Journal articles on the topic 'Tapestry Journal'

Welcome to the seventh volume of the Ex Novo-Journal of Archaeology, which presents a tapestry woven from diverse scholarly threads, offering insights into the intricate relationships between history, myth, contemporary identity, and activism.

This short note is intended as a response to the paper by Dr Hilary Turner published in Vol 88 of the Antiquaries Journal, entitled: ‘Tapestries once at Chastleton and their influence on the image of tapestries called Sheldon: a reassessment’. It seeks to give an alternative account to that given by Dr Turner of the role of the Sheldon family in establishing the tapestry-weaving workshops associated with their name during the reign of Elizabeth i.

In the dynamic realm of academia, researchers face the dual challenge of generating groundbreaking insights and ensuring widespread visibility for their contributions. This article explores the evolving strategies employed by researchers to enhance the visibility of their journal articles in the changing landscape of academic technology. Online publishing platforms have transformed scholarly communication, democratizing knowledge through open-access journals, preprint servers, and institutional repositories. Beyond traditional metrics, we delve into innovative methods, collaboration, and technology-driven solutions that amplify the reach and impact of scholarly articles. Visibility extends beyond dissemination, encapsulating the art of captivating diverse audiences and transcending disciplinary boundaries. This research article illuminates the path towards heightened visibility, empowering researchers to contribute to the collective tapestry of knowledge through means such as Academia.edu, ISSUU, Scribd, ResearchGate, social media, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and ORCID. Enhanced visibility offers multifaceted advantages, including increased citations, higher impact factors, knowledge dissemination, international collaboration, career advancement, public engagement, and job opportunities within the scholarly community. Researchers are equipped with the insights needed to thrive in the evolving landscape of journal article visibility in the digital cosmos. Keywords academic publishing; article visibility; journal impact; research visibility; article promotion; citation indexing; academic visibility strategies; research impact factors

This article comments on: Cui L, Zheng F, Li C, Li G, Ye J, Zhang Y, Wang T, Hong Z, Ye Z, Zhang J. 2024. Defective mutations in STAY-GREEN 1, PHYTOENE SYNTHASE 1, and MYB12 genes lead to formation of green ripe fruit in tomato. Journal of Experimental Botany 75, 3322–3336.

In an ever-evolving world where globalization and technological advancements seem to shrink the geographical distances between nations and cultures, the relevance of community studies and interculturality becomes increasingly evident. As we embark on this intellectual journey through the pages of "Community and Interculturality in Dialogue," our interdisciplinary journal, we invite you to delve into the rich tapestry of topics that define the essence of our academic pursuit. This publication explores multifaceted facets of communities, embracing sociocultural studies, interculturality, community work, social health approaches, health education, gender studies, activism, social policy, and migration.The foundation of our journal lies in recognizing that communities are not static entities; instead, they are dynamic, ever-evolving organisms shaped by the interplay of sociocultural forces. As we navigate the intricate landscape of community and interculturality studies, we are guided by a commitment to fostering collaboration among diverse disciplines and professionals engaged in community-oriented research. Our objective is not only to understand communities better but also to facilitate positive change within them.

This journal article presents a comprehensive historical analysis of the Vietnam War and its profound impact on the United States. The study delves into the intricate layers of the conflict, shedding light on its causes, progression, and aftermath. By examining both the military and socio-political dimensions, the article aims to provide a nuanced understanding of the war's complexity and its lasting implications for American society, politics, and foreign policy. The Vietnam War, intricately woven from geopolitical strategies, ideological clashes, and military tactics, holds enduring significance. Emerging from colonial legacies and Cold War dynamics, its escalation echoed the domino theory and containment policy. Amidst guerrilla warfare and air power strategies, the war's reach extended beyond battlefields, resonating in the anti-war movement, cultural expressions, and societal rifts.

In the profound wisdom of Frantz Fanon’s words, we are reminded that language is a tapestry woven beyond the confines of grammar and basic communication. Fanon urges us to understand that language is the assumption of a culture and a pillar of civilisation. For Kabarak Law Review, language is a culture of diligence, excellence, academic rigour, cooperation and service. Language for us means breaking down frontiers and hegemonic structures thereby producing cutting edge Afrocentric legal research to support the weight of our African civilisation. To this end, Kabarak Law Review 2022-2023 Editorial Board is pleased to present the first double-blind peer reviewed issue of our journal, Kabarak Law Review Volume 2(2023). Within its pages, we invite you to reflect on the transformative power of language and immerse yourselves in the cadence of words, ideas and intellectualism that define our commitment to legal scholarship.

This journal investigates Pekalongan’s city branding through the Giant Lopis tradition and the Ritual & Culture Carnival. As the world’s batik hub, Pekalongan’s cultural richness and diverse communities, epitomized as the Batik City, are integral to its identity. The Giant Lopis tradition, featuring colossal rice cakes, symbolizes unity among diverse ethnic and religious groups, fostering harmony. Conversely, the Ritual & Culture Carnival by Klenteng Po An Thian Pekalongan highlights Chinese cultural expressions, enhancing the city’s cultural tapestry. Using qualitative methods such as ethnographic observations and content analysis, this research explores how these traditions contribute to Pekalongan’s branding as a plural city. Additionally, various cultural backgrounds, including Chinese and Islamic, contribute to the diversity of Batik motifs. Findings underscore their positive impact, fostering resident pride, intercultural bonds, and attracting domestic visitors. This study offers valuable insights for policymakers and marketers aiming to leverage cultural heritage for inclusive city promotion.

In the serene landscapes of Finland, a nation renowned for its quality of life, this journal article delves into the intricate tapestry of mental health. Titled "Unveiling the State of Mental Health in Finland: Insights, Challenges, and Pathways to Well-Being," this study offers a comprehensive exploration of Finland's mental health landscape. Through a mixed-methods approach, it examines the prevalence of mental health issues, demographic and socioeconomic factors shaping mental well-being, and the impact of cultural and regional variations. The study investigates the effectiveness of existing mental health initiatives while acknowledging the persistent gaps. It also provides a comparative analysis with international models, shedding light on valuable insights and lessons. The article underscores Finland's commitment to nurturing mental well-being, reducing stigma, and ensuring access to support. As Finland continues its journey, it offers inspiration and knowledge to nations worldwide striving to prioritize mental health as a fundamental aspect of human flourishing.

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying economic downturn have dramatically impacted the lives of consumers around the world. From a conceptual perspective, such health and economic threats can severely disrupt consumers’ sense of ontological security and elicit adaptive responses by both consumers and marketers. Given the opportune timing, this issue of the Journal of Consumer Research is focused on articles that address questions of consumers’ responses to external threats. The purpose of this introduction is to provide an organizing “conceptual tapestry” to connect the articles appearing in the issue. This framework is provided as a tool to help researchers structure their particular projects within the broader landscape of consumer threat response and to present some potential directions for future research. In conjunction with these articles, we hope that this conceptual framework will provide a point of departure for researchers seeking to enhance the understanding of how consumers and markets collectively respond over the short term and long term to threats that disrupt consumers’ routines, lives, or even the fabric of society.

The fall 2023 issue of the Georgia Journal of Literacy delves into a crucial intersection: the empirically supported science of reading and the ever-present need for diversity, inclusion, and multi-modal literacies in our classrooms. As the dialogue around literacy shifts toward science-based methods, the articles in this issue pose a pivotal question: How can these scientifically grounded methods be incorporated into diverse and inclusive learning environments? Our contributors approach this conundrum from multiple angles—examining ESOL co-teaching strategies, leveraging picturebook biographies for inspiration, implementing culturally relevant pedagogies, and providing practical teaching tips for diverse classrooms. Through a carefully curated ensemble of articles, we challenge traditional paradigms and advocate for a literacy education that is scientifically rigorous yet deeply sensitive to the rich tapestry of cultural, linguistic, and cognitive diversity in our classrooms. The content serves not just as a timely response to ongoing debates in literacy education but also as a catalyst for future innovations that harmonize the science with the art of teaching reading. This issue aims to inspire a shift—from mere motivation to deep-rooted inspiration, from monolingualism to multilingualism, and from traditional to culturally responsive pedagogical practices.

In the ever-expanding realm of psychological science, the domain of developmental psychology has emerged as a beacon of innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration. Recent years have witnessed an unparalleled diversification in the approaches used to decipher the intricate processes underlying human development across the lifespan. This letter aims to encapsulate the significant advancements within developmental psychology, highlighting the integration of evolutionary perspectives, cultural psychology, neuroscience, and the vital emphasis on diversity and inclusivity. The KMAN Counseling and Psychology Nexus, with its pioneering approach to scholarly publishing, stands at the forefront of these developments. By fostering an environment that encourages innovative and impactful research, the journal plays a crucial role in shaping the future of psychological science. It is my hope that this letter will inspire further exploration and dialogue within the field of developmental psychology, encouraging researchers and practitioners alike to contribute to the rich tapestry of knowledge that defines our understanding of human development. In conclusion, the field of developmental psychology is at a pivotal juncture, marked by significant advancements and an ever-expanding horizon of research possibilities. By continuing to embrace interdisciplinary approaches, diversity, and inclusivity, we can ensure that the study of human development remains a vibrant and integral part of psychological science. I look forward to witnessing the future contributions that will emerge from this dynamic field, further enriching our understanding of the complex journey of human development.

Volume 13 titled ‘Exploring Human Well-Being and Community Dynamics’ of the peer-reviewed journal plaNext–Next Generation Planning is here. Partially derived from the 16th AESOP Young Academics Conference ‘In Search of Well-Being in Liminality: No Longer-Not Yet’ that took place in Istanbul between April 5-8, 2022, it includes one research paper previously published online. We are delighted to present this latest volume, which draws together a diverse collection of research papers delving into the complex dynamics of human interaction with the living environment, social participation and community development. While originating from different geographic and disciplinary backgrounds, the four papers featured in this volume share a common theme: the complex interplay between individuals, communities, and the places they inhabit. The theme of ‘Exploring Human Well-Being and Community Dynamics’ encapsulates a rich tapestry of interdisciplinary research examining the diverse connections forged among inhabitants, societies, and their spaces. Grounded on a multidimensional understanding of well-being, this theme integrates insights from sociology, urban planning, economics and related disciplines to unravel the factors influencing human well-being within communal settings. Research in sociology has long emphasized the significance of social structures and community ties in shaping individual well-being. Contemporary scholars have expanded upon this perspective, incorporating concepts such as social capital (Woo et al, 2023; Sanchez-Garcia et al, 2023; Putnam, 2000) and community engagement (Bernstein and Isaac, 2023; Kawachi & Berkman, 2001) to explore the dynamics of collective well-being. The idea that communities play a vital role in shaping the health, prosperity and happiness of their members forms a foundational aspect of this research topic.

Background: According to the research, despite the prevalence of allergic rhinitis (AR), it is frequently misdiagnosed or undertreated about its pattern, severity and risk factors. Aim: This study investigated the pattern, severity, and illness features of AR in Cumilla, Bangladesh, as well as symptom-relieving coping strategies among adult population. Methods: We conducted a quantitative observational descriptive cross-sectional study on outpatients from the ENT department of Central Medical College Cumilla, Bangladesh, between January 2020 and February 2023. Initially the sample size was 2949 and finally n= 2,549 participants selected who experienced at least one of the four symptoms of AR, namely runny nose, sneezing, nasal blockage, itchy nose, and watery eyes, unrelated to a cold or flu in the prior year. The study's results were the triggers, pattern, severity, categorization of AR (2016 ARIA criteria), and coping strategies. We did descriptive statistics, univariate analytic statistics, and binary analysis. At <0.05, the P-value was deemed statistically significant. Results: The top AR trigger was dust (58.8%, n = 1500), followed by pollen (15.7%, n = 400), mold (11.88%, n = 300), and fur/perfumes (5.9%, n = 150). The prevalence of intermittent AR was 56 % (n = 1,435) and 44 percent (n = 1,114) for permanent AR. Nearly one-third (n = 816; 32%) complained of mild forms of AR, while the remainder (n = 1733; 68%) complained of moderate to severe types. The most common coping mechanisms were antihistamines (1649; 64.66%) and herbal hot liquids (185). (7.25%). Conclusion: This study examined the patterns, illness features, and related variables of self-reported AR in Cumilla, Bangladesh. Younger age groups and obese individuals who have reported chronic forms of AR should be given special consideration. Males reported more chronic and severe cases of AR. Central Medical College Journal Vol 7 No 2 July 2023 Page: 97-107

Dear Linguistic Enthusiasts and Scholars, It is with great pleasure that we present this year’s summer issue of the scientific journal of Acta Linguistica Asiatica. With it, we embark on a journey to explore the rich and diverse linguistic tapestry of the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean languages, delving into their contemporary, pedagogical, historical, and other significance. We extend our heartfelt gratitude to the authors, reviewers, and editorial team whose unwavering commitment has made this journal possible. It is our hope that the ALA journal will continue to serve as a platform to foster intellectual exchange and contribute to the advancement of linguistic knowledge in this dynamic and ever-evolving field. This issue offers 4 research articles and one book review. It opens with the article “Distant Co-occurrence Patterns of Connectives: a Corpus Study of Formulaicity in Japanese” written by Andrej BEKEŠ, Bor HODOŠČEK, NISHINA Kikuko, and ABEKAWA Takeshi. In the article, the authors examined two-item and multi-item distant co-occurrence patterns of connectives in written Japanese using corpus research methods. The analysis shows these patterns contribute to discourse development and prediction, resembling Bourdieu’s habitus. In the following article “Teaching Both Simplified and Traditional Characters to Learners of Chinese as L2”, LI Xiao examined Chinese character acquisition in second language learning. It discusses different approaches - prioritizing simplified or traditional characters, teaching both together, or delaying character learning. Results show that most learners prefer simplified characters, some equally acquired both, while fewer prefer traditional characters. Text comprehension is better with characters than with Hanyu Pinyin. The article “Exclamation in Late Archaic Chinese” by WANG Aiqing delved into exclamations in Late Archaic Chinese (LAC), which consist of sentence exclamations and exclamatives. Sentence exclamations assert propositions with or without surprise. The author proposes that exclamatives with degree adverbials he and heqi do not count as true exclamatives in LAC. The last research article in this issue, contributed by Klaudija LUKMAN and RYU Hyeonsook is entitled “Korean Honorifics in Flux: a Case Study of Seoul National University LEI Textbooks”. By examining Korean language textbooks (2000-2019), this research showed the link between society and politeness styles. Notable shifts reveal the replacement of formal hasipsioche with polite haeyoche, reflecting changes in Korean culture and society. Last but not least, Nina GOLOB reviewed the book “Uvod u znanost o japanskom jeziku: Osnovna obilježja, glasovni sustav i leksički slojevi.” Its primary contribution lies in its methodical exploration of diverse facets of the Japanese language and the accomplishments of linguistic research related to it, all while considering the perspective of Croatian and other Slavic languages. The book is ideal for Croatian-speaking Japanese students and linguistics enthusiasts. At this point, it is worth mentioning that in this era of rapid technological advancement, we wish to highlight the significant influence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on linguistic studies. The emergence of AI has brought about a revolution in our methodologies, granting us the capability to analyze extensive linguistic data in real-time and fostering cross-linguistic collaborations with the aid of language translation tools. While we appreciate the immense potential that AI offers, we must tread carefully, striking a balance between leveraging AI’s potential and preserving the essence of human-driven analysis. Ethical considerations surrounding AI integration also deserve our attention. Editors and Editorial board wish the regular and new readers of the ALA journal a pleasant read full of inspiration, and a rise of new research ideas inspired by these papers. Editors

The industrial development era 4.0, many threats lurk children in the form of bad influence through books, videos, or other media and become a challenge for parents and teachers. Gender education and the introduction of personal identity are important given early on. This study aims to determine the effect of teacher knowledge on the implementation of gender education in early childhood. This research uses quantitative survey research methods with a simple linear regression design for data analysis. The respondents were 34 early childhood education teachers. The results show the data with the conclusion that the calculated value> t table and p-value (sig) of 0.001 (<0.05) which means that there is a significant influence on teacher knowledge about early childhood gender education. Research suggests about how to improve gender education in early childhood education and create learning modules for early childhood teacher guidance. Keywords: Early gender education, Teacher knowledge about gender education References: Adoniou, M. (2015). Teacher knowledge: a complex tapestry. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 43(2), 99–116. https://doi.org/10.1080/1359866X.2014.932330 Awaji M, A. K. (2016). Analysis of workrelated injuries among health care workers in armed forces hospi-tal southern region, kingdom of saudi arabia. Br J Med Med Res., 15(4). Azwar, S. (2010). Sikap Manusia: Teori dan Pengukurannya Edisi 2. Yogyakarta: Pustaka Pelajar. Chapman, R. (2016). A case study of gendered play in preschools: how early childhood educators’ perceptions of gender influence children’s play. Early Child Development and Care, 186(8), 1271–1284. https://doi.org/10.1080/03004430.2015.1089435 Cherney, I. D., & Dempsey, J. (2010). Young children’s classification, stereotyping and play behaviour for gender neutral and ambiguous toys. 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Scholarly efforts to understand the use of social media during disasters have grown over the past decade, thanks to widely available data and powerful analytical tools. These efforts occurred in several academic fields, including disaster management, public administration, computer science, communications, and medicine. While such efforts have created a rich tapestry of perspectives, the ever-growing body of literature has become difficult to navigate. This article tackles this issue by painting a broad picture of the past, present, and future of the literature by analyzing metadata of 1,414 articles published on this subject. The results identify five important points. First, the literature on the use of social media during disasters has grown very rapidly in the past decade, but it is approaching a maturation point. Second, the literature is interdisciplinary in nature, and with the exception of medical journals, journals from different disciplines frequently cite each other. Third, the interdisciplinary nature of the literature comes from its intellectual roots. Fourth, the topography of the literature consists of a small number of core journals that publish a significant number of articles and a large number of journals in the periphery that occasionally publish relevant articles. Finally, the article discusses the challenges facing the future of the literature and makes suggestions.

Elementary general music teachers have differing perspectives on the meaning and value of assessment, and few studies have examined how the results of assessment are applied in the classroom. In this case study, I investigated how one elementary general music teacher used information from assessments to individualize instruction. Over the course of seven weeks of observation, think-alouds, interviews, and reading the teacher’s journals, I discovered that my guiding questions had implied a simplistic, linear relationship of assessment and differentiation of instruction—that assessment led to individualization. Rather than the direct relationship my questions anticipated, Ms. Stevens’ music teaching was more like a tapestry that included nearly omnipresent threads of assessment and individualized instruction—threads that were often so interwoven as to be somewhat indistinguishable. This article describes the reciprocal, spiraling, intertwined nature of individualized assessment, teaching, and learning in Ms. Stevens’ classroom. I also discuss the related emergent themes of normalizing independent musicking and structuring open-response activities, which were impacted and undergirded by Ms. Stevens’ beliefs regarding the musicality of all children and the purpose of music education.

Purpose: The study aims to investigate the evolution of digital accounting and accounting information systems (AIS) in the Modern Business Landscape through a qualitative examination of the existing literature. Research Design and Methodology: Employing a systematic review approach, the research examines academic journals, books, and conference proceedings relevant to digital accounting and AIS. The selection criteria focus on publication credibility, relevance, and recency, as well as the contributions to theoretical and empirical knowledge. Data collection integrates searching, screening, and supplementary techniques such as content analysis, citation analysis, and bibliometric analysis. Qualitative methods like coding, categorization, and thematic analysis are used to dissect and identify prevalent themes and theoretical frameworks within the literature. Findings and Discussion: The findings reveal a rich tapestry of historical progression, technological advancements, and organizational implications of digital accounting and AIS. From the automation of routine tasks to the integration of advanced analytics and implications for workforce dynamics, digital accounting emerges as a transformative force shaping organizational practices and strategic decision-making. Implications: The study underscores the foundational role of technology in shaping the trajectory of digital accounting, with implications for efficiency, accuracy, transparency, and strategic planning within organizations.

Javanese holds a central place in the rich tapestry of Indonesian culture, and its significance extends far beyond mere linguistic communication. Its historical roots, role in art and tradition, importance in shaping regional and national identities, and contribution to the nation's literary heritage make it a language of immense significance in Indonesian culture, which needs to be preserved and passed down to future generations. Javanese language revitalization efforts by utilizing digital technology, such as websites, applications, and social media, have become effective as they are easily accessible and engaging. It empowers indigenous communities to take control of their own preservation efforts while connecting them with a global network of supporters and resources. This literature study aims to describe Javanese language preservation in the digital age. Data is obtained from various sources of journals, books, documentation, and the internet. The result of this study is that digital learning serves as a dynamic and inclusive tool to preserve the Javanese language and culture, making it more accessible, engaging, and customizable to the needs and preferences of a diverse and digitally connected audience. The digital age has opened up exciting opportunities to not only explore this rich heritage but also contribute to its preservation.

Purpose: The main objective of this study was to explore the role of climate policy in international relations. Methodology: The study adopted a desktop research methodology. Desk research refers to secondary data or that which can be collected without fieldwork. Desk research is basically involved in collecting data from existing resources hence it is often considered a low cost technique as compared to field research, as the main cost is involved in executive’s time, telephone charges and directories. Thus, the study relied on already published studies, reports and statistics. This secondary data was easily accessed through the online journals and library. Findings: The findings revealed that there exists a contextual and methodological gap relating to climate policy and geopolitics. Preliminary empirical review revealed that climate diplomacy and geopolitics are inextricably linked in the 21st century, with climate policy playing a central role in shaping international relations. The urgency of addressing climate change has forced nations to collaborate and confront shared challenges, while also introducing new dimensions of competition and complexity. Non-state actors, climate justice considerations, and the evolving global energy landscape all contribute to the intricate tapestry of climate diplomacy. The future of international relations will depend, to a large extent, on how effectively nations navigate these challenges and seize the opportunities presented by climate action to build a more sustainable and equitable world. Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: Realism theory, Complex Interdependence theory and the Regime theory may be used to anchor future studies on climate policy. The study recommended promotion of multilateralism, incorporation of climate into foreign policy, supporting vulnerable nations, engagement of non-state actors and incorporation of climate security.

This study summarises the profound insights from the bibliometric analysis of educational spirituality research. The study examines spiritual research from 2005 to 2023 to understand its complex dynamics and patterns. This research quantifies and reveals trends to illuminate the multifaceted growth of spirituality across disciplines and the collaborative efforts, influential authors, and publishing entities that have advanced it. This study uses bibliometric analysis to provide a nuanced view of the field's current state, its relationships with related concepts, and future directions. The study highlights the rise in spirituality research, especially in education, during COVID-19. This trajectory shows the field's evolution and relevance to modern challenges. Citations show the research's scholarly impact in distinct patterns of acknowledgment. Visualizing complex co-authorship networks with VOSviewer software reveals collaborative dynamics and diverse research directions. Spirituality research is interdisciplinary, as evidenced by its publication in various journals and publishers. This research engages 116 nations, demonstrating its global and interconnected nature. Citation analysis shows scholarly recognition across the study's findings. The collaborative nature of academic research is reflected in Web of Science data's panoramic view of research institutions' contributions. Additionally, citation analysis reveals seminal references that have shaped spirituality research discourse. The Web of Science framework's subject categories show spirituality research's adaptability and interdisciplinary nature. The study concludes with a deep understanding of the research landscape, defined by an intricate interplay of clusters that vividly depict spirituality research's reach across diverse human dimensions. These clusters demonstrate spirituality's impact on personal development, environmental awareness, emotional well-being, healthcare, and more, weaving a tapestry of spirituality research's importance across fields.

This paper explores the deep-rooted factors that have shaped multi-ethnic religious, socio-political, and government politics in Nigeria. Nigeria, being a diverse country with hundreds of ethnic groups and a blend of various religions, has experienced complex dynamics that have influenced its contemporary political landscape. This analysis aims to shed light on the historical, socio-cultural, and economic factors that have contributed to the current state of multi-ethnic politics in the country. The process of colonization and subsequent independence marked a critical turning point in Nigeria’s political evolution. The amalgamation of diverse ethnic groups by the British colonial authorities created a complex tapestry of cultural, social, and political identities. These diverse ethnic groups, each with their own cultural heritage and religious beliefs, competed for resources, socio-political power, and representation within the government. Religion has played a significant role in shaping Nigeria’s politics. The historical introduction of Islam and Christianity by foreign missionaries further deepened these divisions, as each religion gained its own following and exerted influence in different regions of the country. The intersection of religious beliefs with political ideologies and aspirations has given rise to unique political dynamics and challenges in Nigeria. Socio-economic factors have also contributed to Nigeria’s multi-ethnic political landscape. Ethnicity-based distribution of resources, economic inequalities, and uneven development across regions have fueled grievances and tensions between different ethnic groups. These inequalities have influenced the allocation of political power, government policies, and resource distribution, thereby affecting inter-ethnic relationships and political dynamics. Furthermore, the structure and operations of the Nigerian government have played a crucial role in shaping contemporary politics. The transition from military rule to democracy, although a positive step, has not entirely eradicated the legacy of authoritarianism on Nigeria’s political system. This legacy has influenced power dynamics, political patronage, and the struggle for control and influence among ethnic and religious groups. In conclusion, the roots of contemporary multi-ethnic religious, socio-political, and government politics in Nigeria can be traced back to historical factors, socio-cultural dynamics, economic disparities, and the structure of governance. Understanding these roots is essential for addressing the challenges associated with diverse ethnic and religious identities, promoting inclusivity, and fostering sustainable political development in Nigeria. A combination of historical research and contemporary ethnographic data was adopted to examine the development of the concept of a multi-ethnic or plural society. Existing literatures from journals was analyze qualitatively. It began by examining the historical roots of the multi-ethnic society, how it was understood in different societies and cultures throughout history. It moved on to examined the concept in a contemporary context, focusing on its application in the modern world. In particular, it explored the challenges and opportunities that a multi-ethnic or plural society presents, as well as the different ways in which it has been implemented in different countries. By delving into the rich tapestry of Nigerian society through qualitative methods, researchers can provide a more comprehensive understanding of the origins of its present-day dynamics.

We are truly honoured to serve as editors for the inaugural issue of the Malaysian Journal of Action Research. Our journal not only aims to showcase the invaluable contributions of Malaysian action researchers but to also warmly welcomes international perspectives. By doing so, we aim to underscore the significant impact of action research on the broader engagement on teacher development and pedagogical innovation. This inaugural issue features a diverse range of contributions, from university academics as well as dedicated school practitioners, hailing not only from Malaysia but also from Ireland. These nine articles span various action research philosophies and methodologies, including keynotes, conversations, interviews, classroom-based action research, and reflective practice. Four articles are written in Bahasa Melayu, thus showcasing the rich tapestry of perspectives specific to the Malaysian context, and neighbouring countries. The first article is written by an invited author, David Coghlan, based on his keynote presentation at ICAR 2022. David describes in depth the evolution of his insider action research framework. He emphasises the importance of the theorising process during this journey, advocating the need for attention to both internal and external data. His central concept, ‘interiority’, refers to the conscious process of self-awareness in our learning journey. His personal experiences led him to challenge traditional views of action research that depict researchers as external agents, emphasising instead the role of insider researchers who lead change from within their organisations. David’s work is a refreshing take on scholarship that emphasises the transformative power of personal inquiry and offers valuable insights for academics and practitioners alike. His narrative serves as an invitation for others to embark on their journey of discovery in the world of research and scholarship. In the second article, we (Sarimah Shaik-Abdullah and Mohd Syafiq Aiman Mat Noor) engage in a dialogue with Jack Whitehead about Living Educational Theory (LET) research. Whitehead presents LET and underlines the role of educators as the instigators of their research. He introduces the concept of ‘living contradiction’ in LET, explaining how differences between one’s values and practices can initiate a process of reflection aimed at achieving consistency. This concept promotes growth and highlights the influence of LET. He also discusses the use of LET in specific cultural contexts, focusing on the Malaysian education system. He notes its potential to contribute to societal progress and manage power dynamics in research. The dialogue ends with a call to action from Jack, emphasising growth, inclusivity, and flourishing. Through this dialogue, we provide insight into LET research, emphasising its potential to shape education and extend its reach. In the third article, we (Mohd Syafiq Aiman Mat Noor and Yoon Sook Jhee) and Muhammad Zulfadhli Kamarudin, also drew inspiration from Kathryn Herr and Gary Anderson’s keynote presentation at ICAR 2022. Kathryn and Gary describe the dynamic nature of action research as a transformative methodology that stretches across a broad spectrum of disciplines and approaches, and covers various positions, from full insider to complete outsider. They also underscore the pivotal role of credibility, trustworthiness, and validity in action research, emphasising its robustness amidst widespread scepticism. They acknowledge the hurdles that action researchers encounter, such as its marginalisation within academic and organisational environments. Nevertheless, they passionately advocate for its undeniable value in tackling real-world dilemmas, amplifying marginalised voices, and propelling substantial change. Their discussion emerge as a compelling call to action. Despite the challenges, the capacity for action research to effectuate positive transformation amplifies its perpetual relevance. Kathryn and Gary’s inspiring words encourage academics, practitioners, and community members to harness the power of this dynamic approach, thereby fostering a more inclusive and equitable terrain of knowledge and practice. The fourth article, written by Mohd Syafiq Aiman Mat Noor and his co-authors, explore action research through the captivating lens of cooking ‘rendang’. Drawing on their personal and professional experiences in the Malaysian context, they highlight commonalities between rendang and action research, focusing on three shared tenets: contextuality, continuity and quality. In their comparison, they demonstrate how the cultural richness and unique preparation methods of rendang mirror the complexity, adaptability, and meticulousness inherent in action research methodologies. By shedding light on the importance of context, iterative learning, and a commitment to quality, they emphasise the need for researchers to view action research as a journey of continuous improvement and exploration. Mohd Syafiq Aiman and his co-authors also highlight the potential for action research to have impacts that extend beyond the immediate participants and influence larger communities and sectors. Thus, the preparation of rendang serves as a potent metaphor for understanding the intricate world of action research. Selvamalar Selvarajan provides a profound exploration of the challenges involved in English language instruction in the fifth article. She presents three vignettes from the Malaysian polytechnic education context, vividly depicting dilemmas related to student proficiency, motivation for English learning, and the dynamics of online student engagement. The narrative highlights the need for a balance between creating a ‘fun’ learning environment and achieving academic objectives. She emphasises the importance of adaptability, encouraging educators to consider innovative teaching methods to better engage students. Despite the challenges posed by the online learning environment, the narrative highlights the transformative potential of these dilemmas. Selvamalar advocates for continuous reflection and adaptation in teaching methodologies to cater for evolving learning needs and contexts. The narrative serves as a testament to the dynamic, ever-evolving nature of teaching. As mentioned earlier, this issue includes contributions from authors who have submitted their articles in Bahasa Melayu. Among the four contributions written in Bahasa Melayu is the sixth article by Julianah Ahmad and Mohd Syafiq Aiman Mat Noor explore the challenges deaf pupils face and suggest instructional strategies to facilitate their learning using a classroom-based action research methodology. They introduce the concept of ‘funds of identity’, which incorporates pupils’ lived experiences into learning. This approach aims to create meaningful learning materials, thus improving deaf pupils’ reading skills. The authors emphasise empathy in teaching and advocate for materials reflective of pupils’ abilities and interests. They highlight the effectiveness of face-to-face and group learning settings over individual and virtual settings for deaf pupils. Julianah and Mohd Syafiq Aiman Mat Noor suggest further exploration of a wider range of identity funds to improve educational materials for deaf pupils. The article provides insights into the unique needs of deaf pupils and presents strategies for a more effective learning environment. In the seventh article, Nor Naimmah Othman and her co-authors explore the ‘sight word’ approach in special education, focusing on pupils with Down Syndrome. The study is rooted in a classroom-based action research methodology, emphasising the need for individualised teaching strategies. The authors present the unique challenges that pupils with Down Syndrome face and discuss how the sight word approach can aid them. Through the presentation of three vignettes, they illustrate the process by which the sight word approach can support students with Down Syndrome in developing their reading skills. Naimmah and her co-authors stress the importance of patience, creativity, and understanding pupils’ needs. The research contributes to special education practices and discusses the role of action research in education. Through their approach, they demonstrate the need to refine teaching methods to cater to the diverse needs of pupils. The improvements observed in the pupils’ learning experiences validate their approach. The eight article in this issue, penned by Daniel Lu Yew Ching and his co-author, explores the integration of mobile learning (M-Learning) into a communication skills course during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their study highlights the role of M-Learning in maintaining educational continuity among a peer-mentoring group (guidance and counselling). They present a classroom-based action research study in a secondary school context in Sarawak, Malaysia, detailing the use of a WhatsApp group, Google Forms, and TikTok as part of the course. The action research process was adapted in their study, so that it consisted of three main phases: reflection, action, and assessment. Daniel and his co-author argue that the flexible nature of M-Learning enhances the educational experience and promotes communication skills and peer mentorship. This study emphasises the potential of M-Learning as an engaging platform for education, particularly in challenging times, and invites educators to explore innovative digital strategies. Zainoriza Zainun shares her personal journey as a Special Education Teacher in Perak, Malaysia during the period of Home-based Teaching and Learning (PdPR) in the final article of this issue. Throughout this experience, she encountered various dilemmas, particularly when it came to parents’ involvement as facilitators and intermediaries in assessing their children's skill tasks. It became evident to her that effective and consistent communication, as well as nurturing relationships among pupils, parents, and teachers, play a pivotal role in implementing meaningful PdPR. Furthermore, the creation of a comprehensive PdPR manual for parents is indispensable, emphasising the importance of consulting them regarding their roles and responsibilities in supporting their children’s assignments at home. This valuable experience serves as a profound lesson for teachers who will be implementing PdPR and assigning homework to their pupils in the future. This issue presents a wide array of articles that explore various facets of action research, teaching, and learning. From innovative frameworks, philosophies and methodologies in action research to tackling challenges in language instruction, special education, and guidance and counselling, each article offers valuable insights and practical strategies applicable to educators, researchers and practitioners. The inclusion of contributions in Bahasa Melayu further enriches the discourse, underscoring the importance of cultural context in educational practices within Malaysia. These articles serve as a reminder of education’s transformative potential, emphasising the need for personalised approaches and ongoing reflection and adaptation. Overall, this issue stands as a testament to the continuous pursuit of knowledge and improvement in education, with the hope of contributing to the advancement of action research scholarship in Malaysia and beyond.

Tarek pukat is the activity of fishing communities in catching fish using pukat (nets) by being ditarek (pulled). Tarek pukat activity in modern times is experiencing extinction, the cause is tiger trawling. The tiger trawl has triggered a shift in the value of the Tarek pukat activity. Tarek pukat activity for the people of Aceh has become part of them and their lives. This activity is present because of the results of the thinking of previous people by doing it together and giving birth to interactions between fellow fishing communities. The phenomenon of Tarek pukat activity is explored using a symbolic expression approach. Symbolic expression is a way to express the phenomenon of Tarek pukat activities in works of art by expressing through pouring symbols as a form of value to be presented. The purpose of this creation is to convey messages and provide self-awareness for the general public and the people of Aceh itself. The methods in the creation of this artwork are: exploration, design in the form of experiments, materials, tools, techniques, and realization. The medium used is surian wood, meranti wood, and jackfruit wood. Techniques are scroll and intarsia. The final stage of the creation of finishing works using melamine system, the achievement of the shape and final result of a work can be influenced by the finishing results.The work created by the artist is a two-dimensional work of art in the form of decorative artwork placed on the wall with the title of the work: "Kulet Bak Meucheue Tuboh" (like the skin becomes the body protector), and "Musafe La'ot" (sea traveler). The artworks presented through this symbolic expression give birth to a new form of activities with the message that the artist wants to convey to the Tarek pukat activity seen today. With the presence of this artwork, it is hoped that it willbe able to become an awareness for the people of Aceh to respond to the results of keunebah indatu (ancestral heritage), so that it can trigger the enthusiasm of the community to be preserved again. The birth of this artwork certainly presents meanings and values that are considered necessary to be conveyed by the author.Keywords: tarek pukat, symbolic expression, intarsia. AbstrakTarek pukat adalah aktivitas masyarakat nelayan dalam menangkap ikan menggunakan pukat (jala/jaring) dengan cara ditarek (ditarik). Aktivitas tarek pukat pada saat zaman modern ini mengalami kepunahan, penyebabnya adalah pukat harimau. Pukat harimau menjadi pemicu terjadinya pergeseran nilai yang ada dalam aktivitas tarek pukat tersebut. Aktivitas tarek pukat bagi masyarakat Aceh sudah menjadi bagian dari mereka dan kehidupannya. Aktivitas ini hadir karena hasil olah pikir orang terdahulu dengan melakukan secara bersama-sama dan melahirkan interaksi-interaksi antar sesama masyarakat nelayan. Fenomena aktivitas tarek pukat digarap menggunakan pendekatan ekspresi simbolik. Ekspresi simbolik menjadi suatu cara untuk menuangkan fenomena aktivitas tarek pukat dalam karya seni dengan cara diekspresikan melalui penuangan simbol-simbol sebagai wujud dari nilai yang mau dihadirkan. Tujuan dari penciptaan ini adalah untuk upaya pesan dan memberi kesadaran diri bagi masyarakat umum maupun masyarakat Aceh sendiri. Metode dalam penciptaan karya seni ini yaitu: eksplorasi, perancangan berupa eksperimen, bahan, alat, teknik, dan perwujudan. Medium yang digunakan berupa kayu surian, kayu meranti, dan kayu nangka. Teknik berupa scroll, dan intarsia. Tahap akhir penciptaan karya finishing menggunakan melamine system, pencapaian bentuk dan hasil akhir dari sebuah karya dapat dipengaruhi dari hasil finishing. Hasil karya yang diciptakan pengkarya merupakan karya seni dua dimensi berupa karya seni dekoratif yang ditempatkan pada dinding dengan judul karya: “Kulet Bak Meucheue Tuboh” (ibarat kulit menjadi pelindung badan), dan “Musafe La’ot” (musafir lautan). Karya seni yang dihadirkan melalui ekspresi simbolik ini melahirkan suatu bentuk aktivitas-aktivitas yang baru dengan isian pesan yang ingin disampaikan oleh pengkarya terhadap aktivitas tarek pukat yang terlihat hari ini. Dengan hadirnya karya seni ini, diharapkan mampu menjadi kesadaran bagi masyarakat Aceh agar menyikapi hasil keunebah indatu (peninggalan leluhur), sehingga bisa memicu semangat masyarakat untuk dilestarikan kembali. Lahirnya karya seni ini tentunya menghadirkan makna-makna serta nilai yang dianggap perlu disampaikan oleh pengkarya.Kata Kunci: tarek pukat, ekspresi simbolik, intarsia.Authors:Fitria : Institut Seni Indonesia PadangpanjangAsril : Institut Seni Indonesia PadangpanjangUbai Dillah Al Anshori : Universitas Muhammadiyah Sumatera Utara References:Apriliana, A., Akmal, A., & Yulika, F. (2021). Penciptaan Kriya Tekstil Tengkuluk Batik Kumbuah. Gorga: Jurnal Seni Rupa, 10(2), 323-343.Ardianti, S. R. (2021). Pemanfaatan Teknik Tapestri Pada Rompi Dengan Bahan Renda.Gorga: Jurnal Seni Rupa, 10(2), 486-494.Dharsono, S. K. (2016). Kreasi Artistik: Perjumpaan Tradisi Modern dalam Paradigma Kekaryaan Seni. Jaten Karanganyar: Citra Sain.Dharsono, S. K. (2017). Seni Rupa Modern. Bandung: Rekayasa Sains.Fitriani. (2017). Nelayan Sebagai Ide Penciptaan Tari Tarek Pukat Dalam Kajian Interaksi Simbolik. Imaji, 15(2), 179-188.Gustami, S. P. (2007). Butir-Butir Mutiara Estetika Timur: Ide Dasar Penciptaan Seni Kriya Indonesia. Yogyakarta: Prasista.Laksono, M. A., & Mubarat, H. (2022). Ekspresi Bejana Perunggu Kerinci Sebagai Penghias Interior. Melayu Arts and Performance Journal, 5(2), 140-151.Saputra, M. I., & Asril, A. (2022). Ekspresi Plak Pleng Pada Interior Ruang Tamu: Penciptaan Kriya dengan Pendekatan Eksplorasi Atas Ornamen Kerajaan Lamuri. Bercadik: Jurnal Pengkajian dan Penciptaan Seni, 5(2), 134-144.Wardoyo, S., Wulandari, T., Guntur, G., Dharsono, D., & Zulkarnain, Z. (2021). Penciptaan Selendang Batik Sri Kuncoro Khas Budaya Samin Margomulyo Bojonegoro. Gorga: Jurnal Seni Rupa, 10(2), 407-414.Yulhanis, Y. (2019). Tradisi Tarek pukat Dalam Masyarakat Aceh. Aceh: Bulletin Haba No. 19.

The events in "Sanskaar" by Indira Goswami take place in Pitambor's rural environment, creating a tapestry of hardships, disputes, and unexpected salvation. This journal explores the complexities of caste, gender, and cultural standards in an effort to dig into the subaltern and feminist aspects present in the story. While Pitambor struggles with his personal issues, the narrative reveals Damayanti's strength as a widow defying social norms. This diary seeks to highlight the feminist undertones that influence the characters' fates and unearth the subaltern voices inside the story through a close examination of their interactions.

In the creation of this volume, we find the culmination of the International Conference on Materials Engineering, Materials Chemistry, and Materials Physics (MECAP-2023), a meticulously orchestrated event by the Nanotechnology Research Centre at Sagi Rama Krishnam Raju Engineering College, Bhimavaram, India, spanning from September 25 to 26, 2023. The primary objective of the conference was to forge a vibrant platform for the convergence of experts, scholars, and students, fostering the exchange of research ideas and technological advancements. With a distinct emphasis on the cutting-edge trends and future horizons in Material Engineering and Materials Science, the conference aimed to stimulate intellectual discourse and collaboration. A pivotal role in this intellectual tapestry was played by the keynote speeches, where luminaries from esteemed institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), San Sebastian University in Chile, Northwestern Polytechnical University in China, and New York University in Abu Dhabi, showcased their profound contributions. Their presentations not only illuminated significant advancements in Material Engineering and Materials Science but also ignited fervent discussions that reverberated through both conference sessions and breaks, creating an atmosphere of dynamic exchange and exploration of key topics within the field. The meticulously curated proceedings of MECAP-2023 encompass a collection of accepted papers that domains such as Materials Engineering, Materials Chemistry, and Materials Physics. Subjected to a rigorous peer review process, these papers now grace the pages of this volume, adhering to the professional standards upheld by the Journal of Physics: Conference Series. Our heartfelt appreciation extends to the committed members of the Conference Advisory Committee, whose unwavering support and insightful suggestions have played an instrumental role in ensuring the resounding success of the conference. Gratitude is also extended to the keynote speakers, whose invaluable contributions and profound ideas have significantly enriched the conference’s success. Finally, we extend our acknowledgment to the Journal of Physics: Conference Series team for their meticulous efforts, guiding us through every stage of the publication process. List of Advisory Committee, Organizing Committee are available in the Pdf.

In this first issue of Volume 33, we delve into the rich tapestry of linguistic diversity and academic discourse, showcasing a range of studies that shed light on various facets of language use, maintenance, and communication. The collection of articles in this issue offers valuable insights into the ever-evolving world of language. The first article in our lineup, Language Shift and Maintenance: A Case Study of the Telugu Community in Bagan Datoh, Perak (Malaysia), takes us to Bagan Datoh, Perak, where the Telugu language, despite being a minority language in Malaysia, continues to thrive in specific domains. This case study illuminates the dynamics of language choice among different generations and provides hope for the revitalization of Telugu among the younger generation. The second article, Metadiscourse Markers in Abstracts of Linguistics and Literature Research Articles from Scopus-Indexed Journals, shifts our focus to the world of academic writing, specifically the use of metadiscourse markers in abstracts. It highlights the crucial role these markers play in structuring and presenting research arguments. The comparative analysis between linguistics and literature abstracts provides valuable insights into disciplinary differences in the use of these markers. Our third article, An Exploratory Analysis of Linking Adverbials Used by Filipino, Pakistani, and Thai Writers of English, undertakes a contrastive interlanguage analysis, shedding light on how students from the Philippines, Pakistan, and Thailand use linking adverbials in their English academic writing. The importance of understanding the distinct production tendencies of various English varieties is emphasised in this article. Turning to a sensitive topic in the Malaysian context, the fourth article, Female Circumcision in Malaysia: Challenges and Lessons Learned in Using Focus Groups through an NGO-Academia Collaboration, explores female circumcision and the challenges faced in conducting research on this subject. It highlights the collaborative efforts between academia and a local NGO, offering valuable insights into data collection via focus group discussions. The fifth article, Prosodic Marking of New and Given Information in English and Mandarin by Chinese Speakers, ventures into the realm of prosody and its impact on language comprehension. Focusing on Chinese English as a Foreign Language learners, it investigates how Mandarin influences the prosodic marking of new and given information in English, shedding light on potential areas of misunderstanding. Our final article, Privacy Policy Pop-up: A Genre Analysis of Journal Websites’ HTTP Cookies, takes a dive into the world of online privacy and transparency. It analyses the communication of transparency through HTTP cookies on academic journal websites, uncovering the rhetorical strategies employed to inform users about data privacy. In this diverse collection of articles, we invite readers to explore the multifaceted world of language and academic discourse. Each study offers unique insights into the complexities of communication and the richness of linguistic diversity. We hope this issue serves as a valuable resource for scholars, researchers, and language enthusiasts alike, encouraging further exploration and understanding of these vital aspects of our academic and cultural landscape. Last but not least, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to all the contributors, reviewers and readers of this Journal. My special thanks also go to all the members of the Editorial Board and Advisory Board for their significant contributions.

Experimental film literature often neglects the important role played by sound design as a key aspect within feminist film practice. Indeed, the utilization of audio techniques, such as voice-over, polyphony, and sonic collage, can powerfully challenge the scopophilic fetishism placed upon images of women. In order to expand the scholarly conversation, I focus on an exemplary found-footage film, The Dream Screen, 1986, by Stephanie Beroes. The 45-minute, 16mm film presents appropriated and re-edited footage of LuLu (Louise Brooks) from G. W. Pabst’s silent film Pandora’s Box. As we see Lulu in familiar scenarios from the original film, the audience also bears witness to a rich tapestry of quotations on the soundtrack, all spoken by different women. These quotations span 1970s feminist theory, Greek mythology, R&B song lyrics, personal diary entries, and Brooks’ own autobiography, giving new meaning and depth to Lulu’s character. I argue that Beroes’ mobilization of these disparate voices and discourses seeks to ‘undo’ (to borrow William Wees’ term) the misogyny of Pabst’s original depiction of femininity. In turn, her film refashions Lulu/Louise Brooks into a punk-feminist icon of resistance, while pointing to ways that women artists might recover images and sounds from and of their own experience. Article received: December 28, 2017; Article accepted: January 10, 2018; Published online: April 15, 2018; Original scholarly paper How to cite this article: Ogrodnik, Ben. "Listening to the ‘Multi-Voiced’ Feminist Film: Aspects of Voice-over, Female Stardom, and Audio-Visual Pleasure in Stephanie Beroes’ The Dream Screen (1986)." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 15 (2018): . doi: 10.25038/am.v0i15.231

06–743Amador moreno, Carolina, stephanie o'riordan & angela chambers (U de Extremadura, Spain; camador@unex.es), Integrating a corpus of classroom discourse in language teacher education: The case of discourse markers. ReCALL (Cambridge University Press) 18.1 (2006), 83–104.06–744Arnold, Ewen (U Leeds, UK; mahakand@omantel.net.om), Assessing the quality of mentoring: Sinking or learning to swim?ELT Journal (Oxford University Press) 60.2 (2006), 117–124.06–745Cary, Lisa J. & Stuart Reifel (U Texas-Austin, USA), Cinematic landscapes of teaching: Lessons from a narrative of classic film, Action in Teacher Education (Association of Teacher Educators) 27.3 (2005), 95–109.06–746Commins, Nancy L. & Ofelia B. Miramontes (U Colorado-Boulder, USA), Addressing linguistic diversity from the outset. Journal of Teacher Education (Sage) 57.3 (2006), 240–246.06–747Donnelly, Anna M. (Washington College, USA), Let me show you my portfolio! Demonstrating competence through peer interviews. Action in Teacher Education (Association of Teacher Educators) 27.3 (2005), 55–63.06–748Ellis, Elizabeth Margaret (U New England, Australia; liz.ellis@une.edu.au), Language learning experience as a contributor to ESOL teacher cognition. TESL-EJ (http://www.tesl-ej.org) 10.1 (2006), 26 pp.06–749Ezer, Hanna (Levinsky College of Education, Israel), Shoshy Millet & Dorit Pakin, Multicultural perspectives in the curricula of two colleges of education in Israel: ‘The curriculum is a cruel mirror of our society’. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice (Routledge/Taylor & Francis) 12.4 (2006), 391–406.06–750Farrel, Thomas (Brock U, Canada; tfarrell@brocku.ca), The first year of language teaching: Imposing order. System (Elsevier) 34.2 (2006), 211–221.06–751Garrido, Cecilia & Inma Álvarez (The Open U, UK), Language teacher education for intercultural understanding. European Journal of Teacher Education (Routledge/Taylor & Francis) 29.2 (2006), 163–179.06–752Goker, Suleyman Davut (Eastern Mediterranean U, Turkey; suleyman.goker@emu.edu.tr), Impact of peer coaching on self-efficacy and instructional skills in TEFL teacher education. System (Elsevier) 34.2 (2006), 239–254.06–753Grant, Carl A. (U Wisconsin-Madison, USA) & Maureen Gillette, A candid talk to teacher educators about effectively preparing teachers who can teach everyone's children. Journal of Teacher Education (Sage) 57.3 (2006), 292–299.06–754Jones, Phyllis (U South Florida, USA; pjones@banshee.sar.usf.edu), Elizabeth West & Dana Stevens, Nurturing moments of transformation in teachers – Comparative perspectives on the challenges of professional development. British Journal of Special Education (Blackwell) 33.2 (2006), 82–90.06–755Kupetz, Rita & Birgit zeigenmeyer (U Hannover, Germany; Rita.Kupetz@anglistik.uni-hannover.de), Flexible learning activities fostering autonomy in teaching training. ReCALL (Cambridge University Press) 18.1 (2006), 63–82.06–756Kwan, Tammy & Francis Lopez-Real (U Hong Kong, China), Mentors' perceptions of their roles in mentoring student teachers. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education (Routledge/Taylor & Francis) 33.3 (2005), 275–287.06–757Lenski, Susan Davis (Portland State U, USA), Kathleen Crawford, Thomas Crumpler & Corsandra Stallworth, Preparing pre-service teachers in a diverse world. Action in Teacher Education (Association of Teacher Educators) 27.3 (2005), 3–12.06–758Martin, Andrew J. (U Western Sydney, Australia), The relationship between teachers' perceptions of student motivation and engagement and teachers' enjoyment of and confidence in teaching. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education (Routledge/Taylor & Francis) 34.1 (2006), 73–93.06–759Mayer, Diane (U California, USA), The changing face of the Australian teaching profession: New generations and new ways of working and learning. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education (Routledge/Taylor & Francis) 34.1 (2006), 57–71.06–760McCormack, Ann, Jennifer Gore & Kaye Thomas (U Newcastle, Australia), Early career teacher professional learning. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education (Routledge/Taylor & Francis) 34.1 (2006), 95–113.06–761Olson, Susan J. & Carol Werhan (U Akron, USA), Teacher preparation via on-line learning: A growing alternative for many. Action in Teacher Education (Association of Teacher Educators) 27.3 (2005), 76–84.06–762Otero, Valerie K. (U Colorado-Boulder, USA), Moving beyond the ‘get it or don't’ conception of formative assessment. Journal of Teacher Education (Sage) 57.3 (2006), 240–246.06–763Phelan, Anne M. (U British Columbia, Canada), Russell Sawa, Constance Barlow, Deborah Hurlock, Katherine Irvine, Gayla Rogers & Florence Myrick, Violence and subjectivity in teacher education. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education (Routledge/Taylor & Francis) 34.2 (2006), 161–179.06–764Rantz, Frédérique (Kildare Education Centre, Ireland), Exploring intercultural awareness in the primary modern language classroom: The potential of the new model of European language portfolio developed by the Irish Modern Languages in Primary Schools Initiative (MLPSI). Language and International Communication (Multilingual Matters) 5.3&4 (2005), 209–221.06–765Reid, Jo-Anne & Ninetta Santoro (Charles Sturt U, Australia), Cinders in snow? Indigenous teacher identities in formation. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education (Routledge/Taylor & Francis) 34.2 (2006), 143–160.06–766Reis-Jorge, José M. (Instituto Superior de Educação e Ciências, Portugal), Developing teachers' knowledge and skills as researchers: A conceptual framework. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education (Routledge/Taylor & Francis) 33.3 (2005), 303–319.06–767Richardson, Paul W. & Helen M. G. Watt (Monash U, Australia), Who chooses teaching and why? Profiling characteristics and motivations across three Australian universities. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education (Routledge/Taylor & Francis) 34.1 (2006), 27–56.06–768Romano, Molly (U Arizona, USA), Assessing and meeting the needs of pre-service teachers: A programmatic perspective. Action in Teacher Education (Association of Teacher Educators) 27.3 (2005), 40–54.06–769Ruan, Jiening & Sara Ann Beach (U Oklahoma, USA), Using online peer dialogue journaling to promote reflection in elementary pre-service teachers. Action in Teacher Education (Association of Teacher Educators) 27.3 (2005), 64–75.06–770Shaw, Carla Cooper (Northern Illinois U, USA) & Deborah Dobbins Nederhouser, Reel teachers: References for reflection for real teachers. Action in Teacher Education (Association of Teacher Educators) 27.3 (2005), 85–94.06–771Shin, Sarah (U Maryland Baltimore County, USA), Learning to teach writing through tutoring and journal writing. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice (Routledge/Taylor & Francis) 12.3 (2006), 325–345.06–772Smith, Erica (Charles Sturt U, Australia), A rich tapestry: Changing views of teaching and teaching qualifications in the vocational education and training sector. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education (Routledge/Taylor & Francis) 33.3 (2005), 339–351.06–773Smith, Kari & Lilach Lev-Ari (Oranim Academic College of Education, Israel), The place of the practicum in pre-service teacher education: The voice of the students. 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The second issue of Approaches in 2020 sees the world still in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic. Music therapy practitioners, educators, and researchers continue to adapt their practice creatively and develop new ways of working while navigating the challenges posed by the pandemic. What is becoming clear is that many of these changes are not simply temporary measures. Instead, they hold the potential to broaden practice, research, and theory, leading to a re-visioning of how music therapy can be practised, conceptualised, taught, and researched. As this re-visioning is becoming gradually evident (Lawes, 2020; Molyneux et al., 2020; Rizkallah, 2020), we encourage paper submissions to the journal reflecting on the implications of the pandemic for music therapy on local, national, or international level. Although not specific to the pandemic, the contents of this issue of Approaches bring to the fore sociocultural perspectives and key considerations around the role of music therapy in ageing and end-of-life care. These considerations of course may well inform and resonate with our professional and societal responses to COVID-19 too. Kirkwood et al. present a synopsis of a feasibility study of music therapy in palliative care, while Segall explores music therapists’ attitude toward wellness and ageing in relation to training curricula. Both papers link to the underlying theme of the special feature contained in this issue. Edited by Giorgos Tsiris and Enrico Ceccato, this special feature is dedicated to Mediterranean perspectives on dementia and end-of-life care documenting music therapy in eight countries. The different country reports showcase the interplay between culture and practice, and the diverse paths of development that music therapy has followed in the Mediterranean region. Some of these paths fit in more easily with dominant Western narratives of music therapy as a contemporary professional field, while other paths are linked more closely to traditional and, at times, mystical uses of music in healing rituals. The articles by Katušić and Konieczna-Nowak, and by Abdulbaki and Berger – while not part of the special feature – offer equally rich sociocultural perspectives exploring therapeutic boundaries in the clinical practice of Croatian and Polish music therapists, and the provision of music therapy in Syrian refugee host environments respectively. Overall – when taken together with the selection of articles, reports, book reviews and conference reports – this issue outlines a rich tapestry of music therapy practice documenting voices and perspectives some of which may not sit comfortably with the prevailing discourse in the field. This openness to otherness is an ever more important component of the ethos of Approaches while considering the need to explore further how issues of justice, equity, oppression, and marginalisation influence practice and knowledge generation in the field (Norris, 2020; Whitehead-Pleaux & Tan, 2013). In closing, we would like to express our gratitude to three colleagues who are stepping down from our editorial team at the end of this year: Daphne Rickson, Neta Spiro, and Laura Corrigan. Each and every one of them have played a crucial role in the development of the journal. Daphne joined the editorial board in 2013 and three years later she became associate editor and worked diligently with numerous authors and reviewers. Her sensitive, dedicated, and insightful way of working championed the ethos of Approaches and expanded the journal’s reach. Her legacy will continue to influence and inspire our collective work. Equally, Neta’s interdisciplinary expertise has been instrumental in the advancement of our work as a music therapy journal with an explicit commitment to dialogue across different disciplines and professional fields. Lastly, Laura’s contribution expanded beyond her standard role as a language consultant to include the development of the referencing style details on our website and of the journal’s in-house proofreading guide. As we thank each of them, we also warmly welcome our new colleagues who recently joined the editorial team: Saphia Abou-Amer, Jodie Bloska, Konstantina Katostari, Crystal Luk, Elizabeth Mitchell, Kivijärvi Sanna, Indra Selvarajah, and Rachel Swanick. References Lawes, M. (2020). Creating a COVID-19 Guided Imagery and Music (GIM) self-help resource for those with mild to moderate symptoms of the disease. Approaches: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Music Therapy, 1-17. https://approaches.gr/lawes-r20201113/ Molyneux, C., Hardy, T., Lin, Y.-T., McKinnon, K., & Odell-Miller, H. (2020). Together in Sound: Music therapy groups for people with dementia and their companions – moving online in response to a pandemic. Approaches: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Music Therapy, 1-17. https://approaches.gr/molyneux-r20201219/ Norris, M. (2020). A call for radical imagining: Exploring anti-blackness in the music therapy profession. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, 20(3). https://voices.no/index.php/voices/article/view/3167/3081 Rizkallah, M. (2020). The North London Music Therapy Phone Support Service for NHS staff during the COVID-19 pandemic: Α report about the service and its relevance for the music therapy profession. Approaches: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Music Therapy, 1-9. https://approaches.gr/rizkallah-r20201110/ Whitehead-Pleaux, A., & Tan, X. (Eds.). (2013). Cultural intersections in music therapy: Music, health, and the person. Barcelona Publishers.

It is with immense pleasure and excitement that I extend my warmest greetings to you as we embark on a new journey with the latest issue of the International Journal of Pharmacy and Integrated Health Sciences (IJPIHS). This edition holds special significance as it focuses on the critical fields of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Clinical Pharmacy, and Drug Delivery Systems, showcasing their profound impact on healthcare applications. Pharmaceutical Sciences, as a multidisciplinary field, plays a pivotal role in advancing medicine and improving patient outcomes. The relentless pursuit of knowledge in this domain has led to transformative breakthroughs in drug discovery, development, and delivery, positively influencing global healthcare. In this issue, we present a diverse array of research articles, reviews, and perspectives that highlight cutting-edge advancements in pharmaceutical sciences. The journey from the laboratory to the clinic is a long and intricate one, requiring unwavering dedication and collaborative efforts from researchers, pharmacists, clinicians, and regulatory agencies. The rich tapestry of contributions in this issue is a testament to the dedication and hard work of the scientific community. The valuable insights and experiences shared by clinical pharmacy practitioners in this issue underscore the indispensable role they play in promoting safe, effective, and personalized pharmacotherapy. From nanotechnology-based carriers to targeted delivery strategies, advancements in drug delivery have redefined the possibilities of treatment modalities, enhanced therapeutic efficiency and minimized adverse effects. The tireless efforts of researchers in Pharmaceutical Sciences have paved the way for novel drug candidates and therapeutic interventions. Moreover, the close collaboration between researchers and clinical pharmacists ensures that these discoveries are translated into real-world clinical practice, benefiting patients across the globe. As we explore the myriad aspects of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Clinical Pharmacy, and Drug Delivery Systems in this issue, it is essential to reflect on the challenges that lie ahead. From addressing drug resistance and medication errors to ensuring equitable access to cutting-edge treatments, our collective responsibility is to surmount these hurdles and strive for the betterment of healthcare worldwide. As Editor in Chief of IJPIHS, I extend my heartfelt gratitude to all the authors, reviewers, and editorial team members for their unwavering commitment to maintaining the highest standards of scientific integrity. Your dedication to staying informed and sharing knowledge is the driving force behind our pursuit of excellence. In conclusion, I encourage all readers to immerse themselves in the enriching content of this issue, fostering curiosity and inspiring new ideas in the fields of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Integrated Health Sciences. Thank you for being part of this remarkable journey.

In this paper, I focus on disclosures by one participant as enabled by a kind of artistic practice that I term “participation cartography.” By using “participation cartography” as a framework for the analysis of Running Stitch (2006), a piece by Jen Southern (U.K.) and Jen Hamilton (Canada), I demonstrate that disclosures by participants in this practice are to be seen as a form of self-mapping that positions the self in relation to a given performance space. These self-positionings present the self in spatio-temporal terms and by means of performative narratives that re-define the subject from an isolated individual into a participant within an unfolding live process.It is my argument here that most of the participation performances to which the term “participation cartography” may be applied don’t have a mechanism for participants to share reflections about their participation experience embedded in the framework the artists provide. By discussing Running Stitch from some participant’s perspectives—mine included—I demonstrate that if such a sharing mechanism was provided, the participant’s disclosures would enact a poetics of sharing that at once reveals and conceals aspects of the self. “Participation cartography” performances hold the power to generate autobiographical conversations and exchanges. Without these (collective) conversations and exchanges, the disclosures made by participants in and through “participation performances” such as Running Stitch conceal more than what they reveal, shattering thereby the cartographic (self-mapping) power of these practices.Running Stitch (2006)This piece is a performative installation that involves the use of Global Positioning Technology and walking performances by participants in order to produce collaboratively a new kind of “map” or visual-art object, more concretely a tapestry. I experienced it in 2006 in Brighton (UK). It was commissioned by Fabrica, “a gallery promoting the understanding of contemporary art” (see: http://www.fabrica.org.uk/).The following is the description made by the artists of the work on their Website (see: http://www.satellitebureau.net/p8.php):Running Stitch is a 5m x 5m tapestry map, created live during the exhibition by charting the journeys of participants through the city...Visitors to the exhibition took a GPS-enabled mobile phone to track their journeys through the city centre. These walks resulted in individual GPS ‘drawings’ of the visitor’s movements that were then projected live in the exhibition to disclose hidden aspects of the city. Each individual route was sewn, as it happened, into a hanging canvas to form an evolving tapestry that revealed a sense of place and interconnection (see also fig. 1). Figure 1. Image: Jen Southern and Jen Hamilton. Running Stitch and audience members. Fabrica Contemporary Art Gallery, 2006.As the vocabulary used by the artists shows, the work was conceived at that time (2006) as a kind of collaborative map-making process by which previously “hidden aspects of the city” can be disclosed. My interrogation of this practice starts by questioning the assumption that cartography, as illustrated by cases such as this, refers to a physical or geographical space—the city. Through the lens of “participation cartography” I mean to show that that what is being mapped in and through practices such as Running Stitch is not (physical) space but the being-who-moves in space. Rather than the city, it is the multiple subjects-who-move in Brighton’s town centre on a particular day in 2006 and within the frame of this event what is the theme and content of the resulting tapestry and of the disclosures it may contain. Accordingly, the resulting visualisation (the map) is to be seen as a documentation of past performances by concrete individuals rather than as a visual representation of urban space or as an autonomous visual-art object. Practices such as this are a particular form of “spatial auto-bio-graphical” performance art. In these practices, the boundaries between notions of cartography and autobiography are blurred and need to be critically addressed.More established critical vocabularies such as locative media (Hemment), psychogeography (Kanarinka), collaborative mapping (Sant), map-art (Wood), or counter-cartographies (Holmes), with which similar works have been discussed typically focus on studying the relationships between the resulting visual-art objects and notions of space, as well as on issues of representation. Similarly, the term site-specific performance, as articulated for instance by Nick Kaye, draws attention primarily to the physical location in which the meaning of a given artwork may be defined (1), rather than on the participation experience by the subject who engages with the artistic process. In my view, a participants-centred approach is needed in order to adequately understand the power of participation performances such as Running Stitch (2006) and its connections with ‘auto-bio-graphical’ performance. Participation Cartography: A New Vocabulary“Participation cartography” introduces an ontological shift in what is typically considered performance art. From live gestures, or more precisely, “live art by artists,” as art historian Rose Lee Goldberg (9) has defined it, performance is re-defined by these practices into live art by participants in response to a spatio-temporal interaction framework provided by artists.Running Stitch illustrates a kind of practice in which the artists’s creation is not a finished artwork or arrangement of actions and conditions (a conventional performance). Rather, the artists’s creation is a kind of “open work” in the sense that the active role of the participant is envisaged by the artist at the very moment of conceiving the work (Eco 3). The participant is, moreover, conceived of by the artist as an individual who collaborates with the artist or group of artists in the very production of the artwork. From an ontological point of view, I conceptualise more specifically practices such as Running Stitch as what Allan Kaprow termed “participation performances,” that is, performances in which those who take part are literally, the ingredients of the performances (Kaprow 184). These were lifelike pieces in which normal routines by non-actors became the performance of a routine. In participation performances or activities every day life “performances” or “presentations of self” (Goffman) are framed as art, and more concretely, as a happening or a new form of theatre or performance art. For instance, by means of instructions to be enacted by non professional performers, in Kaprow’s participation performance Maneuvers the daily routine of the courtesy shown another person when passing through a doorway becomes the artistic performance of that routine (191).I conceptualise practices such as Running Stitch as a particular form of “participation performance,” namely as “participation cartography.” The cartographic power of such practices needs to be studied from the participant’s perspective. Let me illustrate this idea by discussing Running Stitch more in detail.Over a four weeks period, more than hundred participants collaborated in the production of the object called by the artists “the tapestry map”. Each walk was represented by a line of stitches on the canvas, and each walk was stitched with a different colour. At the end of the process, the tapestry was a colourful and intertwined collection of threads stitched onto the same surface (see fig. 2). Figure 2. Image: Jen Southern and Jen Hamilton. Running Stitch and audience members. Fabrica Contemporary Art Gallery, 2006.But, what did each thread disclose about each participant? Who are they? What exactly is disclosed to whom?On DisclosureIn Running Stitch it is possible to speak of two moments of disclosure, each moment illustrating a different scope of the verb “to disclose.” First, there is the disclosure in real time of the physical location of each walker. Second, there is the disclosure of the sense of purpose of the journey and of all what happened to the participant during the walk and after when confronted with the visualisation of her personal walk. It is this second disclosure what can infuse the “map” with personal meaning.In the first case, disclosure is associated with surveillance. Positioning, as used within the framework of Global Positioning Systems, refers to the computational process whereby the geographical location of the carrier of the GPS device can be pinpointed, usually on a conventional digital map. “To disclose” means here to make visible and, more precisely, to “draw” by means of technology the whereabouts of someone—an anonymous other—who is outside of the gallery walking about Brighton’s city centre. This first moment of disclosure happens for all to be seen in the gallery. It is framed by the artists as the core of what constitutes Running Stitch as an artwork.However, the technology-aided map-making that takes place here conceals the mental processes and the autobiographical stories that go with the actual walk—where did the participants go and why, what made them be there in the first place? This can only be known if the participant is given a voice for him or her to “map” herself by presenting the Self in spatio-temporal terms within the public arena of the ongoing artistic event. This would require an additional sharing mechanism to be embedded within the framework provided by the artists. As organised by the artists, two participants at a time were walking during one hour outside in Brighton’s town centre in the area surrounding the Fabrica Gallery. While this was happening, other members of the public could witness the unfolding journeys live on the canvas inside the gallery. While one was watching, there were of course random and casual opportunities to engage in conversations with other onlookers. However, the artists did not devise more formal opportunities for the public to engage in conversations with previous participants or with other onlookers. After the two walkers in turn had returned to the gallery and finished their walks, the next set of walkers would depart. Typically, the previous walkers would stay for some minutes watching at the resulting visualisation of their walk—the running stitches—on the canvas. The framework provided by the artists placed these previous walkers as onlookers rather than as ‘official’ commentators of their own walks. Their comments and their thoughts on the running stitches representing their walk remained secret—concealed, unless spontaneous conversations would randomly communicate (reveal) them.Fortunately, the artists did ask participants-walkers to fill anonymously a feedback sheet before leaving the gallery. In that sheet, participants had an opportunity to share their comments and thoughts about their participation experience with the artists in writing. These responses provide the evidence that, in practices such as this, a second disclosure moment can take place and, indeed, needs to be seen as integral to the cartographic process. Disclosure, in this second moment, is not associated with surveillance but with the ideas of sharing, self-reflexion, subjective positioning, and self-mapping.“My walk was an act of love…”One Running Stitch participant wrote anonymously in the above mentioned feedback sheet:My walk was for a friend of mine –Sandra- who’s very ill. I wanted to go past various landmarks that had meaning for us both and end up in Prestor Park where I could make a large S shape. There was another park where we used to meet where I wanted to make an ‘X’ shape. Sandra signed her e-mails SX. (“My walk was an act of love”).This testimony, which was not shared with others during the cartographic process called Running Stitch but framed by the artists as private participants’s feedback, not only comments about the walk but constitutes it. This story explains what makes the participant ‘be there’, go to Prestor Park, and walk/draw an “X” shape on the canvas. Rather than a statement about place in itself, it is a “spatial auto-bio-graphical” presentation of Self as a friend of Sandra. Within the framework of “participation cartography,” a “spatial auto-bio-graphical presentation” is a presentation of Self in spatio-temporal terms that involves an act of self-reading. By means of reflexive language, the participant gives an account of his walk as represented by his running stitches on the canvas. Literarily, by drawing his walk on the canvas via the Running Stitch framework, the participant made his Self legible. However, nobody but the walker himself is in the position to make an authoritative reading of his walk. The terms “reading” and “legibility” refer in this context to the ability to both remember and make sense of one’s own steps. In this sense, the drawing—the trace of the walk—must be seen as a mnemonic device enabling the subject who walked to perform self-reading, hermeneutic acts. Disclosure, as illustrated by this case, is then linked with a self-reading process in terms of a walk—a spatio-temporal live process—as documented on the canvas.Certainly, the Self of the participant emerges as the theme of his map as drawn on the canvas: “I wanted to go past various landmarks…” Rather than space, it is the being-who-moves in space what is being read and mapped through self-reflexive language.According to Ervin Goffman’s dramaturgical approach to social interaction, the notion of presentation of Self takes relevance whenever an individual “enters the presence of others” (14). To be in the presence of others, whether wittingly or unwittingly, involves a presentation of Self. Goffman’s influential The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) is primarily concerned with arguing that the ways in which one presents the Self may direct the interlocutors’s attention towards those aspects of the Self one chooses to highlight (14). A premise underlying Goffman’s work is that a presentation of Self generates impressions and that one can manage the impressions one makes of oneself. A crucial concept in his theory is the notion of control: one can control and guide the other’s impressions of oneself, and a number of techniques can be employed to do so. It is crucial to understand that in practices such as Running Stitch, participants are enabled to occupy a dual position as “writers” and “readers” of the Self, as positioners and as the ones positioned. As “writers,” participants position themselves physically, graphically and literally both in the city and “on the map.” This takes place by means of a walking-drawing performance via GPS technology. As “readers”, participants position themselves linguistically (by means of autobiographical stories) and in their mind in relation with the performed space in question.By presenting his walk with words as ‘a walk for a friend of mine—Sandra—who’s very ill’, this participant positions himself subjectively in relation to his performed walk. His auto-biographical narrative infuses his walk with meaning. There is a relatively new approach in social psychology called “positioning theory” (Harre and Slocum). Drawing on Goffman’s work on social interaction, the issue that this theory investigates is the dynamics of creation of patterns of meaning. How can these dynamics be brought to light?Positioning theory analyses the emergence of meaning in terms of story lines. It is concerned exclusively with analysis at the level of acts; that is, of the meaning of actions as expressed through story lines that infuse those actions with meaning. A positioning is not a theoretical knowledge about one’s relationship with a given space. Rather, it is a practised knowledge. Moreover, it is an act of freedom. It is a choice. And it is an ethical choice in the sense that the one who positions himself claims responsibility for his own acts and decisions. The “I” of the one who positions himself emerges as the actor, author, and theme of the narratives that go with that decision. Such an act writes subjectivity (biography). Paraphrasing philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, a reflexive positioning is a disclosure and opening of being that takes place for others and with others and where being manifests, loses, and finds itself again “so as to possess itself by showing itself, proposing itself as a theme, exposing itself in truth” (99). A reflexive positioning is a moment of truth. However, and still with Lévinas, truth, “before characterizing a statement or a judgment, consists in the exhibition of being” (23). In other words, by presenting the self in public and in spatio-temporal terms, the subject who presents herself produces truth about herself as a relational and spatial being.Positioning, or the Enactment of a Poetics of SharingI use the term sharing as the act of presenting private, subjective, everyday life, and autobiographical material in public contexts. My notion of the term sharing is inspired by Deirdre Heddon’s (21) account of how consciousness-raising events in which women shared personal concerns with each other was tied with the emergence of feminist, autobiographical live performances. In the context of such feminist events, according to Heddon, sharing and consciousness-raising processes were linked.My argument is that, in a similar fashion to feminist’s consciousness-raising events, the “knowledge” that the representations (maps) claim to represent in practices such as Running Stitch cannot be achieved if the voices behind the trajectories are not activated. The transformation of the represented trajectory into self-mapping knowledge cannot be achieved if the individual who took part does not “read” herself by sharing her spatial autobiographical narrative with others. For such a self-mapping to take place, artists need to devise a mechanism for participants to share reflections about their participation experience and embed it in the framework they provide. I use the word poetics as synonymous with the notion of “technology” as articulated by Martin Heidegger in his 1955 lecture on the question of technology. A poetics is “a way of revealing truth” (qtd. in McKenzie 156). In this sense, “participation cartography” is a technology that enables participants to bring forth “truth” (rather than simply disclose truth) about their self as a being-in-motion. However, it is a way of revealing that also conceals. This is precisely what makes this way of revealing a poiesis: it reveals and conceals at once. For instance, the uniqueness of my Running Stitch walk was concealed to me. I walked with my wife, our son, and a couple of friends who lived in Brighton at that time. Our walk was a means for us to spend some time together. In a way, it was a means for building our relationship. The meaning of our walk became conscious to me after I had read the story of Sandra’s friend and the other ninety or so stories. Without these (collective) conversations and exchanges, the disclosures made by participants in and through ‘participation performances’ such as Running Stitch conceal more than what they reveal, shattering thereby the cartographic (self-mapping) power of these practices.The act of validating the sequence of stitches as his is a crucial performative element of this process. It completes the disclosure process: it is the moment in which the voiceless walker on the canvas becomes a speaking subject who authors himself by recognising himself in the uniqueness of his auto-bio-graphical stitch. His spatial autobiographical narrative is a crucial self-positioning performance. By not framing moments of sharing such as this as integral to the cartographic process, I suggest that the artist may scatter the self-mapping and self-positioning agency of this practice. In consequence, the representation loses sight of what it claims to seek and represent. ReferencesEco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. London: Hutchinson, 1981.Fabrica Contemporary Art Gallery. 2009. Fabrica Gallery. 6 Dec. 2009 < http://www.fabrica.org.uk/ >.Goffman, Ervin. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin, 1990.Goldberg, Rose Lee. Performance Art: from Futurism to the Present. London: Thames and Hudson, 2001.Hamilton, Jen, and Southern, Jen. Running Stitch. 2006. 20 Oct. 2009 ‹http://www.satellitebureau.net/p8.php›.Harre, Rom, and Nikki Slocum. “Disputes as Complex Social Events: On the Uses of Positioning Theory”. Common Knowledge 9.1 (2003): 100–118.Heddon, Deirdre. Autobiography and Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.Hemment, Drew. “Locative Arts.” Leonardo 39.4 (2006): 348–355,Holmes, Brian. “Counter Cartographies.” Else/where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories. Eds. Janet Abrams and Peter Hall. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Design Institute, 2006.Kanarinka, “Art-Machines, Body-Ovens and Map-Recipes: Entries for a Psychogeographic Dictionary.” Cartographic Perspectives 53 (2006): 24–40.Kaprow, Allan. “Participation Performance.” Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Ed. J. Kelley.. Berkeley, Los Angeles, New York: University of California Press, 2003.Kaye, Nick. Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place, and Documentation. London: Routledge, 2000.Lévinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 2006.McKenzie, Jon. Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. London: Routledge, 2001.“My walk was an act of love.” Unpublished anonymous participant's feedback sheet. Running Stitch. Jen Southern and Jen Hamilton. Brighton, U.K.: Fabrica Contemporary Art Gallery, 2006.Running Stitch. Jen Southern and Jen Hamilton. Brighton, UK.: Fabrica Contemporary Art Gallery, 2006. Sant, Alison. “Redefining the Basemap.” TCM Locative Reader (2004). 16 Jan. 2007 < http://locative.net/tcmreader/index.php?mapping;sant >.Wood, Denis. “Map Art.” Cartographic Perspectives: Journal of the North American Cartographic Information Society 53 (2006): 5–14.

The present study aimed to reveal the abundant tapestry of research on citrus waste and livestock feed, taking into account the recurring challenges posed by feed shortage and high price of conventional animal feed in livestock farming. In total, 565 articles were retrieved in a BibTeX format for analysis using bibliometric package in R studio. The retrieved data included, but not restricted to authors, citations, keywords, journals, and institutions. Published outputs on citrus waste and animal feed for livestock production obtained from Scopus and web of science (WOS) databases were used in this study. The field of citrus waste and livestock feed research experienced an increase in terms of research outputs with an annual growth of 10.20% during the study period. Based on the country level, Brazil was rated first with an aggregate sum of publications (n = 81), with China having a huge global academic influence with most top article citations (n = 1,338). The topmost authors' keywords commonly used in the studied research area were citrus pulp (n = 48), pectin (n = 26), performance (n = 22), and citrus (n = 33), which created a hint on associated studies on citrus waste and livestock feed. The present study provides a global trend to traverse the intellectual quandary on citrus waste and livestock feed research, and guidance for further studies in this field. It is essential to stress that the present study only dealt with core areas of citrus waste and livestock feed research, hence, it is anticipated that new empirical research and prospective solutions would afford new knowledge insight on citrus waste and livestock feed as new studies evolve.

Purpose: The main objective of this study was to explore the cross-cultural differences in online communication patterns. Methodology: The study adopted a desktop research methodology. Desk research refers to secondary data or that which can be collected without fieldwork. Desk research is basically involved in collecting data from existing resources hence it is often considered a low cost technique as compared to field research, as the main cost is involved in executive’s time, telephone charges and directories. Thus, the study relied on already published studies, reports and statistics. This secondary data was easily accessed through the online journals and library. Findings: The findings revealed that there exists a contextual and methodological gap relating to the cross-cultural differences in online communication patterns. Preliminary empirical review revealed the importance of cultural sensitivity in the digital age. It has emphasized the need for individuals and organizations to adapt their online communication practices to accommodate the rich tapestry of cultures that populate the digital landscape. By doing so, we can foster more meaningful and harmonious cross-cultural online interactions, ultimately contributing to a more interconnected and culturally aware global society. Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: The Cultural Dimensions theory, Communication Accommodation theory and Media Richness theory may be used to anchor future studies on online communication patterns. The study suggested the several recommendations to enhance cross-cultural online communication. These include promoting cultural sensitivity in online communities, customizing user experiences to align with cultural preferences, emphasizing digital literacy and cross-cultural training, and investing in ongoing research and data-driven strategies. Implementing these recommendations can foster respectful and inclusive online interactions in a rapidly evolving digital landscape, benefiting individuals, organizations, and online platforms alike.

What is game who got game Where's the game In life Behind the game Behind the game I got game She got game We got game They got game He got game -- He Got Game by Public Enemy(From the soundtrack to the 1998 Spike Lee film He Got Game) There is an interesting pattern that develops when a relatively new object of study is broached by cultural studies academics. A reflex response is to defend the reasons why you are giving time to studying these apparently innocuous pastimes. Defenses of television studies twenty-five years ago could have resembled the way that the new forms of games are now being investigated: a preamble of justification -- like an incredibly deep inhalation that has to precede a long-winded exhalation -- would be necessary before launching into the dance of critical analysis. Thankfully our authors have learned and progressed from their forebears at least in this issue (but probably not in every version of game material that you will see flowing outwards in the next few years) and our articles get to the heart of the game, conceptually, analytically and critically. What we're telling you is that this is a remarkable issue that, along with the online re-play conference of 1999, launches the study of games in the contemporary moment of new media game forms and their call and response to previous patterns of play and pastimes. The articles here represent cutting-edge thinking about games and we have, as your humble issue editors, collected those postures and positions in one place. The term pastime to describe playing games has become a bit antiquated, but we'd like to regenerate it here. Our various authors have obviously devoted an incredible number of hours to understanding the games that they describe: contemporary computer games, as much as learning the intricacies of a particular sport, often require an investment of time over weeks and months to achieve sometimes only limited mastery. A pastime has usually been relegated to rainy Saturday afternoons when children (or adults) couldn't work out what do with themselves and were trapped within the confines of the home. To pass the time the old standard board games would appear: from the Victorian Snakes and Ladders to the spirit of proprietorial capitalism of Monopoly; from the war dimensions of Risk and Chess to the mildly headache-producing Scrabble. Passing time could be seen as a description of what childhood has often been about: a transitional reality whose value is always questionable and debatable by others because it is seen as the foundation for the rest of life. Indeed, one element of the moral panic about contemporary computer games is a matter of adults trying to determine whether these games are valuable for their children's future employability in the information economy or a massive waste of time that can never be recovered (Marshall). The pastime, instead of being of peripheral importance has now moved centre-stage in contemporary life through the ubiquity of electronic games and the fact that these games no longer are clearly the province of adolescents but a major cultural reality for a very large population from the ages 5 to 50. The concept of game has similarly migrated, so that most of the authors who have written for this issue have dealt with video and computer games primarily and not with sport or board games or even television game shows, although we have our new and intriguing representative articles from some of these other domains. Several of our authors have been intrigued by how video and computer games have now become metaphors for contemporary life. Certainly recent films have used the game as the new way to deal with the fears and powers of general technological change. In "Flip Horizontal: Gaming as Redemption" José dos Santos Cabral Filho relies on Roger Callois's categories to debate the role of the game in the formation of identity in contemporary culture's continuous debate about the power of technology to determine, and the freedom that technology apparently endows to its users. "The Fortean Continuity of eXistenZ within a Virtual Environment" by Adam Dodd revisits the work of philosopher of the paranormal, Charles Fort, and explores the connections between his ontology of continuity and the movement of signs within a postmodern, virtual, networked environment, analysing Cronenberg's 'game' film eXistenZ and relationships between the body, media, truth and representation. In "Game" Rebecca Farley ponders the concepts of 'game' and 'play' and how these intersect with the values of the society in which games are produced and played, and argues for game theories that recognise the essential element central to all gaming experiences: the player. "The Knowledge Adventure: Game Aesthetics and Web Hieroglyphics" by Axel Bruns looks at the shifting aesthetic relationship between words and images in new media as exemplified by the Internet, as a focus for an examination of the influences computer gaming has brought to the Internet, and to computing in general. Our tapestry on the game weaves from this larger conceptual pattern into analytical reflection about the aesthetics and narratives in particular games. In "Odyssey Renewed: Towards a New Aesthetics of Video-Gaming", Jason Wilson identifies the limitations of critical approaches that focus mainly on the screen and on-screen events; he calls for an expanded aesthetics of gaming that recognises the possibilities for "hybrid, cyborg players to narrate performance, play and self" and then analyses how players access this in a variety of games. In "Towards an Aesthetics of Navigation -- Spatial Organisation in the Cosmology of the Adventure Game", Bernadette Flynn takes us on a guided tour through the virtual worlds of the exploration/adventure games Myst and The Crystal Key via the historic, visual structures of art, architecture and cinema, and examines how these past forms and influences are used to establish representational context, and position, and work to orient and narrate players through the ludic space. In "Computer Games and Narrative Progression", Mark Finn examines the varying degrees of success with which theories from existing media have been applied to computer games, and analyses a variety of console games, specifically using the concepts of narrative progression and subject positioning, showing how these are both enforced by the game and negotiated in the complex relationship between game and player. Computer games are highly diverse in terms of game genre, technology, interactivity and the positioning of the player -- physically, narratively, subjectively and ideologically. While certain analyses may be applied to games in general, some of the best work gets into the particularities of gameplay, success, pleasure and expertise. The two following articles each provide an in-depth analysis of a particular game -- how it is structured, how players interact with the game, and the ideological assumptions that are inherent in the game software. "The Fabric of Virtual Reality -- Courage, Rewards and Death in an Adventure MUD" by Daniel Pargman takes us inside the world of the online adventure MUD (Multi-User Domain) in his analysis of the text-based SvenskMUD, which has been running in Sweden for the last nine years. In "Settler Stories: Representational Ideologies in Computer Strategy Gaming" Nick Caldwell examines a real-time strategy (RTS) game, The Settlers, demonstrating how ideological assumptions about culture and production may be actualised in a virtual environment. Our final two articles deal with the fascinating intersection between games and media: how games are used to create media content, and how this repositioning as media spectacle influences and indeed dictates many aspects of the game. In "Technology and Sport" Greg Levine discusses the impact of media broadcast of sporting matches on televised sport through an analysis of Australian Rules football and looks at the broader effects of technological innovation on sport. Carol Morgan examines another meeting of game and media in "Capitalistic Ideology as an 'Interpersonal Game': The Case of Survivor", an analysis of this year's highly popular game show Survivor and the economic and social ideals that are implicit in, and perpetuated by that particular game. Oh, and then there is our final, final submission that you should not miss -- like an extra game level that you haven't discovered yet: this contribution comes from a person who actually failed in his attempt to capture what he wanted to say through an article for submission to the 'game' issue. Jesper Juul, along with 3D graphics by Mads Rydahl, has created a game instead that is designed for your pleasure and for those who have waded through the articles of game theory. It's called "Game Liberation" and its composed of four levels where you as game theorist have to blast away to destroy each theory that tries to colonise games and claim they have worked out their cultural significance. So cool down with a pleasant round of Space Invader-style shoot-em-up after a hard day of facing the faux-titans of media and cultural studies. Experience the zen-zone pleasure of games firsthand without leaving your comfort zone of intellectual gymnastics. We have tried to capture here some of the surface and depth of game culture -- if we can be so bold as to propose a new area of cultural study that is consolidating as a clear and interesting domain of popular culture and intellectual inquiry. As our articles demonstrate game culture does not fit comfortably into past forms of media analysis although there are insights about games that can be teased outwards from their relationship to visual/textual media forms. We invite your comments so that the analytical/critical process initiated by this issue can continue and encourage you to extrapolate outwards through your interventions and contribution on the Media-Culture list associated with M/C. Our authors are thirsty for discussion and debate. Although the issue is not quite like an adventure game, we invite you to point and click and investigate its various threads of game culture. P. David Marshall & Sue Morris -- 'Game' Issue Editors References Marshall, P. David. "Technophobia: Videogames, Computer Hacks and Cybernetics." Media International Australia 85 (1997): 70-8. Citation reference for this article MLA style: P. David Marshall, Sue Morris. "Editorial: 'Game'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.5 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/edit.php>. Chicago style: P. David Marshall, Sue Morris, "Editorial: 'Game'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 5 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/edit.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: P. David Marshall, Sue Morris. (2000) Editorial: 'game'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(5). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/edit.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction Australia's rich multicultural fabric is woven with the threads of diverse ethnic communities, each bringing unique cultures, languages, and traditions to the tapestry of the nation. Central to the experiences of immigrants and refugees in Australia is ethnic broadcasting, which serves as a bridge between their past and present, homeland and host country. This article delves into the multifaceted landscape of ethnic broadcasting, exploring its historical significance, current challenges, and potential pathways for future development. Historical Significance of Ethnic Broadcasting Immigrants and refugees continue to seek avenues to maintain ties with their home countries, preserve cherished memories of their origins, and find support as they adapt to life in a new environment. This need is especially pronounced for individuals who are not proficient in the primary language(s) of their host nation. Governments in countries attracting migrants recognise the importance of engaging with migrant communities to enhance their integration and bolster their contributions to national productivity. For example, the Minister for Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, M.J.R. Mackellar, noted when establishing ethnic radio in Australia that due to "a steady decline in foreign-language content on established commercial and national radio channels", and "a large increase in the non-English-speaking population in Australia", "the government ha[d] pushed ahead with ethnic radio" to provide "information, entertainment, and educational" facilities (Mackellar). Presently, the Australian Government provides annual funding to support ethnic broadcasting, which includes covering the production costs of ethnic programs for local communities, establishing new programs for specific language groups, and developing innovative projects that benefit culturally and linguistically diverse communities (Courtney). Insufficient attention has been devoted to evaluating the evolving needs and interests of various migrant communities over time (Dissanayake 113). This decline can be attributed to the satisfaction of listeners' interests through advancements in information technology and their increasing proficiency in English (Australian Bureau of Statistics), enabling them to access information from mainstream media sources. In the year 2020, there arose a pressing need to reevaluate the purposes and role of ethnic broadcasting, considering both practical and theoretical perspectives such as listeners' access to new technology to consume information, attracting volunteers, and limited financial support (Anderson et al. 57). Also, insights gained from such assessments could significantly contribute to meeting listeners' expectations, informing policy decisions in this domain, and guiding the work of content creators (Ewart 133) and also the channels in between these two ends of the spectrum, such as station managers. It is imperative to acknowledge that the role of ethnic broadcasting has evolved with broadcasting and production technology, necessitating a nuanced approach in research and creative endeavours within this sector. Furthermore, the shifting digital landscape and the widespread use of social media as a customisable platform for communication underscore the need for adaptation and innovation in ethnic broadcasting practices (Budarick). Despite its importance, ethnic community radio remains relatively understudied by researchers and academics, highlighting a gap in understanding the current dynamics of the ethnic broadcasting industry (Ewart 123). Current Challenges Facing Ethnic Broadcasting In this study, I aim to incorporate my perspective as an ethnic broadcaster to address the needs of migrants presently living in Australia. While government funding has been allocated to meet operational costs and support content development, there remains a gap in addressing the specific needs of listeners and enhancing the skills of ethnic radio presenters. Presenters of ethnic radio programs in Australia often struggle to discern the language preferences and information requirements of their audience. This challenge stems from a lack of regular communication with listeners, leaving broadcasters unaware of the issues that hold significance within their communities. To address this gap, it is essential to develop radio programs that cater to the interests and information needs of ethnic populations. These programs should cover a range of topics, including immigration matters, cultural events, council decisions, and the promotion of talents within these communities. Unlike mainstream commercial media, ethnic radio programs have the unique opportunity to focus on issues that are often overlooked but are highly relevant to ethnic audiences. Furthermore, there is a need to engage the second generation of migrants by encouraging their participation in radio programs conducted in languages they are comfortable with. This initiative not only fosters inclusivity but also ensures the preservation and transmission of cultural heritage to younger generations. Additionally, adapting program formats to align with the evolving needs and expectations of ethnic audiences is crucial for maintaining relevance and engagement. As highlighted by Tanikella, radio producers play a pivotal role in translating the needs of listeners into program formats that resonate with diasporic communities (170). By responding to the demands of their audience and reflecting locally constructed identities, media producers contribute to the representation of community identities in the public sphere. This underscores the importance of designing radio programs that are sensitive to the diverse needs and preferences of ethnic communities, thereby fostering a sense of belonging and cultural continuity. It is crucial for migrants to have access to information about available facilities, their rights, and opportunities for settling in their new country. Research into ethnic media in Australia highlights its significant role in connecting migrants to transnational networks, preserving cultures and languages, navigating new identities and communities, and facilitating adjustment to life in Australia (Hopkins, qtd. in Budarick). The growth of ethnic radio programs in Australia has been notable since its inception in 1975. Presently, the Australian community radio sector produces a substantial amount of ethnic radio content, with over 2,070 hours broadcast weekly in more than 110 languages across 80 radio stations, including six full-time ethnic stations. This vast array of programming engages over 4,000 volunteers from 125 cultural and ethnic groups (NEMBC). However, to ensure the effective support of ethnic minorities in Australia through broadcast radio, financial backing is essential. Community radio stations rely heavily on volunteers, with over 22,000 individuals contributing their time to these stations across Australia. Despite the significant volunteer effort, paid full-time equivalent staff employed by community radio stations numbered 900 in 2023 (Treasury). In recognition of the importance of ethnic media in supporting minority communities, the Australian Federal Government, through the Community Broadcasting Foundation (CBF), allocated $4.18 million from Federal Budget 2022-23 for ethnic content development purposes (CBAA, "Federal Budget 2022-23"). Additionally, various state governments continue to provide funding for ethnic radio programs through relevant agencies (Letch 18). Despite government support at both federal and state levels, the number of ethnic radio programs remain the same serving the relevant ethnic groups. However, this article suggests the need for restructuring within the ethnic broadcasting sector, particularly in content development, to better meet the diverse needs of ethnic audiences. Ethnic Radio Programs Characteristics of ethnic radio programs are multifaceted and influenced by the unique nature of the medium as well as the diverse preferences and behaviours of their listeners. Firstly, radio as a medium engages the sense of hearing, prompting listeners to visualise and imagine based on auditory stimuli. This concept, as articulated by Smythe (qtd. in Beck), underscores the importance of creating vivid "audio pictures" for listeners, especially in ethnic radio where individuals often seek to evoke nostalgic memories of their homeland. Ethnic radio programs serve as a conduit for migrants to reconnect with their cultural roots, offering aural representations of familiar sounds and languages in the absence of electronic communication resources. Additionally, Gary Ferrington distinguishes between hearing and listening, highlighting that while hearing is a physiological process, listening involves the psychological attribution of meaning to auditory input (61-7). This differentiation is pertinent in understanding how radio audiences interact with and interpret program content. Audience engagement with ethnic radio programs can be categorised into active and passive listenership. Active listeners demonstrate a high level of involvement with specific programs, frequently engaging through calls, messages, and interactions with presenters. In contrast, passive listeners tune in intermittently and may not exhibit loyalty to any station or program (Padmakumar 614). Ethnic program listeners tend to lean towards active engagement due to the limited frequency of broadcasts and their desire to stay connected with their cultural community. They often approach radio listening with echoic memories of music and language from their homeland, seeking familiarity and emotional resonance in the programming. For instance, some listeners may prefer original versions of songs from their country, even if they are no longer popular locally (Anderson et al. 21). Moreover, active ethnic radio listeners play an integral role in shaping program content and community engagement. They provide feedback, request songs, share information, participate in fundraising events like radiothons, and even express interest in becoming presenters themselves. This active involvement reflects a deeper sense of connection and ownership within the ethnic radio community (Anderson et al. 36). Conversely, passive listeners may view radio primarily as background music, enjoying the ambience without actively engaging with specific content. Their interaction with the medium is more incidental, often occurring while multitasking or attending to other activities. Overall, the characteristics of ethnic radio programs are shaped by the interplay between the medium's auditory nature, the preferences of diverse listeners, and the cultural significance of maintaining connections to one's heritage. Active engagement, nostalgic resonance, and community involvement are central themes that distinguish ethnic radio programming in its ability to cater to the needs and interests of migrant communities. To navigate the development of the technology and the challenges related to changes in the listenership, ethnic broadcasters must embrace innovative strategies that cater to the evolving needs of their audiences. One approach involves redefining the role of ethnic radio programs to encompass a broader range of topics, including immigration matters, cultural events, and community news. By diversifying content and engaging with listeners' interests, broadcasters can enhance the relevance and appeal of their programs in the digital age. Empowering Ethnic Radio Presenters Ethnic radio program presenters play a crucial role in delivering culturally relevant content and facilitating community engagement. However, recruiting skilled presenters poses challenges, particularly when specific language requirements must be met. Therefore, it is suggested, language fluency should not deter younger people from becoming involved in the sector, and youth ethnic programming in English, or a mixture of languages, should be supported (Anderson et al. 47). Kalinga Seneviratne, a former ethnic radio presenter turned academic, attests to the pivotal role of community radio in fostering broadcasting careers for migrants in Australia (11): “if not for (ethnic) community radio, I have no doubt that I would never have become a broadcaster in Australia”. There are many examples that can be given. Encouraging second-generation migrants to participate as presenters and listeners is vital for sustaining ethnic radio audiences. Surveys suggest that allocating more airtime to music could attract younger listeners, but the language preference for music content remains ambiguous (Anderson). Addressing the relevance of ethnic media for the next generation is a pressing concern, given their evolving cultural identities and media consumption habits (Papoutsaki et al. 23). However, engaging second-generation migrants poses challenges, as older community members often serve as cultural gatekeepers and are hesitant to relinquish control over language and content (Australian House of Representatives). Additionally, community radio stations can only offer limited technical training, focussing on basic broadcasting skills due to resource constraints (Cohen 1016). Training programs provided by stations like 3ZZZ, 3CR, and 3MBS cover fundamental broadcasting knowledge but may not adequately prepare presenters for professional standards (3ZZZ). Effective broadcasting requires mastery of technical operations, vocal delivery, language proficiency, and community knowledge (Beaman 43; Fleming 6-7). Acquiring essential skills enables individuals to effectively communicate through radio, aiding new and emerging communities in their transition. The Community Media Training Organisation (CMTO) could address this need by developing a new pathway course tailored to ethnic listenership, as existing training programs such as Presentation, Advanced Presentation, Audio Editing, Copywriting for Sponsorship, Creating Social Media Content, Music Interviewing, etc. (CMTO) are primarily focussed on general program presentation at community radio stations. To compete with mainstream radio, ethnic broadcasters must prioritise professionalism and engaging presentation styles to attract and retain listeners (Wolfenden 5-21). Ultimately, the success of ethnic radio hinges on the ability of presenters to bridge cultural divides, cater to diverse audience needs, and maintain high-quality programming standards. As Australia continues to welcome new waves of migrants and refugees, there is a pressing need to support their settlement process and integration into society. Ethnic radio programs play a crucial role in providing information, language support, and community connections for recently arrived migrants. By updating program formats and language groups to reflect changing demographics, broadcasters can ensure that their programs remain relevant and accessible to all members of the community. Public Service Broadcasting and New Media Public service broadcasting in Australia encompasses entities like the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), which are funded by the government but operate independently in terms of programming decisions. These broadcasters are tasked with promoting national identity, as well as informing and entertaining audiences (Lobato & Meese 121; Cinque 11-16). The ABC, operating under a statute and receiving public funds, is expected to adhere to standards of objective journalism, distinct from commercial media driven by private interests (Finkelstein). On the other hand, SBS radio programs are tailored to language groups rather than nationalities, allowing for diverse listenership across cultures (Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications). Programs cater to various community needs, including news, current affairs, arts, culture, and sports (ibid.). Public service broadcasting in Australia differs from community broadcasting in several aspects, including licencing, ownership, operational structure, and funding policies. While national broadcasters like the ABC and SBS receive indirect government funding, community broadcasters operate as not-for-profit entities with community ownership structures. Community broadcasters are further distinguished by their obligation to broadcast local content and to represent the community they serve (CBAA). The landscape of ethnic media in Australia now faces competition from emerging digital platforms, spanning radio, television, and streaming services accessible via smartphones and computers. The next section will explore the impact of these alternative media forms on migrants' lives in Australia. Embracing New Technologies Community broadcasting has historically faced limitations in content development. However, it can be argued that community radio is where innovative content and radical programming thrive, without facing the limitations imposed by commercial interests, industry guidelines (ACMA), and broadcasting technology. Community radio primarily caters to audiences via AM/FM radio sets and digital devices. Digital convergence has transformed broadcasting, necessitating a diverse range of technology, personnel, and management skills in today's multi-platform media environment (CBAA). Presently, listeners access radio programs through various channels, including live streaming from radio stations, mobile apps like TuneIn, personal assistant apps such as Google Home and Amazon Alexa, and even television. The availability of archived content on the Internet further enhances accessibility for listeners, a feature not present in traditional radio broadcasting. Audio content producers have embraced alternative publishing methods beyond traditional FM and AM frequencies, including Internet radio, MP3 players, podcasts, and streaming services like Spotify. However, the digital transformation of radio broadcasting raises questions about the medium's nature and mode of delivery, as highlighted by scholars like Dubber and Lacey (Berry). Online streaming allows radio stations to reach audiences beyond their geographic boundaries, offering a more diverse listener base (Jackson Pitts & Harms 274). Internet radio, characterised by live or scheduled audio (and sometimes video) streaming over Internet Protocol (IP), can be accessed via computers and mobile phones with 4G or 5G data connection. Unlike conventional radio, listeners cannot request songs or participate in talkback shows, but they enjoy the flexibility of selecting content according to their preferences. Compared to terrestrial radio stations, Internet radio is cost-effective, requiring minimal infrastructure and often operating from home-based studios (Berry 7-22). Therefore, Internet radio is growing every day and mobile devices are going to play a very important part in the future of radio. According to the Australian Communications and Media Authority, Australians are listening to more audio delivered over the internet in 2022–23 compared to the previous year (ACMA). Moreover, ethnic media, including social media platforms, play a significant role in fostering social bonds among elderly individuals (Du et al.). Ethnic groups utilise various social media apps to create closed groups, share community-related information, and maintain cultural connections. For instance, platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Viber host private groups like 'Aussie Connect', catering to specific ethnic communities in Australia. In summary, conventional radio listeners are transitioning to novel audio listening technologies that offer personalised content experiences. Therefore, this article suggests developing new formats for ethnic radio programs, considering essential factors such as audience preferences, content guidelines, and leveraging available technology for listener benefit. Conclusion In conclusion, ethnic broadcasting in Australia stands at a crossroads, facing both challenges and opportunities in the evolving media landscape. By addressing the changing needs of diverse ethnic communities, empowering presenters, and embracing new technologies, broadcasters can continue to serve as a vital resource for migrants and refugees. Through collaboration, innovation, and a commitment to cultural preservation, ethnic broadcasting can chart a course towards a more inclusive and connected future for all Australians. References 3ZZZ. "Volunteer and Training." 2024. <https://www.3zzz.com.au/event/3zzz-broadcaster-training-course/>. Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). "Communications and Media in Australia: Trends and Developments in Viewing and Listening 2022–23." 2023. <https://www.acma.gov.au/publications/2023-12/report/communications-and-media-australia-trends-and-developments-viewing-and-listening-2022-23>. ———. 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Welcome to the world of pop. Even to announce this issue in such a way seems like a quaint anachronism, a mild nostalgia; the expression echoes the voices of countless TV presenters on Top of the Pops, Beat Club, Countdown, or whatever your local variety was. This association demonstrates that pop has been historically located in the arts and in popular culture as something connected to the 1960s: not so much to the politicisation of musical intent that embodied the late sixties, but to the current of the three-minute-or-less love song, the early Beatles, the vacant but loving repeat of Andy Warhol and his images. The Archies kept it going into the late sixties along with the Monkees and the 1910 Fruitgum Company's beautiful pop bubble "Yummy Yummy Yummy I've Got Love in My Tummy". What pop implied retrospectively was a clear sentiment of unity even as it set up binarisms that separated the serious and significant in popular culture from the ephemera and the momentary, with the perishable products of pop apparently placed quite clearly on the lighter side. This is why there is a nostalgic association between pop and the world: pop implies a simpler unity of the world that is carried momentarily by the pleasure of the song, the image, the dance. It is also why we associate pop with the transitional moments in our lives: it is the music of preteendom, the images of early youth and the moment of unselfconscious dancing to and in front of this aural and visual landscape provided by the very core of the transnational (read "world") culture industries. Those affective connections to cultural products is what pop art plays with and makes the viewer ponder. At the same time, pop styles also move beyond the preteen stage, grow up and change: within the space of a decade, "Yummy Yummy Yummy" mutated to The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star"; within a similar space of years, a suntanned, mirrorshaded George Michael in Wham! became a Sony-battling (mis)user of public toilets; and eventually, even the once united quintamfeminate of Spice World seems inevitably on the course towards diadochal wars. As much as we may look back on personal and public memories with fondness, pop isn't forever caught in a static McHappyland, where nothing ever changes. Or perhaps that is to say that these (and other) pop styles aren't: beyond the stylistic formations, there seems to be a deeper kind of pop, a kind of primordial soup of popness from which a particular species of pop evolves every once in a while, matures, mutates, and discovers whether it is capable of survival even once it's left home. The momentary pleasure of pop is never completely compartmentalised into an historical moment, however much British popular music documentaries try to produce that effect, or however much the postwar generation venerate their particular liminal moments of the 1960s as the most significant. Pop is regenerative. Just when one thinks that the various strands of popular culture have organised themselves completely into niche markets we have the will-to- worldpop, with something like Spice World or Aqua's Barbie Girl. The term 'pop sensibility' -- sensibility to an underlying 'popness' which doesn't equate with any particular style of pop, but pervades all of them -- is useful here, and it informs some of the articles in this issue. Pop sensibility is an understanding of the pleasure generated by popular culture, and recognises that in some ways they point to complex relationships between people and cultural forms. It is difficult to explain why one of our editors (David) enjoys a hit by the boygroup Five while the other (Axel) has serious difficulties telling one boygroup from another, or from many of the more forgettable members of the Stock/Aitken/Waterman stable of the early 80s; but it is partly connected to seeing through the various generations of musical style a pop sensibility that has something to do with accessibility and the pleasure generated by that complex simplicity. Pop engages us with what Fiske described as the "art of making do" and thereby is a conduit to the operations of contemporary culture, industrially and culturally. The 'pop' issue of M/C explores this pop sensibility or, in some cases, a pop sensitivity through a variety of channels that should onomatopoeically "pop" into your thinking processes. Martin Laba's feature article "Picking through the Trash" provides the pin to burst cultural studies' reading of the popular bubble, by identifying and then working through the meaning of the supposed detritus of popular culture that doesn't possess the cultural cache of either 'marginal' or 'hip' status. His inspiration remains Don DeLillo's White Noise for its celebration and lament of the popular as it is organised through consumer culture and the various uses made of the apparent ephemera of contemporary culture. Pop, from Laba's perspective, remains the source for understanding the deep structure of the contemporary, and through detailed investigation in the tradition of DeLillo we can unearth the organisation of cultural value. Sean Smith also dances in the light of consumer culture in his tragicomic "Ya Bloody Cappie!", through his sudden realisation that his hard-working consumption practices had been appropriated as a popular culture practice and demographically defined in a way that made them seem as contrived and deplorable as those of the 1980s yuppie. The identification of the cappie, the Face-designed acronym for Consumer of Alternative Pricey Products, presents a crisis of persona for Smith, and leads to a perceptive reading of this shift as evidence of a new "class formation" through a shifted organisation of the self via a form of exclusive cultural capital. Such media stereotyping gone wrong may be partly behind the atrocities committed by members of the often-quoted "trenchcoat mafia" at Littleton, Colorado, but the media have turned a predictably blind eye to their own complicity in the shootings. In "Seen But Not Heard: Pop Culture Scapegoats and the Media Discourse Hierarchy", Nick Caldwell investigates the incredibly repetitive media patterning of establishing cause and effect relationships between outbreaks of youth violence and the usual suspects of cultural artefacts: 'satanic' popular music and grossly violent and antisocial computer games. Caldwell's article finds the discursive proliferation sadly familiar as the media looks to popular culture to stitch together its neverending narrative without the requisite sideways glance at the cultural context of violence. Benign or malignant, media power is also evident in the excitement leading up to and surrounding the release of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and we simply couldn't pass by this major artefact of current pop culture in this issue. In many ways, Tara Brabazon's "A Red Light Sabre to Go and Other Histories of the Present" is a process of excavation of popular cultural memory. In an elaborate reclamation program, Brabazon establishes Star Wars as a generational benchmark for a certain affectivity or -- in our terms -- pop sensibility that intersects with how cultural experiences are received by that same generation. Linking the Star Wars generation with Generation X (and her academic/pop self), Brabazon weaves a shifted tapestry of the significance of cultural memory in working out contemporary engagements with culture, and thereby presents whole new territories for the investigation of what Raymond Williams called "the structure of feeling". Cultural studies academics unimpressed with George Lucas's storytelling abilities have plenty of other fields to cover, too, though. Diane Railton's "Justify My Love: Popular Culture and the Academy" provides an invigilating examination of where academics have engaged with popular culture. Her critique is with what may be called new Bourdieuian 'distinctions', where popular music is reintegrated into cultural judgments of taste and thereby simply recategorised with shifted monikers of high (legitimate) and low (illegitimate) designations. Railton calls for a realisation of the political nature of academic work on popular culture that moves beyond this new and shifted constitution of cultural elitism. One of the key divides in research into popular music is about authenticity, which often gets reorganised into new categorisations of cultural value. In "Seeing Sound, Hearing Image: 'Remixing' Authenticity in Popular Music Studies" Steve Jones has provided a map through the debates in popular music studies on how the authentic is deployed by scholars. Jones situates the significance of affect in understanding the pop aesthetic and provides some material for how new technologies are shifting the ground on which popular music's authenticity has been built. Two of the remaining articles in this issue also deal with authenticity in various ways, if not necessarily as the term is used by Jones. In the first of these, "Painting Out Pop: 'Andy Warhol' as a Character in 90s Films", Julie Turnock traces more or less authentic portrayals of Andy Warhol (what would a 'pop' issue be without him?) in recent movies. She uncovers how Andy Warhol's blank visage sits uncomfortably with the narrative and content of three films that need the richness of a normative biography. In the process, the films cannot deal with the conceptualisation of pop that Warhol embodied as an artist, where content disappears to surface and repetition. The celebrity persona of Warhol in its contentlessness is Warhol's ultimate canvas, but the films miss this completely. Where Warhol's celebrity refuses its biopic, David Riddell discovers that sports god Wayne Gretzky's retirement reproduces naturally and seamlessly the spectacle of ice hockey into a movie narrative. Riddell's "Wayne's World: The Making of a Hockey Movie" is a close textual reading of Wayne Gretzky's last game in terms of heavily pre- planned causation which transforms the pleasures of the unexpected that are part of watching any sporting event into the constructed celebrity spectacle, throwing into doubt its authenticity as a sports contest. The blur of speed and spontaneity that is ice hockey becomes the blur of celebrity where fact and fabrication are melted together. Warhol and Gretzky (there's an unexpected pairing!) as media superstars both represent the way pop is defined by the cultural industries in all its crassness and oversimplification; frequently, though, the media's attention is self- centred, in a continuous desire to rate their popularity and measure it against those of their rivals. Axel Bruns's "What's Pop, and What's Not? Measuring Popularity in the Many-to-Many Age" questions the meaningfulness of these ratings, and debates the significance of the ways the Internet determines popularity (for example through the ubiquitous counters). Playing against the need to construct an audience to sell to someone (and advertisers are of course always welcome at the bustling M/C site itself) is the manner in which the Internet is constructed, used and abused by its surfers. The mythic models of measuring the television audience prove to be inadequate to describe the forms of interactions and sideward hypertext movements on the contemporary Web. Nevertheless, the counting goes on.... Finally, we turn to myths of a different kind. There is a certain pop sensitivity that Adam Dodd's article, "Making It Unpopular: The CIA and UFOs in Popular Culture" identifies in 1950s America. Dodd's provocatively argued piece indicates that a fear of mass hysteria motivated moves by the CIA and other government agencies to debunk through apparent explanation any possibility that UFOs actually existed and were seen. The desire to believe was so strong in the popular will that the American agencies felt compelled to work in propagandistic techniques to manipulate that belief. Although we may never know with the amount of propaganda and misinformation masquerading as fact, Dodd presents an interesting case study in the government control and movement of information about a popular cultural phenomenon. From "Yummy Yummy Yummy" to White Noise, from Warhol to Gretzky, from satanic music to academically accepted 'pop', from Star Wars to 'real' UFOs, the scope of this issue of M/C demonstrates the wide reach and diversity of 'the popular'. As issue editors, we hope it will also prove popular with our readers (a pun which had to be made eventually), and won't leave the shallow aftertaste of so much average pop. Much rather, we'd like you to remember once again those 60s pop music shows and agree that "it's a hit!" (And feel free to hit M/C's pages frequently and repeatedly.) P. David Marshall Axel Bruns 'Pop' Issue Editors Citation reference for this article MLA style: P. David Marshall, Axel Bruns. "Editorial: 'Pop'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.4 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/edit.php>. Chicago style: P. David Marshall, Axel Bruns, "Editorial: 'Pop'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 4 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/edit.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: P. David Marshall, Axel Bruns. (1999) Editorial: 'Pop'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(4). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/edit.php> ([your date of access]).

In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016, feminist and online craft communities responded with a call to arms (or needles) aimed at resistance through collective action in thread, yarn, and textiles. One such project, Diana Weymar’s Tiny Pricks Project, records the incessant barrage of Trump’s media coverage: tweets, journalist reportage, and statements in stitched thread. Weymar started Tiny Pricks Project on 8 January 2018, stitching the 45th President’s bluster of a 6 January tweet, “I AM A VERY STABLE GENIUS”, in yellow thread across a field of tapestry flowers. Issuing an invitation for contributions from stitchers around the world, Weymar accrued a vast archive of over 5,000 individual textile works which transform political rhetoric into thread. Although the project has been exhibited in its material form in galleries around the United States (particularly in the lead-up to the 2020 election), its primary display is online, where the textured and tactile objects are imaged and uploaded to Instagram. Drawing on the associations of a medium associated with intimacy and femininity, @tinypricksproject traces Trump’s presidency, rejecting the immediacy of the 24-hour media cycle with careful, time-consuming stitching that bears the imprint of its makers. As an attempt to reshape Trump’s violent utterances as a material symbol of resistance, Tiny Pricks Project has a close parallel in the bright pink hand-knitted “pussyhats” that became the symbol of the 2017 Women’s March. With a pattern distributed online through platforms such as Ravelry and sold on online marketplaces such as Etsy, the Pussyhat Project exemplifies the ambitions of twentyfirst-century craftivism, that “creativity can be a catalyst for change” (Greer, 183), but also the neoliberal commodification of these ideals. The contested legacy of the Pussyhat Project, lauded as a means of participatory politics but criticised for the whiteness and transphobic essentialism of its chosen symbol, demonstrates the challenges in harnessing craft as collective activism (Black), and suggests the need for individualised, responsive ways of connecting politics and hand-making. The same phrase that inspired the Pussyhats, Trump’s recording of 2005 admitting sexual assault (“They let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.”) also appears across the Tiny Pricks Project as an embroidered text where it performs a very different role. In contrast to the performative use of knitted projects as a garment to wear in action, Weymar describes Tiny Pricks Project as a “stitched material record” and as “testimony”. Both acts, of stitching and posting, are acts of memory-making and communication, and as such, the cumulative posts of Tiny Pricks Project function as a feminist vernacular temporary memorial. Initially focussed exclusively on Trump, the project has expanded in both territory (with a dedicated Tiny Pricks Project UK) and politically to encompass direct statements of opposition. The intimacy and history of needlework in Tiny Pricks Project punctures distance, drawing the violence of Trump’s political rhetoric (against women, immigrants, the disabled, and the vulnerable) into a direct, affective contact with the bodies of stitchers and viewers. This article proposes the contact of Tiny Pricks Project as a form of haunting, where threads pierce through memories of the past and bodies in the present. Embroiderers have a term for stitching which follows a pattern from the other side – ghost stitching – allowing for the thread to create a pattern which is elsewhere but not visible, a tracing through to the inverse and across multiple layers of textile. To consider threads as conveying presence recognises the powerful affective charge of stitching. As Roszika Parker asserts in her influential work of feminist art history, The Subversive Stitch, “embroiderers … transform materials to produce sense” (6), making complex embodied meaning through thread and fabric. A digital ghost stitch, the tracing of online content in needlework that records the sense of its maker, which is then reposted elsewhere, draws out the affective quality of the material that “pricks” the user. Ghosts here are defined through the work of Avery Gordon, where they are “that special instance of the merging of the visible and the invisible, the dead and the living, the past and the present” (25). In their production of material effects, ghosts are the manifestation of haunting, which for Gordon is a particular form of mediation that breaks down distance: in haunting, organized forces and systemic structures that appear removed from us make their impact felt in everyday life in a way that confounds our analytic separations and confounds the social separations themselves. (19) A ghost stitch, then, is the specific quality of stitched thread in a digital post to puncture mediatised politics, drawing together otherwise invisible bodies and histories. To draw out the haunted nature of thread this article locates the affective quality of the stitched politics of Tiny Pricks Project in the context of contemporary memorial cultures, rather than the field of craftivism or digital activism. Focussing on the histories and politics of needlework, I begin by understanding the material use of thread and stitching in Tiny Pricks Project as a connection to intimate forms of memory-making, specifically American traditions of quilting. I then locate the specific form of @tinypricksproject, cumulative posts on Instagram in response and reaction to historical events, as a form of vernacular memorial that punctures the screen with the presence of stitchers, framing this discussion in relationship to new forms of public memory-making in both public spaces and online. Finally, I consider the combination of these forms, threaded stitches and digital memorials, as a “ghost stitch” that “pricks” me when I scroll through the feed, forcing an embodied relationship with its haunted political texts. The stitched thread has a powerful emotional charge that intimately traces the body, through the gestural mark of a hand, and evokes memory, through a connection to family heirlooms and domestic material culture. This nostalgic embodiment is exploited in the material form of Tiny Pricks Project, where Trump’s words in are stitched into vintage textiles, such as lace-edged napkins or printed children’s handkerchiefs, each carrying sentimental associations. Items of clothing sometimes appear as the support – as Trump’s response to the 2019 Senate inquiry that “I did nothing wrong” stitched in red on the front of a child’s dress decorated with red, white, and blue ric-rac and stars. The technical skill on display varies across the project, but most text is rendered in simple back stitch, creating a punctuated and punctured line that wobbles and reveals its handmade quality. Weymar’s own hand is evident in the use of bold, block lettering, often layered over tapestry – such in a repeat of “I AM A VERY STABLE GENIUS” in blue and yellow thread stitched over a stag tapestry by her grandmother. Some have the addition of more elaborative embroidered imagery or applique in the form of anachronistic illustrations and decorative motifs. Whilst information on individual panels (the stitcher, the source of the quote, and sometimes an account of the work’s production) is available in the Instagram caption in the feed and tag, each individual painstakingly stitched post is understood in relationship to the surrounding images. The combination of the individual panels of repurposed fabric of Tiny Pricks Project evokes the iconic American form of the patchwork quilt that pieces together textiles with their own histories and memories to make new form that is both fragmented and connected. On @tinyprickproject the visual similarity to a quilt is striking, as an image of each textile panel is joined to the next via Instagram’s gridded interface. In the individualised feeds of the account’s followers, each Tiny Pricks Project post is stitched together with other algorithmically selected images, generating a unique piecing together of politics with the personal, as a digital quilt. Although the image of quilting in the popular imagination remains dominated by images of white femininity (as in the 1996 film How to Make an American Quilt), quilts have historically also been a site of expression and memory-making for bodies otherwise effaced in American culture. The tradition of Black quilting, for example, has a complicated history, as bell hooks describes, where quilts were produced out of basic material need but were also a powerful form of aesthetic expression. Remembering her grandmother’s quilting, hooks identifies the way that the reuse of the family’s tattered and worn clothing in crazy quilts results in “bits and pieces of my mama’s life, held and contained there” (121). Peter Stallybrass similarly articulates the powerful communication of presence and absence of using worn garments for quilting, where “a network of cloth can trace the connection of love across the boundaries of absence, of death, because cloth is able to carry the absent body, memory, genealogy” (36-37). In their material and form, quilts have a powerful connection to memories outside dominant narratives as an assertion of the bodies who laboured on them, those bodies whose worn garments have been transformed into pattern, and the bodies they symbolically cover. This quality of intimacy, memory, and embodiment has a political potentiality, as exploited in the cumulative, community NAMES project AIDS Memorial Quilt. Founded by Cleve Jones and first displayed in 1987 in Washington D.C., each individual panel approximates the size of a body (or coffin) and is stitched with the name and memory of someone lost in the AIDS crisis. In its public display through the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the panels spread out on the ground in public spaces, AIDS quilts (both the original NAMES project and subsequent localised versions around the world) controversially drew individual memory into public politics, deploying feeling as a form of activism. At the height of AIDS crisis, Queer art theorist and ACT UP member Douglas Crimp, for example, positioned the spectacle of mourning in opposition to militancy, where “public mourning rituals may of course have their own political force, but they nevertheless often seem, from an activist perspective, indulgent, sentimental, defeatist” (5). Countering this position, Peter Hawkins argued that the quilt “made intimacy its object; it has enabled quite private reality (sometimes sentimental and homey, sometimes kinky and erotic) to ‘come out’ in public” (770), a powerful personification of social and political ambitions. The recent digitisation of the 50,000 panels of the quilt on the National AIDS Memorial Website makes more direct the connect between the intimate feeling of mourning and the “stitching” ability of digital memory. Beyond the specific form of the quilt, on a broader social level the nostalgic quality of Tiny Pricks Project’s accumulation of hand-stitched textiles draws together the past and the present. The rise of craft culture is underpinned by online platforms (including Instagram) that have facilitated DIY and craftivist communities, where historical material processes such as knitting, crocheting, needlework, and sewing provide powerful affective and political points of connection. Addressing the relationship of contemporary artists working in textiles to the economic, political, and social context of globalised late capitalism, Kirsty Robertson argues that such works are “haunted by their passages through time and space”, specifically the “ghosts of textile artists and workers” (195). This connection to bodies across history is wrapped up in the materiality and gestural process of needlework. These are the ghosts of those whose presence is rendered invisible in twentyfirst-century deindustrialised countries, where textile industries have largely disappeared and where feminism has fundamentally changed the ubiquity of domestic crafts in the home. Their return, either in art or the “hobby” sphere, carries both a radical political legacy and a complicated nostalgic charge. In the context of the United States, a further material trace in the stitched and embroidered works of Tiny Pricks Project is in the fibres of the materials themselves, in the bleached history of cotton’s brutal past that connects enslavement and contemporary capitalism (Beckert). The threads of handmade embroidery, quilt, and woven crafts move across time, as art historian Julia Bryan Wilson argues: textiles warp between the past and the present: relentlessly recruited for pressing contemporary concerns they are also tasked with reminding us of, and are often pulled back to, the traditions from which they sprung. (261) Ironically, then, the popularity of online textile and needlecraft projects such as Tiny Pricks Project can then be mapped alongside the rhetoric of Trump’s populist “recruitment” of America’s industrial history (Making America Great Again) as an emotive “pull” to an imagined past within contemporary politics more broadly (Kenny). This deployment of sentimentality untethered from facts is one part of what Lauren Berlant described as the “noise” of Trump, the concentration of feeling as the substance of his politics: Trump is sound and fury and garble. Yet—and this is key—the noise in his message increases the apparent value of what’s clear about it. The ways he’s right seem more powerful, somehow, in relief against the ways he’s blabbing. Rather than communicating a political messaging, Trump’s bluster exemplifies a mediatised politics that has taken on the logic of social media and 24-hour news cycles, fragmenting and dissipating attention (Crary). The disconnection of noisy mediatised politics makes it always just in the past, endlessly present in its digital archive, but evasive in its meaning. Tiny Pricks Project is just one example of drawing affective attention to Trump’s words through this same medium, recontextualising them as an act of memorial-making. Certain key quotes are recovered again and again in different hands alongside “I am a very stable genius” and “grab ‘em by the pussy”. Some are ironic, such as “I know words, I have the best words” (from a speech about Barack Obama in 2015) and “I don’t have a racist bone in my body” (a tweet in 2019); but many capture the most misogynist and racist records of Trump’s speech including “Nasty Woman” (directed at Hillary Clinton in 2016); and “send her back” (a rally chant about Ilhan Omar, 2019). Embroidering Trump’s tweets and soundbites into material form, then preserving these on a digital wall for all to see, Tiny Pricks Project appropriates into thread the American tradition of hagiographic presidential monuments that immortalise political actors through their speech made material. Across Washington D.C., epigraphs are carved into stone and cast in steel, as at the Lincoln Memorial (1922), which fixes its subject’s meaning in historical place with select quotations that evade the mention of slavery. The dominance of these forms of monument to America’s past efface the complex racial violence of the country’s past, as Kirk Savage has argued, and it is only when encountered with living bodies that this becomes legible again as in the iconic use of the Lincoln Memorial for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech (1963). Indicative of a shift in the culture of memory-making and memorials, this visible contest between vulnerable bodies and symbols of state power played out during Trump’s administration in sites across the country, most notably at Charlottesville in 2017, where conflict over the fate of the city’s Robert E. Lee statue boiled over into fatal white supremacist violence. Tiny Prick Project’s function as a collectively generated memorial is part of this broader cultural shift: what Erica Doss has described as America’s “memorial mania”, an explosion in fragmentary memory-making where an ever-growing number of official monuments are joined by individualised commemoration and contestation. Inscribing Trump’s words on repurposed materials, Tiny Pricks Project reshapes presidential monuments through the aesthetics of temporary memorials. Examples such as the spontaneous memorials around the city of New York in the wake of September 11 and mementos left in the chain fence near the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing site “embod[y] the faith that Americans place in things to negotiate complex moments and events” (Doss, 71). Such memorials rely upon stable and commodified ideas of identity such as teddy bears and American flags to assert the “comfort culture” (Sturken, Tourists of History, 6) of American consumerism in the midst of trauma and loss. This has created a visual lexicon for traumatic events that is predicated on the accumulation of the mundane and everyday of material culture. In the sheer scale of posts on the @tinypricksproject Instagram feed the effect is of a cumulative vernacular memorial where the stitched posts accrue over time like mementoes on a wall, each with an affective connection both individual and collective. In many ways the process of memory-making online mirrors the assertion of presence on physical sites, most directly in the convergence of selfies and social media posts at memorial sites: what Kate Douglas describes as “dark selfies” where the act of photographing and sharing is a form of witnessing that locates the self in relationship to the past. Like temporary memorials, on platforms such as Instagram the emphasis is on individualised traces of memories constituted through a shared use of a platform and set of recognisable imagery. The participatory function of digital culture connects memory to identity and communication, through “mediated memories”: media theorist José van Dijck’s term for "the activities and objects we produce and appropriate by means of media technology for creating and re-creating a sense of past, present, and future of ourselves in relation to others” (21). The specific agency of Instagram to hold memory (a capacity built into functionality such as “on this day” or “Memories” features) casts all its posts into memory, but with the potential to return as “mediatised ghosts to haunt participants” (Garde-Hansen et al., 6). There is a distancing effect facilitated by the mediation of digital memory, a re-directing of absence into the presence of participation in social media consumption, echoing the participatory consumption of memorial culture more broadly. As Martin Pogačar argues, digital memorials online facilitate the “exteriorization of intimate and affective … practices of memory and remembering”, but he claims there is still a subversive potential here, “to elude these constraints by negotiating and revising the institutionalized forms and canons of memory and remembering” (33). Similarly, despite official intentions or commoditisation, physical memorials are also sites of feeling that can rupture any containment: they are “haunted” as Marita Sturken describes in her analysis of the Ground Zero Memorial in New York as an official memorial that cannot “contain the ghosts that live there” (“Containing Absence”, 314). In her analysis, Sturken is drawing on Gordon, who argues that haunting has the capacity to produce counter-memory by allowing for unexpected and potentially contradictory connections to be formed that challenge official structures. For Sturken it is the direct embodied trace of individual experience, such as recordings of victims’ voices, that is the ghost here. The difference between the official, intended meaning of a memorial and the haunted counter-memory is akin to the distinction between Roland Barthes’s studium and punctum in a photograph. Where the studium is the communication of conventionalised forms of meaning across a surface, the punctum pierces the viewer’s body, it is “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)” (27). The “prick” of the punctum is, in the context of haunted memorials, the ghost making its presence felt as a material impact. The “prick” of the stitched thread in the posts of Tiny Pricks Project is a similar form of haunting, a ghost stitch that allows direct feeling through in the externalised context of mediatised politics and digital memory as followers scroll and touch each post in close and intimate contact or see the works exhibited in a gallery. As Weymar has said of the project as a site of feeling, “if you can stay present long enough to read what he’s saying, you will become politically active. You will feel a sense of urgency” (Chernick). With its ironic use of nostalgia, the ghost stitch of the Tiny Prick Project posts also punctures through contemporary political rhetoric, exposing the artifice and contradictions of sentimentality for an American past. Instead, Tiny Pricks Project proposes a counter-memorial of Trump’s presidency. A counter-memory of stitched thread runs through American political history, and when introduced to the space of digital memory this thread has a capacity to “prick” by bringing with it an affective connection to the familiar, intimate, and embodied presence distinct to hand-stitching. Defying the fragmentary nature of digital culture, thread sutures and connects, but also punctures and pierces, bringing together but also allowing points of escape. Considering Tiny Pricks Project as an example of digital ghost stitching opens up possibilities for the active role of thread as a way to “prick” the viewer and pull through connections across and between bodies and social systems as a form of political resistance. References Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. Hill and Wang, 1981. Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. Berlant, Lauren. “Trump. Or Political Emotions.” Supervalent Thought Blog, 4 Aug. 2016. <https://supervalentthought.com/2016/08/04/trump-or-political-emotions/#more-964>. Black, Shannon. “KNIT RESIST: Placing the Pussyhat Project in the Context of Craft Activism.” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 24.5 (2017): 696–710. Bryan-Wilson, Julia. Fray: Art + Textile Politics. U of Chicago P, 2017. Chernick, Karen. “US President Donald Trump’s Angry Tweets Recorded in Tiny Pricks.” The Art Newspaper, 20 Sep. 2020. <https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2020/09/21/us-president-donald-trumps-angry-tweets-recorded-in-tiny-pricks>. Crary, Jonathan. Scorched Earth beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World. Verso, 2022. Crimp, Douglas. “Mourning and Militancy.” October 51 (1989): 3-18. Douglas, Kate. “Youth, Trauma and Memorialisation: The Selfie as Witnessing.” Memory Studies 13.4 (2020): 384–399. Doss, Erika. Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America. U of Chicago P, 2010. Garde-Hansen, Joanne, et al. Save As... Digital Memories. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. 2nd ed. U of Minnesota P, 2008. Greer, Betsy. “Craftivist History.” Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art. Ed. Maria Elena Buszek. Duke UP, 2011. 175-183. Hawkins, Peter S. “The Art of Memory and the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt.” Critical Inquiry 19.4 (1993): 752-779. hooks, bell. ‘Aesthetic Inheritances: History Worked by Hand.” Yearning. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2015. 115-122. Kenny, Michael. “Back to the Populist Future?: Understanding Nostalgia in Contemporary Ideological Discourse.” Journal of Political Ideologies 22.3 (2017): 256-273. Parker, Rozsika. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. New ed. I.B. Tauris, 2010. Pogačar, Martin. “Culture of the Past: Digital Connectivity and Dispotentiated Futures.” Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition. Ed. Andrew Hoskins. Taylor & Francis, 2017. 27-47. Robertson, Kirsty. “Rebellious Doilies and Subversive Stitches: Writing a Craftivist History.” Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art. Ed. Maria Elena Buszek. Duke UP, 2011. 184-203. Savage, Kirk. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America. New ed. Princeton UP, 2018. Stallybrass, Peter. “Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning, and the Life of Things.” Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity. Eds. Liliane Weissberg and Dan Ben-Amos. Wayne State UP, 1999. 27-45. Sturken, Marita. Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero. Duke UP, 2007. ———. “Containing Absence, Shaping Presence at Ground Zero.” Memory Studies 13.3 (2020): 313–321. Van Dijck, José. Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford UP, 2007.

Apocacidal Tendencies: Three Excerpts from the Heaven's Gate Website 1995 (A term which blends apocalypse with suicide, apocacides could be best described as those groups or individuals who understand salvation from an imagined approaching armageddon to involve, indeed depend upon, the voluntary sacrifice of one's own life on earth.) 1. '95 Statement by An E.T. Presently Incarnate: "... We brought to Earth with us a crew of students whom we had worked with (nurtured) on Earth in previous missions. They were in varying stages of metamorphic transition from membership in the human kingdom to membership in the physical Evolutionary Level Above Human (what your history refers to as the Kingdom of God or Kingdom of Heaven). It seems that we arrived in Earth's atmosphere between Earth's 1940s and early 1990s. We suspect that many of us arrived in staged spacecraft (UFO) crashes and many of our discarded bodies (genderless, not belonging to the human species), were retrieved by human authorities (government and military). Other crews from the Level Above Human preceded our arrival and 'tagged' -- placed a despite 'chip' -- in each of the vehicles (bodies) that we would individually incarnate into, when that instruction would be given. These 'chips' set aside those bodies for us ... In any given civilisation on a fertile planet such as Earth (and Earth has had many periodic/cyclical civilisations), the Level Above Human plants all the new life forms (including humans) for that civilisation in a neutral condition so that they have a chance to choose the direction of their growth. The Level Above Human -- or Next Level -- directly (hands on) relates significantly to the civilisation at its beginning stage, and subsequently (with few exceptions) at approximately 2000-year intervals (48-hour intervals from a Next Level perspective) until that civilisation's final 'Age.' ..." 2. Our Position Against Suicide: " ... We know that it is only while we are in these physical vehicles (bodies) that we can learn the lessons needed to complete our own individual transition, as well as to complete our task of offering the Kingdom of Heaven to this civilisation one last time. We take good care of our vehicles so they can function well for us in this task, and we try to protect them from any harm. We fully desire, expect, and look forward to boarding a spacecraft from the Next Level very soon (in our physical bodies). There is no doubt in our mind that our being 'picked up' is inevitable in the very near future. But what happens between now and then is the big question. We are keenly aware of several possibilities ... The true meaning of 'suicide' is to turn against the Next Level when it is being offered. In these last days, we are focused on ... entering the Kingdom of Heaven ..." 3. Last Chance to Evacuate Earth Before It's Recycled (Sept 29, 1996): "... I'm in a vehicle that is already falling apart on me, and I'm desperate to try to help you have a last chance to go ... I don't mean to make fun of this. I am desperate -- for your sakes. Within the past twenty-four hours I have been clearly informed by my Older Member of how short the remaining time is; how clearly we cannot concentrate on anything except the perspective that says: the end of this civilisation is very close. The end of a civilisation is accompanied by spading under, refurbishing the planet in preparation for another civilisation. And the only ones who can survive that experience have to be those who are taken into the keeping of the Evolutionary Level Above Human ..." Heaven's Gate -- http://www.trancenet.org/heavensgate/index.html Magnificat Meal Movement [Toowoomba, Australia] -- http://homepages.iol.ie/~magnific/ Apocaholic Cocktails: Mixing Visions of the End Armageddon Anonymous: Hidden Faces Plotting the End on Television The 1996 book release X-Files Confidential describes its subject matter as "'social-science fiction' ... fuelled by the realities -- and internal anxieties -- of [our] time: the era of diminished expectations", a television show which "concerns itself with the dark side of technology, competition, politics, ambition, and selfishness", warning against the "risks of abandoning an interior life or one's community" and reinforcing the notion that "our attempts to combat evil are usually an exercise in futility" though that "effort alone is significant". Unlike the participants within the apocaholic communities who intimate that the 'truth is with us', the X-Files, as an entertainment product of the secular industry, proclaims that the 'truth is out there'. This conceptual and narrative framework within the X-Files works on several levels: Frustrates resolution through contrived revelation; Frustrates revelation through contrived resolution; Identifies and resists externally imposed futures; Gives a narrative voice to marginalised hierarchies of genres, values and futures mythology, eg., those involving ufology, genetic mutations and the like; De-emphasises mainstream hierarchies of authority, genres, values and futures mythology; Suggests a regime of hidden truth, embedded within what initially appears as disconnected and unrelated phenomena; Implicates the mainstream future as conspiricist (i.e., the governments which control our futures do not have our interests at heart); Identifies the ritualistic reassurance set by the mainstream discursive strategy (e.g., "apology is policy"); Cultivates its own in-language, or futurespeak, where special terms refer to a future-oriented conspiracy of mammoth proportions. And, finally, it gives meaning to the millennium beyond a mere change in dates. All in all, the X-Files is popular and successful because it explores the possibilities of resolvable and unresolvable endings. It blurs the boundaries between the theological and the secular imaginings of the end. It borrows elements common to contemporary evangelicalism, endtime signs such as the mark of the beast, and gives them a plausible secular narrative. For example, whereas it might be difficult to suspend disbelief for a story that has a charismatic antichrist controlling the world through marking its population with 666, X-Files modernises the setting by creating a mysterious consortium of 12 elders who are in allegiance with some alien plan to initiate a scheduled holocaust. Such an organised drive towards armageddon involves genetic tagging of the populations through smallpox injections, little biochips which switch on and switch-off cancers, transportation of plague through bee stings and heavenly lights that harbour creatures with sinister purposes. In the X-Files, mainstream society is the cult whose future has been pre-organised by its real architects and whose adherents, the general populace, move through society blinded by ideas and doctrines of thought that Mulder sees as lies. His ultimate quest is find the truth, to reveal the future being secretly planned for the world. His quest involves reading the signs of the times in his encounters with the X-Files. Scully, whose initial introduction was to provide a sceptic balance to his quest, in fact provides a scientific rationale for Mulder's seemingly odd flights of fancy. In explaining Mulder's theories away in pseudo-scientific terms, Scully makes the unthinkable seem more plausible, and her character development from sceptic to believer provides the narrative added credibility for long-term viewers. If Scully can be convinced, then there must really be a hidden sinister future embedded beyond the mainstream outlook. Mainstream programmes such as these can in themselves throw wine of the proverbial armageddon fire. Both Star Trek and the X-Files were favourite pastimes for the Heaven's Gate Cult. Star Trek epitomised the ultimate open-ended humanist future, exploration of the unknown, while the X-Files epitomised the nature of this level, a conspiricist and closed future in which the world's only hope lay in the revealing of the sinister unknown before the great destructive end. Needless to say, X-Files-styled sites proliferate the Webscape in late 1999: Apocalypse Soon -- http://www.apocalypsesoon.org/english.html UFOs & Antichrist Millennium Bug Connection New World Order -- http://www.mt.net/~watcher/nwoy2k.html UFOs, Aliens & Antichrist: The Angelic Conspiracy & End Times Deception -- http://www.mt.net/~watcher/ "The Bible says that the b'nai Elohim, angels, sons of God, were ministers of creation, from before the worlds, Job 38:7. Contrary to popular secular theories, the b'nai Elohim are created beings distinct from ELOHIM the God of Israel. God created the b'nai Elohim to reflect His glory, and reflect His word which spoke all things into being. Before a third of the heavenly host rebelled, they were stewards of creation, building civilizations on the terrestrial planets of our solar system designed to glorify the Word of God. The Cydonia "face" is a monument constructed by these Sons of God, revealing their knowledge of the message in the stars. Both the Cydonia face and the Sphinx are cherubim, combining figures in the constellations Virgo and Leo, symbolic representations of the first and second advent of Christ on Earth." Satan's Plan to Escape Judgement -- http://www.mt.net/~watcher/hate.html "Previous pages explained how Satan was created to lead the angelic hierarchy, ruling over physical civilizations of angels on planets, such as the one still in evidence on Mars. After Satan rebelled, the center of his angelic civilization was destroyed "from among the stones of fire", yet the Bible tells us Satan is still waiting for the time of God's judgment. Satan is not in hell, he is still allowed audience before God, where he accuses the faithful (Rev.), and he still roams above and within the earth (Job). Since Satan is the most beautiful and powerful cherub, Prince of the Powers of the Air, intelligence behind UFO phenomena, the authority over all the aerial regions outward from earth..." The Millennium Group -- http://www.millenngroup.com/ Australia's Fair Dinkum Magazine -- http://unforgiven.iweb.net.au/~dinkum/ Eyes on the World -- http://eotw.orac.net.au/articles/index.html Antichrist / False Prophet -- http://members.tripod.com/jonastheprophet1/antipope.html "Antichrist will arise out of the British Monarchy within the context of the European Union/False prophet will arise out of the Vatican-Whore Church/Both will work together to build Satan's end time kingdom in these last and final days." 666 Sketch: The Mark of the Beast -- http://www.greaterthings.com/Essays/666mark.htm Conspiracy Books -- http://parascope.com/parastore/booksconspiracy.htm Corrupt Government, Conspiracy, New World Order, A Future? -- http://www.pushhamburger.com/ Dark Conspiracy -- http://www.blazing-trails.com/DarkConspiracies/welcome.html "Things have gotten really seriously convoluted. To try to follow some of the conspiracies requires a substantial amount of dedication. Any one thread can lead to so many other threads, eventually, maybe they will come together into a complete tapestry that could scare the bejabbers out of you." New World Order Conspiracy -- http://www.ufomind.com/para/conspire/nwo/ Silver Screen Endings: Blockbuster Profits in Apocalypse Gripped in a delirium of apocaholicism, contemporary secular society is exploring the conditions and consequence of endings. Mainstream presentations such as Independence Day, Event Horizon, Armageddon, End of Days, The Matrix and Deep Impact depict the notion of endings in elaborate and extravagant modes. Independence Day is a lesson in Orwellian doublethink -- it begins by destroying the very values it eschews at its closure. The statue of liberty, the White House, and the Empire State Building, all contemporary icons of western democratic and consumerist values, are brutally and spectacularly disintegrated. Yet the very core of the western meta-narrative, the maintenance of independence, which brought about the empowerment of these icons, is upheld throughout the film, leaving a critical viewer with the sense that what we are watching in this film is not the destruction of the world by some alien force -- certainly no other nation is depicted as so grossly devastated nor are any icons of other significantly known cultures destroyed -- but the annihilation of contemporary western icons: essentially, the death of icons. The values are constant, as emoted by the President of the United States towards the fiery conclusion of the movie, but the icons are unstable, susceptible to external disruption, unlike the proverbial humanist spirit. Hence, most audiences reacted gleefully to seeing famous landmarks blasted to smithereens -- this goes hand in hand I suspect with the prevailing social atmosphere cultivating change: do away with the current icons, they are no longer valid nor do they faithfully represent the social world around us, we require new ones to image our emerging spirit. Event Horizon is very different in content and style. It blends conventional theology with science fiction to create an incredible narrative about a starship so fast that it punches a hole through to hell and back. The concern throughout the film as the blood thickens is not with the collective end to society but rather with the very personal and private closure to individual life and the post-death experience. Other films, like Deep Impact and Armageddon, draw on the "worst bits" in the bible, to quote one trailer, and depict disturbing destructive images of the western metropolitan society, with dramatic wrangling over who will survive and how in order to establish a brave new world. What links these varying cinematic depictions of the end? Is it perhaps the imagined triumph of humanist spiritism, usually legitimised through the sacrificial offering of a main character in a film's final showdown? (Bruce Willis dies in Armageddon, Tea Leoni waits with her estranged father for the tidal wave in Deep Impact, and a half-drunk kamikaze pilot in an old biplane destroys the mothership at the close of Independence Day.) Being excessively popular, one needs to ask what role these films play within the collective social narrative of endism: do these films serve to quiet anxieties about the end by visualising human solutions to impossible destructive odds? Or do apocalyptic blockbusters market towards existing endtimes tension, reflecting the growing apocaholic nature of our societies as we near the close of the twentieth century and thereby, in true western capitalist fashion, profit from this cultural dysfunction? Or do films of this nature answer a more base, unacknowledged desire within our societies to see the end and survive? Event Horizon -- http://www.eventhorizonmovie.com/ End of Days -- http://www.end-of-days.com/ The Matrix -- http://www.whatisthematrix.com/ Deep Impact -- http://www.deepimpact.com/ Timeout: Clocking the Endtimes Christian End-Time Expectations -- Millennia Monitor -- http://www.fas.org/2000/endtime1.htm This resource provides links to a wide variety of Christian sources with a primary focus on millennial, apocalyptic, or other End Time expectations. Countdown 2000: Your Guide to the Millennium -- http://www.countdown2000.com/index.htm "As we approach the millennium, the world seems to be getting weirder. Countdown 2000 is packed with the latest news, hype, and hysteria. Where will the blow-out parties be? Will Y2K cause global havoc? How can I get involved in improving the world? Whatever the millennium and year 2000 mean to you, Countdown 2000 can help you learn what you want to know. Countdown 2000 is packed with over 150 pages, and 2500 links." Amazing Prophecy -- http://bibleprophecy.com/ Topics covered: Bible prophecy, rapture, tribulation, millennium, last days, end times, end of time, second coming, covenants, revelation, advent, antichrist, 666, parousia (appearing of Christ), preterist (fulfilled prophecy), eschatology (the study of last things), and many more. 888 Christ Come: Your Bible Prophecy Website -- http://www.888c.com/ Apocalists: The Tribulation Inbox Interesting things happen on discussion lists. Perhaps a more significant example of apocalyptic dissemination, capable of real-time feedback and iteration on endtime signs within every corner of the Web, millions on the bible highway speak of the premillennial tension that characterises contemporary cultural life and thousands more direct these lunges into apocalyptic extrapolation via discussion lists. Nowhere has the apocalyptic urge to image the end, to identify the sign of its approach, been more revitalised than on this electronic frontier: indeed, Apocalypse has an impressive online presence. Today, anyone can receive daily updates sent to their email inbox on the progress or nearness of the great endtimes tribulation, press releases of the latest armageddon publication list, prophecy ezines, the latest incarnation of the mark of the beast 666, new candidates for antichrist identification and revelation reports, to name but a few: Bible Prophecy Discussion List -- http://www.geocities.com/~dawn-/index.html Bible Prophecy-L was created as an open, moderated forum to discuss and share information related to end times Bible prophecy. Some of the topics you may find discussed are: Eschatology; Global Government; Global Religion and the New Age Movement; Rapture; Antichrist; Environmental Changes (earthquakes, tornados, volcanoes, freak storms, flooding etc.); Israel and the Middle East; Signs in the Heavens (UFOs, Comets, etc.); Pestilence (infectious diseases); Wars and Rumors of Wars; Prophecy Conference Updates ... etc. Bible Prophecy Report -- http://philologos.org/bpr Bible Codes News Update -- http://thebiblecodes.com/news/bcnu.htm Tribulation News -- http://www.tribnews.net/mir Conspiracy Journal -- http://www.members.tripod.com/uforeview/welcome.html Citation reference for this article MLA style: Jason Ensor. "Apocacide, Apocaholics and Apocalists: A Selective Webography of Endism." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.8 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/apocacide.php>. Chicago style: Jason Ensor, "Apocacide, Apocaholics and Apocalists: A Selective Webography of Endism," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 8 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/apocacide.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Jason Ensor. (1999) Apocacide, Apocaholics and Apocalists: A Selective Webography of Endism. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(8). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/apocacide.php> ([your date of access]).

In April 2022, I found myself in the Harold Pinter Theatre on the West End, waiting to watch Jodie Comer star as protagonist Tessa Ensler in Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie. Surprised that after two years of on-and-off-again lockdowns due to COVID-19, I had finally made it all the way overseas to see this Australian play on the British stage, I asked the person next to me if they were excited to see the show. She was a young, twenty-something woman who smiled and said, “I can’t wait to see Jodie Comer in the flesh”. I asked what she knew about the play, and she told me a friend had given her a ticket because she was a Jodie Comer fan and that she did not know anything about the play before coming tonight. I was apprehensive on her behalf, knowing she was about to see a profound performance of a woman processing her own rape on stage, without forewarning. I realised in this moment how far this play had come in a brief period, from its first small run at the Stables Theatre in Sydney to London’s West End, in spite of a global pandemic. After the play ended, I turned to ask my neighbour what she thought. She was crying. After several moments, she praised Comer’s performance, launching into her thoughts on how powerful this play was, how profound an impact it could have for discussions of sexual assault. Prima Facie’s international success, emerging in the wake of the #MeToo movement and COVID-19 pandemic, seems like no coincidence. The negative impact of these two cataclysmic and simultaneous—in that they have impacted and intersected in Western society since their initial emergence—events on the collective health and wellbeing of society cannot be understated (Sehrbrock). They highlight the need to consider how we can enact change within our structural systems to foster frameworks that support our most vulnerable. If we acknowledge the potential for contemporary theatre as a site for political change, we can evaluate its vital role in the wake of such events in framing the problematic issues that exist within society, such as rape culture, as something we can and should critically reflect upon; something Prima Facie has the power to do. While Prima Facie does not have the ability to lessen the impact of COVID-19, its run on the West End marked the beginning of a return—in Western countries at least—to live theatre and events, and as such, a return to the commentary on life and society that theatre can provide. Leading theatre scholar Lisa Fitzpatrick asserts that contemporary rape plays “emerge from personal and collective experience” (220), showing us that contemporary theatre like Prima Facie is created both because of, and to provide a discourse on, real-world situations. This article will argue that Prima Facie has immense value in reshaping what wellbeing means to us in light of these global events—particularly in relation to the #MeToo Movement, which centred women's voices and experiences in contemporary legal and political spheres—and thus shows the possibility for shifting policies, practices, and perceptions to promote and protect the self. The play expertly interrogates the political, legal, and social systems in which those in a liberal democracy, like Australia—and by extension, the UK and USA—all live; those which arguably have been established with the overall wellbeing and benefit of society in mind. The play’s protagonist, Tessa Ensler, is an accomplished criminal barrister who has built her career representing defendants accused of sexual assault. When Tessa herself is the victim of a rape, she faces the reality that society’s legal and political systems, while pursuing 'legal truth’—the idea that truth in a courtroom is often shaped by cultural beliefs and perceptions, rather than objective truth (Tidmarsh and Hamilton 2)—, do not make adequate adjustments for a woman’s lived experience of sexual assault. Shannon Taylor elaborates on this from her own experience as a sexual assault victim when she states that fact is capitulated and, under the male gaze of patriarchy and arguments of legal dialect where concepts of truth, morality, ethics and justice are foreign entities, the experience, the evidence of survivors is oftentimes rendered useless, or at best fragmented, diluted, sanitised, modified. (Taylor 64) Victims of sexual assault are in a unique position as the complainant and (usually) sole witness in a prosecution case and thus bear a greater burden than many other types of crimes (Taslitz 6). These cases can fail to recognise the trauma undergone by a woman in such a position, and the struggle to provide convincing evidence in legal prosecution—or, as in most cases, absolution—of the defendant. Moreover, the staggeringly low conviction rate for sexual assault, which sits at less than one percent (Daly and Bouhours 566), does not bode well for an alleged victim’s confidence in reporting such a crime, or agreeing to stand trial if an eventual prosecution were to happen. The audience is positioned to witness Tessa peel back the patriarchal layers of the legal system and look at the socio-cultural barriers that have held victims of sexual assault back from achieving justice: “we do not interrogate the law’s own assumptions, instead we persist in interrogating the victim … there cannot be any more excuses. It must change” (Miller 93). Thus, the spectators of Prima Facie are left with the play’s final words, “something has to change” (Miller 97), lingering on, challenging them to conceive of a system where the wellbeing of sexual assault victims is prioritised alongside the pursuit of legal truth. It ultimately calls for a revision of the systems that exist, and for the promotion of significant, systemic change, both to better the wellbeing of individual victims, but also our society as a whole. Miller attacks these systems in a strategic manner, persuading the audience into sharing in this belief that for society to achieve wellbeing for all its members, it must ameliorate the parts that neglect and damage our most vulnerable. Tessa’s journey over the course of the play has the power to threaten these systems within society, highlighting the ways in which they expose victims of sexual assault to re-traumatisation, social rejection, and a statistically likely loss in court (Spohn 89). Tessa’s story arc is presented to the audience as symptomatic of the systems—specifically the law—that uphold problematic representations of rape and its victims in society. Tessa is first presented to the audience as a young, determined criminal barrister with an uncompromising stance towards the sexual assault cases she takes on. She argues that it is not her job to determine if the crime happened, but rather “find holes in the case and keep the police honest. Protect society” (Miller 31). Tessa holds firm to the belief that the law is fair and just, that innocent until proven guilty is “the bedrock of how you keep a society civilised” (Miller 30) and “if a few guilty people get off then it’s because the job wasn’t done well enough by the prosecutor and the police” (Miller 35). The audience watch Tessa cross-examine alleged victims of rape; doing so with disarming frankness, posturing that she is testing the law, “test[ing] her word, her version of the story” (Miller 41). In reality, she is conforming to the long-held socio-cultural belief that, despite rape being a deeply personal trauma against oneself, complainants must remain clear and “composed” (Miller 41) to have a chance at winning their case within the rules of the law, upheld via gendered scripts of what a rape victim should look like (Donat and D’Emilio; Fraser; Herman; Ullman). Feminist scholar Tara Roeder grapples with this struggle for women who testify in rape cases, as they “will indeed find themselves under intense pressure to tell clear, concise, and coherent accounts of the violence they have undergone” (18), which can serve to challenge and deny their experience if not presented in the neat package that the legal system demands. This ideology begins to waiver when Tessa is sexually assaulted by her colleague Julian. In acting out the particulars of her own rape on stage—by not only someone Tessa knows, but someone she works with and has been dating—Tessa reminds the audience that rape is not only more pervasive and common in society than acknowledged, but that it can often happen in a way that is less clear cut than is often socially understood. Tessa becomes the voice of reason in a culturally complex issue, positioned on both ‘sides’ of the law—a defence barrister and later victim—and thus in an impossible situation of an adversarial legal system which demands that one side wins and the other loses. This highlights the problematic nature of legal processes being a game, where the ‘winner’ of the case is which lawyer tells the best version of their client’s story (Miller 35). What this system fails to acknowledge is that the reality of attending a trial—where they are in many ways positioned as being ‘on trial’—and having to recall an immense bodily and mental trauma whilst on the stand may often expose rape victims to social ostracism and denial. Additionally, in many cases the absence of corroborative evidence in a rape case is enough to tip the scales in favour of the defendant, yet this is the paradoxical nature of rape: sometimes all you have is your word against theirs. Literature and Human Rights scholar Eleni Coundouriotis unpacks the mechanics of this tension in her article “You Only Have Your Word”, making it evident that “the sexual assault complainant’s testimony has unique significance because it carries most of the burden of proof on the issue of consent” (366), and, despite being a witness to the crime being committed, their testimony can be easily dissected within a trial, and positioned to the judge or jury—depending on the case—as not true by its very nature of being a story. For legal truth, however, it must be ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ as to whether the crime was committed: a difficult thing to determine in issues of consent, as “the defence doesn’t have to prove she did not consent[,] you just have to point out that HE DID NOT KNOW there was NO CONSENT. That it was reasonable for him to think it was okay” (Miller 40). The ultimate difficulty in trying a rape case is that there will almost always be ‘reasonable’ doubt as to the events that took place. The audience sees Tessa process this in real time after she is raped, where she acknowledges the fallibility of the law—and her own previously espoused beliefs—in the attempted prosecution of alleged rapists, and in protecting the women who have been raped. It is only when Tessa faces the same system as a victim, complainant, and witness that she begins to question whether the legal system deserves her unwavering faith. Tessa realises while giving her own testimony that it is more likely that “the events described by the victim in her testimony are usually ambiguous” (Harrison et al. 27) and thus less likely to fit the ‘rape script’ expected of them. Tessa once believed that the peripheral details of a rape (such as what the victim was wearing, how her hands were positioned, how often she attempted to say no, how much she had to drink) are key to determining the legitimacy of the rape occurring. Yet as Tessa herself learns: “as a victim-survivor, let me tell you that the rape and perpetrator are vividly recalled, the peripheral details not so clearly” (Miller 94). Only upon experiencing this first-hand is Tessa—and by extension the audience—able to see that the legal system is not actually fair and just in all cases. Miller emphasises this arduous process for rape victims, reinforcing that it can be re-traumatising to “relive their humiliating experience and then doubted as to their motives for reporting a hideous crime against their person” (7). As the audience go on this journey with Tessa, they are exposed to the idea that to establish better personal and legal outcomes for rape victims, we must reshape the way in which we not only try rape cases, but how we perceive victims themselves. Tessa’s rape is portrayed as emblematic of a larger societal issue that is rooted in the structural systems that have long favoured those accused of sexual assault, rather than those victimised by it. Andrew Taslitz captures this when he states that “despite several decades of a renewed women’s movement and increasing attention to the problem of rape, judges and juries continue to be sceptical of rape, demanding greater proof than for many other types of crimes and demonstrating deep suspicion of victims” (6). Prima Facie shows the law’s inability—shaped by preconceived rape stereotypes coupled with complex patriarchal gender dynamics—to try rape cases in a way that accounts for the lived experience of women and the complicated nuances of rape. Prima Facie proposes that the law’s inadequate grasp of the victim’s mental state after the event, and inability to find ways to interrogate or prosecute the accused in a manner that protects their victims, are to its detriment. This is not to say that the solution for rape cases is to absolve victims from having to testify about their experience, but to explore other methods for pinpointing the truth without re-traumatising victims. In the writer’s note of Prima Facie, Miller reinforces this idea when she posits that “for Tessa, seeing the law for what it is, an imperfect human construct, constantly evolving within social changes, frees her to find her voice and call us all to action” (9). Prima Facie does not attempt to provide solutions, but challenges us to consider how we are complicit in the systems that do not protect some of its vulnerable members, and thus ask ourselves what we can do to reimagine the way society could and should change for the better. What Prima Facie does successfully is to politicise the criminal justice system to question our ability to evolve as a society if we are effectively unable to interrogate how the law is failing its most vulnerable. Miller builds a relatable and engaging narrative of an individual who understands and supports the system but is confronted with the reality that she is unable to receive justice within this system. In doing so, the audience is presented with a subversive rape narrative—that is, a narrative in which the patriarchal structures that protect and uphold rape culture are being interrogated and challenged to reveal their flaws and demand socio-cultural change—that is not only hard to ignore, but one that challenges us to consider how these systems are working against us to impede our achievement of individual and collective wellbeing. Roeder captures the nuanced power of subversive rape stories filtering into social conscience, asserting that “the continued construction—and the ethical reception—of rape narratives … can not only help victims of violence regain control of their own experience but are valuable in expanding narrowly conceived social constructions of what rape victims ‘are like’” (27-8). Miller’s play positions the audience as witness to a relatable, witty, and intelligent woman as the victim of such a crime who can rebuild herself in the aftermath, despite the system’s fallibilities and inclination to silence and erase her experience. Like the audience member who sat beside me at Prima Facie’s West End debut, and who had such an emotional reaction to the play’s subject matter, it is easy to see how bearing witness to Tessa’s rape and the subsequent trial is vital. It can generate necessary discourse about the value in challenging these systems to promote individual wellbeing for victims of sexual assault, and by extension, push us towards creating a better, more just society. Tessa’s experience in the court room is “shaped by the male experience, its cases decided by generations of male judges and its statutes legislated by generations of male politicians” (Miller 7), which she highlights can fail to accept a victim’s testimony as truth if it does not fit within the patriarchal rules of ‘rape’. The audience are encouraged through Tessa’s story to consider their own complicity in such systems, as a direct result of societal misconceptions about rape and rape victims being shaped by the male—or patriarchal—experience. The audience are presented with multiple rape narratives in Prima Facie, leading us to see Tessa’s trial, testimony, and cross-examination, aptly titled in the play as “the Silencing” (Miller 81), as the hardest to watch. Miller weaves a complex tapestry, which reminds us that fundamentally, each story of rape varies in its particulars; there is no one narrative that can contain these explosive and singular moments of disruption. Yet, placed beside each other, these experiences … function as a reminder of the complex power associated with not only the telling, but the hearing, of such stories. (Roeder 28) After the audience is led to this conclusion, the play’s voice of reckoning demands of them that something must change—and that this change begins with them. Miller does not ask this only of the average theatre-goer, but of those who have the power to make a difference. For its opening run with Griffin Theatre Company in Sydney, Prima Facie staged a one-night performance specifically for female judges, barristers, solicitors, lawyers, and politicians, followed by what Miller describes as “a long and exciting discussion where played out before me was an authentic intersection between art and social change” (Miller 8). Miller saw the positive reception to the play as “a beacon of hope for future generations” (Miller 8), as she witnessed the Law Reform Commission attend a matinee, and a series of boys’ schools attend the production. Additionally, many performances internationally and in Australia have been followed by poignant Q&As, positioning this play as a site for political and social change. This is achieved by placing the production team alongside professionals within the field of law to promote these discussions. Miller saw the potential for this play not only to challenge social perceptions of rape held by people within society, but also as a driving force for enacting real and tangible change to the systems by generating discourse with those who, like (the fictional) Tessa, work within such systems. Similarly, for its West End debut, Prima Facie collaborated with The Schools Consent Project, gifting tickets to partner school groups, providing support to students who attended, and donating some of its profits to this not-for-profit organisation. The founder of The Schools Consent Project, Kate Parker, spoke of this collaboration as crucial, in that the play shines a critical spotlight on the themes of consent, the criminal justice system and the female experience – topics we discuss daily with young people in classrooms across the country in our lawyer-led workshops on consent. The production is radical for a West End stage, as is its willingness to have a wider community reach. We are very excited about the impact of this partnership on the behaviour and thinking of the young people we work with. (qtd. in Wood, par. 3) The targeted community outreach linked to its West End run has propelled Prima Facie’s impact beyond the theoretical—or fictional—and into the practical, promoting new ways of thinking about the systems within which society operate, and encouraging those who will effectively dominate the system’s future to consider ways in which we can change. The collective wellbeing of society and its individuals can be brought about by the types of theatrical narratives that have emerged in the contemporary era, like Prima Facie, as it encourages a necessary discourse about the pervasiveness of rape and the fallibilities of the (still) patriarchal systems we have in place through which to examine and test accusations of this kind. This fallibility is preventing society from becoming better; improving for the greater good of all who belong to it. For us to do so, we must consider how our collective complicity in such systems has only contributed to its success in neglecting rape victims at their most vulnerable. Lester Brathwaite captures this eloquently in his review of Prima Facie’s Broadway review for Entertainment Weekly when he writes: “the emotional and physical toll of a performance like this, and the truths it brings to light, is akin to a public service” (par. 16). The play and performance’s ability to reveal the layers of oppression that sit beneath the surface of society and force the audience to look within are powerful, and potentially transformative. References Bix, Brian H. "Linguistic Meaning and Legal Truth." Law and Language: Current Legal Issues. Vol. 15. Eds. Michael Freeman and Fiona Smith. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. 34-44. Coundouriotis, Eleni. “‘You Only Have Your Word’: Rape and Testimony.” Human Rights Quarterly 35. 2 (2013): 365–85. Daly, Kathleen, and Brigitte Bouhours. “Rape and Attrition in the Legal Process: A Comparative Analysis of Five Countries.” Crime and Justice 39.1 (2010): 565–650. Donat, P., and J. D'Emilio. “A Feminist Redefinition of Rape and Sexual Assault: Historical Foundations and Change.” Journal of Social Issues 48 (1992): 9–22. Fitzpatrick, Lisa. “Signifying Rape: Problems of Representing Sexual Violence on Stage.” Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives: Violence and Violation. Eds. Sorcha Gunne and Zoe Brigley Thompson. London: Routledge, 2010. 154–165. Fraser, Courtney. “From Ladies First to Asking for It: Benevolent Sexism in the Maintenance of Rape Culture.” California Law Review 103 (2015): 141–203. Harrison D.H. Lee, Jason M. Tangen, Blake M. McKimmie, and Barbara M. Masser. “Guided by the Rape Schema: The Influence of Event Order on How Jurors Evaluate the Victim’s Testimony in Cases of Rape.” Psychology, Crime & Law 29.1 (2022): 25–55. Herman, Dianne F. “The Rape Culture.” Culture 1.10 (1988): 45–53. Miller, Suzie. Prima Facie. London: Nick Hern Books, 2022. Roeder, Tara. “‘You Have to Confess’: Rape and the Politics of Storytelling.” Journal of Feminist Scholarship 9 (2015): 18–29. Sehrbrock, Joachim. “Social Justice on the Couch: Collapse and Repair of Social Thirdness.” British Journal of Psychotherapy 37.4 (2021): 673–689. Spohn, Cassia. “Sexual Assault Case Processing: The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same.” International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 9.1 (2020): 86–94. Taslitz, Andrew E. Rape and the Culture of the Courtroom. New York: NYU Press, 1999. Taylor, Shannon. “Sexual Assault and the Law – a Diary of a Victim/Survivor's Experience.” Women against Violence: An Australian Feminist Journal 5 (1998): 64–72. Tidmarsh, Patrick, and Gemma Hamilton. “Misconceptions of Sexual Crimes against Adult Victims: Barriers to Justice.” Australian Institute of Criminology: Trends & Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice 611 (2020): 1–18. Ullman, Sarah E. “The Social Context of Talking about Sexual Assault.” Talking about Sexual Assault: Society's Response to Survivors. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2010. Wood, Alex. “West End Prima Facie with Jodie Comer Partners with Schools Consent Project.” WhatsOnStage, 15 Mar. 2022. <https://www.whatsonstage.com/london-theatre/news/west-end-prima-facie-jodie-comer-school-consent_56107.html>.

Engagement in any capacity with mainstream media since mid-2001 has meant immersion in the cross-platform, multimedia phenomenon of Harry Potter: Muggle outcast; boy wizard; corporate franchise. Consumers even casually perusing contemporary popular culture could be forgiven for suspecting they have entered a MÃbius loop in which Harry Potter-related media products and merchandise are ubiquitous: books; magazine cover stories; newspaper articles; websites; television specials; hastily assembled author biographies; advertisements on broadcast and pay television; children's merchandising; and theme park attractions. Each of these media commodities has been anchored in and cross-promoted by America Online-Time Warner's (AOL-TW) first instalment in a projected seven-film sequence—Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.1 The marketing campaign has gradually escalated in the three years elapsing between AOL-TW subsidiary Warner Bros' purchase from J.K. Rowling of the film and merchandising rights to the first two Harry Potter books, and the November 2001 world premiere of the film (Sherber 55). As current AOL-TW CEO Richard Parsons accurately forecast, "You're not going to be able to go anywhere without knowing about it. This could be a bigger franchise than Star Wars" (Auletta 50). Yet, AOL-TW's promotional strategy did not limit itself to creating mere awareness of the film's release. Rather, its tactic was to create an all-encompassing environment structured around the immense value of the Harry Potter brand—a "brand cocoon" which consumers do not so much enter and exit as choose to exist within (Klein 2002). In twenty-first-century mass marketing, the art is to target affluent consumers willing to direct their informational, entertainment, and consumption practices increasingly within the "walled garden" of a single conglomerate's content offerings (Auletta 55). Such an idealised modern consumer avidly samples the diversified product range of the parent conglomerate, but does so specifically by consuming multiple products derived from essentially the same content reservoir. Provided a match between consumer desire and brand can be achieved with sufficient accuracy and demographic breadth, the commercial returns are obvious: branded consumers pay multiple times for only marginally differentiated products. The Brand-Conglomerate Nexus Recyclable content has always been embraced by media industries, as cultural commodities such as early films of stage variety acts, Hollywood studio-era literary adaptations, and movie soundtrack LPs attest. For much of the twentieth century, the governing dynamic of content recycling was sequential, in that a content package (be it a novel, stage production or film) would succeed in its home medium and then, depending upon its success and potential for translation across formats, could be repackaged in a subsequent medium. Successful content repackaging may re-energise demand for earlier formatting of the same content (as film adaptations of literary bestsellers reliably increase sales of the originating novel). Yet the cultural industries providing risk capital to back content repackaging formerly required solid evidence that content had achieved immense success in its first medium before contemplating reformulations into new media. The cultural industries radically restructured in the last decades of the twentieth century to produce the multi-format phenomenon of which Harry Potter is the current apotheosis: multiple product lines in numerous corporate divisions are promoted simultaneously, the synchronicity of product release being crucial to the success of the franchise as a whole. The release of individual products may be staggered, but the goal is for products to be available simultaneously so that they work in aggregate to drive consumer awareness of the umbrella brand. Such streaming of content across parallel media formats is in many ways the logical culmination of broader late-twentieth-century developments. Digital technology has functionally integrated what were once discrete media operating platforms, and major media conglomerates have acquired subsidiaries in virtually all media formats on a global scale. Nevertheless, it remains true that the commercial risks inherent in producing, distributing and promoting a cross-format media phenomenon are vastly greater than the formerly dominant sequential approach, massively escalating financial losses should the elusive consumer-brand fit fail to materialise. A key to media corporations' seemingly quixotic willingness to expose themselves to such risk is perhaps best provided by Michael Harkavy, Warner Bros' vice-president of worldwide licensing, in his comments on Warner Music Group's soundtrack for the first Harry Potter film: It will be music for the child in us all, something we hope to take around the world that will take us to the next level of synergy between consumer products, the [AOL-TW cable channel] Cartoon Network, our music, film, and home video groups—building a longtime franchise for Harry as a team effort. (Traiman 51) The relationship between AOL-TW and the superbrand Harry Potter is essentially symbiotic. AOL-TW, as the world's largest media conglomerate, has the resources to exploit fully economies of scale in production and distribution of products in the vast Harry Potter franchise. Similarly, AOL-TW is pre-eminently placed to exploit the economies of scope afforded by its substantial holdings in every form of content delivery, allowing cross-subsidisation of the various divisions and, crucially, cross-promotion of the Harry Potter brand in an endless web of corporate self-referentiality. Yet it is less frequently acknowledged that AOL-TW needs the Harry Potter brand as much as the global commercialisation of Harry Potter requires AOL-TW. The conglomerate seeks a commercially protean megabrand capable of streaming across all its media formats to drive operating synergies between what have historically been distinct commercial divisions ("Welcome"; Pulley; Auletta 55). In light of AOL-TW's record US$54.2b losses in the first quarter of 2002, the long-term viability of the Harry Potter franchise is, if anything, still more crucial to the conglomerate's health than was envisaged at the time of its dot.com-fuelled January 2000 merger (Goldberg 23; "AOL" 35). AOL-TW's Richard Parsons conceptualises Harry Potter specifically as an asset "driving synergy both ways", neatly encapsulating the symbiotic interdependence between AOL-TW and its star franchise: "we use the different platforms to drive the movie, and the movie to drive business across the platforms" ("Harry Potter" 61). Characteristics of the Harry Potter Brand AOL-TW's enthusiasm to mesh its corporate identity with the Harry Potter brand stems in the first instance from demonstrated consumer loyalty to the Harry Potter character: J.K. Rowling's four books have sold in excess of 100m copies in 47 countries and have been translated into 47 languages.2 In addition, the brand has shown a promising tendency towards demographic bracket-creep, attracting loyal adult readers in sufficient numbers to prompt UK publisher Bloomsbury to diversify into adult-targeted editions. As alluring for AOL-TW as this synchronic brand growth is, the real goldmine inheres in the brand's potential for diachronic growth. From her first outlines of the concept, Rowling conceived of the Potter story as a seven-part series, which from a marketing perspective ensures the broadscale re-promotion of the Harry Potter brand on an almost annual basis throughout the current decade. This moreover assists re-release of the first film on an approximately five-year basis to new audiences previously too young to fall within its demographic catchment—the exact strategy of "classic" rebranding which has underwritten rival studio Disney's fortunes.3 Complementing this brand extension is the potential to grow child consumers through the brand as Harry Potter sequels are produced. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone director Chris Columbus spruiks enthusiastically that "the beauty of making these books into films is that with each one, Harry is a year older, so [child actor] Daniel [Radcliffe] can remain Harry as long as we keep making them" (Manelis 111). Such comments suggest the benefits of luring child consumers through the brand as they mature, harnessing their intense loyalty to the child cast and, through the cast, to the brand itself. The over-riding need to be everything to everyone—exciting to new consumers entering the brand for the first time, comfortingly familiar to already seasoned consumers returning for a repeat hit—helps explain the retro-futuristic feel of the first film's production design. Part 1950s suburban Hitchcock, Part Dickensian London, part Cluny-tapestry medievalism, part public school high-Victorianism, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone strives for a commercially serviceable timelessness, in so doing reinforcing just how very twenty-first-century its conception actually is. In franchise terms, this conscious drive towards retro-futurism fuels Harry Potter's "toyetic potential" (Siegel, "Toys" 19). The ease with which the books' complex plots and mise-en-scene lend themselves to subsidiary rights sales and licensed merchandising in part explains Harry Potter's appeal to commercial media. AOL-TW executives in their public comments have consistently stayed on-message in emphasising "magic" as the brand's key aspirational characteristic, and certainly scenes such as the arrival at Hogwarts, the Quidditch match, the hatching of Hagrid's dragon and the final hunt through the school's dungeons serve as brilliant advertisements for AOL-TW's visual effects divisions. Yet the film exploits many of these "magic" scenes to introduce key tropes of its merchandising programme—Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans, chocolate frogs, Hogwarts house colours, the sorting hat, Scabbers the rat, Hedwig, the Remembrall—such that it resembles a series of home shopping advertisements with unusually high production values. It is this railroading of the film's narrative into opportunities for consumerist display which leads film critic Cynthia Fuchs to dub the Diagon Alley shopping scene "the film's cagiest moment, at once a familiar activity for school kid viewers and an apt metaphor for what this movie is all about—consumption, of everything in sight." More telling than the normalising of shopping as filmic activity in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is the eclipse of the book's checks on commodity fetishism: its very British sensitivity to class snubs for the large and impecunious Weasley family; the puzzled contempt Hogwarts initiates display for Muggle money; the gentle ribbing at children's obsession with branded sports goods. The casual browser in the Warner Bros store confronted with a plastic, light-up version of the Nimbus 2000 Quidditch broomstick understands that even the most avid authorial commitment to delimiting spin-off merchandise can try the media conglomerate's hand only so far. Constructing the Harry Potter Franchise The film Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone constitutes the indispensable brand anchor for AOL-TW's intricate publicity and sales strategy around Harry Potter. Because content recycling within global media conglomerates is increasingly lead by film studio divisions, the opening weekend box office taking for a brand-anchoring film is crucial to the success of the broader franchise and, by extension, to the corporation as a whole. Critic Thomas Schatz's observation that the film's opening serves as "the "launch site" for its franchise development, establishing its value in all other media markets" (83) highlights the precariousness of such multi-party financial investment all hinging upon first weekend takings. The fact that Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone broke (then standing) box office records with its 16 November 2001 three-day weekend openings in the US and the UK, garnering US$93.2m and GBP16m respectively, constituted the crucial first stage in AOL-TW's brand strategy (Collins 9; Fierman and Jensen 26). But it formed only an initial phase, as subsequent content recycling and cross-promotion was then structured to radiate outwards from this commercial epicentre. Three categories of recycled AOL-TW Harry Potter content are discernible, although they are frequently overlapping and not necessarily sequential. The first category, most closely tied to the film itself, are instances of reused digital content, specifically in the advance publicity trailer viewable on the official website, and downloads of movie clips, film stills and music samples from the film and its soundtrack.4 Secondly, at one remove from the film itself, is AOL-TW's licensing of film "characters, names and related indicia" to secondary manufacturers, creating tie-in merchandise designed to cross-promote the Harry Potter brand and stoke consumer investment (both emotional and financial) in the phenomenon.5 This campaign phase was itself tactically designed with two waves of merchandising release: a September 2000 launch of book-related merchandise (with no use of film-related Harry Potter indicia permitted); and a second, better selling February 2001 release of ancillary products sporting Harry Potter film logos and visual branding which coincided with and reinforced the marketing push specifically around the film's forthcoming release (Sherber 55; Siegel, "From Hype" 24; Lyman and Barnes C1; Martin 5). Finally, and most crucial to the long-term strategy of the parent conglomerate, Harry Potter branding was used to drive consumer take up of AOL-TW products not generally associated with the Harry Potter brand, as a means of luring consumers out of their established technological or informational comfort zones. Hence, the official Harry Potter website is laced with far from accidental offers to trial Internet service provider AOL; TimeWarner magazines Entertainment Weekly, People, and Time ran extensive taster stories about the film and its loyal fan culture (Jensen 56-57; Fierman and Jensen 26-28; "Magic Kingdom" 132-36; Corliss 136; Dickinson 115); AOL-TW's Moviefone bookings service advertised pre-release Harry Potter tickets on its website; and Warner Bros Movie World theme park on the Gold Coast in Australia heavily promoted its Harry Potter Movie Magic Experience. Investment in a content brand on the scale of AOL-TW's outlay of US$1.4m for Harry Potter must not only drive substantial business across every platform of the converged media conglomerate by providing premium content (Grover 66). It must, crucially for the long run, also drive take up and on-going subscriptions to the delivery services owned by the parent corporation. Energising such all-encompassing strategising is the corporate nirvana of seamless synergy: between content and distribution; between the Harry Potter and AOL-TW brands; between conglomerate and consumer. Notes 1. The film, like the first of J.K. Rowling's books, is titled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in the "metaphysics-averse" US ("Harry Potter" 61). 2. Publishing statistics sourced from Horn and Jones (59), Manelis (110) and Bloomsbury Publishing's Harry Potter website: http://www.bloomsburymagazine.com/harryp.... 3. Interestingly, Disney tangentially acknowledged the extent to which AOL-TW has appropriated Disney's own content recycling strategies. In a film trailer for the Pixar/Disney animated collaboration Monsters, Inc. which screened in Australia and the US before Harry Potter sessions, two monsters play a game of charades to which the answer is transparently "Harry Potter." In the way of such homages from one media giant to another, it nevertheless subtly directs the audience to the Disney product screening in an adjacent cinema. 4. The official Harry Potter film website is http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com. The official site for the soundtrack to Harry Potter and the Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone is: http://www.harrypottersoundtrack.com. 5. J.K. Rowling." A page and a half of non-negotiable "Harry Potter Terms of Use" further spells out prohibitions on use or modification of site content without the explicit (and unlikely) consent of AOL-TW (refer: http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com/cmp/te...). References "AOL losses 'sort of a deep disappointment'." Weekend Australian 18-19 May 2002: 35. Auletta, Ken. "Leviathan." New Yorker 29 Oct. 2001: 50-56, 58-61. Collins, Luke. "Harry Potter's Magical $178m Opening." Australian Financial Review 20 Nov. 2001: 9. Corliss, Richard. "Wizardry without Magic." Time 19 Nov. 2001: 136. Dickinson, Amy. "Why Movies make Readers." Time 10 Dec. 2001: 115. Fierman, Daniel, and Jeff Jensen. "Potter of Gold: J.K. Rowling's Beloved Wiz Kid hits Screensand Breaks Records." Entertainment Weekly 30 Nov. 2001: 26-28. Fuchs, Cynthia. "The Harry Hype." PopPolitics.com 19 Nov. 2001: n.pag. Online. Internet. 8 Mar. 2002. Available <http://www.poppolitics.com/articles/2001-11-19-harry.shtml>. Goldberg, Andy. "Time Will Tell." Sydney Morning Herald 27-28 Apr. 2002: 23. Grover, Ronald. "Harry Potter and the Marketer's Millstone." Business Week 15 Oct. 2001: 66. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Dir. Chris Columbus. Screenplay by Steve Kloves. Warner Bros, 2001. "Harry Potter and the Synergy Test." Economist 10 Nov. 2001: 61-62. Herman, Edward S., and Robert W. McChesney. The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism. London: Cassell, 1997. Horn, John, and Malcolm Jones. "The Bubble with Harry." The Bulletin/Newsweek 13 Nov. 2001: 58-59. Jensen, Jeff. "Holiday Movie Preview: Potter's Field." Entertainment Weekly 16 Nov. 2001: 56-57. Klein, Naomi. "Naomi KleinNo Logo." The Media Report. ABC Radio National webtranscript. Broadcast in Sydney, 17 Jan. 2002. Online. Internet. 19 Feb. 2002. Available <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8:30/mediarpt/stories/s445871.htm>. Lyman, Rick, and Julian E. Barnes. "The Toy War for Holiday Movies is a Battle Among 3 Heavyweights." New York Times 12 Nov. 2001: C1. "Magic Kingdom." People Weekly 14 Jan. 2002: 132-36. Manelis, Michele. "Potter Gold." Bulletin 27 Nov. 2001: 110-11. Martin, Peter. "Rowling Stock." Weekend Australian 24-25 Nov. 2001: Review, 1, 4-5. Pulley, Brett. "Morning After." Forbes 7 Feb. 2000: 54-56. Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. Schatz, Thomas. "The Return of the Hollywood Studio System." Conglomerates and the Media. Erik Barnouw et al. New York: New Press, 1997. 73-106. Sherber, Anne. "Licensing 2000 Showcases Harry Potter, Rudolph for Kids." Billboard 8 Jul. 2000: 55. Siegel, Seth M. "Toys & Movies: Always? Never? Sometimes!" Brandweek 12 Feb. 2001: 19. ---. "From Hype to Hope." Brandweek 11 Jun. 2001: 24. Traiman, Steve. "Harry Potter, Powerpuff Girls on A-list at Licensing 2000." Billboard 1 Jul. 2000: 51, 53. "Welcome to the 21st Century." Business Week 24 Jan. 2000: 32-34, 36-38. Links http://www.bloomsburymagazine.com/harrypotter/muggles http://www.harrypottersoundtrack.com http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com http://www.poppolitics.com/articles/2001-11-19-harry.shtml http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8:30/mediarpt/stories/s445871.htm http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com/cmp/terms.html Citation reference for this article MLA Style Murray, Simone. "Harry Potter, Inc." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.4 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/recycling.php>. Chicago Style Murray, Simone, "Harry Potter, Inc." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 4 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/recycling.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Murray, Simone. (2002) Harry Potter, Inc.. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(4). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/recycling.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction Explorations of the multimedia game format within cultural studies have been broadly approached from two perspectives: one -- the impact of technologies on user interaction particularly with regard to social implications, and the other -- human computer interactions within the framework of cybercultures. Another approach to understanding or speaking about games within cultural studies is to focus on the game experience as cultural practice -- as an activity or an event. In this article I wish to initiate an exploration of the aesthetics of player space as a distinctive element of the gameplay experience. In doing so I propose that an understanding of aesthetic spatial issues as an element of player interactivity and engagement is important for understanding the cultural practice of adventure gameplay. In approaching these questions, I am focussing on the single-player exploration adventure game in particular Myst and The Crystal Key. In describing these games as adventures I am drawing on Chris Crawford's The Art of Computer Game Design, which although a little dated, focusses on game design as a distinct activity. He brings together a theoretical approach with extensive experience as a game designer himself (Excalibur, Legionnaire, Gossip). Whilst at Atari he also worked with Brenda Laurel, a key theorist in the area of computer design and dramatic structure. Adventure games such as Myst and The Crystal Key might form a sub-genre in Chris Crawford's taxonomy of computer game design. Although they use the main conventions of the adventure game -- essentially a puzzle to be solved with characters within a story context -- the main focus and source of pleasure for the player is exploration, particularly the exploration of worlds or cosmologies. The main gameplay of both games is to travel through worlds solving clues, picking up objects, and interacting with other characters. In Myst the player has to solve the riddle of the world they have entered -- as the CD-ROM insert states "Now you're here, wherever here is, with no option but to explore." The goal, as the player must work out, is to release the father Atrus from prison by bringing magic pages of a book to different locations in the worlds. Hints are offered by broken-up, disrupted video clips shown throughout the game. In The Crystal Key, the player as test pilot has to save a civilisation by finding clues, picking up objects, mending ships and defeating an opponent. The questions foregrounded by a focus on the aesthetics of navigation are: What types of representational context are being set up? What choices have designers made about representational context? How are the players positioned within these spaces? What are the implications for the player's sense of orientation and navigation? Architectural Fabrication For the ancient Greeks, painting was divided into two categories: magalography (the painting of great things) and rhyparography (the painting of small things). Magalography covered mythological and historical scenes, which emphasised architectural settings, the human figure and grand landscapes. Rhyparography referred to still lifes and objects. In adventure games, particularly those that attempt to construct a cosmology such as Myst and The Crystal Key, magalography and rhyparography collide in a mix of architectural monumentality and obsessive detailing of objects. For the ancient Greeks, painting was divided into two categories: magalography (the painting of great things) and rhyparography (the painting of small things). Magalography covered mythological and historical scenes, which emphasised architectural settings, the human figure and grand landscapes. Rhyparography referred to still lifes and objects. In adventure games, particularly those that attempt to construct a cosmology such as Myst and The Crystal Key, magalography and rhyparography collide in a mix of architectural monumentality and obsessive detailing of objects. The creation of a digital architecture in adventure games mimics the Pompeii wall paintings with their interplay of extruded and painted features. In visualising the space of a cosmology, the environment starts to be coded like the urban or built environment with underlying geometry and textured surface or dressing. In The Making of Myst (packaged with the CD-ROM) Chuck Carter, the artist on Myst, outlines the process of creating Myst Island through painting the terrain in grey scale then extruding the features and adding textural render -- a methodology that lends itself to a hybrid of architectural and painted geometry. Examples of external architecture and of internal room design can be viewed online. In the spatial organisation of the murals of Pompeii and later Rome, orthogonals converged towards several vertical axes showing multiple points of view simultaneously. During the high Renaissance, notions of perspective developed into a more formal system known as the construzione legittima or legitimate construction. This assumed a singular position of the on-looker standing in the same place as that occupied by the artist when the painting was constructed. In Myst there is an exaggeration of the underlying structuring technique of the construzione legittima with its emphasis on geometry and mathematics. The player looks down at a slight angle onto the screen from a fixed vantage point and is signified as being within the cosmological expanse, either in off-screen space or as the cursor. Within the cosmology, the island as built environment appears as though viewed through an enlarging lens, creating the precision and coldness of a Piero della Francesca painting. Myst mixes flat and three-dimensional forms of imagery on the same screen -- the flat, sketchy portrayal of the trees of Myst Island exists side-by-side with the monumental architectural buildings and landscape design structures created in Macromodel. This image shows the flat, almost expressionistic trees of Myst Island juxtaposed with a fountain rendered in high detail. This recalls the work of Giotto in the Arena chapel. In Joachim's Dream, objects and buildings have depth, but trees, plants and sky -- the space in-between objects -- is flat. Myst Island conjures up the realm of a magic, realist space with obsolete artefacts, classic architectural styles (the Albert Hall as the domed launch pad, the British Museum as the library, the vernacular cottage in the wood), mechanical wonders, miniature ships, fountains, wells, macabre torture instruments, ziggurat-like towers, symbols and odd numerological codes. Adam Mates describes it as "that beautiful piece of brain-deadening sticky-sweet eye-candy" but more than mere eye-candy or graphic verisimilitude, it is the mix of cultural ingredients and signs that makes Myst an intriguing place to play. The buildings in The Crystal Key, an exploratory adventure game in a similar genre to Myst, celebrate the machine aesthetic and modernism with Buckminster Fuller style geodesic structures, the bombe shape, exposed ducting, glass and steel, interiors with movable room partitions and abstract expressionist decorations. An image of one of these modernist structures is available online. The Crystal Key uses QuickTime VR panoramas to construct the exterior and interior spaces. Different from the sharp detail of Myst's structures, the focus changes from sharp in wide shot to soft focus in close up, with hot-spot objects rendered in trompe l'oeil detail. The Tactility of Objects "The aim of trompe l'oeil -- using the term in its widest sense and applying it to both painting and objects -- is primarily to puzzle and to mystify" (Battersby 19). In the 15th century, Brunelleschi invented a screen with central apparatus in order to obtain exact perspective -- the monocular vision of the camera obscura. During the 17th century, there was a renewed interest in optics by the Dutch artists of the Rembrandt school (inspired by instruments developed for Dutch seafaring ventures), in particular Vermeer, Hoogstraten, de Hooch and Dou. Gerard Dou's painting of a woman chopping onions shows this. These artists were experimenting with interior perspective and trompe l'oeil in order to depict the minutia of the middle-class, domestic interior. Within these luminous interiors, with their receding tiles and domestic furniture, is an elevation of the significance of rhyparography. In the Girl Chopping Onions of 1646 by Gerard Dou the small things are emphasised -- the group of onions, candlestick holder, dead fowl, metal pitcher, and bird cage. Trompe l'oeil as an illusionist strategy is taken up in the worlds of Myst, The Crystal Key and others in the adventure game genre. Traditionally, the fascination of trompe l'oeil rests upon the tension between the actual painting and the scam; the physical structures and the faux painted structures call for the viewer to step closer to wave at a fly or test if the glass had actually broken in the frame. Mirian Milman describes trompe l'oeil painting in the following manner: "the repertory of trompe-l'oeil painting is made up of obsessive elements, it represents a reality immobilised by nails, held in the grip of death, corroded by time, glimpsed through half-open doors or curtains, containing messages that are sometimes unreadable, allusions that are often misunderstood, and a disorder of seemingly familiar and yet remote objects" (105). Her description could be a scene from Myst with in its suggestion of theatricality, rich texture and illusionistic play of riddle or puzzle. In the trompe l'oeil painterly device known as cartellino, niches and recesses in the wall are represented with projecting elements and mock bas-relief. This architectural trickery is simulated in the digital imaging of extruded and painting elements to give depth to an interior or an object. Other techniques common to trompe l'oeil -- doors, shadowy depths and staircases, half opened cupboard, and paintings often with drapes and curtains to suggest a layering of planes -- are used throughout Myst as transition points. In the trompe l'oeil paintings, these transition points were often framed with curtains or drapes that appeared to be from the spectator space -- creating a painting of a painting effect. Myst is rich in this suggestion of worlds within worlds through the framing gesture afforded by windows, doors, picture frames, bookcases and fireplaces. Views from a window -- a distant landscape or a domestic view, a common device for trompe l'oeil -- are used in Myst to represent passageways and transitions onto different levels. Vertical space is critical for extending navigation beyond the horizontal through the terraced landscape -- the tower, antechamber, dungeon, cellars and lifts of the fictional world. Screen shots show the use of the curve, light diffusion and terracing to invite the player. In The Crystal Key vertical space is limited to the extent of the QTVR tilt making navigation more of a horizontal experience. Out-Stilling the Still Dutch and Flemish miniatures of the 17th century give the impression of being viewed from above and through a focussing lens. As Mastai notes: "trompe l'oeil, therefore is not merely a certain kind of still life painting, it should in fact 'out-still' the stillest of still lifes" (156). The intricate detailing of objects rendered in higher resolution than the background elements creates a type of hyper-reality that is used in Myst to emphasise the physicality and actuality of objects. This ultimately enlarges the sense of space between objects and codes them as elements of significance within the gameplay. The obsessive, almost fetishistic, detailed displays of material artefacts recall the curiosity cabinets of Fabritius and Hoogstraten. The mechanical world of Myst replicates the Dutch 17th century fascination with the optical devices of the telescope, the convex mirror and the prism, by coding them as key signifiers/icons in the frame. In his peepshow of 1660, Hoogstraten plays with an enigma and optical illusion of a Dutch domestic interior seen as though through the wrong end of a telescope. Using the anamorphic effect, the image only makes sense from one vantage point -- an effect which has a contemporary counterpart in the digital morphing widely used in adventure games. The use of crumbled or folded paper standing out from the plane surface of the canvas was a recurring motif of the Vanitas trompe l'oeil paintings. The highly detailed representation and organisation of objects in the Vanitas pictures contained the narrative or symbology of a religious or moral tale. (As in this example by Hoogstraten.) In the cosmology of Myst and The Crystal Key, paper contains the narrative of the back-story lovingly represented in scrolls, books and curled paper messages. The entry into Myst is through the pages of an open book, and throughout the game, books occupy a privileged position as holders of stories and secrets that are used to unlock the puzzles of the game. Myst can be read as a Dantesque, labyrinthine journey with its rich tapestry of images, its multi-level historical associations and battle of good and evil. Indeed the developers, brothers Robyn and Rand Miller, had a fertile background to draw on, from a childhood spent travelling to Bible churches with their nondenominational preacher father. The Diorama as System Event The diorama (story in the round) or mechanical exhibit invented by Daguerre in the 19th century created a mini-cosmology with player anticipation, action and narrative. It functioned as a mini-theatre (with the spectator forming the fourth wall), offering a peek into mini-episodes from foreign worlds of experience. The Musée Mechanique in San Francisco has dioramas of the Chinese opium den, party on the captain's boat, French execution scenes and ghostly graveyard episodes amongst its many offerings, including a still showing an upper class dancing party called A Message from the Sea. These function in tandem with other forbidden pleasures of the late 19th century -- public displays of the dead, waxwork museums and kinetescope flip cards with their voyeuristic "What the Butler Saw", and "What the Maid Did on Her Day Off" tropes. Myst, along with The 7th Guest, Doom and Tomb Raider show a similar taste for verisimilitude and the macabre. However, the pre-rendered scenes of Myst and The Crystal Key allow for more diorama like elaborate and embellished details compared to the emphasis on speed in the real-time-rendered graphics of the shoot-'em-ups. In the gameplay of adventure games, animated moments function as rewards or responsive system events: allowing the player to navigate through the seemingly solid wall; enabling curtains to be swung back, passageways to appear, doors to open, bookcases to disappear. These short sequences resemble the techniques used in mechanical dioramas where a coin placed in the slot enables a curtain or doorway to open revealing a miniature narrative or tableau -- the closure of the narrative resulting in the doorway shutting or the curtain being pulled over again. These repeating cycles of contemplation-action-closure offer the player one of the rewards of the puzzle solution. The sense of verisimilitude and immersion in these scenes is underscored by the addition of sound effects (doors slamming, lifts creaking, room atmosphere) and music. Geographic Locomotion Static imagery is the standard backdrop of the navigable space of the cosmology game landscape. Myst used a virtual camera around a virtual set to create a sequence of still camera shots for each point of view. The use of the still image lends itself to a sense of the tableauesque -- the moment frozen in time. These tableauesque moments tend towards the clean and anaesthetic, lacking any evidence of the player's visceral presence or of other human habitation. The player's navigation from one tableau screen to the next takes the form of a 'cyber-leap' or visual jump cut. These jumps -- forward, backwards, up, down, west, east -- follow on from the geographic orientation of the early text-based adventure games. In their graphic form, they reveal a new framing angle or point of view on the scene whilst ignoring the rules of classical continuity editing. Games such as The Crystal Key show the player's movement through space (from one QTVR node to another) by employing a disorientating fast zoom, as though from the perspective of a supercharged wheelchair. Rather than reconciling the player to the state of movement, this technique tends to draw attention to the technologies of the programming apparatus. The Crystal Key sets up a meticulous screen language similar to filmic dramatic conventions then breaks its own conventions by allowing the player to jump out of the crashed spaceship through the still intact window. The landscape in adventure games is always partial, cropped and fragmented. The player has to try and map the geographical relationship of the environment in order to understand where they are and how to proceed (or go back). Examples include selecting the number of marker switches on the island to receive Atrus's message and the orientation of Myst's tower in the library map to obtain key clues. A screenshot shows the arrival point in Myst from the dock. In comprehending the landscape, which has no centre, the player has to create a mental map of the environment by sorting significant connecting elements into chunks of spatial elements similar to a Guy Debord Situationist map. Playing the Flaneur The player in Myst can afford to saunter through the landscape, meandering at a more leisurely pace that would be possible in a competitive shoot-'em-up, behaving as a type of flaneur. The image of the flaneur as described by Baudelaire motions towards fin de siècle decadence, the image of the socially marginal, the dispossessed aristocrat wandering the urban landscape ready for adventure and unusual exploits. This develops into the idea of the artist as observer meandering through city spaces and using the power of memory in evoking what is observed for translation into paintings, writing or poetry. In Myst, the player as flaneur, rather than creating paintings or writing, is scanning the landscape for clues, witnessing objects, possible hints and pick-ups. The numbers in the keypad in the antechamber, the notes from Atrus, the handles on the island marker, the tower in the forest and the miniature ship in the fountain all form part of a mnemomic trompe l'oeil. A screenshot shows the path to the library with one of the island markers and the note from Atrus. In the world of Myst, the player has no avatar presence and wanders around a seemingly unpeopled landscape -- strolling as a tourist venturing into the unknown -- creating and storing a mental map of objects and places. In places these become items for collection -- cultural icons with an emphasised materiality. In The Crystal Key iconography they appear at the bottom of the screen pulsing with relevance when active. A screenshot shows a view to a distant forest with the "pick-ups" at the bottom of the screen. This process of accumulation and synthesis suggests a Surrealist version of Joseph Cornell's strolls around Manhattan -- collecting, shifting and organising objects into significance. In his 1982 taxonomy of game design, Chris Crawford argues that without competition these worlds are not really games at all. That was before the existence of the Myst adventure sub-genre where the pleasures of the flaneur are a particular aspect of the gameplay pleasures outside of the rules of win/loose, combat and dominance. By turning the landscape itself into a pathway of significance signs and symbols, Myst, The Crystal Key and other games in the sub-genre offer different types of pleasures from combat or sport -- the pleasures of the stroll -- the player as observer and cultural explorer. References Battersby, M. Trompe L'Oeil: The Eye Deceived. New York: St. Martin's, 1974. Crawford, C. The Art of Computer Game Design. Original publication 1982, book out of print. 15 Oct. 2000 <http://members.nbci.com/kalid/art/art.php>. Darley Andrew. Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres. London: Routledge, 2000. Lunenfeld, P. Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P 1999. Mates, A. Effective Illusory Worlds: A Comparative Analysis of Interfaces in Contemporary Interactive Fiction. 1998. 15 Oct. 2000 <http://www.wwa.com/~mathes/stuff/writings>. Mastai, M. L. d'Orange. Illusion in Art, Trompe L'Oeil: A History of Pictorial Illusion. New York: Abaris, 1975. Miller, Robyn and Rand. "The Making of Myst." Myst. Cyan and Broderbund, 1993. Milman, M. Trompe-L'Oeil: The Illusion of Reality. New York: Skira Rizzoli, 1982. Murray, J. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Wertheim, M. The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Cyberspace from Dante to the Internet. Sydney: Doubleday, 1999. Game References 7th Guest. Trilobyte, Inc., distributed by Virgin Games, 1993. Doom. Id Software, 1992. Excalibur. Chris Crawford, 1982. Myst. Cyan and Broderbund, 1993. Tomb Raider. Core Design and Eidos Interactive, 1996. The Crystal Key. Dreamcatcher Interactive, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Bernadette Flynn. "Towards an Aesthetics of Navigation -- Spatial Organisation in the Cosmology of the Adventure Game." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.5 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/navigation.php>. Chicago style: Bernadette Flynn, "Towards an Aesthetics of Navigation -- Spatial Organisation in the Cosmology of the Adventure Game," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 5 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/navigation.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Bernadette Flynn. (2000) Towards an aesthetics of navigation -- spatial organisation in the cosmology of the adventure game. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(5). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/navigation.php> ([your date of access]).

IntroductionIn the contemporary West, experiences of time are shaped by—and inextricably linked to—the nature of media production and consumption. In Derrida and Steigler’s estimation, teletechnologies bring time “into play” and thus produce time as an “artifact”, that is, a knowable product (3). How and why time becomes “artifactually” produced, according to these thinkers, is a result of the various properties of media production; media ensure that “gestures” (which can be understood here as the cultural moments marked as significant in some way, especially public ones) are registered. Being so, time is constrained, “formatted, initialised” by the matrix of the media system (3). Subsequently, because the media apparatus undergirds the Western imaginary, so too, the media apparatus undergirds the Western concept of time. We can say, in the radically changing global mediascape then, digital culture performs and generates ontological shifts that rewrite the relationship between media, time, and experience. This point lends itself to the significance of the role of both new media platforms and new media texts in reconfiguring understandings between past, present, and future timescapes.There are various ways in which new media texts and platforms work upon experiences of time. In the following, I will focus on just one of these ways: narrativity. By examining a ‘new media’ text, I elucidate how new media narratives imagine timescapes that are constructed through metaphors of ‘confetti’ or ‘snow’, as opposed to more traditional lineal metaphors like ‘rivers’ or ‘streams’ (see Augustine Sedgewick’s “Against Flows” for more critical thinking on the relationship between history, narrative, and the ‘flows’ metaphor). I focus on the revisioning of narrative structure in the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House (2018) from its original form in the 1959 novel by Shirley Jackson. The narrative revisioning from the novel to the televisual both demonstrates and manifests emergent conceptualisations of time through the creative play of temporal multi-flows, which are contemporaneous yet fragmented.The first consideration is the shift in textual format. However, the translocation of the narrative from a novel to a televisual text is important, but not the focus here. Added to this, I deliberately move toward a “general narrative analysis” (Cobley 28), which has the advantage of focusing onmechanisms which may be integral to linguistically or visually-based genres without becoming embroiled in parochial questions to do with the ‘effectiveness’ of given modes, or the relative ‘value’ of different genres. This also allows narrative analysis to track the development of a specified process as well as its embodiment in a range of generic and technological forms. (Cobley 28)It should be also be noted from the outset that I am not suggesting that fragmented narrative constructions and representations were never imagined or explored prior to this new media age. Quite the contrary if we think of Modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf (Lodwick; Haggland). Rather, it is to claim that this abstraction is emerging in the mainstream entertainment media in greater contest with the dominant and more historically entrenched version of ‘time as a construct’ that is characterised through Realist narratology as linear and flowing only one way. As I will explore below, the reasons for this are largely related to shifts in everyday media consumption brought about by digital culture. There are two reasons why I specifically utilise Netflix’s series The Haunting of Hill House as a fulcrum from which to lever arguments about new media and the contemporary experience of time. First, as a web series, it embodies some of the pertinent conventions of the digital media landscape, both diegetically and also through practices of production and consumption by way of new time-shifting paradigms (see Leaver). I focus on the former in this article, but the latter is fruitful ground for critical consideration. For example, Netflix itself, as a platform, has somewhat destabilised normative temporal routines, such as in the case of ‘binge-watching’ where audiences ‘lose’ time similarly to gamblers in the casino space. Second, the fact that there are two iterations of the same story—one a novel and one a televisual text—provide us with a comparative benchmark from which to make further assertions about the changing nature of media and time from the mid-century to a post-millennium digital mediascape. Though it should be noted, my discussion will focus on the nature and quality of the contemporary framework, and I use the 1959 novel as a frame of reference only rather than examining its rich tapestry in its own right (for critique on the novel itself, see Wilson; see Roberts).Media and the Production of Time-SenseThere is a remarkable canon of literature detailing the relationship between media and the production of time, which can help us place this discussion in a theoretical framework. I am limited by space, but I will engage with some of the most pertinent material to set out a conceptual map. Markedly, from here, I refer to the Western experience of time as a “time-sense” following E.P. Thompson’s work (80). Following Thompson’s language, I use the term “time-sense” to refer to “our inward notation of time”, characterised by the rhythms of our “technological conditioning” systems, whether those be the forces of labour, media, or otherwise (80). Through the textual analysis of Hill House to follow, I will offer ways in which the technological conditioning of the new media system both constructs and shapes time-sense in terms related to a constellation of moments, or, to use a metaphor from the Netflix series itself, like “confetti” or “snow” (“Silence Lay Steadily”).However, in discussing the production of time-sense through new media mechanisms, note that time-sense is not an abstraction but is still linked to our understandings of the literal nature of time-space. For example, Alvin Toffler explains that, in its most simple construction, “Time can be conceived as the intervals during which events occur” (21). However, we must be reminded that events must first occur within the paradigm of experience. That is to say that matters of ‘duration’ cannot be unhinged from the experiential or phenomenological accounts of those durations, or in Toffler’s words, in an echo of Thompson, “Man’s [sic] perception of time is closely linked with his internal rhythms” (71). In the 1970s, Toffler commented upon the radical expansion of global systems of communications that produces the “twin forces of acceleration and transience”, which “alter the texture of existence, hammering our lives and psyches into new and unfamiliar shapes” (18). This simultaneous ‘speeding up’ (which he calls acceleration) and sense of ‘skipping’ (which he calls transience) manifest in a range of modern experiences which disrupt temporal contingencies. Nearly two decades after Toffler, David Harvey commented upon the Postmodern’s “total acceptance of ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity, and the chaotic” (44). Only a decade ago, Terry Smith emphasised that time-sense had become even more characterised by the “insistent presentness of multiple, often incompatible temporalities” (196). Netflix had not even launched in Australia and New Zealand until 2015, as well as a host of other time-shifting media technologies which have emerged in the past five years. As a result, it behooves us to revaluate time-sense with this emergent field of production.That being said, entertainment media have always impressed itself upon our understanding of temporal flows. Since the dawn of cinema in the late 19th century, entertainment media have been pivotal in constructing, manifesting, and illustrating time-sense. This has largely (but not exclusively) been in relation to the changing nature of narratology and the ways that narrative produces a sense of temporality. Helen Powell points out that the very earliest cinema, such as the Lumière Brothers’ short films screened in Paris, did not embed narrative, rather, “the Lumières’ actualities captured life as it happened with all its contingencies” (2). It is really only with the emergence of classical mainstream Hollywood that narrative became central, and with it new representations of “temporal flow” (2). Powell tells us that “the classical Hollywood narrative embodies a specific representation of temporal flow, rational and linear in its construction” reflecting “the standardised view of time introduced by the onset of industrialisation” (Powell 2). Of course, as media production and trends change, so does narrative structure. By the late 20th century, new approaches to narrative structure manifest in tropes such as ‘the puzzle film,’ as an example, which “play with audiences” expectations of conventional roles and storytelling through the use of the unreliable narrator and the fracturing of linearity. In doing so, they open up wider questions of belief, truth and reliability” (Powell 4). Puzzle films which might be familiar to the reader are Memento (2001) and Run Lola Run (1999), each playing with the relationship between time and memory, and thus experiences of contemporaneity. The issue of narrative in the construction of temporal flow is therefore critically linked to the ways that mediatic production of narrative, in various ways, reorganises time-sense more broadly. To examine this more closely, I now turn to Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House.Narratology and Temporal FlowNetflix’s revision of The Haunting of Hill House reveals critical insights into the ways in which media manifest the nature and quality of time-sense. Of course, the main difference between the 1959 novel and the Netflix web series is the change of the textual format from a print text to a televisual text distributed on an Internet streaming platform. This change performs what Marie-Laure Ryan calls “transfictionality across media” (385). There are several models through which transfictionality might occur and thus transmogrify textual and narratival parametres of a text. In the case of The Haunting of Hill House, the Netflix series follows the “displacement” model, which means it “constructs essentially different versions of the protoworld, redesigning its structure and reinventing its story” (Doležel 206). For example, in the 2018 television remake, the protoworld from the original novel retains integrity in that it conveys the story of a group of people who are brought to a mansion called Hill House. In both versions of the protoworld, the discombobulating effects of the mansion work upon the group dynamics until a final break down reveals the supernatural nature of the house. However, in ‘displacing’ the original narrative for adaptation to the web series, the nature of the group is radically reshaped (from a research contingent to a nuclear family unit) and the events follow radically different temporal contingencies.More specifically, the original 1959 novel utilises third-person limited narration and follows a conventional linear temporal flow through which events occur in chronological order. This style of storytelling is often thought about in metaphorical terms by way of ‘rivers’ or ‘streams,’ that is, flowing one-way and never repeating the same configuration (very much unlike the televisual text, in which some scenes are repeated to punctuate various time-streams). Sean Cubitt has examined the relationship between this conventional narrative structure and time sensibility, stating thatthe chronological narrative proposes to us a protagonist who always occupies a perpetual present … as a point moving along a line whose dimensions have however already been mapped: the protagonist of the chronological narrative is caught in a story whose beginning and end have already been determined, and which therefore constructs story time as the unfolding of destiny rather than the passage from past certainty into an uncertain future. (4)I would map Cubitt’s characterisation onto the original Hill House novel as representative of a mid-century textual artifact. Although Modernist literature (by way of Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, and so forth) certainly ‘played’ with non-linear or multi-linear narrative structures, in relation to time-sense, Christina Chau reminds us that Modernity, as a general mood, was very much still caught up in the idea that “time that moves in a linear fashion with the future moving through the present and into the past” (26). Additionally, even though flashbacks are utilised in the original novel, they are revealed using the narrative convention of ‘memories’ through the inner dialogue of the central character, thus still occurring in the ‘present’ of the novel’s timescape and still in keeping with a ‘one-way’ trajectory. Most importantly, the original novel follows what I will call one ‘time-stream’, in that events unfold, and are conveyed through, one temporal flow.In the Netflix series, there are obvious (and even cardinal) changes which reorganise the entire cast of characters as well as the narrative structure. In fact, the very process of returning to the original novel in order to produce a televisual remake says something about the nature of time-sense in itself, which is further sophisticated by the recognition of Netflix as a ‘streaming service’. That is, Netflix encapsulates this notion of ‘rivers-on-demand’ which overlap with each other in the context of the contemporaneous and persistent ‘now’ of digital culture. Marie-Laure Ryan suggests that “the proliferation of rewrites … is easily explained by the sense of pastness that pervades Postmodern culture and by the fixation of contemporary thought with the textual nature of reality” (386). While the Netflix series remains loyal to the mood and basic premise (i.e., that there is a haunted house in which characters endure strange happenings and enter into psycho-drama), the series instead uses fractured narrative convention through which three time-streams are simultaneously at work (although one time-stream is embedded in another and therefore its significance is ‘hidden’ to the viewer until the final episode), which we will examine now.The Time-Streams of Hill HouseIn the Netflix series, the central time-stream is, at first, ostensibly located in the characters’ ‘present’. I will call this time-stream A. (As a note to the reader here, there are spoilers for those who have not watched the Netflix series.) The viewer assumes they are, from the very first scene, following the ‘present’ time-stream in which the characters are adults. This is the time-stream in which the series opens, however, only for the first minute of viewing. After around one minute of viewing time, we already enter into a second time-stream. Even though both the original novel and the TV series begin with the same dialogue, the original novel continues to follow one time-stream, while the TV series begins to play with contemporaneous action by manifesting a second time-stream (following a series of events from the characters past) running in parallel action to the first time-stream. This narrative revisioning resonates with Toffler’s estimation of shifting nature of time-sense in the later twentieth century, in which he cites thatindeed, not only do contemporary events radiate instantaneously—now we can be said to be feeling the impact of all past events in a new way. For the past is doubling back on us. We are caught in what might be called a ‘time skip’. (16)In its ‘displacement’ model, the Hill House televisual remake points to this ongoing fascination with, and re-actualisation of, the exaggerated temporal discrepancies in the experience of contemporary everyday life. The Netflix Hill House series constructs a dimensional timescape in which the timeline ‘skips’ back and forth (not only for the viewer but also the characters), and certain spaces (such as the Red Room) are only permeable to some characters at certain times.If we think about Toffler’s words here—a doubling back, or, a time-skip—we might be pulled toward ever more recent incarnations of this effect. In Helen Powell’s investigation of the relationship between narrative and time-sense, she insists that “new media’s temporalities offer up the potential to challenge the chronological mode of temporal experience” (152). Sean Cubitt proposes that with the intensification of new media “we enter a certain, as yet inchoate, mode of time. For all the boasts of instantaneity, our actual relations with one another are mediated and as such subject to delays: slow downloads, periodic crashes, cache clearances and software uploads” (10). Resultingly, we have myriad temporal contingencies running at any one time—some slow, frustrating, mundane, in ‘real-time’ and others rapid to the point of instantaneous, or even able to pull the past into the present (through the endless trove of archived media on the web) and again into other mediatic dimensions such as virtual reality. To wit, Powell writes that “narrative, in mirroring these new temporal relations must embody fragmentation, discontinuity and incomplete resolution” (153). Fragmentation, discontinuity, and incompleteness are appropriate ways to think through the Hill House’s narrative revision and the ways in which it manifests some of these time-sensibilities.The notion of a ‘time-skip’ is an appropriate way to describe the transitions between the three temporal flows occurring simultaneously in the Hill House televisual remake. Before being comfortably seated in any one time-stream, the viewer is translocated into a second time-stream that runs parallel to it (almost suggesting a kind of parallel dimension). So, we begin with the characters as adults and then almost immediately, we are also watching them as children with the rapid emergence of this second time-stream. This ‘second time-stream’ conveys the events of ‘the past’ in which the central characters are children, so I will call this time-stream B. While time-stream B conveys the scenes in which the characters are children, the scenes are not necessarily in chronological order.The third time-stream is the spectral-stream, or time-stream C. However, the viewer is not fully aware that there is a totally separate time stream at play (the audience is made to think that this time-stream is the product of mere ghost-sightings). This is until the final episode, which completes the narrative ‘puzzle’. That is, the third time-stream conveys the events which are occurring simultaneously in both of the two other time-streams. In a sense, time-stream C, the spectral stream, is used to collapse the ontological boundaries of the former two time-streams. Throughout the early episodes, this time-stream C weaves in and out of time-streams A and B, like an intrusive time-stream (intruding upon the two others until it manifests on its own in the final episode). Time-stream C is used to create a 'puzzle' for the viewer in that the viewer does not fully understand its total significance until the puzzle is completed in the final episode. This convention, too, says something about the nature of time-sense as it shifts and mutates with mediatic production. This echoes back to Powell’s discussion of the ‘puzzle’ trend, which, as I note earlier, plays with “audiences’ expectations of conventional roles and storytelling through the use of the unreliable narrator and the fracturing of linearity” which serves to “open up wider questions of belief, truth and reliability” (4). Similarly, the skipping between three time-streams to build the Hill House puzzle manifests the ever-complicating relationships of time-management experiences in everyday life, in which pasts, presents, and futures impinge upon one another and interfere with each other.Critically, in terms of plot, time-stream B (in which the characters are little children) opens with the character Nell as a small child of 5 or 6 years of age. She appears to have woken up from a nightmare about The Bent Neck Lady. This vision traumatises Nell, and she is duly comforted in this scene by the characters of the eldest son and the father. This provides crucial exposition for the viewer: We are told that these ‘visitations’ from The Bent Neck Lady are a recurring trauma for the child-Nell character. It is important to note that, while these scenes may be mistaken for simple memory flashbacks, it becomes clearer throughout the series that this time-stream is not tied to any one character’s memory but is a separate storyline, though critical to the functioning of the other two. Moreover, the Bent Neck Lady recurs as both (apparent) nightmares and waking visions throughout the course of Nell’s life. It is in Episode Five that we realise why.The reason why The Bent Neck Lady always appears to Nell is that she is Nell. We learn this at the end of Episode Five when the storyline finally conveys how Nell dies in the House, which is by hanging from a noose tied to the mezzanine in the Hill House foyer. As Nell drops from the mezzanine attached to this noose, her neck snaps—she is The Bent Neck Lady. However, Nell does not just drop to the end of the noose. She continues to drop five more times back into the other two time streams. Each time Nell drops, she drops into a different moment in time (and each time the neck snapping is emphasised). The first drop she appears to herself in a basement. The second drop she appears to herself on the road outside the car while she is with her brother. The third is during (what we have been told) is a kind of sleep paralysis. The fourth and fifth drops she appears to herself as the small child on two separate occasions—both of which we witness with her in the first episode. So not only is Nell journeying through time, the audience is too. The viewer follows Nell’s journey through her ‘time-skip’. The result of the staggered but now conjoined time-streams is that we come to realise that Nell is, in fact, haunting herself—and the audience now understands they have followed this throughout not as a ghost-sighting but as a ‘future’ time-stream impinging on another.In the final episode of season one, the siblings are confronted by Ghost-Nell in the Red Room. This is important because it is in this Red Room through which all time-streams coalesce. The Red Room exists dimensionally, cutting across disparate spaces and times—it is the spatial representation of the spectral time-stream C. It is in this final episode, and in this spectral dimension, that all the three time-streams collapse upon each other and complete the narrative ‘puzzle’ for the viewer. The temporal flow of the spectral dimension, time-stream C, interrupts and interferes with the temporal flow of the former two—for both the characters in the text and viewing audience.The collapse of time-streams is produced through a strategic dialogic structure. When Ghost-Nell appears to the siblings in the Red Room, her first line of dialogue is a non-sequitur. Luke emerges from his near-death experience and points to Nell, to which Nell replies: “I feel a little clearer just now. We have. All of us have” ("Silence Lay Steadily"). Nell’s dialogue continues but, eventually, she returns to the same statement, almost like she is running through a cyclic piece of text. She states again, “We have. All of us have.” However, this time around, the phrase is pre-punctuated by Shirley’s claim that she feels as though she had been in the Red Room before. Nell’s dialogue and the dialogue of the other characters suddenly align in synchronicity. The audience now understands that Nell’s very first statement, “We have. All of us have” is actually a response to the statement that Shirley had not yet made. This narrative convention emphasises the ‘confetti-like’ nature of the construction of time here. Confetti is, after all, sheets of paper that have been cut into pieces, thrown into the air, and then fallen out of place. Similarly, the narrative makes sense as a whole but feels cut into pieces and realigned, if only momentarily. When Nell then loops back through the same dialogue, it finally appears in synch and thus makes sense. This signifies that the time-streams are now merged.The Ghost of Nell has travelled through (and in and out of) each separate time-stream. As a result, Ghost-Nell understands the nature of the Red Room—it manifests a slippage of timespace that each of the siblings had entered during their stay at the Hill House mansion. It is with this realisation that Ghost-Nell explains:Everything’s been out of order. Time, I mean. I thought for so long that time was like a line, that ... our moments were laid out like dominoes, and that they ... fell, one into another and on it went, just days tipping, one into the next, into the next, in a long line between the beginning ... and the end.But I was wrong. It’s not like that at all. Our moments fall around us like rain. Or... snow. Or confetti. (“Silence Lay Steadily”)This brings me to the titular concern: The emerging abstraction of time as a mode of layering and fracturing, a mode performed through this analogy of ‘confetti’ or ‘snow’. The Netflix Hill House revision rearranges time constructs so that any one moment of time may be accessed, much like scrolling back and forth (and in and out) of social media feeds, Internet forums, virtual reality programs and so forth. Each moment, like a flake of ‘snow’ or ‘confetti’ litters the timespace matrix, making an infinite tapestry that exists dimensionally. In the Hill House narrative, all moments exist simultaneously and accessing each moment at any point in the time-stream is merely a process of perception.ConclusionNetflix is optimised as a ‘streaming platform’ which has all but ushered in the era of ‘time-shifting’ predicated on geospatial politics (see Leaver). The current media landscape offers instantaneity, contemporaneity, as well as, arbitrary boundedness on the basis of geopolitics, which Tama Leaver refers to as the “tyranny of digital distance”. Therefore, it is fitting that Netflix’s revision of the Hill House narrative is preoccupied with time as well as spectrality. Above, I have explored just some of the ways that the televisual remake plays with notions of time through a diegetic analysis.However, we should take note that even in its production and consumption, this series, to quote Graham Meikle and Sherman Young, is embedded within “the current phase of television [that] suggests contested continuities” (67). Powell problematises the time-sense of this media apparatus further by reminding us that “there are three layers of temporality contained within any film image: the time of registration (production); the time of narration (storytelling); and the time of its consumption (viewing)” (3-4). Each of these aspects produces what Althusser and Balibar have called a “peculiar time”, that is, “different levels of the whole as developing ‘in the same historical time’ … relatively autonomous and hence relatively independent, even in its dependence, of the ‘times’ of the other levels” (99). When we think of the layers upon layers of different time ‘signatures’ which converge in Hill House as a textual artifact—in its production, consumption, distribution, and diegesis—the nature of contemporary time reveals itself as complex but also fleeting—hard to hold onto—much like snow or confetti.ReferencesAlthusser, Louis, and Étienne Balibar. Reading Capital. London: NLB, 1970.Cobley, Paul. Narrative. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013.Cubitt, S. “Spreadsheets, Sitemaps and Search Engines.” New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative. Eds. Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp. London: BFI, 2002. 3-13.Derrida, Jacques, and Bernard Stiegler. Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews. Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2002.Doležel, Lubomir. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999.Hägglund, Martin. Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2012.Hartley, Lodwick. “Of Time and Mrs. Woolf.” The Sewanee Review 47.2 (1939): 235-241.Harvey, David. Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting of Hill House. New York: Viking, 1959.Laurie-Ryan Marie. “Transfictionality across Media.” Theorizing Narrativity. Eds. John Pier, García Landa, and José Angel. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008. 385-418.Leaver, Tama. “Watching Battlestar Galactica in Australia and the Tyranny of Digital Distance.” Media International Australia 126 (2008): 145-154.Meikle, George, and Sherman Young. “Beyond Broadcasting? TV For the Twenty-First Century.” Media International Australia 126 (2008): 67-70.Powell, Helen. Stop the Clocks! Time and Narrative in Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris, 2012.Roberts, Brittany. “Helping Eleanor Come Home: A Reassessment of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.” The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 16 (2017): 67-93.Smith, Terry. What Is Contemporary Art? Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009.The Haunting of Hill House. Mike Flanagan. Amblin Entertainment, 2018.Thompson, E.P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past and Present 38.1 (1967): 56-97.Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. New York: Bantam Books, 1971.Wilson, Michael T. “‘Absolute Reality’ and the Role of the Ineffable in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.” Journal of Popular Culture 48.1 (2015): 114-123.

I can remember setting up the dish, all the excitement of assembling it [...] and then putting the motor on. And in the late afternoon, you position the dish and kind of turn it, to find the right spot, and all of a sudden on this blank television screen there was an image that came on. And it was shocking knowing that this noise and this thing would be there, and begin to infiltrate – because I see it as an infiltration, I see it as invasion – I’m not mad on television, very choosy really about what I watch – and I see it as an invasion, and there was GWN as well as the ABC. I just thought ‘by golly, I’m in the process of brain-washing people to accept stuff without thinking about it, like consciously considering either side of any case’ [...] The one thing that protected you from having it on at all times was the need to put on the generator in order to power it. I felt a bit sad actually. (Savannah Kingston, Female, 55+ – name changed – homestead respondent) This paper addresses the huge communications changes that occurred over the past fifty years in outback Western Australia. (What happened in WA also has parallels with equivalent events in the Northern Territory, Queensland, in the larger properties in western New South Wales and northern South Australia.) Although the ‘coming of television’ – associated in remote areas with using a satellite dish to scan for the incoming signal – is typically associated with a major shift in community and cultural life, the evidence suggests that the advent of the telephone had an equivalent or greater impact in remote areas. With the introduction of the telephone, the homestead family no longer had to tune into (or scan) the radio frequencies to check on predicted weather conditions, to respond to emergencies, to engage in roll call or to hold a ‘public meeting’. As the scanning of the radio frequencies ended, so the scanning of the satellite signals began. As Sandstone resident Grant Coleridge (pseudonym, male, 40-54) said, only half ironically, “We got the telephone and the telly at the same time, so civilisation sort of hit altogether actually.” The scale and importance of changes to the technological communications infrastructure in remote WA within a single life-time spans pre-2-way radio to video livestock auctions by satellite. It comes as a surprise to most Australians that these changes have occurred in the past generation. As recent viewers of the unexpectedly-successful Mongolian film The Story of the Weeping Camel (2004) would know, one of the themes of the Oscar-nominated movie is the coming of television and its impact upon a traditional rural life. The comparative availability of television outside the rural areas of Mongolia – and its attraction to, particularly, the younger family members in the Weeping Camel household – is a motif that is explored throughout the narrative, with an unspoken question about the price to be paid for including television in the cultural mix. It’s easy to construct this story as a fable about the ‘exotic other’, but the same theme was played out comparatively recently in remote Western Australia, where the domestic satellite service AUSSAT first made television an affordable option just under twenty years ago. This paper is about the people in remote Western Australia who started scanning for the satellite signal in 1986, and stopped scanning for the RFDS (Royal Flying Doctor Service) 2-way radio phone messages at about the same time. Savannah Kingston (name changed), who in 1989 generously agreed to an in-depth interview discussing the impact of satellite broadcasting upon her outback life, was a matriarch on a rural property with four grown children. She had clear views upon ways in which life had changed dramatically in the generation before the satellite allowed the scanning of the television signal. Her recollection of the weft and warp of the tapestry of life in outback WA started thirty-five years previously, with her arrival on the station as a young wife: When I went there [mid-1950s], we had a cook and we ate in the dining room. The cook and anyone who worked in the house ate in the kitchen and the men outside ate in the outside. So, with the progress of labour away from the bush, and the cost of labour becoming [prohibitive] for a lot of people, we got down to having governesses or house-girls. If the house-girls were white, they ate at the table with us and the governesses ate with us. If the house-girls were Aboriginal, they didn’t like eating with us, and they preferred to eat in the kitchen. The kids ate with them. Which wasn’t a good idea because two of my children have good manners and two of them have appalling manners. The availability of domestic help supported a culture of hospitality reminiscent of British between-the-wars country house parties, recreated in Agatha Christie novels and historically-based films such as The Remains of the Day (1993): In those early days, we still had lots of visitors [...] People visited a lot and stayed, so that you had people coming to stay for maybe two or three days, five days, a week, two weeks at a time and that required a lot of organisation. [int:] WHERE DID YOUR VISITORS COME FROM? City, or from the Eastern states, occasionally from overseas. [Int:] WOULD THEY BE RELATIVES? Sometimes relatives, friends or someone passing through who’d been, you know, someone would say ‘do visit’ and they’d say ‘they’d love to see you’. But it was lovely, it was good. It’s a way of learning what’s going on. (Savannah Kingston.) The ‘exotic other’ of the fabled hospitality of station life obscures the fact that visitors from the towns, cities and overseas were a major source of news and information in a society where radio broadcasts were unpredictable and there was no post or newspaper delivery. Visitors were supplemented by a busy calendar of social events that tied together a community of settlements in gymkhanas, cricket fixtures and golf tournaments (on a dirt course). Shifts in the communications environment – the introduction of television and telephone – followed a generation of social change witnessing the metamorphosis of the homestead from the hub of a gentrified lifestyle (with servants, governesses, polo and weekends away) to compact, efficient business-units, usually run by a skeleton staff with labour hired in at the peak times of year. Over the years between the 1960s-1980s isolation became a growing problem. Once Indigenous people won the fight for award-rate wages their (essentially) unpaid labour could no longer support the lifestyle of the station owners and the absence of support staff constrained opportunities for socialising off the property, and entertaining on it, and the communication environment became progressively poorer. Life on the homestead was conceived of as being more fragile than that in the city, and more economically vulnerable to a poor harvest or calamities such as wildfire. The differences wrought by the introduction of newer communication technologies were acknowledged by those in the country, but there was a clear resistance to city-dwellers constructing the changes as an attack upon the romance of the outback lifestyle. When the then Communications Minister Tony Staley suggested in 1979 that a satellite could help “dispel the distance – mental as well as geographical – between urban and regional dwellers, between the haves and the have-nots in a communication society”, he was buying into a discourse of rural life which effectively disempowered those who lived in rural and remote areas. He was also ignoring the reality of a situation where the Australian outback was provided with satellite communication a decade after it was made available to Canadians, and where the king-maker in the story – Kerry Packer – stood to reap a financial windfall. There was a mythological dimension to Australia (finally) having a domestic satellite. Cameron Hazelhurst’s article on ‘The Dawn of the Satellite Era in Australia’ includes a colourful account of Kerry Packer’s explanation to Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser of the capacity of domestic satellites to bring television, radio and telephone services to isolated communities in arctic Canada: And I [Packer] went and saw the Prime Minister and I explained to him my understanding of what was happening in those areas, and to his undying credit he grasped on to it immediately and said ‘Of course, it’s what we want. It’s exactly the sort of thing we need to stop the drift of people into urban areas. We can keep them informed. We can allow them to participate in whatever’s happening around the nation (Day 7, cited in Hazelhurst). Fraser here, as someone with experience of running a rural property in Victoria, propounds a pro-country rhetoric as a rationale for deployment of the satellite in terms of the Australian national policy agenda. (The desire of Packer to network his television stations and couple efficiency with reach is not addressed in this mythological reconstruction.) It is difficult, sometimes, to appreciate the level of isolation experienced on outback properties at the time. As Bryan Docker (male, 40-54), a resident of Broome at the time of the interviews, commented, “Telegrams, in those days, were the life-blood of the stations, through the Flying Doctor Service. But at certain times of the year the sun spots would interfere with the microwave links and we were still on morse from Broome to Derby during those periods.” Without reliable shortwave radio; with no television, newspapers or telephone; and with the demands of keeping the RFDS (Royal Flying Doctor Service) 2-way radio channel open for emergencies visitors were one of the ways in which station-dwellers could maintain an awareness of current events. Even at the time of the interviews, after the start of satellite broadcasting, I never travelled to an outback property without taking recent papers and offering to pick up post. (Many of the stations were over an hour’s journey from their nearest post office.) The RFDS 2-way radio service offered a social-lifeline as well as an emergency communication system: [Int:] DO YOU MISS THE ROYAL FLYING DOCTOR SERVICE AT ALL? Yes, I do actually. It’s – I think it’s probably more lonely now because you used to switch it on and – you know if you’re here on your own like I am a lot – and you’d hear voices talking, and you used to know what everybody was doing – sort of all their dramas and all their [...] Now you don’t know anything that’s going on and unless somebody rings you, you don’t have that communication, where before you used to just hop over to another channel and have a chat [...] I think it is lonelier on the telephone because it costs so much to ring up. (Felicity Rohrer, female, 40-54, homestead.) Coupled with the lack of privacy of 2-way radio communication, and the lack of broadcasting, was the particular dynamic of a traditional station family. Schooled at home, and integrated within their homestead lifestyle, station children spent most of their formative years in the company of one or other of their parents (or, in previous decades, the station staff). This all changed at secondary school age when the children of station-owners and managers tended to be sent away to boarding school in the city. Exposure of the next generation to the ways of city life was seen as a necessary background to future business competence, but the transitions from ‘all’ to ‘next-to-nothing’ in terms of children’s integration within family life had a huge socio-emotional cost which was aggravated, until the introduction of the phone service, by the lack of private communication channels. Public Relations and news theory talk about the importance of the ‘environmental scan’ to understand how current events are going to impact upon a business and a family: for many years in outback Australia the environmental scan occurred when families got together (typically in the social and sporting rounds), on the RFDS radio broadcasts and ‘meetings’, in infrequent visits to the closest towns and through the giving and receiving of hospitality. Felicity Rohrer, who commented (above) about how she missed the RFDS had noted earlier in her interview: “It’s made a big difference, telephone. That was the most isolating thing, especially when your children were away at school or your parents are getting older [...] That was the worst thing, not having a phone.” Further, in terms of the economics of running a property, Troy Bowen (male, 25-39, homestead respondent) noted that the phone had made commercial life much easier: I can carry out business on the phone without anyone else hearing [...] On the radio you can’t do it, you more or less have to say ‘well, have you got it – over’. ‘Yeah – over’. ‘Well, I’ll take it – over’. That’s all you can do [...] Say if I was chasing something [...] the cheapest I might get it down to might be [...] $900. Well I can go to the next bloke and I can tell him I got it down to $850. If you can’t do any better than that, you miss out. ‘oh, yes, alright $849, that’s the best I can do.’ So I’ll say ‘alright, I’ll take it’. But how can you do that on the radio and say that your best quote is [$850] when the whole district knows that ‘no, it isn’t’. You can’t very well do it, can you? This dynamic occurs because, for many homestead families prior to the telephone, the RFDS broadcasts were continuously monitored by the women of the station as a way of keeping a finger on the pulse of the community. Even – sometimes, especially – when they were not part of the on-air conversation, the broadcast could be received for as far as reception was possible. The introduction of the phone led to a new level of privacy, particularly appreciated by parents who had children away at school, but also introduced new problems. Fran Coleridge, (female, 40-54, Sandstone) predicted that: The phone will lead to isolation. There’s an old lady down here, she’s about 80, and she housekeeps for her brother and she’s still wearing – her mother died 50 years ago – but she’s still wearing her clothes. She is so encapsulated in her life. And she used to have her [RFDS] transceiver. Any time, Myrtle would know anything that’s going on. Anything. Birthday party at [local station], she’d know about it. She knew everything. Because she used to have the transceiver on all the time. And now there’s hardly any people on, and she’s a poor little old lonely lady that doesn’t hear anything now. Can you see that? Given the nuances of the introduction of the telephone (and the loss of the RFDS 2-way), what was the perceived impact of satellite broadcasting? Savannah Kingston again: Where previously we might have sat around the table and talked about things – at least the kids and I would – with television there is now more of a habit of coming in, showering and changing for dinner, putting on the motor and the men go and sit in front of the television during [...] six o’clock onwards, news programs and whatnot and um, I find myself still in the kitchen, getting the meal and then whoever was going to eat it, wanting to watch whatever was on the television. So it changed quite appreciably. Felicity Rohrer agrees: [Int:] DO YOU THINK THERE HAVE BEEN CHANGES IN THE TIME THAT YOU SPEND WITH EACH OTHER? Yes, I think so. They [the homestead household] come home and they – we all sit down here and look at the news and have a drink before tea whereas people used to be off doing their own tea. [Int] SO YOU THINK IT’S INCREASED THE AMOUNT OF TIME YOU SPEND TOGETHER? Yes, I think so – well, as a family. They all try and be home by 6 to see the [GWN] news. If they miss that, we look at the 7 o’clock [ABC], but they like the Golden West because it’s got country news in it. But the realities of everyday life, as experienced in domestic contexts, are sometimes ignored by commentators and analysts, except insofar as they are raised by interviewees. Thus the advent of the satellite might have made Savannah Kingston feel “a bit sad actually”, but it had its compensations: It was definitely a bit of a peace-maker. It sort of meant there wasn’t the stress that we had previously when going through [...] at least people sitting and watching something, you’re not so likely to get into arguments or [...] It definitely had value there. In fact, when I think about it, that might be one of its major applications, ’cos a lot of men in the bush tend to come in – if they drink to excess they start drinking in the evening, and that can make for very uncomfortable company. For film-makers like the Weeping Camel crew – and for audiences and readers of historical accounts of life in outback Australia – the changes heralded by the end of scanning the RFDS channels, and the start of scanning for satellite channels, may seem like the end of an era. In some ways the rhythms of broadcasting helped to homogenise life in the country with life in the city. For many families in remote homes, as well as the metropolis, the evening news became a cue for the domestic rituals of ‘after work’. A superficial evaluation of communications changes might lead to a consideration of how some areas of life were threatened by improved broadcasting, while others were strengthened, and how some of the uniqueness of a lifestyle had been compromised by an absorption into the communication patterns of urban life. It is unwise for commentators to construct the pre-television past as an uncomplicated romantic prior-time, however. Interviews with those who live such changes as their reality become a more revealing indicator of the nuances and complexities of communications environments than a quick scan from the perspective of the city-dweller. References Day, C. “Packer: The Man and the Message.” The Video Age (February 1983): 7 (cited in Hazelhurst). Hazelhurst, Cameron. “The Dawn of the Satellite Era.” Media Information Australia 58 (November 1990): 9-22. Staley, Tony. Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates. Canberra: House of Representatives Hansard (18 October 1979): 2225, 2228-9. The Remains of the Day. 1993. The Story of the Weeping Camel. Thinkfilm and National Geographic, 2004. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Green, Lelia. "Scanning the Satellite Signal in Remote Western Australia." M/C Journal 8.4 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/01-green.php>. APA Style Green, L. (Aug. 2005) "Scanning the Satellite Signal in Remote Western Australia," M/C Journal, 8(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/01-green.php>.

Photo ID 117847165© Mohamad Faizal Ramli|Dreamstime.com INTRODUCTION In our cosmic narrative, for centuries we believed the Earth held the universe's center, a belief that shifted with evidence and transformed our understanding of our cosmic place. Correspondingly, paradigms surrounding autism have been shaped by medical assumptions that label it a condition, a disorder, or even a tragedy. Just as our understanding of celestial perceptions evolved, that Earth was not at the center of the universe, it is time for a seismic shift in how we perceive and address autism. ANALYSIS Venturing into autism research, we see the prevailing medical paradigm that defines Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) as a developmental disability caused by neurological differences.[1] Social communication, repetitive behaviors, language, movement skills, cognitive abilities, and emotional reactions—all cast as deficits.1 This narrative, embraced by researchers, medical professionals, and society, serves as the foundation of our current understanding. Yet, delving deeper unveils a counter-narrative—one not etched by researchers but articulated by those living with autism. This narrative introduces us to the neurodiversity paradigm, a revolutionary lens that sees autism as a part of the rich tapestry of human neurological development, fostering a stable cognitive landscape.[2] It posits that there is no singular "healthy" brain; and no definitive way of neurocognitive functioning.2 Shockingly, although this perspective is more inclusive, portraying autistic people as crucial contributors to humanity, it remains the more controversial model in society. Contrasting with the classical medical view that treats autism as a disease to be eradicated, the neurodiversity paradigm challenges the notion of normalizing society and underscores the importance of recognizing autism as an advancement. Without it, we would lose invaluable perspectives, strengths in attention to detail, visual perception, creative and artistic talents, mathematical and technical abilities, and expertise in ‘niche’ areas.[3] Asserting that every form of neurological development holds equal validity, deserving of respect and human rights, the neurodiversity paradigm counters the deficit mindset perpetuated by the traditional medical view. The repercussions of our medical-centric assumptions extend beyond perception; they infiltrate the very fabric of societal structures. Autism is labeled a disability. But is it autism that disables individuals, or is it the societal environment that excludes and alienates cognitive diversity? The traditional medical model points fingers at individuals, placing the onus on the differently abled person, not the disabling environments. For example, our societal perspective on disability is largely framed by the medical model, which views disability as an individual problem. According to this model, the disability is located within the person experiencing it—within individuals like me.[4] For instance, I often find myself becoming excessively overstimulated in places like department stores. The bustling environment—loud, brightly lit, unpredictable, and crowded—is a sensory challenge. Following the medical model attributes my struggle in department stores to a perceived problem with the way my brain processes sensory inputs, attributing it to my autism. The consequences of the medical model are far-reaching and profound, particularly in shaping our understanding of autism. This perspective places undue blame on those with autism and directs the focus of research toward "curing" autism rather than addressing societal structures that contribute to exclusion and alienation. One glaring example of this misguided approach is the predominant focus of autism research on finding a cure, as seen in 2020 with a major research theme centered around gene therapies aimed at altering the genetic factors associated with autism-related conditions.[5] Even influential organizations like Autism Speaks, until 2016, subscribed to the notion of seeking a cure.[6] Their evolution, acknowledging the need to listen to the lived experiences of autistic individuals, led to a shift in their mission—from searching for a cure to promoting advocacy, support, understanding, and acceptance.6 This shift highlights the importance of moving away from the medical model. Instead, we should adopt more inclusive models like the neurodiversity or social model of disability, which are rooted in the idea that neurological differences, including autism, are natural variations of the human brain. Listening to the voices of those with autism and embracing the social model of disability allows us to recognize that disabling factors often reside in societal structures, not within the individuals themselves. This paradigm shift is crucial for fostering an inclusive society that values and accommodates cognitive diversity. For instance, when we enter the social model of disability—an alternative lens that shifts the blame from the individual to the environment, it views disability not as a characteristic but as an action done to individuals by society4. In this model, going to a department store is not a struggle for me because there is something inherently wrong with me, but it is a struggle because the environment around me does not cater to my diverse needs. Imagine if our world, including department stores, were designed with neurodiversity in mind—quiet, dimly lit, predictable, and spacious. Neurodivergent individuals would still be cognitively different, but their surroundings would not disable them. Adopting the social model of disability would catalyze shifts in research and attitudes toward autism, reflecting the transformative changes observed in the department store examples. Rather than focusing on changing autistic individuals to fit societal norms, the emphasis would shift to enhancing the lives of neurodivergent people by advocating for structural changes in society. This shift aims to foster inclusivity while preserving individuals' authenticity and embracing their unique differences. Autistic individuals are not seeking a cure for autism because our neurodivergent way of thinking is integral to our identity. Yet, the considerable funding directed toward researching autism's causes for prevention or a "cure" underscores a lack of consideration for our voices in deciding how research funds are utilized. The emphasis on normalization, a cornerstone of the medical model's view of autism, prioritizes societal desires over the well-being of autistic individuals already part of our society. It is imperative to recognize this flaw in research that aims to cure autism, as it risks genetic research for eugenic purposes, necessitating regulation by the autistic community.[7] Redirecting resources from the pursuit of an unwanted cure to research supporting and empowering autistic people to lead fulfilling lives is essential. This redirection involves investing in communication research, offering tools such as communication boards, picture exchange communication systems, speech-generating devices, or sign language for nonverbal or speech-challenged autistic individuals, giving them a voice in our society.[8] Community living research, centered on community inclusion programs, not only provides services but also educates and reinforces accommodations for daily activities such as in schools, workplaces, or even in department stores as stated in the example.[9] Attention to support services for autistic individuals and their families, including residential and day support programs, respite, recreation, and transportation, is crucial.[10] A commitment to promoting lifelong support for autistic individuals necessitates advocating for caregiver support, home and community-based services, financial planning resources, and more.10 Additionally, research aiming to identify qualitative results of adaptation and modification strategies to support inclusive education for autistic students is paramount at school and classroom levels.[11] Research to improve healthcare quality and the healthcare system for autistic individuals is also essential, as they face shorter lifespans and worse health than non-autistics.[12] All these research initiatives align with the principles of the social model of disability. However, as a society that does not follow the social model; the bulk of our understanding of autism is rooted in research driven by medical assumptions and paradigms. In 2022, the United States allocated $306 million to autism research[13]. However, a considerable portion of this research approaches autism as a problem to be solved. An examination of a comprehensive study focused on the allocation of NIH autism research funding from 2008 to 2018 reveals a striking trend. In this distribution, 49.7% of the total funds were allocated to treatment development and evaluation, which represented 53.6% of all projects.[14] This statistic underscores a predominant emphasis on genetic and biological research. However, the goal of such research is not only to understand the underlying reasons for autism so we can cure it. But this research also explores ways of prevention or management of autism through pharmacological treatment or behavioral therapies like intervention or Applied Behavioral Analysis, both of which are intervention models focused on changing the external behaviors of autistic individuals, with the goal of making an autistic person look and act non-autistic.14,[15] Contrastingly, only a minimal fraction of NIH funding—9.1%, approximately $225 million out of nearly $2.5 billion dedicated to ASD research—was channeled towards services-related research.14 This includes critical areas such as improving accessibility and quality of services in the community, characterizing understudied groups, policy development, dissemination, and implementation.14 This glaring discrepancy highlights a diminished emphasis on services research in funding decisions, revealing an imbalanced focus on biological and risk factor research, aiming to eliminate differences rather than seeking ways to integrate accommodations that allow autistic individuals to authentically express themselves within societal structures. The consequence of this skewed prioritization is evident in distressing statistics. Autism affects about 1 in 100 children worldwide, and yet 85% of college-educated adults on the autism spectrum face unemployment—twice the rate of their non-autistic peers.[16],[17] 7 out of 10 autistic individuals wrestle with mental health conditions, including anxiety, depression, ADHD, or OCD.[18] Alarmingly, the suicide rate among autistic individuals is three times higher than the general population.[19] Similarly, individuals with autism have an average life expectancy of 54 years, a staggering 16 years less than the average age of mortality for the general population.[20] And we deserve better. These disheartening realities underscore the urgent need for a paradigm shift in our approach to autism within society. It is crucial to recognize that masking autistic traits is not the optimal outcome for individuals with autism. In fact, hiding autistic traits has been linked to worse mental health outcomes and increased suicidality in autistic adults.15 Services and support systems are required to enable autistic individuals to lead long, happy, and fulfilling lives while respecting their right to be authentically autistic. Embracing neurodiversity is not only a matter of ethical consideration and benefit for autistic individuals but also cultivates progress, acceptance, and overall societal growth for all. CONCLUSION The call for change is clear—we need research initiatives led by autistic individuals, addressing the questions that matter most to the community. We need more autistic individuals in the medical profession to advocate for improvements in the medical perspective. Having only 1% of autistic individuals in the medical profession is no longer enough.[21] Just as the sun is not the center of our universe, individuals with autism are not a tragedy. They deserve a future built on understanding, inclusion, and support. - [1] “Signs and Symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorders.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Last modified, 28 Mar. 2022, www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/signs.html#:~:text=Autism%20spectrum%20disorder%20(ASD)%20is,%2C%20moving%2C%20or%20paying%20attention. [2] Robinson, John Elder. “What Is Neurodiversity?” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 7 Oct. 2013, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/my-life-aspergers/201310/what-is-neurodiversity. [3] “Focus on Strengths as Well as Challenges.” Autistica, 17 Oct. 2019, www.autistica.org.uk/news/focus-on-strengths-and-challenges. [4] “Office of Developmental Primary Care.” Medical and Social Models of Disability | Office of Developmental Primary Care. Accessed 26 Oct. 2023, https://odpc.ucsf.edu/clinical/patient-centered-care/medical-and-social-models-of-disability. [5] “Hot Topics in Autism Research, 2020.” Spectrum, 3 Mar. 2023, www.spectrumnews.org/features/hot-topics-in-autism-research-2020/#:~:text=Gene%20scene,be%20administered%20early%20in%20life. [6] “Questions and Answers.” Autism Speaks. Accessed 26 Oct. 2023, www.autismspeaks.org/autism-speaks-questions-answers-facts#:~:text=It%20was%20the%20right%20decision,research%20for%20the%20autistic%20community. [7] “Research.” Autistic Self Advocacy Network, 31 Aug. 2023, autisticadvocacy.org/research. [8] “7 Autism Behavior and Communication Strategies.” National University, 23 Sept. 2021, www.nu.edu/blog/7-autism-behavior-and-communication-strategies/#:~:text=Strategy%20%231%3A%20Using%20Communication%20Boards,photographs%2C%20illustrations%2C%20or%20symbols. [9] “Inclusion: Ensuring Access for Everyone.” Autism Speaks. Accessed 26 Oct. 2023, www.autismspeaks.org/tool-kit-excerpt/inclusion-ensuring-access-everyone. [10] “Support for Family Members.” Autism Speaks. Accessed 26 Oct. 2023, www.autismspeaks.org/autism-support-family-help#:~:text=People%20with%20autism%20and%20the,%2C%20recreation%2C%20transportation%20and%20others. [11] Petersson-Bloom, Linda, and Mona Holmqvist. “Strategies in Supporting Inclusive Education for Autistic Students-A Systematic Review of Qualitative Research Results.” Autism & Developmental Language Impairments, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 21 Sept. 2022, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9620685/. [12] Weir, Elizabeth, et al. “Autistic Adults Have Poorer Quality Healthcare and Worse Health Based on Self-Report Data - Molecular Autism.” BioMed Central, BioMed Central, 26 May 2022, molecularautism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13229-022-00501-w. [13] Mikulic, Matej. “Research Funding for Autism by U.S. NIH 2011-2024.” Statista, 2 June 2023, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1237464/autism-research-funding-united-states-by-nih/#:~:text=In%20fiscal%20year%202022%2C%20research,U.S.%20dollars%20back%20in%202016. [14] Cervantes, Paige E, et al. “Trends over a Decade in NIH Funding for Autism Spectrum Disorder Services Research.” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 10 Oct. 2020, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8035332/#:~:text=Funding%20for%20treatment%20development%2Fevaluation,averaging%20%2410.2%20million%20per%20year. [15] For Whose Benefit? - Autistic Self Advocacy Network. Accessed 26 Oct. 2023, https://autisticadvocacy.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/ACWP-Ethics-of-Intervention.pdf. [16] “Data & Statistics on Autism Spectrum Disorder.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 4 Apr. 2023, www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/data.html. [17] Peralta, Paola. “85% of Adults on the Autism Spectrum Are Unemployed - and Hiring Practices May Be to Blame.” Employee Benefit News. 10 Aug. 2023, www.benefitnews.com/news/how-to-create-equitable-workplace-experiences-for-autistic-talent#:~:text=85%25%20of%20adults%20on%20the,practices%20may%20be%20to%20blame. [18] “Autism and Mental Health.” Mental Health Foundation. Accessed 26 Oct. 2023, www.mentalhealth.org.uk/explore-mental-health/a-z-topics/autism-and-mental-health#:~:text=Just%20like%20everyone%2C%20autistic%20people,%2Dcompulsive%20disorder%20(OCD). [19] Welch, Ashley. “Rate of Suicide 3 Times Higher for Autistic People.” Healthline, Healthline Media, 2021, www.healthline.com/health-news/rate-of-suicide-3-times-higher-for-autistic-people. [20] Elemy. “Why Do People with Autism Have a Lower Average Lifespan?” Elemy, 2021, https://elemy.wpengine.com/autism/average-lifespan. [21] “Doctors with Autism Speak out against Stigma.” Spectrum, 10 Mar. 2023, www.spectrumnews.org/news/doctors-with-autism-speak-out-against-stigma/#:~:text=The%20condition%20is%20typically%20diagnosed,worry%20they%20will%20be%20stigmatized.

Introduction Amidst ecological collapse and environmental catastrophe, humankind is surrounded by indications that our habitat is turning against us in monstrous ways. The very environments we live within now evoke existential terror, and this state of ecological monstrosity has permeated popular media, including video games. Such cultural manifestations of planetary catastrophe are particularly evident in video game monsters. These virtual figures continue monsters’ long-held role in reflecting the socio-cultural anxieties of their particular era. The horrific figures that monsters present play a culturally reflexive role, echoing the fears and anxieties of their social, political and cultural context. Media monsters closely reflect their surrounding cultural conditions (Cohen 47), representing “a symptom of or a metaphor for something bigger and more significant than the ostensible reality of the monster itself” (Hutchings 37). Society’s deepest anxieties culminate in these figures in forms that are “threatening and impure” (Carroll 28), “unnatural, transgressive, obscene, contradictory” (Kearney 4–5), and abject (Kristeva 4). In this article I ask how the appearance of the monstrous within contemporary video games reflects an era of climate change and ecological collapse, and how this could inform the engagement of players with discourse concerning climate change. Central to this inquiry is the literary practice of ecocriticism, which seeks to examine environmental rather than human representation in cultural artefacts, increasingly including accounts of contemporary ecological decay and disorder (Bulfin 144). I build on such perspectives to address play encounters that foreground figures of monstrosity borne of the escalating climate crisis, and summarise case studies of two recent video games undertaken as part of this project — The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo EPD) and The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog). An ecocritical approach to the monsters that populate these case studies reveals the emergence of a ludic form of ecological monstrosity tied closely to our contemporary climatic conditions and taking two significant forms: one accentuating a visceral otherness and aberrance, and the other marked by the uncanny recognition of human authorship of climate change. Horrors from the Anthropocene A growing climate emergency surrounds us, enveloping us in the abject and aberrant conditions of what could be described as an ecological monstrosity. Monstrous threats to our environment and human survival are experienced on a planetary scale and research evidence plainly illustrates a compounding catastrophe. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a relatively cautious and conservative body (Parenti 5), reports that a human-made emergency has developed since the Industrial Revolution. The multitude of crises that confront us include: changes in the Earth’s atmosphere driving up global temperatures, ice sheets in retreat, sea levels rising, natural ecosystems and species in collapse, and an unprecedented frequency and magnitude of heatwaves, droughts, flooding, winter storms, hurricanes, and wildfires (United Nations Environment Programme). Further human activity, including a post-war addiction to the plastics that have now spread their way across our oceans like a “liquid smog” (Robles-Anderson and Liboiron 258), or short-sighted enthusiasm for pesticides, radiation energy, and industrial chemicals (Robles-Anderson and Liboiron 254), has ensured a damaging shift in the nature of the feedback loops that Earth’s ecosystems depend upon for stability (Parenti 6). Climatic equilibrium has been disrupted, and growing damage to the ecosystems that sustain human life suggests an inexorable, entropic path to decay. To understand Earth’s profound crisis requires thinking beyond just climate and to witness the interconnected “extraordinary burdens” placed on our planet by “toxic chemistry, mining, nuclear pollution, depletion of lakes and rivers under and above ground, ecosystem simplification, vast genocides of people” which will continue to lead to the recursive collapse of interlinked major systems (Haraway 100). To speak of climate change is really to speak of the ruin of ecologies, those “living systems composed of many moving parts” that make up the tapestry of organic life on Earth (Robles-Anderson and Liboiron 251). The emergency that presents itself, as Renata Tyszczuk observes, comprises a pervasiveness, uncertainty, and interdependency that together “affect every aspect of human lives, politics and culture” (47). The emergence of the term Anthropocene (or the Age of the Humans) to describe our current geological epoch (and to supersede the erstwhile and more stable Holocene) (Zalasiewicz et al. 1036–7; Chang 7) reflects a contemporary impossibility with talking about planet Earth without acknowledging the damaging impact of humankind on its ecosystems (Bulfin 142). This recognition of human complicity in the existential crisis engulfing our planet once again connects ecological monstrosity to the socio-cultural history of the monstrous. Monsters, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen points out, “are our children” and despite our repressive efforts, “always return” in order to “ask us why we have created them” (20). Ecological monstrosity declares to us that our relegation of greenhouse gases, rising sea levels, toxic waste, species extinction, and much more, to the discursive periphery has only been temporary. Monsters, when examined closely, start to look a lot like ourselves in terms of biological origins (Perron 357), as well as other abject cultural and social markers that signal these horrific figures as residing “too close to the borders of our [own] subjectivity for comfort” (Spittle 314). Isabel Pinedo sees this uncanny nature of the horror genre’s antagonists as a postmodern condition, a ghoulish reminder of the era’s breakdown of categories, blurring of boundaries, and collapse of master narratives that combine to ensure “mastery is lost … and the stable, unified, coherent self acquires the status of a fiction” (17–18). In standing in for anxiety, the other, and the aberrant, the figure of the monster deftly turns the mirror back on its human victims. Ecocritical Play The vast scale of ecological collapse has complicated effective public communication on the subject. The scope involved is unsettling, even paralysing, to its audiences: climate change might just be “too here, too there, too everywhere, too weird, too much, too big, too everything” to bring oneself to engage with (Tyszczuk 47). The detail involved has also been captured by scientific discourse, a detached communicative mode which too easily obviates the everyday human experience of the emergency (Bulfin 140; Abraham and Jayemanne 74–76). Considerable effort has been focussed upon producing higher-fidelity models of ecological catastrophe (Robles-Anderson and Liboiron 248), rather than addressing the more significant “trouble with representing largely intangible linkages” between micro-environmental actions and macro-environmental repercussions (Chang 86). Ecocriticism is, however, emerging as a cultural means by which the crisis, and restorative possibilities, may be rendered more legible to a wider audience. Representations of ecology and catastrophe not only sustain genres such as Eco-Disaster and Cli-Fi (Bulfin 140), but are also increasingly becoming a precondition for fiction centred upon human life (Tyszczuk 47). Media artefacts concerned with environment are able to illustrate the nature of the emergency alongside “a host of related environmental issues that the technocratic ‘facts and figures’ approach … is unlikely to touch” (Abraham and Jayemanne 76) and encourage in audiences a suprapersonal understanding of the environmental impact of individual actions (Chang 70). Popular culture offers a chance to foster ‘ecological thought’ wherein it becomes “frighteningly easy … to join the dots and see that everything is interconnected” (Morton, Ecological Thought 1) rather than founder before the inexplicability of the temporalities and spatialities involved in ecological collapse. An ecocritical approach is “one of the most crucial—yet under-researched—ways of looking into the possible cultural impact of the digital entertainment industry” upon public discourse relating to the environment crisis (Felczak 185). Video games demand this closer attention because, in a mirroring of the interconnectedness of Earth’s own ecosystems, “the world has also inevitably permeated into our technical artefacts, including games” (Chang 11), and recent scholarship has worked to investigate this very relationship. Benjamin Abraham has extended Morton’s arguments to outline a mode of ecological thought for games (What Is an Ecological Game?), Alenda Chang has closely examined how games model natural environments, and Benjamin Abraham and Darshana Jayemanne have outlined four modes in which games manifest players’ ecological relationships. Close analysis of texts and genres has addressed the capacity of game mechanics to persuade players about matters of sustainability (Kelly and Nardi); implicated Minecraft players in an ecological practice of writing upon landscapes (Bohunicky); argued that Final Fantasy VII’s plot fosters ecological responsibility (Milburn); and, identified in ARMA III’s ambient, visual backdrops of renewable power generation the potential to reimagine cultural futures (Abraham, Video Game Visions). Video games allow for a particular form of ecocriticism that has been overlooked in existing efforts to speak about ecological crisis: “a politics that includes what appears least political—laughter, the playful, even the silly” (Morton, Dark Ecology 113). Play is liminal, emergent, and necessarily incomplete, and this allows its various actors—players, developers, critics and texts themselves—to come together in non-authoritarian, imaginative and potentially radical ways. Through play, audiences are offered new and novel modes for envisioning ecological problems, solutions, and futures. To return, then, to encounters with ecological monstrosity, I next consider the visions of crisis that emerge through the video game monsters that draw upon the aberrant nature of ecological collapse, as well as those that foreground our own complicity as humans in the climate crisis, declaring that we players might ourselves be monstrous. The two case studies that follow are necessarily brief, but indicate the value of further research and textual analysis to more fully uncover the role of ecological monstrosity in contemporary video games. Breath of the Wild’s Corrupted Ecology The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo EPD) is a fantasy action-adventure game in which players adopt the role of the games series’ long-running protagonist, Link, and explore the virtual landscapes of fictional Hyrule in unstructured and nonlinear ways. Landscape is immediately striking to players of Breath of the Wild, with the game using a distinctive, high-definition cel-shaded animation style to vividly render natural environments. Within the first ten minutes of play, lush green grass sways around the player’s avatar, densely treed forests interrupt rolling vistas, and finely detailed mountains tower over the player’s perspective. The player soon learns, however, that behind these inviting landscapes lies a catastrophic corruption of natural order, and that their virtual enemies will manifest a powerful monstrosity that seems to mirror Earth’s own ecological crises. The game’s backstory centres around the Zelda series’ persistent antagonist, Ganon, and his use of a primal form of evil to overwhelm a highly evolved and industrialised Hyrulian civilisation, in an event dubbed the Great Calamity. Hyrule’s dependency on mechanical technology in its defences is misjudged, and Ganon’s re-appearance causes widespread devastation. The parallel between Hyrule’s fate and humankind’s own unsustainable commitment to heavy industry and agriculture, and faith in technological approaches to mitigation in the face of looming catastrophe, are immediately recognisable. Visible, too, is the echo of the revenge of Earth’s climate in the organic and primal force of Ganon’s destructive power. Ganon leaves in his wake an array of impossible, aberrant creatures hostile to the player, including the deformed humanoid figure of the Bokoblin (bearing snouts, arrow-shaped tails, and a horn), the sand-swimming spike-covered whale known as a Molduga, and the Stone Talus, an anthropomorphic rock formation that bursts into life out of otherwise innocuous geological features. One particularly apposite monster, known simply as Malice, is a glowing black and purple substance that oozes its way through environments in Hyrule, spreading to cover and corrupt organic material. Malice is explained by in-game introductory text as “poisonous bogs formed by water that was sullied during the Great Calamity”—an environmental element thrown out of equilibrium by pollution. Monstrosity in Breath of the Wild is decidedly ecological, and its presentation of unstable biologies, poisoned waters, and a collapsed natural order offer a conspicuous display of our contemporary climate crisis. Breath of the Wild places players in a traditional position in relation to its virtual monsters: direct opposition (Taylor 31), with a clear mandate to eliminate the threat(s) and restore equilibrium (Krzywinska 12). The game communicates its collection of biological impossibilities and inexorable corruptions as clear aberrations of a once-balanced natural order, with Hyrule’s landscapes needing purification at the player’s hands. Video games are driven, according to Jaroslav Švelch, by a logic of informatic control when it comes to virtual monsters, where our previously “inscrutable and abject” antagonists can be analysed, defined and defeated as “the medium’s computational and procedural nature makes monstrosity fit into databases and algorithms” (194). In requiring Link, and players, to scrutinise and come to “know” monsters, the game suggests a particular ecocritical possibility. Ecological monstrosity becomes educative, placing the terrors of the climate crisis directly before players’ avatars, screens, and eyes and connecting, in visceral ways, mastery over these threats with pleasure and achievement. The monsters of Breath of the Wild offer the possibility of affectively preparing players for versions of the future by mediating such engagements with disaster and catastrophe. Recognising the Monstrosity Within Set in the aftermath of the outbreak of a mutant strain of the Cordyceps fungus (through exposure to which humans transform into aggressive, zombified ‘Infected’), The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog) is a post-apocalyptic action-adventure game. Players alternate between two playable human characters, Ellie and Abby, whose travels through the infection-ravaged states of Wyoming, Washington, and California overlap and intertwine. At first glance, The Last of Us Part II appears to construct similar forms of ecology and monstrosity as Breath of the Wild. Players are thrust into an experience of the sublime in the game’s presentation of natural environments that are vastly capacious and highly fidelitous in their detailing. Players begin the game scrambling across snowbound ranges and fleeing through thick forests, and later encounter lush grass, rushing rivers, and wild animals reclaiming once-urban environments. And, as in Breath of the Wild, monstrosity in this gameworld appears to embody impurity and corruption, whether through the horrific deformations of various types of zombie bodies, or the fungal masses that carpet many of the game’s abandoned buildings in a reclamation of human environments by nature. Closer analysis, however, demonstrates that the monstrosity that defines the play experience of The Last of Us Part II uncannily reflects the more uncomfortable truths of the Anthropocentric era. A key reason why zombies are traditionally frightening is because they are us. The semblance of human faces and bodies that remain etched into these monsters’ decaying forms act as portents for our own fates when faced with staggering hordes and overwhelmingly poor odds of survival. Impure biologies are presented to players in these zombies, but rather than represent a distant ‘other’ they stand as more-than-likely futures for the game’s avatars, just as Earth’s climate crisis is intimately bound up in human origins and inexorable futures. The Last of Us Part II further pursues its line of anthropocentric critique, as both Ellie and Abby interact during the game with different groupings of human survivors, including hubristic militia and violent religious cultists. The player comes to understand through these encounters that it is the distrust, dogmatism, and depravity of their fellow humans that pose immediate threats to avatarial survival, rather than the scrutable, reliable, and predictable horrors of the mindless zombies. In keeping with the appearance of monsters in both interactive and cinematic texts, monsters’ most important lessons emerge when the boundaries between reality and fiction, human and nonhuman, and normality and abnormality become blurred. The Last of Us Part II utilises this underlying ambiguity in monstrosity to suggest a confronting ecological claim: that monstrous culpability belongs to us—the inhabitants of Earth. For video game users in particular, this is a doubly pointed accusation. As Thomas Apperley and Darshana Jayemanne observe of digital games, “however much their digital virtuality is celebrated they are enacted and produced in strikingly visceral—ontologically virtual—ways”, and such a materialist consideration “demands that they are also understood as objects in the world” (15). The ecological consequences of the production of such digital objects are too often taken for granted, despite critical work examining the damaging impact of resource extraction, electronic waste, energy transfer, telecommunications transfer, and the logics of obsolescence involved (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter; Newman; Chang 152). By foregrounding humanity’s own monstrosity, The Last of Us Part II illustrates what Timothy Morton describes as the “weirdly weird” consequences of human actions during the Anthropocene; those uncanny, unexpected, and planetarily destructive outcomes of the post-industrial myth of progress (Morton, Dark Ecology 7). The ecocritical work of video games could remind players that so many of our worst contemporary nightmares result from human hubris (Weinstock 286), a realisation played out in first-person perspective by Morton: “I am the criminal. And I discover this via scientific forensics … I’m the detective and the criminal!” (Dark Ecology 9). Playing with Ecological Monstrosity The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and The Last of Us Part II confront players with an ecological form of monstrosity, which is deeply recursive in its nature. Players encounter monsters that stand in for socio-political anxieties about ecological disaster as well as those that reflect humanity’s own monstrously destructive hubris. Attention is further drawn to the player’s own, lived role as a contributor to climate crisis, a consequence of not only the material characteristics of digital games, but also their broader participation in the unsustainable economics of the post-industrial age. To begin to make the connections between these recursive monsters and analogies is to engage in the type of ecological thought that lets us see the very interconnectedness that defines the ecosystems we have damaged so fatally. In understanding that video games are the “point of convergence for a whole array of technical, cultural, and promotional dynamics of which [players] are, at best, only partially aware” (Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and de Peuter 19), we see that the nested layering of anxieties, fears, fictions, and realities is fundamental to the very fabric of digital games. Recursion, Donna Haraway observes in relation to the interlinked failure of ecosystems, “can be a drag” (100), but I want to suggest that playing with ecological monstrosity instead turns recursion into opportunity. An ecocritical approach to the examination of contemporary videogame monsters demonstrates that these horrific figures, through their primordial aesthetic and affective impacts, are adept at foregrounding the ecosystemic nature of the relationship between games and our own world. Videogames play a role in representing both desirable and objectionable versions of the world, and such “utopian and dystopian projections of the future can shape our acts in the present” (Fordyce 295). By confronting players with viscerally accessible encounters with the horror of an aberrant and abjected near future (so near that it is, in fact, already the present), games such as Breath of the Wild and The Last of Us Part II can critically position players in relation to discourse and wider public debate about ecological issues and climate change (and further research could more closely examine players’ engagements with ecological monstrosity). Drawing attention to the symmetry between monstrosity and ecological catastrophe is a crucial way that contemporary games might encourage players to untangle the recursive environmental consequences of our anthropocentric era. 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