Journal articles on the topic 'Western Liberal Institute'

A central thesis of this paper is that the philosophical contradictions of liberal ideologies predispose states to institute unjust gender systems. I argue that postcolonial Caribbean states have inherited a complexity of social relations and structures from the Enlightenment discourses of Liberalism, yet they seem unaware that the discourses which created colonialism and Western expansion were themselves part of the Enlightenment project of modernity. In this paper I apply this theoretical framework to a historical analysis of gender systems in the twentieth-century Caribbean. The paper examines three distinct periods: 1900–37, 1937–50s and 1950s-90s, the transition from colonial to postcolonial modernizing societies, and attempts to generate a gendered analytical model which can be widely applied both within and outside of the region.

Diane F. Halpern is the Past-President of the American Psychological Association (APA) and Director of the Berger Institute for Work, Family, and Children and Professor of Psychology at Claremont McKenna College. Her earlier appointments include professor of psychology, Chair and Dean of Undergraduate Studies at California State University, San Bernardino. Her teaching, service to psychology, and research have been recognized with many awards, including the 2002 Outstanding Teaching Award from the Western Psychological Association, Wang Family Excellence Award, American Psychological Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching, Distinguished Career Contributions to Education and Training, G. Stanley Hall Lecture, and the Outstanding Professor Award from California State University-Statewide. Maureen McCarthy is the Director of Precollege and Undergraduate Programs for the APA. She provides leadership and management oversight of programs and initiatives to enhance the teaching and learning of psychology in high schools, community colleges, and undergraduate programs; coordinates programs with initiatives of national organizations, projects, and agencies that share the mission of enhancing teaching and faculty development; and initiates research pertaining to needs, achievements, and characteristics of undergraduate psychology. Effective spring 2005, she became a faculty member at Kennesaw State University, where she teaches experimental psychology and research methods.

The Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID) held its secondannual conference at Georgetown University on April 7, 2001. Students,diplomats, liberal professionals, investors, activists and academicians wereamong the guests at the conference cosponsored by GeorgetownUniversity's Center for Muslim Christian Understanding (CMCU), theInternational Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), and the Institute of GlobalCultural Studies.The conference theme, "Islam, Democracy and the Secularist State in thePost Modem Era" echoed in the presentations of Muslim scholars in thefollowing five panels: Islam and Democracy, The Secular State, Elementsof Democracy with Respect to Islam, Postmdernity, and Democracy inPractice and Islam in Context. A total of twenty presentations were madeby the panelists in these five sections.Since the CSID is a research organization with a membership ofacademics, entrepreneurs, Muslim intellectuals, liberal professionals andactivists committed to promoting democracy in the Muslim world, itsannual conferences and monthly publication "The Muslim Democrat" serveas a forum through which the relationship between Islam and democracy isdefined and democratic elements inherent in Islam are identified. As athink-tank dedicated to defining the historical and philosophical basis ofdemocracy and its compatibility with the elements of Islam, CSID'spresentations underscored justice, equality and tolerance as democraticconcepts intrinsic to Islamic principles.By outlining the historical development of secularism and its role inMuslim societies, the panelists did not only encourage Muslim activists toinstitutionalize democratic practices, but they also addressed Muslimscholars and activists from both the western and the Muslim worlds whoare convinced that Islam is incompatible with democracy. By presentingthe causes of problems inherent in secular trends in Muslim countries likeYemen, Jordan, Indonesia and Malaysia, and identifying the shortcomingsin their democratization process, CSID's presentations simultaneouslysought to convince both Islamists and secularists that democratic ideals andIslamic principles were compatible.Since a distinction must be made between the separation of church andstate and the separation of religion from politics in order to advance the ...

Intellectual potential of modern society is determined by application of new types of thinking, by development of new kinds of activities and new technologies. One of the results of implementation/exploitation of this potential is establishment of Culture, Social Communications and Information Technologies Institute at Baikal State University. The possibility of bringing together humanitarian and mathematical education within one university section is substantiated in this article. Examples are given how efficient mathematical methods can be used for some liberal arts studies. Implementation potential of mathematical methods in Mass Media in the light of modern trends of technology development is considered. It is shown by the example of major players of the Western Online Media market that Big Data technologies can not only significantly improve the accuracy of audience measurement but also influence the editorial policy of Media. The results of mathematical studies in the field of Mass Media at Baikal University are described.

A life of service to others ended on March 26, 2009, when professor emeritus George A. Warp of the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs of the University of Minnesota passed away at age 95. George was born on June 12, 1913, in Northfield, Ohio, and graduated from Bedford High School in Ohio. Prior to being associated with the University of Minnesota for the past 60 years, he graduated from Oberlin College, Case Western University, and Columbia University, earning degrees in political science, public administration, international administration, as well as law. George served briefly as a political science faculty member at the University of Minnesota, where he met and married his late wife, Lois, in 1940 before entering the U.S. Navy following the entry of the United States into World War II. His service in the Pacific theater led to his postwar appointment as a civilian advisor under General MacArthur in Japan from 1946–1948. Upon completion of that assignment, George returned to the University of Minnesota in 1948 as a professor of political science and served first as associate director and then director of the graduate program in public administration in the department's Public Administration Center until 1965 when the center became a self-standing unit of the College of Liberal Arts. He remained director through 1968 when the center was succeeded by the School of Public Affairs and recreated as the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs in 1978 as a collegiate unit named as a memorial honoring the late vice president and Minnesota's senator. George served as a professor and chair of graduate admissions until his retirement in 1982.

The legal and human rights of a LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) person has increased in countries around the world in recent years. For example, the UK Parliament passed the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act, which allowed same-sex marriage in England and Wales, in 2013 and it came into force the following year. There has also been a relaxation in the requirements for sex change. In the wake of such changes, international comparative studies and research has gained traction, with many academics establishing projects that seek to look at the differences in policies and rights for LGBT persons in different countries. However, much of the existing research is focused on Western legal policy and is generally centred on Europe and the US. Of course, this only accounts for a small proportion of the people in the world and so while such research is welcomed, knowledge gaps clearly still exist and more needs to be done to fill them. Associate Professor Hiroyuki Taniguchi, based at the Kanazawa University Institute of Liberal Arts and Science is working on a comparative study of LGBT legal policies in the countries of East Asia. He hopes to form an international comparative research centre that will help people access the information they need to understand their rights.

Elisabeth Özdalga's book is an important introduction to one of the issues that has been front-page news in Turkey since the 1980s. The most visible and controversial sign of the increasing participation in public discourse of Islamic revivalists has been the marked increase in numbers of women in urban spaces and institutions who wear the particular form of dress called tessetür, a public symbol of a personal commitment to a certain form of Islamic values. Özdalga's focus is timely and of interest to both a Turkish audience and a Western one, although it speaks mainly to the latter. The banning of the Islamist Welfare Party (Refah Partisi) from Turkish politics since the publication of the book, as well as the internationally noted furor surrounding the election to, and subsequent dismissal of, a headscarf-wearing woman in Parliament, show that what the author calls Turkey's “large-scale attempt to integrate Islam within the institutions of a modern, liberal democratic polity” (p. viii) continues to be a vitally important and controversial subject. Her book attends both to the symbolic power and legal status of women's clothing in public debate and to women's actual participation in the re-formations of public and private definitions of citizenship.

The article reveals the international cooperation of Taras Shevchenko Kyiv State University with scientific and educational institutions of Western countries in 1944–1975. It was noted that at the end of the Second World War (1944–1945), Kyiv University couldn’t establish ties with educational and scientific institutions of Western countries due to the reconstruction of the city and the university itself. During the period of post-war reconstruction (1946–1950), the Soviet-Western confrontation was added to the mentioned problems, which then turned into the Cold War. However, the liberal social and political changes in the USSR associated with de-Stalinization (1953–1956) and the Khrushchev «Thaw» (1956–1964) had a positive impact on the international activities of the Soviet higher school and KSU named T. G. Shevchenko. It is indicated that since the mid-1950s, delegations and individual scientists from France, Austria, Belgium, and Sweden began to visit Kyiv University. Since the second half of the 1950s, teachers and scientists from Finland and Great Britain, as well as Communist Party leaders, and representatives of student and trade union organizations from Western countries visited Kyiv University to give lectures and deliver scientific reports. However, in 1959–1960, plans for the teaching work of Taras Shevchenko Kyiv State University ​in the Great Britain universities remained unrealized. Nevertheless, since then, teachers and scientists of Kyiv University have actively participated in international scientific events held in Western countries (Madrid, Paris, London, Vienna, and Stockholm). Some teachers completed internships at universities in Italy, France, and Great Britain. Students also did internships in these countries. Mostly, these were senior-year students of the Faculty of Philology who were studying foreign languages. It is noted that the scientific works and teachers of Taras Shevchenko Kyiv State University were published abroad. Among them were Professor Mytropolskyi Yu. (in Great Britain and Sweden), Professor Vsekhsvyatskyi S. (in Great Britain and Belgium), Professor Bileckyi A. (in Greece), Professor Marynych O. (in Great Britain and Sweden) works. Scientists of Kyiv University worked with colleagues from universities and scientific institutions of the West on common scientific themes. The international book exchange of Kyiv State University, as of July 1, 1965, was held with such universities as the Taylor Institute at the University of Oxford, the University of Oslo, the Mathematical Institute at the University of Bonn, Liège (Belgium), Besanson and Cannes (France) universities, and also by the academies of sciences of Denmark and Ireland. The emergence of an international détente in the relations between the West and the USSR at the end of the 1960s had a positive effect on the ties of Taras Shevchenko Kyiv State University with the countries of the West. The number of their youth at Kyiv University continued to grow. Thus, if in 1969 one representative of a Belgian and a Frenchman studied at the university, then as of January 1, 1975, 60 students from the «capitalist countries» studied at the university. In turn, the cooperation of Taras Shevchenko Kyiv State University with educational and scientific institutions of Western countries in 1975–1991 remains understudied. However, this is the subject of the next scientific research.

After the collapse of the bipolar world, the neoliberal mainstream emerged in the global hierarchy of social sciences, built on three axiomatic pillars: Western domination, capitalism (free market) and liberalism (the value of individual autonomy). Nowadays, one can more and more often witness criticism and disintegration of the mainstream, which claimed the universality of descriptions and legitimation of modern societies that have reached the end of history in the form of open-access liberal market democracies. The purpose of the article is to find out how transformations of the prevailing political and economic orders, configurations of the subjects of geopolitical dominance and their legitimate metaphors determine the direction of changes in the social sciences mainstream. The hypothesis of the research is that the prevailing principles of stratification and distribution of public resources will be less and less valuable and institutionally related to capitalism, market and democracy, since an appeal to the latter does not lead to an increase in the available opportunities for the majority of the population in practice. The global change in social ontology, the structure of economic reproduction and legitimate foundations of the political order bring about a drop in the credibility and relevance of mainstream concepts focused on the axiomatics of market values and liberal rhetoric. Intellectual attempts to restore the relevance of the neoliberal mainstream through the construction of local utopias (flat world, creative class, knowledge economy, etc.), the introduction of complementary concepts of civil repair (J. Alexander), sociocultural trauma (P. Shtompka), unworthy government (bad governance), dependence on previous development (path dependence) or gauge (N. Rozov) do not save from growing conceptual stretch. Formation of a society without tangible economic growth and a declining need for mass labor leads to the inevitable transformation of the mainstream. Alternative and peripheral theories that describe the contours of a global future mainly in non-market, non-capitalist and, possibly, non-liberal categories are becoming more influential. These are concepts that fix new formats for the distribution of public resources, less and less connected with the market, democracy and hegemony of the West, but increasingly – with rental mechanisms, distributive political regulation and differentiated value of different social groups for the national state. Acknowledgements. The article has been supported by a grant of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR) and the Expert Institute of Social Research (“опн”). Project no. 20-011-31025 “Alternatives to Political Mainstream amidst the Crisis of the Global World Order”.

This article explores the sources of legitimacy of private property in the means of production in Ukraine. The conceptualization of legitimacy of private property was made by analyzing theoretical approaches to the study of the foundations of private property relations in Western countries. The application of these approaches tests economic utilitarian, psychological, and sociocultural explanations of legitimacy of large and small private enterprises and private land in the process of activation of post-communist transition of Ukrainian society. The basic hypothesis was that the process of legitimation of private property in the means of production proceeds by uniting utilitarian and psychological adaptation with sociocultural agreement of ideological attitudes. This hypothesis was verified with the help of created legitimacy indices by comparison of linear regressions and data of the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of Ukraine for 2013 and 2017. The results indicate that the hypothesis has been held true only concerning legitimacy of small private enterprises. They have acquired a moderate extent of legitimacy owing to the fact that besides the factors of adaptation, social recognition has increased at the expense of people who support the multiparty system and the liberal and mixed methods of regulation of the economy. In contrast, the existence of large private enterprises and private land has not acquired the corresponding sociocultural foundation.

The article tests the hypothesis, based on the concept of post-industrial society that people with higher education will be more politically active, especially in the manifestation of the demand for change. For this purpose, the materials of the All-Russian poll, organized in March 2021 by the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, are used to analyze the sociopolitical characteristics associated with political activism and the formation of a demand for change among different educational groups of Russians. The conclusion is made that, first, education in modern Russia does directly affect an individual's preparedness for political action: more educated Russians are more interested in the political life of the country and are more aware of their ability to influence the "rules of the game". Second, education does directly affect actual involvement in social and political activism. However, concerning conscious political participation, this effect relates not so much to everyday, regular, as to its extreme protest forms. Third, the education of Russians has no discernible correlation with the presence/absence of a liberal demand for change. In terms of meeting the minimum requirements for political participation, Russian educational groups currently correspond to the Western political science mainstream theory and the practices of developed countries. Nevertheless, the highlighted features of the political characteristics of Russians with higher and post-higher education (not all of the examined indicators are stable in dynamics, not all differences between educational groups are clearly expressed, and, in general, the participation of highly educated Russians in the political life of the country is rather formal) lead to the need for a more careful study of the findings not only of the Western scientific mainstream but also of alternative concepts of Third World researchers. In addition, it has been suggested that the emancipation of a group of highly educated Russians from the state is incomplete. Consequently, they are aware of their objectively central place and leading role in political life.

The article reveals the professional biography of Academician Alexander Dynkin, a prominent researcher of contemporary world economy and international relations, the seventh director of IMEMO. He has become the first representative of the post-war generation at the head of the Institute. His civic position is characterized by patriotism with adherence to democratic principles and liberal values. The son of a famous Soviet aircraft engine designer, A. Dynkin planned to continue his father’s career. After completing his studies at the prestigious Moscow Aviation Institute, Dynkin was included in the group of engineers engaged in the development of a project for manned flights to the Moon. When this project was unexpectedly closed at the beginning of 1972, Alexander Dynkin decided to change his profession. He passed the competition for the postgraduate study at IMEMO, where he prepared and in 1976 defended his first dissertation on the topic: “Economic Factors in the Creation and Operation of Civil Aviation Equipment in the United States”. Since that time, his life has become forever linked with IMEMO, where he has grown an outstanding researcher in the economic aspect of modern scientific and technological progress. In 1989, A. Dynkin successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on the topic: “A New Stage of the Scientific and Technological Revolution in the Capitalist Economy: Economic Content and Implementation Mechanism” at the Academic Council of IMEMO. The problematics, which Alexander Dynkin dealt with, were of particular relevance for the Soviet planned economy which was experiencing deep stagnation. Dynkin and his colleagues tried to find out means of overcoming this stagnation by accelerating scientific and technological progress; they looked for opportunities to adapt the Western experience in this area to Soviet economic realities. In the post-Soviet period, high professional qualities of Alexander Dynkin found a worthy application in economic practice. In 1998, he was invited as an economic advisor to Evgeny Primakov, the Prime Minister of Russia. Having returned to IMEMO a year later, Dynkin continued his scientific research and became an internationally recognized authority in world economy issues. Alexander Dynkin as a researcher has always combined fundamental and applied problems. The development of theoretical and practical aspects of the competitiveness of Russian economy, its integration into the world economy have been an important part of his activities. A. Dynkin proved himself to be not only a prominent researcher, but also an experienced organizer of the research process. Since 1989, he was Deputy Director of IMEMO, and in 2006 he was appointed as a Director of the Institute, which he successfully headed for ten years. Afterwards he became the President of IMEMO. Under his leadership, the Institute has confirmed its status as one of the world’s leading think tanks in the field of contemporary world economy and international relations studies.

Abstract The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik (DHfP, German Political Studies Institute) in Berlin both emerged extramurally. LSE was founded in 1895 by Fabian socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb; DHfP was established in 1920 by liberal-national publicists Ernst Jäckh and Theodor Heuss. However, superficial resemblances ended there, as shown in the paper’s first part. The founders’ aims differed markedly; incorporation into London and Berlin universities occurred at different times and in different ways. The chair of political science set up at LSE in 1914 was held, until 1950, by two reform-minded Fabians, Graham Wallas and Harold Laski. DHfP, which did not win academic recognition during the 1920s, split into nationalist, “functionalist”, and democratic “schools”. Against this backdrop, the paper’s second part discusses Harold Laski’s magnum opus (1925) A Grammar of Politics as an attempt at offering a vision of the “good society”, and Theodor Heuss’ 1932 study Hitler’s Course as an example of the divided Hochschule’s inability to provide adequate analytical assessments of the Nazi movement and of the gradual infringement, by established elites, of the Weimar constitution. Laski’s work and intellectual legacy reinforced the tendency towards the predominance, in British political science, of normative political theory. West German political science, initially pursued “from a Weimar perspective”, was also conceived as a highly normative enterprise emphasising classical political theory, the institutions and processes of representative government, and the problematic ideological and institutional predispositions peculiar to German political history. Against this background, the paper’s third part looks, on the one hand, at the contribution to “New Left” thinking (1961 ff.) by Ralph Miliband, who studied under Laski and taught at LSE until 1972, and at Paul Hirst’s 1990s theory of associative democracy, which builds on Laski’s pluralism. On the other hand, the paper considers Karl Dietrich Bracher’s seminal work The Failure of the Weimar Republic (1955) and Ernst Fraenkel’s 1964 collection Germany and the Western Democracies, which originated, respectively, from the (Research) Institute for Political Science – added to Berlin’s Free University in 1950 – and DHfP, re-launched in the same year. In a brief concluding fourth part, the paper touches on the reception, both in Great Britain and West Germany, of the approaches of “modern” American political science since the mid-1960s.

The article is devoted to the study of the relationship between the processes of erosion of the traditional norm vs deviation matrix in the public consciousness and changes in the position of Christian denominations and churches, new tendencies in theological research, canon law, social work, pastoral practice. The purpose of the work is to characterize the processes of diversification of Christian churches for their attitude towards homosexuality under the pressure of changes in the structure of social deviations and the liberalization of the Christian environment. The author defines the main types of historical stigma of homosexuality; characterizes changes in the public opinion of the population of traditionally Christian countries (based on the modern sociological studies); highlights the main innovations in the social doctrine and practice of various Christian denominations; and identifies the dominant trends in eastern and western Christianity in relation to homosexuality. It is substantiated that the contradiction between the official doctrine, the conservative position of the church hierarchy, on the one hand, and liberal tendencies in the public opinion of the secular community, on the other hand, are more or less common to all Christian denominations. The most difficult situation related the Roman Catholic Church, whose followers live in Western countries with a high level of tolerance for homosexuality. Under the pressure of changes in legal institutions, public morals and public opinion, the traditional Christian interpretation of homosexuality is filled with new connotations; changes were introduced in canon law, institute of spiritual education, other religious institutions; the church becomes more open to discuss problems that have long been taboo. Church policy and pastoral practice are based on the clear delineation of the concepts of "homosexuality", "acts of homosexuality", "homosexual inclinations", "homosexual intentions", "homosexual temptation", etc. It has been shown that despite the existing changes in rhetoric, canon law and church practice, the official position of churches is subject to constant critical attacks. Criticism refers not only to the "lack of" acts of homosexuality, the preservation of religious stigma of homosexuality as sin, the condemnation by the church of homosexual behavior, same-sex marriages and gay culture, but also the rooting of patterns of such behavior in monastic and priestly structures. An alternative to the official position of traditional Christian churches is the growing theological movement, which was called "Queer-Theology", which produces its own version of Christian anthropology. Processes of destroying of traditional structure of deviations in the globalized world, from one side, and processes of post-secularizing - from other, generate contradictory consequences for functioning of religious institutes; the palette of possible attitudes to homosexuality becomes complicated. Overall, the differently directed trends were done distinctly in western and east Christianity. In Catholicism, there are processes of liberalization of Christianity, the search for ways to adapt homosexuals to the religious environment, and in the problem field of Christian anthropology new theological interpretations of gender ethics are proposed. In the flow of Orthodoxy, especially of Russian, the fundamentalization and nationalization of Orthodoxy, the defense of the matrix of traditional values will preserve the religious stigma of homosexuality in the future. Research results can be drawn on in the courses of religious-studies and sociological disciplines; in research of the problems of social and religious deviation. Foreseeable assumptions about the development of the research object are finding the best ways to investigate the newest tendencies in attitude of Christian churches toward the social issues of the day; to provide comparative and cross-cultural analysis of processes of diversification of Christian environment.

This paper is an interview with Andrey V. Smirnov, Director of the Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences. The interview was dedicated to the broad set of issues that can all be characterized as relative to the umbrella topic of cultural patterns, the indispensability of cultural difference between nations and civilizations and the roots of such phenomena. Expressing the idea of specific mindsets and inherent value orientations, Andrey V. Smirnov adheres to the theoretical approach designed to underline these elements. The panhuman (vsechelovecheskoye) serves for these ends as well as the collective cognitive unconscious. The visions of panhuman oppose to the universalist paradigm (obshechelovecheskoye) and express concern about the drawbacks of cultural unification. Each culture shares one of these two approaches to a certain extent, and the viability of such cultures can be accessed with the view to the interests, goals and projects such cultures or nations nurture. All such phenomena stem from collective cognitive unconscious. Language as its signifier illustrates innate logical structures that also vary: while, for instance, the Arab thought runs on process-based logic that focuses on actions, European one represents substantial logic — that of the existential feeling. In this way all intercultural communication should take others’ visions and adopt to them, which is important not only for translators and interpreters, but also in the political sphere. Advocates of globalism and supranationalism are driven by ideas generated in the West and remain ignorant of the practices that are actually relevant in localities other than the USA or Western Europe. Many examples can be found in the societal shifts that Russia faces. The seemingly non-alternative modernisationalist initiatives that fall within the universalist liberal model are inadequate for the thought style and the corresponding institutional, authority and educational system. The most obvious examples of this deal with the digital sphere, but the cyber transformations as such are not imposing the universalist vision. Rather, it is the underlying culturally-rooted effects of the leverage the United States as the IT leader have and make use of. The questions on how these intercultural communications function now, what form should they take and the very transformations that burden self-sufficient cultures should be analyzed by philosophers. The realities of modern civilizations suggest that those who are set aside in the periphery raise voices and realize national subjectivity.

The main concept of the article consists in the idea that the crisis is faced not by liberalism as ideology, but by liberal democracy as social order type based on the consensus of mainstream political forces. The author analyzes the causes of the said crisis, the nature of the challenge to liberal democracy and the main features of non-liberal populist political forces. He comes to the conclusion that serious erosion of liberal democracy in the Western countries is under way, still the social order survives. The reason for that lies both in the ingrained liberal values and institutes, and in the failure of the non-liberal populist forces to offer an alternative development project, and thus the limited growth of their influence. In the long run the crisis overcoming depends on the ability of the West to solve fundamental economic problems that can be viewed as the initial cause of the crisis in politics.

The author traces and analyzes the career and activity of Academician Nodari Aleksandrovich Simoniyа (1932–2019), a prominent orientalist and expert in international relations who headed the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2000–2006. The article reveals the formation of the general worldview and academic views of N. Simoniа, assesses his contribution to the study of the East after the collapse of the colonial system and the formation of young independent states. The author acquaints the reader with the views of the Academician on the European, Asian and Russian revolutions, with his approach to understanding the processes of contemporary world development, explains his civil position, both under the Soviet regime and in post-Soviet Russia. N. Simonia combined a detailed knowledge of realities in the Eastern regions he studied – primarily Southeast Asia – with a deep theoretical approach to the study of complex processes in the East after the end of World War II. Over time, the interests of the Academician went beyond the East, to which he devoted several decades of research. At the turn of the 1990s‑2000s, his attention was attracted by the problems of global world development, as well as the development of post-Soviet Russia. All the works of N. Simonia – he published 18 books and dozens of articles in Russian and foreign academic journals – were written by him, as he himself admitted, on the basis of the Marxist methodology. But Simonia’s Marxism had nothing in common with vulgar ideas in Bolsheviks’ teachings of Marx and their “theory of Marxism-Leninism”. At the same time, the Academician criticized not only Stalin and Lenin, but also Marx himself, who succeeded only in deep analysis of contemporary pre-monopoly capitalism. N. Simonia criticized the Soviet model of socialism as well, believing that there has never been any real socialism in the USSR. He was equally critical of the “liberal” turn of the Russian intellectual elite after 1991, blaming its radical faction, which influenced President Boris Yeltsin, for instilling in Russia a model of the “worst”, as he wrote, “the most parasitic version of bureaucratic capitalism”. For Simonia, the latter was associated with Indonesia under Sukarno. But even there, not to mention Japan and South Korea, the business elite has never been antipatriotic, as it happened in modern Russia. In his opinion, the Russian model of capitalism turned out to be unlike either the Western or the Eastern model, and the modernization, which Russia urgently needs, is inseparable from genuine democratization, but should not represent an imitation of democracy, as is the case.

Formulation of the problem: The features of model of presidencialism in modern terms, possibility of application of presidencialism in democracy are analysed in the article. Analis of concept: politics, decision of political conflicts. The political factors of political strategies of presidencialism are considered, of institute of the president, as subject of conceptual power and democratic political system, as its object is investigated. It is shown, that the real model of political system contains oligarchic and antiolygarchic components, each of which can become prevailing. Purpose of the research: The purpose of the article is to carry out a theoretical and methodological analysis of the essence of the presidency as a subject of conceptual power in democratic political systems, to identify the structure of conceptual power, its role and place in the political system of society, to identify trends and to analyze the role of the processes of oligarchization in the functioning of democratic political systems, to uncover conceptual functions of the institution of presidency in western democratic political systems. The conceptual management of political system, preservation its of democratic definiteness, is a major task of presidential power. Using theoretical models D. Easton, E. Sedov, theory of needs A. Maslow and theory of social mobility of P. Sorokin has allowed to reveal static and dynamic parameters of political system, which optimization enables to support evolutionary character of political development.There are several alternative concepts of democracy. At the same time, one of them is legally codified and reigns. That is why political power is usually forced to act in an anti-democratic way on an alternative concept. Institutions of state power, thanks to sustainability, mobility and resource intensiveness, can support and even impose those norms and goals that are not entirely in the interests of society as integrity, or vice versa – the interests of individual, usually the most active individuals and social groups are not taken into account and even sacrificed in general. There is a significant imbalance of interests that threatens the existence of a democratic social system. Consequently, the task arises to develop objective indicators, which should be guided by the head of state, in order to assess the favorable or unfavorable tendencies in the political system.The purpose of the article and the task. Research methods: The following research methods were used to address the issues set in the article: general scientific methods – descriptive, hermeneutic-political, systemic, structural-functional, comparative, institutional-comparative; general logical methods – empirical, statistical, prognostic modeling and analysis; special methods of political science. The preference was given to the method of political-system analysis, by which the common and distinctive characteristics of the basic components of soft power strategies were identified, reflecting existing political, public, information and other challenges and global development. For empirical research, the factual basis was used, which was compiled by an expert survey of Ukrainian specialists-political scientists. Practical and systematic methods were used to analyze the system of relations from four perspectives: influence presidents power. Functional and general historiographical methods were also used. Methods of analysis and synthesis allowed exploring the features. In order to implement these methods, such methodological techniques as analogy, comparison, generalization and extrapolation were used. The method for analyzing the situation (studying documents, comparing, etc.) was used to study international and political processes in the USA, exploratory methods (in particular, content analysis) for the analysis of high-level documents and speeches, which in turn helped identify and outline the trends in foreign policy of the countries of the region. Conclusions. The experience of western (Western, liberal-democratic) political systems suggests that the function of supporting the democratic model of the political system is the responsibility of the president. In this case, the president plays the role of either the head of the executive (political manager of the higher rank), or the formal head of state, or these functions combine. In the context of the political crisis, the president takes steps to preserve the democratic system of society. The complex of these activities includes the function of supporting the democratic nature of the political system.

We look here at the work and action pertaining to the regulation of migrations of international lawyers belonging to the Institut de Droit International (IDI) during the four decades before the First World War. We show that interest for the rights of foreigners in western states and the circulation of people derived both from the liberal agenda these lawyers shared and the will to regulate the interactions between states that could produce conflict. The idi devised during that period a coherent set of rules and recommendations insisting on a minimal protection of refugees, and the necessity of granting foreigners and nationals equal civil rights. The position of power the members of this liberal network shared enabled them shortly before the First World War to ensure that some of these provisions became shared legal norms, even if for a short time and only for some European states.

The paper focuses on the birth of Hungarian cultural diplomacy in the interwar period. Hungary had relatively high prestige in the Western liberal newspapers and journals before the first world war, but the problems with electoral reforms and minority issues dramatically changed this situation. This change together with the results of the first world war lead to the Trianon peace treaty. The Hungarian politicians planned to restore the international prestige of the country by the active cultural and scientific diplomacy. Count Kuno Klebelsberg played the crucial role in this process. He served as conservative minister of education and religion across ten years. The network of Collegium Hungaricum and the institutes for history in Berlin, Rome and Vienna represented the main form of Hungarian foreign representation. Hungary also subsided the university departments and lecturers of Hungarian language working abroad very actively this time. The parliament adopted the main legal norm of cultural policy in 1927. This norm regulated the work of cultural-scientific institutes operating abroad and also the system of Hungarian fellowships. The cultural diplomacy was the domain of the educational ministry instead the foreign office. This diplomacy represented the very successful form of foreign activities of Hungarian state.

This paper explores the approach to religious education that has been instituted in Russia since 2012. The new policy’s manifestly proclaimed goals seem convergent with the values of religious freedom, self-determination, tolerance, and inter-faith peace that are espoused by Western liberal democracies. Yet Russia’s hidden religious education curriculum is far more consistent with a neo-imperial model of ethno-religious (Russian Orthodox) hegemony and limited toleration of selected, other faiths whose reach is restricted to politically peripheral ethno-territorial entities. This model embodies and revitalizes Russia’s imperial legacies. Yet the revitalization is, in itself, an outcome of strategic choices made by the country’s religious and secular elites in the course of its desecularization. Building on discourse analysis of five Russian textbooks and a teacher’s manual, this article shows how the neo-imperial model manifests itself in the suppression of exogenous and endogenous pluralism, cultivation of the ideology of “ethnodoxy”, and in essentially imperialist mythology. The paper concludes by predicting the new model’s potential instability.

Background. At the beginning of the 1920’s, after establishing the borders of the restored Polish State, its eastern territories were dominated by the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian populations, and in the western part, a significant percentage were Germans. Accordingly, the state faced the problem of developing a constructive policy towards national minorities. Purpose. The article analyzes the attitude of the Polish intellectual elite to the prob-lem of national minorities, whose opinions were partially reflected in a poll conducted in July and August 1924 by the liberal Warsaw newspaper “Kurjer Polski”. The discussion intensified, in particular, due to the expiration of the government’s commitment to give Eastern Galicia autonomy, the preparation of a government law on education (known as Lex Grabski). Results. The opening of a Ukrainian university was a part of the problem. At the request of the government, the academic community of the Jagiellonian University expressed its views in June, which generally welcomed the idea of opening a separate Ukrainian university in Lviv, Warsaw or Krakow. “Kurjer Polski” published reflections of intellectuals representing different regions of the country and political currents: socialists (A. Śliwiński – Warsaw), nationalists (S. Bukowiecki – Vilno), conservatives (Fr. Bossowsky, T. Dembowsky – Vilno; E. Hauswald – Lviv ). The basis for solving the problem at that time, most authors called the provisions of the March 1921 Constitution on the main democratic rights of citizens, unanimously called for creating opportunities for cultural and national development of national minorities, hoping for the consolidation of the state. It was emphasized the need to take into account the individual characteristics of each minority and regional specifics. In particular, E. Hauswald considered the experience of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy of the early twentieth century as an example of solving the problem (Moravian Compensation 1905 and The Bukovinian Compromise 1910). Quite controversial about the essence of Belarusian (Belarusians are not a nation that encompasses all segments of society, but only the mass of the peasantry is devoid of any political ambitions; Belarusian language is a set of dialects that makes a gradual transition from Russian to Polish; literary Belarusian lan-guage is artificially created, the population does not understand it) and Ukrainian (did not deny the existence of political ambitions, but emphasized the significant differences in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia and dependence on external support) national movements were the reflections of Fr. Bossovsky, who, however, supported the idea of granting national minorities freedom of cultural development. Lviv lawyer J. Makarewicz (representative of the Christian Democrats) called for a policy of state assimilation towards Ukrainians and Belarusians, tactics of “state indifference” towards Jews, Russians and Germans. However, despite the existence of such ideas in the Polish intellectual environment, government circles have chosen the concept of a unitary mono-national state. As early as July 1924, a law on education was passed, many articles of which were aimed at discriminating against national minorities. And further changes in the political life of the country only exacerbated the problem, which was not solved throughout the interwar period. Keywords: Fr. Bossowski, S. Bukowiecki, T. Dembowski, interwar Poland, E. Hauswald, Kurjer Polski, J. Makarewicz, national question, A. Śliwiński. A never-extinguishing volcano, 1924. Kurjer Polski, May 31, р.2. (In Polish) Announcement of the National Electoral Commission on November 24, 1930, s. 1. [online] Avialable at: http://isap.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/download.xsp/ WMP19302720369/ O/M19300369. pdf [Accessed 15 march 2021]. (In Polish) Baran, Z., 1998. On the question of the agrarian policy of the governments of interwar Poland towards Western Ukraine. Visnyk of the Lviv University, 33. Series History. Lviv, pp.146–153. (In Ukrainian) Baran, Z., 2011. Julian Makarevich’s socio-political views. In: Historical sights of Galicia. Proceedings of the fifth scientific conference on local history, 12 november 2010. Lviv, рр.188–198. (In Ukrainian) Bezuk, O., 2019. The reaction of the Western Ukrainian and world community to the death of Olga Levitska-Basarab. In: The modern movement of science: theses add. VII In-ternational Scientific and Practical Internet Conference, 6–7 june 2019. Dnipro, pp.75–81. (In Ukrainian) Bojarski, Р., 2015. Piłsudski’s May Coup in commentaries of “Dziennik Wileński” journalists. The Scientific Journals of the Learned Society of Ostrołęka, 29, рр.101–114. (In Polish) Bohachevsky-Chomiak, М., 1981. The Ukrainian university in Galicia. Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 5(4). Published by Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, pp.497–545. (In English) Bossowski, F., 1924. Any irritating policy must be abandoned. Kurjer Polski, August 24, р.3. (In Polish) Bukowiecki, S., 1922. The policy of independent Poland. Essay of the program. War-saw: Ignis S.A. (In Polish) Bukowiecki, S., 1924. Providing cultural development for minorities unites them with the State. Kurjer Polski, July 4, р.2. (In Polish) Czekaj, К., 2011. Artur Śliwiński (1877–1953). Politician, publicist, historian. Warsaw. (In Polish) Dąbrowski, P., 2020. Belarussian and Jewish issues in the political and legal thought of polish groups in Vilnius in the first years of independence – selected issues. Studia juridica Lublinensia, 29(4). Pomeranian University in Slupsk, pp.59–70. (In English) Dembowski, T., 1924. May everyone in Poland be fine. Kurjer Polski, August 10, р.4. (In Polish) Do you know who it is?, 1938. S. Łozа, ed. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Głównej księgarni wojskowej. [online] Avialable at: https://prokuratoria.gov.pl/index.php?p=m&idg=m3,113 [Accessed 23 march 2021] (In Polish) Hauswald, Е., 1924. It is necessary to adhere to the principles of fairness and compre-hensive tolerance. Kurjer Polski, August 7, р.2. (In Polish) Hud, B., 2018. From the history of ethnosocial conflicts. Ukrainians and Poles in the Dnieper region, Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in the XIX–first half of the XX century. Harkiv: Akta. (In Ukrainian) Holzer, J. 1974. Political mosaic of the Second Polish Republic. Warsaw: Książka і Wiedza. (In Polish) Jászi, O., 1929. The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy. Chicago–Illinois: The University of Chicago Press. [online] Avialable at: https://ia801603.us.archive.org/33/ items/in.ernet.dli.2015.151077/2015.151077.The-Dissolution-Of-The-Habsburg Monar-chy.pdf [Accessed 15 march 2021]. (In English) Kakareko, A., 2002. To restore the state myth: reception of the Jagiellonian heritage in the environment of the Club of Tramps Seniors in Vilnius in the 1930s. In: Poles and neighbors – distances and the interpenetration of cultures: a collection of studies, part 3. R. Wapiński, еd. Ostaszewo Gdańskie: Stepan design. (In Polish) Krykun, M. and Zashkilnyak, L., 2002. History of Poland. From ancient times to the present days. Lviv: Ivan Franko National University in Lviv. (in Ukrainian). Krzywobłocka, B., 1974. Christian Democrats 1918–1937. Warsaw: Książka і Wiedza. (In Polish) Kurjer Polski, 1924a. May 21. (In Polish) Kurjer Polski, 1924b. May 23. (In Polish) Kurjer Polski, 1924c. July 4. (In Polish) Makarewicz, J., 1924. Minorities. Lviv: Chrześcijańska Spółka Wydawnicza, 1924. (In Polish) Malycka, K., 1924. About Olga Levitsky Bessarabova. Dilo. February 23. (In Ukraini-an) Minutes of a conference held 11–12 july 1924, at the polish Ministry of Religions and Education, 1981. In: Bohachevsky-Chomiak, М., 1981. The Ukrainian university in Gali-cia. Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 5(4). Published by Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, doc.3, pp.524–527. (In Polish) More than independence, 2001. Polish political thought 1918–1939. J. Jachymek and W. Paruch, ed. science. Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej. (In Polish) Mudryj, V., 1948. Ukrainian University in Lviv in 1921–1925. Nurenberg: Czas. (In Ukrainian) National-State Union, 1922. Program declaration. June 28. [online] Avialable at: https://polona.pl/item/deklaracja-programowa-inc-polska-jako-narod-ani-na-chwile-nie-przestawala-istniec,NjIxNjY2NzE/0/#info:metadata [Accessed 15 march 2021]. (In Polish) Orman, E., 1989–1991. Rosner Ignacy Juliusz (1865–1926). Polish Biographical Dictionary, Vol.32. Romiszewski Aleksander – Rudowski Jan. Wrocław: National Institute of Ossolińskich – Publishing House of the Polish Academy of Sciences, рр.106–110. 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Lviv: Triada plus. (In Ukrainian) Smith, A. D., 1994. National Identity. Translate from English by P. Tarashchuk. Kyiv: Osnovy. (In Ukrainian) Stourzh, G., 2019. Equality of nationalities in the constitution and public administration of Austria (1848–1918). S. Paholkiv, ed. Lviv: Piramida. (In Ukrainian) Śliwiński, А., 1924. Nationalist chauvinism is the greatest obstacle to solving the matter. Kurjer Polski, August 19, р.4. (In Polish) The results of the census, 1910. Vom 31. In the Kingdoms and Countries represented in the Imperial Council – The summary results of the census. [online] Avialable at: https://anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/anno-plus?aid=ost&datum =0001&page=168 [Ac-cessed 12 april 2021]. (In German) Zashkilnyak, L., 1997. Genesis and consequences of the Ukrainian-Polish normaliza-tion in 1935. In: Poland and Ukraine – the Alliance of 1920 and its aftermath. Materials from the scientific conference “Poland and Ukraine – the Alliance of 1920 and its after-math”. 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The Modern Western state is characterized by unmediated individual access to wellness, health, safety and liberal human rights. The Newtonian conception of space and time makes formal room for a discursive public area with the citizen and the public institutes in the margin, while participation and ethical responsibility is a prejudice of good citizenship. It is a necessary condition of consistency and coherence of the nation. To date, global migration and multiculturalism threaten those necessary basic conditions of Western states´ political equilibrium. To challenge the actual global phenomena national states transform into virtual places of fear dominated by cybernetics, digital bureaucracy while citizen’s identity is mirrored by the efficiency and unisexual beauty ideal of cyborgs. The substantive conception of technology is government’s tool box to realize the cyberstate while citizen reduce to “cytizen”.In order to escape from this global grey, we propose a different conception of space and time namely the Leibnizian conception of pluralistic independent participating worlds. Moreover, we modify Leopold’s Land-Ethics by introducing the transpersonal identification claim of Warwick Fox inside the common Land so-called eco-homeland while the care for the foreigner serves as paradigmatic core attitude to all participants of the eco-homeland. So we constitute a common eco-refuge, similar to the ideas of Bookchin´s eco- anarchistic ideas but avoiding his dialectic ideal conception of the Land and its participants.

In Britain, as in many other western countries, there emerged in the mid-1970s a variety of business associations, policy and research institutes and political leagues, committed not only to the restoration of a Conservative government, but also to a much broader refurbishing of conservatism. A network of organizations, individuals and ideas grew up that became identified as the New Right. The New Right, which clearly has an international character, was generated by economic and political crises, but it was nurtured by a variety of resentments and discontents whose roots lay in structural and cultural changes that had developed over the whole post-war period. Drawing, in part, upon interviews with leaders of the organisations that did most to mobilize opinion behind the New Right in Britain, the article examines the major changes – particularly those in class structure and in culture – to which the new conservatives were reacting. It explores the major ideological strands – libertarian, neo-liberal and conservative – and looks at the attempts by the New Right to use these to produce changes not only in economic policy but in the cultural and moral fabric of society.

The article analyzes the creative heritage of members of the opposition aristocratic front of northern Ukraine – the works of the brothers N. and G. Volk-Karachevsky, the absolute majority of which are being introduced to international scientific circulation for the first time. The author comes to the conclusion that the discovered set of works of the brothers N. and G. Volk-Karachevskyi is a unique primary source from the history of the Zemstvo liberal movement in the north of Left Bank Ukraine (60-80s of the 19th century). The main issues of N. Volk-Karachevskyi’s works were the development of public education and the progress of agriculture. Nikodym Nikodymovych insisted on the priority free education of the poorest strata of the population – the peasantry, especially former serfs. In the field of agricultural production, the well-known liberal advocated the imperatives of urgent irrigation of the land fund of the Russian Empire, the formation of a purposeful strategy of Zemstvo institutes to improve the economic situation of the peasantry, the introduction of the positions of Zemstvo agronomists and technicians with appropriate official status and financial support, a strategic reference point for the perspective of the union of the peasantry, the liberal nobility and democratic intelligentsia in the struggle against the regime of Russian absolutism. The small number of publications by N. Volk-Karachevskyi were devoted to the problems of the development of the agricultural industry, which were little known at that time. The oppositionist insisted on the need to borrow the progressive experience of the countries of Western Europe, such as France, where a powerful system of agricultural education was built: from primary and higher education institutions to specialized scientific institutions. It is necessary to note separately the manifestation of the national enzyme in the journalism of the authors. Articulated allusions to the history of the statehood of the so-called Little Russia – the imperial name of a part of Ukrainian ethnic lands; their past economic and industrial glory; careful, but transparent wishes regarding the use of the dominant language in the territory of northern Ukraine, clearly indicate that the ethnic component occupied not the last place in the programmatics of the researched current of the liberation movement in the Russian Empire of the second half of the 19th century. In general, the discovered works of the brothers N. and G. Volk-Karachevsky clearly reflect the social program of the Zemstvo liberal party of the Northern Left Bank and illustrate the political and ideological imperatives of the opposition aristocratic front of the region.

Traditionally the phenomenon of the European integration towards South East Europe is regarded starting from the XXI century. The explanation for such a periodization are resolution of the open conflicts on the territory of the former Yugoslavia and implementation of the complex EU strategy for the region. Starting point of the majority of researches is the year of 2003 when the EU Agenda for the Western Balkans was started in Thessaloniki. The topic of EEC-Yugoslavia relations, SFRY having been first socialist country to institutionalize its trade and economic relations with Brussels, are unfairly ignored in domestic and foreign scientific literature. It is regarded solely as a chronological period of trade agreements. Nevertheless, this issue is of fundamental importance for understanding the current neighborhood of the European Union. The main thesis the author proves is that in the 1960s and 1980s as it is the case nowadays, the main imperative of Brussels' policy towards the Balkans was to prevent Moscow from increasing its influence. This led to the formation of a very specific format of relations with Belgrade and was one of the reasons why the economic crisis in Yugoslavia became extreme and its economy irreformable. In addition, at a later and structurally much more complicated stage of relations between the countries of the former Yugoslavia and the European Union the specificity and main components of relations of the Cold War period did not fundamentally change. As for the policy of so-called containment of the external actors one could see that besides Moscow, we can speak about similar attitude of the EU towards China. It makes it possible to consider the EU policy towards the countries of the former Yugoslavia in the paradigm of neoclassical realism, rather than in the paradigm of traditional liberal European integration approaches which allows us to unite neorealists elements with the specifics of internal processes, including the modernization of institutes, relations between society and state, types of political leadership.

Abstract Gallstone disease is known in 10-15% of adults in Western populations. Cholangiopancreatography (MRCP) is the investigation of choice for choledocholithiasis; however, its use is varied, and guidelines are not well defined. The National Institute for Health and Care (NICE) guidelines recommends MRCP to be done when common bile duct (CBD) dilatation ≥ 8mm or liver function tests (LFTs) are abnormal but do not quantify this further. The liberal use of magnetic resonance cholangiopancreatography (MRCP) is gaining popularity as a roadmap prior to cholecystectomy, aiming to assess primarily for the presence of migrated gallstones within the cystic duct or common bile duct, as well as providing information regarding the anatomical features of the extrahepatic biliary tree on an individualised basis .Due to these reasons MRCP’s at times are done unnecessarily which creates economic burden and restricts access to patients in real need of imaging slots The aim of this retrospective study was to identify whether magnetic resonance cholangiopancreatography (MRCP) can be used selectively in patients with deranged liver enzymes with gallstone disease to detect choledocholithiasis, based on liver function tests (LFTs) and ultrasonography appearance.

In his “Science as Vocation,” Weber equates rational academic conduct with Jewish ethics. For Weber, the Jewish tradition, which separates moral conduct from messianism, is emblematic of scientists’ strenuous distinction of empiricism from metaphysics. The emergence of a Zionist university in Jerusalem, an institute that was positioned as a part of a Jewish nation-building project, complicated this parallel. This article examines Gershom Scholem's activist approach to Jewish studies as a fundamental revision of the Weberian model of scholarship with the significant role that this model destines to the Jewish tradition. Scholem's vision of scholarship at the Zionist university constitutes Jewish eschatology as a pillar of a scholastic national tradition. Scholem's portrayal of Jewish messianism as an insular tradition overturns Weber's portrayal of Jewish ethics as a lesson for Western academia. Reading Scholem with Weber shows that the enterprise of founding a university in Jerusalem ran counter to European liberal conceptions of Judaism. Moreover, reading them together shows Scholem's notion of academic labor to reinstitute a separatist theological ethos as a formative model for scholarship.

Background: Gallstone disease is known in 10-15% of adults in Western populations. Magnetic resonance cholangiopancreatography (MRCP) is the investigation of choice for choledocholithiasis; however, its use is varied, and guidelines are not well defined. The National Institute for Health and Care (NICE) guidelines recommends MRCP to be done when common bile duct (CBD) dilatation ≥8 mm or liver function tests (LFTs) are abnormal but do not quantify this further. The liberal use of MRCP is gaining popularity as a roadmap prior to cholecystectomy, aiming to assess primarily for the presence of migrated gallstones within the cystic duct or common bile duct, as well as providing information regarding the anatomical features of the extrahepatic biliary tree on an individualised basis. Due to these reasons MRCP at times is done unnecessarily which creates economic burden and restricts access to patients in real need of imaging slots. Methods: It is hospital based retrospective observational study. Time frame was July 2021 to July 2022 and sample size was 230 patients. Results: Our study showed that isolated elevated alanine aminotransferase (ALT) level should not be reason to evaluate patients for choledocholithiasis. It concluded that elevated serum bilirubin levels, alkaline phosphatase (ALP) and gamma glutamyl transferase (GGT) are the strongest predictors of CBD stones in patients with gallstone disease and hence can be used to triage patients for undergoing MRCP. Conclusions: To conclude elevated serum bilirubin levels, ALP and GGT are the strongest predictors of CBD stones in patients with gallstone disease and hence can be used to triage patients for undergoing MRCP. Isolated elevated ALT should not be a reason to evaluate patients for CBD stones.

In its preamble, The Western Australian Charter of Multiculturalism (WA) commits the state to becoming: “A society in which respect for mutual difference is accompanied by equality of opportunity within a framework of democratic citizenship”. One of the principles of multiculturalism, as enunciated in the Charter, is “equality of opportunity for all members of society to achieve their full potential in a free and democratic society where every individual is equal before and under the law”. An important element of this principle is the “equality of opportunity … to achieve … full potential”. The implication here is that those who start from a position of disadvantage when it comes to achieving that potential deserve more than ‘equal’ treatment. Implicitly, equality can be achieved only through the recognition of and response to differential needs and according to the likelihood of achieving full potential. This is encapsulated in Kymlicka’s argument that neutrality is “hopelessly inadequate once we look at the diversity of cultural membership which exists in contemporary liberal democracies” (903). Yet such a potential commitment to differential support might seem unequal to some, where equality is constructed as the same or equal treatment regardless of differing circumstances. Until the past half-century or more, this problematic has been a hotly-contested element of the struggle for Civil Rights for African-Americans in the United States, especially as these rights related to educational opportunity during the years of racial segregation. For some, providing resources to achieve equal outcomes (rather than be committed to equal inputs) may appear to undermine the very ethos of liberal democracy. In Australia, this perspective has been the central argument of Pauline Hanson and her supporters who denounce programs designed as measures to achieve equality for specific disadvantaged groups; including Indigenous Australians and humanitarian refugees. Nevertheless, equality for all on all grounds of legally-accepted difference: gender, race, age, family status, sexual orientation, political conviction, to name a few; is often held as the hallmark of progressive liberal societies such as Australia. In the matter of religious freedoms the situation seems much less complex. All that is required for religious equality, it seems, is to define religion as a private matter – carried out, as it were, between consenting parties away from the public sphere. This necessitates, effectively, the separation of state and religion. This separation of religious belief from the apparatus of the state is referred to as ‘secularism’ and it tends to be regarded as a cornerstone of a liberal democracy, given the general assumption that secularism is a necessary precursor to equal treatment of and respect for different religious beliefs, and the association of secularism with the Western project of the Enlightenment when liberty, equality and science replaced religion and superstition. By this token, western nations committed to equality are also committed to being liberal, democratic and secular in nature; and it is a matter of state indifference as to which religious faith a citizen embraces – Wiccan, Christian, Judaism, etc – if any. Historically, and arguably more so in the past decade, the terms ‘democratic’, ‘secular’, ‘liberal’ and ‘equal’ have all been used to inscribe characteristics of the collective ‘West’. Individuals and states whom the West ascribe as ‘other’ are therefore either or all of: not democratic; not liberal; or not secular – and failing any one of these characteristics (for any country other than Britain, with its parliamentary-established Church of England, headed by the Queen as Supreme Governor) means that that country certainly does not espouse equality. The West and the ‘Other’ in Popular Discourse The constructed polarisation between the free, secular and democratic West that values equality; and the oppressive ‘other’ that perpetuates theocracies, religious discrimination and – at the ultimate – human rights abuses, is a common theme in much of the West’s media and popular discourse on Islam. The same themes are also applied in some measure to Muslims in Australia, in particular to constructions of the rights of Muslim women in Australia. Typically, Muslim women’s dress is deemed by some secular Australians to be a symbol of religious subjugation, rather than of free choice. Arguably, this polemic has come to the fore since the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001. However, as Aly and Walker note, the comparisons between the West and the ‘other’ are historically constructed and inherited (Said) and have tended latterly to focus western attention on the role and status of Muslim women as evidence of the West’s progression comparative to its antithesis, Eastern oppression. An examination of studies of the United States media coverage of the September 11 attacks, and the ensuing ‘war on terror’, reveals some common media constructions around good versus evil. There is no equal status between these. Good must necessarily triumph. In the media coverage, the evil ‘other’ is Islamic terrorism, personified by Osama bin Laden. Part of the justification for the war on terror is a perception that the West, as a force for good in this world, must battle evil and protect freedom and democracy (Erjavec and Volcic): to do otherwise is to allow the terror of the ‘other’ to seep into western lives. The war on terror becomes the defence of the west, and hence the defence of equality and freedom. A commitment to equality entails a defeat of all things constructed as denying the rights of people to be equal. Hutcheson, Domke, Billeaudeaux and Garland analysed the range of discourses evident in Time and Newsweek magazines in the five weeks following September 11 and found that journalists replicated themes of national identity present in the communication strategies of US leaders and elites. The political and media response to the threat of the evil ‘other’ is to create a monolithic appeal to liberal values which are constructed as being a monopoly of the ‘free’ West. A brief look at just a few instances of public communication by US political leaders confirms Hutcheson et al.’s contention that the official construction of the 2001 attacks invoked discourses of good and evil reminiscent of the Cold War. In reference to the actions of the four teams of plane hijackers, US president George W Bush opened his Address to the Nation on the evening of September 11: “Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts” (“Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation”). After enjoining Americans to recite Psalm 23 in prayer for the victims and their families, President Bush ended his address with a clear message of national unity and a further reference to the battle between good and evil: “This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace. America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day. Yet, we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world” (“Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation”). In his address to the joint houses of Congress shortly after September 11, President Bush implicated not just the United States in this fight against evil, but the entire international community stating: “This is the world’s fight. This is civilisation’s fight” (cited by Brown 295). Addressing the California Business Association a month later, in October 2001, Bush reiterated the notion of the United States as the leading nation in the moral fight against evil, and identified this as a possible reason for the attack: “This great state is known for its diversity – people of all races, all religions, and all nationalities. They’ve come here to live a better life, to find freedom, to live in peace and security, with tolerance and with justice. When the terrorists attacked America, this is what they attacked”. While the US media framed the events of September 11 as an attack on the values of democracy and liberalism as these are embodied in US democratic traditions, work by scholars analysing the Australian media’s representation of the attacks suggested that this perspective was echoed and internationalised for an Australian audience. Green asserts that global media coverage of the attacks positioned the global audience, including Australians, as ‘American’. The localisation of the discourses of patriotism and national identity for Australian audiences has mainly been attributed to the media’s use of the good versus evil frame that constructed the West as good, virtuous and moral and invited Australian audiences to subscribe to this argument as members of a shared Western democratic identity (Osuri and Banerjee). Further, where the ‘we’ are defenders of justice, equality and the rule of law; the opposing ‘others’ are necessarily barbaric. Secularism and the Muslim Diaspora Secularism is a historically laden term that has been harnessed to symbolise the emancipation of social life from the forced imposition of religious doctrine. The struggle between the essentially voluntary and private demands of religion, and the enjoyment of a public social life distinct from religious obligations, is historically entrenched in the cultural identities of many modern Western societies (Dallmayr). The concept of religious freedom in the West has evolved into a principle based on the bifurcation of life into the objective public sphere and the subjective private sphere within which individuals are free to practice their religion of choice (Yousif), or no religion at all. Secularism, then, is contingent on the maintenance of a separation between the public (religion-free) and the private or non- public (which may include religion). The debate regarding the feasibility or lack thereof of maintaining this separation has been a matter of concern for democratic theorists for some time, and has been made somewhat more complicated with the growing presence of religious diasporas in liberal democratic states (Charney). In fact, secularism is often cited as a precondition for the existence of religious pluralism. By removing religion from the public domain of the state, religious freedom, in so far as it constitutes the ability of an individual to freely choose which religion, if any, to practice, is deemed to be ensured. However, as Yousif notes, the Western conception of religious freedom is based on a narrow notion of religion as a personal matter, possibly a private emotional response to the idea of God, separate from the rational aspects of life which reside in the public domain. Arguably, religion is conceived of as recognising (or creating) a supernatural dimension to life that involves faith and belief, and the suspension of rational thought. This Western notion of religion as separate from the state, dividing the private from the public sphere, is constructed as a necessary basis for the liberal democratic commitment to secularism, and the notional equality of all religions, or none. Rawls questioned how people with conflicting political views and ideologies can freely endorse a common political regime in secular nations. The answer, he posits, lies in the conception of justice as a mechanism to regulate society independently of plural (and often opposing) religious or political conceptions. Thus, secularism can be constructed as an indicator of pluralism and justice; and political reason becomes the “common currency of debate in a pluralist society” (Charney 7). A corollary of this is that religious minorities must learn to use the language of political reason to represent and articulate their views and opinions in the public context, especially when talking with non-religious others. This imposes a need for religious minorities to support their views and opinions with political reason that appeals to the community at large as citizens, and not just to members of the minority religion concerned. The common ground becomes one of secularism, in which all speakers are deemed to be indifferent as to the (private) claims of religion upon believers. Minority religious groups, such as fundamentalist Mormons, invoke secular language of moral tolerance and civil rights to be acknowledged by the state, and to carry out their door-to-door ‘information’ evangelisation/campaigns. Right wing fundamentalist Christian groups and Catholics opposed to abortion couch their views in terms of an extension of the secular right to life, and in terms of the human rights and civil liberties of the yet-to-be-born. In doing this, these religious groups express an acceptance of the plurality of the liberal state and engage in debates in the public sphere through the language of political values and political principles of the liberal democratic state. The same principles do not apply within their own associations and communities where the language of the private religious realm prevails, and indeed is expected. This embracing of a political rhetoric for discussions of religion in the public sphere presents a dilemma for the Muslim diaspora in liberal democratic states. For many Muslims, religion is a complete way of life, incapable of compartmentalisation. The narrow Western concept of religious expression as a private matter is somewhat alien to Muslims who are either unable or unwilling to separate their religious needs from their needs as citizens of the nation state. Problems become apparent when religious needs challenge what seems to be publicly acceptable, and conflicts occur between what the state perceives to be matters of rational state interest and what Muslims perceive to be matters of religious identity. Muslim women’s groups in Western Australia for example have for some years discussed the desirability of a Sharia divorce court which would enable Muslims to obtain divorces according to Islamic law. It should be noted here that not all Muslims agree with the need for such a court and many – probably a majority – are satisfied with the existing processes that allow Muslim men and women to obtain a divorce through the Australian family court. For some Muslims however, this secular process does not satisfy their religious needs and it is perceived as having an adverse impact on their ability to adhere to their faith. A similar situation pertains to divorced Catholics who, according to a strict interpretation of their doctrine, are unable to take the Eucharist if they form a subsequent relationship (even if married according to the state), unless their prior marriage has been annulled by the Catholic Church or their previous partner has died. Whereas divorce is considered by the state as a public and legal concern, for some Muslims and others it is undeniably a religious matter. The suggestion by the Anglican Communion’s Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, that the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia law regarding marital disputes or financial matters is ultimately unavoidable, sparked controversy in Britain and in Australia. Attempts by some Australian Muslim scholars to elaborate on Dr Williams’s suggestions, such as an article by Anisa Buckley in The Herald Sun (Buckley), drew responses that, typically, called for Muslims to ‘go home’. A common theme in these responses is that proponents of Sharia law (and Islam in general) do not share a commitment to the Australian values of freedom and equality. The following excerpts from the online pages of Herald Sun Readers’ Comments (Herald Sun) demonstrate this perception: “These people come to Australia for freedoms they have never experienced before and to escape repression which is generally brought about by such ‘laws’ as Sharia! How very dare they even think that this would be an option. Go home if you want such a regime. Such an insult to want to come over to this country on our very goodwill and our humanity and want to change our systems and ways. Simply, No!” Posted 1:58am February 12, 2008 “Under our English derived common law statutes, the law is supposed to protect an individual’s rights to life, liberty and property. That is the basis of democracy in Australia and most other western nations. Sharia law does not adequately share these philosophies and principles, thus it is incompatible with our system of law.” Posted 12:55am February 11, 2008 “Incorporating religious laws in the secular legal system is just plain wrong. No fundamentalist religion (Islam in particular) is compatible with a liberal-democracy.” Posted 2:23pm February 10, 2008 “It should not be allowed in Australia the Muslims come her for a better life and we give them that opportunity but they still believe in covering them selfs why do they even come to Australia for when they don’t follow owe [our] rules but if we went to there [their] country we have to cover owe selfs [sic]” Posted 11:28am February 10, 2008 Conflicts similar to this one – over any overt or non-private religious practice in Australia – may also be observed in public debates concerning the wearing of traditional Islamic dress; the slaughter of animals for consumption; Islamic burial rites, and other religious practices which cannot be confined to the private realm. Such conflicts highlight the inability of the rational liberal approach to solve all controversies arising from religious traditions that enjoin a broader world view than merely private spirituality. In order to adhere to the liberal reduction of religion to the private sphere, Muslims in the West must negotiate some religious practices that are constructed as being at odds with the rational state and practice a form of Islam that is consistent with secularism. At the extreme, this Western-acceptable form is what the Australian government has termed ‘moderate Islam’. The implication here is that, for the state, ‘non-moderate Islam’ – Islam that pervades the public realm – is just a descriptor away from ‘extreme’. The divide between Christianity and Islam has been historically played out in European Christendom as a refusal to recognise Islam as a world religion, preferring instead to classify it according to race or ethnicity: a Moorish tendency, perhaps. The secular state prefers to engage with Muslims as an ethnic, linguistic or cultural group or groups (Yousif). Thus, in order to engage with the state as political citizens, Muslims must find ways to present their needs that meet the expectations of the state – ways that do not use their religious identity as a frame of reference. They can do this by utilizing the language of political reason in the public domain or by framing their needs, views and opinions exclusively in terms of their ethnic or cultural identity with no reference to their shared faith. Neither option is ideal, or indeed even viable. This is partly because many Muslims find it difficult if not impossible to separate their religious needs from their needs as political citizens; and also because the prevailing perception of Muslims in the media and public arena is constructed on the basis of an understanding of Islam as a religion that conflicts with the values of liberal democracy. In the media and public arena, little consideration is given to the vast differences that exist among Muslims in Australia, not only in terms of ethnicity and culture, but also in terms of practice and doctrine (Shia or Sunni). The dominant construction of Muslims in the Australian popular media is of religious purists committed to annihilating liberal, secular governments and replacing them with anti-modernist theocratic regimes (Brasted). It becomes a talking point for some, for example, to realise that there are international campaigns to recognise Gay Muslims’ rights within their faith (ABC) (in the same way that there are campaigns to recognise Gay Christians as full members of their churches and denominations and equally able to hold high office, as followers of the Anglican Communion will appreciate). Secularism, Preference and Equality Modood asserts that the extent to which a minority religious community can fully participate in the public and political life of the secular nation state is contingent on the extent to which religion is the primary marker of identity. “It may well be the case therefore that if a faith is the primary identity of any community then that community cannot fully identify with and participate in a polity to the extent that it privileges a rival faith. Or privileges secularism” (60). Modood is not saying here that Islam has to be privileged in order for Muslims to participate fully in the polity; but that no other religion, nor secularism, should be so privileged. None should be first, or last, among equals. For such a situation to occur, Islam would have to be equally acceptable both with other religions and with secularism. Following a 2006 address by the former treasurer (and self-avowed Christian) Peter Costello to the Sydney Institute, in which Costello suggested that people who feel a dual claim from both Islamic law and Australian law should be stripped of their citizenship (Costello), the former Prime Minister, John Howard, affirmed what he considers to be Australia’s primary identity when he stated that ‘Australia’s core set of values flowed from its Anglo Saxon identity’ and that any one who did not embrace those values should not be allowed into the country (Humphries). The (then) Prime Minister’s statement is an unequivocal assertion of the privileged position of the Anglo Saxon tradition in Australia, a tradition with which many Muslims and others in Australia find it difficult to identify. Conclusion Religious identity is increasingly becoming the identity of choice for Muslims in Australia, partly because it is perceived that their faith is under attack and that it needs defending (Aly). They construct the defence of their faith as a choice and an obligation; but also as a right that they have under Australian law as equal citizens in a secular state (Aly and Green). Australian Muslims who have no difficulty in reconciling their core Australianness with their deep faith take it as a responsibility to live their lives in ways that model the reconciliation of each identity – civil and religious – with the other. In this respect, the political call to Australian Muslims to embrace a ‘moderate Islam’, where this is seen as an Islam without a public or political dimension, is constructed as treating their faith as less than equal. Religious identity is generally deemed to have no place in the liberal democratic model, particularly where that religion is constructed to be at odds with the principles and values of liberal democracy, namely tolerance and adherence to the rule of law. Indeed, it is as if the national commitment to secularism rules as out-of-bounds any identity that is grounded in religion, giving precedence instead to accepting and negotiating cultural and ethnic differences. Religion becomes a taboo topic in these terms, an affront against secularism and the values of the Enlightenment that include liberty and equality. In these circumstances, it is not the case that all religions are equally ignored in a secular framework. What is the case is that the secular framework has been constructed as a way of ‘privatising’ one religion, Christianity; leaving others – including Islam – as having nowhere to go. Islam thus becomes constructed as less than equal since it appears that, unlike Christians, Muslims are not willing to play the secular game. In fact, Muslims are puzzling over how they can play the secular game, and why they should play the secular game, given that – as is the case with Christians – they see no contradiction in performing ‘good Muslim’ and ‘good Australian’, if given an equal chance to embrace both. Acknowledgements 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 ABC. “A Jihad for Love.” Life Matters (Radio National), 21 Feb. 2008. 11 March 2008. < http://www.abc.net.au/rn/lifematters/stories/2008/2167874.htm >.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.Aly, Anne, and Lelia Green. “‘Moderate Islam’: Defining the Good Citizen.” M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). 13 April 2008 < http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/08aly-green.php >.Aly, Anne, and David Walker. “Veiled Threats: Recurrent Anxieties in Australia.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 27.2 (2007): 203-14.Brasted, Howard.V. “Contested Representations in Historical Perspective: Images of Islam and the Australian Press 1950-2000.” Muslim Communities in Australia. Eds. Abdullah Saeed and Akbarzadeh, Shahram. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2001. 206-28.Brown, Chris. “Narratives of Religion, Civilization and Modernity.” Worlds in Collision: Terror and the Future of Global Order. Eds. Ken Booth and Tim Dunne. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. 293-324. Buckley, Anisa. “Should We Allow Sharia Law?” Sunday Herald Sun 10 Feb. 2008. 8 March 2008 < http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,231869735000117,00.html >.Bush, George. W. “President Outlines War Effort: Remarks by the President at the California Business Association Breakfast.” California Business Association 2001. 17 April 2007 < http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/10/20011017-15.html >.———. “Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation”. Washington, 2001. 17 April 2007 < http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010911-16.html >.Charney, Evan. “Political Liberalism, Deliberative Democracy, and the Public Sphere.” The American Political Science Review 92.1 (1998): 97- 111.Costello, Peter. “Worth Promoting, Worth Defending: Australian Citizenship, What It Means and How to Nurture It.” Address to the Sydney Institute, 23 February 2006. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.treasurer.gov.au/DisplayDocs.aspx?doc=speeches/2006/004.htm &pageID=05&min=phc&Year=2006&DocType=1 >.Dallmayr, Fred. “Rethinking Secularism.” The Review of Politics 61.4 (1999): 715-36.Erjavec, Karmen, and Zala Volcic. “‘War on Terrorism’ as Discursive Battleground: Serbian Recontextualisation of G. W. Bush’s Discourse.” Discourse and Society 18 (2007): 123- 37.Green, Lelia. “Did the World Really Change on 9/11?” Australian Journal of Communication 29.2 (2002): 1-14.Herald Sun. “Readers’ Comments: Should We Allow Sharia Law?” Herald Sun Online Feb. 2008. 8 March 2008. < http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/comments/0,22023,23186973-5000117,00.html >.Humphries, David. “Live Here, Be Australian.” The Sydney Morning Herald 25 Feb. 2006, 1 ed.Hutcheson, John S., David Domke, Andre Billeaudeaux, and Philip Garland. “U.S. National Identity, Political Elites, and Patriotic Press Following September 11.” Political Communication 21.1 (2004): 27-50.Kymlicka, Will. “Liberal Individualism and Liberal Neutrality.” Ethics 99.4 (1989): 883-905.Modood, Tariq. “Establishment, Multiculturalism and British Citizenship.” The Political Quarterly (1994): 53-74.Osuri, Goldie, and Subhabrata B. Banerjee. “White Diasporas: Media Representations of September 11 and the Unbearable Whiteness of Being in Australia.” Social Semiotics 14.2 (2004): 151- 71.Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971.Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books 1978.Western Australian Charter of Multiculturalism. WA: Government of Western Australia, Nov. 2004. 11 March 2008 < http://www.equalopportunity.wa.gov.au/pdf/wa_charter_multiculturalism.pdf >.Yousif, Ahmad. “Islam, Minorities and Religious Freedom: A Challenge to Modern Theory of Pluralism.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 20.1 (2000): 30-43.

In this article the vulnerability of democratic states in the context of a hybrid war through the prism of political institutions and processes was considered. It is determined that the Russian Federation in its dissemination of hybrid threats pays special attention to the institute of direct democracy - elections as the main process of state functioning. Through disinformation campaigns and manipulations with democratic values and principles, the aggressor tries to weaken the opponents, undermine political systems from the inside, and exacerbate tension and polarization in society. The article analyzes the publication of the adviser to the president of the Russian Federation, Vladislav Surkov, in which the unequivocal threat to the Western democratic world order is expressed. An analysis of the statements of Surkov showed that modern liberal democracy is an extremely vulnerable mechanism, where the Russian Federation spreads chaos by manipulating. The aggressor focuses on the erosion of confidence in the government and the strengthening of populism. A similar result is achieved by spreading misinformation and manipulating information. It has been established that misinformation is intended to create an appropriate public opinion, which should correspond to the goals of the aggressor. It is established that the aggressor is interested in the elections as a process, and therefore the victory of a particular (pro-Russian) candidate is not so important for aggressor’s purposes. Therefore the process of voting is bringing to the point of absurdity, which would entail doubts about the result of such a procedure. Accordingly, the final result of such elections will be a political system without voter’s confidence. Narratives that are “thrown” into the information field are designed to disorient the voter as much as possible, to polarize society, which ultimately should cast doubt on the effectiveness of the electoral process. Therefore, Russian propaganda, through various channels, simultaneously criticizes all the political forces, even opposing in its ideology, or supports some of them (e.g. far-right or far-left populist movements).

This volume, one of the most important and timely publications of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), represents the latest effort by scholars associated with the organization to formulate an educational program for Muslims. Ziauddin Sardar and Jeremy Henzell-Thomas revise and update the attempts by Ismail Faruqi and fellow founders of IIIT in the 1980s to address the crisis of education faced then by Muslim societies.That is appropriate, for the crisis has not disappeared with the passage of time. If anything, it has become greater and now encompasses Muslims worldwide—not just those in Muslim societies. And, as the authors of this volume note repeatedly, it has captured the attention of educators in the US, UK, and most other European nations.Now, eschewing the older Islamization of knowledge approach, Sardar and Henzell-Thomas propose the integration of knowledge. They set aside the old paradigm while offering minimal comments about the shortcomings that warrant such a change, perhaps so as to avoid giving rise to unnecessary quarrels. Major attention must be accorded, therefore, what the authors understand integration of knowledge to be and how it might address the needs of their specific audience—Muslim societies. One must wonder, all the same, why the audience is so defined. After all, the crisis of education affects people everywhere, Muslims in Muslim and non-Muslim societies as well as non-Muslims living in Muslim and non-Muslim societies. How do differences in political and economic problems faced by these various groups affect the educational goals to be achieved and who is affected by them?Another preliminary objection concerns the way both the earlier IIIT reformers and those involved in the new project ignore or neglect the critique of shortcomings in educational approaches launched in the US early in the twentieth century by Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, a critique that culminated in the Great Books movement. It, or, more accurately, offshoots of it, have given rise to attempts at general or liberal education in numerous American and European institutions. Especially pertinent for the integration of knowledge project is how these offshoots of the Great Books movement, ostensibly centered on Western writings at the outset, have gradually come to incorporate fundamental texts from the Golden Age of the Arabic and Islamic tradition. Today more than ever, it is essential to promote the cultural phenomena common to all. Only greater awareness of the extent to which we are one people will allow us to counter those who seek to divide us and thereby fuel enmity.Finally, no attention is accorded here to how the issues identified with the crisis of education are addressed in other faith traditions or to the way members of those traditions attempt to integrate the teachings of revealed texts with ones arising from simple human reasoning. Such a broader focus would have permitted the authors to propose an approach that might resonate with the general malaise expressed by many educators and suggest a way forward that all, not just Muslims, could embrace.Still, these preliminary objections are just that, preliminary. To assess their merit, it is essential to consider carefully what is actually proposed in the volume under review. It consists of a Foreword setting forth the basic principles of the revised project and four chapters. The first, “Mapping the Terrain,” is by Sardar, as is the second, “From Islamization to Integration of Knowledge.” Henzell-Thomas is the author of the third and fourth chapters, “The Integration We Seek” and “Towards a Language of Integration.”

This volume, one of the most important and timely publications of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), represents the latest effort by scholars associated with the organization to formulate an educational program for Muslims. Ziauddin Sardar and Jeremy Henzell-Thomas revise and update the attempts by Ismail Faruqi and fellow founders of IIIT in the 1980s to address the crisis of education faced then by Muslim societies.That is appropriate, for the crisis has not disappeared with the passage of time. If anything, it has become greater and now encompasses Muslims worldwide—not just those in Muslim societies. And, as the authors of this volume note repeatedly, it has captured the attention of educators in the US, UK, and most other European nations.Now, eschewing the older Islamization of knowledge approach, Sardar and Henzell-Thomas propose the integration of knowledge. They set aside the old paradigm while offering minimal comments about the shortcomings that warrant such a change, perhaps so as to avoid giving rise to unnecessary quarrels. Major attention must be accorded, therefore, what the authors understand integration of knowledge to be and how it might address the needs of their specific audience—Muslim societies. One must wonder, all the same, why the audience is so defined. After all, the crisis of education affects people everywhere, Muslims in Muslim and non-Muslim societies as well as non-Muslims living in Muslim and non-Muslim societies. How do differences in political and economic problems faced by these various groups affect the educational goals to be achieved and who is affected by them?Another preliminary objection concerns the way both the earlier IIIT reformers and those involved in the new project ignore or neglect the critique of shortcomings in educational approaches launched in the US early in the twentieth century by Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, a critique that culminated in the Great Books movement. It, or, more accurately, offshoots of it, have given rise to attempts at general or liberal education in numerous American and European institutions. Especially pertinent for the integration of knowledge project is how these offshoots of the Great Books movement, ostensibly centered on Western writings at the outset, have gradually come to incorporate fundamental texts from the Golden Age of the Arabic and Islamic tradition. Today more than ever, it is essential to promote the cultural phenomena common to all. Only greater awareness of the extent to which we are one people will allow us to counter those who seek to divide us and thereby fuel enmity.Finally, no attention is accorded here to how the issues identified with the crisis of education are addressed in other faith traditions or to the way members of those traditions attempt to integrate the teachings of revealed texts with ones arising from simple human reasoning. Such a broader focus would have permitted the authors to propose an approach that might resonate with the general malaise expressed by many educators and suggest a way forward that all, not just Muslims, could embrace.Still, these preliminary objections are just that, preliminary. To assess their merit, it is essential to consider carefully what is actually proposed in the volume under review. It consists of a Foreword setting forth the basic principles of the revised project and four chapters. The first, “Mapping the Terrain,” is by Sardar, as is the second, “From Islamization to Integration of Knowledge.” Henzell-Thomas is the author of the third and fourth chapters, “The Integration We Seek” and “Towards a Language of Integration.”

IntroductionThis article is about the transformation of coffee, from having no place in the everyday lives of the people of Bangladesh, to a new position as a harbinger of liberal values and Western culture. The context is a group of Australian photojournalism students who embarked on a month-long residency in Bangladesh; the content is a Nescafé advertisement encouraging the young, middle-class Bangladesh audience to consume coffee, in a marketing campaign that promotes “my first cup.” For the Australian students, the marketing positioning of this advertising campaign transformed instant coffee into a strange and unfamiliar commodity. At the same time, the historic association between Bangladesh and tea prompted one of the photographers to undertake her own journey to explore the hidden side of that other Western staple. This paper explores the tradition of tea culture in Bangladesh and the marketing campaign for instant coffee within this culture, combining the authors’ experiences and perspectives. The outline of the Photomedia unit in the Bachelor of Creative Industries degree that the students were working towards at Edith Cowan University (ECU) in Australia states that:students will engage with practices, issues and practicalities of working as a photojournalist in an international, cross cultural context. Students will work in collaboration with students of Pathshala: South Asian Institute of Photography, Dhaka Bangladesh in the research, production and presentation of stories related to Bangladeshi society and culture for distribution to international audiences (ECU). The sixteen students from Perth, living and working in Bangladesh between 5 January and 7 February 2012, exhibited a diverse range of cultures, contexts, and motivations. Young Australians, along with a number of ECU’s international students, including some from Norway, China and Sweden, were required to learn first-hand about life in Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest and most densely populated countries. Danielle Fusco and ECU lecturer Duncan Barnes collaborated with staff and students of Pathshala, South Asian Media Institute (Pathshala). Their recollections and observations on tea production and the location are central to this article but it is the questions asked by the group about the marketing of instant coffee into this culture that provides its tensions. Fusco completed a week-long induction and then travelled in Bangladesh for a fortnight to research and photograph individual stories on rural and urban life. Barnes here sets the scene for the project, describing the expectations and what actually happened: When we travel to countries that are vastly different to our own it is often to seek out that difference; to go in search of the romanticised ideals that have been portrayed as paradise in films, books and photographs. “The West” has long been fascinated with “The East” (Said) and for the past half century, since the hippie treks to Marrakesh and Afghanistan, people have journeyed overland to the Indian sub-continent, both from Europe and from Australia, yearning for a cultural experience they cannot find at home. Living in Perth, Western Australia, sometimes called the most isolated capital city in the world, that pull to something “different” is like a magnet. Upon arrival in Dhaka, you find yourself deliciously overwhelmed by the heavy traffic, the crowded markets, the spicy foods and the milky lassie drinks. It only takes a few stomach upsets to make your Western appetite start kicking in and you begin craving things you have at home but that are hard to find in Bangladesh. Take coffee for example. I recently completed a month-long visit to Bangladesh, which, like India, is a nation of tea drinkers. Getting any kind of good coffee requires that you be in what expatriates call “the Golden Triangle” of Dhaka city—within the area contained by Gulshan-Banani-Baridhara. Here you find the embassies and a sizeable expatriate community that constitutes a Western bubble unrepresentative of Bangladesh beyond these districts. Coffee World is an example of a Western-style café chain that, as the name suggests, serves coffee beverages. It has trouble making a quality flat white. The baristas are poorly trained, the service is painfully slow, yet the prices are comparable to those in the West. Even with these disadvantages, it is frequented by Westerners who also make use of the free WiFi. In contrast, tea is available at every road junction for around 5 cents Australian. It’s ready in seconds: the kettle is always hot due to a constant turnover of local customers. It was the history of tea growing in Bangladesh, and a desire to know more about a commodity that people in the West take for granted, that most attracted Fusco’s interest. She chose to focus on Bangladesh’s oldest commercial tea garden (plantation) Sylhet, which has been in production since 1857 (Tea Board). As is the case with many tea farms in the Indian sub-continent, the workers at Sylhet are part of Bangladesh’s Hindu minority. Fusco left Dhaka and travelled into the rural areas to investigate tea production: Venturing into these estates from the city is like entering an entirely different world. They are isolated places, and although they are close in distance, they are completely separate from the main city. Spending time in the Khadim tea estate amongst the plantations and the workers’ compounds made me very aware of the strong relationship that exists between them. The Hindu teaching of Samsara refers to the continuous cycle of repeated birth, life, death and rebirth [Hinduism], which became a metaphor for me, for this relationship I was experiencing. It is clear that neither farm [where the tea is grown] nor village [which houses the people] could live without each other. The success and maintenance of the tea farm relies on the workers just as much as the workers rely on the tea gardens for their livelihood and sustenance. Their life cycles are intertwined and in synch. There are many problems in the compounds. The people are extremely poor. Their education opportunities are limited, and they work incredibly hard for very little money for their entire lives. They are bound to stay and work here and as those generations before them, were born, worked and died here, living their whole lives in the community of the tea farm. By documenting the lives of the people, I realised I was documenting the process of the lives of the tea trees at the same time. This is how I met Lolita.Figure 1. Bangladeshi tea worker, Lolita, stands in a small section of the Khadim tea plantation in the early morning. Sylhet, Bangladesh (Danielle Fusco, Jan. 2012). This woman emulated everything I was seeing and feeling about the village and the garden. She spoke about the reliance on the trees, especially because of the money and, therefore, the food, they provide for her and her husband. I became aware of the injustice of this system because the workers are paid so little while this industry is booming. It was obvious that life here is far from perfect, but as Lolita explains, they make do. She has worked on the tea estate for decades. As her husband is no longer working, she is the primary income earner. They are able, however, to live in relative comfort now their children have all married and left and it is just the two of them. Lolita describes that money lies within these trees. Money for her means that she can eat that day. Money for the managers means industrial success. Either way, whether it is in the eyes of the individual or the industry, tea always comes down to Taka [the currency of Bangladesh]. Marketing Coffee in a Culture of Tea and Betel Nut With such a strong culture of tea production and consumption and a coffee culture just existing on the fringe, a campaign by Nescafé to encourage Bangladeshi consumers to have “my first cup” of Nescafé instant coffee at the time of this study captured the imagination of the students. How effective can the marketing of Nescafé instant coffee be in a society that is historically a producer and consumer of tea, and which also still embraces the generations-old use of the betel nut as an everyday stimulant? Although it only employs some 150,000 (Islam et al.) in a nation of 150 million people, tea makes an important contribution to the Bangladesh economy. Shortly after the 1971 civil war, in which East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) became independent from West Pakistan (now Pakistan), the then-Chairman of the Bangladesh Tea Board, writing in World Development, commented:In the highly competitive marketing environment of today it is extremely necessary for the tea industry of Bangladesh to increase production by raising the per acre yield, improve quality by adoption of finer plucking standards and modernization of factories and reduce per unit cost of production so as to be able to sell more of our teas to foreign markets and thereby earn higher amounts of much needed foreign exchange for the country as well as generate additional resources within the industry for ploughing back for further development (Ali 55). In Bangladesh, tea is a cash crop that, even in the 1970s following vicious conflicts, is more than capable of meeting local demand and producing an export dividend. Coffee is imported commodity that, historically, has had little place in Bangladeshi life or culture. However important tea is, it is not the traditional Bangladesh stimulant. Instead, over the years, when people in the West would have had a cup of tea or coffee and/or a cigarette, most Bangladeshis have turned to the betel nut. A 2005 study of 100 citizens from Araihazar, Bangladesh, conducted by researchers from Columbia University, found that coffee consumption is “very low in this population” (Hafeman et al. 567). The purpose of the study was to assess the impact of betel quids (the wad of masticated nut) and the chewing of betel nuts, upon tremor. For this reason, it was important to record the consumption of stimulants in the 98 participants who progressed to the next stage of the study and took a freehand spiral-drawing test. While “26 (27%) participants had chewed betel quids, 23 (23%) had smoked one or more cigarettes, [and] 14 (14%) drank tea; on that day, only 1 (1%) drank caffeinated soda, and none (0%) drank coffee” (Hafeman et al. 568). Given its addictive and carcinogenic properties (Sharma), the people who chewed betel quids were more likely to exhibit tremor in their spiral drawings than the people who did not. As this (albeit small) study suggests, the preferred Bangladeshi stimulant is more likely to be betel or tobacco rather than a beverage. Insofar as hot drinks are consumed, Bangladesh citizens drink tea. This poses a significant challenge for multinational advertisers who seek to promote the consumption of instant coffee as a means of growing the global market for Nescafé. Marketing Nescafé to Bangladesh In Dhaka, in January 2012, the television campaign slogan for Nescafé is “My first cup”, with the tagline, “Time you started.” This Nescafé television commercial (NTC) impressed itself upon the Australian visitors, both in terms of its frequency of broadcast and in its referencing of Western culture and values. (The advertisement can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E8mFX43oAM). The NTC’s three stars, Vir Das, Purab Kohli, and leading Bollywood actress Deepika Padukone, are highly-recognisable to young Bangladeshi audiences and the storyline is part of a developing series of advertisements which together form a mini-soap opera, like that used so successfully to advertise the Nescafé Gold Blend brand of instant coffee in the West in the 1980s to 1990s (O’Donohoe 242; Beale). The action takes place in Kohli’s affluent, Western-style apartment. The drama starts with Das challenging Kohli regarding whether he has successfully developed a relationship with his attractive neighbour, Padukone. Using a combination of local language with English words and sub-titles, the first sequence is captioned: “Any progress with Deepika, or are you still mixing coffee?” Suggesting incredulity, and that he could do better, Das asks Kohli, according to the next subtitle, “What are you doing dude?” The use of the word “dude” clearly refers to American youth culture, familiar in such movies as Dude, where’s my car? This is underlined by the immediate transition to the English words of “bikes … biceps … chest … explosion.” Of these four words only “chest” is pronounced in the local tongue, although all four words are included as captions in English. Kohli appears less and less impressed as Das becomes increasingly insistent, with Das going on to express frustration with Kohli through the exclamation “u don’t even have a plan.” The use of the text-speak English “u” here can be constructed as another way of persuading young Bangladeshi viewers that this advertisement is directed at them: the “u” in place of “you” is likely to annoy their English-speaking elders. Das continues speaking in his mother tongue, with the subtitle “Deepika padukone [sic] is your neighbour and you are only drinking coffee,” with the subsequent subtitle emphasising: “Deepika and only coffee.” At this point, Padukone enters the apartment through the open door without knocking and confidently says “Hi.” Kohli explains the situation by responding (in English, and subtitled) “my school friend, Das”. Padukone, in turn, responds in a friendly way to both men (in English, and subtitled) “You guys want to have coffee?” Instead of responding directly to this invitation, Das models to Kohli what it is to take the initiative in this situation: what it is to have a plan. “Hello” (he says, in English and subtitled) “I don’t have coffee but I have a plan. You and me, my bike, right now, hit the town, party!” Kohli looks down at the floor, embarrassed, while Padukone looks quizzically at him over Das’s shoulder. Kohli smiles, and points to himself and Padukone, clearly excluding Das: “I will have coffee” (in English, and subtitle). “Better plan”, exclaims Padukone, “You and me, my place, right now, coffee.” She looks challengingly at Das: “Right?,” a statement rather than a request, and exits, with Kohli following and Das left behind in the apartment. Cue voice-over (not a subtitle, but in-screen speech bubble) “[It’s] time you started” (spoken) “the new Nescafé” (shot change) “My first cup” (with an in-screen price promotion). This commercial associates coffee drinking with Western values of social and personal autonomy. For young women in the traditional Muslim culture of Bangladesh, it suggests a world in which they are at liberty to spend time with the suitors they choose, ignoring those whom they find pushy or inappropriate, and free to invite a man back to “my place, right now” for coffee. The scene setting in this advertisement and the use of English in both the spoken and written text suggests its target is the educated middle class, and indicates that sophisticated, affluent, trend-setters drink coffee as a part of getting to know their neighbours. In line with this, the still which ends the commercial promotes the Facebook page “Know your neighbours.” The flirtatious nature of the actors in the advertisement, the emphasis on each of the male characters spending time alone with the female character, and the female character having both power and choice in this situation is likely to be highly unacceptable to traditional Bangladeshi parental values and, therefore, proportionately more exciting to the target audience. The underlying suggestion of “my first cup” and “time you started” is that the social consumption of that first cup of coffee is the “first step” to becoming more Western. The statement also has overtones of sexual initiation. The advertisement aligns itself with the world portrayed in the Western media consumed in Bangladesh, and the implication is that—even if Western liberal values are not currently a possible choice for all—it is at least feasible to start on the journey towards these values through drinking that first cup of coffee. Unbeknownst to the Bangladesh audience, this Nescafé marketing strategy echoes, in almost all material particulars, the same approach that was so successful in persuading Australians to embrace instant coffee. Khamis, in her essay on Australia and the convenience of instant coffee, argues that, while in 1928 Australia had the highest per capita consumption of tea in the world, this had begun to change by the 1950s. The transformation in the market positioning of coffee was partly achieved through an association between tea and old-fashioned ‘Britishness’ and coffee and the United States: this discovery [of coffee] spoke to changes in Australia’s lifestyle options: the tea habit was tied to Australia’s development as a far-flung colonial outpost, a daily reminder that many still looked to London as the nation’s cultural capital: the growing appeal of instant coffee reflected a widening and more nuanced cultural palate. This was not just ‘another’ example of the United States postwar juggernaut; it marks the transitional phase in Australia’s history, as its cultural identity was informed less by the staid conservativism of Britain than the heady flux of New World glamour (219). Coffee was associated with the USA not simply through advertising but also through cultural exposure. By 1943, notes Khamis, there were 120,000 American service personnel stationed in Australia and she quotes Symons (168) as saying that “when an American got on a friendly footing with an Australian family he was usually found in the kitchen, teaching the Mrs how to make coffee, or washing the dishes” (168, cited in Khamis 220). The chances were that “the Mrs”—the Australian housewife—felt she needed the tuition: an Australian survey conducted by Gallup in March 1950 indicated that 55 per cent of respondents at that time had never tried coffee, while a further 24 per cent said they “seldom” consumed it (Walker and Roberts 133, cited in Khamis 222). In a newspaper article titled, “Overpaid, Oversexed and Over Here”, Munro describes the impact of exposure to the first American troops based in Australia during this time, with a then seven year old recalling: “They were foreign, quite a different culture from us. They spoke more loudly than us. They had strange accents, cute expressions, they were really very exotic.” The American troops caused consternation for Australian fathers and boyfriends. Dulcie Wood was 18 when she was dating an American serviceman: They had more money to spend (than Australian troops). They seemed to have plenty of supplies, they were always bringing you presents—stockings and cartons of cigarettes […] Their uniforms were better. They took you to more places. They were quite good dancers, some of them. They always brought you flowers. They were more polite to women. They charmed the mums because they were very polite. Some dads were a bit more sceptical of them. They weren’t sure if all that charm was genuine (quoted in Munro). Darian-Smith argues that, at that time, Australian understanding of Americans was based on Hollywood films, which led to an impression of American technological superiority and cultural sophistication (215-16, 232). “Against the American-style combination of smart advertising, consumerism, self-expression and popular democracy, the British class system and its buttoned-up royals appeared dull and dour” writes Khamis (226, citing Grant 15)—almost as dull and dour as 1950s tea compared with the postwar sophistication of Nescafé instant coffee. Conclusion The approach Nestlé is using in Bangladesh to market instant coffee is tried and tested: coffee is associated with the new, radical cultural influence while tea and other traditional stimulants are relegated to the choice of an older, more staid generation. Younger consumers are targeted with a romantic story about the love of coffee, reflected in a mini-soap opera about two people becoming a couple over a cup of Nescafé. Hopefully, the Pathshala-Edith Cowan University collaboration is at least as strong. Some of the overseas visitors return to Bangladesh on a regular basis—the student presentations in 2012 were, for instance, attended by two visiting graduates from the 2008 program who were working in Bangladesh. For the Australian participants, the association with Pathshala, South Asian Media Institute, and Drik Photo Agency brings recognition, credibility and opportunity. It also offers a totally new perspective on what to order in the coffee queue once they are home again in Australia. Postscript The final week of the residency in Bangladesh was taken up with presentations and a public exhibition of the students’ work at Drik Picture Agency, Dhaka, 3–7 February 2012. Danielle Fusco’s photographs can be accessed at: http://public-files.apps.ecu.edu.au/SCA_Marketing/coffee/coffee.html References Ali, M. “Commodity Round-up: Problems and Prospects of Bangladesh Tea”, World Development 1.1–2 (1973): 55. Beale, Claire. “Should the Gold Blend Couple Get Back Together?” The Independent 29 Apr 2010. 8 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/advertising/should-the-gold-blend-couple-get-back-together-1957196.html›. Darian-Smith, Kate. On the Home Front: Melbourne in Wartime 1939-1945. 2nd ed. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2009. Dude, Where’s My Car? Dir. Danny Leiner. Twentieth Century Fox, 2000. Edith Cowan University (ECU). “Photomedia Summer School Bangladesh 2012.” 1 May 2012 .Grant, Bruce. The Australian Dilemma: A New Kind of Western Society. Sydney: Macdonald Futura, 1983. Hafeman, D., H. Ashan, T. Islam, and E. Louis. “Betel-quid: Its Tremor-producing Effects in Residents of Araihazar, Bangladesh.” Movement Disorders 21.4 (2006): 567-71. Hinduism. “Reincarnation and Samsara.” Heart of Hinduism. 8 Apr. 2012 ‹http://hinduism.iskcon.org/concepts/102.htm›. Islam, G., M. Iqbal, K. Quddus, and M. Ali. “Present Status and Future Needs of Tea Industry in Bangladesh (Review).” Proceedings of the Pakistan Academy of Science. 42.4 (2005): 305-14. 8 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.paspk.org/downloads/proc42-4/42-4-p305-314.pdf›. Khamis, Susie. “It Only Takes a Jiffy to Make: Nestlé, Australia and the Convenience of Instant Coffee.” Food, Culture & Society 12.2 (2009): 217-33. Munro, Ian. “Overpaid, Oversexed and Over Here.” The Age 27 Feb. 2002. 8 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/02/26/1014704950716.html›. O’Donohoe, Stephanie. “Raiding the Postmodern Pantry: Advertising Intertextuality and the Young Adult Audience.” European Journal of Marketing 31.3/4 (1997): 234-53 Pathshala. Pathshala, South Asian Media Academy. 8 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.pathshala.net/controller.php›. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Sharma, Dinesh. “Betel Quid and Areca Nut are Carcinogenic without Tobacco.” The Lancet Oncology 4.10 (2003): 587. 8 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.lancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(03)01229-4/fulltext›. Symons, Michael. One Continuous Picnic: A History of Eating in Australia. Ringwood, Vic: Penguin, 1984. Tea Board. “History of Bangladesh Tea Industry.” Bangladesh Tea Board. 8 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.teaboard.gov.bd/index.php?option=HistoryTeaIndustry›. Walker, Robin and Dave Roberts. From Scarcity to Surfeit: A History of Food and Nutrition in New South Wales. Sydney: NSW UP, 1988.

Fig 1: Image from a secret Rangoon fashion shoot. Photograph: Myanmar Photo Archive / Lukas Birk. Introduction NOTE: Rangoon, Burma has been known as Yangon, Myanmar, since 2006. I use Rangoon and Burma for the period prior to 2006 and Yangon and Myanmar for the period thereafter. In addition, I have removed the name of any activist currently in Myanmar due to the recent policy of executing political prisoners. On 1 February 2021, Myanmar was again plunged into political turmoil when the military illegally overthrew the country’s democratically elected government. This is the third time Myanmar, formally known as Burma, has been subject to a coup d’état; violent seizures of power took place in 1962 and in 1988-90. While those two earlier military governments met with opposition spearheaded by students and student organisations, in 2021 the military faced organised resistance through a mass Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) initiated by government healthcare workers who refused to come to work. They were joined by private sector “strikes” and, perhaps most visible of all to western viewers, mass street demonstrations “led” by “Gen Z” activists—young people who had come of age during Myanmar’s brief decade of democracy. There is little doubt that the success of the CDM and associated protests is due to the widespread coverage and reach of social media as well as the creative communications skills of the country’s first “generation of digital natives”, who are sufficiently familiar and comfortable with social platforms to “participate and shape their identities in communication and dialogue with global digital media content” (Jordt et al. 12 ). The leveraging of global culture, including the use of English in protest signs, was notable in garnering international media coverage and so keeping Myanmar’s political plight front-of-mind with governments around the world. Yet this is not the whole story behind the effectiveness of these campaigns. As Lisa Brooten argues, contemporary networks are built on “decades of behind-the-scenes activism to build a multi-ethnic civil society” (East Asia Forum). The leading democracy activist, Min Ko Naing, aligned “veteran activists from previous generations with novice Gen Z activists”, declaring “this revolution represents a combination of Generations X, Y and Z in fighting against the military dictatorship’” (Jordt et al. 18). Similarly, the creative strategies used by 2021’s digital campaigners also build on protests by earlier generations of young, creative people. This paper looks at two creative protest across the generations. The first is “secret” fashion photography of the late 1970s collected in Lukas Birk’s Yangon Fashion 1979 – Fashion=Resistance. The second is the contemporary #100projectors campaign, a “projection project for Myanmar democracy movement against the military dictatorship” (in the interest of full disclosure, I took part in the #100projectors project). Drawing from the contemporary advertising principle of “segmentation”, the communications practice where potential consumers are divided into “subgroups … based on specific characteristics and needs” (WARC 1), as well as contemporary thinking on the “aesthetics” of “cosmopolitanism”, (Papastergiadis, Featherstone, and Christensen), I argue that contemporary creative strategies can be traced back to the creative tactics of resistance employed by earlier generations of protesters and their re-imagining of “national space and its politics” (Christensen 556) in the interstices of cosmopolitan Rangoon, Burma, and Yangon, Myanmar. #100projectors Myanmar experienced two distinct periods of military rule, the Socialist era between 1962 and 1988 under General Ne Win and the era under the State Law and Order Restoration Council – State Peace and Development Council between 1988 and 2011. These were followed by a semi-civilian era from 2011 to 2021 (Carlson 117). The coup in 2021 marks a return to extreme forms of control, censorship, and surveillance. Ne Win’s era of military rule saw a push for Burmanisation enforced through “significant cultural restrictions”, ostensibly to protect national culture and unity, but more likely to “limit opportunities for internal dissent” (Carlson 117). Cultural restrictions applied to art, literature, film, television, as well as dress. Despite these prohibitions, in the 1970s Rangoon's young people smuggled in illegal western fashion magazines, such as Cosmopolitan and Vogue, and commissioned local tailors to make up the clothes they saw there. Bell-bottoms, mini-skirts, western-style suits were worn in “secret” fashion shoots, with the models posing for portraits at Rangoon photographic studios such as the Sino-Burmese owned Har Si Yone in Chinatown. Some of the wealthier fashionistas even came for weekly shoots. Demand was so high, a second branch devoted to these photographic sessions was opened with its own stock of costumes and accessories. Copies of these head to toe fashion portraits, printed on 12 x 4 cm paper, were shared with friends and family; keeping portrait albums was a popular practice in Burma and had been since the 1920s and 30s (Birk, Burmese Photographers 113). The photos that survive this era are collected in Lukas Birk’s Yangon Fashion 1979 – Fashion=Resistance. #100projectors was launched in February 2021 by a group of young visual and video artists with the aim of resisting the coup and demanding the return of democracy. Initially a small group of projectionists or “projector fighters”, as the title suggests they plan to amplify their voices by growing their national and international network to 100. #100projectors is one of many campaigns, movements, and fundraisers devised by artists and creatives to protest the coup and advocate for revolution in Myanmar. Other notable examples, all run by Gen Z activists, include the Easter Egg, Watermelon, Flash, and Marching Shoes strikes. The Marching Shoe Strike, which featured images of flowers in shoes, representing those who had died in protests, achieved a reach of 65.2 million in country with 1.4 million interactions across digital channels (VERO, 64) and all of these campaigns were covered by the international press, including The Guardian, Reuters, The Straits Times, and VOA East Asia Pacific Session, as well as arts magazines around the world (for example Hyperallergic, published in Brooklyn). #100projectors material has been projected in Finland, Scotland, and Australia. The campaign was written about in various art magazines and their Video #7 was screened at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre in February 2022 as part of Defiant Art: A Year of Resistance to the Myanmar Coup. At first glance, these two examples seem distant in both their aims and achievements. Fashion photos, taken in secret and shared privately, could be more accurately described as a grassroots social practice rather than a political movement. While Birk describes the act of taking these images as “a rebellion” and “an escape” in a political climate when “a pair of flowers and a pair of sunglasses might just start a revolution”, the fashionistas’ photographs seem “ephemeral” at best, or what Mina Roces describes as the subtlest form of resistance or ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott in Roces 7). By contrast, #100projectors has all the hallmarks of a polished communications campaign. They have a logo and slogans: “We fight for light” and “The revolution must win”. There is a media plan, which includes the use of digital channels, encrypted messaging, live broadcasts, as well as in-situ projections. Finally, there is a carefully “targeted” audience of potential projectionists. It is this process of defining a target audience, based on segmentation, that is particularly astute and sophisticated. Traditionally, segmentation defined audiences based on demographics, geodemographics, and self-identification. However, in the online era segments are more likely to be based on behaviour and activities revealed in search data as well as shares, depending on preferences for privacy and permission. Put another way, as a digital subject, “you are what you choose to share” (WARC 1). The audience for #100projectors includes artists and creative people around the world who choose to share political video art. They are connected through digital platforms including Facebook as well as encrypted messaging. Yet this contemporary description of digital subjectivity, “you are what you choose to share”, also neatly describes the Yangon fashionistas and the ways in which they resist the political status quo. Photographic portraits have always been popular in Burma and so this collection does not look especially radical. Initially, the portraits seem to speak only about status, taste, and modernity. Several subjects within the collection are shown in national or ethnic dress, in keeping with the governments edict that Burma consisted of 135 ethnicities and 8 official races. In addition, there is a portrait of a soldier in full uniform. But the majority of the images are of men and women in “modern” western gear typical of the 1970s. With their wide smiles and careful poses, these men and women look like they’re performing sophisticated worldliness as well as showing off their wealth. They are cosmopolitan adepts taking part in international culture. Status is implicit in the accessories, from sunglasses to jewellery. One portrait is shot at mid-range so that it clearly features a landline phone. In 1970s Burma, this was an object out of reach for most. Landlines were both prohibitively expensive and reserved for the true elites. To make a phone call, most people had to line up at special market stalls. To be photographed with a phone, in western clothes (to be photographed at all), seems more about aspiration than anarchy. In the context of Ne Win’s Burma, however, the portraits clearly capture a form of political agency. Burma had strict edicts for dress and comportment: kissing in public was banned and Burmese citizens were obliged to wear Burmese dress, with western styles considered degenerate. Long hair, despite being what Burmese men traditionally wore prior to colonisation, was also deemed too western and consequently “outlawed” (Edwards 133). Dress was not only proscribed but hierarchised and heavily gendered; only military men had “the right to wear trousers” (Edwards 133). Public disrespect of the all-powerful, paranoid, and vindictive military (known as “sit tat” for military or army versus “Tatmadaw” for the good Myanmar army) was dangerous bordering on the suicidal. Consequently, wearing shoulder-length hair, wide bell bottoms, western-style suits, and “risqué” mini-skirts could all be considered acts of at least daring and definitely defiance. Not only are these photographs a challenge to gender constructions in a country ruled by a hyper-masculine army, but these images also question the nature of what it meant to be Burmese at a time when Burmeseness itself was rigidly codified. Recording such acts on film and then sharing the images entailed further risk. Thus, these models are, as Mina Roces puts it, “express[ing] their agency through sartorial change” (Roces 5). Fig. 2: Image from a secret Rangoon fashion shoot – illicit dress and hair. Photograph: Myanmar Photo Archive / Lukas Birk. Fig. 3: Image from a secret Rangoon fashion shoot. Photograph: Myanmar Photo Archive / Lukas Birk. Roces also notes the “challenge” of making protest visible in spaces “severely limited” under authoritarian regimes (Roces 10). Burma under the Socialist government was a particularly difficult place in which to mount any form of resistance. Consequences included imprisonment or even execution, as in the case of the student leader Tin Maung Oo. Ma Thida, a writer and human rights advocate herself jailed for her work, explains the use of creative tools such as metaphor in a famous story about a crab by the writer and journalist Hanthawaddy U Win Tin: The crab, being hard-shelled, was well protected and could not be harmed. However, the mosquito, despite being a far smaller animal, could bite the eyes of the crab, leading to the crab’s eventual death. ... Readers drew the conclusion that the socialist government of Ne Win was the crab that could be destabilized if a weakness could be found. (Thida 317) If the metaphor of a crab defeated by a mosquito held political meaning, then being photographed in prohibited fashions was a more overt way of making defiance and resistant “visible”. While that visibility seems ephemeral, the fashionistas also found a way not only to be seen by the camera in their rebellious clothing, but also by a “public” or audience of those with whom they shared their images. The act of exchanging portraits, what Birk describes as “old-school Instagram”, anticipates not only the shared selfie, but also the basis of successful contemporary social campaigns, which relied in part on networks sharing posts to amplify their message (Birk, Yangon Fashion 17). What the fashionistas also demonstrate is that an act of rebellion can also be a means of testing the limits of conformity, of the need for beauty, of the human desire to look beautiful. Acts of rebellion are also acts of celebration and so, solidarity. Fig. 4: Image from a secret Rangoon fashion shoot – illicit dress length. Photograph: Myanmar Photo Archive / Lukas Birk. Fig. 5: Image from a secret Rangoon fashion shoot – illicit trousers. Photograph: Myanmar Photo Archive / Lukas Birk. As the art critic and cultural theorist Nikos Papastergiadis writes, “the cosmopolitan imagination in contemporary art could be defined as an aesthetic of openness that engenders a global sense of inter-connectedness” (207). Inter-connectedness and its possibilities and limits shape the aesthetic imaginary of both the secret fashion shoots of 1970s Rangoon and the artists and videographers of 2021. In the videos of the #100projectors project and the fashion portraits of stylish Rangoonites, interconnection comes as a form of aesthetic blending, a conversation that transcends the border. The sitter posing in illicit western clothes in a photo studio in the heart of Rangoon, then Burma’s capital and seat of power, cannot help but point out that borders are permeable, and that national identity is temporally-based, transitory, and full of slippages. In this spot, 40-odd years earlier, Burmese nationalists used dress as a means of publicly supporting the nationalist cause (Edwards, Roces). Like the portraits, the #100projector videos blend global and local perspectives on Myanmar. Combining paintings, drawings, graphics, performance art recordings, as well as photography, the work shares the ‘instagrammable’ quality of the Easter Egg, Watermelon, and Marching Shoes strikes with their bright colours and focus on people—or the conspicuous lack of people and the example of the Silent Strike. Graphics are in Burmese as well as English. Video #6 was linked to International Women’s Day. Other graphics reference American artists such as Shepherd Fairey and his Hope poster, which was adapted to feature Aung San Suu Kyi’s face during then-President Obama’s visit in 2012. The videos also include direct messages related to political entities such as Video #3, which voiced support for the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hlutaw (CRPH), a group of 15 elected MPs who represented the ideals of Gen Z youth (Jordt et al., viii). This would not necessarily be understood by an international viewer. Also of note is the prevalence of the colour red, associated with Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD. Red is one of the three “political” colours formerly banned from paintings under SLORC. The other two were white, associated with the flowers Aung Sang Suu Kyi wore in her hair, and black, symbolic of negative feelings towards the regime (Carlson, 145). The Burmese master Aung Myint chose to paint exclusively in the banned colours as an ongoing act of defiance, and these videos reflect that history. The videos and portraits may propose that culturally, the world is interconnected. But implicit in this position is also the failure of “interconnectedness”. The question that arises with every viewing of a video or Instagram post or Facebook plea or groovy portrait is: what can these protesters, despite the risks they are prepared to take, realistically expect from the rest of the world in terms of help to remove the unwanted military government? Interconnected or not, political misfortune is the most effective form of national border. Perhaps the most powerful imaginative association with both the #100projectors video projections and fashionistas portraits is the promise of transformation, in particular the transformations possible in a city like Rangoon / Yangon. In his discussion of the cosmopolitan space of the city, Christensen notes that although “digital transformations touch vast swathes of political, economic and everyday life”, it is the city that retains supreme significance as a space not easily reducible to an entity beneath the national, regional, or global (556). The city is dynamic, “governed by the structural forces of politics and economy as well as moralities and solidarities of both conservative and liberal sorts”, where “othered voices and imaginaries find presence” in a mix that leads to “contestations” (556). Both the fashionistas and the video artists of the #100projectors use their creative work to contest the ‘national’ space from the interstices of the city. In the studio these transformations of the bodies of Burmese subjects into international “citizens of the world” contest Ne Win’s Burma and reimagine the idea of nation. They take place in the Chinatown, a relic of the old, colonial Rangoon, a plural city and one of the world’s largest migrant ports, where "mobility, foreignness and cross-cultural hybridity" were essential to its make-up (Aung Thin 778). In their instructions on how to project their ideas as a form of public art to gain audience, the #100projectors artists suggest projectors get “full on creative with other ways: projecting on people, outdoor cinema, gallery projection” (#100projectors). It is this idea projection as an overlay, a doubling of the everyday that evokes the possibility of transformation. The #100projector videos screen on Rangoon bridges, reconfiguring the city, albeit temporarily. Meanwhile, Rangoon is doubled onto other cities, towns, villages, communities, projected onto screens but also walls, fences, the sides of buildings in Finland, Scotland, Australia, and elsewhere. Conclusion In this article I have compared the recent #100projectors creative campaign of resistance against the 2021 coup d’état in Myanmar with the “fashionistas” of 1970 and their “secret” photo shoots. While the #100projectors is a contemporary digital campaign, some of the creative tactics employed, such as dissemination and identifying audiences, can be traced back to the practices of Rangoon’s fashionistas of the 1970s. ­­Creative resistance begins with an act of imagination. The creative strategies of resistance examined here share certain imaginative qualities of connection, a privileging of the ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘interconnectedness’ as well as the transformativity of actual space, with the streets of Rangoon, itself a cosmopolitan city. References @100projectors Instagram account. <https://www.instagram.com/100projectors/>. @Artphy_1 Instagram account. <https://www.instagram.com/artphy_1/>. 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Introduction Most developed countries, including Australia, have a strong focus on national, state and local strategies for emergency management and response in the face of disasters and crises. This framework can include coping with catastrophic dislocation, service disruption, injury or loss of life in the face of natural disasters such as major fires, floods, earthquakes or other large-impact natural events, as well as dealing with similar catastrophes resulting from human actions such as bombs, biological agents, cyber-attacks targeting essential services such as communications networks, or other crises affecting large populations. Emergency management frameworks for crisis and disaster response are distinguished by their focus on the domestic context for such events; that is, how to manage and assist the ways in which civilian populations, who are for the most part inexperienced and untrained in dealing with crises and disasters, are able to respond and behave in such situations so as to minimise the impacts of a catastrophic event. Even in countries like Australia that demonstrate a strong public commitment to cultural pluralism and social cohesion, ethno-cultural diversity can be seen as a risk or threat to national security and values at times of political, natural, economic and/or social tensions and crises. Australian government policymakers have recently focused, with increasing intensity, on “community resilience” as a key element in countering extremism and enhancing emergency preparedness and response. In some sense, this is the result of a tacit acknowledgement by government agencies that there are limits to what they can do for domestic communities should such a catastrophic event occur, and accordingly, the focus in recent times has shifted to how governments can best help people to help themselves in such situations, a key element of the contemporary “resilience” approach. Yet despite the robustly multicultural nature of Australian society, explicit engagement with Australia’s cultural diversity flickers only fleetingly on this agenda, which continues to pursue approaches to community resilience in the absence of understandings about how these terms and formations may themselves need to be diversified to maximise engagement by all citizens in a multicultural polity. There have been some recent efforts in Australia to move in this direction, for example the Australian Emergency Management Institute (AEMI)’s recent suite of projects with culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities (2006-2010) and the current Australia-New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee-supported project on “Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism” (Grossman and Tahiri), which I discuss in a longer forthcoming version of this essay (Grossman). Yet the understanding of ethno-cultural identity and difference that underlies much policy thinking on resilience remains problematic for the way in which it invests in a view of the cultural dimensions of community resilience as relic rather than resource – valorising the preservation of and respect for cultural norms and traditions, but silent on what different ethno-cultural communities might contribute toward expanded definitions of both “community” and “resilience” by virtue of the transformative potential and existing cultural capital they bring with them into new national and also translocal settings. For example, a primary conclusion of the joint program between AEMI and the Australian Multicultural Commission is that CALD communities are largely “vulnerable” in the context of disasters and emergency management and need to be better integrated into majority-culture models of theorising and embedding community resilience. This focus on stronger national integration and the “vulnerability” of culturally diverse ethno-cultural communities in the Australian context echoes the work of scholars beyond Australia such as McGhee, Mouritsen (Reflections, Citizenship) and Joppke. They argue that the “civic turn” in debates around resurgent contemporary nationalism and multicultural immigration policies privileges civic integration over genuine two-way multiculturalism. This approach sidesteps the transculturational (Ortiz; Welsch; Mignolo; Bennesaieh; Robins; Stein) aspects of contemporary social identities and exchange by paying lip-service to cultural diversity while affirming a neo-liberal construct of civic values and principles as a universalising goal of Western democratic states within a global market economy. It also suggests a superficial tribute to cultural diversity that does not embed diversity comprehensively at the levels of either conceptualising or resourcing different elements of Australian transcultural communities within the generalised framework of “community resilience.” And by emphasising cultural difference as vulnerability rather than as resource or asset, it fails to acknowledge the varieties of resilience capital that many culturally diverse individuals and communities may bring with them when they resettle in new environments, by ignoring the question of what “resilience” actually means to those from culturally diverse communities. In so doing, it also avoids the critical task of incorporating intercultural definitional diversity around the concepts of both “community” and “resilience” used to promote social cohesion and the capacity to recover from disasters and crises. How we might do differently in thinking about the broader challenges for multiculturalism itself as a resilient transnational concept and practice? The Concept of Resilience The meanings of resilience vary by disciplinary perspective. While there is no universally accepted definition of the concept, it is widely acknowledged that resilience refers to the capacity of an individual to do well in spite of exposure to acute trauma or sustained adversity (Liebenberg 219). Originating in the Latin word resilio, meaning ‘to jump back’, there is general consensus that resilience pertains to an individual’s, community’s or system’s ability to adapt to and ‘bounce back’ from a disruptive event (Mohaupt 63, Longstaff et al. 3). Over the past decade there has been a dramatic rise in interest in the clinical, community and family sciences concerning resilience to a broad range of adversities (Weine 62). While debate continues over which discipline can be credited with first employing resilience as a concept, Mohaupt argues that most of the literature on resilience cites social psychology and psychiatry as the origin for the concept beginning in the mid-20th century. The pioneer researchers of what became known as resilience research studied the impact on children living in dysfunctional families. For example, the findings of work by Garmezy, Werner and Smith and Rutter showed that about one third of children in these studies were coping very well despite considerable adversities and traumas. In asking what it was that prevented the children in their research from being negatively influenced by their home environments, such research provided the basis for future research on resilience. Such work was also ground-breaking for identifying the so-called ‘protective factors’ or resources that individuals can operationalise when dealing with adversity. In essence, protective factors are those conditions in the individual that protect them from the risk of dysfunction and enable recovery from trauma. They mitigate the effects of stressors or risk factors, that is, those conditions that predispose one to harm (Hajek 15). Protective factors include the inborn traits or qualities within an individual, those defining an individual’s environment, and also the interaction between the two. Together, these factors give people the strength, skills and motivation to cope in difficult situations and re-establish (a version of) ‘normal’ life (Gunnestad). Identifying protective factors is important in terms of understanding the particular resources a given sociocultural group has at its disposal, but it is also vital to consider the interconnections between various protective mechanisms, how they might influence each other, and to what degree. An individual, for instance, might display resilience or adaptive functioning in a particular domain (e.g. emotional functioning) but experience significant deficits in another (e.g. academic achievement) (Hunter 2). It is also essential to scrutinise how the interaction between protective factors and risk factors creates patterns of resilience. Finally, a comprehensive understanding of the interrelated nature of protective mechanisms and risk factors is imperative for designing effective interventions and tailored preventive strategies (Weine 65). In short, contemporary thinking about resilience suggests it is neither entirely personal nor strictly social, but an interactive and iterative combination of the two. It is a quality of the environment as much as the individual. For Ungar, resilience is the complex entanglements between “individuals and their social ecologies [that] will determine the degree of positive outcomes experienced” (3). Thinking about resilience as context-dependent is important because research that is too trait-based or actor-centred risks ignoring any structural or institutional forces. A more ecological interpretation of resilience, one that takes into a person’s context and environment into account, is vital in order to avoid blaming the victim for any hardships they face, or relieving state and institutional structures from their responsibilities in addressing social adversity, which can “emphasise self-help in line with a neo-conservative agenda instead of stimulating state responsibility” (Mohaupt 67). Nevertheless, Ungar posits that a coherent definition of resilience has yet to be developed that adequately ‘captures the dual focus of the individual and the individual’s social ecology and how the two must both be accounted for when determining the criteria for judging outcomes and discerning processes associated with resilience’ (7). Recent resilience research has consequently prompted a shift away from vulnerability towards protective processes — a shift that highlights the sustained capabilities of individuals and communities under threat or at risk. Locating ‘Culture’ in the Literature on Resilience However, an understanding of the role of culture has remained elusive or marginalised within this trend; there has been comparatively little sustained investigation into the applicability of resilience constructs to non-western cultures, or how the resources available for survival might differ from those accessible to western populations (Ungar 4). As such, a growing body of researchers is calling for more rigorous inquiry into culturally determined outcomes that might be associated with resilience in non-western or multicultural cultures and contexts, for example where Indigenous and minority immigrant communities live side by side with their ‘mainstream’ neighbours in western settings (Ungar 2). ‘Cultural resilience’ considers the role that cultural background plays in determining the ability of individuals and communities to be resilient in the face of adversity. For Clauss-Ehlers, the term describes the degree to which the strengths of one’s culture promote the development of coping (198). Culturally-focused resilience suggests that people can manage and overcome stress and trauma based not on individual characteristics alone, but also from the support of broader sociocultural factors (culture, cultural values, language, customs, norms) (Clauss-Ehlers 324). The innate cultural strengths of a culture may or may not differ from the strengths of other cultures; the emphasis here is not so much comparatively inter-cultural as intensively intra-cultural (VanBreda 215). A culturally focused resilience model thus involves “a dynamic, interactive process in which the individual negotiates stress through a combination of character traits, cultural background, cultural values, and facilitating factors in the sociocultural environment” (Clauss-Ehlers 199). In understanding ways of ‘coping and hoping, surviving and thriving’, it is thus crucial to consider how culturally and linguistically diverse minorities navigate the cultural understandings and assumptions of both their countries of origin and those of their current domicile (Ungar 12). Gunnestad claims that people who master the rules and norms of their new culture without abandoning their own language, values and social support are more resilient than those who tenaciously maintain their own culture at the expense of adjusting to their new environment. They are also more resilient than those who forego their own culture and assimilate with the host society (14). Accordingly, if the combination of both valuing one’s culture as well as learning about the culture of the new system produces greater resilience and adaptive capacities, serious problems can arise when a majority tries to acculturate a minority to the mainstream by taking away or not recognising important parts of the minority culture. In terms of resilience, if cultural factors are denied or diminished in accounting for and strengthening resilience – in other words, if people are stripped of what they possess by way of resilience built through cultural knowledge, disposition and networks – they do in fact become vulnerable, because ‘they do not automatically gain those cultural strengths that the majority has acquired over generations’ (Gunnestad 14). Mobilising ‘Culture’ in Australian Approaches to Community Resilience The realpolitik of how concepts of resilience and culture are mobilised is highly relevant here. As noted above, when ethnocultural difference is positioned as a risk or a threat to national identity, security and values, this is precisely the moment when vigorously, even aggressively, nationalised definitions of ‘community’ and ‘identity’ that minoritise or disavow cultural diversities come to the fore in public discourse. The Australian evocation of nationalism and national identity, particularly in the way it has framed policy discussion on managing national responses to disasters and threats, has arguably been more muted than some of the European hysteria witnessed recently around cultural diversity and national life. Yet we still struggle with the idea that newcomers to Australia might fall on the surplus rather than the deficit side of the ledger when it comes to identifying and harnessing resilience capital. A brief example of this trend is explored here. From 2006 to 2010, the Australian Emergency Management Institute embarked on an ambitious government-funded four-year program devoted to strengthening community resilience in relation to disasters with specific reference to engaging CALD communities across Australia. The program, Inclusive Emergency Management with CALD Communities, was part of a wider Australian National Action Plan to Build Social Cohesion, Harmony and Security in the wake of the London terrorist bombings in July 2005. Involving CALD community organisations as well as various emergency and disaster management agencies, the program ran various workshops and agency-community partnership pilots, developed national school education resources, and commissioned an evaluation of the program’s effectiveness (Farrow et al.). While my critique here is certainly not aimed at emergency management or disaster response agencies and personnel themselves – dedicated professionals who often achieve remarkable results in emergency and disaster response under extraordinarily difficult circumstances – it is nevertheless important to highlight how the assumptions underlying elements of AEMI’s experience and outcomes reflect the persistent ways in which ethnocultural diversity is rendered as a problem to be surmounted or a liability to be redressed, rather than as an asset to be built upon or a resource to be valued and mobilised. AEMI’s explicit effort to engage with CALD communities in building overall community resilience was important in its tacit acknowledgement that emergency and disaster services were (and often remain) under-resourced and under-prepared in dealing with the complexities of cultural diversity in emergency situations. Despite these good intentions, however, while the program produced some positive outcomes and contributed to crucial relationship building between CALD communities and emergency services within various jurisdictions, it also continued to frame the challenge of working with cultural diversity as a problem of increased vulnerability during disasters for recently arrived and refugee background CALD individuals and communities. This highlights a common feature in community resilience-building initiatives, which is to focus on those who are already ‘robust’ versus those who are ‘vulnerable’ in relation to resilience indicators, and whose needs may require different or additional resources in order to be met. At one level, this is a pragmatic resourcing issue: national agencies understandably want to put their people, energy and dollars where they are most needed in pursuit of a steady-state unified national response at times of crisis. Nor should it be argued that at least some CALD groups, particularly those from new arrival and refugee communities, are not vulnerable in at least some of the ways and for some of the reasons suggested in the program evaluation. However, the consistent focus on CALD communities as ‘vulnerable’ and ‘in need’ is problematic, as well as partial. It casts members of these communities as structurally and inherently less able and less resilient in the context of disasters and emergencies: in some sense, as those who, already ‘victims’ of chronic social deficits such as low English proficiency, social isolation and a mysterious unidentified set of ‘cultural factors’, can become doubly victimised in acute crisis and disaster scenarios. In what is by now a familiar trope, the description of CALD communities as ‘vulnerable’ precludes asking questions about what they do have, what they do know, and what they do or can contribute to how we respond to disaster and emergency events in our communities. A more profound problem in this sphere revolves around working out how best to engage CALD communities and individuals within existing approaches to disaster and emergency preparedness and response. This reflects a fundamental but unavoidable limitation of disaster preparedness models: they are innately spatially and geographically bounded, and consequently understand ‘communities’ in these terms, rather than expanding definitions of ‘community’ to include the dimensions of community-as-social-relations. While some good engagement outcomes were achieved locally around cross-cultural knowledge for emergency services workers, the AEMI program fell short of asking some of the harder questions about how emergency and disaster service scaffolding and resilience-building approaches might themselves need to change or transform, using a cross-cutting model of ‘communities’ as both geographic places and multicultural spaces (Bartowiak-Théron and Crehan) in order to be more effective in national scenarios in which cultural diversity should be taken for granted. Toward Acknowledgement of Resilience Capital Most significantly, the AEMI program did not produce any recognition of the ways in which CALD communities already possess resilience capital, or consider how this might be drawn on in formulating stronger community initiatives around disaster and threats preparedness for the future. Of course, not all individuals within such communities, nor all communities across varying circumstances, will demonstrate resilience, and we need to be careful of either overgeneralising or romanticising the kinds and degrees of ‘resilience capital’ that may exist within them. Nevertheless, at least some have developed ways of withstanding crises and adapting to new conditions of living. This is particularly so in connection with individual and group behaviours around resource sharing, care-giving and social responsibility under adverse circumstances (Grossman and Tahiri) – all of which are directly relevant to emergency and disaster response. While some of these resilient behaviours may have been nurtured or enhanced by particular experiences and environments, they can, as the discussion of recent literature above suggests, also be rooted more deeply in cultural norms, habits and beliefs. Whatever their origins, for culturally diverse societies to achieve genuine resilience in the face of both natural and human-made disasters, it is critical to call on the ‘social memory’ (Folke et al.) of communities faced with responding to emergencies and crises. Such wellsprings of social memory ‘come from the diversity of individuals and institutions that draw on reservoirs of practices, knowledge, values, and worldviews and is crucial for preparing the system for change, building resilience, and for coping with surprise’ (Adger et al.). Consequently, if we accept the challenge of mapping an approach to cultural diversity as resource rather than relic into our thinking around strengthening community resilience, there are significant gains to be made. For a whole range of reasons, no diversity-sensitive model or measure of resilience should invest in static understandings of ethnicities and cultures; all around the world, ethnocultural identities and communities are in a constant and sometimes accelerated state of dynamism, reconfiguration and flux. But to ignore the resilience capital and potential protective factors that ethnocultural diversity can offer to the strengthening of community resilience more broadly is to miss important opportunities that can help suture the existing disconnects between proactive approaches to intercultural connectedness and social inclusion on the one hand, and reactive approaches to threats, national security and disaster response on the other, undermining the effort to advance effectively on either front. This means that dominant social institutions and structures must be willing to contemplate their own transformation as the result of transcultural engagement, rather than merely insisting, as is often the case, that ‘other’ cultures and communities conform to existing hegemonic paradigms of being and of living. In many ways, this is the most critical step of all. A resilience model and strategy that questions its own culturally informed yet taken-for-granted assumptions and premises, goes out into communities to test and refine these, and returns to redesign its approach based on the new knowledge it acquires, would reflect genuine progress toward an effective transculturational approach to community resilience in culturally diverse contexts.References Adger, W. Neil, Terry P. Hughes, Carl Folke, Stephen R. Carpenter and Johan Rockström. “Social-Ecological Resilience to Coastal Disasters.” Science 309.5737 (2005): 1036-1039. ‹http://www.sciencemag.org/content/309/5737/1036.full> Bartowiak-Théron, Isabelle, and Anna Corbo Crehan. “The Changing Nature of Communities: Implications for Police and Community Policing.” Community Policing in Australia: Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) Reports, Research and Policy Series 111 (2010): 8-15. Benessaieh, Afef. “Multiculturalism, Interculturality, Transculturality.” Ed. A. Benessaieh. Transcultural Americas/Ameriques Transculturelles. Ottawa: U of Ottawa Press/Les Presses de l’Unversite d’Ottawa, 2010. 11-38. Clauss-Ehlers, Caroline S. “Sociocultural Factors, Resilience and Coping: Support for a Culturally Sensitive Measure of Resilience.” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 29 (2008): 197-212. Clauss-Ehlers, Caroline S. “Cultural Resilience.” Encyclopedia of Cross-Cultural School Psychology. Ed. C. S. Clauss-Ehlers. New York: Springer, 2010. 324-326. Farrow, David, Anthea Rutter and Rosalind Hurworth. Evaluation of the Inclusive Emergency Management with Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) Communities Program. Parkville, Vic.: Centre for Program Evaluation, U of Melbourne, July 2009. ‹http://www.ag.gov.au/www/emaweb/rwpattach.nsf/VAP/(9A5D88DBA63D32A661E6369859739356)~Final+Evaluation+Report+-+July+2009.pdf/$file/Final+Evaluation+Report+-+July+2009.pdf>.Folke, Carl, Thomas Hahn, Per Olsson, and Jon Norberg. “Adaptive Governance of Social-Ecological Systems.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 30 (2005): 441-73. ‹http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.energy.30.050504.144511>. Garmezy, Norman. “The Study of Competence in Children at Risk for Severe Psychopathology.” The Child in His Family: Children at Psychiatric Risk. Vol. 3. Eds. E. J. Anthony and C. Koupernick. New York: Wiley, 1974. 77-97. Grossman, Michele. “Resilient Multiculturalism? Diversifying Australian Approaches to Community Resilience and Cultural Difference”. Global Perspectives on Multiculturalism in the 21st Century. Eds. B. E. de B’beri and F. Mansouri. London: Routledge, 2014. Grossman, Michele, and Hussein Tahiri. Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism. Canberra: Australia-New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee, forthcoming 2014. Grossman, Michele. “Cultural Resilience and Strengthening Communities”. Safeguarding Australia Summit, Canberra. 23 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.safeguardingaustraliasummit.org.au/uploader/resources/Michele_Grossman.pdf>. Gunnestad, Arve. “Resilience in a Cross-Cultural Perspective: How Resilience Is Generated in Different Cultures.” Journal of Intercultural Communication 11 (2006). ‹http://www.immi.se/intercultural/nr11/gunnestad.htm>. Hajek, Lisa J. “Belonging and Resilience: A Phenomenological Study.” Unpublished Master of Science thesis, U of Wisconsin-Stout. Menomonie, Wisconsin, 2003. Hunter, Cathryn. “Is Resilience Still a Useful Concept When Working with Children and Young People?” Child Family Community Australia (CFA) Paper 2. Melbourne: Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2012.Joppke, Christian. "Beyond National Models: Civic Integration Policies for Immigrants in Western Europe". West European Politics 30.1 (2007): 1-22. Liebenberg, Linda, Michael Ungar, and Fons van de Vijver. “Validation of the Child and Youth Resilience Measure-28 (CYRM-28) among Canadian Youth.” Research on Social Work Practice 22.2 (2012): 219-226. Longstaff, Patricia H., Nicholas J. Armstrong, Keli Perrin, Whitney May Parker, and Matthew A. Hidek. “Building Resilient Communities: A Preliminary Framework for Assessment.” Homeland Security Affairs 6.3 (2010): 1-23. ‹http://www.hsaj.org/?fullarticle=6.3.6>. McGhee, Derek. The End of Multiculturalism? Terrorism, Integration and Human Rights. Maidenhead: Open U P, 2008.Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton U P, 2000. Mohaupt, Sarah. “Review Article: Resilience and Social Exclusion.” Social Policy and Society 8 (2009): 63-71.Mouritsen, Per. "The Culture of Citizenship: A Reflection on Civic Integration in Europe." Ed. R. Zapata-Barrero. Citizenship Policies in the Age of Diversity: Europe at the Crossroad." Barcelona: CIDOB Foundation, 2009: 23-35. Mouritsen, Per. “Political Responses to Cultural Conflict: Reflections on the Ambiguities of the Civic Turn.” Ed. P. Mouritsen and K.E. Jørgensen. Constituting Communities. Political Solutions to Cultural Conflict, London: Palgrave, 2008. 1-30. Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Trans. Harriet de Onís. Intr. Fernando Coronil and Bronislaw Malinowski. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 1995 [1940]. Robins, Kevin. The Challenge of Transcultural Diversities: Final Report on the Transversal Study on Cultural Policy and Cultural Diversity. Culture and Cultural Heritage Department. Strasbourg: Council of European Publishing, 2006. Rutter, Michael. “Protective Factors in Children’s Responses to Stress and Disadvantage.” Annals of the Academy of Medicine, Singapore 8 (1979): 324-38. Stein, Mark. “The Location of Transculture.” Transcultural English Studies: Fictions, Theories, Realities. Eds. F. Schulze-Engler and S. Helff. Cross/Cultures 102/ANSEL Papers 12. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009. 251-266. Ungar, Michael. “Resilience across Cultures.” British Journal of Social Work 38.2 (2008): 218-235. First published online 2006: 1-18. In-text references refer to the online Advance Access edition ‹http://bjsw.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2006/10/18/bjsw.bcl343.full.pdf>. VanBreda, Adrian DuPlessis. Resilience Theory: A Literature Review. Erasmuskloof: South African Military Health Service, Military Psychological Institute, Social Work Research & Development, 2001. Weine, Stevan. “Building Resilience to Violent Extremism in Muslim Diaspora Communities in the United States.” Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict 5.1 (2012): 60-73. Welsch, Wolfgang. “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today.” Spaces of Culture: City, Nation World. Eds. M. Featherstone and S. Lash. London: Sage, 1999. 194-213. Werner, Emmy E., and Ruth S. Smith. Vulnerable But Invincible: A Longitudinal Study of\ Resilience and Youth. New York: McGraw Hill, 1982. NotesThe concept of ‘resilience capital’ I offer here is in line with one strand of contemporary theorising around resilience – that of resilience as social or socio-ecological capital – but moves beyond the idea of enhancing general social connectedness and community cohesion by emphasising the ways in which culturally diverse communities may already be robustly networked and resourceful within micro-communal settings, with new resources and knowledge both to draw on and to offer other communities or the ‘national community’ at large. In effect, ‘resilience capital’ speaks to the importance of finding ‘the communities within the community’ (Bartowiak-Théron and Crehan 11) and recognising their capacity to contribute to broad-scale resilience and recovery.I am indebted for the discussion of the literature on resilience here to Dr Peta Stephenson, Centre for Cultural Diversity and Wellbeing, Victoria University, who is working on a related project (M. Grossman and H. Tahiri, Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism, forthcoming 2014).

The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) learned with immense shock and sadness of the passing on of Professor Samir Amin on Sunday, 12th August 2018. Subsequently, Prof. Samir Amin’s body was interned at Père Lachaise in Paris on 1st September 2018 at a site provided by the French Communist Party. The Council was represented at the burial by Prof. Fatow Sow and Dr. Cherif Sy; two members of the CODESRIA community who have worked with Samir Amin for a while. For CODESRIA, this marks nothing less than the end of an era in the history of African social research given the many pioneering roles the late Professor Amin played as a scholar, teacher, mentor, friend, and revolutionary. Samir was many things to us as a Council; for the younger members of the community, it meant much more to be in his company at the numerous CODESRIA meeting he attended. A model for three generations of African and, indeed, radical scholars globally, Samir was that giant Baobab tree whose grandeur of intellect and spirit made him a worthy role model. While serving as Director of the United Nations African Institute for Economic Development and Planning (IDEP), he hosted the initial scaffolding of the CODESRIA at IDEP, brought together and nurtured new talent that laid the foundations which launched Council on a path of growth and resilience to what it is to-date. As the final note on his reflections contained in this Bulletin illustrates, while serving as CODESRIA’s founding Executive Secretary, Samir worked very closely with Abdalla Bujra and later Thandika Mkandawire, to shape the initial years of CODESRIA’s intellectual identity and trajectory. After CODESRIA relocated from the premises of IDEP to a new home in the Fann Residence part of Dakar, Samir Amin remained engaged with Council and its community of scholars, participating actively and effectively in all its activities. This 15th General Assembly of CODESRIA is perhaps the first Assembly without Samir Amin presence. In all previous General Assemblies, Samir has been a notable presence even giving the Cheikh Anta Diop Lecture at the 10 Assembly in Kampala, Uganda. It is at the General Assembly that many young academics interacted with Samir, often for the first time and indeed experiencing the awe of his presence. Though Samir is absent at the current Assembly, there is no doubt that his intellectual and revolutionary spirit is definitely present just as the thoughts and ideas that he shared so generously and to the very end will continue to inspire reflection and debate. Samir Amin’s intellectual journey was a long and illustrious one. It was a journey marked by commitments that distinguished him as a scholar of unparalleled convictions. He died still an unapologetic socialist academic or, as the title of his memoir reads, ‘an independent Marxist’ whose work was driven by an unshakeable conviction to confront and oppose totalizing economic orthodoxies. He treated this confrontation and opposition as a prelude to social transformation. He was steadfast in his belief that the world must shift away from capitalism and strive to build new ‘post-capitalist’ societies. He described capitalism as a small bracket in the long history of human civilization. His works identify and record the multiple crises of capitalism, a system he described as senile and obsolete. In its place, Samir Amin formulated a political alternative that he envisioned would proceed by i) socializing the ownership of monopolies, ii). definancializing the management of the economy and iii) deglobalising international relations [cited in Campbell, 2015: 286]. For him, these three directions provided the basis of an active politics of dismantling capitalism; a politics he committed his skill and energy mobilizing for. Even as he grew older, he mustered fresh bursts of energy to continue the struggle and to the very last days when he was in Dakar, he was apart of the team of scholar/ activists gathered together by International ENDA Third World Network to draft the Alternative Report on Africa (Dakar, 2018). CODESRIA was apart of this process and the Report will by shared at this General Assembly. Many of Samir Amin’s writings make the point repeatedly on the urgent necessity to dismantle the ‘obsolete system’ known as capitalism. However, none was as emphatic in rethinking the underlying cultural underpinning of the ‘obsolete system’ like Eurocentricism. In that engaging publication, he provided a rggesounding critique of world history as is centered around Eurocentric modernity and invites us to understand modernity as an incomplete process that, to survive its current crises, will need ‘economic, social and political reconstruction of all societies in the world.’ Embedded in this argument is a long held position about the importance of the Bandung moment (1955) as a moment of an alternative globalization based on Afro-Asian solidarity. It is from this perspective that one understands why Samir Amin emphasized the importance of China [see tribute by Sit Tsui and Yan Xiaohui in this bulletin]. Afro-Asian solidarity was the basis upon which Samir Amin located his alternative politics which also defined his towering global outlook and presence. There is no doubt that Samir Amin’s intellectual presence was defined by depth of knowledge, complexity of thought and fidelity to Marxist organising principles. There is no way of summarizing the corpus of work he produced, the revolutionary engagements he undertook and the transformative potential that led him to remain steadfast even when many others were only too happy to find a good reason to backtrack and conform. His work is enormous in volume but also in the depth of its knowledge and relevance to society. He provoked and joined debates across the globe but more importantly with comrades in Latin America and Asia, those of the dependency and underdevelopment school but also later from a South-South perspective. In CODESRIA’s flagship journal Africa Development alone, Samir Amin published twenty articles. A biodata document he shared with the Council has 24 books in English and 41 in French. He is published in English, French, Arabic, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish to name but these few languages. In all these publications and in the various languages, Samir Amin articulated his belief in alternatives, and as indicated above, this belief remained strong even to the last month of his life on earth. Born to an Egyptian father and French mother on 3rd September 1931 in Cairo, Egypt, Samir Amin’s convictions owe much to the context of his childhood all the way from Port Said in northern Egypt to Cairo where he schooled. He spent his early life in Egypt where he attended his formative schooling before proceeding to France to pursue higher education at Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (“Sciences Po”). Here, he earned a diploma in 1952 and later a PhD in 1957 at the Sorbonne. Samir later earned another diploma in mathematical statistics from L’institut national de la statistique et des etudes economiques. He had always been interested in radical thought and action from early on, noting in an interview that he already considered himself a communist in Secondary School. Even though he and his cohort did not know what communism really meant in their early childhood, they assumed it meant “equality between human beings and between nations, and it meant that this has been done by the Russian revolution.” It is not surprising that with this pedigree, Samir Amin focused in his graduate research on “The origins of underdevelopment – capitalist accumulation on a world scale” and emphasized in his work that underdevelopment in the periphery was, in large measure, due to the working of the capitalist system. He consequently underscored the need to search for socialist alternatives to liberal globalisation. Samir Amin returned to Cairo in 1957, worked briefly in Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Institute for Economic Management (1957–1960) before heading to work as an adviser in the Ministry of Planning in Mali (1960- 1963). Subsequently, Samir Amin’s intellectual life became largely internationalist in orientation, and anchored principally on the question of accumulation as key to understanding underdevelopment. He maintained the sojourn between France where he took up a Professorship in 1966 and Dakar, Senegal his adopted home where he worked for ten years, from 1970 to 1980 at IDEP. Later in 1980, he founded the Third World Forum, originally hosted at the CODESRIA Secretariat, and lent his considerable weight to the institutionalisation of ENDA and the World Forum for Alternatives. His support for revolutionary politics is marked not just in the books and papers he published but also in the lecture circuit where he spoke to audiences about the undeniable relevance of radical politics. Samir Amin’s thinking was in large measure defined by the solidarity built around the Bandung Confer- ence of 1955. This remained a critical touchstone in his work in which non-western civilisations and his- tories played an important role. Bandung, for him, inaugurated a different pattern of globalisation, the one he called ‘negotiated globalisation.’ Though not asufficientbasisforcomplete“de-linking”from‘ob- solescent capitalism’, Samir Amin saw in Afro-Asian solidarity possibilities and pathways to that delinking; the process, as he explained, by which you submit “ex- ternal relations to the needs of internal progressive so- cial changes and targets.” The notion of ‘delinking’ oc- cupied a major place in Samir Amin’s thinking and is positioned in contrast to ‘adjustment’ that was the pre- ferred approach of the Bretton Woods Institutions. As Mamdani shows elsewhere in this Bulletin, there are major problematic elements of this notion that Samir Amin continued to grapple with. But ultimately, Samir Amin noted that delinking is in fact a process that, de- pending on the societies implementing it, can be used to install graduated level of autonomous development instead of countries in the periphery remaining locked into and merely adjusting to the trends set by a funda- mentally unequal capitalist system. In Samir Amin, we found the true meaning of praxis; a thinker who insisted that his work has immediate relevance to society. His departure deprives us of the practical energy he brought to our meetings and debates; and denies radical thinkers a model around whom they found the compass that enabled them to navigate the treacherous, indeed murderous, waters of capitalism. We however are lucky to have lived in his company, to have learned from his fountain of knowledge and to have shared in the passion of his convictions. The Council plans to invigorate the value of his legacy by celebrating him during this 15th General Assembly but also beyond the confines of the Assembly. Thus, this edition of the Bulletin contains two intertwined sets of essays; all organised around Samir Amin. In the one instance, we have a selection of messages in his memory. One the other, we have a selection of essays he authored. Separately, we will re-publish all the essays he published in Africa Development in a special issue of the journal to provide them in one collection for posterity. But whichever way, and as his own reflection in the essay published in this volume and his memoirs show, CODESRIA is an inheritance that Samir Amin bequeathed the African social science community. As such, it is fitting that the Bulletin designed for the 15th CODESRIA General Assembly is also a Bulletin that publishes essays in his honour. The choice of theme for the General Assembly predates the passing on of Samir Amin. But the theme itself is one that was dear to Samir Amin. It is our pleasure therefore to present the essays contained here as essays that shed light on a life lived fully but also that open up a space to explore the unfulfilled promises of globalisation. We hope that at the end of it, this will be a fitting study in honour of our departed icon but also a commentary on the key issues the 15th General Assembly explored.

According to Oscar Wilde, the problem with socialism was that it took up too many evenings. Wilde’s aphorism alludes to a major issue that bedevils all attempts to influence the public sphere: the fact that public activities encroach unduly on citizens’ valuable time. In the 21st century, the dilemma of how to deal with “too many evenings” is one that many citizen journalists face as they give their own time to public pursuits. This paper will look at the development of the public citizen and what it means to be a citizen journalist with reference to some of the writer’s own experiences in the field. The paper will conclude with an examination of future possibilities. While large media companies change their change their focus from traditional news values, citizen journalism can play a stronger role in public life as long as it grasps some of the opportunities that are available. There are substantial compensations available to citizen journalists for the problems presented by Wilde’s evenings. The quote from Wilde is borrowed from Albert Hirschman’s Shifting Involvements, which among other things, is an examination of the disappointments of public action. Hirschman noted how it was a common experience for beginners who engage in public action to find that takes up more time than expected (96). As public activity encroaches not only on time devoted to private consumption but also on to the time devoted to the production of income, it can become a costly pursuit which may cause a sharp reaction against the “practice of citizenship” (Hirschman 97). Yet the more stimuli about politics people receive, the greater the likelihood is they will participate in politics and the greater the depth of their participation (Milbrath & Goel 35). People with a positive attraction to politics are more likely to receive stimuli about politics and participate more (Milbrath & Goel 36). Active citizenship, it seems, has its own feedback loops. An active citizenry is not a new idea. The concepts of citizen and citizenship emerged from the sophisticated polity established in the Greek city states about 2,500 years ago. The status of a citizen signified that the individual had the right to full membership of, and participation in, an independent political society (Batrouney & Goldlust 24). In later eras that society could be defined as a kingdom, an empire, or a nation state. The conditions for a bourgeois public sphere were created in the 13th century as capitalists in European city states created a traffic in commodities and news (Habermas 15). A true public sphere emerged in the 17th century with the rise of the English coffee houses and French salons where people had the freedom to express opinions regardless of their social status (Habermas 36). In 1848, France held the first election under universal direct suffrage (for males) and the contemporary slogan was that “universal suffrage closes the era of revolutions” (Hirschman 113). Out of this heady optimism, the late 19th century ushered in the era of the “informed citizen” as voting changed from a social and public duty to a private right – a civic obligation enforceable only by private conscience (Schudson). These concepts live on in the modern idea that the model voter is considered to be a citizen vested with the ability to understand the consequences of his or her choice (Menand 1). The internet is a new knowledge space which offers an alternative reading of the citizen. In Pierre Lévy’s vision of cyberculture, identity is no longer a function of belonging, it is “distributed and nomadic” (Ross & Nightingale 149). The Internet has diffused widely and is increasingly central to everyday life as a place where people go to get information (Dutton 10). Journalism initially prospered on an information scarcity factor however the technology of the Internet has created an information rich society (Tapsall & Varley 18). But research suggests that online discussions do not promote consensus, are short-lived with little impact and end up turning into “dialogues of the deaf” (Nguyen 148). The easy online publishing environment is a fertile ground for rumours, hoaxes and cheating games to circulate which risk turning the public sphere into a chaotic and anarchic space (Nguyen 148). The stereotypical blogger is pejoratively dismissed as “pajama-clad” (Papandrea 516) connoting a sense of disrespect for the proper transmission of ideas. Nevertheless the Internet offers powerful tools for collaboration that is opening up many everyday institutions to greater social accountability (Dutton 3). Recent research by the 2007 Digital Futures project shows 65 percent of respondents consider the Internet “to be a very important or extremely important source of information” (Cowden 76). By 2006, Roy Morgan was reporting that three million Australians were visiting online news site each month (Cowden.76). Crikey.com.au, Australia’s first online-only news outlet, has become a significant independent player in the Australia mediascape claiming over 5,000 subscribers by 2005 with three times as many non-paying “squatters” reading its daily email (Devine 50). Online Opinion has a similar number of subscribers and was receiving 750,000 page views a month by 2005 (National Forum). Both Crikey.com.au and Online Opinion have made moves towards public journalism in an attempt to provide ordinary people access to the public sphere. As professional journalists lose their connection with the public, bloggers are able to fill the public journalism niche (Simons, Content Makers 208). At their best, blogs can offer a “more broad-based, democratic involvement of citizens in the issues that matter to them” (Bruns 7). The research of University of North Carolina journalism professor Philip Meyer showed that cities and towns with public journalism-oriented newspapers led to a better educated local public (Simons, Content Makers 211). Meyer’s idea of good public journalism has six defining elements: a) the need to define a community’s sense of itself b) devotion of time to issues that demand community attention c) devotion of depth to the issues d) more attention to the middle ground e) a preference for substance over tactics and f) encouraging reciprocal understanding (Meyer 1). The objective of public journalism is to foster a greater sense of connection between the community and the media. It can mean journalists using ordinary people as sources and also ordinary people acting as journalists. Jay Rosen proposed a new model based on journalism as conversation (Simons, Content Makers 209). He believes the technology has now overtaken the public journalism movement (Simons, Content Makers 213). His own experiments at pro-am Internet open at assignment.net have had mixed results. His conclusion was that it wasn’t easy for people working voluntarily on the Internet to report on big stories together nor had they “unlocked” the secret of successful pro-am methods (Rosen). Nevertheless, the people formerly known as the audience, as Rosen called them, have seized the agenda. The barriers to entry into journalism have disappeared. Blogging has made Web publishing easy and the social networks are even more user friendly. The problem today is not getting published but finding an audience. And as the audience fragments, the issue will become finding a niche. One such niche is local political activism. The 2007 Australian federal election saw many online sites actively promoting citizen journalism. Most prominent was Youdecide2007 at Queensland University of Technology, funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) in partnership with SBS, Online Opinion and the Brisbane Institute. Site co-editor Graham Young said the site’s aim was to use citizen journalists to report on their own electorates to fill the gap left by fewer journalists on the ground, especially in less populated areas (Young). While the site’s stated aim was to provide a forum for a seat-by-seat coverage and provide “a new perspective on national politics” (Youdecide2007), the end result was significantly skewed by the fact that the professional editorial team was based in Brisbane. Youdecide2007 published 96 articles in its news archive of which 59 could be identified as having a state-based focus. Figure 1 shows 62.7% of these state-based stories were about Queensland. Figure 1: Youdecide2007 news stories identifiable by state (note: national stories are omitted from this table): State Total no. of stories %age Qld 37 62.7 NSW 8 13.6 Vic 6 10.2 WA 3 5.1 Tas 2 3.4 ACT 2 3.4 SA 1 1.6 Modern election campaigns are characterised by a complex and increasingly fragmented news environment and the new media are rapidly adding another layer of complexity to the mix (Norris et al. 11-12). The slick management of national campaigns are is counter-productive to useful citizen journalism. According to Matthew Clayfield from the citizen journalism site electionTracker.net, “there are very few open events which ordinary people could cover in a way that could be described as citizen journalism” (qtd. in Hills 2007). Similar to other systems, the Australian campaign communication empowers the political leaders and media owners at the expense of ordinary party members and citizens (Warhurst 135). However the slick modern national “on message” campaign has not totally replaced old-style local activity. Although the national campaign has superimposed upon the local one and displaced it from the focus of attention, local candidates must still communicate their party policies in the electorate (Warhurst 113). Citizen journalists are ideally placed to harness this local communication. A grassroots approach is encapsulated in the words of Dan Gillmor who said “every reporter should realise that, collectively, the readers know more than they do about what they write about” (qtd. in Quinn & Quinn-Allan 66). With this in mind, I set out my own stall in citizen journalism for the 2007 Australian federal election with two personal goals: to interview all my local federal Lower House candidates and to attend as many public election meetings as possible. As a result, I wrote 19 election articles in the two months prior to the election. This consisted of 9 news items, 6 candidate interviews and 4 reports of public meetings. All the local candidates except one agreed to be interviewed. The local Liberal candidate refused to be interviewed despite repeated requests. There was no reason offered, just a continual ignoring of requests. Liberal candidates were also noticeably absent from most candidate forums I attended. This pattern of non-communicative behaviour was observed elsewhere (Bartlett, Wilson). I tried to turn this to my advantage by turning their refusal to talk into a story itself. For those that were prepared to talk, I set the expectation that the entire interview would be on the record and would be edited and published on my blog site. As a result, all candidates asked for a list of questions in advance which I supplied. Because politicians devote considerable energy and financial resources to ensure the information they impart to citizens has an appropriate ‘spin’ on it, (Negrine 10) I reserved the right to ask follow-up questions on any of their answers that required clarification. For the interviews themselves, I followed the advice of Spradley’s principle by starting with a conscious attitude of near-total ignorance, not writing the story in advance, and attempting to be descriptive, incisive, investigative and critical (Alia 100). After I posted the results of the interview, I sent a link to each of the respondents offering them a chance to clarify or correct any inaccuracies in the interview statements. Defamation skirts the boundary between free speech and reputation (Pearson 159) and a good working knowledge of the way defamation law affects journalists (citizen or otherwise) is crucial, particularly in dealing with public figures. This was an important consideration for some of the lesser known candidates as Google searches on their names brought my articles up within the top 20 results for each of the Democrat, Green and Liberal Democratic Party candidates I interviewed. None of the public meetings I attended were covered in the mainstream media. These meetings are the type of news Jan Schaffer of University of Maryland’s J-Lab saw as an ecological niche for citizen journalists to “create opportunities for citizens to get informed and inform others about micro-news that falls under the radar of news organisations who don’t have the resources” (Schaffer in Glaser). As Mark Bahnisch points out, Brisbane had three daily newspapers and a daily state based 7.30 Report twenty years ago which contrasts with the situation now where there’s no effective state parliamentary press gallery and little coverage of local politics at all (“State of Political Blogging”). Brisbane’s situation is not unique and the gaps are there to be exploited by new players. While the high cost of market entry renders the “central square” of the public sphere inaccessible to new players (Curran 128) the ease of Web access has given the citizen journalists the chance to roam its back alleys. However even if they fill the voids left by departing news organisations, there will still be a large hole in the mediascape. No one will be doing the hardhitting investigative journalism. This gritty work requires great resources and often years of time. The final product of investigative journalism is often complicated to read, unentertaining and inconclusive (Bower in Negrine 13). Margaret Simons says that journalism is a skill that involves the ability to find things out. She says the challenge of the future will be to marry the strengths of the newsroom and the dirty work of investigative journalism with the power of the conversation of blogs (“Politics and the Internet”). One possibility is raised by the Danish project Scoop. They offer financial support to individual journalists who have good ideas for investigative journalism. Founded by the Danish Association for Investigative Journalism and funded by the Danish Foreign Ministry, Scoop supports media projects across the world with the only proviso being that a journalist has to have an agreement with an editor to publish the resulting story (ABC Media Report). But even without financial support, citizens have the ability to perform rudimentary investigative journalism. The primary tool of investigative journalism is the interview (McIlwane & Bowman 260). While an interview can be arranged by anyone with access to a telephone or e-mail, it should not be underestimated how difficult a skill interviewing is. According to American journalist John Brady, the science of journalistic interviewing aims to gain two things, trust and information (Brady in White 75). In the interviews I did with politicians during the federal election, I found that getting past the “spin” of the party line to get genuine information was the toughest part of the task. There is also a considerable amount of information in the public domain which is rarely explored by reporters (Negrine 23). Knowing how to make use of this information will become a critical success factor for citizen journalists. Corporate journalists use databases such as Lexis/Nexis and Factiva to gain background information, a facility unavailable to most citizen journalists unless they are either have access through a learning institution or are prepared to pay a premium for the information. While large corporate vendors supply highly specialised information, amateurs can play a greater role in the creation and transmission of local news. According to G. Stuart Adam, journalism contains four basic elements: reporting, judging, a public voice and the here and now (13). Citizen journalism is capable of meeting all four criteria. The likelihood is that the future of communications will belong to the centralised corporations on one hand and the unsupervised amateur on the other (Bird 36). Whether the motive to continue is payment or empowerment, the challenge for citizen journalists is to advance beyond the initial success of tactical actions towards the establishment as a serious political and media alternative (Bruns 19). Nguyen et al.’s uses and gratification research project suggests there is a still a long way to go in Australia. While they found widespread diffusion of online news, the vast majority of users (78%) were still getting their news from newspaper Websites (Nguyen et al. 13). The research corroborates Mark Bahnisch’s view that “most Australians have not heard of blogs and only a tiny minority reads them (quoted in Simons, Content Makers 219). The Australian blogosphere still waits for its defining Swiftboat incident or Rathergate to announce its arrival. But Bahnisch doesn’t necessarily believe this is a good evolutionary strategy anyway. Here it is becoming more a conversation than a platform “with its own niche and its own value” (Bahnisch, “This Is Not America”). As far as my own experiments go, the citizen journalism reports I wrote gave me no financial reward but plenty of other compensations that made the experience richly rewarding. It was important to bring otherwise neglected ideas, stories and personalities into the public domain and the reports helped me make valuable connections with public-minded members of my local community. They were also useful practice to hone interview techniques and political writing skills. Finally the exercise raised my own public profile as several of my entries were picked up or hyperlinked by other citizen journalism sites and blogs. Some day, and probably soon, a model will be worked out which will make citizen journalism a worthwhile economic endeavour. In the meantime, we rely on active citizens of the blogosphere to give their evenings freely for the betterment of the public sphere. References ABC Media Report. “Scoop.” 2008. 17 Feb. 2008 http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2008/2151204.htm#transcript>. Adam, G. Notes towards a Definition of Journalism: Understanding an Old Craft as an Art Form. St Petersburg, Fl.: Poynter Institute, 1993. Alia, V. “The Rashomon Principle: The Journalist as Ethnographer.” In V. Alia, B. Brennan, and B. Hoffmaster (eds.), Deadlines and Diversity: Journalism Ethics in a Changing World. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 1996. Bahnisch, M. “This Is Not America.” newmatilda.com 2007. 17 Feb. 2008 http://www.newmatilda.com/2007/10/04/not-america>. Bahnisch, M. “The State of Political Blogging.” Larvatus Prodeo 2007. 17 Feb. 2008 http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/09/30/the-state-of-political-blogging/>. Bartlett, A. “Leaders Debate.” The Bartlett Diaries 2007. 19 Feb. 2008 http://andrewbartlett.com/blog/?p=1767>. Batrouney, T., and J. Goldlust. Unravelling Identity: Immigrants, Identity and Citizenship in Australia. Melbourne: Common Ground, 2005. Bird, R. “News in the Global Village.” The End of the News. Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 2005. Bruns, A. “News Blogs and Citizen Journalism: New Directions for e-Journalism.” In K. Prasad (ed.), E-Journalism: New Directions in Electronic News Media. New Delhi: BR Publishing, 2008. 2 Feb. 2008 http://snurb.info/files/News%20Blogs%20and%20Citizen%20Journalism.pdf>. Cowden, G. “Online News: Patterns, Participation and Personalisation.” Australian Journalism Review 29.1 (July 2007). Curran, J. “Rethinking Media and Democracy.” In J. Curran and M. Gurevitch (eds.), Mass Media and Society. 3rd ed. London: Arnold, 2000. Devine, F. “Curse of the Blog.” Quadrant 49.3 (Mar. 2005). Dutton, W. Through the Network (of Networks) – The Fifth Estate. Oxford Internet Institute, 2007. 6 April 2007 http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/dutton/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/ 5th-estate-lecture-text.pdf>. Glaser, M. “The New Voices: Hyperlocal Citizen’s Media Sites Want You (to Write!).” Online Journalism Review 2004. 16 Feb. 2008 http://ojr.org/ojr/glaser/1098833871.php>. Habermas, J. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989 [1962]. Hills, R. “Citizen Journos Turning Inwards.” The Age 18 Nov. 2007. 17 Feb. 2008 http://www.theage.com.au/news/federal-election-2007-news/citizen-journos- turning-inwards/2007/11/17/1194767024688.html>. Hirschman, A, Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1982. Hunter, C. “The Internet and the Public Sphere: Revitalization or Decay?” Virginia Journal of Communication 12 (2000): 93-127. Killenberg, G., and R. Dardenne. “Instruction in News Reporting as Community Focused Journalism.” Journalism & Mass Communication Educator 52.1 (Spring 1997). McIlwane, S., and L. Bowman. “Interviewing Techniques.” In S. Tanner (ed.), Journalism: Investigation and Research. Sydney: Longman, 2002. Menand, L. “The Unpolitical Animal: How Political Science Understands Voters.” The New Yorker 30 Aug. 2004. 17 Feb. 2008 http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/08/30/040830crat_atlarge>. Meyer, P. Public Journalism and the Problem of Objectivity. 1995. 16 Feb. 2008 http://www.unc.edu/%7Epmeyer/ire95pj.htm>. Milbrath, L., and M. Goel. Political Participation: How and Why Do People Get Involved in Politics? Chicago: Rand McNally M, 1975. National Forum. “Annual Report 2005.” 6 April 2008 http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/documents/reports/ annual_report_to_agm_2005.pdf>. Negrine, R. The Communication of Politics. London: Sage, 1996. Nguyen, A. “Journalism in the Wake of Participatory Publishing.” Australian Journalism Review 28.1 (July 2006). Nguyen, A., E. Ferrier, M. Western, and S. McKay. “Online News in Australia: Patterns of Use and Gratification.” Australian Studies in Journalism 15 (2005). Norris, P., J. Curtice, D. Sanders, M. Scammell, and H. Setemko. On Message: Communicating the Campaign. London: Sage, 1999. Papandrea, M. “Citizen Journalism and the Reporter’s Privilege.” Minnesota Law Review 91 (2007). Pearson, M. The Journalist’s Guide to Media Law. 2nd ed. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2004. Quinn, S., and D. Quinn-Allan. “User-Generated Content and the Changing News Cycle.” Australian Journalism Review 28.1 (July 2006). Rosen, J. “Assignment Zero: Can Crowds Create Fiction, Architecture and Photography?” Wired 2007. 6 April 2008 http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2007/07/assignment_zero_all>. Ross, K., and V. Nightingale. Media Audiences: New Perspectives. Maidenhead, Berkshire: Open UP, 2003. Schaffer, J. “Citizens Media: Has It Reached a Tipping Point.” Nieman Reports 59.4 (Winter 2005). Schudson, M. Good Citizens and Bad History: Today’s Political Ideals in Historical Perspective. 1999. 17 Feb. 2008 http://www.mtsu.edu/~seig/paper_m_schudson.html>. Simons, M. The Content Makers. Melbourne: Penguin, 2007. Simons, M. “Politics and the Internet.” Keynote speech at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival, 14 Sep. 2007. Tapsall, S., and C. Varley (eds.). Journalism: Theory in Practice. South Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2001. Warhurst, J. “Campaign Communications in Australia.” In F. Fletcher (ed.), Media, Elections and Democracy, Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1991. White, S. Reporting in Australia. 2nd ed. Melbourne: MacMillan, 2005. Wilson, J. “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Electorate.” Youdecide2007 2007. 19 Feb. 2008 http://www.youdecide2007.org/content/view/283/101/>. Young, G. “Citizen Journalism.” Presentation at the Australian Blogging Conference, 28 Sep. 2007. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Barry, Derek. "Wilde’s Evenings: The Rewards of Citizen Journalism." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/09-barry.php>. APA Style Barry, D. (Apr. 2008) "Wilde’s Evenings: The Rewards of Citizen Journalism," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/09-barry.php>.

According to Oscar Wilde, the problem with socialism was that it took up too many evenings. Wilde’s aphorism alludes to a major issue that bedevils all attempts to influence the public sphere: the fact that public activities encroach unduly on citizens’ valuable time. In the 21st century, the dilemma of how to deal with “too many evenings” is one that many citizen journalists face as they give their own time to public pursuits. This paper will look at the development of the public citizen and what it means to be a citizen journalist with reference to some of the writer’s own experiences in the field. The paper will conclude with an examination of future possibilities. While large media companies change their change their focus from traditional news values, citizen journalism can play a stronger role in public life as long as it grasps some of the opportunities that are available. There are substantial compensations available to citizen journalists for the problems presented by Wilde’s evenings. The quote from Wilde is borrowed from Albert Hirschman’s Shifting Involvements, which among other things, is an examination of the disappointments of public action. Hirschman noted how it was a common experience for beginners who engage in public action to find that takes up more time than expected (96). As public activity encroaches not only on time devoted to private consumption but also on to the time devoted to the production of income, it can become a costly pursuit which may cause a sharp reaction against the “practice of citizenship” (Hirschman 97). Yet the more stimuli about politics people receive, the greater the likelihood is they will participate in politics and the greater the depth of their participation (Milbrath & Goel 35). People with a positive attraction to politics are more likely to receive stimuli about politics and participate more (Milbrath & Goel 36). Active citizenship, it seems, has its own feedback loops. An active citizenry is not a new idea. The concepts of citizen and citizenship emerged from the sophisticated polity established in the Greek city states about 2,500 years ago. The status of a citizen signified that the individual had the right to full membership of, and participation in, an independent political society (Batrouney & Goldlust 24). In later eras that society could be defined as a kingdom, an empire, or a nation state. The conditions for a bourgeois public sphere were created in the 13th century as capitalists in European city states created a traffic in commodities and news (Habermas 15). A true public sphere emerged in the 17th century with the rise of the English coffee houses and French salons where people had the freedom to express opinions regardless of their social status (Habermas 36). In 1848, France held the first election under universal direct suffrage (for males) and the contemporary slogan was that “universal suffrage closes the era of revolutions” (Hirschman 113). Out of this heady optimism, the late 19th century ushered in the era of the “informed citizen” as voting changed from a social and public duty to a private right – a civic obligation enforceable only by private conscience (Schudson). These concepts live on in the modern idea that the model voter is considered to be a citizen vested with the ability to understand the consequences of his or her choice (Menand 1). The internet is a new knowledge space which offers an alternative reading of the citizen. In Pierre Lévy’s vision of cyberculture, identity is no longer a function of belonging, it is “distributed and nomadic” (Ross & Nightingale 149). The Internet has diffused widely and is increasingly central to everyday life as a place where people go to get information (Dutton 10). Journalism initially prospered on an information scarcity factor however the technology of the Internet has created an information rich society (Tapsall & Varley 18). But research suggests that online discussions do not promote consensus, are short-lived with little impact and end up turning into “dialogues of the deaf” (Nguyen 148). The easy online publishing environment is a fertile ground for rumours, hoaxes and cheating games to circulate which risk turning the public sphere into a chaotic and anarchic space (Nguyen 148). The stereotypical blogger is pejoratively dismissed as “pajama-clad” (Papandrea 516) connoting a sense of disrespect for the proper transmission of ideas. Nevertheless the Internet offers powerful tools for collaboration that is opening up many everyday institutions to greater social accountability (Dutton 3). Recent research by the 2007 Digital Futures project shows 65 percent of respondents consider the Internet “to be a very important or extremely important source of information” (Cowden 76). By 2006, Roy Morgan was reporting that three million Australians were visiting online news site each month (Cowden.76). Crikey.com.au, Australia’s first online-only news outlet, has become a significant independent player in the Australia mediascape claiming over 5,000 subscribers by 2005 with three times as many non-paying “squatters” reading its daily email (Devine 50). Online Opinion has a similar number of subscribers and was receiving 750,000 page views a month by 2005 (National Forum). Both Crikey.com.au and Online Opinion have made moves towards public journalism in an attempt to provide ordinary people access to the public sphere. As professional journalists lose their connection with the public, bloggers are able to fill the public journalism niche (Simons, Content Makers 208). At their best, blogs can offer a “more broad-based, democratic involvement of citizens in the issues that matter to them” (Bruns 7). The research of University of North Carolina journalism professor Philip Meyer showed that cities and towns with public journalism-oriented newspapers led to a better educated local public (Simons, Content Makers 211). Meyer’s idea of good public journalism has six defining elements: a) the need to define a community’s sense of itself b) devotion of time to issues that demand community attention c) devotion of depth to the issues d) more attention to the middle ground e) a preference for substance over tactics and f) encouraging reciprocal understanding (Meyer 1). The objective of public journalism is to foster a greater sense of connection between the community and the media. It can mean journalists using ordinary people as sources and also ordinary people acting as journalists. Jay Rosen proposed a new model based on journalism as conversation (Simons, Content Makers 209). He believes the technology has now overtaken the public journalism movement (Simons, Content Makers 213). His own experiments at pro-am Internet open at assignment.net have had mixed results. His conclusion was that it wasn’t easy for people working voluntarily on the Internet to report on big stories together nor had they “unlocked” the secret of successful pro-am methods (Rosen). Nevertheless, the people formerly known as the audience, as Rosen called them, have seized the agenda. The barriers to entry into journalism have disappeared. Blogging has made Web publishing easy and the social networks are even more user friendly. The problem today is not getting published but finding an audience. And as the audience fragments, the issue will become finding a niche. One such niche is local political activism. The 2007 Australian federal election saw many online sites actively promoting citizen journalism. Most prominent was Youdecide2007 at Queensland University of Technology, funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) in partnership with SBS, Online Opinion and the Brisbane Institute. Site co-editor Graham Young said the site’s aim was to use citizen journalists to report on their own electorates to fill the gap left by fewer journalists on the ground, especially in less populated areas (Young). While the site’s stated aim was to provide a forum for a seat-by-seat coverage and provide “a new perspective on national politics” (Youdecide2007), the end result was significantly skewed by the fact that the professional editorial team was based in Brisbane. Youdecide2007 published 96 articles in its news archive of which 59 could be identified as having a state-based focus. Figure 1 shows 62.7% of these state-based stories were about Queensland. Figure 1: Youdecide2007 news stories identifiable by state (note: national stories are omitted from this table): State Total no. of stories %age Qld 37 62.7 NSW 8 13.6 Vic 6 10.2 WA 3 5.1 Tas 2 3.4 ACT 2 3.4 SA 1 1.6 Modern election campaigns are characterised by a complex and increasingly fragmented news environment and the new media are rapidly adding another layer of complexity to the mix (Norris et al. 11-12). The slick management of national campaigns are is counter-productive to useful citizen journalism. According to Matthew Clayfield from the citizen journalism site electionTracker.net, “there are very few open events which ordinary people could cover in a way that could be described as citizen journalism” (qtd. in Hills 2007). Similar to other systems, the Australian campaign communication empowers the political leaders and media owners at the expense of ordinary party members and citizens (Warhurst 135). However the slick modern national “on message” campaign has not totally replaced old-style local activity. Although the national campaign has superimposed upon the local one and displaced it from the focus of attention, local candidates must still communicate their party policies in the electorate (Warhurst 113). Citizen journalists are ideally placed to harness this local communication. A grassroots approach is encapsulated in the words of Dan Gillmor who said “every reporter should realise that, collectively, the readers know more than they do about what they write about” (qtd. in Quinn & Quinn-Allan 66). With this in mind, I set out my own stall in citizen journalism for the 2007 Australian federal election with two personal goals: to interview all my local federal Lower House candidates and to attend as many public election meetings as possible. As a result, I wrote 19 election articles in the two months prior to the election. This consisted of 9 news items, 6 candidate interviews and 4 reports of public meetings. All the local candidates except one agreed to be interviewed. The local Liberal candidate refused to be interviewed despite repeated requests. There was no reason offered, just a continual ignoring of requests. Liberal candidates were also noticeably absent from most candidate forums I attended. This pattern of non-communicative behaviour was observed elsewhere (Bartlett, Wilson). I tried to turn this to my advantage by turning their refusal to talk into a story itself. For those that were prepared to talk, I set the expectation that the entire interview would be on the record and would be edited and published on my blog site. As a result, all candidates asked for a list of questions in advance which I supplied. Because politicians devote considerable energy and financial resources to ensure the information they impart to citizens has an appropriate ‘spin’ on it, (Negrine 10) I reserved the right to ask follow-up questions on any of their answers that required clarification. For the interviews themselves, I followed the advice of Spradley’s principle by starting with a conscious attitude of near-total ignorance, not writing the story in advance, and attempting to be descriptive, incisive, investigative and critical (Alia 100). After I posted the results of the interview, I sent a link to each of the respondents offering them a chance to clarify or correct any inaccuracies in the interview statements. Defamation skirts the boundary between free speech and reputation (Pearson 159) and a good working knowledge of the way defamation law affects journalists (citizen or otherwise) is crucial, particularly in dealing with public figures. This was an important consideration for some of the lesser known candidates as Google searches on their names brought my articles up within the top 20 results for each of the Democrat, Green and Liberal Democratic Party candidates I interviewed. None of the public meetings I attended were covered in the mainstream media. These meetings are the type of news Jan Schaffer of University of Maryland’s J-Lab saw as an ecological niche for citizen journalists to “create opportunities for citizens to get informed and inform others about micro-news that falls under the radar of news organisations who don’t have the resources” (Schaffer in Glaser). As Mark Bahnisch points out, Brisbane had three daily newspapers and a daily state based 7.30 Report twenty years ago which contrasts with the situation now where there’s no effective state parliamentary press gallery and little coverage of local politics at all (“State of Political Blogging”). Brisbane’s situation is not unique and the gaps are there to be exploited by new players. While the high cost of market entry renders the “central square” of the public sphere inaccessible to new players (Curran 128) the ease of Web access has given the citizen journalists the chance to roam its back alleys. However even if they fill the voids left by departing news organisations, there will still be a large hole in the mediascape. No one will be doing the hardhitting investigative journalism. This gritty work requires great resources and often years of time. The final product of investigative journalism is often complicated to read, unentertaining and inconclusive (Bower in Negrine 13). Margaret Simons says that journalism is a skill that involves the ability to find things out. She says the challenge of the future will be to marry the strengths of the newsroom and the dirty work of investigative journalism with the power of the conversation of blogs (“Politics and the Internet”). One possibility is raised by the Danish project Scoop. They offer financial support to individual journalists who have good ideas for investigative journalism. Founded by the Danish Association for Investigative Journalism and funded by the Danish Foreign Ministry, Scoop supports media projects across the world with the only proviso being that a journalist has to have an agreement with an editor to publish the resulting story (ABC Media Report). But even without financial support, citizens have the ability to perform rudimentary investigative journalism. The primary tool of investigative journalism is the interview (McIlwane & Bowman 260). While an interview can be arranged by anyone with access to a telephone or e-mail, it should not be underestimated how difficult a skill interviewing is. According to American journalist John Brady, the science of journalistic interviewing aims to gain two things, trust and information (Brady in White 75). In the interviews I did with politicians during the federal election, I found that getting past the “spin” of the party line to get genuine information was the toughest part of the task. There is also a considerable amount of information in the public domain which is rarely explored by reporters (Negrine 23). Knowing how to make use of this information will become a critical success factor for citizen journalists. Corporate journalists use databases such as Lexis/Nexis and Factiva to gain background information, a facility unavailable to most citizen journalists unless they are either have access through a learning institution or are prepared to pay a premium for the information. While large corporate vendors supply highly specialised information, amateurs can play a greater role in the creation and transmission of local news. According to G. Stuart Adam, journalism contains four basic elements: reporting, judging, a public voice and the here and now (13). Citizen journalism is capable of meeting all four criteria. The likelihood is that the future of communications will belong to the centralised corporations on one hand and the unsupervised amateur on the other (Bird 36). Whether the motive to continue is payment or empowerment, the challenge for citizen journalists is to advance beyond the initial success of tactical actions towards the establishment as a serious political and media alternative (Bruns 19). Nguyen et al.’s uses and gratification research project suggests there is a still a long way to go in Australia. While they found widespread diffusion of online news, the vast majority of users (78%) were still getting their news from newspaper Websites (Nguyen et al. 13). The research corroborates Mark Bahnisch’s view that “most Australians have not heard of blogs and only a tiny minority reads them (quoted in Simons, Content Makers 219). The Australian blogosphere still waits for its defining Swiftboat incident or Rathergate to announce its arrival. But Bahnisch doesn’t necessarily believe this is a good evolutionary strategy anyway. Here it is becoming more a conversation than a platform “with its own niche and its own value” (Bahnisch, “This Is Not America”). As far as my own experiments go, the citizen journalism reports I wrote gave me no financial reward but plenty of other compensations that made the experience richly rewarding. It was important to bring otherwise neglected ideas, stories and personalities into the public domain and the reports helped me make valuable connections with public-minded members of my local community. They were also useful practice to hone interview techniques and political writing skills. Finally the exercise raised my own public profile as several of my entries were picked up or hyperlinked by other citizen journalism sites and blogs. Some day, and probably soon, a model will be worked out which will make citizen journalism a worthwhile economic endeavour. In the meantime, we rely on active citizens of the blogosphere to give their evenings freely for the betterment of the public sphere. References ABC Media Report. “Scoop.” 2008. 17 Feb. 2008 < http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2008/2151204.htm#transcript >. Adam, G. Notes towards a Definition of Journalism: Understanding an Old Craft as an Art Form. St Petersburg, Fl.: Poynter Institute, 1993. Alia, V. “The Rashomon Principle: The Journalist as Ethnographer.” In V. Alia, B. Brennan, and B. Hoffmaster (eds.), Deadlines and Diversity: Journalism Ethics in a Changing World. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 1996. Bahnisch, M. “This Is Not America.” newmatilda.com 2007. 17 Feb. 2008 < http://www.newmatilda.com/2007/10/04/not-america >. 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Gurevitch (eds.), Mass Media and Society. 3rd ed. London: Arnold, 2000. Devine, F. “Curse of the Blog.” Quadrant 49.3 (Mar. 2005). Dutton, W. Through the Network (of Networks) – The Fifth Estate. Oxford Internet Institute, 2007. 6 April 2007 < http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/dutton/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/ 5th-estate-lecture-text.pdf >. Glaser, M. “The New Voices: Hyperlocal Citizen’s Media Sites Want You (to Write!).” Online Journalism Review 2004. 16 Feb. 2008 < http://ojr.org/ojr/glaser/1098833871.php >. Habermas, J. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989 [1962]. Hills, R. “Citizen Journos Turning Inwards.” The Age 18 Nov. 2007. 17 Feb. 2008 < http://www.theage.com.au/news/federal-election-2007-news/citizen-journos- turning-inwards/2007/11/17/1194767024688.html >. Hirschman, A, Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1982. Hunter, C. “The Internet and the Public Sphere: Revitalization or Decay?” Virginia Journal of Communication 12 (2000): 93-127. Killenberg, G., and R. Dardenne. “Instruction in News Reporting as Community Focused Journalism.” Journalism & Mass Communication Educator 52.1 (Spring 1997). McIlwane, S., and L. Bowman. “Interviewing Techniques.” In S. Tanner (ed.), Journalism: Investigation and Research. Sydney: Longman, 2002. Menand, L. “The Unpolitical Animal: How Political Science Understands Voters.” The New Yorker 30 Aug. 2004. 17 Feb. 2008 < http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/08/30/040830crat_atlarge >. Meyer, P. Public Journalism and the Problem of Objectivity. 1995. 16 Feb. 2008 < http://www.unc.edu/%7Epmeyer/ire95pj.htm >. Milbrath, L., and M. Goel. Political Participation: How and Why Do People Get Involved in Politics? Chicago: Rand McNally M, 1975. National Forum. “Annual Report 2005.” 6 April 2008 < http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/documents/reports/ annual_report_to_agm_2005.pdf >. Negrine, R. The Communication of Politics. London: Sage, 1996. Nguyen, A. “Journalism in the Wake of Participatory Publishing.” Australian Journalism Review 28.1 (July 2006). Nguyen, A., E. Ferrier, M. Western, and S. McKay. “Online News in Australia: Patterns of Use and Gratification.” Australian Studies in Journalism 15 (2005). Norris, P., J. Curtice, D. Sanders, M. Scammell, and H. Setemko. On Message: Communicating the Campaign. London: Sage, 1999. Papandrea, M. “Citizen Journalism and the Reporter’s Privilege.” Minnesota Law Review 91 (2007). Pearson, M. The Journalist’s Guide to Media Law. 2nd ed. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2004. Quinn, S., and D. Quinn-Allan. “User-Generated Content and the Changing News Cycle.” Australian Journalism Review 28.1 (July 2006). Rosen, J. “Assignment Zero: Can Crowds Create Fiction, Architecture and Photography?” Wired 2007. 6 April 2008 < http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2007/07/assignment_zero_all >. Ross, K., and V. Nightingale. Media Audiences: New Perspectives. Maidenhead, Berkshire: Open UP, 2003. Schaffer, J. “Citizens Media: Has It Reached a Tipping Point.” Nieman Reports 59.4 (Winter 2005). Schudson, M. Good Citizens and Bad History: Today’s Political Ideals in Historical Perspective. 1999. 17 Feb. 2008 < http://www.mtsu.edu/~seig/paper_m_schudson.html >. Simons, M. The Content Makers. Melbourne: Penguin, 2007. Simons, M. “Politics and the Internet.” Keynote speech at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival, 14 Sep. 2007. Tapsall, S., and C. Varley (eds.). Journalism: Theory in Practice. South Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2001. Warhurst, J. “Campaign Communications in Australia.” In F. Fletcher (ed.), Media, Elections and Democracy, Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1991. White, S. Reporting in Australia. 2nd ed. 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IntroductionThe role, function, and future of the Western public intellectual have been highly contested over the last three decades. The dominant discourse, which predicts the decline of the public intellectual, asserts the institutionalisation of their labour has eroded their authority to speak publicly to power on behalf of others; and that the commodification of intellectual performance has transformed them from sages, philosophers, and men of letters into trivial media entertainers, pundits, and ideologues. Overwhelmingly the crisis debates link the demise of the public intellectual to shifts in public culture, which was initially conceptualised as a literary and artistic space designed to liberate the awareness of citizens through critique and to reflect upon “the chronic and persistent issues of life, meaning and representation” (McGuigan 430). This early imagining of public culture as an exclusively civilising space, however, did not last and Jurgen Habermas documented its decline in response to the commodification and politicisation of culture in the 20th century. Yet, as social activism continued to flourish in the public sphere, Habermas re-theorised public culture as a more pluralistic site which simultaneously accommodates “uncritical populism, radical subversion and critical intervention” (436) and operates as both a marketplace and a “site of communicative rationality, mutual respect and understanding (McGuigan 434). The rise of creative industries expanded popular engagement with public culture but destabilised the authority of the public intellectual. The accompanying shifts also affected the function of the curator, who, like the intellectual, had a role in legislating and arbitrating knowledge, and negotiating and authorising meaning through curated exhibitions of objects deemed sacred and significant. Jennifer Barrett noted the similarities in the two functions when she argued in Museums and the Public Sphere that, because museums have an intellectual role in society, curators have a public intellectual function as they define publics, determine modes of engagement, and shape knowledge formation (150). The resemblance between the idealised role of the intellectual and the curator in enabling the critique that emancipates the citizen means that both functions have been affected by the atomisation of contemporary society, which has exposed the power effects of the imposed coherency of authoritative and universal narratives. Indeed, just as Russell Jacoby, Allan Bloom, and Richard Posner predicted the death of the intellectual, who could no longer claim to speak in universal terms on behalf of others, so museums faced their own crisis of relevancy. Declining visitor numbers and reduced funding saw museums reinvent themselves, and in moving away from their traditional exclusive, authoritative, and nation building roles—which Pierre Bourdieu argued reproduced the “existing class-based culture, education and social systems” (Barrett 3)—museums transformed themselves into inclusive and diverse sites of co-creation with audiences and communities. In the context of this change the curator ceased to be the “primary producer of knowledge” (Barrett 13) and emerged to reproduce “contemporary culture preoccupations” and constitute the “social imagery” of communities (119). The modern museum remains concerned with explaining and interrogating the world, but the shift in curatorial work is away from the objects themselves to a focus upon audiences and how they value the artefacts, knowledge, and experiences of collective shared memory. The change in curatorial practices was driven by what Peter Vergo called a new “museology” (Barrett 2), and according to Macdonald this term assumes that “object meanings are contextual rather than inherent” or absolute and universal (2). Public intellectuals and curators, as the custodians of ideas and narratives in the contemporary cultural industries, privilege audience reception and recognise that consumers and/or citizens engage with public culture for a variety of reasons, including critique, understanding, and entertainment. Curators, like public intellectuals, also recognise that they can no longer assume the knowledge and experience of their audience, nor prescribe the nature of engagement with ideas and objects. Instead, curators and intellectuals emerge as negotiators and translators of cultural meaning as they traverse the divides in public culture, sequestering ideas and cultural artefacts and constructing narratives that engage audiences and communities in the process of re-imagining the past as a way of providing new insights into contemporary challenges.Methodology In exploring the idea that the public intellectual acts as a curator of ideas as he or she defines and privileges the discursive spaces of public culture, this paper begins by providing an overview of the cultural context of the contemporary public intellectual which enables comparisons between intellectual and curatorial functions. Second, this paper analyses a random sample of the content of books, newspaper and magazine articles, speeches, and transcripts of interviews drawn from The Australian, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sydney Institute, the ABC, The Monthly, and Quadrant published or broadcast between 1996 and 2007, in order to identify the key themes of the History Wars. It should be noted that the History War debates were extensive, persistent, and complex—and as they unfolded over a 13-year period they emerged as the “most powerful” and “most disputed form of public intellectual work” (Carter, Ideas 9). Many issues were aggregated under the trope of the History Wars, and these topics were subject to both popular commentary and academic investigation. Furthermore, the History Wars discourse was produced in a range of mediums including popular media sources, newspaper and magazine columns, broadcasts, blogs, lectures, and writers’ forums and publications. Given the extent of this discourse, the sample of articles which provides the basis for this analysis does not seek to comprehensively survey the literature on the History Wars. Rather this paper draws upon Foucault’s genealogical qualitative method, which exposes the subordinated discontinuities in texts, to 1) consider the political context of the History War trope; and 2) identify how intellectuals discursively exhibited versions of the nation’s identity and in the process made visible the power effects of the past. Public Intellectuals The underlying fear of the debates about the public intellectual crisis was that the public intellectual would no longer be able to act as the conscience of a nation, speak truth to power, or foster the independent and dissenting public debate that guides and informs individual human agency—a goal that has lain at the heart of the Western intellectual’s endeavours since Kant’s Sapere aude. The late 20th century crisis discourse, however, primarily mourned the decline of a particular form of public authority attached to the heroic universal intellectual formation made popular by Emile Zola at the end of the 19th century, and which claimed the power to hold the political elites of France accountable. Yet talk of an intellectual crisis also became progressively associated with a variety of general concerns about globalising society. Some of these concerns included fears that structural shifts in the public domain would lead to the impoverishment of the cultural domain, the end of Western civilisation, the decline of the progressive political left, and the end of universal values. It was also expected that the decline in intellectuals would also enable the rise of populism, political conservatism, and anti-intellectualism (Jacoby Bloom; Bauman; Rorty; Posner; Furedi; Marquand). As a result of these fears, the function of the intellectual who engages publicly was re-theorised. Zygmunt Bauman suggested the intellectual was no longer the legislator or arbiter of taste but the negotiator and translator of ideas; Michel Foucault argued that the intellectual could be institutionally situated and still speak truth to power; and Edward Said insisted the public intellectual had a role in opening up possibilities to resolve conflict by re-imagining the past. In contrast, the Australian public intellectual has never been declared in crisis or dead, and this is probably because the nation does not have the same legacy of the heroic public intellectual. Indeed, as a former British colony labelled the “working man’s paradise” (White 4), Australia’s intellectual work was produced in “institutionalised networks” (Head 5) like universities and knowledge disciplines, political parties, magazines, and unions. Within these networks there was a double division of labour, between the abstraction of knowledge and its compartmentalisation, and between the practical application of knowledge and its popularisation. As a result of this legacy, a more organic, specific, and institutionalised form of intellectualism emerged, which, according to Head, limited intellectual influence and visibility across other networks and domains of knowledge and historically impeded general intellectual engagement with the public. Fears about the health and authority of the public intellectual in Australia have therefore tended to be produced as a part of Antonio Gramsci’s ideological “wars of position” (Mouffe 5), which are an endless struggle between cultural and political elites for control of the institutions of social reproduction. These struggles began in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s over language and political correctness, and they reappeared in the 1990s as the History Wars. History Wars“The History Wars” was a term applied to an ideological battle between two visions of the Australian nation. The first vision was circulated by Australian Labor Party Prime Minister Paul Keating, who saw race relations as central to 21st century global Australia and began the process of dealing with the complex and divisive Indigenous issues at home. He established the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation in 1991; acknowledged in the 1992 Redfern speech that white settlers were responsible for the problems in Indigenous communities; and commissioned the Bringing Them Home report, which was completed in 1997 and concluded that the mandated removal of Indigenous children from their families and communities throughout the 20th century had violated their human rights and caused long-term and systemic damage to Indigenous communities.The second vision of Australia was circulated by Liberal Prime Minister John Howard, who, after he came to power in 1996, began his own culture war to reconstruct a more conservative vision of the nation. Howard believed that the stories of Indigenous dispossession undermined confidence in the nation, and he sought to produce a historical view of the past grounded in “Judeo-Christian ethics, the progressive spirit of the enlightenment and the institutions and values of British culture” (“Sense of Balance”). Howard called for a return to a narrative form that valorised Australia’s achievements, and he sought to instil a more homogenised view of the past and a coherent national identity by reviewing high school history programs, national museum appointments, and citizenship tests. These two political positions framed the subsequent intellectual struggles over the past. While a number of issues were implicated in the battle, generally, left commentators used the History Wars as a way to circulate certain ideas about morality and identity, including 1) Australians needed to make amends for past injustices to Indigenous Australians and 2) the nation’s global identity was linked to how they dealt with Australia’s first people. In contrast, the political right argued 1) the left had misrepresented and overstated the damage done to Indigenous communities and rewritten history; 2) stories about Indigenous abuse were fragmenting the nation’s identity at a time when the nation needed to build a coherent global presence; and 3) no apology was necessary, because contemporary Australians did not feel responsible for past injustices. AnalysisThe war between these two visions of Australia was fought in “extra-curricular sites,” according to Stuart Macintyre, and this included newspaper columns, writers’ festivals, broadcast interviews, intellectual magazines like The Monthly and Quadrant, books, and think tank lectures. Academics and intellectuals were the primary protagonists, and they disputed the extent of colonial genocide; the legitimacy of Indigenous land rights; the impact of the Stolen Generation on the lives of modern Indigenous citizens; and the necessity of a formal apology as a part of the reconciliation process. The conflicts also ignited debates about the nature of history, the quality of public debates in Australia, and exposed the tensions between academics, public intellectuals, newspaper commentators and political elites. Much of the controversy played out in the national forums can be linked to the Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families report Stolen Generation inquiry and report, which was commissioned by Keating but released after Howard came to office. Australian public intellectual and professor of politics Robert Manne critiqued the right’s response to the report in his 2001 Quarterly Essay titled “In Denial: The Stolen Generation and The Right”. He argued that there was a right-wing campaign in Australia that sought to diminish and undermine justice for Aboriginal people by discounting the results of the inquiry, underestimating the numbers of those affected, and underfunding the report’s recommendations. He spoke of the nation’s shame and in doing so he challenged Australia’s image of itself. Manne’s position was applauded by many for providing what Kay Schaffer in her Australian Humanities Review paper called an “effective antidote to counter the bitter stream of vitriol that followed the release of the Bringing Them Home report”. Yet Manne also drew criticism. Historian Bain Attwood argued that Manne’s attack on conservatives was polemical, and he suggested that it would be more useful to consider in detail what drives the right-wing analysis of Indigenous issues. Attwood also suggested that Manne’s essay had misrepresented the origins of the narrative of the Stolen Generation, which had been widely known prior to the release of the Stolen Generation report.Conservative commentators focused upon challenging the accuracy of those stories submitted to the inquiry, which provided the basis for the report. This struggle over factual details was to characterise the approach of historian Keith Windschuttle, who rejected both the numbers of those stolen from their families and the degree of violence used in the settlement of Australia. In his 2002 book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847 he accused left-wing academics of exaggerating the events of Aboriginal history in order to further their own political agenda. In particular, he argued that the extent of the “conflagration of oppression and conflict” which sought to “dispossess, degrade, and devastate the Aboriginal people” had been overstated and misrepresented and designed to “create an edifice of black victimhood and white guilt” (Windschuttle, Fabrication 1). Manne responded to Windschuttle’s allegations in Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, arguing that Windschuttle arguments were “unpersuasive and unsupported either by independent research or even familiarity with the relevant secondary historical literature” (7) and that the book added nothing to the debates. Other academics like Stephen Muecke, Marcia Langton and Heather Goodall expressed concerns about Windschuttle’s work, and in 2003 historians Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark published The History Wars, which described the implications of the politicisation of history on the study of the past. At the same time, historian Bain Attwood in Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History argued that the contestation over history was eroding the “integrity of intellectual life in Australia” (2). Fractures also broke out between writers and historians about who was best placed to write history. The Australian book reviewer Stella Clarke wrote that the History Wars were no longer constructive discussions, and she suggested that historical novelists could colonise the territory traditionally dominated by professional historians. Inga Clendinnen wasn’t so sure. She wrote in a 2006 Quarterly Essay entitled “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?” that, while novelists could get inside events through a process of “applied empathy,” imagination could in fact obstruct the truth of reality (20). Discussion The History Wars saw academics engage publicly to exhibit a set of competing ideas about Australia’s identity in the nation’s media and associated cultural sites, and while the debates initially prompted interest they eventually came to be described as violent and unproductive public conversations about historical details and ideological positions. Indeed, just as the museum curator could no longer authoritatively prescribe the cultural meaning of artefacts, so the History Wars showed that public intellectuals could not adjudicate the identity of the nation nor prescribe the nature of its conduct. For left-wing public intellectuals and commentators, the History Wars came to signify the further marginalisation of progressive politics in the face of the dominant, conservative, and increasingly populist constituency. Fundamentally, the battles over the past reinforced fears that Australia’s public culture was becoming less diverse, less open, and less able to protect traditional civil rights, democratic freedoms, and social values. Importantly for intellectuals like Robert Manne, there was a sense that Australian society was less able or willing to reflect upon the moral legitimacy of its past actions as a part of the process of considering its contemporary identity. In contrast right-wing intellectuals and commentators argued that the History Wars showed how public debate under a conservative government had been liberated from political correctness and had become more vibrant. This was the position of Australian columnist Janet Albrechtsen who argued that rather than a decline in public debate there had been, in fact, “vigorous debate of issues that were once banished from the national conversation” (91). She went on to insist that left-wing commentators’ concerns about public debate were simply a mask for their discomfort at having their views and ideas challenged. There is no doubt that the History Wars, while media-orchestrated debates that circulated a set of ideological positions designed to primarily attract audiences and construct particular views of Australia, also raised public awareness of the complex issues associated with Australia’s Indigenous past. Indeed, the Wars ended what W.E.H Stanner had called the “great silence” on Indigenous issues and paved the way for Kevin Rudd’s apology to Indigenous people for their “profound grief, suffering and loss”. The Wars prompted conversations across the nation about what it means to be Australian and exposed the way history is deeply implicated in power surely a goal of both intellectual debate and curated exhibitions. ConclusionThis paper has argued that the public intellectual can operate like a curator in his or her efforts to preserve particular ideas, interpretations, and narratives of public culture. The analysis of the History Wars debates, however, showed that intellectuals—just like curators —are no longer authorities and adjudicators of the nation’s character, identity, and future but cultural intermediaries whose function is not just the performance or exhibition of selected ideas, objects, and narratives but also the engagement and translation of other voices across different contexts in the ongoing negotiation of what constitutes cultural significance. ReferencesAlbrechtsen, Janet. “The History Wars.” The Sydney Papers (Winter/Spring 2003): 84–92. Attwood, Bain. Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005.Bauman, Zygmunt. Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post Modernity and Intellectuals. Cambridge, CAMBS: Polity, 1987. Barrett, Jennifer. Museums and the Public Sphere. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2010. Bloom, Allan. Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.Bourdieu. P. Distinctions: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984. Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Commonwealth of Australia. 1997.Carter, David. Introduction. The Ideas Market: An Alternative Take on Australia’s Intellectual Life. Ed. David Carter. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2004. 1–11.Clendinnen, Inga. True Stories. Sydney: ABC Books, 1999.Clendinnen, Inga. “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?” Quarterly Essay 23 (2006): 1–82. Foucault, Michel, and Giles Deleuze. Intellectuals and Power Language, Counter Memory and Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. and trans. David Bouchard. New York: Cornell UP, 1977. Gratton, Michelle. “Howard Claims Victory in National Culture Wars.” The Age 26 Jan. 2006. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/pm-claims-victory-in-culture-wars/2006/01/25/1138066861163.html›.Head, Brian. “Introduction: Intellectuals in Australian Society.” Intellectual Movements and Australian Society. Eds. Brian Head and James Waller. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1988. 1–44.Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, and Marc Silberman. “Critical Theory, Public Sphere and Culture: Jürgen Habermas and His Critics.” New German Critique 16 (Winter 1979): 89–118.Howard, John. “A Sense of Balance: The Australian Achievement in 2006.” National Press Club. Great Parliament House, Canberra, ACT. 25 Jan. 2006. ‹http://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/browse.php?did=22110›.Howard, John. “Standard Bearer in Liberal Culture.” Address on the 50th Anniversary of Quadrant, Sydney, 3 Oct. 2006. The Australian 4 Oct. 2006. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/john-howard-standard-bearer-in-liberal-culture/story-e6frg6zo-1111112306534›.Jacoby, Russell. The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe. New York: The Noonday Press, 1987.Keating, Paul. “Keating’s History Wars.” Sydney Morning Herald 5 Sep. 2003. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/05/1062549021882.html›.Macdonald, S. “Expanding Museum Studies: An Introduction.” Ed. S. Macdonald. A Companion to Museum Studies. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. 1–12. Macintyre, Stuart, and Anna Clarke. The History Wars. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2003. ———. “The History Wars.” The Sydney Papers (Winter/Spring 2003): 77–83.———. “Who Plays Stalin in Our History Wars? Sydney Morning Herald 17 Sep. 2003. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/16/1063625030438.html›.Manne, Robert. “In Denial: The Stolen Generation and the Right.” Quarterly Essay 1 (2001).———. WhiteWash: On Keith Windshuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Melbourne. Black Ink, 2003.Mark, David. “PM Calls for End to the History Wars.” ABC News 28 Aug. 2009.McGuigan, Jim. “The Cultural Public Sphere.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 8.4 (2005): 427–43.Mouffe, Chantal, ed. Gramsci and Marxist Theory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979. Melleuish, Gregory. The Power of Ideas: Essays on Australian Politics and History. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009.Rudd, Kevin. “Full Transcript of PM’s Apology Speech.” The Australian 13 Feb. 2008. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/full-transcript-of-pms-speech/story-e6frg6nf-1111115543192›.Said, Edward. “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals.” ABC Alfred Deakin Lectures, Melbourne Town Hall, 19 May 2001. Schaffer, Kay. “Manne’s Generation: White Nation Responses to the Stolen Generation Report.” Australian Humanities Review (June 2001). 5 June 2015 ‹http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-June-2001/schaffer.html›. Shanahan, Dennis. “Howard Rallies the Right in Cultural War Assault.” The Australian 4 Oct. 2006. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/howard-rallies-right-in-culture-war-assault/story-e6frg6nf-1111112308221›.Wark, Mackenzie. “Lip Service.” The Ideas Market: An Alternative Take on Australia’s Intellectual Life. Ed. David Carter. Carlton, VIC: Melbourne UP, 2004. 259–69.White, Richard. Inventing Australia Images and Identity 1688–1980. Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1981. Windschuttle, Keith. The Fabrication of Australian History, Volume One: Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847. Sydney: McCleay, 2002. ———. “Why There Was No Stolen Generation (Part One).” Quadrant Online (Jan–Feb 2010). 6 Aug. 2015 ‹https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2010/01-02/why-there-were-no-stolen-generations/›.

The recent threats to a presumed international order posed by acts of heightened terrorism have overshadowed the promise of an emergent order evoked by such concepts as ‘the third way’ and ‘the knowledge society’. Part of the problem with these notions is that they have resonance for only a fairly selective group of intellectuals. Additionally, the terms are somewhat amorphous, so they have not achieved secure purchase in the popular media. But their meanings are not necessarily cancelled by the disordering events of political extremism, worrying as those events are. In the domestic policies of governments, and in workplaces, these other calls to (a beneficent) order continue to be heard and acted upon. The questions are those one must ask of any putative order: what kind of order is it, and is it really beneficial? It is perhaps all the more important to ask these questions when we might be otherwise distracted by the more dramatic events. The End of History? Both the knowledge society and the third way are variations on the ‘end of history’ thesis proposed by the US political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. For Fukuyama, as is by now well known, this collapse (for him of Marxism or communism, not just of the Soviet Union) ushered in the triumph of liberalism and capitalism as practiced in the United States and other Western-style democracies. In the third way thesis, as propounded by Anthony Giddens and others, a similar conviction about the bankruptcy of Marxism is accompanied by a more tempered view of liberal capitalism. The third way is, in practice, a middle path between the two, one which recognizes the need for State intervention, not only to condition and discipline the market – which left to its own devices will inevitably have detrimental social effects – but also to facilitate optimum participation in society generally. Hence, the focus of governments on what they call ‘capacity building’, which strongly emphasizes education and training amongst their responsibilities. As a result, the antithesis between communism and capitalism can now appear to have been resolved in a higher synthesis, leaving no room for further dramatic shifts in social organization. The knowledge society – formerly and still sometimes referred to as ‘the knowledge economy’ – has a similar ‘end of history’ flavor because it promises to resolve or at least ameliorate class conflict. It is based on the idea that, increasingly, machines can perform repetitive work, and that basic necessities can be easily met in modern economies. This creates ample scope for product differentiation (niche marketing) and for the provision of cultural goods – entertainment and so on. Everybody will have the opportunity to learn and apply knowledge, and therefore find fulfilling work. Everybody will have the capacity to innovate, and therefore improve the company’s performance, by which each person gains satisfaction and a stake in the future of the business. Technology is also frequently evoked: the interactive new media are said to be particularly amenable to knowledge sharing and innovation. At least in theory, the knowledge society can itself be seen as a third way, or meeting point, between economics and culture, science and arts; and therefore all disciplines, all areas of education and training, are equally important to future social and economic wellbeing. Both these notions have their clear attractions, and can be logically argued to institute improvements on previous orders. But how fully can they achieve their promises, or more importantly, are their promised benefits not just logical entailments but reasonably certain consequences of their social realization? Or can this new order be exploited to the same ends as previous orders? In this short essay, I can do no more than signal a few warnings or reservations concerning the promises that have been made. Social Unity? First of all, both concepts appeal to a putative unity of society, typically grounded in such notions as ‘social capital’ or ‘civil society’. This is problematic, if it is suspected that such unity is a chimera, impossible to achieve, and indeed a dangerous ambition in that it licenses the powerful to find a scapegoat for its elusiveness. Glyn Daly sums the situation up as follows: In every attempt to command the social terrain – to create an antagonism-free new order – various culprits are identified and made responsible for the original loss, or theft, of the fantastical object: Society, Harmony, Salvation, etc. Indeed, the very construction(s) of the social might be understood as a never-ending attempt to solve the original ‘crime’: to identify who has possession of the lost/stolen objects that would enable the full realization/representation of ‘us’. (79) So today, in my own country, New Zealand, we are given a false picture of a nation that lacks enterprise, drives away its best young intellects, can’t convert ideas into business reality, and so on. That paradise of the past when we ‘punched above our weight’, produced Nobel Prize winners and dominated the world in sports, has been stolen away from us. But all around is evidence that is at least partially to the contrary (it is also a fact that it is a big world, and the rest of it is catching up to our once privileged position). Any edition of the Dominion Post’s technology supplement, Info Tech Weekly, is bursting with technological and new media success stories: new start-ups, joint ventures, profitable sellouts, investment from overseas, revolutionary software, value-added agricultural products. Some of these crash and burn: contrary to the myth about the over-gentle, risk-averse New Zealanders, this is sometimes the result of brashness, rashness, and arrogance. New Artisans? Secondly, similar promises about new and improved orders of capitalism have been made before, but the situation was turned to the advantage of capital. In his book on Walter Benjamin, Julian Roberts refers to the ‘cooperative patterns of control’ implied by technology in the new order emerging between the wars. The production management systems that came to be known as Taylorism and Fordism, for example, by instituting processes based on the division of labor, ensured – in theory – that all participants in production were mutually dependent and therefore in some sense equal. Roberts suggests that these new arrangements threatened the old dispensation centered on private ownership of the means of production, and corrective action was not long following. ‘In order to retain this ownership, capitalism . . . resorted to a number of stratagems of which the most important was the division of the world into thinkers and doers, directors and directed, controllers and controlled’ (170). Does contemporary technology, particularly the advent of computers and the Internet as a significant means of production, imply a change in the pattern of control? Conceivably, computer technology and virtual knowledge products (software, etc.) could facilitate a return to a widespread artisan-like mode of production, and we see this to some extent in the new start-ups based on one or a few individuals, engaged in small-scale production. But we have also already seen that where these new enterprises are successful, they tend to expand and subsume, or are bought out by larger concerns. Significantly, we are in a business climate that remains strongly pro-growth, a feature of which is the repeated exhortation of self-employed or small firms to expand, to gear up to an export level of production. In the dissemination of this entrepreneurial message, the business media, which have themselves multiplied in recent years, have played a prominent role. Diverse and Mutually Enriching Knowledges? The concept of knowledge society has come to privilege science and technology. In the news media, as influenced by powerful interests, knowledge society and science and technology are more or less conflated. They are as well in the minds of important people, including those in the all-important research-funding bodies. A pertinent example in New Zealand is the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology. While official foundation publicity is relatively embracing of different approaches to knowledge – ‘the concept of a knowledge society includes the creation, distribution and application of new knowledge to all aspects and across all parts of society’ (FRST, “Foundation’s Role” 4) – specific individual pronouncements betray the actual emphases. For example, in announcing the appointment of a new CEO, the foundation’s Chairman, Neil Richardson said: ‘We live in exciting times and one can sense that the country is finally embracing the value of science and innovation and with it, the concept of a knowledge economy’ (FRST, “Permanent CEO” 1). By such means, ‘knowledge society’ is being used to maintain a division between science and arts, science and culture, when the term’s initial appearance promised a new or renewed awareness of the entanglement of these categories. (This is an outcome which has been only partly mitigated by the burgeoning of the creative industries, since there has been a trend to coining other terms such as ‘the creative economy’ to characterize this phenomenon.) In consequence, a fully nuanced evaluation of the role of scientific and technological development in contemporary society, as well as of its creeping commercialization, is further postponed. Conclusion Immanuel Wallerstein suggests that what he calls the Capitalist World-System has entered a period of transition towards a new system that may or may not be better than the present one. It is possible to imagine that the ‘third way’ and the ‘knowledge society’ – despite the reservations I have outlined – represent a moderating of the capitalist order that will usher in or help condition the arrival of the new. Or failing that, the privileging of knowledge will foster a reflectivity that will enable society to find a better way. Interestingly, however, Wallerstein suspects that such moderation will only prolong the current order, and that something more drastic (if not revolutionary) will be required in the long run if any significant improvement is to be achieved. And as far as reflectivity is concerned, the opposite is arguably true: that ‘knowledge’ merely serves rhetorically to conceal an intensification of the drive for profit and the general expansion of the business mentality. Note I am grateful for the comments of the anonymous referees of this article, which have been helpful in bringing it to its final form. References Daly, Glyn. ‘Politics and the Impossible: Beyond Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction’. Theory, Culture & Society 16.4 (1999): 75-98. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992. Foundation for Research, Science and Technology, ‘The Foundation’s Role in Creating Value from Knowledge’. http://www.frst.govt.nz/public/thesource/FRSTrole.htm, 2001. Foundation for Research, Science and Technology. ‘Permanent CEO for FRST’. Media statement, 22 August, 2001. Giddens, Anthony. The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. Roberts, Julian. Walter Benjamin. London: Macmillan, 1982. Wallerstein, Immanuel. Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-century Paradigms. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Wallace, Derek. "Knowledge Society and Third Way: A New Beneficent Order?." M/C Journal 7.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/03-wallace.php>. APA Style Wallace, D. (Jan. 2005) "Knowledge Society and Third Way: A New Beneficent Order?," M/C Journal, 7(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/03-wallace.php>.

The 2000s have been a lively decade for cities. The Worldwatch Institute estimated that 2007 was the first year in human history that more people worldwide lived in cities than the countryside. Globalisation and new digital media technologies have generated the seemingly paradoxical outcome that spatial location came to be more rather than less important, as combinations of firms, industries, cultural activities and creative talents have increasingly clustered around a select node of what have been termed “creative cities,” that are in turn highly networked into global circuits of economic capital, political power and entertainment media. Intellectually, the period has seen what the UCLA geographer Ed Soja refers to as the spatial turn in social theory, where “whatever your interests may be, they can be significantly advanced by adopting a critical spatial perspective” (2). This is related to the dynamic properties of socially constructed space itself, or what Soja terms “the powerful forces that arise from socially produced spaces such as urban agglomerations and cohesive regional economies,” with the result that “what can be called the stimulus of socio-spatial agglomeration is today being assertively described as the primary cause of economic development, technological innovation, and cultural creativity” (14). The demand for social justice in cities has, in recent years, taken the form of “Right to the City” movements. The “Right to the City” movement draws upon the long tradition of radical urbanism in which the Paris Commune of 1871 features prominently, and which has both its Marxist and anarchist variants, as well as the geographer Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) arguments that capitalism was fundamentally driven by the production of space, and that the citizens of a city possessed fundamental rights by virtue of being in a city, meaning that political struggle in capitalist societies would take an increasingly urban form. Manifestations of contemporary “Right to the City” movements have been seen in the development of a World Charter for the Right to the City, Right to the City alliances among progressive urban planners as well as urban activists, forums that bring together artists, architects, activists and urban geographers, and a variety of essays on the subject by radical geographers including David Harvey, whose work I wish to focus upon here. In his 2008 essay "The Right to the City," Harvey presents a manifesto for 21st century radical politics that asserts that the struggle for collective control over cities marks the nodal point of anti-capitalist movements today. It draws together a range of strands of arguments recognizable to those familiar with Harvey’s work, including Marxist political economy, the critique of neoliberalism, the growth of social inequality in the U.S. in particular, and concerns about the rise of speculative finance capital and its broader socio-economic consequences. My interest in Harvey’s manifesto here arises not so much from his prognosis for urban radicalism, but from how he understands the suburban in relation to this urban class struggle. It is an important point to consider because, in many parts of the world, growing urbanisation is in fact growing suburbanisation. This is the case for U.S. cities (Cox), and it is also apparent in Australian cities, with the rise in particular of outer suburban Master Planned Communities as a feature of the “New Prosperity” Australia has been experiencing since the mid 1990s (Flew; Infrastructure Australia). What we find in Harvey’s essay is that the suburban is clearly sub-urban, or an inferior form of city living. Suburbs are variously identified by Harvey as being:Sites for the expenditure of surplus capital, as a safety valve for overheated finance capitalism (Harvey 27);Places where working class militancy is pacified through the promotion of mortgage debt, which turns suburbanites into political conservatives primarily concerned with maintaining their property values;Places where “the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism, and its cognate of political withdrawal from collective forms of action” are actively promoted through the proliferation of shopping malls, multiplexes, franchise stores and fast-food outlets, leading to “pacification by cappuccino” (32);Places where women are actively oppressed, so that “leading feminists … [would] proclaim the suburb as the locus of all their primary discontents” (28);A source of anti-capitalist struggle, as “the soulless qualities of suburban living … played a critical role in the dramatic events of 1968 in the US [as] discontented white middle-class students went into a phase of revolt, sought alliances with marginalized groups claiming civil rights and rallied against American imperialism” (28).Given these negative associations, one could hardly imagine citizens demanding the right to the suburb, in the same way as Harvey projects the right to the city as a rallying cry for a more democratic social order. Instead, from an Australian perspective, one is reminded of the critiques of suburbia that have been a staple of radical theory from the turn of the 20th century to the present day (Collis et. al.). Demanding the “right to the suburb” would appear here as an inherently contradictory demand, that could only be desired by those who the Australian radical psychoanalytic theorist Douglas Kirsner described as living an alienated existence where:Watching television, cleaning the car, unnecessary housework and spectator sports are instances of general life-patterns in our society: by adopting these patterns the individual submits to a uniform life fashioned from outside, a pseudo-life in which the question of individual self-realisation does not even figure. People live conditioned, unconscious lives, reproducing the values of the system as a whole (Kirsner 23). The problem with this tradition of radical critique, which is perhaps reflective of the estrangement of a section of the Australian critical intelligentsia more generally, is that most Australians live in suburbs, and indeed seem (not surprisingly!) to like living in them. Indeed, each successive wave of migration to Australia has been marked by families seeking a home in the suburbs, regardless of the housing conditions of the place they came from: the demand among Singaporeans for large houses in Perth, or what has been termed “Singaperth,” is one of many manifestations of this desire (Lee). Australian suburban development has therefore been characterized by a recurring tension between the desire of large sections of the population to own their own home (the fabled quarter-acre block) in the suburbs, and the condemnation of suburban life from an assortment of intellectuals, political radicals and cultural critics. This was the point succinctly made by the economist and urban planner Hugh Stretton in his 1970 book Ideas for Australian Cities, where he observed that “Most Australians choose to live in suburbs, in reach of city centres and also of beaches or countryside. Many writers condemn this choice, and with especial anger or gloom they condemn the suburbs” (Stretton 7). Sue Turnbull has observed that “suburbia has come to constitute a cultural fault-line in Australia over the last 100 years” (19), while Ian Craven has described suburbia as “a term of contention and a focus for fundamentally conflicting beliefs” in the Australian national imaginary “whose connotations continue to oscillate between dream and suburban nightmare” (48). The tensions between celebration and critique of suburban life play themselves out routinely in the Australian media, from the sun-lit suburbanism of Australia’s longest running television serial dramas, Neighbours and Home and Away, to the pointed observational critiques found in Australian comedy from Barry Humphries to Kath and Kim, to the dark visions of films such as The Boys and Animal Kingdom (Craven; Turnbull). Much as we may feel that the diagnosis of suburban life as a kind of neurotic condition had gone the way of the concept album or the tie-dye shirt, newspaper feature writers such as Catherine Deveny, writing in The Age, have offered the following as a description of the Chadstone shopping centre in Melbourne’s eastern suburbChadstone is a metastasised tumour of offensive proportions that's easy to find. You simply follow the line of dead-eyed wage slaves attracted to this cynical, hermetically sealed weatherless biosphere by the promise a new phone will fix their punctured soul and homewares and jumbo caramel mugachinos will fill their gaping cavern of disappointment … No one looks happy. Everyone looks anaesthetised. A day spent at Chadstone made me understand why they call these shopping centres complexes. Complex as in a psychological problem that's difficult to analyse, understand or solve. (Deveny) Suburbanism has been actively promoted throughout Australia’s history since European settlement. Graeme Davison has observed that “Australia’s founders anticipated a sprawl of homes and gardens rather than a clumping of terraces and alleys,” and quotes Governor Arthur Phillip’s instructions to the first urban developers of the Sydney Cove colony in 1790 that streets shall be “laid out in such a manner as to afford free circulation of air, and where the houses are built … the land will be granted with a clause that will prevent more than one house being built on the allotment” (Davison 43). Louise Johnson (2006) argued that the main features of 20th century Australian suburbanisation were very much in place by the 1920s, particularly land-based capitalism and the bucolic ideal of home as a retreat from the dirt, dangers and density of the city. At the same time, anti-suburbanism has been a significant influence in Australian public thought. Alan Gilbert (1988) drew attention to the argument that Australia’s suburbs combined the worst elements of the city and country, with the absence of both the grounded community associated with small towns, and the mental stimuli and personal freedom associated with the city. Australian suburbs have been associated with spiritual emptiness, the promotion of an ersatz, one-dimensional consumer culture, the embourgeoisment of the working-class, and more generally criticised for being “too pleasant, too trivial, too domestic and far too insulated from … ‘real’ life” (Gilbert 41). There is also an extensive feminist literature critiquing suburbanization, seeing it as promoting the alienation of women and the unequal sexual division of labour (Game and Pringle). More recently, critiques of suburbanization have focused on the large outer-suburban homes developed on new housing estates—colloquially known as McMansions—that are seen as being environmentally unsustainable and emblematic of middle-class over-consumption. Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss’s Affluenza (2005) is a locus classicus of this type of argument, and organizations such as the Australia Institute—which Hamilton and Denniss have both headed—have regularly published papers making such arguments. Can the Suburbs Make You Creative?In such a context, championing the Australian suburb can feel somewhat like being an advocate for Dan Brown novels, David Williamson plays, Will Ferrell comedies, or TV shows such as Two and a Half Men. While it may put you on the side of majority opinion, you can certainly hear the critical axe grinding and possibly aimed at your head, not least because of the association of such cultural forms with mass popular culture, or the pseudo-life of an alienated existence. The art of a program such as Kath and Kim is that, as Sue Turnbull so astutely notes, it walks both sides of the street, both laughing with and laughing at Australian suburban culture, with its celebrity gossip magazines, gourmet butcher shops, McManisons and sales at Officeworks. Gina Riley and Jane Turner’s inspirations for the show can be seen with the presence of such suburban icons as Shane Warne, Kylie Minogue and Barry Humphries as guests on the program. Others are less nuanced in their satire. The website Things Bogans Like relentlessly pillories those who live in McMansions, wear Ed Hardy t-shirts and watch early evening current affairs television, making much of the lack of self-awareness of those who would simultaneously acquire Buddhist statues for their homes and take budget holidays in Bali and Phuket while denouncing immigration and multiculturalism. It also jokes about the propensity of “bogans” to loudly proclaim that those who question their views on such matters are demonstrating “political correctness gone mad,” appealing to the intellectual and moral authority of writers such as the Melbourne Herald-Sun columnist Andrew Bolt. There is also the “company you keep” question. Critics of over-consuming middle-class suburbia such as Clive Hamilton are strongly associated with the Greens, whose political stocks have been soaring in Australia’s inner cities, where the majority of Australia’s cultural and intellectual critics live and work. By contrast, the Liberal party under John Howard and now Tony Abbott has taken strongly to what could be termed suburban realism over the 1990s and 2000s. Examples of suburban realism during the Howard years included the former Member for Lindsay Jackie Kelly proclaiming that the voters of her electorate were not concerned with funding for their local university (University of Western Sydney) as the electorate was “pram city” and “no one in my electorate goes to uni” (Gibson and Brennan-Horley), and the former Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Garry Hardgrave, holding citizenship ceremonies at Bunnings hardware stores, so that allegiance to the Australian nation could co-exist with a sausage sizzle (Gleeson). Academically, a focus on the suburbs is at odds with Richard Florida’s highly influential creative class thesis, which stresses inner urban cultural amenity and “buzz” as the drivers of a creative economy. Unfortunately, it is also at odds with many of Florida’s critics, who champion inner city activism as the antidote to the ersatz culture of “hipsterisation” that they associate with Florida (Peck; Slater). A championing of suburban life and culture is associated with writers such as Joel Kotkin and the New Geography group, who also tend to be suspicious of claims made about the creative industries and the creative economy. It is worth noting, however, that there has been a rich vein of work on Australian suburbs among cultural geographers, that has got past urban/suburban binaries and considered the extent to which critiques of suburban Australia are filtered through pre-existing discursive categories rather than empirical research findings (Dowling and Mee; McGuirk and Dowling; Davies (this volume). I have been part of a team engaged in a three-year study of creative industries workers in outer suburban areas, known as the Creative Suburbia project.[i] The project sought to understand how those working in creative industries who lived and worked in the outer suburbs maintained networks, interacted with clients and their peers, and made a success of their creative occupations: it focused on six suburbs in the cities of Brisbane (Redcliffe, Springfield, Forest Lake) and Melbourne (Frankston, Dandenong, Caroline Springs). It was premised upon what has been an inescapable empirical fact: however much talk there is about the “return to the city,” the fastest rates of population growth are in the outer suburbs of Australia’s major cities (Infrastructure Australia), and this is as true for those working in creative industries occupations as it is for those in virtually all other industry and occupational sectors (Flew; Gibson and Brennan-Horley; Davies). While there is a much rehearsed imagined geography of the creative industries that points to creative talents clustering in dense, highly agglomerated inner city precincts, incubating their unique networks of trust and sociality through random encounters in the city, it is actually at odds with the reality of where people in these sectors choose to live and work, which is as often as not in the suburbs, where the citizenry are as likely to meet in their cars at traffic intersections than walking in city boulevards.There is of course a “yes, but” response that one could have to such empirical findings, which is to accept that the creative workforce is more suburbanised than is commonly acknowledged, but to attribute this to people being driven out of the inner city by high house prices and rents, which may or may not be by-products of a Richard Florida-style strategy to attract the creative class. In other words, people live in the outer suburbs because they are driven out of the inner city. From our interviews with 130 people across these six suburban locations, the unequivocal finding was that this was not the case. While a fair number of our respondents had indeed moved from the inner city, just as many would—if given the choice—move even further away from the city towards a more rural setting as they would move closer to it. While there are clearly differences between suburbs, with creative people in Redcliffe being generally happier than those in Springfield, for example, it was quite clear that for many of these people a suburban location helped them in their creative practice, in ways that included: the aesthetic qualities of the location; the availability of “headspace” arising from having more time to devote to creative work rather than other activities such as travelling and meeting people; less pressure to conform to a stereotyped image of how one should look and act; financial savings from having access to lower-cost locations; and time saved by less commuting between locations.These creative workers generally did not see having access to the “buzz” associated with the inner city as being essential for pursuing work in their creative field, and they were just as likely to establish hardware stores and shopping centres as networking hubs as they were cafes and bars. While being located in the suburbs was disadvantageous in terms of access to markets and clients, but this was often seen in terms of a trade-off for better quality of life. Indeed, contrary to the presumptions of those such as Clive Hamilton and Catherine Deveny, they could draw creative inspiration from creative locations themselves, without feeling subjected to “pacification by cappuccino.” The bigger problem was that so many of the professional associations they dealt with would hold events in the inner city in the late afternoon or early evening, presuming people living close by and/or not having domestic or family responsibilities at such times. The role played by suburban locales such as hardware stores as sites for professional networking and as elements of creative industries value chains has also been documented in studies undertaken of Darwin as a creative city in Australia’s tropical north (Brennan-Horley and Gibson; Brennan-Horley et al.). Such a revised sequence in the cultural geography of the creative industries has potentially great implications for how urban cultural policy is being approached. The assumption that the creative industries are best developed in cities by investing heavily in inner urban cultural amenity runs the risk of simply bypassing those areas where the bulk of the nation’s artists, musicians, filmmakers and other cultural workers actually are, which is in the suburbs. Moreover, by further concentrating resources among already culturally rich sections of the urban population, such policies run the risk of further accentuating spatial inequalities in the cultural realm, and achieving the opposite of what is sought by those seeking spatial justice or the right to the city. An interest in broadband infrastructure or suburban university campuses is certainly far more prosaic than a battle for control of the nation’s cultural institutions or guerilla actions to reclaim the city’s streets. Indeed, it may suggest aspirations no higher than those displayed by Kath and Kim or by the characters of Barry Humphries’ satirical comedy. But however modest or utilitarian a focus on developing cultural resources in Australian suburbs may seem, it is in fact the most effective way of enabling the forms of spatial justice in the cultural sphere that many progressive people seek. ReferencesBrennan-Horley, Chris, and Chris Gibson. “Where Is Creativity in the City? Integrating Qualitative and GIS Methods.” Environment and Planning A 41.11 (2009): 2595–614. Brennan-Horley, Chris, Susan Luckman, Chris Gibson, and J. Willoughby-Smith. “GIS, Ethnography and Cultural Research: Putting Maps Back into Ethnographic Mapping.” The Information Society: An International Journal 26.2 (2010): 92–103.Collis, Christy, Emma Felton, and Phil Graham. “Beyond the Inner City: Real and Imagined Places in Creative Place Policy and Practice.” The Information Society: An International Journal 26.2 (2010): 104–12.Cox, Wendell. “The Still Elusive ‘Return to the City’.” New Geography 28 February 2011. < http://www.newgeography.com/content/002070-the-still-elusive-return-city >.Craven, Ian. “Cinema, Postcolonialism and Australian Suburbia.” Australian Studies 1995: 45-69. Davies, Alan. “Are the Suburbs Dormitories?” The Melbourne Urbanist 21 Sep. 2010. < http://melbourneurbanist.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/are-the-suburbs-dormitories/ >.Davison, Graeme. "Australia: The First Suburban Nation?” Journal of Urban History 22.1 (1995): 40-75. Deveny, Catherine. “No One Out Alive.” The Age 29 Oct. 2009. < http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/no-one-gets-out-alive-20091020-h6yh.html >.Dowling, Robyn, and K. Mee. “Tales of the City: Western Sydney at the End of the Millennium.” Sydney: The Emergence of World City. Ed. John Connell. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2000. 244–72.Flew, Terry. “Economic Prosperity, Suburbanization and the Creative Workforce: Findings from Australian Suburban Communities.” Spaces and Flows: Journal of Urban and Extra-Urban Studies 1.1 (2011, forthcoming).Game, Ann, and Rosemary Pringle. “Sexuality and the Suburban Dream.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 15.2 (1979): 4–15.Gibson, Chris, and Chris Brennan-Horley. “Goodbye Pram City: Beyond Inner/Outer Zone Binaries in Creative City Research.” Urban Policy and Research 24.4 (2006): 455–71. Gilbert, A. “The Roots of Australian Anti-Suburbanism.” Australian Cultural History. Ed. S. I. Goldberg and F. B. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. 33–39. Gleeson, Brendan. Australian Heartlands: Making Space for Hope in the Suburbs. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2006.Hamilton, Clive, and Richard Denniss. Affluenza. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005.Harvey, David. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review 53 (2008): 23–40.Infrastructure Australia. State of Australian Cities 2010. Infrastructure Australia Major Cities Unit. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. 2010.Johnson, Lesley. “Style Wars: Revolution in the Suburbs?” Australian Geographer 37.2 (2006): 259–77. Kirsner, Douglas. “Domination and the Flight from Being.” Australian Capitalism: Towards a Socialist Critique. Eds. J. Playford and D. Kirsner. Melbourne: Penguin, 1972. 9–31.Kotkin, Joel. “Urban Legends.” Foreign Policy 181 (2010): 128–34. Lee, Terence. “The Singaporean Creative Suburb of Perth: Rethinking Cultural Globalization.” Globalization and Its Counter-Forces in South-East Asia. Ed. T. Chong. Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, 2008. 359–78. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.McGuirk, P., and Robyn Dowling. “Understanding Master-Planned Estates in Australian Cities: A Framework for Research.” Urban Policy and Research 25.1 (2007): 21–38Peck, Jamie. “Struggling with the Creative Class.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29.4 (2005): 740–70. Slater, Tom. “The Eviction of Critical Perspectives from Gentrification Research.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30.4 (2006): 737–57. Soja, Ed. Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.Stretton, Hugh. Ideas for Australian Cities. Melbourne: Penguin, 1970.Turnbull, Sue. “Mapping the Vast Suburban Tundra: Australian Comedy from Dame Edna to Kath and Kim.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.1 (2008): 15–32.

“There is nothing more public than privacy.” (Berlant and Warner, Sex) How did it come to this? How did it happen that a one-off, two-hour event at a public swimming pool in a suburb of outer Melbourne ignited international hate mail and generated media-fanned political anguish and debate about the proper use of public spaces? In 2010, women who attend a women’s only swim session on Sunday evenings at the Dandenong Oasis public swimming pool asked the pool management and the local council for permission to celebrate the end of Ramadan at the pool during the time of their regular swim session. The request was supported by the pool managers and the council and promoted by both as an opportunity for family and friends to get together in a spirit of multicultural learning and understanding. Responding to criticisms of the event as an unreasonable claim on public facilities by one group, the Mayor of the City of Greater Dandenong, Jim Memeti, rejected claims that this event discriminates against non-Muslim residents of the suburb. But here’s the rub. The event, to be held after hours at the pool, requires all participants older than ten years of age to follow a dress code of knee-length shorts and T-shirts. This is a suburban moment that is borne of but exceeds the local. It reflects and responds to a contemporary global conundrum of great political and theoretical significance—how to negotiate and govern the relations between multiculturalism, religion, gender, sexual freedom, and democracy. Specifically this event speaks to how multicultural democracy in the public sphere negotiates the public presence and expression of different cultural and religious frameworks related to gender and sexuality. This is demanding political stuff. Situated in the messy political and theoretical terrains of the relation between public space and the public sphere, this local moment called for political judgement about how cultural differences should be allowed to manifest in and through public space, giving consideration to the potential effects of these decisions on an inclusive multicultural democracy. The local authorities in Dandenong engaged in an admirable process of democratic labour as they puzzled over how to make decisions that were responsible and equitable, in the absence of a rulebook or precedents for success. Ultimately however this mode of experimental decision-making, which will become increasingly necessary to manage such predicaments in the future, was foreclosed by unwarranted and unhelpful media outrage. "Foreclosed" here stresses the preemptive nature of the loss; a lost opportunity for trialing approaches to governing cultural diversity that may fail, but might then be modified. It was condemned in advance of either success or failure. The role of the media rather than the discomfort of the local publics has been decisive in this event.This Multicultural SuburbDandenong is approximately 30 kilometres southeast of central Melbourne. Originally home to the Bunorong People of the Kulin nation, it was settled by pastoralists by the 1800s, heavily industrialised during the twentieth century, and now combines cultural diversity with significant social disadvantage. The City of Greater Dandenong is proud of its reputation as the most culturally and linguistically diverse municipality in Australia. Its population of approximately 138,000 comprises residents from 156 different language groups. More than half (56%) of its population was born overseas, with 51% from nations where English is not the main spoken language. These include Vietnam, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, India, China, Italy, Greece, Bosnia and Afghanistan. It is also a place of significant religious diversity with residents identifying as Buddhist (15 per cent) Muslim (8 per cent), Hindu (2 per cent) and Christian (52 per cent) [CGD]. Its city logo, “Great Place, Great People” evokes its twin pride in the placemaking power of its diverse population. It is also a brazen act of civic branding to counter its reputation as a derelict and dangerous suburb. In his recent book The Bogan Delusion, David Nichols cites a "bogan" website that names Dandenong as one of Victoria’s two most bogan areas. The other was Moe. (p72). The Sunday Age newspaper had already depicted Dandenong as one of two excessively dangerous suburbs “where locals fear to tread” (Elder and Pierik). The other suburb of peril was identified as Footscray.Central Dandenong is currently the site of Australia’s largest ever state sponsored Urban Revitalisation program with a budget of more than $290 million to upgrade infrastructure, that aims to attract $1billion in private investment to provide housing and future employment.The Cover UpIn September 2010, the Victorian and Civil and Administrative Appeals Tribunal (VCAT) granted the YMCA an exemption from the Equal Opportunity Act to allow a dress code for the Ramadan event at the Oasis swimming pool that it manages. The "Y" sees the event as “an opportunity for the broader community to learn more about Ramadan and the Muslim faith, and encourages all members of Dandenong’s diverse community to participate” (YMCA Ramadan). While pool management and the municipal council refer to the event as an "opening up" of the closed swimming session, the media offer a different reading of the VCAT decision. The trope of the "the cover up" has framed most reports and commentaries (Murphy; Szego). The major focus of the commentaries has not been the event per se, but the call to dress "appropriately." Dress codes however are a cultural familiar. They exist for workplaces, schools, nightclubs, weddings, racing and sporting clubs and restaurants, to name but a few. While some of these codes or restrictions are normatively imposed rather than legally required, they are not alien to cultural life in Australia. Moreover, there are laws that prohibit people from being meagerly dressed or naked in public, including at beaches, swimming pools and so on. The dress code for this particular swimming pool event was, however, perceived to be unusual and, in a short space of time, "unusual" converted to "social threat."Responses to media polls about the dress code reveal concerns related to the symbolic dimensions of the code. The vast majority of those who opposed the Equal Opportunity exemption saw it as the thin edge of the multicultural wedge, a privatisation of public facilities, or a denial of the public’s right to choose how to dress. Tabloid newspapers reported on growing fears of Islamisation, while the more temperate opposition situated the decision as a crisis of human rights associated with tolerating illiberal cultural practices. Julie Szego reflects this view in an opinion piece in The Age newspaper:the Dandenong pool episode is neither trivial nor insignificant. It is but one example of human rights laws producing outcomes that restrict rights. It raises tough questions about how far public authorities ought to go in accommodating cultural practices that sit uneasily with mainstream Western values. (Szego)Without enquiring into the women’s request and in the absence of the women’s views about what meaning the event held for them, most media commentators and their electronically wired audiences treated the announcement as yet another alarming piece of evidence of multicultural failure and the potential Islamisation of Australia. The event raised specific concerns about the double intrusion of cultural difference and religion. While the Murdoch tabloid Herald Sun focused on the event as “a plan to force families to cover up to avoid offending Muslims at a public event” (Murphy) the liberal Age newspaper took a more circumspect approach, reporting on its small vox pop at the Dandenong pool. Some people here referred to the need to respect religions and seemed unfazed by the exemption and the event. Those who disagreed thought it was important not to enforce these (dress) practices on other people (Carey).It is, I believe, significant that several employees of the local council informed me that most of the opposition has come from the media, people outside of Dandenong and international groups who oppose the incursion of Islam into non-Islamic settings. Opposition to the event did not appear to derive from local concern or opposition.The overwhelming majority of Herald Sun comments expressed emphatic opposition to the dress code, citing it variously as unAustralian, segregationist, arrogant, intolerant and sexist. The Herald Sun polled readers (in a self-selecting and of course highly unrepresentative on-line poll) asking them to vote on whether or not they agreed with the VCAT exemption. While 5.52 per cent (512 voters) agreed with the ruling, 94.48 per cent (8,760) recorded disagreement. In addition, the local council has, for the first time in memory, received a stream of hate-mail from international anti-Islam groups. Muslim women’s groups, feminists, the Equal Opportunity Commissioner and academics have also weighed in. According to local reports, Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne, Shahram Akbarzadeh, considered the exemption was “nonsense” and would “backfire and the people who will pay for it will be the Muslim community themselves” (Haberfield). He repudiated it as an example of inclusion and tolerance, labeling it “an effort of imposing a value system (sic)” (Haberfield). He went so far as to suggest that, “If Tony Abbott wanted to participate in his swimwear he wouldn’t be allowed in. That’s wrong.” Tasneem Chopra, chairwoman of the Islamic Women’s Welfare Council and Sherene Hassan from the Islamic Council of Victoria, both expressed sensitivity to the group’s attempt to establish an inclusive event but would have preferred the dress code to be a matter of choice rather coercion (Haberfield, "Mayor Defends Dandenong Pool Cover Up Order"). Helen Szoke, the Commissioner of the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, defended the pool’s exemption from the Law that she oversees. “Matters such as this are not easy to resolve and require a balance to be achieved between competing rights and obligations. Dress codes are not uncommon: e.g., singlets, jeans, thongs etc in pubs/hotels” (in Murphy). The civil liberties organisation, Liberty Victoria, supported the ban because the event was to be held after hours (Murphy). With astonishing speed this single event not only transformed the suburban swimming pool to a theatre of extra-local disputes about who and what is entitled to make claims on public space and publically funded facilities, but also fed into charged debates about the future of multiculturalism and the vulnerability of the nation to the corrosive effects of cultural and religious difference. In this sense suburbs like Dandenong are presented as sites that not only generate fear about physical safety but whose suburban sensitivities to its culturally diverse population represent a threat to the safety of the nation. Thus the event both reflects and produces an antipathy to cultural difference and to the place where difference resides. This aversion is triggered by and mediated in this case through the figure, rather than the (corpo)reality, of the Muslim woman. In this imagining, the figure of the Muslim woman is assigned the curious symbolic role of "cultural creep." The debates around the pool event is not about the wellbeing or interests of the Muslim women themselves, nor are broader debates about the perceived, culturally-derived restrictions imposed on Muslim women living in Australia or other western countries. The figure of the Muslim woman is, I would argue, simply the ground on which the debates are held. The first debate relates to social and public space, access to which is considered fundamental to freedom and participatory democracy, and in current times is addressed in terms of promoting inclusion, preventing exclusion and finding opportunities for cross cultural encounters. The second relates not to public space per se, but to the public sphere or the “sphere of private people coming together as a public” for political deliberation (Habermas 21). The literature and discussions dealing with these two terrains have remained relatively disconnected (Low and Smith) with public space referring largely to activities and opportunities in the socio-cultural domain and the public sphere addressing issues of politics, rights and democracy. This moment in Dandenong offers some modest leeway for situating "the suburb" as an ideal site for coalescing these disparate discussions. In this regard I consider Iveson’s provocative and productive question about whether some forms of exclusions from suburban public space may actually deepen the democratic ideals of the public sphere. Exclusions may in such cases be “consistent with visions of a democratically inclusive city” (216). He makes his case in relation to a dispute about the exclusion of men exclusion from a women’s only swimming pool in the Sydney suburb of Coogee. The Dandenong case is similarly exclusive with an added sense of exclusion generated by an "inclusion with restrictions."Diversity, Difference, Public Space and the Public SphereAs a prelude to this discussion of exclusion as democracy, I return to the question that opened this article: how did it come to this? How is it that Australia has moved from its renowned celebration and pride in its multiculturalism so much in evidence at the suburban level through what Ghassan Hage calls an “unproblematic” multiculturalism (233) and what others have termed “everyday multiculturalism” (Wise and Velayutham). Local cosmopolitanisms are often evinced through the daily rituals of people enjoying the ethnic cuisines of their co-residents’ pasts, and via moments of intercultural encounter. People uneventfully rub up against and greet each other or engage in everyday acts of kindness that typify life in multicultural suburbs, generating "reservoirs of hope" for democratic and cosmopolitan cities (Thrift 147). In today’s suburbs, however, the “Imperilled Muslim women” who need protection from “dangerous Muslim men” (Razack 129) have a higher discursive profile than ethnic cuisine as the exemplar of multiculturalism. Have we moved from pleasure to hostility or was the suburban pleasure in racial difference always about a kind of “eating the other” (bell hooks 378). That is to ask whether our capacity to experience diversity positively has been based on consumption, consuming the other for our own enrichment, whereas living with difference entails a commitment not to consumption but to democracy. This democratic multicultural commitment is a form of labour rather than pleasure, and its outcome is not enrichment but transformation (although this labour can be pleasurable and transformation might be enriching). Dandenong’s prized cultural precincts, "Little India" and the "Afghan bazaar" are showcases of food, artefacts and the diversity of the suburb. They are centres of pleasurable and exotic consumption. The pool session, however, requires one to confront difference. In simple terms we can think about ethnic food, festivals and handicrafts as cultural diversity, and the Muslim woman as cultural difference.This distinction between diversity and difference is useful for thinking through the relation between multiculturalism in public space and multicultural democracy of the public sphere. According to the anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, while a neoliberal sensibility supports cultural diversity in the public space, cultural difference is seen as a major cause of social problems associated with immigrants, and has a diminishing effect on the public sphere (14). According to Eriksen, diversity is understood as aesthetic, or politically and morally neutral expressions of culture that are enriching (Hage 118) or digestible. Difference, however, refers to morally objectionable cultural practices. In short, diversity is enriching. Difference is corrosive. Eriksen argues that differences that emerge from distinct cultural ideas and practices are deemed to create conflicts with majority cultures, weaken social solidarity and lead to unacceptable violations of human rights in minority groups. The suburban swimming pool exists here at the boundary of diversity and difference, where the "presence" of diverse bodies may enrich, but their different practices deplete and damage existing culture. The imperilled Muslim woman of the suburbs carries a heavy symbolic load. She stands for major global contests at the border of difference and diversity in three significant domains, multiculturalism, religion and feminism. These three areas are positioned simultaneously in public space and of the public sphere and she embodies a specific version of each in this suburban setting. First, there a global retreat from multiculturalism evidenced in contemporary narratives that describe multiculturalism (both as official policy and unofficial sensibility) as failed and increasingly ineffective at accommodating or otherwise dealing with religious, cultural and ethnic differences (Cantle; Goodhart; Joppke; Poynting and Mason). In the UK, Europe, the US and Australia, popular media sources and political discourses speak of "parallel lives,"immigrant enclaves, ghettoes, a lack of integration, the clash of values, and illiberal cultural practices. The covered body of the Muslim woman, and more particularly the Muslim veil, are now read as visual signs of this clash of values and of the refusal to integrate. Second, religion has re-emerged in the public domain, with religious groups and individuals making particular claims on public space both on the basis of their religious identity and in accord with secular society’s respect for religious freedom. This is most evident in controversies in France, Belgium and Netherlands associated with banning niqab in public and other religious symbols in schools, and in Australia in court. In this sense the covered Muslim woman raises concerns and indignation about the rightful place of religion in the public sphere and in social space. Third, feminism is increasingly invoked as the ground from which claims about the imperilled Muslim woman are made, particularly those about protecting women from their dangerous men. The infiltration of the Muslim presence into public space is seen as a threat to the hard won gains of women’s freedom enjoyed by the majority population. This newfound feminism of the public sphere, posited by those who might otherwise disavow feminism, requires some serious consideration. This public discourse rarely addresses the discrimination, violation and lack of freedom experienced systematically on an everyday basis by women of majority cultural backgrounds in western societies (such as Australia). However, the sexism of racially and religiously different men is readily identified and decried. This represents a significant shift to a dubious feminist register of the public sphere such that: “[w]omen of foreign origin, ...more specifically Muslim women…have replaced the traditional housewife as the symbol of female subservience” (Tissot 41–42).The three issues—multiculturalism, religion and feminism—are, in the Dandenong pool context, contests about human rights, democracy and the proper use of public space. Szego’s opinion piece sees the Dandenong pool "cover up" as an example of the conundrum of how human rights for some may curtail the human rights of others and lead us into a problematic entanglement of universal "rights," with claims of difference. In her view the combination of human rights and multiculturalism in the case of the Dandenong Pool accommodates illiberal practices that put the rights of "the general public" at risk, or as she puts it, on a “slippery slope” that results in a “watering down of our human rights.” Ideas that entail women making a claim for private time in public space are ultimately not good for "us."Such ideas run counter to the West's more than 500-year struggle for individual freedom—including both freedom of religion and freedom from religion—and for gender equality. Our public authorities ought to be pushing back hardest when these values are under threat. Yet this is precisely where they've been buckling under pressure (Szego)But a different reading of the relation between public and private space, human rights, democracy and gender freedom is readily identifiable in the Dandenong event—if one looks for it. Living with difference, I have already suggested, is a problem of democracy and the public sphere and does not so easily correspond to consuming diversity, as it demands engagement with cultural difference. In what remains, I explore how multicultural democracy in the public sphere and women’s rights in public and private realms relate, firstly, to the burgeoning promise of democracy and civility that might emerge in public space through encounter and exchange. I also point out how this moment in Dandenong might be read as a singular contribution to dealing with this global problematic of living with difference; of democracy in the public sphere. Public urban space has become a focus for speculation among geographers and sociologists in particular, about the prospects for an enhanced civic appreciation of living with difference through encountering strangers. Random and repetitious encounters with people from all cultures typify contemporary urban life. It remains an open question however as to whether these encounters open up or close down possibilities for conviviality and understanding, and whether they undo or harden peoples’ fears and prejudices. There is, however, at least in some academic and urban planning circles, some hope that the "throwntogetherness" (Massey) and the "doing" of togetherness (Laurier and Philo) found in the multicultural city may generate some lessons and opportunities for developing a civic culture and political commitment to living with difference. Alongside the optimism of those who celebrate the city, the suburb, and public spaces as forging new ways of living with difference, there are those such as Gill Valentine who wonder how this might be achieved in practice (324). Ash Amin similarly notes that city or suburban public spaces are not necessarily “the natural servants of multicultural engagement” (Ethnicity 967). Amin and Valentine point to the limited or fleeting opportunities for real engagement in these spaces. Moreover Valentine‘s research in the UK revealed that the spatial proximity found in multicultural spaces did not so much give rise to greater mutual respect and engagement, but to a frustrated “white self-segregation in the suburbs.” She suggests therefore that civility and polite exchange should not be mistaken for respect (324). Amin contends that it is the “micro-publics” of social encounters found in workplaces, schools, gardens, sports clubs [and perhaps swimming pools] rather than the fleeting encounters of the street or park, that offer better opportunities for meaningful intercultural exchange. The Ramadan celebration at the pool, with its dress code and all, might be seen more fruitfully as a purposeful event engaging a micro-public in which people are able to “break out of fixed relations and fixed notions” and “learn to become different” (Amin, Ethnicity 970) without that generating discord and resentment.Micropublics, Subaltern Publics and a Democracy of (Temporary) ExclusionsIs this as an opportunity to bring the global and local together in an experiment of forging new democratic spaces for gender, sexuality, culture and for living with difference? More provocatively, can we see exclusion and an invitation to share in this exclusion as a precursor to and measure of, actually existing democracy? Painter and Philo have argued that democratic citizenship is questionable if “people cannot be present in public spaces (streets, squares, parks, cinemas, churches, town halls) without feeling uncomfortable, victimized and basically ‘out of place’…" (Iveson 216). Feminists have long argued that distinctions between public and private space are neither straightforward nor gender neutral. For Nancy Fraser the terms are “cultural classifications and rhetorical labels” that are powerful because they are “frequently deployed to delegitimate some interests, views and topics and to valorize others” (73). In relation to women and other subordinated minorities, the "rhetoric of privacy" has been historically used to restrict the domain of legitimate public contestation. In fact the notion of what is public and particularly notions of the "public interest" and the "public good" solidify forms of subordination. Fraser suggests the concept of "subaltern counterpublics" as an alternative to notions of "the public." These are discursive spaces where groups articulate their needs, and demands are circulated formulating their own public sphere. This challenges the very meaning and foundational premises of ‘the public’ rather than simply positing strategies of inclusion or exclusion. The twinning of Amin’s notion of "micro-publics" and Fraser’s "counterpublics" is, I suggest, a fruitful approach to interpreting the Dandenong pool issue. It invites a reading of this singular suburban moment as an experiment, a trial of sorts, in newly imaginable ways of living democratically with difference. It enables us to imagine moments when a limited democratic right to exclude might create the sorts of cultural exchanges that give rise to a more authentic and workable recognition of cultural difference. I am drawn to think that this is precisely the kind of democratic experimentation that the YMCA and Dandenong Council embarked upon when they applied for the Equal Opportunity exemption. I suggest that by trialing, rather than fixing forever a "critically exclusive" access to the suburban swimming pool for two hours per year, they were in fact working on the practical problem of how to contribute in small but meaningful ways to a more profoundly free democracy and a reworked public sphere. In relation to the similar but distinct example of the McIver pool for women and children in Coogee, New South Wales, Kurt Iveson makes the point that such spaces of exclusion or withdrawal, “do not necessarily serve simply as spaces where people ‘can be themselves’, or as sites through which reified identities are recognised—in existing conditions of inequality, they can also serve as protected spaces where people can take the risk of exploring who they might become with relative safety from attack and abuse” (226). These are necessary risks to take if we are to avoid entrenching fear of difference in a world where difference is itself deeply, and permanently, entrenched.ReferencesAmin, Ash. “Ethnicity and the Multicultural City: Living with Diversity.” Environment and Planning A 34 (2002): 959–80.———. “The Good City.” Urban Studies 43 (2006): 1009–23.Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 547–66.Cantle, Ted. Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team. London, UK Home Office, 2001.Carey, Adam. “Backing for Pool Cover Up Directive.” The Age 17 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/backing-for-pool-coverup-directive-20100916-15enz.html›.Elder, John, and Jon Pierick. “The Mean Streets: Where the Locals Fear to Tread.” The Sunday Age 10 Jan. 2010. ‹http://www.theage.com.au/national/the-mean-streets-where-the-locals-fear-to-tread-20100109-m00l.html?skin=text-only›.Eriksen, Thomas Hyland. “Diversity versus Difference: Neoliberalism in the Minority Debate." The Making and Unmaking of Difference. Ed. Richard Rottenburg, Burkhard Schnepel, and Shingo Shimada. Bielefeld: Transaction, 2006. 13–36.Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25/26 (1990): 56–80.Goodhart, David. “Too Diverse.” Prospect 95 (2004): 30-37.Haberfield, Georgie, and Gilbert Gardner. “Mayor Defends Pool Cover-up Order.” Dandenong Leader 16 Sep. 2010 ‹http://dandenong-leader.whereilive.com.au/news/story/dandenong-oasis-tells-swimmers-to-cover-up/›.Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2001.Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Sydney: Pluto, 1998.hooks, bell. "Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance." Media and Cultural Studies Keyworks. Eds. Meenakshi Gigi and Douglas Kellner. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001. 366-380.Iveson, Kurt. "Justifying Exclusion: The Politics of Public Space and the Dispute over Access to McIvers Ladies' Baths, Sydney.” Gender, Place and Culture 10.3 (2003): 215–28.Joppke, Christian. “The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal State: Theory and Policy.” The British Journal of Sociology 55.2 (2004): 237–57.Laurier, Chris, and Eric Philo. “Cold Shoulders and Napkins Handed: Gestures of Responsibility.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31 (2006): 193–207.Low, Setha, and Neil Smith, eds. The Politics of Public Space. London: Routledge, 2006.Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005.Murphy, Padraic. "Cover Up for Pool Even at Next Year's Ramadan.” Herald Sun 23 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/cover-up-for-pool-event-during-next-years-ramadan/story-e6frf7kx-1225924291675›.Nichols, David. The Bogan Delusion. Melbourne: Affirm Press, 2011.Poynting, Scott, and Victoria Mason. "The New Integrationism, the State and Islamophobia: Retreat from Multiculturalism in Australia." International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 36 (2008): 230–46.Razack, Sherene H. “Imperilled Muslim Women, Dangerous Muslim Men and Civilised Europeans: Legal and Social Responses to Forced Marriages.” Feminist Legal Studies 12.2 (2004): 129–74.Szego, Julie. “Under the Cover Up." The Age 9 Oct. 2010. < http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/under-the-coverup-20101008-16c1v.html >.Thrift, Nigel. “But Malice Afterthought: Cities and the Natural History of Hatred.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (2005): 133–50.Tissot, Sylvie. “Excluding Muslim Women: From Hijab to Niqab, from School to Public Space." Public Culture 23.1 (2011): 39–46.Valentine, Gill. “Living with Difference: Reflections on Geographies of Encounter.” Progress in Human Geography 32.3 (2008): 323–37.Wise, Amanda, and Selveraj Velayutham, eds. Everyday Multiculturalism. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.YMCA. “VCAT Ruling on Swim Sessions at Dandenong Oasis to Open Up to Community During Ramadan Next Year.” 16 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.victoria.ymca.org.au/cpa/htm/htm_news_detail.asp?page_id=13&news_id=360›.

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

We ask you now, reader, to put your mind, as a citizen of the Australian Commonwealth, to the facts presented in these pages. We ask you to study the problem, in the way that we present the case, from the Aborigines’ point of view. We do not ask for your charity; we do not ask you to study us as scientific-freaks. Above all, we do not ask for your “protection”. No, thanks! We have had 150 years of that! We ask only for justice, decency, and fair play. (Patten and Ferguson 3-4) Jack Patten and William Ferguson’s above declaration on “Plain Speaking” in Aborigines Claim Citizenship Rights! A Statement of the Case for the Aborigines Progressive Association (1938), outlining Aboriginal Australians view of colonisation and the call for Aboriginal self-determinacy, will be my guiding framework in writing this paper. I ask you to study the problem, as it is presented, from the viewpoint of an Indigenous woman who seeks to understand how “sorry” has been uttered in political domains as a word divorced from the moral freight attached to a history of “degrading, humiliating and exterminating” Aboriginal Australians (Patten and Ferguson 11). I wish to argue that the Opposition leader’s utterance of “sorry” in his 13 February 2008 “We Are Sorry – Address to Parliament” was an indicator of the insidious ways in which colonisation has treated Aboriginal Australians as less than, not equal to, white Australians and to examine the ways in which this particular utterance of the word “sorry” is built on longstanding colonial frameworks that position ‘the Aborigine’ as peripheral in the representation of a national identity – a national identity that, as shown by the transcript of the apology, continues to romanticise settler values and ignore Indigenous rights. Nelson’s address tries to disassociate the word “sorry” from any moral attachment. The basis of his address is on constructing a national identity where all injustices are equal. In offering this apology, let us not create one injustice in our attempts to address another. (Nelson) All sorrys are equal, but some are more equal than others. Listening to Nelson’s address, words resembling those of Orwell’s ran through my head. The word “sorry” in relation to Indigenous Australians has taken on cultural, political, educational and economic proportions. The previous government’s refusal to utter the word was attached to the ways in which formations of rhetorically self-sufficient arguments of practicality, equality and justice “functioned to sustain and legitimate existing inequalities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Australia” (Augoustinos, LeCouteur and Soyland 105). How then, I wondered as I nervously waited for Nelson to begin apologising, would he transform this inherited collective discursive practice of legitimised racism that upheld mainstream Australia’s social reality? The need for an apology, and the history of political refusal to give it, is not a simple classification of one event, one moment in history. The ‘act’ of removing children is not a singular, one-off event. The need to do, the justification and rationalisation of the doing and what that means now, the having done, as well as the impact on those that were left behind, those that were taken, those that were born after, are all bound up in this particular “sorry”. Given that reluctance of the previous government to admit injustices were done and still exist, this utterance of the word “sorry” from the leader of the opposition precariously sat between freely offering it and reluctantly giving it. The above quote from Nelson, and its central concern of not performing any injustice towards mainstream Australia (“let us not” [my italics]) very definitely defines this sorry in relation to one particular injustice (the removing of Indigenous children) which therefore ignores the surrounding and complicit colonialist and racist attitudes, policies and practices that both institutionalised and perpetuated racism against Australia’s Indigenous peoples. This comment also clearly articulates the opposition’s concern that mainstream Australia not be offended by this act of offering the word “sorry”. Nelson’s address and the ways that it constructs what this “sorry” is for, what it isn’t for, and who it is for, continues to uphold and legitimate existing inequalities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. From the very start of Nelson’s “We Are Sorry – Address to Parliament”, two specific clarifications were emphasised: the “sorry” was directed at a limited time period in history; and that there is an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. Nelson defines this distinction: “two cultures; one ancient, proud and celebrating its deep bond with this land for some 50,000 years. The other, no less proud, arrived here with little more than visionary hope deeply rooted in gritty determination to build an Australian nation.” This cultural division maintains colonising discourses that define and label, legitimate and exclude groups and communities. It draws from the binary oppositions of self and other, white and black, civilised and primitive. It maintains a divide between the two predominant ideas of history that this country struggles with and it silences those in that space in between, ignoring for example, the effects of colonisation and miscegenation in blurring the lines between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilised’. Although acknowledging that Indigenous Australians inhabited this land for a good few thousand decades before the proud, gritty, determined visionaries of a couple of hundred years ago, the “sorry” that is to be uttered is only in relation to “the first seven decades of the 20th century”. Nelson establishes from the outset that any forthcoming apology, on behalf of “us” – read as non-Indigenous Anglo-Australians – in reference to ‘them’ – “those Aboriginal people forcibly removed” – is only valid for the “period within which these events occurred [which] was one that defined and shaped Australia”. My reading of this sectioning of a period in Australia’s history is that while recognising that certain colonising actions were unjust, specifically in this instance the removal of Indigenous children, this period of time is also seen as influential and significant to the growth of the country. What this does is to allow the important colonial enterprise to subsume the unjust actions by the colonisers by other important colonial actions. Explicit in Nelson’s address is that this particular time frame saw the nation of Australia reach the heights of achievements and is a triumphant period – an approach which extends beyond taking the highs with the lows, and the good with the bad, towards overshadowing any minor ‘unfortunate’ mistakes that might have been made, ‘occasionally’, along the way. Throughout the address, there are continual reminders to the listeners that the “us” should not be placed at a disadvantage in the act of saying “sorry”: to do so would be to create injustice, whereas this “sorry” is strictly about attempting to “address another”. By sectioning off a specific period in the history of colonised Australia, the assumption is that all that happened before 1910 and all that happened after 1970 are “sorry” free. This not only ignores the lead up to the official policy of removal, how it was sanctioned and the aftermath of removal as outlined in The Bringing Them Home Report (1997); it also prevents Indigenous concepts of time from playing a legitimate and recognised role in the construct of both history and society. Aboriginal time is cyclical and moves around important events: those events that are most significant to an individual are held closer than those that are insignificant or mundane. Aleksendar Janca and Clothilde Bullen state that “time is perceived in relation to the socially sanctioned importance of events and is most often identified by stages in life or historic relevance of events” (41). The speech attempts to distinguish between moments and acts in history: firmly placing the act of removing children in a past society and as only one act of injustice amongst many acts of triumph. “Our generation does not own these actions, nor should it feel guilt for what was done in many, but not all cases, with the best of intentions” (Nelson). What was done is still being felt by Indigenous Australians today. And by differentiating between those that committed these actions and “our generation”, the address relies on a linear idea of time, to distance any wrongdoing from present day white Australians. What I struggle with here is that those wrongdoings continue to be felt according to Indigenous concepts of time and therefore these acts are not in a far away past but very much felt in the present. The need to not own these actions further entrenches the idea of separateness between Indigenous Australia and non-Indigenous Australia. The fear of being guilty or at blame evokes notions of wrong and right and this address is at pains not to do that – not to lay blame or evoke shame. Nelson’s address is relying on a national identity that has historically silenced and marginalised Indigenous Australians. If there is no blame to be accepted, if there is no attached shame to be acknowledged (“great pride, but occasionally shame” (Nelson)) and dealt with, then national identity is implicitly one of “discovery”, peaceful settlement and progress. Where are the Aboriginal perspectives of history in this idea of a national identity – then and now? And does this mean that colonialism happened and is now over? State and territory actions upon, against and in exclusion of Indigenous Australians are not actions that can be positioned as past discriminations; they continue today and are a direct result of those that preceded them. Throughout his address, Nelson emphasises the progressiveness of “today” and how that owes its success to the “past”: “In doing so, we reach from within ourselves to our past, those whose lives connect us to it and in deep understanding of its importance to our future”. By relying on a dichotomous approach – us and them, white and black, past and present – Nelson emphasises the distance between this generation of Australia and any momentary unjust actions in the past. The belief is that time moves on – away from the past and towards the future. That advancement, progression and civilisation are linear movements, all heading towards a more enlightened state. “We will be at our best today – and every day – if we pause to place ourselves in the shoes of others, imbued with the imaginative capacity to see this issue through their eyes with decency and respect”. But where is the recognition that today’s experiences, the results of what has been created by the past, are also attached to the need to offer an apology? Nelson’s “we” (Anglo-Australians) are being asked to stop and think about how “they” (Aborigines) might see things differently to the mainstream norm. The implication here also is that “they” – members of the Stolen Generations – must be prepared to understand the position white Australia is coming from, and acknowledge the good that white Australia has achieved. Anglo-Australian pride and achievement is reinforced throughout the address as the basis on which our national identity is understood. Ignoring its exclusion and silencing of the Indigenous Australians to whom his “sorry” is directed, Nelson perpetuates this ideology here in his address: “In brutally harsh conditions, from the small number of early British settlers our non Indigenous ancestors have given us a nation the envy of any in the world”. This gift of a nation where there was none before disregards the acts of invasion, segregation, protection and assimilation that characterise the colonisation of this nation. It also reverts to romanticised settler notions of triumph over great adversities – a notion that could just as easily be attached to Indigenous Australians yet Nelson specifically addresses “our non Indigenous ancestors”. He does add “But Aboriginal Australians made involuntary sacrifices, different but no less important, to make possible the economic and social development of our modern [my emphasis] Australia.” Indigenous Australians certainly made voluntary sacrifices, similar to and different from those made by non Indigenous Australians (Indigenous Australians also went to both World Wars and fought for this nation) and a great deal of “our modern” country’s economic success was achieved on the backs of Blackfellas (Taylor 9). But “involuntary sacrifices” is surely a contradiction in terms, either intellectually shoddy or breathtakingly disingenuous. To make a sacrifice is to do it voluntarily, to give something up for a greater good. “Involuntary sacrifices”, like “collateral damage” and other calculatedly cold-blooded euphemisms, conveniently covers up the question of who was doing what to whom – of who was sacrificed, and by whom. In the attempt to construct a basis of equal contribution between Indigenous and non-Indigenous, as well as equal acts of struggle and triumphing, Nelson’s account of history and nation building draws from the positioning of the oppressors but tries to suppress any notion of racial oppression. It maintains the separateness of Indigenous experiences of colonisation from the colonisers themselves. His reiteration that these occasional acts of unjustness came from benevolent and charitable white Australians privileges non-Indigenous ways of knowing and doing over Indigenous ones and attempts to present them as untainted and innate as opposed to repressive, discriminatory and racist. We honour those in our past who have suffered and all those who have made sacrifices for us by the way we live our lives and shape our nation. Today we recommit to do so – as one people. (Nelson) The political need to identify as “one people” drives assimilation policies (the attitude at the very heart of removing Aboriginal children on the basis that they were Aboriginal and needed to be absorbed into one society of whites). By honouring everyone, and therefore taking the focus off any act of unjustness by non-Indigenous peoples on Indigenous peoples, Nelson’s narrative again upholds an idea of contemporary national identity that has not only romanticised the past but ignores the inequalities of the present day. He spends a good few hundred words reminding his listeners that white Australia deserves to maintain its hard won position. And there is no doubt he is talking to white Australia – his focus is on Western constructs of patriotism and success. He reverts to settler/colonial discourse to uphold ideas of equity and access: These generations considered their responsibilities to their country and one another more important than their rights. They did not buy something until they had saved up for it and values were always more important than value. Living in considerably more difficult times, they had dreams for our nation but little money. Theirs was a mesh of values enshrined in God, King and Country and the belief in something greater than yourself. Neglectful indifference to all they achieved while seeing their actions in the separations only, through the values of our comfortable, modern Australia, will be to diminish ourselves. In “the separations only…” highlights Nelson’s colonial logic, which compartmentalises time, space, people and events and tries to disconnect one colonial act from another. The ideology, attitudes and policies that allowed the taking of Indigenous children were not separate from all other colonial and colonising acts and processes. The desire for a White Australia, a clear cut policy which was in existence at the same time as protection, removal and assimilation policies, cannot be disassociated from either the taking of children or the creation of this “comfortable, modern Australia” today. “Neglectful indifference to all they achieved” could aptly be applied to Indigenous peoples throughout Australian history – pre and post invasion. Where is the active acknowledgment of the denial of Indigenous rights so that “these generations [of non-Indigenous Australians could] consider their responsibilities to their country and one another more important than their rights”? Nelson adheres to the colonialist national narrative to focus on the “positive”, which Patrick Wolfe has argued in his critique of settler colonialism, is an attempt to mask disruptive moments that reveal the scope of state and national power over Aboriginal Australians (33). After consistently reinforcing the colonial/settler narrative, Nelson’s address moves on to insert Indigenous Australians into a well-defined and confined space within a specific chapter of that narrative. His perfunctory overview of the first seven decades of the 20th century alludes to Protection Boards and Reserves, assimilation policies and Christianisation, all underlined with white benevolence. Having established the innocent, inherently humane and decent motivations of “white families”, he resorts to appropriating Indigenous people’s stories and experiences. In the retelling of these stories, two prominent themes in Nelson’s text become apparent. White fellas were only trying to help the poor Blackfella back then, and one need only glance at Aboriginal communities today to see that white fellas are only trying to help the poor Blackfella again. It is reasonably argued that removal from squalor led to better lives – children fed, housed and educated for an adult world of [sic] which they could not have imagined. However, from my life as a family doctor and knowing the impact of my own father’s removal from his unmarried teenaged mother, not knowing who you are is the source of deep, scarring sorrows the real meaning of which can be known only to those who have endured it. No one should bring a sense of moral superiority to this debate in seeking to diminish the view that good was being sought to be done. (Nelson) A sense of moral superiority is what motivates colonisation: it is what motivated the enforced removal of children. The reference to “removal from squalor” is somewhat reminiscent of the 1909 Aborigines Protection Act. Act No. 25, 1909, section 11(1) which states: The board may, in accordance with and subject to the provisions of the Apprentices Act, 1901, by indenture bind or cause to be bound the child of any aborigine, or the neglected child of any person apparently having an admixture of aboriginal blood in his veins, to be apprenticed to any master, and may collect and institute proceedings for the recovery of any wages payable under such indenture, and may expend the same as the board may think fit in the interest of the child. Every child so apprenticed shall be under the supervision of the board, or of such person that may be authorised in that behalf by the regulations. (144) Neglect was often defined as simply being Aboriginal. The representation that being removed would lead to a better life relies on Western attitudes about society and culture. It dismisses any notion of Indigenous rights to be Indigenous and defines a better life according to how white society views it. Throughout most of the 1900s, Aboriginal children that were removed to experience this better life were trained in positions of servants. Nelson’s inclusion of his own personal experience as a non Indigenous Australian who has experienced loss and sorrow sustains his textual purpose to reduce human experiences to a common ground, an equal footing – to make all injustices equal. And he finishes the paragraph off with the subtle reminder that this “sorry” is only for “those” Aboriginal Australians that were removed in the first seven decades of last century. After retelling the experience of one Indigenous person as told to the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, he retells the experience of an Indigenous woman as told to a non-Indigenous man. The appropriate protocols concerning the re-using of Indigenous knowledge and intellectual copyright appeared to be absent in this address. Not only does the individual remain unacknowledged but the potential for misappropriating Indigenous experiences for non Indigenous purposes is apparent. The insertion of the story dismisses the importance of the original act of telling, and the significance of the unspeakable through decades of silence. Felman presents the complexities of the survivor’s tale: “the victim’s story has to overcome not just the silence of the dead but the indelible coercive power of the oppressor’s terrifying, brutal silencing of the surviving, and the inherent speechless silence of the living in the face of an unthinkable, unknowable, ungraspable event” (227). In telling this story Nelson unravelled the foundation of equality he had attempted to resurrect. And his indication towards current happenings in the Northern Territory only served to further highlight the inequities that Indigenous peoples continue to face, resist and surpass. Nelson’s statement that “separation was then, and remains today, a painful but necessary part of public policy in the protection of children” is another reminder of the “indelible coercive power of the oppressor’s terrifying” potential to repeat history. The final unmasking of the hypocritical and contested nature of Nelson’s national ideology and narrative is in his telling of the “facts” – the statistics concerning Indigenous life expectancy, Indigenous infant mortality rates, “diabetes, kidney disease, hospitalisation of women from assault, imprisonment, overcrowding, educational underperformance and unemployment”. These statistics are a result not of what Nelson terms “existential aimlessness” (immediately preceding paragraph) but of colonisation – theft of land, oppression, abuse, discrimination, and lack of any rights whether citizenship or Aboriginal. These contemporary experiences of Indigenous peoples are the direct linear result of the last two hundred years of white nation building. The address is concluded with mention of Neville Bonner, portrayed here as the perfect example of what reading, writing, expressing yourself with dignity and treating people with decency and courtesy can achieve. Bonner is presented as the ‘ideal’ Blackfella, a product of the assimilation period: he could read and write and was dignified, decent and courteous (and, coincidentally, Liberal). The inclusion of this reference to Bonner in the address may hint at the “My best friend is an Aborigine” syndrome (Heiss 71), but it also provides a discursive example to the listener of the ways in which ‘equalness’ is suggested, assumed, privileged or denied. It is a reminder, in the same vein of Patten and Ferguson’s fights for rights, that what is equal has always been apparent to the colonised. Your present official attitude is one of prejudice and misunderstanding … we are no more dirty, lazy stupid, criminal, or immoral than yourselves. Also, your slanders against our race are a moral lie, told to throw all the blame for your troubles on to us. You, who originally conquered us by guns against our spears, now rely on superiority of numbers to support your false claims of moral and intellectual superiority. After 150 years, we ask you to review the situation and give us a fair deal – a New Deal for Aborigines. The cards have been stacked against us, and we now ask you to play the game like decent Australians. Remember, we do not ask for charity, we ask for justice. Nelson quotes Bonner’s words that “[unjust hardships] can only be changed when people of non Aboriginal extraction are prepared to listen, to hear what Aboriginal people are saying and then work with us to achieve those ends”. The need for non-Indigenous Australians to listen, to be shaken out of their complacent equalness appears to have gone unheard. Fiumara, in her philosophy of listening, states: “at this point the opportunity is offered for becoming aware that the compulsion to win is due less to the intrinsic difficulty of the situation than to inhibitions induced by a non-listening language that prevents us from seeing that which would otherwise be clear” (198). It is this compulsion to win, or to at least not be seen to be losing that contributes to the unequalness of this particular “sorry” and the need to construct an equal footing. This particular utterance of sorry does not come from an acknowledged place of difference and its attached history of colonisation; instead it strives to create a foundation based on a lack of anyone being positioned on the high moral ground. It is an irony that pervades the address considering it was the coloniser’s belief in his/her moral superiority that took the first child to begin with. Nelson’s address attempts to construct the utterance of “sorry”, and its intended meaning in this specific context, on ‘equal’ ground: his representation is that we are all Australians, “us” and ‘them’ combined, “we” all suffered and made sacrifices; “we” all deserve respect and equal acknowledgment of the contribution “we” all made to this “enviable” nation. And therein lies the unequalness, the inequality, the injustice, of this particular “sorry”. This particular “sorry” is born from and maintains the structures, policies, discourses and language that led to the taking of Indigenous children in the first place. In his attempt to create a “sorry” that drew equally from the “charitable” as well as the “misjudged” deeds of white Australia, Nelson’s “We Are Sorry – Address to Parliament” increased the experiences of inequality. Chow writes that in the politics of admittance the equal depends on “acceptance by permission … and yet, being ‘admitted’ is never simply a matter of possessing the right permit, for validation and acknowledgment must also be present for admittance to be complete” (36-37). References Augoustinos, Martha, Amanda LeCouteur, and John Soyland. “Self-Sufficient Arguments in Political Rhetoric: Constructing Reconciliation and Apologizing to the Stolen Generations.” Discourse and Society 13.1 (2002): 105-142.Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997.Aborigines Protection Act 1909: An Act to Provide for the Protection and Care of Aborigines; To Repeal the Supply of Liquors Aborigines Prevention Act; To Amend the Vagrancy Act, 1902, and the Police Offences (Amendment) Act, 1908; And for Purposes Consequent Thereon or Incidental Thereto. Assented to 20 Dec. 1909. Digital Collections: Books and Serial, National Library of Australia. 24 Mar. 2008 < http://www.nla.gov.au/apps/cdview?pi=nla.aus-vn71409-9x-s1-v >.Chow, Rey. “The Politics of Admittance: Female Sexual Agency, Miscegenation and the Formation of Community in Frantz Fanon.” In Anthony C. Alessandrini, ed. Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives. London: Routledge, 1999. 34-56.Felman, Shoshana. “Theaters of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust.” Critical Inquiry 27.2 (2001): 201-238.Fiumara, Gemma Corradi. The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.Heiss, Anita. I’m Not a Racist But… UK: Salt Publishing, 2007.Janca, Aleksandar, and Clothilde Bullen. “Aboriginal Concept of Time and Its Mental Health Implications.” Australian Psychiatry 11 (Supplement 2003): 40-44.Nelson, Brendan. “We Are Sorry – Address to Parliament.” 14 Feb. 2008 < http://www.liberal.org.au/info/news/detail/20080213_ WearesorryAddresstoParliament.php >.Patten, Jack, and William Ferguson. Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights! A Statement for the Aborigines Progressive Association. Sydney: The Publicist, 1938.Taylor, Martin, and James Francis. Bludgers in Grass Castles: Native Title and the Unpaid Debts of the Pastoral Industry. Chippendale: Resistance Books, 1997.William, Ross. “‘Why Should I Feel Guilty?’ Reflections on the Workings of White-Aboriginal Relations.” Australian Psychologist 35.2 (2000): 136-142.Wolfe, Patrick. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event. London and New York: Cassell, 1999.

Introduction Curation-related discourses have become widespread. The growing public profile of curators, the emergence of new curation-related discourses and their proliferation beyond the confines of museums, particularly on social media, have led some to conclude that we now live in an age of curation (Buskirk cited in Synder). Curation is commonly understood in instrumentalist terms as the evaluation, selection and presentation of artefacts around a central theme or motif (see O’Neill; Synder). However, there is a growing academic interest in what underlies the shifting discourses and practices. Many are asking what do these changes mean (Martinon) now that “the curatorial turn” has positioned curation as a legitimate object of academic study (O’Neill). This article locates an exploration of the curatorial turn in journalism studies since 2010 within the shifting meanings of curation from antiquity to the digital age. It argues that the industry is facing a Foucauldian moment where the changing political economy of news and the proliferation of user-generated content on social media have disrupted the monopolies traditional news media held over the circulation of knowledge of current affairs and the power this gave them to shape public debate. The disruptions are profound, prompting a rethinking of journalism (Peters and Broersma; Schudson). However, debates have polarised between those who view news curation as symptomatic of the demise of journalism and others who see it as part of a wider revival of the profession, freed from monopolistic institutions to circulate a wider array of knowledge and viewpoints (see Picard). This article eschews such polarisations and instead draws on Robert Picard’s argument that journalism is in transition and that journalism, as a set of professional practices, is adapting to the age of curation but that those traditional news providers that fail to adapt will most likely decline. However, Picard’s approach does not address the definitional problem as to what distinguishes news curating from other journalistic practices when the commonly used instrumental definition can apply to editing. This article aims to negotiate this problem by addressing some of the conceptual ambiguities that arise from wholly instrumental notions of news curation. From “Cura” to the Curatorial Turn and the Age of Curation Modern instrumentalist definitions are necessary but not sufficient for an exploration of the curatorial turn in journalism. Tracing the meanings of curation over time facilitates an expansion of the instrumental to include metaphoric conceptualisations. The term originated in a Latin allegory about a mythological figure, personified as the “cura”, translated literally as care or concern, and who created human beings from the clay of the earth. Having created the human, the cura was charged by the gods with the lifelong care of the human (Reich) and at the same time became a symbol of curiosity and creativity (see Nowotny). “Curators” first emerged in Imperial Rome to denote a public officer charged with maintaining order and the emperor’s finances (Nowotny) but by the fourteenth century the meaning had shifted to that of religious officer charged with the care of souls (Gaskill). At this point the metaphorical associations of creativity and curiosity subsided. Six hundred years later souls had been replaced by artefacts valorised because of their contribution to human knowledge or as a testament to exceptional human creativity (Nowotny). Objects of curiosity and originality, as well as their creators, were reified and curation became the specialist practice of an expert custodian charged with the care and preservation of artefacts but relegated to the background to collect, evaluate and archive artefacts entrusted to the care of museums and to be preserved for future generations. Instrumentalist meanings thus dominated. From the 1960s discourses shifted again from the privileging of a “producer who actually creates the object in its materiality” to an entire set of actors (Bourdieu 261). These shifts were part of the changing political economy of museums, the growing prevalence of exhibitions and the emergence of mega-exhibitions hosted in global cities and capable of attracting massive audiences (see O’Neill). The curator was no longer seen merely as a custodian but able to add cultural value to artefacts when drawing individual items together into a collection, interpreting their relevance to a theme then re-presenting them through a story or visuals (see O’Neill). The verb “to curate”, which had first entered the English lexicon in the early 1900s but was used sporadically (Synder), proliferated from the 1960s in museum studies (Farquharson cited in O’Neill) as mega-exhibitions attracted publicity and the higher profile of curators attracted the attention of intellectuals prompting a curatorial turn in museum studies. The curatorial turn in museum studies from the 1980s marks the emergence of curation as a legitimate object of academic enquiry. O’Neill identified a “Foucauldian moment” in museum studies where shifting discourses signified challenges to, and disruptions of, traditional forms of knowledge-based power. Curation was no longer seen as a neutral activity of preservation, but one located within a contested political economy and invested with contradictions and complexities. Philosophers such as Martinon and Nowotny have highlighted the impossibility of separating the oversight of valuable artefacts from the processes by which these are selected, valorised and signified and what, at times, has been the controversial appropriation of creative outputs. Thus, a new critical approach emerged. Recently, curating-related discourses have expanded beyond the “rarefied” world of museum studies (Synder). Social media platforms have facilitated the proliferation of user-generated content offering a vast array of new artefacts. Information circulates widely and new discourses can challenge traditional bases of knowledge. Audiences now actively search for new material driven in part by curiosity and a growing distrust of the professions and establishments (see Holmberg). The boundaries between professionals and lay people are blurring and, some argue, knowledge is being democratized (see Ibrahim; Holmberg). However, as new information becomes voluminous, alternative truths, misinformation and false information compete for attention and there is a growing demand for the verification, selection and presentation of artefacts, that is online curation (Picard; Bakker). Thus, the appropriation of social media is disrupting traditional power relations but also offering new opportunities for new information-related practices. Journalism is facing its own Foucauldian moment. A Foucauldian Moment in Journalism Studies Journalism has been traditionally understood as capturing today’s happenings, verifying the facts of an event, then presenting these as a narrative that reporters update as news unfolds. News has been seen as the preserve of professionals trained to interview eyewitnesses or experts, to verify facts and to compile what they found into a compelling narrative (Hallin and Mancini). News-gathering was typically the work of an individual tasked with collecting stand-alone stories then passing them onto editors to evaluate, select, prioritise and collate these into a collection that formed a newspaper or news programme . This understanding of journalism emerged from the 1830s along with a type of news that was accessible, that large numbers of people wanted to read and that, consequently, attracted advertising making news profitable (Park). The idea that presumed trained journalists were best placed to produce news appeared first in the UK and USA then spread worldwide (Hallin and Mancini). At the same time as there was growing demand for news, space constraints restricted how much could be published and the high costs of production served as a barrier to entry first in print then later in broadcast media (Picard; Curran and Seaton). The large news organisations that employed these professionals were thus able to control the circulation of information and knowledge they generated and the editors that selected content were able, in part, to shape public debates (Picard; Habermas). Social media challenge the control traditional media have had over the production and dissemination of news since the mid-1800s. Practically every major global news story in 2010 and 2011 from natural disasters to uprisings was broken by ordinary people on social media (Bruns and Highfield). Twitter facilitates a steady stream of updates at an almost real-time speed that 24-hour news channels cannot match. Facebook, Instagram and blogs add commentary, context, visuals and personal stories to breaking news. Experts and official sources routinely post announcements on social media platforms enabling anyone to access much of the same source material that previously was the preserve of reporters. Investigations by bloggers have exposed abuses of power by companies and governments that journalists on traditional media have failed to (Wischnowski). Audiences and advertisers are migrating away from traditional newspapers to a range of different online platforms. News consumers now actively use search engines to find available information of interest and look for efficient ways of sifting through the proliferation of the useful and the dubious, the revelatory and the misleading or inaccurate (see Picard). That is, news organisations and the professional journalists they employ are increasingly operating in a hyper-competitive (see Picard) and hyper-sceptical environment. This paper posits that cumulatively these are disrupting the control news organisations have and journalism is facing a Foucauldian moment when shifting discourses signify a disturbance of the intellectual rules that shape who and what knowledge of news is produced and hence the power relations they sustain. Social media not only challenge the core news business of reporting, they also present new opportunities. Some traditional organisations have responded by adding new activities to their repertoire of practices. In 2011, the Guardian uploaded its entire database of the expense claims of British MPs onto its Website and invited readers to select, evaluate and comment on entries, a form of crowd-sourced curating. Andy Carvin, while at National Public Radio (NPR) built an international reputation from his curation of breaking news, opinion and commentary on Twitter as Syria became too dangerous for foreign correspondents to enter. New types of press agencies such as Storyful have emerged around a curatorial business model that aggregates information culled from social media and uses journalists to evaluate and repackage them as news stories that are sold onto traditional news media around the world (Guerrini). Research into the growing market for such skills in the Netherlands found more advertisements for “news curators” than for “traditional reporters” (Bakker). At the same time, organic and spontaneous curation can emerge out of Twitter and Facebook communities that is capable of challenging news reporting by traditional media (Lewis and Westlund). Curation has become a common refrain attracting the attention of academics. A Curatorial Turn in Journalism The curatorial turn in journalism studies is manifest in the growing academic attention to curation-related discourses and practices. A review of four academic journals in the field, Journalism, Journalism Studies, Journalism Practice, and Digital Journalism found the first mention of journalism and curation emerged in 2010 with references in nearly 40 articles by July 2015. The meta-analysis that follows draws on this corpus. The consensus is that traditional business models based on mass circulation and advertising are failing partly because of the proliferation of alternative sources of information and the migration of readers in search of it. While some of this alternative content is credible, much is dubious and the sheer volume of information makes it difficult to discern what to believe. It is unsurprising, then, that there is a growing demand for “new types and practices of curation and information vetting” that attest to “the veracity and accuracy of content” particularly of news (Picard 280). However, academics disagree on whether new information practices such as curation are replacing or supplementing traditional newsgathering. Some look for evidence of displacement in the expansion of job advertisements for news curators relative to those for traditional reporters (Bakker). Others look at how new and traditional practices co-exist in organisations like the BBC, Guardian and NPR, sometimes clashing and sometimes collaborating in the co-creation of content (McQuail cited in Fahy and Nisbet; Hermida and Thurman). The debate has polarised between whether these changes signify the “twilight years of journalism or a new dawn” (Picard). Optimists view the proliferation of alternative sources of information as breaking the control traditional organisations held over news production, exposing their ideological biases and disrupting their traditional knowledge-based power and practices (see Hermida; Siapera, Papadopoulou, and Archontakis; Compton and Benedetti). Others have focused on the loss of “traditional” permanent journalistic jobs (see Schwalbe, Silcock, and Candello; Spaulding) with the implication that traditional forms of professional practice are in demise. Picard rejects this polarisation, counter-arguing that much analysis implicitly conflates journalism as a practice with the news organisations that have traditionally hosted it. Journalists may or may not be located within a traditional media organisation and social media is offering numerous opportunities for them to operate independently and for new types of hybrid practices and organisations such as Storyful to emerge outside of traditional operations. Picard argues that making the most of the opportunities social media presents is revitalising the profession offering a new dawn but that those traditional organisations that fail to adapt to the new media landscape and new practices are in their twilight years and likely to decline. These divergences, he argues, highlight a profession and industry in transition from an old order to a new one (Picard). This notion of journalism in transition usefully negotiates confusion over what curation in the social media age means for news providers but it does not address the uncertainty as to where it sits in relation to journalism. Futuristic accounts predict that journalists will become “managers of content rather than simply sourcing one story next to another” and that roles will shift from reporting to curation (Montgomery cited in Bakker; see Fahy and Nisbet). Others insist curators are not journalists but “information workers” or “gatecheckers” (McQuail 2013 cited in Bakker; Schwalbe, Silcock, and Candello) thereby differentiating the professional from the manual worker and reinforcing the historic elitism of the professions by implying curation is a lesser practice. However, such demarcation is problematic in that arguably both journalist and news curator can be seen as information workers and the instrumental definition outlined at the beginning of this article is as relevant to curation as it is to news editing. It is therefore necessary to revisit commonly used definitions (see Bakker; Guerrini; Synder). The literature broadly defines content creation, including news reporting, as the generation of original content that is distinguishable from aggregation and curation, both of which entail working with existing material. News aggregation is the automated use of computer algorithms to find and collect existing content relevant to a specified subject followed by the generation of a list or image gallery (Bakker; Synder). While aggregators may help with the collection component of news curation, the practices differ in their relation to technology. Apart from the upfront human design of the original algorithm, aggregation is wholly machine-driven while modern news curation adds human intervention to the technological processes of aggregation (Bakker). This intervention is conscious rather than automated, active rather than passive. It brings to bear human knowledge, expertise and interpretation to verify and evaluate content, filter and select artefacts based on their perceived quality and relevance for a particular topic or theme then re-present them in an accessible form as a narrative or infographics or both. While it does not involve the generation of original news content in the way news reporting does, curation is more than the collation of information. It can also involve the re-presenting of it in imaginative ways, the re-formulating of existing content in new configurations. In this sense, curation can constitute a form of creativity increasingly common in the social media age, that of re-mixing and re-imagining of existing material to create something novel (Navas and Gallagher). The distinction, therefore, between content creation and content curation lies primarily in the relation to original material and not the assumed presence or otherwise of creativity. In addition, curation outputs need not stand apart from news reports. They can serve to contextualize news in ways that short reports cannot while the latter provides original content to sit alongside curated materials. Thus the two types of news-related practices can complement rather than compete with each other. While this addresses the relation between reporting and curation, it does not clarify the relation between curating and editing. Bakker eludes to this when he argues curating also involves “editing … enriching or combining content from different sources” (599). But teasing out the distinctions is tricky because editing encompasses a wide range of sub-specialisations and divergent duties. Broadly speaking, editors are “newsrooms professionals … with decision-making authority over content and structure” who evaluate, verify and select information so are “quality controllers” in newsrooms (Stepp). This conceptualization overlaps with the instrumentalist definition of curation and while the broad type of skills and tasks involved are similar, the two are not synonymous. Editors tends to be relatively experienced professionals who have worked up the newsroom ranks whereas news curators are often new entrants ultimately answerable to editors. Furthermore, curation in the social media age involves voluminous material that curators sift through as part of first level content collection and it involves ever more complex verification processes as digital technologies make it increasingly easy to alter and falsify information and images. The quality control role of curators may also involve in-house specialists or junior staff working with external experts in a particular region or specialisation (Fahy and Nisbett). Some of job advertisements suggest a growing demand for specialist curatorial skills and position these alongside other newsroom professionals (Bakker). Whether this means they are journalists is still open to question. Conclusion This article has presented a more expansive conceptualisation of news curation than is commonly used in journalism studies, by including both the instrumental and the symbolic dimensions of a proliferating practice. It also sought to avoid confining this wider conceptualisation within unhelpful polarisations as to whether news curation is symbolic of a wider demise or revival of journalism by distinguishing the profession from the organisation in which it operates. The article was then free to negotiate the conceptual ambiguity surrounding the often taken-for-granted instrumental meanings of curation. It argues that what distinguishes news curation from traditional newsgathering is the relationship to original content. While the reporter generates the journalistic equivalent of original content in the form of news, the imaginative curator re-mixes and re-presents existing content in potentially novel ways. This has faint echoes of the mythological cura creating something new from the existing clay. The other conceptual ambiguity negotiated was in the definitional overlaps between curating and editing. On the one hand, this questions the appropriateness of reducing the news curator to the status of an “information worker”, a manual labourer rather than a professional. On the other hand, it positions news curators as one of many types of newsroom professionals. What distinguishes them from others is their status in the newsroom, the volume, nature and verification of the material they work with and the re-mixing of different components to create something novel and useful. References Bakker, Piet. “Mr. Gates Returns: Curation, Community Management and Other New Roles for Journalists.” Journalism Studies 15.5 (2014): 596-606. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Bruns, Axel, and Tim Highfield. “Blogs, Twitter, and Breaking News: The Produsage of Citizen Journalism.” Produsing Theory in a Digital World: The Intersection of Audiences and Production in Contemporary Theory. New York: Peter Lang. 15–32. Compton, James R., and Paul Benedetti. “Labour, New Media and the Institutional Restructuring of Journalism.” Journalism Studies 11.4 (2010): 487–499. Curran, J., and J. Seaton. “The Liberal Theory of Press Freedom.” Power without Responsibility. London: Routledge, 2003. Fahy, Declan, and Matthew C. Nisbet. “The Science Journalist Online: Shifting Roles and Emerging Practices.” Journalism 12.7 (2011): 778–793. Guerrini, Federico. “Newsroom Curators & Independent Storytellers : Content Curation As a New Form of Journalism.” Reuters Institute Fellowship Paper (2013): 1–62. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Massachussetts, CA: MIT P, 1991. Hallin, Daniel, and Paolo Mancini. Comparing Media Systems beyond the Western World. Cambridge: Cambridge U P (2012). ———. Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Harb, Zahera. “Photojournalism and Citizen Journalism.” Journalism Practice (2012): 37–41. Hermida, Alfred. “Tweets and Truth.” Journalism Practice 6.5-6 (2012): 659–668. Hermida, Alfred, and Neil Thurman. “A Clash of Cultures: The Integration of User-Generated Content within Professional Journalistic Frameworks at British Newspaper Websites.” Journalism Practice 2.3 (2008): 343–356. Holmberg, Christopher. “Politicization of the Low-Carb High-Fat Diet in Sweden, Promoted on Social Media by Non-Conventional Experts.” International Journal of E-Politics (2015). Ibrahim, Yasmin. “The Discourses of Empowerment and Web 2.0.” Handbook of Research on Web 2.0, 3.0, and X.0: Technologies, Business, and Social Applications. Ed. San Murugesan. Hershey, PA, IGI Global, 2010. 828–845. Lewis, Seth C., and Oscar Westlund. “Actors, Actants, Audiences, and Activities in Cross-Media News Work.” Digital Journalism (July 2014 ): 1–19. Martinon, Jean-Paul. The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating. Ed. Jean-Paul Martinon. London: Bloomsbury P, 2013. Navas, Eduardo, and Owen Gallagher, eds. Routledge Companion to Remix Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. Nowotny, Stefan. “The Curator Crosses the River: A Fabulation.” The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating. Ed. Jean-Paul Martinon. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. O’Neill, Paul. The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse. Bristol: Intellect, 2007. Park, Robert E. “Reflections on Communication and Culture.” American Journal of Sociology 44.2 (1938): 187–205. Peters, Chris, and Marcel Broersma. Rethinking Journalism: Trust and Participation in a Transformed News Landscape. London: Routledge, 2013. Phillips, E. Barbara, and Michael Schudson. “Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers.” Contemporary Sociology 1980: 812. Picard, Robert G. “Twilight or New Dawn of Journalism?” Digital Journalism (May 2014): 1–11. Reich, Warren. “Classic Article: History of the Notion of Care.” Encyclopedia of BioEthics. Ed. Warren Reich. Revised ed. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995: 319–331. Rugg, Judith, and Michèle Sedgwick, eds. Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance. Bristol: Intellect, 2007. Schudson, Michael. “Would Journalism Please Hold Still!” Re-Thinking Journalism. Eds. Chris Peters and Marcel Broersma. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013. Schwalbe, Carol B., B. William Silcock, and Elizabeth Candello. “Gatecheckers at the Visual News Stream.” Journalism Practice 9.4 (2015): 465-83. Siapera, Eugenia, Lambrini Papadopoulou, and Fragiskos Archontakis. “Post-Crisis Journalism.” Journalism Studies 16.3 (2014): 449–465. Spaulding, S. “The Poetics of Goodbye: Change and Nostalgia in Goodbye Narratives Penned by Ex-Baltimore Sun Employees.” Journalism (2014): 1–14. Stepp, Carl Sessions. Editing for Today’s Newsroom: New Perspectives for a Changing Profession. Abingdon: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2013. Synder, Ilana. “Discourses of ‘Curation’ in Digital Times.” Discourse and Digital Practices: Doing Discourse Analysis in the Digital Age. Eds. Rodney H. Harris, Alice Chik, and Christoph Hafner. Oxford: Routledge, 2015. 209–225. Thurman, Neil, and Nic Newman. “The Future of Breaking News Online?” Journalism Studies 15.5 (2014): 655-67. Wischnowski, Benjamin J. “Bloggers with Shields: Reconciling the Blogosphere’s Intrinsic Editorial Process with Traditional Concepts of Media Accountability.” Iowa Law Review 97.327 (2011).

Introduction Resilience is, as a concept and as a discourse, a cultural resource that has experienced a growing importance over the last two decades, especially in the field of psychology. In September 2013, the most important database for scientific productions in psychology (www.psycinfo.org) contained more than 14,000 references concerning resilience. In French-speaking countries, for example, each new book by Boris Cyrulnik, the famous neuropsychiatrist who imported the notion of resilience into the psychological field, sells like hotcakes, with total sales of several million copies (see Marquis). Generally considered as the individual’s tendency to cope with stress and adversity, resilience is not only a successful but also a much-debated concept. Is every human potentially resilient, as Masten puts it, or should this notion only apply, in a Darwinian perspective, to the strongest of us? Should resilience be understood as a process in which culture and environment play important roles, as Ungar shows, or as an individual ability? Should we make a distinction between resilient and non-resilient? Does resilience automatically imply having been deeply traumatised, as Cyrulnik puts it? The main reason why these debates have taken such an important place in psychology is that using the concept of resilience is likely to take on, except for its scientific use, a normative or an evaluative dimension. To avoid this shortcoming, most recent works on resilience clearly insist upon the fact that being resilient is not a character trait or an indicator of the power of a person's will (Rutter). It is a multidimensional ecological process. However, nowadays resilience has become a common sense notion, a cultural resource mobilised by the layman or by self-help (SH) books. Accordingly, “resilience” will not be considered here as a scientific concept but rather as a common sense category. Drawing on an analysis of the success of such books, this article intends to show why a description of the common sense uses of this cultural resource is of prime importance when it comes to understanding some salient characteristics of liberal-individualistic societies, especially by comparison with traditional societies. In fact the success of the discursive category of resilience tells something about ourselves, as people living in societies where personal autonomy is highly valued. Therefore, the description of these common sense uses will show how the “resilience” category also constitutes a resource to evaluate both oneself and others as well as an tool to measure one’s own will or the others’, which is exactly what most psychologists try to avoid doing in their theorisation of resilience. Confidence and Breach in Everyday Life Risk management is part of human life. Actually, we spend most of our time minimising the risks we are running when engaging with the world. This attitude is neither a rational action nor a conscious one. It is, in fact, quite the reverse. In everyday life, we simply trust the world. As Luhmann says, confidence is a sine qua non condition of our existence. Our everyday life turns into a close-meshed fabric that makes us feel secure as it ensures consistency over time. This security enables us to avoid the issue of the relevance of our expectations or of the success of our acts. The common sense attitude we are describing here refers to what the American pragmatists call the “practice regime”, in which our main concern is to make sure that life goes on. But a breach might arise (in the form of a more or less tragic event, a change in one’s routine, a vague unease, etc.). What used to be obvious (and above all unquestioned) now becomes uncertain. Such a breach may seriously lead us to question our involvement with a world that has suddenly become strange, threatening, or complete nonsense. The Reading of Self-Help Books: Mobilising Resilience as a Cultural Reaction to Breaches It may be interesting to observe what people do, in the moments when disquiet has invaded their existence, in order to overcome misfortune, both at a symbolic and operative level. My hypothesis is that our attitude towards misfortune is in line with a specific cultural context. Like Illouz, I understand culture as the way we make sense of who we are through actions shaped by values, key images and scenarios, ideals, and habits of thought; through the stories we use to frame our own and others’ experience; through the accounts we use to explain our own and others’ failures and successes; through what we feel entitled to; through the moral categories we use to hierarchize our social world. (8) In other words: in order to allow life to come back to normal after a breach, people resort to the resources their own culture makes available to them. Nowadays resilience has become one such cultural resource that we use to construct our attitude towards misfortune. The question put here is not whether people are really resilient or not, but why this category experiences such traction in liberal-individualistic societies. Therefore, I have made a sociological study of a well-know social phenomenon: in particular, the reading of SH books, in which the discursive tropes of trauma and resilience are indeed very present. Sociologists too often refer to SH books as having hypothetical effects, or consequences. However, unlike what one might find in a literature review, I haven’t tried to make the success of these books a sign or a cause of the decline of society or of the individual, or of a more reflexive society with happier citizens. As numerous authors shown (including Barker and Petley), it is extremely difficult to assess the impact of cultural resources (for example cinema, books, and all forms of media) on individuals and a fortiori on groups of human through scientific procedures. Needless to say, these books have a bad reputation in academic circles, and this negative reputation is maintained because we actually know very little about how they are used by their readers. To overcome this shortcoming, I have tried to provide an answer to the apparently naïve question as to how reading SH literature can make sense to people who praise the virtues of these books, and the claim that they “have changed their life”, readily resorting to the tropes of resilience and trauma. To put it another way, I tried to understand how readers could know “how to go about” these books and have the expertise “to perform these texts” (Alexander) so they can bring them a degree of help, relief and satisfaction. With this objective in mind, I have explored an empirical field of about a hundred SH books, conducted 50 in-depth conversations with readers of SH books, and examined around 300 letters to three well-known authors of such texts. So why do people that read SH books containing such specific content have no trouble finding a meaning, as well as a symbolic and operative effectiveness, in them? My hypothesis is that these books make use of what Wittgenstein calls a “language game”. A “language game” is constituted by a set of (common sense) words and concepts that we mobilise when confronted with specific situations. In contemporary societies, people experiencing a breach in the fabric of their life will probably summon up a particular “language game” influenced by a psychological vision of the world to express and explain what has happened, what the consequences of this breach are, and what possibilities there are to get out of this situation. “Resilience” is one of the most prominent notions of this “language game”. It is not only to be found in the SH books, but also in the discourse of the readers of such books. What does this particular “language game” look like? What role does resilience play in it ? Two characteristics can be observed. First, this “language game” seems to give an extremely important signal of "interiority", an entity that pervades SH readers’ discourse. More precisely SH readers experience (and explain) that they are being inhabited by a “true self” that is the guardian of the “truth” about themselves, but is also the source of an unsuspected power of action. In a supposedly democratic anthropology, people making use of this “language game” consider that all human beings have such interiority, and can therefore harness the hidden resources it contains. In such narratives the pursuit of and engagement with this “true self” are endowed with important qualities. In short, these actions are considered to be the solution to most of our problems. The second characteristic, leading from the first, is that when faced with misfortune, be it big or small, the readers of SH books place great value on "working on the self”. Generally speaking, only efficient action in dealing with our problems finds favour in their eyes. To be precise, in such people’s discourses, having been traumatized is endowed with the power of revealing who we really are and what we are really capable of. Furthermore, such people come to believe that having suffered makes you a survivor, from now on entitled to become a reference for other people on their road to their “true self”. Let us look at a letter to a famous French-speaking SH book author: I want to thank you for your book “Being Genuine: Stop Being Nice, Start Being Real”, which allowed me to identify two problems that stop me from being who I really am: my lack of self-esteem and of self-confidence. Your book was a revelation to me. At the age of 39, I have at last understood how the 26 years spent with my parents created an attitude of submission and passivity in myself, which caused my lack of self-esteem and self-confidence. I have now decided to tackle these problems and to begin a therapy, in order to get rid of all these limiting issues. I feel that it will offer me a rebirth. Thank you so much. (my translation) This letter illustrates clearly how the “language game” is mobilised. It is used first to translate (or to put words on) a vague unease that relies on interiority (“who I really am”, “lack of self-esteem”, “in myself”, etc.) and secondly to create possibilities action to deal with the unease that has now been defined (“tackle the problem”, “begin a therapy”, “get rid of”, etc.). To sum it up, there is no doubt that, contrary to the stance often observed in the scientific literature on resilience, in the SH readers’ eyes, resilience is first a personal capacity, and even more precisely a question of will, and only second a process depending on contextual elements. The Discourse around Sorcery in Azande’s Society as a Point of Comparison I would like now to give an indication of the way reading such books and drawing on this “language game” constitute a practical attitude towards everyday risks, and how this is particularly adapted to our liberal-individualistic culture, in which the question of personal autonomy and individual responsibility is of unprecedented importance (Ehrenberg): in such cultural contexts each individual is expected to be the entrepreneur of his own life. To make this point clearer, I will briefly sketch a comparison with another practical attitude that has been well-documented in anthropological work: the “language game” of sorcery, which is practiced in many traditional societies but also in some parts of the western societies (Favret-Saada). The first anthropologist to have gone beyond the issue of the reality of magic was Evans-Pritchard. During the first half of the 20th century, he studied the use of sorcery in a tribe of South Sudan: the Azande. Evans-Pritchard thought that such a phenomenon could only be understood if the social institutions making a form of magical thinking plausible were taken into account. On the basis of his fieldwork, he considered the types of situations in which the Azande resorted to magic. His answer was that magic (which is notably present in accusations of sorcery) only intervenes in difficult times and more precisely when two things coincide. The first is the fact that an event (even a totally explicable one) arises, the second is the fact that it happens to the person in question, at that precise moment. For example the Azande understand that it was lightning that made the tree fall down, but they wondered why lightning struck in that place, at that time, above the head of that person in particular. For them, such phenomenon could not remain unexplained. They understood what caused their misfortune, but they needed to find a reason for it all the same. When faced with adversity, the Azande will always wonder: "who is holding a grudge against me”, and “who has got reasons to cast a spell on me?" The discourse around sorcery is what Winch later called an "attitude towards contingencies", which he defines as the “way of dealing (symbolically) with misfortunes and their disruptive effect on a man’s relations with his fellows, with ways in which life can go on despite such disruptions” (321). In this sense, reading SH books and mobilizing the category of resilience both have a similar function, just as praying does: this practice and the corresponding “language game” also testify of an attitude towards contingencies. As is the case with magical practices, both are socially instituted systems of interpretations that enable the people in question to find some meaning to misfortune and to go on living after it (in this matter, Masten’s consideration of resilience as “ordinary magic” is interesting). Nevertheless, the ways these two attitudes towards contingencies enable people to make sense and to set up possible actions are very different. The two systems of accountability are not alike. The Azande’s attitude is fundamentally projective (the responsibility or blame for a misfortune is shifted to somebody else, most of the time to a sorcerer). On the other hand, the attitude of the readers of SH books is introspective: the question that is socially valued is not “who is holding a grudge against me?”, but “what can I do to get out of it?”. In SH readers’ eyes, this is the very question to be answered in order to be considered as a resilient person. The sorcery system makes it possible to consider that the responsibility for the misfortune and the responsibility for the end of it go to the same entity: the sorcerer. In the SH readers’ attitude towards contingencies, these two responsibilities are uncoupled: while “another” is often held responsible for the misfortune, the person that experienced the misfortune is always considered responsible for getting over it: they are supposed to pick themselves up and improve themselves. Likewise, the projective attitude (which is characteristic of the discussions on sorcery) is highly discredited in the “language game” of resilience used by the SH readers. It is considered as the sign of a fake resilience. This is obvious from the distrust that is present in their discourse towards the character of the "victim", as well as towards the figure of the “complaint”, as the following excerpts from interviews with readers clearly show:Woman, 64 years old: People reading SH books are people who want to feel good, find their place in the world and solve the problems arising from their past. They are people who try to get over victimisation and to responsibilise themselves. Woman, 35 years old: I find it a good thing that more and more people read SH books. But a lot of other people continue to consider themselves as the genuine victims of their parents or of their education, and they need a lot of time to get through it. As for me, I believe that we have what we need in ourselves: we choose what we want, and we have what we want. Man, 40 years old: We need to get out of the vicious circle that makes us consider that “the others” are always responsible for our problems. For example: “Oh if I am unemployed, it is because society does not provide me with a job”. Well, maybe, but the good question is “why don’t you have a job while other people do?” It is useless to accuse society. The question is: “which actions do you take to get a job? (my translation for the three quotes) This “language game”, which so enhances both interiority as the resource of meaning and power, and efficient work on one’s own self, allows us to consider others or the environment as responsible for our own misfortune. Yet, it certainly doesn’t allow us to wait passively for things to improve on their own. In the common sense use of resilience, improvement must be caused in a proactive way by exploring our inner resources. In the end, this “language game” is indeed what people try to put into practice when they read SH books: these books build up their conviction that, whatever the situation they find themselves in (and whoever is responsible for it), they can always do something to it, they can always make use of this event to improve themselves. SH books and the “language game”, which resilience is a part of, enable the readers to consider all their problems as finding a solution in a more efficient practice of their interiority. Conclusion: The Evaluative Dimension of Resilience The “language game” of SH books is not only employed by readers as a means to make problems manageable. It is also experienced as a powerful resource for assessing oneself and others. The main finding of this article is the hiatus that exists between the scientific interpretations of resilience as an analytic (thus not normative) resource and the way this notion is mobilized in the common sense by laypeople in their everyday lives order to evaluate responsibilities. It is exactly as if people could not help asking the question: “if this person is not resilient and can’t cope with adversity, isn’t it, at least partly, their own fault?” The reason of this hiatus is that resilience is used in a cultural context where autonomy has taken an unprecedented importance. The key message of SH books, which is endorsed by most readers, is that happiness, well-being and resilience are a matter of personal choice. Behind the democratic proposition of SH books: “everybody has the ability to manage, everybody might be resilient,” lurks a much more meritocratic attitude: namely, “if you cannot come to terms with a problem, it is because you don’t really want to”. In the world of SH books, people who do not “put on a brave face”, or who do not work at being consistent with themselves, who content themselves with the secondary benefits of a life that does not really suit them, who expect solutions to drop down from heaven, – in a word people who do not show what SH readers consider as a genuinely resilient behaviour – only have themselves to blame. This phrase (“only have themselves to blame”), has negative connotations in French-speaking sociological discourses, but is not attached to such negativity in the mind of SH readers that get the most out of such books. “Blaming oneself as the only one responsible”, not for what happened but for what we do/don’t do to get through it, is exactly what the “language game” mobilising resilience and its emphasis on interiority and efficient activity allow. This is what readers are seeking when reading SH books. Indeed, people seeking a solution to their problems would ask: what is the use of reading books saying there is nothing to do to improve our situation? Thus, when using the “language game” of resilience, the SH book readers willingly accept the consequence that their problems have now been brought out into the open: the consequence being that people should take the responsibility for the fact that their problems persist (due to their own failure to act) or disappear (due to their actions). This theory of the consequence of one’s actions is today criticised by sociologists, notably French-speaking ones. References Alexander, Jeffrey. “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy.” Sociological Theory 22 (2004): 527–573. Barker, Martin, and Julian Petley, eds. Ill Effects: The Media/Violence Debate: London: Routledge, 2001. Cyrulnik, Boris. Parler d’Amour au Bord du Gouffre. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2004. Ehrenberg, Alain. La Société du Malaise. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2010. Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. Sorcellerie, Oracles et Magie chez les Azandé. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. Favret-Saada, Jeanne. Les Mots, la Mort, les Sorts. La Sorcellerie dans le Bocage. Paris: Gallimard, 1977. Hazleden, Rebecca. “Promises of Peace and Passion: Enthusing the Readers of Self-Help.” M/C Journal 12.2 (2009). 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/124>. Illouz, Eva. Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help. Berkeley: U of California P, 2008. Luhmann Niklas. La Confiance: Un Mécanisme de Réduction de la Complexité Sociale. Paris: Economica, 2006. Marquis, Nicolas. “Se Remettre en Jeu quand Rien ne va Plus: Une Réflexion Sociologique sur la Catégorie de la Résilience. ” Recherches Sociologiques et Anthropologiques 40.1 (2009): 93–110. Masten Ann S., “Ordinary Magic: Resilience Processes in Development.” American Psychologist 56.3 (2001): 227–238. McGee Micki. Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. Rutter, Michael. “Resilience Reconsidered: Conceptual Considerations, Empirical Findings, and Policy Implications.” Handbook of Early Childhood Intervention. Eds. Jack P. Shonkoff and Samuel J. Meisels. New York: Cambridge UP, 2000. 651–682. Ungar, Michael. “Resilience across Cultures.” British Journal of Social Work 38.2 (2008): 218–235. Winch, Peter. “Understanding a Primitive Society.” American Philosophical Quarterly 1 (1964): 307–324. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Recherches Philosophiques. Paris: Gallimard, 2005.

1. Guy Debord in the Land of the Long WeekendIt’s the weekend – leisure time. It’s the interlude when, Guy Debord contends, the proletarian is briefly free of the “total contempt so clearly built into every aspect of the organization and management of production” in commodity capitalism; when workers are temporarily “treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and politeness, in their new role as consumers.” But this patronising show turns out to be another form of subjection to the diktats of “political economy”: “the totality of human existence falls under the regime of the ‘perfected denial of man’.” (30). As Debord suggests, even the creation of leisure time and space is predicated upon a form of contempt: the “perfected denial” of who we, as living people, really are in the eyes of those who presume the power to legislate our working practices and private identities.This Saturday The Weekend Australian runs an opinion piece by Christopher Pearson, defending ABC Radio National’s Stephen Crittenden, whose program The Religion Report has been axed. “Some of Crittenden’s finest half-hours have been devoted to Islam in Australia in the wake of September 11,” Pearson writes. “Again and again he’s confronted a left-of-centre audience that expected multi-cultural pieties with disturbing assertions.” Along the way in this admirable Crusade, Pearson notes that Crittenden has exposed “the Left’s recent tendency to ally itself with Islam.” According to Pearson, Crittenden has also thankfully given oxygen to claims by James Cook University’s Mervyn Bendle, the “fairly conservative academic whose work sometimes appears in [these] pages,” that “the discipline of critical terrorism studies has been captured by neo-Marxists of a postmodern bent” (30). Both of these points are well beyond misunderstanding or untested proposition. If Pearson means them sincerely he should be embarrassed and sacked. But of course he does not and will not be. These are deliberate lies, the confabulations of an eminent right-wing culture warrior whose job is to vilify minorities and intellectuals (Bendle escapes censure as an academic because he occasionally scribbles for the Murdoch press). It should be observed, too, how the patent absurdity of Pearson’s remarks reveals the extent to which he holds the intelligence of his readers in contempt. And he is not original in peddling these toxic wares.In their insightful—often hilarious—study of Australian opinion writers, The War on Democracy, Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler identify the left-academic-Islam nexus as the brain-child of former Treasurer-cum-memoirist Peter Costello. The germinal moment was “a speech to the Australian American Leadership Dialogue forum at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2005” concerning anti-Americanism in Australian schools. Lucy and Mickler argue that “it was only a matter of time” before a conservative politician or journalist took the plunge to link the left and terrorism, and Costello plunged brilliantly. He drew a mental map of the Great Chain of Being: left-wing academics taught teacher trainees to be anti-American; teacher trainees became teachers and taught kids to be anti-American; anti-Americanism morphs into anti-Westernism; anti-Westernism veers into terrorism (38). This is contempt for the reasoning capacity of the Australian people and, further still, contempt for any observable reality. Not for nothing was Costello generally perceived by the public as a politician whose very physiognomy radiated smugness and contempt.Recycling Costello, Christopher Pearson’s article subtly interpellates the reader as an ordinary, common-sense individual who instinctively feels what’s right and has no need to think too much—thinking too much is the prerogative of “neo-Marxists” and postmodernists. Ultimately, Pearson’s article is about channelling outrage: directing the down-to-earth passions of the Australian people against stock-in-trade culture-war hate figures. And in Pearson’s paranoid world, words like “neo-Marxist” and “postmodern” are devoid of historical or intellectual meaning. They are, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy repeatedly demonstrate, mere ciphers packed with the baggage of contempt for independent critical thought itself.Contempt is everywhere this weekend. The Weekend Australian’s colour magazine runs a feature story on Malcolm Turnbull: one of those familiar profiles designed to reveal the everyday human touch of the political classes. In this puff-piece, Jennifer Hewett finds Turnbull has “a restless passion for participating in public life” (20); that beneath “the aggressive political rhetoric […] behind the journalist turned lawyer turned banker turned politician turned would-be prime minister is a man who really enjoys that human interaction, however brief, with the many, many ordinary people he encounters” (16). Given all this energetic turning, it’s a wonder that Turnbull has time for human interactions at all. The distinction here of Turnbull and “many, many ordinary people” – the anonymous masses – surely runs counter to Hewett’s brief to personalise and quotidianise him. Likewise, those two key words, “however brief”, have an unfortunate, unintended effect. Presumably meant to conjure a picture of Turnbull’s hectic schedules and serial turnings, the words also convey the image of a patrician who begrudgingly knows one of the costs of a political career is that common flesh must be pressed—but as gingerly as possible.Hewett proceeds to disclose that Turnbull is “no conservative cultural warrior”, “onfounds stereotypes” and “hates labels” (like any baby-boomer rebel) and “has always read widely on political philosophy—his favourite is Edmund Burke”. He sees the “role of the state above all as enabling people to do their best” but knows that “the main game is the economy” and is “content to play mainstream gesture politics” (19). I am genuinely puzzled by this and imagine that my intelligence is being held in contempt once again. That the man of substance is given to populist gesturing is problematic enough; but that the Burke fan believes the state is about personal empowerment is just too much. Maybe Turnbull is a fan of Burke’s complex writings on the sublime and the beautiful—but no, Hewett avers, Turnbull is engaged by Burke’s “political philosophy”. So what is it in Burke that Turnbull finds to favour?Turnbull’s invocation of Edmund Burke is empty, gestural and contradictory. The comfortable notion that the state helps people to realise their potential is contravened by Burke’s view that the state functions so “the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection… by a power out of themselves” (151). Nor does Burke believe that anyone of humble origins could or should rise to the top of the social heap: “The occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person… the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule” (138).If Turnbull’s main game as a would-be statesman is the economy, Burke profoundly disagrees: “the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, callico or tobacco, or some other such low concern… It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection”—a sublime entity, not an economic manager (194). Burke understands, long before Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser, that individuals or social fractions must be made admirably “obedient” to the state “by consent or force” (195). Burke has a verdict on mainstream gesture politics too: “When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole composition [of the state] becomes low and base” (136).Is Malcolm Turnbull so contemptuous of the public that he assumes nobody will notice the gross discrepancies between his own ideals and what Burke stands for? His invocation of Burke is, indeed, “mainstream gesture politics”: on one level, “Burke” signifies nothing more than Turnbull’s performance of himself as a deep thinker. In this process, the real Edmund Burke is historically erased; reduced to the status of stage-prop in the theatrical production of Turnbull’s mass-mediated identity. “Edmund Burke” is re-invented as a term in an aesthetic repertoire.This transmutation of knowledge and history into mere cipher is the staple trick of culture-war discourse. Jennifer Hewett casts Turnbull as “no conservative culture warrior”, but he certainly shows a facility with culture-war rhetoric. And as much as Turnbull “confounds stereotypes” his verbal gesture to Edmund Burke entrenches a stereotype: at another level, the incantation “Edmund Burke” is implicitly meant to connect Turnbull with conservative tradition—in the exact way that John Howard regularly self-nominated as a “Burkean conservative”.This appeal to tradition effectively places “the people” in a power relation. Tradition has a sublimity that is bigger than us; it precedes us and will outlast us. Consequently, for a politician to claim that tradition has fashioned him, that he is welded to it or perhaps even owns it as part of his heritage, is to glibly imply an authority greater than that of “the many, many ordinary people”—Burke’s hair-dressers and tallow-chandlers—whose company he so briefly enjoys.In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton assesses one of Burke’s important legacies, placing him beside another eighteenth-century thinker so loved by the right—Adam Smith. Ideology of the Aesthetic is premised on the view that “Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body”; that the aesthetic gives form to the “primitive materialism” of human passions and organises “the whole of our sensate life together… a society’s somatic, sensational life” (13). Reading Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Eagleton discerns that society appears as “an immense machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects”, like “any production of human art”. In Smith’s work, the “whole of social life is aestheticized” and people inhabit “a social order so spontaneously cohesive that its members no longer need to think about it.” In Burke, Eagleton discovers that the aesthetics of “manners” can be understood in terms of Gramscian hegemony: “in the aesthetics of social conduct, or ‘culture’ as it would later be called, the law is always with us, as the very unconscious structure of our life”, and as a result conformity to a dominant ideological order is deeply felt as pleasurable and beautiful (37, 42). When this conservative aesthetic enters the realm of politics, Eagleton contends, the “right turn, from Burke” onwards follows a dark trajectory: “forget about theoretical analysis… view society as a self-grounding organism, all of whose parts miraculously interpenetrate without conflict and require no rational justification. Think with the blood and the body. Remember that tradition is always wiser and richer than one’s own poor, pitiable ego. It is this line of descent, in one of its tributaries, which will lead to the Third Reich” (368–9).2. Jean Baudrillard, the Nazis and Public MemoryIn 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Third Reich’s Condor Legion of the Luftwaffe was on loan to Franco’s forces. On 26 April that year, the Condor Legion bombed the market-town of Guernica: the first deliberate attempt to obliterate an entire town from the air and the first experiment in what became known as “terror bombing”—the targeting of civilians. A legacy of this violence was Pablo Picasso’s monumental canvas Guernica – the best-known anti-war painting in art history.When US Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations on 5 February 2003 to make the case for war on Iraq, he stopped to face the press in the UN building’s lobby. The doorstop was globally televised, packaged as a moment of incredible significance: history in the making. It was also theatre: a moment in which history was staged as “event” and the real traces of history were carefully erased. Millions of viewers world-wide were undoubtedly unaware that the blue backdrop before which Powell stood was specifically designed to cover the full-scale tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica. This one-act, agitprop drama was a splendid example of politics as aesthetic action: a “performance” of history in the making which required the loss of actual historical memory enshrined in Guernica. Powell’s performance took its cues from the culture wars, which require the ceaseless erasure of history and public memory—on this occasion enacted on a breathtaking global, rather than national, scale.Inside the UN chamber, Powell’s performance was equally staged-crafted. As he brandished vials of ersatz anthrax, the power-point behind him (the theatrical set) showed artists’ impressions of imaginary mobile chemical weapons laboratories. Powell was playing lead role in a kind of populist, hyperreal production. It was Jean Baudrillard’s postmodernism, no less, as the media space in which Powell acted out the drama was not a secondary representation of reality but a reality of its own; the overheads of mobile weapons labs were simulacra, “models of a real without origins or reality”, pictures referring to nothing but themselves (2). In short, Powell’s performance was anchored in a “semiurgic” aesthetic; and it was a dreadful real-life enactment of Walter Benjamin’s maxim that “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war” (241).For Benjamin, “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate.” Fascism gave “these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” In turn, this required “the introduction of aesthetics into politics”, the objective of which was “the production of ritual values” (241). Under Adolf Hitler’s Reich, people were able to express themselves but only via the rehearsal of officially produced ritual values: by their participation in the disquisition on what Germany meant and what it meant to be German, by the aesthetic regulation of their passions. As Frederic Spotts’ fine study Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics reveals, this passionate disquisition permeated public and private life, through the artfully constructed total field of national narratives, myths, symbols and iconographies. And the ritualistic reiteration of national values in Nazi Germany hinged on two things: contempt and memory loss.By April 1945, as Berlin fell, Hitler’s contempt for the German people was at its apogee. Hitler ordered a scorched earth operation: the destruction of everything from factories to farms to food stores. The Russians would get nothing, the German people would perish. Albert Speer refused to implement the plan and remembered that “Until then… Germany and Hitler had been synonymous in my mind. But now I saw two entities opposed… A passionate love of one’s country… a leader who seemed to hate his people” (Sereny 472). But Hitler’s contempt for the German people was betrayed in the blusterous pages of Mein Kampf years earlier: “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous” (165). On the back of this belief, Hitler launched what today would be called a culture war, with its Jewish folk devils, loathsome Marxist intellectuals, incitement of popular passions, invented traditions, historical erasures and constant iteration of values.When Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer fled Fascism, landing in the United States, their view of capitalist democracy borrowed from Benjamin and anticipated both Baudrillard and Guy Debord. In their well-know essay on “The Culture Industry”, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, they applied Benjamin’s insight on mass self-expression and the maintenance of property relations and ritual values to American popular culture: “All are free to dance and enjoy themselves”, but the freedom to choose how to do so “proves to be the freedom to choose what is always the same”, manufactured by monopoly capital (161–162). Anticipating Baudrillard, they found a society in which “only the copy appears: in the movie theatre, the photograph; on the radio, the recording” (143). And anticipating Debord’s “perfected denial of man” they found a society where work and leisure were structured by the repetition-compulsion principles of capitalism: where people became consumers who appeared “s statistics on research organization charts” (123). “Culture” came to do people’s thinking for them: “Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown” (144).In this mass-mediated environment, a culture of repetitions, simulacra, billboards and flickering screens, Adorno and Horkheimer concluded that language lost its historical anchorages: “Innumerable people use words and expressions which they have either ceased to understand or employ only because they trigger off conditioned reflexes” in precisely the same way that the illusory “free” expression of passions in Germany operated, where words were “debased by the Fascist pseudo-folk community” (166).I know that the turf of the culture wars, the US and Australia, are not Fascist states; and I know that “the first one to mention the Nazis loses the argument”. I know, too, that there are obvious shortcomings in Adorno and Horkheimer’s reactions to popular culture and these have been widely criticised. However, I would suggest that there is a great deal of value still in Frankfurt School analyses of what we might call the “authoritarian popular” which can be applied to the conservative prosecution of populist culture wars today. Think, for example, how the concept of a “pseudo folk community” might well describe the earthy, common-sense public constructed and interpellated by right-wing culture warriors: America’s Joe Six-Pack, John Howard’s battlers or Kevin Rudd’s working families.In fact, Adorno and Horkheimer’s observations on language go to the heart of a contemporary culture war strategy. Words lose their history, becoming ciphers and “triggers” in a politicised lexicon. Later, Roland Barthes would write that this is a form of myth-making: “myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things.” Barthes reasoned further that “Bourgeois ideology continuously transforms the products of history into essential types”, generating a “cultural logic” and an ideological re-ordering of the world (142). Types such as “neo-Marxist”, “postmodernist” and “Burkean conservative”.Surely, Benjamin’s assessment that Fascism gives “the people” the occasion to express itself, but only through “values”, describes the right’s pernicious incitement of the mythic “dispossessed mainstream” to reclaim its voice: to shout down the noisy minorities—the gays, greenies, blacks, feminists, multiculturalists and neo-Marxist postmodernists—who’ve apparently been running the show. Even more telling, Benjamin’s insight that the incitement to self-expression is connected to the maintenance of property relations, to economic power, is crucial to understanding the contemptuous conduct of culture wars.3. Jesus Dunked in Urine from Kansas to CronullaAmerican commentator Thomas Frank bases his study What’s the Matter with Kansas? on this very point. Subtitled How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Frank’s book is a striking analysis of the indexation of Chicago School free-market reform and the mobilisation of “explosive social issues—summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art—which it then marries to pro-business policies”; but it is the “economic achievements” of free-market capitalism, “not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars” that are conservatism’s “greatest monuments.” Nevertheless, the culture wars are necessary as Chicago School economic thinking consigns American communities to the rust belt. The promise of “free-market miracles” fails ordinary Americans, Frank reasons, leaving them in “backlash” mode: angry, bewildered and broke. And in this context, culture wars are a convenient form of anger management: “Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must remake itself along the lines preferred” by nationalist, populist moralism and free-market fundamentalism (5).When John Howard received the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award, on 6 March 2008, he gave a speech in Washington titled “Sharing Our Common Values”. The nub of the speech was Howard’s revelation that he understood the index of neo-liberal economics and culture wars precisely as Thomas Frank does. Howard told the AEI audience that under his prime ministership Australia had “pursued reform and further modernisation of our economy” and that this inevitably meant “dislocation for communities”. This “reform-dislocation” package needed the palliative of a culture war, with his government preaching the “consistency and reassurance” of “our nation’s traditional values… pride in her history”; his government “became assertive about the intrinsic worth of our national identity. In the process we ended the seemingly endless seminar about that identity which had been in progress for some years.” Howard’s boast that his government ended the “seminar” on national identity insinuates an important point. “Seminar” is a culture-war cipher for intellection, just as “pride” is code for passion; so Howard’s self-proclaimed achievement, in Terry Eagleton’s terms, was to valorise “the blood and the body” over “theoretical analysis”. This speaks stratospheric contempt: ordinary people have their identity fashioned for them; they need not think about it, only feel it deeply and passionately according to “ritual values”. Undoubtedly this paved the way to Cronulla.The rubric of Howard’s speech—“Sharing Our Common Values”—was both a homage to international neo-conservatism and a reminder that culture wars are a trans-national phenomenon. In his address, Howard said that in all his “years in politics” he had not heard a “more evocative political slogan” than Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”—the rhetorical catch-cry for moral re-awakening that launched the culture wars. According to Lawrence Grossberg, America’s culture wars were predicated on the perception that the nation was afflicted by “a crisis of our lack of passion, of not caring enough about the values we hold… a crisis of nihilism which, while not restructuring our ideological beliefs, has undermined our ability to organise effective action on their behalf”; and this “New Right” alarmism “operates in the conjuncture of economics and popular culture” and “a popular struggle by which culture can lead politics” in the passionate pursuit of ritual values (31–2). When popular culture leads politics in this way we are in the zone of the image, myth and Adorno and Horkheimer’s “trigger words” that have lost their history. In this context, McKenzie Wark observes that “radical writers influenced by Marx will see the idea of culture as compensation for a fragmented and alienated life as a con. Guy Debord, perhaps the last of the great revolutionary thinkers of Europe, will call it “the spectacle”’ (20). Adorno and Horkheimer might well have called it “the authoritarian popular”. As Jonathan Charteris-Black’s work capably demonstrates, all politicians have their own idiolect: their personally coded language, preferred narratives and myths; their own vision of who “the people” might or should be that is conjured in their words. But the language of the culture wars is different. It is not a personal idiolect. It is a shared vocabulary, a networked vernacular, a pervasive trans-national aesthetic that pivots on the fact that words like “neo-Marxist”, “postmodern” and “Edmund Burke” have no historical or intellectual context or content: they exist as the ciphers of “values”. And the fact that culture warriors continually mouth them is a supreme act of contempt: it robs the public of its memory. And that’s why, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy so wittily argues, if there are any postmodernists left they’ll be on the right.Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and, later, Debord and Grossberg understood how the political activation of the popular constitutes a hegemonic project. The result is nothing short of persuading “the people” to collaborate in its own oppression. The activation of the popular is perfectly geared to an age where the main stage of political life is the mainstream media; an age in which, Charteris-Black notes, political classes assume the general antipathy of publics to social change and act on the principle that the most effective political messages are sold to “the people” by an appeal “to familiar experiences”—market populism (10). In her substantial study The Persuaders, Sally Young cites an Australian Labor Party survey, conducted by pollster Rod Cameron in the late 1970s, in which the party’s message machine was finely tuned to this populist position. The survey also dripped with contempt for ordinary people: their “Interest in political philosophy… is very low… They are essentially the products (and supporters) of mass market commercialism”. Young observes that this view of “the people” was the foundation of a new order of political advertising and the conduct of politics on the mass-media stage. Cameron’s profile of “ordinary people” went on to assert that they are fatally attracted to “a moderate leader who is strong… but can understand and represent their value system” (47): a prescription for populist discourse which begs the question of whether the values a politician or party represent via the media are ever really those of “the people”. More likely, people are hegemonised into a value system which they take to be theirs. Writing of the media side of the equation, David Salter raises the point that when media “moguls thunder about ‘the public interest’ what they really mean is ‘what we think the public is interested in”, which is quite another matter… Why this self-serving deception is still so sheepishly accepted by the same public it is so often used to violate remains a mystery” (40).Sally Young’s Persuaders retails a story that she sees as “symbolic” of the new world of mass-mediated political life. The story concerns Mark Latham and his “revolutionary” journeys to regional Australia to meet the people. “When a political leader who holds a public meeting is dubbed a ‘revolutionary’”, Young rightly observes, “something has gone seriously wrong”. She notes how Latham’s “use of old-fashioned ‘meet-and-greet’campaigning methods was seen as a breath of fresh air because it was unlike the type of packaged, stage-managed and media-dependent politics that have become the norm in Australia.” Except that it wasn’t. “A media pack of thirty journalists trailed Latham in a bus”, meaning, that he was not meeting the people at all (6–7). He was traducing the people as participants in a media spectacle, as his “meet and greet” was designed to fill the image-banks of print and electronic media. Even meeting the people becomes a media pseudo-event in which the people impersonate the people for the camera’s benefit; a spectacle as artfully deceitful as Colin Powell’s UN performance on Iraq.If the success of this kind of “self-serving deception” is a mystery to David Salter, it would not be so to the Frankfurt School. For them, an understanding of the processes of mass-mediated politics sits somewhere near the core of their analysis of the culture industries in the “democratic” world. I think the Frankfurt school should be restored to a more important role in the project of cultural studies. Apart from an aversion to jazz and other supposedly “elitist” heresies, thinkers like Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer and their progeny Debord have a functional claim to provide the theory for us to expose the machinations of the politics of contempt and its aesthetic ruses.ReferencesAdorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1979. 120–167.Barthes Roland. “Myth Today.” Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. St Albans: Paladin, 1972. 109–58.Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zorn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217–251.Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Charteris-Black, Jonathan. Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.Frank, Thomas. What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004.Grossberg, Lawrence. “It’s a Sin: Politics, Post-Modernity and the Popular.” It’s a Sin: Essays on Postmodern Politics & Culture. Eds. Tony Fry, Ann Curthoys and Paul Patton. Sydney: Power Publications, 1988. 6–71.Hewett, Jennifer. “The Opportunist.” The Weekend Australian Magazine. 25–26 October 2008. 16–22.Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Trans. Ralph Manheim. London: Pimlico, 1993.Howard, John. “Sharing Our Common Values.” Washington: Irving Kristol Lecture, American Enterprise Institute. 5 March 2008. ‹http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,233328945-5014047,00html›.Lucy, Niall and Steve Mickler. The War on Democracy: Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2006.Pearson, Christopher. “Pray for Sense to Prevail.” The Weekend Australian. 25–26 October 2008. 30.Salter, David. The Media We Deserve: Underachievement in the Fourth Estate. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2007. Sereny, Gitta. Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. London: Picador, 1996.Spotts, Frederic. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. London: Pimlico, 2003.Wark, McKenzie. The Virtual Republic: Australia’s Culture Wars of the 1990s. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1997.Young, Sally. The Persuaders: Inside the Hidden Machine of Political Advertising. Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2004.

“This table breeds idleness!” read the text of a handwritten message placed prominently on the table I shared with 5 of my friends many years ago in secondary school. Ours was one of several tables positioned to the side of the main teaching area of the classroom where we would gather on arrival, decant our bags to tables, gossip with our ‘group’ and then begin our school day. It was also a space where we could sit or study quietly between classes and during free periods. The note about our idleness was left only on ‘our’ table. Recognising the handwriting of our classroom teacher, Sister Celestine, we greeted her note with restrained laughter and a sense of teenage pride. Her reprimand was stern, but she had also acknowledged our specialness. We were seen as we might have wanted to be seen, recalcitrant, not too hardworking, slightly roguish, and a bit improper.That note, and its words, stayed with me for a long time. There was something wonderfully urgent about this call to reflexivity; and something pleasantly disturbing about the panicky tone of its message. It seemed a peculiar expression of both crisis and care. ‘Idleness’ was a word we rarely encountered. In fact, it seemed such an old fashioned utterance, belonging more to a past era of our nun and the vernacular of her time. What was it that moved this nun to construe our mischief and our youthful conviviality as idleness? We considered ourselves spirited and boisterous, certainly not inert, as the word seemed to imply. This was curious, but it was the word ‘breeds’ that captured me more. What precisely is the generative or reproductive power of the conjunction of our bodies and this table? The concern was clearly not just about our idleness, but also about the breeding power of this table.Idleness here speaks to us of what happens when proper things are not happening. When the table and our bodies converge in this space of idleness we are in the terrain of waste: wasting time (that could be spent on studying), wasting potential (that could advance our life prospects), wasting space (that could be used productively). The breeding of idleness is a judgement about how we are occupying this time and space. The table is a wasted space, and in turn it produces us as a waste of space. It is regulated by a circular logic. We are wasting time, which is wasting space; this in turn produces us as the wasters of that space. The space of the table might be used more purposefully, but not while it is breeding us. The nun’s note to us might have read, “You are a waste of space because you are wasting time.” Time is thus spatialised. The ‘table of idleness’ has returned to me in recent times as a partial metaphor for the paradigm of urban renewal. Contemporary urban renewal and regeneration programs in places like the UK, Europe, North America and Australia are inspired to use space more productively, and to design and develop urban space in ways that enable the production of vibrant, clean, safer places where cultural diversity might be experienced as cosmopolitan chic. Tethering modern urban design to property development and the trend to ‘lifestyle’ based local economies, urban renewal is a strategy sweeping most postindustrial economies. Suburbs ripe for these renewal, regeneration or revitalisation projects are identified in part through the presence of dormant, derelict spaces, in other words, wasted spaces from bygone eras. Typically these suburbs show the signs of neglect associated with economic change. They have become dormant as large-scale deindustrialisation and the development of large shopping malls away from urban centres sees people exiting the suburbs to work and shop. Street life diminishes and local businesses struggle or close, leaving landscapes of decaying infrastructure and urban decline. Urban renewal apprehends such idle spaces as wasted opportunities that can be designed and developed into a usefulness that provides lifestyles of comfort, vitality and urban safety. But these wasted spaces also produce shadow wastes. Much like our table of indolence and time wasting, these spaces are considered breeding grounds, not just for a sense of urban dullness and decay but, more worryingly, for generating urban sloth and danger. They become the breeding grounds for what is now commonly referred to as ‘antisocial behaviour’ or ‘urban incivility’. That is, those who ‘unproductively’ and ‘dangerously’ occupy particular urban public spaces. In the inner western Melbourne suburb of Footscray, which is currently undergoing renewal, these bodies are identified as the unruly public drinkers and drug users, black African men who have created a street café culture, and people with mental health difficulties who occupy the streets and who at times display anomalous bodily comportment and atypical civil demeanours. Many of these people are poor and sometimes engage in unconventional modalities of conviviality. A contemporary urban version of the idle schoolgirls in many ways, they sit at tables, on footpaths, in stairwells, on seats, in parks and often linger around railways stations. They are the unproductive, idle, culturally defunct bodies of the present day. It is useful to hold these bodies in mind when considering the waste products, and waste producers, of present time In the discourse of urban renewal, Footscray is depicted as a once thriving regional hub that has been ‘in decline’ since the 1980s. Decline here is code for the loss of industry and retail business alongside rising levels of poverty, cultural diversity, and public crime (predominantly drug related and property crime). A suburb in the grip of uneven gentrifying change, its dominant image of danger and diversity still sabotages its ‘lifestyle potential’. It remains a wasted space.The nexus of urban renewal and wasted space reveals a double obligation of renewal programs. The need to remove the waste, to ‘clean up’ the debris and decay of a bygone industrial and suburban era and to ‘clean out’ its progeny, the bodies borne of, and now further wasting, this wasted space. In this sense idle space as waste entails a bio-politics that produces particular bodies as a ‘waste of space’. Urban Dictionary defines waste of space thus: 1. A person devoid of any redeeming characteristics; 2. Someone who consumes valuable resources without contributing anything to society. A bum. A drain on the economy. 3. A person or occasionally an object which nobody is fond of. In fact, most people hate this person/thing and find it completely useless. 4. Completely useless people. 5. Waste of room, usually on computer hard drives, that could be used for better things. It is therefore worth considering the conceptual and historical trajectory of the link between waste and idleness as a prelude to considering in more detail some of the anxieties associated with the disorderly urban effects of idle bodies in wasted spaces. Waste as Improper UseAt its most elemental, waste is a judgment. Waste as profligate or excess consumption, or as leftover material, or as something that has deteriorated through neglect or lack of effort, is a moral reckoning. Judgments about waste signal a moral economy far more than they do a fiscal one. In his book On Garbage, John Scanlan notes that ‘waste’ in its old and middle English modes referred to a land or an environment that was unsuitable to human habitation. This reference was gradually replaced by the corresponding terms ‘wilderness’ or ‘desert’, thus marking the beginning of waste as reprimand. Bringing together modern and pre-modern language usage, Scanlan suggests that waste at its most general refers to an imbalance (22). Whether it is rubbish, junk, clutter or other extravagance excess, and squander, waste is too much, but also too little in the sense of ‘not making the best use of something’ (time, resources, opportunities). Pared right down waste refers to the proper use of something. Scanlan again: “‘waste’ carries force because of the way in which it symbolises an idea of improper use, and therefore operates within a more or less moral economy of the right, the good, the proper, their opposites and all values in between” (22 my emphasis). In the contemporary urban domain this might refer to the overuse of vast tracts of land exhausted or wrecked by industry, the abandonment or underutilisation of shops and commons, or the improper and uncivil use of the space that lingers. Scanlan traces this idea of waste as improper use back to the relation between self and natural space that inheres in seventeenth century English political philosophy. Referring to the work of John Locke in particular, waste is conceived as the original condition of the chaos of nature. For Locke selfhood became linked to freedom from this chaos and entailed the virtue, indeed the necessity, of human labour and intervention to ward off the potential ruin that nature may inflict. Locke outlines a philosophical and ethical basis for claims to property over land and natural resources such that “claims to property ownership rest on an idea of the proper use of land which entails the appropriation (through the use of one’s labour) of its previously unused potential” (Scanlan 24). Hence, “Land that is left wholly to nature, that hath no improvement of pasturage, tillage, or planting, is called, as indeed it is, waste; and we shall see the benefit of it amount to little more than nothing.” (Locke quoted in Scanlan 24). This Lockean understanding of waste has come to be associated with his theories of property rights, but, as Scanlan points out, it was also driven by the idea that any benefits derived from property were “dependent on a duty to a higher power” (26).Nature is construed as useless and chaotic (waste) in the absence of human intervention. Property and ‘land use’ were not just about use by humans, but use for humans in order to defend them against the unruliness of nature and the disorder and ruin it might issue. The danger of going to rack and ruin through the disorder of untamed waste is crucial to this understanding. To neglect nature through idleness or lack of intervention is to invite ruin. Idleness thus breeds waste. There is a link here between land and character, for doing nothing or not doing things properly corresponds with improper character. Scanlan advances that waste can best be understood here as an indeterminacy signaling the need for form and discipline. He notes that Montaigne in his essay On Idleness compares wasted land with the idle mind, which when undisciplined allows wildness of character and purpose. Reminiscent of schoolgirls at their table of idleness, the defunct bodies of urban life are seen to be without purpose or goal and to be wasteful of life itself. As a consequence they are deemed to be inviting havoc and all its destructive tendencies. This fear of the indeterminacy of waste, says Scanlan, portends the social and cultural links between “waste, imperfection, disorder and ruin” (25). While concepts of properness and proper use have multiple histories, it is not difficult to see how these seventeenth century Enlightenment associations of proper use and rights to property underpinned the period of new imperialism of the nineteenth century. We might say then that waste features prominently in the imperialist imaginary. Codes of properness, as in the proper use of things, are time and place specific, hence interrogating the meanings of ‘proper use’ entails a prior enquiry into the framing of time. It is linear time, that is, time as progress which frames imperial and colonial history. Progress is movement away from scarcity, disorder and deficiency towards enlightened reason, discipline and mastery. However, this notion of progress, which is central to ideologies of both Enlightenment and imperialism, is always dependent on a shadow other: backwardness. Anne McClintock emphasises a corresponding need to always travel backwards in time in order to apprehend the colonised spaces and people as existing in an eternally prior time, as obsolete historical subjects. According to McClintock, imperialist discourse relies on two principal tropes: panoptical time and anachronistic space. She explains that the eighteenth century historians and empiricists required “a visual paradigm […] to display evolutionary progress as a measurable spectacle.” Progress is fundamentally a visually driven process and narrative. Panoptical time is depicted as “the image of global history consumed—at a glance—in a single spectacle from the point of privileged invisibility” (37). Marginal groups are placed outside of history in the sense that they can be seen by the bourgeoisie, who itself remains unseen. In this spectacle of progress, history appears static and fixed, but this is countered through the invention of the trope of anachronistic space. This space denies the agency of the archaic subjects that exist outside and therefore threaten history as progress. McClintock explains: “the agency of women, the colonised and the industrial working class are disavowed and projected onto anachronistic space: prehistoric, atavistic and irrational, inherently out of place in the historical time of modernity” (40). If imperial panoptical time produces inferior subjects who are “hemmed in” (Fanon 29) by anterior time and anachronistic space, contemporary urban renewal projects prompt questions about their time, the time of now. How might we conceptualise the time/space of now, and are these regulatory technologies of panoptical time and anachronistic space at work in the time/space of now? In what way is urban renewal a contemporary “measurable spectacle of progress” in an age of postindustrial neoliberalism?Urban Space, Proper Use and Idle BodiesIn a recent article on sexual politics and torture, Judith Butler argues that the ways in which debates of this nature are framed “are already imbued with the problem of time, of progress in particular, and in certain notions of what it means to unfold a future of freedom in time” (1). Butler reminds us that hegemonic conceptions of progress endure, and continue to define themselves over and against a pre-modern temporality produced for self-legitimation. This narrative of progressive modernity continues to spatialise time. For her it is the framing of modernity as sexual freedom that apprehends others as outmoded and stuck in anachronistic space. The time of now in the urban setting is the time of neoliberal modernity, a time that is also driven by spectacle. The vision of freedom through lifestyle consumption similarly identifies others who are outside this time and who threaten it. Neoliberalism as the ideology of a radically free market that institutes economic deregulation, tariff reduction, public financial support for business and its shareholders, and the reduced role of government in areas of welfare and social expenditure, the effects of which are discernable at the urban scale. For Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore, “actually existing neoliberalism” is witnessed in what they call the “creative destruction” that inheres in the urbanisation of neoliberalism. In this materialisation of neoliberal time, modernity and progress continue to be driven visually. Thus this neoliberal/urban nexus depends on further sub-units of time, nominated by Brenner and Theodore as moments of (visual) “destruction and creation.” A series of examples of such creative destruction are offered by Brenner and Theodore and include the destruction of rights through the creation policing and social exclusion agendas. They argue that the mechanism of “re-regulating urban civility” entails moments of destroying notions of the liberal city in which all inhabitants are entitled to social services and political rights, and moments of creating zero tolerance policing, new forms of social surveillance and new policies to prevent social exclusion. The destructive moment of “re-representing the city” recasts the postwar image of the working class through visions of urban disorder, dangerous classes of people and of economic decline, involves the creative moment of entrepreneurial discourses about the need for revitalisation, renewal and reinvestment in urban areas (372). The ‘proper use’ of neoliberal urban space depends on the dynamic of destruction/creation through a new consumer-driven urban entrepreneurialism. Urban renewal as proper neoliberal usage is a re-ordering of space to make it fit for purpose. Proper use here follows the Lockean impulse of human intervention through planning, design and redevelopment, is now apprehended not as service to God, but capitulation to the dictates of the neoliberal agendas implemented by the combined forces of the state and capital. The moral economy of waste is at work in the moral economy of urban renewal, As Sharon Zukin elaborates: “the look and feel of cities reflect decisions about what and who should be visible and what should not, concepts of order and disorder, and on uses of aesthetic power” (7). At the crux of waste, and of urban renewal, is an anxiety about visibility, therefore the persistently visible presence of waste as idleness, has become an acute focus of contemporary urban governance and police ‘law and order’ campaigns. Modernity and progress must materialise as an urban aesthetic that is purposeful and vibrant, not idle and wasteful.The indeterminacy of waste thus becomes determined by its attribution as ‘garbage’ to be disposed of, banished, evicted, cast out. Waste converted to garbage is made into an object disconnected from the process of its production. Garbage is a noun rather than a verb, and as such, it conceals process. Creative destruction is again at play; waste is destroyed (as process) and garbage (as object) is produced. In the suburbs this conversion from process to object is narrated through the objectifying language of anti social behavior and incivility. I recently attended Maribyrnong council meeting (Maribyrnong being the local government authority for Footscray), where a discussion about cleaning up the central activity district quickly became a discussion about “those antisocial people.” This was not the terminology of council officers, but of a number of ratepayers. This anxiety about the image of the area is reflected also in the minutes of a further council meeting where differences between the stigmatised image of Footscray was compared with the changing images of other inner municipalities: “The visibility of these antisocial behaviours and the associated negative impact has significantly diminished in these [other] areas due to the gentrification of the inner-city, and the associated revitalisation of street activities. [Our municipality] is on the cusp of a similar transformation. In the meantime the social issues … continue to remain more visible” (71). These bodies are the garbage to be removed from the urban landscape so it might be made anew.The bodies at the imaginative centre of this cleansing impulse are those bodies that one might see as the waste products of neoliberalism. Loic Wacquant suggests that today’s urban policies focus on “making the dangerous and dirty classes invisible.” This, he argues is “leading to a cleansing of the urban environment and the streets from the physical and human detritus wrought by economic deregulation and welfare retrenchment” (198). Consequently, waste in urban renewal both conceals and reveals the shadow side of contemporary cultural politics. Public policy is increasingly concerned with the detritus, yet the failed and wasted bodies that litter the streets and stations, these bodies and their predicaments, as with other garbage objects, are steadfastly disconnected from the policies and processes that produced and continue to ‘breed’ them. The moral economy of urban renewal targets a cluster of wastes—idle bodies, wasted time, and improper uses of space—all fused in an endless reproduction of uselessness. This coalescence of wastes and wasters forms the spectacle of contemporary urban decay and failure. Neoliberal urban renewal begins to mimic Locke’s taming of nature, making it useful as a defense against ruin and disorder. The uncultivated bodies of urban waste are contemporary versions of Lockean wildness. Being of such poor character they have no right to occupy the property in which they idle. Through the panoptical time of neoliberalism they are cast as remarkable spectacles of failure, out of place in this time and space. They are wasting time, and are themselves a waste of space. References Brenner, Neil and Nik Theodore. “Cities and the Geographies of ‘Actually Existing Neoliberalism’.” Antipode 34.3 (July 2002): 349-79.Butler, Judith. “Sexual Politics, Torture and Secular Time.” The British Journal of Sociology 59.1 (2008): 1-23.Fanon, Frantz. Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin, 1963.Maribyrnong City Council. Ordinary Meeting Minutes, File no: HEA-60-014, 29 April. 2010.McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. London: Routledge, 1995.Scanlan, John. On Garbage. London: Reaktion, 2005.Wacquant, Loic. “Relocating Gentrification: The Working Class, Science and the State in Recent Urban Research.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32.1 (2008): 198-205.Zukin, Sharon. The Culture of Cities. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1995.