Journal articles on the topic 'University of California, Berkeley. School of Social Welfare'

-Monika Arnez, Niels Mulder, Southeast Asian images; Towards civil society? Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2003, ix + 253 pp. -Adriaan Bedner, Connie Carter, Eyes on the prize; Law and economic development in Singapore. The Hague: Kluwer Law International, xviii + 307 pp. [The London-Leiden series on law, administration and development 7.] -Amrit Gomperts, J.R. van Diessen ,Grote atlas van Nederlands Oost-Indië/Comprehensive atlas of the Netherlands East Indies. Zierikzee: Asia Maior, Utrecht: Koninklijk Nederlands Aardrijkskundig Genootschap (KNAG), 2004, 480 pp. (editors, with the collaboration of R.C.M. Braam, W. Leijnse, P.A. Levi, J.J. Reijnders, R.P.G.A. Voskuil and M.P.B. Ziellemans), F.J. Ormeling (eds) -Stuart R. Harrop, Adriaan Bedner ,Towards integrated environmental law in Indonesia? Leiden: Research school CNWS, School of Asian, African and Amerindian studies, 2003, 161 pp. [CNWS publications 127.], Nicole Niessen (eds) -David Henley, Paul H. Kratoska ,Locating Southeast Asia: Geographies of knowledge and politics of space. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2005, xi + 326 pp., Remco Raben, Henk Schulte Nordholt (eds) -Gerry van Klinken, Anthony J. Langlois, The politics of justice and human rights; Southeast Asia and universalist theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, xi + 214 pp. [Cambridge Asia-Pacific studies.] -Koh Keng We, Jurrien van Goor, Prelude to colonialism; The Dutch in Asia. Hilversum: Verloren, 2004, 127 pp. -Lim Beng Soon, Thomas H. Slone, Prokem; An analysis of a Jakartan slang. Oakland: Masalai Press, 2003, 95 pp. -Lim Beng Soon, Neil Khor Jin Keong ,The Penang Po Leung Kuk; Chinese women, prostitution and a welfare organisation. Kuala Lumpur; The Malaysian branch of the Royal Asiatic society (MBRAS), 2004, VII + 181 pp., Khoo Keat Siew (eds) -Dick van der Meij, J. Thomas Lindblad ,Macht en majesteit; Opstellen voor Cees Fasseur bij zijn afscheid als hoogleraar in de geschiedenis van Indonesië aan de Universiteit Leiden. Leiden: Opleiding Talen en Culturen van Zuidoost-Azië en Oceanië, Universiteit Leiden, 2002, xviii + 328 pp. [Semaian 22.], Willem van der Molen (eds) -Dick van der Meij, Renato Rosaldo, Cultural citizenship in island Southeast Asia; Nation and belonging in the hinterlands. Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2003, x + 228 pp. -Lisa Migo, Sjoerd R. Jaarsma, Handle with care; Ownership and control of ethnographic materials. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002, x + 264 pp. [ASAO monograph series 20.] -Jonathan H. Ping, Priyambudi Sulistiyanto, Thailand, Indonesia and Burma in comparative perspective. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002, xiv + 308 pp. [The international political economy of new regionalisms series.] -Anthony L. Smith, Amitav Acharya, Constructing a security community in Southeast Asia; ASEAN and the problem of regional order. London: Routledge, 2001, xx + 234 pp. -Achmad Sunjayadi, Elsbeth Locher-Scholten ,Hof en handel; Aziatische vorsten en de VOC 1620-1720. Leiden: KITLV Uitgeverij, 2004, x + 350 pp. [Verhandelingen 223.], Peter Rietbergen (eds) -Gerard Termorshuizen, Marieke Bloembergen, De koloniale vertoning; Nederland en Indië op de wereldtentoonstellingen (1880-1931). Amsterdam: Wereld-bibliotheek, 2002, 463 pp.''Koloniale inspiratie; Frankrijk, Nederland, Indië en de wereldtentoonstellingen 1883-1931. Leiden: KITLV Uitgeverij, 2004, 256 pp. -Jojanneke van der Toorn, Philip Taylor, Goddess on the rise; Pilgrimage and popular religion in Vietnam. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004, x + 332 pp. -Holger Warnk, Azyumardi Azra, The origins of Islamic reformism in Southeast Asia; Networks of Malay-Indonesian and Middle Eastern 'ulama' in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2004, ix + 253 pp. -Robert Wessing, Gregory Forth, Beneath the volcano; Religion, cosmology and spirit classification among the Nage of eastern Indonesia. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1998, xi + 369 pp. [Verhandelingen 117.] -Edwin Wieringa, Dauril Alden, Charles R. Boxer; An uncommon life: soldier, historian, teacher, collector, traveller. Lisboa: Fundacão Oriente, 2001, 616 pp. (author assisted by James S. Cummins and Michael Cooper)

Vittorio Gallese is professor of Psychobiology at the University of Parma, Italy, and was professor in Experimental Aesthetics at the University of London, UK (2016-2018). He is an expert in neurophysiology, cognitive neuroscience, social neuroscience, and philosophy of mind. Gallese is one of the discoverers of mirror neurons. Gallese has been doing research at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, at the Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan, at the University of California at Berkeley and at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain of the Humboldt University of Berlin. He has been George Miller visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley. His research attempts to elucidate the functional organization of brain mechanisms underlying social cognition, including action understanding, empathy, language, mindreading and aesthetic experience.

Ildikó Bellér-Hann and Chris Hann, Turkish region: State, market, and social identities on the East Black Sea Coast. Oxford/Santa Fe: James Currey/School of American Research Center, 2001, 244 pp., ISBN 0-85255-279-3 (paperback).Micheal E. Meeker, A nation of empire: The Ottoman legacy of Turkish modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, 420 pp., ISBN 0-520-22526-0 (paperback).

At the outset I (Stairs) want to describe my relationship to the indigenous educators with whom I work and the nature of the account which follows. I have worked with the Mohawk community and school which focuses this paper over many years as consultant, researcher, resource provider, among other forms of being there, but most centrally as co-reflector with several key "culture-makers" I have come to know. Our co-reflections share these culture-makers' visions of what Mohawk life and education is and might be. Whatever I re-present of our sharings is to be seen, as Rabinow and Sullivan note in their 1987 volume Interpretive Social Science (Berkeley: University of California Press), as "interpretations of interpretations" on my part, not positivistic description or assumption of insiders' voices.

Christopher Melchert, The Formation of The Sunni School of Law, 9th-10th Centuries (Leader, Brill, 1997) pp 272. Richard Yeomams, The story of Islamic Architecture, (London: Garmet Publishing, 1998) pp. 252. Hasan Kayali, Arabs and Young Truks: Ottomanism, Arabism and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908-1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) pp. 308. Azmi Ozcan, Pan-Islamism: Indian Muslims, The Ottoman and Britain (1877-1924) (Leiden: Brill, 1997) pp. 237 - Jakob Skovgaard-Petersn, Defining Islam for the Egyptian State: Muftis and Fatwas of the Dar al-Ifta, Social Economic, and Political Studies of the Middle East and Asia (Leiden: Brill, 1997) pp. 431. للحصول على كامل المقالة مجانا يرجى النّقر على ملف ال PDF في اعلى يمين الصفحة.

Objective – At the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), researchers compared how well the library collections supported doctoral research in the three related disciplines of education, psychology, and social welfare. The goal of this project was to gather empirical data to answer questions about materials cited in dissertations, including ownership, age of materials and disciplinary usage. Methods – Researchers analyzed the bibliographies of doctoral dissertations from three academic departments at UCB: education (2009-2010), psychology (2009-2010), and social welfare (2009-2011). The sampling methodology used a systematic sample with a random start. To achieve a 95% (+/-4%) confidence interval, the sample included a total of 3,372 citations from 107 dissertations. Researchers consulted with a statistician to determine the statistical significance of the results. The test for the age of citation used a signed ranks test, which is typical for ordinal data or skewed interval data. The test for ownership was a chi-square test, which is typical for nominal data or dichotomous data. Results – Researchers determined that a very high percentage of the cited journals were owned or licensed by the Library. The ownership rate for cited journals was 97% for both education and social welfare, and 99% for psychology. There was a statistically significant difference between the three disciplines, with psychology better supported than either education (p=.02) or social welfare (p=.01). However, since ownership rates for journals in all three disciplines were extremely high, this was not a meaningful difference. For books, the researchers found a significantly smaller percentage of books owned in social welfare compared to either education (p=.00) or psychology (p=.00). We found no significant difference between the percentages of books owned in psychology versus education (p=.27). Psychology students cited the highest percentage of journals while education students cited the highest percentage of books. Psychology students cited almost no free web resources, but education and social welfare students did cite free web resources (primarily government documents, working papers, or non-governmental organization reports). All three disciplines cited older material than anticipated. Conclusions – The citation analysis, while time-consuming, provided new and important information about the use of the Library’s collections and the level of support the collections afford doctoral students in the three related disciplines of education, psychology and social welfare. This data has informed collections-related decisions including format purchases and fund allocations.

Purpose The following article is 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, robotic industry PhD and inventor regarding his pioneering efforts and the commercialization of bringing a technological invention to market. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach The interviewee is Dr Ken Goldberg, an inventor working at the intersection of art, robotics, and social media. He joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1995 where he is the UC Berkeley William S. Floyd Jr Distinguished Chair in Engineering and recently served as Chair of the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department. He has secondary appointments in UC Berkeley’s Electrical Engineering/Computer Science, Art Practice and the School of Information. Goldberg also holds an appointment at the UC San Francisco Medical School’s Department of Radiation Oncology where he pursues research in medical robotics. Goldberg is Director of the CITRIS “People and Robots” Initiative and the UC Berkeley’s Laboratory for Automation Science and Engineering (AUTOLAB) where he and his students research machine learning for robotics and automation in warehouses, homes, and operating rooms. In this interview, Goldberg shares some of his personal and business perspectives from his career-long pursuit of making robots less clumsy. Findings Goldberg earned dual BS degrees in Electrical Engineering and Economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, and MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1990. Goldberg also studied at Edinburgh University and the Technion. From 1991-95 he taught at the University of Southern California, and in fall 2000, he was visiting faculty at the MIT Media Lab. Goldberg and his students pursue research in three primary areas: Geometric Algorithms for Automation, Cloud Robotics, and Robot Learning. Originality/value Goldberg developed the first complete algorithms for part feeding and part fixturing, and developed the first robot on the Internet. His inventions have been awarded nine US Patents. Goldberg has published over 250 peer-reviewed technical papers and edited four books. He co-founded and served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE). He is also Co-Founder of the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab, the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM), the African Robotics Network (AFRON), the Center for Automation and Learning for Medical Robotics (CAL-MR), the CITRIS Data and Democracy Initiative (DDI), Hybrid Wisdom Labs, and Moxie Institute. He has presented over four hundred keynote and invited lectures. Goldberg's artwork, closely linked with his research, has appeared in over seventy venues. Ken was awarded the Presidential Faculty Fellowship in 1995 by Bill Clinton, the Joseph Engelberger Robotics Award in 2000, elected IEEE Fellow in 2005, and selected by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society for the George Saridis Leadership Award in 2016.

- J. Angerler, Jýrg Schneider, From upland to irrigated rice; The development of wet-rice agriculture in Rejang Musi, Southwest Sumatra. Berlin: Reimer, 1995, 214 pp. [Berner Sumatra-Forschungen.] - R.H. Barnes, Janet Hoskins, The play of time; Kodi perspectives on calendars, history, and exchange. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, xx + 414 pp. - Karin Bras, Christel Lýbben, Internationaler Tourismus als Faktor der Regionalentwicklung in Indonesien; Untersucht am Beispiel der Insel Lombok. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1995, xiv + 178 pp. - Peter Boomgaard, Florentino Rodao, Espaýoles en Siam (1540-1939); Una aportaciýn al estudio de la presencia hispana en Asia Oriental. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientýficas, 1997, xix + 206 pp. [Biblioteca de Historia 32.] - Hans Hýgerdal, Winarsih Partaningrat Arifin, Babad Sembar; Chroniques de lýest javanais. Paris: Presses de lýýcole Francaise dýExtrýme Orient, 1995, 149 pp. [EFEO monographie 177.] - Els M. Jacobs, Gerrit J. Knaap, Shallow waters, rising tide; Shipping and trade in Java around 1775. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1996. [Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 172.] - Roy E. Jordaan, John Miksic, Ancient history. Singapore: Archipelago Press/Editions Didier Millet, n.d., 148 pp. [The Indonesian Heritage Series 1.] - Victor T. King, Penelope Graham, Iban shamanism; An analysis of the ethnographic literature. Canberra: Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, 1987 (reprint 1994), x + 174 pp. [Occasional Paper.] - Rita Smith Kipp, Simon Rae, Breath becomes the wind; Old and new in Karo religion. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1994, viii + 306 pp. - Niels Mulder, Raul Pertierra, Explorations in social theory and Philippine ethnography. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1997, xii + 262 pp. - Anthony Reid, Luc Nagtegaal, Riding the Dutch tiger; The Dutch East Indies Company and the northeast coast of Java, 1680-1743 (translated by Beverly Jackson). Leiden: KITLV Press, 1996, x + 250 pp. Index, maps, tables, graphs. - Cornelia M.I. van der Sluys, Signe Howell, For the sake of our future; Sacrificing in eastern Indonesia, Leiden: Centre for Non-Western Studies, 1996, xi + 398 pp. [CNWS Publication 42.] - Jaap Timmer, Bernard Juillerat, Children of the blood; Society, reproduction and cosmology in New Guinea (translated from the French by Nora Scott). Oxford: Berg, 1996, xxx + 601 pp., glossary, bibliography, index. [Explorations in Anthropology.]

- Leonard Y. Andaya, H.A. Poeze, Excursies in Celebes; Een bundel bijdragen bij het afscheid van J. Noorduyn als directeur-secretaris van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde. Leiden: KITLV Uitgeverij, 1991, 348 pp., P. Schoorl (eds.) - Anne Booth, Adrian Clemens, Changing economy in Indonesia Volume 12b; Regional patterns in foreign trade 1911-40. Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute, 1992., J.Thomas Lindblad, Jeroen Touwen (eds.) - A.P. Borsboom, James F. Weiner, The empty place; Poetry space, and being among the Foi of Papua New Guinea. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. - Martin van Bruinessen, Ozay Mehmet, Islamic identity and development; Studies of the Islamic periphery. London and New York: Routledge, 1990 (cheap paperback edition: Kula Lumpur: Forum, 1990), 259 pp. - H.J.M. Claessen, Timothy Earle, Chiefdoms: power, economy, and ideology. A school of American research book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 341 pp., bibliography, maps, figs. - H.J.M. Claessen, Henk Schulte Nordholt, State, village, and ritual in Bali; A historical perspective. (Comparitive Asian studies 7.) Amsterdam: VU University press for the centre for Asian studies Amsterdam, 1991. 50 pp. - B. Dahm, Ruby R. Paredes, Philippine colonial democracy. (Monograph series 32/Yale University Southeast Asia studies.) New Haven: Yale Center for international and Asia studies, 1988, 166 pp. - Eve Danziger, Bambi B. Schieffelin, The give and take of everyday life; Language socialization of Kaluli children. (Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language 9.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. - Roy Ellen, David Hicks, Kinship and religion in Eastern Indonesia. (Gothenburg studies in social anthropology 12.) Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1990, viii 132 pp., maps, figs, tbls. - Paul van der Grijp, Pierre Lemonnier, Guerres et festins; Paix, échanges et competition dans les highlands de Nouvelle-Guinée. (avant-propos par Maurice Godelier). Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1990, 189 pp. - F.G.P. Jaquet, Hans van Miert, Bevlogenheid en onvermogen; Mr. J.H. Abendanon en de Ethische Richting in het Nederlandse kolonialisme. Leiden: KITLV Uitgeverij, 1991. VI 178 pp. - Jan A. B. Jongeneel, Leendert Jan Joosse, ‘Scoone dingen sijn swaere dingen’; een onderzoek naar de motieven en activiteiten in de Nederlanden tot verbreiding van de gereformeerde religie gedurende de eerste helft van de zeventiende eeuw. Leiden: J.J. Groen en Zoon, 1992, 671 pp., - Barbara Luem, Robert W. Hefner, The political economy of Mountain Java; An interpretive history. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. - W. Manuhutu, Dieter Bartels, Moluccans in exile; A struggle for ethnic survival; Socialization, identity formation and emancipation among an East-Indonesian minority in The Netherlands. Leiden: Centre for the study of social conflicts and Moluccan advisory council, 1989, xiii 544 p. - J. Noorduyn, Taro Goh, Sumba bibliography, with a foreword by James J. Fox, Canberra: The Australian National University, 1991. (Occasional paper, Department of Anthropology, Research school of Pacific studies.) xi 96 pp., map, - J.G. Oosten, Veronika Gorog-Karady, D’un conte a l’autre; La variabilité dans la litterature orale/From one tale to the other; Variability in oral literature. Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1990 - Gert Oostindie, J.H. Galloway, The sugar cane industry: An historical geography from its origins to 1914. Cambridge (etc.): Cambridge University Press, 1989. xiii 266 pp. - J.J. Ras, Peter Carey, The British in Java, 1811-1816; A Javanese account. Oriental documents X, published for the British academy by Oxford University Press, 1992, xxii 611 pp., ills., maps. Oxford: Alden press. - Ger P. Reesink, Karl G. Heider, Landscapes of emotion; Mapping three cultures of emotion in Indonesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. 1991, xv 332 p. - Ger P. Reesink, H. Steinhauer, Papers on Austronesian linguistics No. 1. Canberra: Department of linguistics, Research school of Pacific studies, ANU. (Pacific linguistics series A- 81). 1991, vii 225 pp., - Janet Rodenburg, Peter J. Rimmer, The underside of Malaysian history; Pullers, prostitutes, plantation workers...Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1990, xiv 259 p., Lisa M. Allen (eds.) - A.E.D. Schmidgall-Tellings, John M. Echols, An Indonesian-English Dictionary. Third edition. Revised and edited by John U.Wolff and James T. Collins in in cooperation with Hasan Shadily. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989. xix + 618 pp., Hasan Shadily (eds.) - Mary F. Somers Heidhues, Olaf H. Smedal, Order and difference: An ethnographic study of Orang Lom of Bangka, West Indonesia, Oslo: University of Oslo, Department of social anthropology, 1989. [Oslo Occasional Papers in Social Anthropology, Occasional Paper no. 19, 1989]. - E.Ch.L. van der Vliet, Henri J.M. Claessen, Early state economics. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1991 [Political and Anthropology Series volume 8]., Pieter van de Velde (eds.) - G.M. Vuyk, J. Goody, The oriental, the ancient and the primitive; Systems of marriage and the family in the pre-industrial societies of Eurasia. New York, Cambridge University Press, (Studies in literacy, family, culture and the state), 1990, 562 pp. - E.P. Wieringa, Dorothée Buur, Inventaris collectie G.P. Rouffaer. Leiden: Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 1990, vi 105 pp., 6 foto´s.

- R. Anderson Sutton, Wim van Zanten, Ethnomusicology in the Netherlands: present situation and traces of the past. Leiden: Centre of Non-Western Studies, Leiden University, 1995, ix + 330 pp. [Oideion; The performing arts worldwide 2. Special Issue]., Marjolijn van Roon (eds.) - T.E. Behrend, Willem Remmelink, The Chinese War and the collapse of the Javanese state, 1725-1743. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1994, 297 pp. [Verhandelingen 162]. - Erik Brandt, Eric Venbrux, A death in the Tiwi Islands; Conflict, ritual and social life in an Australian Aboriginal Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, xvii + 269 pp. - Madelon Djajadiningrat-Nieuwenhuis, Tineke Hellwig, In the shadow of change; Images of women in Indonesian literature. Berkeley: University of California, Centers for South and Southeast Asia Studies, 1994, xiii + 259 pp. [Monograph 35]. - M. Estellie Smith, Peter J.M. Nas, Issues in urban development; Case studies from Indonesia. Leiden: Research School CNWS, 1995, 293 pp. [CNWS Publications 33]. - Uta Gärtner, Jan Becka, Historical dictionary of Myanmar. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, xxii + 328 pp. [Asian Historical Dictionaries 15]. - Beatriz van der Goes, H. Slaats, Wilhelm Middendorp over de Karo Batak, 1914-1919. Deel 1. Nijmegen: Katholieke Universiteit, Faculteit der Rechtsgeleerdheid, 1994, xvii + 313 pp. [Reeks Recht en Samenleving 11]., K. Portier (eds.) - Stephen C. Headley, Janet Carsten, About the house, Lévi-Strauss and beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, xiv + 300 pp., Stephen Hugh-Jones (eds.) - Stephen C. Headley, James J. Fox, Inside Austronesian houses; Perspectives on domestic designs for living. Canberra: Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University, 1993, x + 237 pp. - M. Hekker, Helmut Buchholt, Continuity, change and aspirations; Social and cultural life in Minahasa, Indonesia. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1994, vii + 231 pp., Ulricht Mai (eds.) - Tineke Hellwig, Brigitte Müller, Op de wipstoel; De niet-gewettigde inheemse vrouw van de blanke Europeaan in Nederlands-Indië (1890-1940); Een literatuuronderzoek naar beeldvorming en werkelijkheid. Amsterdam: Vakgroep Culturele Antropologie/Sociologie der Niets-Westerse Samenlevingen, 1995, xii + 131 pp. - Jan van der Putten, Liaw Yock Fang, Standard Malay made simple. Singapore: Times Books International, 1988. - Jan van der Putten, Liaw Yock Fang, Standard Indonesian made simple, written with the assistance of Nini Tiley-Notodisuryo, Singapore: Times Books International, 1990. - Jan van der Putten, Liaw Yock Fang, Speak standard Malay; A beginner’s guide. Singapore: Times Books International, 1993, xxii + 280 pp. - Jan van der Putten, Liaw Yock Fang, Speak Indonesian; A beginner’s guide, written in collaboration with Munadi Padmadiwiria and Abdullah Hassan. Singapore: Times Books International, 1990. - Alle G. Hoekema, Chr.G.F. de Jong, Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Zending op Zuid-Sulawesi 1852-1966; Een bronnenpublicatie. Oegstgeest: Raad voor de Zending der Nederlands Hervormde Kerk, 1995, xi + 524 pp. - George Hotze, Ronald G. Gill, De Indische stad op Java en Madura; Een morfologische studie van haar ontwikkeling. Delft: Publikatieburo Bouwkunde, Technische Universiteit Delft, 1995, 350 pp. - H.A.J. Klooster, Holk H. Dengel, Neuere Darstellung der Geschichte Indonesiens in Bahasa Inonesia; Entwicklung und Tendenzen der indonesischen Historiographie. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1994, vii + 269 pp. - Harry A. Poeze, Hans Antlöv, Imperial policy and Southeast Asian nationalism 1930-1957. Richmond: Curzon Press, 1995, xiii + 323 pp., Stein Tonnesson (eds.) - P.W. Preston, Michael Hill, The politics of nation building and citizenship in Singapore. London: Routledge, 1995, x + 285 pp., Lian Kwen Fee (eds.) - J.W. (Pim) Schoorl, Michael Southon, The navel of the perahu; Meaning and values in the maritime trading economy of a Butonese village. Canberra: Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, 1995, xiv + 150 pp. - Henk Schulte Nordholt, Geoffrey Robinson, The dark side of paradise; Political violence in Bali. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1995, xxii + 341 pp. - Herman A.O. de Tollenaere, Th. Stevens, Vrijmetselarij en samenleving in Nederlands-Indië en Indonesië 1764-1962. Hilversum: Verloren, 1994, 400 pp. - Donald E. Weatherbee, Mpu Prapañca, Desawarnana (Nagarakrtagama) by Mpu Prapañca, translated and edited by Stuart Robson. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1995, viii + 158 pp. [Verhandelingen 169]. - E.P. Wieringa, Jennifer Lindsay, Kraton Yogyakarta. Diterjemahkan oleh R.M. Soetanto dan T.E. Behrend. Jakarta: Yayasan Obor Indonesia, 1994, xvi + 330 pp. [Seri katalog Induk Naskah-Naskah Nusantara 2]., R.M. Soetanto, Alan Feinstein (eds.) - E.P. Wieringa, Wouter Smit, De islam binnen de horizon; Een missiologische studie over de benadering van de islam door vier Nederlandse zendingscorporaties (1797-1951). Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 1995, xix + 312 pp. [MISSION 11].

The politics of Italian national identity. Edited by Gino Bedani and Bruce Haddock. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000. Pp. vii+296. ISBN 0-7083-1622-0. £40.00.Fascist modernities: Italy, 1922–1945. By Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001. Pp. x+317. ISBN 0-520-22363-2. £28.50.Le spie del regime. By Mauro Canali. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004. Pp. 863. ISBN 88-15-09801-1. €70.00.I campi del Duce: l'internamento civile nell'Italia fascista (1940–1943). By Carlo Spartaco Capogreco. Turin: Einaudi, 2004. Pp. xi+319. ISBN 88-06-16781-2. €16.00.The American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno: essays in comparative history. Edited by Enrico Dal Lago and Rick Halpern. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Pp. 256. ISBN 0-333-73971-X. £28.50.Disastro! Disasters in Italy since 1860: culture, politics, society. Edited by John Dickie, John Foot, and Frank M. Snowden, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Pp. ix+342. ISBN 0-312-23960-2. £32.50.Remaking Italy in the twentieth century. By Roy Palmer Domenico. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. Pp. xiv+181. ISBN 0-8476-9637-5. £16.95.Twentieth century Italy: a social history. By Jonathan Dunnage. Harlow: Pearson, 2002. Pp. xi+271. ISBN 0-582-29278-6. £16.99.Milan since the miracle: city, culture and identity. By John Foot. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Pp. xiv+240. ISBN 1-85973-550-9. £14.99.Squadristi: protagonisti e tecniche della violenza fascista, 1919–1922. By Mimmo Franzinelli. Milan: Mondadori, 2003. Pp. 464. ISBN 88-04-51233-4. €19.00.For love and country: the Italian Resistance. By Patrick Gallo. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2003. Pp. viii+362. ISBN 0-7618-2496-0. $55.00.The struggle for modernity: nationalism, futurism and Fascism. By Emilio Gentile. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. Pp. xix+203. ISBN 0-275-97692-0. $69.95.Italy and its discontents. By Paul Ginsborg. Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 2001. Pp. xv+521. ISBN 0-713-99537-8. £25.00.Silvio Berlusconi: television, power and patrimony. By Paul Ginsborg. London: Verso, 2004. Pp. xvi+189. ISBN 1-84467-000-7. £16.00.Fascists. By Michael Mann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. x+429. ISBN 0-521-53855-6. £15.99.Mussolini: the last 600 days of Il Duce. By Ray Moseley. Dallas: Taylor Trade publishing, 2004. Pp. vii+432. ISBN 1-58979-095-2. $34.95.Lo stato fascista e la sua classe politica, 1922–1943. By Didier Musiedlak. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001. Pp. 585. ISBN 88-15-09381-8. €32.00.Italy's social revolution: charity and welfare from Liberalism to Fascism. By Maria Sophia Quine. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Pp. xv+429. ISBN 0-333-63261-3. £55.00.La seduzione totalitaria: guerra, modernità, violenza politica (1914–1918). By Angelo Ventrone. Rome: Donzelli, 2003. Pp. xvi+288. ISBN 88-7989-840-X. €24.00.With its winning of an American Academy Award, the film Life is beautiful (1997), brought its director and leading actor, Roberto Benigni, global fame. Benigni's zaniness and self-mockery seemed to embody everything that has convinced foreigners that Italians are, above all, brava gente (nice people). Sometimes, this conclusion can have a supercilious air – niceness can easily be reduced to levity or fecklessness. In those university courses that seek to comprehend the terrible tragedies of twentieth-century Europe, Italians seldom play a leading role. German, Russian, Polish, Yugoslav, and even British and French history are each riven with death and disaster or, alternatively, with heroism and achievement. In such austere company, brava gente can seem out of place.

Anthony Esler. The Human Venture. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1986. Volume I: The Great Enterprise, a World History to 1500. Pp. xii, 340. Volume II: The Globe Encompassed, A World History since 1500. Pp. xii, 399. Paper, $20.95 each. Review by Teddy J. Uldricks of the University of North Carolina at Asheville. H. Stuart Hughes and James Wilkinson. Contemporary Europe: A History. Englewood Clifffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1987. Sixth edition. Pp. xiii, 615. Cloth, $35.33. Review by Harry E. Wade of East Texas State University. Ellen K. Rothman. Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1987. Pp. xi, 370. Paper, $8.95. Review by Mary Jane Capozzoli of Warren County Community College. Bernard Lewis, ed. Islam: from the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Volume I: Politics and War. Pp.xxxvii, 226. Paper, $9.95. Volume II: Religion and Society. Pp. xxxix, 310. Paper, $10.95. Review by Calvin H. Allen, Jr. of The School of the Ozarks. Michael Stanford. The Nature of Historical Knowledge. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Pp. vii, 196. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $14.95. Review by Michael J. Salevouris of Webster University. David Stricklin and Rebecca Sharpless, eds. The Past Meets The Present: Essays On Oral History. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988. Pp. 151. Paper, $11.50. Review by Jacob L. Susskind of The Pennsylvania State University. Peter N. Stearns. World History: Patterns of Change and Continuity. New York: Harper and row, 1987. Pp. viii, 598. Paper, $27.00; Theodore H. Von Laue. The World Revolution of Westernization: The Twentieth Century in Global Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Pp. xx, 396. Cloth, $24.95. Review by Jayme A. Sokolow of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean R Quataert, eds. Connecting Spheres: Women in the Western World, 1500 to the Present. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Pp. xvii, 281. Cloth, $29.95; Paper, $10.95. Review by Samuel E. Dicks of Emporia State University. Dietrich Orlow. A History of Modern Germany: 1870 to Present. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1987. Pp. xi, 371. Paper, $24.33. Review by Gordon R. Mork of Purdue University. Gail Braybon and Penny Summerfield. Out of the Cage: Women's Experiences in Two World Wars. Pandora: London and New York, 1987. Pp. xiii, 330. Paper, $14.95. Review by Paul E. Fuller of Transylvania University. Moshe Lewin. The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988. Pp. xii, 176. Cloth, $16.95; David A. Dyker, ed. The Soviet Union Under Gorbachev: Prospects for Reform. London & New York: Croom Helm, 1987. Pp. 227. Cloth, $35.00. Review by Elizabeth J. Wilcoxson of Northern Essex Community College. Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988. Pp. viii, 308. Cloth, $35.00. Review by Arthur Q. Larson of Westmar College. Stephen G. Rabe. Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism. Chapel Hill & London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Pp. 237. Cloth $29.95; paper, $9.95. Review by Donald J. Mabry of Mississippi State University. Earl Black and Merle Black. Politics and Society in the South. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1987. Pp. ix, 363. Cloth, $25.00. Review by Donn C. Neal of the Society of American Archivists. The Lessons of the Vietnam War: A Modular Textbook. Pittsburgh: Center for Social Studies Education, 1988. Teacher edition (includes 64-page Teacher's Manual and twelve curricular units of 31-32 pages each), $39.95; student edition, $34.95; individual units, $3.00 each. Order from Center for Social Studies Education, 115 Mayfair Drive, Pittsburgh, PA 15228. Review by Stephen S. Gosch of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Media Reviews Carol Kammen. On Doing Local History. Videotape (VIIS). 45 minutes. Presented at SUNY-Brockport's Institute of Local Studies First Annual Symposium, September 1987. $29.95 prepaid. (Order from: Dr. Ronald W. Herlan, Director, Institute of Local Studies, Room 180, Faculty Office Bldg., SUNY-Brockport. Brockport. NY 14420.) Review by Herbert Janick of Western Connecticut State University.

- G.W.J. Drewes, Taufik Abdullah, Islam and society in Southeast Asia, Institute of Southeast Asian studies, Singapore, 1986, XII and 348 pp., Sharon Siddique (eds.) - Th. van den End, T.Valentino Sitoy, A history of Christianity in the Philippines. The initial encounter , Vol. I, Quezon City (Philippines): New day publishers, 1985. - R. Hagesteijn, David G. Marr, Southeast Asia in the 9th to 14th centuries, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian studies and the research school of Pacific studies of the Australian National University, 1986, 416 pp., A.C. Milner (eds.) - R. Hagesteijn, Constance M. Wilson, The Burma-Thai frontier over sixteen decades - Three descriptive documents, Ohio University monographs in international studies, Southeast Asia series No. 70, 1985,120 pp., Lucien M. Hanks (eds.) - Barbara Harrisson, John S. Guy, Oriental trade ceramics in South-east Asia, ninth to sixteenth century, Oxford University Press, Singapore, 1986. [Revised, updated version of an exhibition catalogue issued in Australia in 1980, in the enlarged format of the Oxford in Asia studies of ceramic series.] 161 pp. with figs. and maps, 197 catalogue ills., numerous thereof in colour, extensive bibliography, chronol. tables, glossary, index. - V.J.H. Houben, G.D. Larson, Prelude to revolution. Palaces and politics in Surakarta, 1912-1942. VKI 124, Dordrecht/Providence: Foris publications 1987. - Marijke J. Klokke, Stephanie Morgan, Aesthetic tradition and cultural transition in Java and Bali. University of Wisconsin, Center for Southeast Asian studies, Monograph 2, 1984., Laurie Jo Sears (eds.) - Liaw Yock Fang, Mohamad Jajuli, The undang-undang; A mid-eighteenth century law text, Center for South-East Asian studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, Occasional paper No. 6, 1986, VIII + 104 + 16 pp. - S.D.G. de Lima, A.B. Adam, The vernacular press and the emergence of modern Indonesian consciousness (1855-1913), unpublished Ph. D. thesis, School of Oriental and African studies, University of London, 1984, 366 pp. - J. Thomas Lindblad, K.M. Robinson, Stepchildren of progress; The political economy of development in an Indonesian mining town, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986, xv + 315 pp. - Pauline Lunsingh Scheurleer, J.E. van Lohuizen-de Leeuw, Indo-Javanese Metalwork, Linden-Museum, Stuttgart, Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde, 1984, 218 pp. - H.M.J. Maier, V. Matheson, Perceptions of the Haj; Five Malay texts, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian studies (Research notes and discussions paper no. 46), 1984; 63 pp., A.C. Milner (eds.) - Wolfgang Marschall, Sandra A. Niessen, Motifs of life in Toba Batak texts and textiles, Verhandelingen KITLV 110. Dordrecht/Cinnaminson: Foris publications, 1985. VIII + 249 pp., 60 ills. - Peter Meel, Ben Scholtens, Opkomende arbeidersbeweging in Suriname. Doedel, Liesdek, De Sanders, De kom en de werklozenonrust 1931-1933, Nijmegen: Transculturele Uitgeverij Masusa, 1986, 224 pp. - Anke Niehof, Patrick Guinness, Harmony and hierarchy in a Javanese kampung, Asian Studies Association of Australia, Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1986, 191 pp. - C.H.M. Nooy-Palm, Toby Alice Volkman, Feasts of honor; Ritual and change in the Toraja Highlands, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, Illinois Studies in Anthropology no. 16, 1985, IX + 217 pp., 2 maps, black and white photographs. - Gert J. Oostindie, Jean Louis Poulalion, Le Surinam; Des origines à l’indépendance. La Chapelle Monligeon, s.n., 1986, 93 pp. - Harry A. Poeze, Bob Hering, The PKI’s aborted revolt: Some selected documents, Townsville: James Cook University of North Queensland. (Occasional Paper 17.) IV + 100 pp. - Harry A. Poeze, Biografisch woordenboek van het socialisme en de arbeidersbeweging in Nederland; Deel I, Amsterdam: Stichting tot Beheer van Materialen op het Gebied van de Sociale Geschiedenis IISG, 1986. XXIV + 184 pp. - S. Pompe, Philipus M. Hadjon, Perlindungan hukum bagi rakyat di Indonesia, Ph.D thesis Airlangga University, Surabaya: Airlangga University Press, 1985, xviii + 308 pp. - J.M.C. Pragt, Volker Moeller, Javanische bronzen, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Museum für Indische Kunst, Berlin, 1985. Bilderheft 51. 62 pp., ill. - J.J. Ras, Friedrich Seltmann, Die Kalang. Eine Volksgruppe auf Java und ihre Stamm-Myth. Ein beitrag zur kulturgeschichte Javas, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GmbH, 1987, 430 pp. - R. Roolvink, Russell Jones, Hikayat Sultan Ibrahim ibn Adham, Berkeley: Center for South and Southeast Asia Studies, University of California, Monograph Series no. 57, 1985. ix, 332 pp. - R. Roolvink, Russell Jones, Hikayat Sultan Ibrahim, Dordrecht/Cinnaminson: Foris, KITLV, Bibliotheca Indonesica vol. 24, 1983. 75 pp. - Wim Rutgers, Harry Theirlynck, Van Maria tot Rosy: Over Antilliaanse literatuur, Antillen Working Papers 11, Caraïbische Afdeling, Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Leiden, 1986, 107 pp. - C. Salmon, John R. Clammer, ‘Studies in Chinese folk religion in Singapore and Malaysia’, Contributions to Southeast Asian Ethnography no. 2, Singapore, August 1983, 178 pp. - C. Salmon, Ingo Wandelt, Wihara Kencana - Zur chinesischen Heilkunde in Jakarta, unter Mitarbeit bei der Feldforschung und Texttranskription von Hwie-Ing Harsono [The Wihara Kencana and Chinese Therapeutics in Jakarta, with the cooperation of Hwie-Ing Harsono for the fieldwork and text transcriptions], Kölner ethopgraphische Studien Bd. 10, Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1985, 155 pp., 1 plate. - Mathieu Schoffeleers, 100 jaar fraters op de Nederlandse Antillen, Zutphen: De Walburg Pers, 1986, 191 pp. - Mathieu Schoffeleers, Jules de Palm, Kinderen van de fraters, Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1986, 199 pp. - Henk Schulte Nordholt, H. von Saher, Emanuel Rodenburg, of wat er op het eiland Bali geschiedde toen de eerste Nederlanders daar in 1597 voet aan wal zetten. De Walburg Pers, Zutphen, 1986, 104 pp., 13 ills. and map. - G.J. Schutte, W.Ph. Coolhaas, Generale missiven van Gouverneurs-Generaal en Raden aan Heren XVII der Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, VIII: 1725-1729, Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatiën, Grote Serie 193, ‘s-Gravenhage, 1985, 275 pp. - H. Steinhauer, Jeff Siegel, Language contact in a plantation environment. A sociolinguistic history of Fiji, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, xiv + 305 pp. [Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language 5.] - H. Steinhauer, L.E. Visser, Sahu-Indonesian-English Dictionary and Sahu grammar sketch, Verhandelingen van het KITLV 126, Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1987, xiv + 258 pp., C.L. Voorhoeve (eds.) - Taufik Abdullah, H.A.J. Klooster, Indonesiërs schrijven hun geschiedenis: De ontwikkeling van de Indonesische geschiedbeoefening in theorie en praktijk, 1900-1980, Verhandelingen KITLV 113, Dordrecht/Cinnaminson: Foris Publications, 1985, Bibl., Index, 264 pp. - Maarten van der Wee, Jan Breman, Control of land and labour in colonial Java: A case study of agrarian crisis and reform in the region of Ceribon during the first decades of the 20th century, Verhandelingen of the Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology, Leiden, No. 101, Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1983. xi + 159 pp.

-Leslie G. Desmangles, Joan Dayan, Haiti, history, and the Gods. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. xxiii + 339 pp.-Barry Chevannes, James T. Houk, Spirits, blood, and drums: The Orisha religion in Trinidad. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995. xvi + 238 pp.-Barry Chevannes, Walter F. Pitts, Jr., Old ship of Zion: The Afro-Baptist ritual in the African Diaspora. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. xvi + 199 pp.-Robert J. Stewart, Lewin L. Williams, Caribbean theology. New York: Peter Lang, 1994. xiii + 231 pp.-Robert J. Stewart, Barry Chevannes, Rastafari and other African-Caribbean worldviews. London: Macmillan, 1995. xxv + 282 pp.-Michael Aceto, Maureen Warner-Lewis, Yoruba songs of Trinidad. London: Karnak House, 1994. 158 pp.''Trinidad Yoruba: From mother tongue to memory. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996. xviii + 279 pp.-Erika Bourguignon, Nicola H. Götz, Obeah - Hexerei in der Karibik - zwischen Macht und Ohnmacht. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995. 256 pp.-John Murphy, Hernando Calvo Ospina, Salsa! Havana heat: Bronx Beat. London: Latin America Bureau, 1995. viii + 151 pp.-Donald R. Hill, Stephen Stuempfle, The steelband movement: The forging of a national art in Trinidad and Tobago. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. xx + 289 pp.-Hilary McD. Beckles, Jay R. Mandle ,Caribbean Hoops: The development of West Indian basketball. Langhorne PA: Gordon and Breach, 1994. ix + 121 pp., Joan D. Mandle (eds)-Edmund Burke, III, Lewis R. Gordon ,Fanon: A critical reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. xxi + 344 pp., T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Renée T. White (eds)-Keith Alan Sprouse, Ikenna Dieke, The primordial image: African, Afro-American, and Caribbean Mythopoetic text. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. xiv + 434 pp.-Keith Alan Sprouse, Wimal Dissanayake ,Self and colonial desire: Travel writings of V.S. Naipaul. New York : Peter Lang, 1993. vii + 160 pp., Carmen Wickramagamage (eds)-Yannick Tarrieu, Moira Ferguson, Jamaica Kincaid: Where the land meets the body: Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994. xiii + 205 pp.-Neil L. Whitehead, Vera Lawrence Hyatt ,Race, discourse, and the origin of the Americas: A new world view. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995. xiii + 302 pp., Rex Nettleford (eds)-Neil L. Whitehead, Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of possession in Europe's conquest of the new world, 1492-1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. viii + 199 pp.-Livio Sansone, Michiel Baud ,Etnicidad como estrategia en America Latina y en el Caribe. Arij Ouweneel & Patricio Silva. Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala, 1996. 214 pp., Kees Koonings, Gert Oostindie (eds)-D.C. Griffith, Linda Basch ,Nations unbound: Transnational projects, postcolonial predicaments, and deterritorialized nation-states. Langhorne PA: Gordon and Breach, 1994. vii + 344 pp., Nina Glick Schiller, Cristina Szanton Blanc (eds)-John Stiles, Richard D.E. Burton ,French and West Indian: Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guiana today. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia; London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1995. xii + 202 pp., Fred Réno (eds)-Frank F. Taylor, Dennis J. Gayle ,Tourism marketing and management in the Caribbean. New York: Routledge, 1993. xxvi + 270 pp., Jonathan N. Goodrich (eds)-Ivelaw L. Griffith, John La Guerre, Structural adjustment: Public policy and administration in the Caribbean. St. Augustine: School of continuing studies, University of the West Indies, 1994. vii + 258 pp.-Luis Martínez-Fernández, Kelvin A. Santiago-Valles, 'Subject People' and colonial discourses: Economic transformation and social disorder in Puerto Rico, 1898-1947. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. xiii + 304 pp.-Alicia Pousada, Bonnie Urciuoli, Exposing prejudice: Puerto Rican experiences of language, race, and class. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996. xiv + 222 pp.-David A.B. Murray, Ian Lumsden, Machos, Maricones, and Gays: Cuba and homosexuality. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996. xxvii + 263 pp.-Robert Fatton, Jr., Georges A. Fauriol, Haitian frustrations: Dilemmas for U.S. policy. Washington DC: Center for strategic & international studies, 1995. xii + 236 pp.-Leni Ashmore Sorensen, David Barry Gaspar ,More than Chattel: Black women and slavery in the Americas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. xi + 341 pp., Darlene Clark Hine (eds)-A. Lynn Bolles, Verene Shepherd ,Engendering history: Caribbean women in historical perspective. Kingston: Ian Randle; London: James Currey, 1995. xxii + 406 pp., Bridget Brereton, Barbara Bailey (eds)-Bridget Brereton, Mary Turner, From chattel slaves to wage slaves: The dynamics of labour bargaining in the Americas. Kingston: Ian Randle; Bloomington: Indiana University Press; London: James Currey, 1995. x + 310 pp.-Carl E. Swanson, Duncan Crewe, Yellow Jack and the worm: British Naval administration in the West Indies, 1739-1748. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1993. x + 321 pp.-Jerome Egger, Wim Hoogbergen, Het Kamp van Broos en Kaliko: De geschiedenis van een Afro-Surinaamse familie. Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1996. 213 pp.-Ellen Klinkers, Lila Gobardhan-Rambocus ,De erfenis van de slavernij. Paramaribo: Anton de Kom Universiteit, 1995. 297 pp., Maurits S. Hassankhan, Jerry L. Egger (eds)-Kevin K. Birth, Sylvia Moodie-Kublalsingh, The Cocoa Panyols of Trinidad: An oral record. London & New York: British Academic Press, 1994. xiii + 242 pp.-David R. Watters, C.N. Dubelaar, The Petroglyphs of the Lesser Antilles, the Virgin Islands and Trinidad. Amsterdam: Foundation for scientific research in the Caribbean region, 1995. vii + 492 pp.-Suzannah England, Mitchell W. Marken, Pottery from Spanish shipwrecks, 1500-1800. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. xvi + 264 pp.

This research was conducted to analyze and describe the role of the members of the Regional Representative Council (DPRD) of the DKI Jakarta Province E Commission 2014-2019 in absorbing the aspirations of the community in the field of education. The research method uses qualitative methods with a descriptive approach. Based on the results of the study that the role of the DKI Jakarta Provincial Parliament Member Commission E in absorbing community aspirations in the education sector still has to be optimized with efforts to intensify programs / activities carried out to the community intensively, so that the public can know the policies produced, and establish an information center and community service so that it can help facilitate the public in expressing their aspirations. School enrollment rates in Jakarta must be increased, the dropout rate at the Jakarta high school level is quite high. 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CREATING CONSPIRACY BELIEFS: How Our Thoughts Are Shaped by Dolores Albarracín et al. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 308 pages. Paperback; $39.99. ISBN: 9781108965026. *Conspiracy thinking is a prominent topic of discussion in American life today--and Christians, with their concern for truth, should not only be informed about, but contributing to, this discussion. This includes awareness of how scholars in the neuro-psychological and social sciences are contributing to our understanding of the nature of conspiracy thinking. *This book investigates the causes of conspiracy thinking in the United States. Its authors draw their findings from existing social scientific literature on conspiracism, general social psychology research, and six empirical statistical studies conducted during the last two years of the Trump presidency (2019-2021): three cross-sectional online surveys, a longitudinal phone panel survey on "deep state" conspiracy claims, a "manipulation" of fear experiment on the alleged relationship between the COVID-19 virus and 5G technology, and a social media study of Twitter hashtags and "fear words." *This book shares many similarities with previous academic works on conspiracy thinking--for example, Hofstadter (1965), Pipes (1997), Robins and Post (1997), Sunstein and Vermeule (2008), Barkun (2013), and Uscinski and Parent (2014)--but distinguishes itself by relying extensively on recent polling data and statistics instead of interviews, case studies, newspaper op-eds, or conspiracist media. Indeed, the authors consciously dispute psychological works that scrutinize the personality traits and life experiences of conspiracy believers, and political science works that link conspiracy fears to power asymmetries. Such approaches, they contend, insufficiently explain the process through which conspiracy beliefs are spread. They argue, instead, that psychological and political factors are themselves shaped by a mixture of personal, media, and social media contacts. *Their central aim is thus to examine how patterns of media consumption shape conspiracy beliefs, habits that are themselves affected by one's pre-existing feelings of anxiety, which is herein defined as a nonspecific "perception of threat [that] depends on relatively stable psychological motivations of belief defense [the desire to maintain a coherent set of beliefs], belief accuracy [the desire to maintain a realistic view of the world], and social integration [the desire for trust, status, and acceptance within a group], as well as sociopolitical factors and situational factors like communications and media exposure" (p. 163). *When these needs are not met, anxiety rises. But whereas desire for belief accuracy produces, on its own, an increase in critical discernment--and hence a decrease in false conspiracy beliefs--the combination of pre-existing anxiety (e.g., feelings of ostracism) with shared conspiracy narratives increases one's predisposition to believe conspiracy claims. When one's need for closure and community trumps their need for belief accuracy, new information will be interpreted in ways that justify their emotional state and existing beliefs. The emotional turmoil and social discomfort of anxious individuals make them more prone to accept conspiracist interpretations for troubling situations, drawing them into an alternative "media ecosystem." *Assent to conspiracy claims occurs when anxiety is assuaged by theories that offer plausible and unfalsifiable "proofs" of "hidden hand" driving events. Plausibility is achieved when a theory offers the believer historic similarity (similar plots occurred in the past), psychological similarity (the enemy's alleged motive is conceivable), and normative plausibility (other members of one's community share the same belief). The unfalsifiable nature of conspiracy claims lies in their assertion that proofs of a nefarious plot have been hidden or destroyed by the conspirators; such claims dovetail with the believer's existing distrust of authoritative sources of information. The repetition of conspiracist messages by like-minded others (friends, social networks, etc.), and by popular media (e.g., Fox News) reinforces these beliefs. The believer's wounded ego can further elicit schizotypy, paranoia, and narcissism, which serve as means of self-defence against debunkers and skeptics. *The influence of various media is proportional to time spent with, and trust placed in, these sources of information, along with the consumer's prior levels of neuroticism, suspiciousness, and impulsivity. Online media have an additional influence via their use of bots, individually tailored algorithms, and various forms of "information laundering" in reply threads and chatrooms. Heavy media consumption aligns the consumer's view of the world with the one shown in their preferred media. *The prime contribution of this book is its postulation that anxiety precedes conspiracy thinking (rather than the inverse), a psychological explanation for conspiracy belief that does not lead its authors to conclude, as others have, that conspiracism is inherently a form of neurosis. However, its heavy use of statistics, jargon, and unduly complicated flowcharts renders the text onerous, especially for those without statistical training. Given that this is meant to be the book's most 'important new input into the literature, it is also its greatest weakness. *Despite the great efforts made by its authors to produce a detailed empirical study of the effects of media on conspiracy beliefs, the book's conclusions are somewhat underwhelming as they echo the findings of many previous studies and offer few new insights into the topic. For instance, their claim that social interaction is the "proverbial elephant in the room" (pp. xiii, 205) is hardly convincing. The media consumption habits of conspiracy believers are a recurring theme throughout the literature, and none make the claim that conspiracy beliefs develop in an information vacuum. The book's conclusion that anxiety serves as an "intervening mechanism" (p. 87) between conspiracy claims and a person's needs for closure and social integration in not particularly revelatory either. That humans are social animals is an argument as old as Aristotle, and that conspiracy myths help insecure individuals improve their sense of social cohesion is at least as old as Karl Popper's "conspiracy theory of society."1 *The book's statistical data also exhibits several flaws, leading its authors to wrongly conclude, as Hofstadter did in 1965, that the phenomenon of conspiracy thinking is essentially a product of conservative angst2--a claim that has been powerfully disproven by many of Hofstadter's critics. This may be due to the timeframe of the authors' research studies, which were conducted mostly during and after President Trump's first impeachment trial (in 2019-2020), which elicited a massive conservative media backlash. It could also be due to their failure to examine long-term patterns of conspiracy chatter, which would have shown (see Uscinski and Parent, 2014) that conspiracy ideation ebbs and flows along political lines over longer periods of time. Their data also contains some unrepresentative samples, namely, the overrepresentation of low-wage earners, the unemployed, and the highly educated, and the underrepresentation of working-class high school graduates and Hispanics (pp. 243-44). *One could surmise that such flaws are due to an extraordinary historical context (the Trump presidency and COVID-19 restrictions), but they are also likely attributable to the implicit political biases of current social psychological research, which, as Duarte et al. demonstrated,3 is strongly skewed to the political left. This is made evident in the authors' clearly stated opinion that conservative media is the primary cause of conspiracy beliefs and related violence (pp. 224, 169-70) from which its audience--akin to cultists and terrorists--should be deprogrammed with "corrective alternatives" and ridicule (p. 215). This seems to contradict their 'primary claim that anxiety is the underlying cause (and not the product) of conspiracy beliefs, which should presumably be allayed with kinder methods than these. By identifying conspiracy theories as both a product of right-wing media and, simultaneously, as a "type of misinformation" (p. 11), the authors leave themselves open to the charge of circular reasoning. Indeed, their political bias is shown in their frequent use of contested progressive concepts and phrases such as "racialized," "Latinx," "pro-social behavior to reduce [one's] carbon footprint," and by 'connecting peaceable conservative media such as Focus on the Family to the use of gun violence by Edgar Maddison Welch in a Washington pizzeria (p. 219). *The small number of conspiracy theories on which the authors based their surveys is another example of skewed sampling. Most of these represent themes that cause far more anxiety to conservatives than liberals (for example, the "deep state," COVID-19 restrictions, illegal immigration, President Obama's birth certificate), while little attention is given to conspiracy theories that traditionally appeal to the political left (for 'example, JFK, 9/11, GMOs, "BigPharma," CIA malfeasance, Hurricane Katrina) or to progressives' fears about policing, systemic racism, abortion rights, or gender identity, making it all the more likely that their research subjects who displayed conspiracist thinking stood on the right side of the political fence. *Finally, the book spends too much time discussing tangentially pertinent psychological research (for example, the influence of music on pain and imitative suicide) and too little detailing the content and origins of the few conspiracy theories their research is based on (with the exception of the 2016 "Pizzagate" panic). This makes the book difficult for the layperson to follow, when it is compared to academic works such as those of Barkun4 or Uscinski and Parent,5 which are accessible to a nonspecialized audience. Few details are given, for instance, of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, which are mentioned frequently but never in detail as an example of a genuine government conspiracy (rather than a significant but nonsinister breach of medical ethics). In the end, the book complements the rest of the literature but falls short of providing significant new insights, and is unlikely to elicit interest among laypersons, especially those who hold conspiracy beliefs. * Notes *1Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963). *2Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, And Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965). *3José L. Duarte et al., "Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 38 (2015): e130, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X14000430. *4Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013). *5Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent, American Conspiracy Theories (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014). *Reviewed by Michel Jacques Gagné, Champlain College, St. Lambert, QC J4P 3P2. Michel is a historian and author of Thinking Critically about the Kennedy Assassination: Debunking the Myths and Conspiracy Theories (Routledge, 2022).

Cecilia Conrad of Pomona College reviews “Mother’s Work and Children’s Lives: Low-Income Families after Welfare Reform” by Rucker C. Johnson, Ariel Kalil, Rachel E. Dunifon,. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins “Examines the effects of welfare reform in the United States on the work-family balance of women and the effects of this balance on the lives of children. Discusses the road to welfare reform; the Women’s Employment Study--context and content; and the effect of low-income mothers’ employment on children. Johnson is Assistant Professor in the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Kalil is Professor in the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. Dunifon is Associate Professor in the Department of Policy and Management at Cornell University. Index.”

Helen F. Ladd of Duke University reviews “The Money Myth: School Resources, Outcomes, and Equity” by W. Norton Grubb,. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins “Examines how inequalities in resources other than money, such as leadership, instruction, and tracking policies, contribute to the deepening divide in the quality and success of American education. Discusses moving beyond money--the variety of educational resources; multiple resources, multiple outcomes--testing the improved school finance with the National Educational Longitudinal Survey of the Class of 1988; when money does matter--explaining the weak effects of school funding; families as resources--the effects of family background and demographic effects; students as resources--the effects of connectedness to schooling; equity and inequality--from static to dynamic conceptions; dynamic inequality--schooling outcomes over time; correcting dynamic inequality in practice--exploring what schools do for low-performing students; making resources matter--implications for school-level practice; supporting the improved school finance--district, state, and federal roles; the implications for litigation of the improved school finance; and the implications for reform--conceptions of schooling and the role of the welfare state. Grubb is Professor and David Gardner Chair in Higher Education at the School of Education, University of California, Berkeley, and Faculty Coordinator of the Principal Leadership Institute. Index.”

Dean Yang of University of Michigan reviews “Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations” by Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins “Explores the havoc wrought by the corruption and violence of the world's economic “gangsters,” and considers their impacts on economic development. Discusses Mandala Putra Suharto, son of the former Indonesian president, and his business ties; the smuggling operations of Lai Changxing; nature or nurture--understanding the culture of corruption; the disappearance of Lake Chad and its connection to African poverty and conflict; victimization of the elderly in rural Africa; the road back from war; and learning to fight economic gangsters. Fisman is Lambert Family Professor of Social Enterprise and Research Director of the Social Enterprise Program at Columbia Business School. Miguel is Associate Professor of Economics and Director of the Center of Evaluations for Global Action at the University of California, Berkeley. Index.”

This paper explores Benedictine leadership as a concept and praxis hinged on the value of charity. It underscores the tenets of Care ethics in conjunction with Benedictine Spirituality. Using philosophical and theological lens, this paper attempts to 1) present the Benedictine Leadership vis-à-vis Care ethics 2) proffer that charity or care is the driving force of a transformational leader and, 3) purport that a caring leader, directly or indirectly, can transform policies and practices as s/he carves spaces for communion. References Casey, M., St. Benedict's Teaching on the Abbot. Introducing Benedict's Rule. St.Ottilien, 2006. Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Evans, Christopher. Saint Luke Philadelphia: Trinity, 1990. Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Gospel according to Luke. New York: Doubleday 1981. Friedman, Marilyn. “Beyond Caring: The De-Moralization of Gender,” in Marsha Hanen and Kai Nielsen, eds., Science, Morality and Feminist Theory. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1987. Friedman, Marilyn. “Beyond Caring: The De-moralization of Gender” in John Dienhart, Dennis Moberg, Ron Duska eds. The Next Phase of Business Ethics: Integrating Psychology and Ethics Research in Ethical Issues in Organizations, Volume 3, pp. 399-416. USA: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2001. Fry, Timothy OSB (ed.) The Rule of St. Benedict in English. Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1982. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983, 1992. Gilligan, Carol. Ward, Janie. Taylor, Jill McLean and Bardige, Betty eds., Mapping the Moral Domain: A Contribution of Women’s Thinking to Psychological Theory and Education. USA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Green, Joel B. The Gospel of Luke. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997. Held, Virginia. Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Held, Virginia. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political and Global. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Hultgren, Alrand J. The Parables of Jesus: A Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000. Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Kardong, Terence. Benedict’s Rule: A Translation and Commentary. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996. Marshall, Howard I. The Gospel of Luke: A Commentary on the Greek Text Exeter: Paternoster, 1978. Mill, John Stuart. The Subjection of Women. N.p.: The Floating Press, 1869/2009. Milstein, Brian. "Habermas and Kohlberg: An Exercise in Feminist Critique." Unpublished paper. New York: New School for Social Research; http://magictheatre.panopticweb.com/aesthetics/writings/kohlberg.html / accessed 20 Oct.2013. Noddings, Nel. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Noddings, Nel. Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Ricouer, Paul. in “The Socius and the Neighbor,” History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965. Sevenhuijsen, Selma. Citizenship and the Ethics of Care: Feminist Considerations on Justice, Morality and Politics. London: Routledge, 1998. Snodgrass, Klyne. Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008. Tronto, Joan. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. London: Routledge, 1993.

Finn Tarp of UNU-WIDER and University of Copenhagen reviews “The Economics of Food Price Volatility”, by Jean-Paul Chavas, David Hummels, and Brian D. Wright. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Nine papers, plus nine comments, present and assess recent research on central issues related to recent food price volatility. Papers discuss influences of agricultural technology on the size and importance of food price variability; corn production shocks in 2012 and beyond─implications for harvest volatility; biofuels, binding constraints, and agricultural commodity price volatility; the evolving relationships between agricultural and energy commodity prices─a shifting-mean vector autoregressive analysis; the question of bubble troubles─rational storage, mean reversion, and runs in commodity prices; bubbles, food prices, and speculation─evidence from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's daily large trader data files; food price volatility and domestic stabilization policies in developing countries; food price spikes, price insulation, and poverty; and trade insulation as social protection.” Chavas is Anderson-Bascom Professor of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Hummels is Professor of Economics in the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University. Wright is Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California at Berkeley.

06–360Blackledge, Adrian (U Birmingham, UK), The magical frontier between the dominant and the dominated: Sociolinguistics and social justice in a multilingual world. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (Multilingual Matters) 27.1 (2006), 22–41.06–361Boughton, Zoë (U Exeter, UK; z.c.boughton@exeter.ac.uk), Accent levelling and accent localisation in northern French: Comparing Nancy and Rennes. Journal of French Language Studies (Cambridge University Press) 15.3 (2005), 235–256.06–362Brown, N. Anthony (Brigham Young U, Utah, USA; tony_brown@byu.edu), Language and identity in Belarus.Language Policy (Springer) 4.3 (2005), 311–332.06–363Cameron, Deborah (U Oxford, UK) Language, gender, and sexuality: Current issues and new directions. Applied Linguistics (Oxford University Press) 26.4 (2005), 482–502.06–364Deutch, Yocheved (Bar-Ilan U, Israel; yochd@netvision.net.il), Language law in Israel. Language Policy (Springer) 4.3 (2005), 261–285.06–365Edwards, John (St Francis Xavier U, Nova Scotia, Canada), Players and power in minority-group settings. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (Multilingual Matters) 27.1 (2006), 4–21.06–366Edwards, Viv & Lynda Pritchard Newcombe (U Reading, UK), When school is not enough: New initiatives in intergenerational language transmission in Wales. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Multilingual Matters) 8.4 (2005), 298–312.06–367García, Patricia (Stanford U Graduate School of Education, USA), Parental language attitudes and practices to socialise children in a diglossic society. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Multilingual Matters) 8.4 (2005), 328–344.06–368Garner, Mark (U Aberdeen, UK), Christine Raschka & Peter Sercombe, Sociolinguistic minorities, research, and social relationships.Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (Multilingual Matters) 27.1 (2006), 61–78.06–369Goto, Yuko (U Pennsylvania, USA; ybutler@gse.upenn.edu) & Masakazu Iino, Current Japanese reforms in English language education: The 2003 ‘Action Plan’. Language Policy (Springer) 4.1 (2005), 25–45.06–370Hankoni Kamwendo, Gregory (U Botswana, Botswana; kamwendog@mopipi.ub.bw), Language planning from below: An example from northern Malawi. Language Policy (Springer) 4.2 (2005), 143–165.06–371Kaur Gill, Saran (U Kebangsaan, Malaysia, Malaysia; saran@pkrisc.cc.ukm.my), Language policy in Malaysia: Reversing direction. Language Policy (Springer) 4.3 (2005), 241–260.06–372Lantolf, James P. (Pennsylvania State U, USA; jpl7@psu.edu), Sociocultural theory and L2: State of the art. Studies in Second Language Acquisition (Cambridge University Press) 28.1 (2006), 67–109.06–373Määttä, Simo K. (U California, Berkeley, USA; asunto@uclink.berkeley.edu), The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, French language laws, and national identity. Language Policy (Springer) 4.2 (2005), 167–186.06–374Mills, Jean (U Birmingham, UK), Connecting communities: Identity, language and diaspora. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Multilingual Matters) 8.4 (2005), 253–274.06–375Pavlenko, Aneta (Temple U, USA), ‘Ask each pupil about her methods of cleaning’: Ideologies of language and gender in Americanisation instruction (1900–1924). International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Multilingual Matters) 8.4 (2005), 275–297.06–376Richland, Justin B. (U California, Irvine, USA), The multiple calculi of meaning.Discourse & Society (Sage) 17.1 (2006), 65–97.06–377Silver, Rita Elaine (Nanyang Technological U, Singapore; resilver@nie.edu.sg), The discourse of linguistic capital: Language and economic policy planning in Singapore. Language Policy (Springer) 4.1 (2005), 47–66.06–378Tannenbaum, Michal & Marina Berkovich (Tel Aviv U, Israel; mtannen@post.tau.ac.il), Family relations and language maintenance: Implications for language educational policies. Language Policy (Springer) 4.3 (2005), 287–309.06–379Vaish, Viniti (Nanyang Technical U, Singapore; vvaish@nie.edu.sg), A peripherist view of English as a language of decolonization in post-colonial India. Language Policy (Springer) 4.2 (2005), 187–206.06–380Zuengler, Jane & Elizabeth R. Miller (U Winconsin-Madison, USA), Cognitive and sociocultural perspectives: Two parallel SLA worlds?TESOL Quarterly (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) 40.1 (2006), 35–58.

For the past twenty years, academics and other social commentators have, by and large, shared the view that the phase of modernity through which we are currently passing is defined by two interrelated catalysts of change: the physical movement of people and the virtual movement of information around the globe. As we enter the second decade of the new millennium, it is certainly a timely moment to reflect upon the ways in which the prognoses of the scholars and scientists writing in the late twentieth century have come to pass, especially since—during the time this special issue has been in press—the revolutions that are gathering pace in the Arab world appear to be realising the theoretical prediction that the ever-increasing “flows” of people and information would ultimately bring about the end of the nation-state and herald an era of transnationalism (Appadurai, Urry). For writers like Arjun Appadurai, moreover, the concept of diaspora was key to grasping how this new world order would take shape, and how it would operate: Diasporic public spheres, diverse amongst themselves, are the crucibles of a postnational political order. The engines of their discourse are mass media (both interactive and expressive) and the movement of refugees, activists, students, laborers. It may be that the emergent postnational order proves not to be a system of homogeneous units (as with the current system of nation-states) but a system based on relations between heterogeneous units (some social movements, some interest groups, some professional bodies, some non-governmental organizations, some armed constabularies, some judicial bodies) ... In the short run, as we can see already, it is likely to be a world of increased incivility and violence. In the longer run, free from the constraints of the nation form, we may find that cultural freedom and sustainable justice in the world do not presuppose the uniform and general existence of the nation-state. This unsettling possibility could be the most exciting dividend of living in modernity at large. (23) In this editorial, we would like to return to the “here and now” of the late 1990s in which theorists like Arjun Appaduri, Ulrich Beck, John Urry, Zygmunt Bauman, Robert Robertson and others were “imagining” the consequences of both globalisation and glocalisation for the twenty-first century in order that we may better assess what is, indeed, coming to pass. While most of their prognoses for this “second modernity” have proven remarkably accurate, it is their—self-confessed—inability to forecast either the nature or the extent of the digital revolution that most vividly captures the distance between the mid-1990s and now; and it is precisely the consequences of this extraordinary technological revolution on the twin concepts of “glocality” and “diaspora” that the research featured in this special issue seeks to capture. Glocal Imaginaries Appadurai’s endeavours to show how globalisation was rapidly making itself felt as a “structure of feeling” (Williams in Appadurai 189) as well as a material “fact” was also implicit in our conceptualisation of the conference, “Glocal Imaginaries: Writing/Migration/Place,” which gave rise to this special issue. This conference, which was the culmination of the AHRC-funded project “Moving Manchester: Literature/Migration/Place (2006-10)”, constituted a unique opportunity to gain an international, cross-disciplinary perspective on urgent and topical debates concerning mobility and migration in the early twenty-first century and the strand “Networked Diasporas” was one of the best represented on the program. Attracting papers on broadcast media as well as the new digital technologies, the strand was strikingly international in terms of the speakers’ countries of origin, as is this special issue which brings together research from six European countries, Australia and the Indian subcontinent. The “case-studies” represented in these articles may therefore be seen to constitute something of a “state-of-the-art” snapshot of how Appadurai’s “glocal imaginary” is being lived out across the globe in the early years of the twenty-first century. In this respect, the collection proves that his hunch with regards to the signal importance of the “mass-media” in redefining our spatial and temporal coordinates of being and belonging was correct: The third and final factor to be addressed here is the role of the mass-media, especially in its electronic forms, in creating new sorts of disjuncture between spatial and virtual neighborhoods. This disjuncture has both utopian and dystopian potentials, and there is no easy way to tell how these may play themselves out in the future of the production of locality. (194) The articles collected here certainly do serve as testament to the “bewildering plethora of changes in ... media environments” (195) that Appadurai envisaged, and yet it can clearly also be argued that this agent of glocalisation has not yet brought about the demise of the nation-state in the way (or at the speed) that many commentators predicted. Digital Diasporas in a Transnational World Reviewing the work of the leading social science theorists working in the field during the late 1990s, it quickly becomes evident that: (a) the belief that globalisation presented a threat to the nation-state was widely held; and (b) that the “jury” was undecided as to whether this would prove a good or bad thing in the years to come. While the commentators concerned did their best to complexify both their analysis of the present and their view of the future, it is interesting to observe, in retrospect, how the rhetoric of both utopia and dystopia invaded their discourse in almost equal measure. We have already seen how Appadurai, in his 1996 publication, Modernity at Large, looks beyond the “increased incivility and violence” of the “short term” to a world “free from the constraints of the nation form,” while Roger Bromley, following Agamben and Deleuze as well as Appadurai, typifies a generation of literary and cultural critics who have paid tribute to the way in which the arts (and, in particular, storytelling) have enabled subjects to break free from their national (af)filiations (Pearce, Devolving 17) and discover new “de-territorialised” (Deleuze and Guattari) modes of being and belonging. Alongside this “hope,” however, the forces and agents of globalisation were also regarded with a good deal of suspicion and fear, as is evidenced in Ulrich Beck’s What is Globalization? In his overview of the theorists who were then perceived to be leading the debate, Beck draws distinctions between what was perceived to be the “engine” of globalisation (31), but is clearly most exercised by the manner in which the transformation has taken shape: Without a revolution, without even any change in laws or constitutions, an attack has been launched “in the normal course of business”, as it were, upon the material lifelines of modern national societies. First, the transnational corporations are to export jobs to parts of the world where labour costs and workplace obligations are lowest. Second, the computer-generation of worldwide proximity enables them to break down and disperse goods and services, and produce them through a division of labour in different parts of the world, so that national and corporate labels inevitably become illusory. (3; italics in the original) Beck’s concern is clearly that all these changes have taken place without the nation-states of the world being directly involved in any way: transnational corporations began to take advantage of the new “mobility” available to them without having to secure the agreement of any government (“Companies can produce in one country, pay taxes in another and demand state infrastructural spending in yet another”; 4-5); the export of the labour market through the use of digital communications (stereotypically, call centres in India) was similarly unregulated; and the world economy, as a consequence, was in the process of becoming detached from the processes of either production or consumption (“capitalism without labour”; 5-7). Vis-à-vis the dystopian endgame of this effective “bypassing” of the nation-state, Beck is especially troubled about the fate of the human rights legislation that nation-states around the world have developed, with immense effort and over time (e.g. employment law, trade unions, universal welfare provision) and cites Zygmunt Bauman’s caution that globalisation will, at worst, result in widespread “global wealth” and “local poverty” (31). Further, he ends his book with a fully apocalyptic vision, “the Brazilianization of Europe” (161-3), which unapologetically calls upon the conventions of science fiction to imagine a worst-case scenario for a Europe without nations. While fourteen or fifteen years is evidently not enough time to put Beck’s prognosis to the test, most readers would probably agree that we are still some way away from such a Europe. Although the material wealth and presence of the transnational corporations strikes a chord, especially if we include the world banks and finance organisations in their number, the financial crisis that has rocked the world for the past three years, along with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the ascendancy of Al-Qaida (all things yet to happen when Beck was writing in 1997), has arguably resulted in the nations of Europe reinforcing their (respective and collective) legal, fiscal, and political might through rigorous new policing of their physical borders and regulation of their citizens through “austerity measures” of an order not seen since World War Two. In other words, while the processes of globalisation have clearly been instrumental in creating the financial crisis that Europe is presently grappling with and does, indeed, expose the extent to which the world economy now operates outside the control of the nation-state, the nation-state still exists very palpably for all its citizens (whether permanent or migrant) as an agent of control, welfare, and social justice. This may, indeed, cause us to conclude that Bauman’s vision of a world in which globalisation would make itself felt very differently for some groups than others came closest to what is taking shape: true, the transnationals have seized significant political and economic power from the nation-state, but this has not meant the end of the nation-state; rather, the change is being experienced as a re-trenching of whatever power the nation-state still has (and this, of course, is considerable) over its citizens in their “local”, everyday lives (Bauman 55). If we now turn to the portrait of Europe painted by the articles that constitute this special issue, we see further evidence of transglobal processes and practices operating in a realm oblivious to local (including national) concerns. While our authors are generally more concerned with the flows of information and “identity” than business or finance (Appaduri’s “ethnoscapes,” “technoscapes,” and “ideoscapes”: 33-7), there is the same impression that this “circulation” (Latour) is effectively bypassing the state at one level (the virtual), whilst remaining very materially bound by it at another. In other words, and following Bauman, we would suggest that it is quite possible for contemporary subjects to be both the agents and subjects of globalisation: a paradox that, as we shall go on to demonstrate, is given particularly vivid expression in the case of diasporic and/or migrant peoples who may be able to bypass the state in the manufacture of their “virtual” identities/communities) but who (Cohen) remain very much its subjects (or, indeed, “non-subjects”) when attempting movement in the material realm. Two of the articles in the collection (Leurs & Ponzanesi and Marcheva) deal directly with the exponential growth of “digital diasporas” (sometimes referred to as “e-diasporas”) since the inception of Facebook in 2004, and both provide specific illustrations of the way in which the nation-state both has, and has not, been transcended. First, it quickly becomes clear that for the (largely) “youthful” (Leurs & Ponzanesi) participants of nationally inscribed networking sites (e.g. “discovernikkei” (Japan), “Hyves” (Netherlands), “Bulgarians in the UK” (Bulgaria)), shared national identity is a means and not an end. In other words, although the participants of these sites might share in and actively produce a fond and nostalgic image of their “homeland” (Marcheva), they are rarely concerned with it as a material or political entity and an expression of their national identities is rapidly supplemented by the sharing of other (global) identity markers. Leurs & Ponzanesi invoke Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the “rhizome” to describe the way in which social networkers “weave” a “rhizomatic path” to identity, gradually accumulating a hybrid set of affiliations. Indeed, the extent to which the “nation” disappears on such sites can be remarkable as was also observed in our investigation of the digital storytelling site, “Capture Wales” (BBC) (Pearce, "Writing"). Although this BBC site was set up to capture the voices of the Welsh nation in the early twenty-first century through a collection of (largely) autobiographical stories, very few of the participants mention either Wales or their “Welshness” in the stories that they tell. Further, where the “home” nation is (re)imagined, it is generally in an idealised, or highly personalised, form (e.g. stories about one’s own family) or through a sharing of (perceived and actual) cultural idiosyncrasies (Marcheva on “You know you’re a Bulgarian when …”) rather than an engagement with the nation-state per se. As Leurs & Ponzanesi observe: “We can see how the importance of the nation-state gets obscured as diasporic youth, through cultural hybridisation of youth culture and ethnic ties initiate subcultures and offer resistance to mainstream cultural forms.” Both the articles just discussed also note the shading of the “national” into the “transnational” on the social networking sites they discuss, and “transnationalism”—in the sense of many different nations and their diasporas being united through a common interest or cause—is also a focus of Pikner’s article on “collective actions” in Europe (notably, “EuroMayDay” and “My Estonia”) and Harb’s highly topical account of the role of both broadcast media (principally, Al-Jazeera) and social media in the revolutions and uprisings currently sweeping through the Arab world (spring 2011). On this point, it should be noted that Harb identifies this as the moment when Facebook’s erstwhile predominantly social function was displaced by a manifestly political one. From this we must conclude that both transnationalism and social media sites can be put to very different ends: while young people in relatively privileged democratic countries might embrace transnationalism as an expression of their desire to “rise above” national politics, the youth of the Arab world have engaged it as a means of generating solidarity for nationalist insurgency and liberation. Another instance of “g/local” digital solidarity exceeding national borders is to be found in Johanna Sumiala’s article on the circulatory power of the Internet in the Kauhajoki school shooting which took place Finland in 2008. As well as using the Internet to “stage manage” his rampage, the Kauhajoki shooter (whose name the author chose to withhold for ethical reasons) was subsequently found to have been a member of numerous Web-based “hate groups”, many of them originating in the United States and, as a consequence, may be understood to have committed his crime on behalf of a transnational community: what Sumiala has defined as a “networked community of destruction.” It must also be noted, however, that the school shootings were experienced as a very local tragedy in Finland itself and, although the shooter may have been psychically located in a transnational hyper-reality when he undertook the killings, it is his nation-state that has had to deal with the trauma and shame in the long term. Woodward and Brown & Rutherford, meanwhile, show that it remains the tendency of public broadcast media to uphold the raison d’être of the nation-state at the same time as embracing change. Woodward’s feature article (which reports on the AHRC-sponsored “Tuning In” project which has researched the BBC World Service) shows how the representation of national and diasporic “voices” from around the world, either in opposition to or in dialogue with the BBC’s own reporting, is key to the way in which the Commission has changed and modernised in recent times; however, she is also clear that many of the objectives that defined the service in its early days—such as its commitment to a distinctly “English” brand of education—still remain. Similarly, Brown & Rutherford’s article on the innovative Australian ABC children’s television series, My Place (which has combined traditional broadcasting with online, interactive websites) may be seen to be positively promoting the Australian nation by making visible its commitment to multiculturalism. Both articles nevertheless reveal the extent to which these public service broadcasters have recognised the need to respond to their nations’ changing demographics and, in particular, the fact that “diaspora” is a concept that refers not only to their English and Australian audiences abroad but also to their now manifestly multicultural audiences at home. When it comes to commercial satellite television, however, the relationship between broadcasting and national and global politics is rather harder to pin down. Subramanian exposes a complex interplay of national and global interests through her analysis of the Malayalee “reality television” series, Idea Star Singer. Exported globally to the Indian diaspora, the show is shamelessly exploitative in the way in which it combines residual and emergent ideologies (i.e. nostalgia for a traditional Keralayan way of life vs aspirational “western lifestyles”) in pursuit of its (massive) audience ratings. Further, while the ISS series is ostensibly a g/local phenomenon (the export of Kerala to the rest of the world rather than “India” per se), Subramanian passionately laments all the progressive national initiatives (most notably, the campaign for “women’s rights”) that the show is happy to ignore: an illustration of one of the negative consequences of globalisation predicted by Beck (31) noted at the start of this editorial. Harb, meanwhile, reflects upon a rather different set of political concerns with regards to commercial satellite broadcasting in her account of the role of Al-Jazeera and Al Arabiya in the recent (2011) Arab revolutions. Despite Al-Jazeera’s reputation for “two-sided” news coverage, recent events have exposed its complicity with the Qatari government; further, the uprisings have revealed the speed with which social media—in particular Facebook and Twitter—are replacing broadcast media. It is now possible for “the people” to bypass both governments and news corporations (public and private) in relaying the news. Taken together, then, what our articles would seem to indicate is that, while the power of the nation-state has notionally been transcended via a range of new networking practices, this has yet to undermine its material power in any guaranteed way (witness recent counter-insurgencies in Libya, Bahrain, and Syria).True, the Internet may be used to facilitate transnational “actions” against the nation-state (individual or collective) through a variety of non-violent or violent actions, but nation-states around the world, and especially in Western Europe, are currently wielding immense power over their subjects through aggressive “austerity measures” which have the capacity to severely compromise the freedom and agency of the citizens concerned through widespread unemployment and cuts in social welfare provision. This said, several of our articles provide evidence that Appadurai’s more utopian prognoses are also taking shape. Alongside the troubling possibility that globalisation, and the technologies that support it, is effectively eroding “difference” (be this national or individual), there are the ever-increasing (and widely reported) instances of how digital technology is actively supporting local communities and actions around the world in ways that bypass the state. These range from the relatively modest collective action, “My Estonia”, featured in Pikner’s article, to the ways in which the Libyan diaspora in Manchester have made use of social media to publicise and support public protests in Tripoli (Harb). In other words, there is compelling material evidence that the heterogeneity that Appadurai predicted and hoped for has come to pass through the people’s active participation in (and partial ownership of) media practices. Citizens are now able to “interfere” in the representation of their lives as never before and, through the digital revolution, communicate with one another in ways that circumvent state-controlled broadcasting. We are therefore pleased to present the articles that follow as a lively, interdisciplinary and international “state-of-the-art” commentary on how the ongoing revolution in media and communication is responding to, and bringing into being, the processes and practices of globalisation predicted by Appadurai, Beck, Bauman, and others in the 1990s. The articles also speak to the changing nature of the world’s “diasporas” during this fifteen year time frame (1996-2011) and, we trust, will activate further debate (following Cohen) on the conceptual tensions that now manifestly exist between “virtual” and “material” diasporas and also between the “transnational” diasporas whose objective is to transcend the nation-state altogether and those that deploy social media for specifically local or national/ist ends. Acknowledgements With thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) for their generous funding of the “Moving Manchester” project (2006-10). Special thanks to Dr Kate Horsley (Lancaster University) for her invaluable assistance as ‘Web Editor’ in the production of this special issue (we could not have managed without you!) and also to Gail Ferguson (our copy-editor) for her expertise in the preparation of the final typescript. References Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. 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Previous studies contend that Philippines is still a ‘collectivist’ society (Cf. Hofstede Center; Cukur et al. 2004:613-634). In this collectivist or community-oriented society, individualism is not something that is highly valued. Being ‘individualistic’ is often associated to being narcissistic, loner, asocial, selfish, etc. However, one may ask whether the youth in the Philippines are not spared from this insidious culture of individualism, notwithstanding the seemingly dominant collective and communitarian character of the society. Although the overwhelming poverty is still the main problem in the Philippines, where according to Wostyn (2010:26) “only the wonderland of movies gives some respite to their consciousness of suffering and oppression”, the Filipino youth of today are also exposed to the consumeristic values of the ‘city’ and are not spared from the contradictions and insecurities posed by the pluralistic society. They are citizens of an increasing social and cultural pluralism characteristic of many liberal societies. Is it possible that individualism may also exist within this culture, especially among the younger generation? Is individualism slowly creeping in as caused by their exposure and easy access to modern technology, to higher education, mobility, interactions with other cultures, etc. Would this individualistic tendency have any influence on their religious beliefs, especially their belief on salvation? What would be the implications and challenges of these findings to the families in the Philippines? These are the questions we wish to answer in this study. 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Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto (2005) reconceives transience and domesticity together. This queer Irish road film collapses opposition between mobility and home by uncoupling them from heteronormative structures of gender, desire, and space—male/female, public/private. The film’s protagonist, Patrick “Kitten” Braden (Cillian Murphy), wanders in search of a loved one without whom she does not feel at home. Along the way, the film exposes and exploits the doubleness of both “mobility” and “home” in the traditional road narrative, queering the conventions of the road film to convey the desire and possibilities for an alternative domesticity. In its rerouting of the traditional road plot, Breakfast on Pluto does not follow a hero escaping the obligations of home and family to find autonomy on the road. Instead, the film charts Kitten’s quest to realise a sense of home through trans-domesticity—that is, to find shelter in non-heteronormative, mutual care while in both transient and public spaces.I affix “trans-” to “domesticity” to signal both the queerness and mobility that transform understandings of domestic spaces and practices in Breakfast on Pluto. To clarify, trans-domesticity is not queer assimilation to heteronormative domesticity, nor is it a relegation of queer culture to privatised and demobilised spaces. Rather, trans-domesticity challenges the assumption that all forms of domesticity are inherently normalising and demobilising. In other words, trans-domesticity uncovers tensions and violence swept under the rugs of hegemonic domesticity. Moreover, this alternative domesticity moves between and beyond the terms of gender and spatial oppositions that delimit the normative home.Specifically, “trans-domesticity” names non-normative homemaking practices that arise out of the “desire to feel at home”, a desire that Anne-Marie Fortier identifies in queer diasporic narratives (1890-90). Accordingly, “trans-domesticity” also registers the affective processes that foster the connectedness and belonging of “home” away from private domestic spaces and places of origin, a “rethinking of the concept of home”, which Ed Madden traces in lesbian and gay migrant narratives (175-77). Building on the assumption of queer diaspora theorists “that not only can one be at home in movement, but that movement can be one’s very own home” (Rapport and Dawson 27), trans-domesticity focuses critical attention on the everyday practices and emotional labour that create a home in transience.As Breakfast on Pluto tracks its transgender protagonist’s movement between a small Irish border town, Northern Ireland, and London, the film invokes both a specifically Irish migration and the broader queer diaspora of which it is a part. While trans-domesticity is a recurring theme across a wide range of queer diasporic narratives, in Breakfast on Pluto it also simultaneously drives the plot and functions as a narrative frame. The film begins and ends with Kitten telling her story as she wanders through the streets of Soho and cares for a member of her made family, her friend Charlie’s baby.Although I am concerned with the film adaptation, Patrick McCabe’s “Prelude” to his novel, Breakfast on Pluto (1998), offers a useful point of departure: Patrick “Pussy” Braden’s dream, “as he negotiates the minefields of this world”, is “ending, once and for all, this ugly state of perpetual limbo” and “finding a map which might lead to that place called home” (McCabe x). In such a place, McCabe’s hero might lay “his head beneath a flower-bordered print that bears the words at last ‘You’re home’”(McCabe xi). By contrast, the film posits that “home” is never a “place” apart from “the minefields of this world”, and that while being in transit and in limbo might be a perpetual state, it is not necessarily an ugly one.Jordan’s film thus addresses the same questions as does Susan Fraiman in her book Extreme Domesticity: “But what about those for whom dislocation is not back story but main event? Those who, having pulled themselves apart, realize no timely arrival at a place of their own, so that being not-unpacked is an ongoing condition?” (155). Through her trans-domestic shelter-making and caregiving practices, Kitten enacts “home” in motion and in public spaces, and thereby realises the elision in the flower-bordered print in McCabe’s “Prelude” (xi), which does not assure “You are at home” but, rather, “You are home”.From Housed to Trans-Domestic SubjectivitySelf and home are equated in the dominant cultural narratives of Western modernity, but “home” in such formulations is assumed to be a self-owned, self-contained space. Psychoanalytic theorist Carl Jung describes this Ur-house as “a concretization of the individuation process, […] a symbol of psychic wholeness” (225). Philosopher Gaston Bachelard sees in the home “the topography of our intimate being”, a structure that “concentrates being within limits that protect” (xxxii). However, as historian Carolyn Steedman suggests, the mythic house that has become “the stuff of our ‘cultural psychology,’ the system of everyday metaphors by which we see ourselves”, is far from universal; rather, it reflects “the topography of the houses” of those who stand “in a central relationship to the dominant culture” (75, 17).For others, the lack of such housing correlates with political marginalisation, as the house functions as both a metaphor and material marker for culturally-recognised selfhood. As cultural geographer John Agnew argues, in capitalist societies the self-owned home is both a sign of autonomous individuality and a prerequisite for full political subjectivity (60). Philosopher Rosi Braidotti asserts that this figuration of subjectivity in “the phallo-Eurocentric master code” treats as “disposable” the “bodies of women, youth, and others who are racialised or marked off by age, gender, sexuality, and income” (6). These bodies are “reduced to marginality” and subsequently “experience dispossession of their embodied and embedded selves, in a political economy of repeated and structurally enforced eviction” (Braidotti 6).To shift the meaning of “home” and the intimately-linked “self” from a privately-owned, autonomous structure to trans-domesticity, to an ethos of care enacted even, and especially in, transient and public spaces, is not to romanticise homelessness or to deny the urgent necessity of material shelter. Breakfast on Pluto certainly does not allow viewers to do either. Rather, the figure of a trans-domestic self, like Braidotti’s “nomadic subject”, has the potential to challenge and transform the terms of power relations. Those now on the margins might then be seen as equally-embodied selves and full political subjects with the right to shelter and care.Such a political project also entails recognising and revaluing—without appropriating and demobilising—existing trans-domesticity. As Fraiman argues, “domesticity” must be “map[ped] from the margins” in order to include the homemaking practices of gender rebels and the precariously housed, of castaways and outcasts (4-5). This alternative map would allow “outsiders to normative domesticity” to “claim domesticity while wrenching it away from such things as compulsory heterosexuality […] and the illusion of a safely barricaded life” (Fraiman 4-5). Breakfast on Pluto shares in this re-mapping work by exposing the violence embedded in heteronormative domestic structures, and by charting the radical political potential of trans-domesticity.Unsettling HousesIn the traditional road narrative, “home” tends to be a static, confining structure from which the protagonist escapes, a space that then functions as “a structuring absence” on the road (Robertson 271). Bachelard describes this normative structure as a “dream house” that constitutes “a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability” (17); the house functions, Henri Lefebvre argues, as “the epitome of immobility” (92). Whether the dream is to escape and/or to return, “to write of houses”, as Adam Hanna asserts, “is to raise ideas of shelters that are fixed and secure” (113).Breakfast on Pluto quickly gives lie to those expectations. Kitten is adopted by Ma Braden (Ruth McCabe), a single woman who raises Kitten and her adopted sister in domestic space that is connected to, and part of, a public house. That spatial contiguity undermines any illusion of privacy and security, as is evident in the scene in which a school-aged Kitten, who thought herself safely home alone and thus able to dress in her mother’s and sister’s clothes, is discovered in the act by her mother and sister from the pub’s street entrance. Further, the film lays bare the built-in mechanisms of surveillance and violence that reinforce heteronormative, patriarchal structures. After discovering Kitten in women’s clothes, Ma Braden violently scrubs her clean and whacks her with a brush until Kitten says, “I’m a boy, not a girl”. The public/house space facilitates Ma Braden’s close monitoring of Kitten thereafter.As a young writer in secondary school, Kitten satirises the violence within the hegemonic home by narrating the story of the rape of her biological mother, Eily Bergin (Eva Birthistle), by Kitten’s father, Father Liam (Liam Neeson) in a scene of hyper-domesticity set in the rectory kitchen. As Patrick Mullen notes, “the rendition of the event follows the bubble-gum logic and tone of 1950s Hollywood culture” (130). The relationship between the ideal domesticity thereby invoked and the rape then depicted exposes the sexual violence for what it is: not an external violation of the double sanctity of church and home space, but rather an internal and even intrinsic violence that reinforces and is shielded by the power structures from which normative domesticity is never separate.The only sense of home that seems to bind Kitten to her place of origin is based in her affective bonds to friends Charlie (Ruth Negga) and Lawrence (Seamus Reilly). When Lawrence is killed by a bomb, Kitten is no longer at home, and she leaves town to search for the “phantom” mother she never knew. The impetus for Kitten’s wandering, then, is connection rather than autonomy, and neither the home she leaves, nor the sense of home she seeks, are fixed structures.Mobile Homes and Queering of the Western RoadBreakfast on Pluto tracks how the oppositions that seem to structure traditional road films—such as that between home and mobility, and between domestic and open spaces—continually collapse. The film invokes the “cowboy and Indian” mythology from which the Western road narrative descends (Boyle 19), but to different ends: to capture a desire for non-heteronormative affective bonds rather than “lone ranger” autonomy, and to convey a longing for domesticity on the trail, for a home that is both mobile and open. Across the past century of Irish fiction and film, “cowboy and Indian” mythology has often intersected with queer wandering, from James Joyce’s Dubliners story “An Encounter” (1914) to Lenny Abrahamson’s film Adam & Paul (2004). In this tradition, Breakfast on Pluto queers “cowboy and Indian” iconography to convey an alternative conception of domesticity and home. The prevailing ethos in the film’s queered Western scenes is of trans-domesticity—of inclusion and care during transience and in open spaces. After bar bouncers exclude Kitten and friends because of her transgenderism and Lawrence’s Down syndrome, “The Border Knights” (hippie-bikers-cum-cowboys) ride to their rescue and bring them to their temporary home under the stars. Once settled around the campfire, the first biker shares his philosophy with a cuddled-up Kitten: “When I’m riding my hog, you think I’m riding the road? No way, man. I’m travelling from the past into the future with a druid at my back”. “Druid man or woman?” Kitten asks. “That doesn’t matter”, the biker clarifies, “What matters is the journey”. What matters is not place as fixed destination or gender as static difference, but rather the practice of travelling with open relationships to space, to time, and to others. The bikers welcome all to their fire and include both Kitten and Lawrence in their sharing of jokes and joints. The only exclusion is of reference to political violence, which Charlie’s boyfriend, Irwin (Laurence Kinlan), tries to bring into the conversation.Further, Kitten uses domesticity to try to establish a place for herself while on the road with “Billy Hatchett and The Mohawks”, the touring band that picks her up when she leaves Ma Braden’s. As Mullen notes, “Kitten literally works herself into the band by hand sewing a ‘squaw’ outfit to complement the group’s glam-rock Native American image” (Mullen 141). The duet that Kitten performs with Billy (Gavin Friday), a song about a woman inviting “a wandering man” to share the temporary shelter of her campfire, invokes trans-domesticity. But the film intercuts their performance with scenes of violent border-policing: first, by British soldiers at a checkpoint who threaten the group and boast about the “13 less to deal with” in Derry, and then by members of the Republican Prisoners Welfare Association, who throw cans at the group and yell them off stage. A number of critics have noted the postcolonial implications of Breakfast on Pluto’s use of Native American iconography, which in these intercut scenes clearly raises the national stakes of constructions of domestic belonging (see, for instance, Winston 153-71). In complementary ways, the film queers “cowboy and Indian” mythology to reimagine “mobility” and “home” together.After Kitten is forced out by the rest of the band, Billy sets her up in a caravan, a mobile home left to him by his mother. Though Billy “wouldn’t exactly call it a house”, Kitten sees in it her first chance at a Bachelardian “dream house”: she calls it a “house of dreams and longing” and cries, “Oh, to have a little house, to own the hearth, stool, and all”. Kitten ecstatically begins to tidy the place, performing what Fraiman terms a “hyper-investment in homemaking” that functions “as compensation for domestic deprivation” (20).Aisling Cormack suggests that Kitten’s hyper-investment in homemaking signals the film’s “radical disengagement with politics” to a “femininity that is inherently apolitical” (169-70). But that reading holds only if viewers assume a gendered, spatial divide between public and private, and between the political and the domestic. As Fraiman asserts, “the political meaning of fixating on domestic arrangements is more complex […] For the poor or transgendered person, the placeless immigrant or the woman on her own, aspiring to a safe, affirming home doesn’t reinforce hierarchical social relations but is pitched, precisely, against them” (20).Trans-Domesticity as Political ActEven as Kitten invokes the idea of a Bachelardian dream house, she performs a trans-domesticity that exposes the falseness of the gendered, spatial oppositions assumed to structure the normative home. Her domesticity is not an apolitical retreat; rather, it is pitched, precisely, against the violence that public/private and political/domestic oppositions enable within the house, as well as beyond it. As she cleans, Kitten discovers that violence is literally embedded in her caravan home when she finds a cache of Irish Republican Army (IRA) guns under the floor. After a bomb kills Lawrence, Kitten throws the guns into a reservoir, a defiant act that she describes to the IRA paramilitaries who come looking for the guns as “spring cleaning”. Cormack asserts that Kitten “describing her perilous destruction of the guns in terms of domestic labor” strips it “of all political significance” (179). I argue instead that it demonstrates the radical potential of trans-domesticity, of an ethos of care-taking and shelter-making asserted in public and political spaces. Kitten’s act is not apolitical, though it is decidedly anti-violence.From the beginning of Breakfast on Pluto, Kitten’s trans-domesticity exposes the violence structurally embedded in heteronormative domestic ideology. Additionally, the film’s regular juxtaposition of scenes of Kitten’s homemaking practices with scenes of political violence demonstrates that no form of domesticity functions as a private, apolitical retreat from “the minefields of this world” (McCabe x). This latter counterpoint throws into relief the political significance of Kitten’s trans-domesticity. Her domestic practices are her means of resisting and transforming the structural violence that poses an existential threat to marginalised and dispossessed people.After Kitten is accused of being responsible for an IRA bombing in London, the ruthless, violent interrogation of Kitten by British police officers begins to break down her sense of self. Throughout this brutal scene, Kitten compulsively straightens the chairs and tidies the room, and she responds to her interrogators with kindness and even affection. Fraiman’s theorisation of “extreme domesticity” helps to articulate how Kitten’s homemaking in carceral space—she calls it “My Sweet Little Cell”—is an “urgent” act that, “in the wake of dislocation”, can mean “safety, sanity, and self-expression; survival in the most basic sense” (25). Cormack reads Kitten’s reactions in this scene as “masochistic” and the male police officers’ nurturing response as of a piece with the film’s “more-feminine-than-feminine disengagement from political realities” (185-89). However, I disagree: Kitten’s trans-domesticity is a political act that both sustains her within structures that would erase her and converts officers of the state to an ethos of care and shelter. Inspector Routledge, for example, gently carries Kitten back to her cell, and after her release, PC Wallis ensures that she is safely (if not privately) housed with a cooperatively-run peep show, the address at which an atoning Father Liam locates her in London.After Kitten and a pregnant Charlie are burned out of the refuge that they temporarily find with Father Liam, Kitten and Charlie return to London, where Charlie’s baby is born soon after into the trans-domesticity that opens the film. Rejoining the story’s frame, Breakfast on Pluto ends close to where it begins: Kitten and the baby meet Charlie outside a London hospital, where Kitten sees Eily Bergin with her new son, Patrick. Instead of meeting where their paths intersect, the two families pass each other and turn in opposite directions. Kitten now knows that hers is both a different road and a different kind of home. “Home”, then, is not a place gained once and for all. Rather, home is a perpetual practice that does not separate one from the world, but can create the shelter of mutual care as one wanders through it.The Radical Potential and Structural Limits of Trans-DomesticityBreakfast on Pluto demonstrates the agency that trans-domesticity can afford in the lives of marginalised and dispossessed individuals, as well as the power of the structures that militate against its broader realisation. The radical political potential of trans-domesticity manifests in the transformation in the two police officers’ relational practices. Kitten’s trans-domesticity also inspires a reformation in Father Liam, the film’s representative of the Catholic Church and a man whose relationship to others transmutes from sexual violence and repressive secrecy to mutual nurturance and inclusive love. Although these individual conversions do not signify changes in structures of power, they do allow viewers to imagine the possibility of a state and a church that cherish, shelter, and care for all people equally. The film’s ending conveys this sense of fairy-tale-like possibility through its Disney-esque chattering birds and the bubble-gum pop song, “Sugar Baby Love”.In the end, the sense of hopefulness that closes Breakfast on Pluto coexists with the reality that dominant power structures will not recognise Kitten’s trans-domestic subjectivity and family, and that those structures will work to contain any perceived threat, just as the Catholic Church banishes the converted Father Liam to Kilburn Parish. That Kitten and Charlie nevertheless realise a clear contentment in themselves and in their made family demonstrates the vital importance of trans-domesticity and other forms of “extreme domesticity” in the lives of those who wander.ReferencesAgnew, John. “Home Ownership and Identity in Capitalist Societies.” Housing and Identity: Cross Cultural Perspectives. Ed. James S. Duncan. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982. 60–97.Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1957. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.Boyle, Kevin Jon, ed. Rear View Mirror: Automobile Images and American Identities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.Breakfast on Pluto. Dir. Neil Jordan. Pathé Pictures International, 2005.Cormack, Aisling B. “Toward a ‘Post-Troubles’ Cinema? The Troubled Intersection of Political Violence and Gender in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game and Breakfast on Pluto.” Éire-Ireland 49.1–2 (2014): 164–92.Fortier, Anne-Marie. “Queer Diaspora.” Handbook of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Eds. Diane Richardson and Steven Seidman. London: Sage Publishing, 2002. 183–97.Fraiman, Susan. Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.Hanna, Adam. Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Jung, Carl. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. 1957. Ed. Aniela Jaffe. Trans. Clara Winston and Richard Winston. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Social Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.Madden, Ed. “Queering the Irish Diaspora: David Rees and Padraig Rooney.” Éire-Ireland 47.1–2 (2012): 172–200.McCabe, Patrick. Breakfast on Pluto. London: Picador, 1998.Mullen, Patrick R. The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.Rapport, Nigel, and Andrew Dawson. Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of ‘Home’ in a World of Movement. Oxford: Berg, 1998.Robertson, Pamela. “Home and Away: Friends of Dorothy on the Road in Oz.” The Road Movie Book. Eds. Steven Cohen and Ina Rae Hark. London: Routledge, 1997. 271–306.Steedman, Carolyn. Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987.Winston, Greg. “‘Reluctant Indians’: Irish Identity and Racial Masquerade.” Irish Modernism and the Global Primitive. Eds. Maria McGarrity and Claire A. Culleton. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 153–71.

Introduction Eating is one of the most quintessential activities of human life. Because of this primacy, eating is, as food anthropologist Sidney Mintz has observed, “not merely a biological activity, but a vibrantly cultural activity as well” (48). This article posits that the current awareness of climate change in the Western world is animating such cultural activity as the Slow Food movement and is, as a result, stimulating what could be seen as an evolutionary change in popular foodways. Moreover, this paper suggests that, in line with modelling provided by the Slow Food example, an increased awareness of the connections of climate change to the social injustices of food production might better drive social change in such areas. This discussion begins by proposing that contemporary foodways—defined as “not only what is eaten by a particular group of people but also the variety of customs, beliefs and practices surrounding the production, preparation and presentation of food” (Davey 182)—are changing in the West in relation to current concerns about climate change. Such modification has a long history. Since long before the inception of modern Homo sapiens, natural climate change has been a crucial element driving hominidae evolution, both biologically and culturally in terms of social organisation and behaviours. Macroevolutionary theory suggests evolution can dramatically accelerate in response to rapid shifts in an organism’s environment, followed by slow to long periods of stasis once a new level of sustainability has been achieved (Gould and Eldredge). There is evidence that ancient climate change has also dramatically affected the rate and course of cultural evolution. Recent work suggests that the end of the last ice age drove the cultural innovation of animal and plant domestication in the Middle East (Zeder), not only due to warmer temperatures and increased rainfall, but also to a higher level of atmospheric carbon dioxide which made agriculture increasingly viable (McCorriston and Hole, cited in Zeder). Megadroughts during the Paleolithic might well have been stimulating factors behind the migration of hominid populations out of Africa and across Asia (Scholz et al). Thus, it is hardly surprising that modern anthropogenically induced global warming—in all its’ climate altering manifestations—may be driving a new wave of cultural change and even evolution in the West as we seek a sustainable homeostatic equilibrium with the environment of the future. In 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring exposed some of the threats that modern industrial agriculture poses to environmental sustainability. This prompted a public debate from which the modern environmental movement arose and, with it, an expanding awareness and attendant anxiety about the safety and nutritional quality of contemporary foods, especially those that are grown with chemical pesticides and fertilizers and/or are highly processed. This environmental consciousness led to some modification in eating habits, manifest by some embracing wholefood and vegetarian dietary regimes (or elements of them). Most recently, a widespread awareness of climate change has forced rapid change in contemporary Western foodways, while in other climate related areas of socio-political and economic significance such as energy production and usage, there is little evidence of real acceleration of change. Ongoing research into the effects of this expanding environmental consciousness continues in various disciplinary contexts such as geography (Eshel and Martin) and health (McMichael et al). In food studies, Vileisis has proposed that the 1970s environmental movement’s challenge to the polluting practices of industrial agri-food production, concurrent with the women’s movement (asserting women’s right to know about everything, including food production), has led to both cooks and eaters becoming increasingly knowledgeable about the links between agricultural production and consumer and environmental health, as well as the various social justice issues involved. As a direct result of such awareness, alternatives to the industrialised, global food system are now emerging (Kloppenberg et al.). The Slow Food (R)evolution The tenets of the Slow Food movement, now some two decades old, are today synergetic with the growing consternation about climate change. In 1983, Carlo Petrini formed the Italian non-profit food and wine association Arcigola and, in 1986, founded Slow Food as a response to the opening of a McDonalds in Rome. From these humble beginnings, which were then unashamedly positing a return to the food systems of the past, Slow Food has grown into a global organisation that has much more future focused objectives animating its challenges to the socio-cultural and environmental costs of industrial food. Slow Food does have some elements that could be classed as reactionary and, therefore, the opposite of evolutionary. In response to the increasing homogenisation of culinary habits around the world, for instance, Slow Food’s Foundation for Biodiversity has established the Ark of Taste, which expands upon the idea of a seed bank to preserve not only varieties of food but also local and artisanal culinary traditions. In this, the Ark aims to save foods and food products “threatened by industrial standardization, hygiene laws, the regulations of large-scale distribution and environmental damage” (SFFB). Slow Food International’s overarching goals and activities, however, extend far beyond the preservation of past foodways, extending to the sponsoring of events and activities that are attempting to create new cuisine narratives for contemporary consumers who have an appetite for such innovation. Such events as the Salone del Gusto (Salon of Taste) and Terra Madre (Mother Earth) held in Turin every two years, for example, while celebrating culinary traditions, also focus on contemporary artisanal foods and sustainable food production processes that incorporate the most current of agricultural knowledge and new technologies into this production. Attendees at these events are also driven by both an interest in tradition, and their own very current concerns with health, personal satisfaction and environmental sustainability, to change their consumer behavior through an expanded self-awareness of the consequences of their individual lifestyle choices. Such events have, in turn, inspired such events in other locations, moving Slow Food from local to global relevance, and affecting the intellectual evolution of foodway cultures far beyond its headquarters in Bra in Northern Italy. This includes in the developing world, where millions of farmers continue to follow many traditional agricultural practices by necessity. Slow Food Movement’s forward-looking values are codified in the International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture 2006 publication, Manifesto on the Future of Food. This calls for changes to the World Trade Organisation’s rules that promote the globalisation of agri-food production as a direct response to the “climate change [which] threatens to undermine the entire natural basis of ecologically benign agriculture and food preparation, bringing the likelihood of catastrophic outcomes in the near future” (ICFFA 8). It does not call, however, for a complete return to past methods. To further such foodway awareness and evolution, Petrini founded the University of Gastronomic Sciences at Slow Food’s headquarters in 2004. The university offers programs that are analogous with the Slow Food’s overall aim of forging sustainable partnerships between the best of old and new practice: to, in the organisation’s own words, “maintain an organic relationship between gastronomy and agricultural science” (UNISG). In 2004, Slow Food had over sixty thousand members in forty-five countries (Paxson 15), with major events now held each year in many of these countries and membership continuing to grow apace. One of the frequently cited successes of the Slow Food movement is in relation to the tomato. Until recently, supermarkets stocked only a few mass-produced hybrids. These cultivars were bred for their disease resistance, ease of handling, tolerance to artificial ripening techniques, and display consistency, rather than any culinary values such as taste, aroma, texture or variety. In contrast, the vine ripened, ‘farmer’s market’ tomato has become the symbol of an “eco-gastronomically” sustainable, local and humanistic system of food production (Jordan) which melds the best of the past practice with the most up-to-date knowledge regarding such farming matters as water conservation. Although the term ‘heirloom’ is widely used in relation to these tomatoes, there is a distinctively contemporary edge to the way they are produced and consumed (Jordan), and they are, along with other organic and local produce, increasingly available in even the largest supermarket chains. Instead of a wholesale embrace of the past, it is the connection to, and the maintenance of that connection with, the processes of production and, hence, to the environment as a whole, which is the animating premise of the Slow Food movement. ‘Slow’ thus creates a gestalt in which individuals integrate their lifestyles with all levels of the food production cycle and, hence to the environment and, importantly, the inherently related social justice issues. ‘Slow’ approaches emphasise how the accelerated pace of contemporary life has weakened these connections, while offering a path to the restoration of a sense of connectivity to the full cycle of life and its relation to place, nature and climate. In this, the Slow path demands that every consumer takes responsibility for all components of his/her existence—a responsibility that includes becoming cognisant of the full story behind each of the products that are consumed in that life. The Slow movement is not, however, a regime of abstention or self-denial. Instead, the changes in lifestyle necessary to support responsible sustainability, and the sensual and aesthetic pleasure inherent in such a lifestyle, exist in a mutually reinforcing relationship (Pietrykowski 2004). This positive feedback loop enhances the potential for promoting real and long-term evolution in social and cultural behaviour. Indeed, the Slow zeitgeist now informs many areas of contemporary culture, with Slow Travel, Homes, Design, Management, Leadership and Education, and even Slow Email, Exercise, Shopping and Sex attracting adherents. Mainstreaming Concern with Ethical Food Production The role of the media in “forming our consciousness—what we think, how we think, and what we think about” (Cunningham and Turner 12)—is self-evident. It is, therefore, revealing in relation to the above outlined changes that even the most functional cookbooks and cookery magazines (those dedicated to practical information such as recipes and instructional technique) in Western countries such as the USA, UK and Australian are increasingly reflecting and promoting an awareness of ethical food production as part of this cultural change in food habits. While such texts have largely been considered as useful but socio-politically relatively banal publications, they are beginning to be recognised as a valid source of historical and cultural information (Nussel). Cookbooks and cookery magazines commonly include discussion of a surprising range of issues around food production and consumption including sustainable and ethical agricultural methods, biodiversity, genetic modification and food miles. In this context, they indicate how rapidly the recent evolution of foodways has been absorbed into mainstream practice. Much of such food related media content is, at the same time, closely identified with celebrity mass marketing and embodied in the television chef with his or her range of branded products including their syndicated articles and cookbooks. This commercial symbiosis makes each such cuisine-related article in a food or women’s magazine or cookbook, in essence, an advertorial for a celebrity chef and their named products. Yet, at the same time, a number of these mass media food celebrities are raising public discussion that is leading to consequent action around important issues linked to climate change, social justice and the environment. An example is Jamie Oliver’s efforts to influence public behaviour and government policy, a number of which have gained considerable traction. Oliver’s 2004 exposure of the poor quality of school lunches in Britain (see Jamie’s School Dinners), for instance, caused public outrage and pressured the British government to commit considerable extra funding to these programs. A recent study by Essex University has, moreover, found that the academic performance of 11-year-old pupils eating Oliver’s meals improved, while absenteeism fell by 15 per cent (Khan). Oliver’s exposé of the conditions of battery raised hens in 2007 and 2008 (see Fowl Dinners) resulted in increased sales of free-range poultry, decreased sales of factory-farmed chickens across the UK, and complaints that free-range chicken sales were limited by supply. Oliver encouraged viewers to lobby their local councils, and as a result, a number banned battery hen eggs from schools, care homes, town halls and workplace cafeterias (see, for example, LDP). The popular penetration of these ideas needs to be understood in a historical context where industrialised poultry farming has been an issue in Britain since at least 1848 when it was one of the contributing factors to the establishment of the RSPCA (Freeman). A century after Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (published in 1906) exposed the realities of the slaughterhouse, and several decades since Peter Singer’s landmark Animal Liberation (1975) and Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights (1983) posited the immorality of the mistreatment of animals in food production, it could be suggested that Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth (released in 2006) added considerably to the recent concern regarding the ethics of industrial agriculture. Consciousness-raising bestselling books such as Jim Mason and Peter Singer’s The Ethics of What We Eat and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (both published in 2006), do indeed ‘close the loop’ in this way in their discussions, by concluding that intensive food production methods used since the 1950s are not only inhumane and damage public health, but are also damaging an environment under pressure from climate change. In comparison, the use of forced labour and human trafficking in food production has attracted far less mainstream media, celebrity or public attention. It could be posited that this is, in part, because no direct relationship to the environment and climate change and, therefore, direct link to our own existence in the West, has been popularised. Kevin Bales, who has been described as a modern abolitionist, estimates that there are currently more than 27 million people living in conditions of slavery and exploitation against their wills—twice as many as during the 350-year long trans-Atlantic slave trade. Bales also chillingly reveals that, worldwide, the number of slaves is increasing, with contemporary individuals so inexpensive to purchase in relation to the value of their production that they are disposable once the slaveholder has used them. Alongside sex slavery, many other prevalent examples of contemporary slavery are concerned with food production (Weissbrodt et al; Miers). Bales and Soodalter, for example, describe how across Asia and Africa, adults and children are enslaved to catch and process fish and shellfish for both human consumption and cat food. Other campaigners have similarly exposed how the cocoa in chocolate is largely produced by child slave labour on the Ivory Coast (Chalke; Off), and how considerable amounts of exported sugar, cereals and other crops are slave-produced in certain countries. In 2003, some 32 per cent of US shoppers identified themselves as LOHAS “lifestyles of health and sustainability” consumers, who were, they said, willing to spend more for products that reflected not only ecological, but also social justice responsibility (McLaughlin). Research also confirms that “the pursuit of social objectives … can in fact furnish an organization with the competitive resources to develop effective marketing strategies”, with Doherty and Meehan showing how “social and ethical credibility” are now viable bases of differentiation and competitive positioning in mainstream consumer markets (311, 303). In line with this recognition, Fair Trade Certified goods are now available in British, European, US and, to a lesser extent, Australian supermarkets, and a number of global chains including Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonalds, Starbucks and Virgin airlines utilise Fair Trade coffee and teas in all, or parts of, their operations. Fair Trade Certification indicates that farmers receive a higher than commodity price for their products, workers have the right to organise, men and women receive equal wages, and no child labour is utilised in the production process (McLaughlin). Yet, despite some Western consumers reporting such issues having an impact upon their purchasing decisions, social justice has not become a significant issue of concern for most. The popular cookery publications discussed above devote little space to Fair Trade product marketing, much of which is confined to supermarket-produced adverzines promoting the Fair Trade products they stock, and international celebrity chefs have yet to focus attention on this issue. In Australia, discussion of contemporary slavery in the press is sparse, having surfaced in 2000-2001, prompted by UNICEF campaigns against child labour, and in 2007 and 2008 with the visit of a series of high profile anti-slavery campaigners (including Bales) to the region. The public awareness of food produced by forced labour and the troubling issue of human enslavement in general is still far below the level that climate change and ecological issues have achieved thus far in driving foodway evolution. This may change, however, if a ‘Slow’-inflected connection can be made between Western lifestyles and the plight of peoples hidden from our daily existence, but contributing daily to them. Concluding Remarks At this time of accelerating techno-cultural evolution, due in part to the pressures of climate change, it is the creative potential that human conscious awareness brings to bear on these challenges that is most valuable. Today, as in the caves at Lascaux, humanity is evolving new images and narratives to provide rational solutions to emergent challenges. As an example of this, new foodways and ways of thinking about them are beginning to evolve in response to the perceived problems of climate change. The current conscious transformation of food habits by some in the West might be, therefore, in James Lovelock’s terms, a moment of “revolutionary punctuation” (178), whereby rapid cultural adaption is being induced by the growing public awareness of impending crisis. It remains to be seen whether other urgent human problems can be similarly and creatively embraced, and whether this trend can spread to offer global solutions to them. References An Inconvenient Truth. Dir. Davis Guggenheim. Lawrence Bender Productions, 2006. Bales, Kevin. Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004 (first published 1999). Bales, Kevin, and Ron Soodalter. The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962. Chalke, Steve. “Unfinished Business: The Sinister Story behind Chocolate.” The Age 18 Sep. 2007: 11. Cunningham, Stuart, and Graeme Turner. The Media and Communications in Australia Today. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2002. Davey, Gwenda Beed. “Foodways.” The Oxford Companion to Australian Folklore. Ed. Gwenda Beed Davey, and Graham Seal. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1993. 182–85. Doherty, Bob, and John Meehan. “Competing on Social Resources: The Case of the Day Chocolate Company in the UK Confectionery Sector.” Journal of Strategic Marketing 14.4 (2006): 299–313. Eshel, Gidon, and Pamela A. Martin. “Diet, Energy, and Global Warming.” Earth Interactions 10, paper 9 (2006): 1–17. Fowl Dinners. Exec. Prod. Nick Curwin and Zoe Collins. Dragonfly Film and Television Productions and Fresh One Productions, 2008. Freeman, Sarah. Mutton and Oysters: The Victorians and Their Food. London: Gollancz, 1989. Gould, S. J., and N. Eldredge. “Punctuated Equilibrium Comes of Age.” Nature 366 (1993): 223–27. (ICFFA) International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture. Manifesto on the Future of Food. Florence, Italy: Agenzia Regionale per lo Sviluppo e l’Innovazione nel Settore Agricolo Forestale and Regione Toscana, 2006. Jamie’s School Dinners. Dir. Guy Gilbert. Fresh One Productions, 2005. Jordan, Jennifer A. “The Heirloom Tomato as Cultural Object: Investigating Taste and Space.” Sociologia Ruralis 47.1 (2007): 20-41. Khan, Urmee. “Jamie Oliver’s School Dinners Improve Exam Results, Report Finds.” Telegraph 1 Feb. 2009. 24 Aug. 2009 < http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/4423132/Jamie-Olivers-school-dinners-improve-exam-results-report-finds.html >. Kloppenberg, Jack, Jr, Sharon Lezberg, Kathryn de Master, G. W. Stevenson, and John Henrickson. ‘Tasting Food, Tasting Sustainability: Defining the Attributes of an Alternative Food System with Competent, Ordinary People.” Human Organisation 59.2 (Jul. 2000): 177–86. (LDP) Liverpool Daily Post. “Battery Farm Eggs Banned from Schools and Care Homes.” Liverpool Daily Post 12 Jan. 2008. 24 Aug. 2009 < http://www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/liverpool-news/regional-news/2008/01/12/battery-farm-eggs-banned-from-schools-and-care-homes-64375-20342259 >. Lovelock, James. The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth. New York: Bantam, 1990 (first published 1988). Mason, Jim, and Peter Singer. The Ethics of What We Eat. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2006. McLaughlin, Katy. “Is Your Grocery List Politically Correct? Food World’s New Buzzword Is ‘Sustainable’ Products.” The Wall Street Journal 17 Feb. 2004. 29 Aug. 2009 < http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/fairtrade/coffee/1732.html >. McMichael, Anthony J, John W Powles, Colin D Butler, and Ricardo Uauy. “Food, Livestock Production, Energy, Climate Change, and Health.” The Lancet 370 (6 Oct. 2007): 1253–63. Miers, Suzanne. “Contemporary Slavery”. A Historical Guide to World Slavery. Ed. Seymour Drescher, and Stanley L. Engerman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Mintz, Sidney W. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Nussel, Jill. “Heating Up the Sources: Using Community Cookbooks in Historical Inquiry.” History Compass 4/5 (2006): 956–61. Off, Carol. Bitter Chocolate: Investigating the Dark Side of the World's Most Seductive Sweet. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2008. Paxson, Heather. “Slow Food in a Fat Society: Satisfying Ethical Appetites.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 5.1 (2005): 14–18. Pietrykowski, Bruce. “You Are What You Eat: The Social Economy of the Slow Food Movement.” Review of Social Economy 62:3 (2004): 307–21. Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: The Penguin Press, 2006. Regan, Tom. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Scholz, Christopher A., Thomas C. Johnson, Andrew S. Cohen, John W. King, John A. Peck, Jonathan T. Overpeck, Michael R. Talbot, Erik T. Brown, Leonard Kalindekafe, Philip Y. O. Amoako, Robert P. Lyons, Timothy M. Shanahan, Isla S. Castañeda, Clifford W. Heil, Steven L. Forman, Lanny R. McHargue, Kristina R. Beuning, Jeanette Gomez, and James Pierson. “East African Megadroughts between 135 and 75 Thousand Years Ago and Bearing on Early-modern Human Origins.” PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences of the United States of America 104.42 (16 Oct. 2007): 16416–21. Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Doubleday, Jabber & Company, 1906. Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. New York: HarperCollins, 1975. (SFFB) Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity. “Ark of Taste.” 2009. 24 Aug. 2009 < http://www.fondazioneslowfood.it/eng/arca/lista.lasso >. (UNISG) University of Gastronomic Sciences. “Who We Are.” 2009. 24 Aug. 2009 < http://www.unisg.it/eng/chisiamo.php >. Vileisis, Ann. Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes From and Why We Need to Get It Back. Washington: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2008. Weissbrodt, David, and Anti-Slavery International. Abolishing Slavery and its Contemporary Forms. New York and Geneva: Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, United Nations, 2002. Zeder, Melinda A. “The Neolithic Macro-(R)evolution: Macroevolutionary Theory and the Study of Culture Change.” Journal of Archaeological Research 17 (2009): 1–63.

Over a period of ten years Paul Ewing documented the life of his family on film – initially using Super 8 film and then converting to VHS with the advent of the new technology. Through the lens of home movies, autoethnography and memory I discuss his approach to amateur image making and its lasting legacy. Home movies have been the driving force behind a number of autobiographical documentaries such as Tarnation, Video Fool for Love and Stories We Tell. Here I take an auto ethnographical look at the films my own father made over a ten year period, prior to my parents divorce, and examine their impact on my own life and look to see if there is any value to them outside of my own personal investment. “Autoethnography is predicated on the ability to invite readers into the lived experience of the presumed “Other” and to experience it viscerally” (Boylorn and Orbe 15). It is a research method that connects “the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social and political” (Ellis xix). Autoethnography involves the turning of the ethnographic gaze inward on the self (Denzin 227). Autoethnographers use their personal experience as primary data reflexively to bend back on self and look more deeply at self-other interactions.Paul Francis Ewing was born in 1947 in Redhill in the United Kingdom. Inez Anne Taveira was born eight years previously in another part of the world entirely, Taiping in Malaysia or Malaya as it was known then. She immigrated to the UK when she was 21 to study acting and later teaching. She married Paul in 1970 and by 1976 they had two children – my brother Brendan and myself. Around 1978 Paul, or Dad, started to film the family. He wanted to “capture the moment. Like writing a diary”. Patricia Zimmerman writes, “Amateur film represents psychic tracings of diaries and dreams. The family, dreams, and nightmares create new hybrids, new discourses” (276). In the beginning of the last century Pierre Janet already noted that: "certain happenings ... leave indelible and distressing memories – memories to which the sufferer continually returns, and by which he is tormented by day and by night.” Janet, postulated that intense emotional reactions make events traumatic by interfering with the integration of the experience into existing memory schemes. Intense emotions, Janet thought, cause memories of particular events to be dissociated from consciousness, and to be stored, instead, as visceral sensations (anxiety and panic), or as visual images (nightmares and flashbacks). Schachtel defined it as: “Memory as a function of the living personality can be understood as a capacity for the organization and reconstruction of past experiences and impressions in the service of present needs, fears, and interests” (284).The images captured by Paul Ewing are part of both my consciousness and unconsciousness. I have revisited them on numerous occasions for varying reasons. Amateur film’s otherness requires analysis of active relationships between maker and subject (Zimmerman 277). When I questioned Paul in regards to this research, he suggested that screening the films was very important to him. “Mum and I enjoyed them and then later the grand parents. Also you and Bren.” I found it more than interesting that he placed my brother and myself last in the list of those who enjoyed the screenings. As a student of film I have looked for the stories within these images, looking to understand whom the man behind the lens was: potentially who the men behind the lenses have been. Who was the man from my/our memories, who was the boy, who were the boys who became the man/men we are? Van der Kolk and Fisler suggest that ‘dissociation refers to a compartmentalization of experience: elements of the experience are not integrated into a unitary whole, but are stored in memory as isolated fragments consisting of sensory perceptions or affective states” (510). Karen L. Ishizuka insists, “Within home movies ... lie hidden histories of the world.” In this case, perhaps only hidden histories of myself. Given a consistent dissociative reaction to stressful situations my honest agenda in watching and re-watching my father’s home cinema may indeed be to attempt to decode what Janet claimed people experience when intense emotions, memories cannot be transformed into a neutral narrative: a person is “unable to make the recital which we call narrative memory, and yet he remains confronted by the difficult situation” (660). This results in a phobia of memory that prevents the integration of traumatic events and splits off the traumatic memories from ordinary consciousness. Piaget claimed that dissociation occurs when an active failure of semantic memory leads to the organization of memory on somatosensory or iconic levels (201). It cannot be coincidence that these descriptors sound familiar to any student or practitioner of cinema. We, the automaton: a moving mechanical device made in imitation of a human being.“The limbic system is thought to be the part of the central nervous system that maintains and guides the emotions and behavior necessary for self-preservation and survival of the species, and that is critically involved in the storage and retrieval of memory” (Van der Kolk 10). Of all areas in the central nervous system, the amygdala is most clearly implicated in the evaluation of the emotional meaning of incoming stimuli. It is thought to integrate internal representations of the external world in the form of memory images with emotional experiences associated with those memories (Calvin). In a series of experiments, J LeDoux utilized repeated electrical stimulation of the amygdala to produce conditioned fear responses. He found that cortical lesions prevent their extinction. This led him to conclude that, once formed, the subcortical traces of the conditioned fear response are indelible, and that "emotional memory may be forever". Paul filmed us for approximately eight years. First using the Super 8 format and later straight onto VHS using a cumbersome, oversized camera that fed into a VHS deck carried over the shoulder in a plastic satchel. Zimmerman suggests that home movies graph the contradictions between the realities of family life bounded by class, race, and gender expectations and the fantasies of the nuclear family, and they also reveal the unfinished production of obedient subjects and histories (278). They create expectations that wrestle with the fragile nature of family. Paul wasn’t the only “cinematographer” in the family. The camera was often passed to Inez so that Paul’s presence in family occasions could be authenticated. Eventually both Brendan and myself were allowed moments of seeing the world through the black and white view finders. Perhaps those early cinematographic moments started me on the path to today. The picture as a model of reality. The “real” and the “performed” act is twofold in the home movie. Our many different roles exemplify the separation and interrelation of our public and private lives. The act of mimesis seems to signify “I exist” or, rather, “I represent myself here for immortality.” This imitation of ourselves is an authentic “copy” of the original, since actor and role are identical (Forgacs 52). Identical yet problematic: dissociated? Merilee Bennett’s 1987 film, A Song of Air, is a compilation film composed of home movies shot by Merilee’s father, Reverend Arnold Lucas Bennett, who regularly filmed his family with a Paillard Bolex 16mm camera between 1956 and 1983. I saw A Song of Air as an undergraduate and it has never left me. It did not occur to me until years later to work with my own family’s filmic archive but Bennett’s work is undoubtedly a key influence. The film invites two levels of reading: first, the level of the home movies made by the father; second, the analysis made by Merilee of her father’s home movies through her own reediting of the images and her omnipresent commentary in the form of a letter addressed to her father (Odin 256).No other types of films evidence as much direct address as the home movie. The family filmmaker’s camera functions first as a go-between and only secondly as a recording instrument. To film is to take part in a collective game in the family domain. These familial interactions are not always peaceful. In a personal letter, Merilee Bennett recounts one of these conflicts. “The shot of him [my father] talking directly into the camera with a tree and blue sky behind him was shot by me when I was 12 years old and he is actually telling me to stop, that it was enough now. I remember holding my finger on that button knowing that he couldn’t get really mad at me because I would have it on film, so he had to keep smiling even though he was getting cross.” Merilee reclaims her identity through editing, imposing her own order on her father’s films. The father, “like an omnipotent God,” uses cinema to mold his family.Paul Ewing may have been doing the same – he was the only one aware of how fractured the family, his family, our family, my family actually was.In her autobiography The Words to Say It, Marie Cardinal explains to her psychoanalyst that after clinical treatment she had the strength to undertake a search for the origin of her trauma. I had a similar experience in that I was encouraged by a therapist to ask my father about the reasons behind his infidelity and what he felt were the grounds for his divorce. I had for many years believed it was because of me, that I had disappointed him as a son. Cardinal remembered her father filmed her pissing in the forest. Conscious that her urination has not only been watched, but also filmed, she felt traumatized and thought, “I want to hurt him. I want to kill him! (151)” Shooting a home movie does not always have such dramatic consequences, but it always carries a risk for the subjects filmed, especially children. Parents are not aware of the psychic consequences of a seemingly harmless act. Paul Ewing filmed my brother and I in the bath. I was using the toilet as the filming started and jumped, laughing into the tub with my brother. There is nothing suspect in this description. As a father myself I can understand the desire to film all aspects of my child’s life. At last count I have approximately thirty thousand digital photos and videos of my five year old son and the numbers are rising for his one year old sister. As Paul films us, my brother and I, playing with action figures and acting up for the camera, I laugh at my father. Some days later we were assembled to watch Paul’s latest film. The family convened in the living room, along with our maid Yolanda. When the image came on screen, it seemed to slow down. All I saw was my bottom and then as I entered the bath, my penis. And I saw it being seen by Yolanda. I was devastated, ashamed and furious at my father for showing this private moment. I ran off in tears.Unlike traditional cinematographic projection, to watch a home movie is to be involved in a “performance.” Boris Eikhenbaum proposed the notion of “interior language”: “The process of interior discourse resides in the mind of the spectator.” This interior language can be understood without referring to a context because it is located in the Subject. With the home movie, the context resides in the experience of the Subject. This model explains how completely banal images can refer to representations far removed from what is represented. Contrary to the generally euphoric collective experience, this process of returning to the self often conjures painful memories. One image, of Inez, my mother, comes up in my mind a lot. She stares into the camera as my Father films her. She appears to be engaged in a non verbal conversation with him, with the camera. She doesn’t smile but looks ready to resign, the request to stop filming that is present in so many other instances of her in Paul’s films is absent – it seems to suggest there is no point in her asking. Shortly after the date stamped onto the video image, she revealed to my brother and myself that Paul had been having an affair. “Your father does not love us anymore”. In therapy I have explored both moments – the memory and the video taped image. Something in my mother’s gaze suggests the break, the end of the illusion Paul had crafted both on film and video, and in life. Pierre Bourdieu, discussing family photography, argued that nothing could be filmed outside of what must be filmed. The same ritual ceremonies (marriage, birth, family meals, gift-giving), the same daily scenes (a baby in his mother’s arms, a baby having a bath), the same vacation sequences (playtime on the beach, walks in the forest) appear across most home movies. Discussing “common things,” Georges Perec contended the difficulty is “to free these images from the straitjacket in which they are trapped, to make them produce meaning and speak about what they are and what we are.” Home movies are precisely “common things.” Erving Goffman terms the process of “shifting of frame.” A film of minor importance can suddenly become a fabulous document when the historical context of reading changes. Every old home movie that operates within a different spatial, cultural, ethnic, or social framework will benefit from de-framed readings. Even if these images were not documents and were stereotypical home movies, they become precious because they look new. Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács “creates masterful reflections on the notion of the document itself: why one makes films; the language of the images and language itself; and the possibilities that the image holds for cognition” (Odin 266). The cinematography of Paul Ewing remains a source of possibilities. ReferencesAnderson, Steve F. Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2011.Bourdieu, Pierre. Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. Cambridge: Polity, 1990Boylorn, Robin M., and Mark P. Orbe, eds. Critical Autoethnography: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013.Calvin, WH. The Cerebral Symphony. New York: Bantam, 1990.Cardinal, Marie. The Words to Say It: An Autobiographical Novel. London: Women's Press, 1993.Denzin, NK. Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the 21st Century. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997.Ellis, C. The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004. Eikhenbaum, Boris. “Problemes de Cine-Stylistique.” Cahiers du Cinema 220-221 (1970): 70-78.Forgacs, Peter. “Wittgenstein Tractatus: Personal Reflections of Home Movies.” Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories. Berkeley. Eds. Karen Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmermann. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007. 47-56.Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.Ishizuka, Karen L. “The Home Movie: A Veil of Poetry.” Jubilee Book: Essays on Amateur Film (1997): 45-50.Janet, P. L’Automatisme Psychologique. Paris: Alcan, 1889. Janet, P. Les Medications Psychologiques. Paris: Alcan, 1925. MacLean, PD. “Brain Evolution Relating to Family, Play, and the Separation Call.” Arch Gen Psychiat 42 (1985): 505-517.Odin, Roger. “Reflections on the Family Home Movie as Document: A Semio-Pragmatic Approach.” Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories. Eds. Karen Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmermann. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007. 255-271.Perec, Georges. “Approche de Quoi.” Le Pourrissement des Societies. 1975. 251-255.Piaget, Jean. Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. Florence: Routledge, 2013.Schachtel, Ernest G. Metamorphosis: On the Development of Affect, Perception, Attention, and Memory. New York: Basic Books, 1959.Van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Memory and the Evolving Psychobiology of Post Traumatic Stress. Boston: Harvard Medical School, 1994.Van der Kolk, Bessel, and Rita Fisler. “Dissociation and the Fragmentary Nature of Traumatic Memories: Overview and Exploratory Study.” Journal of Traumatic Stress (1995): 505-525.Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value. University of Chicago Press, 1984.Zimmerman, Patricia. “Morphing History into Histories: From Amateur Film to the Archive of the Future.” Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories. Eds. Karen Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmermann. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007. 275-288.

This article uses a case study of a Melbourne-based youth media project called Youthworx to explore the processes at stake in cultural engagement for marginalised young people. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2008 and 2010, I identify some ways in which the city is implicated in promoting or preventing access to socially valued spaces of creativity and intended social mobility. The ethnographic material presented here has both empirical and theoretical value. It reveals the important relationships between the experience of place, creativity, and social life, demonstrating potentialities and limits of creativity-focused development interventions for marginalised youth. The articulation of these relationships and processes taking place within a particular city setting has theoretical implications. It opens up an opportunity to consider "suburbs" as enacted by specific forms of access, contingencies, and opportunities for a particular demographic, rather than treating "suburbs" as abstract, analytical constructs. Finally, my empirically grounded discussion draws attention to cultural and social consequences that inhabiting certain social worlds and acts of travelling "to and beyond" them have for young people. Youthworx is a community-based youth media initiative employing pathway-based semi-formal creative practices to re-engage young people who have a history of drug or alcohol abuse or juvenile justice, who have been long disconnected from mainstream education, or who are homeless. The focus on media production allows it to tap into, and in fact leverage, popular creativity, tacit knowledge, and familiar media-based activities that young people bring to bear on their media training and work in this context. Underpinned by social and creative industry policy, Youthworx brings together social service agency The Salvation Army (TSA), educational provider Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE (NMIT), youth community media organisation SYN Media, and researchers at Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University. Its day-to-day operation is run by contractual, part-time media facilitators, social workers (as part of TSA’s in-kind support), as well as media industry experts who provide casual media training. Youthworx is characterised by the diversity of its young demographic. One can differentiate between at least two groups of participants: those who join Youthworx because of the social opportunities, and those who put more value on its skill-development, or vocational creative industries orientation. This social organisation is, however, far from static. Over the two years of research (2008-2010) we observed evolving ideas about the identity of the program, its key social functions, and how they can be best served. This had proceeded with the construction of what the Youthworx staff term "a community of safe belonging" to a more "serious" media work environment, exemplified by the establishment of a social enterprise (Youthworx Productions) in 2010 that offers paid traineeships to the most capable and determined young creators. To accommodate the diversity of literacy levels, needs, and aspirations of its young participants, the project offers a tailored media education program with a mix of diversionary, educational, and commercial objectives. One-on-one media training sessions, accredited courses in Creative Industries (Media), and industry training within Youthworx Productions are provided to help young people develop a range of skills transferable into a variety of personal, social and professional contexts. Its creative studio, where learning occurs, is located in a former jeans factory warehouse in the heart of an industrial area of Melbourne’s northern inner-city suburb of Brunswick. Young people are referred to Youthworx by a range of social agencies, and they travel to Brunswick from across Melbourne. Some participants are known to spend over three hours commuting from outer suburbs such as Frankston or even regional towns such as King Lake. Unlike community-based creative programs reliant on established community structures within local suburbs (for example, ICE in Western Sydney), Youthworx moved into Tinning Street in Brunswick because its industry partner—The Salvation Army—had existing youth service infrastructure there. The program, however, was not tapping into an existing media “community of practice” (Lane and Wenger); it had to forge its own culture of media participation. In the early days of the program, there were necessary material resources and professional expertise (teachers/social workers/a creative venue), but it took a long while, and a high level of dedication, passion, and practical optimism on the part of the project managers and teaching staff, for young people to genuinely engage in media training and production. Now, Youthworx’s creative space is a “practised place” in de Certeau’s sense. As “the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers” (De Certeau 117), so is the Youthworx space produced by practices of media learning and making by professional creative practitioners and young amateur creators (Raffo; for ideas on institutionalised co-creative practice see Spurgeon et al.). The Brunswick location is where our extensive ethnographic research has taken place, including regular participant observation and qualitative interviews with staff and young participants. The ethnographers frequently travelled with young people to other locations within Melbourne, accompanying them on their trips to youth community radio station SYN Media in the CBD, where they produce a weekly radio show, as well as to film shoots and public social events around the city. As an access learning program for marginalised youth from around Melbourne, Youthworx provides an interesting example to explore how the concerns of material and cultural capital, geographic and cultural distance intersect and shape processes of creative participation and social inclusion. I draw on our ethnographic material to illustrate how these metonymic relationships play out in the ways young participants “travel distance” (Dewson et. al.) on the project and across the city, both figuratively and literally. The idea of “distance travelled” is adapted here from evaluation literature (for other relevant references see Dowmunt et al.; Hayes and Edwards; Holdsworth et al.), and builds on the argument made previously (Podkalicka and Staley 5), to encompass both the geographical mobility and cultural transformation that young people are supported to undergo as an intended outcome of their involvement in Youthworx. This paper also takes inspiration from ethnographic approaches that study a productive and transformative relationship between material culture, spatial geography and processes of identity formation (see Miller). What happens to Youthworx young participants as they travel in a trivial, and at first sight perhaps inconsequential, way between the suburbs they live in, the Youthworx Brunswick location and the city is both experientially real and meaningful. “Suburban space” is then a cultural site that simultaneously refers to concrete, literal places as well as “a state of mind”—that is, identification and connections that are generative of a sense of identity and belonging (Ferber et al.). Youthworx is an intermediary point on these young people’s travels, rather than the final destination (Podkalicka and Staley 5). It provides access to various forms of new spatial, social, and creative experiences and modes of expression. Creating opportunities for highly disenfranchised young people to access and develop new social and creative experiences is an important aspect of Youthworx’s developmental agenda, and is played out at both philosophical and practical levels. On the one hand, a strength-based approach to youth work assumes respect for young people’s potential and knowledges—unlike public discourses that deny them agency due to an assumed lack of life experience (e.g., Poletti). In addition to the material provision of "food and shelter" typical of traditional social work, attention is paid the higher levels of the Maslow hierarchy of human needs, with creativity, self-esteem, and social connectedness at the top of the scale (see also Podkalicka and Campbell; Podkalicka and Thomas). Former Manager of The Salvation Army’s Brunswick Youth Services (BYS)—one of Youthworx’s partners—Craig Campbell argues: Things like truth and beauty are a higher order of dreams for these kids. And by truth I don’t mean the simple lies that can be told to get them out of trouble [but] is there a greater truth to life than a grinding existence in the impoverished neighbourhood, is there something like beauty and aesthetics that wakes us up in the morning and calls a larger life out of us? Most of those kids only faintly dream of such a thing, and this dream is rapidly being extinguished under the weight of drugs and alcohol, abusive family systems, savage interaction with law and justice system, and education as a toxic environment and experience. (Campbell) Campbell's articulate reflection captures the way the Youthworx project has been conceived. It is also a pertinent example of the many reflections on experience and practice at Youthworx that were recorded in my fieldwork, which illustrate the way these kinds of social projects can be understood, interpreted and evaluated. The following personal narrative and contextual description introduce some of the important issues at stake. (The names and other personal details of young people have been changed.) Nineteen-year-old Dave is temporarily staying in an inner-city refuge. Normally, however, like most Youthworx participants, he lives in Broadmeadows, a far northern suburb of Melbourne. To get to Brunswick, where he does his accredited media course three days a week, he either catches a train or waits for a mini-bus to drive him there. The early-morning pick-up for about ten young people is organised by the program’s partner—The Salvation Army. At the Youthworx creative studio, located in the heart of Brunswick, right next to railway tracks, young people produce an array of media products: live and pre-recorded radio programs, digital storytelling, mini-documentaries, and original music. Once at Youthworx, they share the local neighbourhood with other artists who have adapted warehouses into art workshops, studios and galleries. The suburb of Brunswick is well-known for its multicultural profile, a combination of industrial and residential estates, high rates of tertiary students due to its proximity to universities, and its place in the recent history of urban gentrification. However, Youthworx participants don’t seek out or engage with the existing, physically proximate creative base, even within the same street. On a couple of occasions, the opposite has been the case: Youthworx students have been involved in acts of vandalism of local residents’ property, including nearby parked cars. Their connections to the Brunswick neighbourhood remain poor, often reflecting their low social capital as a result of unstable residential situations, isolation, and fraught relationships with family. From Brunswick, they often travel to the city on their own, wander around, sit on the steps of Flinders Street train station—an inner-city hub and popular meeting place for locals and tourists alike. Youthworx plays an important role in these young people’s lives, as an important access point to not only creative digital media-based experiences and skill development, but also to greater and basic geographical mobility and experiences within the city. As one of the students commented: They are giving us chances that we wouldn’t usually get. Every day you’re getting to a place, where it’s pretty damn easy to get into; that’s what’s good about it. There are so many places where you have to do so much to get there and half the time, some people don’t even have the bloody bus ticket to get a [job] interview. But [at Youthworx/BYS], they will pick you up and drive you around if you need it. They are friends. It is reportedly a common practice for many young people at Youthworx and BYS to catch a train or a tram (rather than bus) without paying for a ticket. However, to be caught dodging a fare a few times has legal consequences and young people often face court as a result. The program responds by offering its young participants tickets for public transport, ready for pick-up after afternoon activities, or, if possible, "driving them around"—as some young people told me. The program’s social workers revealed that girls are particularly afraid to travel on their own, especially when catching trains to the outer northern suburbs, for fear of being harassed or attacked. These supported travels are as practical and necessary as they are meaningful for young people’s identity formation, and as such are recognised and built into the project’s design, co-ordination and delivery. At the most basic level, The Salvation Army’s social workers pick young people up from the Broadmeadows area in the mornings. Youthworx creative practitioners assist young people to make trips to SYN Media in the city. For most participants, this is either the first or sporadic experience of travelling to the city, something they enjoy very much but are also somewhat daunted by. Additionally, as part of the curriculum, Youthworx staff make a point of taking young people to inner-city movie theatres or public media events. The following vignette from the fieldwork highlights another important connection between physical journey and creative expression. There is an excitement in Dave’s voice when he talks about his favourite pastime: hanging out around the city. “Why would you walk around the streets?” a curious female friend interjects. Dave replies: “No, it’s not the streets, man. It’s just Federation Square, everywhere … There is just all these young wannabe criminals and shit. People don’t know what goes on; and I want to do a doco on the city, a little doco of the people there, because I know a lot of it.” Dave’s interest in exploring the city may be interpreted as a rather common, mundane routine shared by mildly adventurous adolescents of all walks. And yet, there is much more at stake in his account, and for Youthworx young participants more generally. As mentioned before, for many of these young people, it is the first opportunity to travel to the city. This experience then is crucial in a sense of self-exploration and self-discovery. As they overcome their fear of venturing out into the city on their own, they also learn that they have knowledge which others might lack. This moment of realisation is significant and empowering, and they want to communicate this knowledge to others. Youthworx assists them in learning how to translate this knowledge in a creative and constructive way, through an expression that weaves between the free individual and the social voice constructed to enable a dialogue or understanding (Podkalicka; Podkalicka and Campbell; Podkalicka and Thomas; also Soep and Chavez). For an effective communication to occur, a crafted social voice requires skills and a critical awareness of oneself and an audience, which is very different from the modes of expression that these young people might have accessed previously. Youthworx's young participants draw heavily on their life experiences, geographical locations, the suburbs they come from, and places they visit in the city: their cultural productions often reference their homes, music clubs and hang-out venues, inner city streets, Federation Square, and Youthworx’s immediate physical surroundings, with graffiti-covered narrow alleys and railway tracks. The frequent depiction of Youthworx in young people’s creative outputs is often a token of appreciation of the creative, educational and social opportunities it has offered them. Social and professional connections they make there are found to be very valuable. The existing creative industries literature emphasises the importance of social networks to existing communities of interest and practice for human capacity building. Value is argued to lie not only in specific content produced, but in participatory processes that establish a link between personal growth, individual skills and social and professional networks (Hearn and Bridgestock). In a similar vein, Carlo Raffo uses Granovetter’s concept of “weak ties” to suggest that access to “social relations that go beyond the immediate locality and hence their immediate experiences” can provide marginalised young people with “pathways for authentic and informal learning that go beyond the structuring influences of class, gender and ethnicity and into new and emerging economic experiences” (Raffo 11). But higher levels of confidence or social skills are required to make the most of vocational or professional opportunities beyond the supportive context of Youthworx. Connections between Youthworx participants and other creative practitioners within the creative locality of Brunswick have been absent thus far. Transitions into mainstream education and employment have also proven challenging for this group of heavily marginalised youth. As we found during our ongoing fieldwork, even the most talented students find it hard to get into mainstream education courses, or to get or keep jobs. The project serves as a social basis for young people to develop self-agency and determination so they can start engaging with new opportunities and social networks outside the program (Raffo 15). Indeed, the creative practitioners at Youthworx are key facilitators of connections between young people and the external world. They act as positive role models socially, and illustrate what is possible professionally in terms of media excellence and employment (see also Raffo). There are indications that this very supportive, gradual process of social learning is starting to bear fruit for individual students and the Youthworx community as a whole as they grow more confident with themselves, in interactions with others, and the media work they do. Media projects such as Youthworx are examples of what Leadbeater and Wong call “disruptive innovation,” as they provide new ways of learning for those alienated by formal education. The use of digital hands-on media production makes educational processes relevant and engaging for young people. However, as I demonstrate in this paper, there are tangible, material barriers to releasing creativity, or enhancing self-discovery and sociality. There are, as Leadbeater and Wong observe, persistent links between cultural environment, socio-economic status, corresponding attitudes to learning and educational success in the developed world. In the UK, for example, only small percent of those from the lowest socio-economic background go to university (Leadbeater and Wong 10). Youthworx provides an opportunity and motivation for young people to break a cycle of individual self-destructive behaviour (e.g. getting locked up every 6 months), intergenerational reliance on welfare, or entrenched negative attitudes to learning. At the basic level, it encourages and often insists that young people get up in the morning, with social workers often reporting to have to “knock at people’s houses and get them ready.” The involvement in Youthworx is often an important reason to start delineating between day and night, week and weekend. A couple of students commented: I slept a lot. Yeah, I was always sleeping during the day and out at night; I could have still been doing nothing with my life [were it not for Youthworx]. Now people ask if I want to go out during the week, and I just can’t be bothered. I just want to sleep and then go to [Youthworx] and then weekends are when you go out. It also offers a concrete means to begin exploring the city beyond the constraints of their local suburbs. This literal, geographical mobility is interlocked with potential for a changed perception of opportunities, individual transformation and, consequently, social mobility. Dave, as we have seen, is attracted to the idea of exploring the city but also has creative aspirations, and contemplates professional prospects in the creative industries. It is important to note that the participants are resilient in their negotiation between the suburban, Youthworx and inner city worlds they can inhabit. Accessing learning, despite previous negative schooling experiences, is for many of them very important, and reaffirming of life they aspire to. An opportunity to pursue dreams, creative forms of expression, social networks and education is a vital part of human existence. These aspects of social inclusion are recognised in the current articulation of social policy reconceptualised beyond material, economic equality. Creative industry policy, on the other hand, is concerned with fostering creative outputs and skills to generate engagement and employment opportunities in the knowledge-based economies for wide sections of the population. The value is located in human capacity building, involving basic social as well as vocational skills, and links to social networks. The Youthworx project merges these two policy frameworks of the social and creative to test in practice new collaborative approaches to youth development. The spatial and cultural practices of young people described here serve a basis for proposing a theoretical framework that can help understand the term "suburb" in an intrinsically relational, grounded way. The relationships at stake in cultural and social participation for marginalised young people lead me to suggest that the concept of ‘suburb’ takes on two tightly interwoven meanings. The first refers symbolically to a particular locale for popular creativity (Burgess) or even marginal creativity by a group of young people living at the periphery of the social system. The second meaning refers to the interlocked forms of material and cultural capital (and distance), as theorised in Bourdieu’s work (e.g., Bourdieu). It includes physical, spatial conditions and relations, as well as cultural resources and possibilities made available to young participants by the project (e.g., the instituted, supported travel across the city, or the employment of creative practitioners), and interlinked with everyday dispositions, practices, and status of young people (e.g., taste). This empirically-grounded discussion allows to theorise ‘suburbs’ as perceived and socially enacted by concrete, relational forms of access, contingencies, and opportunities for a particular demographic, rather than analytically pre-conceived, designated spaces within an urban system. The ethnographic material reveals that cultural participation for marginalised youth requires an integrated approach, with a parallel focus on material and creative opportunities made available within creative sites such as Youthworx or even the Brunswick creative area. The important material constraints exemplified in this paper concern socio-economic background, cultural disadvantage and geographical isolation and point to the limits of the creative industries-based interventions to address social inclusion if carried out in isolation. They tap into the very basis of risks for this specific demographic of marginalised youth or "youth at risk." The paper suggests that the productive emphasis on the role of media and communication for (youth) development needs to be contextualised and considered along with the actual realities of everyday existence that often limit young people’s educational and vocational prospects (see Bentley et al.; Leadbeater and Wong). On the other hand, an exclusive focus on material support risks cancelling out the possibilities for positive life transitions, such as those triggered by constructive, non-reductionist engagement with “beauty, aesthetics” (Campbell) and creativity. By exploring how participation in Youthworx engenders both the physical mobility between suburbs and the city, and identity transformation, we are able to gain insights into the nature of social exclusion, its meanings for the youth involved and the project managers and staff. Thinking about Youthworx not just as a hub of creative production but as a cultural site—“a space within a practiced place of identity” (De Certeau 117) in the suburb of Brunswick—opens up a discussion that combines the policy language of opportunity and necessity with concrete creative and material possibilities. Social inclusion objectives aimed at positive youth transitions need to be considered in the light of the connection—or disconnection—between the Youthworx Brunswick site itself, young participants’ suburbs, and, by extension, the trajectory between the inner city and other spaces that young people travel through and inhabit. Acknowledgment I would like to thank all the young participants, staff and industry partners involved in the Youthworx project. I also acknowledge the comments of anonymous peer reviewer which helped to strengthen the argument by foregrounding the value of the empirical material. The paper draws on the larger project funded by the Centre of Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation. Youthworx research team includes: Prof Denise Meredyth (CI); Prof Julian Thomas (CI); Ass/Prof David MacKenzie (CI); Ass/Prof Ellie Rennie; Chris Wilson (PhD candidate), and Jon Staley (Youthworx Manager and PhD candidate). References Bentley, Tom, and Kate Oakley. “The Real Deal: What Young People Think about Government, Politics and Social Exclusion.” Demos. 12 Jan. 2011 ‹http://www.demos.co.uk/files/theRealdeal.pdf›. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1987. Burgess, Jean. “Hearing Ordinary Voices: Cultural Studies, Vernacular Creativity and Digital Storytelling.” Continuum 20.2 (2006): 201–14. Campbell, Craig. Personal Interview. Melbourne, 2009. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. Dewson, Sara, Judith Eccles, Nii Djan Tackey and Annabel Jackson. “Guide to Measuring Soft Outcomes and Distance Travelled.” The Institute for Employment Studies. 12 Jan. 2011‹http:// www.dwp.gov.uk/docs/distance.pdf›. Dowmunt, Tom, Mark Dunford, and N. van Hemert. Inclusion through Media. London: Open Mute, 2007. Ferber, Sarah, Chris Healy, and Chris McAuliffe. Beasts of Suburbia: Reinterpreting Cultures in Australian Suburbs. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1994. Hayes, Alan, Matthew Gray, and Ben Edwards. “Social Inclusion: Origins, Concepts and Key Themes.” Australian Institute of Family Studies, prepared for the Social Inclusion Unit, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. 2008.12 Jan. 2011 ‹http://www.socialinclusion.gov.au/Documents/AIFS_SI_concepts_report_20April09.pdf›. Hearn, Gregory, and Ruth Bridgstock. “Education for the Creative Economy: Innovation, Transdisciplinarity, and Networks. Education in the Creative Economy: Knowledge and Learning in the Age of Innovation. Ed. Daniel Araya and Michael Peters. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. 93–116. Holdsworth, Roger, Murray Lake, Kathleen Stacey, and John Safford. “Doing Positive Things: You Have to Go Out and Do It: Outcomes for Participants in Youth Development Programs.” Australian Youth Research Centre. 12 Jan. 2011 ‹http://www.dest.gov.au/NR/rdonlyres/5385FE14-A74C-4B24-98EA-D31EEA8447B2/21803/doing_positive_things1.pdf›. Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Leadbeater, Charles, and Annika Wong. “Learning from the Extremes.” CISCO. 12 Jan. 2011 ‹http://www.socialinclusion.gov.au/Documents/AIFS_SI_concepts_report_20April09.pdf›. Miller, Daniel. Stuff. Cambridge: Polity, 2010. Podkalicka, Aneta. “Young Listening: An Ethnography of Youthworx Media's Radio Project." Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 23.4 (2009): 561–72. ———, and Jon Staley. “Youthworx Media: Creative Media Engagement for ‘at Risk’ Young People.” 3CM 5 (2009). ———, and Julian Thomas. “The Skilled Social Voice: An Experiment in Creative Economy and Communication Rights.’’ International Communication Gazette 72.4–5 (2010): 395–406. ———, and Craig Campbell. “Understanding Digital Storytelling: Beyond the Politics of Voice in Youth Participation Programs.” seminar.net: Media Technology and Lifelong Learning 6.2 (2010). ‹http://www.seminar.net/index.php/home/75-current-issue/150-understanding-digital-storytelling-individual-voice-and-community-building-in-youth-media-programs›. Poletti, Anna. Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008. Raffo, Carlo. "Mentoring Disenfranchised Young People: An Action Research Project on the Development of 'Weak Ties' and Social Capital Enhancement." Education and Industry in Partnership 6.3 (2000): 22–42. Soep, Elizabeth, and Vivian Chavez. Drop That Knowledge: Youth Radio Stories. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Spurgeon, Christina, Jean Burgess, Helen Klaebe, Kelly McWilliam, Jo Tacchi, and Mimi Tsai. “Co-Creative Media: Theorising Digital Storytelling as a Platform for Researching and Developing Participatory Culture.” 2009 ANZC Conference Proceedings. 2009. 16 Nov. 2010 ‹http://eprints.qut.edu.au/25811/2/25811.pdf›.

At the beginning of his recent collection of essays in queer studies, Jeffrey Escoffier makes the assertion at once portentous and banal that “the moment of acknowledging to oneself homosexual desires and feelings … and then licensing oneself to act ... is the central drama of the homosexual self.” That “moment of self-classification,” he explains, “is an emergency – sublime, horrible, wonderful – in the life of anyone who must confront it.” (1) In the theatre of my own biography, I am unsure how or when I first played out this epiphanic drama of queer self-acknowledgment, but I can vividly recall the first time someone else enacted it for me. In elementary school, at the age of ten, a fellow pupil cornered me in the school playground and announced with calculated precocity to anyone who cared to listen that I was, as he put it, “a homo.” Unlike some of my congregated peers whose chorus of “what’s a homo?” provoked a dizzying exchange of infantile misinformation, I was only too well aware of the term’s meaning and, shocked that my queerness should not only be revealed but also be so transparently legible that even a boorish bully might detect it, slid away in fearful embarrassment. What proved most unsettling to me, however, was that my nascent homosexuality should have been evidenced in this playground spectacle of queer exposure, not on the basis of same-sex desire but, rather, on that of passionate devotion to a woman. Earlier that day, our schoolteacher had directed us to write and then read aloud to the class a composition entitled, “My Hero.” Where most of my classmates wrote predictable tributes to normative role models of the time like Neil Armstrong, Greg Chappell, Muhammad Ali, and even Jesus Christ, I penned an effusive homage to, what I described in the essay as, that “radiant star of stage and screen, Miss Julie Andrews”. It was this profession of ardent affection for a female film star that led directly to my schoolyard outing. As my accuser put it when explicating the deductive rationale behind his sexual detection, “Only a homo would love Julie Andrews!” Even at age ten, the paradoxical (il)logic of this formulation was so glaring as to all but slap me hard across the face – an action transposed from the metaphoric to the literal by my playground adversary who, not content to let “the homo” escape too readily or lightly, pursued me across the schoolyard and pushed me face-first into the asphalt. How could my declaration of desire for a female star – which in strictly definitional terms should have seemed, if anything, eminently heterosexual – be taken so assuredly as a marker of homosexuality? Why and how could my loving Julie Andrews provoke such an explosive manifestation of juvenile homophobia? The answers to these questions were already known, if only intuitively and, thus, only partially, to the ten-year old me. Like many other elements of my childhood, my love for Julie Andrews formed part of what I was fast recognizing was an ever-expanding and ever-consolidating category of bad object-choices – a diverse array of cultural and social cathexes variously abjectified, proscribed or deemed otherwise inconsonant with dominant modes of sexual selfhood. Redefined as a symptom of sexual dissonance, my devotion to Andrews suddenly became a catalytic signifier of shame, a palpable marker of my failure to achieve heteronormality and, thus, another attachment to cache away in the cavernous closet of protogay childhood. That this scenario will sound instantly familiar to many is evidence of the extent to which a politics of shame is routinely mobilized – most potently, though by no means exclusively, in childhood – to stigmatize and thus discipline queer subjectivities. Much of the breathtaking success with which mainstream culture is able to install and mandate a heteronormative economy depends directly on its ability to foster a correlative economy of queer shame through which to disgrace and thus delegitimate all that falls outside the narrow purview of straight sexualities. Not that such processes of juridical stigmatization are necessarily successful. Shameful and shameless are, after all, but a suffix apart and a good deal of the productivity of queer cultures – as of queer lives – resides precisely in the extraordinary capacity they obtain for not only clinging stubbornly and defiantly to the outlawed objects of their desire but investing these objects with a near-inexhaustible source of vitalizing energy. The scene of my schoolyard shaming may have effected a public occlusion of my love for Julie Andrews, but it in no way quelled or attenuated that love. Indeed, transformed into a sign of my developing homosexuality, my attachment to Andrews became more than ever an integral component of my subjectivity and an indefatigable resource for survival in the face of what I perceived to be an unaccommodating social world. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick dubs these survivalist dynamics of queer culture “reparative” in the sense given the term by object-relations theory as an affirmative impulse to repair or make good the losses of subjective constitution. Unlike the competing paranoid positionality which in object-relations theory is understood to fracture the world into colliding part-objects and is marked by “hatred, envy, and anxiety”, the reparative dynamic is marked by love and seeks to reassemble or repair the subject’s world into “something like a whole” that is “available both to be identified with and to offer one nourishment and comfort in turn.” (Sedgwick, 8) For Sedgwick, this idea of a reparative impulse speaks powerfully to the inventive and obstinate ways in which queer subjects negotiate spaces of self-affirmation in the face of a hostile environment, or as she evocatively puts it, the ways in which queer “selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from ... a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.” (35) As a paradigmatic example of and governing trope for this reparative tradition of queer survivalism, Sedgwick offers, significantly for my purposes, the image of the proto-queer child or adolescent ardently (over)attached to a cultural text or object, passionately investing that text or object with almost talismanic properties to repair or make good a damaged socius . “Such a child,” she writes, “is reading for important news about herself, [even] without knowing what form that news will take; with only the patchiest familiarity with its codes; without, even, more than hungrily hypothesizing to what questions this news may proffer an answer.” (2-3) This characterization of a reparatively positioned proto-queer reader resonates profoundly with my own fiercely loving attachments to Julie Andrews. Much of the energy of these attachments – certainly in childhood and, perhaps less urgently but no less decisively, in adulthood – springs directly from the reparative performances to which this particular star has been cast in the playhouse of my own imaginary. To wit: a cherished ritual from childhood. In the days when I was growing up, the days before VCRs and cable television, my Andrews fandom was of necessity organized not so much around her film texts as around her recordings. While I had seen her films and these were vital, generative sites for my fan passions, the primary focus for those passions – where they were practised, indulged, nurtured – was her vocal recordings. On long, listless afternoons, returned home from school, I would rush to the living room, position myself firmly in front of the family hi-fi and blissfully listen my way through my expansive collection of Julie Andrews LPs. My favourite, without doubt, was the soundtrack recording for The Sound of Music, which I would play and replay for hours on end. I can still recall the palpable sense of breathless anticipation when, unsheathed from its cover and reverently placed on the turntable, the disc would crackle to life. A whispering breath of wind, an echo of birdsong, a rapid swell of violins, and Julie’s inimitable voice would break forth in fortissimo triumph, leaping through the speakers and enveloping the room with melodic abundance. To augment the sense of excitement, I would, while listening, gaze intently at the record cover with its celebrated image of Julie leaping in mid-flight like a preternatural oread, her skirt billowing up with carefree delight, arms swinging open in joyous welcome, effortlessly holding aloft a guitar case and a travelling bag, twin symbols of musical expressivity and liberating escape. Projecting myself into the scene, I would twirl with Julie in imaginary freedom, riding the crest of her crystalline voice in rapturous transport from the suburban mundanity of family, school, and straightness. Invested with the attentive love and astonishing creativity of juvenile fandom, Andrews provided not just the promissory vision of a life different from and infinitely freer than the one I knew, but the fantasmatic means through which to achieve and sustain this process of transcendence. If I loved Julie Andrews as a child it was because that love functioned as a process through which to resist and transfigure the oppressive banalities of the heteronormative everyday. Though unaware of it at the time, my childhood mobilization of a female star as a vehicle of, and for, quotidian transcendence has a long and rich pedigree in queer cultures, especially gay male cultures. From the enthusiasms of the nineteenth century dandies for operatic primi donne and the fervent gay cult followings in the mid-twentieth century of Hollywood stars such as Judy Garland and Bette Davis, to contemporary queer celebrations of dancefloor goddesses, diva worship has been a staple of gay male cultural production where it has sustained a spectacularly diverse array of insistently queer pleasures. While loath to generalize its heterogeneous functions and values, I submit that much of the enduring vitality of diva worship in gay male cultures resides in the commodious scope it affords for reparative cultural labour. Indeed, most critical discussions of gay diva worship posit in some fashion that gay men engage divas as imaginary figures of therapeutic empowerment. “At the very heart of gay diva worship”, opines Daniel Harris, is “the almost universal homosexual experience of ostracism and insecurity” and the desire to “elevate [one]self above [one’s] antagonistic surroundings.” (Harris, 10) Wayne Koestenbaum similarly claims that "gay culture has perfected the art of mimicking a diva – of pretending, inside, to be divine – to help the stigmatized self imagine it is received, believed, and adored." (Koestenbaum, 133) Tuned to the chord of reparative amelioration, diva worship emerges here as a vital practice of affective queer enfranchisement: the restoration of a functional selfhood and the provision of emotional resources through which to transcend – and survive – the often violent deformations of a heteronormative world. That such processes of male homosexual affirmation should be articulated through ardent devotion to a woman might seem a strange paradox. But just as love and sex are never inevitable correspondents, the presence of a heterosexual passion inscribed at the very heart of gay male culture by its long histories of diva worship is a sure – and welcome – sign of the irrepressible waywardness of desire and its stubborn refusal to fit the impoverished scripts that we nominate sexuality. Works Cited Escoffier, Jeffrey. American Homo: Community and Perversity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Harris, Daniel. The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture. New York: Hyperion, 1997. Koestenbaum, Wayne. The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire. New York: Poseidon Press, 1993. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You.” Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Farmer, Brett. "Loving Julie Andrews" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.6 (2002). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/lovingjulie.php>. APA Style Farmer, B., (2002, Nov 20). Loving Julie Andrews. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 5,(6). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/lovingjulie.html

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>. Barkun, Michael. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Brown, Jr., James J. Ethical Programs: Hospitality and the Rhetorics of Software. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. CBS News. “How Many People Attended March for Our Lives? Crowd in D.C. Estimated at 200,000.” CBS News 25 Mar. 2018. <https://www.cbsnews.com/news/march-for-our-lives-crowd-size-estimated-200000-people-attended-d-c-march/>. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory.” Critical Inquiry 35.1 (2008): 148-71. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/595632>. Curinga, Matthew X. “Critical Analysis of Interactive Media with Software Affordances.” First Monday 19.9 (2014). <https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4757/4116>. Drobnic Holan, Angie, and Amy Sherman. “PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year: Online Smear Machine Tries to Take Down Parkland Students.” PolitiFact 11 Dec. 2018. <http://www.politifact.com/article/2018/dec/11/politifacts-lie-year-parkland-student-conspiracies/>. Kumar, D. Vinay, et al. “URLs Link Rot: Implications for Electronic Publishing.” World Digital Libraries 8.1 (2015): 59-66. March for Our Lives. “Mission and Story.” <https://marchforourlives.com/mission-story/>. Marwick, Alice, and Becca Lewis. Media Manipulation and Misinformation Online. Data & Society Research Institute, 2017. <https://datasociety.net/library/media-manipulation-and-disinfo-online/>. Media Matters Staff. “Alex Jones on Florida High School Shooting: It May Be a False Flag, and Democrats Are Suspects.” Media Matters for America 14 Feb. 2018. <https://www.mediamatters.org/alex-jones/alex-jones-florida-high-school-shooting-it-may-be-false-flag-and-democrats-are-suspects>. Muirhead, Russell, and Nancy L. Rosenblum. A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. “I Posted A 4Chan Link a few days ago, that got deleted here, that mentions the coming Social Media Purge by a YouTube insider. Now we are seeing it happen.” Reddit. <https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/7zqria/i_posted_a_4chan_link_a_few_days_ago_that_got/>. Phillips, Whitney, and Ryan M. Milner. You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2021. r/conspiracy. Reddit. <https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/>. Rhodes, Sarah. “Breaking Down Link Rot: The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive's Examination of URL Stability.” Law Library Journal 102. 4 (2010): 581-97. Rice, Jenny. Awful Archives: Conspiracy Theory, Rhetoric, and Acts of Evidence. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2020. Russo, Carla Herreria. “The Rest of the World Showed Up to March for Our Lives.” Huffington Post 25 Mar. 2018. <https://www.huffpost.com/entry/world-protests-march-for-our-lives_n_5ab717f2e4b008c9e5f7eeca>. “Searching for video of Parkland shooting on bitchute.” Reddit. <https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/ddl1s8/searching_for_video_of_parkland_shooting_on/>. Timberg, Craig, and Drew Harwell. “We Studied Thousands of Anonymous Posts about the Parkland Attack – and Found a Conspiracy in the Making.” Washington Post 27 Feb. 2018. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/we-studied-thousands-of-anonymous-posts-about-the-parkland-attack---and-found-a-conspiracy-in-the-making/2018/02/27/04a856be-1b20-11e8-b2d9-08e748f892c0_story.html>. “Video exposing David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez as crisis actors and other strange anomalies involving the parkland shooting.” Reddit. <https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/ae3xxp/video_exposing_david_hogg_and_emma_gonzalez_as/>. Wardle, Claire, and Hossein Derakhshan. Information Disorder: Toward and Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policymaking. Council of Europe, 2017. <https://rm.coe.int/information-disorder-toward-an-interdisciplinary-framework-for-researc/168076277c>. Yglesias, Matthew. “The Parkland Conspiracy Theories, Explained.” Vox 22 Feb. 2018. <https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/22/17036018/parkland-conspiracy-theories>. Zittrain, Jonathan, et al. “The Paper of Record Meets an Ephemeral Web: An Examination of Linkrot and Content Drift within The New York Times.” Social Science Research Network 27 Apr. 2021. <https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3833133>.

We live in an era in which the ‘active learner’ has become accepted as the fundamental goal of good teaching from early childcare to university education (Silberman; University of Melbourne University). In this paper we reflect upon the arts of stillness in contemporary classrooms based on research in schools across Sydney (Watkins and Noble).Part of the context for this paper is the way ‘activity’ has been uncritically elevated to a pedagogic principle in contemporary education. Over several decades a critique of traditional or more formal approaches to education has produced an increasing emphasis on learning that is said to be more engaged often under labels such as ‘discovery’ or ‘experiential’ learning, enquiry methods or ‘learning by doing’. This desire to give students a greater role in the educational process is admirable. It is also seen to be more democratic and ‘relevant’ to young people (Cope & Kalantzis). Positioned against a straw man of ‘passive learning’, characterised by the dominance of teacher direction, rote learning and individuated desk work, this active learning or progressivist perspective on education privileges student ‘ownership’ of curriculum, group-based activity and the ‘doing’ of things. Stillness is characterised as a ‘problem of passivity’, a ‘disease’ of ‘chalk and talk’ (Lucas 84-85). In its most extreme form, this emphasis on activity has been translated into ‘educational kinesiology’ and ‘brain gym’, in which physical movement is seen to have a direct, beneficial effect on learning, often in place of content-based curriculum (Lucas 50). In this paper we don’t engage in a critique of ‘active learning’ per se; rather, taking seriously Foucault’s insistence on the productivity of discipline, we argue stillness is crucial to scholarly labour.Part of the context for this research is public anxiety about ‘Asian success’ within Australian education systems. Students from ‘Asian’ backgrounds are often perceived as having a cultural proneness towards educational achievement (Duffy 28). These perceptions rest on assumptions about ‘Asian values’ of family, sacrifice, hard work and success (Robinson). These assumptions, however, are problematic (Wu and Singh), and carry a concern that such students are ‘passive’ in the classroom, deferential to traditional forms of education and obsessed with exams. Certainly, despite their success, these students don’t conform to what many teachers favour as the ideal learner within the dominant paradigm of progressivism (Cope & Kalantzis 4). These anxieties have also emerged in response to the proliferation of coaching colleges which are seen to transgress western notions of childhood.The research – based on a parent survey in 10 primary schools, interviews with Year 3 teachers, parents and students and classroom observations in six of these schools – explored the extent to which a ‘disposition’ to academic achievement can be explained by ethnicity or relates to a complex set of socio-cultural factors. The report from this study engages with the broad question of the relationship between ethnicity and, what we call, following Bourdieu, the ‘scholarly habitus’ (Watkins & Noble). Against a pathologising of cultural background, it examines the ways achievement is embodied as orientations to learning through different home and school practices. Here we use examples drawn from the observations to focus on the capacities for self-discipline and stillness that can foster achievement. Against the tendency to equate stillness with inaction, we argue that a 'productive stillness' underlines capacities for sustained attention and self-direction. This bodily discipline entails a state of composure, a 'staying' of movement which entails a readiness for action necessary for academic tasks. While not all stillness is ‘productive’, we argue there are forms of stillness which are conducive to the formation of the 'scholarly habitus' (Bourdieu, Logic). The Bodily Capacity for Scholarly LabourBourdieu (State) refers to dispositions that are valued in education: self-discipline, the ability to work intensively, confidence, independence, contemplation, abstraction and the value of excellence. Yet he is less interested in exploring these capacities in relation to teaching practice than in discussing them as forms of social distinction. Educational applications of Bourdieu also focus on the social reproduction of inequality, separate to the technical competencies of schooling, although Bourdieu does not differentiate between them (Lareau and Weininger). To understand the uneven distribution of educational competencies, however, they first need to be examined as bodily capacities that are enabling.To do this, let us contrast two classrooms in Broughton PS, a large school in a low-to-mid SES area in Sydney’s inner south-west with large numbers of Arabic-speaking and Asian students, and smaller groups of Anglo, Pasifika and African students. One class is an enrichment class, in which high ability students are placed and where there is a strong focus on academic work. The other class has many of the least able students. The enrichment class comprises students of mostly Chinese background, with a smaller number of Vietnamese, Indian and Anglo background. There is one Arabic-speaking student but no Pasifika students. The second class is more diverse, and has many Pasifika students, with fewer Chinese, Arabic and Anglo students.The first time we saw the enrichment class was after recess. Students shuffled into their classroom and sat down at their desks with minimum fuss. Many of them pulled out books and read them while waiting for their teacher, Heather, to enter. If they talked, it was quietly, and often about what they were reading. They sat still: the posture of most students was upright, even when they were working. Some students occasionally rocked back, stretching arms and legs. Overall, however, these students had mastered the arts of stillness. Sonia, of Chinese background, is a case in point – she was always work-focused, sitting still and getting on with it. Even during unstructured discussion she remained task-orientated displaying a substantial investment in her work.In the second class the students bustled in, taking a while to settle. Kids stood around chatting, playing, shoving each other until the teacher, Betty, shouted at them, which she did a lot. The noise of the students never abated, even as the teacher was giving instructions, and it frequently reached high levels. There was constant movement as students came in late, and teachers and students wandered in and out. Kids visited other kids; one student rolled on the floor. When they were directed to sit at the front, several squatted, some sat away from the area, several simply stood. When they were at their desks, many slouched forward or leant back; a large number of the students rocked on their chairs during the sessions, some constantly. The directions of the teacher to put ‘feet on floor’ and ‘hands on heads’, or putting her fingers to her lips to gesture for them to be quiet, shouting or by counting back from 5 had little effect. This class was a very active group, but little work got done. They did not have sustained capacities of stillness appropriate for academic activities. In the enrichment class, the teacher didn’t have to check noise or movement very often – the students had internalised these behaviours as capacities that directed their work. Occasionally, they policed each other if they were disrupted. There was occasional talk, but it tended to be in whispers. If the task required it, there was plenty of discussion; and some of the students didn’t hesitate in challenging the teacher when she made a mistake. These students’ stillness and quiet was by-and-large productive and appropriate. We call this a state of composure, a readiness for activity. When required, this class was capable of concentration and application; or, alternatively, discussion. We call it composure because it links to Foucault’s (162-3) insight that modern forms of discipline rest on a ‘composition of forces’ which not only produce an efficient organisation but individuals with a disposition towards acting skilfully.Betty’s class, in contrast, was in a state of decomposure, with unproductive movement and noise. They were rarely still, posture was poor, and many students spent little time attending to work or the teacher. They were rarely ready for work when the teacher called them to it. Rather they saw a change in activity as a chance for movement and chatter. This was not the caged resentment that Willis described in his analysis of resistance to school amongst working class boys. It was not a form of conscious insubordination, though a similar form of ‘self-damnation’ was evident.Sonny, a Samoan boy in this class, in contrast to Sonia, struggled to stay on-task for more than a few minutes, and clearly had little investment in his work. He generally didn’t care where he was at with the task, and expected the teacher to constantly direct him. Sonny was a very large child – the teacher commented that his physical presence in the class was an ongoing problem as he was unaware of other children, constantly bowling them over. The teacher struggled to manage Sonny’s body. He talked frequently and loudly, and leant back on his chair despite being placed in a way that pinned him against a cupboard. His location in the class was telling. He was sitting at a table with students who followed tasks, separated from the usual troublemakers. This is significant for another reason of which Sonny was not fully conscious. At one stage in the lesson he sat bolt upright and pointing at each of his tablemates, yelled, ‘Miss, why am I sitting with all Chinese?’ Betty apparently hoped that being with the quieter Chinese students Sonny would not only be out of harm’s way, he might absorb the skills of application they possessed!This uneven distribution of capacities was also seen in the way different classes undertook a maths assessment task on fractions. While other classes treated it as a general lesson, in the enrichment class it was completed in test conditions, which the teacher later commented the kids loved. The teacher explained the task and the conditions – that there should be no copying, to work in silence, concentrate on the questions, the amount of time they’d get and what to do when they finished (further maths work). She initiated an enthusiastic class discussion of the topic (fractions), reminded them of work they had completed in this area and got them to go through basic aspects of fractions. The task was distributed and students immediately filled in their name and the date. When they commenced their work she moved around the room monitoring their progress. Occasionally she directed a student to reread the instructions and towards the end she reminded them to check their work and then gave them a five-minute warning. There was little movement, fiddling or talk, unless it was a question of clarification directed to the teacher. Most finished and moved quickly onto their maths workbooks. There was a lively discussion afterwards as the class went through the questions and discussed the answers and procedure. Overall, there was a clear sense of a strong investment in the process and the product: with many showing real annoyance when they got things wrong, and deep pleasure when they were correct. While the contrast between these classes is clear, and show an uneven distribution of particular capacities, we should be careful not to make a simple assumption that stillness, quiet and obedience are good, and their opposites bad. Apart from the fact that the enrichment class showed itself capable of vociferous and physical behaviour (as when they were completing a craft activity), the point is really about the appropriateness and productivity of these embodied competencies for particular tasks, and the ability to move between these capacities when necessary.Stillness, and its attendant capacities described above, is not a good in and of itself. There is another kind of stillness that we found in a class in another school we observed. Chestervale PS was in a middle class area in a northern suburb of Sydney that was favoured by parents of Chinese background. This class was by no means as unruly as Sonny’s – classroom behaviour was generally well managed by the teacher, and the students were fairly adept at following tasks. Two students we observed – Walter (of Chinese background) and Eric (of Anglo background) – seemed at first glance to be well-behaved students who did their work. Watching these boys for several hours, however, we became aware of the fact that for large chunks of the classroom time they did nothing, but were not recognised as doing so. Walter spent 45 minutes without adding anything to his writing – a straightforward comprehension task. This was also run in near-test-like conditions of quiet concentration, and Walter, apart from a few minor distractions, seemed to be focused on the pages in front of him but actually wrote nothing in the lesson. The teacher strolled around checking students’ work and giving advice or praise as needed – she managed the class quite well – but seemed not to notice when she checked Walter’s work that he hadn’t written anything. Eric, rather more obviously distracted, but who nevertheless seemed to complete 1-2 questions, got by with little work by being, like Walter, generally quiet. His distractions amounted to little more than staring at the contents of the shelf next to him and fidgeting. Walter and Eric were acquiring specific types of capacities – skills in getting out of work that are also fundamentally unproductive. Walter’s general abilities allowed him to float through the class, but Eric’s failure to develop productive capacities was demonstrated in his poor reading and writing levels. We don’t wish to participate in the academic romanticisation of such tactics as ‘resistance’, however, because while this ‘ordinary art’ is diversionary it does not ultimately work to ‘the advantage’ of the student (de Certeau 29-31). Rather, it is simply disabling.This example highlights two important points. First, as mentioned, stillness and quiet are not in themselves signs of educational ‘productivity’ – such capacities always have to be seen in context, related to specific tasks and aims. Many teachers may encourage stillness and quiet – even reward it – simply because it produces an orderly classroom. Second, we should be wary of looking to ethnicity as an explanation of the uneven distribution of capacities: Eric, as an Anglo student, isn’t subject to the kind of cultural pathologising usually reserved for students of particular ethnic backgrounds and Walter, clearly, did not match the stereotype of an academically engaged Chinese student. These issues are taken up in the larger report. Disciplining the Scholarly HabitusOur point is not just to outline some differences in abilities, but to begin to analyse how these contribute to the dispositions, or lack thereof, of the scholarly habitus, to think about how these capacities relate to particular kinds of practices at home and school which instil specific kinds of discipline, and thus eventually to elaborate links between schooling and cultural background. Neither popular pathologies of cultural difference nor sociologies of education which reduce these complexities to either class or gender adequately account for the capacities and practices at stake here (Watkins and Noble).The comparative account of these vignettes of classroom practice provide examples of different disciplinary forms demonstrating the ways in which school structures and pedagogic practices affect students’ engagement in learning and overall performance at school. As indicated, the notion of discipline used here does not simply pertain to control, operating as a negative force inhibiting learning – though a disabling discipline of control was apparent in the pedagogy some teachers employed and also framed some whole school practices. Discipline, here, has a broader meaning. As Foucault intended, it also refers to the knowledge and skills which need to be mastered in order to achieve success in particular fields. Foucault famously analyses the roles of discipline in the functioning of modern institutions. He describes the emergence of the school in modern times as ‘a machine for learning’. Despite his much-repeated insistence on the productive and enabling nature of discipline (and his insight that discipline ‘is no longer simply an art of distributing bodies, … but of composing forces in order to obtain an efficient machine’), it is the machine-like and oppressive quality of discipline that is often the focus. In relation to the nineteenth century school, for example, he describes it as a ‘morality of obedience’ based on a prescriptive discipline of absolute silence and a Pavlovian process of ‘signalisation’ and response (164-7).Sonia’s class (the enrichment class), however, is not one where passivity or docility is the rule – and illustrates better the form of disciplined, productive stillness crucial to educational activity. As this first group of students demonstrates, this discipline takes a material form, whereby students’ bodies are capacitated through the control and focus they embody. This recalls Foucault’s other focus captured in his view that ‘a disciplined body is the prerequisite of an efficient gesture’ (152). This discipline predisposes students towards particular types of endeavour; a discipline that takes the form of dispositions as in the scholarly habitus. Differing degrees of discipline resulting from the repeated performance of certain practices is what distinguishes the three groups of students in this paper.Writing, listening and talking in class are all forms of labour that require bodily control as well as forms of knowledge. Sonia, for example, evinced capacities of stillness, quiet, attention, self-direction and self-discipline which disposed her to engaged learning. This is a state of composure which evinces a readiness for activity. When required, she was capable of sustained application. This is not to be mistaken for docility – her stillness and quiet were productive for academic engagement. In contrast, many in Sonny’s class were far from composed. They did not have sustained capacities of stillness and quiet or the capacity for self-control in an educational environment. They manifested different types of bodily capacities which incline them, like Sonny, towards disengagement. Eric and Walter are different cases yet again. They displayed a degree of quiet and stillness that was unproductive, that didn’t ready them for engaged activity.This sense of bodily control also operates at basic levels of mastery as well as readiness for intellectual activity. Indeed, low-order capacities are stepping stones for higher order skills. It is difficult to develop literacy, for example, without mastering the physical skills of writing. Such skills require a certain posture and control for perfecting letter and word formation. Such mastery, for example, is needed for writing to become ‘transparent’: the student stops ‘thinking’ about forming the letter or word with the pen, and concentrates on the content of their writing. The physical nature of the labour of writing stops being a conscious task and becomes a largely unconscious capacity, which lends itself to the development of capacities in composition, analysis and abstraction. Neither Walter nor Eric had developed a mastery of the pen or their own body. In the case of Eric, Deirdre, his teacher, commented that he had ‘immature fine motor skills’, which affected his writing. She pointed out that ‘when your writing doesn’t come easy it is going to take longer’, which meant Eric ‘rarely completes things’. ConclusionAs Vitalis argued thousands of years ago, with writing, the whole body labours (cited in Ong 95). But this form of labour entails stillness, self-control and the bodily capacity for sustained intellectual engagement. Educational practice needs to not only return to an appreciation of the arts of stillness but to rethink the ways in which activity in learning is understood; the ways in which an active mind is reliant upon a composed yet capacitated body and the particular pedagogies that, from the early years of school, can promote this form of corporeal governance. ReferencesBourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Polity, 1990.———. The State Nobility. Trans. Lauretta Clough. Cambridge: Polity, 1996.Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. “Introduction.” In The Powers of Literacy. Eds. Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis. London: Falmer. 1993. 1-21.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.Duffy, Michael. “Improved by Asian Work Ethic.” Courier Mail 29 Sep. 2001: 28.Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.Lareau, Annette, and Elliot Weininger. “Cultural Capital in Educational Research.” Theory and Society 32.5/6 (2003): 567-606.Lucas, Bill. Power Up your Mind. London: Nicholas Brealey, 2001.Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy. London: Methuen, 1982.Robinson, Kathryn. “Looking for Father-Right.” In Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand. Eds. John Docker and Gerhard Fischer. Kensington: UNSW P, 2000. 158-173.Silberman, Mel. The Active Learner. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1996.University of Melbourne. Active Learning. Academic Skills Unit. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.services.unimelb.edu.au/asu/resources/study/estudy008.html›.Watkins, Megan, and Greg Noble. Cultural Practices and Learning: Diversity, Discipline and Dispositions in Schooling. Penrith South: U of Western Sydney, 2008.Willis, Paul. Learning to Labour. Aldershot: Gower, 1977. Wu, Jianguo, and Michael Singh. ‘“Wishing for Dragon Children”: Ironies and Contradictions in China’s Educational Reforms and the Chinese Diaspora’s Disappointments with Australian Education.” The Australian Educational Researcher 31.2 (2004): 29-44.

IntroductionCoffee, as a stimulant, and the spaces in which it is has been consumed, have long played a vital role in fostering communication, creativity, and sociality. This article explores the interrelationship of café space, communication, creativity, and materialism. In developing these themes, this article is structured in two parts. The first looks back to the coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to give a historical context to the contemporary role of the café as a key site of creativity through its facilitation of social interaction, communication and information exchange. The second explores the continuation of the link between cafés, communication and creativity, through an instance from the mid-twentieth century where this process becomes individualised and is tied more intrinsically to the material surroundings of the café itself. From this, we argue that in order to understand the connection between café space and creativity, it is valuable to consider the rich polymorphic material and aesthetic composition of cafés. The Social Life of Coffee: London’s Coffee Houses While the social consumption of coffee has a long history, here we restrict our focus to a discussion of the London coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was during the seventeenth century that the vogue of these coffee houses reached its zenith when they operated as a vibrant site of mercantile activity, as well as cultural and political exchange (Cowan; Lillywhite; Ellis). Many of these coffee houses were situated close to the places where politicians, merchants, and other significant people congregated and did business, near government buildings such as Parliament, as well as courts, ports and other travel route hubs (Lillywhite 17). A great deal of information was shared within these spaces and, as a result, the coffee house became a key venue for communication, especially the reading and distribution of print and scribal publications (Cowan 85). At this time, “no coffee house worth its name” would be without a ready selection of newspapers for its patrons (Cowan 173). By working to twenty-four hour diurnal cycles and heightening the sense of repetition and regularity, coffee houses also played a crucial role in routinising news as a form of daily consumption alongside other forms of habitual consumption (including that of coffee drinking). In Cowan’s words, “restoration coffee houses soon became known as places ‘dasht with diurnals and books of news’” (172). Among these was the short-lived but nonetheless infamous social gossip publication, The Tatler (1709-10), which was strongly associated with the London coffee houses and, despite its short publication life, offers great insight into the social life and scandals of the time. The coffee house became, in short, “the primary social space in which ‘news’ was both produced and consumed” (Cowan 172). The proprietors of coffee houses were quick to exploit this situation by dealing in “news mongering” and developing their own news publications to supplement their incomes (172). They sometimes printed news, commentary and gossip that other publishers were not willing to print. However, as their reputation as news providers grew, so did the pressure on coffee houses to meet the high cost of continually acquiring or producing journals (Cowan 173; Ellis 185-206). In addition to the provision of news, coffee houses were vital sites for other forms of communication. For example, coffee houses were key venues where “one might deposit and receive one’s mail” (Cowan 175), and the Penny Post used coffeehouses as vital pick-up and delivery centres (Lillywhite 17). As Cowan explains, “Many correspondents [including Jonathan Swift] used a coffeehouse as a convenient place to write their letters as well as to send them” (176). This service was apparently provided gratis for regular patrons, but coffee house owners were less happy to provide this for their more infrequent customers (Cowan 176). London’s coffee houses functioned, in short, as notable sites of sociality that bundled together drinking coffee with news provision and postal and other services to attract customers (Cowan; Ellis). Key to the success of the London coffee house of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the figure of the virtuoso habitué (Cowan 105)—an urbane individual of the middle or upper classes who was skilled in social intercourse, skills that were honed through participation in the highly ritualised and refined forms of interpersonal communication, such as visiting the stately homes of that time. In contrast to such private visits, the coffee house provided a less formalised and more spontaneous space of sociality, but where established social skills were distinctly advantageous. A striking example of the figure of the virtuoso habitué is the philosopher, architect and scientist Robert Hooke (1635-1703). Hooke, by all accounts, used the opportunities provided by his regular visits to coffee houses “to draw on the knowledge of a wide variety of individuals, from servants and skilled laborers to aristocrats, as well as to share and display novel scientific instruments” (Cowan 105) in order to explore and develop his virtuoso interests. The coffee house also served Hooke as a place to debate philosophy with cliques of “like-minded virtuosi” and thus formed the “premier locale” through which he could “fulfil his own view of himself as a virtuoso, as a man of business, [and] as a man at the centre of intellectual life in the city” (Cowan 105-06). For Hooke, the coffee house was a space for serious work, and he was known to complain when “little philosophical work” was accomplished (105-06). Sociality operates in this example as a form of creative performance, demonstrating individual skill, and is tied to other forms of creative output. Patronage of a coffee house involved hearing and passing on gossip as news, but also entailed skill in philosophical debate and other intellectual pursuits. It should also be noted that the complex role of the coffee house as a locus of communication, sociality, and creativity was repeated elsewhere. During the 1600s in Egypt (and elsewhere in the Middle East), for example, coffee houses served as sites of intensive literary activity as well as the locations for discussions of art, sciences and literature, not to mention also of gambling and drug use (Hattox 101). While the popularity of coffee houses had declined in London by the 1800s, café culture was flowering elsewhere in mainland Europe. In the late 1870s in Paris, Edgar Degas and Edward Manet documented the rich café life of the city in their drawings and paintings (Ellis 216). Meanwhile, in Vienna, “the kaffeehaus offered another evocative model of urban and artistic modernity” (Ellis 217; see also Bollerey 44-81). Serving wine and dinners as well as coffee and pastries, the kaffeehaus was, like cafés elsewhere in Europe, a mecca for writers, artists and intellectuals. The Café Royal in London survived into the twentieth century, mainly through the patronage of European expatriates and local intellectuals such as Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, T. S. Elliot, and Henri Bergson (Ellis 220). This pattern of patronage within specific and more isolated cafés was repeated in famous gatherings of literary identities elsewhere in Europe throughout the twentieth century. From this historical perspective, a picture emerges of how the social functions of the coffee house and its successors, the espresso bar and modern café, have shifted over the course of their histories (Bollerey 44-81). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the coffee house was an important location for vibrant social interaction and the consumption and distribution of various forms of communication such as gossip, news, and letters. However, in the years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the café was more commonly a site for more restricted social interaction between discrete groups. Studies of cafés and creativity during this era focus on cafés as “factories of literature, inciters to art, and breeding places for new ideas” (Fitch, The Grand 18). Central in these accounts are bohemian artists, their associated social circles, and their preferred cafés de bohème (for detailed discussion, see Wilson; Fitch, Paris Café; Brooker; Grafe and Bollerey 4-41). As much of this literature on café culture details, by the early twentieth century, cafés emerge as places that enable individuals to carve out a space for sociality and creativity which was not possible elsewhere in the modern metropolis. Writing on the modern metropolis, Simmel suggests that the concentration of people and things in cities “stimulate[s] the nervous system of the individual” to such an extent that it prompts a kind of self-preservation that he terms a “blasé attitude” (415). This is a form of “reserve”, he writes, which “grants to the individual a [certain] kind and an amount of personal freedom” that was hitherto unknown (416). Cafés arguably form a key site in feeding this dynamic insofar as they facilitate self-protectionism—Fitch’s “pool of privacy” (The Grand 22)—and, at the same time, produce a sense of individual freedom in Simmel’s sense of the term. That is to say, from the early-to-mid twentieth century, cafés have become complex settings in terms of the relationships they enable or constrain between living in public, privacy, intimacy, and cultural practice. (See Haine for a detailed discussion of how this plays out in relation to working class engagement with Paris cafés, and Wilson as well as White on other cultural contexts, such as Japan.) Threaded throughout this history is a clear celebration of the individual artist as a kind of virtuoso habitué of the contemporary café. Café Jama Michalika The following historical moment, drawn from a powerful point in the mid-twentieth century, illustrates this last stage in the evolution of the relationship between café space, communication, and creativity. This particular historical moment concerns the renowned Polish composer and conductor Krzysztof Penderecki, who is most well-known for his avant-garde piece Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), his Polymorphia (1961), and St Luke Passion (1963-66), all of which entailed new compositional and notation techniques. Poland, along with other European countries devastated by the Second World War, underwent significant rebuilding after the war, also investing heavily in the arts, musical education, new concert halls, and conservatoria (Monastra). In the immediate post-war period, Poland and Polish culture was under the strong ideological influence exerted by the Soviet Union. However, as Thomas notes, within a year of Stalin’s death in 1953, “there were flickering signs of moderation in Polish culture” (83). With respect to musical creativity, a key turning point was the Warsaw Autumn Music Festival of 1956. “The driving force” behind the first festival (which was to become an annual event), was Polish “composers’ overwhelming sense of cultural isolation and their wish to break the provincial nature of Polish music” at that time (Thomas 85). Penderecki was one of a younger generation of composers who participated in, and benefited from, these early festivals, making his first appearance in 1959 with his composition Strophes, and successive appearances with Dimensions of Time and Silence in 1960, and Threnody in 1961 (Thomas 90). Penderecki married in the 1950s and had a child in 1955. This, in combination with the fact that his wife was a pianist and needed to practice daily, restricted Penderecki’s ability to work in their small Krakow apartment. Nor could he find space at the music school which was free from the intrusion of the sound of other instruments. Instead, he frequented the café Jama Michalika off the central square of Krakow, where he worked most days between nine in the morning and noon, when he would leave as a pianist began to play. Penderecki states that because of the small space of the café table, he had to “invent [a] special kind of notation which allowed me to write the piece which was for 52 instruments, like Threnody, on one small piece of paper” (Krzysztof Penderecki, 2000). In this, Penderecki created a completely new set of notation symbols, which assisted him in graphically representing tone clustering (Robinson 6) while, in his score for Polymorphia, he implemented “novel graphic notation, comparable with medical temperature charts, or oscillograms” (Schwinger 29) to represent in the most compact way possible the dense layering of sounds and vocal elements that is developed in this particular piece. This historical account is valuable because it contributes to discussions on individual creativity that both depends on, and occurs within, the material space of the café. This relationship is explored in Walter Benjamin’s essay “Polyclinic”, where he develops an extended analogy between the writer and the café and the surgeon and his instruments. As Cohen summarises, “Benjamin constructs the field of writerly operation both in medical terms and as a space dear to Parisian intellectuals, as an operating table that is also the marble-topped table of a café” (179). At this time, the space of the café itself thus becomes a vital site for individual cultural production, putting the artist in touch with the social life of the city, as many accounts of writers and artists in the cafés of Paris, Prague, Vienna, and elsewhere in Europe attest. “The attraction of the café for the writer”, Fitch argues, “is that seeming tension between the intimate circle of privacy in a comfortable room, on the one hand, and the flow of (perhaps usable) information all around on the other” (The Grand 11). Penderecki talks about searching for a sound while composing in café Jama Michalika and, hearing the noise of a passing tram, subsequently incorporated it into his famous composition, Threnody (Krzysztof Penderecki, 2000). There is an indirect connection here with the attractions of the seventeenth century coffee houses in London, where news writers drew much of their gossip and news from the talk within the coffee houses. However, the shift is to a more isolated, individualistic habitué. Nonetheless, the aesthetic composition of the café space remains essential to the creative productivity described by Penderecki. A concept that can be used to describe this method of composition is contained within one of Penderecki’s best-known pieces, Polymorphia (1961). The term “polymorphia” refers not to the form of the music itself (which is actually quite conventionally structured) but rather to the multiple blending of sounds. Schwinger defines polymorphia as “many formedness […] which applies not […] to the form of the piece, but to the broadly deployed scale of sound, [the] exchange and simultaneous penetration of sound and noise, the contrast and interflow of soft and hard sounds” (131). This description also reflects the rich material context of the café space as Penderecki describes its role in shaping (both enabling and constraining) his creative output. Creativity, Technology, Materialism The materiality of the café—including the table itself for Penderecki—is crucial in understanding the relationship between the forms of creative output and the material conditions of the spaces that enable them. In Penderecki’s case, to understand the origins of the score and even his innovative forms of musical notation as artefacts of communication, we need to understand the material conditions under which they were created. As a fixture of twentieth and twenty-first century urban environments, the café mediates the private within the public in a way that offers the contemporary virtuoso habitué a rich, polymorphic sensory experience. In a discussion of the indivisibility of sensation and its resistance to language, writer Anna Gibbs describes these rich experiential qualities: sitting by the window in a café watching the busy streetscape with the warmth of the morning sun on my back, I smell the delicious aroma of coffee and simultaneously feel its warmth in my mouth, taste it, and can tell the choice of bean as I listen idly to the chatter in the café around me and all these things blend into my experience of “being in the café” (201). Gibbs’s point is that the world of the café is highly synaesthetic and infused with sensual interconnections. The din of the café with its white noise of conversation and overlaying sounds of often carefully chosen music illustrates the extension of taste beyond the flavour of the coffee on the palate. In this way, the café space provides the infrastructure for a type of creative output that, in Gibbs’s case, facilitates her explanation of expression and affect. The individualised virtuoso habitué, as characterised by Penderecki’s work within café Jama Michalika, simply describes one (celebrated) form of the material conditions of communication and creativity. An essential factor in creative cultural output is contained in the ways in which material conditions such as these come to be organised. As Elizabeth Grosz expresses it: Art is the regulation and organisation of its materials—paint, canvas, concrete, steel, marble, words, sounds, bodily movements, indeed any materials—according to self-imposed constraints, the creation of forms through which these materials come to generate and intensify sensation and thus directly impact living bodies, organs, nervous systems (4). Materialist and medium-oriented theories of media and communication have emphasised the impact of physical constraints and enablers on the forms produced. McLuhan, for example, famously argued that the typewriter brought writing, speech, and publication into closer association, one effect of which was the tighter regulation of spelling and grammar, a pressure toward precision and uniformity that saw a jump in the sales of dictionaries (279). In the poetry of E. E. Cummings, McLuhan sees the typewriter as enabling a patterned layout of text that functions as “a musical score for choral speech” (278). In the same way, the café in Penderecki’s recollections both constrains his ability to compose freely (a creative activity that normally requires ample flat surface), but also facilitates the invention of a new language for composition, one able to accommodate the small space of the café table. Recent studies that have sought to materialise language and communication point to its physicality and the embodied forms through which communication occurs. As Packer and Crofts Wiley explain, “infrastructure, space, technology, and the body become the focus, a move that situates communication and culture within a physical, corporeal landscape” (3). The confined and often crowded space of the café and its individual tables shape the form of productive output in Penderecki’s case. Targeting these material constraints and enablers in her discussion of art, creativity and territoriality, Grosz describes the “architectural force of framing” as liberating “the qualities of objects or events that come to constitute the substance, the matter, of the art-work” (11). More broadly, the design features of the café, the form and layout of the tables and the space made available for individual habitation, the din of the social encounters, and even the stimulating influences on the body of the coffee served there, can be seen to act as enablers of communication and creativity. Conclusion The historical examples examined above indicate a material link between cafés and communication. They also suggest a relationship between materialism and creativity, as well as the roots of the romantic association—or mythos—of cafés as a key source of cultural life as they offer a “shared place of composition” and an “environment for creative work” (Fitch, The Grand 11). We have detailed one example pertaining to European coffee consumption, cafés and creativity. While we believe Penderecki’s case is valuable in terms of what it can tell us about forms of communication and creativity, clearly other cultural and historical contexts may reveal additional insights—as may be found in the cases of Middle Eastern cafés (Hattox) or the North American diner (Hurley), and in contemporary developments such as the café as a source of free WiFi and the commodification associated with global coffee chains. Penderecki’s example, we suggest, also sheds light on a longer history of creativity and cultural production that intersects with contemporary work practices in city spaces as well as conceptualisations of the individual’s place within complex urban spaces. References Benjamin, Walter. “Polyclinic” in “One-Way Street.” One-Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: Verso, 1998: 88-9. Bollerey, Franziska. “Setting the Stage for Modernity: The Cosmos of the Coffee House.” Cafés and Bars: The Architecture of Public Display. Eds. Christoph Grafe and Franziska Bollerey. New York: Routledge, 2007. 44-81. Brooker, Peter. Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism. Houndmills, Hamps.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. Cowan, Brian. The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005. Ellis, Markman. The Coffee House: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2004. Fitch, Noël Riley. Paris Café: The Sélect Crowd. Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2007. -----. The Grand Literary Cafés of Europe. London: New Holland Publishers (UK), 2006. Gibbs, Anna. “After Affect: Sympathy, Synchrony, and Mimetic Communication.” The Affect Theory Reader. Eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Siegworth. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 186-205. Grafe, Christoph, and Franziska Bollerey. “Introduction: Cafés and Bars—Places for Sociability.” Cafés and Bars: The Architecture of Public Display. Eds. Christoph Grafe and Franziska Bollerey. New York: Routledge, 2007. 4-41. Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. Haine, W. Scott. The World of the Paris Café. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Hattox, Ralph S. Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1985. Hurley, Andrew. Diners, Bowling Alleys and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Krzysztof Penderecki. Dir. Andreas Missler-Morell. Spektrum TV production and Telewizja Polska S.A. Oddzial W Krakowie for RM Associates and ZDF in cooperation with ARTE, 2000. Lillywhite, Bryant. London Coffee Houses: A Reference Book of Coffee Houses of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1963. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Abacus, 1974. Monastra, Peggy. “Krzysztof Penderecki’s Polymorphia and Fluorescence.” Moldenhauer Archives, [US] Library of Congress. 12 Jan. 2012 ‹http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/moldenhauer/2428143.pdf› Packer, Jeremy, and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley. “Introduction: The Materiality of Communication.” Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks. New York, Routledge, 2012. 3-16. Robinson, R. Krzysztof Penderecki: A Guide to His Works. Princeton, NJ: Prestige Publications, 1983. Schwinger, Wolfram. Krzysztof Penderecki: His Life and Work. Encounters, Biography and Musical Commentary. London: Schott, 1979. Simmel, Georg. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Ed. and trans. Kurt H. Wolff. Glencoe, IL: The Free P, 1960. Thomas, Adrian. Polish Music since Szymanowski. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. White, Merry I. Coffee Life in Japan. Berkeley: U of California P, 2012. Wilson, Elizabeth. “The Bohemianization of Mass Culture.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2.1 (1999): 11-32.

With the emergence and expansion of post-manufacturing knowledge economies, formerly industrial inner cities in the West have become intensified staging grounds for a range of spatial claims. Among these are processes of residential gentrification, the cultural politics of heritage preservation, the struggles for community development, and the growth of creative industries, such as art, design, architecture, publishing and film, which I focus on here.1 Throughout the last two decades in the UK, inner cities and central city fringe districts have been subject to an assortment of strategies that have endeavored to revitalize them economically and socially. Prominent among these attempts has been the encouragement of new, and the incubation of existing, small-scale creative enterprises. Regeneration executives choose these enterprises for a range of reasons. Creative activities are associated with popular culture that disaffected, unemployed youth find appealing; they are able to occupy and rehabilitate underused existing building stock and to sensitively recycle historic buildings, thereby preserving urban scales; and, as a number of scholars have pointed out, they exhibit transaction-rich, network-intensive organization (Castells 1992; Lash and Urry 1994; Scott 2000). As a result, concerted efforts to design creative industry quarters have sprung up across the UK, including Sheffield, Manchester, Glasgow, and Birmingham. In London, a whole band of formerly industrial, inner-city districts from King's Cross, down through Clerkenwell, Hoxton, Shoreditch and Spitalfields, and along the wharves of the Thames's South Bank, are being or have been revitalized in part through the strategic deployment of creative industries. Certainly, how creative industries and economies develop varies. At King's Cross, nonprofit and commercial creative companies have emerged quietly in a context of protracted struggle over the future of the Railway Lands, which will be reshaped by the coming terminus of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. At Spitalfields, high-profile conversions of Truman Brewery and the Spitalfields Market site into artisanal stalls, creative businesses, and leisure (café, restaurant, and sport) facilities are generating a new local creative economy, bringing in visitors and creating new customer bases for Spitalfields' Bangladeshi restaurant keepers and garment entrepreneurs.2 Whatever the conditions for growth, creative industries have been aided by the rhetoric of Cool Britannia and New Labour's cultural -- or more accurately --creative industrial policy. I would even put forth that, in the form of the creative quarter, the creative industries represent the urbanist logic of Cool Britannia, threatening to elaborate, following the other logics of BritArt and BritPop, a BritSpace. Now, according to some of Britain's foremost cultural critics, Cool Britannia was born sometime in 1996 in the Sunday Times, and died two years later, soon after a piece in the New Musical Express that showcased young musician discontent with New Labour creative industrial policy (Hewison 1996; McRobbie 1999, 4). Yet, before we close the casket, I want to suggest that Cool Britannia be understood as a symptom of a range of 'causes' that have been transforming the idioms of politics, governance, culture, citizenship, social organization; and, as the creative quarter evokes, the city. An itinerary of these causes would include: the expansion of a consumer-driven service/knowledge economy; the growth and globalization of communication and information technologies; the 'flexibilization' of regimes of production; the mutation of the function of the welfare state and corresponding meaning of citizenship; and, the dominance of intellectual property notions of culture. While these shifts are transforming societies around the world, in the UK, they became closely identified with New Labour and its attempts to institutionalize the rhetoric of the Third Way during the late 1990s (e.g., Blair 1998; Giddens 1998). In imagining itself as a force of change, New Labour capitalized on two events that gave birth to Cool Britannia: (1) the glamorization of British art and young British artists in the mid-1990s; and (2) the emergence of a discourse of 'rebranding' Britain, disseminating from reports from brand specialists Wolff Olins and think tank Demos (Bobby 1999).3 The first, producing the nBA (new British Art) and the yBAs (young British Artists) are media events with their own genealogies that have received copious critical attention (e.g., Ford 1996; McRobbie 1999; Roberts 1996, 1998; Stallabrass 1999; Suchin 1998). This glamorization involved the discovery of the artists by the mainstream media and a focus on artistic entrepreneurship in creating, shaping and responding to an enlarged market for cultural products. In the process, some of these artists effectively became brands, authoring, legitimating and licensing a certain kind of ironic, post-political art that was palatable to the international art market.4 The second cause stems from responses to anxiety over post-imperial Britain's future in a post-manufacturing, globalized, knowledge economy. For both the Demos thinkers and Wolff Olins consultants, these were centered on the need to re-imagine British national subjectivity as if it were a commercial brand. The discourse of branding is tangential to that of intellectual property, in which brands are value codings managed through networks of trademarks, patents, copyrights and royalties. Rosemary Coombe (1998) has written, albeit in a different political context, on the increasing dominance of notions of culture defined through intellectual property, and adjudicated by international trade experts. Indeed, New Labour creative industrial policies, as demonstrated in former Culture Secretary, Chris Smith's, essays that linked creativity, entrepreneurship and economic growth (Smith 1998) and initiatives under the Creative Industries Mapping Document (DCMS 2001) reveal how the relationship between the state and national culture is being renegotiated. Less meaningful is the state that served as sponsor or patron of cultural activities for its citizens. Rather, under New Labour, as Nikolas Rose argues (1999), and critics of New Labour cultural policy interrogate (Greenhalgh 1998; Littler 2000), the state is an enabler, partnering with entrepreneurs, small-scale firms, and multinational enterprises to promote the traffic in cultural property. How such a shift affects the production of urban space, and the future meanings attached to the British city remain to be explored. In the context of the American city, M. Christine Boyer (1995), elaborates how an iterative regime of architectural styles and planning ethics functions as a late capitalist cultural logic of urbanism that discards elements, often in decaying and abandoned sections, that cannot be easily incorporated. Borrowing on Kevin Lynch's (1960) notion of the imageable city, she writes: physically, these spaces are linked imaginatively to each other, to other cities, and to a common history of cultural interpretations (82). Within this scenario, the elements of the creative quarter copy, print, art supply and film developing stores, hip cafes and restaurants, galleries, studios, loft conversions and street furniture are gradually linked together to form a recognizable and potentially iterative matrix, overlaid on the disused former industrial district. Moreover, as a prominent, coordinated technique in the revitalization strategies of British cities, and given the aftermath of Cool Britannia, the creative quarter must be seen also as a symptom of a symptom. For, if Cool Britannia is itself produced through the application of branding discourse to the level of national subjectivity, and to the glamorization of the artist, then it is only a short step to contemplate the urbanist logic of the creative quarter as BritSpaceâ„¢. Notes 1. A creative industry is one that has its origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which [has] a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property. I am following the definition of creative industries used by the UK Department of Culture, Media and Sport. It was first used in the Creative Industries Mapping Document, released in November 1998 and was maintained in the second, more extensive mapping exercise in February 2001. The list of activities designated as creative are: advertising, architecture, art and antiques, crafts, design, designer fashion, film and video, interactive leisure software, music, the performing arts, publishing, software and computer services, television and radio. 2. I discuss the emergence of creative enterprises at King's Cross and Spitalfields at length in my doctoral dissertation (Deckha 2000). 3. As Bobby (1999) reports, the Wolff Olins consultants commented that looking at business attitudes towards national identity and UK industry found that 72% of the world's leading companies believe a national image is important when making purchase decisions. In light of this, and worryingly for British business, only 36% of our respondents felt that a 'made in the UK' label would influence their decision positively. 4. Lash and Urry describe this process of branding in the creative or cultural industries: What (all) the culture industries produce becomes increasingly, not like commodities but advertisements. As with advertising firms, the culture industries sell not themselves but something else and they achieve this through 'packaging'. Also like advertising firms, they sell 'brands' of something else. And they do this through the transfer of value through images (1994, 138). References Blair T. (1998) The Third Way: New Politics for a New Century. The Fabian Society, London. Bobby D. (1999) Original Britain' could succeed where 'Cool Britannia' failed Brand Strategy November 22: 6. Boyer M C. (1995) The Great Frame-Up: Fantastic appearances in contemporary spatial politics, Liggett H., Perry D. C., eds. Spatial Practices. Sage, New York. 81-109. Castells M. (1992) The Rise of the Network Society. Blackwell, Oxford. Coombe R. (1998) The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Deckha N. (2000) Repackaging the Inner City: Historic Preservation, Community Development, and the Emergent Cultural Quarter in London. Unpublished MS, Rice University. Department of Culture, Media and Sport [DCMS]. (2001) Creative industries mapping document [http://www.culture.gov.uk/creative/pdf/p...] Ford S. (1996) Myth Making Art Monthly March: 194. Giddens A. (1998) The Third Way. Polity, Cambridge. Greenhalgh L. (1998) From Arts Policy to Creative Economy Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy, 87, May: 84-94. Hewison R. (1996) Cool Britannia Sunday Times, 19 May. Lash S. and Urry J. (1994) Economies of Signs and Space. Sage, London. Littler J. (2000) Creative Accounting: Consumer Culture, The 'Creative Economy' and the Cultural Policies of New Labour in Bewes T. and Gilbert J. eds. Cultural Capitalism. Lawrence & Wishart, London. 203-222. Lynch K. (1960) The Image of the City. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. McRobbie A. (1999) In the Culture Society. Routledge, London. Roberts J. (1996) Mad for it!: Philistinism, the everyday and new British art Third Text, 35 (Summer): 29-42. Roberts J. (1998) Pop Art, the Popular and British Art of the 1990s in McCorquodale D. et al, eds. Occupational Hazard. Black Dog, London. 53-78. Rose N. (1999) Inventiveness in politics: review of Anthony Giddens, The Third Way Economy and Society, 28.3: 467-493. Scott A.J. (2000) The Cultural Economy of Cities. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Smith C. (1998) Creative Britain. Faber and Faber, London. Stallabrass J. (1999) High Art Lite. Verso, London. Suchin P. (1998) After a Fashion: Regress as Progress in Contemporary British Art in McCorquodale D. et al, eds. Occupational Hazard. Black Dog, London. 95-110. Links http://www.culture.gov.uk/creative/pdf/part1.pdf Citation reference for this article MLA Style Deckha, Nityanand. "Britspaceâ„¢?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/britspace.php>. Chicago Style Deckha, Nityanand, "Britspaceâ„¢?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/britspace.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Deckha, Nityanand. (2002) Britspaceâ„¢?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/britspace.php> ([your date of access]).

Explorations of the intersecting terrain between the resources (or mining) sector and gendered socialisation are gaining currency (Laplonge and Albury; Lahiri-Dutt). Some argue that mine workers and their families are particularly vulnerable to divorce, suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, injury, violence and worksite conflict, mental health struggles, financial over-extension, isolation, and loss of familial and community connection (Ashby; Paddenburg 14). Others contradict anecdotal evidence to support these concerns (Clifford 58; BHP Billiton 11-5). Substantive research on the emotional cost of mining remains sparse and contested (Windsor 4). Of concern to some, however, is that mining companies may be placing pressure on employees to generate a profit (Brough 10), while failing to acknowledge the cost of “hypermasculinised” mechanisms of domination that characterise mining cultures (Laplonge, Roadshow). I refer to these characteristic mechanisms of domination throughout this paper as “malestream norms” (O’Brien 62). In this paper, I argue that mining cultures have become prime examples of unsustainable practices. They forfeit relationally and ecologically sensitive modes of production that would otherwise celebrate and indeed prioritise a holistic level of care for the Earth, mining cultures, work colleagues and the self. Here, the term “sustainable” refers to a broader spectrum of social, cultural, psychological and ecological needs of mine workers, mining culture, and the environment upon which mining profits depend. I posit that mining communities that tend to the psycho-social needs of mine workers beyond malestream norms are more likely to implement sustainable mining practices that are not only considerate of the broader needs of mine workers, not only profitable for mining companies, but care for the Earth as well. Granted, employee assistance mechanisms do include substantial support services (such as health and wellness programmes, on-site counselling and therapy, mining family support networks, shorter rosters, improved access to family contact from site, etc.). However, these support services—as they may be offered by individual mining companies—do not adequately address the broader psycho-social impact of mining on mine site communities, the relational integrity of mine workers with their families, or how mine workers are faring within themselves in light of the pressures that abound both on-swing and off (Lahiri-Dutt 201). Discussions of a “softer” approach to mining fail to critically analyse malestream norms (Laplonge, Roadshow). In other words, attempts to make mining more sustainable have at-best been superficial by, for example, seeking to increase numbers of women on-site but then “jamming” these new women into cultures of hypermasculinism in hopes that a “trickle-down affect” of softening mining communities of practice will ensue (Laplonge, "You Can't Rely"). A comprehensive approach to sustainable mining practices must begin with deeper psycho-social care for mine workers (both women and men), and shift mining culture towards environmental care as well—an approach to mining that reflects a holistic and integrated model for pursuing profitable company development that is more caring than is currently the norm throughout the corporate world (Anderson). To accomplish this, we must specifically challenge malestream norms as they manifest in mining (Laplonge, Roadshow). In response, I introduce ecological masculinism as a relational approach to softening the malestream norms that pervade mining. To begin, it is recognised that mining masculinities—like all practices of masculinity—are pluralised social constructions that are not fixed but learned (Connell). Ecological masculinism is explored as a path towards fresh systemic practices that can steer men in mining towards masculine identities that are relationally attuned, emotionally articulate, and environmentally aware. It is argued that the approach to mining masculinities introduced here can help the resources sector become more sustainable for men, more conducive to greater numbers of women, more profitable for mining companies over longer periods of time, and gentler on the Earth. Where Are All the Ecomasculinists in Mining? Ecology as a science of relationships can serve as a guide towards the order that emerges among complex systems such as those that pervade mining (Capra). I suggest that Ecology can assist us to better understand and redefine the intricacies of gender dynamics in mining. It would be easy to presume that Ecology is oppositional to mining. I argue that to the contrary, the relational focus of Ecology has much to teach us about how we might reconfigure malestream norms to make it possible for mining cultures to demonstrate deeper care for others and the self at work and at home. An ecological analysis of malestream norms (and their impacts on Earth, community, others and the self) is not new. Richard Twine initiated some of the earliest explorations of the intersecting terrain between men, masculinities and the Earth. This discourse on the need for an “ecologisation” of masculinities grew out of the “broad church” of ecological feminism that explored so called Logics of Dualism that malestream norms construct and maintain (Plumwood 55-59). For more than 40 years, ecological feminism has served as a specialised discourse interrogating the mutual oppression of women and Nature by the male-dominated world. In his contribution to the Essex Ecofem Listerv, Twine posted the following provocative statement: Where are all the ecomasculinists? … there does not seem to be any literature on how the environmental and feminist movements together form a strong critique of the dominant Western masculine tradition. Does anyone know of any critical examinations … of this position, particularly one that addresses masculinity rather than patriarchy? (Twine et al. 1) Twine highlighted the need for a new discourse about men and masculinities that built on the term “ecomasculinity.” This term was originally coined by Shepherd Bliss in his seminal paper Revisioning Masculinity: A Report on the Growing Men's Movement (1987). I suggest that this intersecting terrain between Ecology and masculinities can guide us beyond the constraints of malestream norms that are entrenched in mining and offer us alternatives to mining cultural practices that oppress women and men as well as the environment upon which mining depends. However, these early investigations into the need for more nurturing masculinities were conceptual more so than practical and failed to take hold in scholarly discourses on gender or the pluralised praxes of modern masculinities. Coupled with this, the dominating aspects of malestream norms have continued to characterise mining cultures resulting in, for example, higher than average injury rates that are indicators of some negative consequences of a hypermasculinised workplace (Department of Health, WA 18; Laplonge, Roadshow). Further, the homophobic elements of malestream norms can give many men cause to hesitate seeking out emotional support if and where needed for fear of peer-group ridicule. These are some of the ways that men are subject to “men’s oppression” (Smith; Irwin et al.; Jackins; Whyte; Rohr), a term used here not to posit men as victims but rather as individuals who suffer as a result of their own internalised sense of superiority that drives them to behave inequitably towards other men, women and the Earth. Men’s Oppression Men’s oppression is a term used to illuminate the impact of malestream norms on men’s lives. Richard Rohr noted that: Part of our oppression as men ... is that we are taught to oppress others who have less status than we do. It creates a pecking order and a sense of superiority. We especially oppress racial minorities, homosexuals, the poor and women. (28) Men’s oppression is harmful to men, women and the ways that we mine the Earth. It is consequently of great importance that we explore the impacts of men’s oppression on mining masculinities with an emphasis on deconstructing the ways that it shapes and maintains malestream norms in mining culture. Men’s oppression pressures men to behave in ways that can constrain the spectrum of permissible behaviours that they adopt. Men’s oppression is ego-driven, based in comparing and competing against each other and pressure them to work tirelessly towards being better, higher, stronger, more virile, smarter, richer, more powerful, outwardly composed and more adored by others through status and material wealth often acquired at the expense of others and indeed the compromising of their own capacities to care for others and the self. These products of malestream norms validate an inner sense of feeling good about oneself at the expense of relational connection with others, including the Earth. As mentioned previously, malestream norms enable men to acquire socioeconomic and political advantages. But this has occurred at what has proven to be a terrible cost for all others as well as men themselves. Many men, especially those most strongly immersed in malestream norms, don’t even know that they are subject to this internalise superiority nor do they recognise it as an oppression that afflicts them at the same time and through the same mechanisms that assures their primacy in a world.. Notably, the symptoms of men’s oppression are not unique to mining. However, this form of oppression is intensely experienced by miners precisely because of the isolated and hypermasculine nature of minthat men (and increasing numbers of women) find themselves immersed in when on-site. Unfortunately, perceiving and then countering men’s oppression can undermine men’s primacy (Smith 51-52). As a consequence many men have little reason to want to take a stand against malestream norms that can come to dominate their lives at work and home. But to refuse to do so can erode their health and well-being and set them on a path of perpetration of oppressive thoughts, words and deeds towards others. Pathways to Ecological Masculinism The conceptual core of ecological masculinism is constructed on five precepts (that I refer to as the ADAMN model). These precepts help guide modern Western men towards greater care for others and the self in tangible ways (Pulé). Accompanying these precepts is the need for a plurality of caring behavioural possibilities for men to emerge. Men are encouraged to pursue inner congruency (aligning head with heart and intuition) as a pathway to their fuller humanness so that more integrated and mature masculinities can emerge. In this sense, ecological masculinism can be adapted to any work or home situation, providing a robust and versatile model that redresses gendered norms amongst mining men despite the diversity of individuals and resistances that might characterise some mining cultures. The ADAMN model draws on the vernacular encouragement for men to “give a damn” about all others and themselves. The five key instructions of masculine ecologisation are: A: Accept the central premise that you were born good and have an infinite capacity to care and be caring D: Don’t separate yourself from others; instead strengthen and rebuild your sense of connection with others and yourself A: Amend your own past hurts and any you have caused to others M: Model mature modern masculinity. Construct your masculine identity on caring thoughts, words and actions that nurture the relational space between yourself and others by seeking a life of service for the common good N: Normalise men’s care; support all men to show their care as central features of being a mature modern man Collectively, these key instructions of the ADAMN model are designed to raise men’s capacities to care for others and the self. They are aspects of ecological masculinism that are introduced to men through large group presentations, working with teams and at the level of one-on-one coaching in order to facilitate the recovering of the fuller human self that emerges through masculine ecologisation. This aspect of ecological masculinism offers tangible alternatives to malestream norms that dominate mining cultures by subverting the oppressive aspects of malestream norms in mining with more integrated levels of care for all others and the self. The ADAMN model is drawn as a nested diagram where each layer of this work forms the foundations of and is imbedded within the next, taking an individual man on a step-by-step journey that charts a course towards a heightened relational self and in so doing shifts the culture of masculinities within which he is immersed (see Figure 1). Trials of the ADAMN model over the past three years have applied ecological masculinism to groups of miners, at first in larger groups where hypermasculinised men can remain anonymous. From there masculine ecologisation drills down into the personal stories of individual men’s lives to uncover the sources of individual adherence to malestream norms—interrogating the pressures at play for them to have donned the “armour” that malestream norms demand of them. Stepping further towards the self, we then explore group and team dynamics for examples of hypermasculinism in the context of its benefits and costs to individual men’s lives in a support group type setting, and finally refine the transformational elements of this exploratory in one-on-one coaching of men across the spectrum from natural leaders to those in crises. At this final level of intensive personal reflection, an individual man is coached towards integrative alignment of his head, heart and intuition so that he can discover fresh perspectives for accessing his caring self. The project’s hope is that from this place of heightened “inner congruency” the ecologised man can more easily awaken and engage his care for others and himself not only as a man, but as an active and engaged citizen whose life of service to his employer, community, family, friends, and himself, becomes a central fixture of the ways he interacts with others at work and at home. Effectively, ecological masculinism reaches beyond the constraints of hypermasculinism as it commonly pervades mining by “peeling the onion” of malestream norms in a step-wise manner. It is hoped that, if the ADAMN model is successful, that the emerging “ecomen” become more sensitive to the needs, wants and intrinsic rights of others, develop rich emotional vocabularies, embrace the value of abstract thinking and a strong and engaged intuition concurrently, engage with others compassionately, educate themselves about their world at work and home, willingly assume leadership on the job, within their families and throughout their communities and grow proactively through the process. Such men embody a humanistic worldview towards all of life. They are flexible, responsive, and attentive to the value of others and themselves. Such is the ecoman I suggest might best benefit resource companies, mining cultures, mining families and miners.Figure 1 Conclusion Central to a more gender-aware future for men in mining is hope—hope that we will adapt to the challenges of mining culture swiftly by reaching beyond engineered solutions to the problems that many mine workers face; hope that our responses will be humanistic, creative and transgress malestream norms; hope that those responses are inclusive of softer and more caring approaches mining masculinities. This hope hinges on the willingness of resource companies to support such a shift in mining culture towards greater care for all others and the self. One path towards this fresh future for mining is through ecological masculinism as I have introduced it here. This new conversation for mining men and masculinities gives priority to the ending of men’s oppression for the benefit of individual mining men as well as all those with whom they share their lives at work and at home. In this paper, my intention has been to emphasise a more caring approach to mining. It is my earnest belief that through such work, mining will become more sustainable for men, women and the Earth. The ecologised mining man will have an important role to play in such a transformation.ReferencesAnderson, Ray. Our Sustainability Journey – Mission Zero. 2008. 29 April 2013 ‹http://www.interfaceglobal.com/Sustainability/Interface-Story.aspx›. Ashby, Nicole. The Need for FIFO Families. Personal Interview. 11 Dec 2012. BHP Billiton. 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2021 is the fiftieth anniversary year for Japanese live-action superhero franchise Kamen Rider. For half a century, heroes bearing the name Kamen Rider have battled rubber suited monsters and defended the smiles of children. Unlike many superheroes, however, the Kamen Riders are grotesque heroes, usually drawing their powers from the same source as the villains they battle. Grotesque human-machine-animal hybrids, they differ from their opponents only in the kindness of their hearts and the strength of their spirits. Although the Kamen Rider franchise includes a variety of texts including manga, novels, movies, and stage musicals, the central text is the Sunday morning children’s television program. This article focusses exclusively on the television series. Each season of the television program is comprised of around fifty twenty-five-minute episodes, and each season features an entirely new cast, title, and premise. Kamen Rider was originally created at a time of economic downturn and social unrest, and the unease of the zeitgeist is reflected in the figure of the no longer human hero. A little over thirty years later Japan was again facing a variety of crises and intense debate over what, if any, role it should play in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The 2002 television season, Kamen Rider Ryūki, tackles difficult questions about what justice, heroism, and monstrosity mean, through the medium of a children’s martial arts and live action special effects hero television program. This article explores the blurred boundaries between monster and hero in Kamen Rider, in the context of social attitudes toward children. The First Kamen Rider The inaugural Kamen Rider (protagonist of the 1971 television season), Hongo Takeshi, is a university student who gains superpowers after being abducted and experimented on by Shocker, a terrorist organisation founded by Nazis. Their medical experiments are part of a plan to produce an army capable of world domination. Takeshi’s body was modified with grasshopper DNA and cybernetic enhancements, but he was able to escape before the mind control portion of the operation. Although he appears human, Takeshi transforms via a special belt into Kamen (masked) Rider in order to fight. His face is obscured by an insectoid helmet with red compound eyes and antennae. The transformation scene is a highlight of every episode, and the transformation belt is the most important of the (many) tie-in toys. The primary audience of Kamen Rider is children between two and seven, and as a media-mix (Steinberg) franchise the sale of toys and branded products to the primary audience is vital. Anne Allison (105) identifies the transformation and blending or crossing of bodily borders it entails as the “money shot” children anticipate and enjoy. There is also a substantial tertiary audience, however, which includes older children and adults. During the early 1970s, when the first few seasons of Kamen Rider were broadcast, ‘employment trains’ were transporting Japanese teenagers (immediately following their graduation from middle school) from rural areas to the large cities, where they worked in factories and construction far from their families (Alt 54). Kamen Rider’s creator, Ishinomori Shōtarō, had debuted as a manga artist while still in school himself, and his works were particularly popular among this disenfranchised demographic. The figure of a young man taken and changed against his will and left to forge his own path in the aftermath may have been particularly resonant with these teenagers. Kamen Rider’s creator, Ishinomori Shōtarō, was a member of the yakeato (burnt ruins) generation, who were children during the Second World War and experienced the fire- and nuclear bombings of Japan and grew up amidst the burned-out ruins. Roman Rosenbaum (Redacting 97-98) argues that this generation (or perhaps more accurately, micro-generation), “later subconsciously released the bent-up trauma of their early childhood experiences throughout their adult lives in their body of work”. Ishinomori was not alone in this experience, of course; other members of the early Kamen Rider creative team were also motivated by childhood trauma. Hirayama Tōru, who helped Ishinomori bring the Rider concept to television as a producer, was sixteen when his hometown of Nagoya was firebombed. He and other schoolboys were dispatched to dispose of the bodies of civilians who had died while trying to escape the flames only to die in the river (Oda and Muraeda 41-2). Members of the yakeato generation were prominent in anti-war activism during the 1970s, opposing Japan’s entanglement in the Vietnam War (Rosenbaum Generation 284). Violence and the meaning of justice were urgent issues for this generation. This first season of Kamen Rider, along with many of the subsequent seasons, is classifiable as a horror text, with numerous Gothic elements (Staite). Many of the monsters Takeshi battles are “designed to elicit a specific reaction: that of abject horror” (Kim 28). While some of the prosthetic suits are quite silly-looking by contemporary standards, many remain compellingly disturbing in their fusion of animal-human-machine. Although he proceeds up the chain of command to eventually battle the leaders of Shocker, Takeshi is always aware when battling other victims of Shocker experimentation that the only difference between himself and them is that he was able to escape before losing his will. He, like them, is no longer entirely human, and has become as grotesque as the unfortunate monsters he must defeat. As Miura Shion (180) puts it (translation mine), “Kamen Rider was originally an entity created by evil. The reality is that the enemy in front of you and you are actually the same. The fate of Kamen Rider is to fight while struggling with this”. Noting that Kamen Rider was created during a time of social, economic, and political upheaval in Japan, Hirofumi Katsuno (37-38) links the rise of the ambiguous hero to the decline of the ‘grand narrative’ of modernity and the belief in the kind of absolute justice represented by more traditional superheroes. Kamen Rider instead inhabits “an ambiguous space between human and nonhuman, good and evil” (Katsuno 44). In the early years of the franchise the ambiguity remained largely centred on the figure of the hero. Members of the opposing Shocker organisation – who were responsible for the rise of the first two Kamen Riders – are unambiguously evil and unsympathetic. For ordinary people who have been subjected to mind control and experimentation there is compassion, but in terms of the central conflict there is no question that destroying Shocker is correct and moral. The villains battled by Kamen Riders remained predominantly fascists and cultists bent on world domination until the late 1980s, with the primary antagonist of 1987 season Kamen Rider Black the protagonist’s beloved brother. The following season, Kamen Rider Black RX, had environmental themes. The villains trying to take over the world in this season are doing so because their own planet has become too polluted to sustain life. They argue, somewhat persuasively, that since humans are on the path to global environmental destruction they are justified in taking over the planet before it is ruined. This gradual shift toward more sympathetic monsters became explicit in 2002 with Kamen Rider Ryūki’s ambivalent response to the Bush administration’s so-called War on Terror. Justice Is a Thing with Teeth and Claws Kamen Rider Ryūki (hereafter Ryūki) was in the planning stages when the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred, destroying the twin towers. TV Asahi, the station that airs Kamen Rider, immediately sent a directive to producer Shirakura Shinichiro stating that “now more than ever we must teach children about justice” (Salas). Seemingly uncomfortable with the implications of this idea of “justice” in light of the Bush administration's subsequent actions, Shirakura says: in that mood I wondered if I could repeat the sort of hero story we had made so far, where the ‘good person’ beats the ‘bad person’ that appears one after another and finally hits the headquarters of evil. It is very dangerous to plant the mentality of the Cold War era in children at this time. ‘Ryuuki’ was created in the hope that children will have an eye for what justice means. (Cited in Uno 261-2, translation mine) Since its creation in the 1970s, Kamen Rider had been forging a new path for Japanese heroes in opposition to what Jonathan Abel identifies as an external attitude to justice in the hero programs of the 1950s and 1960s. In these programs, he argues, justice was represented as something imposed into Japan from outside (by alien superheroes, for example, or the Allied Occupation forces). American superheroes and their various approaches to questions of justice and vigilantism were also well known in Japan, as Timothy Peters has highlighted. In its depiction of a hero so closely resembling the monsters he battles, Kamen Rider rejected notions of an absolute distinction between the categories of hero and monster. As Katsuno (46) argues, “in this postmodern, liquid society, superheroes lack a unified, self-evident justice, but must navigate multiple conceptions of justice … . As embodiments of relativized justice, these grotesque heroes were the seeds for what have become enduring trends in Japanese popular culture”. 2002 season Ryūki takes the idea of relativised justice to its extreme, questioning the very existence of a ‘justice’ that exists independently from the people it impacts. It is impossible to summarise the plot of Ryūki both briefly and accurately; this attempt prioritises the former over the latter. Ryūki features thirteen Kamen Riders in a battle royale, competing for the granting of a single wish. The Riders gain their powers through forming a contract with a mirror monster, who they must feed by defeating other Riders or less powerful mirror monsters (who are themselves feeding on helpless humans). If a Rider is defeated and can no longer feed his contract monster, the creature will consume them. Mirror monsters are so called because they come from mirror world, a parallel dimension connected to ours by reflective surfaces including mirrors and, significantly, gleaming skyscrapers. The battle is controlled by antagonist Kanzaki Shiro, who is trying to save the life of his younger sister Yui. Protagonist Kido Shinji tries to stop the Riders from fighting one another, which delays Shiro’s plans and leads to Yui’s death. Shiro repeatedly loops time to restart the battle and save Yui, but Shinji disrupts each new timeline. There are multiple alternate endings to the story, including both televisual and print versions. Because the endings each involve uncovering the reason Shiro has created the battle as part of their resolution of the story, there are also multiple explanations for why and how the battle began. In some versions the origin of the mirror monsters lies in Shiro and Yui’s childhood experience of abuse at the hands of their parents, while in another Shinji inadvertently sets events in motion after breaking a childhood promise to Yui. Which origin, ending, or time-loop is ‘true’ is never resolved. Viewers were invited to vote on the ending of the television special by telephone; alternate endings had been prepared with the winning option inserted at the end of the broadcast (Uno 271). This moral ambiguity and confusion over what is ‘true’ is an intentional critique of simplistic ideas about justice. In Ryūki each of the Riders participates in the battle because they believe that their wish is important enough to justify the means employed to obtain it. The program problematises the idea that there is an objective division between good and evil by focusing on the subjective righteousness of the individual characters’ motivations, including the irony of Shinji’s battles for the sake of stopping the war. Although these feel like quite adult themes, Shirakura couches them firmly within his interpretation of teaching children about justice, explaining that children sometimes envision themselves as the heroes and think they might also be justice. There is also the idea that people often don’t accept themselves as being wrong, because in one’s mind ‘I am myself, so I’m not wrong’ is the prevailing thought process. These thoughts lead to selfish patterns because kids might not see themselves as themselves but as the heroes. (Salas) Uno Tsunehiro (263-4) argues that there is in fact no villain and no justice in Ryūki, simply competing desires. Ryūki does not make judgements about which desires are more or less worthy, he writes, but displays all of the Riders’ motivations equally, just like Google search results of products displayed on Amazon. Just like Capitalism, Uno (263-4) suggests, Ryūki treats every story (justice / evil) equally as a desire (as a product). The mirror monsters are quite frightening; using a combination of Godzilla-style rubber suits and CGI they are all based on animals including spiders, crabs, and cobras, combined with cyborg elements such as guns embedded in various body parts. However, their behaviour is straightforwardly animalistic. They are hungry; they kill to feed. The truly monstrous characters in Ryūki are clearly the Kamen Riders themselves, who use the mirror monsters to lend power to human motivations that are far more complex and twisted. Although many of the Riders have sympathetic motivations such as saving the life of a loved one, Kamen Rider Ōja simply enjoys violence. Uno points out that this character is essentially the same as The Joker in 2008’s The Dark Knight; like The Joker, Ōja tells a variety of stories explaining the origins of his psychopathy in past traumas only to mock the credulity of those so eager to believe these explanations (Uno 274). Crucially, Ōja is still a Kamen Rider, and appears alongside more sympathetic Kamen Riders in ensemble-cast films and games. The line between hero and monster has become blurred beyond comprehension. Monsters for Children, Children as Monsters Shirakura’s comment about the danger of children uncritically viewing their own actions as being just draws attention to an important shift taking place at the turn of the millennium. Monsters were no longer something to protect children from, but increasingly children themselves were becoming viewed as potentially monstrous. Five years before Ryūki’s release Japan had been rocked by the discovery that the murderer of two elementary school children was a fourteen-year-old child dubbed ‘Youth A’, who had described his behaviour as a game, taunting the police and media before his capture (Arai 370-1). Although violent crimes perpetrated by children are always shocking, what stands out from this particular incident is the response from other school children. Youth A had sent a manifesto to a local newspaper lambasting the education system that had created him. In a survey conducted by the Ministry of Education more than fifty percent of the students surveyed sympathised and identified with at Youth A (cited in Arai 371). Lindsay Nelson (4) notes the prevalence of child-monsters in Japanese horror films in the late 1990s and early 2000s, writing that “the many monstrous children of contemporary Japanese cinema stand at a crossroads of Japan’s past, present, and future, crying out for compassion even as they drag those around them into death” (Nelson 13). There is of course a world of difference between depictions of monstrous children in adult media, and depictions of monsters in children’s media. I do not mean to conflate or confuse the two. Both kinds of monsters are, however, influenced and in turn influence wider social discourses and anxieties. Kamen Rider is also a text characterised by dual address, a narrative mode which addresses both adults and children simultaneously (in contradistinction to double address, in which the adults talk over the heads of children in an exclusionary way (Wall). Although Kamen Rider Ryūki featured adult actors (teenagers began to appear in leading roles with increasing frequency from the mid-2000s), it foreshadows the shifting of social attitudes toward children through intertextual references to the film Battle Royale (2000), also distributed by Kamen Rider’s producer Toei. Battle Royale centres on a school class who have (without their prior knowledge) been selected by lottery to participate in a ‘survival game’ on an isolated island. They must kill one another until only one survives; they have all been fitted with explosive collars, and any child refusing to participate will have their collar remotely detonated, killing them. Director Fukasaku Kinji comments that he felt a connection to the thematic linking of violence and children in Battle Royale because of his own experiences as a member of the yakeato generation. He had worked in a munitions factory during the war that was frequently targeted by bombs, and he describes hiding under and later having to dispose of the bodies of his friends (Rose). The story is a biting commentary of the relationship between economic collapse, school-based violence, and failures of governance. In Andrea Arai’s (368) analysis, “the tropes of battle, survival, and the figure of the schoolchild, reflect and refract social anxieties about the Japanese future in an era of globalisation and neoliberal reform, and the enduring historical conundrums of Japan’s twentieth-century past”. The battle between Kamen Riders in Ryūki is also a battle royale; although the core audience of very young children would probably not have made the intertextual link to the film (or the 1999 novel the film was based on), the association would have been strengthened for older viewers by the use of "those who don't fight won't survive!" as a catchphrase for Kamen Rider Ryūki. Conclusion In the early 1970s, Kamen Rider stood out as a text rejecting externally imposed, objective ideas of justice enforced by unassailable virtue, in favour of a grotesque hero struggling to find a path to justice through a metaphorical forest of misadventure and victimisation. The first Kamen Rider was a grotesque, damaged hero who fought monsters to whom he was more alike than different. In the early 2000s this blurring of the heroic and monstrous was taken even further, questioning the very concepts of justice and monstrosity. Much as the original season of Kamen Rider responded to economic and social upheavals with its reassessment of the role and figure of the hero, Kamen Rider Ryūki draws attention to fears of and for its child audience in response to both domestic economic disaster and global events. In Kamen Rider Ryūki the trope of an unwitting victim being turned into a Kamen Rider through biomechanical enhancements is discarded entirely; anyone can become a Kamen Rider simply by entering into a contract with a mirror monster. No longer grotesque because of powers beyond their control, the new generation of Kamen Riders choose grotesquery and risk their lives to obtain their desire. Anyone can become a hero, Ryūki tells its viewers, and anyone can become a monster. And, perhaps, anyone can be both at the same time. References Abel, Jonathan E. "Masked Justice: Allegories of the Superhero in Cold War Japan." Japan Forum 26.2 (2014): 187–208. Allison, Anne. Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. Berkeley: U of California P, 2006. Alt, Matthew. Pure Invention: How Japan Conquered the World in Eight Fantasies. Brown Book Group, 2020. Arai, Andrea. "Killing Kids: Recession and Survival in Twenty-First-Century Japan." Postcolonial Studies 6.3 (2003): 367–79. Battle Royale. Dir. Kinji Fukasaku. Toei, 2000. Katsuno, Hirofumi. "The Grotesque Hero: Depictions of Justice in Tokusatsu Superhero Television Programs." Introducing Japanese Popular Culture. Eds. Alisa Freedman and Toby Slade. Routledge, 2018. 37–47. Kim, Se Young. "Kamen Rider vs. Spider-Man and Batman." Giant Creatures in Our World: Essays on Kaiju and American Popular Culture. Eds. Camille Mustachio and Jason Barr. McFarland, 2017. Nelson, Lindsay. "Ghosts of the Past, Ghosts of the Future: Monsters, Children, and Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema." Cinemascope 13 (2009). Oda, Katsumi, and Kenichi Muraeda. The Men Who Made Kamen Rider: 1971-2011. Kodansha, 2011. Peters, Timothy. "'Holy Trans-Jurisdictional Representations of Justice, Batman!' Globalisation, Persona and Mask in Kuwata's Batmanga and Morrison's Batman, Incorporated." Law and Justice in Japanese Popular Culture: From Crime Fighting Robots to Duelling Pocket Monsters. Eds. Ashley Pearson, Thomas Giddens, and Kieran Tranter. Taylor & Francis, 2018. Kamen Rider. Toei, 1971. Kamen Rider Black RX. Toei, 1988. Kamen Rider Ryūki. Toei, 2002. Rose, Steve. “The Kid Killers.” The Guardian 2001. Rosenbaum, Roman. “The ‘Generation of the Burnt-out Ruins’.” Japanese Studies 27.3 (2007): 281–293. ———. “Redacting Japanese History: Ishinomori Shōtarō’s Graphic Narratives.” Rewriting History in Manga: Stories for the Nation. Eds. Nissim Otmazgin and Rebecca Suter. Palgrave Macmillan US, 2016. Salas, Jorge. "Kamen Rider’s Reaction to 9/11." Tokusatsu Network 2018. 1 Oct. 2021 <https://tokusatsunetwork.com/2018/08/kamen-riders-reaction-to-9-11/>. Shion, Miura. Momoiro Towairaito. Paperback Bunko: Shinchosha, 2010. Staite, Sophia. "Playing the Bloody Rose: Deconstructing Childhood with Kamen Rider Kiva." Aeternum: The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies 6.1 (2019): 34–48 Steinberg, Marc. Anime's Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan. U of Minnesota P, 2012. The Dark Knight. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Warner Bros, 2008. Uno, Tsunehiro. The Era of Little People. Gentosha, 2015. Wall, Barbara. The Narrator's Voice: The Dilemma of Children's Fiction. Macmillan, 1991.

Introduction The academic area known as food studies—incorporating elements from disciplines including anthropology, folklore, history, sociology, gastronomy, and cultural studies as well as a range of multi-disciplinary approaches—asserts that cooking and eating practices are less a matter of nutrition (maintaining life by absorbing nutrients from food) and more a personal or group expression of various social and/or cultural actions, values or positions. The French philosopher, Michel de Certeau agrees, arguing, moreover, that there is an urgency to name and unpick (what he identifies as) the “minor” practices, the “multifarious and silent reserve of procedures” of everyday life. Such practices are of crucial importance to all of us, as although seemingly ordinary, and even banal, they have the ability to “organise” our lives (48). Within such a context, the following aims to consider the influence and significance of an important (although largely unstudied) professional figure in rural and regional economic life: the country food preparer variously known as the local chef or cook. Such an approach is obviously framed by the concept of “cultural economy”. This term recognises the convergence, and interdependence, of the spheres of the cultural and the economic (see Scott 335, for an influential discussion on how “the cultural geography of space and the economic geography of production are intertwined”). Utilising this concept in relation to chefs and cooks seeks to highlight how the ways these figures organise (to use de Certeau’s term) the social and cultural lives of those in their communities are embedded in economic practices and also how, in turn, their economic contributions are dependent upon social and cultural practices. This initial mapping of the influence and significance of the rural and regional chef in one rural and regional area, therefore, although necessarily different in approach and content, continues the application of such converged conceptualisations of the cultural and economic as Teema Tairu’s discussion of the social, recreational and spiritual importance of food preparation and consumption by the unemployed in Finland, Guy Redden’s exploration of how supermarket products reflect shared values, and a series of analyses of the cultural significance of individual food products, such as Richard White’s study of vegemite. While Australians, both urban and rural, currently enjoy access to an internationally renowned food culture, it is remarkable to consider that it has only been during the years following the Second World War that these sophisticated and now much emulated ways of eating and cooking have developed. It is, indeed, only during the last half century that Australian eating habits have shifted from largely Anglo-Saxon influenced foods and meals that were prepared and eaten in the home, to the consumption of a wider range of more international and sophisticated foods and meals that are, increasingly, prepared by others and eaten outside the consumer’s residence. While a range of commonly cited influences has prompted this relatively recent revolution in culinary practice—including post-war migration, increasing levels of prosperity, widespread international travel, and the forces of globalisation—some of this change owes a debt to a series of influential individual figures. These tastemakers have included food writers and celebrity chefs; with early exponents including Margaret Fulton, Graham Kerr and Charmaine Solomon (see Brien). The findings of this study suggests that many restaurant chefs, and other cooks, have similarly played, and continue to take, a key role in the lives of not only the, necessarily, limited numbers of individuals who dine in a particular eatery or the other chefs and/or cooks trained in that establishment (Ruhlman, Reach), but also the communities in which they work on a much broader scale. Considering Chefs In his groundbreaking study, A History of Cooks and Cooking, Australian food historian Michael Symons proposes that those who prepare food are worthy of serious consideration because “if ‘we are what we eat’, cooks have not just made our meals, but have also made us. They have shaped our social networks, our technologies, arts and religions” (xi). Writing that cooks “deserve to have their stories told often and well,” and that, moreover, there is a “need to invent ways to think about them, and to revise our views about ourselves in their light” (xi), Symons’s is a clarion call to investigate the role and influence of cooks. Charles-Allen Baker-Clark has explicitly begun to address this lacunae in his Profiles from the Kitchen: What Great Cooks Have Taught Us About Ourselves and Our Food (2006), positing not only how these figures have shaped our relationships with food and eating, but also how these relationships impact on identities, culture and a range of social issues including those of social justice, spirituality and environmental sustainability. With the growing public interest in celebrities, it is perhaps not surprising that, while such research on chefs and/or cooks is still in its infancy, most of the existing detailed studies on individuals focus on famed international figures such as Marie-Antoine Carême (Bernier; Kelly), Escoffier (James; Rachleff; Sanger), and Alexis Soyer (Brandon; Morris; Ray). Despite an increasing number of tabloid “tell-all” surveys of contemporary celebrity chefs, which are largely based on mass media sources and which display little concern for historical or biographical accuracy (Bowyer; Hildred and Ewbank; Simpson; Smith), there have been to date only a handful of “serious” researched biographies of contemporary international chefs such as Julia Child, Alice Waters (Reardon; Riley), and Bernard Loiseux (Chelminski)—the last perhaps precipitated by an increased interest in this chef following his suicide after his restaurant lost one of its Michelin stars. Despite a handful of collective biographical studies of Australian chefs from the later-1980s on (Jenkins; O’Donnell and Knox; Brien), there are even fewer sustained biographical studies of Australian chefs or cooks (Clifford-Smith’s 2004 study of “the supermarket chef,” Bernard King, is a notable exception). Throughout such investigations, as well as in other popular food writing in magazines and cookbooks, there is some recognition that influential chefs and cooks have worked, and continue to work, outside such renowned urban culinary centres as Paris, London, New York, and Sydney. The Michelin starred restaurants of rural France, the so-called “gastropubs” of rural Britain and the advent of the “star-chef”-led country bed and breakfast establishment in Australia and New Zealand, together with the proliferation of farmer’s markets and a public desire to consume locally sourced, and ecologically sustainable, produce (Nabhan), has focused fresh attention on what could be called “the rural/regional chef”. However, despite the above, little attention has focused on the Australian non-urban chef/cook outside of the pages of a small number of key food writing magazines such as Australian Gourmet Traveller and Vogue Entertaining + Travel. Setting the Scene with an Australian Country Example: Armidale and Guyra In 2004, the Armidale-Dumaresq Council (of the New England region, New South Wales, Australia) adopted the slogan “Foodies thrive in Armidale” to market its main city for the next three years. With a population of some 20,000, Armidale’s main industry (in economic terms) is actually education and related services, but the latest Tourist Information Centre’s Dining Out in Armidale (c. 2006) brochure lists some 25 restaurants, 9 bistros and brasseries, 19 cafés and 5 fast food outlets featuring Australian, French, Italian, Mediterranean, Chinese, Thai, Indian and “international” cuisines. The local Yellow Pages telephone listings swell the estimation of the total number of food-providing businesses in the city to 60. Alongside the range of cuisines cited above, a large number of these eateries foreground the use of fresh, local foods with such phrases as “local and regional produce,” “fresh locally grown produce,” “the finest New England ingredients” and locally sourced “New England steaks, lamb and fresh seafood” repeatedly utilised in advertising and other promotional material. Some thirty kilometres to the north along the New England highway, the country town of Guyra, proclaimed a town in 1885, is the administrative and retail centre for a shire of some 2,200 people. Situated at 1,325 metres above sea level, the town is one of the highest in Australia with its main industries those of fine wool and lamb, beef cattle, potatoes and tomatoes. Until 1996, Guyra had been home to a large regional abattoir that employed some 400 staff at the height of its productivity, but rationalisation of the meat processing industry closed the facility, together with its associated pet food processor, causing a downturn in employment, local retail business, and real estate values. Since 2004, Guyra’s economy has, however, begun to recover after the town was identified by the Costa Group as the perfect site for glasshouse grown tomatoes. Perfect, due to its rare combination of cool summers (with an average of less than two days per year with temperatures over 30 degrees celsius), high winter light levels and proximity to transport routes. The result: 3.3 million kilograms of truss, vine harvested, hydroponic “Top of the Range” tomatoes currently produced per annum, all year round, in Guyra’s 5-hectare glasshouse: Australia’s largest, opened in December 2005. What residents (of whom I am one) call the “tomato-led recovery” has generated some 60 new local jobs directly related to the business, and significant flow on effects in terms of the demand for local services and retail business. This has led to substantial rates of renovation and building of new residential and retail properties, and a noticeably higher level of trade flowing into the town. Guyra’s main street retail sector is currently burgeoning and stories of its renewal have appeared in the national press. Unlike many similar sized inland towns, there are only a handful of empty shops (and most of these are in the process of being renovated), and new commercial premises have recently been constructed and opened for business. Although a small town, even in Australian country town terms, Guyra now has 10 restaurants, hotel bistros and cafés. A number of these feature local foods, with one pub’s bistro regularly featuring the trout that is farmed just kilometres away. Assessing the Contribution of Local Chefs and Cooks In mid-2007, a pilot survey to begin to explore the contribution of the regional chef in these two close, but quite distinct, rural and regional areas was sent to the chefs/cooks of the 70 food-serving businesses in Armidale and Guyra that I could identify. Taking into account the 6 returns that revealed a business had closed, moved or changed its name, the 42 replies received represented a response rate of 65.5per cent (or two thirds), representatively spread across the two towns. Answers indicated that the businesses comprised 18 restaurants, 13 cafés, 6 bistro/brasseries, 1 roadhouse, 1 takeaway/fast food and 3 bed and breakfast establishments. These businesses employed 394 staff, of whom 102 were chefs and/cooks, or 25.9 per cent of the total number of staff then employed by these establishments. In answer to a series of questions designed to ascertain the roles played by these chefs/cooks in their local communities, as well as more widely, I found a wide range of inputs. These chefs had, for instance, made a considerable contribution to their local economies in the area of fostering local jobs and a work culture: 40 (95 per cent) had worked with/for another local business including but not exclusively food businesses; 30 (71.4 per cent) had provided work experience opportunities for those aspiring to work in the culinary field; and 22 (more than half) had provided at least one apprenticeship position. A large number had brought outside expertise and knowledge with them to these local areas, with 29 (69 per cent) having worked in another food business outside Armidale or Guyra. In terms of community building and sustainability, 10 (or almost a quarter) had assisted or advised the local Council; 20 (or almost half) had worked with local school children in a food-related way; 28 (two thirds) had helped at least one charity or other local fundraising group. An extra 7 (bringing the cumulative total to 83.3 per cent) specifically mentioned that they had worked with/for the local gallery, museum and/or local history group. 23 (more than half) had been involved with and/or contributed to a local festival. The question of whether they had “contributed anything else important, helpful or interesting to the community” elicited the following responses: writing a food or wine column for the local paper (3 respondents), delivering TAFE teacher workshops (2 respondents), holding food demonstrations for Rotary and Lions Clubs and school fetes (5 respondents), informing the public about healthy food (3 respondents), educating the public about environmental issues (2 respondents) and working regularly with Meals on Wheels or a similar organisation (6 respondents, or 14.3 per cent). One respondent added his/her work as a volunteer driver for the local ambulance transport service, the only non-food related response to this question. Interestingly, in line with the activity of well-known celebrity chefs, in addition to the 3 chefs/cooks who had written a food or wine column for the local newspaper, 11 respondents (more than a quarter of the sample) had written or contributed to a cookbook or recipe collection. One of these chefs/cooks, moreover, reported that he/she produced a weblog that was “widely read”, and also contributed to international food-related weblogs and websites. In turn, the responses indicated that the (local) communities—including their governing bodies—also offer some support of these chefs and cooks. Many respondents reported they had been featured in, or interviewed and/or photographed for, a range of media. This media comprised the following: the local newspapers (22 respondents, 52.4 per cent), local radio stations (19 respondents, 45.2 per cent), regional television stations (11 respondents, 26.2 per cent) and local websites (8 respondents, 19 per cent). A number had also attracted other media exposure. This was in the local, regional area, especially through local Council publications (31 respondents, 75 per cent), as well as state-wide (2 respondents, 4.8 per cent) and nationally (6 respondents, 14.3 per cent). Two of these local chefs/cooks (or 4.8 per cent) had attracted international media coverage of their activities. It is clear from the above that, in the small area surveyed, rural and regional chefs/cooks make a considerable contribution to their local communities, with all the chefs/cooks who replied making some, and a number a major, contribution to those communities, well beyond the requirements of their paid positions in the field of food preparation and service. The responses tendered indicate that these chefs and cooks contributed regularly to local public events, institutions and charities (with a high rate of contribution to local festivals, school programs and local charitable activities), and were also making an input into public education programs, local cultural institutions, political and social debates of local importance, as well as the profitability of other local businesses. They were also actively supporting not only the future of the food industry as a whole, but also the viability of their local communities, by providing work experience opportunities and taking on local apprentices for training and mentorship. Much more than merely food providers, as a group, these chefs and cooks were, it appears, also operating as food historians, public intellectuals, teachers, activists and environmentalists. They were, moreover, operating as content producers for local media while, at the same time, acting as media producers and publishers. Conclusion The terms “chef” and “cook” can be diversely defined. All definitions, however, commonly involve a sense of professionalism in food preparation reflecting some specialist knowledge and skill in the culinary arts, as well as various levels of creativity, experience and responsibility. In terms of the specific duties that chefs and professional cooks undertake every day, almost all publications on the subject deal specifically with workplace related activities such as food and other supply ordering, staff management, menu planning and food preparation and serving. This is constant across culinary textbooks (see, for instance, Culinary Institute of America 2002) and more discursive narratives about the professional chef such as the bestselling autobiographical musings of Anthony Bourdain, and Michael Ruhlman’s journalistic/biographical investigations of US chefs (Soul; Reach). An alternative preliminary examination, and categorisation, of the roles these professionals play outside their kitchens reveals, however, a much wider range of community based activities and inputs than such texts suggest. It is without doubt that the chefs and cooks who responded to the survey discussed above have made, and are making, a considerable contribution to their local New England communities. It is also without doubt that these contributions are of considerable value, and valued by, those country communities. Further research will have to consider to what extent these contributions, and the significance and influence of these chefs and cooks in those communities are mirrored, or not, by other country (as well as urban) chefs and cooks, and their communities. Acknowledgements An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Engaging Histories: Australian Historical Association Regional Conference, at the University of New England, September 2007. I would like to thank the session’s participants for their insightful comments on that presentation. A sincere thank you, too, to the reviewers of this article, whose suggestions assisted my thinking on this piece. Research to complete this article was carried out whilst a Visiting Fellow with the Research School of Humanities, the Australian National University. References Armidale Tourist Information Centre. Dining Out in Armidale [brochure]. Armidale: Armidale-Dumaresq Council, c. 2006. Baker-Clark, C. A. Profiles from the Kitchen: What Great Cooks have Taught us about Ourselves and our Food. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2006. Bernier, G. Antoine Carême 1783-1833: La Sensualité Gourmande en Europe. Paris: Grasset, 1989. Bourdain, A. Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. New York: Harper Perennial, 2001. Bowyer, A. Delia Smith: The Biography. London: André Deutsch, 1999. Brandon, R. The People’s Chef: Alexis Soyer, A Life in Seven Courses. Chichester: Wiley, 2005. Brien, D. L. “Australian Celebrity Chefs 1950-1980: A Preliminary Study.” Australian Folklore 21 (2006): 201–18. Chelminski, R. The Perfectionist: Life and Death In Haute Cuisine. New York: Gotham Books, 2005. Clifford-Smith, S. A Marvellous Party: The Life of Bernard King. Milson’s Point: Random House Australia, 2004. Culinary Institute of America. The Professional Chef. 7th ed. New York: Wiley, 2002. de Certeau, M. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Hildred, S., and T. Ewbank. Jamie Oliver: The Biography. London: Blake, 2001. Jenkins, S. 21 Great Chefs of Australia: The Coming of Age of Australian Cuisine. East Roseville: Simon and Schuster, 1991. Kelly, I. Cooking for Kings: The Life of Antoine Carême, The First Celebrity Chef. New York: Walker and Company, 2003. James, K. Escoffier: The King of Chefs. London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2002. Morris, H. Portrait of a Chef: The Life of Alexis Soyer, Sometime Chef to the Reform Club. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1938. Nabhan, G. P. Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002. O’Donnell, M., and T. Knox. Great Australian Chefs. Melbourne: Bookman Press, 1999. Rachleff, O. S. Escoffier: King of Chefs. New York: Broadway Play Pub., 1983. Ray, E. Alexis Soyer: Cook Extraordinary. Lewes: Southover, 1991. Reardon, J. M. F. K. Fisher, Julia Child, and Alice Waters: Celebrating the Pleasures of the Table. New York: Harmony Books, 1994. Redden, G. “Packaging the Gifts of Nation.” M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999) accessed 10 September 2008 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/gifts.php. Riley, N. Appetite For Life: The Biography of Julia Child. New York: Doubleday, 1977. Ruhlman, M. The Soul of a Chef. New York: Viking, 2001. Ruhlman, M. The Reach of a Chef. New York: Viking, 2006. Sanger, M. B. Escoffier: Master Chef. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1976. Scott, A. J. “The Cultural Economy of Cities.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 212 (1997) 323–39. Simpson, N. Gordon Ramsay: The Biography. London: John Blake, 2006. Smith, G. Nigella Lawson: A Biography. London: Andre Deutsch, 2005. Symons, M. A History of Cooks and Cooking. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2004. Tairu, T. “Material Food, Spiritual Quest: When Pleasure Does Not Follow Purchase.” M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999) accessed 10 September 2008 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/pleasure.php. White, R. S. “Popular Culture as the Everyday: A Brief Cultural History of Vegemite.” Australian Popular Culture. Ed. I. Craven. Cambridge UP, 1994. 15–21.

On 23 August 2005, John Howard, then Prime Minister, called together Muslim ‘representatives’ from around the nation for a Muslim Summit in response to the London bombings in July of that year. One of the outcomes of the two hour summit was a Statement of Principles committing Muslim communities in Australia to resist radicalisation and pursue a ‘moderate’ Islam. Since then the ill-defined term ‘moderate Muslim’ has been used in both the political and media discourse to refer to a preferred form of Islamic practice that does not challenge the hegemony of the nation state and that is coherent with the principles of secularism. Akbarzadeh and Smith conclude that the terms ‘moderate’ and ‘mainstream’ are used to describe Muslims whom Australians should not fear in contrast to ‘extremists’. Ironically, the policy direction towards regulating the practice of Islam in Australia in favour of a state defined ‘moderate’ Islam signals an attempt by the state to mediate the practice of religion, undermining the ethos of secularism as it is expressed in the Australian Constitution. It also – arguably – impacts upon the citizenship rights of Australian Muslims in so far as citizenship presents not just as a formal set of rights accorded to an individual but also to democratic participation: the ability of citizens to enjoy those rights at a substantive level. Based on the findings of research into how Australian Muslims and members of the broader community are responding to the political and media discourses on terrorism, this article examines the impact of these discourses on how Muslims are practicing citizenship and re-defining an Australian Muslim identity. Free Speech Free speech has been a hallmark of liberal democracies ever since its defence became part of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Australian Constitution does not expressly contain a provision for free speech. The right to free speech in Australia is implied in Australia’s ratification of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), article 19 of which affirms: Article 19. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. The ultimate recent endorsement of free speech rights, arguably associated with the radical free speech ‘open platform’ movement of the 1960s at the University of California Berkeley, constructs free speech as essential to human and civil liberties. Its approach has been expressed in terms such as: “I reject and detest XYZ views but will defend to the utmost a person’s right to express them”. An active defence of free speech is based on the observation that, unless held to account, “[Authorities] would grant free speech to those with whom they agree, but not to minorities whom they consider unorthodox or threatening” (“Online Archives of California”). Such minorities, differing from the majority view, do so as a right accorded to citizens. In very challenging circumstances – such as opposing the Cold War operations of the US Senate Anti-American Activities Committee – the free speech movement has been celebrated as holding fast (or embodying a ‘return’) to the true meaning of the American First Amendment. It was in public statements of unpopular and minority views, which opposed those of the majority, that the right to free speech could most non-controvertibly be demonstrated. Some have argued that such rights should be balanced by anti-vilification legislation, by prohibitions upon incitement to violence, and by considerations as to whether the organisation defended by the speaker was banned. In the latter case, there can be problems with excluding the defence of banned organisations from legitimate debate. In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, Sinn Fein was denounced in the UK as the ‘political wing of the IRA’ (the IRA being a banned organisation) and denied a speaking position in many forums, yet has proved to be an important party in the eventual reconciliation of the Northern Ireland divide. In effect, the banning of an organisation is a political act and such acts should best be interrogated through free speech and democratic debate. Arguably, such disputation is a responsibility of an involved citizenry. In general, liberal democracies such as Australia do not hesitate to claim that citizens have a right to free speech and that this is a right worth defending. There is a legitimate expectation by Australians of their rights as citizens to freedom of expression. For some Australian Muslims, however, the appeal to free speech seems a hollow one. Muslim citizens run the risk of being constructed as ‘un-Australian’ when they articulate their concerns or opinions. Calls by some Muslim leaders not to reprint the Danish cartoons depicting images of the Prophet Mohammed for example, met with a broader community backlash and drew responses that, typically, constructed Muslims as a threat to Australian cultural values of freedom and liberty. These kinds of responses to expressions by Australian Muslims of their deeply held convictions are rarely, if ever, interpreted as attempts to curtail Australian Muslims’ rights to free speech. There is a poor fit between what many Australian Muslims believe and what they feel the current climate in Australia allows them to say in the public domain. Positioned as the potential ‘enemy within’ in the evolving media and political discourse post September 11, they have been allocated restricted speaking positions on many subjects from the role and training of their Imams to the right to request Sharia courts (which could operate in parallel with Australian courts in the same way that Catholic divorce/annulment courts do). These social and political restrictions lead them to question whether Muslims enjoy citizenship rights on an equal footing with Australians from the broader community. The following comment from an Australian woman, an Iraqi refugee, made in a research interview demonstrates this: The media say that if you are Australian it means that you enjoy freedom, you enjoy the rights of citizenship. That is the idea of what it means to be Australian, that you do those things. But if you are a Muslim, you are not Australian. You are a people who are dangerous, a people who are suspicious, a people who do not want democracy—all the characteristics that make up terrorists. So yes, there is a difference, a big difference. And it is a feeling all Muslims have, not just me, whether you are at school, at work, and especially if you wear the hijab. (Translated from Arabic by Anne Aly) At the same time, Australian Muslims observe some members of the broader community making strong assertions about Muslims (often based on misunderstanding or misinformation) with very little in the way of censure or rebuke. For example, again in 2005, Liberal backbenchers Sophie Panopoulos and Bronwyn Bishop made an emotive plea for the banning of headscarves in public schools, drawing explicitly on the historically inherited image of Islam as a violent, backward and oppressive ideology that has no place in Western liberal democracy: I fear a frightening Islamic class emerging, supported by a perverse interpretation of the Koran where disenchantment breeds disengagement, where powerful and subversive orthodoxies are inculcated into passionate and impressionable young Muslims, where the Islamic mosque becomes the breeding ground for violence and rejection of Australian law and ideals, where extremists hijack the Islamic faith with their own prescriptive and unbending version of the Koran and where extremist views are given currency and validity … . Why should one section of the community be stuck in the Dark Ages of compliance cloaked under a veil of some distorted form of religious freedom? (Panopoulos) Several studies attest to the fact that, since the terrorist attacks in the United States in September 2001, Islam, and by association Australian Muslims, have been positioned as other in the political and media discourse (see for example Aly). The construct of Muslims as ‘out of place’ (Saniotis) denies them entry and representation in the public sphere: a key requisite for democratic participation according to Habermas (cited in Haas). This notion of a lack of a context for Muslim citizenship in Australian public spheres arises out of the popular construction of ‘Muslim’ and ‘Australian’ as mutually exclusive modes of being. Denied access to public spaces to partake in democratic dialogue as political citizens, Australian Muslims must pursue alternative communicative spaces. Some respond by limiting their expressions to closed spheres of communication – a kind of enforced silence. Others respond by pursuing alternative media discourses that challenge the dominant stereotypes of Muslims in Western media and reinforce majority-world cultural views. Enforced Silence In closed spheres of discussion, Australian Muslims can openly share their perceptions about terrorism, the government and media. Speaking openly in public however, is not common practice and results in forced silence for fear of reprisal or being branded a terrorist: “if we jump up and go ‘oh how dare you say this, rah, rah’, he’ll be like ‘oh he’s going to go off, he’ll blow something up’”. One research participant recalled that when his work colleagues were discussing the September 11 attacks he decided not to partake in the conversation because it “might be taken against me”. The participant made this decision despite the fact that his colleagues were expressing the opinion that United States foreign policy was the likely cause for the attacks—an opinion with which he agreed. This suggests some support for the theory that the fear of social isolation may make Australian Muslims especially anxious or fearful of expressing opinions about terrorism in public discussions (Noelle-Neumann). However, it also suggests that the fear of social isolation for Muslims is not solely related to the expression of minority opinion, as theorised in Noelle-Neumann’s Spiral of Silence . Given that many members of the wider community shared the theory that the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre in 2001 may have been a response to American foreign policy, this may well not be a minority view. Nonetheless, Australian Muslims hesitated to embrace it. Saniotis draws attention to the pressure on Australian Muslims to publicly distance themselves from the terrorist attacks of September 11 and to openly denounce the actions of terrorists. The extent to which Muslims were positioned as a threatening other was contingent on their ability to demonstrate that they too participated in the distal responses to the terrorist attacks—initial pity for the sufferer and eventual marginalisation and rejection of the perceived aggressor. Australian Muslims were obliged to declare their loyalty and commitment to Australia’s ally and, in this way, partake in the nationalistic responses to the threat of terrorism. At the same time however, Australian Muslims were positioned as an imagined enemy and a threat to national identity. Australian Muslims were therefore placed in a paradoxical bind- as Australians they were expected to respond as the victims of fear; as Muslims they were positioned as the objects of fear. Even in discussions where their opinions are congruent with the dominant opinion being expressed, Australian Muslims describe themselves as feeling apprehensive or anxious about expressing their opinions because of how these “might be taken”. Pursuing alternative discourses The overriding message from the research project’s Muslim participants was that the media, as a powerful purveyor of public opinion, had inculcated a perception of Muslims as a risk to Australia and Australians: an ‘enemy within’; the potential ‘home grown terrorist’. The daily experience of visibly-different Australian Muslims, however, is that they are more fearing than fear-inspiring. The Aly and Balnaves fear scale indicates that Australian Muslims have twice as many fear indicators as non-Muslims Australians. Disengagement from Western media and media that is seen to be influenced or controlled by the West is widespread among Australian Muslims who increasingly argue that the media institutions are motivated by an agenda that includes profit and the perpetuation of a negative stereotype of Muslims both in Australia and around the globe, particularly in relation to Middle Eastern affairs. The negative stereotypes of Muslims in the Australian media have inculcated a sense of victimhood which Muslims in Australia have used as the basis for a reconstruction of their identity and the creation of alternative narratives of belonging (Aly). Central to the notion of identity among Australian Muslims is a sense of having their citizenship rights curtailed by virtue of their faith: of being included in a general Western dismissal of Muslims’ rights and experiences. As one interviewee said: If you look at the Channel Al Jazeera for example, it’s a channel but they aren’t making up stories, they are taping videos in Iraqi, Palestine and other Muslim countries, and they just show it to people, that’s all they do. And then George Bush, you know, we hear on the news that George Bush was discussing with Tony Blair that he was thinking to bomb Al Jazeera so why would these people have their right to freedom and we don’t? So that’s why I think the people who are in power, they have the control over the media, and it’s a big political game. Because if it wasn’t then George Bush, he’s the symbol of politics, why would he want to bomb Al Jazeera for example? Amidst leaks and rumours (Timms) that the 2003 US bombing of Al Jazeera was a deliberate attack upon one of the few elements of the public sphere in which some Western-nationality Muslims have confidence, many elements of the mainstream Western media rose to Al Jazeera’s defence. For example, using an appeal to the right of citizens to engage in and consume free speech, the editors of influential US paper The Nation commented that: If the classified memo detailing President Bush’s alleged proposal to bomb the headquarters of Al Jazeera is provided to The Nation, we will publish the relevant sections. Why is it so vital that this information be made available to the American people? Because if a President who claims to be using the US military to liberate countries in order to spread freedom then conspires to destroy media that fail to echo his sentiments, he does not merely disgrace his office and soil the reputation of his country. He attacks a fundamental principle, freedom of the press—particularly a dissenting and disagreeable press—upon which that country was founded. (cited in Scahill) For other Australian Muslims, it is the fact that some media organisations have been listed as banned by the US that gives them their ultimate credibility. This is the case with Al Manar, for example. Feeling that they are denied access to public spaces to partake in democratic dialogue as equal political citizens, Australian Muslims are pursuing alternative communicative spaces that support and reinforce their own cultural worldviews. The act of engaging with marginalised and alternative communicative spaces constitutes what Clifford terms ‘collective practices of displaced dwelling’. It is through these practices of displaced dwelling that Australian Muslims essentialise their diasporic identity and negotiate new identities based on common perceptions of injustice against Muslims. But you look at Al Jazeera they talk in the same tongue as the Western media in our language. And then you look again at something like Al Manar who talks of their own tongue. They do not use the other media’s ideas. They have been attacked by the Australians, been attacked by the Israelis and they have their own opinion. This statement came from an Australian Muslim of Jordanian background in her late forties. It reflects a growing trend towards engaging with media messages that coincide with and reinforce a sense of injustice. The Al Manar television station to which this participant refers is a Lebanese based station run by the militant Hezbollah movement and accessible to Australians via satellite. Much like Al Jazeera, Al Manar broadcasts images of Iraqi and Palestinian suffering and, in the recent war between Israel and Hezbollah, graphic images of Lebanese casualties of Israeli air strikes. Unlike the Al Jazeera broadcasts, these images are formatted into video clips accompanied by music and lyrics such as “we do not fear America”. Despite political pressure including a decision by the US to list Al Manar as a terrorist organisation in December 2004, just one week after a French ban on the station because its programming had “a militant perspective with anti-Semitic connotations” (Jorisch), Al Manar continued to broadcast videos depicting the US as the “mother of terrorism”. In one particularly graphic sequence, the Statue of Liberty rises from the depths of the sea, wielding a knife in place of the torch and dripping in blood, her face altered to resemble a skull. As she rises out of the sea accompanied by music resembling a funeral march the following words in Arabic are emblazoned across the screen: On the dead bodies of millions of native Americans And through the enslavement of tens of millions Africans The US rose It pried into the affairs of most countries in the world After an extensive list of countries impacted by US foreign policy including China, Japan, Congo, Vietnam, Peru, Laos, Libya and Guatamala, the video comes to a gruelling halt with the words ‘America owes blood to all of humanity’. Another video juxtaposes images of Bush with Hitler with the caption ‘History repeats itself’. One website run by the Coalition against Media Terrorism refers to Al Manar as ‘the beacon of hatred’ and applauds the decisions by the French and US governments to ban the station. Al Manar defended itself against the bans stating on its website that they are attempts “to terrorise and silence thoughts that are not in line with the US and Israeli policies.” The station claims that it continues on its mission “to carry the message of defending our peoples’ rights, holy places and just causes…within internationally agreed professional laws and standards”. The particular brand of propaganda employed by Al Manar is gaining popularity among some Muslims in Australia largely because it affirms their own views and opinions and offers them opportunities to engage in an alternative public space in which Muslims are positioned as the victims and not the aggressors. Renegotiating an ‘Othered’ Identity The negative portrayal of Muslims as ‘other’ in the Australian media and in political discourse has resulted in Australian Muslims constructing alternative identities based on a common perception of injustice. Particularly since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in September 2001 and the ensuing “war on terror”, the ethnic divisions within the Muslim diaspora are becoming less significant as Australian Muslims reconstruct their identity based on a notion of supporting each other in the face of a global alliance against Islam. Religious identity is increasingly becoming the identity of choice for Muslims in Australia. This causes problems, however, since religious identity has no place in the liberal democratic model, which espouses secularism. This is particularly the case where that religion is sometimes constructed as being at odds with the principles and values of liberal democracy; namely tolerance and adherence to the rule of law. This problematic creates a context in which Muslim Australians are not only denied their heterogeneity in the media and political discourse but are dealt with through an understanding of Islam that is constructed on the basis of a cultural and ideological clash between Islam and the West. Religion has become the sole and only characteristic by which Muslims are recognised, denying them political citizenship and access to the public spaces of citizenship. Such ‘essentialising practices’ as eliding considerable diversity into a single descriptor serves to reinforce and consolidate diasporic identity among Muslims in Australia, but does little to promote and assist participatory citizenship or to equip Muslims with the tools necessary to access the public sphere as political citizens of the secular state. In such circumstances, the moderate Muslim may be not so much a ‘preferred’ citizen as one whose rights has been constrained. Acknowledgment This paper is based on the findings of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project, 2005-7, involving 10 focus groups and 60 in-depth interviews. The authors wish to acknowledge the participation and contributions of WA community members. References Akbarzadeh, Shahram, and Bianca Smith. The Representation of Islam and Muslims in the Media (The Age and Herald Sun Newspapers). Melbourne: Monash University, 2005. Aly, Anne, and Mark Balnaves. ”‘They Want Us to Be Afraid’: Developing Metrics of the Fear of Terrorism.” International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations 6 (2007): 113-122. Aly, Anne. “Australian Muslim Responses to the Discourse on Terrorism in the Australian Popular Media.” Australian Journal of Social Issues 42.1 (2007): 27-40. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. London: Harvard UP, 1997. Haas, Tanni. “The Public Sphere as a Sphere of Publics: Rethinking Habermas’s Theory of the Public Sphere.” Journal of Communication 54.1 (2004): 178- 84. Jorisch, Avi. J. “Al-Manar and the War in Iraq.” Middle East Intelligence Bulletin 5.2 (2003). Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth. “The Spiral of Silence: A Theory of Public Opinion.” Journal of Communication 24.2 (1974): 43-52. “Online Archives of California”. California Digital Library. n.d. Feb. 2008 < http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt1199n498/?&query= %22open%20platform%22&brand=oac&hit.rank=1 >. Panopoulos, Sophie. Parliamentary debate, 5 Sep. 2005. Feb. 2008 < http://www.aph.gov.au.hansard >. Saniotis, Arthur. “Embodying Ambivalence: Muslim Australians as ‘Other’.” Journal of Australian Studies 82 (2004): 49-58. Scahill, Jeremy. “The War on Al-Jazeera (Comment)”. 2005. The Nation. Feb. 2008 < http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051219/scahill >. Timms, Dominic. “Al-Jazeera Seeks Answers over Bombing Memo”. 2005. Media Guardian. Feb. 2008 < http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/nov/23/iraq.iraqandthemedia >.

At one point in Victor Hugo’s novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the archdeacon, Claude Frollo, looked up from a book on his table to the edifice of the gothic cathedral, visible from his canon’s cell in the cloister of Notre Dame: “Alas!” he said, “this will kill that” (146). Frollo’s lament, that the book would destroy the edifice, captures the medieval cleric’s anxiety about the way in which Gutenberg’s print technology would become the new universal means for recording and communicating humanity’s ideas and artistic expression, replacing the grand monuments of architecture, human engineering, and craftsmanship. For Hugo, architecture was “the great handwriting of humankind” (149). The cathedral as the material outcome of human technology was being replaced by the first great machine—the printing press. At this point in the third millennium, some people undoubtedly have similar anxieties to Frollo: is it now the book’s turn to be destroyed by yet another great machine? The inclusion of “post print” in our title is not intended to sound the death knell of the book. Rather, we contend that despite the enduring value of print, digital publishing is “present and active” and is changing the way in which research, particularly in the humanities, is being undertaken. Our approach has three related parts. First, we consider how digital technologies are changing the way in which content is constructed, customised, modified, disseminated, and accessed within a global, distributed network. This section argues that the transition from print to electronic or digital publishing means both losses and gains, particularly with respect to shifts in our approaches to textuality, information, and innovative publishing. Second, we discuss the Children’s Literature Digital Resources (CLDR) project, with which we are involved. This case study of a digitising initiative opens out the transformative possibilities and challenges of digital publishing and e-scholarship for research communities. Third, we reflect on technology’s capacity to bring about major changes in the light of the theoretical and practical issues that have arisen from our discussion. I. Digitising in a “post-print age” We are living in an era that is commonly referred to as “the late age of print” (see Kho) or the “post-print age” (see Gunkel). According to Aarseth, we have reached a point whereby nearly all of our public and personal media have become more or less digital (37). As Kho notes, web newspapers are not only becoming increasingly more popular, but they are also making rather than losing money, and paper-based newspapers are finding it difficult to recruit new readers from the younger generations (37). Not only can such online-only publications update format, content, and structure more economically than print-based publications, but their wide distribution network, speed, and flexibility attract advertising revenue. Hype and hyperbole aside, publishers are not so much discarding their legacy of print, but recognising the folly of not embracing innovative technologies that can add value by presenting information in ways that satisfy users’ needs for content to-go or for edutainment. As Kho notes: “no longer able to satisfy customer demand by producing print-only products, or even by enabling online access to semi-static content, established publishers are embracing new models for publishing, web-style” (42). Advocates of online publishing contend that the major benefits of online publishing over print technology are that it is faster, more economical, and more interactive. However, as Hovav and Gray caution, “e-publishing also involves risks, hidden costs, and trade-offs” (79). The specific focus for these authors is e-journal publishing and they contend that while cost reduction is in editing, production and distribution, if the journal is not open access, then costs relating to storage and bandwith will be transferred to the user. If we put economics aside for the moment, the transition from print to electronic text (e-text), especially with electronic literary works, brings additional considerations, particularly in their ability to make available different reading strategies to print, such as “animation, rollovers, screen design, navigation strategies, and so on” (Hayles 38). Transition from print to e-text In his book, Writing Space, David Bolter follows Victor Hugo’s lead, but does not ask if print technology will be destroyed. Rather, he argues that “the idea and ideal of the book will change: print will no longer define the organization and presentation of knowledge, as it has for the past five centuries” (2). As Hayles noted above, one significant indicator of this change, which is a consequence of the shift from analogue to digital, is the addition of graphical, audio, visual, sonic, and kinetic elements to the written word. A significant consequence of this transition is the reinvention of the book in a networked environment. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is not bound by space and time. Rather, it is an evolving entity within an ecology of readers, authors, and texts. The Web 2.0 platform has enabled more experimentation with blending of digital technology and traditional writing, particularly in the use of blogs, which have spawned blogwriting and the wikinovel. Siva Vaidhyanathan’s The Googlization of Everything: How One Company is Disrupting Culture, Commerce and Community … and Why We Should Worry is a wikinovel or blog book that was produced over a series of weeks with contributions from other bloggers (see: http://www.sivacracy.net/). Penguin Books, in collaboration with a media company, “Six Stories to Start,” have developed six stories—“We Tell Stories,” which involve different forms of interactivity from users through blog entries, Twitter text messages, an interactive google map, and other features. For example, the story titled “Fairy Tales” allows users to customise the story using their own choice of names for characters and descriptions of character traits. Each story is loosely based on a classic story and links take users to synopses of these original stories and their authors and to online purchase of the texts through the Penguin Books sales website. These examples of digital stories are a small part of the digital environment, which exploits computer and online technologies’ capacity to be interactive and immersive. As Janet Murray notes, the interactive qualities of digital environments are characterised by their procedural and participatory abilities, while their immersive qualities are characterised by their spatial and encyclopedic dimensions (71–89). These immersive and interactive qualities highlight different ways of reading texts, which entail different embodied and cognitive functions from those that reading print texts requires. As Hayles argues: the advent of electronic textuality presents us with an unparalleled opportunity to reformulate fundamental ideas about texts and, in the process, to see print as well as electronic texts with fresh eyes (89–90). The transition to e-text also highlights how digitality is changing all aspects of everyday life both inside and outside the academy. Online teaching and e-research Another aspect of the commercial arm of publishing that is impacting on academe and other organisations is the digitising and indexing of print content for niche distribution. Kho offers the example of the Mark Logic Corporation, which uses its XML content platform to repurpose content, create new content, and distribute this content through multiple portals. As the promotional website video for Mark Logic explains, academics can use this service to customise their own textbooks for students by including only articles and book chapters that are relevant to their subject. These are then organised, bound, and distributed by Mark Logic for sale to students at a cost that is generally cheaper than most textbooks. A further example of how print and digital materials can form an integrated, customised source for teachers and students is eFictions (Trimmer, Jennings, & Patterson). eFictions was one of the first print and online short story anthologies that teachers of literature could customise to their own needs. Produced as both a print text collection and a website, eFictions offers popular short stories in English by well-known traditional and contemporary writers from the US, Australia, New Zealand, UK, and Europe, with summaries, notes on literary features, author biographies, and, in one instance, a YouTube movie of the story. In using the eFictions website, teachers can build a customised anthology of traditional and innovative stories to suit their teaching preferences. These examples provide useful indicators of how content is constructed, customised, modified, disseminated, and accessed within a distributed network. However, the question remains as to how to measure their impact and outcomes within teaching and learning communities. As Harley suggests in her study on the use and users of digital resources in the humanities and social sciences, several factors warrant attention, such as personal teaching style, philosophy, and specific disciplinary requirements. However, in terms of understanding the benefits of digital resources for teaching and learning, Harley notes that few providers in her sample had developed any plans to evaluate use and users in a systematic way. In addition to the problems raised in Harley’s study, another relates to how researchers can be supported to take full advantage of digital technologies for e-research. The transformation brought about by information and communication technologies extends and broadens the impact of research, by making its outputs more discoverable and usable by other researchers, and its benefits more available to industry, governments, and the wider community. Traditional repositories of knowledge and information, such as libraries, are juggling the space demands of books and computer hardware alongside increasing reader demand for anywhere, anytime, anyplace access to information. Researchers’ expectations about online access to journals, eprints, bibliographic data, and the views of others through wikis, blogs, and associated social and information networking sites such as YouTube compete with the traditional expectations of the institutions that fund libraries for paper-based archives and book repositories. While university libraries are finding it increasingly difficult to purchase all hardcover books relevant to numerous and varied disciplines, a significant proportion of their budgets goes towards digital repositories (e.g., STORS), indexes, and other resources, such as full-text electronic specialised and multidisciplinary journal databases (e.g., Project Muse and Proquest); electronic serials; e-books; and specialised information sources through fast (online) document delivery services. An area that is becoming increasingly significant for those working in the humanities is the digitising of historical and cultural texts. II. Bringing back the dead: The CLDR project The CLDR project is led by researchers and librarians at the Queensland University of Technology, in collaboration with Deakin University, University of Sydney, and members of the AustLit team at The University of Queensland. The CLDR project is a “Research Community” of the electronic bibliographic database AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource, which is working towards the goal of providing a complete bibliographic record of the nation’s literature. AustLit offers users with a single entry point to enhanced scholarly resources on Australian writers, their works, and other aspects of Australian literary culture and activities. AustLit and its Research Communities are supported by grants from the Australian Research Council and financial and in-kind contributions from a consortium of Australian universities, and by other external funding sources such as the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. Like other more extensive digitisation projects, such as Project Gutenberg and the Rosetta Project, the CLDR project aims to provide a centralised access point for digital surrogates of early published works of Australian children’s literature, with access pathways to existing resources. The first stage of the CLDR project is to provide access to digitised, full-text, out-of-copyright Australian children’s literature from European settlement to 1945, with selected digitised critical works relevant to the field. Texts comprise a range of genres, including poetry, drama, and narrative for young readers and picture books, songs, and rhymes for infants. Currently, a selection of 75 e-texts and digital scans of original texts from Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive have been linked to the Children’s Literature Research Community. By the end of 2009, the CLDR will have digitised approximately 1000 literary texts and a significant number of critical works. Stage II and subsequent development will involve digitisation of selected texts from 1945 onwards. A precursor to the CLDR project has been undertaken by Deakin University in collaboration with the State Library of Victoria, whereby a digital bibliographic index comprising Victorian School Readers has been completed with plans for full-text digital surrogates of a selection of these texts. These texts provide valuable insights into citizenship, identity, and values formation from the 1930s onwards. At the time of writing, the CLDR is at an early stage of development. An extensive survey of out-of-copyright texts has been completed and the digitisation of these resources is about to commence. The project plans to make rich content searchable, allowing scholars from children’s literature studies and education to benefit from the many advantages of online scholarship. What digital publishing and associated digital archives, electronic texts, hypermedia, and so forth foreground is the fact that writers, readers, publishers, programmers, designers, critics, booksellers, teachers, and copyright laws operate within a context that is highly mediated by technology. In his article on large-scale digitisation projects carried out by Cornell and University of Michigan with the Making of America collection of 19th-century American serials and monographs, Hirtle notes that when special collections’ materials are available via the Web, with appropriate metadata and software, then they can “increase use of the material, contribute to new forms of research, and attract new users to the material” (44). Furthermore, Hirtle contends that despite the poor ergonomics associated with most electronic displays and e-book readers, “people will, when given the opportunity, consult an electronic text over the print original” (46). If this preference is universally accurate, especially for researchers and students, then it follows that not only will the preference for electronic surrogates of original material increase, but preference for other kinds of electronic texts will also increase. It is with this preference for electronic resources in mind that we approached the field of children’s literature in Australia and asked questions about how future generations of researchers would prefer to work. If electronic texts become the reference of choice for primary as well as secondary sources, then it seems sensible to assume that researchers would prefer to sit at the end of the keyboard than to travel considerable distances at considerable cost to access paper-based print texts in distant libraries and archives. We considered the best means for providing access to digitised primary and secondary, full text material, and digital pathways to existing online resources, particularly an extensive indexing and bibliographic database. Prior to the commencement of the CLDR project, AustLit had already indexed an extensive number of children’s literature. Challenges and dilemmas The CLDR project, even in its early stages of development, has encountered a number of challenges and dilemmas that centre on access, copyright, economic capital, and practical aspects of digitisation, and sustainability. These issues have relevance for digital publishing and e-research. A decision is yet to be made as to whether the digital texts in CLDR will be available on open or closed/tolled access. The preference is for open access. As Hayles argues, copyright is more than a legal basis for intellectual property, as it also entails ideas about authorship, creativity, and the work as an “immaterial mental construct” that goes “beyond the paper, binding, or ink” (144). Seeking copyright permission is therefore only part of the issue. Determining how the item will be accessed is a further matter, particularly as future technologies may impact upon how a digital item is used. In the case of e-journals, the issue of copyright payment structures are evolving towards a collective licensing system, pay-per-view, and other combinations of print and electronic subscription (see Hovav and Gray). For research purposes, digitisation of items for CLDR is not simply a scan and deliver process. Rather it is one that needs to ensure that the best quality is provided and that the item is both accessible and usable by researchers, and sustainable for future researchers. Sustainability is an important consideration and provides a challenge for institutions that host projects such as CLDR. Therefore, items need to be scanned to a high quality and this requires an expensive scanner and personnel costs. Files need to be in a variety of formats for preservation purposes and so that they may be manipulated to be useable in different technologies (for example, Archival Tiff, Tiff, Jpeg, PDF, HTML). Hovav and Gray warn that when technology becomes obsolete, then content becomes unreadable unless backward integration is maintained. The CLDR items will be annotatable given AustLit’s NeAt funded project: Aus-e-Lit. The Aus-e-Lit project will extend and enhance the existing AustLit web portal with data integration and search services, empirical reporting services, collaborative annotation services, and compound object authoring, editing, and publishing services. For users to be able to get the most out of a digital item, it needs to be searchable, either through double keying or OCR (optimal character recognition). The value of CLDR’s contribution The value of the CLDR project lies in its goal to provide a comprehensive, searchable body of texts (fictional and critical) to researchers across the humanities and social sciences. Other projects seem to be intent on putting up as many items as possible to be considered as a first resort for online texts. CLDR is more specific and is not interested in simply generating a presence on the Web. Rather, it is research driven both in its design and implementation, and in its focussed outcomes of assisting academics and students primarily in their e-research endeavours. To this end, we have concentrated on the following: an extensive survey of appropriate texts; best models for file location, distribution, and use; and high standards of digitising protocols. These issues that relate to data storage, digitisation, collections, management, and end-users of data are aligned with the “Development of an Australian Research Data Strategy” outlined in An Australian e-Research Strategy and Implementation Framework (2006). CLDR is not designed to simply replicate resources, as it has a distinct focus, audience, and research potential. In addition, it looks at resources that may be forgotten or are no longer available in reproduction by current publishing companies. Thus, the aim of CLDR is to preserve both the time and a period of Australian history and literary culture. It will also provide users with an accessible repository of rare and early texts written for children. III. Future directions It is now commonplace to recognize that the Web’s role as information provider has changed over the past decade. New forms of “collective intelligence” or “distributed cognition” (Oblinger and Lombardi) are emerging within and outside formal research communities. Technology’s capacity to initiate major cultural, social, educational, economic, political and commercial shifts has conditioned us to expect the “next big thing.” We have learnt to adapt swiftly to the many challenges that online technologies have presented, and we have reaped the benefits. As the examples in this discussion have highlighted, the changes in online publishing and digitisation have provided many material, network, pedagogical, and research possibilities: we teach online units providing students with access to e-journals, e-books, and customized archives of digitised materials; we communicate via various online technologies; we attend virtual conferences; and we participate in e-research through a global, digital network. In other words, technology is deeply engrained in our everyday lives. In returning to Frollo’s concern that the book would destroy architecture, Umberto Eco offers a placatory note: “in the history of culture it has never happened that something has simply killed something else. Something has profoundly changed something else” (n. pag.). Eco’s point has relevance to our discussion of digital publishing. The transition from print to digital necessitates a profound change that impacts on the ways we read, write, and research. As we have illustrated with our case study of the CLDR project, the move to creating digitised texts of print literature needs to be considered within a dynamic network of multiple causalities, emergent technological processes, and complex negotiations through which digital texts are created, stored, disseminated, and used. Technological changes in just the past five years have, in many ways, created an expectation in the minds of people that the future is no longer some distant time from the present. Rather, as our title suggests, the future is both present and active. References Aarseth, Espen. “How we became Postdigital: From Cyberstudies to Game Studies.” Critical Cyber-culture Studies. Ed. David Silver and Adrienne Massanari. New York: New York UP, 2006. 37–46. An Australian e-Research Strategy and Implementation Framework: Final Report of the e-Research Coordinating Committee. Commonwealth of Australia, 2006. Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1991. Eco, Umberto. “The Future of the Book.” 1994. 3 June 2008 ‹http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_future_of_book.html>. Gunkel, David. J. “What's the Matter with Books?” Configurations 11.3 (2003): 277–303. Harley, Diane. “Use and Users of Digital Resources: A Focus on Undergraduate Education in the Humanities and Social Sciences.” Research and Occasional Papers Series. Berkeley: University of California. Centre for Studies in Higher Education. 12 June 2008 ‹http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_future_of_book.html>. Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. Hirtle, Peter B. “The Impact of Digitization on Special Collections in Libraries.” Libraries & Culture 37.1 (2002): 42–52. Hovav, Anat and Paul Gray. “Managing Academic E-journals.” Communications of the ACM 47.4 (2004): 79–82. Hugo, Victor. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Notre-Dame de Paris). Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth editions, 1993. Kho, Nancy D. “The Medium Gets the Message: Post-Print Publishing Models.” EContent 30.6 (2007): 42–48. Oblinger, Diana and Marilyn Lombardi. “Common Knowledge: Openness in Higher Education.” Opening up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education Through Open Technology, Open Content and Open Knowledge. Ed. Toru Liyoshi and M. S. Vijay Kumar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. 389–400. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Trimmer, Joseph F., Wade Jennings, and Annette Patterson. eFictions. New York: Harcourt, 2001.

On 23 August 2005, John Howard, then Prime Minister, called together Muslim ‘representatives’ from around the nation for a Muslim Summit in response to the London bombings in July of that year. One of the outcomes of the two hour summit was a Statement of Principles committing Muslim communities in Australia to resist radicalisation and pursue a ‘moderate’ Islam. Since then the ill-defined term ‘moderate Muslim’ has been used in both the political and media discourse to refer to a preferred form of Islamic practice that does not challenge the hegemony of the nation state and that is coherent with the principles of secularism. Akbarzadeh and Smith conclude that the terms ‘moderate’ and ‘mainstream’ are used to describe Muslims whom Australians should not fear in contrast to ‘extremists’. Ironically, the policy direction towards regulating the practice of Islam in Australia in favour of a state defined ‘moderate’ Islam signals an attempt by the state to mediate the practice of religion, undermining the ethos of secularism as it is expressed in the Australian Constitution. It also – arguably – impacts upon the citizenship rights of Australian Muslims in so far as citizenship presents not just as a formal set of rights accorded to an individual but also to democratic participation: the ability of citizens to enjoy those rights at a substantive level. Based on the findings of research into how Australian Muslims and members of the broader community are responding to the political and media discourses on terrorism, this article examines the impact of these discourses on how Muslims are practicing citizenship and re-defining an Australian Muslim identity. Free Speech Free speech has been a hallmark of liberal democracies ever since its defence became part of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Australian Constitution does not expressly contain a provision for free speech. The right to free speech in Australia is implied in Australia’s ratification of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), article 19 of which affirms: Article 19. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. The ultimate recent endorsement of free speech rights, arguably associated with the radical free speech ‘open platform’ movement of the 1960s at the University of California Berkeley, constructs free speech as essential to human and civil liberties. Its approach has been expressed in terms such as: “I reject and detest XYZ views but will defend to the utmost a person’s right to express them”. An active defence of free speech is based on the observation that, unless held to account, “[Authorities] would grant free speech to those with whom they agree, but not to minorities whom they consider unorthodox or threatening” (“Online Archives of California”). Such minorities, differing from the majority view, do so as a right accorded to citizens. In very challenging circumstances – such as opposing the Cold War operations of the US Senate Anti-American Activities Committee – the free speech movement has been celebrated as holding fast (or embodying a ‘return’) to the true meaning of the American First Amendment. It was in public statements of unpopular and minority views, which opposed those of the majority, that the right to free speech could most non-controvertibly be demonstrated. Some have argued that such rights should be balanced by anti-vilification legislation, by prohibitions upon incitement to violence, and by considerations as to whether the organisation defended by the speaker was banned. In the latter case, there can be problems with excluding the defence of banned organisations from legitimate debate. In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, Sinn Fein was denounced in the UK as the ‘political wing of the IRA’ (the IRA being a banned organisation) and denied a speaking position in many forums, yet has proved to be an important party in the eventual reconciliation of the Northern Ireland divide. In effect, the banning of an organisation is a political act and such acts should best be interrogated through free speech and democratic debate. Arguably, such disputation is a responsibility of an involved citizenry. In general, liberal democracies such as Australia do not hesitate to claim that citizens have a right to free speech and that this is a right worth defending. There is a legitimate expectation by Australians of their rights as citizens to freedom of expression. For some Australian Muslims, however, the appeal to free speech seems a hollow one. Muslim citizens run the risk of being constructed as ‘un-Australian’ when they articulate their concerns or opinions. Calls by some Muslim leaders not to reprint the Danish cartoons depicting images of the Prophet Mohammed for example, met with a broader community backlash and drew responses that, typically, constructed Muslims as a threat to Australian cultural values of freedom and liberty. These kinds of responses to expressions by Australian Muslims of their deeply held convictions are rarely, if ever, interpreted as attempts to curtail Australian Muslims’ rights to free speech. There is a poor fit between what many Australian Muslims believe and what they feel the current climate in Australia allows them to say in the public domain. Positioned as the potential ‘enemy within’ in the evolving media and political discourse post September 11, they have been allocated restricted speaking positions on many subjects from the role and training of their Imams to the right to request Sharia courts (which could operate in parallel with Australian courts in the same way that Catholic divorce/annulment courts do). These social and political restrictions lead them to question whether Muslims enjoy citizenship rights on an equal footing with Australians from the broader community. The following comment from an Australian woman, an Iraqi refugee, made in a research interview demonstrates this: The media say that if you are Australian it means that you enjoy freedom, you enjoy the rights of citizenship. That is the idea of what it means to be Australian, that you do those things. But if you are a Muslim, you are not Australian. You are a people who are dangerous, a people who are suspicious, a people who do not want democracy—all the characteristics that make up terrorists. So yes, there is a difference, a big difference. And it is a feeling all Muslims have, not just me, whether you are at school, at work, and especially if you wear the hijab. (Translated from Arabic by Anne Aly) At the same time, Australian Muslims observe some members of the broader community making strong assertions about Muslims (often based on misunderstanding or misinformation) with very little in the way of censure or rebuke. For example, again in 2005, Liberal backbenchers Sophie Panopoulos and Bronwyn Bishop made an emotive plea for the banning of headscarves in public schools, drawing explicitly on the historically inherited image of Islam as a violent, backward and oppressive ideology that has no place in Western liberal democracy: I fear a frightening Islamic class emerging, supported by a perverse interpretation of the Koran where disenchantment breeds disengagement, where powerful and subversive orthodoxies are inculcated into passionate and impressionable young Muslims, where the Islamic mosque becomes the breeding ground for violence and rejection of Australian law and ideals, where extremists hijack the Islamic faith with their own prescriptive and unbending version of the Koran and where extremist views are given currency and validity … . Why should one section of the community be stuck in the Dark Ages of compliance cloaked under a veil of some distorted form of religious freedom? (Panopoulos) Several studies attest to the fact that, since the terrorist attacks in the United States in September 2001, Islam, and by association Australian Muslims, have been positioned as other in the political and media discourse (see for example Aly). The construct of Muslims as ‘out of place’ (Saniotis) denies them entry and representation in the public sphere: a key requisite for democratic participation according to Habermas (cited in Haas). This notion of a lack of a context for Muslim citizenship in Australian public spheres arises out of the popular construction of ‘Muslim’ and ‘Australian’ as mutually exclusive modes of being. Denied access to public spaces to partake in democratic dialogue as political citizens, Australian Muslims must pursue alternative communicative spaces. Some respond by limiting their expressions to closed spheres of communication – a kind of enforced silence. Others respond by pursuing alternative media discourses that challenge the dominant stereotypes of Muslims in Western media and reinforce majority-world cultural views. Enforced Silence In closed spheres of discussion, Australian Muslims can openly share their perceptions about terrorism, the government and media. Speaking openly in public however, is not common practice and results in forced silence for fear of reprisal or being branded a terrorist: “if we jump up and go ‘oh how dare you say this, rah, rah’, he’ll be like ‘oh he’s going to go off, he’ll blow something up’”. One research participant recalled that when his work colleagues were discussing the September 11 attacks he decided not to partake in the conversation because it “might be taken against me”. The participant made this decision despite the fact that his colleagues were expressing the opinion that United States foreign policy was the likely cause for the attacks—an opinion with which he agreed. This suggests some support for the theory that the fear of social isolation may make Australian Muslims especially anxious or fearful of expressing opinions about terrorism in public discussions (Noelle-Neumann). However, it also suggests that the fear of social isolation for Muslims is not solely related to the expression of minority opinion, as theorised in Noelle-Neumann’s Spiral of Silence . Given that many members of the wider community shared the theory that the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre in 2001 may have been a response to American foreign policy, this may well not be a minority view. Nonetheless, Australian Muslims hesitated to embrace it. Saniotis draws attention to the pressure on Australian Muslims to publicly distance themselves from the terrorist attacks of September 11 and to openly denounce the actions of terrorists. The extent to which Muslims were positioned as a threatening other was contingent on their ability to demonstrate that they too participated in the distal responses to the terrorist attacks—initial pity for the sufferer and eventual marginalisation and rejection of the perceived aggressor. Australian Muslims were obliged to declare their loyalty and commitment to Australia’s ally and, in this way, partake in the nationalistic responses to the threat of terrorism. At the same time however, Australian Muslims were positioned as an imagined enemy and a threat to national identity. Australian Muslims were therefore placed in a paradoxical bind- as Australians they were expected to respond as the victims of fear; as Muslims they were positioned as the objects of fear. Even in discussions where their opinions are congruent with the dominant opinion being expressed, Australian Muslims describe themselves as feeling apprehensive or anxious about expressing their opinions because of how these “might be taken”. Pursuing alternative discourses The overriding message from the research project’s Muslim participants was that the media, as a powerful purveyor of public opinion, had inculcated a perception of Muslims as a risk to Australia and Australians: an ‘enemy within’; the potential ‘home grown terrorist’. The daily experience of visibly-different Australian Muslims, however, is that they are more fearing than fear-inspiring. The Aly and Balnaves fear scale indicates that Australian Muslims have twice as many fear indicators as non-Muslims Australians. Disengagement from Western media and media that is seen to be influenced or controlled by the West is widespread among Australian Muslims who increasingly argue that the media institutions are motivated by an agenda that includes profit and the perpetuation of a negative stereotype of Muslims both in Australia and around the globe, particularly in relation to Middle Eastern affairs. The negative stereotypes of Muslims in the Australian media have inculcated a sense of victimhood which Muslims in Australia have used as the basis for a reconstruction of their identity and the creation of alternative narratives of belonging (Aly). Central to the notion of identity among Australian Muslims is a sense of having their citizenship rights curtailed by virtue of their faith: of being included in a general Western dismissal of Muslims’ rights and experiences. As one interviewee said: If you look at the Channel Al Jazeera for example, it’s a channel but they aren’t making up stories, they are taping videos in Iraqi, Palestine and other Muslim countries, and they just show it to people, that’s all they do. And then George Bush, you know, we hear on the news that George Bush was discussing with Tony Blair that he was thinking to bomb Al Jazeera so why would these people have their right to freedom and we don’t? So that’s why I think the people who are in power, they have the control over the media, and it’s a big political game. Because if it wasn’t then George Bush, he’s the symbol of politics, why would he want to bomb Al Jazeera for example? Amidst leaks and rumours (Timms) that the 2003 US bombing of Al Jazeera was a deliberate attack upon one of the few elements of the public sphere in which some Western-nationality Muslims have confidence, many elements of the mainstream Western media rose to Al Jazeera’s defence. For example, using an appeal to the right of citizens to engage in and consume free speech, the editors of influential US paper The Nation commented that: If the classified memo detailing President Bush’s alleged proposal to bomb the headquarters of Al Jazeera is provided to The Nation, we will publish the relevant sections. Why is it so vital that this information be made available to the American people? Because if a President who claims to be using the US military to liberate countries in order to spread freedom then conspires to destroy media that fail to echo his sentiments, he does not merely disgrace his office and soil the reputation of his country. He attacks a fundamental principle, freedom of the press—particularly a dissenting and disagreeable press—upon which that country was founded. (cited in Scahill) For other Australian Muslims, it is the fact that some media organisations have been listed as banned by the US that gives them their ultimate credibility. This is the case with Al Manar, for example. Feeling that they are denied access to public spaces to partake in democratic dialogue as equal political citizens, Australian Muslims are pursuing alternative communicative spaces that support and reinforce their own cultural worldviews. The act of engaging with marginalised and alternative communicative spaces constitutes what Clifford terms ‘collective practices of displaced dwelling’. It is through these practices of displaced dwelling that Australian Muslims essentialise their diasporic identity and negotiate new identities based on common perceptions of injustice against Muslims. But you look at Al Jazeera they talk in the same tongue as the Western media in our language. And then you look again at something like Al Manar who talks of their own tongue. They do not use the other media’s ideas. They have been attacked by the Australians, been attacked by the Israelis and they have their own opinion. This statement came from an Australian Muslim of Jordanian background in her late forties. It reflects a growing trend towards engaging with media messages that coincide with and reinforce a sense of injustice. The Al Manar television station to which this participant refers is a Lebanese based station run by the militant Hezbollah movement and accessible to Australians via satellite. Much like Al Jazeera, Al Manar broadcasts images of Iraqi and Palestinian suffering and, in the recent war between Israel and Hezbollah, graphic images of Lebanese casualties of Israeli air strikes. Unlike the Al Jazeera broadcasts, these images are formatted into video clips accompanied by music and lyrics such as “we do not fear America”. Despite political pressure including a decision by the US to list Al Manar as a terrorist organisation in December 2004, just one week after a French ban on the station because its programming had “a militant perspective with anti-Semitic connotations” (Jorisch), Al Manar continued to broadcast videos depicting the US as the “mother of terrorism”. In one particularly graphic sequence, the Statue of Liberty rises from the depths of the sea, wielding a knife in place of the torch and dripping in blood, her face altered to resemble a skull. As she rises out of the sea accompanied by music resembling a funeral march the following words in Arabic are emblazoned across the screen: On the dead bodies of millions of native Americans And through the enslavement of tens of millions Africans The US rose It pried into the affairs of most countries in the world After an extensive list of countries impacted by US foreign policy including China, Japan, Congo, Vietnam, Peru, Laos, Libya and Guatamala, the video comes to a gruelling halt with the words ‘America owes blood to all of humanity’. Another video juxtaposes images of Bush with Hitler with the caption ‘History repeats itself’. One website run by the Coalition against Media Terrorism refers to Al Manar as ‘the beacon of hatred’ and applauds the decisions by the French and US governments to ban the station. Al Manar defended itself against the bans stating on its website that they are attempts “to terrorise and silence thoughts that are not in line with the US and Israeli policies.” The station claims that it continues on its mission “to carry the message of defending our peoples’ rights, holy places and just causes…within internationally agreed professional laws and standards”. The particular brand of propaganda employed by Al Manar is gaining popularity among some Muslims in Australia largely because it affirms their own views and opinions and offers them opportunities to engage in an alternative public space in which Muslims are positioned as the victims and not the aggressors. Renegotiating an ‘Othered’ Identity The negative portrayal of Muslims as ‘other’ in the Australian media and in political discourse has resulted in Australian Muslims constructing alternative identities based on a common perception of injustice. Particularly since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in September 2001 and the ensuing “war on terror”, the ethnic divisions within the Muslim diaspora are becoming less significant as Australian Muslims reconstruct their identity based on a notion of supporting each other in the face of a global alliance against Islam. Religious identity is increasingly becoming the identity of choice for Muslims in Australia. This causes problems, however, since religious identity has no place in the liberal democratic model, which espouses secularism. This is particularly the case where that religion is sometimes constructed as being at odds with the principles and values of liberal democracy; namely tolerance and adherence to the rule of law. This problematic creates a context in which Muslim Australians are not only denied their heterogeneity in the media and political discourse but are dealt with through an understanding of Islam that is constructed on the basis of a cultural and ideological clash between Islam and the West. Religion has become the sole and only characteristic by which Muslims are recognised, denying them political citizenship and access to the public spaces of citizenship. Such ‘essentialising practices’ as eliding considerable diversity into a single descriptor serves to reinforce and consolidate diasporic identity among Muslims in Australia, but does little to promote and assist participatory citizenship or to equip Muslims with the tools necessary to access the public sphere as political citizens of the secular state. In such circumstances, the moderate Muslim may be not so much a ‘preferred’ citizen as one whose rights has been constrained. Acknowledgment This paper is based on the findings of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project, 2005-7, involving 10 focus groups and 60 in-depth interviews. The authors wish to acknowledge the participation and contributions of WA community members. References Akbarzadeh, Shahram, and Bianca Smith. The Representation of Islam and Muslims in the Media (The Age and Herald Sun Newspapers). Melbourne: Monash University, 2005. Aly, Anne, and Mark Balnaves. ”‘They Want Us to Be Afraid’: Developing Metrics of the Fear of Terrorism.” International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations 6 (2007): 113-122. Aly, Anne. “Australian Muslim Responses to the Discourse on Terrorism in the Australian Popular Media.” Australian Journal of Social Issues 42.1 (2007): 27-40. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. London: Harvard UP, 1997. Haas, Tanni. “The Public Sphere as a Sphere of Publics: Rethinking Habermas’s Theory of the Public Sphere.” Journal of Communication 54.1 (2004): 178- 84. Jorisch, Avi. J. “Al-Manar and the War in Iraq.” Middle East Intelligence Bulletin 5.2 (2003). Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth. “The Spiral of Silence: A Theory of Public Opinion.” Journal of Communication 24.2 (1974): 43-52. “Online Archives of California”. California Digital Library. n.d. Feb. 2008 http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt1199n498/?&query= %22open%20platform%22&brand=oac&hit.rank=1>. Panopoulos, Sophie. Parliamentary debate, 5 Sep. 2005. Feb. 2008 http://www.aph.gov.au.hansard>. Saniotis, Arthur. “Embodying Ambivalence: Muslim Australians as ‘Other’.” Journal of Australian Studies 82 (2004): 49-58. Scahill, Jeremy. “The War on Al-Jazeera (Comment)”. 2005. The Nation. Feb. 2008 http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051219/scahill>. Timms, Dominic. “Al-Jazeera Seeks Answers over Bombing Memo”. 2005. Media Guardian. Feb. 2008 http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/nov/23/iraq.iraqandthemedia>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Aly, Anne, and Lelia Green. "‘Moderate Islam’: Defining the Good Citizen." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/08-aly-green.php>. APA Style Aly, A., and L. Green. (Apr. 2008) "‘Moderate Islam’: Defining the Good Citizen," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/08-aly-green.php>.

The Creative City Unlike the terms ‘creative industries’, which nobody ever quite understood, and ‘creative class’, about which actual ‘creatives’ were always ambiguous, the ‘creative city’ has been an incredibly successful global policy meme, to which cities across the world continue to aspire. From the early 1990s, faced with de-industrialisation, rising unemployment, and the increased global mobility of capital, professionals, and consumer-tourists, the ‘creative city’ became an essential part of the new urban imaginary for politicians, planners, local growth coalitions, and advocates and practitioners in art and culture. In the later 1980s and early 1990s, much of this policy and practice work had progressive intent; as decaying parts of the city acquired new artistic and cultural uses, and neo-bohemian lifestyles and pop-cultural aspirations seemed to provide the grounds for future-oriented urban identities. Whilst investment in iconic cultural buildings and refurbished heritage sites repositioned cities as destinations for global tourism and finance (Peck et al.), new forms of creative production would provide employment and catalyse the wider urban economy. The creative city was to be a benign economy of innovative small businesses, working in projects and acting in symbiosis with the transformed urban landscape of the city (Pratt; Scott). If at first such a “creativity fix” (Peck, Creativity) was permeable to new actors and radical visions, it rapidly became a codified “cookie cutter” approach (Oakley), primarily concerned with revalorising decaying urban built stock as ‘vibrant’ spaces for upmarket urban consumption. This has stretched from visual arts to popular music (Bennett; O’Connor Music). The “creative imaginary” of entrepreneurial subjects—working in flat networks clustered around zones or milieux of intensified creativity (O’Connor and Shaw; O’Connor and Gu)—was quickly localised in spaces of real estate-led consumption, with production corralled into the ‘managed workspace’ whose image value—a shiny ‘creative hub’—was usually worth far more than any actual production taking place inside of it (O’Connor, Art). From the turn of the millennium, this global “fast policy” flowed through elite circuits of ‘policy transfer’ (Peck, Scale): unevenly distributed nodes assembling politicians, public administrators, planners, ‘cool’ developers, cultural consultants, branded arts institutions, and creative ‘thought-leaders’ (De Beukelaer and O’Connor). Global agencies such as UNESCO, through its Creative Cities Network, or consultancies such as Charles Landry and BOP, have attempted to frame this in a benign narrative of ‘hands across the ocean’ cultural globalisation. But we now know from two decades of creative economy proselytising that culture is a “driver and enabler” of development, not a normative standard against which it might be judged. And however inclusive ‘culture’ is made to sound, the creative city agenda remains firmly in the hands of local elites attempting to harness global flows of finance, media images, tourists, and ‘creatives’ for local development opportunities (Novy and Colomb; Courage and McKeown). By 2008 the creative city was already in trouble, as an increasingly brutal wave of gentrification came to be seen as the necessary corollary of the gleaming images of creative clusters, hipster hangouts, and iconic arts infrastructure. Predicated on a “spatial fix” (Harvey) for the decaying landscapes of the industrial city, the creative city was already producing its own ruins, as culture-led investment projects failed (Brodie). Since 2008, as the paper-thin walls between art, creativity, and real estate capital dissolved, it became increasingly clear that, though the script remained, the utopian moment was dead and buried. For many critics, both inside the cultural sector and out, it was time to roughly bundle it into the catch-all of neoliberalism and ‘gentrification’ and throw it overboard. Creative City RIP. The Ordinary City This critical take was performed early on by geographers such as Ash Amin and others (Amin and Graham; Amin, Massey, and Thrift), who suggested we re-centre the ordinary city—the one in which most people live—rather than fetishise some high-growth, hi-tech, gleaming Creative City. It was reiterated more recently by the Foundational Economy Collective, who argue that it is the everyday infrastructures and services of our towns and cities—and their mundane local economies of nail bars, cafes, and auto-repair shops—that should form the basis of our urban economic thinking (FEC). Jamie Peck, an early critic of the Creative City, had already cast doubt on the real economic weight of ‘creative industries’ and saw the whole thing as cover for the ‘entrepreneurial (read: neoliberal) city’, and a new kind of culturally-inflected growth coalition (Peck and Ward; Peck, Struggling). Similar dissent could be found amongst those writing within the cultural field. For every new city on the global creative smorgasbord, there were local artists and community activists who could show you a whole other side, excluded from the glass boxes and white cubes, from the funding and the hyped-up narratives lavished on the creative city. This mostly targeted the big iconic developments, led by global brands sucking the funding and the imagination from the surrounding city—what we might call ‘the Bilbao effect’. This cynicism toward the Creative City overlapped with a rejection of a ‘high art’ establishment and its elitist forms of culture. The ‘ordinary city’ here did not set the mundane against art and culture but reframed these as part of an everyday creativity. This could mean small-scale, neighbourhood-embedded art and culture, proposed by those in favour of ‘community arts’ and indeed those seeking localised popular culture such as music scenes. But it could also mean a valorisation of creativity writ large; a generalised urban creativity in which imagination and experimentation, but also subversion and contestation permeate the everyday. Following the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), critiques of the creative city concept became increasingly common. Oli Mould’s 2015 book Urban Subversion and the Creative City captures much of this, providing a distinction between the capitalised Creative City and the lower-case creative city. Mould distinguishes between the ‘Creative City’ ideology as extractive, and the ‘creative city’ as enabling citizenship. For Mould, the Creative City is “the antithesis of urban creativity” (Urban 4), and “shorthand for the capitalistic, paradigmatic (bordering on dogmatic) and meta-narrative view of how creativity can be used to economically stimulate and develop the city” (5). It is top-down creative planning at its worst. Against this, Mould evokes the lower-case concept of creative city, seeing some hope for it as a descriptor of urban spaces where “being creative is the very act of citizenship” (5). The Creative City imposed itself as a requirement of urban economic competitiveness (successful or not) and needs to be implacably opposed. Alternatively, the creative city persists in various forms of ‘urban subversion’, though whether the actual term—like creativity itself (Mould, Against)—can be freed from an association with its capitalised nemesis is, for Mould, still moot. Whilst Mould’s distinction allows us to evoke an urban creativity distinct from the commodified, extractive forms of the Creative City—one rooted in the ordinary, everyday creative practices of the city still open to themes of subversion and contestation centring cultural labour over cultural infrastructure—we also have some reservations. The C/creative couplet recalls de Certeau’s opposition of strategy and tactics, skyscraper and street, and has some of its problems. Baldly, this gives control of the city over to the powerful and condemns the rest of us to a game of endless evasion and subversion. For whilst the contemporary Creative City agenda may be largely as Mould describes it, its provenance is more complex than the extractive agenda which currently animates it. Understanding this provenance might give us some pointers beyond this binary impasse. Roots of the Creative City Although the Creative City eventually became integrated into the neoliberal urban script, the policy imaginary that birthed it emerged from the post-1960s rise of urban social movements, anti-development coalitions, new cultural practices (especially around popular music), artist co-ops, squats, and alternative cultures. Across the 1970s and 1980s one might say the C/creative City was an aspect of growing claims for cultural citizenship, the more explicit acknowledgement of a cultural dimension within T.H. Marshall’s ‘social citizenship’ (Marshall). The Greater London Council (GLC) of 1979-86 is exemplary here (Bianchini; Hatherley), but this was only the most visible case in which de-industrialising cities acquired aspirations to a different kind of city living. The utopian-romantic vision of a new kind of urban culture in which the transformative powers of art would abandon the ethereal world of the museum-gallery and take carnal form in the grotesque ruins of an industrial city was most literal in Wim Wenders’s 1987 film Wings of Desire. It was there in Berlin and New York as it was in Melbourne and Manchester, and a hundred other such cities (Whitney). As an industrial urban civilisation no longer seemed viable in the Global North, ‘culture’ became a central stake in anticipating what might come next. What new forms of working and living might be possible? What new identities, pleasures, desires might it accommodate? A new generation, immersed in what Mark Fisher called ‘popular modernism’ (Fisher), sought new forms of artistic expression within popular culture, making demands on the formal cultural system, on the infrastructure of the city, and on how the city could be re-imagined. In short, the C/creative City was not simply an invention of neoliberalism. It carried within it a utopian promise that should not be discounted. Perhaps we can see this in that most vilified of concepts, the ‘creative class’. The (Not-So) Creative Class By the 2008 GFC, the concept of the ‘creative class’—positioned as the primary driver and beneficiary of the creative city—was already coming apart. Unaffordable housing, rent hikes, rising debts, welfare cuts, reducing returns to ‘educational capital’ and the dominance of asset economies, precarious employment, culture budget cuts, and the integration of large sections of creative production into new platform economies have accelerated since that time. Global development capital has now built high-end leisure, entertainment, accommodation, and amenities into its core business model, one that does not require a prior process of valorisation by local creatives. Mould suggests the Creative City was a Trojan Horse and the creative class the Greeks inside (Urban 8). But whilst policymakers and city marketers embraced this term, it was never a class for-itself, with the clear strategic focus of soldiers waiting to pounce. Florida’s statistical fantasy netted a massive chunk of the population—almost 40 percent—as ‘professional, managerial and scientific’ (Florida, Rise). Meanwhile actual ‘creatives’ were always a poor relation and lived very differently to those others, most of whom preferred the suburbs and ex-burbs to the bustling city. Artists were not the storm-troopers of gentrification but its dupes, eventually evicted from the city they helped conquer. Meanwhile, since the advent of Florida and Landry, developers didn’t even need to use these ‘storm-troopers’ to soften up places for gentrification. They could now work directly with compliant city authorities to do the work for them. Creative cities could be deployed by toolkit (Landry) and, of course, measured via economic impact studies and a variety of other econometrics weaponised by corporate consultancies for hire. This was the social and political landscape upon which the Global Financial Crisis dealt an especially severe form of austerity, disproportionately affecting the cultural sector, and exacerbating many of the problematic areas of ‘creative city’ policy that had previously been abated and ameliorated by a veneer of hipster cool. Nonetheless, the ‘creative class’ also articulated a utopian promise, especially in places outside of the ‘Global North’ where more traditional forms of political power, gender roles, and religion remain in play. In a period of rapid globalisation, as relatively insulated economies became integrated into global capital flows, and cities bore the brunt of disruptive social and cultural changes, the C/creative City could stand in for a global modernity with a future. It could make available a new set of aspirations and identities; for a younger, more educated few perhaps, yet still real despite this. De Beukelaer, in the Indonesian context, talks about the “productive friction” between the two C/creative Cities, where the gap between the universal abstract and the local reality can form a site of negotiation. The C/creative City licences an encounter between new aspirations and identities, and the more traditional elites; an unequal struggle to define or give further content to the neoliberal nostrums of creative modernity that emanate from the Creative City meme. Yet it is not clear just why this negotiation is only made possible by the ‘apolitical’ notion of ‘creative’, or what’s at stake in that term. Is it a merely a cypher—or McGuffin—for a more complex conflict of interests? In what form would the “re-politicisation” of the creative city, called for at the end of the article, consist? What Next? We are not then talking about The City & the City (Mieville), in which two cities occupy the same geographic space but codify their separation by routinely ignoring each other and that which is deemed to belong to the other city. They are always in some kind of negotiation and contestation, but around what? We would argue that the imaginary of the C/creative City was annexed by, but not necessarily created by, neoliberalism. If the C/creative City articulated a future beyond a Fordist industrial civilisation, then we must take care in rejecting it not to abandon at the same time the power to imagine a different future. So, too, in attempting to assert the ordinary everyday city, we must also keep hold of a sense of the creative imagination that art and culture articulates, rather than dismissing this as part of the shiny glass palace on the hill. The absence of art and culture from the new progressive social and economic agendas that are currently finding their way into the mainstream—green new deals, doughnuts, well-being, community and ecological economics, and so on—is telling (O’Connor, Reset). In part this reflects the capture of arts and cultural policy by neoliberalism. This is not just ‘economic rationalism’ or market fundamentalism, for in the ‘creative economy’ art and cultural policy fused with neoliberalism at a deep DNA level, and the creative city imaginary was part of this. Mould is right to doubt whether the notion of ‘creative’, so closely enmeshed, could ever be retrieved. But regardless of whether art and culture have been condemned by this close association, the collapse of its romantic-utopian promise into a consumer leisure economy has left a void. If Jameson’s contention that we cannot think the end of capitalism is no longer the case (Jameson; Morozov), then culture is not present at this new moment of transition. So much well-being, community, and ecological economics speaks of culture whilst barely naming it. For us, the rearticulation of the place of art and culture in the contemporary city is crucial. We would even suggest that without art and culture, a full transformation of the contemporary city would be impossible. But how to think this? Any democratic cultural policy would need to reclaim both the ordinary and the creative city. This would entail the creative city of dissent and subversion, so closely aligned with the broad social movements to which we must look, in large part, to transform the city. It would also mean the right to a full participation in the imaginary of the collective city in which we all dwell and where we can imagine different futures. For this to happen, art and culture needs to be taken out of the hands of real estate, tourism, and economic development, and reframed as part of public service and public value. Just as new movements seek to reframe economic growth in terms of sustainability, equity, and human flourishing (Raworth), a radical creative city would be one in which art and culture were constitutive of the social foundations and part of how we live together as citizens, not simply another engine of the consumption economy. This process of re-embedding art and culture in the everyday foundations of the ordinary city is certainly underway. The ‘new municipalism’ (Thompson) has begun to make space for culture, with cities such as Barcelona and organisations such as the UCLG making a lot of the running. Notions of cultural rights, both individual and collective, have returned to challenge the urban consumption model. Just as art and culture try to position themselves alongside other foundational services—health, education, welfare—they also need to engage with new approaches to urban design, where technologies and infrastructures have been repositioned as cultural rather than technological. This suggests both that art and culture engage with the wider ‘cultural’—as in the anthropological, ‘whole way of life’—but that it no longer ‘owns’ this culture. Art and culture are not to be seen, as in the 1980s, as the ‘key’ to a total social transformation, but as one element only, however crucial. So too ‘creative’ needs to be unpicked and reframed, away from its association with ‘progress’ and absolute self-creation towards ‘slowdown’ (Dorling), sustainability, custodianship, care, incrementalism, and restoration – the kinds of values we now associate with First Nations. The shared DNA between creativity and capitalist modernity runs deep. Conclusion The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated large areas of art and culture, putting a question mark next to the urban use patterns that underpinned so much of the creative city model (Banks and O’Connor; de Peuter et al.; Tanghetti et al.; Whiting and Roberts). The Creative City of consumption, commuting, tourism, and entertainment stopped. Though some construction continued, the very purpose of the city centre—which over three decades had been rebranded as the Central Business District—was called into question. But the creative city was devastated too. Not just the collapse in income for cultural workers and business owners, but so too the filigrees of creative connection, the rhizomic mica that underpin the ecosystem of the city. Creatives already made no money, but at least they could go to openings and stay out late. Not anymore. This knockout blow was followed by the recognition that, for all the creative rhetoric, it was construction spending that counted most towards cultural funding budgets (Pacella et al.). Whilst talk quickly became one of getting artists and creatives to kickstart urban activity and animate deserted main street properties—‘build back better’—it is not at all clear where this endless supply of artists is going to come from. Now might be the time to explore how we might rethink art, culture, and the city rather than business as usual. As Arundhati Roy suggested, “nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next” (Roy). If art and culture don’t form part of that search for the new world, they will end up simply defending this one. 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Introduction This article aims to explore some of the ideological discourses that reinforce marriage as a central social and cultural institution in US-American society. Andrew Cherlin argues that despite social secularisation, rising divorce rates and the emergence of other, alternative forms of love and living, marriage “remains the most highly valued form of family life in American culture, the most prestigious way to live your life” (9). Indeed, marriage in the US has become an ideological and political battlefield, with charged debates about who is entitled to this form of state-sanctioned relationship, with the government spending large sums of money to promote the value of marriage and the highest number of people projected to get married (nearly 90 per cent of all people) compared to other Western nations (Cherlin 4). I argue here that the idea of marriage as the ideal form for an intimate relationship permeates US-American culture to an extent that we can speak of a marital hegemony. This hegemony is fuelled by and reflected in the saturation of American popular culture with celebratory depictions of the white wedding as public performance and symbolic manifestation of the values associated with marriage. These depictions contribute to the discursive production of weddings as “one of the major events that signal readiness and prepare heterosexuals for membership in marriage as an organizing practice for the institution of marriage” (Ingraham 4). From the representation of weddings as cinematic climax in a huge number of films, to TV shows such as The Bachelor, Bridezillas and Race to the Altar, to the advertisement industry and the bridal magazines that construct the figure of the bride as an ideal that every girl and woman should aspire to, popular discourses promote the desirability of marriage in a wide range of media spheres. These representations, which I call bridal fictions, do not only shape and regulate the production of gendered, raced, classed and sexual identities in the media in fundamental ways. They also promote the idea that marriage is the only adequate framework for an intimate relationship and for the constitution of an acceptable gendered identity, meanwhile reproducing heterosexuality as norm and monogamy as societal duty. Thus I argue that we can understand contemporary bridal fictions as a symbolic legitimation of marital hegemony that perpetuates the idea that “lifelong marriage is a moral imperative” (Coontz 292). Marital Hegemony By drawing on Gramsci’s term and argument of cultural hegemony, I propose that public, political, religious and popular discourses work together in intersecting, overlapping, ideologically motivated and often even contradictory ways to produce what can be conceptualised as marital hegemony. Gramsci understands the relationship between state coercion and legitimation as crucial to an understanding of constituted consensus and co-operation. By legitimation Gramsci refers to processes through which social elites constitute their leadership through the universalizing of their own class-based self-interests. These self-interests are adopted by the greater majority of people, who apprehend them as natural or universal standards of value (common sense). This ‘hegemony’ neutralizes dissent, instilling the values, beliefs and cultural meanings into the generalized social structures. (Lewis 76-77)Marital hegemony also consists of those two mechanisms, coercion and legitimation. Coercion by the social elites, in this case by the state, is conducted through intervening in the private life of citizens in order to regulate and control their intimate relationships. Through the offering of financial benefits, medical insurance, tax cuts and various other privileges to married partners only (see Ingraham 175-76), the state withholds these benefits from all those that do not conform to this kind of state-sanctioned relationship. However, this must serve as the topic of another discussion, as this paper is more interested in the second aspect of hegemony, the symbolic legitimation. Symbolic legitimation works through the depiction of the white wedding as the occasion on which entering the institution of marriage is publicly celebrated and marital identity is socially validated. Bridal fictions work on a semiotic and symbolic level to display and perpetuate the idea of marriage as the most desirable and ultimately only legitimate form of intimate, heterosexual relationships. This is not to say that there is no resistance to this form of hegemony, as Foucault argues, eventually there is no “power without resistances” (142). However, as Engstrom contends, contemporary bridal fictions “reinforce and endorse the idea that romantic relationships should and must lead to marriage, which requires public display—the wedding” (3). Thus I argue that we can understand contemporary bridal fictions as one key symbolic factor in the production of marital hegemony. The ongoing centrality of marriage as an institution finds its reflection, as Otnes and Pleck argue, in the fact that the white wedding, in spite of all changes and processes of liberalisation in regard to gender, family and sexuality, “remains the most significant ritual in contemporary culture” (5). Accordingly, popular culture, reflective as well as constitutive of existing cultural paradigms, is saturated with what I have termed here bridal fictions. Bridal representations have been subject to rigorous academic investigation (c.f. Currie, Geller, Bambacas, Boden, Otnes and Pleck, Wallace and Howard). But, by using the term “bridal fictions”, I seek to underscore the fictional nature of these apparent “representations”, emphasising their role in producing pervasive utopias, rather than representing reality. This is not to say that bridal fictions are solely fictive. In fact, my argument here is that these bridal fictions do have discursive influence on contemporary wedding culture and practices. With my analysis of a bridal advertisement campaign later on in this paper, I aim to show exemplarily how bridal fictions work not only in perpetuating marriage, monogamy and heteronormativity as central organizing principles of intimate life. But moreover, how bridal fictions use this framework to promote certain kinds of white, heterosexual, upper-class identities that normatively inform our understanding of who is seen as entitled to this form of state-sanctioned relationship. Furthermore my aim is to highlight the role of postfeminist frames in sustaining marital hegemony. Second Wave feminism, seeing marriage as a form of “intimate colonization” (in Finlay and Clarke 416), has always been one of the few sources of critique in regard to this institution. In contrast, postfeminist accounts, now informing a significant amount of contemporary bridal fictions, evoke marriage as actively chosen, unproblematic and innately desired state of being for women. By constructing the liberated, self-determined figure of the postfeminist bride, contemporary bridal fictions naturalise and re-modernise marriage as framework for the constitution of modern feminine identity. An analysis of postfeminist bridal identities, as done in the following, is thus vital to my argument, because it highlights how postfeminist accounts deflect feminism’s critique of marriage as patriarchal, political and hegemonic institution and hence contribute to the perpetuation and production of marital hegemony. The Postfeminist Bride Postfeminism has emerged since the early 1990s as the dominant mode of constructing femininities in the media. Angela McRobbie understands postfeminism as “to refer to an active process by which feminist gains of the 1970s and 80s come to be undermined”, while simultaneously appearing to be “a well-informed and even well-intended response to feminism” (“Postfeminism” 255). Based on the assumption that women nowadays are no longer subjected to patriarchal power structures anymore, postfeminism actively takes feminism into account while, at the same time, “undoing” it (McRobbie “Postfeminism” 255). In contemporary postfeminist culture, feminism is “decisively aged and made to seem redundant”, which allows a conscious “dis-identification” and/or “forceful non-identity” with accounts of Second Wave feminism (McRobbie Aftermath 15). This demarcation from earlier forms of feminism is particularly evident with regard to marriage and wedding discourses. Second wave feminist critics such as Betty Friedan (1973) and Carole Pateman were critical of the influence of marriage on women’s psychological, financial and sexual freedom. This generation of feminists saw marriage as a manifestation of patriarchal power, which is based on women’s total emotional and erotic loyalty and subservience (Rich 1980), as well as on “men’s domination over women, and the right of men to enjoy equal sexual access to women” (Pateman 1988 2). In contrast, contemporary postfeminism enunciates now that “equality is achieved, in order to install a whole repertoire of new meanings which emphasise that it [feminism] is no longer needed, it is a spent force” (McRobbie “Postfeminism” 255). Instead of seeing marriage as institutionlised subjugation of women, the postfeminist generation of “educated women who have come of age in the 1990s feel that the women’s liberation movement has achieved its goals and that marriage is now an even playing field in which the two sexes operate as equal partners” (Geller 110). As McRobbie argues “feminism was anti-marriage and this can now to be shown to be great mistake” (Aftermath 20). Accordingly, postfeminist bridal fictions do not depict the bride as passive and waiting to be married, relying on conservative and patriarchal notions of hegemonic femininity, but as an active agent using the white wedding as occasion to act out choice, autonomy and power. Genz argues that a characteristic of postfemininities is that they re-negotiate femininity and feminism no longer as mutually exclusive and irreconcilable categories, but as constitutive of each other (Genz; Genz and Brabon). What I term the postfeminist bride embodies this shifted understanding of feminism and femininity. The postfeminist bride is a figure that is often celebrated in terms of individual freedom, professional success and self-determination, instead of resting on traditional notions of female domesticity and passivity. Rather than fulfilling clichés of the homemaker and traditional wife, the postfeminist bride is characterised by an emphasis on power, agency and pleasure. Characteristic of this figure, as with other postfemininities in popular culture, is a simultaneous appropriation and repudiation of feminist critique. Within postfeminist bridal culture, the performance of traditional femininity through the figure of the bride, or by identification with it, is framed in terms of individual choice, depicted as standing outside of the political and ideological struggles surrounding gender, equality, class, sexuality and race. In this way, as Engstrom argues, “bridal media’s popularity in the late 20th and early 21st centuries in the United States as indicative of a postfeminist cultural environment” (18). And although the contemporary white wedding still rests on patriarchal traditions that symbolise what the Second Wave called an “intimate colonization” (such as the bride’s vow of obedience; the giving away of the bride by one male chaperone, her father, to the next, the husband; her loss of name in marriage etc.), feminist awareness of the patriarchal dimensions of marriage and the ritual of the wedding is virtually absent from contemporary bridal culture. Instead, the patriarchal customs of the white wedding are now actively embraced by the women themselves in the name of tradition and choice. This reflects a prevailing characteristic of postfeminism, which is a trend towards the reclamation of conservative ideals of femininity, following the assumption that the goals of traditional feminist politics have been attained. This recuperation of traditional forms of femininity is one key characteristic of postfeminist bridal culture, as Engstrom argues: “bridal media collectively have become the epitomic example of women’s culture, a genre of popular culture that promotes, defends, and celebrates femininity” (21). Bridal fictions indeed produce traditional femininity by positioning the cultural, social and historical significance of the wedding as a necessary rite of passage for women and as the most important framework for the constitution of their (hetero)sexual, classed and gendered identities. Embodied in its ritual qualities, the white wedding symbolises the transition of women from single to belonging, from girlhood to womanhood and implicitly from childlessness to motherhood. However, instead of seeing this form of hegemonic femininity as a product of unequal, patriarchal power relations as Second Wave did, postfeminism celebrates traditional femininity in modernised versions. Embracing conservative feminine roles (e.g. that of the bride/wife) is now a matter of personal choice, individuality and freedom, characterised by awareness, knowingness and sometimes even irony (McRobbie “Postfeminism”). Nevertheless, the wedding is not only positioned as the pinnacle of a monogamous, heterosexual relationship, but also as the climax of a (female) life-story (“the happiest day of the life”). Combining feminist informed notions of power and choice, the postfeminist wedding is constructed as an event which supposedly enables women to act out those notions, while serving as a framework for gendered identity formation and self-realisation within the boundaries of an officialised and institutionalised relationship. “Modern” Brides I would like to exemplarily illustrate how postfeminism informs contemporary bridal fictions by analysing an advertising campaign of the US bridal magazine Modern Bride that paradigmatically and emblematically shows how postfeminist frames are used to construct the ‘modern’ bride. These advertisements feature American celebrities Guiliana Rancic (“host of E! News”), Daisy Fuentes (“host of Ultimate Style”) and Layla Ali, (“TV host and world champion”) stating why they qualify as a “modern bride”. Instead of drawing on notions of passive femininity, these advertisements have a distinct emphasis on power and agency. All advertisements include the women’s profession and other accomplishments. Rancic claims that she is a modern bride because: “I chased my career instead of guys.” These advertisements emphasise choice and empowerment, the key features of postfeminism, as Angela McRobbie (“Postfeminism”) and Rosalind Gill argue. Femininity, feminism and professionalism here are not framed as mutually exclusive, but are reconciled in the identity of the “modern” bride. Marriage and the white wedding are clearly bracketed in a liberal framework of individual choice, underpinned by a grammar of self-determination and individualism. Layla Ali states that she is a modern bride: “Because I refuse to let anything stand in the way of my happiness.” This not only communicates the message that happiness is intrinsically linked to marriage, but clearly resembles the figure that Sharon Boden terms the “super bride”, a role which allows women to be in control of every aspect of their wedding and “the heroic creator of her big day” while being part of a fairy-tale narrative in which they are the centre of attention (74). Agency and power are clearly visible in all of these ads. These brides are not passive victims of the male gaze, instead they are themselves gazing. In Rancic’s advertisement this is particularly evident, as she is looking directly at the viewer, where her husband, looking into another direction, remains rather face- and gazeless. This is in accord with bridal fictions in general, where husbands are often invisible, serving as bystanders or absent others, reinforcing the ideal that this is the special day of the bride and no one else. Furthermore, all of these advertisements remain within the limited visual repertoire that is common within bridal culture: young to middle-aged, heterosexual, able-bodied, conventionally attractive women. The featuring of the non-white bride Layla Ali is a rare occasion in contemporary bridal fictions. And although this can be seen as a welcomed exception, this advertisement remains eventually within the hegemonic and racial boundaries of contemporary bridal fictions. As Ingraham argues, ultimately “the white wedding in American culture is primarily a ritual by, for, and about the white middle to upper classes. Truly, the white wedding” (33). Furthermore, these advertisements illustrate another key feature of bridal culture, the “privileging of white middle- to upper-class heterosexual marriage over all other forms” (Ingraham 164). Semiotically, the discussed advertisements reflect the understanding of the white wedding as occasion to perform a certain classed identity: the luscious white dresses, the tuxedos, the jewellery and make up, etc. are all signifiers for a particular social standing. This is also emphasised by the mentioning of the prestigious jobs these brides hold, which presents a postfeminist twist on the otherwise common depictions of brides as practising hypergamy, meaning the marrying of a spouse of higher socio-economic status. But significantly, upward social mobility is usually presented as only acceptable for women, reinforcing the image of the husband as the provider. Another key feature of postfeminism, the centrality of heterosexual romance, becomes evident through Daisy Fuentes’ statement: “I’m a modern bride, because I believe that old-school values enhance a modern romance.” Having been liberated from the shackles of second wave feminism, which dismissed romance as “dope for dupes” (Greer in Pearce and Stacey 50), the postfeminist bride unapologetically embraces romance as central part of her life and relationship. Romance is here equated with traditionalism and “old school” values, thus reinforcing sexual exclusiveness, traditional gender roles and marriage as re-modernised, romantic norms. Angela McRobbie describes this “double entanglement” as a key feature of postfeminism that is comprised of “the co-existence of neo-conservative values in relation to gender, sexuality and family life […] with processes of liberalisation in regard to choice and diversity in domestic, sexual and kinship relations” (“Postfeminism” 255–56). These advertisements illustrate quite palpably that the postfeminist bride is a complex figure. It is simultaneously progressive and conservative, fulfilling ideals of conservative femininity while actively negotiating in the complex field of personal choice, individualism and social conventions; it oscillates between power and passivity, tradition and modern womanhood, between feminism and femininity. It is precisely this contradictory nature of the postfeminist bride that makes the figure so appealing, as it allows women to participate in the fantasy world of bridal utopias while still providing possibilities to construct themselves as active and powerful agents. Conclusion While we can generally welcome the reconfiguration of brides as powerful and self-determined, we have to remain critical of the postfeminist assumption of women as “autonomous agents no longer constrained by any inequalities or power imbalances whatsoever” (Gill 153). Where marriage is assumed to be an “even playing field” as Geller argues (110), feminism is no longer needed and traditional marital femininity can be, once again, performed without guilt. In these ways postfeminism deflects feminist criticism with regard to the political dimensions of marital femininity and thus contributes to the production of marital hegemony. But why is marital hegemony per se problematic? Firstly, by presenting marital identity as essential for the construction of gendered identity, bridal fictions leave little room for (female) self-definition outside of the single/married binary. As Ingraham argues, not only “are these categories presented as significant indices of social identity, they are offered as the only options, implying that the organization of identity in relation to marriage is universal and in no need of explanation” (17). Hence, by positioning marriage and singledom as opposite poles on the axis of proper femininity, bridal fictions stigmatise single women as selfish, narcissistic, hedonistic, immature and unable to attract a suitable husband (Taylor 20, 40). Secondly, within bridal fictions “weddings, marriage, romance, and heterosexuality become naturalized to the point where we consent to the belief that marriage is necessary to achieve a sense of well-being, belonging, passion, morality and love” (Ingraham 120). By presenting the white wedding as a publicly endorsed and visible entry to marriage, bridal fictions produce in fundamental ways normative notions about who is ‘fit’ for marriage and therefore capable of the associated cultural and social values of maturity, responsibility, ‘family values’ and so on. This is particularly critical, as postfeminist identities “are structured by, stark and continuing inequalities and exclusions that relate to ‘race’ and ethnicity, class, age, sexuality and disability as well as gender” (Gill 149). These postfeminist exclusions are very evident in contemporary bridal fictions that feature almost exclusively young to middle-aged, white, able-bodied couples with upper to middle class identities that conform to the heteronormative matrix, both physically and socially. By depicting weddings almost exclusively in this kind of raced, classed and gendered framework, bridal fictions associate the above mentioned values, that are seen as markers for responsible adulthood and citizenship, with those who comply with these norms. In these ways bridal fictions stigmatise those who are not able or do not want to get married, and, moreover, produce a visual regime that determines who is seen as entitled to this kind of socially validated identity. The fact that bridal fictions indeed play a major role in producing marital hegemony is further reflected in the increasing presence of same-sex white weddings in popular culture. These representations, despite their message of equality for everyone, usually replicate rather than re-negotiate the heteronormative terms of bridal culture. This can be regarded as evidence of bridal fiction’s scope and reach in naturalising marriage not only as the most ideal form of a heterosexual relationship, but increasingly as the ideal for any kind of intimate relationship. References Bambacas, Christyana. “Thinking about White Weddings.” Journal of Australian Studies 26.72 (2002): 191–200.The Bachelor, ABC, 2002–present. Boden, Sharon. Consumerism, Romance and the Wedding Experience. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Bridezillas, We TV, 2004–present. Cherlin, Andrew. The-Marriage-Go-Round. The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today. New York: Vintage, 2010. Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage. A History. New York: Penguin, 2005. Currie, Dawn. “‘Here Comes the Bride’: The Making of a ‘Modern Traditional’ Wedding in Western Culture.” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 24.3 (1993): 403–21. Engstrom, Erika. The Bride Factory. Mass Portrayals of Women and Weddings. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. Fairchild Bridal Study (2005) 27 May 2012. ‹http://www.sellthebride.com/documents/americanweddingsurvey.pdf›. Finlay, Sara-Jane, and Victoria Clarke. “‘A Marriage of Inconvenience?’ Feminist Perspectives on Marriage.” Feminism & Psychology 13.4 (2003): 415–20. Foucault, M. (1980) “Body/Power and Truth/Power” in Gordon, C. (ed.) Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge, Harvester, U.K. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1973. Geller, Jaqlyn. Here Comes the Bride. Women, Weddings, and the Marriage Mystique. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2001. Genz, Stéphanie. Postfemininities in Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave, 2009. Genz, Stéphanie, and Benjamin Brabon. Postfeminsm. Cultural Texts and Theories. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Gill, Rosalind. “Postfeminist Media Culture. Elements of a Sensibility.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 10.2 (2007): 147–66. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971. Howard, Vicki. Brides, Inc. American Weddings and the Business of Tradition. Philadelphia: U of Pen Press, 2006. Ingraham, Chrys. White Weddings. Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Discourse. New York: Routledge, 1999. Lewis, Jeff. Cultural Studies. London: Sage, 2008. McRobbie, Angela. “Post-Feminism and Popular Culture.” Feminist Media Studies 4.3 (2004): 255– 64. McRobbie, A. (2009). The Aftermath of Feminism. Gender, Culture and Social Change. London: Sage. Modern Bride, Condé Nast. Otnes, Cele, and Elizabeth Pleck. Cinderella Dreams. The Allure of the Lavish Wedding. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988. Pearce, Lynn, and Jackie Stacey. Romance Revisited. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995. Race to the Altar, NBC, 2003. Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs Summer.5 (1980): 631–60. Taylor, Anthea. Single Women in Popular Culture. The Limits of Postfeminism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Wallace, Carol. All Dressed in White. The Irresistible Rise of the American Wedding. London: Penguin Books, 2004. Advertisements Analysed Guiliana Rancic. 29 Sept. 2012 ‹http://slackerchic.blogspot.de/2008/06/im-modern-bride-because-my-witness-was.html›. Daisy Fuentes. 29 Sept. 2012 ‹http://slackerchic.blogspot.de/2008/06/im-modern-bride-because-my-witness-was.html›. Layla Ali. 29 Sept. 2012 ‹http://slackerchic.blogspot.de/2008/06/im-modern-bride-because-my-witness-was.html›.

As a mode of open access public self-expression, blogs are one form of the unfolding massification of culture (Lovink). Though widely varied in content and style, they are characterised by a reverse chronological diary-like format, often produced by a single author, and often intimately expressive of that author’s thoughts and experiences. The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of blogs as a space for the detailed and on-going expression of the day to day experiences of sufferers of serious illness. We might traditionally consider the experience of illness as absolutely private, but illness, along with the process of recovery, retains a social and cultural aspect (Kleinman et al). A growing body of literature has recognised that the Internet has become a significant space for the recovery work that accompanies the diagnosis of serious illness (Orgad; Pitts; Hardey). Empowerment and agency are often emphasised in this literature, particularly in terms of the increased access to information and support groups, but also in the dynamic performances of self enabled by different forms of online communication and Web production. I am particularly interested in the ongoing shifts in the accessibility of “private” personal experience enabled by blog culture. Although there are thousands of others like them, three “illness blogs” have recently caught my attention for their candidness, completeness and complexity, expressing in vivid depth and detail individual lives transformed by serious illness. The late US journalist and television producer Leroy Sievers maintained a high profile blog, My Cancer, and weekly podcast on the National Public Radio website until his death from metastasised colon cancer in August 2008. Sievers used his public profile and the infrastructure of the NPR website to both detail his personal experience and bring together a community of people also affected by cancer or moved by his thoughts and experiences. The blogger Brainhell came to my attention through blogsphere comments and tributes when he died in February 2008. Spanning more than four years, Brainhell’s witty and charming blog attracted a significant audience and numerous comments, particularly toward the end of his life as the signs of his deteriorating motor system as a result of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS, or “Lou Gherig’s disease”) riddled his intimate posts. Another blog of interest to me here, called Humanities Researcher, incorporates academic Stephanie Trigg’s period of illness and recovery from breast cancer within a pre-existing and ongoing blog about the intersection between professional and personal life. As I had crossed paths with Trigg while at Melbourne University, I was always interested in her blog. But her diagnosis with breast cancer and subsequent accounts of tests, the pain and debilitation of treatment and recovery within her blog also offer valuable insight into the role of online technologies in affecting experiences of illness and for the process of recovery.The subject matter of illness blogs revolves around significant personal transformations as a result of serious illness or trauma: transformations of everyday life, of body and emotional states, relationships, physical appearance, and the loss or recovery of physical ability. It is not my intention in this brief analysis to overgeneralise on the basis of some relatively limited observations. However, many blogs written in response to illness stand out for what they reveal about the shifting location or locatability of self, experience and the events of ongoing illness and thus how we can conceptualise the inherent “privacy” of illness as personal experience. Self-expression here is encompassing of the possibilities through which illness can be experienced – not as representation of that experience, a performance of a disembodied self (though these notions have their merits) – but an expressive element of the substance of the illness as it is experienced over time, as it affects the bodies, thoughts, events and relationships of individuals moving toward a state of full recovery or untimely death. Locating Oneself OnlineMany authors currently examining the role of online spaces in the lives of sufferers of serious illness see online communication as providing a means for configuring experience as a meaningful and coherent story, and thus conferring, or we could say recovering, a sense of agency amidst a tumultuous and ongoing battle with serious illness (Orgad, Pitts). In her study of breast cancer discussion forums, message boards and websites, Orgad (4) notes their role in regaining “the fundamentals disturbed by cancer” (see also Bury). Well before the emergence of online spaces, the act or writing has been seen as “a crucial affirmation of living, a statement against fearfulness, invisibility and silence” (Orgad, 67; Lorde, 61). For many decades scientists have asserted that “brief structured writing sessions can significantly improve mental and physical health for some groups of people” (Singer and Singer 485). The Internet has provided an infrastructure for bringing personal experiences of illness into the public realm, enabling a new level of visibility. Much of the work on illness and the Internet focuses on the liberatory and empowering act of story telling and “disembodied” self-expression. Discussion forums and cancer websites enable the formation of patient led “discourse communities” (Wuthnow). Online spaces such as discussion forums help their participants gain a foothold within a world they share with other sufferers, building communities of practice (Wegner) around specific forms of illness. In this way, these forms of self-expression and communication enable the sufferer of serious illness to counter the modes by which they are made “subjects”, in the Foucauldian sense, of medical discourse. All illness narratives are defined and constructed socially, and are infused with relations of power (Sontag; Foucault, Birth of the Clinic). Forms of online communication have shifted productive practice from professions to patients. Blogs, like discussion forums, websites, email lists etc., have come to play a central role in this contemporary shift. When Lovink (6) describes blogs as a “technology of the self” he points to their role in “self-fashioning”. Blogs written about and in the context of personal illness are a perfect example of this inclination to speak the truth of oneself in the confessional mode of modern culture borne of the church, science and talkshow television. For Foucault (Technologies of the Self, 17), technologies of the self: Permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, immortality. Likewise, as a central concept for understanding Internet identity, the notion of performance (eg, Turkle) highlights the creativity with which illness bloggers may present their role as cancer patient in online spaces, perhaps as an act of resistance to “subjectifying” medical discourses and practices. Many bloggers wrest semiotic power through regular discussion of the language of pathology and medical knowledge, treatment processes and drugs. In the early stages of her treatment, Trigg plays with the new vocabulary, searching for etiologies and making her own semantic connections: I’ve learnt two new words. “Spiculated” describes the characteristic shape of a carcinoma on an ultrasound or x-ray. …The other word is at the other end of the spectrum of linguistic beauty: “lumpectomy”. It took me quite a while to realise that this was not really any different from partial mastectomy; or local excision. It’s an example of the powerful semantic connotations of words to realise that these phrases name the same processes: a long cut, and then the extraction of the diseased tissue (Humanities Researcher, 14 Oct. 2006).Partly due to the rarity of his illness, Brainhell goes through weeks of waiting for a diagnosis, and posts prolifically in an attempt to test out self-diagnoses. Amidst many serious and humorous posts analysing test results and discussing possible diagnoses Brainhell reflects on his targeted use of the blog: I am a word person. I think in sentences. I often take complex technical problems at work and describe them to myself in words. A story helps me understand things better. This blog has become a tool for me to organize my own thoughts about the Mystery Condition. (Brainhell, 6 Jan. 2004)The emancipatory potential of blog writing, however, can be easily overstated. While it is valuable to note and celebrate the performative potential of online production, and its “transformative” role as a technology of the self, it is easy to fall back on an unproblematic distinction between the actual and the virtual, the experience of illness, and its representation in online spaces. Textual expression should always refer us to the extra-textual practices that encompass it without imposing an artificial hierarchy of online and offline, actual experience and representation. As with other forms of online communication and production, the blog culture that has emerged around forms of serious illness plays a significant role in transforming our concepts of the relationship between online and offline spaces. In his My Cancer blog, Sievers often refers to “Cancer World”. He notes, for example, the many “passing friends” he makes in Cancer World through the medical staff and other regular patients at the radiation clinic, and refers to the equipment that sustains his life as the accoutrements of this world. His blog posts revolved around an articulation of the intricacies of this “world” that is in some ways a means of making sense of that world, but is also expressive of it. Sievers tries to explain the notion of Cancer World as a transformation of status between insider & outsider: “once we cross over into Cancer World, we become strangers in a strange land. What to expect, what to hope for, what to fear – none of those are clear right now” (My Cancer, 30 June 2008). Part of his struggle with the illness is also with the expression of himself as encompassed by this new “world” of the effects and activities of cancer. In a similar way, in her Humanities Researcher blog Trigg describes in beautiful detail the processes, routines and relationships formed during radiation treatment. I see these accounts of the textures of cancer spaces as lying at the point of juncture between expression and experience, not as a disembodied, emancipatory realm free from the fetters of illness and the everyday “real” self, but always encompassed by, and encompassing them, and in this way shifting what might be understood to remain “private” in personal experience and self-expression. Blogs as Public Diary Axel Bruns (171), following Matthew Rothenberg, characterises blogs as an accessible technological extension of the personal home page, gaining popularity in the late 1990s because they provided more easy to use templates and web publishing tools than earlier webpage applications. Personalised self expression is a defining element. However, the temporal quality of the reverse chronological, timestamped entry is equally significant for Bruns (171). Taking a broader focus to Bruns, who is most interested in the potential democratisation of media in news related blogs, Lovink sees the experimentation with a “public diary” format as fundamental, signalling their “productive contradiction between public and private” (Lovink 6). A diary may be written for posterity but it is primarily a secretive mode of communication. While blogs may mirror the temporal form of a diary, their intimate focus on self-expression of experience, thoughts and feelings, they do so in a very different communicative context.Despite research suggesting that a majority of bloggers report that they post primarily “for themselves” (Lenhart and Fox) – meaning that they do not deliberately seek a broad audience or readership – the step of making experiences and thoughts so widely accessible cannot be overlooked in any account of blogging. The question of audience or readership, for example, concerns Trigg in her Humanities Researcher blog: The immediacy of a blog distinguishes it from a journal or diary. I wrote for myself, of course, but also for a readership I could measure and chart and hear from, sometimes within minutes of posting. Mostly I don’t know who my readers are, but the kindness and friendship that come to me through the blog gave me courage to write about the intimacies of my treatment; and to chart the emotional upheaval it produced. (Trigg)In their ability to produce a comprehensive expression of the events, experiences, thoughts and feelings of an individual, blogs differ to other forms of online communication such as discussion forums or email lists. Illness blogs are perhaps an extreme example, an open mode of self-expression often arising abruptly in reaction to a life transforming diagnosis and tracking the process of recovery or deterioration, usually ending with remission or death. Brainhell’s blog begins with MRI results, and a series of posts about medical examination and self-examination regarding his mystery condition: So the MRI shows there is something on my brain that is not supposed to be there. The doctor thinks it is not a tumor. That would be good news. …As long as you are alive and have someone to complain to, you ain’t bad off. I am alive and I am complaining about a mystery spot on my brain, and lazy limbs. (Brainhell, 24 Dec. 2003)Brainhell spent many weeks documenting his search for a diagnosis, and continued writing up to his final deterioration and death in 2008. His final posts convey his physical deterioration in truncated sentences, spelling errors and mangled words. In one post he expresses his inability to wake his caregiver and to communicate his distress and physical discomfort at having to pee: when he snorted on waking, i shrieked and he got me up. splayed uncomfortably in the wc as he put dry clothes on me, i was gifted with his words: “you choose this, not me. you want to make it hard, what can i do?” (Brainhell, 13 Jan. 2008). The temporal and continuous format of the blog traverses the visceral, corporeal transformations of body and thought over time. The diary format goes beyond a straightforward narrative form in being far more experiential and even experimental in its self-reflective expression of the events of daily life, thoughts, feelings and states of being. Its public format bears directly on its role in shaping the communicative context in which that expression takes place, and thus to an extent shapes the experience of the illness itself. Nowhere does the expressive substance of the blog so fully encompass the possibilities through which the illness could be experienced than in the author’s death. At this point the blog feels like it is more than a catalogue, dialogue or self-presentation of a struggle with illness. It may take on the form of a memorial (see for example Tom’s Road to Recovery) – a recovery of the self expressed in the daily physical demise, through data maintained in the memory of servers. Ultimately the blog stands as a complex trace of the life lived within its posts. Brainhell’s lengthy blog exemplifies this quite hauntingly. Revealing the Private in Public Blogs exemplify a further step in the transformation of notions of public and private brought about by information and screen technologies. McQuire (103) refers to contemporary screen and Internet culture as “a social setting in which personal identity is subject to new exigencies”. Reality television, such as Big Brother, has promoted “a new mode for the public viewing of private life” (McQuire 114) contributing to the normalisation of open access to personal, intimate revelations, actions and experiences. However, privacy is “an elusive concept” that relates as much to information and property as to self-expression and personal experience (McCullagh). That is, what we consider private to an individual is itself constituted by our variable categories of personal information, material or immaterial possessions, or what counts as an expression of personal experience. Some analysts of online storytelling in the context of illness recognise the unsustainability of the distinction between public and private, but nonetheless rely on the notion of a continuum upon which activities or events could be considered as experienced in a public or private space (Orgad, 129-133). One of the characteristics of a blog, unlike other forms of online communication such as chat, discussion forums and email, is its predominantly public and openly accessible form. Though many illness bloggers do not seem to seek anonymity or hold back in allowing massive access to their self-expression and personal experience, a tension always seems to be there in the background. Identification through the proper name simply implies potential broader effects of blog writing, a pairing of the personal expressions with the person who expresses them in broader daily interactions and relationships. As already “public” figures, Stephanie Trigg and Leroy Sievers choose to forego anonymity, while Brainhell adopted his alias from the beginning and guarded his anonymity carefully. Each of these bloggers, however, shows signs of grappling with the public character of their site, and the interaction between the blog and their everyday life and relationships. In his etiquette page, Brainhell seems unclear about his readership, noting that his blog is for “friends and soul-mates, and complete strangers too”, but that he has not shared it with his family or all of his friends. He goes on to say: You may not have been invited but you are still welcome here. I made it public so that anyone could read it. Total strangers are welcome. Invited friends are welcome. But of those invited friends, I ask you to ask me before you out me as the blog author, or share the blog with other people who already know me. (Brainhell, 18 Feb. 2004) After his death Ratty took steps to continue to maintain his anonymity, vetting many comments and deleting others to “honor BH’s wishes as he outline in ‘Ettiquett for This Blog”’ (Brainhell, 2 Feb. 2008). In Leroy Sievers’ blog, one post exploring the conflict raised by publicly “sharing” his experiences provoked an interesting discussion. He relays a comment sent to him by a woman named Cherie: I have stage four colorectal cancer with liver mets. This is a strange journey, one I am not entirely sure I can share with my loved ones. I am scared it might rob them of the hope I see in their eyes. The hope which I sometimes don’t believe in. (My Cancer, 26 July 2006) Sievers struggles with this question: “How do you balance the need to talk about what is happening to you with the tears of a close friend when you tell him or her the truth? There’s no simple answer.” The blog, in this sense, seems to offer a more legitimate space for the ongoing, detailed expression of these difficult and affective, and traditionally private experiences. In some posts the privacy of the body and bodily experiences is directly challenged or re-negotiated. Stephanie Trigg was concerned with the effect of the blog on her interactions with colleagues. But another interesting dilemma presents itself to her when she is describing the physical effects of cancer, surgery and radiation treatment on her breast, and forces herself to hold back from comparing with the healthy breast: “it's not a medical breast, so I can't write about it here” (Humanities Researcher, 10 Jan. 2007). One prostate cancer blogger, identified as rdavisjr, seems to have no difficulties expressing the details of a physical intrusion on his “privacy” in the far more open forum of his blog: The pull-around ceiling mounted screen was missing (laundry?), so Kelly was called into the room and told to make a screen with a bed sheet. So here I am with one woman sticking her finger up my ass, while another woman is standing in front of the door holding an outstretched bed sheet under her chin (guess she wanted a view!)The screen was necessary to ensure my privacy in the event someone accidentally came into the room, something they said was a common thing. Well, Kelly peering over that sheet was hardly one of my more private moments in life! (Prostate Cancer Journal, 23 Feb. 2001). ConclusionWhatever emancipatory benefits may be found in expressing the most intimate of experiences and events of a serious illness online, it is the creative act of the blog as self-expression here, in its visceral, comprehensive, continuous timestamped format that dismantles the sense of privacy in the name of recovery. The blog is not the public face of private personal experience, but expressive of the life encompassed by that illness, and encompassing its author’s ongoing personal transformation. The blogs discussed here are not alone in demonstrating these practices. The blog format itself may soon evolve or disappear. Nonetheless, the massification enabled by Internet technologies and applications will continue to transform the ways in which personal experience may be considered private. ReferencesBruns, Axel. Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production. New York: Peter Lang, 2005.Bury, Michael. “Chronic Illness as Biographical Disruption.” Sociology of Health and Illness, 4.2 (1982): 167-182.Foucault, Michel. Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A.M. Sheridan. London: Tavistock, 1973.———. “Technologies of the Self” Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, Patrick M. Hutton, 1988: 16-49. Hardey, Michael. “‘The Story of My Illness’: Personal Accounts of Illness on the Internet.” Health 6.1 (2002): 31-46Kleinman, Arthur, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock, eds. Social Suffering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Lenhart, Amanda, and Susannah Fox. Bloggers: A Portrait of the Internet’s New Storytellers. Washington: PEW Internet and American Life Project, 2006. Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Spinsters Ink, 1980.Lovink, Geert. Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture. London: Routledge, 2008. McCullagh, Karen. “Blogging: Self Presentation and Privacy.” Information and Communications Technology Law 17.1 (2008): 3-23. McQuire, Scott. “From Glass Architecture to Big Brother: Scenes from a Cultural History of Transparency.” Cultural Studies Review 9.1 (2003): 103-123.Orgad, Shani. Storytelling Online: Talking Breast Cancer on the Internet. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Pitts, Victoria. “Illness and Internet Empowerment: Writing and Reading Breast Cancer in Cyberspace.” Health 8.1 (2004): 33-59.Rothenberg, Matthew. “Weblogs, Metadata, and the Semantic Web”, paper presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, Toronto, 16 Oct. 2003. ‹http://aoir.org/members/papers42/rothenberg_aoir.pdf›.Singer, Jessica, and George H.S. Singer. “Writing as Physical and Emotional Healing: Findings from Clinical Research.” Handbook of Research on Writing: History, Society, School, Individual, Text. Ed. Charles Bazerman. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2008: 485-498. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor; And, AIDS and Its Metaphors. London: Penguin, 1991. Trigg, Stephanie. “Life Lessons.” Sunday Age, 10 June 2007. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Wuthnow, Robert. Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Socialism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.BlogsBrainhell. ‹http://brainhell.blogspot.com/›. rdavisjr. Prostate Cancer Journal. ‹http://pcjournal-rrd.blogspot.com/›. Sievers, Leroy. My Cancer. ‹http://www.npr.org/blogs/mycancer/›. Tom’s Road to Recovery. ‹http://tomsrecovery.blog.com/›. Trigg, Stephanie. Humanities Researcher. ‹http://stephanietrigg.blogspot.com/›.

"If people don't trust their information, it's not much better than a Marxist-Leninist society." -- Orville Schell Dean, Graduate School of Journalism, UC Berkeley "Most people aren't very discerning. Maybe they need good financial information, but I don't think people know what good information is when you get into culture, society, and politics." -- Steven Brill,Chairman and Editor-in-chief, Brill's Content Once upon a time, not very long ago, advertisements were easy to recognise. They had simple personalities with goals not much more complicated than selling you a bar of soap or a box of cereal. And they possessed the reassuring familiarity of old friends or relatives you've known all your life. They were Pilgrims who smiled at you from Quaker Oats boxes or little tablets named "Speedy" who joyfully danced into a glass of water with the sole purpose of giving up their short life to help lessen your indigestion from overindulgence. Yes, sometimes they could be a little obnoxious but, hey, it was a predictable annoyance. And once, not very long ago, advertisements also knew their place in the landscape of popular culture, their boundaries were the ad space of magazines or the commercial time of television programs. When the ads got too annoying, you could toss the magazine aside or change the TV channel. The ease and quickness of their dispatch had the abruptness of slamming your front door in the face of an old door-to-door salesman. This all began to change around the 1950s when advertisements acquired a more complex and subtle personality and began straying outside of their familiar media neighborhoods. The social observer Vance Packard wrote a best-selling book in the late 50s called The Hidden Persuaders which identified this change in advertising's personality as coming from hanging around Professor Freud's psychoanalysis and learning his hidden, subliminal methods of trickery. Ice cubes in a glass for a liquor ad were no longer seen as simple props to help sell a brand of whiskey but were now subliminal suggestions of female anatomy. The curved fronts of automobiles were more than aesthetic streamlined design features but rather suggestive of a particular feature of the male anatomy. Forgotten by the new subliminal types of ads was the simple salesmanship preached by founders of the ad industry like David Ogilvy and John Caples. The word "sales" became a dirty word and was replaced with modern psychological buzzwords like subliminal persuasion. The Evolution of Subliminal Techniques The book Hidden Persuaders made quite a stir at the time, bringing about congressional hearings and even the introduction of legislation. Prominent motivation researchers Louis Cheskin and Ernest Dichter utilised the new ad methods and were publicly admonished as traitors to their profession. The life of the new subliminal advertising seemed short indeed. Even Vance Packard predicted its coming demise. "Eventually, say by A.D. 2000," he wrote in the preface to the paperback edition of his book, "all this depth manipulation of the psychological variety will seem amusingly old- fashioned". Yet, 40 years later, any half-awake observer of popular culture knows that things haven't exactly worked out the way Packard predicted. In fact what seems old-fashioned today is the belief that ads are those simpletons they once were before the 50s and that products are sold for features and benefits rather than for images. Even Vance Packard expresses an amazement at the evolution of advertising since the 50s, noting that today ads for watches have nothing to do with watches or that ads for shoes scarcely mention shoes. Packard remarks "it used to be the brand identified the product. In today's advertising the brand is the product". Modern advertising, he notes, has an almost total obsession with images and feelings and an almost total lack of any concrete claims about the product and why anyone should buy it. Packard admits puzzlement. "Commercials seem totally unrelated to selling any product at all". Jeff DeJoseph of the J. Walter Thompson firm underlines Packard's comments. "We are just trying to convey a sensory impression of the brand, and we're out of there". Subliminal advertising techniques have today infiltrated the heart of corporate America. As Ruth Shalit notes in her article "The Return of the Hidden Persuaders" from the 27 September 1999 issue of Salon magazine, "far from being consigned to the maverick fringe, the new psycho- persuaders of corporate America have colonized the marketing departments of mainstream conglomerates. At companies like Kraft, Coca-Cola, Proctor & Gamble and Daimler-Chrysler, the most sought-after consultants hail not from McKinsey & Company, but from brand consultancies with names like Archetype Discoveries, PsychoLogics and Semiotic Solutions". Shalit notes a growing number of CEOs have become convinced they cannot sell their brands until they first explore the "Jungian substrata of four- wheel drive; unlock the discourse codes of female power sweating; or deconstruct the sexual politics of bologna". The result, as Shalit observes, is a "charmingly retro school of brand psychoanalysis, which holds that all advertising is simply a variation on the themes of the Oedipus complex, the death instinct, or toilet training, and that the goal of effective communications should be to compensate the consumer for the fact that he was insufficiently nursed as an infant, has taken corporate America by storm". The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising Yet pervasive as the subliminal techniques of advertising have become, the emerging power of modern advertising ultimately centres around "where" it is rather than "what" it is or "how" it works. The power of modern advertising is within this growing ubiquity or "everywhereness" of advertising rather than the technology and methodology of advertising. The ultimate power of advertising will be arrived at when ads cannot be distinguished from their background environment. When this happens, the environment will become a great continuous ad. In the process, ads have wandered away from their well-known hangouts in magazines and TV shows. Like alien-infected pod-people of early science fiction movies, they have stumbled out of these familiar media playgrounds and suddenly sprouted up everywhere. The ubiquity of advertising is not being driven by corporations searching for new ways to sell products but by media searching for new ways to make money. Traditionally, media made money by selling subscriptions and advertising space. But these two key income sources are quickly drying up in the new world of online media. Journalist Mike France wisely takes notice of this change in an important article "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap" from the 11 October 1999 issue of Business Week. France notes that subscription fees have not worked because "Web surfers are used to getting content for free, and they have been reluctant to shell out any money for it". Advertising sales and their Internet incarnation in banner ads have also been a failure so far, France observes, because companies don't like paying a flat fee for online advertising since it's difficult to track the effectiveness of their marketing dollars. Instead, they only want to pay for actual sales leads, which can be easily monitored on the Web as readers' click from site to site. Faced with the above situation, media companies have gone on the prowl for new ways to make money. This search underpins the emerging ubiquity of advertising: the fact that it is increasingly appearing everywhere. In the process, traditional boundaries between advertising and other societal institutions are being overrun by these media forces on the prowl for new "territory" to exploit. That time when advertisements knew their place in the landscape of popular culture and confined themselves to just magazines or TV commercials is a fading memory. And today, as each of us is bombarded by thousands of ads each day, it is impossible to "slam" the door and keep them out of our house as we could once slam the door in the face of the old door-to-door salesmen. Of course you can find them on the matchbook cover of your favorite bar, on t-shirts sold at some roadside tourist trap or on those logo baseball caps you always pick up at trade shows. But now they have got a little more personal and stare at you over urinals in the men's room. They have even wedged themselves onto the narrow little bars at the check-out counter conveyer belts of supermarkets or onto the handles of gasoline pumps at filling stations. The list goes on and on. (No, this article is not an ad.) Advertising and Entertainment In advertising's march to ubiquity, two major boundaries have been crossed. They are crucial boundaries which greatly enhance advertising's search for the invisibility of ubiquity. Yet they are also largely invisible themselves. These are the boundaries separating advertising from entertainment and those separating advertising from journalism. The incursion of advertising into entertainment is a result of the increasing merger of business and entertainment, a phenomenon pointed out in best-selling business books like Michael Wolf's Entertainment Economy and Joseph Pine's The Experience Economy. Wolf, a consultant for Viacom, Newscorp, and other media heavy-weights, argues business is becoming synonymous with entertainment: "we have come to expect that we will be entertained all the time. Products and brands that deliver on this expectation are succeeding. Products that do not will disappear". And, in The Experience Economy, Pine notes the increasing need for businesses to provide entertaining experiences. "Those businesses that relegate themselves to the diminishing world of goods and services will be rendered irrelevant. To avoid this fate, you must learn to stage a rich, compelling experience". Yet entertainment, whether provided by businesses or the traditional entertainment industry, is increasingly weighted down with the "baggage" of advertising. In a large sense, entertainment is a form of new media that carries ads. Increasingly, this seems to be the overriding purpose of entertainment. Once, not long ago, when ads were simple and confined, entertainment was also simple and its purpose was to entertain rather than to sell. There was money enough in packed movie houses or full theme parks to make a healthy profit. But all this has changed with advertising's ubiquity. Like media corporations searching for new revenue streams, the entertainment industry has responded to flat growth by finding new ways to squeeze money out of entertainment content. Films now feature products in paid for scenes and most forms of entertainment use product tie-ins to other areas such as retail stores or fast-food restaurants. Also popular with the entertainment industry is what might be termed the "versioning" of entertainment products into various sub-species where entertainment content is transformed into other media so it can be sold more than once. A film may not make a profit on just the theatrical release but there is a good chance it doesn't matter because it stands to make a profit in video rentals. Advertising and Journalism The merger of advertising and entertainment goes a long way towards a world of ubiquitous advertising. Yet the merger of advertising and journalism is the real "promised land" in the evolution of ubiquitous advertising. This fundamental shift in the way news media make money provides the final frontier to be conquered by advertising, a final "promised land" for advertising. As Mike France observes in Business Week, this merger "could potentially change the way they cover the news. The more the press gets in the business of hawking products, the harder it will be to criticize those goods -- and the companies making them". Of course, there is that persistent myth, perpetuated by news organisations that they attempt to preserve editorial independence by keeping the institutions they cover and their advertisers at arm's length. But this is proving more and more difficult, particularly for online media. Observers like France have pointed out a number of reasons for this. One is the growth of ads in news media that look more like editorial content than ads. While long-standing ethical rules bar magazines and newspapers from printing advertisements that look like editorial copy, these rules become fuzzy for many online publications. Another reason making it difficult to separate advertising from journalism is the growing merger and consolidation of media corporations. Fewer and fewer corporations control more and more entertainment, news and ultimately advertising. It becomes difficult for a journalist to criticise a product when it has a connection to the large media conglomerate the journalist works for. Traditionally, it has been rare for media corporations to make direct investments in the corporations they cover. However, as Mike France notes, CNBC crossed this line when it acquired a stake in Archipelago in September 1999. CNBC, which runs a business-news Website, acquired a 12.4% stake in Archipelago Holdings, an electronic communications network for trading stock. Long-term plans are likely to include allowing visitors to cnbc.com to link directly to Archipelago. That means CNBC could be in the awkward position of both providing coverage of online trading and profiting from it. France adds that other business news outlets, such as Dow Jones (DJ), Reuters, and Bloomberg, already have indirect ties to their own electronic stock-trading networks. And, in news organisations, a popular method of cutting down on the expense of paying journalists for content is the growing practice of accepting advertiser written content or "sponsored edit" stories. The confusion to readers violates the spirit of a long-standing American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) rule prohibiting advertisements with "an editorial appearance". But as France notes, this practice is thriving online. This change happens in ever so subtle ways. "A bit of puffery inserted here," notes France, "a negative adjective deleted there -- it doesn't take a lot to turn a review or story about, say, smart phones, into something approaching highbrow ad copy". He offers an example in forbes.com whose Microsoft ads could easily be mistaken for staff-written articles. Media critic James Fallows points out that consumers have been swift to discipline sites that are caught acting unethically and using "sponsored edits". He notes that when it was revealed that amazon.com was taking fees of up to $10,000 for books that it labelled as "destined for greatness", its customers were outraged, and the company quickly agreed to disclose future promotional payments. Unfortunately, though, the lesson episodes like these teach online companies like Amazon centres around more effective ways to be less "revealing" rather than abstention from the practice of "sponsored edits". France reminds us that journalism is built on trust. In the age of the Internet, though, trust is quickly becoming an elusive quality. He writes "as magazines, newspapers, radio stations, and television networks rush to colonize the Internet, the Great Wall between content and commerce is beginning to erode". In the end, he ponders whether there is an irrevocable conflict between e-commerce and ethical journalism. When you can't trust journalists to be ethical, just who can you trust? Transaction Fees & Affiliate Programs - Advertising's Final Promised Land? The engine driving the growing ubiquity of advertising, though, is not the increasing merger of advertising with other industries (like entertainment and journalism) but rather a new business model of online commerce and Internet technology called transaction fees. This emerging and potentially dominant Internet e-commerce technology provides for the ability to track transactions electronically on Websites and to garner transaction fees. Through these fees, many media Websites take a percentage of payment through online product sales. In effect, a media site becomes one pervasive direct mail ad for every product mentioned on its site. This of course puts them in a much closer economic partnership with advertisers than is the case with traditional fixed-rate ads where there is little connection between product sales and the advertising media carrying them. Transaction fees are the new online version of direct marketing, the emerging Internet technology for their application is one of the great economic driving forces of the entire Internet commerce apparatus. The promise of transaction fees is that a number of people, besides product manufacturers and advertisers, might gain a percentage of profit from selling products via hypertext links. Once upon a time, the manufacturer of a product was the one that gained (or lost) from marketing it. Now, however, there is the possibility that journalists, news organisations and entertainment companies might also gain from marketing via transaction fees. The spread of transaction fees outside media into the general population provides an even greater boost to the growing ubiquity of advertising. This is done through the handmaiden of media transaction fees: "affiliate programs" for the general populace. Through the growing magic of Internet technology, it becomes possible for all of us to earn money through affiliate program links to products and transaction fee percentages in the sale of these products. Given this scenario, it is not surprising that advertisers are most likely to increasingly pressure media Websites to support themselves with e-commerce transaction fees. Charles Li, Senior Analyst for New Media at Forrester Research, estimates that by the year 2003, media sites will receive $25 billion in revenue from transaction fees, compared with $17 billion from ads and $5 billion from subscriptions. The possibility is great that all media will become like great direct response advertisements taking a transaction fee percentage for anything sold on their sites. And there is the more dangerous possibility that all of us will become the new "promised land" for a ubiquitous advertising. All of us will have some cut in selling somebody else's product. When this happens and there is a direct economic incentive for all of us to say nice things about products, what is the need and importance of subliminal techniques and methods creating advertising based on images which try to trick us into buying things? A Society Without Critics? It is for these reasons that criticism and straight news are becoming an increasingly endangered species. Everyone has to eat but what happens when one can no longer make meal money by criticising current culture? Cultural critics become a dying breed. There is no money in criticism because it is based around disconnection rather than connection to products. No links to products or Websites are involved here. Critics are becoming lonely icebergs floating in the middle of a cyber-sea of transaction fees, watching everyone else (except themselves) make money on transaction fees. The subliminal focus of the current consultancies is little more than a repackaging of an old theme discovered long ago by Vance Packard. But the growing "everywhereness" and "everyoneness" of modern advertising through transaction fees may mark the beginning of a revolutionary new era. Everyone might become their own "brand", a point well made in Tim Peters's article "A Brand Called You". Media critic James Fallows is somewhat optimistic that there still may remain "niche" markets for truthful information and honest cultural criticism. He suggests that surely people looking for mortgages, voting for a politician, or trying to decide what movie to see will continue to need unbiased information to help them make decisions. But one must ask what happens when a number of people have some "affiliate" relationship with suggesting particular movies, politicians or mortgages? Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, has summarised this growing ubiquity of advertising in a rather simple and elegant manner saying "at a certain point, people won't be able to differentiate between what's trustworthy and what isn't". Over the long run, this loss of credibility could have a corrosive effect on society in general -- especially given the media's importance as a political, cultural, and economic watchdog. Schell warns, "if people don't trust their information, it's not much better than a Marxist-Leninist society". Yet, will we be able to realise this simple fact when we all become types of Marxists and Leninists? Still, there is the great challenge to America to learn how to utilise transaction fees in a democratic manner. In effect, a combination of the technological promise of the new economy with that old promise, and perhaps even myth, of a democratic America. America stands on the verge of a great threshold and challenge in the growing ubiquity of advertising. In a way, as with most great opportunities or threats, this challenge centres on a peculiar paradox. On the one hand, there is the promise of the emerging Internet business model and its centre around the technology of transaction fees. At the same time, there is the threat posed by transaction fees to America's democratic society in the early years of the new millennium. Yes, once upon a time, not very long ago, advertisements were easy to recognise and also knew their place in the landscape of popular culture. Their greatest, yet silent, evolution (especially in the age of the Internet) has really been in their spread into all areas of culture rather than in methods of trickery and deceit. Now, it is more difficult to slam that front door in the face of that old door-to-door salesman. Or toss that magazine and its ad aside, or switch off commercials on television. We have become that door-to-door salesman, that magazine ad, that television commercial. The current cultural landscape takes on some of the characteristics of the theme of that old science fiction movie The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. A current advertising campaign from RJ Reynolds has a humorous take on the current zeitgeist fad of alien abduction with copy reading "if aliens are smart enough to travel through space then why do they keep abducting the dumbest people on earth?" One might add that when Americans allow advertising to travel through all our space, perhaps we all become the dumbest people on earth, abducted by a new alien culture so far away from a simplistic nostalgia of yesterday. (Please press below for your links to a world of fantastic products which can make a new you.) References Brill, Steven. Quoted by Mike France in "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap." Business Week 11 Oct. 1999. France, Mike. "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap." Business Week 11 Oct. 1999. <http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_41/b3650163.htm>. Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. Out of Print, 1957. Pine, Joseph, and James Gilmore. The Experience Economy. Harvard Business School P, 1999. Shalit, Ruth. "The Return of the Hidden Persuaders." Salon Magazine 27 Sep. 1999. <http://www.salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/09/27/persuaders/index.php>. Schell, Orville. Quoted by Mike France in "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap." Business Week 11 Oct. 1999. Wolf, Michael. Entertainment Economy. Times Books, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: John Fraim. "Friendly Persuasion: The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising, or What Happens When Everyone Becomes an Ad?." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/ads.php>. Chicago style: John Fraim, "Friendly Persuasion: The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising, or What Happens When Everyone Becomes an Ad?," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/ads.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: John Fraim. (2000) Friendly Persuasion: The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising, or What Happens When Everyone Becomes an Ad?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/ads.php> ([your date of access]).

Photo by Hédi Benyounes on Unsplash ABSTRACT The current incarceration facilities for the growing number of women are depriving expecting mothers of adequate care crucial for the child’s mental and physical development. Programs need to be established to counteract this. INTRODUCTION Currently, Diana Sanchez was eight months pregnant when she was arrested for identity theft and put in a prison cell in Denver. At five a.m., two weeks after being incarcerated, she announced to a deputy outside her cell that she was going into labor. Footage from a camera in her cell shows her pacing anxiously or writhing in her bed for the five hours preceding the arrival of her son. She banged on the door and begged for help. All she received was an absorbent pad. She gave birth alone in her prison cell on July 31, 2015, around 10:45 am. At 11:00 am, a prison nurse walked in to cut the umbilical cord and take Sanchez’s newborn baby without offering postnatal care. Sanchez was later sent to a hospital, and her baby was separated from her until she was put on probation. In 2018, on behalf of her three-year-old son, Sanchez sued Denver Health and Denver Sheriff Department and won a $480,000 settlement.[1] Though many more men are incarcerated than women, the rate of growth of female incarceration has exceeded that of male incarceration for decades. One study estimated that 231,000 women are currently incarcerated in the US,[2] 80 percent of whom are mothers, and 150,000 pregnant.[3] Another recent study of 1,396 incarcerated pregnant women found that 92 percent had live births, 6.5 percent had stillbirths or miscarriages, and 4 percent terminated the pregnancy. The authors found that there is no system of reporting pregnancy outcomes in US prisons. There is a noteworthy ethical lapse in mental, emotional, and medical care that threatens the well-being of pregnant women in prison. According to Carolyn Sufrin, “Pregnant incarcerated people are one of the most marginalized and forgotten groups in our country… and women who don't get counted don't count.” [4] Poor documentation, visibility, and transparency contribute to the systemic abuse of incarcerated women. Studies document women giving birth alone in cells and shackles in solitary confinement. Their complaints regarding contractions, bleeding, and other pains of labor are often ignored.[5] l. Prenatal Care in American Prisons Diana Sanchez was not offered any prenatal care after she was incarcerated. And neither she nor her son received appropriate postnatal care.[6] Sanchez was on medication for opioid withdrawal while pregnant, which could have been detrimental to her baby’s health.[7] There is an unacceptable absence of pre- and postnatal care in most US prisons. A lack of regulation makes the availability of perinatal care unpredictable and unreliable. Several studies confirmed that there is not a standard for prenatal care for women incarcerated during pregnancy. [8] Knowledge of the appropriate mental and physical care pregnant women require, addiction support, and support for maternal-infant bonding all exists outside the prison system and ought to be used as a benchmark. At the very least, pregnant women, birthing women, and new mothers should not be placed in solitary confinement or shackled.[9] In the prenatal arena, depriving an individual of adequate healthcare is not appropriate and could be cruel and unusual. Only 18 percent of funding in prisons goes to health care for the prisoners. That is roughly $5.7 thousand per prisoner, according to an NIH study done in 2015.[10] There should be an adequate amount of funding for the health needs of incarcerated pregnant women. By depriving pregnant women of healthcare, the prisons are depriving the fetus of adequate care. ll. Respect for Autonomy During Incarceration Women maintain healthcare autonomy even when incarcerated. The purpose of a prison sentence is retribution for crimes and rehabilitation to prevent reoffending.[11] The separation of a mother and newborn causes significant developmental and psychological harm to the child and the parent. Parent-child separation does not serve the purpose of retribution or rehabilitation and is authorized only due to prisons’ limited space and resources that make it difficult to accommodate children, as well as a state interest in children’s best interests or the custody rights of the other parent. When it is possible to keep a family together, prisons should make every effort to do so for the health of the mother-child relationship. Incarcerated people may become a burden to family or society due to prison medical neglect. For example, diabetes and hypertension, which can occur during pregnancy, can worsen without treatment. The inability to access the care they would otherwise want and need endangers women and poses a burden to the healthcare system after incarceration, Depersonalizing individuals convicted of crimes must be placed in the context of historical eugenics practices. State-sanctioned sterilization and efforts to prevent women from reproducing were widespread during the early 20th century.[12] Cases of coerced and nonconsensual sterilization of incarcerated women and men evidence the history of eugenics.[13]Abortions are offered to some incarcerated women.[14] However, many incarcerated women are denied the right to see healthcare providers to thoroughly discuss abortion or other options.[15] Although the abortions are consensual, the quality of consent is questionable. lll. Prison Nursery Programs, “I need something to live for…” Indiana Women’s Prison (IWP), a max security female prison, has a program called Wee Ones that enables women convicted of nonviolent crimes to spend 30 months bonding with their newborn child. It is one of eight programs in the country that allows pregnant mothers to spend the last few months of their sentence with their children. It is a voluntary program that allows pregnant offenders a private room in a housing unit. It offers parent education, resources that are accessible after release, and career education. The program application process and the rules to which women must adhere to remain in the program are stringent. The programs generally have a zero-tolerance policy. Even simply sleeping in the same bed as the child or arguing with other mothers can result in termination from the program. Kara, a pregnant woman incarcerated for drug possession, had a history of abuse in her family and tended to act out in anger against her peers in the program. She was learning how to have healthy reactions to anger when handling her child, but her temper ultimately led to her removal from the program. Her son was placed in foster care, and Kara returned to the regular cells. In an interview before her transfer, she told the camera that Charlie gave her a purpose. With tears in her eyes, she said, “Charlie was my way of life here [...] I need something to live for [,] and I screwed up.”[16] Pregnancy in prison can be a way to improve quality of life for some women. Studies demonstrate that nursery programs improve mental health of the incarcerated women.[17] The secure attachment of the infant to its primary caregiver promotes healthy development in the child and a bonded relationship with the mother.[18] The close bond between mother and child in prisons has been shown to decrease recidivism and to reduce the burden on the foster care system.[19] Women who do not qualify for these programs, or are incarcerated in prisons without them, are separated from their newborn babies and their other children. The disconnect can lead to the child rejecting the incarcerated mother once she is released.[20] Programs like Wee Ones honor women’s autonomy while they are incarcerated. During interviews, the women expressed that although raising a child in that environment is difficult, it was better than not being with their children. While rocking a baby in her lap, one inmate expressed her frustrations with Wee Ones but then paused to express gratitude and said, “After all, it’s prison. And prison ain’t supposed to be nice.”[21] The ethical issue of autonomy reflects a more difficult dilemma in the prison landscape. lV. Counter Arguments: Do the Nursery Programs Work for the Children and the Women Typically, newborns are taken from their incarcerated mothers within two to three days of birth and sent to live with a relative or placed in foster care. Many women are never reunited with their babies. There is much debate over whether the programs are beneficial to the children. One ethical issue is whether children, as innocents, are being punished either by being in the prison system or by being separated from their mothers. Skeptics, like James Dwyer, have argued against keeping innocent babies in the custody of incarcerated mothers asserting that there is little evidence demonstrating that the programs rehabilitate the women.[22] Dwyer commented on the “reckless” hopefulness the programs provide: "It might, in fact, be the babies distract them from rehabilitation they should be doing instead. […] They're so focused on childcare and have this euphoria — they think they'll be just fine when they get out of prison and they're not. We just don't know."[23] One study showed that 58 percent of incarcerated women are arrested again after release, 38 percent are reconvicted, and 30 percent return to prison within three years.[24] Dwyer uses this data to argue that the programs are not worthwhile. However, the data is not limited to the special population that had the prison nursery experience. The data applies to all incarcerated women limiting its applicability. More importantly, there is compelling evidence to support prison nursery programs.[25] The programs do decrease recidivism[26] and prison misconduct,[27] and they allow women to create stronger bonds with their children.[28] Bev Little argues that allowing mothers to bond with their babies only delays the inevitable separation and will cause trauma and have other ill effects on the baby. [29] But others feel that stronger maternal-fetal attachment is best for both parties. There is evidence that the bond, once formed, is long-lasting. Later in life, there is less drug addiction among children who stayed in the nursery rather than being separated from their mothers.[30] Another counterargument is that the policies in prison nurseries are not as useful for motherhood outside of the facility; thus, an issue with recidivism occurs because the women are less prepared for motherhood upon release from prison. Prison nursery programs establish methods and procedures for successful motherhood that are unique to operation within correctional environments. Yet, fortunately, parenting classes offered by prisons and jails emphasize sacrifice, self-restraint, and dedicated attention to the baby. These classes aptly apply to motherhood outside of prison.[31] One incarcerated mother experiencing addiction, Kima, was described as ambivalent toward her pregnancy. “It’s something about knowing but not knowing that makes me not accountable or makes me think I’m not accountable,” Kima shared.[32] After the nurse confirmed her pregnancy, she acknowledged fear and knew she would be held accountable to the baby. The occurrence of pregnancy ambivalence is common.[33] A study of a population of prisoners from Rhode Island found that 41 percent of the women expressed ambivalent attitudes about pregnancy. 70 of the women from a population in San Francisco expressed ambivalent or negative attitudes towards pregnancy.[34] But the ambivalence of some women toward pregnancy is not a reason to prevent women who feel differently from reaping the full benefits of programs that support them during pregnancy. Another counterargument is that prison is becoming a comfort that women might seek if they are homeless or housing insecure. For example, Evelyn was released from a San Francisco jail after being arrested for using cocaine. She was 26 weeks pregnant and had a four-year-old son in the custody of her aunt. Following her release, she was homeless and using drugs in the streets. She felt that her only hope of keeping her baby safe was to go back to jail. Like Kima, she had been in and out of jail from a young age. She grew accustomed to and dependent on the care provided there. While incarceration can provide a home and a nursery, there is no ethical reason to argue for making prison less comfortable by separating babies and children from incarcerated women. Instead, these facts suggest we are not doing enough for women outside prisons either. CONCLUSION Many experts stress the dearth of research and information on these women and their babies. There is no empirical data to show how big the problem is, but there is evidence that programs providing nursery care for the children of incarcerated women have many benefits. Because the research is not largescale enough, many pregnant women in the prison system are ignored. Many women give birth in unacceptable conditions, and their children are taken from them the moment the umbilical cord is cut. While the US incarcerates too many women, a movement to expand prison nurseries could help new mothers bond with their children. Strong educational programs could aid in lowering the rates of recidivism by providing therapeutic resources for mothers.[35] There is a growing problem of mass incarceration in the US as many women are placed in correctional facilities. Most of these women are convicted of possession or use of illegal substances.[36] Many women come from disadvantaged backgrounds, poverty, and have experienced addiction. Depriving an expectant mother of adequate care is cruel and irresponsible both to the mother and her innocent child. The criminal justice system is harming children both mentally and physically. Reform of the system is needed to provide the basic care those children need. Programs like IWP’s Wee Ones are necessary for physical, psychological, and social development. A program that offers a place for mothers to raise their babies in the community of other mothers would incentivize and facilitate healthy parental habits. Further programs for mothers who are released from prison would give them valuable resources to keep them from returning and encourage healthy relationships between the mother and the baby. - [1] Li, D. K. Video allegedly shows woman giving birth in Denver jail cell alone, with no assistance. Denver: NBC News, 2019. [2] Kajstura, Aleks. “Women's Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2019.” Prison Policy Initiative, 29 Oct. 2019, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2019women.html. (“Including those in prisons, jails, and other correctional facilities.”) [3] Swavola, E, K Riley and R Subramanian. "Overlooked: Women and Jails in an Era of Reform." Vera Institute of Justice August 2016. [4] Sufrin, C. Pregnant Behind Bars: What We Do and Don't Know About Pregnancy and Incarceration Allison Chang. 21 March 2019. Transcript. [5] Sufrin, C., 2019. (Suffrin expressed that she had seen such practices firsthand working as an OB/GYN for incarcerated women.) [6] Padilla, M. “Woman Gave Birth in Denver Jail Cell Alone, Lawsuit Says,” New York Times, Sep. 1, 2019. [7] Li, D. “Video allegedly shows woman giving birth in Denver jail cell alone, with no assistance,” NBC U.S. News, Apr. 29. 2019. [8] Knittel, A. and C. Sufrin. "Maternal Health Equity and Justice for Pregnant Women Who Experience Incarceration." JAMA Network Open 3.8 (2020). A study in Ontario, Canada, coincided with a study done in Australia. [9] Sufrin, C., et al. "Pregnancy Outcomes in US Prisons, 2016–2017." p. 803-804. [10] Sridhar, S., R. Cornish and S. Fazel. "The Costs of Healthcare in Prison and Custody: Systematic Review of Current Estimates and Proposed Guidelines for Future Reporting." Frontiers in Psychiatry 9.716 (2018). [11] Kifer, M., Hemmens, C., Stohr, M. K. “The Goals of Corrections: Perspectives from the Line” Criminal Justice Review. 1 May 2003 [12] Perry, D. M. "Our Long, Troubling History of Sterilizing the Incarcerated." The Marshall Project: Sterilization of Women in Prison 26 July 2017. [13] Rachel Roth & Sara L. Ainsworth, If They Hand You a Paper, You Sign It: A Call to End the Sterilization of Women in Prison, 26 Hastings WOMEN's L.J. 7 (2015); See Skinner v. Oklahoma ex rel. Williamson, 316 U.S. 535 (1942) (procreation considered a fundamental right; fact pattern of male sterilization in prison based on type of crime.) [14] Sufrin, C., M. D. Creinin, J. C. Chang. “Incarcerated Women and Abortion Provision: A Survey of Correctional Health Providers.” Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health. p. 6-11. 23 March 2009. [15] Kasdan, D. “Abortion Access for Incarcerated Women: Are Correctional Health Practices in Conflict with Constitutional Standards?” Guttmacher Institute. 26 March 2009. [16] Born Behind Bars. Season 1, Episode 5, “They Can Take Your Baby Away,” produced by Luke Ellis, Francis Gasparini, & Jen Wise, aired on 15 Nov. 2017 A&E Networks [17] Bick, J., & Dozier, M. (2008). Helping Foster Parents Change: The Role of Parental State of Mind. In H. Steele & M. Steele (Eds.), Clinical applications of the Adult Attachment Interview (pp. 452–470). New York: Guilford Press. [18]Sroufe, L. A., B. Egeland, E. A. Carlson, W. A. Collins. (2005). The Development of the Person: The Minnesota Study of Risk and Adaptation from Birth to Adulthood. New York: Guilford Press. [19] Goshin, L. S., & Byrne, M. W. “Converging Streams of Opportunity for Prison Nursery Programs in the United States.” Journal of Offender Rehabilitation. 15 Apr 2009. [20] Babies Behind Bars. Dirs. W. Serrill and S. O'Brien. 2015. Another IWP pregnant woman is Taylor. At the time of the show, she was pregnant and expecting twins. In interviews throughout the episode, she expressed how her pregnancies in prison had put her in a better mood and felt beneficial to her. She had tried to sign up for the nursery program for her previous pregnancy, but her sentence was too long to get it. Her child was sent to live with a caregiver, and when Taylor was on probation, Taylor’s daughter didn’t want to be around Taylor. Taylor was so distraught that she messed up and went back, this time, pregnant with twins. After she was reincarcerated, she was able to be accepted into Wee Ones. She expressed to the camera man that the program might help her feel more like a mother so that when she gets out, she will have someone to care for. Taylor, Kara, and many other women depend on their children or their pregnancy for a purpose while behind bars. They relied on their babies to be a boon for them. [21] Babies Behind Bars. Dirs. W. Serrill and S. O'Brien. 2015. [22] Corley, C. "Programs Help Incarcerated Moms Bond with Their Babies in Prison." Criminal Justice Collaborative (2018). [23] Corley, C. "Programs Help Incarcerated Moms Bond with Their Babies in Prison." Criminal Justice Collaborative (2018). [24] Owen, B. & Crow, J. “Recidivism among Female Prisoners: Secondary Analysis of the 1994 BJS Recidivism Data Set” Department of Criminology California State University (2006) p. 28 [25] Prison Nursery Programs: Literature Review and Fact Sheet for CT. Diamond Research Consulting, 2012, www.cga.ct.gov/2013/JUDdata/tmy/2013HB-06642-R000401-Sarah Diamond - Director, Diamond Research Consulting-TMY.PDF. [26] New York Department of Correction Services (NYDOCS). (1993). Profile of Participants: The Bedford and Taconic Nursery Program in 1992. Albany, NY. Department of Correction Services.Rowland, M., & Watts, A. (2007). Washington State’s effort to the generational impact on crime. Corrections Today. Retrieved September 12, 2007, from http://www. aca.org/publications/pdf/Rowland_Watts_Aug07.pdf. [27] Carlson, J. R. (2001). Prison nursery 2000: A five-year review of the prison nursery at the Nebraska Correctional Center for Women. Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, 33, 75–97. [28] Carlson, J.R. [29] Little, B. "What Happens When a Woman Gives Birth Behind Bars?" A+E Networks, 29 October 2019. <https://www.aetv.com/real-crime/what-happens-when-a-woman-gives-birth-in-jail-or-prison>. [30] Margolies, J. K., & Kraft-Stolar, T. When “Free” Means Losing Your Mother: The Collision of Child Welfare and the Incarceration of Women in New York State 1, 9 (Correctional Association of N.Y. Women in Prison Project 2006) [31] Sufrin, C. Jailcare: Finding the Safety Net for Women Behind Bars. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017. [32] Sufrin, C. Jailcare: p. 155. [33] Peart, M. S. & Knittel, A. K. “Contraception need and available services among incarcerated women in the United States: a systematic review.” Contraception and Reproductive Medicine. 17 March 2020 [34] LaRochelle, F., C. Castro, J. Goldenson, J. P. Tulsky, D.L. Cohan, P. D. Blumenthal, et al. “Contraceptive use and barriers to access among newly arrested women.” J Correct Health Care. (2012) p. 111–119. [35] Goshin, L., & Byrne, M. (2009). “Converging streams of opportunity for prison nursery programs in the United States.” Journal of Offender Rehabilitation. 2009. p.271–295. [36] Elizabeth Swavola, Kristine Riley, Ram Subramanian. Overlooked: Women and Jails in an Era of Reform. New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2016.

IntroductionThe existential question today is not whether to be or not to be, but how one can become what one truly is. (Golomb 200)In contemporary Western culture the ideal of living authentically, of being “true to yourself,” is ubiquitous. Authenticity is “taken for granted” as an absolute value in a multitude of areas, from music, to travel to identity (Lindholm 1). A core component of authentic selfhood is to find an occupation that is a “passion:” work that is “really you.” This article draws on recent qualitative interviews with Australians from a range of occupations about work, identity and meaning (James). It will demonstrate that for these contemporary individuals, occupation is often closely linked to perceptions of authentic selfhood. I begin by overviewing the significance and presence of authenticity as a value in contemporary culture through discussions of reality television and self-help literature focussed on careers. This is followed by a discussion of sociological theories of authenticity, drawing out the connections between the authentic self, modernity and work. The final section uses examples from the interviews to argue that the ideal of work being an extension of the authentic self is compelling because in providing direction and purpose, it helps the individual avoid anomie, disenchantment and other modern malaises (Taylor).The Authentic Self and Career Guidance in Contemporary Popular CultureThe prevalence of authenticity in contemporary Western popular culture can be seen in reality television programs like Master Chef (a cooking competition) and The Voice (a singing competition). Generally, contestants take part in the show in order to “follow their dreams” and pursue the career they feel they were “destined” for. When elimination is immanent, those at risk of departure are given one last chance to tell the judges what being in the competition means to them. This usually takes the form of a tearful monologue in which the contestant explains that the past few weeks have been the best of their life, that they finally feel “alive” and that they have found their “passion.” In these shows, finding work that is “really you”—that is an extension of your authentic-self—is portrayed as being a fundamental component of fulfillment and self-actualization.The same message is delivered in self-help media and texts. Since the 1970s, “finding your passion” and “finding yourself” have been popular subjects for the genre. The best known of these books is perhaps Richard Bolles’s What Color is Your Parachute?: a job-hunting manual aimed primarily at people looking for a career change. First published in 1970, a new edition has been released every year and there are over 10 million copies in print. In 1995 it was included in the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book’s 25 Books That Have Shaped Readers’ Lives, placing Bolles in the company of Cervantes and Tolstoy (Bolles).Bolles’s book and similar career guidance titles generally follow a pattern of providing exercises for the reader to help them discover the “real you,” which then becomes the basis for choosing the “right” occupation, or as Bolles puts it, “first deciding who you are before deciding the kind of work you want to pursue.” Another best-selling self-help writer is Phil McGraw or “Dr. Phil,” better known for his television program than his books. In his Self Matters—Creating Your Life from the Inside Out, McGraw begins bytelling the story of his own search for his authentic “passion.” Before moving into television, McGraw spent ten years working as a practicing psychiatrist. He recalls:So much of what I did—while totally okay if it had been what I had a passion for—was as unnatural for me as it would be for a dog. It didn’t come from the heart. It wasn’t something that sprang from who I really was ... I wasn’t doing what was meaningful for me. I wasn’t doing what I was good at and therefore was not pursuing my mission in life, my purpose for being here … You and everyone else has a mission, a purpose in life that cannot be denied if you are to live fully. If you have no purpose, you have no passion. If you have no passion, you have sold yourself out (7–12).McGraw connects living authentically with living meaningfully. Working in an occupation that is in accordance with the authentic self gives one’s life purpose. This is the same message Oprah Winfrey chose to deliver in the final episode of the The Oprah Winfrey Show, which was watched by more than 16 million viewers in the U.S. alone. Rather than following the usual pattern of the show and interview celebrity guests, Winfrey chose to talk directly to her viewers about what matters in life:Everybody has a calling, and your real job in life is to figure out what that is and get about the business of doing it. Every time we have seen a person on this stage who is a success in their life, they spoke of the job, and they spoke of the juice that they receive from doing what they knew they were meant to be doing [...] Because that is what a calling is. It lights you up and it lets you know that you are exactly where you're supposed to be, doing exactly what you're supposed to be doing. And that is what I want for all of you and hope that you will take from this show. To live from the heart of yourself.Like McGraw, Winfrey draws a link between living authentically—living “from the heart”—and finding a “calling.” The message here is that the person whose career is in accordance with their authentic self can live with certainty, direction and purpose. Authenticity may act as a buffer against the anomie and disenchantment that arguably plague individuals in late modernity (Elliott & du Gay).Disenchantment, Modernity and Authenticity For many sociologists, most famously Max Weber, finding something that gives life purpose is the great challenge for individuals in the modern West. In a disenchanted society, without religion or other “mysterious incalculable forces” to provide direction, individuals may struggle to work out what they should do with their lives (149). For Weber the answer is to find your calling. Each individual must discover the “demon who holds the fibers of his very life” and obey its demands (156).Following Weber, John Carroll has argued that in modern secular societies, individuals must draw on their inner resources to find answers to life’s “fundamental questions” (Ego 3–4). As Carroll stresses, it is not that the religious impulse has disappeared from contemporary society, but it is expressed in new ways. Individuals still yearn for a sense of purpose but they are “more likely to pursue their quests for meaning on their own, in experimental ways and with their main resource being their ontological qualities” (Carroll, Beauty 221).Other Australian academics, like Gary Bouma and David Tacey, argue that rather than a decline in religiosity in Australia, what we are seeing is a change in the way people pursue the spiritual. Tacey suggests that while many Australians may “slink away” from the idea of God as something external to our lives, they may find more resonance with a conception of God as a “core dimension” of the person (167). Contemporary Australians continue to yearn for guidance, but they are more likely to look within to find it.There is a clear link between this process of turning inward to pursue the spiritual, the prevalence of authenticity in contemporary Western culture, and modernity. With the breakdown of traditional structures, individuals become more “free to self-create” (Bauman, Identity 3). As Charles Lindholm describes it: “The inclination toward a spontaneous mode of expressive self-revelation correlates with the collapse of reliable and sacralised institutional frameworks that once offered meaning and succour” (65–66).For Charles Taylor, the origins of this “massive subjective turn of modern culture” (26) lie in the 18th-century romantic period with the idea that each individual has an intuitive moral sense. To determine what is right, the individual must be in touch with their “inner voice” and act in accordance with it. It is in this notion that Taylor identifies the background to the belief, which is so prominent today, that “There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s” (28–29). Lindholm points to Rousseau as the “inventor” of this ideal, with his revelatory Confessions becoming “the harbinger of a new ideal in which exploring and revealing one’s essential nature was taken as an absolute good” (8). According to Rousseau, social norms suppress the individual’s true nature, and so it is only possible for one to be authentic if they break these chains and act in accordance with their inner depths. For employees in today’s service-oriented knowledge economy, there are significant risks involved in following Rousseau’s advice and expressing one’s “true feelings.” As many researchers have noted, in the new capitalism, workers are increasingly required to regulate their emotions and present themselves as calm, agreeable and above all positive (Hochschild; Sennett; Ehrenreich). To offer criticism or express frustration, to drop the “mask of cooperativeness” (Sennett 112), may mean risking one’s employment.Nevertheless, while it is arguably becoming more difficult to express authentic feeling at work, for contemporary workers, choice of occupation is still often closely linked to perceptions of authentic selfhood. In fact, in a time of increasingly fragmented careers and short-term, episodic work, it becomes more necessary to create a meaningful narrative to link numerous and varied jobs to a core sense of self. As Richard Sennett argues, today’s flexible employees—frequently moving from one workplace to the next—are at risk of “drift:” a sensation of aimless movement (30). To counter this, individuals must create a convincing story that provides a rationale for career changes and can thereby “form their characters into sustained narratives” (31).In the next section, drawing on recent empirical research, I argue that linking authentic selfhood to work provides individuals with a way to make sense of the trajectory of their work lives and to accept change. Today’s employees are able to interpret even the most unexpected career changes as a beneficial occurrence—something that was “meant to be”—by rationalising that such changes are part of a process of finding work that is an expression of the authentic self.The Authentic Self at Work: Being True to Your EssenceThe following discussion focuses on how authenticity as an ideal influences individuals’s work identity and career aspirations. It draws examples from recent qualitative interviews with Australian workers from a range of occupations (James 2012). A number of interviewees described a search for an occupation that was authentically “them,” a task that was well-suited to their capabilities and came “naturally:”I have a feeling that I was sort of a natural teacher. (Teacher, 60)Medical is what I like, that’s me. (Paramedic, 49)I found my thing, I stick to it. (Farrier, 27) These beliefs are quite clearly influenced by the idea of vocation, in that there is a particular task the individual is most suited to, but they do not invoke the sense of duty that a religious “calling” entails. Often, the interviewees had discovered the occupation that was “really them” by working in other jobs that were not their “true passion.” Realising that performing a particular role felt inauthentic helped them to define their authentic self and encouraged them to pursue more fulfilling work. This process often required experimentation, since “one knows what one is only after realising what one is not” (Golomb 201).For instance, Olivia, a 33-year old lawyer had begun her career in a corporate law firm. She had never felt comfortable in the corporate environment: “I always thought, ‘They know I don’t belong here’.” Her performance at work felt inauthentic: “I was never good at smiling and saying yes.” This experience led her to move into human rights, which she found more fulfilling. Similarly Hazel, a 50 year-old social worker, had started her career in what she described as “boring administration jobs.” Although she had “always wanted” to work in the “caring sector” her family’s expectations and her low self-confidence had stopped her from applying for university. When she finally quit the administration work and began to study it was liberating: “a weight had come out off my shoulders.” In her occupation as a social worker she felt that her work fitted with her authentic self: “the kind of person I am,” and for the first time in her life she looked forward to going to work. Both of these women, and many of the other interviewees, rationalised their decision to work in a particular field by appealing to narratives of authentic selfhood.Similarly, in explaining why they enjoyed their work, a number of interviewees looked back to their childhood for signs of what was “meant to be.” For instance, Tim, a 27 year-old farrier, justified his work with horses: “Mum came from a farming background, every school holidays I was up there…I followed my grandpa around like a little dog, annoyed and pestered him and asked him ‘Why’ and How?’ I’ve always been like that … So I think from an early age I was destined to do something like this.” Ken, a 50 year-old electrician, had a similar explanation for his choice of occupation: “Even as a little kid I was always mucking around with batteries and getting lights to work and things like that, so I think it was just a natural progression.”This tendency to associate childhood interests with authentic selfhood is perhaps due to the belief that childhood is a time of innocence and freedom, where the individual had not yet been moulded by society. As Duschinsky argues, childhood is often connected with an “originary natural essence.” We are close here to Rousseau’s “sentiment of being,” or its contemporary manifestation the “real you.” Of course, the idea that the child is free from external influence is problematised by ideas of socialisation. From birth the infant learns by copying “significant others” and self-conception is formed through interaction (Cooley; Mead). Therefore, from the very beginning, an individual’s interests, dispositions and tastes are influenced by family and culture.Shane, a 29 year-old real estate agent, had resisted working in property because it was the family business and he “didn’t want to be as boring as to follow in Dad’s footsteps.” He saw himself as “academic” and “creative” and for a number of years worked as a writer. Eventually though he decided that writing was not his calling: it was “not actually me … I categorise myself as someone who has the ability to write but not naturally.” When Shane began working in real-estate however, it felt almost automatic. Like the other members of his family he had the right skills and traits to thrive in the business and was immediately successful. Interestingly, Shane’s conception of his authenticity includes both a belief in an essential, pre-social “true” self and at the same time an understanding of the importance of the influence of family in the formation of the self.Regardless of whether the idea of a natural, inner-essence discernable in childhood pastimes can be disproven, it is clear that the understanding of authentic selfhood as an “immediate expression of our essence” continues to influence how individuals conceive of their work identities. However, at the same time, the interviewees’ accounts of authenticity also acknowledged the role of parents in influencing traits and dispositions. In these narratives of the self, authenticity encompasses opposing understandings of childhood as being both free from social influences and highly influenced by primary agents of socialisation. That individuals are willing to do the necessary mental and emotional work to maintain these contradictory beliefs suggests that there is a strong incentive to frame work identity as an expression of authentic selfhood.Authenticity Provides PurposeThe great benefit of being able to convincingly rationalise one’s work as a manifestation of the true self is that it gives the individual direction and purpose. Work then provides answers to Carroll’s fundamental questions: “who am I?” and “What should I do with my life?” A number of the interviewees recalled their attempts to secure a sense of purpose by linking their current occupation to their inner essence. As Greg, a 36-year-old fitness consultant described it:You just gotta think ‘What do you really wanna do, what makes you happy, what are you about?’ … I guess the strengthening and conditioning work, the fitness, has been the constant right the way through. It’s probably the core of what I’ve done over the years, seeing individuals and teams get fit. It’s what I do. That’s my role, if you put it in a nutshell. That’s what I’m about … I was sort of floating around a little bit … I need to go ‘This is what I am.’ By identifying his authentic self and linking it to his work, Greg was able to make sense of his past. He had once been a professional runner and after an injury was forced to redefine himself. He now rationalised that his ability to run had led him into the fitness field: You look at what is your life mission and basically what are you out here for … with athletics it’s allowed me to deal with any sport, made me flexible in my career … if I was, therefore born to run? Yeah, quite possibly, there had to be a reason. Like many of the interviewees, Greg had been forced to change his plans, but he was able to rationalise that this change was positive by forming a narrative that connected both his current and previous occupations to his perception of his authentic self. As Sennett describes it, he is able to from his character into a “sustained narrative” (31). Similarly, Trish, a 42 year-old retail coordinator, connected both her work as a chef and her job in a hardware store back to her sense of authentic self. Both occupations, she thought, were “down and dirty” and she linked this to her family “roots” and her identity as a “country girl.” In interpreting these two substantially different occupations as an expression of her true self, Trish is able to create a narrative in which unexpected career changes are as seen as something beneficial that was “meant to be.” These accounts of career trajectories suggest that linking authenticity to work identity is a strategy individuals employ to cope with the disorienting effects of fragmented work lives. Even jobs that are unfulfilling and feel inauthentic can be made meaningful by interpreting them as necessary steps leading towards the discovery of one’s “ true passion”. This is quite different to the ideal of a life-long calling in one occupation, which as Bauman has noted, has become a “privilege of the few” in late-modernity (Work 34). In an era of insecure and fragmented work, the narrative of an authentic self becomes particularly appealing as it allows the individual to create a meaningful work-narrative that can accommodate the numerous twists and turns of contemporary “liquid” existence (Bauman, Identity 5) and avoid “drift” (Sennett). Conclusion Drawing on qualitative research, this paper has analysed the connections between authenticity, work and modern selfhood. I have shown that in an era of flexible and fragmented working lives, work-identities are often closely tied to understandings of authentic selfhood. Interpreting particular kinds of work as being expressions of the authentic self provides individuals with a sense of purpose and in some cases assists them in coming to terms with unexpected career changes. A meaningful career narrative acts as a buffer against disorientation, disenchantment and anomie. It is therefore no wonder that authentic selfhood is such a prominent theme in reality television, self-help and other forms of popular culture, since it is taps into an existential need for a sense of purpose that becomes increasingly elusive in late-modernity. It is clear from the accounts presented in this paper that the pursuit of authenticity is not merely a narcissistic endeavor, and is employed by individuals to work through fundamental existential questions. Future work in this area should continue to make use of empirical research to add depth and complexity to theoretical accounts of authentic selfhood. References Bauman, Zygmunt. “Identity in the Globalizing World.” Identity in Question. Ed. Anthony Elliott and Paul du Gay. London: Sage, 2009. 1–12. Bauman, Zygmunt. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor. Buckingham: Open UP, 1998. Bolles, Richard. What Colour Is Your Parachute 2015. 23 Jan. 2015 ‹http://www.jobhuntersbible.com/books/view/what-color-is-your-parachute-2015›. Bolles, Richard. What Colour Is Your Parachute. Berkley: Ten Speed, 1970. Bouma, Gary. Australian Soul: Religion and Spirituality in the 21st Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Carroll, John. “Beauty contra God: Has Aesthetics Replaced Religion in Modernity?” Journal of Sociology 48.2 (2012): 206–23. Carroll, John. Ego and Soul: The Modern West in Search of Meaning. Melbourne: Scribe, 2008. Cooley, Charles Horton. Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Scribner’s, 1902. Duschinsky, Robbie. “Childhood Innocence: Essence, Education, and Performativity.” Textual Practice 27.5 (2013): 763–81. Elliott, Anthony, and Paul du Gay. “Editors’ Introduction.” Identity in Question. Eds. Anthony Elliott and Paul du Gay. London: Sage, 2009. xi–xxi. Ehrenreich, Barbara. Bright-Sided : How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. New York: Henry Holt, 2009. Golomb, Jacob. In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus. London: Routledge, 1995. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialization Human Feeling. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983. James, Sara. “Making a Living, Making a Life: Contemporary Narratives of Work, Vocation and Meaning.” PhD Thesis. La Trobe U, 2012. Lindholm, Charles. Culture and Authenticity. Malden: Blackwell, 2008. McGraw, Phil. Self Matters—Creating Your Life from the Inside Out. London: Simon and Schuster, 2001. Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1934. Sennett, Richard. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, New York: WW Norton, 1998. Tacey, David. Edge of the Sacred: Jung, Psyche, Earth. Sydney: Daimon, 2008. Taylor, Charles. Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation.” From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Ed. Hans Heinrich Gerth and Charles Wright Mills. London: Routledge, 1991. 129–56. Winfrey, Oprah. The Oprah Winfrey Show Finale. 23 Jan. 2015 ‹http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/The-Oprah-Winfrey-Show-Finale_1#ixzz3PbhBrdBs›.

We take as our subject what many would deem a waste of good celluloid: the degraded cultural form of the stoner film. Stoner films plot the experiences of the wasted (those intoxicated on marijuana) as they exhibit wastefulness—excessiveness, improvidence, decay—on a number of fronts. Stoners waste time in constantly hunting for pot and in failing to pursue more productive activity whilst wasted. Stoners waste their minds, both literally, if we believe contested studies that indicate marijuana smoking kills brains cells, and figuratively, in rendering themselves cognitively impaired. Stoners waste their bodies through the dangerous practice of smoking and through the tendency toward physical inertia. Stoners waste money on marijuana firstly, but also on such sophomoric accoutrements as the stoner film itself. Stoners lay waste to convention in excessively seeking pleasure and in dressing and acting outrageously. And stoners, if the scatological humour of so many stoner films is any index, are preoccupied with bodily waste. Stoners, we argue here, waste whiteness as well. As the likes of Jesse and Chester (Dude, Where’s My Car?), Wayne and Garth (Wayne’s World), Bill and Ted (Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure) and Jay and Silent Bob (Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back) make clear, whiteness looms large in stoner films. Yet the genre, we argue, disavows its own whiteness, in favour of a post-white hybridity that lavishly squanders white privilege. For all its focus on whiteness, filmic wastedness has always been an ethnically diverse and ambiguous category. The genre’s origins in the work of Cheech Marin, a Chicano, and Tommy Chong, a Chinese-European Canadian, have been buttressed in this regard by many African American contributions to the stoner oeuvre, including How High, Half Baked and Friday, as well as by Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, and its Korean-American and Indian-American protagonists. Cheech and Chong initiated the genre with the release of Up in Smoke in 1978. A host of films have followed featuring protagonists who spend much of their time smoking and seeking marijuana (or—in the case of stoner films such as Dude, Where’s My Car? released during the height of the War on Drugs—acting stoned without ever being seen to get stoned). Inspired in part by the 1938 anti-marijuana film Reefer Madness, and the unintended humour such propaganda films begat amongst marijuana smokers, stoner films are comedies that satirise both marijuana culture and its prohibition. Self-consciously slapstick, the stoner genre excludes more serious films about drugs, from Easy Rider to Shaft, as well as films such as The Wizard of Oz, Yellow Submarine, the Muppet movies, and others popular amongst marijuana smokers because of surreal content. Likewise, a host of films that include secondary stoner characters, such as Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Wooderson in Dazed and Confused, are commonly excluded from the genre on the grounds that the stoner film, first and foremost, celebrates stonerism, that is “serious commitment to smoking and acquiring marijuana as a lifestyle choice.” (Meltzer). Often taking the form of the “buddy film,” stoner flicks generally feature male leads and frequently exhibit a decidedly masculinist orientation, with women, for the most part reduced to little more than the object of the white male gaze.The plot, such as it is, of the typical stoner film concerns the search for marijuana (or an accessory, such as junk food) and the improbable misadventures that ensue. While frequently represented as resourceful and energetic in their quest for marijuana, filmic stoners otherwise exhibit ambivalent attitudes toward enterprise that involves significant effort. Typically represented as happy and peaceable, filmic stoners rarely engage in conflict beyond regular clashes with authority figures determined to enforce anti-drug laws, and other measures that stoners take to be infringements upon happiness. While Hollywood’s stoners thus share a sense of entitlement to pleasure, they do not otherwise exhibit a coherent ideological orthodoxy beyond a certain libertarian and relativistic open-mindedness. More likely to take inspiration from comic book heroes than Aldous Huxley or Timothy Leary, stoners are most often portrayed as ‘dazed and confused,’ and could be said to waste the intellectual tradition of mind expansion that Leary represents. That stoner films are, at times, misunderstood to be quintessentially white is hardly suprising. As a social construct that creates, maintains and legitimates white domination, whiteness manifests, as one of its most defining features, an ability to swallow up difference and to insist upon, at critical junctures, a universal subjectivity that disallows for difference (hooks 167). Such universalising not only sanctions co-optation of ethnic cultural expression, it also functions to mask whiteness’s existence, thus reinforcing its very power. Whiteness, as Richard Dyer argues, is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. It obfuscates itself and its relationship to the particular traits it is said to embody—disinterest, prudence, temperance, rationality, bodily restraint, industriousness (3). Whiteness is thus constructed as neither an ethnic nor racial particularity, but rather the transcendence of such positionality (Wiegman 139). While non-whites are raced, to be white is to be “just human” and thus to possess the power to “claim to speak for the commonality of humanity” whilst denying the accrual of any particular racial privilege (Dyer 2). In refuting its own advantages—which are so wide ranging (from preferential treatment in housing loans, to the freedom to fail without fear of reflecting badly on other whites) that they are, like whiteness itself, both assumed and unproblematic—whiteness instantiates individualism, allowing whites to believe that their successes are in no way the outcome of systematic racial advantage, but rather the product of individual toil (McIntosh; Lipsitz). An examination of the 1978 stoner film Up in Smoke suggests that whatever the ethnic ambiguity of the figure of the stoner, the genre of the stoner film is all about the wasting of whiteness. Up in Smoke opens with two alternating domestic scenes. We first encounter Pedro De Pacas (Cheech Marin) in a cluttered and shadowy room as his siblings romp affectionately upon his back, waking him from his slumber on the couch. Pedro rises, stepping into a bowl of cereal on the floor. He stumbles to the bathroom, where, sleepy and disoriented, he urinates into the laundry hamper. The chaos of Pedro’s disrupted sleep is followed in the film by a more metaphoric awakening as Anthony Stoner (Tommy Chong) determines to leave home. The scene takes place in a far more orderly, light and lavish room. The space’s overpowering whiteness is breached only by the figure of Anthony and his unruly black hair, bushy black beard, and loud Hawaiian shirt, which vibrates with colour against the white walls, white furnishings and white curtains. We watch as Anthony, behind an elaborate bar, prepares a banana protein shake, impassively ignoring his parents, both clothed in all-white, as they clutch martini glasses and berate their son for his lack of ambition. Arnold Stoner [father]: Son, your mother and me would like for you to cozy up to the Finkelstein boy. He's a bright kid, and, uh... he's going to military school, and remember, he was an Eagle Scout. Tempest Stoner [mother]: Arnold…Arnold Stoner: [shouts over/to his wife] Will you shut up? We’re not going to have a family brawl!Tempest Stoner: [continues talking as her husband shouts]…. Retard.Arnold Stoner: [to Anthony] We've put up with a hell of a lot.[Anthony starts blender] Can this wait? ... Build your goddamn muscles, huh? You know, you could build your muscles picking strawberries.You know, bend and scoop... like the Mexicans. Shit, maybe I could get you a job with United Fruit. I got a buddy with United Fruit. ... Get you started. Start with strawberries, you might work your way up to these goddamn bananas! When, boy? When...are you going to get your act together?Anthony: [Burps]Tempest Stoner: Gross.Arnold Stoner: Oh, good God Almighty me. I think he's the Antichrist. Anthony, I want to talk to you. [Anthony gathers his smoothie supplements and begins to walk out of the room.] Now, listen! Don't walk away from me when I'm talking to you! You get a goddamn job before sundown, or we're shipping you off to military school with that goddamn Finkelstein shit kid! Son of a bitch!The whiteness of Anthony’s parents is signified so pervasively and so strikingly in this scene—in their improbable white outfits and in the room’s insufferably white décor—that we come to understand it as causative. The rage and racism of Mr. Stoner’s tirade, the scene suggests, is a product of whiteness itself. Given that whiteness achieves and maintains its domination via both ubiquity and invisibility, what Up in Smoke accomplishes in this scene is notable. Arnold Stoner’s tortured syntax (“that goddamn Finkelstein shit kid”) works to “mak[e] whiteness strange” (Dyer 4), while the scene’s exaggerated staging delineates whiteness as “a particular – even peculiar – identity, rather than a presumed norm” (Roediger, Colored White 21). The belligerence of the senior Stoners toward not only their son and each other, but the world at large, in turn, functions to render whiteness intrinsically ruthless and destructive. Anthony’s parents, in all their whiteness, enact David Roediger’s assertion that “it is not merely that ‘Whiteness’s is oppressive and false; it is that ‘Whiteness’s is nothing but oppressive and false” (Toward the Abolition 13).Anthony speaks not a word during the scene. He communicates only by belching and giving his parents the finger as he leaves the room and the home. This departure is significant in that it marks the moment when Anthony, hereafter known only as “Man,” flees the world of whiteness. He winds up taking refuge in the multi-hued world of stonerism, as embodied in the scene that follows, which features Pedro emerging from his home to interact with his Chicano neighbours and to lovingly inspect his car. As a lowrider, a customised vehicle that “begin[s] with the abandoned materials of one tradition (that of mainstream America), … [and is] … then transformed and recycled . . . into new and fresh objects of art which are distinctly Chicano,” Pedro’s car serves as a symbol of the cultural hybridisation that Man is about to undergo (quoted in Ondine 141).As Man’s muteness in the presence of his parents suggests, his racial status seems tentative from the start. Within the world of whiteness, Man is the subaltern, silenced and denigrated, finding voice only after he befriends Pedro. Even as the film identifies Man as white through his parental lineage, it renders indeterminate its own assertion, destabilising any such fixed or naturalised schema of identity. When Man is first introduced to Pedro’s band as their newest member, James, the band’s African American bass player, looks at Man, dressed in the uniform of the band, and asks: “Hey Pedro, where’s the white dude you said was playing the drums?” Clearly, from James’s point of view, the room contains no white dudes, just stoners. Man’s presumed whiteness becomes one of the film’s countless gags, the provocative ambiguity of the casting of a Chinese-European to play a white part underscored in the film by the equally implausible matter of age. Man, according to the film’s narrative, is a high school student; Chong was forty when the film was released. Like his age, Man’s whiteness is never a good fit. That Man ultimately winds up sleeping on the very couch upon which we first encounter Pedro suggests how radical and final the break with his dubious white past is. The “Mexicans” whom his father would mock as fit only for abject labour are amongst those whom Man comes to consider his closest companions. In departing his parents’ white world, and embracing Pedro’s dilapidated, barrio-based world of wastedness, Man traces the geographies narrated by George Lipsitz in The Possessive Investment in Whiteness. Historically, Lipsitz argues, the development of affluent white space (the suburbs) was made possible by the disintegration of African American, Chicano and other minority neighbourhoods disadvantaged by federal, state, and corporate housing, employment, health care, urban renewal, and education policies that favoured whites over non-whites. In this sense, Man’s flight from his parents’ home is a retreat from whiteness itself, and from the advantages that whiteness conveys. In choosing the ramshackle, non-white world of stonerism, Man performs an act of racial treachery. Whiteness, Lipsitz contends, has “cash value,” and “is invested in, like property, but it is also a means of accumulating property and keeping it from others,” which allows for “intergenerational transfers of inherited wealth that pass on the spoils of discrimination to succeeding generations” (vii-viii). Man’s disavowal of the privileges of whiteness is a reckless refusal to accept this racial birthright. Whiteness is thus wasted upon Man because Man wastes his whiteness. Given the centrality of prudence and restraint to hegemonic constructions of whiteness, Man’s willingness to squander the “valuable asset” that is his white inheritance is especially treasonous (Harris 1713). Man is the prodigal son of whiteness, a profligate who pours down the drain “the wages of whiteness” that his forbearers have spent generations accruing and protecting (Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness). His waste not only offends the core values which whiteness is said to comprise, it also denigrates whiteness itself by illuminating the excess of white privilege, as well as the unarticulated excess of meanings that hover around whiteness to create the illusion of transcendence and infinite variety. Man’s performance, like all bad performances of whiteness, “disrupt[s] implicit understandings of what it means to be white” (Hartigan 46). The spectre of seeing white domination go ‘up in smoke’—via wasting, as opposed to hoarding, white privilege—amounts to racial treason, and helps not only to explicate why whites in the film find stonerism so menacing, but also to explain the paradox of “pot [making] the people who don’t smoke it even more paranoid than the people who do” (Patterson). While Tommy Chong’s droll assertion that "what makes us so dangerous is that we're harmless" ridicules such paranoia, it ultimately fails to account for the politics of subversive squandering of white privilege that characterise the stoner film (“Biographies”). Stoners in Up in Smoke, as in most other stoner films, are marked as non-white, through association with ethnic Others, through their rejection of mainstream ideas about work and achievement, and/or through their lack of bodily restraint in relentlessly seeking pleasure, in dressing outrageously, and in refusing to abide conventional grooming habits. Significantly, the non-white status of the stoner is both voluntary and deliberate. While stonerism embraces its own non-whiteness, its Otherness is not signified, primarily, through racial cross-dressing of the sort Eric Lott detects in Elvis, but rather through race-mixing. Stoner collectivity practices an inclusivity that defies America’s historic practice of racial and ethnic segregation (Lott 248). Stonerism further reveals its unwillingness to abide constrictive American whiteness in a scene in which Pedro and Man, both US-born Americans, are deported. The pair are rounded up along with Pedro’s extended family in a raid initiated when Pedro’s cousin “narcs” on himself to la migra (the Immigration and Naturalization Service) in order to get free transport for his extended family to his wedding in Tijuana. Pedro and Man return to the US as unwitting tricksters, bringing back to the US more marijuana than has ever crossed the Mexican-US border at one time, fusing the relationship between transnationalism and wastedness. The disrespect that stoners exhibit for pregnable US borders contests presumed Chicano powerlessness in the face of white force and further affronts whiteness, which historically has mobilised itself most virulently at the threat of alien incursion. Transgression here is wilful and playful; stoners intend to offend normative values and taste through their actions, their dress, and non-white associations as part of the project of forging a new hybridised, transnational subjectivity that threatens to lay waste to whiteness’s purity and privilege. Stoners invite the scrutiny of white authority with their outrageous attire and ethnically diverse composition, turning the “inevitability of surveillance” (Borrie 87) into an opportunity to enact their own wastedness—their wasted privilege, their wasted youth, their wasted potential—before a gaze that is ultimately confounded and threatened by the chaotic hybridity with which it is faced (Hebdige 26). By perpetually displaying his/her wasted Otherness, the stoner makes of him/herself a “freak,” a label cops use derisively throughout Up in Smoke to denote the wasted without realising that stoners define themselves in precisely such terms, and, by doing so, obstruct whiteness’s assertion of universal subjectivity. Pedro’s cousin Strawberry (Tom Skerritt), a pot dealer, enacts freakishness by exhibiting a large facial birthmark and by suffering from Vietnam-induced Post Traumatic Stress disorder. A freak in every sense of the word, Strawberry is denied white status by virtue of physical and mental defect. But Strawberry, as a stoner, ultimately wants whiteness even less than it wants him. The defects that deny him membership in the exclusive “club” that is whiteness prove less significant than the choice he makes to defect from the ranks of whiteness and join with Man in the decision to waste his whiteness wantonly (“Editorial”). Stoner masculinity is represented as similarly freakish and defective. While white authority forcefully frustrates the attempts of Pedro and Man to “score” marijuana, the duo’s efforts to “score” sexually are thwarted by their own in/action. More often than not, wastedness produces impotence in Up in Smoke, either literally or figuratively, wherein the confusion and misadventures that attend pot-smoking interrupt foreplay. The film’s only ostensible sex scene is unconsummated, a wasted opportunity for whiteness to reproduce itself when Man sleeps through his girlfriend’s frenzied discussion of sex. During the course of Up in Smoke, Man dresses as a woman while hitchhiking, Pedro mistakes Man for a woman, Man sits on Pedro’s lap when they scramble to change seats whilst being pulled over by the police, Man suggests that Pedro has a “small dick,” Pedro reports liking “manly breasts,” and Pedro—unable to urinate in the presence of Sgt. Stedenko—tells his penis that if it does not perform, he will “put [it] back in the closet.” Such attenuations of the lead characters’ masculinity climax in the penultimate scene, in which Pedro, backed by his band, performs “Earache My Eye,” a song he has just composed backstage, whilst adorned in pink tutu, garter belt, tassle pasties, sequined opera mask and Mickey Mouse ears: My momma talkin’ to me tryin’ to tell me how to liveBut I don't listen to her cause my head is like a sieveMy daddy he disowned me cause I wear my sister's clothesHe caught me in the bathroom with a pair of pantyhoseMy basketball coach he done kicked me off the teamFor wearing high heeled sneakers and acting like a queen“Earache My Eye” corroborates the Othered natured of stonerism by marking stoners, already designated as non-white, as non-straight. In a classic iteration of a bad gender performance, the scene rejects both whiteness and its hegemonic partners-in-crime, heterosexuality and normative masculinity (Butler 26). Here stoners waste not only their whiteness, but also their white masculinity. Whiteness, and its dependence upon “intersection … [with] interlocking axes [of power such as] gender … [and] sexuality,” is “outed” in this scene (Shome 368). So, too, is it enfeebled. In rendering masculinity freakish and defective, the film threatens whiteness at its core. For if whiteness can not depend upon normative masculinity for its reproduction, then, like Man’s racial birthright, it is wasted. The stoner’s embodiment of freakishness further works to emphasise wasted whiteness by exposing just how hysterical whiteness’s defense of its own normativity can be. Up in Smoke frequently inflates not only the effects of marijuana, but also the eccentricities of those who smoke it, a strategy which means that much of the film’s humour turns on satirising hegemonic stereotypes of marijuana smokers. Equally, Cheech Marin’s exaggerated “slapstick, one-dimensional [portrayal] of [a] Chicano character” works to render ridiculous the very stereotypes his character incarnates (List 183). While the film deconstructs processes of social construction, it also makes extensive use of counter-stereotyping in its depictions of characters marked as white. The result is that whiteness’s “illusion of [its] own infinite variety” is contested and the lie of whiteness as non-raced is exposed, helping to explain the stoner’s decision to waste his/her whiteness (Dyer 12; 2). In Up in Smoke whiteness is the colour of straightness. Straights, who are willing neither to smoke pot nor to tolerate the smoking of pot by others/Others, are so comprehensively marked as white in the film that whiteness and straightness become isomorphic. As a result, the same stereotypes are mobilised in representing whiteness and straightness: incompetence, belligerence, hypocrisy, meanspiritedness, and paranoia, qualities that are all the more oppressive because virtually all whites/straights in the film occupy positions of authority. Anthony’s spectacularly white parents, as we have seen, are bigoted and dominating. Their whiteness is further impugned by alcohol, which fuels Mr. Stoner’s fury and Mrs. Stoner’s unintelligibility. That the senior Stoners are drunk before noon works, of course, to expose the hypocrisy of those who would indict marijuana use while ignoring the social damage alcohol can produce. Their inebriation (revealed as chronic in the DVD’s outtake scenes) takes on further significance when it is configured as a decidedly white attribute. Throughout the film, only characters marked as white consume alcohol—most notably, the judge who is discovered to be drinking vodka whist adjudicating drug charges against Pedro and Man—therefore dislodging whiteness’s self-construction as temperate, and suggesting just how wasted whiteness is. While stonerism is represented as pacific, drunkenness is of a piece with white/straight bellicosity. In Up in Smoke, whites/straights crave confrontation and discord, especially the angry, uptight, and vainglorious narcotics cop Sgt. Stedenko (Stacey Keech) who inhabits so many of the film’s counter-stereotypes. While a trio of white cops roughly apprehend and search a carload of innocent nuns in a manner that Man describes as “cold blooded,” Stedenko, unawares in the foreground, gives an interview about his plans for what he hopes will be the biggest border drug bust in US history: “[Reporter:] Do you expect to see any violence here today? [Sgt. Stedenko:] I certainly hope so.” Stedenko’s desire to act violently against stoners echoes mythologies of white regeneration in the Old West, wherein whiteness refurbished itself through violent attacks on Native Americans, whose wasteful cultures failed to make “civilised” use of western lands (Slotkin 565).White aggression is relentlessly depicted in the film, with one important exception: the instance of the stoned straight. Perhaps no other trope is as defining of the genre, as is the scene wherein a straight person accidentally becomes stoned. Up in Smoke offers several examples, most notably the scene in which a motorcycle cop pulls over Pedro and Man as they drive a van belonging to Pedro’s Uncle Chuey. In a plot twist requiring a degree of willing suspension of disbelief that even wasted audiences might find a stretch, the exterior shell of the van, unbeknownst to Pedro and Man, is made entirely of marijuana which has started to smoulder around the exhaust pipe. The cop, who becomes intoxicated whilst walking through the fumes, does not hassle Pedro and Man, as expected, but instead asks for a bite of their hot dog and then departs happily, instructing the duo to “have a nice day.” In declining, or perhaps simply forgetting, to exercise his authority, the cop demonstrates the regenerative potential not of violent whiteness but rather of hybrid wastedness. Marijuana here is transformative, morphing straight consciousness into stoner consciousness and, in the process, discharging all the uptight, mean-spirited, unnecessary, and hence wasteful baggage of whiteness along the way. While such a utopian potential for pot is both upheld and satirised in the film, the scene amounts to far more than an inconsequential generic gag, in that it argues for the disavowal of whiteness via the assumption of the voluntary Otherness that is stonerism. Whiteness, the scene suggests, can be cast off, discarded, wasted and thus surmounted. Whites, for want of a better phrase, simply need to ‘just say no’ to whiteness in order to excrete the brutality that is its necessary affliction and inevitable result. While Up in Smoke laudably offers a powerful refusal to horde the assets of whiteness, the film fails to acknowledge that ‘just saying no’ is, indeed, one of whiteness’s exclusive privileges, since whites and only whites possess the liberty to refuse the advantages whiteness bestows. Non-whites possess no analogical ability to jettison the social constructions to which they are subjected, to refuse the power of dominant classes to define their subjectivity. Neither does the film confront the fact that Man nor any other of Up in Smoke’s white freaks are disallowed from re-embracing their whiteness, and its attendant value, at any time. However inchoate the film’s challenge to racial privilege, Up in Smoke’s celebration of the subversive pleasures of wasting whiteness offers a tentative, if bleary, first step toward ‘the abolition of whiteness.’ Its utopian vision of a post-white hybridised subjectivity, however dazed and confused, is worthy of far more serious contemplation than the film, taken at face value, might seem to suggest. Perhaps Up in Smoke is a stoner film that should also be viewed while sober. ReferencesBill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Dir. Stephen Herek. Orion Pictures Corporation, 1989.“Biographies”. 10 June 2010 ‹http://www.cheechandchongfans.com/biography.html›. Borrie, Lee. "Wild Ones: Containment Culture and 1950s Youth Rebellion”. Diss. University of Canterbury, 2007.Butler, Judith. "Critically Queer”. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1.1 (1993): 17-32.Chavoya, C. Ondine. “Customized Hybrids: The Art of Ruben Ortiz Torres and Lowriding in Southern California”. 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