Journal articles on the topic 'Tunisia – History – Demonstrations, 2010-'

Since December 2010, the ‘Arab Spring’ has featured techniques of civil resistance in sustained campaigns involving strikes, demonstrations, marches and rallies, as well as the use of the new social media to organize, communicate, and raise awareness in the face of state attempts at repression and censorship. In the case of Tunisia, Egypt, and - most dramatically - Libya, the protests have actually led to the departure of long-established regimes, whereas the situation in Syria and Bahrain remains unsettled to date.

The massive anti ‑regime demonstrations in Arab countries that started in December 2010 in Tunisia were followed by questions about causes and effects of those revolts. Attention of the researchers was understandably concentrated on Arab countries but it seems that other Muslim countries were overlooked – the adjective “Arab” superceded “Muslim” in the name of this widespread movement. This paper aims at proving that the process that culminated in the Arab Spring have not started in Tunisia in December 2010 but in Pakistan in 2007 and 2008.

The Arab Spring is a popular term used to describe the revolutionary movement of demonstrations and protests, and civil wars in the Arab world that began on December 18, 2010 in Tunisia and spread in the whole Arab countries. Tunisia and Egypt became the center of this revolution, and then it moved to include Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Sudan, Mauritania, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, Western Sahara and Palestine. Yemeni youth’s revolution movement began to change the system through mobilization of people and social action. This paper focuses on the importance of Facebook in the revolution and how the Yemeni youth used Facebook to attract more supporters and keep the spirit up. The present paper reports the impact of Facebook in nurturing political revolution in Yemen analyzing the data achieved by survey method.Int. J. Soc. Sc. Manage. Vol. 5, Issue-1: 5-9

The Arab Springs is known as “a revolutionary wave of demonstrations, protests, riots, protracted civil wars and other forms of opposition (both violent and non-violent) in the Arab territories” (Elfaith. 2015, 121). Starting in Tunisia on December 18, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi a street vendor, set himself on fire after being harassed by municipal police officials. Bouazizi’s act of self-immolation sparked international attention, leading Tunisia into a revolution. After being in power for 23 years as Tunisia’s President, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali stepped down and fled to Saudi Arabia (Bunton 2013, 16). Tunisia’s revolution led both the Arab and non-Arab world to witness “spontaneous explosions of protests, [revolutions] and popular political upheaval” in countries such as Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Morocco, Lebanon, Algeria, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Sudan and Mauritania (Ismael and Ismael 2013, 229). The high levels of political corruption, economic hardships and the desire for a free democratic government all inspired the citizens of these countries to take action against their governments.

Peaceful protests and demonstrations have swept through the Arab world, toppling rulers and advancing programs of radical change. Some enthusiasts for these movements have already proclaimed them a revolution. They predict a new Middle Eastern political and economic order. A new generation of young people—men and women, mainly in their twenties and thirties, using their skills in cyberspace communication and fueled by many frustrations—assembled vast numbers in peaceful protests that have thus far claimed many triumphs. They forced the departures of the long-standing dictators of Egypt and Tunisia and have demanded that the monarchs of Jordan, Morocco, and Bahrain reign rather than rule.

The paper points out, first of all, the fact that the contemporary migrant crisis represents a projected migration of peoples and that everything that is happening in the world today (the so-called Arab Spring - a wave of demonstrations, protests and rebellions, started in December 2010 in Tunisia and continued in other countries of North Africa and the Middle East, wars in certain countries, millions of homeless people, refugees and migrants, etc.) is not accidental at all. International law and its theoretical principles have never been more developed, on the one hand, but they have never been violated or compromised in practice, applied by naked political force and political power, on the other hand. Namely, all this is an integral part of the realization of the idea of the New World Order, which is by no means new. The destruction of "national sovereignty" and the creation of "limited sovereignty", the de-sovereignation of national states is the harsh reality of the modern world. This is done through the creation of supranational regional organizations (for example, the European Union) and institutions of global financial power (the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and others).

In the wake of the 2010-2011 Arab Spring uprisings, six Tunisians of Muslim parentage were prosecuted in quick succession for blasphemy in a series of unprecedented trials. This article focuses specifically on the link between blasphemy and apostasy in the prosecutions of Tunisians in the 2011-2013 period. Some defendants accepted the link between blasphemy and apostasy, while others rejected being labeled apostates. Through an analysis of these cases, I conclude that the defendants who embraced the label of apostate were more severely punished by the local judicial system than those who rejected it. I also explore the possibility that those who openly assume an apostate position situated outside the Islamic community are also simply less well connected, and thus ill-advised, as to how to navigate a legal system whose public order and public decency articles allow judges significant latitude.

The transition of the memory of twentieth-century conflicts from survivor to cultural memory has become inevitable with the passing of the survivor generation. This article examines the role of different generations in the retrieval and commemoration of the traumatic past in Germany and Spain by focusing on two main areas: firstly, it analyzes the debates surrounding the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and the ongoing review of form and function of existing memorial sites in the city, as well as ongoing vandalism and trivialization of these sites. Secondly, it examines recent debates and protests in Spain surrounding the 1977 Amnesty Law by prominent artists and the wider public. These range from protests against the indictment of Judge Baltasar Garzón in 2010 for opening an investigation into crimes against humanity committed by the Franco regime to demonstrations in November 2015 demanding an annulment of the 1977 Law, and to the recent Argentinean court case of Franco-era human rights crimes. Considering Pierre Nora’s notion that lieux de mémoire can be ‘material or non-material’, this article suggests that debates and demonstrations can act as a virtual space in which memory is viable. It analyzes the role of the ‘generations of postmemory’, in particular the third and fourth generations, in forestalling silence and forgetting and changing existing rigid discursive patterns.

The aim of this study is to analyse the extent to which different productive factors, and the relationships that exist between them, affect the economic growth of productivity in ten Middle Eastern and North African (mena) countries during the period 1990-2010. A translog production function is estimated by using panel data and the contribution of the factors to growth is calculated. The results show a positive effect of the physical and human capital on productivity and high complementarity relationships between them, both factors being essential in determining economic growth. However, the magnitude of their contribution varies substantially between the ten countries considered. Thus, the capitalisation of the economies and the improvement of the human capital seem to be key policy elements of economic growth in these countries. Nevertheless, a considerable part of the economic growth cannot be explained by these factors, particularly in Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia.

The Arab Spring in Tunisia has brought with it positive changes, such as freedom of expression and democracy. However, Tunisians have found that these applauded achievements have not improved their living conditions. After Ben Ali was ousted in 2010, the decline of Tunisia’s economy was exacerbated by internal and external factors such as global recession, a dysfunctional liberal economy, internal political infighting, and corruption. To ventilate their frustration and dismay with the government and the overall socio-economic situation in Tunisia, some Tunisians turn to the music of rap and Mizoued in search for a new space where there is solace and escapism. Mizoued music and rap deal with core issues about the living conditions in Tunisia, such as ḥarga (border jumping, clandestine migration). Most rappers and Mzēwdiyye (Mizoued players) represent the houma (neighbourhood), and it is their connection with frustrated youths and struggling Tunisians that influenced these two genres to merge and gain popularity in their shared history of marginalization. The purpose of this article is twofold. First, it analyses the points of convergence and divergence of these two genres in terms of themes and authenticity. Second, it discusses how rap and Mizoued discourses use the notion of ‘space’ in the development of the artists’ trajectories and narratives in three domains: cultural, political, and sociological. Within these domains, Bourdieu’s social concepts of habitus, cultural capital, and field throw light on how ‘taste’, power’, and ‘class’ are exercised in the three domains.

This book discusses the dynamics of the relationship between Islam as a religious and political teaching with democracy in the context of the effects of the Arab Spring and the subsequent events after it. The authors, who are considered to be “titans” in the field of democracy and Islam, started the book by saying “Many western observers were shocked when Arabs began open rebellions against their governments in December 2010” and this seem to point out not only the unpredictability of the uprisings, but also to the inaccuracy behind several of the most accepted assumptions about politics and governance in the Arab world. The chapters of the book discuss the experiences of political transition in general and how democratisation works in particular through the examples of seven different countries, namely Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, Senegal, Tunisia and Egypt.

Abstract This study seeks to improve election forecasting by supplementing polling data with online information-seeking behavior trends as an indicator of public opinion. Aggregate trends of demonstrations of interest or engagement have been shown to accurately predict behavior trends and reflect public opinion. Further, because traditional poll-based predictions are inherently undermined by self-reporting biases and the intention-behavior disconnect, we can expect that information-seeking trends on widely used social media—as an autonomous and unobtrusive indicator of relative levels of public opinion—can help correct for some of this error and explain unique, additional variance in election results. We advance the literature by using data from Wikipedia pageviews along with polling data in a synthesized model based on the results of the 2008, 2010, and 2012 US Senate general elections. Results show that Wikipedia pageviews data significantly add to the ability of poll- and fundamentals-based projections to predict election results up to 28 weeks prior to Election Day, and benefit predictions most at those early points, when poll-based predictions are weakest.

AbstractThis article draws on extensive fieldwork and original data to trace the transformation of civil–military relations in Tunisia during the tenure of the former president Zayn al-ʿAbidin bin ʿAli (1987–2011). The republican ethos of the Tunisian Armed Forces (al-Quwwat al-Musallaha al-Tunusiyya) is often stressed to explain its traditional political quiescence. However, I maintain that it was the active hostility of the military's rivals within the Bin ʿAli regime that prevented Tunisian generals from playing a greater role in their country's public life. I disaggregate Bin ʿAli's regime into its fundamental institutional components—namely, the presidency, the party, the police, and the military—and investigate rivalries and alliances that structured the struggle for influence and power between Bin ʿAli's rise to the presidency and his downfall. I argue that there is a direct and causal relationship between the 2010–11 uprising and inter- and intrainstitutional dynamics within the regime. In other words, the study of contemporary Tunisian civil–military relations is critical to understanding the breakdown of the Bin ʿAli regime.

In this article Vicki Ann Cremona traces the development of the complex process of montage used by Eugenio Barba for Ur-Hamlet, based on the oral tale Amleth, which Saxo Grammaticus included in his history of the Danes (circa 1216). Besides Odin Teatret, the project involved a large number of actors and musicians from Bali, Brazil, and Japan, and other participants and trainees with whom Barba had worked at the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA). The author here recounts how the work was developed from different cultural perspectives, describing how the actors' physical scores were combined without their cultural specificity being modified in any way. Vicki Ann Cremona is an Associate Professor at the University of Malta, currently serving as Malta's Ambassador to Tunisia. Her co-edited texts include Costume in Malta: a History of Fabric, Form, and Fashion (1998) and Theatrical Events: Borders, Dynamics, Frames (2004). She updated, revised and edited Nicola Savarese's Eurasian Theatre: Drama and Performance between East and West from Classical Antiquity to the Present, translated from the Italian by Richard Fowler (Holstebro, Malta, Wrocław: Icarus Publishing, 2010).

Abstract Recognized in the twentieth and twenty-first-century history of political suicides as a radical act of protest and a spectacular expression of an intense experience of suffering, self-burning has returned since 2010 when Mohamed Bouazizi’s act sparked protests in Tunisia. Its last wave in Europe includes those cases of self-incinerations in which the conditions for their political performativity are only partly fulfilled: the acts are public and communicate with the antagonist in the symbolic places of power, but their motivations aren’t explicitly formulated as political. When self-annihilation is triggered by the basic needs and rights to maintain life, – such as unemployment, housing crisis, conflicts at work, and other forms of precarity, – means and ends with respect to life become indistinguishable. How can life be weaponized as a transindividual form of dissent if self-destruction also brings an end to desperation and suffering of the person? How are we to attend to irreparable acts of self-annihilation, which stand in dire contrast to contemporary practices of self-care, vitalist intensity and self-enhancement?

In recent years, West Nile virus (WNV) has re-emerged in the Western Mediterranean region. As a result, the number of complete WNV genome sequences available from this region has increased, allowing more detailed phylogenetic analyses, which may help to understand the evolutionary history of WNV circulating in the Western Mediterranean. To this aim, the present work describes six new complete WNV sequences from recent outbreaks and surveillance in Italy in 2008–2009 and in Spain in 2008 and 2010. Comparison with other sequences from different WNV clusters within lineage 1 (clade 1a) confirmed that all Western Mediterranean WNV isolates obtained since 1996 (except one from Tunisia, collected in 1997) cluster in a single monophyletic group (here called ‘WMed’ subtype). The analysis differentiated two subgroups within this subtype, which appear to have evolved from earlier WMed strains, suggesting a single introduction in the area, and further dissemination and evolution. Close similarities between WNV variants circulating in consecutive years, one in Spain, between 2007 and 2008, and another in Italy between 2008 and 2009, suggest that the virus possibly overwinters in Western Mediterranean sites. The NS3249-proline genotype, recently proposed as a virulence determinant for WNV, has arisen independently at least twice in the area. Overall, these results indicate that the frequent recurrence of outbreaks caused by phylogenetically homogeneous WNV in the Western Mediterranean since 1996 is consistent with a single introduction followed by viral persistence in endemic foci in the area, rather than resulting from independent introductions from exogenous endemic foci.

Abstract Abstract 4852 Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) is a complex disease with various complications such as stroke, vaso-occlusive crisis (VOC), acute chest syndrome and leg ulcers. Sickle cell anemia (SCA; homozygous hemoglobin SS) is the most common form of SCD. Genetic variations and/or environmental modifiers may modulate clinical presentation of SCD. Few studies have examined hemoglobinopathies in Tunisia, North Africa. However, recently, frequencies of beta-thalassemia and sickle cell trait were estimated at 2.21% and 1.89%, respectively (Fattoum, 2006). In order to identify genetic factors that may predispose patients to SCD complications in this population, a pilot case control study was designed to assess polymorphisms in Human Platelet Antigen (HPA) Genes. HPA polymorphisms were recently associated with severe coronary artery disease in the general population in Tunisia (Abboud et al, 2010) and VOC presentation in SCA patients from Bahrain (Al-Subaie et al, 2009). We present here a study conducted in collaboration with the Department of Clinical Hematology at the Aziza Othmana Hospital in Tunis (Tunisia). The National Medical Ethics committee of Tunisia as well as the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM) approved the study. Blood samples, clinical history and DNA samples were collected from SCD adult patients and healthy controls after informed consent. Previously validated questionnaires for genetic risks in patients with SCD (courtesy of Dr Telen, Duke University) were adapted to French. The Helena test kit was used to generate hemoglobin variant data in conjunction with cellulose acetate electrophoresis. Blood samples were collected in EDTA vacutainer tubes and genomic DNA was isolated,stored at −80°C and then shipped to MSM. Single nucleotide polymorphisms, SNPs (Table 1) were genotyped using PCR-RFLPs and compared with different clinical sub-phenotypes such as, onset age, strokes, cardiac problems, splenectomies, etc. as defined in the questionnaire. Pearson Chi-Square was used for comparison and a P<0.05 value was considered significant. A total of 98 DNA samples were collected and 54 questionnaires were filled (Table 2). Age of patients at time of sample collection ranged from 19 to 61 (n = 49) with a mean ± sd (standard deviation) of 29 ± 7. The reported age at onset ranged from 1 to 30 (n = 44) with a mean ± sd of 12 ± 9. No significant differences were found in the HPA alleles and genotype frequencies in SCD versus healthy controls. There was significant association between HPA1 polymorphism with patient defined cardiac problems in all SCD patients (P = 0.002) as well as in the SS sub-group separately (P = 0.01). There was significant association between HPA1 and reported age of onset in SCD patients (P = 0.05) as well as in the non-SS sub-group alone (P = 0.04). The HPA1 variant was linked to self-reported age of disease onset and heart complications in adult SCD patients in Tunisia. This present study is one of the first genetic studies in a seldom-studied group of Tunisian adult SCD patients. These results show that identification of biomarkers of SCD disease severity may be possible using a validated self-reporting instrument. This kind of approach could help to improve early diagnosis of at risk patients and enable development of early interventions.Table 1:SNPs screened.SymbolRs#Ch.Gene (GeneID)MutationPeptide changeRestriction Enz.HPA1rs591817ITGB3 (3690)196 T>CLeu33ProMspIHPA2rs606517GP1BA (2811)524 C>TMet145ThrSfaNIHPA3rs591117ITGA2B (3674)2622 T>GIle843SerFokITable 2:Tunisian cohort collection took place from January to December 2009. This table summarizes the number and genotypes of patients enrolled and questionnaires collectedSexMaleFemaleTotal (%)TOTAL455196 (100)SCD Patients403575 (78)Healthy Controls51621 (22)Hemoglobin Genotype of SCD patientsSS141529 (38.6)Sβ010919 (25.3)Sβ+112 (2.6)SC112 (2.6)SO101 (1.3)unknown13922 (29.3)Total (%)403575 (100)Questionnaires filled282654No questionnaires111021 Disclosures: No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

Abstract Background: Diffuse Large B Cell Lymphoma (DLBCL) is the most common form of aggressive non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) accounting for approximately 40 % of all NHL cases. The aim of our study is to carry out an epidemiologic description and to compute the incidence of DLBCL in 2North African countries, Algeria and Tunisia. Patients and methods: This is a multicenter retrospective and descriptive study, covering a period of 5 years (January 2010 - December 2014), carried out in 17 centers in Algeria and 5 centers in Tunisia. Patients aged less than 15 years were excluded. We used the classification of World Health Organization. We used Epi info 6 software to analyze the data. Results: 1432 cases were identified, 1175 in Algeria and 257 in Tunisia. The sex distribution of DLBCL was as follows: males 837 (58.4 %), females 591 (41.6 %), male-to-female ratio 1.40. The age of patients ranged from 16 to 96 years (median 52 years) and 64.2 % of the patients are less than 60. The incidence estimates for the years 2012 and 2013 are respectively 0.86 and 0.87 for 100,000 inhabitants. The most frequent occupation of the cases is farmworker (11.5%). The average time between the date of diagnosis and clinical examination is 31 days. The average delay between the first clinical sign and the date of diagnosis is 133 days. A familial history of cancer is found in 10% of the cases. The lymph node biopsy was undertaken in 30.7% of the cases in the cervical area and in 15% of cases in the mediastinal area. A reexamination of the slides was undertaken in 20% of cases while 61.6% of them were found to be advanced clinical stages (III + IV). Splenomegaly was found in 16% of the cases and hepatomegaly in 7%. ORL damage was found in 16% of the cases and marrow infiltration in 10.2%. A Prognostic Score IPI ≥ 2 is found in 38% of the patients. Comments: On a previous Algerian study concerning all lymphomas diagnosed over a period of 6 years (2007-2012) (Journal of Hematology No. 10-11, 2015), 485 new cases of lymphoma were diagnosed on average per year. In the present study, the average number of new cases of DLBCL was 235 and the average proportion was 48% of all lymphomas. It should be emphasized that all cases underwent an immunohistochemical study and that lymphatic cases were excluded (digestive, bone, skin). The national incidence rate is low compared to that of international studies, a fact that is probably due to difficulties in the diagnosis including lack of implementation of immunohistochemistry techniques in our region. Disclosures No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

IntroductionDementia’s prevalence increases due to population aging, it has become a major public health concern.ObjectivesTo estimate the incidence of dementia and to describe the socio-demographic and clinical profile of patients attended in the psychiatry department of Gabes (Southern of Tunisia).MethodsIt was a retrospective descriptive study including all the patients who attended for the first time in the psychiatry department of Gabes, from the 1st January, 2010 to December 31, 2018, and who were diagnosed with dementia according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). Socio-demographic and clinical data were assessed. The Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) was used as a neuropsychological examination.ResultsWe included 98 patients. The mean annual hospital incidence of dementia was 2.38%. The mean age was 76.5 ± 9.8 years. Patients were married (68%), illiterate (68%) and jobless (42.9%). A family history of dementia was noted in 39.8% of patients. The common cardiovascular comorbidity was high blood pressure (41.8%). Among our patients, 30 (30.6%) were smokers. The mean age of onset of dementia was 73 ± 11 years. The mean duration of untreated dementia was 3 years [3 months to 11 years]. First symptoms were mainly memory disorders (57.3 %) and behavioral disorders (17.3%) The mean MMSE score was 14 ± 4.8. Alzheimer’s disease was the most frequent etiology of dementia (80 cases, 82.7%).ConclusionsOur study shows a high incidence of dementia and made it possible to draw up a socio-demographic and clinical profile of dementia patients.DisclosureNo significant relationships.

In 2011, the Arab world had become the centre of attention once again after the emergence of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ in December 2010. This historical event in the modern history of the Arab region has brought significant social and political reform to the Arab world. The wave of Arab uprising begins in Tunisia at the end of 2010, rapidly separated into other neighbouring countries such as Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Bahrain, and Sudan. Since the early stage of protest, which mainly participated by locals, mass media has comprehensively reported this historical event, which brought down many Arab leaders in power for decades. Thus, Arab Spring has become the headline of many international media outlets, and the media are still discussing the significant impact of the event until now. Hence, the main objective of the study is to examine the event's Arabic online news discourse by focusing on the keywords and prominent social actors in the news reports surrounding the Arab Spring. This will indicate what has been included and excluded or highlighted and marginalised in the news coverage. The data is consist of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) online news published by four prominent news outlets namely with different origin and background: Al-Arabia of Saudi Arabia, Al-Jazeera of Qatar, BBC Arabic of the UK and CNN of the USA. These well-established news outlets were selected for their comprehensive international coverage aims at various Arabic readers worldwide. The study employs corpus linguistics analytical tools by using corpus data mining software ‘AntConc 3.4’. Then, the quantitative results of corpus data will be analysed using a qualitative approach based on the textual-oriented Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of Fairclough (1992) and Wodak (2001). The result shows that news coverage of the event has highlighted several keywords that indicate the main social actors and main social events of the Arab Spring. These keywords are the shared command features among the news outlets, although each outlet portraying them is significantly different. Finally, the article presents suggestions for other related studies in the future.

Purpose On December 14, 2010, University of Puerto Rico (UPR) student activists initiated the second wave of their strike at a disadvantage. The presence of the police force inside the campus raised the stakes for the student movement. No longer did student activists have the “legal rights” or control of the university as a physical public space to hold their assemblies and coordinate their different events. As a result, student activists had to improvise and (re)construct their spaces of resistance by using emotional narratives, organizing non-violent civil disobedience acts at public places, fomenting lobbying groups, disseminating online petitions, and developing alternative proposals to the compulsory fee. This second wave continued until March 2011, when it came to a halt after an incident that involved physical harassment to the Chancellor, Ana Guadalupe, during one of the student demonstrations. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach Building on Ron Eyerman’s (2005, p. 53) analysis on “the role of emotions in social movements with the aid of performance theory,” the author center this paper on examining student activists’ tactics and strategies in the development and maintenance of their emotional narratives and internet activism. By adapting Joshua Atkinson’s (2010) concept of resistance performance, the author argues that student activists’ resistance performances assisted them in (re)framing their collective identities by (re)constructing spaces of resistance and contention while immersed in violent confrontations with the police. Findings Ever since the establishment of the university as an institution, student activism has played a key role in shaping the political policies and history of many countries; “today, student actions continue to have direct effects on educational institutions and on national and international politics” (Edelman, 2001, p. 3). Consequently, and especially in times of economic and political crisis, student activism has occupied and constructed spaces of resistance and contention to protest and reveal the existing repressions of neoliberal governments serving as a (re)emergence of an international social movement to guarantee the accessibility to a public higher education of excellence. Thus, it is important to remember that the 2010-2011 UPR student activism’s success should not be measured by the sum of demands granted, but rather by the sense of community achieved and the establishment of social networks that have continued to create resistance and change in the island. Originality/value As of yet there is no thorough published analysis of the 2010-2011 UPR student strike, its implications, and how the university community currently perceives it. By elaborating on the concept of resistance performance, the author’s study illustrates how both traditional and alternative media (re)presentations of student activism can develop, maintain, adjust, or change the students’ collective identity(ies). The author’s work not only makes Puerto Rico visible in the research concerning social movements, student activism, and internet activism; in addition, it provides resistance performance as a concept to describe various degrees of participation in current social movements.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, industry engineer-turned entrepreneur regarding his pioneering efforts in bringing a robotic invention to market. This paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach The interviewee is Geoff Howe, Senior Vice President of Howe & Howe, Inc., a subsidiary of Textron Systems and a leader in advanced robotic platform solutions and applications built and proven for the most extreme conditions in the world. Geoff and Michael Howe founded Howe & Howe Technologies in 2001 and was acquired by Textron Systems in 2018. In 2010, Howe and Howe developed one of the world’s first robotic fire-fighting solutions. Geoff Howe describes the evolution of the Thermite robotic firefighter’s commercial development, along with the challenges of breaking ground in this new industry. Findings Geoff and his identical twin brother, Michael Howe, are inventors, military contractors, actors and entrepreneurial businessmen famous for their philanthropic drive to give back to their community. When Geoff and Mike were just six years old, they were known as “Howe and Howe Construction.” At the age of eight, Mike and Geoff built their own one room log cabin with the power tools their mom had given them for their birthday. At 16 years old, they started tinkering with vehicles before they even had their drivers’ licenses. They both graduated from Maine high school and colleges with honors. The company’s portfolio includes the RIPSAW® , Thermite, the Badger, Subterranean Rover and other extreme vehicles used for numerous applications. In 2010, Howe and Howe completed three new vehicles. First was the Thermite™ which entered the unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) market as the USA’s first firefighting UGV. The second vehicle was Ripchair™, the development of an off-road wheelchair for those that have become disabled and are unable to walk. The third vehicle was Riptide, the amphibious version of the RIPSAW. Year 2015 saw the commercial development of the Big Dog Extreme 4x4 fire truck and the Thermite RS1 and RS3 firefighting robots. The Big Dog is an off-road truck and also serves as an all-terrain multi-use firetruck. The Thermite provides firefighters and first responders immediate eyes inside the fire as well the ability to safely attack industrial, chemical and HAZMAT fires from their core. The Thermite robot provides safety and inside access on containing and defeating fires of any magnitude. Originality/value Howe & Howe Technologies first gained notoriety in 2001, with the development of the world’s fastest tank, the RIPSAW. Successful demonstrations soon followed, which eventually allowed the Howes, at the age of 31, to be named among the youngest in history to ever receive a multi-million dollar military contract from the USA. Soon after, in 2010, Howe & Howe received a Guinness World Record for developing the world’s smallest armored vehicle, the Badger. By the time the Howes were 36, they had one world record, multiple patents pending for their product developments, as well as military contracts. The Howes also had their own reality television show on a major US network. In 2010, they completed the Thermite, Fire Fighting Unmanned Ground Vehicle. In 2012, the Howes founded “Outdoors Again,” a nonprofit 501c3 organization that holds outdoor events and social activities for those who require the use of a wheelchair.

Introduction. Balneology has a long European and Asian tradition and Romania can be the cornerstone of international bridges in this area due to its geographical position, legendary tradition and extraordinary natural resources of all kind. The use of thermal and mineral springs on the territory of the country for health and treatment purposes is a tradition with a history of more than two thousand years. Unique spa resources, such as thermal and mineral springs, mud, mofettes, saline microclimate and bioclimate (sedative or relaxing, exciting of marine seaside or plains, stimulant or tonic), are used successfully in the sphere of health care services, preventive medical actions, rehabilitation and wellness. Legend of Hercule bathing in Cerna's waters is a proof of the use of thermal waters long before the Roman conquest. This tradition exists in almost all civilizations. Today it maintains its usefulness and is spread across all continents, mainly in the Middle East and South and East Europe, Asia (Middle East, Japan, China, Turkey), South America (Argentina, Mexico, Colombia) and North Africa (Morocco, Tunisia) (244-249). Material and method. This article is a sistematic and summarizing review of all published articles by Balneo Research Journal in its ten years of existence, from november 2010 until September 2019. All the ten volumes and more than 250 articles were analized in order to understand the main thematic of the articles, the more usefull scientific concepts, the realistic benefits of the published articles for the development of Balneology. Results and discussions. Analizing an article database of about 250 publised articles in Balneo Research Journal can be of real impact on the development of the field of Balneology but also can drive the future of the jurnal to better understand its implications in the scientific arena. Conclusions. Main scientific concepts with which Balneology is operating, interdisciplinary connections and interests were focused on ideas to have in mind by the authors and readers of this article. Key words: Balneology, Balneotherapy, Balneo Research Journal, Natural therapeutic factors, Balneary Resort,

Region Bliskiego Wschodu w historii ludzkości odgrywał istotne znaczenie geopolityczne i geoekonomiczne. Wynikało to z jego położenia geograficznego, co powodowało, że stanowił swego rodzaju „pomost” w handlu łączącym Europę z Azją i Afryką. Współcześnie jednym z kluczowym aspektów są znajdujące się na tych obszarach znaczące złoża ropy naftowej, a także zbiegające się interesy geopolityczne mocarstw regionalnych i globalnych. Doprowadziło to do sytuacji, że region ten stał się jednym z kluczowych obszarów geopolitycznych i geoekonomicznych we współczesnej polityce międzynarodowej. Historycznie w tym regionie dominowały państwa o reżimie autorytarnym lub monarchicznym. Pod koniec 2010 i na początku 2011 r. doszło jednak do masowych wystąpień w szeregu krajów regionu. Protestująca ludność dążyła do poprawy swojej sytuacji politycznej i socjoekonomicznej, a wystąpienia nazwane zostały później Arabką Wiosną. Arabska Wiosna zmieniła krajobraz polityczny regionu, co dotyczyło zwłaszcza reżimów w Egipcie, Libii, Tunezji i Jemenie. Przemiany w krajach arabskich miały szereg skutków politycznych, społeczno-ekonomicznych i geostrategicznych. Sytuacja w poszczególnych państwach jest nierozerwalnie związana z polityką regionalną i globalną. Kluczowe są tu uwarunkowania geopolityczne i geoekonomiczne, uwzględniając role globalnych i lokalnych graczy, tj. Stanów Zjednoczonych, Chin, Rosji, Turcji, Izraela, Iranu czy Arabii Saudyjskiej. Arabska Wiosna nasiliła geopolityczną rywalizację i rozprzestrzeniła ją na Syrię. W artykule podjęto się próby charakterystyki definicji pojęć geopolityki oraz geoekonomii. Celem głównym było przedstawienie przeobrażeń geopolitycznych oraz geoekonomicznych w regionie Bliskiego Wschodu po wydarzeniach Arabskiej Wiosny z 2011 r. Changes in geopolitical and geoeconomic conditions in the Middle East as a result of the Arab Spring of 2011 The Middle East region has played an important geopolitical and geoeconomic role throughout human history. This was due to its geographic location, which made it a kind of „bridge” in trade connecting Europe with Asia and Africa. Nowadays, one of the key aspects is the significant oil deposits located in these areas, as well as the converging geopolitical interests of regional and global powers. This has led to the region becoming one of the key geopolitical and geo-economic areas in modern international politics. Historically, the region has been dominated by states with authoritarian or monarchical regimes. In late 2010 and early 2011, however, there were mass uprisings in a number of countries in the region seeking to improve the political and socioeconomic situation of the societies living there, and the uprisings were later dubbed the Arab Spring. The Arab Spring changed the political landscape of the region, which especially affected the regimes in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen. The Arab transition has had a number of political, socioeconomic and geostrategic effects. The situation in individual countries is inextricably linked to regional and global politics. Geopolitical and geo-economic factors and conditions are key, taking into account the roles of global and local players, i.e. the United States, China, Russia, Turkey, Israel, Iran or Saudi Arabia. The Arab Spring intensified the geopolitical rivalry and spread it to Syria. The article attempts to characterize the definitions of the concepts of geopolitics and geo-economics. The main objective was to present the changes in geopolitical and geo-economic conditions in the Middle East region after the events of the Arab Spring of 2011.

The taxonomy of the Palearctic genusMegacraspedusZeller, 1839 (Lepidoptera, Gelechiidae) is revised, based on external morphology, genitalia and DNA barcodes. An integrative taxonomic approach supports the existence of 85 species which are arranged in 24 species groups (disputed taxa from other faunal regions are discussed). Morphology of all species is described and figured in detail. For 35 species both sexes are described; for 46 species only the male sex is reported, in one species the male is unknown, whereas in three species the female adult and/or genitalia morphology could not be analysed due to lack of material.DNA barcode sequences of the COI barcode fragment with &gt; 500 bp were obtained from 264 specimens representing 62 species or about three-quarters of the species. Species delimitation is particularly difficult in a few widely distributed species with high and allegedly intraspecific DNA barcode divergence of nearly 14%, and with up to 23 BINs in a single species. Deep intraspecific or geographical splits in DNA barcode are frequently not supported by morphology, thus indicating a complex phylogeographic history or other unresolved molecular problems.The following 44 new species (22 of them from Europe) are described:Megacraspedusbengtssonisp. n.(Spain),M.junnilainenisp. n.(Turkey),M.similellussp. n.(Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey),M.golestanicussp. n.(Iran),M.tokarisp. n.(Croatia),M.nelisp. n.(France, Italy),M.faunierensissp. n.(Italy),M.gredosensissp. n.(Spain),M.bidentatussp. n.(Spain),M.fuscussp. n.(Spain),M.trineaesp. n.(Portugal, Spain),M.skouisp. n.(Spain),M.spinophallussp. n.(Spain),M.occidentellussp. n.(Portugal),M.granadensissp. n.(Spain),M.heckfordisp. n.(Spain),M.tenuiuncussp. n.(France, Spain),M.devoratorsp. n.(Bulgaria, Romania),M.brachypterissp. n.(Albania, Greece, Macedonia, Montenegro),M.barcodiellussp. n.(Macedonia),M.sumpichisp. n.(Spain),M.tabellisp. n.(Morocco),M.gallicussp. n.(France, Spain),M.libycussp. n.(Libya, Morocco),M.latiuncussp. n.(Kazahkstan),M.kazakhstanicussp. n.(Kazahkstan),M.knudlarsenisp. n.(Spain),M.tenuignathossp. n.(Morocco),M.glaberipalpussp. n.(Morocco),M.nupponenisp. n.(Russia),M.pototskiisp. n.(Kyrgyzstan),M.feminensissp. n.(Kazakhstan),M.kirgizicussp. n.(Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan),M.ibericussp. n.(Portugal, Spain),M.steinerisp. n.(Morocco),M.gibeauxisp. n.(Algeria, Tunisia),M.multipunctellussp. n.(Turkey),M.teriolensissp. n.(Croatia, Greece, Italy, Slovenia),M.korabicussp. n.(Macedonia),M.skuleisp. n.(Spain),M.longivalvellussp. n.(Morocco),M.peslierisp. n.(France, Spain),M.pacificussp. n.(Afghanistan), andM.armatophallussp. n.(Afghanistan).NevadiaCaradja, 1920,syn. n.(homonym),CauloecistaDumont, 1928,syn. n.,ReichardtiellaFilipjev, 1931,syn. n., andVadeniaCaradja, 1933,syn. n.are treated as junior synonyms ofMegacraspedus. Furthermore the following species are synonymised:M.subdolellusStaudinger, 1859,syn. n.,M.tuttiWalsingham, 1897,syn. n., andM.grossisquammellusChrétien, 1925,syn. n. ofM.lanceolellus(Zeller, 1850);M.culminicolaLe Cerf, 1932,syn. n.ofM.homochroaLe Cerf, 1932;M.separatellus(Fischer von Röslerstamm, 1843),syn. n.andM.incertellusRebel, 1930,syn. n.ofM.dolosellus(Zeller, 1839);M.mareotidellusTurati, 1924,syn. n.ofM.numidellus(Chrétien, 1915);M.litovalvellusJunnilainen, 2010,syn. n.ofM.imparellus(Fischer von Röslerstamm, 1843);M.kaszabianusPovolný, 1982,syn. n.ofM.leuca(Filipjev, 1929);M.chretienella(Dumont, 1928),syn. n.,M.halfella(Dumont, 1928),syn. n., andM.arnaldi(Turati &amp; Krüger, 1936),syn. n.ofM.violacellum(Chrétien, 1915);M.escalerellusSchmidt, 1941,syn. n.ofM.squalidaMeyrick, 1926.Megacraspedusribbeella(Caradja, 1920),comb. n.,M.numidellus(Chrétien, 1915),comb. n.,M.albella(Amsel, 1935),comb. n.,M.violacellum(Chrétien, 1915),comb. n., andM.grisea(Filipjev, 1931),comb. n.are newly combined inMegacraspedus.

Abstract Background: Factor V Leiden (FVL) mutation and Protein gene G20210A mutation (PGM) are the most common inherited thrombophilias in the world. (Limdi NA et.al, Blood Cells Mol Dis. 2006 Sep-Oct;37(2):100-6) Both are inherited in an autosomal recessive fashion with individuals who are homozygous having higher risk of thrombosis compared to those who are heterozygous.(Rodger MA et.al, PLoS Med. 2010 Jun 15;7(6):e1000292.) The global prevalence of FVL and PGM is variable with Caucasians carrying the highest prevalence and Africans living in Africa, Asians and Native Americans having the lowest rate of these mutations; it is zero in West and Southern African countries, 2.4%-3.9% in North African countries including Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. (Limdi NA et.al, Blood Cells Mol Dis. 2006 Sep-Oct;37(2):100-6, Dziadosz M et. al, Blood Coagul Fibrinolysis. 2016 Jul;27(5):481-9) Pregnancy increases the risk of developing venous thromboembolism (VTE) by 0.05-1.8 %, (Eldor A, Thromb Haemost. 2001 12.12.2017;86(07):104-11) which is 4 to 5 fold greater than in non-pregnant female.(Croles FN et.al, BMJ. 2017;359, Greer IA, N Engl J Med. 2015 Aug 6;373(6):540-7) Inheritance of FVL and PGM increases the risk for development of VTE in pregnancy, the risk is higher with homozygous than heterozygous mutations.(Rodger MA et.al, PLoS Med. 2010 Jun 15;7(6):e1000292.) Concurrent presentation of FVL and PGM in pregnancy presenting as thrombosis is not common. Aim: The aim of this case report is to present a patient of African descent with concurrent FVL and PGM mutation who had thrombosis during pregnancy. The Case: A 32-year-old Nigerian female who was 28 weeks pregnant presented to the gynecologist with a swollen left leg. Physical examination and the Wells score were very suggestive of a deep vein thrombosis (DVT). The Duplex Doppler performed confirmed a diagnosis of bilateral lower limb DVT. The patient was referred to a physician, who together with the haematologist performed a thrombophilia screen including FVL, PGM, Protein C, Protein S and Anticardiolipin antibody tests. The D-DIMERS were raised and the viral markers including HIV, HBV, and HCV were negative. The PT, APTT and full blood counts were normal. The thrombophilia tests revealed that the patient was homozygous for FVL and also heterozygous for the PGM mutations. The rest of the thrombophilia screen including Protein C, Protein S and Antithrombin tests were all negative. She has no family history of thrombosis; no past history of hormone based contraceptives. She was counselled on the need for using anticoagulation, low molecular weight heparin (LMWH) during the rest of her pregnancy period, and therapeutic anticoagulation with a LMWH at a dose of 1mg/kg twice a day until onset of labour was started. During labour LMWH was discontinued, delivery was per vaginal and was uncomplicated. Postpartum LMWH was continued at therapeutic doses for six weeks with no bleeding or thrombotic events. After six weeks, the patient was started on lifelong warfarin. Results (See Table) Discussion: To our knowledge this is a first case of a patient born and living in Africa presenting with thrombosis and found to have homozygous FVL and heterozygous PGM during pregnancy, the one report that is similar was in a second generation South African woman of German, Dutch and French ancestry. (Wilson J et. al, Medical Technology SA. [Case Report]. December 2011;25(2):4) Most reports have shown ethnic and regional affectation. (Limdi NA et.al, Blood Cells Mol Dis. 2006 Sep-Oct;37(2):100-6, Bavikatty NR, et.al, Am J Clin Pathol. 2000 Aug;114(2):272-5) There is no single agreed reason as to why the mutation is rare in Africa though founder effect is being studied to define how the mutation came about, it could have taken place before divergence of race. (Jadaon MM. [Thrombosis, Familiar Thrombophilia]. 2011 2011-11-28;3(1) We could not do family studies to help define the origin of this mutation whether it is denovo for Nigeria; this has to do with sentiments about genetic inheritance in Africa. Conclusion: Concurrent inheritance of both FVL and PGM is possible in Africa. This rare case has open opportunities to revisit the prevalence of thrombophilia in Nigeria and other African countries. Disclosures Mahlangu: Alnylam: Consultancy, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Biomarin: Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Catalyst Biosciences: Consultancy, Research Funding; Chugai: Consultancy; Amgen: Consultancy; Bayer: Research Funding; Biogen: Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; CSL Behring: Consultancy, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; NovoNordisk: Consultancy, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; LFB: Consultancy; Roche: Consultancy, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Sanofi: Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Shire: Consultancy, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Sobi: Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Spark: Consultancy, Research Funding.

In her recent book published after the election of Donald Trump as the US President in 2016, Cynthia Enloe argues that the patriarchy, similar to our smart phones, has updated itself as a reaction against the achievements of the second and third wave feminisms. The updated patriarchy has this time renewed itself through the beliefs and values about the ways the world works (2017). The competing foreign policies representing the hypermasculine hegemonic masculinity of the current world politics and its authoritarian leaders are the outputs of this new updated version of patriarchy. Enloe doubts that having gained sustainability with its updates, the patriarchy could be fought against simply with street demonstrations, as it was before. The patriarchy could be forced to retreat only by incessantly asking “curious” feminist questions that would expose all masculine patterns of life (2017). Continuously asking questions without giving up or giving in would make the patriarchy transparent and vulnerable. In the face of curious, non-stop questions from a gender perspective and the conscious use of the terms supporting gender equality, the patriarchy, albeit updated and sustained, does not stand a chance. Enloe explains the reason why incorporating gender in International Relations has been considered irrelevant by the power- and security dominated character of the discipline. Also, because the heavy majority of the academics associated with International Relations are male, it is them who choose what is important and worthy of ‘serious’ investigation (Enloe, 2004, 96). This masculine attitude, however, has been clearly excluding multiple human experiences and hindering their capacity to create new possibilities for peaceful co-existence in international relations (Youngs, 2004). As a matter of fact, when we look at the emergence of International Relations as a separate discipline, and the political theories that it takes as its first point of reference, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen) – the human rights document at the time of the French Revolution – Machiavelli’s The Prince; and Man, the State and War, written in 1959 by Kenneth Waltz, the founder of neo-realism, were the mainstream writings that brought liberal (libertarian) and realist perspectives to the discipline of International Relations, respectively. The fundamental aim of these texts was, in fact, to make an analysis based on history and ‘his’ problems. Although these texts put forward a desire for rights and freedoms, as well as the achievement of peace, these values are mostly targeted towards men. Thus, over time, the prominent concepts of International Relations, such as security and hegemony, were defined from a masculine and patriarchal perspective. For instance, from the theoretical view of realists, hegemony is attributed to the order established and led by the most powerful state of the international system– both militarily and economically– while sovereignty evokes the Hobbesian Leviathan (the Devil), with its masculine nature and might. Raewyn Connell responds to these masculine conceptualizations by pointing out that hegemony includes organized social domination in all spheres of life, from religious doctrines to mundane practice, from mass media to taxation (1998: 246). As Connell reminds us, “hegemonic masculinity” expresses the domination of men over women intellectually, culturally, socially, or even politically, thus establishing an unequivocal linkage between gender and power (Connell, 1998). Just as the Western approach to reading and identifying the East and its fiction found an answer in Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, the theory of political realism put forth by Hans Morgenthau was criticized by Ann Tickner for conceptualizing international politics through the lens of an assumed masculine subject (Tür & Koyuncu, 2010: 9). Critical theory and postmodernism, as alternative approaches in International Relations, drew attention to the otherization of different geographies, civilizations and identities. Yet, on the issue of gender equality, the otherization of women has not been sufficiently recognized; the superiority of man and patriarchy is made possible through the othering of women. From this point of view, it would be beneficial to make a holistic reading of the International Relations literature, and to dismantle these masculine concepts by asking “curious” questions of the discipline. In Terrell Carver’s words, “Gendering IR” is...a project; “gendered” IR is an outcome” (Carver, 2003: 289). In order to achieve such outcome, it bears utmost importance for the gender-equality advocates to insist on, institutionally and practically, gender-based approaches and to not agree with the priority list of the masculine agenda. Security, order, control and retaliation increasingly dominate the discourse shaping the world politics. The gender perspective in International Relations develops to create alternative paradigms that would break this vicious circle of (in)security. Feminist theory in International Relations has demonstrated significant progress since the 1990s and opened pathways in an uncharted territory. Cynthia Enloe, Ann Tickner, Spike V. Peterson and Christine Sylvester, among others, are the most prominent forerunners of this field. Through their works, feminist theory has adopted a perspective critical of the masculinity and the masculine values of international politics by taking not only ‘women’ but a wider category of gender into its centre. These feminist scholars have deconstructed International Relations theories by posing gender-related questions and displayed the masculine prejudice embedded in the definitions of security, power and sovereignty. The feminist theories of International Relations have thus distinguished themselves from the other theories of the discipline by paying a ‘curious’ attention to the power hierarchies and relation structures through inclusiveness and self-reflexivity (True, 2017: 3). As Cynthia Enloe puts it, the gender perspective in International Relations must first be guided by a feminist consciousness (2004: 97). The feminist International Relations, however, although more than a quarter of century has passed since its emergence, are still struggling with the masculine theories to be considered as an equally legitimate way of understanding how the world works. Various epistemological, ontological and ethical debates may have enriched the field (True, 2017: 1), but at the same time, too many as they are, such debates may paradoxically be accusing the spreading-thin of the gender coalition. The capacity of the feminist International Relations’ ethical principles to participate in the global politics has been limited to the United Nations Security Council’s decision number 1325 and the Swedish feminist foreign policy. The feminist attempt to facilitate substantial change and interaction by creating a normative agenda has been called ‘normative feminism’ by Jacqui True (2013: 242). Normative feminism is a project of institutionalising gender in foreign policy by focusing on socio-economic and political changes. The special issue here is our attempt to partake in this project of change in international relations. We have aimed to enhance the visibility of the gender norms of behavior and decision-making with the presupposition that they would pose an alternative to the masculine norms in International Relations by better supporting the human priorities of peace and co-existence. Adopting Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, the feminist existence in international politics has an undeniable connection to engaging in continuous activities. As Rihannan Bury suggests, “what gives a community its substance is the consistent repetition of these ‘various acts’ by a majority of members.” “Being a member of community,” therefore, “is not something one is but something one does” (2005: 14). In Turkey, too, in order to challenge the recognition of the ‘hyper’ version of the hegemonic masculinity as the only viable world view, gender-charged normative discourses, interactions and agendas must be continuously created and multiplied. We hope that the Turkish literature-review and the articles published here will serve this purpose. As is the situation in all disciplines, the feminist International Relations has nurtured many onto-epistemologies, some in competition with one another. Such multitude, though definitely a richness, has been challenging the feminist stance’s capacity to stand united against the hypermasculine hegemonic masculinity. In her latest book, Enloe calls for a continuous struggle of a new and wider feminist coalition against the updated authoritarianism of the patriarchy –inspiring our title “Don’t Give Up! Don’t Give In!.” Such expanded coalition could rise on the common purpose of fighting male dominance and ignore the differences of discourse created by the debate on identity. The gender-guided change and transformation desired in international politics could be achieved more easily in this way (Hemmings, 2012: 148, 155). On this account, in parallel with Enloe’s proposal of establishing a wider consensus simply on peace and co-existence (2017), a new era, in which questions of identity will, for some time, not be asked, may be dawning. A grand coalition of consensus has better chance of resisting the authoritarian leaders of hyper hegemonic masculinity. Our special issue of Gender and International Relations opens with a Turkish literature review with the aim of introducing the topic to Turkish readers. Çiçek Coşkun, against a historical background, presents some of the prominent feminist scholars who have left their footprints in this very masculine area with their fresh gender perspectives. In doing that she offers us a comparative framework in which works by the Turkish and international scholars could be assessed simultaneously. Nezahat Doğan’s article seeks to establish the relation between global peace and gender by using the data obtained from the Global Peace Index, Gender Inequality Index and Social Institutions and Gender Index. In this way, adopting a currently trendy approach, Doğan investigates the interaction between gender and International Relations through a quantitative method. Zehra Yılmaz’s article discusses the temporary position of Syrian women asylum seekers in Turkey from the perspective of the post-colonial feminist concept of subaltern. The article aims to combine feminist migration studies and post-colonial feminist literature within the context of International Relations. Sinem Bal’s article questions whether the EU has designed its gender policies as an aspect of the human-right norms of the European integration or as a way to regulate market economy. Bal pursues such questioning through the reading of the official documents of the EU that prescribes what Europeanization is for Turkey. Thus, all articles constitute a well-rounded understanding of what gendered approaches can achieve in the current practice of international studies. The co-authored article written by Bezen Balamir-Coşkun and Selin Akyüz examined how the images of women leaders in international politics were presented in the international media. The selected images the three most powerful women political leaders list of Forbes in 2017 –Angela Merkel, Theresa May and Federica Mogherini were analysed in the light of the political masculinities literature from a social visual semiotics perspective. It is believed that such an analysis will contribute to the debates about gendered aspect of international relations as well as the current debates on political masculinities. Gizem Bilgin-Aytaç points out that the global policy that emerged after the Cold War and the emergence of the new way of approaching the IR from a feminist perspective have improved the scope of conceptual analysis in peace theories as well. Bilgin-Aytaç discusses global peace conditions with a gender perspective - in particular, referring to United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, with a focus on exemplary contemporary issues. Fulden İbrahimhakkıoğlu, in her article, discusses the debate between Ukraine-based feminist group FEMEN staged several protests in support of Amina Tyler, a Tunisian FEMEN activist receiving death threats for posting nude photographs of herself online with social messages written on her body and the Muslim Women Against FEMEN who released an open letter criticizing the discourse FEMEN used in these protests, which they found to be white colonialist and Islamophobic. Thus, İbrahimhakkıoğlu aimes to examines the discursive strategies put forth by the two sides of the very debate, and unveiling the shortcomings of liberalism as drawn on by both positions, the author attempts to rethink what “freedom” might mean for international feminist alliances across differences.

This paper is meant to study the apocalyptic scenario of the at the perspectives of the Great Acceleration. the apocalyptic scenario is not a pure imagination of the literature works. Instead, scientific evidences are in favour of dramatic change in the climatic conditions related to the climax of Man actions. the modelling of the future climate leads to horrible situations including intolerable temperatures, dryness, tornadoes, and noticeable sear level rise evading coastal regions. Going far from these scientific claims, Homo Sapiens Sapiens extended his imagination through the Climate-Fiction (cli-fi) to propose a dramatic end. Climate Fiction is developed into a recording machine containing every kind of fictions that depict environmental condition events and has consequently lost its true significance. Introduction The Great Acceleration may be considered as the Late Anthropocene in which Man actions reached their climax to lead to dramatic climatic changes paving the way for a possible apocalyptic scenario threatening the existence of the humanity. So, the apocalyptic scenario is not a pure imagination of the literature works. Instead, many scientific arguments especially related to climate change are in favour of the apocalypse1. As a matter of fact, the modelling of the future climate leads to horrible situations including intolerable temperatures (In 06/07/2021, Kuwait recorded the highest temperature of 53.2 °C), dryness, tornadoes, and noticeable sear level rise evading coastal regions. These conditions taking place during the Great Acceleration would have direct repercussions on the human species. Considering that the apocalyptic extinction had really caused the disappearance of many stronger species including dinosaurs, Homo Sapiens Sapiens extended his imagination though the Climate-Fiction (cli-fi) to propose a dramatic end due to severe climate conditions intolerable by the humankind. The mass extinction of animal species has occurred several times over the geological ages. Researchers have a poor understanding of the causes and processes of these major crises1. Nonetheless, whatever the cause of extinction, the apocalyptic scenario has always been present in the geological history. For example, dinosaurs extinction either by asteroids impact or climate changes could by no means denies the apocalyptic aspect2.At the same time as them, many animal and plant species became extinct, from marine or flying reptiles to marine plankton. This biological crisis of sixty-five million years ago is not the only one that the biosphere has suffered. It was preceded and followed by other crises which caused the extinction or the rarefaction of animal species. So, it is undeniable that many animal groups have disappeared. It is even on the changes of fauna that the geologists of the last century have based themselves to establish the scale of geological times, scale which is still used. But it is no less certain that the extinction processes, extremely complex, are far from being understood. We must first agree on the meaning of the word "extinction", namely on the apocalyptic aspect of the concept. It is quite understood that, without disappearances, the evolution of species could not have followed its course. Being aware that the apocalyptic extinction had massacred stronger species that had dominated the planet, Homo Sapiens Sapiens has been aware that the possibility of apocalyptic end at the perspective of the Anthropocene (i.e., Great Acceleration) could not be excluded. This conviction is motivated by the progressive defaunation in some regions3and the appearance of alien species in others related to change of mineralogy and geochemistry4 leading to a climate change during the Anthropocene. These scientific claims fed the vast imagination about climate change to set the so-called cli-fi. The concept of the Anthropocene is the new geological era which begins when the Man actions have reached a sufficient power to modify the geological processes and climatic cycles of the planet5. The Anthropocene by no means excludes the possibility of an apocalyptic horizon, namely in the perspectives of the Great Acceleration. On the contrary, two scenarios do indeed seem to dispute the future of the Anthropocene, with a dramatic cross-charge. The stories of the end of the world are as old as it is, as the world is the origin of these stories. However, these stories of the apocalypse have evolved over time and, since the beginning of the 19th century, they have been nourished particularly by science and its advances. These fictions have sometimes tried to pass themselves off as science. This is the current vogue, called collapsology6. This end is more than likely cli-fi driven7and it may cause the extinction of the many species including the Homo Sapiens Sapiens. In this vein, Anthropocene defaunation has become an ultimate reality8. More than one in eight birds, more than one in five mammals, more than one in four coniferous species, one in three amphibians are threatened. The hypothesis of a hierarchy within the living is induced by the error of believing that evolution goes from the simplest to the most sophisticated, from the inevitably stupid inferior to the superior endowed with an intelligence giving prerogative to all powers. Evolution goes in all directions and pursues no goal except the extension of life on Earth. Evolution certainly does not lead from bacteria to humans, preferably male and white. Our species is only a carrier of the DNA that precedes us and that will survive us. Until we show a deep respect for the biosphere particularly, and our planet in general, we will not become much, we will remain a predator among other predators, the fiercest of predators, the almighty craftsman of the Anthropocene. To be in the depths of our humanity, somehow giving back to the biosphere what we have taken from it seems obvious. To stop the sixth extinction of species, we must condemn our anthropocentrism and the anthropization of the territories that goes with it. The other forms of life also need to keep their ecological niches. According to the first, humanity seems at first to withdraw from the limits of the planet and ultimately succumb to them, with a loss of dramatic meaning. According to the second, from collapse to collapse, it is perhaps another humanity, having overcome its demons, that could come. Climate fiction is a literary sub-genre dealing with the theme of climate change, including global warming. The term appears to have been first used in 2008 by blogger and writer Dan Bloom. In October 2013, Angela Evancie, in a review of the novel Odds against Tomorrow, by Nathaniel Rich, wonders if climate change has created a new literary genre. Scientific basis of the apocalyptic scenario in the perspective of the Anthropocene Global warming All temperature indices are in favour of a global warming (Fig.1). According to the different scenarios of the IPCC9, the temperatures of the globe could increase by 2 °C to 5 °C by 2100. But some scientists warn about a possible runaway of the warming which can reach more than 3 °C. Thus, the average temperature on the surface of the globe has already increased by more than 1.1 °C since the pre-industrial era. The rise in average temperatures at the surface of the globe is the first expected and observed consequence of massive greenhouse gas emissions. However, meteorological surveys record positive temperature anomalies which are confirmed from year to year compared to the temperatures recorded since the middle of the 19th century. Climatologists point out that the past 30 years have seen the highest temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere for over 1,400 years. Several climatic centres around the world record, synthesize and follow the evolution of temperatures on Earth. Since the beginning of the 20th century (1906-2005), the average temperature at the surface of the globe has increased by 0.74 °C, but this progression has not been continuous since 1976, the increase has clearly accelerated, reaching 0.19 °C per decade according to model predictions. Despite the decline in solar activity, the period 1997-2006 is marked by an average positive anomaly of 0.53 °C in the northern hemisphere and 0.27 °C in the southern hemisphere, still compared to the normal calculated for 1961-1990. The ten hottest years on record are all after 1997. Worse, 14 of the 15 hottest years are in the 21st century, which has barely started. Thus, 2016 is the hottest year, followed closely by 2015, 2014 and 2010. The temperature of tropical waters increased by 1.2 °C during the 20th century (compared to 0.5 °C on average for the oceans), causing coral reefs to bleach in 1997. In 1998, the period of Fort El Niño, the prolonged warming of the water has destroyed half of the coral reefs of the Indian Ocean. In addition, the temperature in the tropics of the five ocean basins, where cyclones form, increased by 0.5 °C from 1970 to 2004, and powerful cyclones appeared in the North Atlantic in 2005, while they were more numerous in other parts of the world. Recently, mountains of studies focused on the possible scenario of climate change and the potential worldwide repercussions including hell temperatures and apocalyptic extreme events10 , 11, 12. Melting of continental glaciers As a direct result of the global warming, melting of continental glaciers has been recently noticed13. There are approximately 198,000 mountain glaciers in the world; they cover an area of approximately 726,000 km2. If they all melted, the sea level would rise by about 40 cm. Since the late 1960s, global snow cover has declined by around 10 to 15%. Winter cold spells in much of the northern half of the northern hemisphere are two weeks shorter than 100 years ago. Glaciers of mountains have been declining all over the world by an average of 50 m per decade for 150 years. However, they are also subject to strong multi-temporal variations which make forecasts on this point difficult according to some specialists. In the Alps, glaciers have been losing 1 meter per year for 30 years. Polar glaciers like those of Spitsbergen (about a hundred km from the North Pole) have been retreating since 1880, releasing large quantities of water. The Arctic has lost about 10% of its permanent ice cover every ten years since 1980. In this region, average temperatures have increased at twice the rate of elsewhere in the world in recent decades. The melting of the Arctic Sea ice has resulted in a loss of 15% of its surface area and 40% of its thickness since 1979. The record for melting arctic sea ice was set in 2017. All models predict the disappearance of the Arctic Sea ice in summer within a few decades, which will not be without consequences for the climate in Europe. The summer melting of arctic sea ice accelerated far beyond climate model predictions. Added to its direct repercussions of coastal regions flooding, melting of continental ice leads to radical climatic modifications in favour of the apocalyptic scenario. Fig.1 Evolution of temperature anomaly from 1880 to 2020: the apocalyptic scenario Sea level rise As a direct result of the melting of continental glaciers, sea level rise has been worldwide recorded14 ,15. The average level of the oceans has risen by 22 cm since 1880 and 2 cm since the year 2000 because of the melting of the glaciers but also with the thermal expansion of the water. In the 20th century, the sea level rose by around 2 mm per year. From 1990 to 2017, it reached the relatively constant rate of just over 3mm per year. Several sources contributed to sea level increase including thermal expansion of water (42%), melting of continental glaciers (21%), melting Greenland glaciers (15%) and melting Antarctic glaciers (8%). Since 2003, there has always been a rapid rise (around 3.3 mm / year) in sea level, but the contribution of thermal expansion has decreased (0.4 mm / year) while the melting of the polar caps and continental glaciers accelerates. Since most of the world’s population is living on coastal regions, sea level rise represents a real threat for the humanity, not excluding the apocalyptic scenario. Multiplication of extreme phenomena and climatic anomalies On a human scale, an average of 200 million people is affected by natural disasters each year and approximately 70,000 perish from them. Indeed, as evidenced by the annual reviews of disasters and climatic anomalies, we are witnessing significant warning signs. It is worth noting that these observations are dependent on meteorological survey systems that exist only in a limited number of countries with statistics that rarely go back beyond a century or a century and a half. In addition, scientists are struggling to represent the climatic variations of the last two thousand years which could serve as a reference in the projections. Therefore, the exceptional nature of this information must be qualified a little. Indeed, it is still difficult to know the return periods of climatic disasters in each region. But over the last century, the climate system has gone wild. Indeed, everything suggests that the climate is racing. Indeed, extreme events and disasters have become more frequent. For instance, less than 50 significant events were recorded per year over the period 1970-1985, while there have been around 120 events recorded since 1995. Drought has long been one of the most worrying environmental issues. But while African countries have been the main affected so far, the whole world is now facing increasingly frequent and prolonged droughts. Chile, India, Australia, United States, France and even Russia are all regions of the world suffering from the acceleration of the global drought. Droughts are slowly evolving natural hazards that can last from a few months to several decades and affect larger or smaller areas, whether they are small watersheds or areas of hundreds of thousands of square kilometres. In addition to their direct effects on water resources, agriculture and ecosystems, droughts can cause fires or heat waves. They also promote the proliferation of invasive species, creating environments with multiple risks, worsening the consequences on ecosystems and societies, and increasing their vulnerability. Although these are natural phenomena, there is a growing understanding of how humans have amplified the severity and impacts of droughts, both on the environment and on people. We influence meteorological droughts through our action on climate change, and we influence hydrological droughts through our management of water circulation and water processes at the local scale, for example by diverting rivers or modifying land use. During the Anthropocene (the present period when humans exert a dominant influence on climate and environment), droughts are closely linked to human activities, cultures, and responses. From this scientific overview, it may be concluded apocalyptic scenario is not only a literature genre inspired from the pure imagination. Instead, many scientific arguments are in favour of this dramatic destiny of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Fig.2. Sea level rise from 1880 to 2020: a possible apocalyptic scenario (www.globalchange.gov, 2021) Apocalyptic genre in recent writing As the original landmark of apocalyptic writing, we must place the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 587 BC and the Exile in Babylon. Occasion of a religious and cultural crossing with imprescriptible effects, the Exile brought about a true rebirth, characterized by the maintenance of the essential ethical, even cultural, of a national religion, that of Moses, kept as pure as possible on a foreign land and by the reinterpretation of this fundamental heritage by the archaic return of what was very old, both national traditions and neighbouring cultures. More precisely, it was the place and time for the rehabilitation of cultures and the melting pot for recasting ancient myths. This vast infatuation with Antiquity, remarkable even in the vocabulary used, was not limited to Israel: it even largely reflected a general trend. The long period that preceded throughout the 7th century BC and until 587, like that prior to the edict of Cyrus in 538 BC, was that of restorations and rebirths, of returns to distant sources and cultural crossings. In the biblical literature of this period, one is struck by the almost systematic link between, on the one hand, a very sustained mythical reinvestment even in form and, on the other, the frequent use of biblical archaisms. The example of Shadday, a word firmly rooted in the Semites of the Northwest and epithet of El in the oldest layers of the books of Genesis and Exodus, is most eloquent. This term reappears precisely at the time of the Exile as a designation of the divinity of the Patriarchs and of the God of Israel; Daily, ecological catastrophes now describe the normal state of societies exposed to "risks", in the sense that Ulrich Beck gives to this term: "the risk society is a society of catastrophe. The state of emergency threatens to become a normal state there1”. Now, the "threat" has become clearer, and catastrophic "exceptions" are proliferating as quickly as species are disappearing and climate change is accelerating. The relationship that we have with this worrying reality, to say the least, is twofold: on the one hand, we know very well what is happening to us; on the other hand, we fail to draw the appropriate theoretical and political consequences. This ecological duplicity is at the heart of what has come to be called the “Anthropocene”, a term coined at the dawn of the 21st century by Eugene Stoermer (an environmentalist) and Paul Crutzen (a specialist in the chemistry of the atmosphere) in order to describe an age when humanity would have become a "major geological force" capable of disrupting the climate and changing the terrestrial landscape from top to bottom. If the term “Anthropocene” takes note of human responsibility for climate change, this responsibility is immediately attributed to overpowering: strong as we are, we have “involuntarily” changed the climate for at least two hundred and fifty years. Therefore, let us deliberately change the face of the Earth, if necessary, install a solar shield in space. Recognition and denial fuel the signifying machine of the Anthropocene. And it is precisely what structures eco-apocalyptic cinema that this article aims to study. By "eco-apocalyptic cinema", we first mean a cinematographic sub-genre: eco-apocalyptic and post-eco-apocalyptic films base the possibility (or reality) of the end of the world on environmental grounds and not, for example, on damage caused by the possible collision of planet Earth with a comet. Post-apocalyptic science fiction (sometimes abbreviated as "post-apo" or "post-nuke") is a sub-genre of science fiction that depicts life after a disaster that destroyed civilization: nuclear war, collision with a meteorite, epidemic, economic or energy crisis, pandemic, alien invasion. Conclusion Climate and politics have been linked together since Aristotle. With Montesquieu, Ibn Khaldûn or Watsuji, a certain climatic determinism is attributed to the character of a nation. The break with modernity made the climate an object of scientific knowledge which, in the twentieth century, made it possible to document, despite the controversies, the climatic changes linked to industrialization. Both endanger the survival of human beings and ecosystems. Climate ethics are therefore looking for a new relationship with the biosphere or Gaia. For some, with the absence of political agreements, it is the beginning of inevitable catastrophes. For others, the Anthropocene, which henceforth merges human history with natural history, opens onto technical action. The debate between climate determinism and human freedom is revived. The reference to the biblical Apocalypse was present in the thinking of thinkers like Günther Anders, Karl Jaspers or Hans Jonas: the era of the atomic bomb would mark an entry into the time of the end, a time marked by the unprecedented human possibility of 'total war and annihilation of mankind. The Apocalypse will be very relevant in describing the chaos to come if our societies continue their mad race described as extra-activist, productivist and consumerist. In dialogue with different theologians and philosophers (such as Jacques Ellul), it is possible to unveil some spiritual, ethical, and political resources that the Apocalypse offers for thinking about History and human engagement in the Anthropocene. What can a theology of collapse mean at a time when negative signs and dead ends in the human situation multiply? What then is the place of man and of the cosmos in the Apocalypse according to Saint John? Could the end of history be a collapse? How can we live in the time we have left before the disaster? Answers to such questions remain unknown and no scientist can predict the trajectory of this Great Acceleration taking place at the Late Anthropocene. When science cannot give answers, Man tries to infer his destiny for the legend, religion and the fiction. Climate Fiction is developed into a recording machine containing every kind of fictions that depict environmental condition events and has consequently lost its true significance. Aware of the prospect of ecological collapse additionally as our apparent inability to avert it, we tend to face geology changes of forceful proportions that severely challenge our ability to imagine the implications. Climate fiction ought to be considered an important supplement to climate science, as a result, climate fiction makes visible and conceivable future modes of existence inside worlds not solely deemed seemingly by science, however that area unit scientifically anticipated. 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Rapid urbanization rates impact significantly on the nature of Land Cover patterns of the environment, which has been evident in the depletion of vegetal reserves and in general modifying the human climatic systems (Henderson, et al., 2017; Kumar, Masago, Mishra, & Fukushi, 2018; Luo and Lau, 2017). This study explores remote sensing classification technique and other auxiliary data to determine LULCC for a period of 50 years (1967-2016). The LULCC types identified were quantitatively evaluated using the change detection approach from results of maximum likelihood classification algorithm in GIS. Accuracy assessment results were evaluated and found to be between 56 to 98 percent of the LULC classification. The change detection analysis revealed change in the LULC types in Minna from 1976 to 2016. Built-up area increases from 74.82ha in 1976 to 116.58ha in 2016. Farmlands increased from 2.23 ha to 46.45ha and bared surface increases from 120.00ha to 161.31ha between 1976 to 2016 resulting to decline in vegetation, water body, and wetlands. The Decade of rapid urbanization was found to coincide with the period of increased Public Private Partnership Agreement (PPPA). Increase in farmlands was due to the adoption of urban agriculture which has influence on food security and the environmental sustainability. The observed increase in built up areas, farmlands and bare surfaces has substantially led to reduction in vegetation and water bodies. The oscillatory nature of water bodies LULCC which was not particularly consistent with the rates of urbanization also suggests that beyond the urbanization process, other factors may influence the LULCC of water bodies in urban settlements. Keywords: Minna, Niger State, Remote Sensing, Land Surface Characteristics References Akinrinmade, A., Ibrahim, K., & Abdurrahman, A. (2012). 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Migration expansion is especially pronounced in the dynamic processes that take place within contemporary societies. The reasons for large migrations of the population are primarily found in the imposed conflicts by the world's leading countries. The latest largest conflict started at the end of 2010 with the „Arab Spring“, that is a wave of demonstrations against the dictatorial regimes in the Arab countries: Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Iraq, Morocco, etc. The crisis continues with the war that started in Afghanistan (2001 - 2021), which is considered the longest war in the history of the United States, and then the civil war in Syria, which began in 2011. The consequences of these war conflicts manifested in a large number of refugees coming from the Middle East, North and Central Africa, and Central and South Asia, who have moved to Europe. An important strategic direction in the migration route to Europe went through the Balkans. The assumption is well-founded on demographic indicators, that just the underdeveloped and the developing countries of the so-called „Western Balkans“ in the incoming period, will accept the largest number of emigrants, in order to resolve the long-standing migration crisis.

Background: The real incidence of Kawasaki disease (KD) in the Maghreb countries (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) is unknown. It is estimated low according to the literature. However, the number of Maghrebi children living in Quebec (Qc) affected by KD seems important. We sought to determine the incidence of KD among Maghrebi children in Qc, Canada, and to study its epidemiological and clinical features and to clarify possible risk factors related or superimposed to their immigration. Methods: A retrospective study of KD in Maghrebi children living in Qc (n=24) (1996-2013), compared to reports from Fes, Morocco (n=23) a doctoral thesis published in 2010 (2001-2009) and from Tunisia (n=31) collected in five university hospitals with four from the Great Tunis and one from Nabeul city (1996-2013). There are no reports available from Algeria. The “country of origin” specific population in the Province of Qc was obtained from Statistics Canada. Results: The annualized incidence rate (AIR) of KD among Maghrebi children in Qc was 9.58/100,000 children under 5 years(Standard-Denominator (SD)).This is 6 times higher in Qc (5.57/SD and 19.02/SD among Tunisian and Moroccan descents) vs Tunisia (Nabeul Governorate) and Morocco (Fes) (0.95/SD and 3.15/SD). Personal and family history of allergy were significantly higher in Qc 42% (10/24) and 75% (18/24), respectively, whereas these features were reported near 0% in both reports from Morocco and Tunisia. The prevalence of incomplete KD criteria was relatively high in the 3 series 46% (11/24) in Qc vs 43% (10/23) and 35% (11/31); (p=NS). Diagnosis was late (gt day 10 of fever) in 1/24(4%) in Qc vs 7/23 (30%) in Morocco and 11/31 (35%) in Tunisia; (p 0.01). IVIG were administered in the acute phase to all patients in Qc, 5/23 in Morocco and 28/31 in Tunisia. However coronary complications were more common in Qc 42% (10/24) vs 22% (5/23) vs 19% (6/31) (p=0.02). Aneurysms were significantly associated with the incomplete form in the 3 groups (p=0.01). Conclusions: The observed AIR of KD in the Maghreb community in Qc is higher than the countries of origin where underdiagnosis is possible. Atopy may still be a risk factor in Qc. The coronary artery disease seems linked not only to therapeutic delay but also to the underlying terrain.

The Middle East and North Africa have experienced mass protests and political changes since the end of 2010. Indeed, the uprisings were a decisive turning point in the history of the Arab world. Although the leading causes of the revolts appear to be similar, as they result from political repression and socioeconomic grievances, their outcomes were highly different, and thus each state has developed a distinct state-building process. This article aims to explain one of the main factors that led to these divergences by comparing the role of “social cohesion” in Tunisia’s and Libya’s uprisings. The study concludes that, while the strength of social cohesion in Tunisia has fostered the role of civil society and thus explains to a certain degree the relative success of democratic transition in the country, the weakness of social cohesion in Libya has damaged the social fabric and therefore increased the emergence of tribal conflicts in the post-transition era.

The Arab world witnessed an influx of satellite channels during the 1990s and in the early years of the first decade of the new century. Many analysts in the Arab world applauded this influx as a potential tool for political change in the Arab countries. Two stations were at the heart of the new optimism: Al-Jazeera and Al Arabiya, the two most prominent 24-hour news channels in the region. Al-Jazeera proved to be more controversial because in its early years of broadcasting it managed to break taboos in the Arab media by tackling issues of human rights and hosting Arab dissidents. Also, its coverage of international conflicts (primarily Afghanistan and Iraq) has marked it as a counter-hegemonic news outlet. For the first time, the flow of news went from South to North. Some scholars who study Arab satellite media, and Al-Jazeera specifically, have gone so far as to suggest that it has created a new Arab public sphere (Lynch, Miladi). However, the political developments in the Arab world, mainly the recent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt and what is now happening in Bahrain, Libya, and Yemen, have raised questions as to how credible these suggestions are. And are we going to claim the same powers for social media in the Arab world? This article takes the form of a personal reflection on how successful (or not) Arab satellite channels are proving to be as a tool for political change and reform in the Arab world. Are these channels editorially free from Arab governments’ political and economic interests? And could new media (notably social networking sites) achieve what satellite channels have been unable to over the last two decades? 1996 saw the launch of Al-Jazeera, the first 24-hour news channel in the Arab world. However, it didn’t have much of an impact on the media scene in the region until 1998 and gained its controversial reputation through its coverage of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars (see Zayani; Miles; Allan and Zelizer; El-Nawawy and Iskandar). In the Arab world, it gained popularity with its compelling talk shows and open discussions of human rights and democracy (Alterman). But its dominance didn’t last long. In 2003, Al Walid Al Ibrahim, son-in-law of the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia (1921-2005) established Al Arabiya, the second 24-hour news channel in the Arab world, just before the start of the Iraq war. Many scholars and analysts saw in this a direct response to the popularity that Al-Jazeera was achieving with the Arab audiences. Al Arabiya, however, didn’t achieve the level of popularity that Al-Jazeera enjoyed throughout its years of broadcasting (Shapiro). Al Arabiya and Al-Jazeera Arabic subsequently became rivals representing political and national interests and not just news competitors. Indeed, one of Wikileaks’ latest revelations states that Al-Jazeera changed its coverage to suit Qatari foreign policy. The US ambassador to Qatar, Joseph LeBaron, was reported as saying: The Qatari prime minister, Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, had joked in an interview that Al-Jazeera had caused the Gulf State such headaches that it might be better to sell it. But the ambassador remarked: “Such statements must not be taken at face value.” He went on: “Al-Jazeera’s ability to influence public opinion throughout the region is a substantial source of leverage for Qatar, one which it is unlikely to relinquish. Moreover, the network can also be used as a chip to improve relations. For example, Al-Jazeera’s more favourable coverage of Saudi Arabia's royal family has facilitated Qatari–Saudi reconciliation over the past year.” (Booth). The unspoken political rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Qatar on Lebanese domestic disputes, over Iran, and over the Palestinian internal conflict was played out in the two channels. This brings us to my central question: can Arab satellite channels, and specifically Al-Jazeera Arabic and Al Arabiya, be regarded as tools for democratic political change? In the recent revolution in Tunisia (spring 2011), satellite channels had to catch up with what social media were reporting: and Al-Jazeera more so than Al Arabiya because of previous encounters between Al-Jazeera and Zein Al Abidine bin Ali’s regime (Greenslade, The Guardian). Bin Ali controlled the country’s media and access to satellite media to suit his interests. Al-Jazeera was banned from Tunisia on several occasions and had their offices closed down. Bin Ali allowed private TV stations to operate but under indirect state control when it came to politics and what Ben Ali’s regime viewed as national and security interests. Should we therefore give social networking credit for facilitating the revolution in Tunisia? Yes, we should. We should give it credit for operating as a mobilising tool. The people were ready, the political moment came, and the people used it. Four out of ten Tunisians are connected to the Internet; almost 20 per cent of the Tunisian population are on Facebook (Mourtada and Salem). We are talking about a newly media-literate population who have access to the new technology and know how to use it. On this point, it is important to note that eight out of ten Facebook users in Tunisia are under the age of 30 (Mourtada and Salem). Public defiance and displays of popular anger were sustained by new media outlets (Miladi). Facebook pages have become sites of networking and spaces for exchanging and disseminating news about the protests (Miladi). Pages such as “The people of Tunisia are burning themselves, Mr President” had around 15,000 members. “Wall-posts” specifying the date and place of upcoming protest became very familiar on social media websites. They even managed to survive government attempts to disable and block these sites. Tunisian and non-Tunisians alike became involved in spreading the message through these sites and Arab transnationalism and support for the revolution came to a head. Many adjacent countries had Facebook pages showing support for the Tunisian revolution. And one of the most prominent of these pages was “Egyptians supporting the Tunisian revolution.” There can be little doubt, therefore, that the success of the Tunisian revolution encouraged the youth of Egypt (estimated at 80 per cent of its Facebook users) to rise up and persist in their call for change and political reform. Little did Wael Ghonim and his friends on the “Kolinah Khaled Said” (“We are all Khaled Said”) Facebook page know where their call for demonstrations on the 25 January 2011 would lead. In the wake of the Tunisian victory, the “We are all Khaled Said” page (Said was a young man who died under torture by Egyptian police) garnered 100,000 hits and most of these virtual supporters then took to the streets on 25 January which was where the Egyptian revolution started. Egyptians were the first Arab youth to have used the Internet as a political platform and tool to mobilise people for change. Egypt has the largest and most active blogosphere in the Arab world. The Egyptian bloggers were the first to reveal corruption and initiated calls for change as early as 2007 (Saleh). A few victories were achieved, such as the firing and sentencing of two police officers condemned for torturing Imad Al Kabeer in 2007 (BBC Arabic). However, these early Egyptian bloggers faced significant jail sentences and prosecution (BBC News). Several movements were orchestrated via Facebook, including the 6 April uprising of 2007, but at this time such resistance invariably ended in persecution and even more oppression. The 25 January revolution therefore took the regime by surprise. In response, former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and his entourage (who controlled the state media and privately owned TV stations such as Dream TV) started making declarations that “Egypt is not Tunisia,” but the youth of Egypt were determined to prove them wrong. Significantly, Mubarak’s first reaction was to block Twitter, then Facebook, as well as disrupting mobile phone text-messaging and Blackberry-messaging services. Then, on Thursday 27 January, the regime attempted to shut down the Internet as a whole. Al-Jazeera Arabic quickly picked up on the events in Egypt and began live coverage from Cairo’s Tahrir Square, which resulted in Mubarak’s block of Al-Jazeera’s transmission in Egypt and the withdrawal of its operational licences. One joke exchanged with Tunisian activists on Facebook was that Egyptians, too, had “Ammar 404” (the nickname of the government censor in Tunisia). It was not long, however, before Arab activists from across the regions started exchanging codes and software that allowed Egyptians to access the Internet, despite the government blockades. Egyptian computer science students also worked on ways to access the Worldwide Web and overcome the government’s blockade (Shouier) and Google launched a special service to allow people in Egypt to send Twitter messages by dialling a phone number and leaving a voice message (Oreskovic, Reuters). Facebook group pages like Akher Khabar’s “Latest News” and Rased’s “RNN” were then used by the Egyptian diaspora to share all the information they could get from friends and family back home, bypassing more traditional modes of communication. This transnational support group was crucial in communicating their fellow citizens’ messages to the rest of the world; through them, news made its way onto Facebook and then through to the other Arab nations and beyond. My own personal observation of these pages during the period 25 January to 12 February revealed that the usage of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter changed markedly, shifting from being merely social in nature to becoming rapidly and primarily political, not only among Arab users in the Arab world, as Mourtada and Salem argue, but also throughout the Arabian diaspora. In the case of Libya’s revolution, also, social media may be seen to be a mobilising tool in the hands of both Libyans at home and across the Libyan diaspora. Libya has around 4 per cent of its population on Facebook (Mourtada and Salem), and with Gaddafi’s regime cracking down on the Internet, the Libyan diaspora has often been the source of information for what is happening inside the country. Factual information, images, and videos were circulated via the February 17th website (in Arabic and in English) to appeal to Arab and international audiences for help. Facebook and Twitter were where the hash tag “#Feb17th” was created. Omar Amer, head of the UK’s Libyan youth movement based in Manchester, told Channel 4: “I can call Benghazi or Tripoli and obtain accurate information from the people on the ground, then report it straight onto Twitter” (Channel 4 News). Websites inspired by #Feb17th were spread online and Facebook pages dedicated to news about the Libyan uprisings quickly had thousands of supporters (Channel 4 News). Social media networks have thus created an international show of solidarity for the pro-democracy protestors in Libya, and Amer was able to report that they have received overwhelming support from all around the globe. I think that it must therefore be concluded that the role Arab satellite channels were playing a few years ago has now been transferred to social media websites which, in turn, have changed from being merely social/cultural to political platforms. Moreover, the nature of the medium has meant that the diasporas of the nations concerned have been instrumental to the success of the uprisings back home. However, it would be wrong to suggest that broadcast media have been totally redundant in the revolutionary process. Throughout the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, Al-Jazeera became a disseminating tool for user-generated content. A call for Arab citizens to send their footage of unfolding events to the Al-Jazeera website for it to re-broadcast on its TV screens was a key factor in the dissemination of what was happening. The role Al-Jazeera played in supporting the Egyptian revolution especially (which caused some Arab analysts to give it the name “channel of revolutions”), was quickly followed by criticism for their lack of coverage of the pro-democracy protests in Bahrain. The killing of peaceful protestors in Bahrain did not get airtime the way that the killing of Egyptian pro-democracy protestors had. Tweets, Facebook posts and comments came pouring in, questioning the lack of coverage from Bahrain. Al Arabiya followed Al-Jazeera’s lead. Bahrain was put last on the running order of the coverage of the “Arab revolutions.” Newspaper articles across the Arab world were questioning the absence of “the opinion and other opinion” (Al-Jazeera’s Arabic motto) when it came to Bahrain (see Al Akhbar). Al Jazeera’s editor-in-chief, Hassan El Shoubaki, told Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar that they were not deliberately absent but had logistical problems with the coverage since Al-Jazeera is banned in Bahrain (Hadad). However, it can be argued that Al-Jazeera was also banned in Egypt and Tunisia and that didn’t stop the channel from reporting or remodelling its screen to host and “rebroadcast” an activist-generated content. This brings us back to the Wikileaks’ revelation mentioned earlier. Al-Jazeera’s coverage of the Bahraini protests is influenced by Qatari foreign policy and, in the case of Bahrain, is arguably abiding by Qatar’s commitment to Gulf Cooperation Council security treaties. (This is one of the occasions where Al Arabiya and Al-Jazeera appear to have shared the same editorial guidelines, influenced by Qatari and Saudi Arabian shared policy.) Nevertheless, the Bahraini protests continue to dominate the social networks sites and information has kept flowing from Bahrain and it will continue to do so because of these platforms. The same scenario is also unfolding in Syria, but this time Al-Jazeera Arabic is taking a cautious stance while Al Arabiya has given the protests full coverage. Once again, the politics are obvious: Qatar is a supporter of the Syrian regime, while Saudi Arabia has long been battling politically with Syria on issues related to Lebanon, Palestine, and Iran (this position might change with Syria seeking support on tackling its own domestic unrest from the Saudi regime). All this confirms that there are limits to what satellite channels in the Arab world can do to be part of a process for democratic political reform. The Arab media world is not free of the political and economic influence of its governments, its owners or the various political parties struggling for control. However, this is clearly not a phenomenon unique to the Arab world. Where, or when, has media reporting ever been totally “free”? So is this, then, the age of new media? Could the Internet be a free space for Arab citizens to express their opinion and fulfil their democratic aspirations in bringing about freedom of speech and political freedom generally? Is it able to form the new Arab public sphere? Recent events show that the potential is there. What happened in Tunisia and Egypt was effectively the seizure of power by the people as part of a collective will to overthrow dictators and autocratic regimes and to effect democratic change from within (i.e. not having it imposed by foreign powers). The political moment in Tunisia was right and the people receptive; the army refused to respond violently to the protests and members of bin Ali’s government rose up against him. The political and social scene in Egypt became receptive after the people felt empowered by events in Tunis. Will this transnational empowerment now spread to other Arab countries open to change notwithstanding the tribal and sectarian alliances that characterise their populations? Further, since new media have proven to be “dangerous tools” in the hands of the citizens of Tunisia and Egypt, will other Arab regimes clamp down on them or hijack them for their own interests as they did the satellite channels previously? Maybe, but new media technology is arguably ahead of the game and I am sure that those regimes stand to be taken by surprise by another wave of revolutions facilitated by a new online tool. So far, Arab leaders have been of one voice in blaming the media for the protests (uprisings) their countries are witnessing—from Tunisia to Syria via Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Libya. As Khatib puts it: “It is as if the social, economic, and political problems the people are protesting against would disappear if only the media would stop talking about them.” Yet what is evident so far is that they won’t. The media, and social networks in particular, do not of themselves generate revolutions but they can facilitate them in ways that we are only just beginning to understand. References Allan, Stuart, and Barbie Zelizer. Reporting War: Journalism in War Time. London: Routledge, 2004. Alterman, John. New Media New Politics? From Satellite Television to the Internet in the Arab World. Washington: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1998. BBC News. “Egypt Blogger Jailed for ‘Insult,’” 22 Feb. 2007. 1 Mar. 2011 ‹http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/middle_east/6385849.stm›. BBC Arabic. “Three Years Jail Sentence for Two Police Officers in Egypt in a Torture Case.” 5 Nov. 2007. 26 Mar. 2011 ‹http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/arabic/middle_east_news/newsid_7079000/7079123.stm›. Booth, Robert. “WikiLeaks Cables Claim Al-Jazeera Changed Coverage to Suit Qatari Foreign Policy.” The Guardian 6 Dec. 2010. 22 Feb. 2011 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/05/wikileaks-cables-al-jazeera-qatari-foreign-policy›. Channel 4 News. “Arab Revolt: Social Media and People’s Revolution.” 25 Feb. 2011. 3 Mar. 2011 ‹http://www.channel4.com/news/arab-revolt-social-media-and-the-peoples-revolution›. El-Nawawy, Mohammed, and Adel Iskandar. Al Jazeera. USA: Westview, 2002. Greenslade, Roy. “Tunisia Breaks Ties with Qatar over Al-Jazeera.” The Guardian 26 Oct. 2006. 23 Mar. 2011 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2006/oct/26/tunisiabreakstieswithqatar›. Hadad, Layal. “Al thowra al Arabiya tawqafet Eindah masharef al khaleegj” (The Arab Revolution Stopped at the Doorsteps of the Gulf). Al Akhbar 19 Feb. 2011. 20 Feb. 2011 ‹http://www.al-akhbar.com/node/4614›. Khatib, Lina. “How to Lose Friends and Alienate Your People.” Jadaliyya 26 Mar. 2011. 27 Mar. 2011 ‹http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1014/how-to-lose-friends-and-alienate-your-people›. Lynch, Marc. Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, Al-Jazeera, and Middle East Politics Today. New York: Columbia UP, 2006. Miladi, Noureddine. “Tunisia A Media Led Revolution?” Al Jazeera 17 Jan. 2011. 2 Mar. 2011 ‹http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/01/2011116142317498666.html#›. Miles, Hugh. Al Jazeera: How Arab TV News Challenged the World. London: Abacus, 2005. Mourtada, Rasha, and Fadi Salem. “Arab Social Media Report, Facebook Usage: Factors and Analysis.” Dubai School of Government 1.1 (Jan. 2011). Oreskovic, Alexei. “Google Inc Launched a Special Service...” Reuters 1 Feb. 2011. 28 Jan. 2011 ‹http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/01/us-egypt-protest-google-idUSTRE71005F20110201›. Saleh, Heba. “Egypt Bloggers Fear State Curbs.” BBC News 22 Feb. 2007. 28 Jan. 2011 ‹http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/middle_east/6386613.stm›. Shapiro, Samantha. “The War inside the Arab Newsroom.” The New York Times 2 Jan. 2005. Shouier, Mohammed. “Al Tahrir Qanat al Naser … Nawara Najemm” (Liberation, Victory Channel… and Nawara Najem). Al Akhbar 17 Feb. 2011. Zayani, Mohammed. The Al-Jazeera Phenomenon: Critical Perspectives on Arab Media. London: Pluto, 2005.

Introduction With a deluge of mouthwatering pre-publicity, the opening of The Spotted Pig, the USA’s first self-identified British-styled gastropub, in Manhattan in February 2004 was much anticipated. The late Australian chef, food writer and restauranteur Mietta O’Donnell has noted how “taking over a building or business which has a long established reputation can be a mixed blessing” because of the way that memories “can enrich the experience of being in a place or they can just make people nostalgic”. Bistro Le Zoo, the previous eatery on the site, had been very popular when it opened almost a decade earlier, and its closure was mourned by some diners (Young; Kaminsky “Feeding Time”; Steinhauer & McGinty). This regret did not, however, appear to affect The Spotted Pig’s success. As esteemed New York Times reviewer Frank Bruni noted in his 2006 review: “Almost immediately after it opened […] the throngs started to descend, and they have never stopped”. The following year, The Spotted Pig was awarded a Michelin star—the first year that Michelin ranked New York—and has kept this star in the subsequent annual rankings. Writing Restaurant Biography Detailed studies have been published of almost every type of contemporary organisation including public institutions such as schools, hospitals, museums and universities, as well as non-profit organisations such as charities and professional associations. These are often written to mark a major milestone, or some significant change, development or the demise of the organisation under consideration (Brien). Detailed studies have also recently been published of businesses as diverse as general stores (Woody), art galleries (Fossi), fashion labels (Koda et al.), record stores (Southern & Branson), airlines (Byrnes; Jones), confectionary companies (Chinn) and builders (Garden). In terms of attracting mainstream readerships, however, few such studies seem able to capture popular reader interest as those about eating establishments including restaurants and cafés. This form of restaurant life history is, moreover, not restricted to ‘quality’ establishments. Fast food restaurant chains have attracted their share of studies (see, for example Love; Jakle & Sculle), ranging from business-economic analyses (Liu), socio-cultural political analyses (Watson), and memoirs (Kroc & Anderson), to criticism around their conduct and effects (Striffler). Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal is the most well-known published critique of the fast food industry and its effects with, famously, the Rolling Stone article on which it was based generating more reader mail than any other piece run in the 1990s. The book itself (researched narrative creative nonfiction), moreover, made a fascinating transition to the screen, transformed into a fictionalised drama (co-written by Schlosser) that narrates the content of the book from the point of view of a series of fictional/composite characters involved in the industry, rather than in a documentary format. Akin to the range of studies of fast food restaurants, there are also a variety of studies of eateries in US motels, caravan parks, diners and service station restaurants (see, for example, Baeder). Although there has been little study of this sub-genre of food and drink publishing, their popularity can be explained, at least in part, because such volumes cater to the significant readership for writing about food related topics of all kinds, with food writing recently identified as mainstream literary fare in the USA and UK (Hughes) and an entire “publishing subculture” in Australia (Dunstan & Chaitman). Although no exact tally exists, an informed estimate by the founder of the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards and president of the Paris Cookbook Fair, Edouard Cointreau, has more than 26,000 volumes on food and wine related topics currently published around the world annually (ctd. in Andriani “Gourmand Awards”). The readership for publications about restaurants can also perhaps be attributed to the wide range of information that can be included a single study. My study of a selection of these texts from the UK, USA and Australia indicates that this can include narratives of place and architecture dealing with the restaurant’s location, locale and design; narratives of directly food-related subject matter such as menus, recipes and dining trends; and narratives of people, in the stories of its proprietors, staff and patrons. Detailed studies of contemporary individual establishments commonly take the form of authorised narratives either written by the owners, chefs or other staff with the help of a food journalist, historian or other professional writer, or produced largely by that writer with the assistance of the premise’s staff. These studies are often extensively illustrated with photographs and, sometimes, drawings or reproductions of other artworks, and almost always include recipes. Two examples of these from my own collection include a centennial history of a famous New Orleans eatery that survived Hurricane Katrina, Galatoire’s Cookbook. Written by employees—the chief operating officer/general manager (Melvin Rodrigue) and publicist (Jyl Benson)—this incorporates reminiscences from both other staff and patrons. The second is another study of a New Orleans’ restaurant, this one by the late broadcaster and celebrity local historian Mel Leavitt. The Court of Two Sisters Cookbook: With a History of the French Quarter and the Restaurant, compiled with the assistance of the Two Sisters’ proprietor, Joseph Fein Joseph III, was first published in 1992 and has been so enduringly popular that it is in its eighth printing. These texts, in common with many others of this type, trace a triumph-over-adversity company history that incorporates a series of mildly scintillating anecdotes, lists of famous chefs and diners, and signature recipes. Although obviously focused on an external readership, they can also be characterised as an instance of what David M. Boje calls an organisation’s “story performance” (106) as the process of creating these narratives mobilises an organisation’s (in these cases, a commercial enterprise’s) internal information processing and narrative building activities. Studies of contemporary restaurants are much more rarely written without any involvement from the eatery’s personnel. When these are, the results tend to have much in common with more critical studies such as Fast Food Nation, as well as so-called architectural ‘building biographies’ which attempt to narrate the historical and social forces that “explain the shapes and uses” (Ellis, Chao & Parrish 70) of the physical structures we create. Examples of this would include Harding’s study of the importance of the Boeuf sur le Toit in Parisian life in the 1920s and Middlebrook’s social history of London’s Strand Corner House. Such work agrees with Kopytoff’s assertion—following Appadurai’s proposal that objects possess their own ‘biographies’ which need to be researched and expressed—that such inquiry can reveal not only information about the objects under consideration, but also about readers as we examine our “cultural […] aesthetic, historical, and even political” responses to these narratives (67). The life story of a restaurant will necessarily be entangled with those of the figures who have been involved in its establishment and development, as well as the narratives they create around the business. This following brief study of The Spotted Pig, however, written without the assistance of the establishment’s personnel, aims to outline a life story for this eatery in order to reflect upon the pig’s place in contemporary dining practice in New York as raw foodstuff, fashionable comestible, product, brand, symbol and marketing tool, as well as, at times, purely as an animal identity. The Spotted Pig Widely profiled before it even opened, The Spotted Pig is reportedly one of the city’s “most popular” restaurants (Michelin 349). It is profiled in all the city guidebooks I could locate in print and online, featuring in some of these as a key stop on recommended itineraries (see, for instance, Otis 39). A number of these proclaim it to be the USA’s first ‘gastropub’—the term first used in 1991 in the UK to describe a casual hotel/bar with good food and reasonable prices (Farley). The Spotted Pig is thus styled on a shabby-chic version of a traditional British hotel, featuring a cluttered-but-well arranged use of pig-themed objects and illustrations that is described by latest Michelin Green Guide of New York City as “a country-cute décor that still manages to be hip” (Michelin 349). From the three-dimensional carved pig hanging above the entrance in a homage to the shingles of traditional British hotels, to the use of its image on the menu, website and souvenir tee-shirts, the pig as motif proceeds its use as a foodstuff menu item. So much so, that the restaurant is often (affectionately) referred to by patrons and reviewers simply as ‘The Pig’. The restaurant has become so well known in New York in the relatively brief time it has been operating that it has not only featured in a number of novels and memoirs, but, moreover, little or no explanation has been deemed necessary as the signifier of “The Spotted Pig” appears to convey everything that needs to be said about an eatery of quality and fashion. In the thriller Lethal Experiment: A Donovan Creed Novel, when John Locke’s hero has to leave the restaurant and becomes involved in a series of dangerous escapades, he wants nothing more but to get back to his dinner (107, 115). The restaurant is also mentioned a number of times in Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell’s Lipstick Jungle in relation to a (fictional) new movie of the same name. The joke in the book is that the character doesn’t know of the restaurant (26). In David Goodwillie’s American Subversive, the story of a journalist-turned-blogger and a homegrown terrorist set in New York, the narrator refers to “Scarlett Johansson, for instance, and the hostess at the Spotted Pig” (203-4) as the epitome of attractiveness. The Spotted Pig is also mentioned in Suzanne Guillette’s memoir, Much to Your Chagrin, when the narrator is on a dinner date but fears running into her ex-boyfriend: ‘Jack lives somewhere in this vicinity […] Vaguely, you recall him telling you he was not too far from the Spotted Pig on Greenwich—now, was it Greenwich Avenue or Greenwich Street?’ (361). The author presumes readers know the right answer in order to build tension in this scene. Although this success is usually credited to the joint efforts of backer, music executive turned restaurateur Ken Friedman, his partner, well-known chef, restaurateur, author and television personality Mario Batali, and their UK-born and trained chef, April Bloomfield (see, for instance, Batali), a significant part has been built on Bloomfield’s pork cookery. The very idea of a “spotted pig” itself raises a central tenet of Bloomfield’s pork/food philosophy which is sustainable and organic. That is, not the mass produced, industrially farmed pig which produces a leaner meat, but the fatty, tastier varieties of pig such as the heritage six-spotted Berkshire which is “darker, more heavily marbled with fat, juicier and richer-tasting than most pork” (Fabricant). Bloomfield has, indeed, made pig’s ears—long a Chinese restaurant staple in the city and a key ingredient of Southern US soul food as well as some traditional Japanese and Spanish dishes—fashionable fare in the city, and her current incarnation, a crispy pig’s ear salad with lemon caper dressing (TSP 2010) is much acclaimed by reviewers. This approach to ingredients—using the ‘whole beast’, local whenever possible, and the concentration on pork—has been underlined and enhanced by a continuing relationship with UK chef Fergus Henderson. In his series of London restaurants under the banner of “St. John”, Henderson is famed for the approach to pork cookery outlined in his two books Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking, published in 1999 (re-published both in the UK and the US as The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating), and Beyond Nose to Tail: A Kind of British Cooking: Part II (coauthored with Justin Piers Gellatly in 2007). Henderson has indeed been identified as starting a trend in dining and food publishing, focusing on sustainably using as food the entirety of any animal killed for this purpose, but which mostly focuses on using all parts of pigs. In publishing, this includes Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s The River Cottage Meat Book, Peter Kaminsky’s Pig Perfect, subtitled Encounters with Some Remarkable Swine and Some Great Ways to Cook Them, John Barlow’s Everything but the Squeal: Eating the Whole Hog in Northern Spain and Jennifer McLagan’s Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes (2008). In restaurants, it certainly includes The Spotted Pig. So pervasive has embrace of whole beast pork consumption been in New York that, by 2007, Bruni could write that these are: “porky times, fatty times, which is to say very good times indeed. Any new logo for the city could justifiably place the Big Apple in the mouth of a spit-roasted pig” (Bruni). This demand set the stage perfectly for, in October 2007, Henderson to travel to New York to cook pork-rich menus at The Spotted Pig in tandem with Bloomfield (Royer). He followed this again in 2008 and, by 2009, this annual event had become known as “FergusStock” and was covered by local as well as UK media, and a range of US food weblogs. By 2009, it had grown to become a dinner at the Spotted Pig with half the dishes on the menu by Henderson and half by Bloomfield, and a dinner the next night at David Chang’s acclaimed Michelin-starred Momofuku Noodle Bar, which is famed for its Cantonese-style steamed pork belly buns. A third dinner (and then breakfast/brunch) followed at Friedman/Bloomfield’s Breslin Bar and Dining Room (discussed below) (Rose). The Spotted Pig dinners have become famed for Henderson’s pig’s head and pork trotter dishes with the chef himself recognising that although his wasn’t “the most obvious food to cook for America”, it was the case that “at St John, if a couple share a pig’s head, they tend to be American” (qtd. in Rose). In 2009, the pigs’ head were presented in pies which Henderson has described as “puff pastry casing, with layers of chopped, cooked pig’s head and potato, so all the lovely, bubbly pig’s head juices go into the potato” (qtd. in Rose). Bloomfield was aged only 28 when, in 2003, with a recommendation from Jamie Oliver, she interviewed for, and won, the position of executive chef of The Spotted Pig (Fabricant; Q&A). Following this introduction to the US, her reputation as a chef has grown based on the strength of her pork expertise. Among a host of awards, she was named one of US Food & Wine magazine’s ten annual Best New Chefs in 2007. In 2009, she was a featured solo session titled “Pig, Pig, Pig” at the fourth Annual International Chefs Congress, a prestigious New York City based event where “the world’s most influential and innovative chefs, pastry chefs, mixologists, and sommeliers present the latest techniques and culinary concepts to their peers” (Starchefs.com). Bloomfield demonstrated breaking down a whole suckling St. Canut milk raised piglet, after which she butterflied, rolled and slow-poached the belly, and fried the ears. As well as such demonstrations of expertise, she is also often called upon to provide expert comment on pork-related news stories, with The Spotted Pig regularly the subject of that food news. For example, when a rare, heritage Hungarian pig was profiled as a “new” New York pork source in 2009, this story arose because Bloomfield had served a Mangalitsa/Berkshire crossbreed pig belly and trotter dish with Agen prunes (Sanders) at The Spotted Pig. Bloomfield was quoted as the authority on the breed’s flavour and heritage authenticity: “it took me back to my grandmother’s kitchen on a Sunday afternoon, windows steaming from the roasting pork in the oven […] This pork has that same authentic taste” (qtd. in Sanders). Bloomfield has also used this expert profile to support a series of pork-related causes. These include the Thanksgiving Farm in the Catskill area, which produces free range pork for its resident special needs children and adults, and helps them gain meaningful work-related skills in working with these pigs. Bloomfield not only cooks for the project’s fundraisers, but also purchases any excess pigs for The Spotted Pig (Estrine 103). This strong focus on pork is not, however, exclusive. The Spotted Pig is also one of a number of American restaurants involved in the Meatless Monday campaign, whereby at least one vegetarian option is included on menus in order to draw attention to the benefits of a plant-based diet. When, in 2008, Bloomfield beat the Iron Chef in the sixth season of the US version of the eponymous television program, the central ingredient was nothing to do with pork—it was olives. Diversifying from this focus on ‘pig’ can, however, be dangerous. Friedman and Bloomfield’s next enterprise after The Spotted Pig was The John Dory seafood restaurant at the corner of 10th Avenue and 16th Street. This opened in November 2008 to reviews that its food was “uncomplicated and nearly perfect” (Andrews 22), won Bloomfield Time Out New York’s 2009 “Best New Hand at Seafood” award, but was not a success. The John Dory was a more formal, but smaller, restaurant that was more expensive at a time when the financial crisis was just biting, and was closed the following August. Friedman blamed the layout, size and neighbourhood (Stein) and its reservation system, which limited walk-in diners (ctd. in Vallis), but did not mention its non-pork, seafood orientation. When, almost immediately, another Friedman/Bloomfield project was announced, the Breslin Bar & Dining Room (which opened in October 2009 in the Ace Hotel at 20 West 29th Street and Broadway), the enterprise was closely modeled on the The Spotted Pig. In preparation, its senior management—Bloomfield, Friedman and sous-chefs, Nate Smith and Peter Cho (who was to become the Breslin’s head chef)—undertook a tasting tour of the UK that included Henderson’s St. John Bread & Wine Bar (Leventhal). Following this, the Breslin’s menu highlighted a series of pork dishes such as terrines, sausages, ham and potted styles (Rosenberg & McCarthy), with even Bloomfield’s pork scratchings (crispy pork rinds) bar snacks garnering glowing reviews (see, for example, Severson; Ghorbani). Reviewers, moreover, waxed lyrically about the menu’s pig-based dishes, the New York Times reviewer identifying this focus as catering to New York diners’ “fetish for pork fat” (Sifton). This representative review details not only “an entree of gently smoked pork belly that’s been roasted to tender goo, for instance, over a drift of buttery mashed potatoes, with cabbage and bacon on the side” but also a pig’s foot “in gravy made of reduced braising liquid, thick with pillowy shallots and green flecks of deconstructed brussels sprouts” (Sifton). Sifton concluded with the proclamation that this style of pork was “very good: meat that is fat; fat that is meat”. Concluding remarks Bloomfield has listed Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie as among her favourite food books. Publishers Weekly reviewer called Ruhlman “a food poet, and the pig is his muse” (Q&A). In August 2009, it was reported that Bloomfield had always wanted to write a cookbook (Marx) and, in July 2010, HarperCollins imprint Ecco publisher and foodbook editor Dan Halpern announced that he was planning a book with her, tentatively titled, A Girl and Her Pig (Andriani “Ecco Expands”). As a “cookbook with memoir running throughout” (Maurer), this will discuss the influence of the pig on her life as well as how to cook pork. This text will obviously also add to the data known about The Spotted Pig, but until then, this brief gastrobiography has attempted to outline some of the human, and in this case, animal, stories that lie behind all businesses. References Andrews, Colman. “Its Up To You, New York, New York.” Gourmet Apr. (2009): 18-22, 111. Andriani, Lynn. “Ecco Expands Cookbook Program: HC Imprint Signs Up Seven New Titles.” Publishers Weekly 12 Jul. (2010) 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/cooking/article/43803-ecco-expands-cookbook-program.html Andriani, Lynn. “Gourmand Awards Receive Record Number of Cookbook Entries.” Publishers Weekly 27 Sep. 2010 http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/cooking/article/44573-gourmand-awards-receive-record-number-of-cookbook-entries.html Appadurai, Arjun. 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Brien, Donna Lee. “Writing to Understand Ourselves: An Organisational History of the Australian Association of Writing Programs 1996–2010.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses Apr. 2010 http://www.textjournal.com.au/april10/brien.htm Bruni, Frank. “Fat, Glorious Fat, Moves to the Center of the Plate.” New York Times 13 Jun. 2007. 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/13/dining/13glut.html Bruni, Frank. “Stuffed Pork.” New York Times 25 Jan. 2006. 4 Sep. 2010 http://events.nytimes.com/2006/01/25/dining/reviews/25rest.html Bushnell, Candace. Lipstick Jungle. New York: Hyperion Books, 2008. Byrnes, Paul. Qantas by George!: The Remarkable Story of George Roberts. Sydney: Watermark, 2000. Chinn, Carl. The Cadbury Story: A Short History. Studley, Warwickshire: Brewin Books, 1998. Dunstan, David and Chaitman, Annette. “Food and Drink: The Appearance of a Publishing Subculture.” Ed. David Carter and Anne Galligan. Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. 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Introduction Since December 2010 the dramatic spectacle of the spread of mass uprisings, civil unrest, and protest across North Africa and the Middle East have been chronicled daily on mainstream media and new media. Broadly speaking, the Arab Spring—as it came to be known—is challenging repressive, corrupt governments and calling for democracy and human rights. The convulsive events linked with these debates have been striking not only because of the rapid spread of historically momentous mass protests but also because of the ways in which the media “have become inextricably infused inside them” enabling the global media ecology to perform “an integral part in building and mobilizing support, co-ordinating and defining the protests within different Arab societies as well as trans-nationalizing them” (Cottle 295). Images of mass protests have been juxtaposed against those of individuals prepared to self-destruct for political ends. Video clips and photographs of the individual suffering of Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation and the Bahraini Abdulhad al-Khawaja’s emaciated body foreground, in very graphic ways, political struggles that larger events would mask or render invisible. Highlighting broad commonalties does not assume uniformity in patterns of protest and media coverage across the region. There has been considerable variation in the global media coverage and nature of the protests in North Africa and the Middle East (Cottle). In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen uprisings overthrew regimes and leaders. In Syria it has led the country to the brink of civil war. In Bahrain, the regime and its militia violently suppressed peaceful protests. As a wave of protests spread across the Middle East and one government after another toppled in front of 24/7 global media coverage, Bahrain became the “Arab revolution that was abandoned by the Arabs, forsaken by the West … forgotten by the world,” and largely ignored by the global media (Al-Jazeera English). Per capita the protests have been among the largest of the Arab Spring (Human Rights First) and the crackdown as brutal as elsewhere. International organizations have condemned the use of military courts to trial protestors, the detaining of medical staff who had treated the injured, and the use of torture, including the torture of children (Fisher). Bahraini and international human rights organizations have been systematically chronicling these violations of human rights, and posting on Websites distressing images of tortured bodies often with warnings about the graphic depictions viewers are about to see. It was in this context of brutal suppression, global media silence, and the reluctance of the international community to intervene, that the Bahraini-Danish human rights activist Abdulhad al-Khawaja launched his “death or freedom” hunger strike. Even this radical action initially failed to interest international editors who were more focused on Egypt, Libya, and Syria, but media attention rose in response to the Bahrain Formula 1 race in April 2012. Pro-democracy activists pledged “days of rage” to coincide with the race in order to highlight continuing human rights abuses in the kingdom (Turner). As Al Khawaja’s health deteriorated the Bahraini government resisted calls for his release (Article 19) from the Danish government who requested that Al Khawaja be extradited there on “humanitarian grounds” for hospital treatment (Fisk). This article does not explore the geo-politics of the Bahraini struggle or the possible reasons why the international community—in contrast to Syria and Egypt—has been largely silent and reluctant to debate the issues. Important as they are, those remain questions for Middle Eastern specialists to address. In this article I am concerned with the overlapping and interpenetration of two ecologies. The first ecology is the ethical framing of a prison hunger strike as a corporeal-environmental act of (self) destruction intended to achieve political ends. The second ecology is the operation of global media where international inaction inadvertently foregrounds the political struggles that larger events and discourses surrounding Egypt, Libya, and Syria overshadow. What connects these two ecologies is the body of the hunger striker, turned into a spectacle and mediated via a politics of affect that invites a global public to empathise and so enter into his suffering. The connection between the two lies in the emaciated body of the hunger striker. An Ecological Humanities Approach This exploration of two ecologies draws on the ecological humanities and its central premise of connectivity. The ecological humanities critique the traditional binaries in Western thinking between nature and culture; the political and social; them and us; the collective and the individual; mind, body and emotion (Rose & Robin, Rieber). Such binaries create artificial hierarchies, divisions, and conflicts that ultimately impede the ability to respond to crises. Crises are major changes that are “out of control” driven—primarily but not exclusively—by social, political, and cultural forces that unleash “runaway systems with their own dynamics” (Rose & Robin 1). The ecological humanities response to crises is premised on the recognition of the all-inclusive connectivity of organisms, systems, and environments and an ethical commitment to action from within this entanglement. A founding premise of connectivity, first articulated by anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson, is that the “unit of survival is not the individual or the species, but the organism-and-its-environment” (Rose & Robin 2). This highlights a dialectic in which an organism is shaped by and shapes the context in which it finds itself. Or, as Harries-Jones puts it, relations are recursive as “events continually enter into, become entangled with, and then re-enter the universe they describe” (3). This ensures constantly evolving ecosystems but it also means any organism that “deteriorates its environment commits suicide” (Rose & Robin 2) with implications for the others in the eco-system. Bateson’s central premise is that organisms are simultaneously independent, as separate beings, but also interdependent. Interactions are not seen purely as exchanges but as dynamic, dialectical, dialogical, and mutually constitutive. Thus, it is presumed that the destruction or protection of others has consequences for oneself. Another dimension of interactions is multi-modality, which implies that human communication cannot be reduced to a single mode such as words, actions, or images but needs to be understood in the complexity of inter-relations between these (see Rieber 16). Nor can dissemination be reduced to a single technological platform whether this is print, television, Internet, or other media (see Cottle). The final point is that interactions are “biologically grounded but not determined” in that the “cognitive, emotional and volitional processes” underpinning face-to-face or mediated communication are “essentially indivisible” and any attempt to separate them by privileging emotion at the expense of thought, or vice versa, is likely to be unhealthy (Rieber 17). This is most graphically demonstrated in a politically-motivated hunger strike where emotion and volition over-rides the survivalist instinct. The Ecology of a Prison Hunger Strike The radical nature of a hunger strike inevitably gives rise to medico-ethical debates. Hunger strikes entail the voluntary refusal of sustenance by an individual and, when prolonged, such deprivation sets off a chain reaction as the less important components in the internal body systems shut down to protect the brain until even that can no longer be protected (see Basoglu et al). This extreme form of protest—essentially an act of self-destruction—raises ethical issues over whether or not doctors or the state should intervene to save a life for humanitarian or political reasons. In 1975 and 1991, the World Medical Association (WMA) sought to negotiate this by distinguishing between, on the one hand, the mentally/psychological impaired individual who chooses a “voluntary fast” and, on the other hand, the hunger striker who chooses a form of protest action to secure an explicit political goal fully aware of fatal consequences of prolonged action (see Annas, Reyes). This binary enables the WMA to label the action of the mentally impaired suicide while claiming that to do so for political protesters would be a “misconception” because the “striker … does not want to die” but to “live better” by obtaining certain political goals for himself, his group or his country. “If necessary he is willing to sacrifice his life for his case, but the aim is certainly not suicide” (Reyes 11). In practice, the boundaries between suicide and political protest are likely to be much more blurred than this but the medico-ethical binary is important because it informs discourses about what form of intervention is ethically appropriate. In the case of the “suicidal” the WMA legitimises force-feeding by a doctor as a life-saving act. In the case of the political protestor, it is de-legitimised in discourses of an infringement of freedom of expression and an act of torture because of the pain involved (see Annas, Reyes). Philosopher Michel Foucault argued that prison is a key site where the embodied subject is explicitly governed and where the exercising of state power in the act of incarceration means the body of the imprisoned no longer solely belongs to the individual. It is also where the “body’s range of significations” is curtailed, “shaped and invested by the very forces that detain and imprison it” (Pugliese 2). Thus, prison creates the circumstances in which the incarcerated is denied the “usual forms of protest and judicial safeguards” available outside its confines. The consequence is that when presented with conditions that violate core beliefs he/she may view acts of self-destruction—such as hunger strikes or lip sewing—as one of the few “means of protesting against, or demanding attention” or achieving political ends still available to them (Reyes 11; Pugliese). The hunger strike implicates the state, which, in the act of imprisoning, has assumed a measure of power and responsibility for the body of the individual. If a protest action is labelled suicidal by medical professionals—for instance at Guantanamo—then the force-feeding of prisoners can be legitimised within the WMA guidelines (Annas). There is considerable political temptation to do so particularly when the hunger striker has become an icon of resistance to the state, the knowledge of his/her action has transcended prison confines, and the alienating conditions that prompted the action are being widely debated in the media. This poses a two-fold danger for the state. On the one hand, there is the possibility that the slow emaciation and death while imprisoned, if covered by the media, may become a spectacle able to mobilise further resistance that can destabilise the polity. On the other hand, there is the fear that in the act of dying, and the spectacle surrounding death, the hunger striker would have secured the public attention to the very cause they are championing. Central to this is whether or not the act of self-destruction is mediated. It is far from inevitable that the media will cover a hunger strike or do so in ways that enable the hunger striker’s appeal to the emotions of others. However, when it does, the international scrutiny and condemnation that follows may undermine the credibility of the state—as happened with the death of the IRA member Bobby Sands in Northern Ireland (Russell). The Media Ecology and the Bahrain Arab Spring The IRA’s use of an “ancient tactic ... to make a blunt appeal to sympathy and emotion” in the form of the Sands hunger strike was seen as “spectacularly successful in gaining worldwide publicity” (Willis 1). Media ecology has evolved dramatically since then. Over the past 20 years communication flows between the local and the global, traditional media formations (broadcast and print), and new communication media (Internet and mobile phones) have escalated. The interactions of the traditional media have historically shaped and been shaped by more “top-down” “politics of representation” in which the primary relationship is between journalists and competing public relations professionals servicing rival politicians, business or NGOs desire for media attention and framing issues in a way that is favourable or sympathetic to their cause. However, rapidly evolving new media platforms offer bottom up, user-generated content, a politics of connectivity, and mobilization of ordinary people (Cottle 31). However, this distinction has increasingly been seen as offering too rigid a binary to capture the complexity of the interactions between traditional and new media as well as the events they capture. The evolution of both meant their content increasingly overlaps and interpenetrates (see Bennett). New media technologies “add new communicative ingredients into the media ecology mix” (Cottle 31) as well as new forms of political protests and new ways of mobilizing dispersed networks of activists (Juris). Despite their pervasiveness, new media technologies are “unlikely to displace the necessity for coverage in mainstream media”; a feature noted by activist groups who have evolved their own “carnivalesque” tactics (Cottle 32) capable of creating the spectacle that meets television demands for action-driven visuals (Juris). New media provide these groups with the tools to publicise their actions pre- and post-event thereby increasing the possibility that mainstream media might cover their protests. However there is no guarantee that traditional and new media content will overlap and interpenetrate as initial coverage of the Bahrain Arab Spring highlights. Peaceful protests began in February 2011 but were violently quelled often by Saudi, Qatari and UAE militia on behalf of the Bahraini government. Mass arrests were made including that of children and medical personnel who had treated those wounded during the suppression of the protests. What followed were a long series of detentions without trial, military court rulings on civilians, and frequent use of torture in prisons (Human Rights Watch 2012). By the end of 2011, the country had the highest number of political prisoners per capita of any country in the world (Amiri) but received little coverage in the US. The Libyan uprising was afforded the most broadcast time (700 minutes) followed by Egypt (500 minutes), Syria (143), and Bahrain (34) (Lobe). Year-end round-ups of the Arab Spring on the American Broadcasting Corporation ignored Bahrain altogether or mentioned it once in a 21-page feature (Cavell). This was not due to a lack of information because a steady stream has flowed from mobile phones, Internet sites and Twitter as NGOs—Bahraini and international—chronicled in images and first-hand accounts the abuses. However, little of this coverage was picked up by the US-dominated global media. It was in this context that the Bahraini-Danish human rights activist Abdulhad Al Khawaja launched his “freedom or death” hunger strike in protest against the violent suppression of peaceful demonstrations, the treatment of prisoners, and the conduct of the trials. Even this radical action failed to persuade international editors to cover the Bahrain Arab Spring or Al Khawaja’s deteriorating health despite being “one of the most important stories to emerge over the Arab Spring” (Nallu). This began to change in April 2012 as a number of things converged. Formula 1 pressed ahead with the Bahrain Grand Prix, and pro-democracy activists pledged “days of rage” over human rights abuses. As these were violently suppressed, editors on global news desks increasingly questioned the government and Formula 1 “spin” that all was well in the kingdom (see BBC; Turner). Claims by the drivers—many of who were sponsored by the Bahraini government—that this was a sports event, not a political one, were met with derision and journalists more familiar with interviewing superstars were diverted into covering protests because their political counterparts had been denied entry to the country (Fisk). This combination of media events and responses created the attention, interest, and space in which Al Khawaja’s deteriorating condition could become a media spectacle. The Mediated Spectacle of Al Khawaja’s Hunger Strike Journalists who had previously struggled to interest editors in Bahrain and Al Khawaja’s plight found that in the weeks leading up to the Grand Prix and since “his condition rapidly deteriorated”’ and there were “daily updates with stories from CNN to the Hindustan Times” (Nulla). Much of this mainstream news was derived from interviews and tweets from Al Khawaja’s family after each visit or phone call. What emerged was an unprecedented composite—a diary of witnesses to a hunger strike interspersed with the family’s struggles with the authorities to get access to him and their almost tangible fear that the Bahraini government would not relent and he would die. As these fears intensified 48 human rights NGOs called for his release from prison (Article 19) and the Danish government formally requested his extradition for hospital treatment on “humanitarian grounds”. Both were rejected. As if to provide evidence of Al Khawaja’s tenuous hold on life, his family released an image of his emaciated body onto Twitter. This graphic depiction of the corporeal-environmental act of (self) destruction was re-tweeted and posted on countless NGO and news Websites (see Al-Jazeera). It was also juxtaposed against images of multi-million dollar cars circling a race-track, funded by similarly large advertising deals and watched by millions of people around the world on satellite channels. Spectator sport had become a grotesque parody of one man’s struggle to speak of what was going on in Bahrain. In an attempt to silence the criticism the Bahraini government imposed a de facto news blackout denying all access to Al Khawaja in hospital where he had been sent after collapsing. The family’s tweets while he was held incommunicado speak of their raw pain, their desperation to find out if he was still alive, and their grief. They also provided a new source of information, and the refrain “where is alkhawaja,” reverberated on Twitter and in global news outlets (see for instance Der Spiegel, Al-Jazeera). In the days immediately after the race the Danish prime minister called for the release of Al Khawaja, saying he is in a “very critical condition” (Guardian), as did the UN’s Ban-Ki Moon (UN News and Media). The silencing of Al Khawaja had become a discourse of callousness and as global media pressure built Bahraini ministers felt compelled to challenge this on non-Arabic media, claiming Al Khawaja was “eating” and “well”. The Bahraini Prime Minister gave one of his first interviews to the Western media in years in which he denied “AlKhawaja’s health is ‘as bad’ as you say. According to the doctors attending to him on a daily basis, he takes liquids” (Der Spiegel Online). Then, after six days of silence, the family was allowed to visit. They tweeted that while incommunicado he had been restrained and force-fed against his will (Almousawi), a statement almost immediately denied by the military hospital (Lebanon Now). The discourses of silence and callousness were replaced with discourses of “torture” through force-feeding. A month later Al Khawaja’s wife announced he was ending his hunger strike because he was being force-fed by two doctors at the prison, family and friends had urged him to eat again, and he felt the strike had achieved its goal of drawing the world’s attention to Bahrain government’s response to pro-democracy protests (Ahlul Bayt News Agency). Conclusion This article has sought to explore two ecologies. The first is of medico-ethical discourses which construct a prison hunger strike as a corporeal-environmental act of (self) destruction to achieve particular political ends. 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All history of this area and the general talk and all of that is that 1973 was a turning point and the Aquarius Festival is credited with having turned this region around in so many ways, but I think that is a myth ... and I have to honour the truth; and the truth is that old Dicke Donelly came and did a Welcome to Country the night before the festival. (Joseph in Joseph and Hanley)In 1973 the Australian Union of Students (AUS) held the Aquarius Arts and Lifestyle Festival in a small, rural New South Wales town called Nimbin. The festival was seen as the peak expression of Australian counterculture and is attributed to creating the “Rainbow Region”, an area with a concentration of alternative life stylers in Northern NSW (Derrett 28). While the Aquarius Festival is recognised as a founding historical and countercultural event, the unique and important relationships established with Indigenous people at this time are generally less well known. This article investigates claims that the 1973 Aquarius Festival was “the first event in Australian history that sought permission for the use of the land from the Traditional Owners” (Joseph and Hanley). The diverse international, national and local conditions that coalesced at the Aquarius Festival suggest a fertile environment was created for reconciliatory bonds to develop. Often dismissed as a “tree hugging, soap dodging movement,” the counterculture was radically politicised having sprung from the 1960s social revolutions when the world witnessed mass demonstrations that confronted war, racism, sexism and capitalism. Primarily a youth movement, it was characterised by flamboyant dress, music, drugs and mass gatherings with universities forming the epicentre and white, middle class youth leading the charge. As their ideals of changing the world were frustrated by lack of systematic change, many decided to disengage and a migration to rural settings occurred (Jacob; Munro-Clarke; Newton). In the search for alternatives, the counterculture assimilated many spiritual practices, such as Eastern traditions and mysticism, which were previously obscure to the Western world. This practice of spiritual syncretism can be represented as a direct resistance to the hegemony of the dominant Western culture (Stell). As the new counterculture developed, its progression from urban to rural settings was driven by philosophies imbued with a desire to reconnect with and protect the natural world while simultaneously rejecting the dominant conservative order. A recurring feature of this countercultural ‘back to the land’ migration was not only an empathetic awareness of the injustices of colonial past, but also a genuine desire to learn from the Indigenous people of the land. Indigenous people were generally perceived as genuine opposers of Westernisation, inherently spiritual, ecological, tribal and communal, thus encompassing the primary values to which the counterculture was aspiring (Smith). Cultures converged. One, a youth culture rebelling from its parent culture; the other, ancient cultures reeling from the historical conquest by the youths’ own ancestors. Such cultural intersections are rich with complex scenarios and politics. As a result, often naïve, but well-intended relations were established with Native Americans, various South American Indigenous peoples, New Zealand Maori and, as this article demonstrates, the Original People of Australia (Smith; Newton; Barr-Melej; Zolov). The 1960s protest era fostered the formation of groups aiming to address a variety of issues, and at times many supported each other. Jennifer Clarke says it was the Civil Rights movement that provided the first models of dissent by formulating a “method, ideology and language of protest” as African Americans stood up and shouted prior to other movements (2). The issue of racial empowerment was not lost on Australia’s Indigenous population. Clarke writes that during the 1960s, encouraged by events overseas and buoyed by national organisation, Aborigines “slowly embarked on a political awakening, demanded freedom from the trappings of colonialism and responded to the effects of oppression at worst and neglect at best” (4). Activism of the 1960s had the “profoundly productive effect of providing Aborigines with the confidence to assert their racial identity” (159). Many Indigenous youth were compelled by the zeitgeist to address their people’s issues, fulfilling Charlie Perkins’s intentions of inspiring in Indigenous peoples a will to resist (Perkins). Enjoying new freedoms of movement out of missions, due to the 1967 Constitutional change and the practical implementation of the assimilation policy, up to 32,000 Indigenous youth moved to Redfern, Sydney between 1967 and 1972 (Foley, “An Evening With”). Gary Foley reports that a dynamic new Black Power Movement emerged but the important difference between this new younger group and the older Indigenous leaders of the day was the diverse range of contemporary influences. Taking its mantra from the Black Panther movement in America, though having more in common with the equivalent Native American Red Power movement, the Black Power Movement acknowledged many other international struggles for independence as equally inspiring (Foley, “An Evening”). People joined together for grassroots resistance, formed anti-hierarchical collectives and established solidarities between varied groups who previously would have had little to do with each other. The 1973 Aquarius Festival was directly aligned with “back to the land” philosophies. The intention was to provide a place and a reason for gathering to “facilitate exchanges on survival techniques” and to experience “living in harmony with the natural environment.” without being destructive to the land (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). Early documents in the archives, however, reveal no apparent interest in Australia’s Indigenous people, referring more to “silken Arabian tents, mediaeval banners, circus, jugglers and clowns, peace pipes, maypole and magic circles” (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). Obliterated from the social landscape and minimally referred to in the Australian education system, Indigenous people were “off the radar” to the majority mindset, and the Australian counterculture similarly was slow to appreciate Indigenous culture. Like mainstream Australia, the local counterculture movement largely perceived the “race” issue as something occurring in other countries, igniting the phrase “in your own backyard” which became a catchcry of Indigenous activists (Foley, “Whiteness and Blackness”) With no mention of any Indigenous interest, it seems likely that the decision to engage grew from the emerging climate of Indigenous activism in Australia. Frustrated by student protestors who seemed oblivious to local racial issues, focusing instead on popular international injustices, Indigenous activists accused them of hypocrisy. Aquarius Festival directors, found themselves open to similar accusations when public announcements elicited a range of responses. Once committed to the location of Nimbin, directors Graeme Dunstan and Johnny Allen began a tour of Australian universities to promote the upcoming event. While at the annual conference of AUS in January 1973 at Monash University, Dunstan met Indigenous activist Gary Foley: Gary witnessed the presentation of Johnny Allen and myself at the Aquarius Foundation session and our jubilation that we had agreement from the village residents to not only allow, but also to collaborate in the production of the Festival. After our presentation which won unanimous support, it was Gary who confronted me with the question “have you asked permission from local Aboriginal folk?” This threw me into confusion because we had seen no Aboriginals in Nimbin. (Dunstan, e-mail) Such a challenge came at a time when the historical climate was etched with political activism, not only within the student movement, but more importantly with Indigenous activists’ recent demonstrations, such as the installation in 1972 of the Tent Embassy in Canberra. As representatives of the counterculture movement, which was characterised by its inclinations towards consciousness-raising, AUS organisers were ethically obliged to respond appropriately to the questions about Indigenous permission and involvement in the Aquarius Festival at Nimbin. In addition to this political pressure, organisers in Nimbin began hearing stories of the area being cursed or taboo for women. This most likely originated from the tradition of Nimbin Rocks, a rocky outcrop one kilometre from Nimbin, as a place where only certain men could go. Jennifer Hoff explains that many major rock formations were immensely sacred places and were treated with great caution and respect. Only a few Elders and custodians could visit these places and many such locations were also forbidden for women. Ceremonies were conducted at places like Nimbin Rocks to ensure the wellbeing of all tribespeople. Stories of the Nimbin curse began to spread and most likely captivated a counterculture interested in mysticism. As organisers had hoped that news of the festival would spread on the “lips of the counterculture,” they were alarmed to hear how “fast the bad news of this curse was travelling” (Dunstan, e-mail). A diplomatic issue escalated with further challenges from the Black Power community when organisers discovered that word had spread to Sydney’s Indigenous community in Redfern. Organisers faced a hostile reaction to their alleged cultural insensitivity and were plagued by negative publicity with accusations the AUS were “violating sacred ground” (Janice Newton 62). Faced with such bad press, Dunstan was determined to repair what was becoming a public relations disaster. It seemed once prompted to the path, a sense of moral responsibility prevailed amongst the organisers and they took the unprecedented step of reaching out to Australia’s Indigenous people. Dunstan claimed that an expedition was made to the local Woodenbong mission to consult with Elder, Uncle Lyle Roberts. To connect with local people required crossing the great social divide present in that era of Australia’s history. Amy Nethery described how from the nineteenth century to the 1960s, a “system of reserves, missions and other institutions isolated, confined and controlled Aboriginal people” (9). She explains that the people were incarcerated as a solution to perceived social problems. For Foley, “the widespread genocidal activity of early “settlement” gave way to a policy of containment” (Foley, “Australia and the Holocaust”). Conditions on missions were notoriously bad with alcoholism, extreme poverty, violence, serious health issues and depression common. Of particular concern to mission administrators was the perceived need to keep Indigenous people separate from the non-indigenous population. Dunstan described the mission he visited as having “bad vibes.” He found it difficult to communicate with the elderly man, and was not sure if he understood Dunstan’s quest, as his “responses came as disjointed raves about Jesus and saving grace” (Dunstan, e-mail). Uncle Lyle, he claimed, did not respond affirmatively or negatively to the suggestion that Nimbin was cursed, and so Dunstan left assuming it was not true. Other organisers began to believe the curse and worried that female festival goers might get sick or worse, die. This interpretation reflected, as Vanessa Bible argues, a general Eurocentric misunderstanding of the relationship of Indigenous peoples with the land. Paul Joseph admits they were naïve whites coming into a place with very little understanding, “we didn’t know if we needed a witch doctor or what we needed but we knew we needed something from the Aborigines to lift the spell!”(Joseph and Hanley). Joseph, one of the first “hippies” who moved to the area, had joined forces with AUS organisers. He said, “it just felt right” to get Indigenous involvement and recounted how organisers made another trip to Woodenbong Mission to find Dickee (Richard) Donnelly, a Song Man, who was very happy to be invited. Whether the curse was valid or not it proved to be productive in further instigating respectful action. Perhaps feeling out of their depth, the organisers initiated another strategy to engage with Australian Indigenous people. A call out was sent through the AUS network to diversify the cultural input and it was recommended they engage the services of South African artist, Bauxhau Stone. Timing aligned well as in 1972 Australia had voted in a new Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam. Whitlam brought about significant political changes, many in response to socialist protests that left a buoyancy in the air for the counterculturalist movement. He made prodigious political changes in support of Indigenous people, including creating the Aboriginal Arts Board as part of the Australian Council of the Arts (ACA). As the ACA were already funding activities for the Aquarius Festival, organisers were successful in gaining two additional grants specifically for Indigenous participation (Farnham). As a result We were able to hire […] representatives, a couple of Kalahari bushmen. ‘Cause we were so dumb, we didn’t think we could speak to the black people, you know what I mean, we thought we would be rejected, or whatever, so for us to really reach out, we needed somebody black to go and talk to them, or so we thought, and it was remarkable. This one Bau, a remarkable fellow really, great artist, great character, he went all over Australia. He went to Pitjantjatjara, Yirrkala and we arranged buses and tents when they got here. We had a very large contingent of Aboriginal people come to the Aquarius Festival, thanks to Whitlam. (Joseph in Joseph and Henley) It was under the aegis of these government grants that Bauxhau Stone conducted his work. Stone embodied a nexus of contemporary issues. Acutely aware of the international movement for racial equality and its relevance to Australia, where conditions were “really appalling”, Stone set out to transform Australian race relations by engaging with the alternative arts movement (Stone). While his white Australian contemporaries may have been unaccustomed to dealing with the Indigenous racial issue, Stone was actively engaged and thus well suited to act as a cultural envoy for the Aquarius Festival. He visited several local missions, inviting people to attend and notifying them of ceremonies being conducted by respected Elders. Nimbin was then the site of the Aquarius Lifestyle and Celebration Festival, a two week gathering of alternative cultures, technologies and youth. It innovatively demonstrated its diversity of influences, attracted people from all over the world and was the first time that the general public really witnessed Australia’s counterculture (Derrett 224). As markers of cultural life, counterculture festivals of the 1960s and 1970s were as iconic as the era itself and many around the world drew on the unique Indigenous heritage of their settings in some form or another (Partridge; Perone; Broadley and Jones; Zolov). The social phenomenon of coming together to experience, celebrate and foster a sense of unity was triggered by protests, music and a simple, yet deep desire to reconnect with each other. Festivals provided an environment where the negative social pressures of race, gender, class and mores (such as clothes) were suspended and held the potential “for personal and social transformation” (St John 167). With the expressed intent to “take matters into our own hands” and try to develop alternative, innovative ways of doing things with collective participation, the Aquarius Festival thus became an optimal space for reinvigorating ancient and Indigenous ways (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). With philosophies that venerated collectivism, tribalism, connecting with the earth, and the use of ritual, the Indigenous presence at the Aquarius Festival gave attendees the opportunity to experience these values. To connect authentically with Nimbin’s landscape, forming bonds with the Traditional Owners was essential. Participants were very fortunate to have the presence of the last known initiated men of the area, Uncle Lyle Roberts and Uncle Dickee Donnely. These Elders represented the last vestiges of an ancient culture and conducted innovative ceremonies, song, teachings and created a sacred fire for the new youth they encountered in their land. They welcomed the young people and were very happy for their presence, believing it represented a revolutionary shift (Wedd; King; John Roberts; Cecil Roberts). Images 1 and 2: Ceremony and talks conducted at the Aquarius Festival (people unknown). Photographs reproduced by permission of photographer and festival attendee Paul White. The festival thus provided an important platform for the regeneration of cultural and spiritual practices. John Roberts, nephew of Uncle Lyle, recalled being surprised by the reaction of festival participants to his uncle: “He was happy and then he started to sing. And my God … I couldn’t get near him! There was this big ring of hippies around him. They were about twenty deep!” Sharing to an enthusiastic, captive audience had a positive effect and gave the non-indigenous a direct Indigenous encounter (Cecil Roberts; King; Oshlak). Estimates of the number of Indigenous people in attendance vary, with the main organisers suggesting 800 to 1000 and participants suggesting 200 to 400 (Stone; Wedd; Oshlak: Joseph; King; Cecil Roberts). As the Festival lasted over a two week period, many came and left within that time and estimates are at best reliant on memory, engagement and perspectives. With an estimated total attendance at the Festival between 5000 and 10,000, either number of Indigenous attendees is symbolic and a significant symbolic statistic for Indigenous and non-indigenous to be together on mutual ground in Australia in 1973. Images 3-5: Performers from Yirrkala Dance Group, brought to the festival by Stone with funding from the Federal Government. Photographs reproduced by permission of photographer and festival attendee Dr Ian Cameron. For Indigenous people, the event provided an important occasion to reconnect with their own people, to share their culture with enthusiastic recipients, as well as the chance to experience diverse aspects of the counterculture. Though the northern NSW region has a history of diverse cultural migration of Italian and Indian families, the majority of non-indigenous and Indigenous people had limited interaction with cosmopolitan influences (Kijas 20). Thus Nimbin was a conservative region and many Christianised Indigenous people were also conservative in their outlook. The Aquarius Festival changed that as the Indigenous people experienced the wide-ranging cultural elements of the alternative movement. The festival epitomised countercultural tendencies towards flamboyant fashion and hairstyles, architectural design, fantastical art, circus performance, Asian clothes and religious products, vegetarian food and nudity. Exposure to this bohemian culture would have surely led to “mind expansion and consciousness raising,” explicit aims adhered to by the movement (Roszak). Performers and participants from Africa, America and India also gave attending Indigenous Australians the opportunity to interact with non-European cultures. Many people interviewed for this paper indicated that Indigenous people’s reception of this festival experience was joyous. For Australia’s early counterculture, interest in Indigenous Australia was limited and for organisers of the AUS Aquarius Festival, it was not originally on the agenda. The counterculture in the USA and New Zealand had already started to engage with their Indigenous people some years earlier. However due to the Aquarius Festival’s origins in the student movement and its solidarities with the international Indigenous activist movement, they were forced to shift their priorities. The coincidental selection of a significant spiritual location at Nimbin to hold the festival brought up additional challenges and countercultural intrigue with mystical powers and a desire to connect authentically to the land, further prompted action. Essentially, it was the voices of empowered Indigenous activists, like Gary Foley, which in fact triggered the reaching out to Indigenous involvement. While the counterculture organisers were ultimately receptive and did act with unprecedented respect, credit must be given to Indigenous activists. The activist’s role is to trigger action and challenge thinking and in this case, it was ultimately productive. Therefore the Indigenous people were not merely passive recipients of beneficiary goodwill, but active instigators of appropriate cultural exchange. After the 1973 festival many attendees decided to stay in Nimbin to purchase land collectively and a community was born. Relationships established with local Indigenous people developed further. Upon visiting Nimbin now, one will see a vibrant visual display of Indigenous and psychedelic themed art, a central park with an open fire tended by local custodians and other Indigenous community members, an Aboriginal Centre whose rent is paid for by local shopkeepers, and various expressions of a fusion of counterculture and Indigenous art, music and dance. While it appears that reconciliation became the aspiration for mainstream society in the 1990s, Nimbin’s early counterculture history had Indigenous reconciliation at its very foundation. The efforts made by organisers of the 1973 Aquarius Festival stand as one of very few examples in Australian history where non-indigenous Australians have respectfully sought to learn from Indigenous people and to assimilate their cultural practices. It also stands as an example for the world, of reconciliation, based on hippie ideals of peace and love. 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This paper provides embedded, reflective practice-based insight arising from my experience collaborating to produce online and print-on-demand editions of a magazine showcasing the photography of members of haphazart! Contemporary Abstracts group (hereafter referred to as haphazart!). The group’s online visual, textual and activity-based practices via the photo sharing social networking site Flickr are portrayed as achieving cohesive visual identity. Stylistic analysis of pictures in support of this claim is not attempted. Rather negotiation, that Elliot has previously described in M/C Journal as innate in collaboration, is identified as the unifying factor. However, the collaborators’ adherence to Flickr’s communication platform proves problematic in the editorial context. Some technical incoherence with possible broader cultural implications is encountered during the process of repurposing images from screen to print. A Scan of Relevant Literature The photographic gaze perceives and captures objects which seem to ‘carry within them ready-made’ a work of art. But the reminiscences of the gaze are only made possible by knowing and associating with groups that define a tradition. The list of valorised subjects is not actually defined with reference to a culture, but rather by familiarity with a limited group. (Chamboredon 144) As part of the array of socio-cultural practices afforded by Web 2.0 interoperability, sites of produsage (Bruns) are foci for studies originating in many disciplines. Flickr provides a rich source of data that researchers interested in the interface between the technological and the social find useful to analyse. Access to the Flickr application programming interface enables quantitative researchers to observe a variety of means by which information is propagated, disseminated and shared. Some findings from this kind of research confirm the intuitive. For example, Negoecsu et al. find that “a large percentage of users engage in sharing with groups and that they do so significantly” ("Analyzing Flickr Groups" 425). They suggest that Flickr’s Groups feature appears to “naturally bring together two key aspects of social media: content and relations.” They also find evidence for what they call hyper-groups, which are “communities consisting of groups of Flickr groups” ("Flickr Hypergroups" 813). Two separate findings from another research team appear to contradict each other. On one hand, describing what they call “social cascades,” Cha et al. claim that “content in the form of ideas, products, and messages spreads across social networks like a virus” ("Characterising Social Cascades"). Yet in 2009 they claim that homocity and reciprocity ensure that “popularity of pictures is localised” ("Measurement-Driven Analysis"). Mislove et al. reflect that the affordances of Flickr influence the growth patterns they observe. There is optimism shared by some empiricists that through collation and analysis of Flickr tag data, the matching of perceptual structures of images and image annotation techniques will yield ontology-based taxonomy useful in automatic image annotation and ultimately, the Semantic Web endeavour (Kennedy et al.; Su et al.; Xu et al.). Qualitative researchers using ethnographic interview techniques also find Flickr a valuable resource. In concluding that the photo sharing hobby is for many a “serious leisure” activity, Cox et al. propose that “Flickr is not just a neutral information system but also value laden and has a role within a wider cultural order.” They also suggest that “there is genuinely greater scope for individual creativity, releasing the individual to explore their own identity in a way not possible with a camera club.” Davies claims that “online spaces provide an arena where collaboration over meanings can be transformative, impacting on how individuals locate themselves within local and global contexts” (550). She says that through shared ways of describing and commenting on images, Flickrites develop a common criticality in their endeavour to understand images, each other and their world (554).From a psychologist’s perspective, Suler observes that “interpersonal relationships rarely form and develop by images alone” ("Image, Word, Action" 559). He says that Flickr participants communicate in three dimensions: textual (which he calls “verbal”), visual, and via the interpersonal actions that the site affords, such as Favourites. This latter observation can surely be supplemented by including the various games that groups configure within the constraints of the discussion forums. These often include submissions to a theme and voting to select a winning image. Suler describes the place in Flickr where one finds identity as one’s “cyberpsychological niche” (556). However, many participants subscribe to multiple groups—45.6% of Flickrites who share images share them with more than 20 groups (Negoescu et al., "Analyzing Flickr Groups" 420). Is this a reflection of the existence of the hyper-groups they describe (2009) or, of the ranging that people do in search of a niche? It is also probable that some people explore more than a singular identity or visual style. Harrison and Bartell suggest that there are more interesting questions than why users create media products or what motivates them to do so: the more interesting questions center on understanding what users will choose to do ultimately with [Web2.0] capabilities [...] in what terms to define the success of their efforts, and what impact the opportunity for individual and collaborative expression will have on the evolution of communicative forms and character. (167) This paper addresseses such questions. It arises from a participatory observational context which differs from that of the research described above. It is intended that a different perspective about online group-based participation within the Flickr social networking matrix will avail. However, it will be seen that the themes cited in this introductory review prove pertinent. Context As a university teacher of a range of subjects in the digital media field, from contemporary photomedia to social media to collaborative multimedia practice, it is entirely appropriate that I embed myself in projects that engage, challenge and provide me with relevant first-hand experience. As an academic I also undertake and publish research. As a practicing new media artist I exhibit publically on a regular basis and consider myself semi-professional with respect to this activity. While there are common elements to both approaches to research, this paper is written more from the point of view of ‘reflective practice’ (Holmes, "Reconciling Experimentum") rather than ‘embedded ethnography’ (Pink). It is necessarily and unapologetically reflexive. Abstract Photography Hyper-Group A search of all Flickr groups using the query “abstract” is currently likely to return around 14,700 results. However, only in around thirty of them does the group name, its stated rules and, the stream of images that flow through the pool arguably reflect a sense of collective concept and aesthetic that is coherently abstract. This loose complex of groups comprises a hyper-group. Members of these groups often have co-memberships, reciprocal contacts, and regularly post images to a range of groups and comment on others’ posts to be found throughout. Given that one of Flickr’s largest groups, Black and White, currently has around 131,150 members and hosts 2,093,241 items in its pool, these abstract special interest groups are relatively small. The largest, Abstract Photos, has 11,338 members and hosts 89,306 items in its pool. The group that is the focus of this paper, haphazart!, currently has 2,536 members who have submitted 53,309 items. The group pool is more like a constantly flowing river because the most recently added images are foremost. Older images become buried in an archive of pages which cannot be reverse accessed at a rate greater than the seven pages linked from a current view. A member’s presence is most immediate through images posted to a pool. This structural feature of Flickr promotes a desire for currency; a need to post regularly to maintain presence. Negotiating Coherence to the Abstract The self-managing social dynamics in groups has, as Suler proposes to be the case for individuals, three dimensions: visual, textual and action. A group integrates the diverse elements, relationships and values which cumulatively constitute its identity with contributions from members in these dimensions. First impressions of that identity are usually derived from the group home page which consists of principal features: the group name, a selection of twelve most recent posts to the pool, some kind of description, a selection of six of the most recent discussion topics, and a list of rules (if any). In some of these groups, what is considered to constitute an abstract photographic image is described on the group home page. In some it is left to be contested and becomes the topic of ongoing forum debates. In others the specific issue is not discussed—the images are left to speak for themselves. Administrators of some groups require that images are vetted for acceptance. In haphazart! particular administrators dutifully delete from the pool on a regular basis any images that they deem not to comply with the group ethic. Whether reasons are given or not is left to the individual prosecutor. Mostly offending images just disappear from the group pool without trace. These are some of the ways that the coherence of a group’s visual identity is established and maintained. Two groups out of the abstract photography hyper-group are noteworthy in that their discussion forums are particularly active. A discussion is just the start of a new thread and may have any number of posts under it. At time of writing Abstract Photos has 195 discussions and haphazart! — the most talkative by this measure—has 333. Haphazart! invites submissions of images to regularly changing themes. There is always lively and idiosyncratic banter in the forum over the selection of a theme. To be submitted an image needs to be identified by a specific theme tag as announced on the group home page. The tag can be added by the photographer themselves or by anyone else who deems the image appropriate to the theme. An exhibition process ensues. Participant curators search all Flickr items according to the theme tag and select from the outcome images they deem to most appropriately and abstractly address the theme. Copies of the images together with comments by the curators are posted to a dedicated discussion board. Other members may also provide responses. This activity forms an ongoing record that may serve as a public indicator of the aesthetic that underlies the group’s identity. In Abstract Photos there is an ongoing discussion forum where one can submit an image and request that the moderators rule as to whether or not the image is ‘abstract’. The same group has ongoing discussions labelled “Hall of Appropriate” where worthy images are reposted and celebrated and, “Hall of Inappropriate” where images posted to the group pool have been removed and relegated because abstraction has been “so far stretched from its definition that it now resides in a parallel universe” (Askin). Reasons are mostly courteously provided. In haphazart! a relatively small core of around twelve group members regularly contribute to the group discussion board. A curious aspect of this communication is that even though participants present visually with a ‘buddy icon’ and most with a screen name not their real name, it is usual practice to address each other in discussions by their real Christian names, even when this is not evident in a member’s profile. This seems to indicate a common desire for authenticity. The makeup of the core varies from time to time depending on other activities in a member’s life. Although one or two may be professionally or semi-professionally engaged as photographers or artists or academics, most of these people would likely consider themselves to be “serious amateurs” (Cox). They are internationally dispersed with bias to the US, UK, Europe and Australia. English is the common language though not the natural tongue of some. The age range is approximately 35 to 65 and the gender mix 50/50. The group is three years old. Where Do We Go to from Here? In early January 2009 the haphazart! core was sparked into a frenzy of discussion by a post from a member headed “Where do we go to from here?” A proposal was mooted to produce a ‘book’ featuring images and texts representative of the group. Within three days a new public group with invited membership dedicated to the idea had been established. A smaller working party then retreated to a private Flickr group. Four months later Issue One of haphazart! magazine was available in print-on-demand and online formats. Following however is a brief critically reflective review of some of the collaborative curatorial, editorial and production processes for Issue Two which commenced in early June 2009. Most of the team had also been involved with Issue One. I was the only newcomer and replaced the person who had undertaken the design for Issue One. I was not provided access to the prior private editorial ruminations but apparently the collaborative curatorial and editorial decision-making practices the group had previously established persisted, and these took place entirely within the discussion forums of a new dedicated private Flickr group. Over a five-month period there were 1066 posts in 54 discussions concerning matters such as: change of format from the previous; selection of themes, artists and images; conduct of and editing of interviews; authoring of texts; copyright and reproduction. The idiom of those communications can be described as: discursive, sporadic, idiosyncratic, resourceful, collegial, cooperative, emphatic, earnest and purposeful. The selection process could not be said to follow anything close to a shared manifesto, or articulation of style. It was established that there would be two primary themes: the square format and contributors’ use of colour. Selection progressed by way of visual presentation and counter presentation until some kind of consensus was reached often involving informal votes of preference. Stretching the Limits of the Flickr Social Tools The magazine editorial collaborators continue to use the facilities with which they are familiar from regular Flickr group participation. However, the strict vertically linear format of the Flickr discussion format is particularly unsuited to lengthy, complex, asynchronous, multithreaded discussion. For this purpose it causes unnecessary strain, fatigue and confusion. Where images are included, the forums have set and maximum display sizes and are not flexibly configured into matrixes. Images cannot readily be communally changed or moved about like texts in a wiki. Likewise, the Flickrmail facility is of limited use for specialist editorial processes. Attachments cannot be added. This opinion expressed by a collaborator in the initial, open discussion for Issue One prevailed among Issue Two participants: do we want the members to go to another site to observe what is going on with the magazine? if that’s ok, then using google groups or something like that might make sense; if we want others to observe (and learn from) the process - we may want to do it here [in Flickr]. (Valentine) The opinion appears socially constructive; but because the final editorial process and production processes took place in a separate private forum, ultimately the suggested learning between one issue and the next did not take place. During Issue Two development the reluctance to try other online collaboration tools for the selection processes requiring visual comparative evaluation of images and trials of sequencing adhered. A number of ingenious methods of working within Flickr were devised and deployed and, in my opinion, proved frustratingly impractical and inefficient. The digital layout, design, collation and formatting of images and texts, all took place on my personal computer using professional software tools. Difficulties arose in progressively sharing this work for the purposes of review, appraisal and proofing. Eventually I ignored protests and insisted the team review demonstrations I had converted for sharing in Google Documents. But, with only one exception, I could not tempt collaborators to try commenting or editing in that environment. For example, instead of moving the sequence of images dynamically themselves, or even typing suggestions directly into Google Documents, they would post responses in Flickr. To Share and to Hold From the first imaginings of Issue One the need to have as an outcome something in one’s hands was expressed and this objective is apparently shared by all in the haphazart! core as an ongoing imperative. Various printing options have been nominated, discussed and evaluated. In the end one print-on-demand provider was selected on the basis of recommendation. The ethos of haphazart! is clearly not profit-making and conflicts with that of the printing organisation. Presumably to maintain an incentive to purchase the print copy online preview is restricted to the first 15 pages. To satisfy the co-requisite to make available the full 120 pages for free online viewing a second host that specialises in online presentation of publications is also utilised. In this way haphazart! members satisfy their common desires for sharing selected visual content and ideas with an online special interest audience and, for a physical object of art to relish—with all the connotations of preciousness, fetish, talisman, trophy, and bookish notions of haptic pleasure and visual treasure. The irony of publishing a frozen chunk of the ever-flowing Flickriver, whose temporally changing nature is arguably one of its most interesting qualities, is not a consideration. Most of them profess to be simply satisfying their own desire for self expression and would eschew any critical judgement as to whether this anarchic and discursive mode of operation results in a coherent statement about contemporary photographic abstraction. However there remains a distinct possibility that a number of core haphazart!ists aspire to transcend: popular taste; the discernment encouraged in camera clubs; and, the rhetoric of those involved professionally (Bourdieu et al.); and seek to engage with the “awareness of illegitimacy and the difficulties implied by the constitution of photography as an artistic medium” (Chamboredon 130). Incoherence: A Technical Note My personal experience of photography ranges from the filmic to the digital (Holmes, "Bridging Adelaide"). For a number of years I specialised in facsimile graphic reproduction of artwork. In those days I became aware that films were ‘blind’ to the psychophysical affect of some few particular paint pigments. They just could not be reproduced. Even so, as I handled the dozens of images contributed to haphazart!2, converting them from the pixellated place where Flickr exists to the resolution and gamut of the ink based colour space of books, I was surprised at the number of hue values that exist in the former that do not translate into the latter. In some cases the affect is subtle so that judicious tweaking of colour levels or local colour adjustment will satisfy discerning comparison between the screenic original and the ‘soft proof’ that simulates the printed outcome. In other cases a conversion simply does not compute. I am moved to contemplate, along with Harrison and Bartell (op. cit.) just how much of the experience of media in the shared digital space is incomparably new? Acknowledgement Acting on the advice of researchers experienced in cyberethnography (Bruckman; Suler, "Ethics") I have obtained the consent of co-collaborators to comment freely on proceedings that took place in a private forum. They have been given the opportunity to review and suggest changes to the account. References Askin, Dean (aka: dnskct). “Hall of Inappropriate.” Abstract Photos/Discuss/Hall of Inappropriate, 2010. 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www.flickr.com/groups/abstractphotos/discuss/72157623148695254/>. Bourdieu, Pierre, Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, Jean-Claude Chamboredeon, and Dominique Schnapper. Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. 1965. Trans. Shaun Whiteside. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Bruckman, Amy. Studying the Amateur Artist: A Perspective on Disguising Data Collected in Human Subjects Research on the Internet. 2002. 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/ethics_bru_full.html>. Bruns, Axel. “Towards Produsage: Futures for User-Led Content Production.” Proceedings: Cultural Attitudes towards Communication and Technology 2006. Perth: Murdoch U, 2006. 275–84. ———, and Mark Bahnisch. Social Media: Tools for User-Generated Content. 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IntroductionIn 2011, Four Corners — the flagship current affairs program of the Australian national broadcaster, ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) — aired an investigative report on the conditions in Indonesian slaughterhouses. Central to the report was a focus on how Australian cows were being killed for human consumption. Moral outrage ensued. The Federal Government responded with a temporary ban on the live export of cattle to Indonesia. In 2010 the Australian Government initiated legal action in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) opposing Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean, following a sustained period of public opposition. This article pays close attention to expressions of public opposition to the killing of what have come to be referred to as our cows and our whales, and the response of the Federal Government.Australia’s recent history with the live export of farmed animals and its transformation into an anti-whaling nation provides us with a foundation to analyse these contemporary disputes. In contrast to a focus on “Australian cow making” (Fozdar and Spittles 76) during the live export controversy, this article investigates the processes through which the bodies of cows and whales became sites for the mapping of Australian identity and nationhood – in other words, a relational construction of Australianness that we can identify as a form of animal nationalism (Dalziell and Wadiwel). What is at stake are claims about desired national self-image. In what we might consider as part of a history of cows and whales is in many ways a ‘history of people with animals in it” (Davis 551). In other words, these disputes are not really about cows and whales.The Live Export IndustryAustralia is the largest exporter of live farmed animals, primarily sheep and cows, to the Middle East and Southeast Asia respectively (Phillips and Santurtun 309). The live export industry is promoted and supported by the Federal Government, with an explicit emphasis on the conditions experienced by these farmed animals. According to the Government, “Australia leads the world in animal welfare practices … [and] does not tolerate cruelty towards animals and will not compromise on animal welfare standards” (Department of Agriculture and Water Resources). These are strong and specific claims about Australia’s moral compass. What is being asserted is the level of care and concern about how Australia’s farmed animals are raised, transported and killed.There is an implicit relationality here. To be a ‘world leader’ or to claim world’s best practice, there must be some form of moral or ethical measure to judge these practices against. We can locate these more clearly and directly in the follow-up sentence on the above claim: “Our ongoing involvement in the livestock export trade provides an opportunity to influence animal welfare conditions in importing countries” (Department of Agriculture and Water Resources). The enthusiasm expressed in this statement manifests in explicitly seeking to position Australia as an exporter of moral progress (see Caulfield 76). These are cultural claims about us.In its current form the Australian live export industry dates back to the early 1960s, with concerns about the material conditions of farmed animals in destination countries raised from the outset (Caulfield 72; Villanueva Pain 100). In the early 1980s animal activists formed the Australian Federation of Animal Societies to put forward a national unified voice. Protests and political lobbying lead to the formation of a Senate Select Committee on Animal Welfare, reflecting what Gonzalo Villanueva has referred to as a social and political landscape that “appeared increasingly favourable to discussing animal welfare” (Transnational 89-91).The Select Committee’s first report focussed on live export and explicitly mentioned the treatment of Australian farmed animals in the abattoirs of destination countries. The conditions in these facilities were described as being of a lower “standard of animal welfare” to those in Australia (Senate Select Committee on Animal Welfare xiii). These findings directly mirror the expressions of concern in the wake of the 2011 controversy.“A Bloody Business”On 30 May 2011, Four Corners aired a report entitled ‘A Bloody Business’ on the conditions in Indonesian slaughterhouses. The investigation followed-up on footage provided by Animals Australia and Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA Australia). Members from these groups had travelled to Indonesia in order to document conditions in slaughterhouses and prepare briefing notes which were later shared with the ABC. Their aim was to increase public awareness of the conditions Australian farmed cattle faced in Indonesia, provide a broader indictment of the live export industry, and call for an end the practice. The nationwide broadcast which included graphic footage of our cows being killed, enabled broader Australia to participate from the comfort of their own homes (see Della Porta and Diani 177-8).The program generated significant media coverage and public moral outrage (Dalziell and Wadiwel 72). Dr Bidda Jones, Chief Scientist of RSPCA Australia, referred to “28,000 radio stories, 13,000 TV mentions and 3,000 press stories” making it one of the top five national issues in the media for five weeks. An online petition created by the activist organisation GetUp! collected more than 260,000 signatures over a period of three days and $300,000 was raised for campaign advertising (Jones 102). Together, these media reports and protest actions influenced the Federal Government to suspend live exports to Indonesia. A front-page story in The Age described the Federal Government as having “caved in to public and internal party pressure” (Willingham and Allard). In her first public statement about the controversy, Prime Minister Julia Gillard outlined the Government’s intent: “We will be working closely with Indonesia, and with the industry, to make sure we can bring about major change to the way cattle are handled in these slaughter houses” (Willingham and Allard).The Prime Minister’s statement directly echoed the claims made on the Department of Agriculture and Water Resources website introduced above. Implicit is these statements is a perceived ability to bring about “major change” and an assumption that we kill better. Both directly align with claims of leading the world in animal welfare practices and the findings of the 1985 Select Committee report. Further, the controversy itself was positioned as providing an “opportunity to influence animal welfare conditions in importing countries” (Department of Agriculture and Water Resources).Four Corners provided a nationwide platform to influence decision-makers (see Della Porta and Diani 168-9). White, Director of Strategy for Animals Australia, expressed this concisely:We should be killing the animals here under Australian conditions, under our control, and then they should only be shipped as meat products, not live animals. (Ferguson, Doyle, and Worthington)Jones provided more context, describing the suffering experienced by “Australian cattle” in Indonesia as “too much,” especially when “a clear, demonstrated and successful alternative to the live export of animals” was already available (“Broader”; Jones 188). Implicit in these calls for farmed cows to be killed in Australia was an inference to technical and moral progress, evoking Australia’s “national self-image” as “a modern, principled culture” (Dalziell and Wadiwel 84). The clean, efficient and modern processes undertaken in Australia were relationally positioned against the bloody practices conducted in the Indonesian facilities. In other words, we kill cows in a nicer, more humane and better way.Australia and WhalingAustralia has a long and dynamic history with whaling (Salter). A “fervently” pro-whaling nation, the “rapidly growing” local industry went through a modernisation process in the 1950s (Day 19; Kato 484). Operations became "clean and smooth,” and death became "instant, swift and painless”. As with the live export controversy, an inference of a nicer, more humane and better way of killing was central the Australian whaling industry (Kato 484-85). Enthusiastic support for an Australian whaling industry was superseded within three decades by what Charlotte Epstein describes as “a dramatic historical turnabout” (Power 150). In June 1977, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) came to Canberra, and protests were organised across Australia to coincide with the meeting.The IWJ meeting was seen as a political opportunity. An IWC meeting being held in the last English-as-first-language nation with a commercial whaling operation provided an ideal target for the growing anti-whaling movement (Epstein, Power 149). In parallel, the opportunity to make whaling an electoral issue was seen as a priority for locally based activists and organisations (Pash 31). The collective actions of those campaigning against the backdrop of the IWC meeting comprised an array of performances (Tarrow 29). Alongside lobbying delegates, protests were held outside the venue, including the first use of a full-sized replica inflatable sperm whale by anti-whaling activists. See Image 1. The symbol of the whale became a signifier synonymous for the environment movement for decades to follow (see Epstein, Power 110-11). The number of environmental organisations attending exceeded those of any prior IWC meeting, setting in place a practice that would continue for decades to follow (M’Gonigle 150; Pash 27-8).Image 1: Protest at Australia’s last whaling station August 28, 1977. Photo credit: Jonny Lewis Collection.Following the IWC meeting in Canberra, activists packed up their equipment and prepared for the long drive to Albany in Western Australia. Disruption was added to their repertoire (Tarrow 99). The target was the last commercial whaling operation in Australia. Two months later, on August 28, demonstrations were held at the gates of the Cheynes Beach Whaling Company. Two inflatable Zodiac boats were launched, with the aim of positioning themselves between the whales being hunted and the company’s harpoon vessels. Greenpeace was painted on the side — the first protest action in Australia under the organisation’s banner (Pash 93-94).In 1978, Prime Minister Fraser formally announced an Inquiry into the future of whaling in Australia, seeking to position Australia as being on the right side of history, “taking a decisive step forward in the human consciousness” (Epstein, World 313). Underpinning announcement was a (re)purposing of whales bodies as a site for the mapping of relational constructions of Australian identity and nationhood:Many thousands of Australians — and men, women and children throughout the world — have long felt deep concern about the activities of whalers… I abhor any such activity — particularly when it is directed against a species as special and intelligent as the whale.(Qtd. in Frost vii)The actions of those protesting against whaling and the language used by Fraser in announcing the Inquiry signalled Australia’s becoming as the first nation in which “ethical arguments about the intrinsic value of the whale” displaced “scientific considerations of levels of endangerment” (Epstein, Power 150). The idea of taking action for whales had become about more than just saving their lives, it was an ethical imperative for us.Standing Up for (Our) WhalesThe Inquiry into “whales and whaling” provided specific recommendations, which were adopted in full by Prime Minister Fraser:The Inquiry’s central conclusion is that Australian whaling should end, and that, internationally, Australia should pursue a policy of opposition whaling. (Frost 206)The inquiry found that the majority of Australians viewed whaling as “morally wrong” and as a nation we should stand up for whales internationally (Frost 183). There is a direct reference here to the moral values of a civilised community, what Arne Kalland describes as a claim to “social maturity” (130). By identifying itself as a nation on the right side of the issue, Australia was pursuing a position of moral leadership on the world stage. The Whale Protection Act (1980) replaced the Whaling Act (1960). Australia’s policy of opposition to whaling was “pursued both domestically and internationally though the IWC and other organizations” (Day 19).Public opposition to whaling increased with the commencement of Japan’s scientific research whaling program in the Southern Ocean, and the dramatic actions of Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. The Daily Telegraph which ran a series of articles under the banner of “our whales” in June 2005 (see, for example, Hossack; Rehn). The conservative Federal Government embraced the idea, with the Department of the Environment and Heritage website including a “Save Our Whales” page. Six months out from the 2007 federal election, opposition leader Kevin Rudd stated “It's time that Australia got serious when it comes to the slaughter of our whales” (Walters). As a “naturally more compassionate, more properly developed” people, we [Australians] had a duty to protect them (Dalziell and Wadiwel 84).Alongside oft-repeated claims of Australia’s status as a “world leader” and the priority placed on the protection of whales nationally and internationally, saveourwhales.gov.au wristbands were available for order from the government website — at no charge. By wearing one of these wristbands, all Australians could “show [their] support for the protection of whales and dolphins” (Department of the Environment and Heritage). In other words, the wearer could join together with other Australians in making a clear moral and ethical statement about both how much whales mean to us and that we all should stand up for them. The wristbands provided a means to individually and collectively express this is what we do in unobtrusive everyday way.Dramatic actions in the Southern Ocean during the 2008/09 whaling season received a broader audience with the airing of the first season of the reality TV series Whale Wars, which became Animal Planets most viewed program (Robé 94). As with A Bloody Business, Whale Wars provided an opportunity for a manifestly larger number of people to eyewitness the plight of whales (see Epstein, Power 142). Alongside the dramatised representation of the risky and personally sacrificial actions taken by the crew, the attitudes expressed reflected those of Prime Minister Fraser in 1977: protecting special and intelligent whales was the right and civilised thing to do.These sentiments were framed by the footage of activists in the series. For example, in episode four of season two, Lockhart McClean, Captain of the MV Gojira referred to Japanese whalers and their vessels as “evil” and “barbaric”, and their practices outdated. The drama of the series revolved around Sea Shepherd patrolling the Southern Ocean, their attempts to intervene against the Japanese fleet and protect our whales. The clear undercurrent here is a claim of moral progress, situated alongside an enthusiasm to export it. Such sentiments were clearly echoed by Bob Brown, a respected former member of federal parliament and spokesperson for Sea Shepherd: “It’s just a gruesome, bloody, medieval, scene which has no place in this modern world” (Japanese Whaling).On 31 May 2010 the Federal Government initiated proceedings against Japan in the ICJ. Four years later, the Court found in their favour (Nagtzaam, Young and Sullivan).Conclusion, Claims of Moral LeadershipHow the 2011 live export controversy and opposition to Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean have unfolded provide us with an opportunity to explore a number of common themes. As Dalziell and Wadiwell noted with regard to the 2011 live export controversy, our “national self-image” was central (84). Both disputes encompass claims about us about how we want to be perceived. Whereas our cows and whales appear as key players, both disputes are effectively a ‘history of people with animals in it” (Davis 551). In other words, these disputes were not really about the lives of our farmed cows or whales.The Federal Government sought to reposition the 2011 live export controversy as providing (another) opportunity "to influence animal welfare conditions in importing countries,” drawing from our own claimed worlds-best practices (Department of Agriculture and Water Resources). The “solution” put forward by White and Jones solution was for Australian farmed cows to be killed here. Underpinning both was an implicit claim that we kill cows in a nicer, more humane and better way: "Australians are naturally more compassionate, more properly developed; more human” (Dalziell and Wadiwel 84).Similarly, the Federal Government’s pursuit of a position of world-leadership in opposing whaling was rooted in claims of our moral progress as a nation. Having formally recognised the specialness of whales in the 1970s, it was our duty to pursue their protection internationally. We could individually and collectively express national identity on our wrists, through wearing a government-provided saveourwhales.gov.au wristband. Collectively, we would not stand by and let the "gruesome, bloody, medieval” practice of Japanese whaling continue in our waters (“Japanese”). Legal action undertaken in the ICJ was the penultimate pronouncement.In short, expressions of concerns for our cows whales positioned their bodies as sites for the mapping of relational constructions of our identity and nationhood.Author’s NoteFor valuable comments on earlier drafts, I thank Talei Vulatha, Ben Hightower, Scott East and two anonymous referees.References“Broader Ban the Next Step: Animal Group.” Sydney Morning Herald, 8 June 2011. 11 July 2018 <https://www.smh.com.au/environment/conservation/broader-ban-the-next-step-animal-group-20110608-1frsr.html>.Caulfield, Malcolm. Handbook of Australian Animal Cruelty Law. North Melbourne: Animals Australia, 2009.Dalziell, Jacqueline, and Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel. “Live Exports, Animal Advocacy, Race and ‘Animal Nationalism’.” Meat Culture. Ed. Annie Potts. Brill Academic Pub., 2016. 73-89.Day, David. The Whale War. Random House, Inc., 1987.Della Porta, Donatella, and Mario Diani. Social Movements: An Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006.Department of Agriculture and Water Resources. “Live Animal Export Trade.” Canberra: Australian Government, 2015. 15 May 2018 <http://www.agriculture.gov.au/animal/welfare/export-trade/>.Department of the Environment and Heritage. “Save Our Whales.” Canberra, Australian Government, 2007. 31 May 2017 <https://web.archive.org/web/20070205015403/http://www.environment.gov.au/coasts/species/cetaceans/intro.html>.Epstein, Charlotte. The Power of Words in International Relations: Birth of an Anti-Whaling Discourse. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2008.———. “WorldWideWhale. 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Introduction In December 2010, Nespresso, the world’s leading brand of premium-portioned coffee, opened a flagship “boutique” in Sydney’s Pitt Street Mall. This was Nespresso’s fifth boutique opening of 2010, after Brussels, Miami, Soho, and Munich. The Sydney debut coincided with the mall’s upmarket redevelopment, which explains Nespresso’s arrival in the city: strategic geographic expansion is key to the brand’s growth. Rather than panoramic ubiquity, a retail option favoured by brands like McDonalds, KFC and Starbucks, Nespresso opts for iconic, prestigious locations. This strategy has been highly successful: since 2000 Nespresso has recorded year-on-year per annum growth of 30 per cent. This has been achieved, moreover, despite a global financial downturn and an international coffee market replete with brand variety. In turn, Nespresso marks an evolution in the coffee market over the last decade. The Nespresso Story Founded in 1986, Nespresso is the fasting growing brand in the Nestlé Group. Its headquarters are in Lausanne, Switzerland, with over 7,000 employees worldwide. In 2012, Nespresso had 270 boutiques in 50 countries. The brand’s growth strategy involves three main components: premium coffee capsules, “mated” with specially designed machines, and accompanied by exceptional customer service through the Nespresso Club. Each component requires some explanation. Nespresso offers 16 varieties of Grand Crus coffee: 7 espresso blends, 3 pure origin espressos, 3 lungos (for larger cups), and 3 decaffeinated coffees. Each 5.5 grams of portioned coffee is cased in a hermetically sealed aluminium capsule, or pod, designed to preserve the complex, volatile aromas (between 800 and 900 per pod), and prevent oxidation. These capsules are designed to be used exclusively with Nespresso-branded machines, which are equipped with a patented high-pressure extraction system designed for optimum release of the coffee. These machines, of which there are 28 models, are developed with 6 machine partners, and Antoine Cahen, from Ateliers du Nord in Lausanne, designs most of them. For its consumers, members of the Nespresso Club, the capsules and machines guarantee perfect espresso coffee every time, within seconds and with minimum effort—what Nespresso calls the “ultimate coffee experience.” The Nespresso Club promotes this experience as an everyday luxury, whereby café-quality coffee can be enjoyed in the privacy and comfort of Club members’ homes. This domestic focus is a relatively recent turn in its history. Nestlé patented some of its pod technology in 1976; the compatible machines, initially made in Switzerland by Turmix, were developed a decade later. Nespresso S. A. was set up as a subsidiary unit within the Nestlé Group with a view to target the office and fine restaurant sector. It was first test-marketed in Japan in 1986, and rolled out the same year in Switzerland, France and Italy. However, by 1988, low sales prompted Nespresso’s newly appointed CEO, Jean-Paul Gillard, to rethink the brand’s focus. Gillard subsequently repositioned Nespresso’s target market away from the commercial sector towards high-income households and individuals, and introduced a mail-order distribution system; these elements became the hallmarks of the Nespresso Club (Markides 55). The Nespresso Club was designed to give members who had purchased Nespresso machines 24-hour customer service, by mail, phone, fax, and email. By the end of 1997 there were some 250,000 Club members worldwide. The boom in domestic, user-friendly espresso machines from the early 1990s helped Nespresso’s growth in this period. The cumulative efforts by the main manufacturers—Krups, Bosch, Braun, Saeco and DeLonghi—lowered the machines’ average price to around US $100 (Purpura, “Espresso” 88; Purpura, “New” 116). This paralleled consumers’ growing sophistication, as they became increasingly familiar with café-quality espresso, cappuccino and latté—for reasons to be detailed below. Nespresso was primed to exploit this cultural shift in the market and forge a charismatic point of difference: an aspirational, luxury option within an increasingly accessible and familiar field. Between 2006 and 2008, Nespresso sales more than doubled, prompting a second production factory to supplement the original plant in Avenches (Simonian). In 2008, Nespresso grew 20 times faster than the global coffee market (Reguly B1). As Nespresso sales exceeded $1.3 billion AU in 2009, with 4.8 billion capsules shipped out annually and 5 million Club members worldwide, it became Nestlé’s fastest growing division (Canning 28). According to Nespresso’s Oceania market director, Renaud Tinel, the brand now represents 8 per cent of the total coffee market; of Nespresso specifically, he reports that 10,000 cups (using one capsule per cup) were consumed worldwide each minute in 2009, and that increased to 12,300 cups per minute in 2010 (O’Brien 16). Given such growth in such a brief period, the atypical dynamic between the boutique, the Club and the Nespresso brand warrants closer consideration. Nespresso opened its first boutique in Paris in 2000, on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. It was a symbolic choice and signalled the brand’s preference for glamorous precincts in cosmopolitan cities. This has become the design template for all Nespresso boutiques, what the company calls “brand embassies” in its press releases. More like art gallery-style emporiums than retail spaces, these boutiques perform three main functions: they showcase Nespresso coffees, machines and accessories (all elegantly displayed); they enable Club members to stock up on capsules; and they offer excellent customer service, which invariably equates to detailed production information. The brand’s revenue model reflects the boutique’s role in the broader business strategy: 50 per cent of Nespresso’s business is generated online, 30 per cent through the boutiques, and 20 per cent through call centres. Whatever floor space these boutiques dedicate to coffee consumption is—compared to the emphasis on exhibition and ambience—minimal and marginal. In turn, this tightly monitored, self-focused model inverts the conventional function of most commercial coffee sites. For several hundred years, the café has fostered a convivial atmosphere, served consumers’ social inclinations, and overwhelmingly encouraged diverse, eclectic clientele. The Nespresso boutique is the antithesis to this, and instead actively limits interaction: the Club “community” does not meet as a community, and is united only in atomised allegiance to the Nespresso brand. In this regard, Nespresso stands in stark contrast to another coffee brand that has been highly successful in recent years—Starbucks. Starbucks famously recreates the aesthetics, rhetoric and atmosphere of the café as a “third place”—a term popularised by urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg to describe non-work, non-domestic spaces where patrons converge for respite or recreation. These liminal spaces (cafés, parks, hair salons, book stores and such locations) might be private, commercial sites, yet they provide opportunities for chance encounters, even therapeutic interactions. In this way, they aid sociability and civic life (Kleinman 193). Long before the term “third place” was coined, coffee houses were deemed exemplars of egalitarian social space. As Rudolf P. Gaudio notes, the early coffee houses of Western Europe, in Oxford and London in the mid-1600s, “were characterized as places where commoners and aristocrats could meet and socialize without regard to rank” (670). From this sanguine perspective, they both informed and animated the modern public sphere. That is, and following Habermas, as a place where a mixed cohort of individuals could meet and discuss matters of public importance, and where politics intersected society, the eighteenth-century British coffee house both typified and strengthened the public sphere (Karababa and Ger 746). Moreover, and even from their early Ottoman origins (Karababa and Ger), there has been an historical correlation between the coffee house and the cosmopolitan, with the latter at least partly defined in terms of demographic breadth (Luckins). Ironically, and insofar as Nespresso appeals to coffee-literate consumers, the brand owes much to Starbucks. In the two decades preceding Nespresso’s arrival, Starbucks played a significant role in refining coffee literacy around the world, gauging mass-market trends, and stirring consumer consciousness. For Nespresso, this constituted major preparatory phenomena, as its strategy (and success) since the early 2000s presupposed the coffee market that Starbucks had helped to create. According to Nespresso’s chief executive Richard Giradot, central to Nespresso’s expansion is a focus on particular cities and their coffee culture (Canning 28). In turn, it pays to take stock of how such cities developed a coffee culture amenable to Nespresso—and therein lays the brand’s debt to Starbucks. Until the last few years, and before celebrity ambassador George Clooney was enlisted in 2005, Nespresso’s marketing was driven primarily by Club members’ recommendations. At the same time, though, Nespresso insisted that Club members were coffee connoisseurs, whose knowledge and enjoyment of coffee exceeded conventional coffee offerings. In 2000, Henk Kwakman, one of Nestlé’s Coffee Specialists, explained the need for portioned coffee in terms of guaranteed perfection, one that demanding consumers would expect. “In general”, he reasoned, “people who really like espresso coffee are very much more quality driven. When you consider such an intense taste experience, the quality is very important. If the espresso is slightly off quality, the connoisseur notices this immediately” (quoted in Butler 50). What matters here is how this corps of connoisseurs grew to a scale big enough to sustain and strengthen the Nespresso system, in the absence of a robust marketing or educative drive by Nespresso (until very recently). Put simply, the brand’s ascent was aided by Starbucks, specifically by the latter’s success in changing the mainstream coffee market during the 1990s. In establishing such a strong transnational presence, Starbucks challenged smaller, competing brands to define themselves with more clarity and conviction. Indeed, working with data that identified just 200 freestanding coffee houses in the US prior to 1990 compared to 14,000 in 2003, Kjeldgaard and Ostberg go so far as to state that: “Put bluntly, in the US there was no local coffee consumptionscape prior to Starbucks” (Kjeldgaard and Ostberg 176). Starbucks effectively redefined the coffee world for mainstream consumers in ways that were directly beneficial for Nespresso. Starbucks: Coffee as Ambience, Experience, and Cultural Capital While visitors to Nespresso boutiques can sample the coffee, with highly trained baristas and staff on site to explain the Nespresso system, in the main there are few concessions to the conventional café experience. Primarily, these boutiques function as material spaces for existing Club members to stock up on capsules, and therefore they complement the Nespresso system with a suitably streamlined space: efficient, stylish and conspicuously upmarket. Outside at least one Sydney boutique for instance (Bondi Junction, in the fashionable eastern suburbs), visitors enter through a club-style cordon, something usually associated with exclusive bars or hotels. This demarcates the boutique from neighbouring coffee chains, and signals Nespresso’s claim to more privileged patrons. This strategy though, the cultivation of a particular customer through aesthetic design and subtle flattery, is not unique. For decades, Starbucks also contrived a “special” coffee experience. Moreover, while the Starbucks model strikes a very different sensorial chord to that of Nespresso (in terms of décor, target consumer and so on) it effectively groomed and prepped everyday coffee drinkers to a level of relative self-sufficiency and expertise—and therein is the link between Starbucks’s mass-marketed approach and Nespresso’s timely arrival. Starbucks opened its first store in 1971, in Seattle. Three partners founded it: Jerry Baldwin and Zev Siegl, both teachers, and Gordon Bowker, a writer. In 1982, as they opened their sixth Seattle store, they were joined by Howard Schultz. Schultz’s trip to Italy the following year led to an entrepreneurial epiphany to which he now attributes Starbucks’s success. Inspired by how cafés in Italy, particularly the espresso bars in Milan, were vibrant social hubs, Schultz returned to the US with a newfound sensitivity to ambience and attitude. In 1987, Schultz bought Starbucks outright and stated his business philosophy thus: “We aren’t in the coffee business, serving people. We are in the people business, serving coffee” (quoted in Ruzich 432). This was articulated most clearly in how Schultz structured Starbucks as the ultimate “third place”, a welcoming amalgam of aromas, music, furniture, textures, literature and free WiFi. This transformed the café experience twofold. First, sensory overload masked the dull homogeny of a global chain with an air of warm, comforting domesticity—an inviting, everyday “home away from home.” To this end, in 1994, Schultz enlisted interior design “mastermind” Wright Massey; with his team of 45 designers, Massey created the chain’s decor blueprint, an “oasis for contemplation” (quoted in Scerri 60). At the same time though, and second, Starbucks promoted a revisionist, airbrushed version of how the coffee was produced. Patrons could see and smell the freshly roasted beans, and read about their places of origin in the free pamphlets. In this way, Starbucks merged the exotic and the cosmopolitan. The global supply chain underwent an image makeover, helped by a “new” vocabulary that familiarised its coffee drinkers with the diversity and complexity of coffee, and such terms as aroma, acidity, body and flavour. This strategy had a decisive impact on the coffee market, first in the US and then elsewhere: Starbucks oversaw a significant expansion in coffee consumption, both quantitatively and qualitatively. In the decades following the Second World War, coffee consumption in the US reached a plateau. Moreover, as Steven Topik points out, the rise of this type of coffee connoisseurship actually coincided with declining per capita consumption of coffee in the US—so the social status attributed to specialised knowledge of coffee “saved” the market: “Coffee’s rise as a sign of distinction and connoisseurship meant its appeal was no longer just its photoactive role as a stimulant nor the democratic sociability of the coffee shop” (Topik 100). Starbucks’s singular triumph was to not only convert non-coffee drinkers, but also train them to a level of relative sophistication. The average “cup o’ Joe” thus gave way to the latte, cappuccino, macchiato and more, and a world of coffee hitherto beyond (perhaps above) the average American consumer became both regular and routine. By 2003, Starbucks’s revenue was US $4.1 billion, and by 2012 there were almost 20,000 stores in 58 countries. As an idealised “third place,” Starbucks functioned as a welcoming haven that flattened out and muted the realities of global trade. The variety of beans on offer (Arabica, Latin American, speciality single origin and so on) bespoke a generous and bountiful modernity; while brochures schooled patrons in the nuances of terroir, an appreciation for origin and distinctiveness that encoded cultural capital. This positioned Starbucks within a happy narrative of the coffee economy, and drew patrons into this story by flattering their consumer choices. Against the generic sameness of supermarket options, Starbucks promised distinction, in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense of the term, and diversity in its coffee offerings. For Greg Dickinson, the Starbucks experience—the scent of the beans, the sound of the grinders, the taste of the coffees—negated the abstractions of postmodern, global trade: by sensory seduction, patrons connected with something real, authentic and material. At the same time, Starbucks professed commitment to the “triple bottom line” (Savitz), the corporate mantra that has morphed into virtual orthodoxy over the last fifteen years. This was hardly surprising; companies that trade in food staples typically grown in developing regions (coffee, tea, sugar, and coffee) felt the “political-aesthetic problematization of food” (Sassatelli and Davolio). This saw increasingly cognisant consumers trying to reconcile the pleasures of consumption with environmental and human responsibilities. The “triple bottom line” approach, which ostensibly promotes best business practice for people, profits and the planet, was folded into Starbucks’s marketing. The company heavily promoted its range of civic engagement, such as donations to nurses’ associations, literacy programs, clean water programs, and fair dealings with its coffee growers in developing societies (Simon). This bode well for its target market. As Constance M. Ruch has argued, Starbucks sought the burgeoning and lucrative “bobo” class, a term Ruch borrows from David Brooks. A portmanteau of “bourgeois bohemians,” “bobo” describes the educated elite that seeks the ambience and experience of a counter-cultural aesthetic, but without the political commitment. Until the last few years, it seemed Starbucks had successfully grafted this cultural zeitgeist onto its “third place.” Ironically, the scale and scope of the brand’s success has meant that Starbucks’s claim to an ethical agenda draws frequent and often fierce attack. As a global behemoth, Starbucks evolved into an iconic symbol of advanced consumer culture. For those critical of how such brands overwhelm smaller, more local competition, the brand is now synonymous for insidious, unstoppable retail spread. This in turn renders Starbucks vulnerable to protests that, despite its gestures towards sustainability (human and environmental), and by virtue of its size, ubiquity and ultimately conservative philosophy, it has lost whatever cachet or charm it supposedly once had. As Bryant Simon argues, in co-opting the language of ethical practice within an ultimately corporatist context, Starbucks only ever appealed to a modest form of altruism; not just in terms of the funds committed to worthy causes, but also to move thorny issues to “the most non-contentious middle-ground,” lest conservative customers felt alienated (Simon 162). Yet, having flagged itself as an ethical brand, Starbucks became an even bigger target for anti-corporatist sentiment, and the charge that, as a multinational giant, it remained complicit in (and one of the biggest benefactors of) a starkly inequitable and asymmetric global trade. It remains a major presence in the world coffee market, and arguably the most famous of the coffee chains. Over the last decade though, the speed and intensity with which Nespresso has grown, coupled with its atypical approach to consumer engagement, suggests that, in terms of brand equity, it now offers a more compelling point of difference than Starbucks. Brand “Me” Insofar as the Nespresso system depends on a consumer market versed in the intricacies of quality coffee, Starbucks can be at least partly credited for nurturing a more refined palate amongst everyday coffee drinkers. Yet while Starbucks courted the “average” consumer in its quest for market control, saturating the suburban landscape with thousands of virtually indistinguishable stores, Nespresso marks a very different sensibility. Put simply, Nespresso inverts the logic of a coffee house as a “third place,” and patrons are drawn not to socialise and relax but to pursue their own highly individualised interests. The difference with Starbucks could not be starker. One visitor to the Bloomingdale boutique (in New York’s fashionable Soho district) described it as having “the feel of Switzerland rather than Seattle. Instead of velvet sofas and comfy music, it has hard surfaces, bright colours and European hostesses” (Gapper 9). By creating a system that narrows the gap between production and consumption, to the point where Nespresso boutiques advertise the coffee brand but do not promote on-site coffee drinking, the boutiques are blithely indifferent to the historical, romanticised image of the coffee house as a meeting place. The result is a coffee experience that exploits the sophistication and vanity of aspirational consumers, but ignores the socialising scaffold by which coffee houses historically and perhaps naively made some claim to community building. If anything, Nespresso restricts patrons’ contemplative field: they consider only their relationships to the brand. In turn, Nespresso offers the ultimate expression of contemporary consumer capitalism, a hyper-individual experience for a hyper-modern age. By developing a global brand that is both luxurious and niche, Nespresso became “the Louis Vuitton of coffee” (Betts 14). Where Starbucks pursued retail ubiquity, Nespresso targets affluent, upmarket cities. As chief executive Richard Giradot put it, with no hint of embarrassment or apology: “If you take China, for example, we are not speaking about China, we are speaking about Shanghai, Hong Kong, Beijing because you will not sell our concept in the middle of nowhere in China” (quoted in Canning 28). For this reason, while Europe accounts for 90 per cent of Nespresso sales (Betts 15), its forays into the Americas, Asia and Australasia invariably spotlights cities that are already iconic or emerging economic hubs. The first boutique in Latin America, for instance, was opened in Jardins, a wealthy suburb in Sao Paulo, Brazil. In Nespresso, Nestlé has popularised a coffee experience neatly suited to contemporary consumer trends: Club members inhabit a branded world as hermetically sealed as the aluminium pods they purchase and consume. Besides the Club’s phone, fax and online distribution channels, pods can only be bought at the boutiques, which minimise even the potential for serendipitous mingling. The baristas are there primarily for product demonstrations, whilst highly trained staff recite the machines’ strengths (be they in design or utility), or information about the actual coffees. For Club members, the boutique service is merely the human extension of Nespresso’s online presence, whereby product information becomes increasingly tailored to increasingly individualised tastes. In the boutique, this emphasis on the individual is sold in terms of elegance, expedience and privilege. Nespresso boasts that over 70 per cent of its workforce is “customer facing,” sharing their passion and knowledge with Club members. Having already received and processed the product information (through the website, boutique staff, and promotional brochures), Club members need not do anything more than purchase their pods. In some of the more recently opened boutiques, such as in Paris-Madeleine, there is even an Exclusive Room where only Club members may enter—curious tourists (or potential members) are kept out. Club members though can select their preferred Grands Crus and checkout automatically, thanks to RFID (radio frequency identification) technology inserted in the capsule sleeves. So, where Starbucks exudes an inclusive, hearth-like hospitality, the Nespresso Club appears more like a pampered clique, albeit a growing one. As described in the Financial Times, “combine the reception desk of a designer hotel with an expensive fashion display and you get some idea what a Nespresso ‘coffee boutique’ is like” (Wiggins and Simonian 10). Conclusion Instead of sociability, Nespresso puts a premium on exclusivity and the knowledge gained through that exclusive experience. The more Club members know about the coffee, the faster and more individualised (and “therefore” better) the transaction they have with the Nespresso brand. This in turn confirms Zygmunt Bauman’s contention that, in a consumer society, being free to choose requires competence: “Freedom to choose does not mean that all choices are right—there are good and bad choices, better and worse choices. The kind of choice eventually made is the evidence of competence or its lack” (Bauman 43-44). Consumption here becomes an endless process of self-fashioning through commodities; a process Eva Illouz considers “all the more strenuous when the market recruits the consumer through the sysiphian exercise of his/her freedom to choose who he/she is” (Illouz 392). In a status-based setting, the more finely graded the differences between commodities (various places of origin, blends, intensities, and so on), the harder the consumer works to stay ahead—which means to be sufficiently informed. Consumers are locked in a game of constant reassurance, to show upward mobility to both themselves and society. For all that, and like Starbucks, Nespresso shows some signs of corporate social responsibility. In 2009, the company announced its “Ecolaboration” initiative, a series of eco-friendly targets for 2013. By then, Nespresso aims to: source 80 per cent of its coffee through Sustainable Quality Programs and Rainforest Alliance Certified farms; triple its capacity to recycle used capsules to 75 per cent; and reduce the overall carbon footprint required to produce each cup of Nespresso by 20 per cent (Nespresso). This information is conveyed through the brand’s website, press releases and brochures. However, since such endeavours are now de rigueur for many brands, it does not register as particularly innovative, progressive or challenging: it is an unexceptional (even expected) part of contemporary mainstream marketing. Indeed, the use of actor George Clooney as Nespresso’s brand ambassador since 2005 shows shrewd appraisal of consumers’ political and cultural sensibilities. As a celebrity who splits his time between Hollywood and Lake Como in Italy, Clooney embodies the glamorous, cosmopolitan lifestyle that Nespresso signifies. However, as an actor famous for backing political and humanitarian causes (having raised awareness for crises in Darfur and Haiti, and backing calls for the legalisation of same-sex marriage), Clooney’s meanings extend beyond cinema: as a celebrity, he is multi-coded. Through its association with Clooney, and his fusion of star power and worldly sophistication, the brand is imbued with semantic latitude. Still, in the television commercials in which Clooney appears for Nespresso, his role as the Hollywood heartthrob invariably overshadows that of the political campaigner. These commercials actually pivot on Clooney’s romantic appeal, an appeal which is ironically upstaged in the commercials by something even more seductive: Nespresso coffee. References Bauman, Zygmunt. “Collateral Casualties of Consumerism.” Journal of Consumer Culture 7.1 (2007): 25–56. Betts, Paul. “Nestlé Refines its Arsenal in the Luxury Coffee War.” Financial Times 28 Apr. (2010): 14. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Butler, Reg. “The Nespresso Route to a Perfect Espresso.” Tea & Coffee Trade Journal 172.4 (2000): 50. Canning, Simon. “Nespresso Taps a Cultural Thirst.” The Australian 26 Oct. (2009): 28. Dickinson, Greg. “Joe’s Rhetoric: Finding Authenticity at Starbucks.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32.4 (2002): 5–27. Gapper, John. “Lessons from Nestlé’s Coffee Break.” Financial Times 3 Jan. (2008): 9. Gaudio, Rudolf P. “Coffeetalk: StarbucksTM and the Commercialization of Casual Conversation.” Language in Society 32.5 (2003): 659–91. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1962. Illouz, Eva. “Emotions, Imagination and Consumption: A New Research Agenda.” Journal of Consumer Culture 9 (2009): 377–413. Karababa, EmInegül, and GüIIz Ger. “Early Modern Ottoman Coffehouse Culture and the Formation of the Consumer Subject." Journal of Consumer Research 37.5 (2011): 737–60 Kjeldgaard, Dannie, and Jacob Ostberg. “Coffee Grounds and the Global Cup: Global Consumer Culture in Scandinavia”. Consumption, Markets and Culture 10.2 (2007): 175–87. Kleinman, Sharon S. “Café Culture in France and the United States: A Comparative Ethnographic Study of the Use of Mobile Information and Communication Technologies.” Atlantic Journal of Communication 14.4 (2006): 191–210. Luckins, Tanja. “Flavoursome Scraps of Conversation: Talking and Hearing the Cosmopolitan City, 1900s–1960s.” History Australia 7.2 (2010): 31.1–31.16. Markides, Constantinos C. “A Dynamic View of Strategy.” Sloan Management Review 40.3 (1999): 55. Nespresso. “Ecolaboration Initiative Directs Nespresso to Sustainable Success.” Nespresso Media Centre 2009. 13 Dec. 2011. ‹http://www.nespresso.com›. O’Brien, Mary. “A Shot at the Big Time.” The Age 21 Jun. (2011): 16. Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day. New York: Paragon House, 1989. Purpura, Linda. “New Espresso Machines to Tempt the Palate.” The Weekly Home Furnishings Newspaper 3 May (1993): 116. Purpura, Linda. “Espresso: Grace under Pressure.” The Weekly Home Furnishings Newspaper 16 Dec. (1991): 88. Reguly, Eric. “No Ordinary Joe: Nestlé Pulls off Caffeine Coup.” The Globe and Mail 6 Jul. (2009): B1. Ruzich, Constance M. “For the Love of Joe: The Language of Starbucks.” The Journal of Popular Culture 41.3 (2008): 428–42. Sassatelli, Roberta, and Federica Davolio. “Consumption, Pleasure and Politics: Slow Food and the Politico-aesthetic Problematization of Food.” Journal of Consumer Culture 10.2 (2010): 202–32. Savitz, Andrew W. The Triple Bottom Line: How Today’s Best-run Companies are Achieving Economic, Social, and Environmental Success—And How You Can Too. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006. Scerri, Andrew. “Triple Bottom-line Capitalism and the ‘Third Place’.” Arena Journal 20 (2002/03): 57–65. Simon, Bryant. “Not Going to Starbucks: Boycotts and the Out-sourcing of Politics in the Branded World.” Journal of Consumer Culture 11.2 (2011): 145–67. Simonian, Haig. “Nestlé Doubles Nespresso Output.” FT.Com 10 Jun. (2009). 2 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0dcc4e44-55ea-11de-ab7e-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1tgMPBgtV›. Topik, Steven. “Coffee as a Social Drug.” Cultural Critique 71 (2009): 81–106. Wiggins, Jenny, and Haig Simonian. “How to Serve a Bespoke Cup of Coffee.” Financial Times 3 Apr. (2007): 10.

One cannot use the Internet for long without encountering its many dead ends. Despite the adage that everything posted online stays there forever, users quickly discover how fleeting Web content can be. Whether it be the result of missing files, platform moderation, or simply bad code, the Internet constantly displaces its archival contents. Eventual decay is the fate of all digital media, as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun observed in a 2008 article. “Digital media is not always there”, she writes. “We suffer daily frustrations with digital sources that just disappear” (160). When the media content we seek is something trivial like a digitised vacation photo, our inability to retrieve it may merely disappoint us. But what happens when we lose access to Web content about significant cultural events, like viral misinformation about a school shooting? This question takes on great urgency as conspiracy content spreads online at baffling scale and unprecedented speed. Although conspiracy theories have long been a fixture of American culture, the contemporary Internet enables all manner of “information disorder” (Wardle and Derakhshan) to warp media coverage, sway public opinion, and even disrupt the function of government—as seen in the harrowing “Stop the Steal” attack on the U.S. Capitol on 6 January 2021, when rioters attempted to prevent Congress from verifying the results of the 2020 Presidential Election. Scholars across disciplines have sought to understand how conspiracy theories function within our current information ecosystem (Marwick and Lewis; Muirhead and Rosenblum; Phillips and Milner). Much contemporary research focusses on circulation, tracking how conspiracy theories and other types of misinformation travel from fringe Websites to mainstream news outlets such as the New York Times. While undoubtedly valuable, this emphasis on circulation provides an incomplete picture of online conspiracy theories’ lifecycle. How should scholars account for the afterlife of conspiracy content, such as links to conspiracy videos that get taken down for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines? This and related questions about the dead ends of online conspiracy theorising are underexplored in the existing scholarly literature. This essay contends that the Internet’s tendency to decay ought to factor into our models of digital conspiracy theories. I focus on the phenomenon of malfunctional hyperlinks, one of the most common types of disrepair to which the Internet is prone. The product of so-called “link rot”, broken links would appear to signal an archival failure for online conspiracy theories. Yet recent work from rhetorical theorist Jenny Rice suggests that these broken hyperlinks instead function as a rhetorically potent archive in their own right. To understand this uncanny persuasive work, I draw from rhetorical theory to analyse broken links to conspiracy content on Reddit, the popular social news platform, surrounding the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, the worst high school shooting in American history. I show that broken links on the subreddit r/conspiracy, by virtue of their dysfunction, persuade conspiracy theorists that they possess “stigmatized knowledge” (Barkun 26) about the shooting that is being suppressed. Ultimately, I argue that link rot functions as a powerful source of evidence within digital conspiracy theories, imbuing broken links with enduring rhetorical force to validate marginalised belief systems. Link Rot—Archival Failure or Archival Possibility? As is suggested by the prefix ‘inter-’, connectivity has always been one of the Internet’s core functionalities. Indeed, the ability to hyperlink two different texts—and now images, videos, and other media—is so fundamental to navigating the Web that we often take these links for granted until they malfunction. In popular parlance, we then say we have clicked on a “broken” or “dead” link, and without proper care to prevent its occurrence, all URLs are susceptible to dying eventually (much like us mortals). This slow process of decay is known as “link rot”. The precise extent of link rot on the Internet is unknown—and likely unknowable, in practice if not principle—but multiple studies have been conducted to assess the degree of link rot in specific archives. One study from 2015 found that nearly 50% of the URLs cited in 406 library and information science journal articles published between 2008-2012 were no longer accessible (Kumar et al. 59). In the context of governmental Webpages, a 2010 study determined that while only 8% of the URLs sampled in 2008 had link rot, that number more than tripled to 28% of URLs with link rot when sampled only two years later (Rhodes 589-90). More recently, scholars from Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society uncovered an alarming amount of link rot in the online archive of the New York Times, perhaps the most prominent newspaper in the United States: “25% of all links were completely inaccessible, with linkrot becoming more common over time – 6% of links from 2018 had rotted, as compared to 43% of links from 2008 and 72% of links from 1998” (Zittrain et al. 4). Taken together, these data indicate that link rot worsens over time, creating a serious obstacle for the study of Web-based phenomena. Link rot is particularly worrisome for researchers who study online misinformation (including digital conspiracy theories), because the associated links are often more vulnerable to removal due to content moderation or threats of legal action. How should scholars understand the function of link rot within digital conspiracy theories? If our academic focus is on how conspiracy theories circulate, these broken links might seem at best a roadblock to scholarly inquiry or at worst as totally insignificant or irrelevant. After all, users cannot access the material in question; they reach a dead end. Yet recent work by rhetoric scholar Jenny Rice suggests these dead ends might have enduring persuasive power. In her book Awful Archives: Conspiracy Rhetoric and Acts of Evidence, Rice argues that evidence is an “act rather than a thing” and that as a result, we ought to recalibrate what we consider an archive (12, original emphasis). For Rice, archives are more than simple aggregates of documents; instead, they are “ordinary and extraordinary experiences in public life that leave lasting, palpable residues, which then become our sources—our resources—for public discourse” (16-17). These “lasting, palpable residues” are deeply embodied, Rice maintains, for the evidence we gather is “always real in its reference, which is to a felt experience of proximities” (118). For conspiracy theorists in particular, an archive might evoke a profound sense of what Rice memorably describes as “Something intense, something real. Something off. Something fucked up. Something anomalous” (12, original emphasis). This is no less true when an archive fails to function as designed. Hence, for the remainder of this essay, I pivot to analysing how link rot functions within digital conspiracy theories about the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida. As we will see, the shooting galvanised meaningful gun control activism via the March for Our Lives movement, but the event also quickly became fodder for proliferating conspiracy content. From Crisis to Crisis Actors: The Parkland Shooting and Its Aftermath On the afternoon of 14 February 2018, Nikolas Cruz entered his former high school, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and murdered 17 people, including 14 students (Albright). While a horrific event, the Parkland shooting unfortunately marked merely the latest in a long line of similar tragedies in the United States, which has been punctuated by school shootings for decades. But the Parkland shooting stands out among the gruesome lineage of similar tragedies due to the profound resolve of its student-survivors, who agitated for gun policy reform through the March for Our Lives movement. In the weeks following the shooting, a group of Parkland students partnered with Everytown for Gun Safety, a non-profit organisation advocating for gun control, to coordinate a youth-led demonstration against gun violence. Held in the U.S. capitol of Washington, D.C. on 24 March 2018, the March for Our Lives protest was the largest demonstration against gun violence in American history (March for Our Lives). The protest drew around 200,000 participants to Washington; hundreds of thousands of protestors attended an estimated 800 smaller rallies held across the United States (CBS News). Furthermore, likeminded protestors across Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia held allied events to show support for these American students’ cause (Russo). The broader March for Our Lives organisation developed out of the political demonstrations on 24 March 2018; four years later, March for Our Lives continues to be a major force in debates about gun violence in the United States. Although the Parkland shooting inspired meaningful gun control activism, it also quickly provoked a deluge of online conspiracy theories about the tragedy and the people involved, including the student-activists who survived the shooting and spearheaded March for Our Lives. This conspiracy content arrived at breakneck pace: according to an analysis by the Washington Post, the first conspiracy posts appeared on the platform 8chan a mere 47 minutes after the first news reports aired about the shooting (Timberg and Harwell). Later that day, Parkland conspiracy theories migrated from fringe haunts like 8chan to InfoWars, a mainstay of the conspiracy media circuit, where host/founder Alex Jones insinuated that the shooting could be a “false flag” event orchestrated by the Democratic Party (Media Matters Staff). Over the ensuing hours, days, weeks, and months, Parkland conspiracies continued to circulate, receiving mainstream news coverage when conversative activists and politicians publicly espoused conspiracy claims about the shooting (Arkin and Popken). Ultimately, the conspiracist backlash was so persistent and virulent throughout 2018 that PolitiFact, a fact-checking site run by the Poynter Institute, declared the Parkland conspiracy theories their 2018 “Lie of the Year” (Drobnic Holan and Sherman). As with many conspiracy theories, the Parkland conspiracies remixed novel information with longstanding conspiracist tropes. Predominantly, these theories alleged that the Parkland student-activists who founded March for Our Lives were being controlled by outside forces to do their bidding. Although conspiracy theorists diverged in who they named as the shadowy puppet master pulling the strings—was it the Democratic Party? George Soros? Someone else?—all agreed that a secretive agenda was afoot. The most extreme version of this theory held that David Hogg, X González, and other prominent March for Our Lives activists were “crisis actors”. This account envisions Hogg et al. as paid performers playing the part of angry and traumatised students for media coverage about a school shooting that either did not occur as reported or did not occur at all (Yglesias). While unnerving and callous, these crisis actor allegations are not new ideas; rather, they draw from a long history of loosely antisemitic “New World Order” conspiracy theories that see an ulterior motive behind significant historical events (Barkun 39-65). Parkland conspiracy theorists circulated a wide variety of media artifacts—anti-March for Our Lives memes, obscure blog posts, and manipulated video footage of the Parkland students, among other content—to propagate their crisis actor claims. But whether due to platform moderation, threat of legal action, or simply public pressure, much of this conspiracy material is now inaccessible, leaving behind only broken links to conspiracy content that once was. By closely examining these broken links through a rhetorical lens, we can trace the “lasting, palpable residues” (Rice 16) link rot leaves in its wake. “All part of the purge”: Parkland Link Rot on r/conspiracy In this final section, I use the tools of rhetorical analysis to demonstrate how link rot can function as a form of evidence for conspiracy theorists. Rhetorical analysis, when applied to digital infrastructure, requires that we expand our notion of rhetoric beyond intentional human persuasion. As James J. Brown, Jr. argues, digital infrastructure is rhetorical because it determines “what’s possible in a given space”, which may or may not involve human beings (99). Human intentionality still matters in many contexts, of course, but seeing digital infrastructure as a “possibility space” opens up productive new avenues for rhetorical inquiry (Brown, Jr. 72-99). This rhetorical perspective aligns with the method of “affordance analysis” derived from Science and Technology Studies and related fields, which investigates how technologies facilitate certain outcomes for users (Curinga). Much like an affordance analysis, my goal is to illustrate how broken links produce certain rhetorical effects, not to make broader empirical claims about the extent of link rot within Parkland conspiracy theories. The r/conspiracy page on Reddit, the popular social news platform, serves as an ideal site for conducting a rhetorical analysis of broken links. The r/conspiracy subreddit is a preeminent hub for digital conspiracy content, with nearly 1.7 million members as of March 2022 and thousands of active users viewing the site at any given time (r/conspiracy). Beyond its popularity, Reddit’s platform design makes link rot a common feature on r/conspiracy. As a forum-based social media platform, Reddit consists entirely of subreddits dedicated to various topics. In each subreddit, users generate and contribute to threads with relevant content, which often entails posting links to materials hosted elsewhere on the Internet. Importantly, Reddit allows each subreddit to set its own specific community rules for content moderation (so long as these rules themselves abide by Reddit’s general Content Policy), and unlike other profile-based social media platforms, Reddit allows anonymity through the use of pseudonyms. For all of these reasons, one finds a high frequency of link rot on r/conspiracy, as posts linking to external conspiracy media stay up even when the linked content itself disappears from the Web. Consider the following screenshot of an r/conspiracy Parkland post from 23 February 2018, a mere nine days after the Parkland shooting, which demonstrates what conspiracist link rot looks like on Reddit (fig. 1). Titling their thread “A compilation of anomalies from the Parkland shooting that the media won't address. The media wants to control the narrative. Feel free to use this if you find it helpful”, this unknown Redditor frames their post as an intervention against media suppression of suspicious details (“A compilation of anomalies”). Yet the archive this poster hoped to share with likeminded users has all but disintegrated—the poster’s account has been deleted (whether by will or force), and the promised “compilation of anomalies” no longer exists. Instead, the link under the headline sends users to a blank screen with the generic message “If you are looking for an image, it was probably deleted” (fig. 2). Fittingly, the links that the sole commenter assembled to support the original poster are also rife with link rot. Of the five links in the comment, only the first one works as intended; the other four videos have been removed from Google and YouTube, with corresponding error messages informing users that the linked content is inaccessible. Fig. 1: Parkland Link Rot on r/conspiracy. (As a precaution, I have blacked out the commenter’s username.) Fig. 2: Error message received when clicking on the primary link in Figure 1. Returning to Jenny Rice’s theory of “evidentiary acts” (173), how might the broken links in Figure 1 be persuasive despite their inability to transport users to the archive in question? For conspiracy theorists who believe they possess “stigmatized knowledge” (Barkun 26) about the Parkland shooting, link rot paradoxically serves as powerful validation of their beliefs. The unknown user who posted this thread alleges a media blackout of sorts, one in which “the media wants to control the narrative”. This claim, if true, would be difficult to verify. Interested users would have to scour media coverage of Parkland to assess whether the media have ignored the “compilation of anomalies” the poster insists they have uncovered and then evaluate the significance of those oddities. But link rot here produces a powerful evidentiary shortcut: the alleged “compilation of anomalies” cannot be accessed, seemingly confirming the poster’s claims to have secretive information about the Parkland shooting that the media wish to suppress. Indeed, what better proof of media censorship than seeing links to professed evidence deteriorate before your very eyes? In a strange way, then, it is through objective archival failure that broken links function as potent subjective evidence for Parkland conspiracy theories. Comments about Parkland link rot elsewhere on r/conspiracy further showcase how broken links can validate conspiracy theorists’ marginalised belief systems. For example, in a thread titled “Searching for video of Parkland shooting on bitchute”, a Redditor observes, “Once someone gives the link watch it go poof”, implying that links to conspiracy content disappear due to censorship by an unnamed force (“Searching for video”). That nearly everything else on this particular thread suffers from link rot—the original poster, the content of their post, and most of the other comments have since been deleted—seems only to confirm the commentor’s ominous prediction. In another thread about a since-deleted YouTube video supposedly “exposing” Parkland students as crisis actors, a user notes, “You can tell there’s an agenda with how quickly this video was removed by YouTube” (“Video Exposing”). Finally, in a thread dedicated to an alleged “Social Media Purge”, Redditors share strategies for combating link rot, such as downloading conspiracy materials and backing them up on external hard drives. The original poster warns their fellow users that even r/conspiracy is not safe from censorship, for removal of content about Parkland and other conspiracies is “all part of the purge” (“the coming Social Media Purge”). In sum, these comments suggest that link rot on r/conspiracy persuades users that their ideas and their communities are under threat, further entrenching their conspiratorial worldviews. I have argued in this article that link rot has a counterintuitive rhetorical effect: in generating untold numbers of broken links, link rot supplies conspiracy theorists with persuasive evidence for the validity of their beliefs. These and other dead ends on the Internet are significant yet understudied components of digital conspiracy theories that merit greater scholarly attention. Needless to say, I can only gesture here to the sheer scale of dead ends within online conspiracy communities on Reddit and elsewhere. Future research ought to trace other permutations of these dead ends, unearthing how they persuade users from beyond the Internet’s grave. References “A compilation of anomalies from the Parkland shooting that the media won't address. The media wants to control the narrative. Feel free to use this if you find it helpful.” Reddit. <https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/7ztc9l/a_compilation_of_anomalies_from_the_parkland/>. Albright, Aaron. “The 17 Lives Lost at Douglas High.” Miami Herald 21 Feb. 2018.<https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/broward/article201139254.html>. Arkin, Daniel, and Ben Popken. “How the Internet’s Conspiracy Theorists Turned Parkland Students into ‘Crisis Actors’.” NBC News 21 Feb. 2018. <https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/how-internet-s-conspiracy-theorists-turned-parkland-students-crisis-actors-n849921>. 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IntroductionThe popularity of social networking sites (SNSs) bears witness to thriving movement protests worldwide. The development of new hardware technologies such as mobile devices and digital cameras, in particular, has fast enhanced visual communications among users that help document and broadcast contemporary social movements. Using social media with these technologies thus presents new opportunities for grassroots social movement organisations (SMOs) and activist groups to become narrators of their activist lives, and to promote solidarity and recognition for advancing varied civic and political agendas. With the case of a student activist group that led and organised a 10-day occupation protest in Hong Kong, this article examines the idea of new media-savvy SMOs as political curators that employ SNS platforms to (co-)create digital narratives at large-scale movement protests. Invoking the concepts of curation and choreography, it highlights how these processes can work together to encourage contentious engagement and collaboration in contemporary social movements.The New Media-Savvy SMO as Political CuratorWhereas traditional social movement studies stressed the importance of pre-existing social networks and organisational structures for collective action, developments in new information and communication technologies (ICTs) challenge the common theories of how people are drawn into and participate in social movements. In recent years, a spate of research has particularly emphasised the ability of individuals and small groups to self-organise on the Internet (e.g. Rheingold). Lately, observing the use of SNSs such as Facebook and Twitter in contemporary social movements, work in this area has focused on how SNSs enable movement diffusion through personal networks and individuals’ online activities even without either the aid or the oversight of an organisation (e.g. Shirky).However, horizontal activism self-organised by atomised new media users seems insufficient as an explanation of how many recent protest movements achieved their high tides. While the flourishing literature shows writers have correctly centred their study on the changing dynamics in control over information and the growing importance of individual users’ contributions, it fails to account for the crucial role that SMOs continue to play. In fact, recent studies consistently observe the continuing importance of SMOs in mobilising and coordinating collective actions in online environments (Bimber, Flanagin, and Stohl, Collective). Whereas new ICTs have provided activist groups with the instrument to deal with their contentious activities with less cueing and leadership from conventional institutionalised structures, SMOs have created their own new media resources. Nowadays, a significant percentage of protest participants have received their information from online platforms that are run by or affiliated with these organisations. The critical questions remain about the kinds of communication methods they utilise to activate and integrate independent activists’ networks and participation, especially in emerging social media environments.Unfortunately, existing research tends to overlook the discursive potentials and cultural dimensions in online activism while emphasising the cost-effectiveness and organisational function of new ICTs. In particular, social movement and new media scholars merely attended to the ways in which digital media enable widescale, relatively un-coordinated contributions to repositories of resources for networks of activists and interest groups, as SNS applications stress the importance of user participation, openness, and network effects in the processes of content production and sharing. However, the mere existence or even “surplus” (Shirky 27) of “second-order communal goods” (Bimber, Flanagin, and Stohl, “Reconceptualizing” 372)—a collection of resources created collectively but without a bounded community, through video-posting, tagging, and circulation practices engaged in by individuals—does not accidentally result in critical publics that come to take part in political activism. Rather, social movements are, above all, the space for manifesting ideas, choices, and a collective will, in which people produce their own history through their cultural creations and social struggles (Touraine). As such, the alteration of meaning, the struggle to define the situation, and the discursive practices carried out within a social movement are all major aspects of social movements and change (Melucci).Indeed, SMOs and marginalised communities worldwide have increasingly learnt the ability to become narrators of their activist and community lives, and to express solidarity and recognition afforded through technology adoption. The recent proliferation of social media applications and mobile digital technologies has allowed activist groups to create and distribute their own stories regarding concrete actions, ongoing campaigns, and thematic issues of protest movements on more multimedia platforms. In order to advance political ideas and collective action frames, they may bring together a variety of online content in such a way that the collated materials offer a commentary on a subject area by articulating and negotiating new media artefacts, while also inviting responses. Therefore, not only are the new media channels for activist communication comparatively inexpensive, but they also provide for a richer array of content and the possibility of greater control by SMOs over its (re-)creation, maintenance, and distribution for potential digital narrating. To understand how digital narrating takes place in contemporary protest movements with SNSs, we now turn to two analytic concepts—curation and choreography.Social Media Content Curation and Choreography Curation, as a new media practice, involves finding, categorising, and organising relevant online content on specific issues. For instance, museums and libraries may have curators to select and feature digital items for collection and display, improving the types of information accessible to a public audience. In protest movements, SMOs and political actors may also curate peer-produced content on SNS platforms so as to filter and amplify useful information for mobilising collective action. In fact, this process by SMOs and political actors is particularly important, as it helps sort and draw timely attention to these information sources, especially at times when users are faced with a large amount of noise created by millions of producers (Bennett, Segerberg, and Walker). More importantly, not only does content curating entail the selection and preservation of online materials that may facilitate collective action, but it may also involve the (re-)presentation of selected content by telling stories not being told or by telling existing stories in a different way (Fotopoulou and Couldry). In contrast to professional collecting, it is a much more deliberate process, one which clearly articulates and puts forwards (opportunities for) new meanings or new understanding of a subject (Franks). For example, when new media content is re-posted or shared in its original form but in a new context, digital narrating occurs as it may result in a new or additional layer of meaning (Baym and Shah). Therefore, more than merely expending information resources available to activists, the power of curation can be understood primarily as discursive, as users may pick up particular versions of reality in interpreting social issues and protest movements (Bekkers, Moody, and Edwards).Moreover, nowadays, social media curating is not restricted to text but also includes image and video streaming, as the development of mobile devices and digital cameras has facilitated and enhanced instant communication and information retrieval almost regardless of location. The practice of content curating with SNSs may also involve the process of choreographing with various social media modules, such as posting a series of edited pictures under an overarching schema and organising user-generated photos into an album that suggests a particular theme. Rather than simply using a single visual item designed to tell a story, the idea of choreographing is thus concerned with how curated items are seen and experienced from the users’ perspectives as it “allows curators not just to expose elements of a story but to tell a structured tale with the traditional elements of beginning, middle and end” (Franks 288).In practice, the implementation of choreography can be envisioned to bring together the practice of content curating and that of enhancing and connecting contentious engagement at protest movements. For example, when SMOs make use of images and video to help frame an issue in a more advanced way by sharing a picture with a comment added on Facebook, they may at once, whether consciously or unconsciously, suggest possible endorsement to the selected content and/or the source—may it be that of an individual user or a formal organisation—while drawing attention to the image and circulating it beyond the original network for which it was posted (Bennett, Segerberg, and Walker). As such, by posting pictures with captions and sharing user-generated photos that do not belong to the SMO but are produced by other users, curating and choreographing with social media content can create a temporary space for practicing mutual recognition and extending the relationship between the SMO and the larger public. Combined, they may therefore “entail the creation of norms and boundaries in particular user communities and their platforms” (Bennett, Segerberg, and Walker 239).This article examines the ways in which a new media-savvy SMO employed SNS platforms to (co-)create digital narratives, with the case of the 2012 Anti-National Education Movement in Hong Kong. By highlighting how social media content curating and choreographing may work together to encourage engagement and collaboration at large-scale protests, we can better understand how emerging SNS-enabled affordances can be translated into concrete contentious activities, as well as the discursive aspects and cultural expressions of using new media platforms and digital technologies in contemporary protest movements.Digital Narrating for Grassroots Mobilisation Since 2010, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government has undertaken “national education” curriculum reform. However, the worry about mainland-Chinese style national education in schools brought people out to defend values that were held dear in Hong Kong. Scholarism, a new media-savvy SMO founded by about 20 secondary school students in May 2011, became the first pressure group formed against the “Moral and National Education” curriculum and became the leading activist group. On 30 August 2012, about 50 members and supporters of Scholarism started occupying the public area in front of the government’s headquarters, while three of its members went on a hunger strike. At the same time, Scholarism made active use of Facebook to undertake grassroots mobilisation, prompting both online activism and offline participation. On 7 September, over 120,000 people went to Occupy Headquarters. The next day, the Chief Executive, C. Y. Leung, succumbed to the pressure and declared that the curriculum would not be imposed in Hong Kong schools. In order to initiate a grassroots mobilisation, upon the beginning of Occupy Headquarters, Scholarism carried out the new media practice of telling the story of the student hunger strikers on Facebook to create a “moral shock” (Jasper 106) among the general public. On the first day of the occupation protest, 30 August, a poster on the hunger strike was released by Scholarism on its Facebook page. Instead of providing detailed information about the protest movement, this poster was characterised by the pictures of the three student hunger strikers. The headline message simply stated “We have started the hunger strike.” This poster was very popular among Facebook users; it accumulated more than 16,000 likes.By appealing to the hardships and sufferings of the three student hunger strikers, more photos were uploaded to narrate the course of the hunger strike and the occupation protest. In particular, pictures with captions added were posted on Facebook every couple of hours to report on the student hunger strikers’ latest situation. Although the mobilising power of these edited pictures did not come from their political ideology or rational argumentation, they sought to appeal to the “martyr-hood” of the student activists. Soon thereafter, as the social media updates of the student hunger strikers spread, feelings of shock and anger grew rapidly. Most of the comments that were posted under the updates and photos of the student hunger strikers on Scholarism’s Facebook page protested against the government’s brutality.In addition, as the movement grew, Scholarism extended the self-reporting activities on Facebook from members to non-members. For instance, it frequently (self-)reported on the amount of people joining the movement days and nights. This was especially so on 7 September, when Scholarism uploaded multiple photos and text messages to report on the physical movement of the 120,000 people. As a movement strategy, the display of images of protests and rallies on the Internet can help demonstrate the legitimacy, unity, numbers, and commitment of people supporting the movement goals (Carty and Onyett). Curating and choreographing with protest images on Facebook therefore facilitated the symbolic interactions and emotional exchanges among activists for maintaining movement solidarity and consolidating activist identity.To demonstrate the public support for its organisation and the movement, Scholarism extensively reported on its own, as well as other, protest activities and efforts on Facebook against the introduction of the “Moral and National Education” curriculum, creating unprecedented parallel public records of these events. In fact, throughout the entire movement protest, Scholarism took tight photo records of protest activities, systematically organised them into albums, and uploaded them onto Facebook every day between 30 August and 8 September.Content Co-Creation for Counter-Hegemonic ExpressionsFrom a (neo-)Gramscian perspective, counter-hegemony is often embedded and embodied in music, novels, drama, movies, and so on (Boggs). An example of counter-hegemony in the traditional media is a documentary that questions the government’s involvement in a war (Cohen). Therefore, popular culture in the media may help foster counter-hegemony on the terrain of civil society in preparation for political change (Pratt). For Chinese communities in East Asia, pop music, for example, had played a significant role in organising patriotic feelings in mass protest events, such as the Tiananmen demonstrations of 1989 and the many subsequent protests in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and elsewhere against the violence of the Beijing government (Chow 153). During the occupation protest, Facebook was turned into an open and flexible discursive space, in which cutting-edge counter-hegemonic narratives were produced, distributed, and expressed. Scholarism and many individual activists adopted the social media platform to (co-)create activists’ discourses and knowledge in order to challenge the dominant political and cultural codes (Melucci). An example is a poster created by Scholarism, posted on its Facebook page on 4 September. The title message of this poster is: “This is not the government headquarters. This is our CIVIC SQUARE. Come and occupy!” This message represents a discursive intervention that seeks to “illuminate the limits of normative discourses of knowledge and power” (Lane 138). It did so by replacing the original, official name and meaning of the government headquarters as well as its authority with the counter-hegemonic idea of “civic square,” a term developed and coined by Scholarism during the occupation protest to represent the public space in front of the headquarters.Moreover, the Facebook page of Scholarism was by no means the only source of content out of which counter-hegemonic knowledge and discourses were produced. Conversely, most of the new media artefacts observed on the Facebook page of Scholarism were originally created by and posted on, and therefore re-posted and shared from, the Facebook pages of other individual or group users. They are in forms of text, picture, video, and the like that sought to undermine the legitimacy of the Hong Kong government, ridicule the rationale of the “Moral and National Education” curriculum, and discredit figures in the opposition.An example is a cartoon made by an individual user and re-posted on the Facebook page of Scholarism on 2 September, the day before schools restarted in Hong Kong after the summer break. This cartoon features a schoolboy in his school uniform, who is going to school with a bunch of identical locks tied to his head. The title message is: “School begins, keep your brain safe.” This cartoon was created to ridicule the rationale of the introduction of the “Moral and National Education” by “making visible the underlying and hidden relations of power on which the smooth operation of government repression depends” (Lane 136).Another new media artefact re-posted on the Facebook page of Scholarism was originally created by a well-known Hong Kong cartoon painter of a major local newspaper. This cartoon sought to humanise the student activists and to condemn the brutality of the Hong Kong government. It paints an imagined situation in which a public conversation between the Secretary for Education, Hak-kim Eddie Ng, and the three students on the hunger strike takes place. In this cartoon, Ng is cast as the wholesaler of the “Moral and National Education” curriculum. Holding a bottle of liquid in his hand, he says to the students: “This is the tears of the chief executive from last night. Kids, should you all go home now?”Thus, counter-hegemonic expressions did not flow unidirectionally from Scholarism to the society at large. The special role of Scholarism was indeed to curate and choreograph new media artefacts by employing social media modules such as re-posting and sharing user-generated content. In so doing, it facilitated the mobilisation of the occupation protest and instant collaboration, as it connected scattered activities, turned them into a collective, and branded it with a common identity, conviction, and/or purpose.ConclusionThis article has briefly looked at the case of a new media-savvy SMO in Hong Kong as an example of how activist groups can become political curators at large-scale protest events. In particular, it highlights the concepts of curation and choreography in explaining how emerging SNS-enabled affordances can be translated into concrete contentious activities. This article argues that, rather than simply producing and disseminating content on SNS platforms, SMOs today have learnt to actively construct stories about protest movements with social media modules such as (re-)posting edited pictures and sharing user-generated photos in order to mobilise effective political interventions and sustain a vibrant participatory culture.ReferencesBaym, Geoffrey, and Chirag Shah. “Circulating Struggle: The On-Line Flow of Environmental Advocacy Clips from the Daily Show and the Colbert Report.” Information Communication & Society 14.7 (2011): 1017–38. Bekkers, Victor, Rebecca Moody, and Arthur Edwards. “Micro-Mobilization, Social Media and Coping Strategies: Some Dutch Experiences.” Policy and Internet 3.4 (2011): 1–29. Bennett, W. Lance, Alexandra Segerberg, and Shawn Walker. “Organization in the Crowd: Peer Production in Large-Scale Networked Protests.” Information, Communication & Society 17.2 (2014): 232–60. Bimber, Bruce, Andrew J. 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Introduction It is now commonplace for babies to begin their lives inhabiting media environments characterised by the presence, distribution, and mobility of digital devices and screens. Such arrangements can be traced, in part, to the birth of a new regime of mobile and touchscreen media beginning with the release of the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010, which stimulated a surge in household media consumption, underpinned by broadband and wireless Internet infrastructures. Research into these conditions of ambient mediation at the beginnings of life, however, is currently dominated by medical and educational literature, largely removed from media studies approaches that seek to understand the everyday contexts of babies using media. Putting aside discourses of promise or peril familiar to researchers of children’s media (Buckingham; Postman), this paper draws on ongoing research in both domestic and social media settings exploring infants’ everyday encounters and entanglements with mobile media and communication technologies. The paper identifies the ways infants’ mobile communication is assembled and distributed through touchscreen interfaces, proxy parent users, and commercial software sorting. It argues that within these interfacial, intermediary, and interactive contexts, we can conceptualise infants’ communicative agency through an emerging repertoire of techniques: accidental, assisted and automated. This assemblage of infant communication recognises that children no longer live with but in media (Deuze), which underscores the impossibility of a path of media resistance found in medical discourses of ‘exposure’ and restriction, and instead points to the need for critical and ethical responses to these immanent conditions of infant media life. Background and Approach Infants, understandably, have largely been excluded from analyses of mobile mediality given their historically limited engagement with or capacity to use mobile media. Yet, this situation is undergoing change as mobile devices become increasingly prominent in children’s homes (OfCom; Rideout), and as touchscreen interfaces lower thresholds of usability (Buckleitner; Hourcade et al.). The dominant frameworks within research addressing infants and media continue to resonate with long running and widely circulated debates in the study of children and mass media (Wartella and Robb), responding in contradictory ways to what is seen as an ever-increasing ‘technologization of childhood’ (McPake, Plowman and Stephen). Education research centres on digital literacy, emphasising the potential of mobile computing for these future digital learners, labourers, and citizens (McPake, Plowman and Stephen). Alternatively, health research largely positions mobile media within the rubric of ‘screen time’ inherited from older broadcast models, with paediatric groups continuing to caution parents about the dangers of infants’ ‘exposure’ to electronic screens (Strasburger and Hogan), without differentiating between screen types or activities. In turn, a range of digital media channels seek to propel or profit from infant media culture, with a number of review sites, YouTube channels and tech blogs promoting or surveying the latest gadgets and apps for babies. Within media studies, research is beginning to analyse the practices, conceptions and implications of digital interfaces and content for younger children. Studies are, for example, quantifying the devices, activities, and time spent by young children with mobile devices (Ofcom; Rideout), reviewing the design and marketing of children’s mobile application software products (e.g. Shuler), analysing digital content shared about babies on social media platforms (Kumar & Schoenebeck; Morris), and exploring emerging interactive spaces and technologies shaping young children’s ‘postdigital’ play (Giddings; Jayemanne, Nansen and Apperley). This paper extends this growing area of research by focusing specifically on infants’ early encounters, contexts, and configurations of mobile mediality, offering some preliminary analysis of an emerging repertoire of mobile communication techniques: accidental, assisted, and automated. That is, through infants playing with devices and accidentally activating them; through others such as parents assisting use; and through software features in applications that help to automate interaction. This analysis draws from an ongoing research project exploring young children’s mobile and interactive media use in domestic settings, which is employing ethnographic techniques including household technology tours and interviews, as well as participant observation and demonstrations of infant media interaction. To date 19 families, with 31 children aged between 0 and 5, located in Melbourne, Australia have participated. These participating families are largely homogeneous and privileged; though are a sample of relatively early and heavy adopters that reveal emerging qualities about young children’s changing media environments and encounters. This approach builds on established traditions of media and ethnographic research on technology consumption and use within domestic spaces (e.g. Mackay and Ivey; Silverstone and Hirsch), but turns to the digital media encountered by infants, the geographies and routines of these encounters, and how families mediate these encounters within the contexts of home life. This paper offers some preliminary findings from this research, drawing mostly from discussions with parents about their babies’ use of digital, mobile, and touchscreen media. In this larger project, the domestic and family research is accompanied by the collection of online data focused on the cultural context of, and content shared about, infants’ mobile media use. In this paper I report on social media analysis of publicly shared images tagged with #babyselfie queried from Instagram’s API. I viewed all publicly shared images on Instagram tagged with #babyselfie, and collected the associated captions, comments, hashtags, and metadata, over a period of 48 hours in October 2014, resulting in a dataset of 324 posts. Clearly, using this data for research purposes raises ethical issues about privacy and consent given the posts are being used in an unintended context from which they were originally shared; something that is further complicated by the research focus on young children. These issues, in which the ease of extracting online data using digital methods research (Rogers), needs to be both minimised and balanced against the value of the research aims and outcomes (Highfield and Leaver). To minimise risks, captions and comments cited in this paper have been de-identified; whist the value of this data lies in complementing and contextualising the more ethnographically informed research, despite perceptions of incompatibility, through analysis of the wider cultural and mediated networks in which babies’ digital lives are now shared and represented. This field of cultural production also includes analysis of examples of children’s software products from mobile app stores that support baby image capture and sharing, and in particular in this paper discussion of the My Baby Selfie app from the iTunes App Store and the Baby Selfie app from the Google Play store. The rationale for drawing on these multiple sources of data within the larger project is to locate young children’s digital entanglements within the diverse places, platforms and politics in which they unfold. This research scope is limited by the constraints of this short paper, however different sources of data are drawn upon here in order to identify, compare, and contextualise the emerging themes of accidental, assisted, and automated. Accidental Media Use The domestication and aggregation of mobile media in the home, principally laptops, mobile phones and tablet computers has established polymediated environments in which infants are increasingly surrounded by mobile media; in which they often observe their parents using mobile devices; and in which the flashing of screens unsurprisingly draws their attention. Living within these ambient media environments, then, infants often observe, find and reach for mobile devices: on the iPad or whatever, then what's actually happening in front of them, then naturally they'll gravitate towards it. These media encounters are animated by touchscreens interfaces that are responsive to the gestural actions of infants. Conversely, touchscreen interfaces drive attempts to swipe legacy media screens. Underscoring the nomenclature of ‘natural user interfaces’ within the design and manufacturer communities, screens lighting up through touch prompts interest, interaction, and even habituation through gestural interaction, especially swiping: It's funny because when she was younger she would go up the T.V. and she would try swiping to turn the channel.They can grab it and start playing with it. It just shows that it's so much part of their world … to swipe something. Despite demonstrable capacities of infants to interact with mobile screens, discussions with parents revealed that accidental forms of media engagement were a more regular consequence of these ambient contexts, interfacial affordances and early encounters with mobile media. It was not uncommon for infants to accidentally swipe and activate applications, to temporarily lock the screen, or even to dial contacts: He didn't know the password, and he just kept locking it … find it disabled for 15 minutes.If I've got that on YouTube, they can quite quickly get on to some you know [video] … by pressing … and they don't do it on purpose, they're just pushing random buttons.He does Skype calls! I think he recognizes their image, the icon. Then just taps it and … Similarly, in the analysis of publicly shared images on Instagram tagged with #babyselfie, there were instances in which it appeared infants had accidentally taken photos with the cameraphone based on the image content, photo framing or descriptions in the caption. Many of these photos showed a baby with an arm in view reaching towards the phone in a classic trope of a selfie image; others were poorly framed shots showing parts of baby faces too close to the camera lens suggesting they accidentally took the photograph; whilst most definitive was many instances in which the caption of the image posted by parents directly attributed the photographic production to an infant: Isabella's first #babyselfie She actually pushed the button herself! My little man loves taking selfies lol Whilst, then, the research identified many instances in which infants accidentally engaged in mobile media use, sometimes managing to communicate with an unsuspecting interlocutor, it is important to acknowledge such encounters could not have emerged without the enabling infrastructure of ambient media contexts and touchscreen interfaces, nor observed without studying this infrastructure utilising materially-oriented ethnographic perspectives (Star). Significantly, too, was the intermediary role played by parents. With parents acting as intermediaries in household environments or as proxy users in posting content on their behalf, multiple forms of assisted infant communication were identified. Assisted Media Use Assisted communication emerged from discussions with parents about the ways, routines, and rationale for making mobile media available to their children. These sometimes revolved around keeping their child engaged whilst they were travelling as a family – part of what has been described as the pass-back effect – but were more frequently discussed in terms of sharing and showing digital content, especially family photographs, and in facilitating infant mediated communication with relatives abroad: they love scrolling through my photos on my iPhone …We quite often just have them [on Skype] … have the computers in there while we're having dinner … the laptop will be there, opened up at one end of the table with the family here and there will be my sister having breakfast with her family in Ireland … These forms of parental mediated communication did not, however, simply situate or construct infants as passive recipients of their parents’ desires to make media content available or their efforts to establish communication with extended family members. Instead, the research revealed that infants were often active participants in these processes, pushing for access to devices, digital content, and mediated communication. These distributed relations of agency were expressed through infants verbal requests and gestural urging; through the ways parents initiated use by, for example, unlocking a device, preparing software, or loading an application, but then handed them over to infants to play, explore or communicate; and through wider networks of relations in which others including siblings, acted as proxies or had a say in the kinds of media infants used: she can do it, once I've unlocked … even, even with iView, once I'm on iView she can pick her own show and then go to the channel she wants to go to.We had my son’s birthday and there were some photos, some footage of us singing happy birthday and the little one just wants to watch it over and over again. She thinks it's fantastic watching herself.He [sibling] becomes like a proxy user … with the second one … they don't even need the agency because of their sibling. Similarly, the assisted communication emerging from the analysis of #babyselfie images on Instagram revealed that parents were not simply determining infant media use, but often acting as proxies on their behalf. #Selfie obsessed baby. Seriously though. He won't stop. Insists on pressing the button and everything. He sees my phone and points and says "Pic? Pic?" I've created a monster lol. In sharing this digital content on social networks, parents were acting as intermediaries in the communication of their children’s digital images. Clearly they were determining the platforms and networks where these images were published online, yet the production of these images was more uncertain, with accidental self-portraits taken by infants suggesting they played a key role in the circuits of digital photography distribution (van Dijck). Automated Media Use The production, archiving, circulation and reception of these images speaks to larger assemblages of media in which software protocols and algorithms are increasingly embedded in and help to configure everyday life (e.g. Chun; Gillespie), including young children’s media lives (Ito). Here, software automates process of sorting and shaping information, and in doing so both empowers and governs forms of infant media conduct. The final theme emerging from the research, then, is the identification of automated forms of infant mobile media use enabled through software applications and algorithmic operations. Automated techniques of interaction emerged as part of the repertoire of infant mobile mediality and communication through observations and discussions during the family research, and through surveying commercial software applications. Within family discussions, parents spoke about the ways digital databases and applications facilitated infant exploration and navigation. These included photo galleries stored on mobile devices, as well as children’s Internet television services such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s catch-up online TV service, iView, which are visually organised and easily scrollable. In addition, algorithmic functions for sorting, recommending and autoplay on the video-sharing platform YouTube meant that infants were often automatically delivered an ongoing stream of content: They just keep watching it [YouTube]. So it leads on form the other thing. Which is pretty amazing, that's pretty interactive.Yeah, but the kids like, like if they've watched a YouTube clip now, they'll know to look down the next column to see what they want to play next … you get suggestions there so. Forms of automated communication specifically addressing infants was also located in examples of children’s software products from mobile app stores: the My Baby Selfie app from the iTunes App Store and the Baby Selfie app from the Google Play store. These applications are designed to support baby image capture and sharing, promising to “allow your baby to take a photo of him himself [sic]” (Giudicelli), based on automated software features that use sounds and images to capture a babies attention and touch sensors to activate image capture and storage. In one sense, these applications may appear to empower infants to participate in the production of digital content, namely selfies, yet they also clearly distribute this agency with and through mobile media and digital software. Moreover, they imply forms of conduct, expectations and imperatives around the possibilities of infant presence in a participatory digital culture. Immanent Ethic and Critique Digital participation typically assumes a degree of individual agency in deciding what to share, post, or communicate that is not typically available to infants. The emerging communicative practices of infants detailed above suggests that infants are increasingly connecting, however this communicative agency is distributed amongst a network of ambient devices, user-friendly interfaces, proxy users, and software sorting. Such distributions reflect conditions Deuze has noted, that we do not live with but in media. He argues this ubiquity, habituation, and embodiment of media and communication technologies pervade and constitute our lives becoming effectively invisible, negating the possibility of an outside from which resistance can be mounted. Whilst, resistance remains a solution promoted in medical discourses and paediatric advice proposing no ‘screen time’ for children aged below two (Strasburger and Hogan), Deuze’s thesis suggests this is ontologically futile and instead we should strive for a more immanent relation that seeks to modulate choices and actions from within our media life: finding “creative ways to wield the awesome communication power of media both ethically and aesthetically” ("Unseen" 367). An immanent ethics and a critical aesthetics of infant mediated life can be located in examples of cultural production and everyday parental practice addressing the arrangements of infant mobile media and communication discussed above. For example, an article in the Guardian, ‘Toddlers pose a serious risk to smartphones and tablets’ parodies moral panics around children’s exposure to media by noting that media devices are at greater risk of physical damage from children handling them, whilst a design project from the Eindhoven Academy – called New Born Fame – built from soft toys shaped like social media logos, motion and touch sensors that activate image capture (much like babyselfie apps), but with automated social media sharing, critically interrogates the ways infants are increasingly bound-up with the networked and algorithmic regimes of our computational culture. Finally, parents in this research revealed that they carefully considered the ethics of media in their children’s lives by organising everyday media practices that balanced dwelling with new, old, and non media forms, and by curating their digitally mediated interactions and archives with an awareness they were custodians of their children’s digital memories (Garde-Hansen et al.). I suggest these examples work from an immanent ethical and critical position in order to make visible and operate from within the conditions of infant media life. Rather than seeking to deny or avoid the diversity of encounters infants have with and through mobile media in their everyday lives, this analysis has explored the ways infants are increasingly configured as users of mobile media and communication technologies, identifying an emerging repertoire of infant mobile communication techniques. The emerging practices of infant mobile communication outlined here are intertwined with contemporary household media environments, and assembled through accidental, assisted, and automated relations of living with mobile media. Moreover, such entanglements of use are both represented and discursively reconfigured through multiple channels, contexts, and networks of public mediation. Together, these diverse contexts and forms of conduct have implications for both studying and understanding the ways babies are emerging as active participants and interpellated subjects within a continually expanding digital culture. Acknowledgments This research was supported with funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE130100735). I would like to express my appreciation to the children and families involved in this study for their generous contribution of time and experiences. References Buckingham, David. After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media. Polity Press: Oxford, 2000. Buckleitner, Warren. “A Taxonomy of Multi-Touch Interaction Styles, by Stage.” Children's Technology Review 18.11 (2011): 10-11. Chun, Wendy. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011. Deuze, Mark. “Media Life.” Media, Culture and Society 33.1 (2011): 137-148. Deuze, Mark. “The Unseen Disappearance of Invisible Media: A Response to Sebastian Kubitschko and Daniel Knapp.” Media, Culture and Society 34.3 (2012): 365-368. Garde-Hansen, Joanne, Andrew Hoskins and Anna Reading. Save as … Digital Memories. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Giddings, Seth. Gameworlds: Virtual Media and Children’s Everyday Play. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Gillespie, Tarleton. “The Relevance of Algorithms.” Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. Eds. Tarelton Gillespie, Pablo Boczkowski and Kirsten Foot. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014. 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Morris, Meredith. “Social Networking Site Use by Mothers of Young Children.” Proceedings of CSCW 2014. 1272-1282. OfCom. Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes Report. London: OfCom, 2013. McPake, Joanna, Lydia Plowman and Christine Stephen. "The Technologisation of Childhood? Young Children and Technology in The Home.” Children and Society 24.1 (2010): 63–74. Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage, 1993. Rideout, Victoria. Zero to Eight: Children’s Media Use in America 2013. Common Sense Media, 2013. Rogers, Richard. Digital Methods. Boston. MIT Press, 2013. Silverstone, Roger, and Eric Hirsch (eds). Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces. London: Routledge, 1992. Shuler, Carly. iLearn: A Content Analysis of the iTunes App Store’s Education Section. New York: The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, 2009. 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[Editors’ note: this lyric essay was presented as the keynote address at Edith Cowan University’s CREATEC symposium on the theme Catastrophe and Creativity in November 2012, and represents excerpts from the author’s publication Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Regina, SK: Hagios Press, 2011. Reproduced with the author’s permission].Essay and verse and anecdote are the ways I have chosen to apprentice myself to loss, grief, faith, memory, and the stories we use to tie and untie them. Cat’s cradle, Celtic lines, bends and hitches are familiar: however, when I write about loss, I find there are knots I cannot tie or release, challenging both my imagination and my craft. Over the last decade, I have been learning that writing poetry is also the art of tying together light and dark, grief and joy, of grasping and releasing. Language is a hinge that connects us with the flesh of our experience; it is also residue, the ash of memory and imagination. (Threading Light 7) ———Greek katastrophé overturning, sudden turn, from kata down + strophe ‘turning” from strephein to turn.Loss and catastrophe catapult us into the liminal, into a threshold space. We walk between land we have known and the open sea. ———Mnemosyne, the mother of the nine Muses, the personification of memory, makes anthropologists of us all. When Hermes picked up the lyre, it was to her—to Remembrance —that he sang the first song. Without remembrance, oral or written, we have no place to begin. Stone, amulet, photograph, charm bracelet, cufflink, fish story, house, facial expression, tape recorder, verse, or the same old traveling salesman joke—we have places and means to try to store memories. Memories ground us, even as we know they are fleeting and flawed constructions that slip through our consciousness; ghosts of ghosts. One cold winter, I stayed in a guest room in my mother’s apartment complex for three days. Because she had lost her sight, I sat at the table in her overheated and stuffy kitchen with the frozen slider window and tried to describe photographs as she tried to recall names and events. I emptied out the dusty closet she’d ignored since my father left, and we talked about knitting patterns, the cost of her mother’s milk glass bowl, the old clothes she could only know by rubbing the fabric through her fingers. I climbed on a chair to reach a serving dish she wanted me to have, and we laughed hysterically when I read aloud the handwritten note inside: save for Annette, in a script not hers. It’s okay, she said; I want all this gone. To all you kids. Take everything you can. When I pop off, I don’t want any belongings. Our family had moved frequently, and my belongings always fit in a single box; as a student, in the back of a car or inside a backpack. Now, in her ninth decade, my mother wanted to return to the simplicity she, too, recalled from her days on a small farm outside a small town. On her deathbed, she insisted on having her head shaved, and frequently the nursing staff came into the room to find she had stripped off her johnny shirt and her covers. The philosopher Simone Weil said that all we possess in the world is the power to say “I” (Gravity 119).Memory is a cracked bowl, and it fills endlessly as it empties. Memory is what we create out of what we have at hand—other people’s accounts, objects, flawed stories of our own creation, second-hand tales handed down like an old watch. Annie Dillard says as a life’s work, she’d remember everything–everything against loss, and go through life like a plankton net. I prefer the image of the bowl—its capacity to feed us, the humility it suggests, its enduring shape, its rich symbolism. Its hope. To write is to fashion a bowl, perhaps, but we know, finally, the bowl cannot hold everything. (Threading Light 78–80) ———Man is the sire of sorrow, sang Joni Mitchell. Like joy, sorrow begins at birth: we are born into both. The desert fathers believed—in fact, many of certain faiths continue to believe—that penthos is mourning for lost salvation. Penthus was the last god to be given his assignment from Zeus: he was to be responsible for grieving and loss. Eros, the son of Aphrodite, was the god of love and desire. The two can be seen in concert with one another, each mirroring the other’s extreme, each demanding of us the farthest reach of our being. Nietzsche, through Zarathustra, phrased it another way: “Did you ever say Yes to one joy? O my friends, then you have also said Yes to all Woe as well. All things are chained, entwined together, all things are in love.” (Threading Light 92) ———We are that brief crack of light, that cradle rocking. We can aspire to a heaven, or a state of forgiveness; we can ask for redemption and hope for freedom from suffering for ourselves and our loved ones; we may create children or works of art in the vague hope that we will leave something behind when we go. But regardless, we know that there is a wall or a dark curtain or a void against which we direct or redirect our lives. We hide from it, we embrace it; we taunt it; we flout it. We write macabre jokes, we play hide and seek, we walk with bated breath, scream in movies, or howl in the wilderness. We despair when we learn of premature or sudden death; we are reminded daily—an avalanche, an aneurysm, a shocking diagnosis, a child’s bicycle in the intersection—that our illusions of control, that youthful sense of invincibility we have clung to, our last-ditch religious conversions, our versions of Pascal’s bargain, nothing stops the carriage from stopping for us.We are fortunate if our awareness calls forth our humanity. We learn, as Aristotle reminded us, about our capacity for fear and pity. Seeing others as vulnerable in their pain or weakness, we see our own frailties. As I read the poetry of Donne or Rumi, or verse created by the translator of Holocaust stories, Lois Olena, or the work of poet Sharon Olds as she recounts the daily horror of her youth, I can become open to pity, or—to use the more contemporary word—compassion. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that works of art are not only a primary means for an individual to express her humanity through catharsis, as Aristotle claimed, but, because of the attunement to others and to the world that creation invites, the process can sow the seeds of social justice. Art grounds our grief in form; it connects us to one another and to the world. And the more we acquaint ourselves with works of art—in music, painting, theatre, literature—the more we open ourselves to complex and nuanced understandings of our human capacities for grief. Why else do we turn to a stirring poem when we are mourning? Why else do we sing? When my parents died, I came home from the library with stacks of poetry and memoirs about loss. How does your story dovetail with mine? I wanted to know. How large is this room—this country—of grief and how might I see it, feel the texture on its walls, the ice of its waters? I was in a foreign land, knew so little of its language, and wanted to be present and raw and vulnerable in its climate and geography. Writing and reading were my way not to squander my hours of pain. While it was difficult to live inside that country, it was more difficult not to. In learning to know graveyards as places of comfort and perspective, Mnemosyne’s territory with her markers of memory guarded by crow, leaf, and human footfall, with storehouses of vast and deep tapestries of stories whispered, sung, or silent, I am cultivating the practice of walking on common ground. Our losses are really our winter-enduring foliage, Rilke writes. They are place and settlement, foundation and soil, and home. (Threading Light 86–88) ———The loseability of our small and larger worlds allows us to see their gifts, their preciousness.Loseability allows us to pay attention. ———“A faith-based life, a Trappistine nun said to me, aims for transformation of the soul through compunction—not only a state of regret and remorse for our inadequacies before God, but also living inside a deeper sorrow, a yearning for a union with the divine. Compunction, according to a Christian encyclopaedia, is constructive only if it leads to repentance, reconciliation, and sanctification. Would you consider this work you are doing, the Trappistine wrote, to be a spiritual journey?Initially, I ducked her question; it was a good one. Like Neruda, I don’t know where the poetry comes from, a winter or a river. But like many poets, I feel the inadequacy of language to translate pain and beauty, the yearning for an embodied understanding of phenomena that is assensitive and soul-jolting as the contacts of eye-to-eye and skin-to-skin. While I do not worship a god, I do long for an impossible union with the world—a way to acknowledge the gift that is my life. Resonance: a search for the divine in the everyday. And more so. Writing is a full-bodied, sensory, immersive activity that asks me to give myself over to phenomena, that calls forth deep joy and deep sorrow sometimes so profound that I am gutted by my inadequacy. I am pierced, dumbstruck. Lyric language is the crayon I use, and poetry is my secular compunction...Poets—indeed, all writers—are often humbled by what we cannot do, pierced as we are by—what? I suggest mystery, impossibility, wonder, reverence, grief, desire, joy, our simple gratitude and despair. I speak of the soul and seven people rise from their chairs and leave the room, writes Mary Oliver (4). Eros and penthos working in concert. We have to sign on for the whole package, and that’s what both empties us out, and fills us up. The practice of poetry is our inadequate means of seeking the gift of tears. We cultivate awe, wonder, the exquisite pain of seeing and knowing deeply the abundant and the fleeting in our lives. Yes, it is a spiritual path. It has to do with the soul, and the sacred—our venerating the world given to us. Whether we are inside a belief system that has or does not have a god makes no difference. Seven others lean forward to listen. (Threading Light 98–100)———The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a rare thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. – Simone Weil (169)I can look at the lines and shades on the page clipped to the easel, deer tracks in the snow, or flecks of light on a summer sidewalk. Or at the moon as it moves from new to full. Or I can read the poetry of Paul Celan.Celan’s poem “Tenebrae” takes its title from high Christian services in which lighting, usually from candles, is gradually extinguished so that by the end of the service, the church is in total darkness. Considering Celan’s—Antschel’s—history as a Romanian Jew whose parents were killed in the Nazi death camps, and his subsequent years tortured by the agony of his grief, we are not surprised to learn he chose German, his mother’s language, to create his poetry: it might have been his act of defiance, his way of using shadow and light against the other. The poet’s deep grief, his profound awareness of loss, looks unflinchingly at the past, at the piles of bodies. The language has become a prism, reflecting penetrating shafts of shadow: in the shine of blood, the darkest of the dark. Enlinked, enlaced, and enamoured. We don’t always have names for the shades of sorrows and joys we live inside, but we know that each defines and depends upon the other. Inside the core shadow of grief we recognise our shared mortality, and only in that recognition—we are not alone—can hope be engendered. In the exquisite pure spot of light we associate with love and joy, we may be temporarily blinded, but if we look beyond, and we draw on what we know, we feel the presence of the shadows that have intensified what appears to us as light. Light and dark—even in what we may think are their purest state—are transitory pauses in the shape of being. Decades ago my well-meaning mother, a nurse, gave me pills to dull the pain of losing my fiancé who had shot himself; now, years later, knowing so many deaths, and more imminent, I would choose the bittersweet tenderness of being fully inside grief—awake, raw, open—feeling its walls, its every rough surface, its every degree of light and dark. It is love/loss, light/dark, a fusion that brings me home to the world. (Threading Light 100–101) ———Loss can trigger and inspire creativity, not only at the individual level but at the public level, whether we are marching in Idle No More demonstrations, re-building a shelter, or re-building a life. We use art to weep, to howl, to reach for something that matters, something that means. And sometimes it may mean that all we learn from it is that nothing lasts. And then, what? What do we do then? ———The wisdom of Epictetus, the Stoic, can offer solace, but I know it will take time to catch up with him. Nothing can be taken from us, he claims, because there is nothing to lose: what we lose—lover, friend, hope, father, dream, keys, faith, mother—has merely been returned to where it (or they) came from. We live in samsara, Zen masters remind us, inside a cycle of suffering that results from a belief in the permanence of self and of others. Our perception of reality is narrow; we must broaden it to include all phenomena, to recognise the interdependence of lives, the planet, and beyond, into galaxies. A lot for a mortal to get her head around. And yet, as so many poets have wondered, is that not where imagination is born—in the struggle and practice of listening, attending, and putting ourselves inside the now that all phenomena share? Can I imagine the rush of air under the loon that passes over my house toward the ocean every morning at dawn? The hot dust under the cracked feet of that child on the outskirts of Darwin? The gut-hauling terror of an Afghan woman whose family’s blood is being spilled? Thich Nhat Hanh says that we are only alive when we live the sufferings and the joys of others. He writes: Having seen the reality of interdependence and entered deeply into its reality, nothing can oppress you any longer. You are liberated. Sit in the lotus position, observe your breath, and ask one who has died for others. (66)Our breath is a delicate thread, and it contains multitudes. I hear an echo, yes. The practice of poetry—my own spiritual and philosophical practice, my own sackcloth and candle—has allowed me a glimpse not only into the lives of others, sentient or not, here, afar, or long dead, but it has deepened and broadened my capacity for breath. Attention to breath grounds me and forces me to attend, pulls me into my body as flesh. When I see my flesh as part of the earth, as part of all flesh, as Morris Berman claims, I come to see myself as part of something larger. (Threading Light 134–135) ———We think of loss as a dark time, and yet it opens us, deepens us.Close attention to loss—our own and others’—cultivates compassion.As artists we’re already predisposed to look and listen closely. We taste things, we touch things, we smell them. We lie on the ground like Mary Oliver looking at that grasshopper. We fill our ears with music that not everyone slows down to hear. We fall in love with ideas, with people, with places, with beauty, with tragedy, and I think we desire some kind of fusion, a deeper connection than everyday allows us. We want to BE that grasshopper, enter that devastation, to honour it. We long, I think, to be present.When we are present, even in catastrophe, we are fully alive. It seems counter-intuitive, but the more fully we engage with our losses—the harder we look, the more we soften into compassion—the more we cultivate resilience. ———Resilience consists of three features—persistence, adaptability transformability—each interacting from local to global scales. – Carl FolkeResilent people and resilient systems find meaning and purpose in loss. We set aside our own egos and we try to learn to listen and to see, to open up. Resilience is fundamentally an act of optimism. This is not the same, however, as being naïve. Optimism is the difference between “why me?” and “why not me?” Optimism is present when we are learning to think larger than ourselves. Resilience asks us to keep moving. Sometimes with loss there is a moment or two—or a month, a year, who knows?—where we, as humans, believe that we are standing still, we’re stuck, we’re in stasis. But we aren’t. Everything is always moving and everything is always in relation. What we mistake for stasis in a system is the system taking stock, transforming, doing things underneath the surface, preparing to rebuild, create, recreate. Leonard Cohen reminded us there’s a crack in everything, and that’s how the light gets in. But what we often don’t realize is that it’s we—the human race, our own possibilities, our own creativity—who are that light. We are resilient when we have agency, support, community we can draw on. When we have hope. ———FortuneFeet to carry you past acres of grapevines, awnings that opento a hall of paperbarks. A dog to circle you, look behind, point ahead. A hip that bends, allows you to slidebetween wire and wooden bars of the fence. A twinge rides with that hip, and sometimes the remnant of a fall bloomsin your right foot. Hands to grip a stick for climbing, to rest your weight when you turn to look below. On your left hand,a story: others see it as a scar. On the other, a newer tale; a bone-white lump. Below, mist disappears; a nichein the world opens to its long green history. Hills furrow into their dark harbours. Horses, snatches of inhale and whiffle.Mutterings of men, a cow’s long bellow, soft thud of feet along the hill. You turn at the sound.The dog swallows a cry. Stays; shakes until the noise recedes. After a time, she walks on three legs,tests the paw of the fourth in the dust. You may never know how she was wounded. She remembers your bodyby scent, voice, perhaps the taste of contraband food at the door of the house. Story of human and dog, you begin—but the wordyour fingers make is god. What last year was her silken newborn fur is now sunbleached, basket dry. Feet, hips, hands, paws, lapwings,mockingbirds, quickening, longing: how eucalypts reach to give shade, and tiny tight grapes cling to vines that align on a slope as smoothlyas the moon follows you, as intention always leans toward good. To know bones of the earth are as true as a point of light: tendernesswhere you bend and press can whisper grace, sorrow’s last line, into all that might have been,so much that is. (Threading Light 115–116) Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Dr. Lekkie Hopkins and Dr. John Ryan for the opportunity to speak (via video) to the 2012 CREATEC Symposium Catastrophe and Creativity, to Dr. Hopkins for her eloquent and memorable paper in response to my work on creativity and research, and to Dr. Ryan for his support. The presentation was recorded and edited by Paul Poirier at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. My thanks go to Edith Cowan and Mount Saint Vincent Universities. ReferencesBerman, Morris. Coming to Our Senses. New York: Bantam, 1990.Dillard, Annie. For the Time Being. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.Folke, Carl. "On Resilience." Seed Magazine. 13 Dec. 2010. 22 Mar. 2013 ‹http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_resilience›.Franck, Frederick. Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing. New York: Bantam Books, 1993.Hanh, Thich Nhat. The Miracle of Mindfulness. Boston: Beacon Press, 1976.Hausherr, Irenee. Penthos: The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1982.Neilsen Glenn, Lorri. Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Regina, SK: Hagios Press, 2011. Nietzsche, Frederick. Thus Spake Zarathustra. New York: Penguin, 1978. Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Oliver, Mary. “The Word.” What Do We Know. Boston: DaCapo Press, 2002.Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. (Tenth Elegy). Ed. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Random House/Vintage Editions, 2009.Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots. London: Taylor & Francis, 2005 (1952).Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. London: Routledge, 2004.Further ReadingChodron, Pema. Practicing Peace in Times of War. Boston: Shambhala, 2006.Cleary, Thomas (trans.) The Essential Tao: An Initiation into the Heart of Taoism through Tao de Ching and the Teachings of Chuang Tzu. Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1993.Dalai Lama (H H the 14th) and Venerable Chan Master Sheng-yen. Meeting of Minds: A Dialogue on Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism. New York: Dharma Drum Publications, 1999. Hirshfield, Jane. "Language Wakes Up in the Morning: A Meander toward Writing." Alaska Quarterly Review. 21.1 (2003).Hirshfield, Jane. Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. Trans. Arthur Waley. Chatham: Wordsworth Editions, 1997. Neilsen, Lorri. "Lyric Inquiry." Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research. Eds. J. Gary Knowles and Ardra Cole. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2008. 88–98. Ross, Maggie. The Fire and the Furnace: The Way of Tears and Fire. York: Paulist Press, 1987.