, Health and Healing. Eds. Lynn Harter, Linda Japp, and Christina Beck. New York: Taylor and Francis, 2005. 149-69. Harter, Lynn, Linda Japp, and Christina Beck, eds. Narratives, Health & Healing. New York: Taylor & Francis. 2005. Hartley, John. "TV Stories: From Representation to Productivity." Story Circle: Digital Storytelling around the World. Eds. John Hartley and Kelly McWilliam. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009. 16-37.———. Uses of Digital Literacy. St. Lucia: U of Queensland P. 2009. Hildebrand, Lucas. "YouTube: Where Cultural Memory and Copyright Converge." Film Quarterly 61.1 (2007): 48-57. Kansteiner, Wolf. "Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies." History & Theory 41 (2002): 179-97. Klaebe, Helen, and Jean Burgess. "Mediatisation and Institutions of Public Memory: Digital Storytelling and the Apology." Australian Historical Studies 41 (2002): 149-65. Lambert, Joe. "Where It All Started: The Centre of Digital Storytelling in California." Story Circle: Digital Storytelling around the World. Eds. John Hartley and Kelly McWilliam. Oxford: Blackwell, 2010. 79-90. Lundby, Kunt. Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories: Self-Representations in New Media. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Meadows, Daniel. "Digital Storytelling - Research Based Practice in New Media." Visual Communication 2.2 (2003): 189-93. McWilliam, Kelly. "The Global Diffusion of a Community Media Practice: Digital Storytelling Online." Eds. John Hartley and Kelly McWilliam. Oxford: Blackwell, 2010. 37-77. Project Team. "Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants Oral History Project." National Library of Australia. 16 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.nla.gov.au/oral-history/forgotten-australians-and-former-child-migrants-oral-history-project›. Social Inclusion Unit. "The Social Inclusion Agenda." Social Inclusion. Australian Government, 2011. 19 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.socialinclusion.gov.au/›. Tacchi, Jo. "Finding a Voice: Participatory Development in Southeast Asia." Story Circle: Digital Storytelling around the World. Eds. John Hartley and Kelly McWilliam. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009. 167-75.

One of the first challenges faced by new Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, was what to do with the former government’s controversial citizenship test. While a quick evaluation of the test shows that 93 percent of those who have sat it ‘passed’ (Hoare), most media controversy has focussed less on the validity of such a test than whether questions relating to Australian cricketing legend, Don Bradman, are appropriate (Hawley). While the citizenship test seems nothing more that a crude and populist measure imposed by the former Howard government in its ongoing nationalistic agenda, which included paying schools to raise the Australian flag (“PM Unfurls Flag”), its imposition seems a timely reminder of the challenge of understanding citizenship today. For as the demographic structures around us continue to change, so must our understandings of ‘citizenship’. More importantly, this fluid understanding of citizenship is not limited to academics, and policy-makers, but new technologies, the processes of globalisation including a globalised media, changing demographic patterns including migration, as well as environmental challenges that place pressure on limited resources is altering the citizens understanding of their own role as well as those around them. This paper aims to sketch out a proposed new research agenda that seeks to investigate this fluid and heterogenous nature of citizenship. The focus of the research has so far been Sydney and is enveloped by a broader aim of promoting an increased level of citizen engagement both within formal and informal political structures. I begin by sketching the complex nature of Sydney before presenting some initial research findings. Sydney – A Complex City The so-called ‘emerald city’ of Sydney has been described in many ways: from a ‘global’ city (Fagan, Dowling and Longdale 1) to an ‘angry’ city (Price 16). Sarah Price’s investigative article included research from the University of Western Sydney’s Centre of Culture Research, the Bureau of Crime Statistics and interviews with Tony Grabs, the director of trauma at St Vincent’s Hospital in inner city Darlinghurst. Price found that both injuries from alcohol and drug-related violence had risen dramatically over the last few years and seemed to be driven by increasing frustrations of a city that is perceived to be lacking appropriate infrastructure and rising levels of personal and household debt. Sydney’s famous harbour and postcard landmarks are surrounded by places of controversy and poverty, with residents of very backgrounds living in close proximity: often harmoniously and sometimes less so. According to recent research by Griffith University’s Urban Research Program, the city is becoming increasingly polarised, with the wealthiest enjoying high levels of access to amenities while other sections of the population experiencing increasing deprivation (Frew 7). Sydney is often segmented into different regions: the growth corridors of the western suburbs which include the ‘Aspirational class’; the affluent eastern suburb; the southern beachside suburbs surrounding Cronulla affectionately known by local residents as ‘the Shire’, and so on. This, however, hides that fact that these areas are themselves complex and heterogenous in character (Frew 7). As a result, the many clichés associated with such segments lead to an over simplification of regional characteristics. The ‘growth corridors’ of Western Sydney, for example, have, in recent times, become a focal point of political and social commentary. From the rise of the ‘Aspirational’ voter (Anderson), seen to be a key ‘powerbroker’ in federal and state politics, to growing levels of disenfranchised young people, this region is multifaceted and should not be simplified. These areas often see large-scale, private housing estates; what Brendan Gleeson describes as ‘privatopias’, situated next to rising levels of homelessness (“What’s Driving”): a powerful and concerning image that should not escape our attention. (Chamberlain and Mackenzie pay due attention to the issue in Homeless Careers.) It is also home to a growing immigrant population who often arrive as business migrants and as well as a rising refugee population traumatised by war and displacement (Collins 1). These growth corridors then, seem to simultaneously capture both the ambitions and the fears of Sydney. That is, they are seen as both areas of potential economic boom as well as social stress and potential conflict (Gleeson 89). One way to comprehend the complexity associated with such diversity and change is to reflect on the proximity of the twin suburbs of Macquarie Links and Macquarie Fields situated in Sydney’s south-western suburbs. Separated by the clichéd ‘railway tracks’, one is home to the growing Aspirational class while the other continues to be plagued by the stigma of being, what David Burchell describes as, a ‘dysfunctional dumping ground’ whose plight became national headlines during the riots in 2005. The riots were sparked after a police chase involving a stolen car led to a crash and the death of a 17 year-old and 19 year-old passengers. Residents blamed police for the deaths and the subsequent riots lasted for four nights – involving 150 teenagers clashing with New South Wales Police. The dysfunction, Burchell notes is seen in crime statistics that include 114 stolen cars, 227 burglaries, 457 cases of property damage and 279 assaults – all in 2005 alone. Interestingly, both these populations are surrounded by exclusionary boundaries: one because of the financial demands to enter the ‘Links’ estate, and the other because of the self-imposed exclusion. Such disparities not only provide challenges for policy makers generally, but also have important implications on the attitudes that citizens’ experience towards their relationship with each other as well as the civic institutions that are meant to represent them. This is particular the case if civic institutions are seen to either neglect or favour certain groups. This, in part, has given rise to what I describe here as a ‘citizenship surplus’ as well as a ‘citizenship deficit’. Research Agenda: Investigating Citizenship Surpluses and Deficits This changing city has meant that there has also been a change in the way that different groups interact with, and perceive, civic bodies. As noted, my initial research shows that this has led to the emergence of both citizenship surpluses and deficits. Though the concept of a ‘citizen deficits and surpluses’ have not emerged within the broader literature, there is a wide range of literature that discusses how some sections of the population lack of access to democratic processes. There are three broad areas of research that have emerged relevant here: citizenship and young people (see Arvanitakis; Dee); citizenship and globalisation (see Della Porta; Pusey); and citizenship and immigration (see Baldassar et al.; Gow). While a discussion of each of these research areas is beyond the scope of this paper, a regular theme is the emergence of a ‘democratic deficit’ (Chari et al. 422). Dee, for example, looks at how there exist unequal relationships between local and central governments, young people, communities and property developers in relation to space. Dee argues that this shapes social policy in a range of settings and contexts including their relationship with broader civic institutions and understandings of citizenship. Dee finds that claims for land use that involve young people rarely succeed and there is limited, if any, recourse to civic institutions. As such, we see a democratic deficit emerge because the various civic institutions involved fail in meeting their obligations to citizens. In addition, a great deal of work has emerged that investigates attempts to re-engage citizens through mechanisms to promote citizenship education and a more active citizenship which has also been accompanied by government programs with the same goals (See for example the Western Australian government’s ‘Citizenscape’ program ). For example Hahn (231) undertakes a comparative study of civic education in six countries (including Australia) and the policies and practices with respect to citizenship education and how to promote citizen activism. The results are positive, though the research was undertaken before the tumultuous events of the terrorist attacks in New York, the emergence of the ‘war on terror’ and the rise of ‘Muslim-phobia’. A gap rises, however, within the Australian literature when we consider both the fluid and heterogenous nature of citizenship. That is, how do we understand the relationship between these diverse groups living within such proximity to each other overlayed by changing migration patterns, ongoing globalised processes and changing political environments as well as their relations to civic institutions? Further, how does this influence the way individuals perceive their rights, expectations and responsibilities to the state? Given this, I believe that there is a need to understand citizenship as a fluid and heterogenous phenomenon that can be in surplus, deficit, progressive and reactionary. When discussing citizenship I am interested in how people perceive both their rights and responsibilities to civic institutions as well as to the residents around them. A second, obviously related, area of interest is ‘civic engagement’: that is, “the activities of people in the various organisations and associations that make up what scholars call ‘civil society’” (Portney and Leary 4). Before describing these categories in more detail, I would like to briefly outline the methodological processes employed thus far. Much of the research to this point is based on a combination of established literature, my informal discussions with citizen groups and my observations as ‘an activist.’ That is, over the last few years I have worked with a broad cross section of community-based organisations as well as specific individuals that have attempted to confront perceived injustices. I have undertaken this work as both an activist – with organisations such as Aid/Watch and Oxfam Australia – as well as an academic invited to share my research. This work has involved designing and implementing policy and advocacy strategies including media and public education programs. All interactions begin with a detailed discussion of the aims, resources, abilities and knowledge of the groups involved, followed by workshopping campaigning strategies. This has led to the publication of an ‘activist handbook’ titled ‘From Sitting on the Couch to Changing the World’, which is used to both draft the campaign aims as well as design a systematic strategy. (The booklet, which is currently being re-drafted, is published by Oxfam Australia and registered under a creative commons licence. For those interested, copies are available by emailing j.arvanitakis (at) uws.edu.au.) Much research is also sourced from direct feedback given by participants in reviewing the workshops and strategies The aim of tis paper then, is to sketch out the initial findings as well as an agenda for more formalised research. The initial findings have identified the heterogenous nature of citizenship that I have separated into four ‘citizenship spaces.’ The term space is used because these are not stable groupings as many quickly move between the areas identified as both the structures and personal situations change. 1. Marginalisation and Citizenship Deficit The first category is a citizenship deficit brought on by a sense of marginalisation. This is determined by a belief that it is pointless to interact with civic institutions, as the result is always the same: people’s opinions and needs will be ignored. Or in the case of residents from areas such as Macquarie Fields, the relationship with civic institutions, including police, is antagonistic and best avoided (White par. 21). This means that there is no connection between the population and the civic institutions around them – there is no loyalty or belief that efforts to be involved in political and civic processes will be rewarded. Here groups sense that they do not have access to political avenues to be heard, represented or demand change. This is leading to an experience of disconnection from political processes. The result is both a sense of disengagement and disempowerment. One example here emerged in discussions with protesters around the proposed development of the former Australian Defence Industry (ADI) site in St Marys, an outer-western suburb of Sydney. The development, which was largely approved, was for a large-scale housing estate proposed on sensitive bushlands in a locality that resident’s note is under-serviced in terms of public space. (For details of these discussions, see http://www.adisite.org/.) Residents often took the attitude that whatever the desire of the local community, the development would go ahead regardless. Those who worked at information booths during the resident protests informed me that the attitude was one best summarised by: “Why bother, we always get stuffed around any way.” This was confirmed by my own discussions with local residents – even those who joined the resident action group. 2. Privatisation and Citizenship Deficit This citizenship deficit not only applies to the marginalised, however, for there are also much wealthier populations who also appear to experience a deficit that results from a lack of access to civic institutions. This tends to leads to a privatisation of decision-making and withdrawal from the public arena as well as democratic processes. Consequently, the residents in the pockets of wealth may not be acting as citizens but more like consumers – asserting themselves in terms of Castells’s ‘collective consumption’ (par. 25). This citizenship deficit is brought on by ongoing privatisation. That is, there is a belief that civic institutions (including government bodies) are unable or at least unwilling to service the local community. As a result there is a tendency to turn to private suppliers and believe that individualisation is the best way to manage the community. The result is that citizens feel no connection to the civic institutions around them, not because there is no desire, but there are no services. This group of citizens has often been described as the ‘Aspirationals’ and are most often found in the growth corridors of Sydney. There is no reason to believe that this group is this way because of choice – but rather a failure by government authorities to service their needs. This is confirmed by research undertaken as early as 1990 which found that the residents now labelled Aspirational, were demanding access to public infrastructure services including public schools, but have been neglected by different levels of government. (This was clearly stated by NSW Labor MP for Liverpool, Paul Lynch, who argued for such services as a way to ensure a functioning community particularly for Western Sydney; NSWPD 2001.) As a result there is a reliance on private schools, neighbourhoods, transport and so on. Any ‘why bother’ attitude is thus driven by a lack of evidence that civic institutions can or are not willing to meet their needs. There is a strong sense of local community – but this localisation limited to others in the same geographical location and similar lifestyle. 3. Citizenship Surplus – Empowered Not Engaged The third space of citizenship is based on a ‘surplus’ even if there is limited or no political engagement. This group has quite a lot in common with the ‘Aspirationals’ but may come from areas that are higher serviced by civic institutions: the choice not to engage is therefore voluntary. There is a strong push for self-sufficiency – believing that their social capital, wealth and status mean that they do not require the services of civic institutions. While not antagonistic towards such institutions, there is often a belief is that the services provided by the private sector are ultimately superior to public ones. Consequently, they feel empowered through their social background but are not engaged with civic institutions or the political process. Despite this, my initial research findings show that this group has a strong connection to decision-makers – both politicians and bureaucrats. This lack of engagement changes if there is a perceived injustice to their quality of life or their values system – and hence should not be dismissed as NIMBYs (not in my backyard). They believe they have the resources to mobilise and demand change. I believe that we see this group materialise in mobilisations around proposed developments that threaten the perceived quality of life of the local environment. One example brought to my attention was the rapid response of local residents to the proposed White City development near Sydney’s eastern suburbs that was to see tennis courts and public space replaced by residential and commercial buildings (Nicholls). As one resident informed me, she had never seen any political engagement by local residents previously – an engagement that was accompanied by a belief that the development would be stopped as well as a mobilisation of some impressive resources. Such mobilisations also occur when there is a perceived injustice. Examples of this group can be found in what Hugh Mackay (13) describes as ‘doctor’s wives’ (a term that I am not wholly comfortable with). Here we see the emergence of ‘Chilout’: Children out of Detention. This was an organisation whose membership was described to me as ‘north shore professionals’, drew heavily on those who believed the forced incarceration of young refugee children was an affront to their values system. 4. Insurgent Citizenship – Empowered and Engaged The final space is the insurgent citizen: that is, the citizen who is both engaged and empowered. This is a term borrowed from South Africa and the USA (Holston 1) – and it should be seen as having two, almost diametrically opposed, sides: progressive and reactionary. This group may not have access to a great deal of financial resources, but has high social capital and both a willingness and ability to engage in political processes. Consequently, there is a sense of empowerment and engagement with civic institutions. There is also a strong push for self-sufficiency – but this is encased in a belief that civic institutions have a responsibility to provide services to the public, and that some services are naturally better provided by the public sector. Despite this, there is often an antagonistic relationship with such institutions. From the progressive perspective, we see ‘activists’ promoting social justice issues (including students, academics, unionists and so on). Organisations such as A Just Australia are strongly supported by various student organisations, unions and other social justice and activist groups. From a reactionary perspective, we see the emergence of groups that take an anti-immigration stance (such as ‘anti-immigration’ groups including Australia First that draw both activists and have an established political party). (Information regarding ‘anti-refugee activists’ can be found at http://ausfirst.alphalink.com.au/ while the official website for the Australia First political part is at http://www.australiafirstparty.com.au/cms/.) One way to understand the relationship between these groups is through the engagement/empowered typology below. While a detailed discussion of the limitations of typologies is beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to acknowledge that any typology is a simplification and generalisation of the arguments presented. Likewise, it is unlikely that any typology has the ability to cover all cases and situations. This typology can, however, be used to underscore the relational nature of citizenship. The purpose here is to highlight that there are relationships between the different citizenship spaces and individuals can move between groups and each cluster has significant internal variation. Key here is that this can frame future studies. Conclusion and Next Steps There is little doubt there is a relationship between attitudes to citizenship and the health of a democracy. In Australia, democracy is robust in some ways, but many feel disempowered, disengaged and some feel both – often believing they are remote from the workings of civic institutions. It would appear that for many, interest in the process of (formal) government is at an all-time low as reflected in declining membership of political parties (Jaensch et al. 58). Democracy is not a ‘once for ever’ achievement – it needs to be protected and promoted. To do this, we must ensure that there are avenues for representation for all. This point also highlights one of the fundamental flaws of the aforementioned citizenship test. According to the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, the test is designed to: help migrants integrate and maximise the opportunities available to them in Australia, and enable their full participation in the Australian community as citizens. (par. 4) Those designing the test have assumed that citizenship is both stable and, once achieved, automatically ensures representation. This paper directly challenges these assumptions and offers an alternative research agenda with the ultimate aim of promoting high levels of engagement and empowerment. References Anderson, A. “The Liberals Have Not Betrayed the Menzies Legacy.” Online Opinion 25 Oct. 2004. < http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=2679 >. Arvanitakis, J. “Highly Affected, Rarely Considered: The International Youth Parliament Commission’s Report on the Impacts of Globalisation on Young People.” Sydney: Oxfam Australia, 2003. Baldassar, L., Z. Kamalkhani, and C. Lange. “Afghan Hazara Refugees in Australia: Constructing Australian Citizens.” Social Identities 13.1 (2007): 31-50. Burchell, D. “Dysfunctional Dumping Grounds.” The Australian 10 Feb. 2007. < http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21199266-28737,00.html >. Burnley, I.H. The Impact of Immigration in Australia: A Demographic Approach. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2001. Castells, M. “European Cities, the Informational Society, and the Global Economy.” New Left Review I/204 (March-April 1994): 46-57. Chamberlain, C., and D. Mackenzie. Homeless Careers: Pathways in and out of Homelessness. Melbourne: RMIT University, 2002. Chari, R., J. Hogan, and G. Murphy. “Regulating Lobbyists: A Comparative Analysis of the United States, Canada, Germany and the European Union.” The Political Quarterly 78.3 (2007): 423-438. Collins, J. “Chinese Entrepreneurs: The Chinese Diaspora in Australia.” International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research 8.1/2 (2002): 113-133. Dee, M. “Young People, Citizenship and Public Space.” International Sociological Association Conference Paper, Brisbane, 2002. Della Porta, D. “Globalisations and Democracy.” Democratizations 12.5 (2005): 668-685. Fagan, B., R. Dowling, and J. Longdale. “Suburbs in the ‘Global City’: Sydney since the Mid 1990s.” State of Australian cities conference. Parramatta, 2003. Frew, W. “And the Most Polarised City Is…” Sydney Morning Herald 16-17 Feb. 2008: 7. Gleeson, B. Australian Heartlands: Making Space for Hope in the Suburbs. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2006. Gleeson, B. “What’s Driving Suburban Australia?” Australian Policy Online 15 Jan. 2004. < http://www.apo.org.au/webboard/results.chtml?filename_num=00558 >. Gow, G. “Rubbing Shoulders in the Global City: Refugees, Citizenship and Multicultural Alliances in Fairfield, Sydney.” Ethnicities 5.3 (2005): 386-405. Hahn, C. L. “Citizenship Education: An Empirical Study of Policy, Practices and Outcomes.” Oxford Review of Education 25.1/2 (1999): 231-250. Hawley, S. “Sir Donald Bradman Likely to Be Dumped from Citizenship Test.” ABC Local Radio Online. 29 Jan. 2008. < http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2007/s2148383.htm >. Hoare, D. “Bradman’s Spot in Citizenship Test under Scrutiny.” ABC Local Radio online. 29 Jan. 2008. < http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2008/s2149325.htm >. Holston, J. Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. California: Cloth, 2007. Jaensch, D., P. Brent, and B. Bowden. “Australian Political Parties in the Spotlight.” Democratic Audit of Australia Report 4. Australian National University, 2004. Mackay, H. “Sleepers Awoke from Slumber of Indifference.” Sydney Morning Herald 27 Nov. 2007: 13. NSWPD – New South Wales Parliamentary Debates. “South Western Sydney Banking Services.” Legislative Assembly Hansard, 52nd NSW Parliament, 19 Sep. 2001. Portney, K.E., and L. O’Leary. Civic and Political Engagement of America’s Youth: National Survey of Civic and Political Engagement of Young People. Medford, MA: Tisch College, Tufts University, 2007. Price, S. “Stress and Debt Make Sydney a Violent City.” Sydney Morning Herald 13 Jan. 2008: 16. Pusey, M. The Experience of Middle Australia: The Dark Side of Economic Reform. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. White, R. “Swarming and the Social Dynamics of Group Violence.” Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice 326 (Oct. 2006). < http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/tandi2/tandi326t.html >. Wolfe, P. “Race and Citizenship.” Magazine of History 18.5 (2004): 66-72.

Introduction One of the first challenges faced by new Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, was what to do with the former government’s controversial citizenship test. While a quick evaluation of the test shows that 93 percent of those who have sat it ‘passed’ (Hoare), most media controversy has focussed less on the validity of such a test than whether questions relating to Australian cricketing legend, Don Bradman, are appropriate (Hawley). While the citizenship test seems nothing more that a crude and populist measure imposed by the former Howard government in its ongoing nationalistic agenda, which included paying schools to raise the Australian flag (“PM Unfurls Flag”), its imposition seems a timely reminder of the challenge of understanding citizenship today. For as the demographic structures around us continue to change, so must our understandings of ‘citizenship’. More importantly, this fluid understanding of citizenship is not limited to academics, and policy-makers, but new technologies, the processes of globalisation including a globalised media, changing demographic patterns including migration, as well as environmental challenges that place pressure on limited resources is altering the citizens understanding of their own role as well as those around them. This paper aims to sketch out a proposed new research agenda that seeks to investigate this fluid and heterogenous nature of citizenship. The focus of the research has so far been Sydney and is enveloped by a broader aim of promoting an increased level of citizen engagement both within formal and informal political structures. I begin by sketching the complex nature of Sydney before presenting some initial research findings. Sydney – A Complex City The so-called ‘emerald city’ of Sydney has been described in many ways: from a ‘global’ city (Fagan, Dowling and Longdale 1) to an ‘angry’ city (Price 16). Sarah Price’s investigative article included research from the University of Western Sydney’s Centre of Culture Research, the Bureau of Crime Statistics and interviews with Tony Grabs, the director of trauma at St Vincent’s Hospital in inner city Darlinghurst. Price found that both injuries from alcohol and drug-related violence had risen dramatically over the last few years and seemed to be driven by increasing frustrations of a city that is perceived to be lacking appropriate infrastructure and rising levels of personal and household debt. Sydney’s famous harbour and postcard landmarks are surrounded by places of controversy and poverty, with residents of very backgrounds living in close proximity: often harmoniously and sometimes less so. According to recent research by Griffith University’s Urban Research Program, the city is becoming increasingly polarised, with the wealthiest enjoying high levels of access to amenities while other sections of the population experiencing increasing deprivation (Frew 7). Sydney, is often segmented into different regions: the growth corridors of the western suburbs which include the ‘Aspirational class’; the affluent eastern suburb; the southern beachside suburbs surrounding Cronulla affectionately known by local residents as ‘the Shire’, and so on. This, however, hides that fact that these areas are themselves complex and heterogenous in character (Frew 7). As a result, the many clichés associated with such segments lead to an over simplification of regional characteristics. The ‘growth corridors’ of Western Sydney, for example, have, in recent times, become a focal point of political and social commentary. From the rise of the ‘Aspirational’ voter (Anderson), seen to be a key ‘powerbroker’ in federal and state politics, to growing levels of disenfranchised young people, this region is multifaceted and should not be simplified. These areas often see large-scale, private housing estates; what Brendan Gleeson describes as ‘privatopias’, situated next to rising levels of homelessness (“What’s Driving”): a powerful and concerning image that should not escape our attention. (Chamberlain and Mackenzie pay due attention to the issue in Homeless Careers.) It is also home to a growing immigrant population who often arrive as business migrants and as well as a rising refugee population traumatised by war and displacement (Collins 1). These growth corridors then, seem to simultaneously capture both the ambitions and the fears of Sydney. That is, they are seen as both areas of potential economic boom as well as social stress and potential conflict (Gleeson 89). One way to comprehend the complexity associated with such diversity and change is to reflect on the proximity of the twin suburbs of Macquarie Links and Macquarie Fields situated in Sydney’s south-western suburbs. Separated by the clichéd ‘railway tracks’, one is home to the growing Aspirational class while the other continues to be plagued by the stigma of being, what David Burchell describes as, a ‘dysfunctional dumping ground’ whose plight became national headlines during the riots in 2005. The riots were sparked after a police chase involving a stolen car led to a crash and the death of a 17 year-old and 19 year-old passengers. Residents blamed police for the deaths and the subsequent riots lasted for four nights – involving 150 teenagers clashing with New South Wales Police. The dysfunction, Burchell notes is seen in crime statistics that include 114 stolen cars, 227 burglaries, 457 cases of property damage and 279 assaults – all in 2005 alone. Interestingly, both these populations are surrounded by exclusionary boundaries: one because of the financial demands to enter the ‘Links’ estate, and the other because of the self-imposed exclusion. Such disparities not only provide challenges for policy makers generally, but also have important implications on the attitudes that citizens’ experience towards their relationship with each other as well as the civic institutions that are meant to represent them. This is particular the case if civic institutions are seen to either neglect or favour certain groups. This, in part, has given rise to what I describe here as a ‘citizenship surplus’ as well as a ‘citizenship deficit’. Research Agenda: Investigating Citizenship Surpluses and Deficits This changing city has meant that there has also been a change in the way that different groups interact with, and perceive, civic bodies. As noted, my initial research shows that this has led to the emergence of both citizenship surpluses and deficits. Though the concept of a ‘citizen deficits and surpluses’ have not emerged within the broader literature, there is a wide range of literature that discusses how some sections of the population lack of access to democratic processes. There are three broad areas of research that have emerged relevant here: citizenship and young people (see Arvanitakis; Dee); citizenship and globalisation (see Della Porta; Pusey); and citizenship and immigration (see Baldassar et al.; Gow). While a discussion of each of these research areas is beyond the scope of this paper, a regular theme is the emergence of a ‘democratic deficit’ (Chari et al. 422). Dee, for example, looks at how there exist unequal relationships between local and central governments, young people, communities and property developers in relation to space. Dee argues that this shapes social policy in a range of settings and contexts including their relationship with broader civic institutions and understandings of citizenship. Dee finds that claims for land use that involve young people rarely succeed and there is limited, if any, recourse to civic institutions. As such, we see a democratic deficit emerge because the various civic institutions involved fail in meeting their obligations to citizens. In addition, a great deal of work has emerged that investigates attempts to re-engage citizens through mechanisms to promote citizenship education and a more active citizenship which has also been accompanied by government programs with the same goals (See for example the Western Australian government’s ‘Citizenscape’ program ). For example Hahn (231) undertakes a comparative study of civic education in six countries (including Australia) and the policies and practices with respect to citizenship education and how to promote citizen activism. The results are positive, though the research was undertaken before the tumultuous events of the terrorist attacks in New York, the emergence of the ‘war on terror’ and the rise of ‘Muslim-phobia’. A gap rises, however, within the Australian literature when we consider both the fluid and heterogenous nature of citizenship. That is, how do we understand the relationship between these diverse groups living within such proximity to each other overlayed by changing migration patterns, ongoing globalised processes and changing political environments as well as their relations to civic institutions? Further, how does this influence the way individuals perceive their rights, expectations and responsibilities to the state? Given this, I believe that there is a need to understand citizenship as a fluid and heterogenous phenomenon that can be in surplus, deficit, progressive and reactionary. When discussing citizenship I am interested in how people perceive both their rights and responsibilities to civic institutions as well as to the residents around them. A second, obviously related, area of interest is ‘civic engagement’: that is, “the activities of people in the various organisations and associations that make up what scholars call ‘civil society’” (Portney and Leary 4). Before describing these categories in more detail, I would like to briefly outline the methodological processes employed thus far. Much of the research to this point is based on a combination of established literature, my informal discussions with citizen groups and my observations as ‘an activist.’ That is, over the last few years I have worked with a broad cross section of community-based organisations as well as specific individuals that have attempted to confront perceived injustices. I have undertaken this work as both an activist – with organisations such as Aid/Watch and Oxfam Australia – as well as an academic invited to share my research. This work has involved designing and implementing policy and advocacy strategies including media and public education programs. All interactions begin with a detailed discussion of the aims, resources, abilities and knowledge of the groups involved, followed by workshopping campaigning strategies. This has led to the publication of an ‘activist handbook’ titled ‘From Sitting on the Couch to Changing the World’, which is used to both draft the campaign aims as well as design a systematic strategy. (The booklet, which is currently being re-drafted, is published by Oxfam Australia and registered under a creative commons licence. For those interested, copies are available by emailing j.arvanitakis (at) uws.edu.au.) Much research is also sourced from direct feedback given by participants in reviewing the workshops and strategies The aim of tis paper then, is to sketch out the initial findings as well as an agenda for more formalised research. The initial findings have identified the heterogenous nature of citizenship that I have separated into four ‘citizenship spaces.’ The term space is used because these are not stable groupings as many quickly move between the areas identified as both the structures and personal situations change. 1. Marginalisation and Citizenship Deficit The first category is a citizenship deficit brought on by a sense of marginalisation. This is determined by a belief that it is pointless to interact with civic institutions, as the result is always the same: people’s opinions and needs will be ignored. Or in the case of residents from areas such as Macquarie Fields, the relationship with civic institutions, including police, is antagonistic and best avoided (White par. 21). This means that there is no connection between the population and the civic institutions around them – there is no loyalty or belief that efforts to be involved in political and civic processes will be rewarded. Here groups sense that they do not have access to political avenues to be heard, represented or demand change. This is leading to an experience of disconnection from political processes. The result is both a sense of disengagement and disempowerment. One example here emerged in discussions with protesters around the proposed development of the former Australian Defence Industry (ADI) site in St Marys, an outer-western suburb of Sydney. The development, which was largely approved, was for a large-scale housing estate proposed on sensitive bushlands in a locality that resident’s note is under-serviced in terms of public space. (For details of these discussions, see http://www.adisite.org/.) Residents often took the attitude that whatever the desire of the local community, the development would go ahead regardless. Those who worked at information booths during the resident protests informed me that the attitude was one best summarised by: “Why bother, we always get stuffed around any way.” This was confirmed by my own discussions with local residents – even those who joined the resident action group. 2. Privatisation and Citizenship Deficit This citizenship deficit not only applies to the marginalised, however, for there are also much wealthier populations who also appear to experience a deficit that results from a lack of access to civic institutions. This tends to leads to a privatisation of decision-making and withdrawal from the public arena as well as democratic processes. Consequently, the residents in the pockets of wealth may not be acting as citizens but more like consumers – asserting themselves in terms of Castells’s ‘collective consumption’ (par. 25). This citizenship deficit is brought on by ongoing privatisation. That is, there is a belief that civic institutions (including government bodies) are unable or at least unwilling to service the local community. As a result there is a tendency to turn to private suppliers and believe that individualisation is the best way to manage the community. The result is that citizens feel no connection to the civic institutions around them, not because there is no desire, but there are no services. This group of citizens has often been described as the ‘Aspirationals’ and are most often found in the growth corridors of Sydney. There is no reason to believe that this group is this way because of choice – but rather a failure by government authorities to service their needs. This is confirmed by research undertaken as early as 1990 which found that the residents now labelled Aspirational, were demanding access to public infrastructure services including public schools, but have been neglected by different levels of government. (This was clearly stated by NSW Labor MP for Liverpool, Paul Lynch, who argued for such services as a way to ensure a functioning community particularly for Western Sydney; NSWPD 2001.) As a result there is a reliance on private schools, neighbourhoods, transport and so on. Any ‘why bother’ attitude is thus driven by a lack of evidence that civic institutions can or are not willing to meet their needs. There is a strong sense of local community – but this localisation limited to others in the same geographical location and similar lifestyle. 3. Citizenship Surplus – Empowered Not Engaged The third space of citizenship is based on a ‘surplus’ even if there is limited or no political engagement. This group has quite a lot in common with the ‘Aspirationals’ but may come from areas that are higher serviced by civic institutions: the choice not to engage is therefore voluntary. There is a strong push for self-sufficiency – believing that their social capital, wealth and status mean that they do not require the services of civic institutions. While not antagonistic towards such institutions, there is often a belief is that the services provided by the private sector are ultimately superior to public ones. Consequently, they feel empowered through their social background but are not engaged with civic institutions or the political process. Despite this, my initial research findings show that this group has a strong connection to decision-makers – both politicians and bureaucrats. This lack of engagement changes if there is a perceived injustice to their quality of life or their values system – and hence should not be dismissed as NIMBYs (not in my backyard). They believe they have the resources to mobilise and demand change. I believe that we see this group materialise in mobilisations around proposed developments that threaten the perceived quality of life of the local environment. One example brought to my attention was the rapid response of local residents to the proposed White City development near Sydney’s eastern suburbs that was to see tennis courts and public space replaced by residential and commercial buildings (Nicholls). As one resident informed me, she had never seen any political engagement by local residents previously – an engagement that was accompanied by a belief that the development would be stopped as well as a mobilisation of some impressive resources. Such mobilisations also occur when there is a perceived injustice. Examples of this group can be found in what Hugh Mackay (13) describes as ‘doctor’s wives’ (a term that I am not wholly comfortable with). Here we see the emergence of ‘Chilout’: Children out of Detention. This was an organisation whose membership was described to me as ‘north shore professionals’, drew heavily on those who believed the forced incarceration of young refugee children was an affront to their values system. 4. Insurgent Citizenship – Empowered and Engaged The final space is the insurgent citizen: that is, the citizen who is both engaged and empowered. This is a term borrowed from South Africa and the USA (Holston 1) – and it should be seen as having two, almost diametrically opposed, sides: progressive and reactionary. This group may not have access to a great deal of financial resources, but has high social capital and both a willingness and ability to engage in political processes. Consequently, there is a sense of empowerment and engagement with civic institutions. There is also a strong push for self-sufficiency – but this is encased in a belief that civic institutions have a responsibility to provide services to the public, and that some services are naturally better provided by the public sector. Despite this, there is often an antagonistic relationship with such institutions. From the progressive perspective, we see ‘activists’ promoting social justice issues (including students, academics, unionists and so on). Organisations such as A Just Australia are strongly supported by various student organisations, unions and other social justice and activist groups. From a reactionary perspective, we see the emergence of groups that take an anti-immigration stance (such as ‘anti-immigration’ groups including Australia First that draw both activists and have an established political party). (Information regarding ‘anti-refugee activists’ can be found at http://ausfirst.alphalink.com.au/ while the official website for the Australia First political part is at http://www.australiafirstparty.com.au/cms/.) One way to understand the relationship between these groups is through the engagement/empowered typology below. While a detailed discussion of the limitations of typologies is beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to acknowledge that any typology is a simplification and generalisation of the arguments presented. Likewise, it is unlikely that any typology has the ability to cover all cases and situations. This typology can, however, be used to underscore the relational nature of citizenship. The purpose here is to highlight that there are relationships between the different citizenship spaces and individuals can move between groups and each cluster has significant internal variation. Key here is that this can frame future studies. Conclusion and Next Steps There is little doubt there is a relationship between attitudes to citizenship and the health of a democracy. In Australia, democracy is robust in some ways, but many feel disempowered, disengaged and some feel both – often believing they are remote from the workings of civic institutions. It would appear that for many, interest in the process of (formal) government is at an all-time low as reflected in declining membership of political parties (Jaensch et al. 58). Democracy is not a ‘once for ever’ achievement – it needs to be protected and promoted. To do this, we must ensure that there are avenues for representation for all. This point also highlights one of the fundamental flaws of the aforementioned citizenship test. According to the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, the test is designed to: help migrants integrate and maximise the opportunities available to them in Australia, and enable their full participation in the Australian community as citizens. (par. 4) Those designing the test have assumed that citizenship is both stable and, once achieved, automatically ensures representation. This paper directly challenges these assumptions and offers an alternative research agenda with the ultimate aim of promoting high levels of engagement and empowerment. References Anderson, A. “The Liberals Have Not Betrayed the Menzies Legacy.” Online Opinion 25 Oct. 2004. http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=2679>. Arvanitakis, J. “Highly Affected, Rarely Considered: The International Youth Parliament Commission’s Report on the Impacts of Globalisation on Young People.” Sydney: Oxfam Australia, 2003. Baldassar, L., Z. Kamalkhani, and C. Lange. “Afghan Hazara Refugees in Australia: Constructing Australian Citizens.” Social Identities 13.1 (2007): 31-50. Burchell, D. “Dysfunctional Dumping Grounds.” The Australian 10 Feb. 2007. http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21199266-28737,00.html>. Burnley, I.H. The Impact of Immigration in Australia: A Demographic Approach. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2001. Castells, M. “European Cities, the Informational Society, and the Global Economy.” New Left Review I/204 (March-April 1994): 46-57. Chamberlain, C., and D. Mackenzie. Homeless Careers: Pathways in and out of Homelessness. Melbourne: RMIT University, 2002. Chari, R., J. Hogan, and G. Murphy. “Regulating Lobbyists: A Comparative Analysis of the United States, Canada, Germany and the European Union.” The Political Quarterly 78.3 (2007): 423-438. Collins, J. “Chinese Entrepreneurs: The Chinese Diaspora in Australia.” International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research 8.1/2 (2002): 113-133. Dee, M. “Young People, Citizenship and Public Space.” International Sociological Association Conference Paper, Brisbane, 2002. Della Porta, D. “Globalisations and Democracy.” Democratizations 12.5 (2005): 668-685. Fagan, B., R. Dowling, and J. Longdale. “Suburbs in the ‘Global City’: Sydney since the Mid 1990s.” State of Australian cities conference. Parramatta, 2003. Frew, W. “And the Most Polarised City Is…” Sydney Morning Herald 16-17 Feb. 2008: 7. Gleeson, B. Australian Heartlands: Making Space for Hope in the Suburbs. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2006. Gleeson, B. “What’s Driving Suburban Australia?” Australian Policy Online 15 Jan. 2004. http://www.apo.org.au/webboard/results.chtml?filename_num=00558>. Gow, G. “Rubbing Shoulders in the Global City: Refugees, Citizenship and Multicultural Alliances in Fairfield, Sydney.” Ethnicities 5.3 (2005): 386-405. Hahn, C. L. “Citizenship Education: An Empirical Study of Policy, Practices and Outcomes.” Oxford Review of Education 25.1/2 (1999): 231-250. Hawley, S. “Sir Donald Bradman Likely to Be Dumped from Citizenship Test.” ABC Local Radio Online. 29 Jan. 2008. http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2007/s2148383.htm>. Hoare, D. “Bradman’s Spot in Citizenship Test under Scrutiny.” ABC Local Radio online. 29 Jan. 2008. http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2008/s2149325.htm>. Holston, J. Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. California: Cloth, 2007. Jaensch, D., P. Brent, and B. Bowden. “Australian Political Parties in the Spotlight.” Democratic Audit of Australia Report 4. Australian National University, 2004. Mackay, H. “Sleepers Awoke from Slumber of Indifference.” Sydney Morning Herald 27 Nov. 2007: 13. NSWPD – New South Wales Parliamentary Debates. “South Western Sydney Banking Services.” Legislative Assembly Hansard, 52nd NSW Parliament, 19 Sep. 2001. Portney, K.E., and L. O’Leary. Civic and Political Engagement of America’s Youth: National Survey of Civic and Political Engagement of Young People. Medford, MA: Tisch College, Tufts University, 2007. Price, S. “Stress and Debt Make Sydney a Violent City.” Sydney Morning Herald 13 Jan. 2008: 16. Pusey, M. The Experience of Middle Australia: The Dark Side of Economic Reform. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. White, R. “Swarming and the Social Dynamics of Group Violence.” Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice 326 (Oct. 2006). http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/tandi2/tandi326t.html>. Wolfe, P. “Race and Citizenship.” Magazine of History 18.5 (2004): 66-72. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Arvanitakis, James. "The Heterogenous Citizen: How Many of Us Care about Don Bradman’s Average?." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/07-arvanitakis.php>. APA Style Arvanitakis, J. (Apr. 2008) "The Heterogenous Citizen: How Many of Us Care about Don Bradman’s Average?," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/07-arvanitakis.php>.

This single and critical case study evaluated a faith-based natural family planning program's salient features using a framework on implementation fidelity. Multiple focus group discussions were conducted, with three groups of stakeholders (n=100), to gather qualitative data on their knowledge and experience of the program. Overall, the findings showed that the program primarily adhered to the essential elements of implementation fidelity, such as content, frequency, duration, and coverage prescribed by its designers. Three lessons were drawn to address some issues that have influenced the degree of fidelity in which the program was implemented. The first is the need to secure adequate and sustained human and financial resources. The second is the need to strengthen its partnership with government and non-government organizations that have provided them with much-needed assistance. Finally, there is also the need to provide extensive training, materials, and support to its service providers to preserve their morale and interest. Other faith-based organizations may hold this case as an indicator of how and why an NFP program works and the extent to which the need for family planning can be met adapted to their local conditions and needs. References Arbuckle, Gerald A. Refounding the Church: Dissent for Leadership. Quezon City: Claretian Publications. 1993. Arevalo, Marcos. "Expanding the Availability and improving the delivery of natural family planning services and fertility awareness education: providers' perspectives. Adv Contracept. Jun-Sep 1997; 13(2-3):275-81. Arévalo, Marcos, Victoria Jennings, and Irit Sinai. "Efficacy of a new method of family planning: the Standard Days Method." Contraception 65, no. 5 (2002): 333-338.Arévalo, Marcos, Irit Sinai, and Victoria Jennings. 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S. “ICF Philippines national demographic and health survey.” Quezon City, Philippines, and Rockville, Maryland, USA: PSA and ICF, 2017. Bamber, John, Stella Owens, Heino Schonfeld, Deborah Ghate, and Deirdre Fullerton. "Effective Community Development Programmes: a review of the international evidence base." (2010). Barden-O'Fallon, Janine. "Availability of family planning services and quality of counseling by faith-based organizations: a three-country comparative analysis." Reproductive health, 14, no. 1 (2017): 57. Baskarada, Sasa. "Qualitative case study guidelines." The Qualitative Report 19, no. 40 (2014): 1-25. Accessed July 25, 2019, from http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR19/baskarada24.pdf Beaubien, Louis, and Daphne Rixon. "Key performance indicators in co-operatives: directions and principles." Journal of Co-operative Studies 45, no. 2 (2012): 5-15. Booker, Victoria K., June Grube Robinson, Bonnie J. Kay, Lourdes Gutierrez Najera, and Genevieve Stewart. 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Introduction This article explores the phenomenon of the Creative City in the context of Aberdeen, Scotland’s third-largest city. The common perception of Aberdeen is likely to revolve around its status, for the last 50 years, as Europe’s Oil & Gas Capital. However, for more than a decade Aberdeen’s city planners have sought to incorporate creativity and culture in their placemaking. The most visible expression of this was the unsuccessful 2013 bid to become the UK City of Culture 2017 (CoC), which was referred to as a “reality check” by Marie Boulton (BBC), the councillor charged with the culture portfolio. This article reviews and appraises subsequent policies and actions. It looks at Aberdeen’s history and its current Cultural Strategy and how events have supported or inhibited the reimagining of Aberdeen as a Creative and Cultural City. Landry’s “Lineages of the Creative City” tracks the rise in interest around culture and creative sectors and highlights that there is more to the creative city than economic growth, positing that a creative city is a holistic environment in which “ordinary people can make the extra-ordinary happen” (2). Comunian develops Landry’s concept of hard (infrastructural) assets and soft (people and activity) assets by introducing Complexity Theory to examine the interactions between the two. Comunian argues that a city should be understood as a complex adaptive system (CAS) and that the interconnectivity of consumption and production, micro and macro, and networks of actors must be incorporated into policy thinking. Creating physical assets without regard to what happens in and around them does not build a creative city. Aberdeen: Context and History Important when considering Aberdeen is its remoteness: 66 miles north of its closest city neighbour Dundee, 90 miles north of Edinburgh and 125 miles north-east of Glasgow. For Aberdonians travel is a necessity to connect with other cultural centres whether in Scotland, the UK, Europe, or further afield, making Aberdeen’s nearly 900-year-old port a key asset. Sitting at the mouth of the River Dee, which marks Aberdeen’s southern boundary, this key transport hub has long been central to Aberdeen’s culture giving rise to two of the oldest established businesses in the UK: the Port of Aberdeen (1136) and the Shore Porter’s Society (1498). Fishing and trade with Europe thrived and connections with the continent led to the establishment of Aberdeen’s first university: King’s College (Scotland’s third and the UK’s fifth) in 1495. A second, Marischal College, was established in 1593, joining forces with King’s in 1860 to become the University of Aberdeen. The building created in 1837 to house Marischal College is the second-largest granite building in the world (VisitAberdeenshire, Marischal) and now home to Aberdeen City Council (ACC). Robert Gordon University (RGU), awarded university status in 1992, grew out of an institution established in 1729 (RGU, Our History); this period marked the dawning of the Scottish Enlightenment when Aberdeen’s Wise Club were key to an intellectual discourse that changed western thinking (RSA). Gray’s School of Art, now part of RGU, was established in 1885, at the same time as Aberdeen Art Gallery which holds a collection of national significance (ACC, Art Gallery). Aberdeen’s northern boundary is marked by its second river, the River Don, which has also contributed to the city’s history, economics, and culture. For centuries, paper and woollen mills, including the world-famous Crombie, thrived on its banks and textile production was the city’s largest employer, with one mill employing 3,000 staff (P&J, Broadford). While the city and surrounds have been home to notable creatives, including writers Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Lord Byron; musicians Annie Lennox, Dame Evelyn Glennie, and Emeli Sandé; fashion designer Bill Gibb and dancer Michael Clark, it has struggled to attract and retain creative talent, and there is a familiar exodus of art school graduates to the larger and more accepted creative cities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and London. In 2013, at the time of the CoC bid, ACC recognised that creative industries graduates leaving the city was “a serious issue” (ACC, Cultural Mapping 1). The City of Culture Bid This recognition came at a time when ACC acknowledged that Aberdeen, with already low unemployment, required an influx of workforce. An ACC document (Cultural Mapping) cites Richard Florida’s proposal that a strong cultural offer attracts skilled workers to a city, adding that they “look for a lively cultural life in their choice of location” (7) and quoting an oil executive: “our poor city centre is often cited as a major obstacle in attracting people” (7). Changing the image of the city to attract new residents appears to have been a key motivation for the CoC bid. The CoC assessor noted this in their review of the bid, citing a report that 120,000 recruits were required in the city and agreeing that Aberdeen needed to “change perceptions of the city to retain and attract talent” (Regeneris 1). Aberdeen’s CoC bid was rejected at the first shortlisting stage, with feedback that the artistic vision “lacked depth” and “that cultural activity in the city was weaker than in several other bidding areas” (Regeneris 3). In an exploration of the bidding process, McGillivray and Turner highlight two factors which link to other concerns and feedback about the bid. Firstly, they compare Aberdeen’s choice of a Bid Manager from the business community with Paisley’s choice of one from their local arts sector in their bid for CoC 2021, which was successful in being shortlisted, highlighting different motivators behind the bids. Secondly, Aberdeen secured a bid team member from “Pafos’s bid to be 2017 European Capital of Culture (ECC), who subsequently played an important role” for Kalamata’s 2021 ECC bid (41), showing Aberdeen’s reluctance to develop local talent. A Decade of Investment ACC responded to the “reality check” with a series of investments in the hard assets of the city. Major refurbishment of two key buildings, the Music Hall and the Art Gallery, caused them both to be closed for several years, significantly diminishing the cultural offer in the city. The Music Hall re-opened in 2018 (Creative Scotland) and the Art Gallery in 2019 (McLean). In 2021, the extended and updated Art Gallery was named “Scotland’s building of the year” by the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland (RIAS) (Museums Association). Concurrent with this was the development of “Europe’s largest new events complex, TECA [now P&J live] part financed through a £370 million stock market bond issue” (InvestAberdeen). Another cultural asset of the city which has been undergoing a facelift since 2019 is Union Terrace Gardens (UTG), the green heart of the city centre, gifted to the public in 1877. The development of this asset has had a chequered history. In 2008 it had been awarded “funding from Aberdeen Council (£3 million), the Scottish Arts Council (£4.3M) and Scottish Enterprise (£2 million)” (Aberdeenvoice) to realise a new multi-disciplinary contemporary art centre to be called ‘Northern Light’ and housed in a purpose-designed building (Brizac Gonzalez). The project, led by Peacock Visual arts, a printmaking centre of excellence and gallery founded in 1974, had secured planning permission. It would host Peacock Visual Arts, City Moves dance company, and the ACC arts development team. It echoed similar cultural partnership approaches, such as Dundee Contemporary Arts, although notably without involvement from the universities. Three months later, a counterbid to radically re-think UTG as a vast new city square was proposed by oil tycoon Sir Ian Wood, who backed the proposal with £50 million of his own funds, requiring matching finance by the city and ownership of the Gardens passing to private hands. Resistance to these plans came from ‘Friends of UTG’, and a public consultation was held. ACC voted to adopt Wood’s plans and drop those of Peacock, but a change of administration in the local authority overturned Wood’s plans in August 2012. A significant portion of the funding granted to the Northern Lights project was consumed in the heated public debate and the remainder was lost to the city, as was the Wood money, providing a highly charged backdrop to the CoC bid and an unfortunate divide created between the business and culture sectors that is arguably still discernible in the city today. According to the Aberdeen & Grampian Chamber of Commerce (AGCC) 2022 Investment Tracker, the nearly complete UTG transformation has cost £28.3m. The AGCC trackers since 2016 provide a useful reference for a wider view of investment in the region over this period. During this period, ACC commissioned two festivals: Spectra (ACC, Culture Programme 5), a festival of light curated by a Manchester-based organisation, and NuArt (VisitAberdeenshire, Nuart), a street-art festival curated by a Stavanger-based team. Both festivals deliver large-scale public spectacles but have little impact on the development of the cultural sector in the city. The drivers of footfall, income generation, and tourism are key motivators for these festivals, supporting a prevailing narrative of cultural consumption over cultural production in the city, despite Regeneris’s concerns about “importing of cultural activity, which might not leave behind a cultural sector” (1) and ACC’s own published concerns (ACC, Cultural Mapping). It is important to note that in 2014 the oil and gas industry that brought prosperity to Aberdeen was severely impacted upon by a drop in price and revenue. Many jobs were lost, people left the city, and housing prices, previously inflated, fell dramatically. The attention of the authorities turned to economic regeneration of the city and in 2015, the Aberdeen City Region Deal (UK Gov), bringing £250m to the region, (REF) was signed between the UK Government, Scottish Government, ACC, Aberdeenshire Council, and Opportunity North East (ONE). ONE “is the private sector leader and catalyst for economic diversification in northeast Scotland” with board members from industry, enterprise, AGCC, the councils, the universities, the harbour, and NHS. ONE focuses on five ‘pillars’: Digital Technology, Energy, Life Sciences, Tourism and Food, and Drink & Agriculture. A Decade of Creativity and Cultural Development Aberdeen’s ambitious cultural capital infrastructure spending of the last decade has seen the creation or refurbishment of significant hard assets in the city. The development of people (Cohendet et al.), the soft assets that Landry and Comunian agree are essential to the complex system that is a Creative City, has also seen development over this time. In 2014, RGU commissioned a review of Creative Industries in the North East of Scotland. The report notes that: the cultural sector in the region is strong at the grass roots end, but less so the higher up the scale it goes. There is no producing theatre, and no signature events or assets, although the revitalised art gallery might provide an opportunity to address this. (Ekos 2) This was followed by an international conference at which other energy cities (Calgary, Houston, Perth, and Oslo) presented their culture strategies, providing useful comparators for Aberdeen and a second RGU report (RGU, Regenerating). A third report, (RGU, New North), set out a vision for the region’s cultural future. The reports recommend strategy, leadership, and vision in the development of the cultural and creative soft assets of the region and the need to create conditions for graduate and practitioner retention. Also in 2014, RGU initiated the Look Again Festival of Art and Design, an annual festival to address a gap in the city festival roster and meet a need arising from the closure of both Art Gallery and Music Hall for refurbishment. The first festival took place in 2015 with a weekend-long public event showcasing a series of thought-provoking installations and events which demonstrated a clear appetite amongst the public and partner organisations for more activity of this type. Between 2015 and 2019, the festivals grew from strength to strength and increased in size and ambition, “carving out a new creative community in Aberdeen” (Williams). The 2019 festival involved 119 creatives, the majority from the region, and created 62 paid opportunities. Look Again expanded and became a constant presence and vehicle for sectoral and skills development, supporting students, graduates, volunteers, and new collectives, focussing on social capital and the intangible creative community assets in the city. Creative practitioners were supported with a series of programmes such as ‘Cultivate’ (2018), funded by Creative Scotland, that provided mentoring to strengthen business sustainability and networking events to improve connectivity in the sector. Cultivate also provided an opportunity to undertake further research, and a survey of over 100 small and micro creative businesses presented a view of a tenacious sector, committed to staying in the region but lacking structured and tailored support. The project report noted consistent messages about the need for “a louder voice for the sector” and concluded that further work was needed to better profile, support, and connect the sector (Cultivate 15). Comunian’s work supports this call to give greater consideration to the interplay of the agents in the creation of a strong creative city. In 2019, Look Again’s evolving role in creative sector skills development was recognised when they became part of Gray’s School of Art. A partnership quickly formed with the newly created Entrepreneurship & Innovation Group (EIG), a team formed within RGU to drive entrepreneurial thinking across all schools of the university. Together, Look Again and EIG ran a Creative Accelerator which became a prototype for a validated Creative Entrepreneurship post-graduate short-course that has supported around 120 creative graduates and practitioners with tailored business skills, contextual thinking, and extended peer networks. Meanwhile, another Look Again collaboration with the newly re-opened Art Gallery provided pop-up design events that many of these small businesses took part in, connecting them with public-facing retail opportunities and, for some, acquisitions for the Gallery’s collection. Culture Aberdeen During this time and after a period of public consultation, a new collaborative group, ‘Culture Aberdeen’, emerged. Membership of the group includes many regional cultural and arts organisations including ACC, both universities, and Aberdeen Civic Forum, which seeks “to bring the voice and views of all communities to every possible level of decision making”. The group subsequently published Culture Aberdeen: A Culture Strategy for the City of Aberdeen 2018-2028, which was endorsed by ACC in their first Cultural Investment Impact Report. The strategy sets out a series of cultural ambitions including a bid to become a UNESCO Creative City, establishing an Aberdeen Biennale, and becoming a national centre of excellence for an (unspecified) artform. This collaboration brings a uniting vision to Aberdeen’s creative activity and places of culture and presents a more compelling identity as a creative city. It also begins to map to Comunian’s concept of CAS and establish a framework for realising the potential of hard assets by strategically envisioning and leading the agents, activities, and development of the city’s creative sector. Challenges for Delivery of the Strategy In delivering a strategy based on collaborative efforts, it is essential to have shared goals and strong governance “based on characteristics such as trust, shared values, implicit standards, collaboration, and consultation” (Butcher et al. 77). Situations like Aberdeen’s tentative bid for UNESO Creative City status, which began in late 2018 but was halted in early 2019, suggest that shared goals and clear governance may not be in place. Wishing to join other UNESCO cities across Scotland – Edinburgh (Literature), Glasgow (Music), and Dundee (Design) –, Aberdeen had set its sights on ‘City of Craft and Folk Art’; that title subsequently went to the city of Perth in 2022, limiting Aberdeen’s future hopes of securing UNESCO Creative City status. In 2022, Aberdeen is nearly halfway through its strategy timeline; to achieve its vision by 2028, the leadership recommended in 2014 needs to be established and given proper authority and backing. Covid-19 has been particularly disruptive for the strategy, arriving early in its implementation and lasting for two years during which collaborators have, understandably, had to attend to core business and crisis management. Picking up the threads of collaborative activity at the same time as ‘returning to normal’ will be challenging. The financial impacts of Covid-19 have also hit arts organisations and local councils particularly hard, creating survival challenges that displace future investment plans. The devastation caused to city centres across the UK as shops close and retail moves online is keenly felt in Aberdeen. Yet the pandemic has also seen the growth of pockets of new activity. With falling demand for business space resulting in more ‘meanwhile spaces’ and lower rents, practitioners have been able to access or secure spaces that were previously prohibitive. Deemouth Artists’ Studios, an artist-run initiative, has provided a vital locus of support and connectivity for creatives in the city, doubling in size over the past two years. ‘We Are Here Scotland’ arrived in response to the resurgent Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, as a Community Interest Company initiated in Aberdeen to support black creatives and creatives of colour across Scotland. Initiatives such as EP Spaces that re-purpose empty offices as studios have created a resource, albeit precarious, for scores of recent creative graduates, supporting an emerging creative community. The consequences of the pandemic for the decade of cultural investment and creative development are yet to be understood, but disrupted strategies are hard to rekindle. Culture Aberdeen’s ability to resolve or influence these factors is unclear. As a voluntary network without a cohesive role or formal status in the provision of culture in the city, and little funding and few staff to advocate on its behalf, it probably lacks the strength of leadership required. Nevertheless, work is underway to refresh the strategy in response to the post-pandemic needs of the city and culture, and the Creative Industries more broadly, are, once again, beginning to be seen as part of the solution to recovery as new narratives emerge. There is a strong desire in the city’s and region’s creative communities to nurture, realise, and retain emerging talent to authentically enrich the city’s culture. Since the 2013 failed CoC bid, much has been done to rekindle confidence and shine a light on the rich creative culture that exists in Aberdeen, and creative communities are gaining a new voice for their work. 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Introduction The highly contagious COVID-19 virus has presented particularly difficult public policy challenges. The relatively late emergence of an effective treatments and vaccines, the structural stresses on health care systems, the lockdowns and the economic dislocations, the evident structural inequalities in effected societies, as well as the difficulty of prevention have tested social and political cohesion. Moreover, the intrusive nature of many prophylactic measures have led to individual liberty and human rights concerns. As noted by the Victorian (Australia) Ombudsman Report on the COVID-19 lockdown in Melbourne, we may be tempted, during a crisis, to view human rights as expendable in the pursuit of saving human lives. This thinking can lead to dangerous territory. It is not unlawful to curtail fundamental rights and freedoms when there are compelling reasons for doing so; human rights are inherently and inseparably a consideration of human lives. (5) These difficulties have raised issues about the importance of social or community capital in fighting the pandemic. This article discusses the impacts of social and community capital and other factors on the governmental efforts to combat the spread of infectious disease through the maintenance of social distancing and household ‘bubbles’. It argues that the beneficial effects of social and community capital towards fighting the pandemic, such as mutual respect and empathy, which underpins such public health measures as social distancing, the use of personal protective equipment, and lockdowns in the USA, have been undermined as preventive measures because they have been transmogrified to become a salient aspect of the “culture wars” (Peters). In contrast, states that have relatively lower social capital such a China have been able to more effectively arrest transmission of the disease because the government was been able to generate and personify a nationalist response to the virus and thus generate a more robust social consensus regarding the efforts to combat the disease. Social Capital and Culture Wars The response to COVID-19 required individuals, families, communities, and other types of groups to refrain from extensive interaction – to stay in their bubble. In these situations, especially given the asymptomatic nature of many COVID-19 infections and the serious imposition lockdowns and social distancing and isolation, the temptation for individuals to breach public health rules in high. From the perspective of policymakers, the response to fighting COVID-19 is a collective action problem. In studying collective action problems, scholars have paid much attention on the role of social and community capital (Ostrom and Ahn 17-35). Ostrom and Ahn comment that social capital “provides a synthesizing approach to how cultural, social, and institutional aspects of communities of various sizes jointly affect their capacity of dealing with collective-action problems” (24). Social capital is regarded as an evolving social type of cultural trait (Fukuyama; Guiso et al.). Adger argues that social capital “captures the nature of social relations” and “provides an explanation for how individuals use their relationships to other actors in societies for their own and for the collective good” (387). The most frequently used definition of social capital is the one proffered by Putnam who regards it as “features of social organization, such as networks, norms and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit” (Putnam, “Bowling Alone” 65). All these studies suggest that social and community capital has at least two elements: “objective associations” and subjective ties among individuals. Objective associations, or social networks, refer to both formal and informal associations that are formed and engaged in on a voluntary basis by individuals and social groups. Subjective ties or norms, on the other hand, primarily stand for trust and reciprocity (Paxton). High levels of social capital have generally been associated with democratic politics and civil societies whose institutional performance benefits from the coordinated actions and civic culture that has been facilitated by high levels of social capital (Putnam, Democracy 167-9). Alternatively, a “good and fair” state and impartial institutions are important factors in generating and preserving high levels of social capital (Offe 42-87). Yet social capital is not limited to democratic civil societies and research is mixed on whether rising social capital manifests itself in a more vigorous civil society that in turn leads to democratising impulses. Castillo argues that various trust levels for institutions that reinforce submission, hierarchy, and cultural conservatism can be high in authoritarian governments, indicating that high levels of social capital do not necessarily lead to democratic civic societies (Castillo et al.). Roßteutscher concludes after a survey of social capita indicators in authoritarian states that social capital has little effect of democratisation and may in fact reinforce authoritarian rule: in nondemocratic contexts, however, it appears to throw a spanner in the works of democratization. Trust increases the stability of nondemocratic leaderships by generating popular support, by suppressing regime threatening forms of protest activity, and by nourishing undemocratic ideals concerning governance (752). In China, there has been ongoing debate concerning the presence of civil society and the level of social capital found across Chinese society. If one defines civil society as an intermediate associational realm between the state and the family, populated by autonomous organisations which are separate from the state that are formed voluntarily by members of society to protect or extend their interests or values, it is arguable that the PRC had a significant civil society or social capital in the first few decades after its establishment (White). However, most scholars agree that nascent civil society as well as a more salient social and community capital has emerged in China’s reform era. This was evident after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, where the government welcomed community organising and community-driven donation campaigns for a limited period of time, giving the NGO sector and bottom-up social activism a boost, as evidenced in various policy areas such as disaster relief and rural community development (F. Wu 126; Xu 9). Nevertheless, the CCP and the Chinese state have been effective in maintaining significant control over civil society and autonomous groups without attempting to completely eliminate their autonomy or existence. The dramatic economic and social changes that have occurred since the 1978 Opening have unsurprisingly engendered numerous conflicts across the society. In response, the CCP and State have adjusted political economic policies to meet the changing demands of workers, migrants, the unemployed, minorities, farmers, local artisans, entrepreneurs, and the growing middle class. Often the demands arising from these groups have resulted in policy changes, including compensation. In other circumstances, where these groups remain dissatisfied, the government will tolerate them (ignore them but allow them to continue in the advocacy), or, when the need arises, supress the disaffected groups (F. Wu 2). At the same time, social organisations and other groups in civil society have often “refrained from open and broad contestation against the regime”, thereby gaining the space and autonomy to achieve the objectives (F. Wu 2). Studies of Chinese social or community capital suggest that a form of modern social capital has gradually emerged as Chinese society has become increasingly modernised and liberalised (despite being non-democratic), and that this social capital has begun to play an important role in shaping social and economic lives at the local level. However, this more modern form of social capital, arising from developmental and social changes, competes with traditional social values and social capital, which stresses parochial and particularistic feelings among known individuals while modern social capital emphasises general trust and reciprocal feelings among both known and unknown individuals. The objective element of these traditional values are those government-sanctioned, formal mass organisations such as Communist Youth and the All-China Federation of Women's Associations, where members are obliged to obey the organisation leadership. The predominant subjective values are parochial and particularistic feelings among individuals who know one another, such as guanxi and zongzu (Chen and Lu, 426). The concept of social capital emphasises that the underlying cooperative values found in individuals and groups within a culture are an important factor in solving collective problems. In contrast, the notion of “culture war” focusses on those values and differences that divide social and cultural groups. Barry defines culture wars as increases in volatility, expansion of polarisation, and conflict between those who are passionate about religiously motivated politics, traditional morality, and anti-intellectualism, and…those who embrace progressive politics, cultural openness, and scientific and modernist orientations. (90) The contemporary culture wars across the world manifest opposition by various groups in society who hold divergent worldviews and ideological positions. Proponents of culture war understand various issues as part of a broader set of religious, political, and moral/normative positions invoked in opposition to “elite”, “liberal”, or “left” ideologies. Within this Manichean universe opposition to such issues as climate change, Black Lives Matter, same sex rights, prison reform, gun control, and immigration becomes framed in binary terms, and infused with a moral sensibility (Chapman 8-10). In many disputes, the culture war often devolves into an epistemological dispute about the efficacy of scientific knowledge and authority, or a dispute between “practical” and theoretical knowledge. In this environment, even facts can become partisan narratives. For these “cultural” disputes are often how electoral prospects (generally right-wing) are advanced; “not through policies or promises of a better life, but by fostering a sense of threat, a fantasy that something profoundly pure … is constantly at risk of extinction” (Malik). This “zero-sum” social and policy environment that makes it difficult to compromise and has serious consequences for social stability or government policy, especially in a liberal democratic society. Of course, from the perspective of cultural materialism such a reductionist approach to culture and political and social values is not unexpected. “Culture” is one of the many arenas in which dominant social groups seek to express and reproduce their interests and preferences. “Culture” from this sense is “material” and is ultimately connected to the distribution of power, wealth, and resources in society. As such, the various policy areas that are understood as part of the “culture wars” are another domain where various dominant and subordinate groups and interests engaged in conflict express their values and goals. Yet it is unexpected that despite the pervasiveness of information available to individuals the pool of information consumed by individuals who view the “culture wars” as a touchstone for political behaviour and a narrative to categorise events and facts is relatively closed. This lack of balance has been magnified by social media algorithms, conspiracy-laced talk radio, and a media ecosystem that frames and discusses issues in a manner that elides into an easily understood “culture war” narrative. From this perspective, the groups (generally right-wing or traditionalist) exist within an information bubble that reinforces political, social, and cultural predilections. American and Chinese Reponses to COVID-19 The COVID-19 pandemic first broke out in Wuhan in December 2019. Initially unprepared and unwilling to accept the seriousness of the infection, the Chinese government regrouped from early mistakes and essentially controlled transmission in about three months. This positive outcome has been messaged as an exposition of the superiority of the Chinese governmental system and society both domestically and internationally; a positive, even heroic performance that evidences the populist credentials of the Chinese political leadership and demonstrates national excellence. The recently published White Paper entitled “Fighting COVID-19: China in Action” also summarises China’s “strategic achievement” in the simple language of numbers: in a month, the rising spread was contained; in two months, the daily case increase fell to single digits; and in three months, a “decisive victory” was secured in Wuhan City and Hubei Province (Xinhua). This clear articulation of the positive results has rallied political support. Indeed, a recent survey shows that 89 percent of citizens are satisfied with the government’s information dissemination during the pandemic (C Wu). As part of the effort, the government extensively promoted the provision of “political goods”, such as law and order, national unity and pride, and shared values. For example, severe publishments were introduced for violence against medical professionals and police, producing and selling counterfeit medications, raising commodity prices, spreading ‘rumours’, and being uncooperative with quarantine measures (Xu). Additionally, as an extension the popular anti-corruption campaign, many local political leaders were disciplined or received criminal charges for inappropriate behaviour, abuse of power, and corruption during the pandemic (People.cn, 2 Feb. 2020). Chinese state media also described fighting the virus as a global “competition”. In this competition a nation’s “material power” as well as “mental strength”, that calls for the highest level of nation unity and patriotism, is put to the test. This discourse recalled the global competition in light of the national mythology related to the formation of Chinese nation, the historical “hardship”, and the “heroic Chinese people” (People.cn, 7 Apr. 2020). Moreover, as the threat of infection receded, it was emphasised that China “won this competition” and the Chinese people have demonstrated the “great spirit of China” to the world: a result built upon the “heroism of the whole Party, Army, and Chinese people from all ethnic groups” (People.cn, 7 Apr. 2020). In contrast to the Chinese approach of emphasising national public goods as a justification for fighting the virus, the U.S. Trump Administration used nationalism, deflection, and “culture war” discourse to undermine health responses — an unprecedented response in American public health policy. The seriousness of the disease as well as the statistical evidence of its course through the American population was disputed. The President and various supporters raged against the COVID-19 “hoax”, social distancing, and lockdowns, disparaged public health institutions and advice, and encouraged protesters to “liberate” locked-down states (Russonello). “Our federal overlords say ‘no singing’ and ‘no shouting’ on Thanksgiving”, Representative Paul Gosar, a Republican of Arizona, wrote as he retweeted a Centers for Disease Control list of Thanksgiving safety tips (Weiner). People were encouraged, by way of the White House and Republican leadership, to ignore health regulations and not to comply with social distancing measures and the wearing of masks (Tracy). This encouragement led to threats against proponents of face masks such as Dr Anthony Fauci, one of the nation’s foremost experts on infectious diseases, who required bodyguards because of the many threats on his life. Fauci’s critics — including President Trump — countered Fauci’s promotion of mask wearing by stating accusingly that he once said mask-wearing was not necessary for ordinary people (Kelly). Conspiracy theories as to the safety of vaccinations also grew across the course of the year. As the 2020 election approached, the Administration ramped up efforts to downplay the serious of the virus by identifying it with “the media” and illegitimate “partisan” efforts to undermine the Trump presidency. It also ramped up its criticism of China as the source of the infection. This political self-centeredness undermined state and federal efforts to slow transmission (Shear et al.). At the same time, Trump chided health officials for moving too slowly on vaccine approvals, repeated charges that high infection rates were due to increased testing, and argued that COVID-19 deaths were exaggerated by medical providers for political and financial reasons. These claims were amplified by various conservative media personalities such as Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham of Fox News. The result of this “COVID-19 Denialism” and the alternative narrative of COVID-19 policy told through the lens of culture war has resulted in the United States having the highest number of COVID-19 cases, and the highest number of COVID-19 deaths. At the same time, the underlying social consensus and social capital that have historically assisted in generating positive public health outcomes has been significantly eroded. According to the Pew Research Center, the share of U.S. adults who say public health officials such as those at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are doing an excellent or good job responding to the outbreak decreased from 79% in March to 63% in August, with an especially sharp decrease among Republicans (Pew Research Center 2020). Social Capital and COVID-19 From the perspective of social or community capital, it could be expected that the American response to the Pandemic would be more effective than the Chinese response. Historically, the United States has had high levels of social capital, a highly developed public health system, and strong governmental capacity. In contrast, China has a relatively high level of governmental and public health capacity, but the level of social capital has been lower and there is a significant presence of traditional values which emphasise parochial and particularistic values. Moreover, the antecedent institutions of social capital, such as weak and inefficient formal institutions (Batjargal et al.), environmental turbulence and resource scarcity along with the transactional nature of guanxi (gift-giving and information exchange and relationship dependence) militate against finding a more effective social and community response to the public health emergency. Yet China’s response has been significantly more successful than the Unites States’. Paradoxically, the American response under the Trump Administration and the Chinese response both relied on an externalisation of the both the threat and the justifications for their particular response. In the American case, President Trump, while downplaying the seriousness of the virus, consistently called it the “China virus” in an effort to deflect responsibly as well as a means to avert attention away from the public health impacts. As recently as 3 January 2021, Trump tweeted that the number of “China Virus” cases and deaths in the U.S. were “far exaggerated”, while critically citing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's methodology: “When in doubt, call it COVID-19. Fake News!” (Bacon). The Chinese Government, meanwhile, has pursued a more aggressive foreign policy across the South China Sea, on the frontier in the Indian sub-continent, and against states such as Australia who have criticised the initial Chinese response to COVID-19. To this international criticism, the government reiterated its sovereign rights and emphasised its “victimhood” in the face of “anti-China” foreign forces. Chinese state media also highlighted China as “victim” of the coronavirus, but also as a target of Western “political manoeuvres” when investigating the beginning stages of the pandemic. The major difference, however, is that public health policy in the United States was superimposed on other more fundamental political and cultural cleavages, and part of this externalisation process included the assignation of “otherness” and demonisation of internal political opponents or characterising political opponents as bent on destroying the United States. This assignation of “otherness” to various internal groups is a crucial element in the culture wars. While this may have been inevitable given the increasingly frayed nature of American society post-2008, such a characterisation has been activity pushed by local, state, and national leadership in the Republican Party and the Trump Administration (Vogel et al.). In such circumstances, minimising health risks and highlighting civil rights concerns due to public health measures, along with assigning blame to the democratic opposition and foreign states such as China, can have a major impact of public health responses. The result has been that social trust beyond the bubble of one’s immediate circle or those who share similar beliefs is seriously compromised — and the collective action problem presented by COVID-19 remains unsolved. Daniel Aldrich’s study of disasters in Japan, India, and US demonstrates that pre-existing high levels of social capital would lead to stronger resilience and better recovery (Aldrich). Social capital helps coordinate resources and facilitate the reconstruction collectively and therefore would lead to better recovery (Alesch et al.). Yet there has not been much research on how the pool of social capital first came about and how a disaster may affect the creation and store of social capital. Rebecca Solnit has examined five major disasters and describes that after these events, survivors would reach out and work together to confront the challenges they face, therefore increasing the social capital in the community (Solnit). However, there are studies that have concluded that major disasters can damage the social fabric in local communities (Peacock et al.). The COVID-19 epidemic does not have the intensity and suddenness of other disasters but has had significant knock-on effects in increasing or decreasing social capital, depending on the institutional and social responses to the pandemic. In China, it appears that the positive social capital effects have been partially subsumed into a more generalised patriotic or nationalist affirmation of the government’s policy response. Unlike civil society responses to earlier crises, such as the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, there is less evidence of widespread community organisation and response to combat the epidemic at its initial stages. This suggests better institutional responses to the crisis by the government, but also a high degree of porosity between civil society and a national “imagined community” represented by the national state. The result has been an increased legitimacy for the Chinese government. Alternatively, in the United States the transformation of COVID-19 public health policy into a culture war issue has seriously impeded efforts to combat the epidemic in the short term by undermining the social consensus and social capital necessary to fight such a pandemic. Trust in American institutions is historically low, and President Trump’s untrue contention that President Biden’s election was due to “fraud” has further undermined the legitimacy of the American government, as evidenced by the attacks directed at Congress in the U.S. capital on 6 January 2021. As such, the lingering effects the pandemic will have on social, economic, and political institutions will likely reinforce the deep cultural and political cleavages and weaken interpersonal networks in American society. Conclusion The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated global public health and impacted deeply on the world economy. Unsurprisingly, given the serious economic, social, and political consequences, different government responses have been highly politicised. Various quarantine and infection case tracking methods have caused concern over state power intruding into private spheres. The usage of face masks, social distancing rules, and intra-state travel restrictions have aroused passionate debate over public health restrictions, individual liberty, and human rights. Yet underlying public health responses grounded in higher levels of social capital enhance the effectiveness of public health measures. In China, a country that has generally been associated with lower social capital, it is likely that the relatively strong policy response to COVID-19 will both enhance feelings of nationalism and Chinese exceptionalism and help create and increase the store of social capital. 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The curtain rose. The howling of desert wind filled the performance hall in the Shanghai Grand Theatre. Into the center stage, where a scenic construction of a mountain cliff and a desert landscape was dimly lit, entered the character of the Daoist priest Wang Yuanlu (1849–1931), performed by Chen Yizong. Dressed in a worn and dusty outfit of dark blue cotton, characteristic of Daoist priests, Wang began to sweep the floor. After a few moments, he discovered a hidden chambre sealed inside one of the rock sanctuaries carved into the cliff.Signaled by the quick, crystalline, stirring wave of sound from the chimes, a melodious Chinese ocarina solo joined in slowly from the background. Astonished by thousands of Buddhist sūtra scrolls, wall paintings, and sculptures he had just accidentally discovered in the caves, Priest Wang set his broom aside and began to examine these treasures. Dawn had not yet arrived, and the desert sky was pitch-black. Priest Wang held his oil lamp high, strode rhythmically in excitement, sat crossed-legged in a meditative pose, and unfolded a scroll. The sound of the ocarina became fuller and richer and the texture of the music more complex, as several other instruments joined in.Below is the opening scene of the award-winning, theatrical dance-drama Dunhuang, My Dreamland, created by China’s state-sponsored Lanzhou Song and Dance Theatre in 2000. Figure 1a: Poster Side A of Dunhuang, My Dreamland Figure 1b: Poster Side B of Dunhuang, My DreamlandThe scene locates the dance-drama in the rock sanctuaries that today are known as the Dunhuang Mogao Caves, housing Buddhist art accumulated over a period of a thousand years, one of the best well-known UNESCO heritages on the Silk Road. Historically a frontier metropolis, Dunhuang was a strategic site along the Silk Road in northwestern China, a crossroads of trade, and a locus for religious, cultural, and intellectual influences since the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.). Travellers, especially Buddhist monks from India and central Asia, passing through Dunhuang on their way to Chang’an (present day Xi’an), China’s ancient capital, would stop to meditate in the Mogao Caves and consult manuscripts in the monastery's library. At the same time, Chinese pilgrims would travel by foot from China through central Asia to Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, playing a key role in the exchanges between ancient China and the outside world. Travellers from China would stop to acquire provisions at Dunhuang before crossing the Gobi Desert to continue on their long journey abroad. Figure 2: Dunhuang Mogao CavesThis article approaches the idea of “abroad” by examining the present-day imagination of journeys along the Silk Road—specifically, staged performances of the various Silk Road journey-themed dance-dramas sponsored by the Chinese state for enhancing its cultural and foreign policies since the 1970s (Kuang).As ethnomusicologists have demonstrated, musicians, choreographers, and playwrights often utilise historical materials in their performances to construct connections between the past and the present (Bohlman; Herzfeld; Lam; Rees; Shelemay; Tuohy; Wade; Yung: Rawski; Watson). The ancient Silk Road, which linked the Mediterranean coast with central China and beyond, via oasis towns such as Samarkand, has long been associated with the concept of “journeying abroad.” Journeys to distant, foreign lands and encounters of unknown, mysterious cultures along the Silk Road have been documented in historical records, such as A Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (Faxian) and The Great Tang Records on the Western Regions (Xuanzang), and illustrated in classical literature, such as The Travels of Marco Polo (Polo) and the 16th century Chinese novel Journey to the West (Wu). These journeys—coming and going from multiple directions and to different destinations—have inspired contemporary staged performance for audiences around the globe.Home and Abroad: Dunhuang and the Silk RoadDunhuang, My Dreamland (2000), the contemporary dance-drama, staged the journey of a young pilgrim painter travelling from Chang’an to a land of the unfamiliar and beyond borders, in search for the arts that have inspired him. Figure 3: A scene from Dunhuang, My Dreamland showing the young pilgrim painter in the Gobi Desert on the ancient Silk RoadFar from his home, he ended his journey in Dunhuang, historically considered the northwestern periphery of China, well beyond Yangguan and Yumenguan, the bordering passes that separate China and foreign lands. Later scenes in Dunhuang, My Dreamland, portrayed through multiethnic music and dances, the dynamic interactions among merchants, cultural and religious envoys, warriors, and politicians that were making their own journey from abroad to China. The theatrical dance-drama presents a historically inspired, re-imagined vision of both “home” and “abroad” to its audiences as they watch the young painter travel along the Silk Road, across the Gobi Desert, arriving at his own ideal, artistic “homeland”, the Dunhuang Mogao Caves. Since his journey is ultimately a spiritual one, the conceptualisation of travelling “abroad” could also be perceived as “a journey home.”Staged more than four hundred times since it premiered in Beijing in April 2000, Dunhuang, My Dreamland is one of the top ten titles in China’s National Stage Project and one of the most successful theatrical dance-dramas ever produced in China. With revenue of more than thirty million renminbi (RMB), it ranks as the most profitable theatrical dance-drama ever produced in China, with a preproduction cost of six million RMB. The production team receives financial support from China’s Ministry of Culture for its “distinctive ethnic features,” and its “aim to promote traditional Chinese culture,” according to Xu Rong, an official in the Cultural Industry Department of the Ministry. Labeled an outstanding dance-drama of the Chinese nation, it aims to present domestic and international audiences with a vision of China as a historically multifaceted and cosmopolitan nation that has been in close contact with the outside world through the ancient Silk Road. Its production company has been on tour in selected cities throughout China and in countries abroad, including Austria, Spain, and France, literarily making the young pilgrim painter’s “journey along the Silk Road” a new journey abroad, off stage and in reality.Dunhuang, My Dreamland was not the first, nor is it the last, staged performances that portrays the Chinese re-imagination of “journeying abroad” along the ancient Silk Road. It was created as one of many versions of Dunhuang bihua yuewu, a genre of music, dance, and dramatic performances created in the early twentieth century and based primarily on artifacts excavated from the Mogao Caves (Kuang). “The Mogao Caves are the greatest repository of early Chinese art,” states Mimi Gates, who works to increase public awareness of the UNESCO site and raise funds toward its conservation. “Located on the Chinese end of the Silk Road, it also is the place where many cultures of the world intersected with one another, so you have Greek and Roman, Persian and Middle Eastern, Indian and Chinese cultures, all interacting. Given the nature of our world today, it is all very relevant” (Pollack). As an expressive art form, this genre has been thriving since the late 1970s contributing to the global imagination of China’s “Silk Road journeys abroad” long before Dunhuang, My Dreamland achieved its domestic and international fame. For instance, in 2004, The Thousand-Handed and Thousand-Eyed Avalokiteśvara—one of the most representative (and well-known) Dunhuang bihua yuewu programs—was staged as a part of the cultural program during the Paralympic Games in Athens, Greece. This performance, as well as other Dunhuang bihua yuewu dance programs was the perfect embodiment of a foreign religion that arrived in China from abroad and became Sinicized (Kuang). Figure 4: Mural from Dunhuang Mogao Cave No. 45A Brief History of Staging the Silk Road JourneysThe staging of the Silk Road journeys abroad began in the late 1970s. Historically, the Silk Road signifies a multiethnic, cosmopolitan frontier, which underwent incessant conflicts between Chinese sovereigns and nomadic peoples (as well as between other groups), but was strongly imbued with the customs and institutions of central China (Duan, Mair, Shi, Sima). In the twentieth century, when China was no longer an empire, but had become what the early 20th-century reformer Liang Qichao (1873–1929) called “a nation among nations,” the long history of the Silk Road and the colourful, legendary journeys abroad became instrumental in the formation of a modern Chinese nation of unified diversity rooted in an ancient cosmopolitan past. The staged Silk Road theme dance-dramas thus participate in this formation of the Chinese imagination of “nation” and “abroad,” as they aestheticise Chinese history and geography. History and geography—aspects commonly considered constituents of a nation as well as our conceptualisations of “abroad”—are “invariably aestheticized to a certain degree” (Bakhtin 208). Diverse historical and cultural elements from along the Silk Road come together in this performance genre, which can be considered the most representative of various possible stagings of the history and culture of the Silk Road journeys.In 1979, the Chinese state officials in Gansu Province commissioned the benchmark dance-drama Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road, a spectacular theatrical dance-drama praising the pure and noble friendship which existed between the peoples of China and other countries in the Tang dynasty (618-907 C.E.). While its plot also revolves around the Dunhuang Caves and the life of a painter, staged at one of the most critical turning points in modern Chinese history, the work as a whole aims to present the state’s intention of re-establishing diplomatic ties with the outside world after the Cultural Revolution. Unlike Dunhuang, My Dreamland, it presents a nation’s journey abroad and home. To accomplish this goal, Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road introduces the fictional character Yunus, a wealthy Persian merchant who provides the audiences a vision of the historical figure of Peroz III, the last Sassanian prince, who after the Arab conquest of Iran in 651 C.E., found refuge in China. By incorporating scenes of ethnic and folk dances, the drama then stages the journey of painter Zhang’s daughter Yingniang to Persia (present-day Iran) and later, Yunus’s journey abroad to the Tang dynasty imperial court as the Persian Empire’s envoy.Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road, since its debut at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on the first of October 1979 and shortly after at the Theatre La Scala in Milan, has been staged in more than twenty countries and districts, including France, Italy, Japan, Thailand, Russia, Latvia, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and recently, in 2013, at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York.“The Road”: Staging the Journey TodayWithin the contemporary context of global interdependencies, performing arts have been used as strategic devices for social mobilisation and as a means to represent and perform modern national histories and foreign policies (Davis, Rees, Tian, Tuohy, Wong, David Y. H. Wu). The Silk Road has been chosen as the basis for these state-sponsored, extravagantly produced, and internationally staged contemporary dance programs. In 2008, the welcoming ceremony and artistic presentation at the Olympic Games in Beijing featured twenty apsara dancers and a Dunhuang bihua yuewu dancer with long ribbons, whose body was suspended in mid-air on a rectangular LED extension held by hundreds of performers; on the giant LED screen was a depiction of the ancient Silk Road.In March 2013, Chinese president Xi Jinping introduced the initiatives “Silk Road Economic Belt” and “21st Century Maritime Silk Road” during his journeys abroad in Kazakhstan and Indonesia. These initiatives are now referred to as “One Belt, One Road.” The State Council lists in details the policies and implementation plans for this initiative on its official web page, www.gov.cn. In April 2013, the China Institute in New York launched a yearlong celebration, starting with "Dunhuang: Buddhist Art and the Gateway of the Silk Road" with a re-creation of one of the caves and a selection of artifacts from the site. In March 2015, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s top economic planning agency, released a new action plan outlining key details of the “One Belt, One Road” initiative. Xi Jinping has made the program a centrepiece of both his foreign and domestic economic policies. One of the central economic strategies is to promote cultural industry that could enhance trades along the Silk Road.Encouraged by the “One Belt, One Road” policies, in March 2016, The Silk Princess premiered in Xi’an and was staged at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing the following July. While Dunhuang, My Dreamland and Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road were inspired by the Buddhist art found in Dunhuang, The Silk Princess, based on a story about a princess bringing silk and silkworm-breeding skills to the western regions of China in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) has a different historical origin. The princess's story was portrayed in a woodblock from the Tang Dynasty discovered by Sir Marc Aurel Stein, a British archaeologist during his expedition to Xinjiang (now Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region) in the early 19th century, and in a temple mural discovered during a 2002 Chinese-Japanese expedition in the Dandanwulike region. Figure 5: Poster of The Silk PrincessIn January 2016, the Shannxi Provincial Song and Dance Troupe staged The Silk Road, a new theatrical dance-drama. Unlike Dunhuang, My Dreamland, the newly staged dance-drama “centers around the ‘road’ and the deepening relationship merchants and travellers developed with it as they traveled along its course,” said Director Yang Wei during an interview with the author. According to her, the show uses seven archetypes—a traveler, a guard, a messenger, and so on—to present the stories that took place along this historic route. Unbounded by specific space or time, each of these archetypes embodies the foreign-travel experience of a different group of individuals, in a manner that may well be related to the social actors of globalised culture and of transnationalism today. Figure 6: Poster of The Silk RoadConclusionAs seen in Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road and Dunhuang, My Dreamland, staging the processes of Silk Road journeys has become a way of connecting the Chinese imagination of “home” with the Chinese imagination of “abroad.” Staging a nation’s heritage abroad on contemporary stages invites a new imagination of homeland, borders, and transnationalism. Once aestheticised through staged performances, such as that of the Dunhuang bihua yuewu, the historical and topological landscape of Dunhuang becomes a performed narrative, embodying the national heritage.The staging of Silk Road journeys continues, and is being developed into various forms, from theatrical dance-drama to digital exhibitions such as the Smithsonian’s Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottes at Dunhuang (Stromberg) and the Getty’s Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China's Silk Road (Sivak and Hood). 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The 2000s have been a lively decade for cities. The Worldwatch Institute estimated that 2007 was the first year in human history that more people worldwide lived in cities than the countryside. Globalisation and new digital media technologies have generated the seemingly paradoxical outcome that spatial location came to be more rather than less important, as combinations of firms, industries, cultural activities and creative talents have increasingly clustered around a select node of what have been termed “creative cities,” that are in turn highly networked into global circuits of economic capital, political power and entertainment media. Intellectually, the period has seen what the UCLA geographer Ed Soja refers to as the spatial turn in social theory, where “whatever your interests may be, they can be significantly advanced by adopting a critical spatial perspective” (2). This is related to the dynamic properties of socially constructed space itself, or what Soja terms “the powerful forces that arise from socially produced spaces such as urban agglomerations and cohesive regional economies,” with the result that “what can be called the stimulus of socio-spatial agglomeration is today being assertively described as the primary cause of economic development, technological innovation, and cultural creativity” (14). The demand for social justice in cities has, in recent years, taken the form of “Right to the City” movements. The “Right to the City” movement draws upon the long tradition of radical urbanism in which the Paris Commune of 1871 features prominently, and which has both its Marxist and anarchist variants, as well as the geographer Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) arguments that capitalism was fundamentally driven by the production of space, and that the citizens of a city possessed fundamental rights by virtue of being in a city, meaning that political struggle in capitalist societies would take an increasingly urban form. Manifestations of contemporary “Right to the City” movements have been seen in the development of a World Charter for the Right to the City, Right to the City alliances among progressive urban planners as well as urban activists, forums that bring together artists, architects, activists and urban geographers, and a variety of essays on the subject by radical geographers including David Harvey, whose work I wish to focus upon here. In his 2008 essay "The Right to the City," Harvey presents a manifesto for 21st century radical politics that asserts that the struggle for collective control over cities marks the nodal point of anti-capitalist movements today. It draws together a range of strands of arguments recognizable to those familiar with Harvey’s work, including Marxist political economy, the critique of neoliberalism, the growth of social inequality in the U.S. in particular, and concerns about the rise of speculative finance capital and its broader socio-economic consequences. My interest in Harvey’s manifesto here arises not so much from his prognosis for urban radicalism, but from how he understands the suburban in relation to this urban class struggle. It is an important point to consider because, in many parts of the world, growing urbanisation is in fact growing suburbanisation. This is the case for U.S. cities (Cox), and it is also apparent in Australian cities, with the rise in particular of outer suburban Master Planned Communities as a feature of the “New Prosperity” Australia has been experiencing since the mid 1990s (Flew; Infrastructure Australia). What we find in Harvey’s essay is that the suburban is clearly sub-urban, or an inferior form of city living. Suburbs are variously identified by Harvey as being:Sites for the expenditure of surplus capital, as a safety valve for overheated finance capitalism (Harvey 27);Places where working class militancy is pacified through the promotion of mortgage debt, which turns suburbanites into political conservatives primarily concerned with maintaining their property values;Places where “the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism, and its cognate of political withdrawal from collective forms of action” are actively promoted through the proliferation of shopping malls, multiplexes, franchise stores and fast-food outlets, leading to “pacification by cappuccino” (32);Places where women are actively oppressed, so that “leading feminists … [would] proclaim the suburb as the locus of all their primary discontents” (28);A source of anti-capitalist struggle, as “the soulless qualities of suburban living … played a critical role in the dramatic events of 1968 in the US [as] discontented white middle-class students went into a phase of revolt, sought alliances with marginalized groups claiming civil rights and rallied against American imperialism” (28).Given these negative associations, one could hardly imagine citizens demanding the right to the suburb, in the same way as Harvey projects the right to the city as a rallying cry for a more democratic social order. Instead, from an Australian perspective, one is reminded of the critiques of suburbia that have been a staple of radical theory from the turn of the 20th century to the present day (Collis et. al.). Demanding the “right to the suburb” would appear here as an inherently contradictory demand, that could only be desired by those who the Australian radical psychoanalytic theorist Douglas Kirsner described as living an alienated existence where:Watching television, cleaning the car, unnecessary housework and spectator sports are instances of general life-patterns in our society: by adopting these patterns the individual submits to a uniform life fashioned from outside, a pseudo-life in which the question of individual self-realisation does not even figure. People live conditioned, unconscious lives, reproducing the values of the system as a whole (Kirsner 23). The problem with this tradition of radical critique, which is perhaps reflective of the estrangement of a section of the Australian critical intelligentsia more generally, is that most Australians live in suburbs, and indeed seem (not surprisingly!) to like living in them. Indeed, each successive wave of migration to Australia has been marked by families seeking a home in the suburbs, regardless of the housing conditions of the place they came from: the demand among Singaporeans for large houses in Perth, or what has been termed “Singaperth,” is one of many manifestations of this desire (Lee). Australian suburban development has therefore been characterized by a recurring tension between the desire of large sections of the population to own their own home (the fabled quarter-acre block) in the suburbs, and the condemnation of suburban life from an assortment of intellectuals, political radicals and cultural critics. This was the point succinctly made by the economist and urban planner Hugh Stretton in his 1970 book Ideas for Australian Cities, where he observed that “Most Australians choose to live in suburbs, in reach of city centres and also of beaches or countryside. Many writers condemn this choice, and with especial anger or gloom they condemn the suburbs” (Stretton 7). Sue Turnbull has observed that “suburbia has come to constitute a cultural fault-line in Australia over the last 100 years” (19), while Ian Craven has described suburbia as “a term of contention and a focus for fundamentally conflicting beliefs” in the Australian national imaginary “whose connotations continue to oscillate between dream and suburban nightmare” (48). The tensions between celebration and critique of suburban life play themselves out routinely in the Australian media, from the sun-lit suburbanism of Australia’s longest running television serial dramas, Neighbours and Home and Away, to the pointed observational critiques found in Australian comedy from Barry Humphries to Kath and Kim, to the dark visions of films such as The Boys and Animal Kingdom (Craven; Turnbull). Much as we may feel that the diagnosis of suburban life as a kind of neurotic condition had gone the way of the concept album or the tie-dye shirt, newspaper feature writers such as Catherine Deveny, writing in The Age, have offered the following as a description of the Chadstone shopping centre in Melbourne’s eastern suburbChadstone is a metastasised tumour of offensive proportions that's easy to find. You simply follow the line of dead-eyed wage slaves attracted to this cynical, hermetically sealed weatherless biosphere by the promise a new phone will fix their punctured soul and homewares and jumbo caramel mugachinos will fill their gaping cavern of disappointment … No one looks happy. Everyone looks anaesthetised. A day spent at Chadstone made me understand why they call these shopping centres complexes. Complex as in a psychological problem that's difficult to analyse, understand or solve. (Deveny) Suburbanism has been actively promoted throughout Australia’s history since European settlement. Graeme Davison has observed that “Australia’s founders anticipated a sprawl of homes and gardens rather than a clumping of terraces and alleys,” and quotes Governor Arthur Phillip’s instructions to the first urban developers of the Sydney Cove colony in 1790 that streets shall be “laid out in such a manner as to afford free circulation of air, and where the houses are built … the land will be granted with a clause that will prevent more than one house being built on the allotment” (Davison 43). Louise Johnson (2006) argued that the main features of 20th century Australian suburbanisation were very much in place by the 1920s, particularly land-based capitalism and the bucolic ideal of home as a retreat from the dirt, dangers and density of the city. At the same time, anti-suburbanism has been a significant influence in Australian public thought. Alan Gilbert (1988) drew attention to the argument that Australia’s suburbs combined the worst elements of the city and country, with the absence of both the grounded community associated with small towns, and the mental stimuli and personal freedom associated with the city. Australian suburbs have been associated with spiritual emptiness, the promotion of an ersatz, one-dimensional consumer culture, the embourgeoisment of the working-class, and more generally criticised for being “too pleasant, too trivial, too domestic and far too insulated from … ‘real’ life” (Gilbert 41). There is also an extensive feminist literature critiquing suburbanization, seeing it as promoting the alienation of women and the unequal sexual division of labour (Game and Pringle). More recently, critiques of suburbanization have focused on the large outer-suburban homes developed on new housing estates—colloquially known as McMansions—that are seen as being environmentally unsustainable and emblematic of middle-class over-consumption. Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss’s Affluenza (2005) is a locus classicus of this type of argument, and organizations such as the Australia Institute—which Hamilton and Denniss have both headed—have regularly published papers making such arguments. Can the Suburbs Make You Creative?In such a context, championing the Australian suburb can feel somewhat like being an advocate for Dan Brown novels, David Williamson plays, Will Ferrell comedies, or TV shows such as Two and a Half Men. While it may put you on the side of majority opinion, you can certainly hear the critical axe grinding and possibly aimed at your head, not least because of the association of such cultural forms with mass popular culture, or the pseudo-life of an alienated existence. The art of a program such as Kath and Kim is that, as Sue Turnbull so astutely notes, it walks both sides of the street, both laughing with and laughing at Australian suburban culture, with its celebrity gossip magazines, gourmet butcher shops, McManisons and sales at Officeworks. Gina Riley and Jane Turner’s inspirations for the show can be seen with the presence of such suburban icons as Shane Warne, Kylie Minogue and Barry Humphries as guests on the program. Others are less nuanced in their satire. The website Things Bogans Like relentlessly pillories those who live in McMansions, wear Ed Hardy t-shirts and watch early evening current affairs television, making much of the lack of self-awareness of those who would simultaneously acquire Buddhist statues for their homes and take budget holidays in Bali and Phuket while denouncing immigration and multiculturalism. It also jokes about the propensity of “bogans” to loudly proclaim that those who question their views on such matters are demonstrating “political correctness gone mad,” appealing to the intellectual and moral authority of writers such as the Melbourne Herald-Sun columnist Andrew Bolt. There is also the “company you keep” question. Critics of over-consuming middle-class suburbia such as Clive Hamilton are strongly associated with the Greens, whose political stocks have been soaring in Australia’s inner cities, where the majority of Australia’s cultural and intellectual critics live and work. By contrast, the Liberal party under John Howard and now Tony Abbott has taken strongly to what could be termed suburban realism over the 1990s and 2000s. Examples of suburban realism during the Howard years included the former Member for Lindsay Jackie Kelly proclaiming that the voters of her electorate were not concerned with funding for their local university (University of Western Sydney) as the electorate was “pram city” and “no one in my electorate goes to uni” (Gibson and Brennan-Horley), and the former Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Garry Hardgrave, holding citizenship ceremonies at Bunnings hardware stores, so that allegiance to the Australian nation could co-exist with a sausage sizzle (Gleeson). Academically, a focus on the suburbs is at odds with Richard Florida’s highly influential creative class thesis, which stresses inner urban cultural amenity and “buzz” as the drivers of a creative economy. Unfortunately, it is also at odds with many of Florida’s critics, who champion inner city activism as the antidote to the ersatz culture of “hipsterisation” that they associate with Florida (Peck; Slater). A championing of suburban life and culture is associated with writers such as Joel Kotkin and the New Geography group, who also tend to be suspicious of claims made about the creative industries and the creative economy. It is worth noting, however, that there has been a rich vein of work on Australian suburbs among cultural geographers, that has got past urban/suburban binaries and considered the extent to which critiques of suburban Australia are filtered through pre-existing discursive categories rather than empirical research findings (Dowling and Mee; McGuirk and Dowling; Davies (this volume). I have been part of a team engaged in a three-year study of creative industries workers in outer suburban areas, known as the Creative Suburbia project.[i] The project sought to understand how those working in creative industries who lived and worked in the outer suburbs maintained networks, interacted with clients and their peers, and made a success of their creative occupations: it focused on six suburbs in the cities of Brisbane (Redcliffe, Springfield, Forest Lake) and Melbourne (Frankston, Dandenong, Caroline Springs). It was premised upon what has been an inescapable empirical fact: however much talk there is about the “return to the city,” the fastest rates of population growth are in the outer suburbs of Australia’s major cities (Infrastructure Australia), and this is as true for those working in creative industries occupations as it is for those in virtually all other industry and occupational sectors (Flew; Gibson and Brennan-Horley; Davies). While there is a much rehearsed imagined geography of the creative industries that points to creative talents clustering in dense, highly agglomerated inner city precincts, incubating their unique networks of trust and sociality through random encounters in the city, it is actually at odds with the reality of where people in these sectors choose to live and work, which is as often as not in the suburbs, where the citizenry are as likely to meet in their cars at traffic intersections than walking in city boulevards.There is of course a “yes, but” response that one could have to such empirical findings, which is to accept that the creative workforce is more suburbanised than is commonly acknowledged, but to attribute this to people being driven out of the inner city by high house prices and rents, which may or may not be by-products of a Richard Florida-style strategy to attract the creative class. In other words, people live in the outer suburbs because they are driven out of the inner city. From our interviews with 130 people across these six suburban locations, the unequivocal finding was that this was not the case. While a fair number of our respondents had indeed moved from the inner city, just as many would—if given the choice—move even further away from the city towards a more rural setting as they would move closer to it. While there are clearly differences between suburbs, with creative people in Redcliffe being generally happier than those in Springfield, for example, it was quite clear that for many of these people a suburban location helped them in their creative practice, in ways that included: the aesthetic qualities of the location; the availability of “headspace” arising from having more time to devote to creative work rather than other activities such as travelling and meeting people; less pressure to conform to a stereotyped image of how one should look and act; financial savings from having access to lower-cost locations; and time saved by less commuting between locations.These creative workers generally did not see having access to the “buzz” associated with the inner city as being essential for pursuing work in their creative field, and they were just as likely to establish hardware stores and shopping centres as networking hubs as they were cafes and bars. While being located in the suburbs was disadvantageous in terms of access to markets and clients, but this was often seen in terms of a trade-off for better quality of life. Indeed, contrary to the presumptions of those such as Clive Hamilton and Catherine Deveny, they could draw creative inspiration from creative locations themselves, without feeling subjected to “pacification by cappuccino.” The bigger problem was that so many of the professional associations they dealt with would hold events in the inner city in the late afternoon or early evening, presuming people living close by and/or not having domestic or family responsibilities at such times. The role played by suburban locales such as hardware stores as sites for professional networking and as elements of creative industries value chains has also been documented in studies undertaken of Darwin as a creative city in Australia’s tropical north (Brennan-Horley and Gibson; Brennan-Horley et al.). Such a revised sequence in the cultural geography of the creative industries has potentially great implications for how urban cultural policy is being approached. The assumption that the creative industries are best developed in cities by investing heavily in inner urban cultural amenity runs the risk of simply bypassing those areas where the bulk of the nation’s artists, musicians, filmmakers and other cultural workers actually are, which is in the suburbs. Moreover, by further concentrating resources among already culturally rich sections of the urban population, such policies run the risk of further accentuating spatial inequalities in the cultural realm, and achieving the opposite of what is sought by those seeking spatial justice or the right to the city. An interest in broadband infrastructure or suburban university campuses is certainly far more prosaic than a battle for control of the nation’s cultural institutions or guerilla actions to reclaim the city’s streets. Indeed, it may suggest aspirations no higher than those displayed by Kath and Kim or by the characters of Barry Humphries’ satirical comedy. But however modest or utilitarian a focus on developing cultural resources in Australian suburbs may seem, it is in fact the most effective way of enabling the forms of spatial justice in the cultural sphere that many progressive people seek. ReferencesBrennan-Horley, Chris, and Chris Gibson. “Where Is Creativity in the City? Integrating Qualitative and GIS Methods.” Environment and Planning A 41.11 (2009): 2595–614. Brennan-Horley, Chris, Susan Luckman, Chris Gibson, and J. Willoughby-Smith. “GIS, Ethnography and Cultural Research: Putting Maps Back into Ethnographic Mapping.” The Information Society: An International Journal 26.2 (2010): 92–103.Collis, Christy, Emma Felton, and Phil Graham. “Beyond the Inner City: Real and Imagined Places in Creative Place Policy and Practice.” The Information Society: An International Journal 26.2 (2010): 104–12.Cox, Wendell. “The Still Elusive ‘Return to the City’.” New Geography 28 February 2011. < http://www.newgeography.com/content/002070-the-still-elusive-return-city >.Craven, Ian. “Cinema, Postcolonialism and Australian Suburbia.” Australian Studies 1995: 45-69. Davies, Alan. “Are the Suburbs Dormitories?” The Melbourne Urbanist 21 Sep. 2010. < http://melbourneurbanist.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/are-the-suburbs-dormitories/ >.Davison, Graeme. "Australia: The First Suburban Nation?” Journal of Urban History 22.1 (1995): 40-75. Deveny, Catherine. “No One Out Alive.” The Age 29 Oct. 2009. < http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/no-one-gets-out-alive-20091020-h6yh.html >.Dowling, Robyn, and K. Mee. “Tales of the City: Western Sydney at the End of the Millennium.” Sydney: The Emergence of World City. Ed. John Connell. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2000. 244–72.Flew, Terry. “Economic Prosperity, Suburbanization and the Creative Workforce: Findings from Australian Suburban Communities.” Spaces and Flows: Journal of Urban and Extra-Urban Studies 1.1 (2011, forthcoming).Game, Ann, and Rosemary Pringle. “Sexuality and the Suburban Dream.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 15.2 (1979): 4–15.Gibson, Chris, and Chris Brennan-Horley. “Goodbye Pram City: Beyond Inner/Outer Zone Binaries in Creative City Research.” Urban Policy and Research 24.4 (2006): 455–71. Gilbert, A. “The Roots of Australian Anti-Suburbanism.” Australian Cultural History. Ed. S. I. Goldberg and F. B. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. 33–39. Gleeson, Brendan. Australian Heartlands: Making Space for Hope in the Suburbs. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2006.Hamilton, Clive, and Richard Denniss. Affluenza. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005.Harvey, David. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review 53 (2008): 23–40.Infrastructure Australia. State of Australian Cities 2010. Infrastructure Australia Major Cities Unit. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. 2010.Johnson, Lesley. “Style Wars: Revolution in the Suburbs?” Australian Geographer 37.2 (2006): 259–77. Kirsner, Douglas. “Domination and the Flight from Being.” Australian Capitalism: Towards a Socialist Critique. Eds. J. Playford and D. Kirsner. Melbourne: Penguin, 1972. 9–31.Kotkin, Joel. “Urban Legends.” Foreign Policy 181 (2010): 128–34. Lee, Terence. “The Singaporean Creative Suburb of Perth: Rethinking Cultural Globalization.” Globalization and Its Counter-Forces in South-East Asia. Ed. T. Chong. Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, 2008. 359–78. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.McGuirk, P., and Robyn Dowling. “Understanding Master-Planned Estates in Australian Cities: A Framework for Research.” Urban Policy and Research 25.1 (2007): 21–38Peck, Jamie. “Struggling with the Creative Class.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29.4 (2005): 740–70. Slater, Tom. “The Eviction of Critical Perspectives from Gentrification Research.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30.4 (2006): 737–57. Soja, Ed. Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.Stretton, Hugh. Ideas for Australian Cities. Melbourne: Penguin, 1970.Turnbull, Sue. “Mapping the Vast Suburban Tundra: Australian Comedy from Dame Edna to Kath and Kim.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.1 (2008): 15–32.

“There is nothing more public than privacy.” (Berlant and Warner, Sex) How did it come to this? How did it happen that a one-off, two-hour event at a public swimming pool in a suburb of outer Melbourne ignited international hate mail and generated media-fanned political anguish and debate about the proper use of public spaces? In 2010, women who attend a women’s only swim session on Sunday evenings at the Dandenong Oasis public swimming pool asked the pool management and the local council for permission to celebrate the end of Ramadan at the pool during the time of their regular swim session. The request was supported by the pool managers and the council and promoted by both as an opportunity for family and friends to get together in a spirit of multicultural learning and understanding. Responding to criticisms of the event as an unreasonable claim on public facilities by one group, the Mayor of the City of Greater Dandenong, Jim Memeti, rejected claims that this event discriminates against non-Muslim residents of the suburb. But here’s the rub. The event, to be held after hours at the pool, requires all participants older than ten years of age to follow a dress code of knee-length shorts and T-shirts. This is a suburban moment that is borne of but exceeds the local. It reflects and responds to a contemporary global conundrum of great political and theoretical significance—how to negotiate and govern the relations between multiculturalism, religion, gender, sexual freedom, and democracy. Specifically this event speaks to how multicultural democracy in the public sphere negotiates the public presence and expression of different cultural and religious frameworks related to gender and sexuality. This is demanding political stuff. Situated in the messy political and theoretical terrains of the relation between public space and the public sphere, this local moment called for political judgement about how cultural differences should be allowed to manifest in and through public space, giving consideration to the potential effects of these decisions on an inclusive multicultural democracy. The local authorities in Dandenong engaged in an admirable process of democratic labour as they puzzled over how to make decisions that were responsible and equitable, in the absence of a rulebook or precedents for success. Ultimately however this mode of experimental decision-making, which will become increasingly necessary to manage such predicaments in the future, was foreclosed by unwarranted and unhelpful media outrage. "Foreclosed" here stresses the preemptive nature of the loss; a lost opportunity for trialing approaches to governing cultural diversity that may fail, but might then be modified. It was condemned in advance of either success or failure. The role of the media rather than the discomfort of the local publics has been decisive in this event.This Multicultural SuburbDandenong is approximately 30 kilometres southeast of central Melbourne. Originally home to the Bunorong People of the Kulin nation, it was settled by pastoralists by the 1800s, heavily industrialised during the twentieth century, and now combines cultural diversity with significant social disadvantage. The City of Greater Dandenong is proud of its reputation as the most culturally and linguistically diverse municipality in Australia. Its population of approximately 138,000 comprises residents from 156 different language groups. More than half (56%) of its population was born overseas, with 51% from nations where English is not the main spoken language. These include Vietnam, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, India, China, Italy, Greece, Bosnia and Afghanistan. It is also a place of significant religious diversity with residents identifying as Buddhist (15 per cent) Muslim (8 per cent), Hindu (2 per cent) and Christian (52 per cent) [CGD]. Its city logo, “Great Place, Great People” evokes its twin pride in the placemaking power of its diverse population. It is also a brazen act of civic branding to counter its reputation as a derelict and dangerous suburb. In his recent book The Bogan Delusion, David Nichols cites a "bogan" website that names Dandenong as one of Victoria’s two most bogan areas. The other was Moe. (p72). The Sunday Age newspaper had already depicted Dandenong as one of two excessively dangerous suburbs “where locals fear to tread” (Elder and Pierik). The other suburb of peril was identified as Footscray.Central Dandenong is currently the site of Australia’s largest ever state sponsored Urban Revitalisation program with a budget of more than $290 million to upgrade infrastructure, that aims to attract $1billion in private investment to provide housing and future employment.The Cover UpIn September 2010, the Victorian and Civil and Administrative Appeals Tribunal (VCAT) granted the YMCA an exemption from the Equal Opportunity Act to allow a dress code for the Ramadan event at the Oasis swimming pool that it manages. The "Y" sees the event as “an opportunity for the broader community to learn more about Ramadan and the Muslim faith, and encourages all members of Dandenong’s diverse community to participate” (YMCA Ramadan). While pool management and the municipal council refer to the event as an "opening up" of the closed swimming session, the media offer a different reading of the VCAT decision. The trope of the "the cover up" has framed most reports and commentaries (Murphy; Szego). The major focus of the commentaries has not been the event per se, but the call to dress "appropriately." Dress codes however are a cultural familiar. They exist for workplaces, schools, nightclubs, weddings, racing and sporting clubs and restaurants, to name but a few. While some of these codes or restrictions are normatively imposed rather than legally required, they are not alien to cultural life in Australia. Moreover, there are laws that prohibit people from being meagerly dressed or naked in public, including at beaches, swimming pools and so on. The dress code for this particular swimming pool event was, however, perceived to be unusual and, in a short space of time, "unusual" converted to "social threat."Responses to media polls about the dress code reveal concerns related to the symbolic dimensions of the code. The vast majority of those who opposed the Equal Opportunity exemption saw it as the thin edge of the multicultural wedge, a privatisation of public facilities, or a denial of the public’s right to choose how to dress. Tabloid newspapers reported on growing fears of Islamisation, while the more temperate opposition situated the decision as a crisis of human rights associated with tolerating illiberal cultural practices. Julie Szego reflects this view in an opinion piece in The Age newspaper:the Dandenong pool episode is neither trivial nor insignificant. It is but one example of human rights laws producing outcomes that restrict rights. It raises tough questions about how far public authorities ought to go in accommodating cultural practices that sit uneasily with mainstream Western values. (Szego)Without enquiring into the women’s request and in the absence of the women’s views about what meaning the event held for them, most media commentators and their electronically wired audiences treated the announcement as yet another alarming piece of evidence of multicultural failure and the potential Islamisation of Australia. The event raised specific concerns about the double intrusion of cultural difference and religion. While the Murdoch tabloid Herald Sun focused on the event as “a plan to force families to cover up to avoid offending Muslims at a public event” (Murphy) the liberal Age newspaper took a more circumspect approach, reporting on its small vox pop at the Dandenong pool. Some people here referred to the need to respect religions and seemed unfazed by the exemption and the event. Those who disagreed thought it was important not to enforce these (dress) practices on other people (Carey).It is, I believe, significant that several employees of the local council informed me that most of the opposition has come from the media, people outside of Dandenong and international groups who oppose the incursion of Islam into non-Islamic settings. Opposition to the event did not appear to derive from local concern or opposition.The overwhelming majority of Herald Sun comments expressed emphatic opposition to the dress code, citing it variously as unAustralian, segregationist, arrogant, intolerant and sexist. The Herald Sun polled readers (in a self-selecting and of course highly unrepresentative on-line poll) asking them to vote on whether or not they agreed with the VCAT exemption. While 5.52 per cent (512 voters) agreed with the ruling, 94.48 per cent (8,760) recorded disagreement. In addition, the local council has, for the first time in memory, received a stream of hate-mail from international anti-Islam groups. Muslim women’s groups, feminists, the Equal Opportunity Commissioner and academics have also weighed in. According to local reports, Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne, Shahram Akbarzadeh, considered the exemption was “nonsense” and would “backfire and the people who will pay for it will be the Muslim community themselves” (Haberfield). He repudiated it as an example of inclusion and tolerance, labeling it “an effort of imposing a value system (sic)” (Haberfield). He went so far as to suggest that, “If Tony Abbott wanted to participate in his swimwear he wouldn’t be allowed in. That’s wrong.” Tasneem Chopra, chairwoman of the Islamic Women’s Welfare Council and Sherene Hassan from the Islamic Council of Victoria, both expressed sensitivity to the group’s attempt to establish an inclusive event but would have preferred the dress code to be a matter of choice rather coercion (Haberfield, "Mayor Defends Dandenong Pool Cover Up Order"). Helen Szoke, the Commissioner of the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, defended the pool’s exemption from the Law that she oversees. “Matters such as this are not easy to resolve and require a balance to be achieved between competing rights and obligations. Dress codes are not uncommon: e.g., singlets, jeans, thongs etc in pubs/hotels” (in Murphy). The civil liberties organisation, Liberty Victoria, supported the ban because the event was to be held after hours (Murphy). With astonishing speed this single event not only transformed the suburban swimming pool to a theatre of extra-local disputes about who and what is entitled to make claims on public space and publically funded facilities, but also fed into charged debates about the future of multiculturalism and the vulnerability of the nation to the corrosive effects of cultural and religious difference. In this sense suburbs like Dandenong are presented as sites that not only generate fear about physical safety but whose suburban sensitivities to its culturally diverse population represent a threat to the safety of the nation. Thus the event both reflects and produces an antipathy to cultural difference and to the place where difference resides. This aversion is triggered by and mediated in this case through the figure, rather than the (corpo)reality, of the Muslim woman. In this imagining, the figure of the Muslim woman is assigned the curious symbolic role of "cultural creep." The debates around the pool event is not about the wellbeing or interests of the Muslim women themselves, nor are broader debates about the perceived, culturally-derived restrictions imposed on Muslim women living in Australia or other western countries. The figure of the Muslim woman is, I would argue, simply the ground on which the debates are held. The first debate relates to social and public space, access to which is considered fundamental to freedom and participatory democracy, and in current times is addressed in terms of promoting inclusion, preventing exclusion and finding opportunities for cross cultural encounters. The second relates not to public space per se, but to the public sphere or the “sphere of private people coming together as a public” for political deliberation (Habermas 21). The literature and discussions dealing with these two terrains have remained relatively disconnected (Low and Smith) with public space referring largely to activities and opportunities in the socio-cultural domain and the public sphere addressing issues of politics, rights and democracy. This moment in Dandenong offers some modest leeway for situating "the suburb" as an ideal site for coalescing these disparate discussions. In this regard I consider Iveson’s provocative and productive question about whether some forms of exclusions from suburban public space may actually deepen the democratic ideals of the public sphere. Exclusions may in such cases be “consistent with visions of a democratically inclusive city” (216). He makes his case in relation to a dispute about the exclusion of men exclusion from a women’s only swimming pool in the Sydney suburb of Coogee. The Dandenong case is similarly exclusive with an added sense of exclusion generated by an "inclusion with restrictions."Diversity, Difference, Public Space and the Public SphereAs a prelude to this discussion of exclusion as democracy, I return to the question that opened this article: how did it come to this? How is it that Australia has moved from its renowned celebration and pride in its multiculturalism so much in evidence at the suburban level through what Ghassan Hage calls an “unproblematic” multiculturalism (233) and what others have termed “everyday multiculturalism” (Wise and Velayutham). Local cosmopolitanisms are often evinced through the daily rituals of people enjoying the ethnic cuisines of their co-residents’ pasts, and via moments of intercultural encounter. People uneventfully rub up against and greet each other or engage in everyday acts of kindness that typify life in multicultural suburbs, generating "reservoirs of hope" for democratic and cosmopolitan cities (Thrift 147). In today’s suburbs, however, the “Imperilled Muslim women” who need protection from “dangerous Muslim men” (Razack 129) have a higher discursive profile than ethnic cuisine as the exemplar of multiculturalism. Have we moved from pleasure to hostility or was the suburban pleasure in racial difference always about a kind of “eating the other” (bell hooks 378). That is to ask whether our capacity to experience diversity positively has been based on consumption, consuming the other for our own enrichment, whereas living with difference entails a commitment not to consumption but to democracy. This democratic multicultural commitment is a form of labour rather than pleasure, and its outcome is not enrichment but transformation (although this labour can be pleasurable and transformation might be enriching). Dandenong’s prized cultural precincts, "Little India" and the "Afghan bazaar" are showcases of food, artefacts and the diversity of the suburb. They are centres of pleasurable and exotic consumption. The pool session, however, requires one to confront difference. In simple terms we can think about ethnic food, festivals and handicrafts as cultural diversity, and the Muslim woman as cultural difference.This distinction between diversity and difference is useful for thinking through the relation between multiculturalism in public space and multicultural democracy of the public sphere. According to the anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, while a neoliberal sensibility supports cultural diversity in the public space, cultural difference is seen as a major cause of social problems associated with immigrants, and has a diminishing effect on the public sphere (14). According to Eriksen, diversity is understood as aesthetic, or politically and morally neutral expressions of culture that are enriching (Hage 118) or digestible. Difference, however, refers to morally objectionable cultural practices. In short, diversity is enriching. Difference is corrosive. Eriksen argues that differences that emerge from distinct cultural ideas and practices are deemed to create conflicts with majority cultures, weaken social solidarity and lead to unacceptable violations of human rights in minority groups. The suburban swimming pool exists here at the boundary of diversity and difference, where the "presence" of diverse bodies may enrich, but their different practices deplete and damage existing culture. The imperilled Muslim woman of the suburbs carries a heavy symbolic load. She stands for major global contests at the border of difference and diversity in three significant domains, multiculturalism, religion and feminism. These three areas are positioned simultaneously in public space and of the public sphere and she embodies a specific version of each in this suburban setting. First, there a global retreat from multiculturalism evidenced in contemporary narratives that describe multiculturalism (both as official policy and unofficial sensibility) as failed and increasingly ineffective at accommodating or otherwise dealing with religious, cultural and ethnic differences (Cantle; Goodhart; Joppke; Poynting and Mason). In the UK, Europe, the US and Australia, popular media sources and political discourses speak of "parallel lives,"immigrant enclaves, ghettoes, a lack of integration, the clash of values, and illiberal cultural practices. The covered body of the Muslim woman, and more particularly the Muslim veil, are now read as visual signs of this clash of values and of the refusal to integrate. Second, religion has re-emerged in the public domain, with religious groups and individuals making particular claims on public space both on the basis of their religious identity and in accord with secular society’s respect for religious freedom. This is most evident in controversies in France, Belgium and Netherlands associated with banning niqab in public and other religious symbols in schools, and in Australia in court. In this sense the covered Muslim woman raises concerns and indignation about the rightful place of religion in the public sphere and in social space. Third, feminism is increasingly invoked as the ground from which claims about the imperilled Muslim woman are made, particularly those about protecting women from their dangerous men. The infiltration of the Muslim presence into public space is seen as a threat to the hard won gains of women’s freedom enjoyed by the majority population. This newfound feminism of the public sphere, posited by those who might otherwise disavow feminism, requires some serious consideration. This public discourse rarely addresses the discrimination, violation and lack of freedom experienced systematically on an everyday basis by women of majority cultural backgrounds in western societies (such as Australia). However, the sexism of racially and religiously different men is readily identified and decried. This represents a significant shift to a dubious feminist register of the public sphere such that: “[w]omen of foreign origin, ...more specifically Muslim women…have replaced the traditional housewife as the symbol of female subservience” (Tissot 41–42).The three issues—multiculturalism, religion and feminism—are, in the Dandenong pool context, contests about human rights, democracy and the proper use of public space. Szego’s opinion piece sees the Dandenong pool "cover up" as an example of the conundrum of how human rights for some may curtail the human rights of others and lead us into a problematic entanglement of universal "rights," with claims of difference. In her view the combination of human rights and multiculturalism in the case of the Dandenong Pool accommodates illiberal practices that put the rights of "the general public" at risk, or as she puts it, on a “slippery slope” that results in a “watering down of our human rights.” Ideas that entail women making a claim for private time in public space are ultimately not good for "us."Such ideas run counter to the West's more than 500-year struggle for individual freedom—including both freedom of religion and freedom from religion—and for gender equality. Our public authorities ought to be pushing back hardest when these values are under threat. Yet this is precisely where they've been buckling under pressure (Szego)But a different reading of the relation between public and private space, human rights, democracy and gender freedom is readily identifiable in the Dandenong event—if one looks for it. Living with difference, I have already suggested, is a problem of democracy and the public sphere and does not so easily correspond to consuming diversity, as it demands engagement with cultural difference. In what remains, I explore how multicultural democracy in the public sphere and women’s rights in public and private realms relate, firstly, to the burgeoning promise of democracy and civility that might emerge in public space through encounter and exchange. I also point out how this moment in Dandenong might be read as a singular contribution to dealing with this global problematic of living with difference; of democracy in the public sphere. Public urban space has become a focus for speculation among geographers and sociologists in particular, about the prospects for an enhanced civic appreciation of living with difference through encountering strangers. Random and repetitious encounters with people from all cultures typify contemporary urban life. It remains an open question however as to whether these encounters open up or close down possibilities for conviviality and understanding, and whether they undo or harden peoples’ fears and prejudices. There is, however, at least in some academic and urban planning circles, some hope that the "throwntogetherness" (Massey) and the "doing" of togetherness (Laurier and Philo) found in the multicultural city may generate some lessons and opportunities for developing a civic culture and political commitment to living with difference. Alongside the optimism of those who celebrate the city, the suburb, and public spaces as forging new ways of living with difference, there are those such as Gill Valentine who wonder how this might be achieved in practice (324). Ash Amin similarly notes that city or suburban public spaces are not necessarily “the natural servants of multicultural engagement” (Ethnicity 967). Amin and Valentine point to the limited or fleeting opportunities for real engagement in these spaces. Moreover Valentine‘s research in the UK revealed that the spatial proximity found in multicultural spaces did not so much give rise to greater mutual respect and engagement, but to a frustrated “white self-segregation in the suburbs.” She suggests therefore that civility and polite exchange should not be mistaken for respect (324). Amin contends that it is the “micro-publics” of social encounters found in workplaces, schools, gardens, sports clubs [and perhaps swimming pools] rather than the fleeting encounters of the street or park, that offer better opportunities for meaningful intercultural exchange. The Ramadan celebration at the pool, with its dress code and all, might be seen more fruitfully as a purposeful event engaging a micro-public in which people are able to “break out of fixed relations and fixed notions” and “learn to become different” (Amin, Ethnicity 970) without that generating discord and resentment.Micropublics, Subaltern Publics and a Democracy of (Temporary) ExclusionsIs this as an opportunity to bring the global and local together in an experiment of forging new democratic spaces for gender, sexuality, culture and for living with difference? More provocatively, can we see exclusion and an invitation to share in this exclusion as a precursor to and measure of, actually existing democracy? Painter and Philo have argued that democratic citizenship is questionable if “people cannot be present in public spaces (streets, squares, parks, cinemas, churches, town halls) without feeling uncomfortable, victimized and basically ‘out of place’…" (Iveson 216). Feminists have long argued that distinctions between public and private space are neither straightforward nor gender neutral. For Nancy Fraser the terms are “cultural classifications and rhetorical labels” that are powerful because they are “frequently deployed to delegitimate some interests, views and topics and to valorize others” (73). In relation to women and other subordinated minorities, the "rhetoric of privacy" has been historically used to restrict the domain of legitimate public contestation. In fact the notion of what is public and particularly notions of the "public interest" and the "public good" solidify forms of subordination. Fraser suggests the concept of "subaltern counterpublics" as an alternative to notions of "the public." These are discursive spaces where groups articulate their needs, and demands are circulated formulating their own public sphere. This challenges the very meaning and foundational premises of ‘the public’ rather than simply positing strategies of inclusion or exclusion. The twinning of Amin’s notion of "micro-publics" and Fraser’s "counterpublics" is, I suggest, a fruitful approach to interpreting the Dandenong pool issue. It invites a reading of this singular suburban moment as an experiment, a trial of sorts, in newly imaginable ways of living democratically with difference. It enables us to imagine moments when a limited democratic right to exclude might create the sorts of cultural exchanges that give rise to a more authentic and workable recognition of cultural difference. I am drawn to think that this is precisely the kind of democratic experimentation that the YMCA and Dandenong Council embarked upon when they applied for the Equal Opportunity exemption. I suggest that by trialing, rather than fixing forever a "critically exclusive" access to the suburban swimming pool for two hours per year, they were in fact working on the practical problem of how to contribute in small but meaningful ways to a more profoundly free democracy and a reworked public sphere. In relation to the similar but distinct example of the McIver pool for women and children in Coogee, New South Wales, Kurt Iveson makes the point that such spaces of exclusion or withdrawal, “do not necessarily serve simply as spaces where people ‘can be themselves’, or as sites through which reified identities are recognised—in existing conditions of inequality, they can also serve as protected spaces where people can take the risk of exploring who they might become with relative safety from attack and abuse” (226). These are necessary risks to take if we are to avoid entrenching fear of difference in a world where difference is itself deeply, and permanently, entrenched.ReferencesAmin, Ash. “Ethnicity and the Multicultural City: Living with Diversity.” Environment and Planning A 34 (2002): 959–80.———. “The Good City.” Urban Studies 43 (2006): 1009–23.Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 547–66.Cantle, Ted. Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team. 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