Artykuły w czasopismach na temat „Races, meets”

Jumps racing is a form of Thoroughbred horse racing that involves hurdles and steeples and typically longer distances, and heavier weights compared with flat racing, which does not incorporate obstacles. In Australia, jumps racing is carried out only in Victoria, one of eight states and territories. The continuation of jumps racing is contentious due to the higher risk of fatalities, falls and injuries for horses, compared with flat racing. While measures have been introduced by the industry to improve the safety of riders and horses, the rates of fatalities, falls and injuries in horses participating in jumps races have not been collectively reported in Australia since the 2012 to 2014 race seasons. Although information on individual horse fatalities, falls and injuries is published by Racing Victoria in Stewards’ Reports, the data are not aggregated, and so cannot readily be used to assess trends or evaluate the efficacy of safety measures introduced by the industry. The aim of this study was to determine the fatality, fall and injury rates for horses participating in hurdle and steeplechase races in Victoria in the 2022 and 2023 Thoroughbred horse jumps racing seasons compared with horses participating in flat races at the same race meets. Data on horse fatalities, falls and injuries were extracted from the published Racing Victoria race results and Stewards’ Reports for the jumps races (n = 150) and corresponding flat races (n = 157) held at the 38 jumps race meets in Victoria in 2022 and 2023. Overall, horse fatalities, falls and injuries occurred at higher rates in jumps races compared with flat races during the study period. The rate of horse fatalities in jumps races was 3.3 per 1000 starts, with no fatalities in flat races. The rate of horse falls in hurdle races was 24 per 1000 starts and 41.6 per 1000 starts in steeplechase races, comparable with rates previously reported in the 2012 to 2014 seasons. There were no falls in flat races. Horse injuries occurred at a rate of 68.9 per 1000 starts in jumps races compared with 18.8 per 1000 starts in flat races. In hurdle and steeplechase races, veterinary clearance being required following horse injury was 5.4 times (OR 5.4, 95% CI 2.8–10.2) and 7.2 times (OR 7.2, 95% CI 3.3–15.6) more likely, respectively, compared with flat races. The risk of trauma was 4 times more likely in hurdle and steeplechase races (OR 4.8, 95% CI 1.7–13.3 and OR 4.1, 95% CI 1.2–13.4, respectively) and the risk of lameness was increased by 2.5 times in hurdles (OR 2.5, 95% CI 1.2–5.2) and 5.1 times in steeplechase races (OR 5.1, 95% CI 2.3–11.5), compared with flat races. These findings support concerns about the welfare of horses involved in jumps racing and of the need for further safety measures to reduce these risks.

Based on 38 replicated trials over 3 yr, Alvena, hard red spring wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) expressed significantly higher mean grain yield than the checks. It was significantly earlier maturing than AC Barrie and significantly more resistant to lodging than Katepwa. Wheat protein concentration of Alvena was similar to the mean of the checks and flour protein concentration was significantly higher than the check mean. Amylograph viscosity was significantly lower than the mean of the checks. Alvena meets the end-use quality and Canadian Grain Commission’s kernel visual distinguishability specifications of the Canada Western Red Spring wheat market class. Alvena expressed moderate resistance to prevalent races of loose smut and stem rust, intermediate resistance to prevalent races of leaf rust and common bunt, and moderate susceptibility to fusarium head blight. Key words: Triticum aestivum L., cultivar description, grain yield, maturity, disease resistance

Based on 34 replicated trials over 3 yr, Stettler, a doubled haploid hard red spring wheat (Triticum aestivum L.), expressed significantly higher grain yield than all checks except Superb. Wheat and flour protein concentration were significantly greater than all of the checks except Lillian. It matured significantly later than AC Barrie and Katepwa but earlier than Superb. Stettler was significantly shorter than all of the checks except Superb and was more resistant to lodging than Katepwa and Laura. Stettler had high grain volume weight and intermediate kernel weight relative to the checks, and meets the end-use quality specifications of the Canada Western Red Spring wheat market class. Stettler expressed resistance to prevalent races of stem rust, common bunt and loose smut, with moderate susceptibility to prevalent races of leaf rust and fusarium head blight.Key words: Triticum aestivum L., cultivar description, grain yield, protein, disease resistance, doubled haploid

Scholars have made considerable progress in recent years in researching the history of sport in Ireland, yet there are still important areas that have not received scholarly attention. One of these is the topic of sport during the Great Famine. A close perusal of contemporary newspapers reveals that large numbers of Irish people, from all social groups, continued to enjoy sports, either as participants or as spectators, during the Famine years. Horse races, especially steeplechases, were universally popular, with many meets attracting attendances that numbered in the thousands. Other popular sports included fox hunting, stag hunting, greyhound coursing, sailing, cricket and cockfighting. This article illustrates the widespread popularity of sport in Ireland in this period, based mainly on a reading of newspaper accounts, and discusses why the subject of sport does not feature in folk or popular memory of the Famine.

Randhawa, H. S., Graf, R. J. and Sadasivaiah, R. S. 2015. AAC Indus soft white spring wheat. Can. J. Plant Sci. 95: 793–797. AAC Indus is a soft white spring wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) cultivar that meets the end-use quality specifications of the Canada Western Soft White Spring (CWSWS) class. AAC Indus is adapted to the irrigated wheat-growing regions of southern Alberta and southern Saskatchewan, and for dryland production in the western prairies. AAC Indus had higher (P≤0.05) grain yield under dryland conditions than all of the check cultivars. AAC Indus exhibited excellent straw strength and was 2 d later in maturity. AAC Indus exhibited good levels of resistance to the prevalent races of stripe rust and powdery, mildew and intermediate reactions to kernel black point and leaf rust. AAC Indus was susceptible to stem rust, common bunt, loose smut and Fusarium head blight.

Burnside is a hard, red, spring wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) that meets the end-use quality specifications of the Canada Western Extra Strong wheat class. Burnside was evaluated in the Canada Western Extra Strong Wheat Cooperative Test in 2000, 2001, and 2002. In comparison with CWES cultivars Glenlea, Bluesky, AC Corinne, and CDC Walrus, Burnside had higher grain yields than Bluesky and AC Corinne, was similar to Glenlea and lower yielding than CDC Walrus. Burnside had maturity similar to Bluesky and was earlier maturing than Glenlea, AC Corinne, and CDC Walrus. Burnside is resistant to moderately resistant to prevalent races of leaf and stem rust and resistant to loose smut. End-use quality tests showed that Burnside had significantly higher grain protein content than the check cultivars.Key words: Triticum aestivum L., Canada Western Extra Strong, hard red extra strong spring wheat, cultivar description, yield, disease resistance

DePauw, R. M., Knox, R. E., McCaig, T. N., Clarke, F. R. and Clarke, J. M. 2011. Muchmorehard red spring wheat. Can. J. Plant Sci. 91: 797–803. Based on 36 replicated trials over 3 yr, Muchmore, a doubled haploid hard red spring wheat (Triticum aestivum L.), averaged up to 20% more grain yield than the checks. It matured significantly later than AC Barrie, Katepwa and Lillian. Muchmore was significantly shorter than all of the checks and was significantly more resistant to lodging than Katepwa, Laura and Lillian. Muchmore had significantly higher test weight than Katepwa and Lillian, intermediate kernel weight relative to the checks, and meets the end-use quality specifications of the Canada Western Red Spring wheat market class. Muchmore expressed resistance to prevalent races of leaf rust, stem rust and common bunt, moderate resistance to loose smut, and moderate susceptibility to fusarium head blight.

AAC Paramount is a soft white spring wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) cultivar that meets the end-use quality specifications of the Canada Western Soft White Spring (CWSWS) class. AAC Paramount is adapted to the irrigated wheat growing regions of southern Alberta and southern Saskatchewan, and for dry land production in the western prairies. On average, AAC Paramount had 6% higher grain yield (under both irrigated and dry land conditions) than the check cultivar AC Andrew. AAC Paramount exhibited excellent straw strength and similar maturity to AC Andrew and Sadash but was 2 d earlier than AAC Indus. Its plant height was taller than both AC Andrew and Sadash but similar to AAC Indus. AAC Paramount exhibited high levels of resistance to the prevalent races of stripe rust, powdery mildew, and loose smut; intermediate reactions to leaf rust, stem rust, and kernel black point; was moderately susceptible to Fusarium head blight and leaf spot diseases, and susceptible to common bunt.

Sadash is a soft white spring wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) that meets the end-use quality specifications of the Canada Western Soft White Spring class. Sadash is well-adapted to the wheat-growing regions of southern Alberta and southern Saskatchewan. Based on data from the Western Soft White Spring Wheat Cooperative Registration Test from 2003 to 2005, Sadash exhibited high grain yield, mid-season maturity, semi-dwarf stature with very strong straw, and good resistance to shattering. Sadash expressed resistance to the prevalent races of stem rust and powdery mildew, intermediate resistance to loose smut, moderate susceptibility to leaf rust and common bunt, and susceptibility to Fusarium head blight. Based on end-use quality analysis performed at the Grain Research Laboratory of the Canadian Grain Commission, Sadash had improved test weight over the check cultivars AC Reed and AC Phil and similar milling and baking performance.Key words: Triticum aestivum L., cultivar description, wheat (soft white spring), grain yield, quality, disease resistance

Introduction. Language refers to the elements of culture. This is a socio-historical product that reflects culture, the system of social relations, traditions, ethnic history which as a special form of culture materializes spiritual culture. The dialectical connection between language and society lies in the fact that, having arisen as a historical necessity, language meets the requirements set for it by society, reflects its state. Each language is a means of expressing a particular culture. Language represents for those who own it the very existence of a certain culture, its living development, its continuity from generation to generation. Language has its own surroundings. The people who speak it belong to some race (or several races), that is, to such a group of mankind that differs in its physical properties from other groups. Language does not exist outside of culture, outside the socially inherited totality of practical skills and ideas that characterize lifestyle.

Randhawa, H. S., Graf, R. J. and Sadasivaiah, R. S. 2014. AAC Chiffon soft white spring wheat. Can. J. Plant Sci. 94: 1303–1308. AAC Chiffon is a soft white spring wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) cultivar that meets the end-use quality specifications of the Canada Western Soft White Spring (CWSWS) class. AAC Chiffon is well-adapted to the irrigated wheat growing regions of southern Alberta and southern Saskatchewan, and for rain-fed production in the western prairies. Based on data from the Western Soft White Spring Wheat Cooperative registration trials from 2008 to 2011, AAC Chiffon exhibited higher grain yield than the check cultivars, similar maturity, and taller stature with moderate straw strength. AAC Chiffon expressed resistance to the prevalent races of stripe rust, intermediate responses to powdery mildew, kernel black point and leaf rust, and susceptibility to stem rust, common bunt, loose smut and Fusarium head blight. Based on end-use quality analysis performed by the Grain Research Laboratory of the Canadian Grain Commission, AAC Chiffon was eligible for grades of CWSWS wheat.

Kanata is an early-maturing hard white spring wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) that meets the end-use quality and kernel visual distinguish ability specifications of the Canada Western Hard White Spring wheat class. Kanata was evaluated in the Central Bread Wheat Cooperative Test (1998–2000), and was found to be adapted to the wheat-growing regions of the Canadian prairies, particularly the shorter season areas. Kanata yielded less than check cultivars AC Majestic, AC Barrie, Harvest, and McKenzie but had similar grain yield compared with Neepawa and Roblin. In the Central Bread Wheat Cooperative Test, Kanata was resistant to the prevalent races of leaf rust, moderately resistant to stem rust, loose smut, and common root rot. Kanata is similar to Neepawa in its reaction to Fusarium head blight. End-use quality tests indicated that Kanata had similar grain and flour protein content as other check cultivars but had 1% less protein content compared to Roblin. Key words: Triticum aestivum L., Canada Western Hard White, hard white spring wheat, cultivar description, yield, disease resistance

Snowbird is a hard white spring wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) that meets the end-use quality and kernel visual distinguishability specifications of the Canada Western Hard White Spring Wheat class. Snowbird was evaluated in the Central Bread Wheat Cooperative Test in 1998, 1999 and 2000, and was found to be adapted to the wheat-growing regions of the Canadian prairies. Snowbird yielded more than the check cultivars Neepawa, Roblin, AC Majestic, McKenzie, Harvest, and AC Barrie but less than McKenzie. Snowbird is resistant to the prevalent races of leaf rust and moderately resistant to stem rust, loose smut and common root rot. Snowbird and Roblin exhibited similar levels of resistance to tanspot, Septoria tritici, and Septoria nodorum while its reaction to Fusarium head blight was similar to that of AC Barrie. Snowbird has similar grain and flour protein content as other check cultivars but had 1% less protein compared to Roblin. Key words: Triticum aestivum L., Canada Western Hard White, hard white spring wheat, cultivar description, yield, disease resistance

Malaysia is a country of various races and religions under the same supreme law, the Federal Constitution. Even so, the Federal Constitution has set out several provisions that give privileges to the Malays and Muslims. Article 11 provides for the right to freedom of religion for every citizen, but this right is not absolute for Muslims as it restricts the spread of non -Muslim religions among Muslims. This clearly shows that the right to freedom of religion in the Federal Constitution is in line with the principles of Maqasid Al-Syariah, which is to preserve religion. Thus, the objective of this study is to analyze the extent to which the provision of the right to freedom of religion in the Federal Constitution meets the principles of Maqasid Al-Syariah. This study is a qualitative study that uses the library method followed by content analysis. The findings of this study have proven that there is a relationship between Maqasid Al-Syariah and the right to freedom of religion in the Federal Constitution thereby enhance the community's understanding of the interpretation of the right to freedom of religion and its relationship with Maqasid Al-Syariah.

KANE is a hard red spring wheat that meets the end-use quality and kernel visual distinguishability specifications of the Canada Western Red Spring market class. KANE was found to be adapted to the wheat-growing regions of Manitoba and eastern Saskatchewan from the data provided by the Central Bread Wheat Cooperative registration test in 2003–2005. In comparison with the check cultivars Katepwa, McKenzie, CDC Teal, AC Barrie, and Superb, the overall grain yield of KANE was similar to the high yield checks McKenzie and Superb. Compared with the highest yielding check McKenzie, KANE was 1.7 d later maturing, was 6 cm shorter, had stronger straw, and was significantly higher (1.1 kg hL-1) in test weight. KANE is resistant to the prevalent races of leaf rust and stem rust. Resistance to common bunt and loose smut was intermediate, being similar to CDC Teal and McKenzie, respectively. Resistance to fusarium head blight was similar to AC Barrie. KANE has good preharvest sprouting resistance with similar or lower sprouting scores compared to the best check in 4 out of 5 yr of testing. End-use quality tests showed that KANE had a 0.7% higher flour extraction rate than the best checks and was within the range of the checks for the other quality traits. Key words: Triticum aestivum L., cultivar description, red spring wheat, test weight, preharvest sprouting, leaf rust

The willingness of racing greyhounds in Australia to chase a mechanical lure on racetracks will affect the longevity of its racing career. Racing greyhounds that fail to chase may be retired from racing at an early age and their fate becomes uncertain and may in some cases be euthanasia. At the end of races, greyhounds are diverted into a catching pen while the lure continues on. Racing greyhounds may also run on straight tracks for training purposes, where the lure comes to a stop either within the catching pen or just outside it, rather than continuing on. The purpose of the current study was to determine if these different track conditions and lure features affected greyhound behaviour before and after chasing the lure. Video cameras were used to record the behaviour of greyhounds immediately before chasing a lure either on one of two straight trial tracks (n = 89 greyhounds) or during race-meets on oval racetracks (n = 537), as well as at the end of the chase in the catching pen. The results were analysed with logistic regression mixed models and coefficients expressed as odds ratios. It was predicted there would be a higher frequency of behaviours indicating frustration in the catching pen at tracks where no chase objects were accessible. This pattern was present, but not significant. It was also predicted there would be a higher frequency of behaviours that may indicate high anticipation before chasing at tracks where chase objects were accessible in the catching pen. This pattern was not realised. Behaviours prior to chasing varied between track types and days, suggesting these behaviours are unlikely to be good indicators of anticipation or motivation to chase. This study shows that greyhounds behave differently in the catching pen depending on the track and lure features.

Abstract Racial and ethnic disparities have been reported regarding outcomes of intermediate or high-risk surgical (IHRS) procedures. This study aimed to assess whether or not these disparities exist with respect to post-procedural discharge disposition (DD). EMR chart reviews of patients (≥65 years old) undergoing IHRS were conducted, 2016-2019 in Tucson, AZ. Race and ethnicity were reported as American Indian/Alaskan Native; Black or African American; More-Than-One-Race; Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander; White/Caucasian; Unknown/Not Reported, Hispanic/Latino; Non-Hispanic/Latino; or Unknown/Not Reported. DD was reported as to home, home with home health, rehabilitation center, skilled nursing facility (SNF), death, or other. Kruskal-Wallis tests were performed to determine the association with DD. Of the 161 patients (mean age: 74.7±6.9, [60-91], 53.4% male) assessed, 15.4% were discharged to a facility other than home or home with home health. Ethnicity was significantly associated with discharge disposition (p<0.005). Non-Hispanic/Latinos (66.1%) were more likely to be discharged home compared Hispanic/Latinos (14.8%), while those Unknown/Not Reported were more likely to be discharged to a SNF. Although race was not significantly associated with DD (p<0.062) due to sample size, it is clinically important to consider as 59.9% of White/Caucasians were more likely to be discharged home compared to 1.6% of American Indian/Alaskan Natives; 1.6% Black or African Americans; 5.7 of More-Than-One-Races; and 12.0% Unknown/Not Reported. We demonstrated ethnic disparities affect postoperative DD. Although racial disparities were not significantly associated with DD, anticipating the impact of race and ethnicity to facilitate discharge planning that meets the goals of the older patient is crucial to care.

Deadlocks are one of the most notorious concurrency bugs, and significant research has focused on detecting them efficiently. Dynamic predictive analyses work by observing concurrent executions, and reason about alternative interleavings that can witness concurrency bugs. Such techniques offer scalability and sound bug reports, and have emerged as an effective approach for concurrency bug detection, such as data races. Effective dynamic deadlock prediction, however, has proven a challenging task, as no deadlock predictor currently meets the requirements of soundness, high-precision, and efficiency. In this paper, we first formally establish that this tradeoff is unavoidable, by showing that (a) sound and complete deadlock prediction is intractable, in general, and (b) even the seemingly simpler task of determining the presence of potential deadlocks, which often serve as unsound witnesses for actual predictable deadlocks, is intractable. The main contribution of this work is a new class of predictable deadlocks, called sync(hronization)-preserving deadlocks. Informally, these are deadlocks that can be predicted by reordering the observed execution while preserving the relative order of conflicting critical sections. We present two algorithms for sound deadlock prediction based on this notion. Our first algorithm SPDOffline detects all sync-preserving deadlocks, with running time that is linear per abstract deadlock pattern, a novel notion also introduced in this work. Our second algorithm SPDOnline predicts all sync-preserving deadlocks that involve two threads in a strictly online fashion, runs in overall linear time, and is better suited for a runtime monitoring setting. We implemented both our algorithms and evaluated their ability to perform offline and online deadlock-prediction on a large dataset of standard benchmarks. Our results indicate that our new notion of sync-preserving deadlocks is highly effective, as (i) it can characterize the vast majority of deadlocks and (ii) it can be detected using an online, sound, complete and highly efficient algorithm.

В связи с постоянным поиском и проведением пивоварами различных экспериментов при производстве крафтового пива, все более актуально встает вопрос возможности «заимствования» определенных технологических приемов из виноделия в пивоварении. В настоящей статье проведен подробный сравнительный анализ сырья и технологических этапов производства пива и вина. Рассмотрены по отдельности наиболее важные характеристики и особенности каждого этапа. Приведено описание технологических приемов из виноделия, которые используются в крафтовом пивоварении в настоящее время, либо которые могут быть использованы в будущем. По результату анализа выявлены схожие технологические этапы производства в виноделии и пивоварении, а также технологические приемы, которые кардинально отличаются и несут в себе особые функции и цели при переработке исходного сырья. Теоретически в статье обосновано, что применение в пивоварении некоторых технологических приемов из виноделия, а также использование винных рас дрожжей позволяет получить пиво, соответствующее по всем показателям нормативной документации (ГОСТам), с новыми эксклюзивными характеристиками. In connection with the constant search and conduct of various experiments by brewers in the production of craft beer, the question of the possibility of «borrowing» certain technological methods from winemaking in brewing is becoming more and more urgent. This article provides a detailed comparative analysis of raw materials and technological stages of beer and wine production. The most important characteristics and features of each stage are considered separately. Describes the technological methods of winemaking, which are currently used in craft brewing, or which may be used in the future. The analysis revealed similar technological stages of production in winemaking and brewing, as well as technological methods that are fundamentally different and have special functions and goals in the processing of raw materials. Theoretically, the article substantiates that the use of some technological methods from winemaking in brewing, as well as the use of wine yeast races, makes it possible to obtain beer that meets all the indicators of regulatory documentation (GOSTs) with new exclusive characteristics.

This is the English translation of a speech Bergson made at Lycée Henri-IV on July 30, 1892. This is an interesting text because it anticipates Bergson’s last book, his The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Like the distinction in The Two Sources between the open and the closed, “Politeness” defines its subject matter in two ways. There is what Bergson calls “manners” and there is true politeness. For Bergson, both kinds of politeness concern equality. Manners or material politeness amount to the ritualized greetings and formalities by means of which we usually define politeness. Unfortunately and like The Two Sources, Bergson attributes this formalized relation to other human beings with primitive and “inferior races.” Nevertheless, Bergson sees in these formalities an attempt, in the name of equality, to ignore other people’s talents and merits so that one can dominate morally superior people. In contrast, true politeness or “spiritual politeness” consists in “intellectual flexibility.” When one meets a person of superior morality, one is flexible in one’s relation to him or her; one abandons the formalities in order to really live her life and think her thoughts. Here we find equality too: “what defines this very polite person is to prefer each of his friends over the others, and to succeed in this way in loving them equally.” After making a comparison to dance, Bergson defines spiritual politeness as “a grace of the mind.” Since both kinds of politeness concern equality, Bergson associates both with justice. However, beyond these two kinds of politeness and justice there is “politeness of the heart,” which concerns charity. In order to indicate politeness of the heart, Bergson describes the kind of person, a sensitive person, who anxiously awaits a word of praise in order to feel good about herself but who also, when she hears a word of reproach, is thrown into sadness. Although Bergson calls the sensibility of this person “a bit sickly,” he also claims that the sensibility is found in the heart of each of us. It indicates a fundamental sympathy with others. For this person such a word from another makes every power of one’s being vibrate in unison. So in this short speech, one will find Bergson distinguishing between material politeness, mental or spiritual politeness, and politeness of the heart. Politeness of the heart is true openness to others. And, for Bergson, it opens up to a society exemplified by ancient philosophy: true friends of each other and of ideas.

Receptor-activated Ca2+ channels (RACCs) play a central role in regulation of the functions of animal cells. Together with voltage-operated Ca2+ channels (VOCCs) and ligand-gated non-selective cation channels, RACCs provide a variety of pathways by which Ca2+ can be delivered to the cytoplasmic space and the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) in order to initiate or maintain specific types of intracellular Ca2+ signal. Store-operated Ca2+ channels (SOCs), which are activated by a decrease in Ca2+ in the ER, are a major subfamily of RACCs. A careful analysis of the available data is required in order to discern the different types of RACCs (differentiated chiefly on the basis of ion selectivity and mechanism of activation) and to properly develop hypotheses for structures and mechanisms of activation. Despite much intensive research, the structures and mechanisms of activation of RACCs are only now beginning to be understood. In considering the physiological functions of the different RACCs, it is useful to consider the specificity for Ca2+ of each type of cation channel and the rate at which Ca2+ flows through a single open channel; the locations of the channels on the plasma membrane (in relation to the ER, cytoskeleton and other intracellular units of structure and function); the Ca2+-responsive enzymes and proteins; and the intracellular buffers and proteins that control the distribution of Ca2+ in the cytoplasmic space. RACCs which are non-selective cation channels can deliver Ca2+ directly to specific regions of the cytoplasmic space, and can also admit Na+, which induces depolarization of the plasma membrane, the opening of VOCCs and the subsequent inflow of Ca2+. SOCs appear to deliver Ca2+ specifically to the ER, thereby maintaining oscillating Ca2+ signals.

Abstract Development is an innate manifestation on earth. It is not even surprising that the world has developed tremendously over the past decade considering the development in the previous decades. That is, development precipitates development. Therefore, even though everybody can see what risks it brings to the earth, we cannot simply restrain it. Of course, we cannot restrain it. The bottomline is that we have no choice but to be part of the development and be one of those who assist in the ever spontaneous development by trying to minimize its unwanted effects to the planet and its inhabitantants, the humans. Even looking at the ‘development’ from one’s own microcosm, we can perceive that as we go through life and gain some of what this world can offer, we produce tons and tons of wastes. These wastes, which are naturally not part of the earth, pollute and disrupt the natural processes of the planet. It is also simple to notice that the fundamental cause of the depletion of the earth’s natural resources was definitely proportional to the increase in population and to the development itself. Here lies one of the underlying global problems at hand aside from poverty, hunger, low access to education, and other socio-anthropological issues we have, this is the issue on natural resources depletion. Even to worldleaders from well-developed countries can recognize that they will also be the ones at the receiving end of this problem. It is basic that living organisms rely on their environment or the abiotic factors, to live sustainably. Considering these problems, the United Nations, with the worldleaders as its composition, has come up with strategies that advocate development while keeping the earth’s natural resources from depletion or the earth’s natural processes from disruption. This advocacy is called Sustainable Development. Sustainable Development is the development that meets the need of the present generation without compromising the ability of the next generation to meet their own needs. It is, at its core, an advocacy for futurism and the next generation. Sustainable Development is primarily anchored with the case of the “carrying capacity” of the planet Earth. It was already implied by several natural scientists as well as social scientists that indeed the Planet Earth increasingly finds it hard to sustain the needs of the human races because of overpopulation. These things result to poverty and hunger around the world. On the otherhand, it is increasing implied that most of the Natural Resources of the planet goes to the well-developed countries, leaving the developing and underdeveloped countries with meager resources. This further increases cases of hunger and poverty. Although it is deceptive that the call for a sustainable development should take its toll on the countries with bigger economy since they consume the most and pollute the most, it is very definite that there should be a much more intensive application in developing countries since we are just about to experience what the rest of the developed countries have already experienced. More importantly, developing countries should advocate Sustainable Development since it is a common knowledge that even if they contribute least to the causes of natural resource depletion and disruption of natural processes, they are the ones who suffer most from the devastating effects of unsustainable development. As citizens of the Republic of the Philippines, we are one of those who suffer most.

When a fire occurs on storage racks in a warehouse, it is not advisable to find the location of the fire point accurately, because there are a large number of goods on the storage rack, and many interference factors such as light will disturb the precise location of the fire. In response to the above problems, and thanks to the high-speed growth of deep learning technology, we propose an edge detection method and apply it in fire locations successfully. We adopt VGG-16 as our backbone and introduce an attention module to suppress background information and eliminate interference. We test the proposed method on our collected dataset, and the results show that our proposed model can extract the shelf edges more completely and locate the fire point accurately. In terms of detection speed, our method can achieve 0.188 s per image, which meets the requirements of real-time detection. Our approach lays a good foundation for the precise extinguishing of fire that occurs on storage racks.

Medical record is a collection of facts or evidence of the patient's condition, past and current medical history and treatment written by the health professional who provides services to the patient. Medical records require sufficient storage shelves and storage space is needed to maintain confidentiality, avoid damage and make it easier for officers to retrieve and return medical records in the long term. If the medical record storage is adequate and meets the standards to support maximum patient care, it is necessary to adjust the need for medical record storage racks at the South Bangka Hospital. The purpose of this study was to determine the need for medical record storage racks for the next 5 years at RSUD South Bangka. This type of research uses a descriptive method with a quantitative approach. Data collection techniques used are observation and interviews. The results of this study are the number of medical record storage racks in the South Bangka Hospital currently amounts to 17 shelves and the South Bangka Hospital currently has a medical record storage area of 25m². It is recommended that the South Bangka Hospital need to provide 49 storage shelves for the next 5 (five) years so that the shelf needs can be met and can accommodate all medical records and it is hoped that the hospital will add an area of medical record room with an additional area of 11.96m² to adjust the addition of medical record racks.

The large-seeded sunflower variety Konditer was developed at V.S. Pustovoit All-Russian Research Institute of Oil Crops as part of the breeding program for developing varieties of different maturity groups, directions of use and resistance to stressful environment conditions. The variety Konditer belongs to the middle maturity group. The period from seedling to physiological maturity is 96–98 days. Its feature is a potentially high yield, resistance to the complex of broomrape races E, F, G. The plant height is 190–200 cm. The new variety is characterized by high initial growth rate and high germination energy. Thousand-seed weight varies within 100 g at a density of 40 thousand plants/ha, under the recommended density of 25–30 thousand plants/ha, the thousand-seed weight is more than 150 g. Dehulling ability of the variety Konditer is the same as that of the standard variety Dzhinn. The variety Kodniter has been in-cluded in the State Register of Breeding Achieve-ments of the Russian Federation since 2022 and is approved for cultivation in the Central Black Earth (5), North Caucasus (6), Middle Volga (7), and Lower Volga (8) regions.

The large-seeded sunflower variety Konditer was developed at V.S. Pustovoit All-Russian Research Institute of Oil Crops as part of the breeding program for developing varieties of different maturity groups, directions of use and resistance to stressful environment conditions. The variety Konditer belongs to the middle maturity group. The period from seedling to physiological maturity is 96–98 days. Its feature is a potentially high yield, resistance to the complex of broomrape races E, F, G. The plant height is 190–200 cm. The new variety is characterized by high initial growth rate and high germination energy. Thousand-seed weight varies within 100 g at a density of 40 thousand plants/ha, under the recommended density of 25–30 thousand plants/ha, the thousand-seed weight is more than 150 g. Dehulling ability of the variety Konditer is the same as that of the standard variety Dzhinn. The variety Kodniter has been in-cluded in the State Register of Breeding Achieve-ments of the Russian Federation since 2022 and is approved for cultivation in the Central Black Earth (5), North Caucasus (6), Middle Volga (7), and Lower Volga (8) regions.

Smoked fish is traditionally processed by fish through an open process of hot smoked. Smoked fish process in Indonesia, especially in Maluku, is still carried out traditionally with capital and small business scale so that the use of tools is still simple, besides the sanitation and hygiene of handling and processing are still low. The raw material used in this study is smoke tuna loin produced by Dusun Air Manis,Laha village. This study aims to determine the microbiological and chemical quality of the smoked fish that was produced from Dusun Air Manis, Laha village. The test parameters carried out consisted of microbiological tests: 1) Total microbes on frozen tuna loin, washing water, immersion water, bamboo, smoked racks and smoked tuna, 2) Escherichia coli test on frozen tuna loin, washing water, soaking water, smoked tuna, 3) Salmonella test on smoked tuna. Chemical analysis of smoked tuna included moisture and pH. The results showed that the total plate count (TPC), Escherichia coli and Salmonella on tuna loin smoke still met microbiological standards according to SNI 2725: 2013. Moisture of smoked tuna was 59% and still meets the quality standard according to SNI 2725: 2013 which is a maximum of 60%. The pH of smoked tuna was 5.8.

Newly skinned tails of beef carcasses at two packing plants were similarly contaminated with total aerobes and with coliforms that were largely Escherichia coli at log mean numbers about 3.5/cm2 and 4.5/100 cm2, respectively. The log mean numbers of aerobes and coliforms on the skinned tails after washing at plant A were, respectively, 1 and 2 log units less than the numbers on the newly skinned tails. At plant B, the log mean numbers of aerobes on skinned and on washed tails were similar while the log mean numbers of E. coli on washed tails were only about 1 log unit less than the numbers on skinned tails. Cooling of tails on racks in a chiller at plant B reduced the log mean numbers of E. coli by about 1 log unit but did not reduce the numbers of total aerobes. Tongues in the heads of carcasses at both plants were similarly contaminated with total aerobes and with coliforms that were largely E. coli at log mean numbers of about 4.5/cm2 and 4.5/100 cm2, respectively. The log mean numbers of aerobes on and the log total number of E. coli recovered from washed tongues were, respectively, about 2 and 4 log units less than for unwashed tongues at plant A and about 1 and 3 log units less than for unwashed tongues at plant B. The log mean numbers of aerobes and E. coli on washed cheeks and lips were both about 2 log units less than the numbers on unwashed tongues at both plants. With appropriate collection and washing procedures, the microbiological conditions of beef tails, tongues, and head meats can apparently be comparable to those of primal cuts and manufacturing beef at the times that the products are packed.

Indonesia's economic growth during the Covid-19 pandemic was not good due to low levels of public consumption. The government and MSME actors are trying to build the economy so that it can survive in all the conditions it faces. This study aims to find out how the implementation of the a priori algorithm and the TOPSIS method determine the sales pattern of a business. The analysis was carried out using two methods, namely the association rule using the a priori algorithm and the TOPSIS method as a decision support system. The analysis of the a priori algorithm produces an itemset of house frames, doors and windows as a combination that meets the 20% support value. Meanwhile, there are three association rules, namely if you buy house frames and doors, then buy windows with a confidence value of 100% and a lift ratio of 1.89. It's the same as the other 2 rules which produce a lift ratio value of more than 1, which means the rule is valid. In the analysis of the TOPSIS method, of the 22 alternatives it is known that alternative A14, namely windows, is ranked 1st as the product that sells the most, followed by alternative A13, namely doors. In addition, there are several products that have the same preference value so that they are also in the same rank, such as cafe chairs, stakes/stones and flower shelves then cafe tables and shoe racks.

The indices used in determining bee breeds were stud-ied: wing size and abdominal tergite 3 width; the metatar-sus of the right hind leg was measured to determine the tarsal index. The percentage of individuals with different variants of discoidal displacement (positive, negative, neu-tral) was determined. The data of morphometric measure-ments of bees of 3 colonies are presented. The wing indi-ces in the 1st group of bees were slightly lower thanthe standard values (8.81-9.21; 3.01-3.23 mm). In the 2nd and 3rd bee colonies, the wing length was the same as in the European darkand Carpathian populations in 15% and 25% of individuals. A certain number of insects (15; 25; 60%) had a wing width equalto the European darkand Italian races. The studied bees had the sizes of the third abdominal tergite (4.88 ± 0.030; 4.92 ± 0.030; 4.97 ± 0.033 mm) as in all major breeds kept in the Russian Fed-eration. The tarsal index values (60.43 ± 0.452; 58.62 ± 0.445; 57.08 ± 0.322%) did not fit within the standards of the main bee breeds (54.0-56.2%). There was yellow color of the third tergite (35%; 80%) and all types of discoidal displacement (+; -; 0) in the insects of the 1st and 2nd col-onies. In the 3rd bee colony, the yellowness of the ab-dominal tergites lacked completely, and the positive dis-coidal displacement made 80%. In 3 studied groups of bees, the coefficient of variability was at the level of 1-4% for all indices. Thus, the research revealed the insectswith the signs of the European dark, Carniolan, Carpathian, Italian and Caucasian breeds.

The amount of aflatoxin contamination has exceeded the maximum limit for sales in the European market, which is 10 µg/kg of nutmeg seed products with mold according to SNI standards not exceeding 8%. In order to obtain nutmeg seed products of SNI 01-0007-1993 standard quality, pre-harvest, harvest, and post-harvest handling are carried out in the right manner and at the right time. The aims of the study were to determine harvesting techniques and drying methods to produce quality nutmeg products and to recommend efficient and applicable harvesting and drying methods that meet the requirements of SNI standards. The research method used a Completely Randomized Design (CRD) with two factors, Factor A how to harvest (picked, using nets, and collected), Factor B how to dry (electric oven, drying racks, and tarpaulin), repeated 3 times so that 27 experimental units were obtained. Parameters observed included: 1. Analysis of Water Content, 2. Physical Characteristics, and 3 Physical Characteristics of Mold. The results showed that the water content of nutmeg seeds before drying ranged from 80.72 – 82.00%, after the drying process the moisture content of nutmeg seeds ranged from 7.50 – 9.67%. The highest water content was in sample A1B2, while the lowest water content was in sample A3B2. In general, the indication of the water content of nutmeg seeds for each treatment is less than 10% so it meets the Indonesian National Standard, namely the maximum 10%. Keywords: Nutmeg, how to harvest, drying, moisture, mold. Abstrak Jumlah cemaran aflatoksin tidak melebihi batas maksimal untuk diperdagangkan di pasar Eropa, yaitu 10 µg/kg atau produk biji pala yang berkapang sesuai persyaratan standar SNI tidak melebihi 8%. Untuk mendapatkan produk biji pala, berkualitas standar SNI 01-0007-1993 maka penanganan prapanen, panen dan pascapanen dilakukan dengan cara dan pada waktu yang tepat. Penelitian bertujuan untuk menentukan teknik panen dan cara pengeringan untuk menghasilkan produk biji pala berkualitas dan untuk merekomendasi cara panen dan pengeringan yang efisien dan aplikatif memenuhi syarat standar SNI. Metode penelitian menggunakan Rancangan Acak Lengkap (RAL) dengan dua faktor, Faktor A cara panen (dipetik, menggunakan jaring, dan dipungut), Faktor B cara pengeringan (oven listrik, rak pengering/para-para, dan terpal), diulang sebanyak 3 kali, sehingga diperoleh 27 satuan pecobaan. Parameter yang diamati meliputi : 1. Analisis Kadar Air, 2. Karakteristik Fisik Biji Pala, dan 3 Karakteristik Fisik Kapang. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa kadar air biji pala sebelum dikeringkan berkisar antara 80.72 – 82.00%, setelah dilakukan proses pengeringan kadar air biji pala berkisar antara 7.50 – 9.67%. Kadar air tertinggi pada sampel A1B2, sedangkan kadar air terendah pada sampel A3B2. Umumnya indikasi kadar air biji pala setiap perlakuan kurang dari 10% sehingga telah memenuhi Standar Nasional Indonesia yakni maksimum 10%. Demikian halnya pengamatan karakteristik fisik biji pala dan kapang untuk semua perlakuan relatif memenuhi Standar Nasional Indonesia (SNI). Kata Kunci : Biji Pala, Cara Panen, Pengeringan, Kadar Air, Kapang.

Abstrak. Tujuan dari penelitian ini untuk melakukan desain dan rancang bangun serta pengujian fungsional terhadap pengering Efek Rumah Kaca (ERK) atap parabolik untuk kacang tanah (Arachis hypogaeai L.). Penelitian ini dilaksanakan pada bulan April sampai Oktober 2021, bertempat di Laboratorium Perbengkelan Alat dan Mesin Pertanian Program Studi Teknik Pertanian Fakultas Pertanian Universitas Syiah Kuala Darussalam Banda Aceh. Metode yang dilakukan pada penelitian ini adalah mendesain pengering Efek Rumah Kaca (ERK) atap parabolik menggunakan software SolidWorks 2017. Selanjutnya, rancang bangun pembuatan pengering ERK atap parabolik dan melakukan pengujian fungsional alat tanpa bahan dan menggunakan bahan kacang tanah untuk mengetahui performansi pengering ini sudah berfungsi dengan baik atau belum. Parameter penelitian pada penelitian ini adalah kadar air, kapasitas pengering, dan analisis energi panas.Hasil dari penelitian ini adalah prinsip kerja pengering ERK Atap Parabolik dengan mensirkulasikan udara panas yang terperangkap di dalam ruang pengering. Lalu, mengeluarkan udara menggunakan kipas outlet. Uji kinerja rancang bangun pengering ERK Atap Parabolik dapat berfungsi dengan baik dalam melakukan pengeringan, karena terlihat adanya fluktuasi suhu dalam ruang pengering selama 8 jam pengeringan. Rata-rata pengeringan menggunakan kacang tanah adalah 36,15℃, dan rata-rata suhu lingkungan adalah 29,4℃ . Kadar air akhir kacang tanah pada rak 1, 2, dan 3 sebesar 19,55%, 11,90%, dan 8,06%. Kadar air kacang tanah pada rak 3 memenuhi SNI mutu II, sedangkan kadar air kacang pada rak 1 dan 2 belum memenuhi SNI. Kapasitas kerja pengeringan input (KKPI) adalah 1,875 kg/jam dan kapasitas kerja pengeringan output (KKPO) adalah 1,532 kg/jam. Energi panas yang dibutuhkan untuk pengeringan kacang tanah (Qd) adalah sebesar 803.128,61 Joule atau setara dengan 223,091 Wh. Sedangkan energi listrik yaitu dibutuhkan yaitu 427,68 Wh.Modification Of Greenhouse Effect Dryer (Erk) Parabolic Roof For Peanut (Arachis Hypogaeai L.)The purpose of this study was to design and construct and perform functional testing of the Roof parabolic Greenhouse Effect (ERK) dryer for peanuts (Arachis hypogaeai L.). This research was conducted from April to October 2021, at the Agricultural Equipment and Machinery Workshop Laboratory, Agricultural Engineering Study Program, Faculty of Agriculture, Syiah Kuala Darussalam University, Banda Aceh. The method used in this research is to design a parabolic roof greenhouse effect (ERK) dryer using the SolidWorks 2017 software. Next, design the manufacture of a parabolic roof ERK dryer and perform functional testing of the tool without materials and using peanuts to determine the performance of this dryer already working. well or not. The research parameters in this study were moisture content, drying capacity, and heat energy analysis.The result of this research is the working principle of Parabolic Roof ERK dryer by circulating hot air trapped in the drying chamber. Then, remove the used air using the outlet fan. The performance test of the Parabolic Roof ERK dryer design can function properly in drying, because it can be seen that there are temperature fluctuations in the drying chamber for 8 hours of drying. The average drying using peanuts is 36.15℃, and the average environmental temperature is 29.4℃. It can be seen that the temperature of using peanuts is higher than that of the environment. The final moisture content of peanuts on shelves 1, 2, and 3 was 19.55%, 11.90%, and 8.06%. The moisture content of peanuts on rack 3 meets SNI quality II, while the moisture content of peanuts on racks 1 and 2 does not meet SNI. The input drying working capacity (KKPI) is 1.875 kg/hour. Meanwhile, the output drying working capacity (KKPO) is 1,532 kg/hour. The heat energy required for drying peanuts (Qd) is 803.128.61 Joules or equivalent to 223.091 Wh. Meanwhile, the electrical energy required is 427.68 Wh.

Abstract When a new disease emerges, there are at first no specific medicinal products to treat it. This has also been the case in the Covid-19 pandemic. Scientists and health professionals have been trying to establish the best treatments possible using the already-existing medicines that are normally used for different indications. The off-label use of medicinal products is a standard part of medical practice. If it meets certain criteria, it is not contradictory to the standard of care. Nevertheless, the urgency of the pandemic situation brings about new issues. What amount of data on efficacy and safety should be considered sufficient to scientifically justify the off-label use of a particular medicine? How should health professionals reflect the rapid scientific developments and high levels of uncertainty in their clinical practice? How can be these factors influenced by the politicisation of medicine? The paper deals with the outlined questions in order to analyse and concretise the criteria for off-label use of medicinal product in the specific context of the Covid-19 pandemic.

George Floyd’s death invigorated the Black Lives Matter movement and stimulated debate and passionate action across the globe. Commitments are set out at every level to address racial inequalities and injustices. However, changing mindsets and instituting changes meets with challenges at multiple levels. Taking the knee, wearing the tee-shirt, removing statues and decolonising the curriculum is not enough. The school curriculum is a major site for the development of understanding about, and the development of attitudes towards, people of other races. Across the spectrum, from challenging selective and biased histories about other peoples to multiple government commissions about ethnic inequalities we have seen limited impact on institutions in their treatment of ethnic minorities. Viewing the effects of policy interventions in England hitherto realistically – and pessimistically – one conclusion is that the challenges to the eradication of racism are too narrowly conceived, symbolic and performative. Indeed, symbolic allyship and multiple government ‘commissionsphere’ reports deceive us into thinking we do enough, whilst experience shows failure. In increasingly neoliberal political and economic environments, individualised, competitive, populist agenda, are forces supporting inequality and subjugation blunting drives for social justice. Sustained, holistic policies enacted with energy and critically monitored are required.

Abstract‘Black Pearl’ black bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) (Reg. no. CV‐362, PI 705445), developed by Michigan State University AgBioResearch, was released in 2023 as an upright, full‐season cultivar with anthracnose resistance and superior canning quality. Black Pearl was developed using pedigree breeding method to the F4 generation followed by pure line selection for disease, agronomic, and quality traits. In 5 years of field trials, Black Pearl yielded 3372 kg ha−1, flowered in 47 days, and matured in 98 days on average. Plants averaged 46 cm in height, with lodging resistance score of 1.8 and seed weight of 21.9 g 100 seed−1. Black Pearl combines high yield potential with upright architecture and full‐season maturity in a black seed type. Black Pearl has resistance to lodging and high pod placement within the plant making it suitable for direct harvest under narrow row production systems. Black Pearl is resistant to races 7 and 73 of anthracnose, resistant to Bean common mosaic virus, and has shown better resistance to Rhizoctonia root rot than other black bean cultivars. Black Pearl produces seed that meets industry standards for export and packaging and was rated the highest in canned bean color in the black bean market class.

Abstract‘AuSable’ (Reg. no. CV‐358, PI 705150) navy bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.), developed by Michigan State University AgBioResearch was released in 2023 as an early‐mid season, disease‐resistant, upright, short‐vine bean cultivar with excellent dry down. AuSable was developed with the pedigree breeding method to the F4 generation followed by pure line selection for disease, agronomic, and quality traits. In 6 years of field trials, AuSable yielded 3073 kg ha−1, flowered in 46 days, and matured in 95 days on average. Plants averaged 45 cm in height, with a lodging resistance score of 1.7 and seed size of 22 g 100 seed−1. AuSable combines high yield potential with early midseason maturity in a navy bean seed type. AuSable has outyielded ‘Merlin’ by 17% across 6 years and matured 3 days earlier. It exhibits uniform dry down equivalent to ‘Vigilant’ and is well adapted to the intensively managed, narrow row, direct‐harvested production systems where beans are typically grown in Michigan and the Upper Midwest. AuSable possesses resistance to Bean common mosaic virus, is resistant to anthracnose races 7 and 73, has shown moderate tolerance to white mold, and was as tolerant to post emergence damping off caused by Rhizoctonia solani as other navy beans. It is susceptible to common bacterial blight. The seed size of AuSable (22 g 100 seed−1) is most similar to ‘Valiant’ and slightly smaller than ‘Liberty’ (23 g 100 seed−1). Seed of AuSable meets industry standards for packaging and canning quality in the navy bean seed class.

Abstract Background Melasma is one of the most encountered dermatoses in dermatology and skin care clinics. It is a challenging chronic, recurrent condition associated with hyperpigmentation. Its aetiology is poorly understood. Melasma affects all races and gender but is more prevalent in women with darker skin types. Being a facial lesion, melasma has a severe impact on quality of life due to its disfigurement. While many modalities of treatment for melasma exists, unfortunately, effectiveness and safety remain a huge concern. Treatment modalities are variable and often unsatisfactory. The objective of this scoping review is to systemically map available evidence from literature regarding melasma on people with darker skin types, garner insight as to how melasma affects the quality of life and begin to investigate and gain understanding on effectiveness of different treatments used for melasma. Methods A scoping review guided by Arksey and O’Malley’s framework, the enhancements and recommendations of Levac, Colquhoun and O’Brien, Daudt and associates and the 2015 Johanna Briggs Institute’s guidelines will be conducted. Systematic electronic searches of databases and search engines will include Scopus, PubMed, CINAHL Complete, Cochrane, Science Direct, and Web of Science which will be conducted to attain published peer-reviewed articles of all study designs excluding reviews and grey literature. All literature that meets the inclusion criteria, research question and sub-question will be included in this review. All the retrieved literature will be exported to an Endnote X20 library. Quality appraisal of the included articles will be conducted using the mixed methods appraisal tool (MMAT) 2018 version. Discussion We anticipate mapping relevant literature on the melasma, investigating the effectiveness of treatment options of melasma as well as evaluating its association with quality of life in people with darker skin types. This study is likely to reveal research gaps, which could guide future implementation research on melasma treatment interventions. Systematic review registration This protocol has been registered a priori with OSF and is accessible on this link: https://osf.io/ru3jc/.

***Access the interview with author Shelly Becker by clicking here.*** Dear Readers, It is my pleasure to be contributing the editorial for this special issue of The Deakin Review of Children’s Literature. My name is Lynne Wiltse and I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Elementary Education at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta. I teach courses in language and literacy and children’s literature. This is the third time that the graduate students in my Children's Literature in the Elementary School (EDEL 510) course have participated in writing book reviews for a Special Issue of the Deakin Review; however, this is the first time that they have been joined by undergraduate students from my Teaching Literature in Elementary Schools (EDEL 409) course. This term, I taught a combined undergraduate/graduate course, and the editorial team of the Deakin Review generously agreed to a special issue featuring book reviews by my 10 graduate and 20 undergraduate students. We began our course by reading Kathy Short’s (2108) article, What’s Trending in Children’s Literature and Why It Matters. In her articles, Short identifies the increasing influence of visual culture in children’s books and continuing concerns about the lack of diversity in children’s literature as two recent trends. Regarding the first trend, the opportunity to evaluate picture books was linked to course content about visual storytelling and the design of picture books. In her article, Short makes the point that, because children are immersed in a visual culture, they find books with powerful visual images particularly appealing. This was certainly reflected in the selection of picture books, published in 2018, chosen by the 30 students in the course for review. An example can be found in Ocean Meets Sky, a finalist for the 2018 Governor General's Literary Award for young people's literature (illustrated books category), by brothers Eric and Terry Fan. You can read about the stunning visual images in this picture book about a young boy who sets sail to find the spot where the ocean meets the sky in Melinda Cooke’s review. Kathy Short notes that the influence of visual culture is evident in the increasing publication of wordless books in which the story is told completely (or almost completely) through visual images. In this regard, our collection includes I Walk With Vanessa: A Story about a Simple Act of Kindness, a wordless book by Kerascoet (the joint pen name of married illustrators, Marie Pommepuy and Sébastien Cosset). Terri Beach reviewed this book, told without words, about a girl who is bullied and then supported by school mates. That the students in this book comprise different ethnicities and races relates to the second trend in children’s books that Short highlights in her article. The author argues that the limited availability of books that reflect the diversity within society can be damaging for children who rarely see their lives represented within books. On this count, the books reviewed by my students were encouraging as they displayed diverse ways of being diverse, so to speak. Immigrant students may recognize themselves in Island Born, written by Junot Diaz and illustrated by Leo Espinosa, while young non-binary readers may identify with Julian is a Mermaid by Jessica Love. Girls, long underrepresented in children’s literature, may in particular be inspired by Roda Ahmedk’s and Stasia Burrington’s Mae Among the Stars, based on the first African American woman to travel in space, Hidden Figures: The True Story of Four Black Women and the Space Race, written by Margot Lee Shetterly and illustrated by Laura Freeman, and Chelsea Clinton and Alexandra Boiger’s, She Persisted Around the World:13 Women who Changed History. I am hopeful that these and other books reviewed by my students indicate a positive shift in the second trend regarding the lack of diversity in children’s literature. Short’s view is that, as educators, we are often followers, rather than creators of trends. I am confident that the teachers, librarians and prospective teachers from my course will contribute to this shift by thoughtfully selecting children’s literature for our diverse society. Writing reviews for this issue was a valuable learning experience for my students and we are eager to see the published reviews. I am grateful to the editorial team of the Deakin Review for their support, and a special thanks is extended to Kim Frail for assisting me with the process and my students with their reviews. Reference Short, K. (2018). What’s Trending in Children’s Literature and Why It Matters. Language Arts, 95(5), 287-298.

As an important part of the lifting platform of pallet forklift trucks, how to reduce the deformation of the pallet rack under working conditions while reducing the mass to ensure the safety performance of forklift trucks is the most concerning issue in the design of forklift truck structure. The pallet rack structure is complex, and optimizing simulation using traditional high-precision simulation models takes much time and effort. Therefore, this paper takes the lifting platform of an unmanned AVG forklift truck as the research object and establishes a parametric model of the pallet rack using the 3D modelling software SolidWorks and the finite element analysis software ANSYS to carry out static analysis of it. Optimization design variables are selected, a single surrogate model and ensemble surrogate model are chosen for various surrogate model techniques, a small number of sample points are used to construct a low-precision model, and adaptive infilling technology is used to improve the model accuracy, and the structure is optimized, and the results show that, while the pallet rack structure meets the requirements of light weight and strength, the mass is reduced by 1.2%, and the morphology is reduced by 17.2%. Moreover, a global sensitivity analysis of each design parameter was carried out under the guidance of the surrogate model, highlighting the most influential design variable as the height of the channel steel and establishing the design variables that should be taken into account in the structural design. This paper compares the performance of the mainstream single-surrogate model and ensemble-surrogate model as well as the adaptive infilling strategy in engineering design and proves that the surrogate model optimization method has a certain guiding significance for the structural optimization design of pallet racking.

This issue of M/C Journal called for a wide multidisciplinary exploration around the notion of ‘street’. The papers we received offered this diversity and range from discussions of everyday activities to seeing the street as a site for events, conflicts and the possibility of new learning. They explored a range of social meanings and cultural ramifications engaged in/on/off and around the notion of street. Street in its most conventional sense represents the link between physical places, but more than that, spaces where cultural negotiations are made. They are everyday spaces where the informal meets the formal, and the public meets the private. In other words, they are spaces where unanticipated, sudden encounters may take place, or where ordinary space may be made special. Their utilitarian purpose may be subverted and they become ‘special’ spaces and sites where Formula 1 races, charity runs, street parties, revolutions, protests, and markets occur. They may be formalised sites known for consumption, entertainment, and recreation or where drugs, sex and gambling are found behind closed doors. Feature: “Where Ordinary Activities Lead to War: Street Politics in Seth Tobocman’s War in the Neighborhood” Vanessa Raney’s piece, like many of the others, deals with the street as a site of potential political and social conflict. In this case, she describes elements of the urban experience of New York as represented in Seth Tobocman’s graphic novel War in the Neighbourhood. This centres on the relationships between squatters, the police, politicians and the media in a classic conflict about gentrification or the uses and ownership of urban space. Raney compares the representation of this battle in the novel, with historical and current conflicts about urban space and the place that street plays as a site for these conflicts. Street is not community in the sense beloved of current politicians – a banal consensus about law and order – but the site for contestation and in a few cases, resolution. Thus, streets are not accidents, they are shaped by social and economic changes, cultural imaginings and practices. In “Vigilant Citizens”, Cameron Muir investigates a conflict that took place under the guise of a public petition in the city of Dubbo, New South Wales, Australia in 2003. The petition was for the Carr government to “do something” about the “uncontrollable” criminal children who were taking over the streets. That the children were often Aboriginal was not directly mentioned. Muir tracks the media discursive practices and the government’s campaign of fear leading up to this moment of moral panic, arguing through the idea of Statecraft that the desired order for one’s streets can serve to exclude the rights of these others. Continuing of the theme of order and disorder in the public imagination, Irina Gendelman in “The Romantic and Dangerous Stranger” contrasts the reception given to a sculpted hobo, versus the real hobo on the streets of Seattle. Entwined within the figure of the real hobo are a range of prescribed representations, all of which demand a disciplining of the body and the public spaces – made safe for normalised occupations. Gendelman argues that this ‘othering’ is achieved in part through the control (Foucault) exterted via media discussions of what are the acceptable and stable boundaries of society. To conclude, Gendelman returns to Jane Jacobs’s argument that, as there is no one element that makes the city vibrant, so there is no singular investment that can create cultural capital in the city for all, but that inclusive, well-used public spaces remain one of the best ways to build trust among strangers.. We then move back to Australia, to “Imagining King Street in the Gay/Lesbian Media” and the construction of its place-identity. The media can create shorthand for class and lifestyle differentiation in television land – think Coronation Street, Sesame Street, 42nd Street, Wisteria Lane (Desperate Housewives), or Ramsey Street (Neighbours). But in the local and community newspapers, these socio-economic distinctions come to be replaced by subcultural affiliations of localness. In his comparison between the two iconic gay and lesbian streets in Sydney, Andrew Gorman-Murray’s investigation is driven by the gay/lesbian newspaper discursive portrayals that recreate King Street as alternative and secondary to Oxford Street. His analysis re-emphasises the integral notion of places and streets as social and cultural constructs, open and liable for constant representations, manipulations and challenges. He argues that streets, like identities, are not stable in meaning, they are negotiated subjectively over time and shift according to the imagined constructs, in this case, of the local papers. Street is the social platform for urban displays of inclusion and exclusion: loitering on the street, street kids, living on the street, wrong side of the street, and graffiti on the street, all present conflicting notions surrounding shared city spaces. Melike Turkan Bagli and Sebnem Timur present a personal account of an accidental experience of loitering in a foreign street, “A Bodily Sign of ‘Doing Nothing’: Loitering or the Silence before the Storm”. Faced with this cultural translation at the moment of arrival, the author deliberates on the semiological and discursive impact of what ‘no loitering’ could mean. In hindsight and with adequate cultural context, the notion of loitering is made sense of in relation to the “Chicago Anti-Gang Loitering” law of 1992 and the element of criminality located in the Act. While loitering is clearly a cultural and historically specific term, its ambiguity to the reader emphasises the dissonance such public signs may serve. In the next article, Paula Geyh takes us above the street, transcending the street even, in “Urban Free Flow: A Poetics of Parkour”, to examine the popularity of parkour through a BBC advertisement. Such practices can commonly be regarded as a form of street culture even as their main purpose is to avoid the street! Street thus becomes the main structure against which parkour-ism can be defined. Geyh’s analysis of parkour as a form of physical poetics is dependent on the context of the urban cityscape and the ability of the body to transcend the street below. The street with its multiple meanings is once again defined as another form of social space, one that represents the barriers and repression of urban life. Knowing your back streets distinguishes one as a local rather than the outsider. Being street wise is integral to top selling computer games like Grand Theft Auto, Gangland or Sim City, where the strategy lies in competent negotiation of streets. Or, as Robert Sweeny in “Code of the Street: Videogames and the City” argues, many videogames centred around urban centres often reinvent ways of looking and imagining the street and its utilitarianism. Skateboarding and graffiti become challenges to the player, casting them as active agents of the city in games such as Tony Hawkes’s Underground and Getting Up: Contents under Pressure. Sweeny suggests that the players will perhaps harbour a different view of marginalised activities, having ‘performed’ them in the videogames. But what are the actual effects these games have on the players and their relationship with the cities? How is de Certeau’s idea of walking in the city appropriated for videogames when now the urban may be experienced more often via the screen than in actuality? Thus, this article posits the city as an interface which serves as an overriding context for game playing – and walking in the city may perhaps be read differently forever after an interactive walk. Finally, Andrew Hickey’s paper “Street Smarts/Smart Streets: Public Pedagogies and the Streetscape” considers the street as a site of instruction or learning. As we move through our streets we are bombarded by advertising messages, directed by public signage, influenced by our fellow walkers and disciplined by multiple codes of behaviour, implicit and explicit. The papers in this volume reflect different aspects of that learning – how do we learn how to be citizens? How do we learn about ownership and inequality? Exclusion and inclusion? At a time of high levels of insecurity in the global North, fear of crime and suspicion of outsiders, these papers suggest that the street still has things to teach us that we can not easily learn in other ways. The street is a particular form of public space, but one that, these papers suggest, precisely because of their role as marginal spaces and as sometime sites of context, cannot easily be replaced. Kate Oakley & Jinna TayM/C Journal ‘street’ Issue Editors Citation reference for this article MLA Style Oakley, Kate, and Jinna Tay. "Street." M/C Journal 9.3 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/00-editorial.php>. APA Style Oakley, K., and J. Tay. (Jul. 2006) "Street," M/C Journal, 9(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/00-editorial.php>.

The Black Summer of 2019/2020 saw the forests of southeast Australia go up in flames. The fire season started early, in September 2019, and by March 2020 fires had burned over 12.6 million hectares (Werner and Lyons). The scale and severity of the fires was quickly confirmed by scientists to be “unprecedented globally” (Boer et al.) and attributable to climate change (Nolan et al.).The fires were also a media spectacle, generating months of apocalyptic front-page images and harrowing broadcast footage. Media coverage was particularly preoccupied by the cause of the fires. Media framing of disasters often seeks to attribute blame (Anderson et al.; Ewart and McLean) and, over the course of the fire period, blame for the fires was attributed to climate change in much media coverage. However, as the disaster unfolded, denialist discourses in some media outlets sought to veil this revelation by providing alternative explanations for the fires. Misinformation originating from social media also contributed to this obscuration.In this article, we investigate the extent to which media coverage of the 2019/2020 bushfires functioned both to precipitate a climate change epiphany and also to support refutation of the connection between catastrophic fires and the climate crisis.Environmental Communication and RevelationIn its biblical sense, revelation is both an ending and an opening: it is the apocalyptic end-time and also the “revealing” of this time through stories and images. Environmental communication has always been revelatory, in these dual senses of the word – it is a mode of communication that is tightly bound to crisis; that has long grappled with obfuscation and misinformation; and that disrupts power structures and notions of the status quo as it seeks to reveal what is hidden. Climate change in particular is associated in the popular imagination with apocalypse, and is also a reality that is constantly being “revealed”. Indeed, the narrative of climate change has been “animated by the revelations of science” (McNeish 1045) and presented to the public through “key moments of disclosure and revelation”, or “signal moments”, such as scientist James Hansen’s 1988 US Senate testimony on global warming (Hamblyn 224).Journalism is “at the frontline of environmental communication” (Parham 96) and environmental news, too, is often revelatory in nature – it exposes the problems inherent in the human relationship with the natural world, and it reveals the scientific evidence behind contentious issues such as climate change. Like other environmental communicators, environmental journalists seek to “break through the perceptual paralysis” (Nisbet 44) surrounding climate change, with the dual aim of better informing the public and instigating policy change. Yet leading environmental commentators continually call for “better media coverage” of the planetary crisis (Suzuki), as climate change is repeatedly bumped off the news agenda by stories and events deemed more newsworthy.News coverage of climate-related disasters is often revelatory both in tone and in cultural function. The disasters themselves and the news narratives which communicate them become processes that make visible what is hidden. Because environmental news is “event driven” (Hansen 95), disasters receive far more news coverage than ongoing problems and trends such as climate change itself, or more quietly devastating issues such as species extinction or climate migration. Disasters are also highly visual in nature. Trumbo (269) describes climate change as an issue that is urgent, global in scale, and yet “practically invisible”; in this sense, climate-related disasters become a means of visualising and realising what is otherwise a complex, difficult, abstract, and un-seeable concept.Unsurprisingly, natural disasters are often presented to the public through a film of apocalyptic rhetoric and imagery. Yet natural disasters can be also “revelatory” moments: instances of awakening in which suppressed truths come spectacularly and devastatingly to the surface. Matthewman (9–10) argues that “disasters afford us insights into social reality that ordinarily pass unnoticed. As such, they can be read as modes of disclosure, forms of communication”. Disasters, he continues, can reveal both “our new normal” and “our general existential condition”, bringing “the underbelly of progress into sharp relief”. Similarly, Lukes (1) states that disasters “lift veils”, revealing “what is hidden from view in normal times”. Yet for Lukes, “the revelation tells us nothing new, nothing that we did not already know”, and is instead a forced confronting of that which is known yet difficult to engage with. Lukes’ concern is the “revealing” of poverty and inequality in New Orleans following the impact of Hurricane Katrina, yet climate-related disasters can also make visible what McNeish terms “the dark side effects of industrial civilisation” (1047). The Australian bushfires of 2019/2020 can be read in these terms, primarily because they unveiled the connection between climate change and extreme events. Scorching millions of hectares, with a devastating impact on human and non-human communities, the fires revealed climate change as a physical reality, and—for Australians—as a local issue as well as a global one. As media coverage of the fires unfolded and smoke settled on half the country, the impact of climate change on individual lives, communities, landscapes, native animal and plant species, and well-established cultural practices (such as the summer camping holiday) could be fully and dramatically realised. Even for those Australians not immediately impacted, the effects were lived and felt: in our lungs, and on our skin, a physical revelation that the impacts of climate change are not limited to geographically distant people or as-yet-unborn future generations. For many of us, the summer of fire was a realisation that climate change can no longer be held at arm’s length.“Revelation” also involves a temporal collapse whereby the future is dragged into the present. A revelatory streak of this nature has always existed at the heart of environmental communication and can be traced back at least as far as the environmentalist Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring revealed a bleak, apocalyptic future devoid of wildlife and birdsong. In other words, environmental communication can inspire action for change by exposing the ways in which the comforts and securities of the present are built upon a refusal to engage with the future. This temporal rupture where the future meets the present is particularly characteristic of climate change narratives. It is not surprising, then, that media coverage of the 2019/2020 bushfires addressed not just the immediate loss and devastation but also dread of the future, and the understanding that summer will increasingly hold such threats. Bushfires, Climate Change and the MediaThe link between bushfire risk and climate change generated a flurry of coverage in the Australian media well before the fires started in the spring of 2019. In April that year, a coalition of 23 former fire and emergency services leaders warned that Australia was “unprepared for an escalating climate threat” (Cox). They requested a meeting with the new government, to be elected in May, and better funding for firefighting to face the coming bushfire season. When that meeting was granted, at the end of Australia’s hottest and driest year on record (Doyle) in November 2019, bushfires had already been burning for two months. As the fires burned, the emergency leaders expressed frustration that their warnings had been ignored, claiming they had been “gagged” because “you are not allowed to talk about climate change”. They cited climate change as the key reason why the fire season was lengthening and fires were harder to fight. "If it's not time now to speak about climate and what's driving these events”, they asked, “– when?" (McCubbing).The mediatised uncovering of a bushfire/climate change connection was not strictly a revelation. Recent fires in California, Russia, the Amazon, Greece, and Sweden have all been reported in the media as having been exacerbated by climate change. Australia, however, has long regarded itself as a “fire continent”: a place adapted to fire, whose landscapes invite fire and can recover from it. Bushfires had therefore been considered part of the Australian “normal”. But in the Australian spring of 2019, with fires having started earlier than ever and charring rainforests that did not usually burn, the fire chiefs’ warning of a climate change-induced catastrophic bushfire season seemed prescient. As the fires spread and merged, taking homes, lives, landscapes, and driving people towards the water, revelatory images emerged in the media. Pictures of fire refugees fleeing under dystopian crimson skies, masked against the smoke, were accompanied by headlines like “Apocalypse Now” (Fife-Yeomans) and “Escaping Hell” (The Independent). Reports used words like “terror”, “nightmare” (Smee), “mayhem”, and “Armageddon” (Davidson).In the Australian media, the fire/climate change connection quickly became politicised. The Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack interviewed by the ABC, responding to a comment by Greens leader Adam Bandt, said connecting bushfire and climate while the fires raged was “disgraceful” and “disgusting”. People needed help, he said, not “the ravings of some pure enlightened and woke capital city greenies” (Goloubeva and Haydar). Gladys Berejiklian the NSW Premier also described it as “inappropriate” (Baker) and “disappointing” (Fox and Higgins) to talk about climate change at this time. However Carol Sparks, Mayor of bushfire-ravaged Glen Innes in rural NSW, contradicted this stance, telling the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) “Michael McCormack needs to read the science”. Climate change, she said, was “not a political thing” but “scientific fact” (Goloubeva and Haydar).As the fires merged and intensified, so did the media firestorm. Key Australian media became a sparring ground for issue definition, with media predictably split down ideological lines. Public broadcasters the ABC and SBS (Special Broadcasting Service), along with The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian Australia, predominantly framed the catastrophe as wrought by climate change. The Guardian, in an in-depth investigation of climate science and bushfire risk, stated that “despite the political smokescreen” the connection between the fires and global warming was “unequivocal” (Redfearn). The ABC characterised the fires as “a glimpse of the horrors of climate change’s crescendoing impact” (Rose). News outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Australia, however, actively sought to play down the fires’ seriousness. On 2 January, as front pages of newspapers across the world revealed horrifying fiery images, Murdoch’s Australian ran an upbeat shot of New Year’s Day picnic races as its lead, relegating discussion of the fires to page 4 (Meade). More than simply obscuring the fires’ significance, News Corp media actively sought to convince readers that the fires were not out of the ordinary. For example, as the fires’ magnitude was becoming clear on the last day of 2019, The Australian ran a piece comparing the fires with previous conflagrations, claiming such conditions were “not unprecedented” and the fires were “nothing new” (Johnstone). News Corp’s Sky News also used this frame: “climate alarmists”, “catastrophise”, and “don’t want to look at history”, it stated in a segment comparing the event to past major bushfires (Kenny).As the fires continued into January and February 2020, the refutation of the climate change frame solidified around several themes. Conservative media continued to insist the fires were “normal” for Australia and attributed their severity to a lack of hazard reduction burning, which they blamed on “Greens policies” (Brown and Caisley). They also promoted the argument, espoused by Energy Minister Angus Taylor, that with only “1.3% of global emissions” Australia “could not have meaningful impact” on global warming through emissions reductions, and that top-down climate mitigation pressure from the UN was “doomed to fail” (Lloyd). Foreign media saw the fires in quite different terms. From the outside looking in, the Australian fires were clearly revealed as fuelled by global heating and exacerbated by the Australian government’s climate denialism. Australia was framed as a “notorious climate offender” (Shield) that was—as The New York Times put it—“committing climate suicide” (Flanagan) with its lack of coherent climate policy and its predilection for mining coal. Ouest-France ran a headline reading “High on carbon, rich Australia denies global warming” in which it called Scott Morrison’s position on climate change “incomprehensible” (Guibert). The LA Times called the Australian fires “a climate change warning to its leaders—and ours”, noting how “fossil fuel friendly Morrison” had “gleefully wielded a fist-sized chunk of coal on the floor of parliament in 2017” (Karlik). In the UK, the Independent online ran a front page spread of the fires’ vast smoke plume, with the headline “This is what a climate crisis looks like” (Independent Online), while Australian MP Craig Kelly was called “disgraceful” by an interviewer on Good Morning Britain for denying the fires’ link to climate change (Good Morning Britain).Both in Australia and internationally, deliberate misinformation spread by social media additionally shaped media discourse on the fires. The false revelation that the fires had predominantly been started by arson spread on Twitter under the hashtag #ArsonEmergency. While research has been quick to show that this hashtag was artificially promoted by bots (Weber et al.), this and misinformation like it was also shared and amplified by real Twitter users, and quickly spread into mainstream media in Australia—including Murdoch’s Australian (Ross and Reid)—and internationally. Such misinformation was used to shore up denialist discourses about the fires, and to obscure revelation of the fire/climate change connection. Blame Framing, Public Opinion and the Extent of the Climate Change RevelationAs studies of media coverage of environmental disasters show us, media seek to apportion blame. This blame framing is “accountability work”, undertaken to explain how and why a disaster occurred, with the aim of “scrutinizing the actions of crisis actors, and holding responsible authorities to account” (Anderson et al. 930). In moments of disaster and in their aftermath, “framing contests” (Benford and Snow) can emerge in which some actors, regarding the crisis as an opportunity for change, highlight the systemic issues that have led to the crisis. Other actors, experiencing the crisis as a threat to the status quo, try to attribute the blame to others, and deny the need for policy change. As the Black Summer unfolded, just such a contest took place in Australian media discourse. While Murdoch’s dominant News Corp media sought to protect the status quo, promote conservative politicians’ views, and divert attention from the climate crisis, other Australian and overseas media outlets revealed the fires’ link to climate change and intransigent emissions policy. However, cracks did begin to show in the News Corp stance on climate change during the fires: an internal whistleblower publicly resigned over the media company’s fires coverage, calling it a “misinformation campaign”, and James Murdoch also spoke out about being “disappointed with the ongoing denial of the role of climate change” in reporting the fires (ABC/Reuters).Although media reporting on the environment has long been at the forefront of shaping social understanding of environmental issues, and news maintains a central role in both revealing environmental threats and shaping environmental politics (Lester), during Australia’s Black Summer people were also learning about the fires from lived experience. Polls show that the fires affected 57% of Australians. Even those distant from the catastrophe were, for some time, breathing the most toxic air in the world. This personal experience of disaster revealed a bushfire season that was far outside the normal, and public opinion reflected this. A YouGov Australia Institute poll in January 2020 found that 79% of Australians were concerned about climate change—an increase of 5% from July 2019—and 67% believed climate change was making the bushfires worse (Australia Institute). However, a January 2020 Ipsos poll also found that polarisation along political lines on whether climate change was indeed occurring had increased since 2018, and was at its highest levels since 2014 (Crowe). This may reflect the kind of polarised media landscape that was evident during the fires. A thorough dissection in public discourse of Australia’s unprecedented fire season has been largely eclipsed by the vast coverage of the coronavirus pandemic that so quickly followed it. In May 2020, however, the fires were back in the media, when the Bushfires Royal Commission found that the Black Summer “played out exactly as scientists predicted it would” and that more seasons like it were now “locked in” because of carbon emissions (Hitch). It now remains to be seen whether the revelatory extent of the climate change blame frame that played out in media discourse on the fires will be sufficient to garner meaningful action and policy change—or whether denialist discourses will again obscure climate change revelation and seek to maintain the status quo. References Anderson, Deb, et al. "Fanning the Blame: Media Accountability, Climate and Crisis on the Australian ‘Fire Continent’." Environmental Communication 12.7 (2018): 928-41.Australia Institute. “Climate Change Concern.” Jan. 2020. <https://www.tai.org.au/sites/default/files/Polling%20-%20January%202020%20-%20Climate%20change%20concern%20and%20attitude%20%5BWeb%5D.pdf>.Baker, Nick. “NSW Mayor Alams Deputy PM’s 'Insulting' Climate Change Attack during Bushfires.” SBS News 11 Nov. 2019. <https://www.sbs.com.au/news/nsw-mayor-slams-deputy-pm-s-insulting-climate-change-attack-during-bushfires>.Benford, Robert D., and David A. Snow. "Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment." Annual Review of Sociology 26.1 (2000): 611-39.Boer, Matthias M., Víctor Resco de Dios, and Ross A. Bradstock. "Unprecedented Burn Area of Australian Mega Forest Fires." Nature Climate Change 10.3 (2020): 171-72.Brown, Greg, and Olivia Caisley. “Greens Policies Increasing Bushfire Threat, Barnaby Joyce Says.” The Australian 11 Nov. 2019. <https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/deputy-pm-michael-mccormack-slams-raving-innercity-lunatics-for-linking-climate-change-to-fires/news-story/5c3ba8d3e72bc5f10fcf49a94fc9be85>.Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002 [1962].Cox, Lisa. “Former Fire Chiefs Warn Australia Is Unprepared for Escalating Fire Threat.” The Guardian 10 Apr. 2019. <https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/apr/09/former-fire-chiefs-warn-australia-unprepared-for-escalating-climate-threat>.Crowe, David. “Ipsos Poll Offers Only a Rough Guide to the Liberal Party’s Uncertain Fate.” Sydney Morning Herald 7 Apr. 2019.Davidson, Helen. “Mallacoota Fire: Images of 'Mayhem' and 'Armageddon' as Bushfires Rage.” The Guardian 31 Dec. 2019. <https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/31/mallacoota-fire-mayhem-armageddon-bushfires-rage-victoria-east-gippsland>.Doyle, Kate. “2019 Was Australia’s Hottest and Driest Year on Record.” ABC News 2 Jan. 2020. <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-02/2019-was-australias-hottest-and-driest-year-on-record/11837312>.“Escaping Hell.” The Independent 2 Jan. 2020.Ewart, Jacqui, and Hamish McLean. "Ducking for Cover in the ‘Blame Game’: News Framing of the Findings of Two Reports into the 2010–11 Queensland floods." Disasters 39.1 (2015): 166-84.Fife-Yeomans, Janet. “Apocalypse Now.” Herald Sun 1 Jan. 2020. Flanagan, Richard. “Australia Is Committing Climate Suicide.” The New York Times 3 Jan. 2020. <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/03/opinion/australia-fires-climate-change.html>.Fox, Aine, and Hannah Higgins. “Climate Talks for Another Day: NSW Premier.” 7 News 11 Nov. 2019. <https://7news.com.au/news/disaster-and-emergency/climate-change-talk-inappropriate-premier-c-55045>.Goloubeva, Jenya, and Nour Haydar. “Regional Mayors Criticise Politicians for Failing to Link Climate Change and Deadly Bushfires.” ABC News 11 Nov. 2019. <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-11/carol-sparks-climate-change-federal-government-claire-pontin/11691444>.Good Morning Britain. “Interview with Craig Kelly MP.” ITV 6 Jan. 2020.Guibert, Christelle. “Dopée au Charbon, la Riche Australie Nie le Réchauffement Climatique.” Ouest France 20 Dec. 2019. <https://www.ouest-france.fr/monde/australie/dopee-au-charbon-la-riche-australie-nie-le-rechauffement-climatique-6664289>.Hamblyn, Richard. “The Whistleblower and the Canary: Rhetorical Constructions of Climate Change.” Journal of Historical Geography 35 (2009): 223–36.Hansen, Anders. Environment, Media, and Communication. New York: Routledge, 2010.Happer, Catherine, and Greg Philo. “New Approaches to Understanding the Role of the News Media in the Formation of Public Attitudes and Behaviours on Climate Change.” European Journal of Communication 31.2 (2016): 136–51.Hitch, Georgia. “Bushfire Royal Commission: 'Black Summer' Played Out Exactly as Scientists Predicted It Would.” ABC News 25 May 2020. <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-25/bushfire-royal-commission-hearing-updates/12282808>.Johnstone, Craig. “History of Disasters Shows There Is Nothing New about Nation’s Destructive Blazes.” The Australian 31 Dec. 2019. <https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/history-of-disasters-shows-there-is-nothing-new-about-nations-destructive-blazes/news-story/f43c2a6037a8b0e422a69880bce10139>.Karlik, Evan. “Opinion: In Australia’s Raging Bushfires, a Climate-Change Warning to Its Leaders — and Ours.” The Los Angeles Times 10 Jan. 2020. <https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-01-10/australia-fires-prime-minister-politics-united-states>.Kenny, Chris. “Climate Alarmists Don't Want to Look at History.” Sky News 21 Nov. 2019. <https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6106878027001>.Lester, Libby. Media & Environment: Conflict, Politics and the News. Polity: Cambridge, 2010. Lloyd, Graham. “Climate Pressure ‘Doomed to Fail’, Says Angus Taylor.” The Australian 30 Dec. 2019. <https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/climate-pressure-doomed-to-fail-says-angus-taylor/news-story/f2441a20c70b944dd1d54ae15f304791>.Lukes, Stephen. “Questions about Power: Lessons from the Louisiana Hurricane.” Social Science Research Council (2006). 12 May. 2020 <https://items.ssrc.org/understanding-katrina/questions-about-power-lessons-from-the-louisiana-hurricane/>.Matthewman, Steve. Disasters, Risks and Revelation: Making Sense of Our Times. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.McCubbing, Gus. “Declare Climate Emergency: Ex-Fire Chiefs.” The Canberra Times 14 Nov. 2019. <https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6491540/declare-climate-emergency-ex-fire-chiefs/>.McNeish, Wallace. “From Revelation to Revolution: Apocalypticism in Green Politics.” Environmental Politics 26.6 (2017): 1035–54.Meade, Amanda. “The Australian: Murdoch-Owned Newspaper Accused of Downplaying Bushfires in Favour of Picnic Races.” The Guardian 4 Jan. 2020. <https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jan/04/the-australian-murdoch-owned-newspaper-accused-of-downplaying-bushfires-in-favour-of-picnic-races>.Nisbet Matthew C. “Knowledge into Action: Framing the Debates over Climate Change and Poverty.” Doing News Framing Analysis: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives. Eds. Paul D’Angelo and Jim A. Kuypers. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. 59–99.Nolan, Rachael H., et al. "Causes and Consequences of Eastern Australia’s 2019‐20 Season of Mega‐Fires." Global Change Biology (2020): 1039-41.Parham, John. Green Media and Popular Culture: An Introduction. New York and London: Palgrave, 2016.Redfearn, Graham. “Explainer: What Are the Underlying Causes of Australia's Shocking Bushfire Season?” The Guardian 13 Jan. 2020. <https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/13/explainer-what-are-the-underlying-causes-of-australias-shocking-bushfire-season>.Rose, Anna. “The Battle against the Bushfires Should Focus Our Attention on the War against Climate Inaction”. ABC News 2 Feb. 2020. <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-02/battle-against-bushfires-war-against-climate-inaction/11909806>.Ross, David, and Imogen Reid. “Bushfires: Firebugs Fuelling Crisis as National Arson Toll Hits 183.” The Australian 15 Jan. 2020. <https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/bushfires-firebugs-fuelling-crisis-asarson-arresttollhits183/news-story/52536dc9ca9bb87b7c76d36ed1acf53f>. “Rupert Murdoch's Son James Criticises News Corp, Fox for Climate Change and Bushfire Coverage.” ABC/Reuters 15 Jan. 2020. <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-15/james-murdoch-criticises-news-corp-fox-climate-change-coverage/11868544>.Shield, Charli. “Australian Bushfires: The Canary Building the Coal Mine.” Deutsche Welle 1 Jan. 2020. <https://www.dw.com/en/australian-bushfires-the-canary-building-the-coal-mine/a-51955677>.Smee, Ben. “Darkness at Noon: Australia’s Bushfire Day of Terror.” The Guardian 31 Dec. 2019. <https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/31/darkness-at-noon-australia-bushfire-day-of-terror>.“This Is What a Climate Crisis Looks Like.” Independent Online. 2 Jan. 2020. Suzuki, David. “Ecological Crises Deserve Better Media Coverage.” The David Suzuki Foundation, 2020. 18 Mar. 2020. <https://davidsuzuki.org/story/ecological-crises-deserve-better-media-coverage/>.Trumbo, Craig. “Constructing Climate Change: Claims and Frames in US News Coverage of an Environmental Issue.” Public Understanding of Science 5.3 (1996): 269–84.Weber, Derek, et al. "#ArsonEmergency and Australia's ‘Black Summer’: Polarisation and Misinformation on Social Media." arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.00742 (2020).Werner, Joel, and Suzannah Lyons. “The Size of Australia's Bushfire Crisis Captured in Five Big Numbers.” ABC News 5 Mar. 2020. <https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2020-03-05/bushfire-crisis-five-big-numbers/12007716>.

Samurai and Chinese martial arts themes inspire and permeate the uniquely philosophical lyrics and beats of Wu-Tang Clan, a New York-based hip-hop collective made popular in the mid-nineties with their debut album Enter the Wu-Tang: Return of the 36 Chambers. Original founder RZA (“Rizza”) scored his first full-length motion-picture soundtrack and made his feature film debut with Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch, 2000). Through a critical exploration of the film’s musical filter, it will be argued that RZA’s aesthetic vision effectively deterritorialises the figure of the samurai, according to which the samurai “change[s] in nature and connect[s] with other multiplicities” (Deleuze and Guattari, 9). The soundtrack consequently emancipates and redistributes the idea of the samurai from within the dynamic context of a fundamentally different aesthetic intensity, which the Wu-Tang has always hoped to communicate, that is to say, an aesthetics of adaptation or of what is called in hip-hop music more generally: an aesthetics of flow. At the center of Jarmusch’s film is a fundamental opposition between the sober asceticism and deeply coded lifestyle of Ghost Dog and the supple, revolutionary, itinerant hip-hop beats that flow behind it and beneath it, and which serve at once as philosophical foil and as alternate foundation to the film’s themes and message. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai tells the story of Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker), a deadly and flawlessly precise contract killer for a small-time contemporary New York organised crime family. He lives his life in a late 20th-century urban America according to the strict tenets of the 18th century text Hagakure, which relates the principles of the Japanese Bushido (literally, the “way of the warrior,” but more often defined and translated as the “code of the samurai”). Others have noted the way in which Ghost Dog not only fails as an adaptation of the samurai genre but thematises this very failure insofar as the film depicts a samurai’s unsuccessful struggle to adapt in a corrupt and fractured postmodern, post-industrial reality (Lanzagorta, par. 4, 9; Otomo, 35-8). If there is any hope at all for these adaptations (Ghost Dog is himself an example), it lies, according to some, in the singular, outmoded integrity of his nostalgia, which despite the abstract jouissance or satisfaction it makes available, is nevertheless blank and empty (Otomo, 36-7). Interestingly, in his groundbreaking book Spectacular Vernaculars, and with specific reference to hip-hop, Russell Potter suggests that where a Eurocentric postmodernism posits a lack of meaning and collapse of value and authority, a black postmodernism that is neither singular nor nostalgic is prepared to emerge (6-9). And as I will argue there are more concrete adaptive strategies at work in the film, strategies that point well beyond the film to popular culture more generally. These are anti-nostalgic strategies of possibility and escape that have everything to do with the way in which hip-hop as soundtrack enables Ghost Dog in his becoming-samurai, a process by which a deterritorialised subject and musical flow fuse to produce a hybrid adaptation and identity. But hip-hip not only makes possible such a becoming, it also constitutes a potentially liberating adaptation of the past and of otherness that infuses the film with a very different but still concrete jouissance. At the root of Ghost Dog is a conflict between what Deleuze and Guattari call state and nomad authority, between the code that prohibits adaptation and its willful betrayer. The state apparatus, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the quintessential form of interiority. The state nourishes itself through the appropriation, the bringing into its interior, of all that over which it exerts its control, and especially over those nomadic elements that constantly threaten to escape (Deleuze and Guattari, 380-7). In Ghost Dog, the code or state-form functions throughout the film as an omnipresent source of centralisation, authorisation and organisation. It is attested to in the intensely stratified urban environment in which Ghost Dog lives, a complicated and forbidding network of streets, tracks, rails, alleys, cemeteries, tenement blocks, freeways, and shipping yards, all of which serve to hem Ghost Dog in. And as race is highlighted in the film, it, too, must be included among the many ways in which characters are always already contained. What encounters with racism in the film suggest is the operative presence of a plurality of racial and cultural codes; the strict segregation of races and cultures in the film and the animosity which binds them in opposition reflect a racial stratification that mirrors the stratified topography of the cityscape. Most important, perhaps, is the way in which Bushido itself functions, at least in part, as code, as well as the way in which the form of the historical samurai in legend and reality circumscribes not only Ghost Dog’s existence but the very possibility of the samurai and the samurai film as such. On the one hand, Bushido attests to the absolute of religion, or as Deleuze and Guattari describe it: “a center that repels the obscure … essentially a horizon that encompasses” and which forms a “bond”, “pact”, or “alliance” between subject/culture and the all-encompassing embrace of its deity: in this case, the state-form which sanctions samurai existence (382-3). On the other hand, but in the same vein, the advent of Bushido, and in particular the Hagakure text to which Ghost Dog turns for meaning and guidance, coincides historically with the emergence of the modern Japanese state, or put another way, with the eclipse of the very culture it sponsors. In fact, samurai history as a whole can be viewed to some extent as a process of historical containment by which the state-form gradually encompassed those nomadic warring elements at the heart of early samurai existence. This is the socio-historical context of Bushido, insofar as it represents the codification of the samurai subject and the stratification of samurai culture under the pressures of modernisation and the spread of global capitalism. It is a social and historical context marked by the power of a bourgeoning military, political and economic organisation, and by policies of restraint, centralisation and sedentariness. Moreover, the local and contemporary manifestations of this social and historical context are revealed in many of the elements that permeate not only the traditional samurai films of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi or Kobayashi, but modern adaptations of the genre as well, which tend to convey a nostalgic mourning for this loss, or more precisely, for this failure to adapt. Thus the filmic atmosphere of Ghost Dog is dominated by the negative qualities of inaction, nonviolence and sobriety, and whether these are taken to express the sterility and impotence of postmodern existence or the emptiness of a nostalgia for an unbroken and heroic past, these qualities point squarely towards the transience of culture and towards the impossibility of adaptation and survival. Ghost Dog is a reluctant assassin, and the inherently violent nature of his task is always deflected. In the same way, most of Ghost Dog’s speech in the film is delivered through his soundless readings of the Hagakure, silent and austere moments that mirror as well the creeping, sterile atmosphere in which most of the film’s action takes place. It is an atmosphere of interiority that points not only towards the stratified environment which restricts possibility and expressivity but also squarely towards the meaning of Bushido as code. But this atmosphere meets resistance. For the samurai is above all a man of war, and, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “the man of war [that is to say, the nomad] is always committing an offence against” the State (383). In Ghost Dog, for all the ways in which Ghost Dog’s experience is stratified by the Bushido as code and by the post-industrial urban reality in which he lives and moves, the film shows equally the extent to which these strata or codes are undermined by nomadic forces that trace “lines of flight” and escape (Deleuze and Guattari, 423). Clearly it is the film’s soundtrack, and thus, too, the aesthetic intensities of the flow in hip-hop music, which both constitute and facilitate this escape: We have an APB on an MC killer Looks like the work of a master … Merciless like a terrorist Hard to capture the flow Changes like a chameleon (“Da Mystery of Chessboxin,” Enter) Herein lies the significance of (and difference between) the meaning of Bushido as code and as way, a problem of adaptation and translation which clearly reflects the central conflict of the film. A way is always a way out, the very essence of escape, and it always facilitates the breaking away from a code. Deleuze and Guattari describe the nomad as problematic, hydraulic, inseparable from flow and heterogeneity; nomad elements, as those elements which the State is incapable of drawing into its interior, are said to remain exterior and excessive to it (361-2). It is thus significant that the interiority of Ghost Dog’s readings from the Hagakure and the ferocious exteriority of the soundtrack, which along with the Japanese text helps narrate the tale, reflect the same relationship that frames the state and nomad models. The Hagakure is not only read in silence by the protagonist throughout the film, but the Hagakure also figures prominently inside the diegetic world of the film as a visual element, whereas the soundtrack, whether it is functioning diegetically or non-diegetically, is by its very nature outside the narrative space of the film, effectively escaping it. For Deleuze and Guattari, musical expression is inseparable from a process of becoming, and, in fact, it is fair to say that the jouissance of the film is supplied wholly by the soundtrack insofar as it deterritorialises the conventional language of the genre, takes it outside of itself, and then reinvests it through updated musical flows that facilitate Ghost Dog’s becoming-samurai. In this way, too, the soundtrack expresses the violence and action that the plot carefully avoids and thus intimately relates the extreme interiority of the protagonist to an outside, a nomadic exterior that forecloses any possibility of nostalgia but which suggests rather a tactics of metamorphosis and immediacy, a sublime deterritorialisation that involves music becoming-world and world becoming-music. Throughout the film, the appearance of the nomad is accompanied, even announced, by the onset of a hip-hop musical flow, always cinematically represented by Ghost Dog’s traversing the city streets or by lengthy tracking shots of a passenger pigeon in flight, both of which, to take just two examples, testify to purely nomadic concepts: not only to the sheer smoothness of open sky-space and flight with its techno-spiritual connotations, but also to invisible, inherited pathways that cross the stratified heart of the city undetected and untraceable. Embodied as it is in the Ghost Dog soundtrack, and grounded in what I have chosen to call an aesthetics of flow, hip-hop is no arbitrary force in the film; it is rather both the adaptive medium through which Ghost Dog and the samurai genre are redeemed and the very expression of this adaptation. Deleuze and Guattari write: The necessity of not having control over language, of being a foreigner in one’s own tongue, in order to draw speech to oneself and ‘bring something incomprehensible into the world.’ Such is the form of exteriority … that forms a war machine. (378) Nowhere else do Deleuze and Guattari more clearly outline the affinities that bind their notion of the nomad and the form of exteriority that is essential to it with the politics of language, cultural difference and authenticity which so color theories of race and critical analyses of hip-hop music and culture. And thus the key to hip-hop’s adaptive power lies in its spontaneity and in its bringing into the world of something incomprehensible and unanticipated. If the code in Ghost Dog is depicted as nonviolent, striated, interior, singular, austere and measured, then the flow in hip-hop and in the music of the Wu-Tang that informs Ghost Dog’s soundtrack is violent, fluid, exterior, variable, plural, playful and incalculable. The flow in hip-hop, as well as in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, is grounded in a kinetic linguistic spontaneity, variation and multiplicity. Its lyrical flow is a cascade of accelerating rhymes, the very speed and implausibility of which often creates a sort of catharsis in performers and spectators: I bomb atomically, Socrates’ philosophies and hypotheses can’t define how I be droppin’ these mockeries, lyrically perform armed robberies Flee with the lottery, possibly they spotted me Battle-scarred shogun, explosion. … (“Triumph”, Forever) Over and against the paradigm of the samurai, which as I have shown is connected with relations of content and interiority, the flow is attested to even more explicitly in the Wu-Tang’s embrace of the martial arts, kung-fu and Chinese cinematic traditions. And any understanding of the figure of the samurai in the contemporary hip-hop imagination must contend with the relationship of this figure to both the kung-fu fighting traditions and to kung-fu cinema, despite the fact that they constitute very different cultural and historical forms. I would, of course, argue that it is precisely this playful adaptation or literal deterritorialisation of otherwise geographically and culturally distinct realities that comprises the adaptive potential of hip-hop. Kung-fu, like hip-hop, is predicated on the exteriority of style. It is also a form of action based on precision and immediacy, on the fluid movements of the body itself deterritorialised as weapon, and thus it reiterates that blend of violence, speed and fluidity that grounds the hip-hop aesthetic: “I’ll defeat your rhyme in just four lines / Yeh, I’ll wax you and tax you and plus save time” (RZA and Norris, 211). Kung-fu lends itself to improvisation and to adaptability, essential qualities of combat and of lyrical flows in hip-hop music. For example, just as in kung-fu combat a fighter’s success is fundamentally determined by his ability to intuit and adapt to the style and skill and detailed movements of his adversary, the victory of a hip-hop MC engaged in, say, a freestyle battle will be determined by his capacity for improvising and adapting his own lyrical flow to counter and overcome his opponent’s. David Bordwell not only draws critical lines of difference between the Hong Kong and Hollywood action film but also hints at the striking differences between the “delirious kinetic exhilaration” of Hong Kong cinema and the “sober, attenuated, and grotesque expressivity” of the traditional Japanese samurai film (91-2). Moreover, Bordwell emphasises what the Wu-Tang Clan has always known and demonstrated: the sympathetic bond between kung-fu action or hand-to-hand martial arts combat and the flow in hip-hop music. Bordwell calls his kung-fu aesthetic “expressive amplification”, which communicates with the viewer through both a visual and physical intelligibility and which is described by Bordwell in terms of beats, exaggerations, and the “exchange and rhyming of gestures” (87). What is pointed to here are precisely those aspects of Hong Kong cinema that share essential similarities with hip-hop music as such and which permeate the Wu-Tang aesthetic and thus, too, challenge or redistribute the codified stillness and negativity that define the filmic atmosphere of Ghost Dog. Bordwell argues that Hong Kong cinema constitutes an aesthetics in action that “pushes beyond Western norms of restraint and plausibility,” and in light of my thesis, I would argue that it pushes beyond these same conventions in traditional Japanese cinema as well (86). Bruce Lee, too, in describing the difference between Chinese kung-fu and Japanese fighting forms in A Warrior’s Journey (Bruce Little, 2000) points to the latter’s regulatory principles of hesitation and segmentarity and to the former’s formlessness and shapelessness, describing kung-fu when properly practiced as “like water, it can flow or it can crash,” qualities which echo not only Bordwell’s description of the pause-burst-pause pattern of kung-fu cinema’s combat sequences but also the Wu-Tang Clan’s own self-conception as described by GZA (“Jizza”), a close relative of RZA and co-founder of the Wu-Tang Clan, when he is asked to explain the inspiration for the title of his album Liquid Swords: Actually, ‘Liquid Swords’ comes from a kung-fu flick. … But the title was just … perfect. I was like, ‘Legend of a Liquid Sword.’ Damn, this is my rhymes. This is how I’m spittin’ it. We say the tongue is symbolic of the sword anyway, you know, and when in motion it produces wind. That’s how you hear ‘wu’. … That’s the wind swinging from the sword. The ‘Tang’, that’s when it hits an object. Tang! That’s how it is with words. (RZA and Norris, 67) Thus do two competing styles animate the aesthetic dynamics of the film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai: an aesthetic of codified arrest and restraint versus an aesthetic of nomadic resistance and escape. The former finds expression in the film in the form of the cultural and historical meanings of the samurai tradition, defined by negation and attenuated sobriety, and in the “blank parody” (Otomo, 35) of a postmodern nostalgia for an empty historical past exemplified in the appropriation of the Samurai theme and in the post-industrial prohibitions and stratifications of contemporary life and experience; the latter is attested to in the affirmative kinetic exhilaration of kung-fu style, immediacy and expressivity, and in the corresponding adaptive potential of a hip-hop musical flow, a distributive, productive, and anti-nostalgic becoming, the nomadic essence of which redeems the rhetoric of postmodern loss described by the film. References Bordwell, David. “Aesthetics in Action: Kungfu, Gunplay, and Cinematic Expressivity.” At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Ed. and Trans. Esther Yau. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2004. Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey. Dir./Filmmaker John Little. Netflix DVD. Warner Home Video, 2000. Daidjo, Yuzan. Code of the Samurai. Trans. Thomas Cleary. Tuttle Martial Arts. Boston: Tuttle, 1999. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP,1987. Forman, Murray, and Mark Anthony Neal, eds. That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. Dir. Jim Jarmusch. Netflix DVD. Artisan, 2000. Hurst, G. Cameron III. Armed Martial Arts of Japan. New Haven: Yale UP,1998. Ikegami, Eiko. The Taming of the Samurai. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Jansen, Marius, ed. Warrior Rule in Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Kurosawa, Akira. Seven Samurai and Other Screenplays. Trans. Donald Richie. London: Faber and Faber, 1992. Lanzagorta, Marco. “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.” Senses of Cinema. Sept-Oct 2002. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/02/22/ghost_dog.htm>. Mol, Serge. Classical Fighting Arts of Japan. Tokyo/New York: Kodansha Int., 2001. Otomo, Ryoko. “‘The Way of the Samurai’: Ghost Dog, Mishima, and Modernity’s Other.” Japanese Studies 21.1 (May 2001) 31-43. Potter, Russell. Spectacular Vernaculars. Albany: SUNY P, 1995. RZA, The, and Chris Norris. The Wu-Tang Manual. New York: Penguin, 2005. Silver, Alain. The Samurai Film. Woodstock, New York: Overlook, 1983. Smith, Christopher Holmes. “Method in the Madness: Exploring the Boundaries of Identity in Hip-Hop Performativity.” Social Identities 3.3 (Oct 1997): 345-75. Watkins, Craig S. Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998. Wu-Tang Clan. Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers. CD. RCA/Loud Records, 1993. ———. Wu-Tang Forever. CD. RCA/Loud Records, 1997. Xing, Yan, ed. Shaolin Kungfu. Trans. Zhang Zongzhi and Zhu Chengyao. Beijing: China Pictorial, 1996. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Eubanks, Kevin P. "Becoming-Samurai: Samurai (Films), Kung-Fu (Flicks) and Hip-Hop (Soundtracks)." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/11-eubanks.php>. APA Style Eubanks, K. (May 2007) "Becoming-Samurai: Samurai (Films), Kung-Fu (Flicks) and Hip-Hop (Soundtracks)," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/11-eubanks.php>.

Introduction Within wellness circles, there has been growing concern over an increasing focus on Alternative Right (or Alt-right) conspiracy (see Aubry; Bloom and Moskalenko). Greene, referring to a definition provided by the Anti-Defamation League, defines the Alt-right as a loose political network characterised by its rejection of mainstream conservatism, embrace of white nationalism, and use of online platforms (33). The “wellness revolution”, on the other hand, which marked a split from the health care sector in which “thought leaders” replaced medical experts as authorities on health (Pilzer, qtd. in Kickbusch and Payne 275), combines New Age practices with ideological movements that emphasise the “interdependence of body, mind and spirit” (Voigt and Laing 32). It has been noted that there is overlap between the circulation of conspiracy theory and New Age mysticism (see Ward and Voas; Parmigiani). Influencers following the Paleo diet, or Palaeolithic diet, such as Australian celebrity chef and Paleo diet guru Pete Evans, have also come under fire for sharing conspiracy theories and pseudoscience (see Brennan). Johnson notes that the origins of the Paleo diet can be traced back to 1975, with the publication of Dr Walter Voegtlin’s book The Stone Age Diet. This text, however, has been largely disavowed by Paleo leaders due to Voegtlin’s “white supremacist, eugenicist, and generally unpalatable politics”. Nevertheless, it is interesting to consider how white nationalism and conspiracy theory may overlap within the wellness space. A specific example occurred in 2020, when Pete Evans shared an Alt-right conspiracy meme to his Facebook account. The ‘butterfly-caterpillar meme’ contained the image of a black sun, a symbol equated with the swastika (Goodrick-Clarke 3). Though Evans later commented that the sharing of the hate symbol was unintentional, and that he misunderstood the symbol, this case raised questions about the ability of wellness influencers to amplify white nationalist messaging. This essay is concerned with the question: what makes the wellness industry a target for the spreading of white nationalist ideas? It argues that the wellness industry and far-right ideology possess a pre-occupation with bodily purity which makes it more likely that white nationalist material carrying this message will be spread via wellness networks. Through a critical examination of the media surrounding Evans’s sharing of the butterfly-caterpillar meme, this case study will examine the ideological aspects of the Paleo diet and how they appeal to a white nationalist agenda. Focussing on the Australian context, this essay will theorise the spreadability of memes in relation to white nationalist symbolism. It contends that the Paleo diet positions foods that are not organic as impure, and holds a preference for positive messaging. Alt-right propaganda packaged in a positive and New Age frame poses a danger in that it can operate as a kind of contagion for high-profile networks, exponentially increasing its spreadability. This is of particular concern when it is considered that diet can have an impact on people’s actions outside of the online space: it impacts what people consume and do with their bodies, as evidenced by calls for eating disorders created by algorithmic repetition to be considered a ‘cyber-pathy’. This creates the conditions for the wellness industry to be targeted using memes as recruitment material for white nationalist groups. The Paleo Diet and the Sharing of a Neo-Nazi Meme Pete Evans is a famous Australian TV Chef from the hit series My Kitchen Rules, a show that ran from 2010-2020. The show followed pairs from different households as they cooked for Evans and his co-host Manu Feildel. During the show’s run, Evans also became known for spruiking the Paleo diet, producing several cookbooks and a documentary on the topic. According to Catie Gressier, who conducted a study of Paleo dieters in Melbourne, Paleo’s aim is “to eat only those foods available prior to the agricultural revolution: meat, fish, vegetables, nuts, seeds and a small amount of fruit” and that this framed as a more “authentic” diet (3). This is seen as an ideological diet as opposed to others which may consist of rules or eating restrictions. The Paleo diet stresses “real foods” or “organic foods as close to their real state as possible” (Ramachandran et al.). Studies find that the paleo diet can be very nutritious (Cambeses-Franco et al. 2021). However, it is important to note that the presence of multiple influencers and thought leaders in the field means that there can be several variations in the diet. This article will limit its examination to that of the diet promoted by Evans. A common rationale is that the human body is incompatible with certain mass-produced foods (like grains, pulses, and dairy products, sugar, salt, and modification practices (like food processing), and that these are the cause of many modern conditions (Cambeses-Franco et al. 2021). While growing concerns over unnatural additives in foods are warranted, it can be observed that in Evans’s case, the promotion of the Paleo diet increasingly blurred the line between pseudoscience and conspiracy. In his Paleo diet book for toddlers, Evans emphasised the importance of the ideological diet and suggested that parents feed their toddlers bone broth instead of breast milk, prompting a federal investigation by the health department (Brennan). This escalated in 2020 during the global pandemic. In January, Evans promoted the work of a prominent anti-vaccine advocate (Molloy). In April, his Biocharger device, which he claimed could cure coronavirus, earned him a hefty fine from the Therapeutic Goods Administration (White). In November, several months after My Kitchen Rules was cancelled, Evans posted an Alt-right political cartoon with the image of a black sun, a symbol equated with the swastika (Goodrick-Clarke 3), to his Facebook account (Gillespie). In later news reports, it was also pointed out that the black sun symbol was emblazoned on the backpack of the Christchurch shooter (see Sutton and Molloy) who had targeted two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 people and injuring 40. Initially, when a user on Facebook pointed out that the meme contained a black sun, Evans responded “I was waiting for someone to see that” (Evans, qtd. in Gillespie). Evans eventually recanted the image, writing: sincere apologies to anyone who misinterpreted a previous post of a caterpillar and a butterfly having a chat over a drink and perceived that I was promoting hatred. I look forward to studying every symbol that have ever existed and research them thoroughly before posting. Hopefully this symbol ❤️ resonates deeply into the hearts of ALL! (Evans, qtd. in Gillespie). The post was later deleted. In December of 2020, Evans’s Facebook page of around 1.5 million followers was removed due to its sharing of conspiracy theories and misinformation about the coronavirus (Gillespie). However, it should be noted that the sharing of the caterpillar-butterfly meme was different from the previous instances of conspiracy sharing, in that Evans stated that it was unintentional, and it included imagery associated with neo-Nazi ideology (the black sun). Evans’s response implies that, while the values of the Paleo diet are framed in terms of positivity, the symbols in the butterfly-caterpillar meme are associated with “promoting hatred”. In this way, Evans frames racism as merely and simplistically an act of hatred, rather than engaging in the ways in which it reinforces a racial hierarchy and racially motivated violence. According to Hartzell (10), white nationalists tend to position themselves as superior to other races and see themselves as protectors of the “white race”. “White” in this context is of European descent (Geary, Schofield and Sutton). There are conspiracy theories associated with this belief, one of which is that their race is under threat of extinction because of immigration from ‘undesirable’ countries of origin. This can also be observed in the Alt-right, which is a white nationalist movement that was created and organised online. According to Berger, this movement “seeks to unify the activities of several different extremist movements or ideologies”. This is characterised by anti-immigrant sentiment, conspiracy theories, and support for former US President Donald Trump. It can be argued, in this case, that the symbol links to a larger conspiracy theory in which whiteness must be defended against some perceived threat. The meme implies that there is an ‘us’ versus ‘them’, or ‘good’ versus ‘evil’, and that some people are ‘in the know’ while others are not. Spreadable Memes An important aspect of this case study is that this instance of far-right recruitment used the form of a meme. Memes are highly spreadable, and they have very complex mechanisms for disseminating ideas and ideology. This can have a dramatic impact if that ideology is a harmful one, such a white supremacist symbol. While the digital meme, an image with a small amount of text, is common today, Richard Dawkins originally used the term meme to describe the ways in which units of culture can be spread from person to person (qtd. in Shifman 9). These can be anything from the lyrics of a song to a political idea. Jeff Hemsley and Robert Mason (qtd. in Shifman) see virality as a “process wherein a message is actively forwarded from one person to other, within and between multiple weakly linked personal networks, resulting in a rapid increase in the number of people who are exposed to the message” (55). This also links to Jenkins, Ford, and Green’s notions of spreadability (3-11), a natural selection process by which media content continues to exist through networked sharing, or disappears once it stops being shared. Evans’s response indicates that he merely shared the image. Despite the black sun imagery, a Make America Great Again (MAGA) hat is clearly present. A political presence, and one that is associated with white nationalism, is present despite Evans’s attempts to frame the meme in the language of innocence and positivity. This is not to say Evans is extremist or supports a white nationalist agenda. However, in much the same way that sharing of imagery may not necessarily indicate agreement with its ideological messaging, this framing creates a way in which wellness influencers may avoid criticism (Ma 1). Furthermore, the act of sharing the meme, regardless of intention, amplifies its message exponentially. The Paleo Diet, the Far Right and Purity This overlap between wellness and white nationalist ideology is not new. In Jules Evans’s exploration of why QAnon is popular with New Age and far-right followers, she points to the fact that many Nazi leaders – Hitler, Hess, Himmler – “were into alternative medicine, organic and vegetarian diets, homeopathy, anti-vaxxing, and natural healing”. Similarly, Bernhard Forchtner and Ana Tominc argue that a natural diet which focussed on food purity was favoured by the Nazis (421). In their examination of the German neo-Nazi YouTube channel Balaclava Küche they argue add that “present-day extreme right views on environment and diet are often close to positions found in contemporary Green movements and foodie magazines” (422). Like neo-Nazi preoccupations with food, the Paleo diet’s ideology has its basis in the concept of purity. Gressier found that the Paleo diet contains an “embedded moralism” that “filters into constructions of food as either pure or polluting” (1). This is supported by Ramachandran et al.’s study, which found that the diet “promoted ‘real food’ – or the shift to consuming organic whole foods that are as close to their natural state as possible, with an avoidance of processed foods”. This framing of the food as real creates a binary – if one is real, the other must not be. Another example can be seen in Pete Evans’s Webpage, which lists about 33 Paleo recipes. The Butter Chicken recipe states: the paleo way of life is not meant to be restrictive, as you can see from this lovely butter chicken recipe. All the nasties have been replaced with good-quality ingredients that make it as good, if not better, than the original. I prefer chicken thighs for their superior flavour and tenderness. The term “nasties” here can be seen to create a dichotomy between real and fake, the west and the east. We see these foods are associated with impurity, the foods that are not “real foods” are positioned as a threat. It can be seen as an orientalist approach, othering those not associated with the west. As can be observed in this Butter Chicken recipe that is “getting rid of the nasties”, it appropriates and ‘sanitises’ ingredients. In her article on the campaign to boycott Halal, Shakira Hussein points out that “ethnic food” presents as multiculturalism in the context of white chefs and homecooks, but the opposite is true if the roles are switched (91). Later in her essay “Halal Chops and Fascist Cupcakes”, she discusses the “weaponisation of food” and how specific white nationalist groups express disgust at the thought of consuming Muslim food. This ethnocentric framing of butter chicken projects a western superiority, replacing traditional ingredients with ‘familiar’ ingredients, making it more palatable to nationalistic tastes. Spreading Consumption I have established that the Paleo diet, with its emphasis on ‘real foods’, is deeply embedded with nationalist ideology. I have also discussed how this is highly spreadable in the form of a meme, particularly when it is framed in the language of positivity. Furthermore, I have argued that this is an attempt to escape criticism for promoting white nationalist values. I would like to turn now to how this spreadability through diet can have an impact on the physical actions of its followers through its digital communication. The Paleo diet, and how to go about following it as described by celebrity influencers, has an impact on what people do with their bodies. Hanganu-Bresch discusses the concept of orthorexia, a fixation with eating proper foods that operates as a cyber-pathy, a digitally propagated condition targeting media users. Like the ‘viral’ and ‘spreadable’ meme, this puritanical obsession with eating can also be considered both a spreadable condition and ideology. According to Hanganu-Bresch, orthorexia sees this diet as a way to overcome an illness or to improve general health, but this also begins to feel righteous and even holy or spiritual. This operates within the context of neoliberalism. Brice and Thorpe talk about women’s activewear worn in everyday settings, or ‘athleisure’, as a neoliberal uniform that says, ‘I’m taking control of my body and health’. To take this idea a step further, this uniform could be extended out into digital spaces as well in terms of what people post on their profiles and social media. This ideological aspect operates as not only a highly spreadable message, but one that is targeted at the overall health of its followers. It encourages not only the spreading of ideology, in this case, white nationalist ideology, but also the modification of food consumption. If this were then to be used as a vehicle to spread messages that encourage white nationalist ideology, it can be seen to be not only a kind of contagion but a powerful one at that. White nationalist iconography that is clearly associated with white supremacist propaganda has the potential to spread extremism. However, neoliberal principles of discipline and bodywork operate through “messages of empowerment, choice, and self-care” (Lavrence and Lozanski, qtd. in Brice and Thorpe). While racist extremism does not necessarily equate to neoliberal and ethnocentric values, a frame of growth, purity, and positivity create an overlap that allow extremist messaging to spread more easily through these networks. Conclusion The case of Pete Evans’s sharing of the butterfly-caterpillar meme exemplifies a concerning overlap between white nationalist discourse and wellness. Ideologically based diets that emphasise real foods, such as the Paleo diet, have a preoccupation with purity and consumption that appeals to white nationalism. They also share a tolerance for the promotion of conspiracy theory and tendency to create an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dichotomy. Noting these points can provide insight into a potential targeting of the wellness industry to spread racist ideology. As research into spreadability shows, memes are extremely shareable, even if the user does not grasp the meaning behind the symbolism. This article has also extended the idea of the cyberpathy further, noting a weaponisation of the properties of the meme, for the purposes of radicalisation, and how these are accelerated by celebrity influence. This is more potent within the wellness industry when the message is packaged as a form of growth and positivity, which serve to deflect accusations of racism. Furthermore, when diet is combined with white nationalist ideology, it may operate like a contagion, creating the conditions for racism. Those exposed may not have the intention of sharing or spreading racist ideology, but its amplification contributes to the promotion of a racist agenda nevertheless. As such, further investigation into the far-right infiltration of the wellness industry would be beneficial as it could provide more insight into how wellness groups are targeted. Acknowledgements A previous version of this article was presented with Dr Shakira Hussein and Scheherazade Bloul at the Just Food Conference at New York University in June 2021. This article would not have been possible without their input and advice. Dr Shakira Hussein can be contacted at shussein@unimelb.edu.au and Scheherazade Bloul can be contacted at scherrybloul@gmail.com. References Aubry, Sophie. “‘Playing with Fire’: The Curious Marriage of Qanon and Wellness.” Sydney Morning Herald 27 Sep. 2020. 29 July 2020 <https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/health-and-wellness/playing-with-fire-the- curious-marriage-of-qanon-and-wellness-20200924-p55yu7.html>. Berger, J.M. “Trump Is the Glue That Binds the Far Right.” The Atlantic 29 Oct. 2018. 20 July 2021 <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/trump-alt-right-twitter/574219/>. Bloom, Mia, and Sophia Moskalenko. Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon. Stanford University Press, 2021. Brennan, Imogen. “Pete Evans’ Co-Authored Paleo Diet Cookbook for Babies under Investigation.” ABC News 12 Mar. 2015. 13 Nov. 2021 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-12/paleo-diet-cookbook-for-babies-under-investigation-pete-evans/6309452>. Brice, Julie, and Holly Thorpe. “Chapter 1: Activewear: The Uniform of the Neoliberal Female Citizen.” Sportswomen’s Apparel around the World: Uniformly Dressed (New Femininities in Digital, Physical and Sporting Cultures). Ed. Linda K. Fuller. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 19-35. Cambeses-Franco, Cristina, Sara González-García, Gumersindo Feijoo, and María Teresa Moreira. “Is the Paleo Diet Safe for Health and the Environment?” Science of the Total Environment 781 (2021). <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972101785X>. Evans, Pete. “Butter Chicken.” Peteevans.com. 8 Mar. 2022 <https://peteevans.com/recipes/butter-chicken/>. Forchtner, Bernhard, and Ana Tominc. “Kalashnikov and Cooking-Spoon: Neo-Nazism, Veganism and a Lifestyle Cooking Show on Youtube.” Food, Culture & Society 20.3 (2017): 415-441. Geary, Daniel, Camilla Schofield, and Jennifer Sutton. “Introduction: Toward a Global History of White Nationalism.” Global White Nationalism: From Apartheid to Trump. Eds. Daniel Geary, Camilla Schofield, and Jennifer Sutton. 1st ed. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2020. 1–28. Gillespie, Eden. “‘Misinterpreted’: Pete Evans Apologises for Sharing Cartoon with Supposed Neo-Nazi Symbol and Is Dropped by Publisher.” SBS The Feed 16 Nov. 2020. 13 Nov. 2021 <https://www.sbs.com.au/news/the-feed/misinterpreted-pete-evans-apologises-for-sharing-cartoon-with-supposed-neo-nazi-symbol-and-is-dropped-by-publisher>. Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity. New York: New York UP, 2001. Greene, Viveca S. “‘Deplorable’ Satire: Alt-Right Memes, White Genocide Tweets, and Redpilling Normies.” Studies in American Humor 5.1 (2019): 31-69. Gressier, Catie. “Food as Faith: Suffering, Salvation and the Paleo Diet in Australia.” Food Culture & Society (2021): 1-13. Hanganu-Bresch, Cristina. “Orthorexia: Eating Right in the Context of Healthism.” Medical Humanities 46.3 (2020): 311-322. Hartzell, Stephanie L. “Alt-White: Conceptualizing the Alt-Right as a Rhetorical Bridge between White Nationalism and Mainstream Public Discourse.” Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric 8 (2018). Hussein, Shakira. “Not Eating the Muslim Other: Halal Certification, Scaremongering, and the Racialisation of Muslim Identity.” International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 4.3 (2015): 85-96. Hussein, Shakira. “Halal Chops and Fascist Cupcakes: On Diversity and the Weaponisation of Food.” Meanjin 76.1 (2017). <https://meanjin.com.au/essays/halal-chops-and-fascist-cupcakes/>. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York UP, 2013. Johnson, Adrienne Rose. “The Paleo Diet and the American Weight Loss Utopia, 1975–2014.” Utopian Studies 26.1 (2015): 101-124. Kickbusch, Ilona, and Lea Payne. “Twenty-First Century Health Promotion: The Public Health Revolution Meets the Wellness Revolution.” Health Promotion International 18.4 (2003): 275-278. Ma, Cindy. “What Is the ‘Lite’ in ‘Alt-Lite?’ The Discourse of White Vulnerability and Dominance among Youtube’s Reactionaries.” Social Media + Society 7.3 (2021). Molloy, Shannon. “Celebrity Chef Pete Evans Sparks Fury for ‘Dangerous’ Selfie with Anti-Vaccination Voice.” News.com.au 13 Jan. 2020. 13 Nov. 2021 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-12/paleo-diet-cookbook-for-babies-under-investigation-pete-evans/6309452>. Morgan, Jonathon. “These Charts Show Exactly How Racist and Radical the Alt-Right Has Gotten This Year.” The Washington Post 26 Sep. 2016. 20 July 2021 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/09/26/these-charts-show-exactly-how-racist-and-radical-the-alt-right-has-gotten-this-year/>. Parmigiani, Giovanna. “Magic and Politics: Conspirituality and COVID-19.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 89.2 (2021): 506–529. Ramachandran, Divya, James Kite, Amy Jo Vassallo, Josephine Y. Chau, Stephanie Partridge, Becky Freeman, and Timothy Gill. “Food Trends and Popular Nutrition Advice Online – Implications for Public Health.” Online Journal of Public Health Informatics 10.2 (2018). Shifman, Limor. Memes in Digital Culture. MIT Press, 2014. Sutton, Candace, Shannon Molloy, and staff writers. “Gunman’s Family in Australia Called Police after News of Christchurch Massacre.” News.com.au 16 Mar. 2019. 14 Nov 2021 <https://www.news.com.au/world/pacific/gunman-who-opened-fire-on-christchurch-mosque-addresses-attack-in-manifesto/news-story/70372a39f720697813607a9ec426a734>. Voigt, Cornelia, and Jennifer H. Laing. “A Way through the Maze: Exploring Differences and Overlaps between Wellness and Medical Tourism Providers.” Medical Tourism and Transnational Health Care (2013): 30-47. Ward, Charlotte, and David Voas. “The Emergence of Conspirituality.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 26.1 (2011): 103–121. White, Daniella. “Celebrity Chef Pete Evans Fined $80,000, Ordered to Stop Making Wellness Claims.” Sydney Morning Herald 25 Mar. 2020. 13 Nov. 2021 <https://www.smh.com.au/national/celebrity-chef-pete-evans-fined-80-000-ordered-to-stop-making-wellness-claims-20210525-p57v40.html>. Zhou, Naaman. “Pete Evans’ Documentary Should be Cut from Netflix, Doctors Group Says”. The Guardian 2 June 2018. 3 Jan. 2022 <https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/jun/03/pete-evans-documentary-should-be-cut-from-netflix-doctors-group-says>.

Revving I’m convinced that no one actually listens to podcasts. Or maybe it’s just that no one admits it. This is partially because a podcast falls between fetish and precious. Listening to a podcast is at once intimate, someone speaking directly to you through your AirPods, and distant, since you’re likely listening by yourself. Listening to a podcast is weird enough; talking about listening to a podcast makes other people feel uncomfortable. This is why no one listens to podcasts while doing nothing else. Podcasts encourage passive listening; they compel active participation in something other than the podcast. There’s a suggested utility to listening to a podcast while doing something else—walking your cockapoo around the block, rearranging your bookshelf, prepping your meals—like you’re performing your practicality for the world. Listening to a podcast is not sufficient. When listening to a podcast, you simultaneously do something else to justify the listening. Podcasts are relatively new, as academic texts go. Yet they have been quickly taken up as technologies and artifacts of analysis (Vásquez), tools for teaching writing (Bowie), and modes of distributing scholarship (McGregor and Copeland). Podcasts are also, importantly, not simply audio versions of written essays (Detweiller), or non-visual equivalents of videos (Vásquez). Podcasts represent genres and opportunities for rhetorical choice that instructors cannot assume students already possess expected literacies for (Bourelle, Bourelle, and Jones). Paralleling much service work at institutions of higher education, women scholars and scholars of colour take on inequitable labour with podcast scholarship (Faison et al.; Shamburg). A promising new direction challenges the raced and gendered stereotypes of the genre and mode, highlighting podcasts as an anti-racist and anti-disinformation tool (Vrikki) and a way to engage reluctant students in critical race discourse (Harris). And, with so many podcasts accessible on virtually any topic imaginable, podcasts have more recently emerged as reliable secondary sources for academic research, a usage accelerated by the availability of audio versions of scholarly publications and professional academics composing podcasts to distribute and conduct their research. When we incorporate podcasts into our academic work, new connections become recognisable: connections between ourselves and other humans, ourselves and other things, and things and other things—including the connections between audio and work. Podcasts maintain their histories as a passive medium. A student can listen to a podcast for class while making dinner and keeping an eye on their family. A professional academic might more dutifully pay attention to the content of the podcast, but they’ll also attune to how the physical experience of doing research that way affects their work, their findings, and themself. When considered as academic work, as in this piece, podcasts persuade us to pay attention to methods, materiality, networks, and embodiment. Methods I listen to podcasts in the car, most often while driving to and from work. Listening to podcasts while commuting is common. Yet listening beyond content immersion or distraction, listening as part of an intentional methodology—formulating a plan, rhetorically listening, taking audio notes, annotating and building on those notes later—maybe less so. This intentional, rhetorical approach to listening while driving attunes the researcher to the embodied, physical aspects of each of these activities: research, driving, and listening. As a result, the research experience provides different kinds of opportunities for invention and reflection. My process is as follows: first, I curate a playlist based around a specific research question or agenda. This playlist will include selected episodes from podcasts that I have evaluated as reliable on a given topic. This evaluation is usually based on a combination of factors, mainly my familiarity with the podcast, the professional credentials (academic or otherwise) of the podcast hosts and guests, and recommendations from other researchers or podcasters. I also consider the structure of the podcast and the quality of the audio recording, because if I can’t hear the content, or if I must spend more time skipping ads than actively listening, then the podcast isn’t very usable for this stage of my research process. I will sometimes include single episodes of podcasts I’m less familiar with, usually because I noticed them pitched on one of my social media feeds and as a trial to see if I want to subscribe to the podcast. The playlist is arranged in what I hope will be a coherent order based on the episode descriptions. For example, sequencing episodes of Have You Heard (Berkshire and Schneider), Talking Race, Africa and People (Tiluk and Hope), and Is This Democracy (Mason and Zimmer) with the titles, "Digging Deep into the Education Wars”, “They Stole WOKE”, and “‘Cancel Culture’: How a Moral Panic Is Capturing America and the World” places these sources in conversation with each other, juxtaposes the arguments, and allows me to synthesise my own comprehensive response. Second, I listen. Ratcliffe positioned rhetorical listening as a performative “trope for interpretive invention” and a method for “facilitating cross-cultural dialogues” within composition studies (196). Listening is a thing we do in order to do something else. Under this framework, the listener/researcher approaches their task with goals of understanding and responsibility to themselves and others, which then affords opportunities to identify commonalities and differences within claims and cultural logics (204). In other words, by paying closer attention to who we are and who we’re listening to, and by listening in good faith, we can better understand what and why people are saying and doing what they are, and when we understand those better, we are better equipped for future action. Listening rhetorically can be an anchor when researching with podcasts, a modality notoriously coded and memed as white, male, and upper middle class (Locke; Morgan; “A Group of White Men Is Called a Podcast”). The technologies I use during this research afford and constrain, which leads to the third aspect: notetaking. I can’t write while driving. I tend to forget important bits. But the act of listening opens me up to things I might otherwise have missed. Sound, Detweiler shows, “affords different modes of composing, listening, thinking, and responding”. To facilitate my listening as invention, I added myself to my contacts list so that I can talk-to-text myself with questions about what I’m listening to, names and key terms that I need to look up later, and starter drafts of my own writing. While driving, I can “favourite” an episode while on the go, a marker to myself to re-listen and inspect the episode transcript. Later, at my work desk, I decipher whatever it is my phone’s text messaging app thought I said. “Anna Genesis Evolution from one species to another.” “Ben sick something at the bottom of the sea.” “Dinosaurs and dragons make each other plausible.” (Pretty sure my phone got that last one right.) There, my workflow is mediated by expected reading research technologies (word processing application, PDF viewer, boutique file organisation and annotation software), agents (desk, chair, and lighting selected by my employer to improve my productivity), and processes (coding transcripts, annotating secondary sources, writing, and revising). Materiality My methodology is an auditory variation of McNely’s visual fieldwork, which “attempts to render visible the environs, objects, sensations, and affects of inquiry” ("Lures" 216). Podcasts are expressions of physicality that bring together a confluence of networked actors, technologies, and spaces. Moreover, a podcast is itself a material artifact in the most literal sense: sound is a physical phenomenon, emitting and reverberating waves stimulating effects in our body and affecting physio-emotional responses. Inside my car, there is little impeding the sound waves emitting from the speakers and into my ears. Diffraction is minimal; the sound fills the interior of my vehicle so quickly that I can’t perceive that it is moving. I’m surrounded by the sound of the podcast, but not in the sense that is usually meant by “surround sound”. I’m also inundated by other sounds, the noises of driving that the twenty-first-century commuter has been conditioned to render ambient: the buzz of other vehicles passing me, the hum of my tyres on asphalt, the squeak of brakes and crunch of slowly turning tyres. Listening to a podcast in the car is like sitting in on a conversation that you can’t participate in. Slate magazine’s sports podcast “Hang Up and Listen” plays with this expectation, taking its name for the clichéd valediction that callers to local sports radio shows would say to indicate that they are done asking their question, signifying to the host that it’s their turn again. It’s a shibboleth through which the caller acknowledges and performs the participatory role of the listener as an actor within the network of the show. McNely writes that when he walks, “there are sounds in me, around me, passing through me. When I walk, I feel wind, mist, sleet. When I walk, I feel bass, treble, empathy. When I walk, I feel arguments, metaphors, dialogues—in my gut, in my chest” (Engaging 184). His attunement to all of these elicits physical sensations and emotional responses, and the sounds of the podcast cause similar responses for me. I jostle in my seat. I tense up, grip the steering wheel, and grind my teeth. I sigh, guffaw, roll my eyes, and yell. I pause—both my movement and the podcast app—to let a potential response roll about in my head. I’m in the car, but podcasts attempt to place me somewhere else through ambient worldbuilding: the clinking of cups and spoons to let me know the conversation is taking place in a coffee shop, the chirps of frogs and bugs to make me feel like I’m with the guest interviewee at the Amazonian research site, the clamour of a teacher calling their third-grade class to attention as a lead in for a discussion of public school funding. The arrangement and design of the podcast takes the listener to the world within the podcast, and it reminds me how the podcast, and myself, my car, and the listening are connected to everything else. Networks I am employed at an institution with a “distributed campus”, with multiple sites spread across the local region and online, without an officially designated central campus. Faculty and students attend these different places based on appointment, proximity, and preference. I teach classes in person on two of the campuses, sometimes at both simultaneously connected via videoconference. So where is the location of my class? It’s the physical campuses, certainly. It’s also the online space where the class meets, the locations where users join from (home, a dorm room, their workplace, etc.), and the Internet connecting those people and spaces. The class is transnational, as many of our students live in the neighbouring country. The class is also in between and in transit, with students using the shuttle bus Wi-Fi to complete work or join meetings. As with the research methodology detailed above, the class is moving between the static places, too, as the instructor and students alike travel to teach or attend class or book it home to join via videoconference in time. The institution’s networks enact Detweiller’s characterisation of podcasts as enacting both rhetorical distribution and circulation. Taken together, “distribution is not a strictly one-to-many phenomenon”. Yes, it’s “a conception of rhetoric that challenges but does not erase the role of human agency in rhetorical causes and effects”, but it’s also the physical networks and “supply chains” that move things. In both cases, the decentralisation draws attention away from individual nodes and to the network and the interconnections between various actors. Consider the routes the podcast takes. I start the episode as I leave my driveway. By the time I reach the highway, the podcast has made it through its preamble and first ad read. The episode travels with me in the car along my route, the sound of a single word literally takes up physical space on the highway. Ideas stretch for miles. I make the entire trip in a single episode. I then assign that episode to my students, who take the podcast with them. It moves at different speeds but also at the same speed (unless a particular listener sets their playback at a faster pace). In some ways, it’s the same sound, yet in other ways—time, space, distribution, audience—the same episode makes a different sound. Meanwhile, the podcast hosts remain in their recording booth, simultaneously locked into and moving through spacetime. Further, by analysing the various texts surrounding my listening to podcasts, we can see a multimodal genre ecology of signs, roadways, mapped and unmapped routes, turn-by-turn navigation apps, as well as other markers of location and direction, like billboards, water towers in the distance, the setting sun, and that one tree in a field that doesn’t belong there but lets me know I’ve passed the midpoint of my commute. Visual cues are perhaps more easily felt, but Rickert reminds us that “we consciously and unconsciously depend on sound to orient, situate, and wed ourselves to the places we inhabit” (152). The three-note dinging of a railroad crossing halts drivers even without visual confirmation of an oncoming train. The brutal springtime crosswind announces its presence on my passenger window, giving me a split second to steady the wheel. The lowering pitch of the pavement as I take the exit towards my house. The network of audio extends beyond the situations of the researcher and draws attention to what Barad referred to as “entangled material agencies” resulting in “networks or assemblages of humans and nonhumans” (1118, 1131). The network of my podcast listening accounts for the mobile device that we use to access content, the digital networks that I download episodes over, as well as the physical infrastructures that enable those networks, the hosting services and recording technologies and funding mechanisms used by the podcasters, the distribution of campuses, the roads I travel on, the tonnage of steel and plastic that I manipulate while researching, and that’s even before we get to everything else that impacts on my listening, like weather, traffic, the pathways all these material items took to get where they are, the head cold impacting on my hearing, my personal history of hearing different sounds, and on and on. Embodiment I listen to podcasts in the car while commuting to work. A more accurate way of putting that would be to say that commuting is work, which I mean twice over. First, a commute is likely a requisite component of your job. This is not to assign full culpability to one actor or another; the length of your commute likely owes to various factors—availability of affordable housing, proximity of worksite relative to your home, competing duties of family care, etc.—but a commute is and should be considered part of the work. Even if you’re not getting paid for it, even if the neoliberal economic system that overarches your life has convinced you that you are actively choosing to commute as part of the mutually and equally entered-into contract with your employer, you’re on the clock when commuting because you’re doing that action because of the work. If your response to this is, “then what about people who work from home? Should their personal devices and monthly Internet costs be considered work expenses? Or what about the time it takes to get up early to put makeup on or prepare lunches for their kids? Does all that count as work?” Yes. Yes, it does. The farmer’s day doesn’t start when they milk the cow, it starts as soon as they wake up. It starts before then, even. We are entangled with our work selves. Lately, I’ve begun logging these listening commutes on my weekly timesheet. It’s not an official record: salaried employees at my institution are not required to keep track of their work hours. Instead, it’s a routine and technical document I developed to help me get things done, an artifact of procedural rhetoric and the broader genre ecology of my work. Second, commuting is a physical act. It is work. We walk to bus and train stops and stand around waiting. We power our bicycles. We drive our vehicles, manoeuvring through streets and turns and other drivers. The deleterious effects of sitting down for prolonged periods for work, including while commuting, are well documented (Ding et al.). Driving itself is an act that places the human—the driver, passengers, and pedestrians—in greater physical danger than flying, or riding a train, or swimming with sharks. Research in this way presents a different kind of epistemic risk. Arriving So, the question I’m left to codify is what does this commuting audio research methodology offer for researchers that other, more traditional approaches, might not? Rickert analysed an electric car as “inherently suasive”, as it “participates in the conflicted discourses about that built environment and showcases some fundamental preconceptions rooted into our everyday ways of being together” (263). I’m alone in the car, but every sound reminds me of how I am connected to someone or something else. Of course, neither commuting nor listening to podcasts are exclusively solo endeavours: people carpool to work, and fans attend live recordings of their favourite shows. Perhaps listening while driving causes me to pay closer attention to what’s being said, the way you seem to learn the words of a song better when listening and singing along in the car. There are different kinds of distractions when driving versus sitting at one’s desk to read or listen (although it’s fair to say that the podcast itself is the distraction from what I should be paying the most attention to when driving). Anyone who has taken a long road trip alone can tell you about the opportunities it provides to sit with one’s thoughts, to spend uninterrupted time and miles turning over an idea in your mind, to reflect at length on a single topic, to rant to the noise of the road. Maybe that’s what a commuting podcast methodology affords: isolated moments surrounded by sound, away from the overtly audio, and connected to the rest of the world. References “A Group of White Men Is Called a Podcast.” Know Your Meme, 20 Feb. 2019. 6 Mar. 2024 <https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/a-group-of-white-men-is-called-a-podcast>. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Berkshire, Jennifer, and Jack Schneider, hosts. “Digging Deep into the Education Wars.” Have You Heard 156 (4 May 2023). <https://www.haveyouheardpodcast.com/episodes/156-digging-deep-into-the-education-wars?rq=woke>. Bourelle, Andrew, Tiffany Bourelle, and Natasha Jones. “Multimodality in the Technical Communication Classroom: Viewing Classical Rhetoric through a 21st Century Lens.” Technical Communication Quarterly 24.4 (2015): 306-327. Bowie, Jennifer L. “Podcasting in a Writing Class? Considering the Possibilities.” Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 16.2 (2012). 29 Nov. 2023 <https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/16.2/topoi/bowie/index.html>. Detweiler, Eric. “The Bandwidth of Podcasting.” Tuning in to Soundwriting, special issue of enculturation/Intermezzo. 9 Feb. 2024 <http://intermezzo.enculturation.net/14-stedman-et-al/detweiler.html>. Ding, Ding, et al. “Driving: A Road to Unhealthy Lifestyles and Poor Health Outcomes.” Plos One 9.6. 15 Feb. 2024 <https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0094602>. Faison, Wonderful, et al. “White Benevolence: Why Supa-Save-a-Savage Rhetoric Ain’t Getting It.” In Counterstories from the Writing Center, eds. Wonderful Faison and Frankie Condon. Logan: Utah State UP. 81-94. Harris, Jasmine. “Podcast Talk and Public Sociology: Teaching Critical Race Discourse Participation through Podcast Production.” About Campus 24.3 (2019): 16-20. Locke, Charley. “Podcasts' Biggest Problem Isn't Discovery, It's Diversity.” Wired, 31 Aug. 2015. 6 Mar. 2024 <https://www.wired.com/2015/08/podcast-discovery-vs-diversity/>. Mason, Lily, and Thomas, hosts. “‘Cancel Culture’: How a Moral Panic Is Capturing America and the World – with Adrian Daub.” Is This Democracy 24 (16 May 2023). <https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/24-cancel-culture-how-a-moral-panic-is-capturing/id1652741954?i=1000612321369>. McGregor, Hannah, and Stacey Copeland. “Why Podcast? Podcasting as Publishing, Sound-Based Scholarship, and Making Podcasts Count.” Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 27.1 (2022). 15 Feb. 2024 <https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/27.1/topoi/mcgregor-copeland/index.html>. McNely, Brian. “Lures, Slimes, Time: Viscosity and the Nearness of Distance.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 52.3 (2019): 203-226. ———. Engaging Ambience: Visual and Multisensory Methodologies and Rhetorical Theory. Logan: Utah State UP, 2024. Morgan, Josh. “Data Confirm That Podcasting in the US Is a White Male Thing.” Quartz, 12 Jan. 2016. 6 Mar. 2024 <https://qz.com/591440/data-confirm-that-podcasting-in-the-us-is-a-white-male-thing>. Ratcliffe, Krista. “Rhetorical Listening: A Trope for Interpretive Invention and a 'Code of Cross-Cultural Conduct'.” College Composition and Communication 51.2 (1999): 195-224. Rickert, Thomas. Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2013. Shamburg, Christopher. “Rising Waves in Informal Education: Women of Color with Educationally Oriented Podcasts.” Education and Information Technologies 26 (2021): 699–713. Tiluk, Daniel, and Have Hope, hosts. “They Stole WOKE.” Talking Race, Africa and People 1 (14 Apr. 2023). <https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/01-they-stole-woke/id1682830005?i=1000609221830> Vásquez, Camilla. Research Methods for Digital Discourse Analysis. London, Bloomsbury, 2022. Vrikki, Photini, and Sarita Malik. “Voicing Lived-Experience and Anti-Racism: Podcasting as a Space at the Margins for Subaltern Counterpublics.” Popular Communication 17.4 (2018): 273-287.

The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal pace have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role (Illich 25).The most basic definition of Stillness refers to a state of being in the absence of both motion and disturbance. Some might say it is anti-American. Stillness denies the democratic freedom of mobility in a social system where, as Ivan Illich writes in Energy and Equity, people “believe that political power grows out of the capacity of a transportation system, and in its absence is the result of access to the television screen” (26). In America, it isn’t too far of a stretch to say that most are quite used to being interpolated as some sort of subject of the screen, be it the windshield or the flat screen. Whether in transport or tele-vision, life is full of traffic and flickering images. In the best of times there is a choice between being citizen-audience member or citizen-passenger. A full day might include both.But during the summer of 2008 things seemed to change. The citizen-passenger was left beached, not in some sandy paradise but in their backyard. In this state of SIMBY (stuck in my backyard), the citizen-passenger experienced the energy crisis first hand. Middle class suburbanites were forced to come to terms with a new disturbance due to rising fuel prices: unattainable motion. Domestic travel had been exchanged for domestication. The citizen-passenger was rendered what Paul Virilio might call, “a voyager without a voyage, this passenger without a passage, the ultimate stranger, and renegade to himself” (Crepuscular 131). The threat to capitalism posed by this unattainable motion was quickly thwarted by America’s 'big box' stores, hotel chains, and news networks. What might have become a culturally transformative politics of attainable stillness was hijacked instead by The Great American Staycation. The Staycation is a neologism that refers to the activity of making a vacation out of staying at home. But the Staycation is more than a passing phrase; it is a complex cultural phenomenon that targeted middle class homes during the summer of 2008. A major constraint to a happy Staycation was the uncomfortable fact that the middle class home was not really a desirable destination as it stood. The family home would have to undergo a series of changes, one being the initiation of a set of time management strategies; and the second, the adoption of new objects for consumption. Good Morning America first featured the Staycation as a helpful parenting strategy for what was expected to be a long and arduous summer. GMA defined the parameters of the Staycation with four golden rules in May of 2008:Schedule start and end dates. Otherwise, it runs the risk of feeling just like another string of nights in front of the tube. Take Staycation photos or videos, just as you would if you went away from home on your vacation. Declare a 'choratorium.' That means no chores! Don't make the bed, vacuum, clean out the closets, pull weeds, or nothing, Pack that time with activities. (Leamy)Not only did GMA continue with the theme throughout the summer but the other networks also weighed in. Expert knowledge was doled out and therapeutic interventions were made to make people feel better about staying at home. Online travel companies such as expedia.com and tripadvisor.com, estimated that 60% of regular vacation takers would be staying home. With the rise and fall of gas prices, came the rise of fall of the Staycation.The emergence of the Staycation occurred precisely at a time when American citizens were confronted with the reality that their mobility and localities, including their relationship to domestic space, were structurally bound to larger geopolitical forces. The Staycation was an invention deployed by various interlocutors most threatened by the political possibilities inherent in stillness. The family home was catapulted into the circuits of production, consumption, and exchange. Big TV and Big Box stores furthered individual’s unease towards having to stay at home by discursively constructing the gas prices as an impediment to a happy domestic life and an affront to the American born right to be mobile. What was reinforced was that Americans ideally should be moving, but could not. Yet, at the same time it was rather un-American not to travel. The Staycation was couched in a powerful rhetoric of one’s moral duty to the nation while playing off of middle class anxieties and senses of privilege regarding the right to be mobile and the freedom to consume. The Staycation satiates all of these tensions by insisting that the home can become a somewhere else. Between spring and autumn of 2008, lifestyle experts, representatives from major retailers, and avid Staycationers filled morning slots on ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS, and CNN with Staycation tips. CNN highlighted the Staycation as a “1st Issue” in their Weekend Report on 12 June 2008 (Alban). This lead story centred on a father in South Windsor, Connecticut “who took the money he would normally spend on vacations and created a permanent Staycation residence.” The palatial home was fitted with a basketball court, swimming pool, hot tub, gardening area, and volleyball court. In the same week (and for those without several acres) CBS’s Early Show featured the editor of behindthebuy.com, a company that specialises in informing the “time starved consumer” about new commodities. The lifestyle consultant previewed the newest and most necessary items “so you could get away without leaving home.” Key essentials included a “family-sized” tent replete with an air conditioning unit, a projector TV screen amenable to the outdoors, a high-end snow-cone maker, a small beer keg, a mini-golf kit, and a fast-setting swimming pool that attaches to any garden hose. The segment also extolled the virtues of the Staycation even when gas prices might not be so high, “you have this stuff forever, if you go on vacation all you have are the pictures.” Here, the value of the consumer products outweighs the value of erstwhile experiences that would have to be left to mere recollection.Throughout the summer ABC News’ homepage included links to specific products and profiled hotels, such as Hiltons and Holiday Inns, where families could at least get a few miles away from home (Leamy). USA Today, in an article about retailers and the Staycation, reported that Wal-Mart would be “rolling back prices on everything from mosquito repellent to portable DVD players to baked beans and barbecue sauce”. Target and Kohl’s were celebrated for offering discounts on patio furniture, grills, scented candles, air fresheners and other products to make middle class homes ‘staycationable’. A Lexis Nexis count revealed over 200 news stories in various North American sources, including the New York Times, Financial Times, Investors Guide, the Christian Science Monitor, and various local Consumer Credit Counselling Guides. Staying home was not necessarily an inexpensive option. USA Today reported brand new grills, grilling meats, patio furniture and other accoutrements were still going to cost six percent more than the previous year (24 May 2008). While it was suggested that the Staycation was a cost-saving option, it is clear Staycations were for the well-enough off and would likely cost more or as much as an actual vacation. To put this in context with US vacation policies and practices, a recent report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research called No-Vacation Nation found that the US is the only advanced economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation (Ray and Schmidt 3). Subsequently, without government standards 25% of Americans have neither paid vacation nor paid holidays. The Staycation was not for the working poor who were having difficulty even getting to work in the first place, nor were they for the unemployed, recently job-less, or the foreclosed. No, the Staycationers were middle class suburbanites who had backyards and enough acreage for swimming pools and tents. These were people who were going to be ‘stuck’ at home for the first time and a new grill could make that palatable. The Staycation would be exciting enough to include in their vacation history repertoire.All of the families profiled on the major networks were white Americans and in most cases nuclear families. For them, unattainable motion is an affront to the privilege of their white middle class mobility which is usually easy and unencumbered, in comparison to raced mobilities. Doreen Massey’s theory of “power geometry” which argues that different people have differential and inequitable relationships to mobility is relevant here. The lack of racial representation in Staycation stories reinforces the reality that has already been well documented in the works of bell hooks in Black Looks: Race and Representation, Lynn Spigel in Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs, and Jeremy Packer in Mobility without Mayhem: Safety, Cars and Citizenship. All of these critical works suggest that taking easily to the great open road is not the experience of all Americans. Freedom of mobility is in fact a great American fiction.The proprietors for the Great American Staycation were finding all sorts of dark corners in the American psyche to extol the virtues of staying at home. The Staycation capitalised on latent xenophobic tendencies of the insular family. Encountering cultural difference along the way could become taxing and an impediment to the fully deserved relaxation that is the stuff of dream vacations. CNN.com ran an article soon after their Weekend Report mentioned above quoting a life coach who argued Staycations were more fitting for many Americans because the “strangeness of different cultures or languages, figuring out foreign currencies or worrying about lost luggage can take a toll” (12 June 2008). The Staycation sustains a culture of insularity, consumption, distraction, and fear, but in doing so serves the national economic interests quite well. Stay at home, shop, grill, watch TV and movies, these were the economic directives programmed by mass media and retail giants. As such it was a cultural phenomenon commensurable to the mundane everyday life of the suburbs.The popular version of the Staycation is a highly managed and purified event that reflects the resort style/compound tourism of ‘Club Meds’ and cruise ships. The Staycation as a new form of domestication bears a significant resemblance to the contemporary spatial formations that Marc Augé refers to as non-places – contemporary forms of homogeneous architecture that are scattered across disparate locales. The nuclear family home becomes another point of transfer in the global circulation of capital, information, and goods. The chain hotels and big box stores that are invested in the Staycation are touted as part of the local economy but instead devalue the local by making it harder for independent restaurants, grocers, farmers’ markets and bed and breakfasts to thrive. In this regard the Staycation excludes the local economy and the community. It includes backyards not balconies, hot-dogs not ‘other’ types of food, and Wal-Mart rather than then a local café or deli. Playing on the American democratic ideals of freedom of mobility and activating one’s identity as a consumer left little room to re-think how life in constant motion (moving capital, moving people, moving information, and moving goods) was partially responsible for the energy crisis in the first place. Instead, staying at home became a way for the American citizen to support the floundering economy while waiting for gas prices to go back down. And, one wouldn’t have to look that much further to see that the Staycation slips discursively into a renewed mission for a just cause – the environment. For example, ABC launched at the end of the summer a ruse of a national holiday, “National Stay at Home Week” with the tag line: “With gas prices so high, the economy taking a nosedive and global warming, it's just better to stay in and enjoy great ABC TV.” It comes as no shock that none of the major networks covered this as an environmental issue or an important moment for transformation. In fact, the air conditioning units in backyard tents attest to quite the opposite. Instead, the overwhelming sense was of a nation waiting at home for it all to be over. Soon real life would resume and everyone could get moving again. The economic slowdown and the energy crisis are examples of the breakdown and failure of capitalism. In a sense, a potential opened up in this breakdown for Stillness to become an alternative to life in constant and unrequited motion. That is, for the practice of non-movement and non-circulation to take on new political and cultural forms especially in the sprawling suburbs where the car moves individuals between the trifecta of home, box store, and work. The economic crisis is also a temporary stoppage of the flows. If the individual couldn’t move, global corporate capital would find a way to set the house in motion, to reinsert it back into the machinery that is now almost fully equated with freedom.The reinvention of the home into a campground or drive-in theatre makes the house a moving entity, an inverted mobile home that is both sedentary and in motion. Paul Virilio’s concept of “polar inertia” is important here. He argues, since the advent of transportation individuals live in a state of “resident polar inertia” wherein “people don’t move, even when they’re in a high speed train. They don’t move when they travel in their jet. They are residents in absolute motion” (Crepuscular 71). Lynn Spigel has written extensively about these dynamics, including the home as mobile home, in Make Room for TV and Welcome to the Dreamhouse. She examines how the introduction of the television into domestic space is worked through the tension between the private space of the home and the public world outside. Spigel refers to the dual emergence of portable television and mobile homes. Her work shows how domestic space is constantly imagined and longed for “as a vehicle of transport through which they (families) could imaginatively travel to an illicit place of passion while remaining in the safe space of the family home” (Welcome 60-61). But similarly to what Virilio has inferred Spigel points out that these mobile homes stayed parked and the portable TVs were often stationary as well. The Staycation exists as an addendum to what Spigel captures about the relationship between domestic space and the television set. It provides another example of advertisers’ attempts to play off the suburban tension between domestic space and the world “out there.” The Staycation exacerbates the role of the domestic space as a site of production, distribution, and consumption. The gendered dynamics of the Staycation include redecorating possibilities targeted at women and the backyard beer and grill culture aimed at men. In fact, ‘Mom’ might suffer the most during a Staycation, but that is another topic. The point is the whole family can get involved in a way that sustains the configurations of power but with an element of novelty.The Staycation is both a cultural phenomenon that feeds off the cultural anxieties of the middle class and an economic directive. It has been constructed to maintain movement at a time when the crisis of capital contains seeds for an alternative, for Stillness to become politically and culturally transformative. But life feels dull when the passenger is stuck and the virtues of Stillness are quite difficult to locate in this cultural context. As Illich argues, “the passenger who agrees to live in a world monopolised by transport becomes a harassed, overburdened consumer of distances whose shape and length he can no longer control” (45). When the passenger is the mode of identification, immobility becomes unbearable. In this context a form of “still mobility” such as the Staycation might be satisfying enough. ConclusionThe still citizen is a threatening figure for capital. In Politics of the Very Worst Virilio argues at the heart of capitalism is a state of permanent mobility, a condition to which polar inertia attests. The Staycation fits completely within this context of this form of mobile immobility. The flow needs to keep flowing. When people are stationary, still, and calm the market suffers. It has often been argued that the advertising industries construct dissatisfaction while also marginally eliminating it through the promises of various products, yet ultimately leaving the individual in a constant state of almost satisfied but never really. The fact that the Staycation is a mode of waiting attests to this complacent dissatisfaction.The subjective and experiential dimensions of living in a capitalist society are experienced through one’s relationship to time and staying on the right path. The economic slowdown and the energy crisis are also crises in pace, energy, and time. The mobility and tempo, the pace and path that capital relies on, has become unhinged and vulnerable to a resistant re-shaping. The Staycation re-sets the tempo of suburbia to meet the new needs of an economic slowdown and financial crisis. Following the directive to staycate is not necessarily a new form of false consciousness, but an intensified technological and economic mode of subjection that depends on already established cultural anxieties. But what makes the Staycation unique and worthy of consideration is that capitalists and other disciplinary institutions of power, in this case big media, construct new and innovative ways to control people’s time and regulate their movement in space. The Staycation is a particular re-territorialisation of the temporal and spatial dimensions of home, work, and leisure. In sum, Staycation and the staging of National Stay at Home Week reveals a systemic mobilising and control of a population’s pace and path. As Bernard Stiegler writes in Technics and Time: “Deceleration remains a figure of speed, just as immobility is a figure of movement” (133). These processes are inexorably tied to one another. Thinking back to the opening quote from Illich, we could ask how we might stop imagining ourselves as passengers – ushered along, falling in line, or complacently floating past. To be still in the flows could be a form of ultimate resistance. In fact, Stillness has the possibility of becoming an autonomous practice of refusal. It is after all this threatening potentiality that created the frenzied invention of the Staycation in the first place. To end where I began, Illich states that “the habitual passenger must adopt a new set of beliefs and expectations if he is to feel secure in the strange world” (25-26). The horizon of political possibility is uniformly limited for the passenger. Whether people actually did follow these directives during the summer of 2008 is hard to determine. The point is that the energy crisis and economic slowdown offered a potential to vacate capital’s premises, both its pace and path. But corporate capital is doing its best to make sure that people wait, staycate, and see it through. The Staycation is not just about staying at home for vacation. It is about staying within reach, being accounted for, at a time when departing global corporate capital seems to be the best option. ReferencesAlban, Debra. “Staycations: Alternative to Pricey, Stressful Travel.” CNN News 12 June 2008. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://edition.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/worklife/06/12/balance.staycation/index.html›.Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Verso, London, 1995.hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.Illich, Ivan. Energy and Equity. New York: Perennial Library, 1974.Leamy, Elisabeth. “Tips for Planning a Great 'Staycation'.” ABC News 23 May 2008. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Parenting/story?id=4919211›.Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: Minnesota U P, 1994.Packer, Jeremy. Mobility without Mayhem: Safety, Cars, and Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 2008.Ray, Rebecca and John Schmitt. No-Vacation Nation. Washington, D.C.: Center for Economic and Policy Research, May 2007.Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: Chicago U P, 1992.———. Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 2001.Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time 2: Disorientation. Trans. Stephen Barker. California: Stanford University Press, 2009.USA Today. “Retailers Promote 'Staycation' Sales.” 24 May 2008. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/2008-05-24-staycations_N.htm›.Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. New York: Semiotext(e), 1986.———. In James der Derian, ed. The Virilio Reader. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998.———. Politics of the Very Worst. New York: Semiotext(e), 1999.———. Crepuscular Dawn. New York: Semiotext(e), 2002.