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Mancik, Ashley M., Karen F. Parker e Kirk R. Williams. "Neighborhood Context and Homicide Clearance: Estimating the Effects of Collective Efficacy". Homicide Studies 22, n.º 2 (13 de fevereiro de 2018): 188–213. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1088767918755419.
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Only a handful of macro-level studies of homicide clearance exist, and the impact of community characteristics is mixed. In addition, community members are critical to clearances, but the willingness of residents to unite for the collective goal of aiding in investigations (via collective efficacy) remains to be tested. Combining data from the Chicago Police Department, Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), and U.S. Census, we estimate the effect of collective efficacy on homicide clearances in Chicago neighborhoods, while taking into account neighborhood characteristics and case composition. Results indicate that economic disadvantage, residential stability, and victimization significantly decrease homicides clearances, while collective efficacy increases clearances.
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Amsden, Alice H. "Economic Development: The History of an Idea. By H. W. Arndt. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1987. viii + 217. Notes and partial index. $20.95." Business History Review 62, n.º 2 (1988): 348–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3116024.
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Uriona, Ramiro Cavero. "Jeffrey D. Sachs, (ed.), Developing Country Debt and Economic Performance: Country Studies – Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, Volume 2 (Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. ix+565". Journal of Latin American Studies 24, n.º 1 (fevereiro de 1992): 214–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0022216x00023178.
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Shore, Marlene. "Carl Dawson and the Research Ideal: The Evolution of a Canadian Sociologist". Historical Papers 20, n.º 1 (26 de abril de 2006): 45–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/030932ar.
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Abstract Carl Dawson's development as a sociologist reflected a general trend in sociology's evolution out of theology and social work. Trained as a minister, Dawson rejected the religious vocation at some point after World War I to become a social scientist. Appointed to McGill in 1922, he strove to establish research as the foundation for understanding society, questioning the efficacy of social reform. His convictions stemmed from his Maritime Baptist background, wartime experience and education at the University of Chicago. In 1914, Dawson left the Maritime region where he had been born and raised to attend the divinity school of the University of Chicago. In so doing, he was following a well travelled route: poor economic conditions drove numerous people out of the Maritime provinces between 1910 and 1929, and the lack of doctoral programmes in Canada compelled many students to attend American graduate schools. With its strong reputation for research, the University of Chicago was a popular choice. Its divinity school, a Baptist stronghold, was attractive to adherents of that faith. That a number of its faculty members were Canadians also attested to the institutional ties that had long linked Baptists in Canada and the northern United States. In 1918, Dawson recessed from graduate studies for war service and resumed his studies in 1919 - his interests now sharply turned towards sociology. This shift was partly influenced by the Chicago divinity school's close ties with the sociology department - a result of the historic link between the social gospel and sociology generally - but was also the product of the school's position as a leader in liberal and radical theological doctrine. The modernists within the institution stressed that all studies of society, including religion, must accord with modern empirical methods. That, in addition to their acceptance of the ideas of John Dewey and the Chicago School regarding social development, led some to the conclusion that religion itself was but a form of group behaviour. In reflecting all those currents of thought, Dawson's Ph.D. thesis, "The Social Nature of Knowledge," hinted at the reasons for his departure from the ministry for a career in social science. Showing that all culture and knowledge, morals and ideals had social origins, Dawson concluded that even fact was not fixed truth but represented the decision of individuals to agree on certain points and issues. This explained why Dawson believed that research - a collection of facts - would aid in understanding society. The thesis was also marked by an opposition to social action, stemming from what Dawson had witnessed during the war and the upheaval which followed, but also, it must be argued, from the antiauthoritarian and antihierarchial strain in the Baptist faith. The fact that Dawson eschewed social action in much the same way as did Harold Innis, another Baptist educated at Chicago, suggests that there exists a tradition in the development of Canadian social science quite different from the one which Brian McKillop has traced in A Disciplined Intelligence, and it was that legacy which Dawson's brand of sociology represented.
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McCusker, John J. "Capitalism in Context: Essays on Economic Development and Cultural Change in Honor of R. M. Hartwell. Edited byJohn A. James and Mark Thomas · Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1994. x + 355 pp. Tables, charts, notes, index, and bibliography. $31.00. ISBN 0-226-39198-1." Business History Review 70, n.º 2 (1996): 282–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3116893.
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McCallum, Bennett T. "AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT E. LUCAS, JR." Macroeconomic Dynamics 3, n.º 2 (junho de 1999): 278–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1365100599011074.
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Bob Lucas is widely regarded as the most influential economist of the past 25–30 years, at least among those working in macro and monetary economics. His work provided the primary stimulus for a drastic overhaul and revitalization of that broad area, an overhaul that featured the ascendance of rational expectations, the emergence of a coherent equilibrium theory of cyclical fluctuations, and specification of the analytical ingredients necessary for the use of econometric models in policy design. These are the accomplishments for which he was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. In addition, he has made outstanding contributions on other topics—enough, arguably, for another prize. Among these are seminal writings on asset pricing, economic growth and development, exchange-rate determination, optimal fiscal and inflation policy, and tools for the analysis of dynamic recursive models.Clearly, Bob Lucas is very much a University of Chicago product; he studied there both as an undergraduate and as a Ph.D. student and has been on the faculty since 1975. Also, he has served as chairman of the Chicago Department of Economics and two terms as an editor of the Journal of Political Economy. Nevertheless, I and several colleagues at Carnegie Mellon like to point out that Bob was a professor here in the Graduate School of Industrial Administration from 1963 until 1974, during which time he conducted and published the central portions of the work for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Consequently, I could not resist asking Bob a few questions about his GSIA years in the interview.Many researchers in the economics profession have been impressed and inspired by Lucas's technical skills, but the clarity and elegance of his writing style also deserve mention, plus his choice of research topics. The latter is reflective of Bob's utter seriousness of purpose. Each of his projects attacks a problem that is simultaneously of genuine theoretical interest and also of considerable importance from the perspective of economic policy. There is nothing frivolous about Lucas's research, as he had occasion to remind me during our interview.As is well known to those who have been around him, Bob Lucas is a person who never uses three words when one will suffice—but that one will usually be carefully chosen. This characteristic shows up in the interview below. As a departure from standard MD Interview practice, and with the Editor's permission, this interview was conducted at a distance—i.e., via mail and e-mail. It yielded a smaller number of pages than have previous interviews, but I think that readers will find them stimulating. The process of obtaining them was somewhat challenging but highly informative and thoroughly enjoyable for me.
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Ahmed, Md Ashraf Uddin, ASM Morshed, Farzana Yasmin e Dwijraz Chakraborty. "Perception About the Use of Over-the-Counter Antibiotics Among Patients Attending Outpatient Department of a Tertiary Care Hospital of Bangladesh". Ibrahim Cardiac Medical Journal 9, n.º 1-2 (5 de março de 2020): 42–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/icmj.v9i1-2.53985.
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Background & objective: Antibiotics are considered among the most commonly sold drug classes in the developing countries. The irrational and overuse of antibiotics result not only in the emergence of resistant bacterial strains but also adverse reactions and economic burden on national health system. This study was carried out with the focus to assess the awareness, attitude and practice of patients visiting Outpatient Department (OPD) of Bangladesh Institute of Research & Development in Endocrine & Metabolism (BIRDEM) General Hospital. towards antibiotic usage and development of its resistance
Methods: This cross-sectional study was done in the OPD of BIRDEM General Hospital from June 2017 to July 2017. Patients presented at OPD were selected by convenient sampling. The total number of respondents was 100. A semi-structured questionnaire was used to collect information from the respondents. Data were analyzed using statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) version 20.0 and descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data.
Results: Of all the participants who took part in the study, 46% had no knowledge and 36% were unaware of ill-effects of antibiotic resistance. Over half (54%) of the patients showed confusion between antibiotic and antiviral drugs. Investigating patients’ practice about antibiotics revealed that 50% patients used to take incomplete antibiotic course and 30% patients shared their antibiotics with other sick family members. During emergencies, 16% patients used the previously left-over antibiotics without seeing the expiry date. Nearly half (46%) of the patients had a practice of taking previously prescribed antibiotic again for the similar nature of illness without consulting a doctor, 6% patients sought antibiotics prescription whenever they consult a doctor.
Conclusion: Although the results of this study cannot be generalized to all adult Bangladeshi, indiscriminate use of antibiotic and unawareness of antibiotic resistance and poor attitude towards the antibiotic usage can be a concern for antibiotic resistance in Bangladesh. It highlights the need of educational interventions to increase awareness of people about the consequences of antibiotic misuse and also to develop healthy attitude to practice antibiotic usage.
Ibrahim Card Med J 2019; 9 (1&2): 42-48
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Akbar, Jalaluddin, Syed Tanveer Shah, Muhammad Naeem Khan e Ahmad Naeem. "Role of Facilities Available and Un-Available in Attracting of Tourist in Swat Valley Pakistan". Journal of Landscape Ecology 10, n.º 1 (1 de janeiro de 2017): 5–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jlecol-2017-0006.
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Abstract Natural landscape is an important resource for mountainous regions and play crucial role in tourism development. Tourism play a key role in economic development of a country. Developing tourist areas is the key to meet the expectations of mountain inhabitants, tourists, and the general public outside of mountainous areas. In order to know tourist perception, problems, and role of landscape & horticulture plants in the field of tourism. A research study entitled “Role of facilities available and un-available in attracting of tourist in swat valley Pakistan “The data was collected from the respondents through a questionnaire survey and analyzed using percentages, frequencies and Chi-square test (where applicable). The analyzed data revealed that most of the respondent (55 %) considered natural green environment as a reason for their visit and 67 % respondents wanted to visit with their friends and were satisfied with the tourist area, respectively. Most of the respondent (39 %) observed throwing of surplus food as major waste materials which turned the beautiful green environment into unattractive environment. Most of the visitors (52 %) dislike un-cleanliness of the locality, 74% respondents felt ill effect due to deforestation.53 % tourist disagree with the current maintenance of the locality by tourism department. The most missed facilities were non availability of dustbins and children playing areas. 75 % respondents agreed with the fact that most of the people (local inhabitants as well as tourist) were unaware with regard to maintenance activities of the area 15.7 % respondent agreed that road system should be improved to access most of the greenery in the locality, respectively to aware local people and tourist regarding maintenance of the locality will improve tourism in Swat valley. The studies need to be develop for the improvement of existing as well as artificial landscape of the tourist area (Kalam and Malamjabba) of Swat valley.
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Myers, Deborah J., Bryan S. Pivovar, Rangachary Mukundan, Shaun M. Alia, Guido Bender, Scott A. Mauger, Siddharth Komini Babu, Alexey Serov, Alex Badgett e Rajesh Ahluwalia. "(Invited) Recent Polymer Electrolyte Membrane (PEM) Electrolysis Research Advances in the Hydrogen from Next-Generation Electrolyzers of Water (H2NEW) Consortium". ECS Meeting Abstracts MA2023-01, n.º 36 (28 de agosto de 2023): 1995. http://dx.doi.org/10.1149/ma2023-01361995mtgabs.
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The H2NEW consortium is a Department of Energy (DOE)-Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technology Office (HFTO) funded effort with a vision to enable $2/kg hydrogen production by 2025 through large-scale production of hydrogen by either low-temperature electrolysis (LTE) or high-temperature electrolysis (HTE). The H2NEW consortia was established in October 2020 and has seen a recent increase in emphasis and expansion of scope with the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and the focus on a Clean Hydrogen Electrolysis Program, a $1B commitment over 5 years from the US government. This has resulted in a series of workshops, supported by members of H2NEW, on topics relevant to electrolysis including liquid alkaline electrolysis,[1] high temperature electrolysis,[2] and manufacturing and advanced materials for polymer electrolyte membrane electrolyzers.[3] H2NEW focuses on better understanding the cost, performance, and durability tradeoffs of electrolysis systems through an increased understanding of the factors that contribute to these metrics. This includes the impact of operating conditions, materials selection, and component design and integration. Techno-economic and system analysis help provide guidance for the primary components of interest based on cost and trade-offs associated with electricity prices as they relate to hydrogen levelized costs. The consortium has a focus on durability without compromising efficiency while dramatically reducing costs. While the efforts of H2NEW have historically covered polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) and oxide ion conducting solid oxide electrolysis (SOEC), recently these efforts have expanded to also include liquid alkaline electrolysis. An overview of the scope of H2NEW and analysis efforts that relate to all electrolysis technologies will be highlighted in this talk, but a focus will be placed on scientific advances made in PEM technology. For example, H2NEW has made significant progress in the areas of anode stability including investigations of operating strategies and Ir stability under various operating conditions; quantification of performance metrics including hydrogen crossover under operation; processing of inks and electrodes; and development and characterization of porous transport layers. These topics and highlights of research advances will be presented. Acknowledgements This presentation is a summary of the research efforts of numerous H2NEW researchers. See h2new.energy.gov for a comprehensive list of the researchers contributing to this work. This research is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office under the auspices of the Electrocatalysis Consortium (ElectroCat). Argonne National Laboratory is managed for the U.S Department of Energy by the University of Chicago Argonne, LLC, also under contract DE-AC-02-06CH11357. References energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/advanced-liquid-alkaline-electrolysis-experts-meeting energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/us-department-energy-high-temperature-electrolysis-hte-manufacturing-workshop energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/h2-amp-hydrogen-shot-workshop-advanced-materials-pem-electrolyzers
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Binkauskas, Gintaras. "INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL FACTORS THAT DETERMINED INNOVATION DIFFUSION CHANNELS IN LITHUANIA". Ekonomika 88 (1 de janeiro de 2009): 90–105. http://dx.doi.org/10.15388/ekon.2009.0.1033.
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The prevailing opinion in Lithuania is that the country‘s economic growth was determined by the inflow of foreign direct investments (FDI). Their influence on the Lithuanian economy remains unquestionable, however, there is a tendency to overestimate their impact, while otherfactors are under-estimated or ignored completely when conclusions on their influence on the country‘s economy are drawn. Based on the data of the Department of Statistics of Lithuania, Eurostat, other agencies and the analysis of the research of Lithuanian and foreign academics on FDI, and the impact of the innovations on the country‘s economy, the given study presents the analysis of the three main channels for the technological and innovation diffusion, which have exercised a decisive influence on the economic development in Lithuania over the last decade. They are foreign direct investments, international trade, and the country‘s knowledge capital. These diffusion channels were considerably important in the transition period, however, the creation of original knowledge and innovations, or the creative application of the technology created in other countries and application of the knowledge gained abroad was utilised least. In Lithuania,, the creation and adoption of extended modifying innovations and technologies was dominant in terms of innovation modes, while the strategic innovations were created by only 1 percent of Lithuanian enterprises . A comparative analysis of surveys, statistical data, and academic studies was conducted and lead to the conclusion that the main technology and innovation diffusion channel, as well as the main driving force behind Lithuania‘s economy during the transitional period of 1996–2007 was neithert FDI nor the scientific potential of the country, but rather the international trade. In addition, the data suggests that the country‘s scientific potential was ill-prepared for the changes brought on by globalisation and had a very weak impact on the growth of the Lithuanian economy and the economy‘s technological and innovational reorientation, which led to the enterprises searching for other possible sources of innovation. The model for the creation of innovation eacompassing state institutions, the science community and enterprises was not functional during the said period in Lithuania.
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Jyoti, Deep, Arti ., Padam Jamwal, Sonika Kotwal e Kunzes Dolma. "Clinical profile of the patients with oral squamous cell carcinoma: a tertiary institutional study". International Journal of Otorhinolaryngology and Head and Neck Surgery 6, n.º 4 (25 de março de 2020): 628. http://dx.doi.org/10.18203/issn.2454-5929.ijohns20201002.
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<p class="abstract"><strong>Background:</strong> Oral cancer consists of a group of neoplasms affecting any region of the oral cavity. This term is commonly used interchangeably with oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC), representing the most frequent of all oral neoplasms. Factors affecting the development of the oral squamous cell carcinoma are tobacco use, alcohol consumption, low socio-economic status, poor hygiene, poor diet, viral infection like HPV, ill-fitting dentures, jagged teeth.</p><p class="abstract"><strong>Methods:</strong> An institution based retrospective observational study was conducted in the department of ENT, GMC Jammu, including the records of the patients with oral squamous cell carcinoma admitted from June 2016 to July 2019. 80 patients of oral carcinoma were included in the study.</p><p class="abstract"><strong>Results:</strong> Male to female ratio was 5.1:1. Mean age of presentation was 49.2±4.1 with most of the cases presenting in the 6<sup>th</sup> decade. 27 (33.75%) patients had history of chewing tobacco alone, 17 (21%) had smoking with chewing tobacco and 10 (12.5 %) smoking with alcohol. 52% patients presented with growth of tongue (52%) followed by buccal mucosa (17.5%) and other sites. Histopathological grading of OSCC showed predominance of well differentiated cancer in 44 cases (55%).</p><p class="abstract"><strong>Conclusions:</strong> Cases of OSCC are increasing day by day in young generation due to increasing exposure to the risk habits which are easily accessible to them.</p>
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Schneider, John E., Jonathan Romanowsky, Philipp Schuetz, Ivana Stojanovic, Henry K. Cheng, Oliver Liesenfeld, Ljubomir Buturovic e Timothy E. Sweeney. "Cost Impact Model of a Novel Multi-mRNA Host Response Assay for Diagnosis and Risk Assessment of Acute Respiratory Tract Infections and Sepsis in the Emergency Department". Journal of Health Economics and Outcomes Research 7, n.º 1 (29 de abril de 2020): 24–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.36469/jheor.2020.12637.
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Background: Early identification of acute infections and sepsis remains an unmet medical need. While early detection and initiation of treatment reduces mortality, inappropriate treatment leads to adverse events and the development of antimicrobial resistance. Current diagnostic and prognostic solutions, including procalcitonin, lack required accuracy. A novel blood-based host response test, HostDx™ Sepsis by Inflammatix, Inc., assesses the likelihood of a bacterial infection, the likelihood of a viral infection, and the severity of the condition. Objectives: We estimated the economic impact of adopting HostDx Sepsis testing among patients with suspected acute respiratory tract infection (ARTI) in the emergency department (ED). Methods: Our cost impact model estimated costs for adult ED patients with suspected ARTI under the standard of care versus with the adoption of HostDx Sepsis from the perspective of US payers. Included costs were those assumed to be associated with an episode of sepsis diagnosis, management, and treatment. Projected accuracies for test predictions, disease prevalence, and clinical parameters was derived from patient-level meta-analysis data of randomized trials, supplemented with published performance data for HostDx Sepsis. One-way sensitivity analysis was performed on key input parameters. Results: Compared to standard of care including procalcitonin, the superior test characteristics of HostDx Sepsis resulted in an average cost savings of approximately US$1974 per patient (-31.3%) exclusive of the cost of HostDx Sepsis. Reductions in hospital days (-0.80 days, -36.7%), antibiotic days (-1.49 days, -29.5%), and percent 30-day mortality (-1.67%, -13.64%) were driven by HostDx Sepsis providing fewer “noninformative” moderate risk predictions and more “certain” low- or high-risk predictions compared to standard of care, especially for patients who were not severely ill. These results were robust to changes in key parameters, including disease prevalence. Conclusions: Our model shows substantial savings associated with introduction of HostDx Sepsis among patients with ARTIs in EDs. These results need confirmation in interventional trials.
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Bhat, Eijaz Ahmed, Maqsood Ahmad Dar, Peer Abdul Lateef Sidiqui e Farukh Jabeen. "Cost of illness of epilepsy per patient per year in a tertiary care hospital in New Delhi: A Prospective Observational study". Asian Journal of Medical Sciences 12, n.º 6 (1 de junho de 2021): 59–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/ajms.v12i6.36558.
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Background: Epilepsy is a disorder of the brain characterized by an enduring predisposition to generate epileptic seizures that imposes heavy burden on individuals, families, and also on healthcare systems. As the better understanding of economic aspects of epilepsy will lead to better development of epilepsy care this study was conducted to estimate the cost of illness in epilepsy per patient per year in a tertiary care hospital in New Delhi.
Aims and Objectives: The aim of study was to study the direct, indirect and total cost of illness in epilepsy per patient per year in a tertiary care hospital.
Materials and Methods: Patients with epilepsy attending the Department of Neurology at Batra Hospital and Medical Research Centre in New Delhi were included in this study. All epilepsy patients fulfilling the inclusion and exclusion criteria were included in the study. The cost of illness was estimated as total, direct and indirect costs of illness per year for each patient. The information was collected on a properly formed format which consists of the demographic details of the patient, general biodata of patient, information about the direct medical costs and direct non-medical costs and information about indirect costs. The results are presented in Mean ± SD frequencies and percentages. The Kruskal-Wallis test was used to compare the costs of illness among different strata. The Mann-Whitney U test was used to compare the costs of illness between strata. The p-value<0.05 was considered significant. All the analysis was carried out on SPSS 16.0 version (Chicago, Inc., USA).
Results: A total of 70 patients were included in the study. The median age of patients was 28.50 years and the mean age was 33.36 years. The total indirect and direct cost of illness was Rs. 5265.30±6363.42 and Rs. 25249.38±14480.09 respectively. The total cost of illness was Rs. 26808.42±16108.05. The highest mean cost was for Carbamazepine (Rs. 14500.00), followed by Levetiracetam (Rs.13300.00) and rest by the other commonly used drugs.
Conclusion: We concluded that economic burden of epilepsy on the family and patients can be decreased by decreasing the hospitalization rates of patients, avoiding poly therapy as much as possible and rationalizing the investigations.
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Hasanov, A. M. "Using bacterial preparations of pasteurellosis infection". Scientific Messenger of LNU of Veterinary Medicine and Biotechnologies 21, n.º 96 (14 de dezembro de 2019): 113–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.32718/nvlvet9620.
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The using of antibiotics and antimicrobials drugs without control may leads to the development of numerous complications and resistance of microorganisms to antibiotics. The using of antibiotics and antimicrobials drugs should are controlled on farms. That is why the monitoring and determination of sensitivity of bacterial diseases agents to antimicrobial drugs are very important. Results of pasterella, of salmonellas’ and kolibakterias’ monitoring in farms of Azerbaijan are introduced in the article. The studies were conducted on the basis of the department for quality control of biological preparations of the Azerbaijan Scientific Research Institute. Sampling for microbiological studies was carried out on farms from pathological material and premises where livestock of different age groups are kept. At the same time, the spread of the disease, incidence, mortality, mortality, age-related features, economic losses caused by bacterial pathogens were taken into account. Inoculations from samples of bone, brain, heart, liver, spleen, and lymph nodes were performed on simple and selective and differential diagnostic nutrient media. The results were read visually. Antibiotic sensitivity was determined by agar disco-diffusion method. Microbiological monitoring of a number of farms in Azerbaijan has shown that agents of bacterial diseases’ are widely spread. Between the isolated pasterella agent largest number were accounted for Salmonella (54.1%) and the Escherichia (30.8 per cent). The rest (15.1%) were isolated cultures of Proteus, Pseudomonas, Klebsiella, Salmonella, Campylobacteria, Enterobacteria, and Clostridia Citrobacter. This indicates that systematic control over the availability of the causative agents of bacterial infections in all critical points of farms is very necessary. Among isolates that were isolated from ill calves and objects, differences in their sensitivity to antimicrobial agents from active substances that officially have registered in our country were discovered. Bactericidal activity of relatively isolated cultures was showed by oxitetraciklin, colistin, ftorfenicol, zeftiocur, doxicyclin, enroxil and sarafloxacin.
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Fotina, A. A., e Zh E. Klischova. "ЧУТЛИВІСТЬ ЗБУДНИКІВ БАКТЕРІАЛЬНИХ ХВОРОБ ПТИЦІ ДО АНТИБАКТЕРІАЛЬНИХ ПРЕПАРАТІВ". Scientific Messenger of LNU of Veterinary Medicine and Biotechnologies 18, n.º 3(71) (12 de outubro de 2016): 182–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.15421/nvlvet7141.
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The using of antibiotics and antimicrobials drugs without control may leads to the development of numerous complications and resistance of microorganisms to antibiotics. The using of antibiotics and antimicrobials drugs should are controlled on poultry farms. That is why the monitoring and determination of sensitivity of bacterial diseases agents to antimicrobial drugs are very important. Results of salmonellas’ and kolibakterias’ monitoring in poultry’s farms of Ukraine are introduced in the article. Researches were conducted at the Department of veterinary sanitary examination, microbiology, zoohygiene and safety and quality of livestock products of Sumy NAU. Sampling for microbiological studies was conducted from the hatchery and from pathological material and premises where poultry of different age groups was held. The spread of the disease, morbidity, mortality, mortality rate, age characteristics, economic loss what diseases cause to the poultry farms were counted. Identification of Salmonella and Escherichia was conducted by ELISA with using of RIDASCREEN® and LOCATE® test systems, according to methodical recommendations of RIDASCREEN® and LOCATE® test systems using. The results were read visually or after addition of storageco with ELISA–photometer (reader) at 450 nm. Sensitivity to antibiotics was determined by disco – diffusion method in agar. Microbiological monitoring of a number of poultry farms in Ukraine has shown that agents of bacterial diseases’ are widely spread. Between the isolated microflora largest number were accounted for Salmonella (54.1%) and the Escherichia (30.8 per cent). The rest (15,1%) were isolated cultures of Proteus, Pseudomonas, Klebsiella, Salmonella, Campylobacteria, Enterobacteria, and Clostridia Citrobacter. This indicates that systematic control over the availability of the causative agents of bacterial infections in all critical points of production of poultry products is very necessary. Among isolates that were isolated from ill poultry and poultry objects, differences in their sensitivity to antimicrobial agents from active substances that officially have registered in our country were discovered. Bactericidal activity of relatively isolated cultures was showed by colistin, ftorfenicol, zeftiocur, TimTil 250, doxicyclin, enroxil and sarafloxacin.
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Kustyshev, Andrey N. "NKVD Industrial Engineering in the Kola North in the Late 1930s – Early 1940s". Economic History 18, n.º 2 (30 de junho de 2022): 132–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.15507/2409-630x.057.018.202202.132-142.
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Introduction. On the territory of the Kola North, the prisoners carried out hydraulic construction, and mining enterprises were built. An analysis of the NKVD industrial construction sector’s functioning in the designated time and regional dimension allows a deeper understanding of the role of the GULAG in the industrialization of a particular region, the country as a whole, contributes to the further development of scientific ideas about the NKVD’s mobilization potential in the prewar period. The purpose of this study is to analyze the construction activities of the GULAG camps in the Kola North in the context of the mobilization practice of the NKVD in the prewar years. Materials and Methods. The source foundation of the study was a set of materials from both central and regional archives. Analyzing the processes took place in the regional sector of the industrial construction of the NKVD at the turn of the 1930s – 1940s, the author used dialectical, systemic approaches, comparative and statistical research methods. Results. At the turn of the 1930s – 1940s, in the territory of the Kola North, the construction activities of the NKVD were of a large-scale nature and were of military-strategic importance for the country. There was a goal given to the department to speed up the completion of important construction objects. At the same time, a whole range of problems characterizing the GULAG economy characterized the construction sector of the NKVD: a poor supply of machines and mechanisms, materials, and a lack of project documentation. These circumstances systematically led to the disruption of planned targets. In addition, construction labor camps, despite the growth in the number of special contingents, experienced a permanent shortage of labor, the cause of which was a large proportion of disabled prisoners and chronically ill, unfit for work, as well as disabled, sick prisoners. Significant losses of labor force in forced labor camps were the result of serious problems associated with the organization of labor processes. Construction management delayed the conclusion of contracts with ITL forced labor camps on the provision of labor. A significant part of the prisoners was not taken to work due to the failure to provide an escort, the lack of clothes and shoes, downtime at work due to the lack of building materials. Discussion and Conclusion. An analysis of the construction activities of the NKVD in the Kola North, the economy of the GULAG, as a whole, helps to identify and specify the problem of the safety of resources at the disposal of labor camps, the inability of the latter to ensure the economic use of thousands of prisoners. This circumstance significantly limited the mobilization capabilities of the NKVD, including in the process of implementing large industrial projects of military strategic importance for the country. The economic consequences of resource losses (an increase of production cost, work in general, a decrease in the balance of working time, etc.) largely determine the place of the GULAG in the economic history of the country.
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Morozova, O. A., D. A. Sharov, N. N. Sharova, V. V. Morskova, A. V. Karpova e Yu N. Mikhel'kova. "ANALYSIS OF NEUROLOGICAL PATHOLOGY IN AN OUTPATIENT TREATMENT PROGRAM". Ulyanovsk Medico-biological Journal, n.º 3 (10 de setembro de 2019): 8–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.34014/2227-1848-2019-3-8-21.
Texto completo da fonteResumo:
Scientific-based interpretation of anamnestic and objective data of patients who seek neurologist’s advice in an outpatient hospital plays an important role in improving diagnostics, treatment and rehabilitation, as the main purpose of any outpatient department is early detection and prevention of diseases. The aim of the paper is to identify differential and diagnostic characteristics of early neuropathological manifestations in patients, visiting neurologist at an outpatient department, since early diagnostics can improve neuro-rehabilitative and preventive measures. Materials and Methods. The authors examined 128 patients who were visiting a neurologist at an outpatient department within a month’s time. Two age-gender groups were identified (40 males, 88 females). The average age of the patients was 53.8±5.6 years. The authors gained the medical history of the patients (anamnesis) through interviews, questionnaires, neurological examinations, instrumental and laboratory tests, and analysis of the obtained results according to verified diagnoses of ICD-10. Results. The authors identified social and age-gender groups, which numerically dominated in the structure of neurological outpatient examination (pensioners and disabled people, 50–69 years of age). They also established the relationship between clinical neuropathological manifestations, life and work characteristics and the sociocultural patients’ profile. Harmful working conditions and working stress prevailed in the structure of general morbidity of the industrial workers. The most commonly diagnosed CNS pathologies were cerebrovascular diseases (including discirculatory encephalopathy), vestibular sickness, pain syndromes (including cephalgic syndrome), asthenic and anxiety syndromes, and vegetovascular disfunction. Conclusion. Timely early (preclinical) neuropathological diagnostics and the development of individualized neuro-rehabilitative and preventive programs at the outpatient level can provide an opportunity to increase the effectiveness of the periodic health examination aimed at ill-health prevention and CNS disease progression, leading to high economic costs. Keywords: outpatient hospital, analysis of the neurological morbidity structure, cerebrovascular pathology, risk factors, stress. Научно обоснованная интерпретация анамнестических и объективных данных пациентов, обратившихся к врачу-неврологу поликлиники, занимает особое место в повышении качества диагностической и лечебно-реабилитационной помощи, так как главное направление деятельности поликлинической службы – своевременное выявление и профилактика болезней. Цель – выявить дифференциально-диагностические особенности ранних проявлений неврологической патологии у пациентов врача-невролога поликлиники с целью оптимизации нейрореабилитационных и профилактических мероприятий. Материалы и методы. Обследовано 128 пациентов, обратившихся к неврологу поликлиники в течение месяца. Выделены две возрастно-половые группы (муж. – 40 чел., жен. – 88 чел.). Средний возраст пациентов – 53,8±5,6 года. Проведены сбор анамнестических сведений методами опроса и анкетирования, неврологический осмотр, инструментально-лабораторные исследования, анализ полученных результатов в соответствии с верифицированными диагнозами по МКБ-10. Результаты. Выделены социальные и возрастно-половые группы, численно преобладающие в структуре неврологического поликлинического приема (пенсионеры и инвалиды в возрастном диапазоне 50–69 лет). Установлена взаимосвязь клинических проявлений неврологической патологии, особенностей производственно-бытовой сферы и социокультурального профиля пациентов. В структуре причин общей заболеваемости лиц, занятых в сфере производства, преобладающий удельный вес имели вредные условия труда и производственные стрессы. Наиболее часто диагностируемая патология нервной системы – цереброваскулярные болезни (в т.ч. дисциркуляторная энцефалопатия), вестибулопатии, болевые синдромы (в т.ч. цефалгический синдром), астенический и тревожный синдромы, вегетососудистая дистония. Выводы. Своевременная ранняя (доклиническая) диагностика неврологической патологии с разработкой индивидуализированных нейрореабилитационных и профилактических программ на этапе поликлинической помощи предоставит возможность повышения эффек¬тивности диспансеризации, направленной на предупреждение возникновения и прогрессирования болезней нервной системы, в тяжелых стадиях, требующих высоких экономических затрат. Ключевые слова: поликлиника, анализ структуры неврологической заболеваемости, цереброваскулярная патология, факторы риска, стресс.
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KITLV, Redactie. "Book Reviews". Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia 158, n.º 1 (2002): 95–144. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/22134379-90003788.
Texto completo da fonteResumo:
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Endrika, Sujarwo e Said Suhil Achmad. "Relationship between Socio-Economic Status, Interpersonal Communication, and School Climate with Parental Involvement in Early Childhood Education". JPUD - Jurnal Pendidikan Usia Dini 14, n.º 2 (30 de novembro de 2020): 361–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.21009/jpud.142.14.
Texto completo da fonteResumo:
Parental Involvement in their children's schooling has long been recognized as a critical component of good education. This study aims to find out the relationship between socioeconomic status, interpersonal communication, and school climate with parental involvement in early childhood education. Using survey and correlational research design, data collection was carried out through accumulation techniques with tests and questionnaires. The data analysis technique used statistical analysis and multiple regressions. The findings in the socio-economic context of parents show that the measure of power is an indicator in the very high category with a total score of 5, while the measures of wealth, honour and knowledge are included in the high category with a total score of 4 in relation to parental involvement. The form of interpersonal communication, the openness of parents in responding happily to information / news received from schools about children is a finding of a significant relationship with parental involvement in early childhood education. The school climate describes the responsibility for their respective duties and roles, work support provided, and interpersonal communication relationships, parents at home and teachers at school.
Keywords: Socio-economic Status, Interpersonal Communication, Climate School, Parental Involvement, Early Childhood Education
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Silitonga, Mirdat, Herien Puspitawati e Istiqlaliyah Muflikhati. "MODAL SOSIAL, COPING EKONOMI, GEJALA STRES SUAMI DAN KESEJAHTERAAN SUBJEKTIF KELUARGA PADA KELUARGA TKW". JKKP (Jurnal Kesejahteraan Keluarga dan Pendidikan) 5, n.º 1 (17 de abril de 2018): 20–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.21009/jkkp.051.03.
Texto completo da fonteResumo:
The achievement of family well - being is an aspiration of all families including families of migrant workers, to achieve the well - being of one of the ways that the families of migrant workers with the departure of the wife work as domestic servants in various countries. The purpose of this study was to analyze social capital, economic coping, sress symptom’s husband and family subjektive well - being of women migrant workers. This research use cross sectional studies. The location was chosen purposively in Tanggeung Village, Pagermaneuh Village, Margaluyu Village, Karangtengah Village, Tanggeung District and Pasirdalam Village Kadupandak District, Cianjur, West Java, Indonesia. Seventy five families were selected purposively among the families of women migrant workers. The finding indicates that social capital is in the moderate category, the coping economy is in the moderate category, the sress symptom’s husband is in the low category and the family well-being is in the low category. Finding in this study family subjective well-being is influenced by income per capita, sress symptom’s husband and economic coping.
Keywords: economic coping, family subjective well-being, social capital, stress symptom
Abstrak
Kesejahteraan keluarga merupakan sesuatu yang ingin dicapai seluruh keluarga, termasuk keluarga Tenaga Kerja Wanita (TKW), untuk mencapai kesejahteraan tersebut salah satu cara yang dilakukan oleh keluarga TKW adalah mengirim istri sebagai pembantu rumah tangga di berbagai negara. Tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah untuk menganalisis modal sosial, coping ekonomi, gejala stres suami, dan kesejahteraan subjektif keluarga TKW. Penelitian ini menggunakan cross sectional studies. Lokasi dipilih dengan metode purposive di Provinsi Jawa Barat, Kabupaten Cianjur, Kecamatan Tanggeung, Desa Pagermaneuh, Desa Marguluyu, Desa Karangtengah, Desa Tanggeung, Kecamatan Kadupandak, Desa Pasirdalam. Jumlah sampel sebanyak 75 keluarga TKW dengan metode purposive sampling. Penelitian ini menemukan modal sosial berada pada kategori sedang, coping ekonomi berada pada kategori sedang, gelaja stres suami berada pada kategori rendah, dan kesejahteraan subjektif berada pada kategori rendah. Penelitian ini juga menemukan kesejahteraan keluarga berpengaruh terhadap pendapatan perkapita, gelaja stres suami, dan coping ekonomi.
Kata kunci : coping ekonomi, gejala stres, kesejahteraan subjektif, modal sosial.
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Fursov, Andrey. "Public hearings as an institution of deliberative democracy in major Russian and American cities". Sravnitel noe konstitucionnoe obozrenie 30, n.º 1 (2021): 59–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.21128/1812-7126-2021-1-59-83.
Texto completo da fonteResumo:
Currently, public hearings are one of the most widespread forms of deliberative municipal democracy in Russia. This high level of demand, combined with critique of legal regulations and the practices for bringing this system to reality – justified, in the meantime, by its development (for example, by the Agency for Strategic Initiatives and the Public Chambers of the Russian Federation) of proposals for the correction of corresponding elements of the legal code – make both the study of Russian experiences in this sphere and comparative studies of legal regulations and practical usage of public hearings in Russia and abroad extremely relevant. This article is an attempt to make a contribution to this field of scientific study. If the appearance of public hearings in Russia as an institution of Russian municipal law is connected with the passing of the Federal Law of 6 October 2003 No.131-FZ, “On the general organisational principles of local government in the Russian Federation,” then in the United States, this institution has existed since the beginning of the 20th century, with mass adoption beginning in the 1960s. In this time, the United States has accumulated significant practical experience in the use of public hearings and their legal formulation. Both countries are large federal states, with their own regional specifics and diversity, the presence of three levels of public authority and different principles of federalism, which cause differences in the legal regulation of municipal public hearings. For this reason, this article undertakes a comparative legal analysis of Russian and American experiences of legal regulation and practical use of public hearings, on the example of several major municipalities – the cities of Novosibirsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Voronezh and New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. A comparison of laws influencing the public hearing processes in these cities is advisable, given the colossal growth in the role of city centers in the industrial and post-industrial eras. Cities in particular are the primary centers for economic growth, the spread of innovations, progressive public policy and the living environment for the majority of both Russian and American citizens. The cities under research are one of the largest municipalities in the two countries by population, and on such a scale, the problem of involving residents in solving local issues is especially acute. In this context, improving traditional institutions of public participation is a timely challenge for the legislator, and the experiences of these cities are worth describing. The unique Russian context for legal regulations of public hearings involves the combination of overarching federal law and specific municipal decrees that regulate the hearing process. There are usually two municipal acts regulating public hearings on general issues of the city district (charter, budget, etc.) and separately on urban planning. In the United States, the primary regulation of public hearings is assigned to the state and municipality level, with a whole series of corresponding laws and statutes; meanwhile, methodological recommendations play a specific role in the organisation of hearings, which are issued by the state department of a given state. It is proposed that regulating the corresponding relationships at the federal subject level will permit a combination of the best practices of legal administration with local nuances, thereby reinforcing the guarantee of the realization of civil rights to self-government. There are other features in the process of organizing and conducting public hearings in the United States, which, as shown in the article, can be perceived by Russian lawmakers as well in order to create an updated construct of public discussions at the local level.
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Wong, Harry K. "Programas de indução que mantêm os novos professores ensinando e melhorando (Induction Programs That Keep New Teachers Teaching and Improving)". Revista Eletrônica de Educação 14 (9 de outubro de 2020): 4139112. http://dx.doi.org/10.14244/198271994139.
Texto completo da fonteResumo:
e4139111This article features schools and school districts with successful induction programs, all easily replicable. Increasingly, research confirms that teacher and teaching quality are the most powerful predictors of student success. In short, principals ensure higher student achievement by assuring better teaching. To do this, effective administrators have a new teacher induction program available for all newly hired teachers, which then seamlessly becomes part of the lifelong, sustained professional development program for the district or school. What keeps a good teacher are structured, sustained, intensive professional development programs that allow new teachers to observe others, to be observed by others, and to be part of networks or study groups where all teachers share together, grow together, and learn to respect each other’s work.ResumoEste artigo apresenta escolas e distritos escolares com programas bem sucedidos de indução, todos facilmente replicáveis. Cada vez mais, a pesquisa confirma que o professor e a qualidade do ensino são os mais poderosos preditores do sucesso do aluno. Em suma, os diretores garantem maior desempenho dos alunos, garantindo melhor ensino. Para fazer isso, os administradores eficazes têm um novo programa de indução de professores disponível para todos os professores recém-contratados, que então se torna parte do programa de desenvolvimento profissional sustentado ao longo da vida para o distrito ou escola. O que mantém um bom professor são programas estruturados, constantes e intensivos de desenvolvimento profissional que permitem que os novos professores observem outros, sejam observados por outros e façam parte de redes ou grupos de estudo onde todos os professores compartilham juntos, crescem juntos e aprendem a respeitar o trabalho um do outro.Tradução do original WONG, Harry K. “Induction Programs That Keep New Teachers Teaching and Improving”. NASSP Bulletin – Vol. 88 No 638 March 2004. © Harry K. Wong Publications, Inc. por Adriana Teixeira Reis.Palavras-chave: Programas de indução, Professor iniciante, Desenvolvimento profissional docente.Keywords: Induction programs, Beginner teacher, Teacher professional development.ReferencesALLINGTON, R. (2003). The six ts of effective elementary literacy instruction. Retrieved from www.readingrockets.org / article.php?ID=413.BREAUX, A., & WONG, H. (2003). New teacher induction: How to train, support, and retain new teachers. Mountain View, CA: Harry K. Wong Publications.BRITTON, E., PAINE, L., PIMM, D., & RAIZEN, S. (Eds.). (2003). Comprehensive teacher induction: Systems for early career learning. State: Kluwer Academic Publishers and WestEd.CROSS, C. T., & RIGDEN, D. W. (2002, April). Improving teacher quality [Electronic version]. American School Board Journal, 189(4), 24–27.DARLING-HAMMOND, L., & SYKES, G. (2003). Wanted: A national teacher sup- ply policy for education: The right way to meet the “highly qualified teacher” challenge. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 11(33). Retrieved from http: // epaa.asu.edu / epaa / v11n33 /DARLING-HAMMOND, L., & YOUNGS, P. (2002). Defining “highly qualified teachers”: What does scientifically-based research actually tell us? Educational Researcher, 31(9), 13–25.DEPAUL, A. (2000). Survival guide for new teachers: How new teachers can work effec- tively with veteran teachers, parents, principals, and teacher educators. Jessup, MD: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement.DRUMMOND, S. (2002, April 18). What will it take to hold onto the next gen- eration of teachers? Harvard Graduate School of Education News. Retrieved from www.gse.harvard.edu / news / features / ngt04182002.htmlELMORE, R. (2002, January/ February). The limits of “change.” Harvard Education Letter. Retrieved from www.edletter.org / past / issues / 2002-jf / limitsofchange.shtmlFEIMAN-NEMSER, S. (1996). Teacher mentoring: A critical review. Washington, DC: ERIC Clearinghouse on Teaching and Teacher Education. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED397060)FULLAN, M. (2001). The new meaning of educational change (3rd ed.). New York: Teachers College Press.FULLAN, M. (2003). Change forces with a vengeance. London: Routledge Falmer.GARET, M., Porter, A., DESMOINE, L., BIRMAn, B., & KWANG, S. K. (2001). What makes professional development effective? American Educational Research Journal, 38(4), 915–946.GREENWALD, R., HEDGES, L., & LAINE, R. (1996). The effect of school resources on student achievement. Review of Educational Research, 66(3), 361–396.HANUSHEK, E. A., KAIN, J. F., & RIVKIN, S. G. (2001). Why public schools lose teachers (NBER Working Paper No. 8599). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.HARE, D., & HEAP, J. (2001). Effective teacher recruitment and retention strategies in the Midwest. Naperville, IL: North Central Regional Laboratory. Re- trieved June 26, 2002, from www.ncrel.org / policy/ pubs / html / strategy/ index.htmlHASSEL, E. (1999). Professional development: Learning from the best. Naperville, IL: North Central Regional Educational Laboratory.HIEBERT, H., GALLIMORE, R., & STIGLER, J. (2002). A knowledge base for the teaching profession: What would it look like and how can we get one? Educational Researcher, 31(5), 3–15.JOHNSON, S., & BIRKELAND, S. (2003). Pursuing a sense of success: New teach- ers explain their career decisions. American Educational Research Journal, 40(3), 581–617.JOHNSON, S. M., & KARDOS, S. M. (2002). Keeping new teachers in mind. Educational Leadership, 59(6), 13–16.KARDOS, S. (2003, April). Integrated professional culture: Exploring new teachers’ experiences in 4 states. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL.LEHMAN, P. (2003, November 26). Ten steps to school reform at bargain prices. Education Week, 23(13), 36, 28.LIU, E. (2003, April). New teachers’ experiences of hiring: Preliminary findings from a 4-state study. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL.MARTIN, S. (2003, March). From the ground up: Building your own university. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development, San Francisco, CA.NORTH CAROLINA TEACHING FELLOWS COMMISSION. (1995). Keeping talented teach- ers. Raleigh, NC: Public School Forum of North Carolina.PALOMBO, M. (2003). A network that puts the net to work. Journal of Staff Development, 24(1), 24–28.ROTHMAN, R. (2002 / 2003). Transforming high schools into small learning communities. Challenge Journal, 6(2), 1–8.SANDERS, W. (1996). Cumulative and residual effects of teachers on future student academic achievement. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Value-Added Research & Assessment Center.SAPHIER, J., FREEDMAN, S., & ASCHHEIM, B. (2001). Beyond mentoring: How to nurture, support, and retain new teachers. Newton, MA: Teachers21.SCHLAGER, M., FUSCO, J., KOCH, M., CRAWFORD, V., & PHILLIPS, M. (2003, July). Designing equity and diversity into online strategies to support new teachers. Paper presented at the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC), Seattle, WA.SERPELL, Z., & BOZEMAN, L. (1999). Beginning teacher induction: A report of beginning teacher effectiveness and retention. Washington, DC: National Partnership for Excellence and Accountability in Teaching.WONG, H. (2001, August 8). Mentoring can’t do it all. Education Week, 20(43), pp. 46, 50.WONG, H. (2002a). Induction: The best form of professional development. Educational Leadership, 59(6), 52–55.WONG, H. (2002b). Play for keeps. Principal Leadership, 3(1), 55–58.WONG, H. (2003a). Collaborating with colleagues to improve student learn- ing. ENC Focus, 11(6), 9.WONG, H. (2003b, October). Induction: How to train, support, and retain new teachers. Paper presented at the conference of the National Staff Development Council.WONG, H. (2003c). Induction programs that keep working. In M. Scherer (Ed.), Keeping good teachers ( pp. 42–49). Alexandria, VA: Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development.WONG, H., & ASQUITH, C. (2002). Supporting new teachers. American School Board Journal, 189(12), p. 22.YOUNGS, P. (2003). State and district policies related to mentoring and new teacher induction in Connecticut. New York: National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future.
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Nolan, James L. "Atomic Doctors: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age". Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 73, n.º 1 (março de 2021): 54–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.56315/pscf3-21nolan.
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ATOMIC DOCTORS: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age by James L. Nolan Jr. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020. 294 pages, plus index. Hardcover; $29.95. ISBN: 9780674248632. *This book ends with a tragic photograph. The reader will see a young boy carrying a sleeping infant on his back. However, the infant is not asleep but instead is dead as his brother waits his turn to have his brother's body thrown into a giant pyre at Nagasaki in the days following the atomic bomb blast. This picture is symbolic of the tragedy of war and provides a provocative statement regarding the involvement of US physicians in the development of the atomic weapons program toward the end of World War II. The author, James L. Nolan Jr., PhD (Professor of Sociology, Williams College), provides an excellent historical vignette of this period through a written biography of his grandfather, James F. Nolan, MD. *Dr. Nolan, as well as Louis Hempelmann, MD and Stafford Warren, MD, were intricately involved with the Trinity testing in New Mexico as well as with the development of the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. Dr. Nolan met and collaborated with such famous people associated with the Manhattan Project, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, and General Leslie Groves. The entire group of physicians oversaw determining radiation risks during atomic bomb development and testing. This placed them in a difficult situation which "linked the arts of healing and war in ways that had little precedent" (p. 166) especially regarding the Hippocratic Oath.1 *Dr. Nolan was involved with setting up the hospital at Los Alamos as well as providing medical care for the Los Alamos staff and families. However, the job of these clinicians also had other aspects. Radiation exposure to workers was observed and recorded at Los Alamos leading to some of the initial descriptions of radiation poisoning. Additionally, the physicians were involved in determining radiation hazards associated with Los Alamos and in the setting of Trinity with most of their findings either being ignored or hidden from the public, sometimes with the complicity of these individuals. It is fascinating to consider that Dr. Nolan was one of the military personnel chosen to accompany Little Boy (the bomb that exploded over Hiroshima) to the Pacific Front at Tinian Island on the famous and later tragic USS Indianapolis. I cannot imagine, in our present time, that a physician would be charged with transporting and reporting the safety of a technologically advanced weapons system. *The book contains many fascinating stories, including how military physicians as well as other personnel were told to assert there was no significant radiation after the bombing in Japan (despite obvious radiation injury being noted in thousands of individuals), how the military allowed reporters at the Trinity test site after the bomb test with no protection except for "protective" booties, how US military physicians were told to not treat Japanese civilians after the bombing in order to circumvent moral responsibility of the bombing (this was ignored), how the inhabitants of the Bikini Atoll and Enewetak Atoll were forced to abandon their ancestral homes so that further atomic bomb testing could occur (with subsequent deleterious effects in their sociologic and health outcomes), and how patients in the United States (many who were already terminally ill) were secretly injected with plutonium to determine the effects of radiation injury. *Besides being a biography and history of a physician and his colleagues, this book also goes in some philosophical directions, including considering what is the goal of technology. Oppenheimer himself stated that "It's amazing ... how the technology tools trap one" (p. 33). The "trap" leads to a myriad of issues. Dr. Nolan believed radiation should be considered under the paradigm of an "instrumentalist view of technology" in which new technology could be used for the advancement or decline of our species. In his case, he began experimenting with radiation to treat gynecologic cancer in his patients. The book then explores "technological determinism," both optimistic and pessimistic, which is still an issue permeating our culture today. The author states that humans appear to always choose technologic advances even before fully knowing downstream economic, political, or cultural effects. Such examples cited by the author include the internet, social media, and genetic engineering. *A Christian will find this book unsettling when one considers what one prioritizes in his (her) faith. For example, one of the physicists who worked at Los Alamos was a Quaker. The Trinity test was named after the Christian Trinity (based on a John Donne sonnet). These facts are sobering when the author provides reports of "downwinders" who suffered catastrophic disease after the Trinity test as well as going into detail about the thousands of Japanese who suffered radiation poisoning after the nuclear bombing. In addition, the bombing of Nagasaki was close to the Christian part of the city resulting in the killing of most of the Christians living there. Indeed, the pursuit of science is a fascinating human endeavor, but the point of science is to objectively determine facts. Science does not necessarily provide subjectivity by itself which allows it to be influenced by meaning, moral values, and responsibility.2 In the moral arena, people with religious beliefs, including Christians, are required to influence the idea of technologic determinism in a positive direction. I highly recommend this book not only to learn about an interesting part of world history but also to appreciate the tragedy of the human condition in the setting of war. *Notes *1Michael North, translator, "Greek Medicine," History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, last updated February 7, 2012, https://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/greek/greek_oath.html. *2Mehdi Golshani, "Science Needs a Comprehensive Worldview," Theology and Science 18, no. 3 (2020): 438-47. *Reviewed by John F. Pohl, MD, Professor of Pediatrics, Department of Pediatrics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84113.
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Fayez, R., A. AlMuntashery, G. Bodie, A. Almamar, R. S. Gill, I. Raîche, C. L. Mueller et al. "Canadian Surgery Forum1 Is laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy a reasonable stand-alone procedure for super morbidly obese patients?2 Postoperative monitoring requirements of patients with obstructive sleep apnea undergoing bariatric surgery3 Role of relaparoscopy in the diagnosis and treatment of bariatric complications in the early postoperative period4 Changes of active and total ghrelin, GLP-1 and PYY following restrictive bariatric surgery and their impact on satiety: comparison of sleeve gastrectomy and adjustable gastric banding5 Prioritization and willingness to pay for bariatric surgery: the patient perspective6 Ventral hernia at the time of laparoscopic gastric bypass surgery: Should it be repaired?7 Linear stapled gastrojejunostomy with transverse handsewn enterotomy closure significantly reduces strictures for laparoscopic Roux-en-Y bypass8 Laparoscopic biliopancreatic diversion with duodenal switch as second stage for super super morbidly obese patients. Do all patients benefit?9 Sleeve gastrectomy in the super super morbidly obese (BMI > 60 kg/m2): a Canadian experience10 Laparoscopic gastric bypass for the treatment of refractory idiopathic gastroparesis: a report of 2 cases11 Duodeno-ileal switch as a primary bariatric and metabolic surgical option for the severely obese patient with comorbidities: review of a single-institution case series of duodeno-ileal intestinal bypass12 Management of large paraesophageal hernias in morbidly obese patients with laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy: a case series13 Early results of the Ontario bariatric surgical program: using the bariatric registry14 Improving access to bariatric surgical care: Is universal health care the answer?15 Early and liberal postoperative exploration can reduce morbidity and mortality in patients undergoing bariatric surgery16 Withdrawn17 Identification and assessment of technical errors in laparoscopic Roux-en-Y gastric bypass18 A valid and reliable tool for assessment of surgical skill in laparoscopic Roux-en-Y gastric bypass19 Psychiatric predictors of presurgery drop-out following suitability assessment for bariatric surgery20 Predictors of outcomes following Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery at The Ottawa Hospital21 Prophylactic management of cholelithiasis in bariatric patients: Is routine cholecystectomy warranted?22 Early outcomes of Roux-en-Y gastric bypass in a publicly funded obesity program23 Similar incidence of gastrojejunal anastomotic stricture formation with hand-sewn and 21 mm circular stapler techniques during Roux-en-Y gastric bypass24 (CAGS Basic Science Award) Exogenous glucagon-like peptide-1 improves clinical, morphological and histological outcomes of intestinal adaptation in a distal-intestinal resection piglet model of short bowel syndrome25 (CAGS Clinical Research Award) Development and validation of a comprehensive curriculum to teach an advanced minimally invasive procedure: a randomized controlled trial26 Negative-pressure wound therapy (iVAC) on closed, high-risk incisions following abdominal wall reconstruction27 The impact of seed granting on research in the University of British Columbia Department of Surgery28 Quality of surgical care is inadequate for elderly patients29 Recurrence of inguinal hernia in general and hernia specialty hospitals in Ontario, Canada30 Oncostatin M receptor deficiency results in increased mortality in an intestinal ischemia reperfusion model in mice31 Laparoscopic repair of large paraesophageal hernias with anterior gastropexy: a multicentre trial32 Response to preoperative medical therapy predicts success of laparoscopic splenectomy for immune thrombocytopenic purpura33 Perioperative sepsis, but not hemorrhagic shock, promotes the development of cancer metastases in a murine model34 Measuring the impact of implementing an acute care surgery service on the management of acute biliary disease35 Patient flow and efficiency in an acute care surgery service36 The relationship between treatment factors and postoperative complications after radical surgery for rectal cancer37 Risk of ventral hernia after laparoscopic colon surgery38 Urinary metabolomics as a tool for early detection of Barrett’s and esophageal cancer39 Construct validity of individual and summary performance metrics associated with a computer-based laparo-scopic simulator40 Impact of a city-wide health system reorganization on emergency department visits in hospitals in surrounding communities41 Transcatheter aortic valve implantation for the nonoperative management of aortic stenosis: a cost-effectiveness analysis42 Breast cancer: racial differences in age of onset. A potential confounder in Canadian screening recommendations43 Risk taking in surgery: in and out of the comfort zone44 A tumour board in the office: Track those cancer patients!45 Increased patient BMI is not associated with advanced colon cancer stage or grade on presentation: a retrospective chart review46 Consensus statements regarding the multidisciplinary care of limb amputation patients in disasters or humanitarian emergencies. Report of the 2011 Humanitarian Action Summit Surgical Working Group on amputations following disasters or conflict47 Learning the CanMEDS role of professional: a pilot project of supervised discussion groups addressing the hidden curriculum48 Assessing the changing scope of training in Canadian general surgery programs: expected versus actual experience49 Predicting need for surgical management for massive gastrointestinal hemorrhage50 International health care experience: using CanMEDS to evaluate learning outcomes following a surgical mission in Mampong, Ghana51 The open abdomen: risk factors for mortality and rates of closure52 How surgeons think: an exploration of mental practice in surgical preparation53 The surgery wiki: a novel method for delivery of under-graduate surgical education54 Understanding surgical residents’ postoperative practices before implementing an enhanced recovery after surgery (ERAS) guideline at the University of Toronto55 From laparoscopic transabdominal to posterior retroperitoneal adrenalectomy: a paradigm shift in operative approach56 A retrospective audit of outcomes in patients over the age of 80 undergoing acute care abdominal surgery57 Canadian general surgery residents’ perspectives on work-hour regulations58 Timing of surgical intervention and its outcomes in acute appendicitis59 Preparing surgical trainees to deal with adverse events. An outline of learning issues60 Acute care surgical service: surgeon agreement at the time of handover61 Predicting discharge of elderly patients to prehospitalization residence following emergency general surgery62 Morbidity and mortality after emergency abdominal surgery in octo- and nonagenarians63 The impact of acute abdominal illness and urgent admission to hospital on the living situation of elderly patients64 A comparison of laparoscopic versus open subtotal gastrectomy for antral gastric adenocarcinoma: a North American perspective65 Minimally invasive excision of ectopic mediastinal parathyroid adenomas66 Perioperative outcomes of laparoscopic hernia repair in a tertiary care centre: a single institution’s experience67 Evaluation of a student-run, practical and didactic curriculum for preclerkship medical students68 Joseph Lister: Father of Modern Surgery69 Comparisons of melanoma sentinel lymph node biopsy prediction nomograms in a cohort of Canadian patients70 Local experience with myocutaneous flaps after extensive pelvic surgery71 The treatment of noncirrhotic splanchnic vein thrombosis: Is anticoagulation enough?72 Implementation of an acute care surgery service does not affect wait-times for elective cancer surgeries: an institutional experience73 Use of human collagen mesh for closure of a large abdominal wall defect, after colon cancer surgery, a case report74 The role of miR-200b in pulmonary hypoplasia associated with congenital diaphragmatic hernia75 Systematic review and meta-analysis of electrocautery versus scalpel for incising epidermis and dermis76 Accuracy of sentinel lymph node biopsy for early breast cancer in the community setting in St. John’s, New-foundland: results of a retrospective review77 Acute surgical outcomes in the 80 plus population78 The liberal use of platelets transfusions in the acute phase of trauma resuscitation: a systematic review79 Implementation of an acute care surgical on call program in a Canadian community hospital80 Short-term outcomes following paraesophageal hernia repair in the elderly patient81 First experience with single incision surgery: feasibility in the pediatric population and cost evaluation82 The impact of the establishment of an acute care surgery unit on the outcomes of appendectomies and cholecystectomies83 Description and preliminary evaluation of a low-cost simulator for training and evaluation of flexible endoscopic skills84 Tumour lysis syndrome in metastatic colon cancer: a case report85 Acute care surgery service model implementation study at a single institution86 Colonic disasters approached by emergent subtotal and total colectomy: lessons learned from 120 consecutive cases87 Acellular collagen matrix stent to protect bowel anastomoses88 Lessons we learned from preoperative MRI-guided wire localization of breast lesions: the University Health Network (UHN) experience89 Interim cost comparison for the use of platinum micro-coils in the operative localization of small peripheral lung nodules90 Routine barium esophagram has minimal impact on the postoperative management of patients undergoing esophagectomy for esophageal cancer91 Iron deficiency anemia is a common presenting issue with giant paraesophageal hernia and resolves following repair92 A randomized comparison of different ventilation strategies during thoracotomy and lung resection93 The Canadian Lung Volume Reduction Surgery study: an 8-year follow-up94 A comparison of minimally invasive versus open Ivor-Lewis esophagectomy95 A new paradigm in the follow-up after curative resection for lung cancer: minimal-dose CT scan allows for early detection of asymptomatic cancer activity96 Predictors of lymph node metastasis in early esophageal adenocarcinoma: Is endoscopic resection worth the risk?97 How well can thoracic surgery residents operate? Comparing resident and program director opinions98 The impact of extremes of age on short- and long-term outcomes following surgical resection of esophageal malignancy99 Epidermal growth factor receptor targeted gold nanoparticles for the enhanced radiation treatment of non–small cell lung cancer100 Laparoscopic Heller myotomy results in excellent outcomes in all subtypes of achalasia as defined by the Chicago classification101 Neoadjuvant chemoradiation versus surgery in managing esophageal cancer102 Quality of life postesophagectomy for cancer!103 The implementation, evolution and translocation of standardized clinical pathways can improve perioperative outcomes following surgical treatment of esophageal cancer104 A tissue-mimicking phantom for applications in thoracic surgical simulation105 Sublobar resection compared with lobectomy for early stage non–small cell lung cancer: a single institution study106 Not all reviews are equal: the quality of systematic reviews and meta-analyses in thoracic surgery107 Do postoperative complications affect health-related quality of life after video-assisted thoracoscopic lobectomy for patients with lung cancer? A cohort study108 Thoracoscopic plication for palliation of dyspnea secondary to unilateral diaphragmatic paralysis: A worthwhile venture?109 Thoracic surgery experience in Canadian general surgery residency programs110 Perioperative morbidity and pathologic response rates following neoadjuvant chemotherapy and chemoradiation for locally advanced esophageal carcinoma111 An enhanced recovery pathway reduces length of stay after esophagectomy112 Predictors of dysplastic and neoplastic progression of Barrett’s esophagus113 Recurrent esophageal cancer complicated by tracheoesophageal fistula: management by means of palliative airway stenting114 Pancreaticopleural fistula-induced empyema thoracis: principles and results of surgical management115 Prognostic factors of early postoperative mortality following right extended hepatectomy116 Optimizing steatotic livers for transplantation using a cell-penetrating peptide CPP-fused heme oxygenase117 Video outlining the technical steps for a robot-assisted laparoscopic pancreaticoduodenectomy118 Establishment of a collaborative group to conduct innovative clinical trials in Canada119 Hepatic resection for metastatic malignant melanoma: a systematic review and meta-analysis120 Acellular normothermic ex vivo liver perfusion for donor liver preservation121 Pancreatic cancer and predictors of survival: comparing the CA 19–9/bilirubin ratio with the McGill Brisbane Scoring System122 Staged liver resections for bilobar hepatic colorectal metastases: a single centre experience123 Economic model of observation versus immediate resection of hepatic adenomas124 Resection of colorectal liver metastasis in the elderly125 Acceptable long-term survival in patients undergoing liver resection for metastases from noncolorectal, non-neuroendocrine, nonsarcoma malignancies126 Patient and clinicopathological features and prognosis of CK19+ hepatocellular carcinomas: a case–control study127 The management of blunt hepatic trauma in the age of angioembolization: a single centre experience128 Liver resections for noncolorectal and non-neuroendocrine metastases: an evaluation of oncologic outcomes129 Developing an evidence-based clinical pathway for patients undergoing pancreaticoduodenectomy130 Hepatitis C infection and hepatocellular carcinoma in liver transplant: a 20 year experience131 The effect of medication on the risk of post-ERCP pancreatitis132 Temporal trends in the use of diagnostic imaging for patients with hepato-pancreato-biliary (HPB) conditions: How much ionizing radiation are we really using?196 A phase II study of aggressive metastasectomy for intra-and extrahepatic metastases from colorectal cancer133 Why do women choose mastectomy for breast cancer treatment? A conceptual framework for understanding surgical decision-making in early-stage breast cancer134 Synoptic operative reporting: documentation of quality of care data for rectal cancer surgery135 Learning curve analysis for cytoreductive surgery: a useful application of the cumulative sum (CUSUM) method136 Pancreatic cancer is strongly associated with a unique urinary metabolomic signature137 Concurrent neoadjuvant chemo/radiation in locally advanced breast cancer138 Impact of positron emission tomography on clinical staging of newly diagnosed rectal cancer: a specialized single centre retrospective study139 An evaluation of intraoperative Faxitron microradiography versus conventional specimen radiography for the excision of nonpalpable breast lesions140 Comparison of breast cancer treatment wait-times in the Southern Interior of British Columbia in 2006 and 2010141 Factors affecting lymph nodes harvest in colorectal carcinoma142 Laparoscopic adrenalectomy for metastases143 You have a message! Social networking as a motivator for fundamentals of laparoscopic surgery (FLS) training144 The evaluation and validation of a rapid diagnostic and support clinic for women assessment for breast cancer145 Oncoplastic breast surgery: oncologic benefits and limitations146 A qualitative study on rectal cancer patients’ preferences for location of surgical care147 The effect of surgery on local recurrence in young women with breast cancer148 Elevated IL-6 and IL-8 levels in tumour microenvironment is not associated with increased serum levels in humans with Pseudomyxoma peritonei and peritoneal mesothelioma149 Conversion from laparoscopic to open approach during gastrectomy: a population-based analysis150 A scoping review of surgical process improvement tools (SPITs) in cancer surgery151 Splenectomy during gastric cancer surgery: a population-based study152 Defining the polo-like kinase 4 (Plk4) interactome in cancer cell protrusions153 Neoadjuvant imatinib mesylate for locally advanced gastrointestinal stromal tumours154 Implementing results from ACOSOG Z0011: Practice-changing or practice-affirming?155 Should lymph node retrieval be a surgical quality indicator in colon cancer?156 Long-term outcomes following resection of retroperitoneal recurrence of colorectal cancer157 Clinical research in surgical oncology: an analysis of clinicaltrials.gov158 Radiation therapy after breast conserving surgery: When are we missing the mark?159 The accuracy of endorectal ultrasound in staging rectal lesions in patients undergoing transanal endoscopic microsurgery160 Quality improvement in gastrointestinal cancer surgery: expert panel recommendations for priority research areas161 Factors influencing the quality of local management of ductal carcinoma in situ: a cohort study162 Papillary thyroid microcarcinoma: Does size matter?163 Hyperthermic isolated limb perfusion for extremity soft tissue sarcomas: systematic review of clinical efficacy and quality assessment of reported trials164 Adherence to antiestrogen therapy in seniors with breast cancer: How well are we doing?165 Parathyroid carcinoma: Challenging the surgical dogma?166 A qualitative assessment of the journey to delayed breast reconstruction195 The role of yoga therapy in breast cancer patients167 Outcomes reported in comparative studies of surgical interventions168 Enhanced recovery pathways decrease length of stay following colorectal surgery, but how quickly do patients actually recover?169 The impact of complications on bed utilization after elective colorectal resection170 Impact of trimodal prehabilitation program on functional recovery after colorectal cancer surgery: a pilot study171 Complex fistula-in-ano: Should the plug be abandoned in favour of the LIFT or BioLIFT?172 Prognostic utility of cyclooxygenase-2 expression by colon and rectal cancer173 Laparoscopic right hemicolectomy with complete mesocolic excision provides acceptable perioperative outcomes but is complex and time-consuming: analysis of learning curves for a novice minimally invasive surgeon174 Intraoperative quality assessment following double stapled circular colorectal anastomosis175 Improving patient outcomes through quality assessment of rectal cancer care176 Are physicians willing to accept a decrease in treatment effectiveness for improved functional outcomes for low rectal cancer?177 Turnbull-Cutait delayed coloanal anastomosis for the treatment of distal rectal cancer: a prospective cohort study178 Preoperative high-dose rate brachytherapy in preparation for sphincter preservation surgery for patients with advanced cancer of the lower rectum179 Impact of an enhanced recovery program on short-term outcomes after scheduled laparoscopic colon resection180 The clinical results of the Turnbull-Cutait delayed coloanal anastomosis: a systematic review181 Is a vertical rectus abdominus flap (VRAM) necessary? An analysis of perineal wound complications182 Fistula plug versus endorectal anal advancement flap for the treatment of high transsphincteric cryptoglandular anal fistulas: a systematic review and meta-analysis183 Maternal and neonatal outcomes following colorectal cancer surgery184 Transanal drainage to treat anastomotic leaks after low anterior resection for rectal cancer: a valuable option185 Trends in colon cancer in Ontario: 2002–2009186 Validation of electronically derived short-term outcomes in colorectal surgery187 A population-based assessment of transanal and endoscopic resection for adenocarcinoma of the rectum188 Laparoscopic colorectal surgery in the emergency setting: trends in the province of Ontario from 2002 to 2009189 Prevention of perineal hernia after laparoscopic and robotic abdominoperineal resection: review with case series of internal hernia through pelvic mesh which was placed in attempt to prevent perineal hernia190 Effect of rectal cancer treatments on quality of life191 The use of antibacterial sutures as an adjunctive preventative strategy for surgical site infection in Canada: an economic analysis192 Impact of socioeconomic status on colorectal cancer screening and stage at presentation: preliminary results of a population-based study from an urban Canadian centre193 Initial perioperative results of the first transanal endoscopic microsurgery (TEM) program in the province of Quebec194 Use of negative pressure wound therapy decreases perineal wound infections following abdominal perineal resection". Canadian Journal of Surgery 55, n.º 4 Suppl 1 (agosto de 2012): S63—S135. http://dx.doi.org/10.1503/cjs.016712.
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Gunders, Lisa. "Welfare in the Future -". M/C Journal 2, n.º 9 (1 de janeiro de 2000). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1820.
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On 29 September 1999, Senator Jocelyn Newman, the Australian Government's Minister for Family and Community Services, delivered a controversial address to the National Press Club in Canberra. The delivery had been delayed a week and it was widely rumoured that the Minister had been forced to remove some of the more controversial proposals (see Senate Question Time on 29 September, for instance). The speech, entitled "The Future of Welfare in the 21st Century", announced plans to tackle a supposed trend towards welfare dependency by creating an "active" rather than a "passive" welfare system set within the Government's policy of "Mutual Obligation": a system that focusses on "capacity and ability" (Newman para. 42) and "what people can do" rather than what they can't do (para. 44). This article, however, questions whether the welfare system projected for the future will be enabling for those who use it, or whether income-based social divisions will become further entrenched. Since taking government in 1996, the Coalition's policies have included privatisation of previously government-run utilities and services and restructuring of the economy and industrial relations to assure Australia's place in 'globalisation'. Restructuring the welfare system is but the next step. Speeches such as this one are typically part of the process by which governments expound their 'vision' for the future, announce policy directions and generate public feedback and, had the speech not been delayed a week, it would normally have attracted considerably less attention. However, with the approaching 'end of the millennium' and increasing evidence that economic restructuring and globalisation are not benefiting everyone, debates about the integration of social and economic policies have been a concern for politicians, press and policy-makers for some time (see for instance reporting of the "Australia Unlimited" Conference). While party polling may indicate support for reform (McGregor 28) there is also a perception that society is becoming a "meaner" place (Dickens 22-3). My method derives from the work of Teun A. van Dijk on ideological analysis. He maintains that ideologies function to co-ordinate the activities and thinking of group members so that the group's interests are protected and their goals realised (24). Our social identity is formed in part by our membership of particular groups. In talk and writing we promote the interests of our group by highlighting the positive things our group (the ingroup) has done and minimising or mitigating the negative things. Conversely, we highlight the negative aspects of those not in our group (the outgroup) and minimise their positive aspects (van Dijk 33). This type of analysis is designed to uncover group ideologies (26), not personal positions, and so when I attribute something to "the Minister" it is in her position as member of a group with social and political power whose interests are served by particular social and economic policies. I do not attribute it to Jocelyn Newman personally. At the most obvious level, the Minister constructs the Government as ingroup and the Opposition as outgroup. She does this by highlighting the achievements of her government while highlighting the failures of the Opposition. For instance, paragraph six says: ... the Howard Government has embarked upon a range of challenging and difficult policy agenda. We have reformed the tax system, so that it supports our new economic and social structures -- not those of the 1930s. We have reformed workplace relations in this country so that it supports the flexible and productive workplaces needed to provide jobs. As a result of our sound economic management, we have enjoyed strong, non-inflationary economic growth with low interest rates, and high employment growth. This is all the more remarkable when considered in the context of the Asian economic crisis. By contrast, she says: "the Opposition has failed to support responsible economic policy" and implies that their policies amount to "empty promises" which would be damaging if carried through (para. 11). There is ingroup/outgroup definition at a more subtle level also. The Minister uses "we" in paragraphs three to five to refer to a broad coalition of Government and community and presents the Government's own interests as being the interests of the broader group, thereby implying that they are really only one interest group when it comes to social and economic policy. Paragraph six reinforces this by showing that "we" (the community) have benefitted from the reforms that "we" (the Government) have embarked upon. This blurring of group boundaries between Government and community is also a way of shifting responsibility as I shall show shortly below. Before that, it is informative to look at the way welfare recipients are classified. They are not described as doing anything positive. The exception is "older women who have spent their lives caring for others" (para. 35), but who are then characterised as "uncertain" and "discouraged" (para. 35). Caring for others (generally undervalued in our individualistic society) is to be seen as a limited-time option only, with work being the ultimate goal (para. 48-53). Passivity and dependency are both devalued in our society -- praise is generally reserved for people who are active while "economic security and independence" (para. 9) are assumed to be everyone's goals. In the speech, however, people receiving welfare payments are defined in terms of: the welfare they receive (e.g. 53, 46, 39, 29, etc); their lack of income (e.g. 46, 15, etc.); their lack of paid work (e.g. 24, 25, 26,31, 33, 35, etc.); their age (e.g. 19, 23, 29, 35, 36, etc.); their family responsibilities (e.g. 24, 25, 26, 27, 35, etc); or their disabilities (e.g. 38, 39, 40, etc.). Even the words used are passive rather than active: "people on passive welfare assistance" rather than an active verb like "claiming" or even "receiving". Again, "no adult in paid work" (para. 24), "out of paid work" (para. 25), and "worklessness" (para. 26) are all attributes implying passivity. If she had used instead the expression 'non-working' it would at least imply the possibility of working, which is active. The term dependency commonly has associations with childhood and addiction which partly carry over to the term "welfare dependency" used by the Minister to describe the state of those receiving income support. These people may still be part of the community (para. 31), but they are contrasted with the community proper: the taxpayers (para. 19) and "hard working men and women of this country" who underwrite them (para. 32). The new welfare system places people receiving income support under obligation. They are expected to "help themselves" (para. 12, 13, 20), contribute to the economy and society (para. 12, 13), and "use every opportunity to become self-supporting" (para. 19). It becomes clear that the obligation on these people is to do whatever they can to get themselves into sufficient paid work so that they no longer need income support. The specified social contribution is minimal (para. 18, 48, 47, 37, 50). The duty of the responsible citizen is primarily economic -- to get a self-supporting job (para. 29-30). As we have seen, then, the ingroup consists of the Government and those members of the community who have benefited from the Government's economic reforms. The outgroup consists of those people who, due to low wages or unemployment, are dependent on income support -- i.e. those who have not benefitted from the Government's economic reforms. I now want to return to the matter of responsibility and the blurred boundaries between Government and community referred to above. The policies, reforms and initiatives are credited to the government (para. 15, 16, and 19 for example), but the responsibilities lie with "the community" and "the individual" (para. 17). "The community" is not a clearly defined entity, yet the Minister says that it "must and should provide income support" for those who cannot get a job despite their best efforts in the case of a genuine failure of the labour market (para. 31) -- a situation she has already claimed does not exist (para. 6). Throughout the sections on "People with disabilities" and "Parenting Payment", the Minister uses "we" inclusively (Government and community) when talking about what should be done for 'them' and non-inclusively (Government only) when talking about specific programs (50). The effect, as mentioned above, is to assert that the interests of one are the interests of both, but also to transfer the responsibility for doing something for 'them' to the broader community group. Together with the statement that "the community needs to think carefully and thoroughly" about "our" approach to income support and assistance (38), this blurring of boundaries prepares for the announcement of a Reference Group to "guide the development of a comprehensive Green Paper on welfare reform" (54). This "high-level" group will be "seeking submissions from interest groups and the broader community" (56), but the terms of reference and ultimate policies will be set by the government. I would suggest that "we" is used strategically in this speech to create in ordinary community members a sense of inclusion, ownership and responsibility for policies in which they ultimately will have little say. But by transferring the sense of responsibility in this way, the government removes from itself total responsibility when those policies fail. Will welfare in the coming years really be about enabling people to develop their capacities? I would suggest this is not possible while the people concerned are still conceptualised in terms of passivity and deficiency, and are regarded as not being part of 'our' group, not sharing 'our' interests. Rather, this speech projects a future where those who are self-supporting are encouraged to assume a position of superiority to those who are not, while their own interests are subsumed in the economic and social agendas of the Government. This speech also suggests a society where the only capacity that counts is the capacity to earn an income and people's responsibility to one another is limited to these terms. It seems clear that while the Government will continue to set the rules, it will continue to shirk provision of services, instead handing that responsibility to an ill-defined "community" and increasing the community's sense that those who receive welfare are somehow responsible for their own situation because they have not accepted their "responsibility" and "obligation" to help themselves. Is an economically driven, socially divided society what we want to create as we enter a new century? References "Australia Unlimited." Special Liftout. Weekend Australian 8-9 May 1999. Department of Family and Community Services. "Reference Group on Welfare Reform: Request for Public Submissions." Weekend Australian 23-4 Oct. 1999: 19. Dickens, Barry. "The Price of Kindness on Mean Streets." Weekend Australian 1-2 Jan. 2000: Review 22-23. McGregor, Richard. "Operation Dole Bludger." Weekend Australian 28-9 Aug. 1999: Focus 28. Newman, Jocelyn. "The Future of Welfare in the 21st Century." National Press Club, Canberra. 29 Sep. 1999. 10 Jan. 2000 <http://www.facs.gov.au/internet/newman.nsf/v1/sdiscusswelfare.htm>. Shanahan, Dennis. "Jobless Put Straight to Work." Australian 17 Dec. 1999: 1. Van Dijk, Teun A. "Opinions and Ideologies in the Press." Approaches to Media Discourse. Ed. Allan Bell and Peter Garrett. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 21-63. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Lisa Gunders. "Welfare in the Future -- What Kind of Society?." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.9 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/welfare.php>. Chicago style: Lisa Gunders, "Welfare in the Future -- What Kind of Society?," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 9 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/welfare.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Lisa Gunders. (2000) Welfare in the future -- what kind of society?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(9). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/welfare.php> ([your date of access]).
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Y.Lin, Angel M. "Modernity and the Self". M/C Journal 5, n.º 5 (1 de outubro de 2002). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1983.
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'Self-awareness' and the development of the autonomous subject (derived from Enlightenment and the Anglo-European philosophical traditions) has often been implicated in discussions of modernity. In East Asian societies where the Confucianist social order is seen as a deep-rooted social and cultural force, discussions of modernity and modernisation have often revolved around the tension between the spread of individualism and liberalism that come with modernisation and contact with the West. The preservation of traditional sociocultural values and familial and social structures that stress mutual obligations, social harmony and a certain form of "benign" paternalism have been key concerns. The popular television dramas in these societies seem to provide a public imaginary space where such tensions and conflicts are often played out in dramatic ways. They provide places were simulated or compromised solutions are proposed and explored. Popular TV romance dramas in particular can serve as a window to the ways in which the topic of the (non-) self-determining subject is explored. These dramas typically present a scenario in which strong mutual love and desire between two people come into conflict with the existing sociocultural values (e.g., familial, social constraints). In this paper, I analyse a recent popular South Korean TV romance drama: (1) Autumn in My Heart (also known as Endless Love I, Autumn for short below) and contrast it with (2) Friends, another recent popular TV romance drama jointly produced by television companies in Japan and South Korea. These cultural products are shown not only in their respective societies but also sold to television companies in other neighbouring countries; their VCD/DVDs are widely marketed and circulated in East Asian areas (e.g., Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mainland China). 1 Autumn is about a brother (played by Song Seung-hun) and sister (played by Song Hye-kyo) who had grown up together and had developed a very close relationship in a happy middle class family until one day the family found out that the girl was actually not their own. There had been a mistake in the hospital and two baby girls were swapped. Hye-kyo was 14 when this mistake was discovered. She returned to her real mother's poor working class home (her father died from blood cancer before she was born), while the middle class family left Korea for the States with their son and newly recovered daughter as an attempt to forget about the whole incident. From then on, Hye-kyo was separated from her "brother" (Seung-hun) and started her longing for him. Ten years later, the middle class family returned to South Korea and the "brother" and "sister" met again and fell in love. Seung-hun wanted to break his prior engagement with his fiancée to marry Hye-kyo. However, family and friends still saw them as "brother" and "sister" (despite the fact that they are not related in blood) and imposed great familial and social pressure on them to end their "improper" relationship. Later, Hye-kyo discovered that she had blood cancer. She hid her illness from Seung-hun and wished him happiness with his fiancé. Seung-hun, not knowing about Hye-kyo's illness, and under a guilty conscience to make it up to his fiancée (who had attempted suicide for him), consented to leave Hye-kyo and go back to the States with his fiancé. At the last moment, he found out about Hye-kyo's illness and rushed to the hospital. Families and friends were finally moved by their love for each other and did not prevent them from spending their last days together. Hye-kyo died from her illness soon and Seung-hun, having lost all hope and interest in life, was hit by a truck. To the Western audience, such a storyline may seem implausible and perhaps impossible. For instance, how can family and friends find any legitimate reasons to prevent Seung-hun and Hye-kyo from loving each other when they are not blood relatives? Seung-hun's father mentioned once that their "improper relationship" would bring disgrace to the family. His mother did not support their union, either, as she could not bear to see the "brother-sister" relationship being transformed into a romantic, sexual relationship. She became ill, tormented by her own guilty feelings: she blamed herself for not taking Hye-kyo with her to the States ten years ago and she thought that their "love" for each other was a tragic distortion of their original brotherly and sisterly feelings due to their long separation. On the other hand, Seung-hun felt guilty for breaking his prior promise to his fiancé. Hye-kyo was also full of guilty feelings for she felt that they were hurting everybody who cared about them. Almost 90% of the time when the couple talked to each other, they were in tears and were deeply tormented by the conflict between their perceived obligations towards family and friends who loved them and their strong desire to stay together. At one point, they decided to part so that "no one would get hurt any more" (without admitting that they themselves were deeply hurt). Such self-negating actions were coupled with an unquestioning acceptance of the legitimacy of the familial and social demands on them. Is the current South Korean society very much against the development of an autonomous individual and the individual's self-determining actions? On this issue, Korean cultural studies scholar Lee Dong-hoo had the following comments: Many Korean dramas, especially daily soap operas, put values on relationships, such as family relationship and friendship. Even a success story, which emphasizes one's own will to succeed, doesn't neglect the aspect of human relationships. … The traditional Confucianist ethics or patriarchal ideology can be found in the dramas' emphasis on relationship or one's social role. And I think that keeping good relationships is one of the survival strategies in Korea. The Korean society has been maintained by the closely connected social nets. The dramas may (unconsciously) reflect this reality. Lee's remarks about the importance of Confucianism in the Korean society are evidenced in the long-term activities of the well-organised Confucianist society ("Confucian Forest"), which maintains special schools in major cities and counties, offering instruction in Confucianist ethics, rituals and practices (Wu 27). Another example of Confucianist relational ethics can be found in the recent rejection by the South Korean parliament of the nominated female prime minister; one of the reasons quoted is that her son has chosen to be an American citizen (Nan 26). Before moving on to a discussion of the ideological implications of the tragic ending in Autumn, let us first look at another recent popular TV romance drama, Friends, which was jointly produced by Japanese and South Korean television companies. Interestingly, Friends did not start with a scene in Korea or Japan but with the Victorian Harbor scene in Hong Kong, with spectacular cosmopolitan skyscrapers in the background, and a Western-style saxophonist playing Jazz music in a busy street corner. Tomoko, a tourist from Japan, was left on her own by her colleague who had travelled with her on holiday but was keen to see her boyfriend who worked in Hong Kong. Soon, Tomoko was robbed of her handbag in a busy street. In chasing the robber, she mistook Kim as the culprit. After the misunderstanding was cleared up, they became friends. Kim was a college student from South Korea and an active member of the Film society in his university. He was in Hong Kong trying to shoot his first and last movie on a shoestring budget (last because he had decided to give up film-making after this to conform to his father's wish for him to run the family business). Tomoko agreed to help Kim by acting in his movie, which was about a young woman running and searching for true love in the busy streets of a foreign place (Hong Kong). After the short stay in Hong Kong, they returned to Japan and Korea respectively and started their e-mail correspondence. Soon they fell in love. Tomoko felt that corresponding with Kim made her able to like herself again. Coming from a divorced, single-parent family and not doing very well in school, she had tried to commit suicide before. Her lowly, routine job as a sales assistant in a big department store in Tokyo also gave her little satisfaction and purpose in life. However, after starting her romance with Kim, Tomoko seemed to have regained confidence in herself and a purpose in life -- she started taking lessons in the Korean language, worked very hard and finally succeeded in becoming a tour guide for Korean trips so that she could move to South Korea. Likewise, Kim found that he could become himself again when he was with Tomoko. Tomoko encouraged him to pursue his dream of becoming a movie director. However, aggravating family pressure later made Kim wonder whether he was right in defying his father's wishes (by pursuing a film career and loving a Japanese woman) and he blamed Tomoko for his strained relationship with his father. Tomoko, dejected and heart-broken, returned to Japan. Kim, having lost Tomoko, came to his senses and returned to his low-paid job as a film production assistant. Finally he succeeded in gaining a prize for his movie and his parents came to the award ceremony indicating a softening on the part of his father, who finally came to recognise the value of, and his passion for, film work. Kim later became re-united with Tomoko. The happy ending of Friends stands in sharp contrast with the tragic ending of Autumn. The simulated ending of Friends reflects "imaginary realism", one of the newly appropriated strategies based on marketing considerations found in the recent hugely successful blockbuster movies produced in South Korea; it "enables [one] to escape the restrictions of reality without losing a sense of the real" (Lee 12). In Autumn, Hye-kyo frequently said to Seung-hun that their actions would be punished and she later remarked that her illness was a punishment for hurting other people. This tragic ending thus seems to have the ideological, didactic effect of teaching about the punishment for violating the Confucianist social order. Friends, on the other hand, seems to use the hybrid, third space created by the cosmopolitan scene and Western symbols (the Western street musician playing jazz) in Hong Kong (a former British colony which claims itself to be "the Manhattan of Asia") to fabricate a modernised, Westernised and yet still Asian background for the love story to start in. Tomoko was instrumental in inducing Kim to follow his dream, to become the person he really wanted to be. Kim's subsequent success which helped win the acceptance of his father symbolises the possibility of the maturing of the self-determining subject in the new, globalised economic order (Kim's superior in Kim's military service once encouraged him to follow his passion and contribute to the film-making industry to bring glory to the nation) and the possible gradual transition from Confucianism to a certain form of nationalist liberalism in South Korea (e.g., following one's dream and contributing to national glory simultaneously), under the influence of seemingly more Wesernised neighbouring societies (e.g., Japan, Hong Kong). Autumn and Friends seem to represent two different possible stances towards the traditional order at this historical juncture when South Korea is experiencing enormous economic success and going through modernisation and a certain degree of Westernisation that come with its participation in the global economic order. Sociocultural tensions, conflicts and resolutions are simulated and explored in the relatively safe, imaginary space of popular TV dramas, which apart from playing their economic part in a highly successful national media industry, also play an important role in engaging the transnational public (e.g., audiences in East Asian societies which share a Confucianist tradition) with sociocultural issues in an imaginary space. As in the feminist retelling and re-staging of the traditional Chinese opera Butterfly Lovers in newly formed Communist China in the 1950s to explore the self-determining subject and autonomous actions of the female protagonist (Li), these Korean TV dramas seem to provide an important public space for the explorations of a society's cultural ethos and the contested issues of modernity, Westernisation and cosmopolitanisation. They reflect the articulation of different (contradictory) cultural, economic and historical forces and their potential constitutive impact on the future sociocultural landscape of East Asian societies awaits further research. Notes For instance, the media in Hong Kong and China readily talk of the coming of the "Korean Wave" and the names of Korean TV idols such as Song Hye-kyo, Song Seung-hun and Won Bin (who co-starred in Autumn) are familiar to many Chinese young people. The final episode of Autumn aired on Asia Television (ATV) in August 2002 had attracted as high as 70% of that night's television audience in Hong Kong, a rare phenomenon that ATV hurried to boast of. References Lee, Dong-Hoo. "Relationships in Korean Dramas". E-mail communication to the author, 6 August 2002. Lee, Sooyeon. Explaining the South Korean blockbuster movies: An industrial and textual analysis. Unpublished manuscript. Korean Women's Development Institute, South Korea, 2002. Li, Siu Leung. Cross-dressing in Chinese opera. Hong Kong: The University of Hong Kong Press, 2001. Nan, Li Ming. "Broken dream of female prime minister in a sad South Korea [in Chinese]." Yazhou Zhoukan—The International Chinese Newsweekly, 12-18 August 2002: 26. Wu, Le Shan. "Female prime minister in South Korea's new era [in Chinese]." Yazhou Zhoukan—The International Chinese Newsweekly, 22-28 July 2002: 26-27. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Lin, Angel M. Y.. "Modernity and the Self" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.5 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Lin.html >. Chicago Style Lin, Angel M. Y., "Modernity and the Self" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 5 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Lin.html > ([your date of access]). APA Style Lin, Angel M. Y.. (2002) Modernity and the Self. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Lin.html > ([your date of access]).
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Papier, Joy. "JOVACET Volume 2 Issue 2 (2019)". Journal of Vocational, Adult and Continuing Education and Training 2, n.º 2 (22 de novembro de 2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.14426/jovacet.v2i2.91.
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This third publication of JOVACET follows the Special Issue which emanated from our 2018 conference on adult learning and education. While the Special Issue was focused on papers presented on the theme of the conference, the conference call for papers also yielded additional submissions outside the scope of the Special Issue, which contributed to this subsequent volume. Articles in this issue are situated in the vocational education and workplace training domains and constitute research at the level of practice as well as at the macro-policy level.
Our first article herein, authored by Barabasch, Caldart and Keller, concerns competence development in apprenticeship training, and how innovation in the labour market in Switzerland is impacting on VET (vocational education and training) learning cultures as well as on approaches to learning at, and through, work. The Swiss dual-learning model, in which the major part of apprentice learning takes place in the workplace, is widely admired, and Switzerland is seen as an innovation leader among its peers in Europe. Even so, the constant drive for innovation, new technologies and work processes can be seen to be impacting on workforce development. Vocational learners are requiring new skill sets, for instance less product-specific knowledge and more ‘agile’ approaches such as ‘creativity’, ‘reflectivity’, and ‘taking the initiative’. Through a case study of the Swiss telecommunication industry, the authors examine how a new, innovative learning culture is being shaped in order to adapt to new work demands.
Next, Gaffoor and Van der Bijl report on an investigation into factors that influence retention and attrition at a sample technical and vocational education and training (TVET) college in South Africa. The reasons for student dropout at public colleges have not been well documented and only a handful of studies have been conducted to date. The social and economic cost of young people leaving schools and colleges with incomplete qualifications is potentially crippling, and it is imperative that institutions understand the ‘push’ or ‘pull’ factors that are at play. Using the early constructs of Tinto, and later Bean, the authors attempt to provide a more holistic explanation of why students fail to complete their college programmes.
From explanations of early college exit, Groener and Andrews examine the access pathways into higher education offered by TVET colleges through their vocational qualifications in early childhood educator training. Public colleges have for many years offered early childhood development (ECD) programmes for aspirant teachers, and a persistent source of frustration has been the lack of articulation in this field between TVET college and university qualifications. Universities offer initial teacher education in ECD but only very recently has there been an attempt to build pathways into these university qualifications by perusing the nature and content of the programmes offered at colleges. Nonetheless, it is not the lack of articulation which is the main focus of this article, but rather the aspirations of students who enter TVET colleges in order to create a basis for recognition of prior learning (RPL) for access into university by an alternative route. Evidence from Groener and Andrews’ case study shows that students in the sample who had the goal of access to university after completing their vocational college programme, demonstrated considerable agency and determination in overcoming structural and institutional barriers in pursuit of their goals.
Moving from learner-centred studies to broader social and policy constructs in TVET, Kraak’s article considers the concept of ‘intermediation’ in the brokering of training compacts, especially in the light of the role that sector education and training authorities (SETAs) are required to play in South Africa. SETAs have a range of mandated functions with regard to employers in their scope of authority, but, with regard to training and development, they have an essential role in, inter alia, fostering links among employers, unions, and training providers. South Africa still has some way to go in developing the kind of relationships between employers and training providers that have seen established vocational systems become successful, and in enabling young graduates in these systems to become sought-after, highly skilled employees. Notwithstanding the slow progress towards the goal of a coherent system in which supply and demand can coexist, the author points to at least two successful examples of intermediation which could serve as a basis for future initiatives. An interesting dimension of the article is the inclusion of key stakeholder perspectives of four senior officials in the skills system, perspectives which suggest that, in the current dispensation, the expectation of intermediation may be a step too far for most SETAs. In this regard, Kraak acknowledges the input he received from the late Adrienne Bird, Director of the Special Projects Unit in the Department of Higher Education and Training, where she was leading the Centres of Specialisation initiative to revitalise the apprenticeship model. Adrienne Bird was a passionate advocate of vocational education and training and had a distinguished career in the South African post-apartheid skills development system. Her untimely passing in 2019, after a long battle with ill health, leaves a void in our still fragile and emergent national training architecture, where her dedication, experience and keen insight will no doubt be missed.
Needham continues on the policy theme in his article as he interrogates the inability of the public TVET sector to meet human-capital development goals of reduced unemployment and improved economic returns on education investment. He argues that, while privatisation of education is a global phenomenon, in South Africa it is the result of the state’s adoption of neo-liberal reforms and a shift in emphasis on education as a public good in favour of narrower interests. The dominant discourses of performance management, efficiency, accountability, and the like have come to characterise education, to the detriment of developmental goals. He critiques privatisation policy approaches, for instance the ‘outsourcing’ of public education to private providers and the disincentivisation of public colleges to offer occupational programmes which, he argues, led to the creation of multiple private providers to offer this training. When colleges were subsequently encouraged to offer SETA-led occupational programmes, many colleges found themselves ill-equipped to take on this task, he contends. In essence, the article concludes that neither public nor private providers have been well served by the confusing privatisation policy messages, and the two systems of provision have as a result been pitted against each other rather than working collaboratively for more effective skills development delivery.
Finally, in this issue of JOVACET, there is a book review by Martin Mulcahy, a former educator, policy analyst, and education adviser with vast experience of post-school education and training. He reviews the latest Springer handbook edited by McGrath, Mulder, Papier and Suart (2019), which is a mammoth two-volume edition covering nine broad themes and containing a host of scholarly articles within each theme. Mulcahy provides an informative overview of the handbook and its various sections, which will no doubt be a welcome and essential introduction to both volumes for vocational researchers, policymakers, teachers and students. We are indeed pleased that this timeous review could be included in this edition of JOVACET.
The authors of papers in this issue of JOVACET demonstrated patience and diligence throughout the rigorous peer-review process, and undertook with good grace the amendments that needed to be made to their articles. We trust that readers will appreciate their effort.
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McKay, Duncan Robert. "Trading in Freedoms: Creating Value and Seeking Coalition in Western Australian Arts and Culture". M/C Journal 13, n.º 6 (30 de novembro de 2010). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.313.
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IntroductionAs a visual artist it seems to me that the ideal relationship between government and cultural producers is a coalitional one; an “alliance for combined action of distinct parties, persons or states without permanent incorporation into one body” (Oxford English Dictionary). The word “coalition”, however, is entirely absent from the document that forms the basis of the analysis of this paper, Creating Value: An Arts and Culture Sector Policy Framework 2010-2014, from the Government of Western Australia’s Department of Culture and the Arts. Released in March 2010, Creating Value has been introduced by the DCA’s Deputy Director General Jacqui Allen as the “first arts policy in Australia to adopt a public value approach” (DCA, New Policy Framework) whereby "the Department of Culture and the Arts is charged with delivering public value to the Western Australian community through our partnership with the culture and arts sector." As indicated in Allen’s press release, this document achieves its aim of providing “clarity in [the DCA’s] relationships with the culture and arts sector”. As an artist, cultural worker, or someone generally interested in the cultural wellbeing of Australian communities it would seem timely to consider just how this new and influential policy framework envisages the specific working relationships that make up the “partnerships across the culture and arts sector, government, the public and private sector” (DCA, Creating Value 2).In this brief paper it is my intention to interrogate the idea of “coalition” in relation to the evidence provided in the DCA’s Policy Framework, Creating Value, in order to examine the extent to which this State’s involvement in culture and arts may indeed be considered coalitional. In approaching the notion of the coalitional I take the position that there are two key elements to this idea, the first being the notion of an “alliance for combined action” and the second being that the distinct parties involved are not incorporated into one body. What is difficult, at this intersection between the strategic advances of governance and the more organic development of culture, is to distinguish between levels at which the interests of both parties in a coalition or partnership are served by the alliance. As I will argue later in this paper, there is an important distinction to be made between working under temporary contract to specifications (in which one party’s design is realised through a primarily economic exchange with those providing the requisite goods and services) and the kind of negotiated relationship between means and ends that is required to support the genuine development of culture. The question is whether the artist (or other cultural producer), receiving funding to produce cultural work according to “public value” criteria, is able to develop culture or merely able to reproduce an understanding of culture given by the funding brief and assessment panel? It seems to me that significant cultural development is only possible where the public value of the outcomes of cultural production is subject to continuous negotiation and debate – surely it is in the coalitional outcomes (the alliance of distinct parties for combined action) of such discussion that a meaningful identification with culture occurs?In the following discussion around Creating Value my approach is to focus upon some aspects of the policy framework that provide particular evidence of the kind of “combined action” of government and the culture and arts sector that the DCA is proposing in this document. When seen against a more cultural understanding of the “action” of making art and the dynamic processes of producing and identifying with culture, it becomes clear why it may be considered that the DCA and many Western Australian cultural producers may not be engaged in the same project at all, let alone be in effective partnership or coalition.“Public Value” and the Specifications of Cultural ProductionEliseo Vivas observes that in the process of creatively applying symbolic order and understanding to the physical world, humanity acquires culture and an ability to better exploit the world. He also notes that in this process “of constituting the world, [human-kind’s] merely physiological needs are complicated by new needs” (129); new systems of cultural values that assume no less importance in human activity than our more basic bodily needs. Vivas pertinently states, however, that more often than not in human society within a complex and existing symbolic order these cultural needs simply become an aspect of our practical functioning (an extension of survival), and we tend to inhibit our capacity to constitute the world through creative and symbolic endeavours. This depiction of cultural production as an activity that is constitutive of the world is particularly significant in relation to the DCA’s Creating Value. Despite noting that “it is through creative people that we better understand our world” (DCA, Creating Value 8), which echoes with Vivas’s contention that “the poet is needed to give the practical man his stage” (Vivas 129) the policy framework seems rather to exemplify the inhibiting of culturally constitutive activities (production) in favour of “practical functioning” (reproduction).What can be observed particularly well in the DCA’s policy framework is how effectively ideas associated with creative and cultural production have been co-opted to the cause of “practical functioning”. Looking for instance at the notion of “creativity” within Creating Value we discover that “creativity is the driving force of the arts and culture sector” (DCA, Creating Value 5) and that “creativity” is one of the “priority public value principles” for the policy framework, along with “engagement”. Reading more closely one understands that creativity is seen as producing the “distinctive” and the “unique”, a brand that is recognised as Western Australian and which, through such “recognition” and “significance” and through its “enriching” and “transforming” capacities (7), is seen to “add to a sense of place and belonging” (11) for the WA community. This in turn makes WA a “better place to live, work and visit” and ultimately delivers “economic and social outcomes that encourage and support growth” (2). The DCA’s strategies appear to have little to do with a dynamic conception of culture in which new worlds and systems of values may be constituted, but is focussed upon the optimisation and rationalisation of economic outcomes under the guise of “public value”.My contention is that, as difficult as the notion may be to entertain, a department of culture and the arts ought to understand that creative and cultural production are part of a dynamic system that continually engages in a process of tentatively constituting the world. The arts and culture sector undeniably has an important role to play in the formation of and identification with a national cultural identity, which can manifest in international prestige, tourist dollars and other forms of economic growth (Abbing 246; Chaney 166-67). Western Australian culture is not, however, as the DCA seems to perceive, a static and monumental edifice that acts as a singular landmark for Western Australia in local, national and international contexts. The DCA’s arts and culture policy framework talks of its strategies “reflecting the DCA’s vision, values and strategic objectives” (DCA, Creating Value 13) and in a number of places suggests that it will “respond to changing needs” (2, 5, 8). Surely an approach that was interested in the specific value that creative and cultural production has to offer to the community would recognise that it is not in a singular vision but in the world creatively renegotiated and reconstituted by different people and groups of people that such a value and identification is to be found? Furthermore, if Vivas is right, then the support and promotion of culture ought to be as much about cultural needs not yet anticipated, for cultural products whose significance is not currently recognised, as it is about being responsive and catering to the demands of those whom the DCA identifies as the present consumers and stake-holders in WA arts and culture. What is missing from the partnership, as conceived by the DCA between itself and the culture and arts sector, is an adequate mechanism by which “public value” is recognised as a system of constantly changing values in which the culture and arts sector play an important role in developing, extending and negotiating through their creative and cultural production.As Jürgen Habermas suggests, to approach culture strategically in terms of outcomes and deployment is to compromise the internal development that actually provides arts and cultural work with its meaning and significance (Habermas 71). Culture becomes not a distinctive composite of differing and changing world views linked by the “living” process of their “nature-like” coexistence and development, but a monolithic identity or brand with representative products (no matter how diverse those products may be).This policy framework document would suggest not a coalitional “alliance for combined action” but more accurately a process of putting the various strategic goals and cultural aspirations (with “public value” specifications) of the DCA up for tender in much the same way that another Government department might seek tenders for the construction of a bridge or building. It is perhaps telling that Creating Value is described as a “road map to help the Department achieve its vision” (DCA, Creating Value 2).“Engagement” and the Use Value of FreedomCreating Value states that “there is a complex relationship between creativity and engagement, which are the principles driving the delivery of public value outcomes” (DCA, Creating Value 5). The policy framework goes on to suggest that the conception of “engagement” that informs the document is geared towards notions of participation, access and interaction in response to the demands of society for “more than passive enjoyment of cultural experiences” (5). Ultimately, as the “Framework Measurements” (15) in Creating Value suggest, the public values associated with engagement are about quantifying access and participation in arts and culture, and polling audiences and the public regarding “their satisfaction with their level of engagement” (15). I have been arguing that the public value of creative and cultural production is the result of engagement, but I do not think that it follows that the cultural value of such engagement can be assumed to be the correlative of high attendance numbers or measures that indicate a high level of consumer satisfaction. Nor can one assume that the “impact” or “reach” of a cultural or creative experience can be assessed adequately while the box office is open and the door counter is operational, let alone prior to a project being granted funding.Some of the genuine complexity in the relationship between creativity and engagement and its bearing upon public value can be seen in George Steiner’s writing on the nature of “creation”. Steiner suggests on the one hand that the act of creation is “irresponsible” (Steiner 43); that the work of artists occurs at one remove from world of material consequence. On the other hand Steiner notes that external resistance to artistic production has the effect of reinforcing the necessity and significance of artists’ work, freeing them from “justifying [art’s] vital functions and dignifying its motivations” (189). In this understanding of the value of creativity, it seems to me, there is a delicate balance to be struck between “freedom” and “consequence” in artistic and cultural production. The cultural producer is most able to constitute the world in new or innovative ways when he/she is able to work irresponsibly, however, such culturally constitutive actions are most significant and valuable when access to a freedom sought is denied or challenged and the motivations and mores of our cultural institutions are brought under question.Herbert Marcuse wrote in One Dimensional Man that the high culture of the past, “free from socially necessary labour,” was “the appearance of the realm of freedom: the refusal to behave” (Marcuse 71) but he also suggests that in advanced technological societies such as our own, the “good life” of administered society “reduces the use-value of freedom” (49). Marcuse claims that the achievements of rational society have transcended those of the “culture heroes and half-gods” (56) and, given that rational society appears to be steadily advancing towards the best of all possible worlds (or at least the best of the existing alternatives), the inclination to “hope” and to look beyond our own world and for other means of advance has been lost. Here again there is a sense in which the creative activities of culturally constituting the world have lost significant ground to the administrative concerns of “practical functioning”. What is interesting, however, is that it is possible to see the residual traces of the importance of the concept of “freedom”, however illusory, to the notion of the public value of creative and cultural production, even in Creating Value.In Creating Value, the valuable conception of “freedom” occurs obliquely in the insistence that the policy framework supports and encourages artistic risk taking (DCA, Creating Value 5, 8). A closer examination of Creating Value and the DCA’s Arts Grants Handbook 2010 reveals that “artistic risk” (DCA, Arts Grants 17) is understood as a strength in a proposal that is indicative of artistic merit and quality, and quality, understood in the public value terms of the policy framework, is measured by “the distinctive, innovative and significant elements of the creative experience” (DCA, Creating Value 15). The value of risk-taking in the pursuit of innovation is a recurring theme of some of the literature concerning the creative industries over the past decade. Concepts such as the “no-collar workplace” (Florida) and the “artscience lab” (Edwards) have the appearance of promoting a relatively unfettered space apart in which creativity is unhindered by practical obstacles and institutional barriers. However, the concept becomes problematic as soon as there is an expectation that such a space apart will be “productive” in an economic or any other existing sense. Steiner’s notion of “irresponsible” creation, importantly suggests a creativity that defines its own productivity, in which the consequences of artistic or cultural production are contained within the context of the creative space apart. The greatest risk in a creative project is at the point of engagement, where it is met by consequence, where the public value of the work becomes available for negotiation and debate. The process required in applying for a DCA grant is actually a process of modelling, anticipating and containing the risks associated with artistic or cultural production. The conspicuous absence of genuine consequence in this schema suggests that the DCA seeks to manage the “engagement” to produce its own series of desired outcomes. Yet active control of the relationship between funding organisation and the funded artists may inhibit the production of arts and culture. What is required instead is a coalition of interests and aspirations that has the potential to produce (rather than merely reproduce) culture. In such a circumstance the coalitional relationship will be one where meaning, significance and identification are established in a negotiation between diverse entities and interests. In a realm of cultural values the capacity for these “combined actions” to be meaningful and significant (to possess genuine public value) seems to be compromised by the dominance of the authoritative vision of the Department. ConclusionThe coalitional premise that underpins this paper is predicated on the notion that the “combined action” that is the motivation for the partnership between the Department of Culture and the Arts and the culture and arts sector is to enrich the Western Australian community through “unique and transforming culture and arts experiences” (DCA, Creating Value 1), as stated in the DCA’s strategic charter. What my brief engagement with the DCA’s 2010 policy framework, Creating Value, suggests, however, is that the DCA’s vision is not conceived in terms of the coalitional development of culture, in which culture is acknowledged as a collective work in progress, but rather as a strategic project with instrumental aims. The concept of “public value” that is at the core of Creating Value is not ultimately the product of, or productive of, an ongoing discourse or debate into which cultural producers contribute their various creative outputs. Instead it is presented as a static set of assessment criteria designed to channel creativity into economic growth and to contain the risks associated with cultural production. The ideal of the “coalitional” should inform the concept of public value, as the ongoing work of “combined action” in which creative and cultural producers (through their production), Government (through venues and funding) and the public (through attendance and participation) are engaged in a dialogue whose outcomes provide an indication of public value in a dynamic cultural sphere.George Walden writes:Democratic peoples must be more creative than non-democratic ones, if only because the idea that the opposite might be the case is intolerable. Whatever the merits of the contention that repressive or authoritarian regimes have produced the finest literature or most brilliant artistic movements, it would be a bold politician who took the next logical step in the argument… Like health care or education, art is a public good, a commodity whose provision must be officially guaranteed and overseen. (Walden qtd. in Timms 68)Artistic and cultural freedom, according to this observation, is not actually a freedom at all, but rather a political imperative for welfare states such as ours, which in turn makes the support for creative and cultural production a “socially necessary labour”, that performs instrumental and political functions (Timms 68; Abbing 239) that are at least as important as the cultural wellbeing that seems to be promoted. In contrast Pierre Bourdieu suggests that ultimately the state is the “official guarantor” of “everything that pertains to the universal – that is, to the general interest” (Bourdieu & Haacke 72). If culture is to maintain a critical perspective, he argues, “we should expect (and even demand) from the state the instruments of freedom from economic and political powers – that is from the state itself” (71). Somewhere between “socially necessary labour” and “critical distance”, Charles Esche posits the idea of an “engaged autonomy” for creative and cultural projects operating unavoidably within the economic hegemony of capitalism, whereby they work in “tolerated cultural enclosure called ‘art’, able to act according to different rules,” but “still totally inside the system” (Esche 11). Or perhaps, as Tony Moore suggests:A new cultural renaissance will not be built by bureaucrats subsidising elitism or “picking winners”… but by entrepreneurs and public institutions bold enough to harness the diverse creative energy in the community from suburban garages to inner city garrets. (Moore 122)Ultimately the issue of state interests, support and patronage for the arts is the same balancing act between creativity and engagement, or freedom and consequence, that I introduced referencing Steiner earlier in the paper. The point is, however, that creative irresponsibility brought into an effective engagement ought to lead to a negotiation that allows for the dynamic processes of culture to develop around a debate on public value. Creative and cultural producers should be amongst the coalitional co-creators of contemporary Western Australian culture rather than the contractors brought in to make the DCA’s vision of culture a reality.References Abbing, Hans. Why Are Artists Poor?: The Exceptional Economy of the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2008.Bourdieu, Pierre, and Hans Haacke. Free Exchange. Trans. Johnson, Randal and Hans Haacke. Cambridge: Polity P, 1995.Chaney, David. “Cosmopolitan Art and Cultural Citizenship.” Theory, Culture & Society 19.1-2 (2002): 157-74.Department of Culture and the Arts (DCA). Arts Grants Handbook 2010. Government of Western Australia, 2010.———. Creating Value: An Arts and Culture Sector Policy Framework, 2010-2014. Government of Western Australia, 2010.———. New Policy Framework Creates Value for WA Artists. 2010. ‹http://www.dca.wa.gov.au/news/stories/front_page_items/new_policy_framework_creates_value_for_wa_artists>.Edwards, David. Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2008.Esche, Charles. “The Possibility Forum – Institutional Change and Modest Proposals.” Artlink 22.4 (2002): 11-13.Florida, R. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books, 2002.Habermas, Jürgen. Legitimation Crisis, Trans. McCarthy, Thomas. Boston: Beacon P, 1975.Marcuse, Herbert. One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964.Moore, Tony. “The Art of Risk in an Age of Anxiety or in Praise of the Long Lunch.” Making Meaning, Making Money: Directions for the Arts and Cultural Industries in the Creative Age. Eds. Lisa Anderson and Kate Oakley. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. 111-125.Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.Steiner, George. Grammars of Creation: Originating in the Gifford Lectures for 1990. London: Faber and Faber, 2002.Timms, Peter. What’s Wrong with Contemporary Art? Sydney: UNSWP, 2004.Vivas, Eliseo. “What Is a Poem?” Creation and Discovery: Essays in Criticism and Aesthetics. Gateway Editions, Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1954. 111-41.
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Apple, Jacki. "Some Speculation on the Future of the Body and Soul". M/C Journal 2, n.º 9 (1 de janeiro de 2000). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1821.
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It's the beginning of 2000 and the 21st century is all mapped out. Since we've just had that time at the end of a decade (not to mention the end of the century, as well as the Christian calendar "millennium"), when all the pundits came out to review where we had been and forecast where we are going, we should have expected a profundity of future-casting. But neither the familiar prognostications of the coming apocalypse spewing forth from the Religious Right, nor the usual statistical projections made by "experts" on such things as population growth, world politics, economic cycles, new products and shifting job markets, etc. will provide any help in reading the map we have already drawn up, or translating the directional signs. The future is now. It occupies the same domain as the past. Both are inhabitants of the present moment. History, memory, desire, imagination, the creative instinct, and the impetus to act, unfold and are realised as the future becomes the present. We cannot help but tinker with the universe. The future is what we make it and there are an infinite number of possible timelines. Or maybe not. It's the beginning of 2000 and the 21st century is all mapped out. The Human Genome Project1 is about to decode our physiology. We are preparing for the next evolution of the species. The battle between the cyberneticists and the geneticists for a new and improved version of homo sapiens version 3.0 has just begun. The question of where it will lead is open-ended. Will the insatiable quest for self-improvement lead to enlightenment -- a world with less suffering, hunger, disease, violence, and greed? Or, will we be the makers of our own extinction, and end up as a version of Star Trek's Borg -- the ultimate consumers, assimilating automatons devouring everything they encounter, and utterly devoid of the qualities that make us human? As an example of a hypothetical biological and social future the Borg are an interesting model -- a synthesis of a utopian socialist dream and the capitalist imperative of acquisition in the information age. As organic/cybernetic humanoid machines with one unified mind, equal and undifferentiated, untroubled by ego or id, individual ambitions, desires or passions, loneliness, alienation, or imagination they are the ultimate homogeneous collective. At the same time they are both the perfect corporate entity -- masters of the merger, the hostile takeover ("resistance is futile"), and a mindless population programmed to consume and continually upgrade each and every new technology and product. But the Borg don't invent; they only appropriate. Postmodern androids to the core! And we are presently very busy making new discoveries, creating and inventing, and transforming theories into things which tell us not only what is possible, but probable. One of the determining factors in the course of our future is whether or not our belief in technology over other values turns us into the puppets instead of the puppeteers, slaves to masters of our own invention -- be it HAL, Dr. Frankenstein's monster, or the Terminator. Let us consider some possible future scenarios, based not on fiction, but on what already exists, or is about to do so. Facts No one now disputes that the transformation of stem cells into new body parts, cloning technology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and microchip replacements not only could, but will dramatically change medicine and extend life in the coming century. In strictly medical terms, the implementation of all these technologies will bring about extraordinary relief of both the physical and psychological pain and suffering caused by debilitating, disabling, or disfiguring disease or injuries, not to mention the lives saved, and the genetic diseases prevented. Current research has found that not only stem cells taken from human embryos or fetuses could be directed to grow replacements for ailing hearts, livers or other organs, but that some stem cells taken from adult tissue could be converted into other types of cells -- brain cells becoming blood cells, or bone marrow becoming liver. The application of this technology is dazzling -- transformative biology, and it is just over the horizon2. Recently, scientists announced the creation of the first artificial cornea made from human cells. It could help restore the sight of those with certain kinds of eye damage. At the same time cybernetics is playing an equally important part. In development is a mini-computer that essentially takes over damaged visual functions and projects them onto a screen. One model expected to be ready for market within three years is a version of Geordie's visor in Star Trek: Next Generation. Another is a microchip that is inserted behind the eye3. In his newest book Fuzzy Future: From Society and Science to Heaven in a Chip, University of Southern California electrical engineering professor Bart Kosco, author of Fuzzy Thinking (1993), projects his theories onto everything from smart machines, the politics of genomes (who owns you, your genetic material, that is) and the environment (who owns the sea, or for that matter the air) to the problem of human mortality. Kosco foresees the day when we may be able to download our brains onto a microchip, thus achieving digital immortality via a gradual (fuzzy) transformation in which the brain's "meat" is replaced piece by piece with nanochips that work ever faster, better, and more creatively than old-fashioned neurons and synapses. The use of microchips to repair or replace damaged cells or portions of the brain is one thing, but as a means to greatly increase mental capacity, and gain everlasting life by "leaving your gray matter pickled in a jar" in favour of a computer in your skull is another. Would you still be you? While researchers have currently found new molecules in the brain that play a role in creating memories and learning, it does not ensure wisdom in how we put our knowledge to work. That great benefits await us, in the prevention and treatment of disease and the disintegration due to aging, is not in dispute. Nor is the enhanced capacity of a healthier society in body and mind. What constitutes the latter is. We are still left with ethical questions about the uses of technology, and spiritual and philosophical questions about what it means to be human. What are the political and social ramifications of biotechnology? British television playwright Dennis Potter's last work Cold Lazarus represents the ethical dilemmas of a future world capable of robbing a man's soul against his will. Scientists, whose funding is controlled by one or another governing media megalomaniac, seek to experience the 20th century through the genuine memories of the late Daniel Feeld, whose frozen head they have obtained. Their biochemical experiments are no less despicable than the CEO who wants to broadcast Feeld's "consciousness" worldwide twenty-four hours a day. Political opposition exists only in the form of a clandestine "terrorist" organization known as R.O.N. (Reality Or Nothing). If we were to base our forecasts on the patterns of history, just such a techno-fascist corporate future awaits us. If we are to judge by the dominant values of the present, the economic priorities of the marketplace will overpower the dissenting voices, placing not only the natural environment at risk, but our social environment as well. What will such a society do about the underclasses when smart machines have taken over their work, and they haven't the means to buy our goods, only consume precious resources; that is, when they are no longer "necessary" to the economic system. Will they be technologically phased out or upgraded? Fast Forward Let's not jump too far ahead. Maybe just to 2050. You can grow your own body part replacements, not just internal organs, but muscle, nerve tissue, skin. You can rejuvenate. Living to 120 or longer will not be unusual. The manufacture of body parts will be a big biotech business. Invest now! But will this technology be available to anyone and everyone, or only those who can afford it? Will we have parts kept in cold storage ready and waiting? Organs grown from extractions of our own foetal tissue perhaps. If it is a right not a privilege, how will our society deal with the problems of overpopulation? Will only those over a certain age -- say 80 -- who are viewed as "contributing" or "productive" members of society be eligible for new organs? Or will your lifestyle and health habits be a factor? No new livers for recalcitrant unreformed alcoholics? Will there be a ranking system of qualifications? Who will decide what they will be? Never mind arms and drugs. Consider this black market in the making! Subterranean high-tech operating rooms, organ factories, contraband stem cells, DNA, "smart" nanochips. Fast Forward And what about those microchips for brain functions? Not just for disease but for self-improvement. You might be able to improve your personality the way you can have a face-lift or breast implants. Then again, microchips could replace both pharmacology and psychotherapy in the treatment of mental disease, or merely antisocial or criminally aberrant behaviour, a new form of rehabilitation. As for sheer brain power, there would be no end to your capacity to absorb information, memorize and catalogue it, or to calculate stock market transactions. And just think of the lawsuits bound to jam up the courts, should someone have the misfortune to get a faulty chip, or even one that doesn't live up to expectations. Advertising is bound to promise you the answer to your dreams. The insertion of these parts by choice is one thing, but suppose it is forced on you by a government or a corporation. Or even by a parent while you are too young to fight back, the ones who want their offspring to be a math genius, Olympic athlete, or musical prodigy. Then again, genetic engineering may take care of some of that. Babies to order. By the end of this century you might not even have to have one the old messy way. Or you might not even be allowed to. Your genetically selected child might be grown in a computer-controlled organic womb. No more unwanted pregnancies. No more crack babies, or Downs Syndrome, or spina bifida4. We've been messing around for quite some time with a lot of things we don't know or haven't considered the consequences of in terms of the long term ecological balance of life and all its interdependent systems: cross-species genetic implants in plants and animals; plants altered to kill insects that are food for another creature on the food chain. And so on up the ladder: tomatoes that only look like tomatoes, but aren't really tomatoes any more. A perfect example of surface over substance. While we are so sure of our technological mastery, the actual "apocalypse" may well be of our own making when the forces of nature wreak havoc and pay us back for our abuses and arrogance. Or perhaps it will be nature's way of resetting the balance of things by greatly reducing the human population. Or it just might turn out this way. The newly evolved, genetically and cybernetically enhanced humanoids 3.0 survive and adapt (to 3.5), while the great mass of old humans become an endangered species like the Siberian tiger. Present Tense If you think this is all just science fiction, consider this. Already a number of young men in Silicon Valley or at M.I.T. walk around all day every day with one eye and ear always focused on the little headset computer screen that keeps them perpetually "on-line", plugged in. Do they look a little like the Borg? Well yes. Or, think about this. About a year ago a bill came up in the California state legislature proposing that a microchip be inserted in all newborn infants, like the ones you can put in your dog so you can track her if she gets lost or stolen. Same principle with babies. The bill was defeated. But very soon we will all be locatable, "on-line". No chance of disappearing in the 21st century when the wilderness is about to become another "theme" park, and when, at this very moment, you can be traced every time you use a plastic card or make a phone call. What a scary thought for dissidents, revolutionaries, battered women, or anyone who just wants to "get away from it all". In the 21st century, Huxley's "savages" would have as hard a time surviving or avoiding capture as a wolf in Arizona. How will our civil rights, our human rights be affected at the present rate of invasion into our privacy. Is your body your own? And what about your mind? What exactly will the "right to your life" mean? Will "smart" machines have that right? How will we define a sentient being? And so here we are. The 21st century is all mapped out. Maps can be misread. Maps can be wrong. The place that has been charted can be changed. By a force of nature, or an act of will. Or better still, by an act of conscience or consciousness, for it is an energy force with transformative powers. We could become better in our hearts and souls. We could use our knowledge with grace. Now go out and draw a new map(s). Happy New Century! Footnotes Huge advances in genomics, the science of deciphering the basic genetic pattern of life, were made in 1999, including the complete gene sequence for three microbes, a third of the base pairs in human DNA, along with one complete chromosome, number 22, and a rough draft of the entire human genome is expected by March 2000. For more about the Human Genome Project check out the following Website: http://www.ornl.gov/hgmis/ and all its links. Also http://www.turbulence.org/ for Bionet :: Recombinant by Eugene Thacker, an artist's "attempt to assemble a body of discourse surrounding contemporary molecular genetics and biotechnology at the end of the millenium". Science journal editor Floyd E. Bloom optimistically predicts that "although much remains to be done to convert today's results into tomorrow's treatments and tools, the likelihood of success seems high". Researchers in this field are: May Griffith, Research Scientist, University of Ottowa Eye Institute, Professor, Cellular and Molecular Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario Gislin Dagnelie, Researcher, Lions Vision Research and Rehabilitation Center, Wilmer Eye Institute, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland Dr. Thomas Friberg, Professor, Ophthalmology, Chairman, Department of Ophthalmology, Director of Retina and Vitreous Service, The Eye and Ear Institute of Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Dr. Terry Ernest, Professor, Chairman, Ophthalmology and Visual Science, University of Chicago Medical Center, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois A congenital cleft of the vertebral column with hernial protrusion of the meninges (membranes that envelop the brain and spinal cord). Citation reference for this article MLA style: Jacki Apple. "Some Speculation on the Future of the Body and Soul." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.9 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/body.php>. Chicago style: Jacki Apple, "Some Speculation on the Future of the Body and Soul," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 9 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/body.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Jacki Apple. (2000) Some speculation on the future of the body and soul. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(9). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/body.php> ([your date of access]).
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Felton, Emma. "The City". M/C Journal 5, n.º 2 (1 de maio de 2002). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1958.
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In the television series Sex and the City, there is a scene which illustrates a familiar contempt for suburban life as dull and boring. Implicit is the oppositional view that urban life by comparison, is the more exciting one. Charlotte (one of four women whose sexual and romantic relationships are the focus of the series), has spent time with her in-laws in an upper middle class suburban enclave, and is confessing to her three girl friends her fantasies and ultimate sexual encounter with her in-law's hunk of a gardener. She's racked with guilt over the incident, not least because she is married to the sexually non-performing Trey. At this point in the conversation, Samantha, whose voracious appetite for men is her hallmark, dismisses Charlotte's concerns with the retort: 'well honey really, what's the point of living in the suburbs if you can't fuck the gardener?' Ergo, a life of suburban mediocrity deserves some kind of compensation, preferably an exciting sexual antidote. Samantha's remark draws on a wealth of discourses which reinforce the opposition between the city and the suburbs, and the city and the country, where the city is the crucible for adventure, opportunity and sometimes danger. For these New York women, it is precisely excitement and the possibility of sex and romance that holds them to the metropolis. The association of sexual opportunity for women and the metropolis is something of a departure from earlier narratives of the city. Gender and sexual identity - through discourse, narrative, image and metaphor are inscribed in spatial landscapes, with a rich source to be found in articulations of the city. Inscriptions are contingent on social, economic and cultural forces which shift over time and place, often defining and redefining utopian and dystopian visions. The rise of the great nineteenth century European cities, for instance provoked both utopian and dystopian discourse. Industrialization, overcrowding and poverty were issues which provided representations of the city as menacing and deleterious (as represented in the writing of Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe), while the practice of the flaneur--a nineteenth century male who observed and chronicled the new cities of nineteenth century Europe--confirmed the metropolis as a storehouse of aesthetic and experiential delights. The contemporary zeitgeist is largely utopian, the postmodern city is desirable, uber-cool: sexy. Look at any advertising for inner city apartment living to confirm this. The city's erotic potential is characterized by one of the fundamental conditions of urban life: the close proximity in which we all live among strangers (see also Patton 1995). On a psychic, if not material level, this might provide opportunity for reinvention and renewal of self, for an individual freedom and expression denied to those living in smaller and closer communities. This is the attraction and romanticism of the city. The proximity of strangers gives urban life its erotic possibilities, the capacity for anonymity, that chance meetings with strangers, who we so often live and work among. Lawrence Knopp (1995) describes this aspect of city life as: a world of strangers, a particular life space with a logic and sexuality of its own. The city's sexuality is described as an eroticisation of many of the characteristic experiences of modern urban life: anonymity, voyeurism, exhibitionism, consumption, authority (and challenges to it), tactility, motion danger, power, navigation and restlessness. (151) I've been collecting metaphors of the city and these reveal the congruence between eros and the city. I have yet to find one that is masculine. For instance, journalist Harold Nicholson summing up three European cities used woman as metaphor: 'London is an old lady - Paris is a woman - But Berlin is a girl in a pullover, not much powder on her face' (Petro 1989, 21). Jean Baudrillard's description of Las Vegas as 'that great whore' is similarly feminized and sexualized, and metropolises like New York where aggressive advertisements are like 'wall to wall prostitution.' For Baudrillard, in New York, the plumes of smoke are reminiscent of 'girls wringing out their hair after bathing' (in Docker 1995, 106). Author and journalist John Birmingham described Sydney as 'a tart, loud and brash'. I should add to the list a straw poll of metaphors I conducted for Brisbane, my favourite being Brisbane as a 'middle aged woman in resort wear' (thanks to Maureen Burns for this contribution). But maybe, with the focus on urban development, she might be getting younger. For a (heterosexual) man the city can be alluring, dangerous and feminine. Eros, the city, femininity and danger all collide in the film noir genre, in films such as Roman Polanski's Chinatown, Lawrence Kasden's Body Heat, where beautiful femme fatales lead men astray, or further down the path of corruption. Woman as stranger is alluring and seductive for men, but for woman the chance encounter with a male stranger might signal caution and fear. For women, the dangers are clear: the threat of sexual danger, the chance encounter with a male whose intentions may not be benign. `Reclaim the Night' marches are testament to women's concerns about safety and access to public space, particularly at night. Although research shows that the overwhelming majority of assaults upon women occur in the home, by a person known to the woman, this sober fact does not prevent the cautionary strategies most women employ while out at night. Nor does it diminish the fear and limitations which are the reality of women's experience in public space, particularly at night. Historically, women's role in the public space of the city has been an ambivalent one. A number of analyses of women's role in the nineteenth century city identify the ways in which women in public space were managed and regulated by social and economic interests. Courted on the one hand as consumers for the new department stores and a burgeoning capitalist economy, women were also subject to strict codes of conduct, lest their virtue be in question. Judith Walkowitz in The City of Dreadful Delights examined the ways in which public discourse of danger in nineteenth century London, including the account of Jack the Ripper, as malevolent male stranger, function as a form of moral regulation for women in these newly created city spaces. Both Walkowitz and cultural historian Elizabeth Wilson argue that the metropolis of the nineteenth century, eroded the boundaries between private and public spheres and divisions of labour between men and women. A disquiet and concern over women entering these new public spaces manifested in a discourse of danger and morality, underpinned by the idea that women were at the mercy of their passions and required control and guidance. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Freud had something to say about this. He speculated that the condition of agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces, (which for Freud was an intrinsically female neurosis), was linked to a repressed inner desire to walk the streets, to be streetwalkers (Vidler 1993, 35). But times have changed: the contemporary postmodern city, is celebrated, promoted and regulated as one of diversity, inclusivity and liveablity. Access and amenity are the buzzwords of local and state government policy. In the postmodern city everyone ostensibly is made welcome and a plethora of infrastructure support different interests and lifestyles. Cafés culture has provided a social space for women in particular, previously denied wholesale access to that other Australian social space, the pub. Women's earning capacity means that many of their interests are represented culturally and socially and that they are more firmly inserted into the fabric of city life. Television series and sit-coms located in the city, where groups of friends sometimes live together; Friends, Seinfeld, Sex and the City reinforce the perception of city living as a place of opportunity and fun for younger women and men. Promotional literature is quick to exploit this image. A tourism brochure for the inner city Sydney (non!) suburb of Newtown, describes the attractions of the area: `some cities are cursed with suburbs, but Sydney's blessed with Newtown, a cosmopolitan neighbourhood.' As if Cabramatta, Fairfield or Parramatta, all outer suburban areas of Sydney, weren't cosmopolitan. A billboard in Brisbane's urban renewal area of Newstead, advertises apartment living as 'Urban living NOT suburban'. Drawing upon the rhetoric of opposition and expressing the familiar anti-suburban sentiment which for Australia, originated in the bohemian movement of the late nineteenth century (see also Kinnane 1998). This tradition probably reached its apotheosis with Barry Humphries in the 1960s whose comedic alter ego, Edna Everage signified everything that was despicable and mindless about suburbia. Edna's obsession with housing décor, cooking and recipes, social status and the minutiae of domesticity was portrayed with a venomous satire that depended upon a trivialization of traditional feminine competencies. Is there a connection between the anti- suburban tradition of cultural elites and the suburbs' close association with the domestic and feminine sphere of life? Patrick White in describing the mythical suburb of Sarsaparilla claimed it as 'a geographical hell ruled by female demons' (in Duruz 1994). American historian Lewis Mumford in his seminal work The City in History wrote that the suburbs are not 'merely a child centred environment: it is based on a childish view of the world which is sacrificed to the pleasure principle' (1961). Little wonder that today, younger women are fleeing the suburbs and flocking to the city, attracted by its possibility of adventure and eros. The other day I picked up my teenage daughter from her school to which she had returned after a five day camp in the bush. 'Aaaagh', she sighed with a sense of relief, as we approached our densely populated inner city suburb, 'buildings again… and not too many trees'. The following morning we were out in the lush and fecund Samford Valley, this time at her first soccer match for the season. As we drove further into the bush she yelled out, 'Oh no, not all these trees again!' Is this the response of a typical twenty- first century urban woman? References Docker, John. (1995) Postmodernism and Popular Culture: A cultural history. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Duruz, Jean. (1994) 'Romancing the Suburbs?' in Katherine Gibson and Sophie Watson (eds) Metropolis Now. Sydney, Pluto Press. Kinnane, Gary. (1998) 'Shopping at Last!:History, Fiction and the Anti-Suburban Tradition.' Australian Literary Studies: Writing the Everyday, Australian Literature and the Limits of Suburbia, 18. 4: 41-55. Knopp, Lawrence. (1995) 'Sexuality and Urban Space: a framework for analysis' in David Bell and Gill Valentine (eds) Mapping Desire. London, Routledge. Mumford, Lewis. (1961) The City in History, Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects. London, Penguin. Patton, Paul. (1995) 'Imaginary Cities' in Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson (eds) Postmodern Cities and Spaces. Cambridge, Blackwell Publishers. Petro, Patrice (1989) Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimer Germany. Princeton, Princeton University Press. Vidler, Anthony (1993) 'Bodies in Space/Subjects in the City: Psychopathologies of Modern Urbanism.' Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 5.3: 31-51. Walkowitz, Judith. (1992) City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in late Victorian London. Chicago, Chicago University Press. Watson, Sophie and Gibson, Katherine. (1995) Postmodern Cities and Spaces. Oxford, Basil Blackwell. Wilson, Elizabeth. (1991) The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, The Control of Disorder and Women. London: Virago. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Felton, Emma. "The City" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/eros.php>. Chicago Style Felton, Emma, "The City" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/eros.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Felton, Emma. (2002) The City. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/eros.php> ([your date of access]).
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Callaghan, Michaela. "Dancing Embodied Memory: The Choreography of Place in the Peruvian Andes". M/C Journal 15, n.º 4 (18 de agosto de 2012). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.530.
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This article is concerned with dance as an embodied form of collective remembering in the Andean department of Ayacucho in Peru. Andean dance and fiesta are inextricably linked with notions of identity, cultural heritage and history. Rather than being simply aesthetic —steps to music or a series of movements — dance is readable as being a deeper embodiment of the broader struggles and concerns of a people. As anthropologist Zoila Mendoza writes, in post-colonial countries such as those in Africa and Latin America, dance is and was a means “through which people contested, domesticated and reworked signs of domination in their society” (39). Andean dance has long been a space of contestation and resistance (Abercrombie; Bigenho; Isbell; Mendoza; Stern). It also functions as a repository, a dynamic archive which holds and tells the collective narrative of a cultural time and space. As Jane Cowan observes “dance is much more than knowing the steps; it involves both social knowledge and social power” (xii). In cultures where the written word has not played a central role in the construction and transmission of knowledge, dance is a particularly rich resource for understanding. “Embodied practice, along with and bound up with other cultural practices, offers a way of knowing” (Taylor 3). This is certainly true in the Andes of Peru where dance, music and fiesta are central to social, cultural, economic and political life. This article combines the areas of cultural memory with aspects of dance anthropology in a bid to reveal what is often unspoken and discover new ways of accessing and understanding non-verbal forms of memory through the embodied medium of dance. In societies where dance is integral to daily life the dance becomes an important resource for a deeper understanding of social and cultural memory. However, this characteristic of the dance has been largely overlooked in the field of memory studies. Paul Connerton writes, “… that there is an aspect of social memory which has been greatly ignored but is absolutely essential: bodily social memory” (382). I am interested in the role of dance as a site memory because as a dancer I am acutely aware of embodied memory and of the importance of dance as a narrative mode, not only for the dancer but also for the spectator. This article explores the case study of rural carnival performed in the city of Huamanga, in the Andean department of Ayacucho and includes interviews I conducted with rural campesinos (this literally translates as people from the country, however, it is a complex term imbedded with notions of class and race) between June 2009 and March 2010. Through examining the transformative effect of what I call the chorography of place, I argue that rural campesinos embody the memory of place, dancing that place into being in the urban setting as a means of remembering and maintaining connection to their homeland and salvaging cultural heritage.The department of Ayacucho is located in the South-Central Andes of Peru. The majority of the population are Quechua-speaking campesinos many of whom live in extreme poverty. Nestled in a cradle of mountains at 2,700 meters above sea level is the capital city of the same name. However, residents prefer the pre-revolutionary name of Huamanga. This is largely due to the fact that the word Ayacucho is a combination of two Quechua words Aya and Kucho which translate as Corner of the Dead. Given the recent history of the department it is not surprising that residents refer to their city as Huamanga instead of Ayacucho. Since 1980 the department of Ayacucho has become known as the birthplace of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and the ensuing 20 years of political violence between Sendero and counter insurgency forces. In 2000, the interim government convened the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC – CVR Spanish). In 2003, the TRC released its report which found that over 69,000 people were killed or disappeared during the conflict and hundreds of thousands more were forced to leave their homes (CVR). Those most affected by the violence and human rights abuses were predominantly from the rural population of the central-southern Andes (CVR). Following the release of the TRC Report the department of Ayacucho has become a centre for memory studies investigations and commemorative ceremonies. Whilst there are many traditional arts and creative expressions which commemorate or depict some aspect of the violence, dance is not used it this way. Rather, I contend that the dance is being salvaged as a means of remembering and connecting to place. Migration Brings ChangeAs a direct result of the political violence, the city of Huamanga experienced a large influx of people from the surrounding rural areas, who moved to the city in search of relative safety. Rapid forced migration from the country to the city made integration very difficult due to the sheer volume of displaced populations (Coronel 2). As a result of the internal conflict approximately 450 rural communities in the southern-central Andes were either abandoned or destroyed; 300 of these were in the department of Ayacucho. As a result, Huamanga experienced an enormous influx of rural migrants. In fact, according to the United Nations International Human Rights Instruments, 30 per cent of all people displaced by the violence moved to Ayacucho (par. 39). As campesinos moved to the city in search of safety they formed new neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the city. Although many are now settled in Huamanga, holding professional positions, working in restaurants, running stalls, or owning shops, most maintain strong links to their community of origin. The ways in which individuals sustain connection to their homelands are many and varied. However, dance and fiesta play a central role in maintaining connection.During the years of violence, Sendero Luminoso actively prohibited the celebration of traditional ceremonies and festivals which they considered to be “archaic superstition” (Garcia 40). Reprisals for defying Sendero Luminoso directives were brutal; as a result many rural inhabitants restricted their ritual practices for fear of the tuta puriqkuna or literally, night walkers (Ritter 27). This caused a sharp decline in ritual custom during the conflict (27).As a result, many Ayacuchano campesinos feel they have been robbed of their cultural heritage and identity. There is now a conscious effort to rescatar y recorder or to salvage and remember what was been taken from them, or, in the words of Ruben Romani, a dance teacher from Huanta, “to salvage what was killed during the difficult years.”Los Carnavales Ayacuchanos Whilst carnival is celebrated in many parts of the world, the mention of carnival often evokes images of scantily clad Brazilians dancing to the samba rhythms in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, or visions of elaborate floats and extravagant costumes. None of these are to be found in Huamanga. Rather, the carnival dances celebrated by campesinos in Huamanga are not celebrations of ‘the now’ or for the benefit of tourists, but rather they are embodiments of the memory of a lost place. During carnival, that lost or left homeland is danced into being in the urban setting as a means of maintaining a connection to the homeland and of salvaging cultural heritage.In the Andes, carnival coincides with the first harvest and is associated with fertility and giving thanks. It is considered a time of joy and to be a great leveller. In Huamanga carnival is one of the most anticipated fiestas of the year. As I was told many times “carnival is for everyone” and “we all participate.” From the old to the very young, the rich and poor, men and women all participate in carnival."We all participate." Carnavales Rurales (rural carnival) is celebrated each Sunday during the three weeks leading up to the official time of carnival before Lent. Campesinos from the same rural communities, join together to form comparsas, or groups. Those who participate identify as campesinos; even though many participants have lived in the city for more than 20 years. Some of the younger participants were born in the city. Whilst some campesinos, displaced by the violence, are now returning to their communities, many more have chosen to remain in Huamanga. One such person is Rómulo Canales Bautista. Rómulo dances with the comparsa Claveles de Vinchos.Rómulo Bautista dancing the carnival of VinchosOriginally from Vinchos, Rómulo moved to Huamanga in search of safety when he was a boy after his father was killed. Like many who participate in rural carnival, Rómulo has lived in Huamanga for a many years and for the most part he lives a very urban existence. He completed his studies at the university and works as a professional with no plans to return permanently to Vinchos. However, Rómulo considers himself to be campesino, stating “I am campesino. I identify myself as I am.” Rómulo laughed as he explained “I was not born dancing.” Since moving to Huamanga, Rómulo learned the carnival dance of Vinchos as a means of feeling a connection to his place of origin. He now participates in rural carnival each year and is the captain of his comparsa. For Rómulo, carnival is his cultural inheritance and that which connects him to his homeland. Living and working in the urban setting whilst maintaining strong links to their homelands through the embodied expressions of fiesta, migrants like Rómulo negotiate and move between an urbanised mestizo identity and a rural campesino identity. However, for rural migrants living in Huamanga, it is campesino identity which holds greater importance during carnival. This is because carnival allows participants to feel a visceral connection to both land and ancestry. As Gerardo Muñoz, a sixty-seven year old migrant from Chilcas explained “We want to make our culture live again, it is our patrimony, it is what our grandfathers have left us of their wisdom and how it used to be. This is what we cultivate through our carnival.”The Plaza TransformedComparsa from Huanta enter the PlazaEach Sunday during the three weeks leading up to the official time of carnival the central Plaza is transformed by the dance, music and song of up to seventy comparsas participating in Carnavales Rurales. Rural Carnival has a transformative effect not only on participants but also on the wider urban population. At this time campesinos, who are generally marginalised, discounted or actively discriminated against, briefly hold a place of power and respect. For a few hours each Sunday they are treated as masters of an ancient art. It is no easy task to conjure the dynamic sensory world of dance in words. As Deidre Sklar questions, “how is the ineffable to be made available in words? How shall I draw out the effects of dancing? Imperfectly, and slowly, bit by bit, building fragments of sensation and association so that its pieces lock in with your sensory memories like a jigsaw puzzle” (17).Recalling the DanceAs comparsas arrive in the Plaza there is creative chaos and the atmosphere hums with excitement as more and more comparsas gather for the pasecalle or parade. At the corner of the plaza, the deafening crack of fire works, accompanied by the sounds of music and the blasting of whistles announce the impending arrival of another comparsa. They are Los Hijos de Chilcas from Chilcas in La Mar in the north-east of the department. They proudly dance and sing their way into the Plaza – bodies strong, their movements powerful yet fluid. Their heads are lifted to greet the crowd, their chests wide and open, eyes bright with pride. Led by the capitán, the dancers form two long lines in pairs the men at the front, followed by the women. All the men carry warakas, long whips of plaited leather which they crack in the air as they dance. These are ancient weapons which are later used in a ritual battle. They dance in a swinging stepping motion that swerves and snakes, winds and weaves along the road. At various intervals the two lines open out, doubling back on themselves creating two semicircles. The men wear frontales, pieces of material which hang down the front of the legs, attached with long brightly coloured ribbons. The dancers make high stepping motions, kicking the frontales up in the air as they go; as if moving through high grasses. The ribbons swish and fly around the men and they are clouded in a blur of colour and movement. The women follow carrying warakitas, which are shorter and much finer. They hold their whips in two hands, stretched wide in front of their bodies or sweeping from side to side above their heads. They wear large brightly coloured skirts known as polleras made from heavy material which swish and swoosh as they dance from side to side – step, touch together, bounce; step, touch together, bounce. The women follow the serpent pattern of the men. Behind the women are the musicians playing guitars, quenas and tinyas. The musicians are followed by five older men dressed in pants and suit coats carrying ponchos draped over the right shoulder. They represent the traditional community authorities known as Varayuq and karguyuq. The oldest of the men is carrying the symbols of leadership – the staff and the whip.The Choreography of PlaceFor the members of Los Hijos de Chilcas the dance represents the topography of their homeland. The steps and choreography are created and informed by the dancers’ relationship to the land from which they come. La Mar is a very mountainous region where, as one dancer explained, it is impossible to walk a straight line up or down the terrain. One must therefore weave a winding path so as not to slip and fall. As the dancers snake and weave, curl and wind they literally dance their “place” of origin into being. With each swaying movement of their body, with each turn and with every footfall on the earth, dancers lay the mountainous terrain of La Mar along the paved roads of the Plaza. The flying ribbons of the frontales evoke the long grasses of the hillsides. “The steps are danced in the form of a zigzag which represents the changeable and curvilinear paths that join the towns, as well as creating the figure eight which represents the eight anexos of the district” (Carnaval Tradicional). Los Hijos de ChilcasThe weaving patterns and the figure eights of the dance create a choreography of place, which reflects and evoke the land. This choreography of place is built upon with each step of the dance many of which emulate the native fauna. One of the dancers explained whilst demonstrating a hopping step “this is the step of a little bird” common to La Mar. With his body bent forward from the waist, left hand behind his back and elbow out to the side like a wing, stepping forward on the left leg and sweeping the right leg in half circle motion, he indeed resembled a little bird hopping along the ground. Other animals such as the luwichu or deer are also represented through movement and costume.Katrina Teaiwa notes that the peoples of the South Pacific dance to embody “not space but place”. This is true also for campesinos from Chilcas living in the urban setting, who invoke their place of origin and the time of the ancestors as they dance their carnival. The notion of place is not merely terrain. It includes the nature elements, the ancestors and those who also those who have passed away. The province of La Mar was one of the most severely affected areas during the years of internal armed conflict especially during 1983-1984. More than 1,400 deaths and disappearances were reported to the TRC for this period alone (CVR). Hundreds of people were forced to leave their homes and in many communities it became impossible to celebrate fiestas. Through the choreography of place dancers transform the urban streets and dance the very land of their origin into being, claiming the urban streets as their own. The importance of this act can not be overstated for campesinos who have lost family members and were forced to leave their communities during the years of violence. As Deborah Poole has noted dance is “…the active Andean voice …” (99). As comparsa members teach their children the carnival dance of their parents and grandparents they maintain ancestral connections and pass on the stories and embodied memories of their homes. Much of the literature on carnival views it as a release valve which allows a temporary freedom but which ultimately functions to reinforce established structures. This is no longer the case in Huamanga. The transformative effect of rural carnival goes beyond the moment of the dance. Through dancing the choreography of place campesinos salvage and restore that which was taken from them; the effects of which are felt by both the dancer and spectator.ConclusionThe closer examination of dance as embodied memory reveals those memory practices which may not necessarily voice the violence directly, but which are enacted, funded and embodied and thus, important to the people most affected by the years of conflict and violence. In conclusion, the dance of rural carnival functions as embodied memory which is danced into being through collective participation; through many bodies working together. Dancers who participate in rural carnival have absorbed the land sensorially and embodied it. Through dancing the land they give it form and bring embodied memory into being, imbuing the paved roads of the plaza with the mountainous terrain of their home land. For those born in the city, they come to know their ancestral land through the Andean voice of dance. The dance of carnival functions in a unique way making it possible for participants recall their homelands through a physical memory and to dance their place into being wherever they are. This corporeal memory goes beyond the normal understanding of memory as being of the mind for as Connerton notes “images of the past are remembered by way of ritual performances that are ‘stored’ in a bodily memory” (89). ReferencesAbercrombie, Thomas A. “La fiesta de carnaval postcolonial en Oruro: Clase, etnicidad y nacionalismo en la danza folklórica.” Revista Andina 10.2 (1992): 279-352.Carnaval Tradicional del Distrito de Chilcas – La Mar, Comparsas de La Asociación Social – Cultural “Los Hijos de Chilcas y Anexos”, pamphlet handed to the judges of the Atipinakuy, 2010.CVR. Informe Final. Lima: Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, 2003. 1 March 2008 < http://www.cverdad.org.pe >.Bigenho, Michelle. “Sensing Locality in Yura: Rituals of Carnival and of the Bolivian State.” American Ethnologist 26.4 (1999): 95-80.Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1989.Coronel Aguirre, José, M. Cabrera Romero, G. Machaca Calle, and R. Ochatoma Paravivino. “Análisis de acciones del carnaval ayacuchano – 1986.” Carnaval en Ayacucho, CEDIFA, Investigaciones No. 1, 1986.Cowan, Jane. Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990.Garcia, Maria Elena. Making Indigenous Citizens: Identities, Education and Multicultural Development in Peru. California: Stanford University Press, 2005.Isbelle, Billie Jean. To Defend Ourselves: Ecology and Ritual in an Andean Village. Illinois: Waveland Press, 1985.Mendoza, Zoila S. Shaping Society through Dance: Mestizo Ritual Performance in the Peruvian Andes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.Poole, Deborah. “Andean Ritual Dance.” TDR 34.2 (Summer 1990): 98-126.Ritter, Jonathan. “Siren Songs: Ritual and Revolution in the Peruvian Andes.” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 11.1 (2002): 9-42.Sklar, Deidre. “‘All the Dances Have a Meaning to That Apparition”: Felt Knowledge and the Danzantes of Tortugas, New Mexico.” Dance Research Journal 31.2 (Autumn 1999): 14-33.Stern, Steve J. Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982.Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.Teaiwa, Katerina. "Challenges to Dance! Choreographing History in Oceania." Paper for Greg Denning Memorial Lecture, Melbourne University, Melbourne, 14 Oct. 2010.United Nations International Human Rights Instruments. Core Document Forming Part of the Reports of States Parties: Peru. 27 June 1995. HRI/CORE/1/Add.43/Rev.1. 12 May 2012 < http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/3ae6ae1f8.html >.
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Kuang, Lanlan. "Staging the Silk Road Journey Abroad: The Case of Dunhuang Performative Arts". M/C Journal 19, n.º 5 (13 de outubro de 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1155.
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The curtain rose. The howling of desert wind filled the performance hall in the Shanghai Grand Theatre. Into the center stage, where a scenic construction of a mountain cliff and a desert landscape was dimly lit, entered the character of the Daoist priest Wang Yuanlu (1849–1931), performed by Chen Yizong. Dressed in a worn and dusty outfit of dark blue cotton, characteristic of Daoist priests, Wang began to sweep the floor. After a few moments, he discovered a hidden chambre sealed inside one of the rock sanctuaries carved into the cliff.Signaled by the quick, crystalline, stirring wave of sound from the chimes, a melodious Chinese ocarina solo joined in slowly from the background. Astonished by thousands of Buddhist sūtra scrolls, wall paintings, and sculptures he had just accidentally discovered in the caves, Priest Wang set his broom aside and began to examine these treasures. Dawn had not yet arrived, and the desert sky was pitch-black. Priest Wang held his oil lamp high, strode rhythmically in excitement, sat crossed-legged in a meditative pose, and unfolded a scroll. The sound of the ocarina became fuller and richer and the texture of the music more complex, as several other instruments joined in.Below is the opening scene of the award-winning, theatrical dance-drama Dunhuang, My Dreamland, created by China’s state-sponsored Lanzhou Song and Dance Theatre in 2000. Figure 1a: Poster Side A of Dunhuang, My Dreamland Figure 1b: Poster Side B of Dunhuang, My DreamlandThe scene locates the dance-drama in the rock sanctuaries that today are known as the Dunhuang Mogao Caves, housing Buddhist art accumulated over a period of a thousand years, one of the best well-known UNESCO heritages on the Silk Road. Historically a frontier metropolis, Dunhuang was a strategic site along the Silk Road in northwestern China, a crossroads of trade, and a locus for religious, cultural, and intellectual influences since the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.). Travellers, especially Buddhist monks from India and central Asia, passing through Dunhuang on their way to Chang’an (present day Xi’an), China’s ancient capital, would stop to meditate in the Mogao Caves and consult manuscripts in the monastery's library. At the same time, Chinese pilgrims would travel by foot from China through central Asia to Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, playing a key role in the exchanges between ancient China and the outside world. Travellers from China would stop to acquire provisions at Dunhuang before crossing the Gobi Desert to continue on their long journey abroad. Figure 2: Dunhuang Mogao CavesThis article approaches the idea of “abroad” by examining the present-day imagination of journeys along the Silk Road—specifically, staged performances of the various Silk Road journey-themed dance-dramas sponsored by the Chinese state for enhancing its cultural and foreign policies since the 1970s (Kuang).As ethnomusicologists have demonstrated, musicians, choreographers, and playwrights often utilise historical materials in their performances to construct connections between the past and the present (Bohlman; Herzfeld; Lam; Rees; Shelemay; Tuohy; Wade; Yung: Rawski; Watson). The ancient Silk Road, which linked the Mediterranean coast with central China and beyond, via oasis towns such as Samarkand, has long been associated with the concept of “journeying abroad.” Journeys to distant, foreign lands and encounters of unknown, mysterious cultures along the Silk Road have been documented in historical records, such as A Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (Faxian) and The Great Tang Records on the Western Regions (Xuanzang), and illustrated in classical literature, such as The Travels of Marco Polo (Polo) and the 16th century Chinese novel Journey to the West (Wu). These journeys—coming and going from multiple directions and to different destinations—have inspired contemporary staged performance for audiences around the globe.Home and Abroad: Dunhuang and the Silk RoadDunhuang, My Dreamland (2000), the contemporary dance-drama, staged the journey of a young pilgrim painter travelling from Chang’an to a land of the unfamiliar and beyond borders, in search for the arts that have inspired him. Figure 3: A scene from Dunhuang, My Dreamland showing the young pilgrim painter in the Gobi Desert on the ancient Silk RoadFar from his home, he ended his journey in Dunhuang, historically considered the northwestern periphery of China, well beyond Yangguan and Yumenguan, the bordering passes that separate China and foreign lands. Later scenes in Dunhuang, My Dreamland, portrayed through multiethnic music and dances, the dynamic interactions among merchants, cultural and religious envoys, warriors, and politicians that were making their own journey from abroad to China. The theatrical dance-drama presents a historically inspired, re-imagined vision of both “home” and “abroad” to its audiences as they watch the young painter travel along the Silk Road, across the Gobi Desert, arriving at his own ideal, artistic “homeland”, the Dunhuang Mogao Caves. Since his journey is ultimately a spiritual one, the conceptualisation of travelling “abroad” could also be perceived as “a journey home.”Staged more than four hundred times since it premiered in Beijing in April 2000, Dunhuang, My Dreamland is one of the top ten titles in China’s National Stage Project and one of the most successful theatrical dance-dramas ever produced in China. With revenue of more than thirty million renminbi (RMB), it ranks as the most profitable theatrical dance-drama ever produced in China, with a preproduction cost of six million RMB. The production team receives financial support from China’s Ministry of Culture for its “distinctive ethnic features,” and its “aim to promote traditional Chinese culture,” according to Xu Rong, an official in the Cultural Industry Department of the Ministry. Labeled an outstanding dance-drama of the Chinese nation, it aims to present domestic and international audiences with a vision of China as a historically multifaceted and cosmopolitan nation that has been in close contact with the outside world through the ancient Silk Road. Its production company has been on tour in selected cities throughout China and in countries abroad, including Austria, Spain, and France, literarily making the young pilgrim painter’s “journey along the Silk Road” a new journey abroad, off stage and in reality.Dunhuang, My Dreamland was not the first, nor is it the last, staged performances that portrays the Chinese re-imagination of “journeying abroad” along the ancient Silk Road. It was created as one of many versions of Dunhuang bihua yuewu, a genre of music, dance, and dramatic performances created in the early twentieth century and based primarily on artifacts excavated from the Mogao Caves (Kuang). “The Mogao Caves are the greatest repository of early Chinese art,” states Mimi Gates, who works to increase public awareness of the UNESCO site and raise funds toward its conservation. “Located on the Chinese end of the Silk Road, it also is the place where many cultures of the world intersected with one another, so you have Greek and Roman, Persian and Middle Eastern, Indian and Chinese cultures, all interacting. Given the nature of our world today, it is all very relevant” (Pollack). As an expressive art form, this genre has been thriving since the late 1970s contributing to the global imagination of China’s “Silk Road journeys abroad” long before Dunhuang, My Dreamland achieved its domestic and international fame. For instance, in 2004, The Thousand-Handed and Thousand-Eyed Avalokiteśvara—one of the most representative (and well-known) Dunhuang bihua yuewu programs—was staged as a part of the cultural program during the Paralympic Games in Athens, Greece. This performance, as well as other Dunhuang bihua yuewu dance programs was the perfect embodiment of a foreign religion that arrived in China from abroad and became Sinicized (Kuang). Figure 4: Mural from Dunhuang Mogao Cave No. 45A Brief History of Staging the Silk Road JourneysThe staging of the Silk Road journeys abroad began in the late 1970s. Historically, the Silk Road signifies a multiethnic, cosmopolitan frontier, which underwent incessant conflicts between Chinese sovereigns and nomadic peoples (as well as between other groups), but was strongly imbued with the customs and institutions of central China (Duan, Mair, Shi, Sima). In the twentieth century, when China was no longer an empire, but had become what the early 20th-century reformer Liang Qichao (1873–1929) called “a nation among nations,” the long history of the Silk Road and the colourful, legendary journeys abroad became instrumental in the formation of a modern Chinese nation of unified diversity rooted in an ancient cosmopolitan past. The staged Silk Road theme dance-dramas thus participate in this formation of the Chinese imagination of “nation” and “abroad,” as they aestheticise Chinese history and geography. History and geography—aspects commonly considered constituents of a nation as well as our conceptualisations of “abroad”—are “invariably aestheticized to a certain degree” (Bakhtin 208). Diverse historical and cultural elements from along the Silk Road come together in this performance genre, which can be considered the most representative of various possible stagings of the history and culture of the Silk Road journeys.In 1979, the Chinese state officials in Gansu Province commissioned the benchmark dance-drama Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road, a spectacular theatrical dance-drama praising the pure and noble friendship which existed between the peoples of China and other countries in the Tang dynasty (618-907 C.E.). While its plot also revolves around the Dunhuang Caves and the life of a painter, staged at one of the most critical turning points in modern Chinese history, the work as a whole aims to present the state’s intention of re-establishing diplomatic ties with the outside world after the Cultural Revolution. Unlike Dunhuang, My Dreamland, it presents a nation’s journey abroad and home. To accomplish this goal, Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road introduces the fictional character Yunus, a wealthy Persian merchant who provides the audiences a vision of the historical figure of Peroz III, the last Sassanian prince, who after the Arab conquest of Iran in 651 C.E., found refuge in China. By incorporating scenes of ethnic and folk dances, the drama then stages the journey of painter Zhang’s daughter Yingniang to Persia (present-day Iran) and later, Yunus’s journey abroad to the Tang dynasty imperial court as the Persian Empire’s envoy.Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road, since its debut at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on the first of October 1979 and shortly after at the Theatre La Scala in Milan, has been staged in more than twenty countries and districts, including France, Italy, Japan, Thailand, Russia, Latvia, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and recently, in 2013, at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York.“The Road”: Staging the Journey TodayWithin the contemporary context of global interdependencies, performing arts have been used as strategic devices for social mobilisation and as a means to represent and perform modern national histories and foreign policies (Davis, Rees, Tian, Tuohy, Wong, David Y. H. Wu). The Silk Road has been chosen as the basis for these state-sponsored, extravagantly produced, and internationally staged contemporary dance programs. In 2008, the welcoming ceremony and artistic presentation at the Olympic Games in Beijing featured twenty apsara dancers and a Dunhuang bihua yuewu dancer with long ribbons, whose body was suspended in mid-air on a rectangular LED extension held by hundreds of performers; on the giant LED screen was a depiction of the ancient Silk Road.In March 2013, Chinese president Xi Jinping introduced the initiatives “Silk Road Economic Belt” and “21st Century Maritime Silk Road” during his journeys abroad in Kazakhstan and Indonesia. These initiatives are now referred to as “One Belt, One Road.” The State Council lists in details the policies and implementation plans for this initiative on its official web page, www.gov.cn. In April 2013, the China Institute in New York launched a yearlong celebration, starting with "Dunhuang: Buddhist Art and the Gateway of the Silk Road" with a re-creation of one of the caves and a selection of artifacts from the site. In March 2015, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s top economic planning agency, released a new action plan outlining key details of the “One Belt, One Road” initiative. Xi Jinping has made the program a centrepiece of both his foreign and domestic economic policies. One of the central economic strategies is to promote cultural industry that could enhance trades along the Silk Road.Encouraged by the “One Belt, One Road” policies, in March 2016, The Silk Princess premiered in Xi’an and was staged at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing the following July. While Dunhuang, My Dreamland and Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road were inspired by the Buddhist art found in Dunhuang, The Silk Princess, based on a story about a princess bringing silk and silkworm-breeding skills to the western regions of China in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) has a different historical origin. The princess's story was portrayed in a woodblock from the Tang Dynasty discovered by Sir Marc Aurel Stein, a British archaeologist during his expedition to Xinjiang (now Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region) in the early 19th century, and in a temple mural discovered during a 2002 Chinese-Japanese expedition in the Dandanwulike region. Figure 5: Poster of The Silk PrincessIn January 2016, the Shannxi Provincial Song and Dance Troupe staged The Silk Road, a new theatrical dance-drama. Unlike Dunhuang, My Dreamland, the newly staged dance-drama “centers around the ‘road’ and the deepening relationship merchants and travellers developed with it as they traveled along its course,” said Director Yang Wei during an interview with the author. According to her, the show uses seven archetypes—a traveler, a guard, a messenger, and so on—to present the stories that took place along this historic route. Unbounded by specific space or time, each of these archetypes embodies the foreign-travel experience of a different group of individuals, in a manner that may well be related to the social actors of globalised culture and of transnationalism today. Figure 6: Poster of The Silk RoadConclusionAs seen in Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road and Dunhuang, My Dreamland, staging the processes of Silk Road journeys has become a way of connecting the Chinese imagination of “home” with the Chinese imagination of “abroad.” Staging a nation’s heritage abroad on contemporary stages invites a new imagination of homeland, borders, and transnationalism. Once aestheticised through staged performances, such as that of the Dunhuang bihua yuewu, the historical and topological landscape of Dunhuang becomes a performed narrative, embodying the national heritage.The staging of Silk Road journeys continues, and is being developed into various forms, from theatrical dance-drama to digital exhibitions such as the Smithsonian’s Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottes at Dunhuang (Stromberg) and the Getty’s Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China's Silk Road (Sivak and Hood). They are sociocultural phenomena that emerge through interactions and negotiations among multiple actors and institutions to envision and enact a Chinese imagination of “journeying abroad” from and to the country.ReferencesBakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1982.Bohlman, Philip V. “World Music at the ‘End of History’.” Ethnomusicology 46 (2002): 1–32.Davis, Sara L.M. Song and Silence: Ethnic Revival on China’s Southwest Borders. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.Duan, Wenjie. “The History of Conservation of Mogao Grottoes.” International Symposium on the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Property: The Conservation of Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes and the Related Studies. Eds. Kuchitsu and Nobuaki. Tokyo: Tokyo National Research Institute of Cultural Properties, 1997. 1–8.Faxian. A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms. Translated by James Legge. New York: Dover Publications, 1991.Herzfeld, Michael. Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985.Kuang, Lanlan. Dunhuang bi hua yue wu: "Zhongguo jing guan" zai guo ji yu jing zhong de jian gou, chuan bo yu yi yi (Dunhuang Performing Arts: The Construction and Transmission of “China-scape” in the Global Context). Beijing: She hui ke xue wen xian chu ban she, 2016.Lam, Joseph S.C. State Sacrifice and Music in Ming China: Orthodoxy, Creativity and Expressiveness. New York: State University of New York Press, 1998.Mair, Victor. T’ang Transformation Texts: A Study of the Buddhist Contribution to the Rise of Vernacular Fiction and Drama in China. Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, 1989.Pollack, Barbara. “China’s Desert Treasure.” ARTnews, December 2013. Sep. 2016 <http://www.artnews.com/2013/12/24/chinas-desert-treasure/>.Polo, Marco. The Travels of Marco Polo. Translated by Ronald Latham. Penguin Classics, 1958.Rees, Helen. Echoes of History: Naxi Music in Modern China. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.Shelemay, Kay Kaufman. “‘Historical Ethnomusicology’: Reconstructing Falasha Liturgical History.” Ethnomusicology 24 (1980): 233–258.Shi, Weixiang. Dunhuang lishi yu mogaoku yishu yanjiu (Dunhuang History and Research on Mogao Grotto Art). Lanzhou: Gansu jiaoyu chubanshe, 2002.Sima, Guang 司马光 (1019–1086) et al., comps. Zizhi tongjian 资治通鉴 (Comprehensive Mirror for the Aid of Government). Beijing: Guji chubanshe, 1957.Sima, Qian 司马迁 (145-86? B.C.E.) et al., comps. Shiji: Dayuan liezhuan 史记: 大宛列传 (Record of the Grand Historian: The Collective Biographies of Dayuan). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959.Sivak, Alexandria and Amy Hood. “The Getty to Present: Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China’s Silk Road Organised in Collaboration with the Dunhuang Academy and the Dunhuang Foundation.” Getty Press Release. Sep. 2016 <http://news.getty.edu/press-materials/press-releases/cave-temples-dunhuang-buddhist-art-chinas-silk-road>.Stromberg, Joseph. “Video: Take a Virtual 3D Journey to Visit China's Caves of the Thousand Buddhas.” Smithsonian, December 2012. Sep. 2016 <http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/video-take-a-virtual-3d-journey-to-visit-chinas-caves-of-the-thousand-buddhas-150897910/?no-ist>.Tian, Qing. “Recent Trends in Buddhist Music Research in China.” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 3 (1994): 63–72.Tuohy, Sue M.C. “Imagining the Chinese Tradition: The Case of Hua’er Songs, Festivals, and Scholarship.” Ph.D. Dissertation. Indiana University, Bloomington, 1988.Wade, Bonnie C. Imaging Sound: An Ethnomusicological Study of Music, Art, and Culture in Mughal India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.Wong, Isabel K.F. “From Reaction to Synthesis: Chinese Musicology in the Twentieth Century.” Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology. Eds. Bruno Nettl and Philip V. Bohlman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. 37–55.Wu, Chengen. Journey to the West. Tranlsated by W.J.F. Jenner. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2003.Wu, David Y.H. “Chinese National Dance and the Discourse of Nationalization in Chinese Anthropology.” The Making of Anthropology in East and Southeast Asia. Eds. Shinji Yamashita, Joseph Bosco, and J.S. Eades. New York: Berghahn, 2004. 198–207.Xuanzang. The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions. Hamburg: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation & Research, 1997.Yung, Bell, Evelyn S. Rawski, and Rubie S. Watson, eds. Harmony and Counterpoint: Ritual Music in Chinese Context. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
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Paull, John. "Beyond Equal: From Same But Different to the Doctrine of Substantial Equivalence". M/C Journal 11, n.º 2 (1 de junho de 2008). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.36.
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A same-but-different dichotomy has recently been encapsulated within the US Food and Drug Administration’s ill-defined concept of “substantial equivalence” (USFDA, FDA). By invoking this concept the genetically modified organism (GMO) industry has escaped the rigors of safety testing that might otherwise apply. The curious concept of “substantial equivalence” grants a presumption of safety to GMO food. This presumption has yet to be earned, and has been used to constrain labelling of both GMO and non-GMO food. It is an idea that well serves corporatism. It enables the claim of difference to secure patent protection, while upholding the contrary claim of sameness to avoid labelling and safety scrutiny. It offers the best of both worlds for corporate food entrepreneurs, and delivers the worst of both worlds to consumers. The term “substantial equivalence” has established its currency within the GMO discourse. As the opportunities for patenting food technologies expand, the GMO recruitment of this concept will likely be a dress rehearsal for the developing debates on the labelling and testing of other techno-foods – including nano-foods and clone-foods. “Substantial Equivalence” “Are the Seven Commandments the same as they used to be, Benjamin?” asks Clover in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”. By way of response, Benjamin “read out to her what was written on the wall. There was nothing there now except a single Commandment. It ran: ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS”. After this reductionist revelation, further novel and curious events at Manor Farm, “did not seem strange” (Orwell, ch. X). Equality is a concept at the very core of mathematics, but beyond the domain of logic, equality becomes a hotly contested notion – and the domain of food is no exception. A novel food has a regulatory advantage if it can claim to be the same as an established food – a food that has proven its worth over centuries, perhaps even millennia – and thus does not trigger new, perhaps costly and onerous, testing, compliance, and even new and burdensome regulations. On the other hand, such a novel food has an intellectual property (IP) advantage only in terms of its difference. And thus there is an entrenched dissonance for newly technologised foods, between claiming sameness, and claiming difference. The same/different dilemma is erased, so some would have it, by appeal to the curious new dualist doctrine of “substantial equivalence” whereby sameness and difference are claimed simultaneously, thereby creating a win/win for corporatism, and a loss/loss for consumerism. This ground has been pioneered, and to some extent conquered, by the GMO industry. The conquest has ramifications for other cryptic food technologies, that is technologies that are invisible to the consumer and that are not evident to the consumer other than via labelling. Cryptic technologies pertaining to food include GMOs, pesticides, hormone treatments, irradiation and, most recently, manufactured nano-particles introduced into the food production and delivery stream. Genetic modification of plants was reported as early as 1984 by Horsch et al. The case of Diamond v. Chakrabarty resulted in a US Supreme Court decision that upheld the prior decision of the US Court of Customs and Patent Appeal that “the fact that micro-organisms are alive is without legal significance for purposes of the patent law”, and ruled that the “respondent’s micro-organism plainly qualifies as patentable subject matter”. This was a majority decision of nine judges, with four judges dissenting (Burger). It was this Chakrabarty judgement that has seriously opened the Pandora’s box of GMOs because patenting rights makes GMOs an attractive corporate proposition by offering potentially unique monopoly rights over food. The rear guard action against GMOs has most often focussed on health repercussions (Smith, Genetic), food security issues, and also the potential for corporate malfeasance to hide behind a cloak of secrecy citing commercial confidentiality (Smith, Seeds). Others have tilted at the foundational plank on which the economics of the GMO industry sits: “I suggest that the main concern is that we do not want a single molecule of anything we eat to contribute to, or be patented and owned by, a reckless, ruthless chemical organisation” (Grist 22). The GMO industry exhibits bipolar behaviour, invoking the concept of “substantial difference” to claim patent rights by way of “novelty”, and then claiming “substantial equivalence” when dealing with other regulatory authorities including food, drug and pesticide agencies; a case of “having their cake and eating it too” (Engdahl 8). This is a clever slight-of-rhetoric, laying claim to the best of both worlds for corporations, and the worst of both worlds for consumers. Corporations achieve patent protection and no concomitant specific regulatory oversight; while consumers pay the cost of patent monopolization, and are not necessarily apprised, by way of labelling or otherwise, that they are purchasing and eating GMOs, and thereby financing the GMO industry. The lemma of “substantial equivalence” does not bear close scrutiny. It is a fuzzy concept that lacks a tight testable definition. It is exactly this fuzziness that allows lots of wriggle room to keep GMOs out of rigorous testing regimes. Millstone et al. argue that “substantial equivalence is a pseudo-scientific concept because it is a commercial and political judgement masquerading as if it is scientific. It is moreover, inherently anti-scientific because it was created primarily to provide an excuse for not requiring biochemical or toxicological tests. It therefore serves to discourage and inhibit informative scientific research” (526). “Substantial equivalence” grants GMOs the benefit of the doubt regarding safety, and thereby leaves unexamined the ramifications for human consumer health, for farm labourer and food-processor health, for the welfare of farm animals fed a diet of GMO grain, and for the well-being of the ecosystem, both in general and in its particularities. “Substantial equivalence” was introduced into the food discourse by an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report: “safety evaluation of foods derived by modern biotechnology: concepts and principles”. It is from this document that the ongoing mantra of assumed safety of GMOs derives: “modern biotechnology … does not inherently lead to foods that are less safe … . Therefore evaluation of foods and food components obtained from organisms developed by the application of the newer techniques does not necessitate a fundamental change in established principles, nor does it require a different standard of safety” (OECD, “Safety” 10). This was at the time, and remains, an act of faith, a pro-corporatist and a post-cautionary approach. The OECD motto reveals where their priorities lean: “for a better world economy” (OECD, “Better”). The term “substantial equivalence” was preceded by the 1992 USFDA concept of “substantial similarity” (Levidow, Murphy and Carr) and was adopted from a prior usage by the US Food and Drug Agency (USFDA) where it was used pertaining to medical devices (Miller). Even GMO proponents accept that “Substantial equivalence is not intended to be a scientific formulation; it is a conceptual tool for food producers and government regulators” (Miller 1043). And there’s the rub – there is no scientific definition of “substantial equivalence”, no scientific test of proof of concept, and nor is there likely to be, since this is a ‘spinmeister’ term. And yet this is the cornerstone on which rests the presumption of safety of GMOs. Absence of evidence is taken to be evidence of absence. History suggests that this is a fraught presumption. By way of contrast, the patenting of GMOs depends on the antithesis of assumed ‘sameness’. Patenting rests on proven, scrutinised, challengeable and robust tests of difference and novelty. Lightfoot et al. report that transgenic plants exhibit “unexpected changes [that] challenge the usual assumptions of GMO equivalence and suggest genomic, proteomic and metanomic characterization of transgenics is advisable” (1). GMO Milk and Contested Labelling Pesticide company Monsanto markets the genetically engineered hormone rBST (recombinant Bovine Somatotropin; also known as: rbST; rBGH, recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone; and the brand name Prosilac) to dairy farmers who inject it into their cows to increase milk production. This product is not approved for use in many jurisdictions, including Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Japan. Even Monsanto accepts that rBST leads to mastitis (inflammation and pus in the udder) and other “cow health problems”, however, it maintains that “these problems did not occur at rates that would prohibit the use of Prosilac” (Monsanto). A European Union study identified an extensive list of health concerns of rBST use (European Commission). The US Dairy Export Council however entertain no doubt. In their background document they ask “is milk from cows treated with rBST safe?” and answer “Absolutely” (USDEC). Meanwhile, Monsanto’s website raises and answers the question: “Is the milk from cows treated with rbST any different from milk from untreated cows? No” (Monsanto). Injecting cows with genetically modified hormones to boost their milk production remains a contested practice, banned in many countries. It is the claimed equivalence that has kept consumers of US dairy products in the dark, shielded rBST dairy farmers from having to declare that their milk production is GMO-enhanced, and has inhibited non-GMO producers from declaring their milk as non-GMO, non rBST, or not hormone enhanced. This is a battle that has simmered, and sometimes raged, for a decade in the US. Finally there is a modest victory for consumers: the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture (PDA) requires all labels used on milk products to be approved in advance by the department. The standard issued in October 2007 (PDA, “Standards”) signalled to producers that any milk labels claiming rBST-free status would be rejected. This advice was rescinded in January 2008 with new, specific, department-approved textual constructions allowed, and ensuring that any “no rBST” style claim was paired with a PDA-prescribed disclaimer (PDA, “Revised Standards”). However, parsimonious labelling is prohibited: No labeling may contain references such as ‘No Hormones’, ‘Hormone Free’, ‘Free of Hormones’, ‘No BST’, ‘Free of BST’, ‘BST Free’,’No added BST’, or any statement which indicates, implies or could be construed to mean that no natural bovine somatotropin (BST) or synthetic bovine somatotropin (rBST) are contained in or added to the product. (PDA, “Revised Standards” 3) Difference claims are prohibited: In no instance shall any label state or imply that milk from cows not treated with recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST, rbST, RBST or rbst) differs in composition from milk or products made with milk from treated cows, or that rBST is not contained in or added to the product. If a product is represented as, or intended to be represented to consumers as, containing or produced from milk from cows not treated with rBST any labeling information must convey only a difference in farming practices or dairy herd management methods. (PDA, “Revised Standards” 3) The PDA-approved labelling text for non-GMO dairy farmers is specified as follows: ‘From cows not treated with rBST. No significant difference has been shown between milk derived from rBST-treated and non-rBST-treated cows’ or a substantial equivalent. Hereinafter, the first sentence shall be referred to as the ‘Claim’, and the second sentence shall be referred to as the ‘Disclaimer’. (PDA, “Revised Standards” 4) It is onto the non-GMO dairy farmer alone, that the costs of compliance fall. These costs include label preparation and approval, proving non-usage of GMOs, and of creating and maintaining an audit trail. In nearby Ohio a similar consumer versus corporatist pantomime is playing out. This time with the Ohio Department of Agriculture (ODA) calling the shots, and again serving the GMO industry. The ODA prescribed text allowed to non-GMO dairy farmers is “from cows not supplemented with rbST” and this is to be conjoined with the mandatory disclaimer “no significant difference has been shown between milk derived from rbST-supplemented and non-rbST supplemented cows” (Curet). These are “emergency rules”: they apply for 90 days, and are proposed as permanent. Once again, the onus is on the non-GMO dairy farmers to document and prove their claims. GMO dairy farmers face no such governmental requirements, including no disclosure requirement, and thus an asymmetric regulatory impost is placed on the non-GMO farmer which opens up new opportunities for administrative demands and technocratic harassment. Levidow et al. argue, somewhat Eurocentrically, that from its 1990s adoption “as the basis for a harmonized science-based approach to risk assessment” (26) the concept of “substantial equivalence” has “been recast in at least three ways” (58). It is true that the GMO debate has evolved differently in the US and Europe, and with other jurisdictions usually adopting intermediate positions, yet the concept persists. Levidow et al. nominate their three recastings as: firstly an “implicit redefinition” by the appending of “extra phrases in official documents”; secondly, “it has been reinterpreted, as risk assessment processes have … required more evidence of safety than before, especially in Europe”; and thirdly, “it has been demoted in the European Union regulatory procedures so that it can no longer be used to justify the claim that a risk assessment is unnecessary” (58). Romeis et al. have proposed a decision tree approach to GMO risks based on cascading tiers of risk assessment. However what remains is that the defects of the concept of “substantial equivalence” persist. Schauzu identified that: such decisions are a matter of “opinion”; that there is “no clear definition of the term ‘substantial’”; that because genetic modification “is aimed at introducing new traits into organisms, the result will always be a different combination of genes and proteins”; and that “there is no general checklist that could be followed by those who are responsible for allowing a product to be placed on the market” (2). Benchmark for Further Food Novelties? The discourse, contestation, and debate about “substantial equivalence” have largely focussed on the introduction of GMOs into food production processes. GM can best be regarded as the test case, and proof of concept, for establishing “substantial equivalence” as a benchmark for evaluating new and forthcoming food technologies. This is of concern, because the concept of “substantial equivalence” is scientific hokum, and yet its persistence, even entrenchment, within regulatory agencies may be a harbinger of forthcoming same-but-different debates for nanotechnology and other future bioengineering. The appeal of “substantial equivalence” has been a brake on the creation of GMO-specific regulations and on rigorous GMO testing. The food nanotechnology industry can be expected to look to the precedent of the GMO debate to head off specific nano-regulations and nano-testing. As cloning becomes economically viable, then this may be another wave of food innovation that muddies the regulatory waters with the confused – and ultimately self-contradictory – concept of “substantial equivalence”. Nanotechnology engineers particles in the size range 1 to 100 nanometres – a nanometre is one billionth of a metre. This is interesting for manufacturers because at this size chemicals behave differently, or as the Australian Office of Nanotechnology expresses it, “new functionalities are obtained” (AON). Globally, government expenditure on nanotechnology research reached US$4.6 billion in 2006 (Roco 3.12). While there are now many patents (ETC Group; Roco), regulation specific to nanoparticles is lacking (Bowman and Hodge; Miller and Senjen). The USFDA advises that nano-manufacturers “must show a reasonable assurance of safety … or substantial equivalence” (FDA). A recent inventory of nano-products already on the market identified 580 products. Of these 11.4% were categorised as “Food and Beverage” (WWICS). This is at a time when public confidence in regulatory bodies is declining (HRA). In an Australian consumer survey on nanotechnology, 65% of respondents indicated they were concerned about “unknown and long term side effects”, and 71% agreed that it is important “to know if products are made with nanotechnology” (MARS 22). Cloned animals are currently more expensive to produce than traditional animal progeny. In the course of 678 pages, the USFDA Animal Cloning: A Draft Risk Assessment has not a single mention of “substantial equivalence”. However the Federation of Animal Science Societies (FASS) in its single page “Statement in Support of USFDA’s Risk Assessment Conclusion That Food from Cloned Animals Is Safe for Human Consumption” states that “FASS endorses the use of this comparative evaluation process as the foundation of establishing substantial equivalence of any food being evaluated. It must be emphasized that it is the food product itself that should be the focus of the evaluation rather than the technology used to generate cloned animals” (FASS 1). Contrary to the FASS derogation of the importance of process in food production, for consumers both the process and provenance of production is an important and integral aspect of a food product’s value and identity. Some consumers will legitimately insist that their Kalamata olives are from Greece, or their balsamic vinegar is from Modena. It was the British public’s growing awareness that their sugar was being produced by slave labour that enabled the boycotting of the product, and ultimately the outlawing of slavery (Hochschild). When consumers boycott Nestle, because of past or present marketing practices, or boycott produce of USA because of, for example, US foreign policy or animal welfare concerns, they are distinguishing the food based on the narrative of the food, the production process and/or production context which are a part of the identity of the food. Consumers attribute value to food based on production process and provenance information (Paull). Products produced by slave labour, by child labour, by political prisoners, by means of torture, theft, immoral, unethical or unsustainable practices are different from their alternatives. The process of production is a part of the identity of a product and consumers are increasingly interested in food narrative. It requires vigilance to ensure that these narratives are delivered with the product to the consumer, and are neither lost nor suppressed. Throughout the GM debate, the organic sector has successfully skirted the “substantial equivalence” debate by excluding GMOs from the certified organic food production process. This GMO-exclusion from the organic food stream is the one reprieve available to consumers worldwide who are keen to avoid GMOs in their diet. The organic industry carries the expectation of providing food produced without artificial pesticides and fertilizers, and by extension, without GMOs. Most recently, the Soil Association, the leading organic certifier in the UK, claims to be the first organisation in the world to exclude manufactured nonoparticles from their products (Soil Association). There has been the call that engineered nanoparticles be excluded from organic standards worldwide, given that there is no mandatory safety testing and no compulsory labelling in place (Paull and Lyons). The twisted rhetoric of oxymorons does not make the ideal foundation for policy. Setting food policy on the shifting sands of “substantial equivalence” seems foolhardy when we consider the potentially profound ramifications of globally mass marketing a dysfunctional food. If there is a 2×2 matrix of terms – “substantial equivalence”, substantial difference, insubstantial equivalence, insubstantial difference – while only one corner of this matrix is engaged for food policy, and while the elements remain matters of opinion rather than being testable by science, or by some other regime, then the public is the dupe, and potentially the victim. “Substantial equivalence” has served the GMO corporates well and the public poorly, and this asymmetry is slated to escalate if nano-food and clone-food are also folded into the “substantial equivalence” paradigm. Only in Orwellian Newspeak is war peace, or is same different. It is time to jettison the pseudo-scientific doctrine of “substantial equivalence”, as a convenient oxymoron, and embrace full disclosure of provenance, process and difference, so that consumers are not collateral in a continuing asymmetric knowledge war. References Australian Office of Nanotechnology (AON). Department of Industry, Tourism and Resources (DITR) 6 Aug. 2007. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.innovation.gov.au/Section/Innovation/Pages/ AustralianOfficeofNanotechnology.aspx >.Bowman, Diana, and Graeme Hodge. “A Small Matter of Regulation: An International Review of Nanotechnology Regulation.” Columbia Science and Technology Law Review 8 (2007): 1-32.Burger, Warren. “Sidney A. Diamond, Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks v. Ananda M. Chakrabarty, et al.” Supreme Court of the United States, decided 16 June 1980. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=447&invol=303 >.Curet, Monique. “New Rules Allow Dairy-Product Labels to Include Hormone Info.” The Columbus Dispatch 7 Feb. 2008. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/business/stories/2008/02/07/dairy.html >.Engdahl, F. William. Seeds of Destruction. Montréal: Global Research, 2007.ETC Group. Down on the Farm: The Impact of Nano-Scale Technologies on Food and Agriculture. Ottawa: Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Conservation, November, 2004. European Commission. Report on Public Health Aspects of the Use of Bovine Somatotropin. Brussels: European Commission, 15-16 March 1999.Federation of Animal Science Societies (FASS). Statement in Support of FDA’s Risk Assessment Conclusion That Cloned Animals Are Safe for Human Consumption. 2007. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.fass.org/page.asp?pageID=191 >.Grist, Stuart. “True Threats to Reason.” New Scientist 197.2643 (16 Feb. 2008): 22-23.Hochschild, Adam. Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery. London: Pan Books, 2006.Horsch, Robert, Robert Fraley, Stephen Rogers, Patricia Sanders, Alan Lloyd, and Nancy Hoffman. “Inheritance of Functional Foreign Genes in Plants.” Science 223 (1984): 496-498.HRA. Awareness of and Attitudes toward Nanotechnology and Federal Regulatory Agencies: A Report of Findings. Washington: Peter D. Hart Research Associates, 25 Sep. 2007.Levidow, Les, Joseph Murphy, and Susan Carr. “Recasting ‘Substantial Equivalence’: Transatlantic Governance of GM Food.” Science, Technology, and Human Values 32.1 (Jan. 2007): 26-64.Lightfoot, David, Rajsree Mungur, Rafiqa Ameziane, Anthony Glass, and Karen Berhard. “Transgenic Manipulation of C and N Metabolism: Stretching the GMO Equivalence.” American Society of Plant Biologists Conference: Plant Biology, 2000.MARS. “Final Report: Australian Community Attitudes Held about Nanotechnology – Trends 2005-2007.” Report prepared for Department of Industry, Tourism and Resources (DITR). Miranda, NSW: Market Attitude Research Services, 12 June 2007.Miller, Georgia, and Rye Senjen. “Out of the Laboratory and on to Our Plates: Nanotechnology in Food and Agriculture.” Friends of the Earth, 2008. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://nano.foe.org.au/node/220 >.Miller, Henry. “Substantial Equivalence: Its Uses and Abuses.” Nature Biotechnology 17 (7 Nov. 1999): 1042-1043.Millstone, Erik, Eric Brunner, and Sue Mayer. “Beyond ‘Substantial Equivalence’.” Nature 401 (7 Oct. 1999): 525-526.Monsanto. “Posilac, Bovine Somatotropin by Monsanto: Questions and Answers about bST from the United States Food and Drug Administration.” 2007. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.monsantodairy.com/faqs/fda_safety.html >.Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “For a Better World Economy.” Paris: OECD, 2008. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.oecd.org/ >.———. “Safety Evaluation of Foods Derived by Modern Biotechnology: Concepts and Principles.” Paris: OECD, 1993.Orwell, George. Animal Farm. Adelaide: ebooks@Adelaide, 2004 (1945). 30 Apr. 2008 < http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george >.Paull, John. “Provenance, Purity and Price Premiums: Consumer Valuations of Organic and Place-of-Origin Food Labelling.” Research Masters thesis, University of Tasmania, Hobart, 2006. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://eprints.utas.edu.au/690/ >.Paull, John, and Kristen Lyons. “Nanotechnology: The Next Challenge for Organics.” Journal of Organic Systems (in press).Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture (PDA). “Revised Standards and Procedure for Approval of Proposed Labeling of Fluid Milk.” Milk Labeling Standards (2.0.1.17.08). Bureau of Food Safety and Laboratory Services, Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, 17 Jan. 2008. ———. “Standards and Procedure for Approval of Proposed Labeling of Fluid Milk, Milk Products and Manufactured Dairy Products.” Milk Labeling Standards (2.0.1.17.08). Bureau of Food Safety and Laboratory Services, Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, 22 Oct. 2007.Roco, Mihail. “National Nanotechnology Initiative – Past, Present, Future.” In William Goddard, Donald Brenner, Sergy Lyshevski and Gerald Iafrate, eds. Handbook of Nanoscience, Engineering and Technology. 2nd ed. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2007.Romeis, Jorg, Detlef Bartsch, Franz Bigler, Marco Candolfi, Marco Gielkins, et al. “Assessment of Risk of Insect-Resistant Transgenic Crops to Nontarget Arthropods.” Nature Biotechnology 26.2 (Feb. 2008): 203-208.Schauzu, Marianna. “The Concept of Substantial Equivalence in Safety Assessment of Food Derived from Genetically Modified Organisms.” AgBiotechNet 2 (Apr. 2000): 1-4.Soil Association. “Soil Association First Organisation in the World to Ban Nanoparticles – Potentially Toxic Beauty Products That Get Right under Your Skin.” London: Soil Association, 17 Jan. 2008. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.soilassociation.org/web/sa/saweb.nsf/848d689047 cb466780256a6b00298980/42308d944a3088a6802573d100351790!OpenDocument >.Smith, Jeffrey. Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods. Fairfield, Iowa: Yes! Books, 2007.———. Seeds of Deception. Melbourne: Scribe, 2004.U.S. Dairy Export Council (USDEC). Bovine Somatotropin (BST) Backgrounder. Arlington, VA: U.S. Dairy Export Council, 2006.U.S. Food and Drug Administration (USFDA). Animal Cloning: A Draft Risk Assessment. Rockville, MD: Center for Veterinary Medicine, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 28 Dec. 2006.———. FDA and Nanotechnology Products. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 2008. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.fda.gov/nanotechnology/faqs.html >.Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (WWICS). “A Nanotechnology Consumer Products Inventory.” Data set as at Sep. 2007. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Project on Emerging Technologies, Sep. 2007. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.nanotechproject.org/inventories/consumer >.
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Deckha, Nityanand. "Britspace™?" M/C Journal 5, n.º 2 (1 de maio de 2002). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1957.
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With the emergence and expansion of post-manufacturing knowledge economies, formerly industrial inner cities in the West have become intensified staging grounds for a range of spatial claims. Among these are processes of residential gentrification, the cultural politics of heritage preservation, the struggles for community development, and the growth of creative industries, such as art, design, architecture, publishing and film, which I focus on here.1 Throughout the last two decades in the UK, inner cities and central city fringe districts have been subject to an assortment of strategies that have endeavored to revitalize them economically and socially. Prominent among these attempts has been the encouragement of new, and the incubation of existing, small-scale creative enterprises. Regeneration executives choose these enterprises for a range of reasons. Creative activities are associated with popular culture that disaffected, unemployed youth find appealing; they are able to occupy and rehabilitate underused existing building stock and to sensitively recycle historic buildings, thereby preserving urban scales; and, as a number of scholars have pointed out, they exhibit transaction-rich, network-intensive organization (Castells 1992; Lash and Urry 1994; Scott 2000). As a result, concerted efforts to design creative industry quarters have sprung up across the UK, including Sheffield, Manchester, Glasgow, and Birmingham. In London, a whole band of formerly industrial, inner-city districts from King's Cross, down through Clerkenwell, Hoxton, Shoreditch and Spitalfields, and along the wharves of the Thames's South Bank, are being or have been revitalized in part through the strategic deployment of creative industries. Certainly, how creative industries and economies develop varies. At King's Cross, nonprofit and commercial creative companies have emerged quietly in a context of protracted struggle over the future of the Railway Lands, which will be reshaped by the coming terminus of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. At Spitalfields, high-profile conversions of Truman Brewery and the Spitalfields Market site into artisanal stalls, creative businesses, and leisure (café, restaurant, and sport) facilities are generating a new local creative economy, bringing in visitors and creating new customer bases for Spitalfields' Bangladeshi restaurant keepers and garment entrepreneurs.2 Whatever the conditions for growth, creative industries have been aided by the rhetoric of Cool Britannia and New Labour's cultural -- or more accurately --creative industrial policy. I would even put forth that, in the form of the creative quarter, the creative industries represent the urbanist logic of Cool Britannia, threatening to elaborate, following the other logics of BritArt and BritPop, a BritSpace. Now, according to some of Britain's foremost cultural critics, Cool Britannia was born sometime in 1996 in the Sunday Times, and died two years later, soon after a piece in the New Musical Express that showcased young musician discontent with New Labour creative industrial policy (Hewison 1996; McRobbie 1999, 4). Yet, before we close the casket, I want to suggest that Cool Britannia be understood as a symptom of a range of 'causes' that have been transforming the idioms of politics, governance, culture, citizenship, social organization; and, as the creative quarter evokes, the city. An itinerary of these causes would include: the expansion of a consumer-driven service/knowledge economy; the growth and globalization of communication and information technologies; the 'flexibilization' of regimes of production; the mutation of the function of the welfare state and corresponding meaning of citizenship; and, the dominance of intellectual property notions of culture. While these shifts are transforming societies around the world, in the UK, they became closely identified with New Labour and its attempts to institutionalize the rhetoric of the Third Way during the late 1990s (e.g., Blair 1998; Giddens 1998). In imagining itself as a force of change, New Labour capitalized on two events that gave birth to Cool Britannia: (1) the glamorization of British art and young British artists in the mid-1990s; and (2) the emergence of a discourse of 'rebranding' Britain, disseminating from reports from brand specialists Wolff Olins and think tank Demos (Bobby 1999).3 The first, producing the nBA (new British Art) and the yBAs (young British Artists) are media events with their own genealogies that have received copious critical attention (e.g., Ford 1996; McRobbie 1999; Roberts 1996, 1998; Stallabrass 1999; Suchin 1998). This glamorization involved the discovery of the artists by the mainstream media and a focus on artistic entrepreneurship in creating, shaping and responding to an enlarged market for cultural products. In the process, some of these artists effectively became brands, authoring, legitimating and licensing a certain kind of ironic, post-political art that was palatable to the international art market.4 The second cause stems from responses to anxiety over post-imperial Britain's future in a post-manufacturing, globalized, knowledge economy. For both the Demos thinkers and Wolff Olins consultants, these were centered on the need to re-imagine British national subjectivity as if it were a commercial brand. The discourse of branding is tangential to that of intellectual property, in which brands are value codings managed through networks of trademarks, patents, copyrights and royalties. Rosemary Coombe (1998) has written, albeit in a different political context, on the increasing dominance of notions of culture defined through intellectual property, and adjudicated by international trade experts. Indeed, New Labour creative industrial policies, as demonstrated in former Culture Secretary, Chris Smith's, essays that linked creativity, entrepreneurship and economic growth (Smith 1998) and initiatives under the Creative Industries Mapping Document (DCMS 2001) reveal how the relationship between the state and national culture is being renegotiated. Less meaningful is the state that served as sponsor or patron of cultural activities for its citizens. Rather, under New Labour, as Nikolas Rose argues (1999), and critics of New Labour cultural policy interrogate (Greenhalgh 1998; Littler 2000), the state is an enabler, partnering with entrepreneurs, small-scale firms, and multinational enterprises to promote the traffic in cultural property. How such a shift affects the production of urban space, and the future meanings attached to the British city remain to be explored. In the context of the American city, M. Christine Boyer (1995), elaborates how an iterative regime of architectural styles and planning ethics functions as a late capitalist cultural logic of urbanism that discards elements, often in decaying and abandoned sections, that cannot be easily incorporated. Borrowing on Kevin Lynch's (1960) notion of the imageable city, she writes: physically, these spaces are linked imaginatively to each other, to other cities, and to a common history of cultural interpretations (82). Within this scenario, the elements of the creative quarter copy, print, art supply and film developing stores, hip cafes and restaurants, galleries, studios, loft conversions and street furniture are gradually linked together to form a recognizable and potentially iterative matrix, overlaid on the disused former industrial district. Moreover, as a prominent, coordinated technique in the revitalization strategies of British cities, and given the aftermath of Cool Britannia, the creative quarter must be seen also as a symptom of a symptom. For, if Cool Britannia is itself produced through the application of branding discourse to the level of national subjectivity, and to the glamorization of the artist, then it is only a short step to contemplate the urbanist logic of the creative quarter as BritSpaceâ„¢. Notes 1. A creative industry is one that has its origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which [has] a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property. I am following the definition of creative industries used by the UK Department of Culture, Media and Sport. It was first used in the Creative Industries Mapping Document, released in November 1998 and was maintained in the second, more extensive mapping exercise in February 2001. The list of activities designated as creative are: advertising, architecture, art and antiques, crafts, design, designer fashion, film and video, interactive leisure software, music, the performing arts, publishing, software and computer services, television and radio. 2. I discuss the emergence of creative enterprises at King's Cross and Spitalfields at length in my doctoral dissertation (Deckha 2000). 3. As Bobby (1999) reports, the Wolff Olins consultants commented that looking at business attitudes towards national identity and UK industry found that 72% of the world's leading companies believe a national image is important when making purchase decisions. In light of this, and worryingly for British business, only 36% of our respondents felt that a 'made in the UK' label would influence their decision positively. 4. Lash and Urry describe this process of branding in the creative or cultural industries: What (all) the culture industries produce becomes increasingly, not like commodities but advertisements. As with advertising firms, the culture industries sell not themselves but something else and they achieve this through 'packaging'. Also like advertising firms, they sell 'brands' of something else. And they do this through the transfer of value through images (1994, 138). References Blair T. (1998) The Third Way: New Politics for a New Century. The Fabian Society, London. Bobby D. (1999) Original Britain' could succeed where 'Cool Britannia' failed Brand Strategy November 22: 6. Boyer M C. (1995) The Great Frame-Up: Fantastic appearances in contemporary spatial politics, Liggett H., Perry D. C., eds. Spatial Practices. Sage, New York. 81-109. Castells M. (1992) The Rise of the Network Society. Blackwell, Oxford. Coombe R. (1998) The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Deckha N. (2000) Repackaging the Inner City: Historic Preservation, Community Development, and the Emergent Cultural Quarter in London. Unpublished MS, Rice University. Department of Culture, Media and Sport [DCMS]. (2001) Creative industries mapping document [http://www.culture.gov.uk/creative/pdf/p...] Ford S. (1996) Myth Making Art Monthly March: 194. Giddens A. (1998) The Third Way. Polity, Cambridge. Greenhalgh L. (1998) From Arts Policy to Creative Economy Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy, 87, May: 84-94. Hewison R. (1996) Cool Britannia Sunday Times, 19 May. Lash S. and Urry J. (1994) Economies of Signs and Space. Sage, London. Littler J. (2000) Creative Accounting: Consumer Culture, The 'Creative Economy' and the Cultural Policies of New Labour in Bewes T. and Gilbert J. eds. Cultural Capitalism. Lawrence & Wishart, London. 203-222. Lynch K. (1960) The Image of the City. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. McRobbie A. (1999) In the Culture Society. Routledge, London. Roberts J. (1996) Mad for it!: Philistinism, the everyday and new British art Third Text, 35 (Summer): 29-42. Roberts J. (1998) Pop Art, the Popular and British Art of the 1990s in McCorquodale D. et al, eds. Occupational Hazard. Black Dog, London. 53-78. Rose N. (1999) Inventiveness in politics: review of Anthony Giddens, The Third Way Economy and Society, 28.3: 467-493. Scott A.J. (2000) The Cultural Economy of Cities. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Smith C. (1998) Creative Britain. Faber and Faber, London. Stallabrass J. (1999) High Art Lite. Verso, London. Suchin P. (1998) After a Fashion: Regress as Progress in Contemporary British Art in McCorquodale D. et al, eds. Occupational Hazard. Black Dog, London. 95-110. Links http://www.culture.gov.uk/creative/pdf/part1.pdf Citation reference for this article MLA Style Deckha, Nityanand. "Britspaceâ„¢?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/britspace.php>. Chicago Style Deckha, Nityanand, "Britspaceâ„¢?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/britspace.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Deckha, Nityanand. (2002) Britspaceâ„¢?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/britspace.php> ([your date of access]).
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Ruggill, Judd, e Ken McAllister. "The Wicked Problem of Collaboration". M/C Journal 9, n.º 2 (1 de maio de 2006). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2606.
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In “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” urban planners Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber outline what they term “wicked problems.” According to Rittel and Webber, wicked problems are unavoidably “ill-defined,” that is, unlike “problems in the natural sciences, which are definable and separable and may have solutions that are findable…[wicked problems] are never solved. At best they are only re-solved—over and over again” (160). Rittel and Webber were thinking specifically of the challenges involved in making decisions within immensely complex social circumstances—building highways through cities and designing low income housing projects, for example—but public policy-making and urban design are not the only fields rife with wicked problems. Indeed, the nub of Rittel and Webber’s articulation of wicked problems concerns a phenomenon common to many disciplines: interdisciplinary collaboration. As anyone who has collaborated with people outside her area of expertise will acknowledge, interdisciplinary collaboration itself is among the wickedest problems of all. By way of introduction, we direct the Learning Games Initiative (LGI), a transdisciplinary, inter-institutional research group that studies, teaches with, and builds computer games. In the seven years since LGI was inaugurated, we have undertaken many productive and well-received collaborations, including: 1) leading workshops at national and international conferences; 2) presenting numerous academic talks; 3) editing academic journals; 4) writing books, book chapters, journal articles, and other scholarly materials; 5) exhibiting creative and archival work in museums, galleries, and libraries; and 6) building one of the largest academic research archives of computer games, systems, paraphernalia, and print-, video-, and audio-scholarship in the world. We thus have a fair bit of experience with the wicked problem of collaboration. The purpose of this article is to share some of that experience with readers and to describe candidly some of the challenges we have faced—and sometimes overcome—working collaboratively across disciplinary, institutional, and even international boundaries. Collaborative Circle? Michael Farrell, whose illuminating analysis of “collaborative circles” has lent much to scholars’ understandings of group dynamics within creative contexts, succinctly describes how many such groups form: “A collaborative circle is a set of peers in the same discipline who, through open exchange of support, ideas, and criticism develop into an interdependent group with a common vision that guides their creative work” (266). Farrell’s model, while applicable to several of the smaller projects LGI has nurtured over the years, does not capture the idiosyncratic organizational method that has evolved more broadly within our collective. Rather, LGI has always tended to function according to a model more akin to that found in used car dealerships, one where “no reasonable offer will be refused.” LGI is open to anyone willing to think hard and get their hands dirty, which of course has molded the organization and its projects in remarkable ways. Unlike Farrell’s collaborative circles, for example, LGI’s collaborative model actually decentralizes the group’s study and production of culture. Any member from anywhere—not just “peers in the same discipline”—can initiate or join a project provided she or he is willing to trade in the coin of the realm: sweat equity. Much like the programmers of the open source software movement, LGI’s members work only on what excites them, and with other similarly motivated people. The “buy-in,” simply, is interest and a readiness to assume some level of responsibility for the successes and failures of a given project. In addition to decentralizing the group, LGI’s collaborative model has emerged such that it naturally encourages diversity, swelling our ranks with all kinds of interesting folks, from fine artists to clergy members to librarians. In large part this is because our members view “peers” in the most expansive way possible; sure, optical scientists can help us understand how virtual cameras simulate the real properties of lenses and research linguists can help us design more effective language-in-context tools for our games. However, in an organization that always tries to understand the layers of meaning-making that constitute computer games, such technical expertise is only one stratum. For a game about the cultural politics of ancient Greece that LGI has been working on for the past year, our members invited a musical instrument maker, a potter, and a school teacher to join the development team. These new additions—all experts and peers as far as LGI is concerned—were not merely consultants but became part of the development team, often working in areas of the project completely outside their own specialties. While some outsiders have criticized this project—currently known as “Aristotle’s Assassins”—for being too slow in development, the learning taking place as it moves forward is thrilling to those on the inside, where everyone is learning from everyone else. One common consequence of this dynamic is, as Farrell points out, that the work of the individual members is transformed: “Those who are merely good at their discipline become masters, and, working together, very ordinary people make extraordinary advances in their field” (2). Additionally, the diversity that gives LGI its true interdisciplinarity also makes for praxical as well as innovative projects. The varying social and intellectual concerns of the LGI’s membership means that every collaboration is also an exploration of ethics, responsibility, epistemology, and ideology. This is part of what makes LGI so special: there are multiple levels of learning that underpin every project every day. In LGI we are fond of saying that games teach multiple things in multiple ways. So too, in fact, does collaborating on one of LGI’s projects because members are constantly forced to reevaluate their ways of seeing in order to work with one another. This has been particularly rewarding in our international projects, such as our recently initiated project investigating the relationships among the mass media, new media, and cultural resource management practices. This project, which is building collaborative relationships among a team of archaeologists, game designers, media historians, folklorists, and grave repatriation experts from Cambodia, the Philippines, Australia, and the U.S., is flourishing, not because its members are of the same discipline nor because they share the same ideology. Rather, the team is maturing as a collaborative and productive entity because the focus of its work raises an extraordinary number of questions that have yet to be addressed by national and international researchers. In LGI, much of the sweat equity we contribute involves trying to answer questions like these in ways that are meaningful for our international research teams. In our experience, it is in the process of investigating such questions that effective collaborative relationships are cemented and within which investigators end up learning about more than just the subject matter at hand. They also learn about the micro-cultures, histories, and economies that provide the usually invisible rhetorical infrastructures that ground the subject matter and to which each team member is differently attuned. It is precisely because of this sometimes slow, sometimes tense learning/teaching dynamic—a dynamic too often invoked in both academic and industry settings to discourage collaboration—that François Chesnais calls attention to the fact that collaborative projects frequently yield more benefits than the sum of their parts suggests possible. This fact, says Chesnais, should lead institutions to value collaborative projects more highly as “resource-creating, value-creating and surplus-creating potentialities” (22). Such work is always risky, of course, and Jitendra Mohan, a scholar specializing in cross-cultural collaborations within the field of psychology, writes that international collaboration “raises methodological problems in terms of the selection of culturally-coloured items and their historical as well as semantic meaning…” (314). Mohan means this as a warning and it is heeded as such by LGI members; at the same time, however, it is precisely the identification and sorting out of such methodological problems that seems to excite our best collaborations and most innovative work. Given such promise, it is easy to see why LGI is quite happy to adopt the used car dealer’s slogan “no reasonable offer refused.” In fact, in LGI we see our open-door policy for projects as mirroring our primary object of study: games. This is another factor that we believe contributes to the success of our members’ collaborations. Commercial computer game development is a notoriously interdisciplinary and collaborative endeavor. By collaborating in a fashion similar to professional game developers, LGI members are constantly fashioning more complex understandings of the kinds of production practices and social interactions involved in game development; these practices and interactions are crucial to game studies precisely because they shape what games consist of, how they mean, and the ways in which they are consumed. For this reason, we think it foolish to refuse any reasonable offer to help us explore and understand these meaning-making processes. Wicked Problem Backlash Among the striking points that Rittel and Webber make about wicked problems is that solutions to them are usually created with great care and planning, and yet inevitably suffer severe criticism (at least) or utter annihilation (at worst). Far from being indicative of a bad solution, this backlash against a wicked problem’s solution is an integral element of what we call the “wicked problem dialectic.” The backlash against attempts to establish and nurture transdisciplinary collaboration is easy to document at multiple levels. For example, although our used car dealership model has created a rich research environment, it has also made the quotidian work of doing projects difficult. For one thing, organizing something as simple as a project meeting can take Herculean efforts. The wage earners are on a different schedule than the academics, who are on a different schedule from the artists, who are on a different schedule from the librarians. Getting everyone together in the same room at the same time (even virtually) is like herding cats. As co-directors of LGI, we have done our best to provide the membership with both synchronous and asynchronous resources to facilitate communication (e.g., conference-call enabled phones, online forums, chat clients, file-sharing software, and so on), but nothing beats face-to-face meetings, especially when projects grow complex or deadlines impend mercilessly. Nonetheless, our members routinely fight the meeting scheduling battle, despite the various communication options we have made available through our group’s website and in our physical offices. Most recently we have found that an organizational wiki makes the process of collecting and sharing notes, drawings, videos, segments of code, and drafts of writing decidedly easier than it had been, especially when the projects involve people who do not live a short distance (or a cheap phone call) away from each other. Similarly, not every member has the same amount of time to devote to LGI and its projects despite their considerable and demonstrated interest in them. Some folks are simply busier than others, and cannot contribute to projects as much as they might like. This can be a real problem when a project requires a particular skill set, and the owner of those skills is busy doing other things like working at a paying job or spending time with family. LGI’s projects are always done in addition to members’ regular workload, and it is understandable when that workload has to take precedence. Like regular exercise and eating right, the organization’s projects are the first things to go when life’s demands intrude. Different projects handle this challenge in a variety of ways, but the solutions always tend to reflect the general structure of the project itself. In projects that follow what Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede refer to as “hierarchical collaborations”—projects that are clearly structured, goal-oriented, and define clear roles for its participants—milestones and deadlines are set at the beginning of the project and are often tied to professional rewards that stand-in for a paycheck: recommendation letters, all-expenses-paid conference trips, guest speaking invitations, and so forth (133). Less organized projects—what Lunsford and Ede call “dialogic collaborations”—deal with time scheduling challenges differently. Inherently, dialogic collaborations such as these tend to be less hampered by time because they are loosely structured, accept and often encourage members to shift roles, and often value the process of working toward the project’s goals as highly as actually attaining them (134). The most common adaptive strategy used in these cases is simply for the most experienced members of the team to keep the project in motion. As long as something is happening, dialogic collaborations can be kept fruitful for a very long time, even when collaborators are only able to contribute once or twice a month. In our experience, as long as each project’s collaborators understand its operative expectations—which can, by the way, be a combination of hierarchical and dialogical modes—their work proceeds smoothly. Finally, there is the matter of expenses. As an institutionally unaffiliated collective, the LGI has no established revenue stream, which means project funding is either grant-based or comes out of the membership’s pockets. As anyone who has ever applied for a grant knows, it is one thing to write a grant, and another thing entirely to get it. Things are especially tough when grant monies are scarce, as they have been (at least on this side of the pond) since the U.S. economy started its downward spiral several years ago. Tapping the membership’s pockets is not really a viable funding option either. Even modest projects can be expensive, and most folks do not have a lot of spare cash to throw around. What this means, ultimately, is that even though our group’s members have carte blanche to do as they will, they must do so in a resource-starved environment. While it is sometimes disappointing that we are not able to fund certain projects despite their artistic and scholarly merit, LGI members learned long ago that such hardships rarely foreclose all opportunities. As Anne O’Meara and Nancy MacKenzie pointed out several years ago, many “seemingly extraneous features” of collaborative projects—not only financial limitations, but also such innocuous phenomena as where collaborators meet, the dance of their work and play patterns, their conflicting responsibilities, geographic separations, and the ways they talk to each other—emerge as influential factors in all collaborations (210). Thus, we understand in LGI that while our intermittent funding has influenced the dimension and direction of our group, it has also led to some outcomes that in hindsight we are glad we were led to. For example, while LGI originally began studying games in order to discover where production-side innovations might be possible, a series of funding shortfalls and serendipitous academic conversations led us to favor scholarly writing, which has now taken precedence over other kinds of projects. At the most practical level, this works out well because writing costs nothing but time, plus there is a rather desperate shortage of good game scholarship. Moreover, we have discovered that as LGI members have refined their scholarship and begun turning out books, chapters, and articles on a consistent basis, both they and the organization accrue publicity and credibility. Add to this the fact that for many of the group’s academics, traditional print-based work is more valued in the tenure and promotion economy than is, say, an educational game, an online teachers’ resource, or a workshop for a local parent-teacher association, and you have a pretty clear research path blazed by what Kathleen Clark and Rhunette Diggs have called “dialectical collaboration,” that is, collaboration marked by “struggle and opposition, where tension can be creative, productive, clarifying, as well as difficult” (10). Conclusion In sketching out our experience directing a highly collaborative digital media research collective, we hope we have given readers a sense of why collaboration is almost always a “wicked problem.” Collaborators negotiate different schedules, work demands, and ways of seeing, as well as resource pinches that hinder the process by which innovative digital media collaborations come to fruition. And yet, it is precisely because collaboration can be so wicked that it is so valuable. In constantly requiring collaborators to assess and reassess their rationales, artistic visions, and project objectives, collaboration makes for reflexive, complex, and innovative projects, which (at least to us) are the most satisfying and useful of all. References Chesnais, François. “Technological Agreements, Networks and Selected Issues in Economic Theory.” In Technological Collaboration: The Dynamics of Cooperation in Industrial Innovation. Rod Coombs, Albert Richards, Vivien Walsh, and Pier Paolo Saviotti, eds. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 1996. 18-33. Clark, Kathleen D., and Rhunette C. Diggs. “Connected or Separated?: Toward a Dialectical View of Interethnic Relationships.” In Building Diverse Communities: Applications of Communication Research. McDonald, Trevy A., Mark P. Orbe, and Trevellya Ford-Ahmed, eds. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002. 3-25. Farrell, Michael P. Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics & Creative Work. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. Lunsford, Andrea, and Lisa Ede. Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990. Mohan, Jitendra. “Cross-Cultural Experience of Collaboration in Personality Research.” Personality across Cultures: Recent Developments and Debates. Jitendra Mohan, ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 313-335. O’Meara, Anne, and Nancy R. MacKenzie. “Reflections on Scholarly Collaboration.” In Common Ground: Feminist Collaboration in the Academy. Elizabeth G. Peck and JoAnna Stephens Mink, eds. Albany: State U of New York P, 1998. 209-26. Rittel, Horst W. J., and Melvin M. Weber. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” Policy Sciences 4 (1973): 155-69. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ruggill, Judd, and Ken McAllister. "The Wicked Problem of Collaboration." M/C Journal 9.2 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/07-ruggillmcallister.php>. APA Style Ruggill, J., and K. McAllister. (May 2006) "The Wicked Problem of Collaboration," M/C Journal, 9(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/07-ruggillmcallister.php>.
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Tanchuco, Joven Jeremius Q. "Quo Vadis, COVID-19?" Acta Medica Philippina 54, n.º 2 (25 de outubro de 2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.47895/amp.v54i2.4474.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) declared a COVID-19 pandemic last March 11, 2020.1,2 According to the WHO Director General, “In the past two weeks, the number of cases of COVID-19 outside China has increased 13-fold, and the number of affected countries has tripled. There are now more than 118,000 cases in 114 countries, and 4,291 people have lost their lives. Thousands more are fighting for their lives in hospitals.” Soon after, Metro Manila was placed on a complete lockdown which started on March 15, 2020 and continues up to the time of this writing.2
So, what exactly is this COVID-19 pandemic? Will it be changing how we live our lives as healthcare professionals? What will be our role in taking care of patients with COVID-19? These and many other related questions require immediate answers as we face the threat of COVID-19.
The WHO was first informed of cases of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan City, China near the end of 2019. A novel coronavirus was identified as the cause by Chinese authorities and was initially named 2019-nCoV.3,4 This was later revised to COVID-19 (coronavirus disease of 2019) and the virus that causes it called SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus 2).
In the first global epidemic caused by the “first” SARS coronavirus in 2003, the Philippines had a total of only eight confirmed patients. All the cases had contact with a nurse aide who had returned from Toronto, Canada where she got it. The index case and her father eventually died from SARS while the rest recovered.5
But, with COVID-19, at the time of writing this editorial, there were approximately 1,611 weekly cases with 112 weekly deaths in the Philippines and appears to be an increasing trend.6,7 By mid-March 2020, the WHO European Region had become the epicenter of the epidemic, reporting over 40% of globally confirmed cases. As of 28 April 2020, 63% of global mortality from the virus was from the Region, according to the WHO.3
There is much that we need to know about SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. It belongs to the same family of coronavirus that causes SARS, MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), and even the common cold.3 Early studies report that SARS-CoV-2 was most often detected in respiratory samples from patients in China. However, live virus was also found in feces.8 It is thought that transmission mainly occurs through the respiratory route, probably as droplets, but extra respiratory sources may also be important.
Risk factors for severe illness remain uncertain but old age and comorbidities such as cardiovascular disease, liver disease, kidney disease or malignant tumors, have emerged as likely important factors. There are no proven effective specific treatment strategies, and the risk-benefit ratio for commonly used treatments such as corticosteroids is not clear.7,8 COVID-19 may also cause damage to other organs such as the heart, the liver, and the kidneys, as well as to organ systems such as the blood and the immune system. Patients die of multiple organ failure, shock, acute respiratory distress syndrome, heart failure, arrhythmias, and renal failure.9,10
Among the WHO’s current recommendations, people with mild respiratory symptoms should be encouraged to isolate themselves, and social distancing is emphasized, and these recommendations apply even to countries with no reported cases.3,11 However, such measures could drastically affect the economy with impact on work practices as well as commercial establishments which depend on people’s patronage.12,13 Moreover, the psychological and mental burden that isolation and quarantine can bring about should also be considered. 14,15 For those in the academe, adjustments and quick transition to online learning strategies will need to be made.16 This will also affect how scientific research is done, particularly as we try to learn more about COVID-19.17 The longer the pandemic lasts, and the longer these measures need to be implemented, the more significant will the effects be on the economic and mental well-being of the people. There has certainly been a rush to get more information about COVID-19.18 Although well-intended in most cases, this has resulted into an “infodemic” with some erroneous or unscientific information about COVID-19. 19-21 Even mainstream scientific publications have not been spared by such faulty information. 22,23 Health professionals, therefore, who will be using the information found in these publications will need to be more vigilant in making sure that the data are properly collected and interpreted. We need to constantly update ourselves as new information becomes available.24-26
As in many viral diseases, the best way to combat COVID-19 could be vaccination. Based on the experience with developing vaccines for the other coronaviruses such as the ones causing SARS, MERS and even the common colds, the development of an effective vaccine against COVID-19 may be challenging.27-30 Even if one were to be quickly developed, having the resources needed to make enough vaccines for potentially all inhabitants of our planet are also staggering. And then of course, once a vaccine is available, each country would have to device its own vaccination strategy and all of its accompanying logistic considerations. And then there is the cost of such a vaccine. As a third world country, would the Philippines be able to afford enough vaccines for its citizens?
Pending availability of an effective vaccine, one would need to look at actual treatment of COVID-19 patients. In the short-term, it may be possible to repurpose some of the currently available drugs we use for treating other viruses.31-33 In order to help address these, some wide-ranging initiatives have been set up. In March 2020, the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Medical Research Council and the UK National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) started the RECOVERY (Randomised Evaluation of COVID-19 Therapy) trial.34,35 It is the world’s largest clinical trial into treatments for COVID-19, with more than 40,000 participants across 185 trials sites in the UK. It is led by the University of Oxford. At about the same time, the WHO also announced the start of an international randomized and adaptive clinical trial SOLIDARITY which will also be looking at potential treatments for COVID-19. 36,37 The Philippines is set to participate in the SOLIDARITY trial.38
Use of personal protective equipment (PPEs) similar to how we have used them against Ebola and other viruses could also be beneficial.39 But similar to developing capacity for making enough vaccines, the ability to make enough PPEs, especially the disposable ones and bring these to where they are needed could also be additional challenges. In the Philippines, as in many other parts of the world, many healthcare workers report insufficient availability of PPEs which puts them at risk of getting COVID-19 from their patients.40,41
There are many more questions needing answers that we will need to deal with as we confront COVID-19. And, most likely, there will also be new challenges that can arise as the pandemic evolves. The combined efforts of the scientific and political communities will need to be engaged if we hope to successfully deal with this emergency.
Joven Jeremius Q. Tanchuco, MD, MHA Professor, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, College of Medicine, University of the Philippines Manila Clinical Professor, Division of Pulmonary Medicine, Department of Medicine, College of Medicine and Philippine General Hospital, University of the Philippines Manila
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Huang C, Wang Y, Li X, Ren L, Zhao J, Hu Y, et al. Clinical features of patients infected with 2019 novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China. Lancet. 2020; 395(10223):497-506.
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Goggin, Gerard. "Innovation and Disability". M/C Journal 11, n.º 3 (2 de julho de 2008). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.56.
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Critique of Ability In July 2008, we could be on the eve of an enormously important shift in disability in Australia. One sign of change is the entry into force on 3 May 2008 of the United Nations convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which will now be adopted by the Rudd Labor government. Through this, and other proposed measures, the Rudd government has indicated its desire for a seachange in the area of disability. Bill Shorten MP, the new Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Children’s Services has been at pains to underline his commitment to a rights-based approach to disability. In this inaugural speech to Parliament, Senator Shorten declared: I believe the challenge for government is not to fit people with disabilities around programs but for programs to fit the lives, needs and ambitions of people with disabilities. The challenge for all of us is to abolish once and for all the second-class status that too often accompanies Australians living with disabilities. (Shorten, “Address in reply”; see also Shorten, ”Speaking up”) Yet if we listen to the voices of people with disability, we face fundamental issues of justice, democracy, equality and how we understand the deepest aspects of ourselves and our community. This is a situation that remains dire and palpably unjust, as many people with disabilities have attested. Elsewhere I have argued (Goggin and Newell) that disability constitutes a systemic form of exclusion and othering tantamount to a “social apartheid” . While there have been improvements and small gains since then, the system that reigns in Australia is still fundamentally oppressive. Nonetheless, I would suggest that through the rise of the many stranded movements of disability, the demographic, economic and social changes concerning impairment, we are seeing significant changes in how we understand impairment and ability (Barnes, Oliver and Barton; Goggin and Newell, Disability in Australia; Snyder, Brueggemann, and Garland-Thomson; Shakespeare; Stiker). There is now considerable, if still incomplete, recognition of disability as a category that is constituted through social, cultural, and political logics, as well as through complex facets of impairment, bodies (Corker and Shakespeare), experiences, discourses (Fulcher), and modes of materiality and subjectivity (Butler), identity and government (Tremain). Also there is growing awareness of the imbrication of disability and other categories such as sex and gender (Fine and Asch; Thomas), race, age, culture, class and distribution of wealth (Carrier; Cole; Davis, Bending over Backwards, and Enforcing Normalcy; Oliver; Rosenblum and Travis), ecology and war (Bourke; Gerber; Muir). There are rich and wide-ranging debates that offer fundamental challenges to the suffocating grip of the dominant biomedical model of disability (that conceives disability as individual deficit — for early critiques see: Borsay; Walker), as well as the still influential and important (if at times limiting) social model of disability (Oliver; Barnes and Mercer; Shakespeare). All in all,there have been many efforts to transform the social and political relations of disability. If disability has been subject to considerable examination, there has not yet been an extended, concomitant critique of ability. Nor have we witnessed a thoroughgoing recognition of unmarked, yet powerful operations of ability in our lives and thought, and the potential implications of challenging these. Certainly there have been important attempts to reframe the relationship between “ability” and “disability” (for example, see Jones and Mark). And we are all familiar with the mocking response to some neologisms that seek to capture this, such as the awkward yet pointed “differently-abled.” Despite such efforts we lack still a profound critique of ability, an exploration of “able”, the topic that this special issue invites us to consider. If we think of the impact and significance of “whiteness”, as a way to open up space for how to critically think about and change concepts of race; or of “masculinity” as a project for thinking about gender and sexuality — we can see that this interrogation of the unmarked category of “able” and “ability” is much needed (for one such attempt, see White). In this paper I would like to make a small contribution to such a critique of ability, by considering what the concept of innovation and its contemporary rhetorics have to offer for reframing disability. Innovation is an important discourse in contemporary life. It offers interesting possibilities for rethinking ability — and indeed disability. And it is this relatively unexplored prospect that this paper seeks to explore. Beyond Access, Equity & Diversity In this scene of disability, there is attention being given to making long over-due reforms. Yet the framing of many of these reforms, such as the strengthening of national and international legal frameworks, for instance, also carry with them considerable problems. Disability is too often still seen as something in need of remediation, or special treatment. Access, equity, and anti-discrimination frameworks offer important resources for challenging this “special” treatment, so too do the diversity approaches which have supplemented or supplanted them (Goggin and Newell, “Diversity as if Disability Mattered”). In what new ways can we approach disability and policies relevant to it? In a surprisingly wide range of areas, innovation has featured as a new, cross-sectoral approach. Innovation has been a long-standing topic in science, technology and economics. However, its emergence as master-theme comes from its ability to straddle and yoke together previously diverse fields. Current discussions of innovation bring together and extend work on the information society, the knowledge economy, and the relationships between science and technology. We are now familiar for instance with arguments about how digital networked information and communications technologies and their consumption are creating new forms of innovation (Benkler; McPherson; Passiante, Elia, and Massari). Innovation discourse has extended to many other unfamiliar realms too, notably the area of social and community development, where a new concept of social innovation is now proposed (Mulgan), often aligned with new ideas of social entrepreneurship that go beyond earlier accounts of corporate social responsibility. We can see the importance of innovation in the ‘creative industries’ discourses and initiatives which have emerged since the 1990s. Here previously distinct endeavours of arts and culture have become reframed in a way that puts their central achievement of creativity to the fore, and recognises its importance across all sorts of service and manufacturing industries, in particular. More recently, theorists of creative industries, such as Cunningham, have begun to talk about “social network markets,” as a way to understand the new hybrid of creativity, innovation, digital technology, and new economic logics now being constituted (Cunningham and Potts). Innovation is being regarded as a cardinal priority for societies and their governments. Accordingly, the Australian government has commissioned a Review of The National Innovation System, led by Dr Terry Cutler, due to report in the second half of 2008. The Cutler review is especially focussed upon gaps and weaknesses in the Australian innovation system. Disability has the potential to figure very strongly in this innovation talk, however there has been little discussion of disability in the innovation discourse to date. The significance of disability in relation to innovation was touched upon some years ago, in a report on Disablism from the UK Demos Foundation (Miller, Parker and Gillinson). In a chapter entitled “The engine of difference: disability, innovation and creativity,” the authors discuss the area of inclusive design, and make the argument for the “involvement of disabled people to create a stronger model of user design”:Disabled people represented a market of 8.6 million customers at the last count and their experiences aren’t yet feeding through into processes of innovation. But the role of disabled people as innovators can and should be more active; we should include disabled people in the design process because they are good at it. (57) There are two reasons given for this expertise of disabled people in design. Firstly, “disabled people are often outstanding problem solvers because they have to be … life for disabled people at the moment is a series of challenges to be overcome” (57). Secondly, “innovative ideas are more likely to come from those who have a new or different angle on old problems” (57). The paradox in this argument is that as life becomes more equitable for people with disabilities, then these ‘advantages’ should disappear” (58). Accordingly, Miller et al. make a qualified argument, namely that “greater participation of disabled people in innovation in the short term may just be the necessary trigger for creating an altogether different, and better, system of innovation for everyone in the future” (58). The Demos Disablism report was written at a time when rhetorics of innovation were just beginning to become more generalized and mainstream. This was also at a time in the UK, when there was hope that new critical approaches to disability would see it become embraced as a part of the diverse society that Blair’s New Labor Britain had been indicating. The argument Disablism offers about disability and innovation is in some ways a more formalized version of vernacular theory (McLaughlin, 1996). In the disability movement we often hear, with good reason, that people with disability, by dint of their experience and knowledge are well positioned to develop and offer particular kinds of expertise. However, Miller et al. also gesture towards a more generalized account of disability and innovation, one that would intersect with the emerging frameworks around innovation. It is this possibility that I wish to take up and briefly explore here. I want to consider the prospects for a fully-fledged encounter between disability and innovation. I would like to have a better sense of whether this is worth pursuing, and what it would add to our understanding of both disability and innovation? Would the disability perspective be integrated as a long-term part of our systems of innovation rather than, as Miller et al. imply, deployed temporarily to develop better innovation systems? What pitfalls might be bound up with, or indeed be the conditions of, such a union between disability and innovation? The All-Too-Able User A leading area where disability figures profoundly in innovation is in the field of technology — especially digital technology. There is now a considerable literature and body of practice on disability and digital technology (Annable, Goggin, and Stienstra; Goggin and Newell, Digital Disability; National Council on Disability), however for my purposes here I would like to focus upon the user, the abilities ascribed to various kinds of users, and the user with disability in particular. Digital technologies are replete with challenges and opportunities; they are multi-layered, multi-media, and global in their manifestation and function. In Australia, Britain, Canada, the US, and Europe, there have been some significant digital technology initiatives which have resulted in improved accessibility for many users and populations (Annable, Goggin, and Stienstra; National Council on Disability) . There are a range of examples of ways in which users with disability are intervening and making a difference in design. There is also a substantial body of literature that clarifies why we need to include the perspective of the disabled if we are to be truly innovative in our design practices (Annable, Goggin and Stienstra; Goggin and Newell, “Disability, Identity and Interdependence”). I want to propose, however, that there is merit in going beyond recognition of the role of people with disability in technology design (vital and overlooked as it remains), to consider how disability can enrich contemporary discourses on innovation. There is a very desirable cross-over to be promoted between the emphasis on the user-as-expert in the sphere of disability and technology, and on the integral role of disability groups in the design process, on the one hand, and the rise of the user in digital culture generally, on the other. Surprisingly, such connections are nowhere near as widespread and systematic as they should be. It may be that contemporary debates about the user, and about the user as co-creator, or producer, of technology (Haddon et al.; von Hippel) actually reinstate particular notions of ability, and the able user, understood with reference to notions of disability. The current emphasis on the productive user, based as it is on changing understandings of ability and disability, provides rich material for critical revision of the field and those assumptions surrounding ability. It opens up possibilities for engaging more fully with disability and incorporating disability into the new forms and relations of digital technology that celebrate the user (Goggin and Newell, Digital Disability). While a more detailed consideration of these possibilities require more time than this essay allows, let us consider for a moment the idea of a genuine encounter between the activated user springing from the disability movement, and the much feted user in contemporary digital culture and theories of innovation. People with disability are using these technologies in innovative ways, so have much to contribute to wider discussions of digital technology (Annable, Goggin and Stienstra). The Innovation Turn Innovation policy, the argument goes, is important because it stands to increase productivity, which in turn leads to greater international competitiveness and economic benefit. Especially with the emergence of capitalism (Gleeson), productivity has strong links to particular notions of which types of production and produce are valued. Productivity is also strongly conditioned by how we understand ability and, last in a long chain of strong associations, how we as a society understand and value those kinds of people and bodies believed to contain and exercise the ordained and rewarded types of ability, produce, and productivity. Disability is often seen as antithetical to productivity (a revealing text on the contradictions of disability and productivity is the 2004 Productivity Commission Review of the Disability Discrimination Act). When we think about the history of disability, we quickly realize that productivity, and by extension, innovation, are strongly ideological. Ideological, that is, in the sense that these fields of human endeavour and our understanding of them are shaped by power relations, and are built upon implicit ‘ableist’ assumptions about productivity. In this case, the power relations of disability go right to the heart of the matter, highlighting who and what are perceived to be of value, contributing economically and in other ways to society, and who and what are considered as liabilities, as less valued and uneconomical. A stark recent example of this is the Howard government workplace and welfare reforms, which further disenfranchised, controlled, and impoverished people with disability. If we need to rethink our ideas of productivity and ability in the light of new notions of disability, then so too do we need to rethink our ideas about innovation and disability. Here the new discourses of innovation may actually be useful, but also contain limited formulations and assumptions about ability and disability that need to be challenged. The existing problems of a fresh approach to disability and innovation can be clearly observed in the touchstones of national science and technology “success.” Beyond One-Sided Innovation Disability does actually feature quite prominently in the annals of innovation. Take, for instance, the celebrated case of the so-called “bionic ear” (or cochlear implant) hailed as one of Australia’s great scientific inventions of the past few decades. This is something we can find on display in the Powerhouse Museum of Technology and Design, in Sydney. Yet the politics of the cochlear implant are highly controversial, not least as it is seen by many (for instance, large parts of the Deaf community) as not involving people with disabilities, nor being informed by their desires (Campbell, also see “Social and Ethical Aspects of Cochlear Implants”). A key problem with the cochlear implant and many other technologies is that they are premised on the abolition or overcoming of disability — rather than being shaped as technology that acknowledges and is informed by disabled users in their diverse guises. The failure to learn the lessons of the cochlear implant for disability and innovation can be seen in the fact that we are being urged now to band together to support the design of a “bionic eye” by the year 2020, as a mark of distinction of achieving a great nation (2020 Summit Initial Report). Again, there is no doubting the innovation and achievement in these artefacts and their technological systems. But their development has been marked by a distinct lack of consultation and engagement with people with disabilities; or rather the involvement has been limited to a framework that positions them as passive users of technology, rather than as “producer/users”. Further, what notions of disability and ability are inscribed in these technological systems, and what do they represent and symbolize in the wider political and social field? Unfortunately, such technologies have the effect of reproducing an ableist framework, “enforcing normalcy” (Davis), rather than building in, creating and contributing to new modes of living, which embrace difference and diversity. I would argue that this represents a one-sided logic of innovation. A two-sided logic of innovation, indeed what we might call a double helix (at least) of innovation would be the sustained, genuine interaction between different users, different notions of ability, disability and impairment, and the processes of design. If such a two-sided (or indeed many-sided logic) is to emerge there is good reason to think it could more easily do so in the field of digital cultures and technologies, than say, biotechnology. The reason for this is the emphasis in digital communication technologies on decentralized, participatory, user-determined governance and design, coming from many sources. Certainly this productive, democratic, participatory conception of the user is prevalent in Internet cultures. Innovation here is being reshaped to harness the contribution and knowledge of users, and could easily be extended to embrace pioneering efforts in disability. Innovating with Disability In this paper I have tried to indicate why it is productive for discourses of innovation to consider disability; the relationship between disability and innovation is rich and complex, deserving careful elaboration and interrogation. In suggesting this, I am aware that there are also fundamental problems that innovation raises in its new policy forms. There are the issues of what is at stake when the state is redefining its traditional obligations towards citizens through innovation frameworks and discourses. And there is the troubling question of whether particular forms of activity are normatively judged to be innovative — whereas other less valued forms are not seen as innovative. By way of conclusion, however, I would note that there are now quite basic, and increasingly accepted ways, to embed innovation in design frameworks, and while they certainly have been adopted in the disability and technology area, there is much greater scope for this. However, a few things do need to change before this potential for disability to enrich innovation is adequately realized. Firstly, we need further research and theorization to clarify the contribution of disability to innovation, work that should be undertaken and directed by people with disability themselves. Secondly, there is a lack of resources for supporting disability and technology organisations, and the development of training and expertise in this area (especially to provide viable career paths for experts with disability to enter the field and sustain their work). If this is addressed, the economic benefits stand to be considerable, not to mention the implications for innovation and productivity. Thirdly, we need to think about how we can intensify existing systems of participatory design, or, better still, introduce new user-driven approaches into strategically important places in the design processes of ICTs (and indeed in the national innovation system). Finally, there is an opportunity for new approaches to governance in ICTs at a general level, informed by disability. New modes of organising, networking, and governance associated with digital technology have attracted much attention, also featuring recently in the Australia 2020 Summit. Less well recognised are new ideas about governance that come from the disability community, such as the work of Queensland Advocacy Incorporated, Rhonda Galbally’s Our Community, disability theorists such as Christopher Newell (Newell), or the Canadian DIS-IT alliance (see, for instance, Stienstra). The combination of new ideas in governance from digital culture, new ideas from the disability movement and disability studies, and new approaches to innovation could be a very powerful cocktail indeed.Dedication This paper is dedicated to my beloved friend and collaborator, Professor Christopher Newell AM (1964-2008), whose extraordinary legacy will inspire us all to continue exploring and questioning the idea of able. 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Hope, Cathy, e Bethaney Turner. "The Right Stuff? The Original Double Jay as Site for Youth Counterculture". M/C Journal 17, n.º 6 (18 de setembro de 2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.898.
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On 19 January 1975, Australia’s first youth station 2JJ (Double Jay) launched itself onto the nation’s airwaves with a NASA-style countdown and You Only Like Me ‘Cause I’m Good in Bed by Australian band Skyhooks. Refused airtime by the commercial stations because of its explicit sexual content, this song was a clear signifier of the new station’s intent—to occupy a more radical territory on Australian radio. Indeed, Double Jay’s musical entrée into the highly restrictive local broadcasting environment of the time has gone on to symbolise both the station’s role in its early days as an enfant terrible of radio (Inglis 376), and its near 40 years as a voice for youth culture in Australia (Milesago, Double Jay). In this paper we explore the proposition that Double Jay functioned as an outlet for youth counterculture in Australia, and that it achieved this even with (and arguably because of) its credentials as a state-generated entity. This proposition is considered via brief analysis of the political and musical context leading to the establishment of Double Jay. We intend to demonstrate that although the station was deeply embedded in “the system” in material and cultural terms, it simultaneously existed in an “uneasy symbiosis” (Martin and Siehl 54) with this system because it consciously railed against the mainstream cultures from which it drew, providing a public and active vehicle for youth counterculture in Australia. The origins of Double Jay thus provide one example of the complicated relationship between culture and counterculture, and the multiple ways in which the two are inextricably linked. As a publicly-funded broadcasting station Double Jay was liberated from the industrial imperatives of Australia’s commercial stations which arguably drove their predisposition for formula. The absence of profit motive gave Double Jay’s organisers greater room to experiment with format and content, and thus the potential to create a genuine alternative in Australia broadcasting. As a youth station Double Jay was created to provide a minority with its own outlet. The Labor government committed to wrenching airspace from the very restrictive Australian broadcasting “system” (Wiltshire and Stokes 2) to provide minority voices with room to speak and to be heard. Youth was identified by the government as one such minority. The Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) contributed to this process by enabling young staffers to establish the semi-independent Contemporary Radio Unit (CRU) (Webb) and within this a youth station. Not only did this provide a focal point around which a youth collective could coalesce, but the distinct place and identity of Double Jay within the ABC offered its organisers the opportunity to ignore or indeed subvert some of the perceived strictures of the “mothership” that was the ABC, whether in organisational, content and/or stylistic terms. For these and other reasons Double Jay was arguably well positioned to counter the broadcasting cultures that existed alongside this station. It did so stylistically, and also in more fundamental ways, At the same time, however, it “pillaged the host body at random” (Webb) co-opting certain aspects of these cultures (people, scheduling, content, administration) which in turn implicated Double Jay in the material and cultural practices of those mainstream cultures against which it railed. Counterculture on the Airwaves: Space for Youth to Play? Before exploring these themes further, we should make clear that Double Jay’s legitimacy as a “counterculture” organisation is observably tenuous against the more extreme renderings of the concept. Theodore Roszak, for example, requires of counterculture something “so radically disaffiliated from the mainstream assumptions of our society that it scarcely looks to many as a culture at all” (5). Double Jay was a brainchild of the state: an outcome of the Whitlam Government’s efforts to open up the nation’s airwaves (Davis, Government; McClelland). Further, the supervision of this station was given to the publicly funded Australian national broadcaster, the ABC (Inglis). Any claim Double Jay has to counterculture status then is arguably located in less radical invocations of the term. Some definitions, for example, hold that counterculture contains value systems that run counter to culture, but these values are relational rather than divorced from each other. Kenneth Leech, for example, states that counterculture is "a way of life and philosophy which at central points is in conflict with the mainstream society” (Desmond et al. 245, our emphasis); E.D. Batzell defines counterculture as "a minority culture marked by a set of values, norms and behaviour patterns which contradict those of the dominant society" (116, our emphasis). Both definitions imply that counterculture requires the mainstream to make sense of what it is doing and why. In simple terms then, counterculture as the ‘other’ does not exist without its mainstream counterpoint. The particular values with which counterculture is in conflict are generated by “the system” (Heath and Potter 6)—a system that imbues “manufactured needs and mass-produced desires” (Frank 15) in the masses to encourage order, conformity and consumption. Counterculture seeks to challenge this “system” via individualist, expression-oriented values such as difference, diversity, change, egalitarianism, and spontaneity (Davis On Youth; Leary; Thompson and Coskuner‐Balli). It is these kinds of counterculture values that we demonstrate were embedded in the content, style and management practices within Double Jay. The Whitlam Years and the Birth of Double Jay Double Jay was borne of the Whitlam government’s brief but impactful period in office from 1972 to 1975, after 23 years of conservative government in Australia. Key to the Labor Party’s election platform was the principle of participatory democracy, the purpose of which was “breaking down apathy and maximising active citizen engagement” (Cunningham 123). Within this framework, the Labor Party committed to opening the airwaves, and reconfiguring the rhetoric of communication and media as a space of and for the people (Department of the Media 3). Labor planned to honour this commitment via sweeping reforms that would counter the heavily concentrated Australian media landscape through “the encouragement of diversification of ownership of commercial radio and television”—and in doing so enable “the expression of a plurality of viewpoints and cultures throughout the media” (Department of the Media 3). Minority groups in particular were to be privileged, while some in the Party even argued for voices that would actively agitate. Senator Jim McClelland, for one, declared, “We say that somewhere in the system there must be broadcasting which not only must not be afraid to be controversial but has a duty to be controversial” (Senate Standing Committee 4). One clear voice of controversy to emerge in the 1960s and resonate throughout the 1970s was the voice of youth (Gerster and Bassett; Langley). Indeed, counterculture is considered by some as synonymous with a particular strain of youth culture during this time (Roszak; Leech). The Labor Government acknowledged this hitherto unrecognised voice in its 1972 platform, with Minister for the Media Senator Doug McClelland claiming that his party would encourage the “whetting of the appetite” for “life and experimentation” of Australia’s youth – in particular through support for the arts (160). McClelland secured licenses for two “experimental-type” stations under the auspices of the ABC, with the youth station destined for Sydney via the ABC’s standby transmitter in Gore Hill (ABCB, 2). Just as the political context in early 1970s Australia provided the necessary conditions for the appearance of Double Jay, so too did the cultural context. Counterculture emerged in the UK, USA and Europe as a clear and potent force in the late 1960s (Roszak; Leech; Frank; Braunstein and Doyle). In Australia this manifested in the 1960s and 1970s in various ways, including political protest (Langley; Horne); battles for the liberalisation of censorship (Hope and Dickerson, Liberalisation; Chipp and Larkin); sex and drugs (Dawson); and the art film scene (Hope and Dickerson, Happiness; Thoms). Of particular interest here is the “lifestyle” aspect of counterculture, within which the value-expressions against the dominant culture manifest in cultural products and practices (Bloodworth 304; Leary ix), and more specifically, music. Many authors have suggested that music was pivotal to counterculture (Bloodworth 309; Leech 8), a key “social force” through which the values of counterculture were articulated (Whiteley 1). The youth music broadcasting scene in Australia was extremely narrow prior to Double Jay, monopolised by a handful of media proprietors who maintained a stranglehold over the youth music scene from the mid-50s. This dominance was in part fuelled by the rising profitability of pop music, driven by “the dreamy teenage market”, whose spending was purely discretionary (Doherty 52) and whose underdeveloped tastes made them “immune to any sophisticated disdain of run-of-the-mill” cultural products (Doherty 230-231). Over the course of the 1950s the commercial stations pursued this market by “skewing” their programs toward the youth demographic (Griffen-Foley 264). The growing popularity of pop music saw radio shift from a “multidimensional” to “mono-dimensional” medium according to rock journalist Bruce Elder, in which the “lowest-common-denominator formula of pop song-chat-commercial-pop-song” dominated the commercial music stations (12). Emblematic of this mono-dimensionalism was the appearance of the Top 40 Playlist in 1958 (Griffin-Foley 265), which might see as few as 10–15 songs in rotation in peak shifts. Elder claims that this trend became more pronounced over the course of the 1960s and peaked in 1970, with playlists that were controlled with almost mechanical precision [and] compiled according to American-devised market research methods which tended to reinforce repetition and familiarity at the expense of novelty and diversity. (12) Colin Vercoe, whose job was to sell the music catalogues of Festival Records to stations like 2UE, 2SER and SUW, says it was “an incredibly frustrating affair” to market new releases because of the rigid attachment by commercials to the “Top 40 of endless repeats” (Vercoe). While some air time was given to youth music beyond the Top 40, this happened mostly in non-peak shifts and on weekends. Bill Drake at 2SM (who was poached by Double Jay and allowed to reclaim his real name, Holger Brockmann) played non-Top 40 music in his Sunday afternoon programme The Album Show (Brockmann). A more notable exception was Chris Winter’s Room to Move on the ABC, considered by many as the predecessor of Double Jay. Introduced in 1971, Room to Move played all forms of contemporary music not represented by the commercial broadcasters, including whole albums and B sides. Rock music’s isolation to the fringes was exacerbated by the lack of musical sales outlets for rock and other forms of non-pop music, with much music sourced through catalogues, music magazines and word of mouth (Winter; Walker). In this context a small number of independent record stores, like Anthem Records in Sydney and Archie and Jugheads in Melbourne, appear in the early 1970s. Vercoe claims that the commercial record companies relentlessly pursued the closure of these independents on the grounds they were illegal entities: The record companies hated them and they did everything they could do close them down. When (the companies) bought the catalogue to overseas music, they bought the rights. And they thought these record stores were impinging on their rights. It was clear that a niche market existed for rock and alternative forms of music. Keith Glass and David Pepperell from Archie and Jugheads realised this when stock sold out in the first week of trade. Pepperell notes, “We had some feeling we were doing something new relating to people our own age but little idea of the forces we were about to unleash”. Challenging the “System” from the Inside At the same time as interested individuals clamoured to buy from independent record stores, the nation’s first youth radio station was being instituted within the ABC. In October 1974, three young staffers—Marius Webb, Ron Moss and Chris Winter— with the requisite youth credentials were briefed by ABC executives to build a youth-style station for launch in January 1975. According to Winter “All they said was 'We want you to set up a station for young people' and that was it!”, leaving the three with a conceptual carte blanche–although assumedly within the working parameters of the ABC (Webb). A Contemporary Radio Unit (CRU) was formed in order to meet the requirements of the ABC while also creating a clear distinction between the youth station and the ABC. According to Webb “the CRU gave us a lot of latitude […] we didn’t have to go to other ABC Departments to do things”. The CRU was conscious from the outset of positioning itself against the mainstream practices of both the commercial stations and the ABC. The publicly funded status of Double Jay freed it from the shackles of profit motive that enslaved the commercial stations, in turn liberating its turntables from baser capitalist imperatives. The two coordinators Ron Moss and Marius Webb also bypassed the conventions of typecasting the announcer line-up (as was practice in both commercial and ABC radio), seeking instead people with charisma, individual style and youth appeal. Webb told the Sydney Morning Herald that Double Jay’s announcers were “not required to have a frontal lobotomy before they go on air.” In line with the individual- and expression-oriented character of the counterculture lifestyle, it was made clear that “real people” with “individuality and personality” would fill the airwaves of Double Jay (Nicklin 9). The only formula to which the station held was to avoid (almost) all formula – a mantra enhanced by the purchase in the station’s early days of thousands of albums and singles from 10 or so years of back catalogues (Robinson). This library provided presenters with the capacity to circumvent any need for repetition. According to Winter the DJs “just played whatever we wanted”, from B sides to whole albums of music, most of which had never made it onto Australian radio. The station also adapted the ABC tradition of recording live classical music, but instead recorded open-air rock concerts and pub gigs. A recording van built from second-hand ABC equipment captured the grit of Sydney’s live music scene for Double Jay, and in so doing undercut the polished sounds of its commercial counterparts (Walker). Double Jay’s counterculture tendencies further extended to its management style. The station’s more political agitators, led by Webb, sought to subvert the traditional top-down organisational model in favour of a more egalitarian one, including a battle with the ABC to remove the bureaucratic distinction between technical staff and presenters and replace this with the single category “producer/presenter” (Cheney, Webb, Davis 41). The coordinators also actively subverted their own positions as coordinators by holding leaderless meetings open to all Double Jay employees – meetings that were infamously long and fraught, but also remembered as symbolic of the station’s vibe at that time (Frolows, Matchett). While Double Jay assumed the ABC’s focus on music, news and comedy, at times it politicised the content contra to the ABC’s non-partisan policy, ignored ABC policy and practice, and more frequently pushed its contents over the edges of what was considered propriety and taste. These trends were already present in pockets of the ABC prior to Double Jay: in current affairs programmes like This Day Tonight and Four Corners (Harding 49); and in overtly leftist figures like Alan Ashbolt (Bowman), who it should be noted had a profound influence over Webb and other Double Jay staff (Webb). However, such an approach to radio still remained on the edges of the ABC. As one example of Double Jay’s singularity, Webb made clear that the ABC’s “gentleman’s agreement” with the Federation of Australian Commercial Broadcasters to ban certain content from airplay would not apply to Double Jay because the station would not “impose any censorship on our people” – a fact demonstrated by the station’s launch song (Nicklin 9). The station’s “people” in turn made the most of this freedom with the production of programmes like Gayle Austin’s Horny Radio Porn Show, the Naked Vicar Show, the adventures of Colonel Chuck Chunder of the Space Patrol, and the Sunday afternoon comic improvisations of Nude Radio from the team that made Aunty Jack. This openness also made its way into the news team, most famously in its second month on air with the production of The Ins and Outs of Love, a candid documentary of the sexual proclivities and encounters of Sydney’s youth. Conservative ABC staffer Clement Semmler described the programme as containing such “disgustingly explicit accounts of the sexual behaviour of young teenagers” that it “aroused almost universal obloquy from listeners and the press” (35). The playlist, announcers, comedy sketches, news reporting and management style of Double Jay represented direct challenges to the entrenched media culture of Australia in the mid 1970s. The Australian National Commission for UNESCO noted at the time that Double Jay was “variously described as political, subversive, offensive, pornographic, radical, revolutionary and obscene” (7). While these terms were understandable given the station’s commitment to experiment and innovation, the “vital point” about Double Jay was that it “transmitted an electronic reflection of change”: What the station did was to zero in on the kind of questioning of traditional values now inherent in a significant section of the under 30s population. It played their music, talked in their jargon, pandered to their whims, tastes, prejudices and societal conflicts both intrinsic and extrinsic. (48) Conclusion From the outset, Double Jay was locked in an “uneasy symbiosis” with mainstream culture. On the one hand, the station was established by federal government and its infrastructure was provided by state funds. It also drew on elements of mainstream broadcasting in multiple ways. However, at the same time, it was a voice for and active agent of counterculture, representing through its content, form and style those values that were considered to challenge the ‘system,’ in turn creating an outlet for the expression of hitherto un-broadcast “ways of thinking and being” (Leary). As Henry Rosenbloom, press secretary to then Labor Minister Dr Moss Cass wrote, Double Jay had the potential to free its audience “from an automatic acceptance of the artificial rhythms of urban and suburban life. In a very real sense, JJ [was] a deconditioning agent” (Inglis 375-6). While Double Jay drew deeply from mainstream culture, its skilful and playful manipulation of this culture enabled it to both reflect and incite youth-based counterculture in Australia in the 1970s. References Australian Broadcasting Control Board. Development of National Broadcasting and Television Services. ABCB: Sydney, 1976. Batzell, E.D. “Counter-Culture.” Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Social Thought. Eds. Williams Outhwaite and Tom Bottomore. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 116-119. Bloodworth, John David. “Communication in the Youth Counterculture: Music as Expression.” Central States Speech Journal 26.4 (1975): 304-309. Bowman, David. “Radical Giant of Australian Broadcasting: Allan Ashbolt, Lion of the ABC, 1921-2005.” Sydney Morning Herald 15 June 2005. 15 Sep. 2013 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/news/Obituaries/Radical-giant-of-Australian-broadcasting/2005/06/14/1118645805607.html›. 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Henley, Nadine. "You will die!" M/C Journal 5, n.º 1 (1 de março de 2002). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1942.
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Scenario: You are exhausted after a long day at work and collapse in front of the television for some mindless entertainment. One of your favourite comedy shows is on. You begin to relax. You laugh a couple of times. There's a commercial break. You watch the first ad for a hardware store, giving it only half your attention. And then there's another ad, something about a father and son in a car together and then ". WOOOMPH! A truck slams into the car. The message is "Speed kills!" Or there are people playing and sunbathing on a beach, happy holidays, and then vultures descend and surround them. The message is "Slip! Slop! Slap! Don't die in the sun this summer". Or someone is shown smoking a cigarette and the caption reads : "Give up now. You'll soon stop dying for a cigarette". This might be accompanied by scenes of a post-mortem, dissections of human lungs or brain. Context Threat appeals are used frequently in health and road safety promotion. Many use the threat of death as the consequence of undesirable behaviours, for example, "Quit smoking or you'll die' (Henley and Donovan). ("Non-death threats' appeal to other consequences such as "Quit smoking or your skin will age'.) There is an implicit notion of premature death threat, although this is rarely stated explicitly. When reminded of our risk of premature death, we are reminded by extension of the ultimate inevitability of our death. An understanding of the philosophy of existentialism can help us understand why consumers may, quite reasonably, tune out, or literally switch off health promotion messages that remind them of their own death. This paper explores the effect on consumers of these mass media invocations of the fear of death, or "death threats'. Verbatim comments are included from six focus groups conducted on fear and health promotion. Groups were delineated by age (16-20 years, 21-29 years and 30-49 years), gender, and socio-economic status (blue collar/white collar) (Henley). What is existential dread? Fear is one of the primary human emotions (along with anger, sadness, love, joy and surprise) and "dread' is one of the emotion names associated with fear (Shaver et al. 1067). We do not need to learn how to feel fear. We have to learn what to fear, however. Despite the joke about death and taxes, death is uniquely inevitable. (Some people do manage to avoid taxes!) In his definitive work, Denial of Death, Becker stated his belief that knowledge of our own death is the source of 'man's peculiar and greatest anxiety' (70); it's what makes us human. Existentialists think that knowing about the inevitability of our own death can be overwhelming, arousing the worst fear imaginable, "existential dread' (Bugental 287). Existential philosophers and psychologists believe that part of this anxiety stems from the existential dread of "not being'. Discussing Heidegger's analysis of the meaning of death in Being and Time, Barrett put it this way: The point is that I may die at any moment, and therefore death is my possibility now. It is like a precipice at my feet. It is also the most extreme and absolute of my possibilities: extreme, because it is the possibility of not being and hence cuts off all other possibilities; absolute, because man can surmount all other heartbreaks, even the deaths of those he loves, but his own death puts an end to him (201). The essence of existential philosophy is this idea that we are all deeply, terribly afraid of death. Fear of death can be seen even in very young children (Anthony, The child's; Anthony, The discovery; Nagy) who express considerable anxiety about death, but quickly learn from their parents and others how to deny it (Yalom). Existential psychologists have suggested that the fear of our own death is the cause of much of our psychopathology (Yalom). Existentialists believe that the most common response to existential anxiety is to deny it, creating in oneself a 'state of forgetfulness of being' as far as possible. Weisman described three levels of denial in terminally ill patients: "first-order denial' of the facts of illness; "second-order denial' of the implications of the illness; and "third-order denial' of death itself. He noted that often a patient moves from first and second order denial into "middle knowledge' (i.e., acceptance of near death), but then relapses. Weisman remarked that this relapse is often the signal that the terminal phase has begun. This aspect of denial is a complicated factor in the complex measurement of death anxiety. When people say they are not afraid of death, who can say whether they are denying fear or truly not afraid? In either case, health promotion appeals that threaten death may not be effective, either because the fear is denied or because there is no fear. In focus groups exploring people's concepts of death (Henley 111), few people acknowledged being afraid of their own death and many specifically stated that they were not afraid of their own death. One woman voiced the universal difficulty of truly conceiving what it might be like "not to be' (Kastenbaum and Aisenberg) when she said: 'death seems like such an unrealistic proposition'. People did acknowledge fears about death, such as dying painfully, so health promotion messages that threaten these other dimensions of death anxiety may be more effective. Health promotion practitioners frequently use these related death fears. The fear of causing death, for example, is used in road safety advertisements. However, this discussion on existential fear is limited to threat appeals of death per se. Death threats in health promotion Is arousing existential dread an effective way to market healthy behaviours? At first sight, it seems logical that the threat of death would be more persuasive than lesser threats and yet it may not be the most effective approach. There is some evidence that lesser threats may be more effective for some groups of adolescents and young adults for smoking (Donovan and Leivers), and for road safety behaviours (Donovan et al.). For example, for some 18 year old males, the threat of being caught drinking and driving, of losing their driving licence and, thus, their new-found independence may be a more effective deterrent than the threat of dying in a car accident (Donovan et al.). The humiliation of being arrested and charged for drink-driving may be the most powerful persuader for adults of all ages (Bevins). For men attending the Jerusalem Centre for Impotency and Fertility, impotence was reported a more persuasive threat than death: 78% of men who were told that smoking causes impotence quit smoking, compared to 40% who quit when told that smoking causes heart attacks ("No smoking tip"). One woman in a focus group said, 'you tend to think short-term, "can I afford a $100 fine?" rather than long-term, "this is my life." If I stop to think about it, obviously I'm more afraid of dying than $100 [fine], but that's not what I think about' (Henley 95). This makes sense in the context of forgetfulness, the denial of death. We don't want to be reminded of our death so we switch off the death message. Lesser threats may be more easily internalised. Does arousing existential dread do any harm? Perhaps. Job suggested that fear arousal is likely to be effective only for specific behaviours that successfully reduce the level of fear arousal and that high-fear messages may actually increase behaviours that people employ to reduce anxiety, such as smoking and alcohol consumption. People high in anxiety are hypothesised to be hypersensitive to threats and likely to employ a restricted range of self-soothing coping behaviours to reduce negative affect (Wickramasekera and Price). Death threat appeals such as "Quit smoking or you'll die' may arouse defensive, counter-productive responses, at least in some people, because it is impossible to identify any specific behaviour that could successfully reduce the particular, unique fear of death per se. Firestone identified a number of psychological defences against death anxiety, including self-nourishing and addictive habits, such as smoking and overeating. Ironically, these same behaviours are frequently the subject of health promotion campaigns. If such campaigns arouse death anxiety in an effort to curb defensive responses to death anxiety, there clearly could be an increase rather than a decrease in those defensive responses. Arousing death anxiety might contribute to fatalistic thinking. Job described some people's defenses against very high fear, for example, "...you've got to go sometime' or "...when your number's up, your number's up'. In focus groups, people commented, 'if an accident is going to happen, it's going to happen' and 'what's the point of giving up [unhealthy behaviours] if you get run over by a bus tomorrow?' (Henley 95, 108). Rippetoe and Rogers found that fatalistic thinking occurred when subjects did not believe that the recommended behaviour would avert the threat. That is, people may realise that quitting smoking could avert lung cancer and even some causes of premature death but that nothing can avert death itself. Fatalism may be one of the most maladaptive responses because the threat is acknowledged but rendered ineffective (Rippetoe and Rogers). Social marketers can make some of their persuasive communications more effective if they are more mindful of consumers' existential fears. A sensitivity to consumers' psychological defences against existential fear may result in more effective use of threat appeals in health promotion. Mindfulness Mindful that the title of this paper itself may arouse some existential dread, I end with a comment on the existentialist alternative to denial. Existentialists advocate a state of 'mindfulness of being' or 'ontological mode' (Heidegger, quoted in Yalom 31) in which "one remains mindful of being, not only mindful of the fragility of being but mindful, too ... of one's responsibility for one's own being." (Yalom 31). The existentialist strives to be as mindful, as present in the moment, and therefore as authentic as possible. This involves the acceptance of existential anxiety as an appropriate and reasonable response to the human condition (Bugental). Some focus group participants wanted to know in advance that they were going to die, 'so you can fit things in you'd want to do and say goodbye'. Others thought it was better not to know or 'you'd start having regrets'. One person pointed out that we do know in advance: 'you know you're going to die sometime!'. This last comment was followed by a sober, almost shocked silence suggesting that, even while we are freely discussing death on one level, the full meaning of death may still elude us. As consumers of health promotion messages, we are exposed to many reminders of our finite existence. If we sit mindlessly in front of the television receiving these messages, we may feel some unresolved discomfort. People talk about looking away, or switching channels when particularly shocking ads are shown. The existentialist alternative response would be to embrace these reminders and use them to sustain a state of mindfulness. With this state of mindfulness comes a heightened sense of responsibility for one's own being. It is in this ontological mode that we are most likely to adopt the healthy behaviours recommended in health promotion messages. By hearing the death threat openly, and acting to protect ourselves from at least those causes of premature death that may lie within our control, we may be able to discover a fuller experience of what it means to be alive. References Anthony, Sylvia. The Child's Discovery of Death. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1940. Anthony, Sylvia. The Discovery of Death in Childhood and After. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Education, 1973. Barrett, W. Irrational Man, A Study in Existential Philosophy. London: Heinemann, 1958. Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: The Free Press, 1973. Bevins, John. "Using Advertising to Sell and Promote Health and Healthy Products". Paper presented at the ACHPER Health Products and Services Marketing Seminar. Kuring-gai College, Sydney, 1987. Bugental, J. F. T. The Search for Authenticity: An Existential-analytic Approach to Psychotherapy. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1965. Donovan, Robert J., and Sue Leivers. Young Women and Smoking. Report to Commonwealth Department of Human Services and Health. Perth: Donovan Research, 1988. Donovan, Robert J., Nadine Henley, Geoffrey Jalleh, and Clive Slater. Road Safety Advertising: An Empirical Study and Literature Review. Canberra: Federal Office of Road Safety, 1995. Firestone, Robert W. "Psychological Defenses against Death Anxiety." Death Anxiety Handbook: Research, Instrumentation, and Application. Series in Death Education, Aging, and Health Care. Ed. Robert A. Neimeyer. Washington, DC: Taylor & Francis, 1994. 217-241. Henley, Nadine R. "Fear Arousal in Social Marketing: Death vs Non-death Threats." Doctoral Dissertation, University of Western Australia, Perth, 1997. Henley, Nadine and Robert J. Donovan. "Threat Appeals in Social Marketing: Death as a "Special Case'". International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing, 4.4 (1999): 300-319. Job, R. F. Soames. "Effective and Ineffective Use of Fear in Health Promotion Campaigns." American Journal of Public Health, 78 (1988): 163-167. Kastenbaum, R., and R. Aisenberg. The Psychology of Death. London: Duckworth, 1974. Nagy, Maria H. "The Child's View of Death." The Meaning of Death. Ed. Herman Feifel. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1959. 79-98. "No Smoking Tip for Lovers". Daily Telegraph, (1994, September 24): p. 4. Rippetoe, P.A. and Rogers, R.W. "Effects of components of protection-motivation theory on adaptive and maladaptive coping with a health threat." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52.3 (1987): 596-604. Shaver, P., J. Schwartz, D. Kirson, and C. O'Connor. "Emotion Knowledge: Further Exploration of a Prototype Approach." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52.6 (1987): 1061-1086. Weisman, A.D. On dying and denying: A psychiatric study of terminality. New York: Behavioral Publications, 1972. Wickramasekera, Ian and Daniel C. Price. "Morbid Obesity, Absorption, Neuroticism, and the High Risk Model of Threat Perception." American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 39 (1997): 291-301. Yalom, I. D. Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books, 1980. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Henley, Nadine. "You will die! " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.1 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/youwilldie.php>. Chicago Style Henley, Nadine, "You will die! " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 1 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/youwilldie.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Henley, Nadine. (2002) You will die! . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(1). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/youwilldie.php> ([your date of access]).
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Brackley du Bois, Ailsa. "Repairing the Disjointed Narrative of Ballarat's Theatre Royal". M/C Journal 20, n.º 5 (13 de outubro de 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1296.
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IntroductionBallarat’s Theatre Royal was the first permanent theatre built in inland Australia. Upon opening in 1858, it was acclaimed as having “the handsomest theatrical exterior in the colony” (Star, “Editorial” 7 Dec. 1889) and later acknowledged as “the grandest playhouse in all Australia” (Spielvogel, Papers Vol. 1 160). Born of Gold Rush optimism, the Royal was loved by many, yet the over-arching story of its ill-fated existence has failed to surface, in any coherent fashion, in official history. This article takes some first steps toward retrieving lost knowledge from fragmented archival records, and piecing together the story of why this purpose-built theatre ceased operation within a twenty-year period. A short history of the venue will be provided, to develop context. It will be argued that while a combination of factors, most of which were symptomatic of unfortunate timing, destroyed the longevity of the Royal, the principal problem was one of stigmatisation. This was an era in which the societal pressure to visibly conform to conservative values was intense and competition in the pursuit of profits was fierce.The cultural silence that befell the story of the Royal, after its demise, is explicable in relation to history being written by the victors and a loss of spokespeople since that time. As theatre arts historiographer McConachie (131) highlights, “Theatres, like places for worship and spectator sports, hold memories of the past in addition to providing a practical and cognitive framework for performance events in the present.” When that place, “a bounded area denoted by human agency and memory” (131), is lost in time, so too may be the socio-cultural lessons from the period, if not actively recalled and reconsidered. The purpose of this article is to present the beginning of an investigation into the disjointed narrative of Ballarat’s Theatre Royal. Its ultimate failure demonstrates how dominant community based entertainment became in Ballarat from the 1860s onwards, effectively crushing prospects for mid-range professional theatre. There is value in considering the evolution of the theatre’s lifespan and its possible legacy effects. The connection between historical consciousness and the performing arts culture of by-gone days offers potential to reveal specks of cross-relevance for regional Australian theatrical offerings today.In the BeginningThe proliferation of entertainment venues in Ballarat East during the 1850s was a consequence of the initial discovery of surface alluvial gold and the ongoing success of deep-lead mining activities in the immediate area. This attracted extraordinary numbers of people from all over the world who hoped to strike it rich. Given the tough nature of life on the early gold diggings, most disposable income was spent on evening entertainment. As a result, numerous venues sprang into operation to cater for demand. All were either canvas tents or makeshift wooden structures: vibrant in socio-cultural activity, however humble the presentation values. It is widely agreed (Withers, Bate and Brereton) that noteworthy improvements occurred from 1856 onwards in the artistry of the performers, audience tastes, the quality of theatrical structures and living standards in general. Residents began to make their exit from flood and fire prone Ballarat East, moving to Ballarat West. The Royal was the first substantial entertainment venture to be established in this new, affluent, government surveyed township area. Although the initial idea was to draw in some of the patronage which had flourished in Ballarat East, Brereton (14) believed “There can be no doubt that it was [primarily] intended to attract those with good taste and culture”. This article will contend that how society defined ‘good taste’ turned out to be problematic for the Royal.The tumultuous mid-1850s have attracted extensive academic and popular attention, primarily because they were colourful and politically significant times. The period thereafter has attracted little scholarly interest, unless tied to the history of surviving organisations. Four significant structures designed to incorporate theatrical entertainment were erected and opened in Ballarat from 1858 onwards: The Royal was swiftly followed by the Mechanics Institute 1859, Alfred Hall 1867 and Academy of Music 1874-75. As philosopher Albert Borgmann (41) highlighted, the erection of “magnificent settings in which the public could gather and enjoy itself” was the dominant urban aspiration for cultural consumption in the nineteenth century. Men of influence in Victorian cities believed strongly in progress and grand investments as a conscious demonstration of power, combined with Puritan vales, teetotalism and aggressive self-assertiveness (Briggs 287-88). At the ceremonial laying of the foundation stone for the Royal on 20 January 1858, eminent tragedian, Gustavos Brooke, announced “… may there be raised a superstructure perfect in all its parts, and honourable to the builder.” He proclaimed the memorial bottle to be “a lasting memento of the greatness of Ballarat in erecting such a theatre” and philosophised that “the stage not only refines the manners, but it is the best teacher of morals, for it is the truest and most intelligible picture of life. It stamps the image of virtue on the mind …” (Star, “Laying” 21 Jan. 1858). These initial aspirations seem somewhat ambitious when viewed with the benefit of hindsight. Ballarat’s Theatre Royal opened in December 1858, ironically with Jerrold’s comedy ‘Time Works Wonders’. The large auditorium holding around 1500 people “was crowded to overflowing and was considered altogether brilliant in its newness and beauty” by all in attendance (Star, “Local and General” 30 Dec. 1858). Generous descriptions abound of how splendid it was, in architectural terms, but also in relation to scenery, decorations and all appointments. Underneath the theatre were two shops, four bars, elegant dining rooms, a kitchen and 24 bedrooms. A large saloon was planned to be attached soon-after. The overall cost of the build was estimated at a substantial 10,000 pounds.The First Act: 1858-1864In the early years, the Royal was deemed a success. The pleasure-seeking public of Ballarat came en masse and the glory days seemed like they might continue unabated. By the early 1860s, Ballarat was known as a great theatrical centre for performing arts, its population was famous both nationally and internationally for an appreciation of good acting, and the Royal was considered the home of the best dramatic art in Ballarat (Withers 260). Like other theatres of the 1850s diggings, it had its own resident company of actors, musicians, scenic artists and backstage crew. Numerous acclaimed performers came to visit and these were prosperous and happy times for the Royal’s lively theatrical community. As early as 1859, however, there was evident rivalry between the Royal and the Mechanics Institute, as suggested on numerous occasions in the Ballarat Star. As a multi-purpose venue for education and the betterment of the working classes, the latter venue had the distinct advantage of holding the moral high ground. Over time this competition increased as audiences decreased. As people shifted to family-focussed entertainments, these absorbed their time and attention. The transformation of a transient population into a township of families ultimately suffocated prospects for professional entertainment in Ballarat. Consumer interest turned to the growth of strong amateur societies with the establishment of the Welsh Eisteddfod 1863; Harmonic Society 1864; Bell Ringers’ Club 1866 and Glee and Madrigal Union 1867 (Brereton 38). By 1863, the Royal was reported to have “scanty patronage” and Proprietor Symonds was in financial trouble (Star, “News and Notes” 15 Sep. 1864). It was announced that the theatre would open for the last time on Saturday, 29 October 1864 (Australasian). On that same date, the Royal was purchased by Rowlands & Lewis, the cordial makers. They promptly on-sold it to the Ballarat Temperance League, who soon discovered that there was a contract in place with Bouchier, the previous owner, who still held the hotel next door, stating that “all proprietors … were bound to keep it open as a theatre” (Withers 260-61). Having invested immense energy into the quest to purchase it, the Temperance League backed out of the deal. Prominent Hotelier Walter Craig bought it for less than 3,000 pounds. It is possible that this stymied effort to quell the distribution of liquor in the heart of the city evoked the ire of the Protestant community, who were on a dedicated mission “to attack widespread drunkenness, profligacy, licentiousness and agnosticism,” and forming an interdenominational Bible and Tract Society in 1866 (Bate 176). This caused a segment of the population to consider the Royal a ‘lost cause’ and steer clear of it, advising ‘respectable’ families to do the same, and so the stigma grew. Social solidarity of this type had significant impact in an era in which people openly demonstrated their morality by way of unified public actions.The Second Act: 1865-1868The Royal closed for renovations until May 1865. Of the various alterations made to the interior and its fittings, the most telling was the effort to separate the ladies from the ‘town women’, presumably to reassure ‘respectable’ female patrons. To this end, a ladies’ retiring room was added, in a position convenient to the dress circle. The architectural rejuvenation of the Royal was cited as an illustration of great progress in Sturt Street (Ballarat Star, “News and Notes” 27 May 1865). Soon after, the Royal hosted the Italian Opera Company.However, by 1866 there was speculation that the Royal may be converted into a dry goods store. References to what sort of impression the failing of theatre would convey to the “old folks at home” in relation to “progress in civilisation'' and "social habits" indicated the distress of loyal theatre-goers. Impassioned pleas were written to the press to help preserve the “Temple of Thespus” for the legitimate use for which it was intended (Ballarat Star, “Messenger” and “Letters to the Editor” 30 Aug. 1866). By late 1867, a third venue materialised. The Alfred Hall was built for the reception of Ballarat’s first Royal visitor, the Duke of Edinburgh. On the night prior to the grand day at the Alfred, following a private dinner at Craig’s Hotel, Prince Alfred was led by an escorted torchlight procession to a gala performance at Craig’s very own Theatre Royal. The Prince’s arrival caused a sensation that completely disrupted the show (Spielvogel, Papers Vol. 1 165). While visiting Ballarat, the Prince laid the stone for the new Temperance Hall (Bate 159). This would not have been required had the League secured the Royal for their use three years earlier.Thereafter, the Royal was unable to reach the heights of what Brereton (15) calls the “Golden Age of Ballarat Theatre” from 1855 to 1865. Notably, the Mechanics Institute also experienced financial constraints during the 1860s and these challenges were magnified during the 1870s (Hazelwood 89). The late sixties saw the Royal reduced to the ‘ordinary’ in terms of the calibre of productions (Brereton 15). Having done his best to improve the physical attributes and prestige of the venue, Craig may have realised he was up against a growing stigma and considerable competition. He sold the Royal to R.S. Mitchell for 5,500 pounds in 1868.Another New Owner: 1869-1873For the Saturday performance of Richard III in 1869, under the new Proprietor, it was reported that “From pit to gallery every seat was full” and for many it was standing room only (Ballarat Star, “Theatre Royal” 1 Feb. 1869). Later that year, Othello attracted people with “a critical appreciation of histrionic matters” (Ballarat Star, “News and Notes” 19 July 1869). The situation appeared briefly promising. Unfortunately, larger economic factors were soon at play. During 1869, Ballarat went ‘mad’ with mine share gambling. In 1870 the economic bubble burst, and hundreds of people in Ballarat were financially ruined. Over the next ten years the population fell from 60,000 to less than 40,000 (Spielvogel, Papers Vol. 3 39). The last surviving theatre in Ballarat East, the much-loved Charles Napier, put on its final show in September 1869 (Brereton 15). By 1870 the Royal was referred to as a “second-class theatre” and was said to be such bad repute that “it would be most difficult to draw respectable classes” (Ballarat Star, “News and Notes” 17 Jan. 1870). It seems the remaining theatre patrons from the East swung over to support the Royal, which wasn’t necessarily in the best interests of its reputation. During this same period, family-oriented crowds of “the pleasure-seeking public of Ballarat” were attending events at the newly fashionable Alfred Hall (Ballarat Courier, “Theatre Royal” June 1870). There were occasional high points still to come for the Royal. In 1872, opera drew a crowded house “even to the last night of the season” which according to the press, “gave proof, if proof were wanting, that the people of Ballarat not only appreciate, but are willing to patronise to the full any high-class entertainment” (Ballarat Courier, “Theatre Royal” 26 Aug. 1872). The difficulty, however, lay in the deterioration of the Royal’s reputation. It had developed negative connotations among local temperance and morality movements, along with their extensive family, friendship and business networks. Regarding collective consumption, sociologist John Urry wrote “for those engaged in the collective tourist gaze … congregation is paramount” (140). Applying this socio-cultural principle to the behaviour of Victorian theatre-going audiences of the 1870s, it was compelling for audiences to move with the masses and support popular events at the fresh Alfred Hall rather than the fading Royal. Large crowds jostling for elbow room was perceived as the hallmark of a successful event back then, as is most often the case now.The Third Act: 1874-1878An additional complication faced by the Royal was the long-term effect of the application of straw across the ceiling. Acoustics were initially poor, and straw was intended to rectify the problem. This caused the venue to develop a reputation for being stuffy and led to the further indignity of the Royal suffering an infestation of fleas (Jenkins 22); a misfortune which caused some to label it “The Royal Bug House” (Reid 117). Considering how much food was thrown at the stage in this era, it is not surprising that rotten debris attracted insects. In 1873, the Royal closed for another round of renovations. The interior was redesigned, and the front demolished and rebuilt. This was primarily to create retail store frontage to supplement income (Reid 117). It was reported that the best theatrical frontage in Australasia was lost, and in its place was “a modestly handsome elevation” for which all play-goers of Ballarat should be thankful, as the miracle required of the rebuild was that of “exorcising the foul smells from the old theatre and making it bright and pretty and sweet” (Ballarat Star, “News and Notes” 26 Jan. 1874). The effort at rejuvenation seemed effective for a period. A “large and respectable audience” turned out to see the Fakir of Oolu, master of the weird, mystical, and strange. The magician’s show “was received with cheers from all parts of the house, and is certainly a very attractive novelty” (Ballarat Courier, “Theatre Royal” 29 Mar. 1875). That same day, the Combination Star Company gave a concert at the Mechanics Institute. Indicating the competitive tussle, the press stated: “The attendance, however, doubtless owing to attractions elsewhere, was only moderately large” (Courier, “Concert at the Mechanics’” 29 Mar. 1875). In the early 1870s, there had been calls from sectors of society for a new venue to be built in Ballarat, consistent with its status. The developer and proprietor, Sir William Clarke, intended to offer a “higher class” of entertainment for up to 1700 people, superior to the “broad farces” at the Royal (Freund n.p.) In 1875, the Academy of Music opened, at a cost of twelve thousand pounds, just one block away from the Royal.As the decade of decreasing population wore on, it is intriguing to consider an unprecedented “riotous” incident in 1877. Levity's Original Royal Marionettes opened at the Royal with ‘Beauty and the Beast’ to calamitous response. The Company Managers, Wittington & Lovell made clear that the performance had scarcely commenced when the “storm” arose and they believed “the assault to be premeditated” (Wittington and Lovell in Argus, “The Riot” 6 Apr. 1877). Paid thuggery, with the intent of spooking regular patrons, was the implication. They pointed out that “It is evident that the ringleaders of the riot came into the theatre ready armed with every variety of missiles calculated to get a good hit at the figures and scenery, and thereby create a disturbance.” The mob assaulted the stage with “head-breaking” lemonade bottles, causing costly damage, then chased the frightened puppeteers down Sturt Street (Mount Alexander Mail, “Items of News” 4 Apr. 1877). The following night’s performance, by contrast, was perfectly calm (Ballarat Star, “News and Notes” 7 Apr. 1877). Just three months later, Webb’s Royal Marionette pantomimes appeared at the Mechanics’ Institute. The press wrote “this is not to be confounded, with the exhibition which created something like a riot at the Theatre Royal last Easter” (Ballarat Star, “News and Notes” 5 July 1877).The final performance at the Royal was the American Rockerfellers’ Minstrel Company. The last newspaper references to the Royal were placed in the context of other “treats in store” at The Academy of Music, and forthcoming offerings at the Mechanics Institute (Star, “Advertising” 3 July 1878). The Royal had experienced three re-openings and a series of short-term managements, often ending in loss or even bankruptcy. When it wound up, investors were left to cover the losses, while the owner was forced to find more profitable uses for the building (Freund n.p.). At face value, it seemed that four performing arts venues was one too many for Ballarat audiences to support. By August 1878 the Royal’s two shop fronts were up for lease. Thereafter, the building was given over entirely to retail drapery sales (Withers 260). ReflectionsThe Royal was erected, at enormous expense, in a moment of unbridled optimism, after several popular theatres in Ballarat East had burned to the ground. Ultimately the timing for such a lavish investment was poor. It suffered an inflexible old-fashioned structure, high overheads, ongoing staffing costs, changing demographics, economic crisis, increased competition, decreased population, the growth of local community-based theatre, temperance agitation and the impact of negative rumour and hear-say.The struggles endured by the various owners and managers of, and investors in, the Royal reflected broader changes within the larger community. The tension between the fixed nature of the place and the fluid needs of the public was problematic. Shifting demographics meant the Royal was negatively affected by conservative values, altered tastes and competing entertainment options. Built in the 1850s, it was sound, but structurally rigid, dated and polluted with the bacterial irritations of the times. “Resident professional companies could not compete with those touring from Melbourne” by whom it was considered “… hard to use and did not satisfy the needs of touring companies who required facilities equivalent to those in the metropolitan theatres” (Freund n.p.). Meanwhile, the prevalence of fund-raising concerts, created by charitable groups and member based community organisations, detracted from people’s interest in supporting professional performances. After-all, amateur concerts enabled families to “embrace the values of British middle class morality” (Doggett 295) at a safe distance from grog shops and saloons. Children aged 5-14 constituted only ten percent of the Ballarat population in 1857, but by 1871 settler families had created a population in which school aged children comprised twenty-five of the whole (Bate 146). This had significant ramifications for the type of theatrical entertainments required. By the late sixties, as many as 2000 children would perform at a time, and therefore entrance fees were able to be kept at affordable levels for extended family members. Just one year after the demise of the Royal, a new secular improvement society became active, holding amateur events and expanding over time to become what we now know as the Royal South Street Society. This showed that the appetite for home-grown entertainment was indeed sizeable. It was a function that the Royal was unable to service, despite several ardent attempts. Conclusion The greatest misfortune of the Royal was that it became stigmatised, from the mid 1860s onwards. In an era when people were either attempting to be pure of manners or were considered socially undesirable, it was hard for a cultural venue to survive which occupied the commercial middle ground, as the Royal did. It is also conceivable that the Royal was ‘framed’, by one or two of its competitor venues, or their allies, just one year before its closure. The Theatre Royal’s negative stigma as a venue for rough and intemperate human remnants of early Ballarat East had proven insurmountable. The Royal’s awkward position between high-class entrepreneurial culture and wholesome family-based community values, both of which were considered tasteful, left it out-of-step with the times and vulnerable to the judgement of those with either vested interests or social commitments elsewhere. This had long-term resonance for the subsequent development of entertainment options within Ballarat, placing the pendulum of favour either on elite theatre or accessible community based entertainments. The cultural middle-ground was sparse. The eventual loss of the building, the physical place of so much dramatic energy and emotion, as fondly recalled by Withers (260), inevitably contributed to the Royal fading from intergenerational memory. The telling of the ‘real story’ behind the rise and fall of the Ballarat Theatre Royal requires further exploration. If contemporary cultural industries are genuinely concerned “with the re-presentation of the supposed history and culture of a place”, as Urry believed (154), then untold stories such as that of Ballarat’s Theatre Royal require scholarly attention. This article represents the first attempt to examine its troubled history in a holistic fashion and locate it within a context ripe for cultural analysis.ReferencesBate, Weston. Lucky City: The First Generation at Ballarat 1851–1901. Carlton South: Melbourne UP, 1978.Brereton, Roslyn. Entertainment and Recreation on the Victorian Goldfields in the 1850s. BA (Honours) Thesis. Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 1967.Borgmann, Albert. Crossing the Postmodern Divide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Briggs, Asa. Victorian Cities: Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Middlesbrough, Melbourne. London: Penguin, 1968.Doggett, Anne. “And for Harmony Most Ardently We Long”: Musical Life in Ballarat, 1851-187. PhD Thesis. Ballarat: Ballarat University, 2006.Freund, Peter. Her Maj: A History of Her Majesty's Theatre. Ballarat: Currency Press, 2007.Hazelwood, Jennifer. A Public Want and a Public Duty: The Role of the Mechanics Institute in the Cultural, Social and Educational Development of Ballarat from 1851 to 1880. PhD Thesis. Ballarat: University of Ballarat 2007.Jenkins, Lloyd. Another Five Ballarat Cameos. Ballarat: Lloyd Jenkins, 1989.McConachie, Bruce. Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008.Reide, John, and John Chisholm. Ballarat Golden City: A Pictorial History. Bacchus Marsh: Joval Publications, 1989.Spielvogel, Nathan. Spielvogel Papers, Volume 1. 4th ed. Bakery Hill: Ballarat Historical Society, 2016.Spielvogel, Nathan. Spielvogel Papers, Volume 3. 4th ed. Bakery Hill: Ballarat Historical Society, 2016.Urry, John. Consuming Places. London: Routledge, 1995.Withers, William. History of Ballarat (1870) and some Ballarat Reminiscences (1895/96). Ballarat: Ballarat Heritage Services, 1999.NewspapersThe Age.The Argus (Melbourne).The Australasian.The Ballarat Courier.The Ballarat Star.Coolgardie Miner.The Malcolm Chronicle and Leonora Advertiser.Mount Alexander Mail.The Star (Ballarat).
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Piatti-Farnell, Lorna. "“The Blood Never Stops Flowing and the Party Never Ends”: The Originals and the Afterlife of New Orleans as a Vampire City". M/C Journal 20, n.º 5 (13 de outubro de 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1314.
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IntroductionAs both a historical and cultural entity, the city of New Orleans has long-maintained a reputation as a centre for hedonistic and carnivaleque pleasures. Historically, images of mardi gras, jazz, and parties on the shores of the Mississippi have pervaded the cultural vision of the city as a “mecca” for “social life” (Marina 2), and successfully fed its tourism narratives. Simultaneously, however, a different kind of narrative also exists in the historical folds of the city’s urban mythology. Many tales of vampire sightings and supernatural accounts surround the area, and have contributed, over the years, to the establishment and mystification of New Orleans as a ‘vampire city’. This has produced, in turn, its own brand of vampire tourism (Murphy 2015). Mixed with historical rumours and Gothic folklore, the recent narratives of popular culture lie at the centre of the re-imagination of New Orleans as a vampire hub. Taking this idea as a point of departure, this article provides culturally- and historically-informed critical considerations of New Orleans as a ‘vampire city’, especially as portrayed in The Originals (2013-2017), a contemporary television series where vampires are the main protagonists. In the series, the historical narratives of New Orleans become entangled with – and are, at times, almost inseparable from – the fictional chronicles of the vampire in both aesthetic and conceptual terms.The critical connection between urban narratives and vampires representation, as far as New Orleans is concerned, is profoundly entangled with notions of both tourism and fictionalised popular accounts of folklore (Piatti-Farnell 172). In approaching the conceptual relationship between New Orleans as a cultural and historical entity and the vampire — in its folkloristic and imaginative context — the analysis will take a three-pronged approach: firstly, it will consider the historical narrative of tourism for the city of New Orleans; secondly, the city’s connection to vampires and other Gothicised entities will be considered, both historically and narratively; and finally, the analysis will focus on how the connection between New Orleans and Gothic folklore of the vampire is represented in The Originals, with the issue of cultural authenticity being brought into the foreground. A critical footnote must be given to the understanding of the term ‘New Orleans’ in this article as meaning primarily the French Quarter – or, the Vieux Carre – and its various representations. This geographical focus principally owes its existence to the profound cultural significance that the French Quarter has occupied in the history of New Orleans as a city, and, in particular, in its connection to narratives of magic and Gothic folklore, as well as the broader historical and contemporary tourism structures. A History of TourismSocial historian Kevin Fox Gotham agues that New Orleans as a city has been particularly successful in fabricating a sellable image of itself; tourism, Gotham reminds us, is about “the production of local difference, local cultures, and different local histories that appeal to visitors’ tastes for the exotic and the unique” (“Gentrification” 1100). In these terms, both the history and the socio-cultural ‘feel’ of the city cannot be separated from the visual constructs that accompany it. Over the decades, New Orleans has fabricated a distinct network of representational patterns for the Vieux Carre in particular, where the deployment of specific images, themes and motifs – which are, in truth, only peripherally tied to the city’ actual social and political history, and owe their creation and realisation more to the success of fictional narratives from film and literature – is employed to “stimulate tourist demands to buy and consume” (Gotham, “Gentrification” 1102). This image of the city as hedonistic site is well-acknowledged, has to be understood, at least partially, as a conscious construct aimed at the production an identity for itself, which the city can in turn sell to visitors, both domestically and internationally. New Orleans, Gotham suggests, is a ‘complex and constantly mutating city’, in which “meanings of place and community” are “inexorably intertwined with tourism” (Authentic 5). The view of New Orleans as a site of hedonistic pleasure is something that has been heavily capitalised upon by the tourism industry of the city for decades, if not centuries. A keen look at advertising pamphlets for the city, dating form the late Nineteenth century onwards, provides an overview of thematic selling points, that primarily focus on notions of jazz, endless parties and, in particular, nostalgic and distinctly rose-tinted views of the Old South and its glorious plantations (Thomas 7). The decadent view of New Orleans as a centre of carnal pleasures has often been recalled by scholars and lay observers alike; this vision of he city indeed holds deep historical roots, and is entangled with the city’s own economic structures, as well as its acculturated tourism ones. In the late 19th and early 20th century one of the things that New Orleans was very famous for was actually Storyville, the city’s red-light district, sanctioned in 1897 by municipal ordinance. Storyville quickly became a centralized attraction in the heart of New Orleans, so much so that it began being heavily advertised, especially through the publication of the ‘Blue Book’, a resource created for tourists. The Blue Book contained, in alphabetical order, information on all the prostitutes of Storyville. Storyville remained very popular and the most famous attraction in New Orleans until its demolition in 1919 Anthony Stanonis suggests that, in its ability to promote a sellable image for the city, “Storyville meshed with the intersts of business men in the age before mass tourism” (105).Even after the disappearance of Storyville, New Orleans continued to foster its image a site of hedonism, a narrative aided by a favourable administration, especially in the 1930s and 1940s. The French Quarter, in particular, “became a tawdry mélange of brothers and gambling dens operating with impunity under lax law enforcement” (Souther 16). The image of the city as a site for pleasures of worldly nature continued to be deeply rooted, and even survives in the following decades today, as visible in the numerous exotic dance parlours located on the famous Bourbon Street.Vampire TourismSimultaneously, however, a different kind of narrative also exists in the recent historical folds of the city’s urban mythology, where vampires, magic, and voodoo are an unavoidable presence. Many tales of vampire sightings and supernatural accounts surround the area, and have contributed, over the years, to the establishment and mystification of New Orleans as a ‘vampire city’. Kenneth Holditch contends that ‘”New Orleans is a city in love with its myths, mysteries and fantasies” (quoted in McKinney 8). In the contemporary era, these qualities are profoundly reflected in the city’s urban tourism image, where the vampire narrative is pushed into the foreground. When in the city, one might be lucky enough to take one of the many ‘vampire tours’ — often coupled with narratives of haunted locations — or visit the vampire bookshop, or even take part in the annual vampire ball. Indeed, the presence of vampires in New Orleans’s contemporary tourism narrative is so pervasive that one might be tempted to assume that it has always occupied a prominent place in the city’s cultural fabric. Nonetheless, this perception is not accurate: the historical evidence from tourism pamphlets for the city do not make any mentions of vampire tourism before the 1990s, and even then, the focus on the occult side of new Orleans tended to privilege stories of voodoo and hoodoo — a presence that still survives strongly in the cultural narrative city itself (Murphy 91). While the connection between vampires and New Orleans is a undoubtedly recent one, the development and establishment of New Orleans as vampire city cannot be thought of as a straight line. A number of cultural and historical currents appear to converge in the creation of the city’s vampire mystique. The history and geography of the city here could be an important factor, and a useful starting point; as the site of extreme immigration and ethnic and racial mingling New Orleans holds a reputation for mystery. The city was, of course, the regrettable site of a huge marketplace for the slave trade, so discussions of political economy could also be important here, although I’ll leave them for another time. As a city, New Orleans has often been described – by novelists, poets, and historians alike – as being somewhat ‘peculiar’. Simone de Behaviour was known to have remarked that that the city is surrounded by a “pearl grey” and ‘luminous’ air” (McKinney 1). In similar fashion, Oliver Evans claims the city carries “opalescent hints” (quoted in McKinney 1). New Orleans is famous for having a quite thick mist, the result of a high humidity levels in the air. To an observing eye, New Orleans seems immersed in an almost otherworldly ‘glow’, which bestows upon its limits an ethereal and mysterious quality (Piatti-Farnell 173). While this intention here is not to suggest that New Orleans is the only city to have mist – especially in the Southern States – one might venture to say that this physical phenomenon, joined with other occurrences and legends, has certainly contributed to the city’s Gothicised image. The geography of the city also makes it sadly famous for floods and their subsequent devastation, which over centuries have wrecked parts of the city irrevocably. New Orleans sits at a less than desirable geographical position, is no more than 17 feet above sea level, and much of it is at least five feet below (McKinney 5). In spite of its lamentable fame, hurricane Katrina was not the first devastating geo-meteorological phenomenon to hit and destroy most of New Orleans; one can trace similar hurricane occurrences in 1812 and 1915, which at the time significantly damaged parts of the French Quarter. The geographical position of New Orleans also owes to the city’s well-known history of disease such as the plague and tuberculosis – often associated, in previous centuries, with the miasma proper to reclaimed river lands. In similar terms, one must not forget New Orleans’s history of devastating fires – primarily in the years 1788, 1794, 1816, 1866 and 1919 – which slowly destroyed the main historical parts of the city, particularly in the Vieux Carre, and to some extent opened the way for regeneration and later gentrification as well. As a result of its troubled and destructive history, Louise McKinnon claims that the city ‒ perhaps unlike any others in the United States ‒ hinges on perpetual cycles of destruction and regeneration, continuously showing “the wear and tear of human life” (McKinney 6).It is indeed in this extremely important element that New Orleans finds a conceptual source in its connection to notions of the undead, and the vampire in particular. Historically, one can identify the pervasive use of Gothic terminology to describe New Orleans, even if, the descriptions themselves were more attuned to perceptions of the city’s architecture and metrological conditions, rather than the recollection of any folklore-inspired narratives of unread creatures. Because of its mutating, and often ill-maintained historical architecture – especially in the French Quarter - New Orleans has steadily maintained a reputation as a city of “splendid decay” (McKinney, 6). This highly lyrical and metaphorical approach plays an important part in building the city as a site of mystery and enchantment. Its decaying outlook functions as an unavoidable sign of how New Orleans continues to absorb, and simultaneously repel, as McKinney puts it, “the effects of its own history” (6).Nonetheless, the history of New Orleans as a cultural entity, especially in terms of tourism, has not been tied to vampires for centuries, as many imagine, and the city itself insists in its contemporary tourism narratives. Although a lot of folklore has survived around the city in connection to magic and mysticism, for a number of reasons, vampires have not always been in the foreground of its publicised cultural narratives. Mixed with historical rumours and Gothic folklore, the recent narratives of popular culture lie at the centre of the re-imagination of New Orleans as a vampire spot: most scholars claim that it all started with the publication of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976), but actually evidence shows that the vampire narrative for the city of New Orleans did not fully explode until the release of Neil Jordan’s cinematic adaptation of Interview with the Vampire (1994). This film really put New Orleans at the centre of the vampire narrative, indulging in the use of many iconic locations in the city as tied to vampire, and cementing the idea of New Orleans as a vampiric city (Piatti-Farnell 175). The impact of Rice’s work, and its adaptations, has also been picked up by numerous other examples of popular culture, including Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire mystery series, and its well-known television adaptation True Blood. Harris herself states in one of her novels: “New Orleans had been the place to go for vampires and those who wanted to be around them ever since Anne Rice had been proven right about their existence” (2). In spite of the fact that popular culture, rather than actual historical evidence, lies at the heart of the city’s cultural relationship with vampires, this does not detract from the fact that vampires themselves – as fabricated figures lying somewhere between folklore, history, and fiction – represent an influential part of New Orleans’s contemporary tourism narrative, building a bridge between historical storytelling, mythologised identities, and consumerism. The Originals: Vampires in the CityIndeed, the impact of popular culture in establishing and re-establishing the success of the vampire tourism narrative in New Orleans is undeniable. Contemporary examples continue to capitalise on the visual, cultural, and suggestively historical connection between the city’s landmarks and vampire tales, cementing the notion of New Orleans as a solid entity within the Gothic tourism narrative. One such successful example is The Originals. This television show is actually a spin-off of the Vampires Diaries, and begins with three vampires, the Mikaelson siblings (Niklaus, Elijah, and Rebekkah) returning to the city of New Orleans for the first time since 1919, when they were forced to flee by their vengeful father. In their absence, Niklaus's protégé, Marcel, took charge of the city. The storyline of The Originals focuses on battles within the vampire factions to regain control of the city, and eliminate the hold of other mystical creatures such as werewolves and witches (Anyiwo 175). The central narrative here is that the city belongs to the vampire, and there can be no other real Gothic presence in the Quarter. One can only wonder, even at this embryonic level, how this connects functions in a multifaceted way, extending the critique of the vampire’s relationship to New Orleans from the textual dimension of the TV show to the real life cultural narrative of the city itself. A large number of the narrative strands in The Originals are tied to city and its festivals, its celebrations, and its visions of the past, whether historically recorded, or living in the pages of its Gothic folklore. Vampires are actually claimed to have made New Orleans what it is today, and they undoubtedly rule it. As Marcel puts it: “The blood never stops flowing, and the party never ends” (Episode 1, “Always and Forever”). Even the vampiric mantra for New Orleans in The Originals is tied to the city’s existing and long-standing tourism narrative, as “the party never ends” is a reference to one of Bourbon Street’s famous slogans. Indeed, the pictorial influence of the city’s primary landmarks in The Originals is undeniable. In spite of the fact the inside scenes for The Originals were filmed in a studio, the outside shots in the series reveal a strong connections to the city itself, as viewers are left with no doubt as to the show’s setting. New Orleans is continuously mentioned and put on show – and pervasively referred to as “our city”, by the vampires. So much so, that New Orleans becomes the centre of the feud between supernatural forces, as the vampires fight witches and werewolves – among others- to maintain control over the city’s historical heart. The French Quarter, in particular, is given renewed life from the ashes of history into the beating heart of the vampire narrative, so much so that it almost becomes its own character in its own right, instrumental in constructing the vampire mystique. The impact of the vampire on constructing an image for the city of New Orleans is made explicit in The Originals, as the series explicitly shows vampires at the centre of the city’s history. Indeed, the show’s narrative goes as far as justifying the French Quarter’s history and even legends through the vampire metaphor. For instance, the series explains the devastating fire that destroyed the French Opera House in 1919 as the result of a Mikaelson vampire family feud. In similar terms, the vampires of the French Quarter are shown at the heart of the Casquette Girls narrative, a well-known tale from Eighteenth-century colonial New Orleans, where young women were shipped from France to the new Louisiana colony, in order to marry. The young women were said to bring small chests – or casquettes – containing their clothes (Crandle 47). The Originals, however, capitalises on the folkloristic interpretation that perceives the girls’ luggage as coffins potentially containing the undead, a popular version of the tale that can often be heard if taking part in one of the many vampire tours in New Orleans. One can see here how the chronicles of the French Quarter in New Orleans and the presumed narratives of the vampire in the city merge to become one and the same, blurring the lines between history and fiction, and presenting the notion of folklore as a verifiable entity of the everyday (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 25) It is essential to remember, en passant, that, as far as giving the undead their own historical chronicles in connection to New Orleans, The Originals is not alone in doing this. Other TV series like American Horror Story have provided Gothicised histories for the city, although in this case more connected to witchcraft, hoodoo, and voodoo, rather than vampires.What one can see taking place in The Originals is a form of alternate and revisionist history that is reminiscent of several instances of pulp and science fiction from the early 20th century, where the Gothic element lies at the centre of not only the fictional narrative, but also of the re-conceptualisation of historical time and space, as not absolute entities, but as narratives open to interpretation (Singles 103). The re-interpretation here is of course connected to the cultural anxieties that are intrinsic to the Gothic – of changes, shifts, and unwanted returns - and the vampire as a figure of intersections, signalling the shift between stages of existence. If it is true that, to paraphrase Paul Ricoeur’s famous contention, the past returns to “haunt” us (105), then the history of New Orleans in The Originals is both established and haunted by vampires, a pervasive shadow that provides the city itself with an almost tangible Gothic afterlife. This connection, of course, extends beyond the fictional world of the television series, and finds fertile ground in the cultural narratives that the city constructs for itself. The tourism narrative of New Orleans also lies at the heart of the reconstructive historical imagination, which purposefully re-invents the city as a constructed entity that is, in itself, extremely sellable. The Originals mentions on multiple occasions that certain bars — owned, of course, by vampires — host regular ‘vampire themed events’, to “keep the tourists happy”. The importance of maintaining a steady influx of vampire tourism into the Quarter is made very clear throughout, and the vampires are complicit in fostering it for a number of reasons: not only because it provides them and the city with a constant revenue, but also because it brings a continuous source of fresh blood for the vampires to feed on. As Marcel puts it: “Something's gotta draw in the out-of-towners. Otherwise we'd all go hungry” (Episode 1, “Always and Forever”). New Orleans, it is made clear, is not only portrayed as a vampire hub, but also as a hot spot for vampire tourism; as part of the tourism narratives, the vampires themselves — who commonly feign humanity — actually further ‘pretend’ to be vampires for the tourists, who expect to find vampires in the city. It is made clear in The Originals that vampires often put on a show – and bear in mind, these are vampires who pretend to be human, who pretend to be vampires for the tourists. They channel stereotypes that belong in Gothic novels and films, and that are, as far as the ‘real’ vampires of the series, are concerned, mostly fictional. The vampires that are presented to the tourists in The Originals are, inevitably, inauthentic, for the real vampires themselves purposefully portray the vision of vampires put forward by popular culture, together with its own motifs and stereotypes. The vampires happily perform their popular culture role, in order to meet the expectations of the tourist. This interaction — which sociologist Dean MacCannell would refer to, when discussing the dynamics of tourism, as “staged authenticity” (591) — is the basis of the appeal, and what continues to bring tourists back, generating profits for vampires and humans alike. Nina Auerbach has persuasively argued that the vampire is often eroticised through its connections to the “self-obsessed’ glamour of consumerism that ‘subordinates history to seductive object” (57).With the issue of authenticity brought into sharp relief, The Originals also foregrounds questions of authenticity in relation to New Orleans’s own vampire tourism narrative, which ostensibly bases into historical narratives of magic, horror, and folklore, and constructs a fictionalised urban tale, suitable to the tourism trade. The vampires of the French Quarter in The Originals act as the embodiment of the constructed image of New Orleans as the epitome of a vampire tourist destination. ConclusionThere is a clear suggestion in The Originals that vampires have evolved from simple creatures of old folklore, to ‘products’ that can be sold to expectant tourists. This evolution, as far as popular culture is concerned, is also inevitably tied to the conceptualisation of certain locations as ‘vampiric’, a notion that, in the contemporary era, hinges on intersecting narratives of culture, history, and identity. Within this, New Orleans has successfully constructed an image for itself as a vampire city, exploiting, in a number ways, the popular and purposefully historicised connection to the undead. In both tourism narratives and popular culture, of which The Originals is an ideal example, New Orleans’s urban image — often sited in constructions and re-constructions, re-birth and decay — is presented as a result of the vampire’s own existence, and thrives in the Gothicised afterlife of imagery, symbolism, and cultural persuasion. In these terms, the ‘inauthentic’ vampires of The Originals are an ideal allegory that provides a channelling ground for the issues surrounding the ‘inauthentic’ state of New Orleans a sellable tourism entity. As both hinge on images of popular representation and desirable symbols, the historical narratives of New Orleans become entangled with — and are, at times, almost inseparable from — the fictional chronicles of the vampire in both aesthetic and conceptual terms. ReferencesAnyiwo, U. Melissa. “The Female Vampire in Popular Culture.” Gender in the Vampire Narrative. Eds. Amanda Hobson and U. Melissa Anyiwo. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2016. 173-192. Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.Crandle, Marita Woywod. New Orleans Vampires: History and Legend. Stroud: The History Press, 2017.Gotham, Kevin Fox. Authentic New Orleans: Tourism, Culture, and Race in the Big Easy. New York: New York University Press, 2007.———. “Tourism Gentrification: The Case of New Orleans’ Vieux Carre’.” Urban Studies 42.7 (2005): 1099-1121. Harris, Charlaine. All Together Dead. London: Gollancz, 2008.Interview with the Vampire. Dir. Neil Jordan. Geffen Pictures, 1994. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. “Mistaken Dichotomies.” Public Folklore. Eds. Robert Baron and Nick Spitzer. Oxford: University of Missisippi Press, 2007. 28-48.Marina, Peter J. Down and Out in New Orleans: Trangressive Living in the Informal Economy. New York: Columia University Press, 2017. McKinney, Louise. New Orleans: A Cultural History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.Murphy, Michael. Fear Dat New Orleans: A Guide to the Voodoo, Vampires, Graveyards & Ghosts of the Crescent City. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015.Piatti-Farnell, Lorna. The Vampire in Contemporary Popular Literature. London: Routledge, 2014. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Singles, Kathleen. Alternate History: Playing with Contingency and Necessity. Boston: de Gruyter, 2013.Souther, Mark. New Orleans on Parade: Tourism and the Transformation of the Crescent City. Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 2006. Stanonis, Anthony J. Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918-1945. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006.The Originals. Seasons 1-4. CBS/Warner Bros Television. 2013-2017.Thomas, Lynell. Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
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Wagman, Ira. "Wasteaminute.com: Notes on Office Work and Digital Distraction". M/C Journal 13, n.º 4 (18 de agosto de 2010). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.243.
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For those seeking a diversion from the drudgery of work there are a number of websites offering to take you away. Consider the case of wasteaminute.com. On the site there is everything from flash video games, soft-core pornography and animated nudity, to puzzles and parlour games like poker. In addition, the site offers links to video clips grouped in categories such as “funny,” “accidents,” or “strange.” With its bright yellow bubble letters and elementary design, wasteaminute will never win any Webby awards. It is also unlikely to be part of a lucrative initial public offering for its owner, a web marketing company based in Lexington, Kentucky. The internet ratings company Alexa gives wasteaminute a ranking of 5,880,401 when it comes to the most popular sites online over the last three months, quite some way behind sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, and Windows Live.Wasteaminute is not unique. There exists a group of websites, a micro-genre of sorts, that go out of their way to offer momentary escape from the more serious work at hand, with a similar menu of offerings. These include sites with names such as ishouldbeworking.com, i-am-bored.com, boredatwork.com, and drivenbyboredom.com. These web destinations represent only the most overtly named time-wasting opportunities. Video sharing sites like YouTube or France’s DailyMotion, personalised home pages like iGoogle, and the range of applications available on mobile devices offer similar opportunities for escape. Wasteaminute inspired me to think about the relationship between digital media technologies and waste. In one sense, the site’s offerings remind us of the Internet’s capacity to re-purpose old media forms from earlier phases in the digital revolution, like the retro video game PacMan, or from aspects of print culture, like crosswords (Bolter and Grusin; Straw). For my purposes, though, wasteaminute permits the opportunity to meditate, albeit briefly, on the ways media facilitate wasting time at work, particularly for those working in white- and no-collar work environments. In contemporary work environments work activity and wasteful activity exist on the same platform. With a click of a mouse or a keyboard shortcut, work and diversion can be easily interchanged on the screen, an experience of computing I know intimately from first-hand experience. The blurring of lines between work and waste has accompanied the extension of the ‘working day,’ a concept once tethered to the standardised work-week associated with modernity. Now people working in a range of professions take work out of the office and find themselves working in cafes, on public transportation, and at times once reserved for leisure, like weekends (Basso). In response to the indeterminate nature of when and where we are at work, the mainstream media routinely report about the wasteful use of computer technology for non-work purposes. Stories such as a recent one in the Washington Post which claimed that increased employee use of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter led to decreased productivity at work have become quite common in traditional media outlets (Casciato). Media technologies have always offered the prospect of making office work more efficient or the means for management to exercise control over employees. However, those same technologies have also served as the platforms on which one can engage in dilatory acts, stealing time from behind the boss’s back. I suggest stealing time at work may well be a “tactic,” in the sense used by Michel de Certeau, as a means to resist the rules and regulations that structure work and the working life. However, I also consider it to be a tactic in a different sense: websites and other digital applications offer users the means to take time back, in the form of ‘quick hits,’ providing immediate visual or narrative pleasures, or through interfaces which make the time-wasting look like work (Wagman). Reading sites like wasteaminute as examples of ‘office entertainment,’ reminds us of the importance of workers as audiences for web content. An analysis of a few case studies also reveals how the forms of address of these sites themselves recognise and capitalise on an understanding of the rhythms of the working day, as well as those elements of contemporary office culture characterised by interruption, monotony and surveillance. Work, Media, Waste A mass of literature documents the transformations of work brought on by industrialisation and urbanisation. A recent biography of Franz Kafka outlines the rigors imposed upon the writer while working as an insurance agent: his first contract stipulated that “no employee has the right to keep any objects other than those belonging to the office under lock in the desk and files assigned for its use” (Murray 66). Siegfried Kracauer’s collection of writings on salaried workers in Germany in the 1930s argues that mass entertainment offers distractions that inhibit social change. Such restrictions and inducements are exemplary of the attempts to make work succumb to managerial regimes which are intended to maximise productivity and minimise waste, and to establish a division between ‘company time’ and ‘free time’. One does not have to be an industrial sociologist to know the efforts of Frederick W. Taylor, and the disciplines of “scientific management” in the early twentieth century which were based on the idea of making work more efficient, or of the workplace sociology scholarship from the 1950s that drew attention to the ways that office work can be monotonous or de-personalising (Friedmann; Mills; Whyte). Historian JoAnne Yates has documented the ways those transformations, and what she calls an accompanying “philosophy of system and efficiency,” have been made possible through information and communication technologies, from the typewriter to carbon paper (107). Yates evokes the work of James Carey in identifying these developments, for example, the locating of workers in orderly locations such as offices, as spatial in nature. The changing meaning of work, particularly white-collar or bureaucratic labour in an age of precarious employment and neo-liberal economic regimes, and aggressive administrative “auditing technologies,” has subjected employees to more strenuous regimes of surveillance to ensure employee compliance and to protect against waste of company resources (Power). As Andrew Ross notes, after a deep period of self-criticism over the drudgery of work in North American settings in the 1960s, the subsequent years saw a re-thinking of the meaning of work, one that gradually traded greater work flexibility and self-management for more assertive forms of workplace control (9). As Ross notes, this too has changed, an after-effect of “the shareholder revolution,” which forced companies to deliver short-term profitability to its investors at any social cost. With so much at stake, Ross explains, the freedom of employees assumed a lower priority within corporate cultures, and “the introduction of information technologies in the workplace of the new capitalism resulted in the intensified surveillance of employees” (12). Others, like Dale Bradley, have drawn attention to the ways that the design of the office itself has always concerned itself with the bureaucratic and disciplinary control of bodies in space (77). The move away from physical workspaces such as ‘the pen’ to the cubicle and now from the cubicle to the virtual office is for Bradley a move from “construction” to “connection.” This spatial shift in the way in which control over employees is exercised is symbolic of the liquid forms in which bodies are now “integrated with flows of money, culture, knowledge, and power” in the post-industrial global economies of the twenty-first century. As Christena Nippert-Eng points out, receiving office space was seen as a marker of trust, since it provided employees with a sense of privacy to carry out affairs—both of a professional or of a personal matter—out of earshot of others. Privacy means a lot of things, she points out, including “a relative lack of accountability for our immediate whereabouts and actions” (163). Yet those same modalities of control which characterise communication technologies in workspaces may also serve as the platforms for people to waste time while working. In other words, wasteful practices utilize the same technology that is used to regulate and manage time spent in the workplace. The telephone has permitted efficient communication between units in an office building or between the office and outside, but ‘personal business’ can also be conducted on the same line. Radio stations offer ‘easy listening’ formats, providing unobtrusive music so as not to disturb work settings. However, they can easily be tuned to other stations for breaking news, live sports events, or other matters having to do with the outside world. Photocopiers and fax machines facilitate the reproduction and dissemination of communication regardless of whether it is it work or non-work related. The same, of course, is true for computerised applications. Companies may encourage their employees to use Facebook or Twitter to reach out to potential clients or customers, but those same applications may be used for personal social networking as well. Since the activities of work and play can now be found on the same platform, employers routinely remind their employees that their surfing activities, along with their e-mails and company documents, will be recorded on the company server, itself subject to auditing and review whenever the company sees fit. Employees must be careful to practice image management, in order to ensure that contradictory evidence does not appear online when they call in sick to the office. Over time the dynamics of e-mail and Internet etiquette have changed in response to such developments. Those most aware of the distractive and professionally destructive features of downloading a funny or comedic e-mail attachment have come to adopt the acronym “NSFW” (Not Safe for Work). Even those of us who don’t worry about those things are well aware that the cache and “history” function of web browsers threaten to reveal the extent to which our time online is spent in unproductive ways. Many companies and public institutions, for example libraries, have taken things one step further by filtering out access to websites that may be peripheral to the primary work at hand.At the same time contemporary workplace settings have sought to mix both work and play, or better yet to use play in the service of work, to make “work” more enjoyable for its workers. Professional development seminars, team-building exercises, company softball games, or group outings are examples intended to build morale and loyalty to the company among workers. Some companies offer their employees access to gyms, to game rooms, and to big screen TVs, in return for long and arduous—indeed, punishing—hours of time at the office (Dyer-Witheford and Sherman; Ross). In this manner, acts of not working are reconfigured as a form of work, or at least as a productive experience for the company at large. Such perks are offered with an assumption of personal self-discipline, a feature of what Nippert-Eng characterises as the “discretionary workplace” (154). Of course, this also comes with an expectation that workers will stay close to the office, and to their work. As Sarah Sharma recently argued in this journal, such thinking is part of the way that late capitalism constructs “innovative ways to control people’s time and regulate their movement in space.” At the same time, however, there are plenty of moments of gentle resistance, in which the same machines of control and depersonalisation can be customised, and where individual expressions find their own platforms. A photo essay by Anna McCarthy in the Journal of Visual Culture records the inspirational messages and other personalised objects with which workers adorn their computers and work stations. McCarthy’s photographs represent the way people express themselves in relation to their work, making it a “place where workplace politics and power relations play out, often quite visibly” (McCarthy 214). Screen SecretsIf McCarthy’s photo essay illustrates the overt ways in which people bring personal expression or gentle resistance to anodyne workplaces, there are also a series of other ‘screen acts’ that create opportunities to waste time in ways that are disguised as work. During the Olympics and US college basketball playoffs, both American broadcast networks CBS and NBC offered a “boss button,” a graphic link that a user could immediately click “if the boss was coming by” that transformed the screen to something was associated with the culture of work, such as a spreadsheet. Other purveyors of networked time-wasting make use of the spreadsheet to mask distraction. The website cantyouseeimbored turns a spreadsheet into a game of “Breakout!” while other sites, like Spreadtweet, convert your Twitter updates into the form of a spreadsheet. Such boss buttons and screen interfaces that mimic work are the presentday avatars of the “panic button,” a graphic image found at the bottom of websites back in the days of Web 1.0. A click of the panic button transported users away from an offending website and towards something more legitimate, like Yahoo! Even if it is unlikely that boss keys actually convince one’s superiors that one is really working—clicking to a spreadsheet only makes sense for a worker who might be expected to be working on those kinds of documents—they are an index of how notions of personal space and privacy play out in the digitalised workplace. David Kiely, an employee at an Australian investment bank, experienced this first hand when he opened an e-mail attachment sent to him by his co-workers featuring a scantily-clad model (Cuneo and Barrett). Unfortunately for Kiely, at the time he opened the attachment his computer screen was visible in the background of a network television interview with another of the bank’s employees. Kiely’s inauspicious click (which made his the subject of an investigation by his employees) continues to circulate on the Internet, and it spawned a number of articles highlighting the precarious nature of work in a digitalised environment where what might seem to be private can suddenly become very public, and thus able to be disseminated without restraint. At the same time, the public appetite for Kiely’s story indicates that not working at work, and using the Internet to do it, represents a mode of media consumption that is familiar to many of us, even if it is only the servers on the company computer that can account for how much time we spend doing it. Community attitudes towards time spent unproductively online reminds us that waste carries with it a range of negative signifiers. We talk about wasting time in terms of theft, “stealing time,” or even more dramatically as “killing time.” The popular construction of television as the “boob tube” distinguishes it from more ‘productive’ activities, like spending time with family, or exercise, or involvement in one’s community. The message is simple: life is too short to be “wasted” on such ephemera. If this kind of language is less familiar in the digital age, the discourse of ‘distraction’ is more prevalent. Yet, instead of judging distraction a negative symptom of the digital age, perhaps we should reinterpret wasting time as the worker’s attempt to assert some agency in an increasingly controlled workplace. ReferencesBasso, Pietro. Modern Times, Ancient Hours: Working Lives in the Twenty-First Century. London: Verso, 2003. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.Bradley, Dale. “Dimensions Vary: Technology, Space, and Power in the 20th Century Office”. Topia 11 (2004): 67-82.Casciato, Paul. “Facebook and Other Social Media Cost UK Billions”. Washington Post, 5 Aug. 2010. 11 Aug. 2010 ‹http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/05/AR2010080503951.html›.Cuneo, Clementine, and David Barrett. “Was Banker Set Up Over Saucy Miranda”. The Daily Telegraph 4 Feb. 2010. 21 May 2010 ‹http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/entertainment/sydney-confidential/was-banker-set-up-over-saucy-miranda/story-e6frewz0-1225826576571›.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Vol. 1. Berkeley: U of California P. 1988.Dyer-Witheford, Nick, and Zena Sharman. "The Political Economy of Canada's Video and Computer Game Industry”. Canadian Journal of Communication 30.2 (2005). 1 May 2010 ‹http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/1575/1728›.Friedmann, Georges. Industrial Society. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1955.Kracauer, Siegfried. The Salaried Masses. London: Verso, 1998.McCarthy, Anna. Ambient Television. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. ———. “Geekospheres: Visual Culture and Material Culture at Work”. Journal of Visual Culture 3 (2004): 213-21.Mills, C. Wright. White Collar. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1951. Murray, Nicholas. Kafka: A Biography. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004.Newman, Michael. “Ze Frank and the Poetics of Web Video”. First Monday 13.5 (2008). 1 Aug. 2010 ‹http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2102/1962›.Nippert-Eng, Christena. Home and Work: Negotiating Boundaries through Everyday Life. Chicago: U. of Chicago P, 1996.Power, Michael. The Audit Society. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Ross, Andrew. No Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2004. Sharma, Sarah. “The Great American Staycation and the Risk of Stillness”. M/C Journal 12.1 (2009). 11 May 2010 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/122›. Straw, Will. “Embedded Memories”. Residual Media Ed. Charles Acland. U. of Minnesota P., 2007. 3-15.Whyte, William. The Organisation Man. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957. Wagman, Ira. “Log On, Goof Off, Look Up: Facebook and the Rhythms of Canadian Internet Use”. How Canadians Communicate III: Contexts for Popular Culture. Eds. Bart Beaty, Derek, Gloria Filax Briton, and Rebecca Sullivan. Athabasca: Athabasca UP 2009. 55-77. ‹http://www2.carleton.ca/jc/ccms/wp-content/ccms-files/02_Beaty_et_al-How_Canadians_Communicate.pdf›Yates, JoAnne. “Business Use of Information Technology during the Industrial Age”. A Nation Transformed by Information. Eds. Alfred D. Chandler & James W. Cortada. Oxford: Oxford UP., 2000. 107-36.
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Brien, Donna Lee. "Forging Continuing Bonds from the Dead to the Living: Gothic Commemorative Practices along Australia’s Leichhardt Highway". M/C Journal 17, n.º 4 (24 de julho de 2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.858.
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The Leichhardt Highway is a six hundred-kilometre stretch of sealed inland road that joins the Australian Queensland border town of Goondiwindi with the Capricorn Highway, just south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Named after the young Prussian naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt, part of this roadway follows the route his party took as they crossed northern Australia from Morton Bay (Brisbane) to Port Essington (near Darwin). Ignoring the usual colonial practice of honouring the powerful and aristocratic, Leichhardt named the noteworthy features along this route after his supporters and fellow expeditioners. Many of these names are still in use and a series of public monuments have also been erected in the intervening century and a half to commemorate this journey. Unlike Leichhardt, who survived his epic trip, some contemporary travellers who navigate the remote roadway named in his honour do not arrive at their final destinations. Memorials to these violently interrupted lives line the highway, many enigmatically located in places where there is no obvious explanation for the lethal violence that occurred there. This examination profiles the memorials along Leichhardt’s highway as Gothic practice, in order to illuminate some of the uncanny paradoxes around public memorials, as well as the loaded emotional terrain such commemorative practices may inhabit. All humans know that death awaits them (Morell). Yet, despite this, and the unprecedented torrent of images of death and dying saturating news, television, and social media (Duwe; Sumiala; Bisceglio), Gorer’s mid-century ideas about the denial of death and Becker’s 1973 Pulitzer prize-winning description of the purpose of human civilization as a defence against this knowledge remains current in the contemporary trope that individuals (at least in the West) deny their mortality. Contributing to this enigmatic situation is how many deny the realities of aging and bodily decay—the promise of the “life extension” industries (Hall)—and are shielded from death by hospitals, palliative care providers, and the multimillion dollar funeral industry (Kiernan). Drawing on Piatti-Farnell’s concept of popular culture artefacts as “haunted/haunting” texts, the below describes how memorials to the dead can powerfully reconnect those who experience them with death’s reality, by providing an “encrypted passageway through which the dead re-join the living in a responsive cycle of exchange and experience” (Piatti-Farnell). While certainly very different to the “sublime” iconic Gothic structure, the Gothic ruin that Summers argued could be seen as “a sacred relic, a memorial, a symbol of infinite sadness, of tenderest sensibility and regret” (407), these memorials do function in both this way as melancholy/regret-inducing relics as well as in Piatti-Farnell’s sense of bringing the dead into everyday consciousness. Such memorialising activity also evokes one of Spooner’s features of the Gothic, by acknowledging “the legacies of the past and its burdens on the present” (8).Ludwig Leichhardt and His HighwayWhen Leichhardt returned to Sydney in 1846 from his 18-month journey across northern Australia, he was greeted with surprise and then acclaim. Having mounted his expedition without any backing from influential figures in the colony, his party was presumed lost only weeks after its departure. Yet, once Leichhardt and almost all his expedition returned, he was hailed “Prince of Explorers” (Erdos). When awarding him a significant purse raised by public subscription, then Speaker of the Legislative Council voiced what he believed would be the explorer’s lasting memorial —the public memory of his achievement: “the undying glory of having your name enrolled amongst those of the great men whose genius and enterprise have impelled them to seek for fame in the prosecution of geographical science” (ctd. Leichhardt 539). Despite this acclaim, Leichhardt was a controversial figure in his day; his future prestige not enhanced by his Prussian/Germanic background or his disappearance two years later attempting to cross the continent. What troubled the colonial political class, however, was his transgressive act of naming features along his route after commoners rather than the colony’s aristocrats. Today, the Leichhardt Highway closely follows Leichhardt’s 1844-45 route for some 130 kilometres from Miles, north through Wandoan to Taroom. In the first weeks of his journey, Leichhardt named 16 features in this area: 6 of the more major of these after the men in his party—including the Aboriginal man ‘Charley’ and boy John Murphy—4 more after the tradesmen and other non-aristocratic sponsors of his venture, and the remainder either in memory of the journey’s quotidian events or natural features there found. What we now accept as traditional memorialising practice could in this case be termed as Gothic, in that it upset the rational, normal order of its day, and by honouring humble shopkeepers, blacksmiths and Indigenous individuals, revealed the “disturbance and ambivalence” (Botting 4) that underlay colonial class relations (Macintyre). On 1 December 1844, Leichhardt also memorialised his own past, referencing the Gothic in naming a watercourse The Creek of the Ruined Castles due to the “high sandstone rocks, fissured and broken like pillars and walls and the high gates of the ruined castles of Germany” (57). Leichhardt also disturbed and disfigured the nature he so admired, famously carving his initials deep into trees along his route—a number of which still exist, including the so-called Leichhardt Tree, a large coolibah in Taroom’s main street. Leichhardt also wrote his own memorial, keeping detailed records of his experiences—both good and more regretful—in the form of field books, notebooks and letters, with his major volume about this expedition published in London in 1847. Leichhardt’s journey has since been memorialised in various ways along the route. The Leichhardt Tree has been further defaced with numerous plaques nailed into its ancient bark, and the town’s federal government-funded Bicentennial project raised a formal memorial—a large sandstone slab laid with three bronze plaques—in the newly-named Ludwig Leichhardt Park. Leichhardt’s name also adorns many sites both along, and outside, the routes of his expeditions. While these fittingly include natural features such as the Leichhardt River in north-west Queensland (named in 1856 by Augustus Gregory who crossed it by searching for traces of the explorer’s ill-fated 1848 expedition), there are also many businesses across Queensland and the Northern Territory less appropriately carrying his name. More somber monuments to Leichhardt’s legacy also resulted from this journey. The first of these was the white settlement that followed his declaration that the countryside he moved through was well endowed with fertile soils. With squatters and settlers moving in and land taken up before Leichhardt had even arrived back in Sydney, the local Yeeman people were displaced, mistreated and completely eradicated within a decade (Elder). Mid-twentieth century, Patrick White’s literary reincarnation, Voss of the eponymous novel, and paintings by Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker have enshrined in popular memory not only the difficult (and often described as Gothic) nature of the landscape through which Leichhardt travelled (Adams; Mollinson, and Bonham), but also the distinctive and contrary blend of intelligence, spiritual mysticism, recklessness, and stoicism Leichhardt brought to his task. Roadside Memorials Today, the Leichhardt Highway is also lined with a series of roadside shrines to those who have died much more recently. While, like centotaphs, tombstones, and cemeteries, these memorialise the dead, they differ in usually marking the exact location that death occurred. In 43 BC, Cicero articulated the idea of the dead living in memory, “The life of the dead consists in the recollection cherished of them by the living” (93), yet Nelson is one of very few contemporary writers to link roadside memorials to elements of Gothic sensibility. Such constructions can, however, be described as Gothic, in that they make the roadway unfamiliar by inscribing onto it the memory of corporeal trauma and, in the process, re-creating their locations as vivid sites of pain and suffering. These are also enigmatic sites. Traffic levels are generally low along the flat or gently undulating terrain and many of these memorials are located in locations where there is no obvious explanation for the violence that occurred there. They are loci of contradictions, in that they are both more private than other memorials, in being designed, and often made and erected, by family and friends of the deceased, and yet more public, visible to all who pass by (Campbell). Cemeteries are set apart from their surroundings; the roadside memorial is, in contrast, usually in open view along a thoroughfare. In further contrast to cemeteries, which contain many relatively standardised gravesites, individual roadside memorials encapsulate and express not only the vivid grief of family and friends but also—when they include vehicle wreckage or personal artefacts from the fatal incident—provide concrete evidence of the trauma that occurred. While the majority of individuals interned in cemeteries are long dead, roadside memorials mark relatively contemporary deaths, some so recent that there may still be tyre marks, debris and bloodstains marking the scene. In 2008, when I was regularly travelling this roadway, I documented, and researched, the six then extant memorial sites that marked the locations of ten fatalities from 1999 to 2006. (These were all still in place in mid-2014.) The fatal incidents are very diverse. While half involved trucks and/or road trains, at least three were single vehicle incidents, and the deceased ranged from 13 to 84 years of age. Excell argues that scholarship on roadside memorials should focus on “addressing the diversity of the material culture” (‘Contemporary Deathscapes’) and, in these terms, the Leichhardt Highway memorials vary from simple crosses to complex installations. All include crosses (mostly, but not exclusively, white), and almost all are inscribed with the name and birth/death dates of the deceased. Most include flowers or other plants (sometimes fresh but more often plastic), but sometimes also a range of relics from the crash and/or personal artefacts. These are, thus, unsettling sights, not least in the striking contrast they provide with the highway and surrounding road reserve. The specific location is a key component of their ability to re-sensitise viewers to the dangers of the route they are travelling. The first memorial travelling northwards, for instance, is situated at the very point at which the highway begins, some 18 kilometres from Goondiwindi. Two small white crosses decorated with plastic flowers are set poignantly close together. The inscriptions can also function as a means of mobilising connection with these dead strangers—a way of building Secomb’s “haunted community”, whereby community in the post-colonial age can only be built once past “murderous death” (131) is acknowledged. This memorial is inscribed with “Cec Hann 06 / A Good Bloke / A Good hoarseman [sic]” and “Pat Hann / A Good Woman” to tragically commemorate the deaths of an 84-year-old man and his 79-year-old wife from South Australia who died in the early afternoon of 5 June 2006 when their Ford Falcon, towing a caravan, pulled onto the highway and was hit by a prime mover pulling two trailers (Queensland Police, ‘Double Fatality’; Jones, and McColl). Further north along the highway are two memorials marking the most inexplicable of road deaths: the single vehicle fatality (Connolly, Cullen, and McTigue). Darren Ammenhauser, aged 29, is remembered with a single white cross with flowers and plaque attached to a post, inscribed hopefully, “Darren Ammenhauser 1971-2000 At Rest.” Further again, at Billa Billa Creek, a beautifully crafted metal cross attached to a fence is inscribed with the text, “Kenneth J. Forrester / RIP Jack / 21.10.25 – 27.4.05” marking the death of the 79-year-old driver whose vehicle veered off the highway to collide with a culvert on the creek. It was reported that the vehicle rolled over several times before coming to rest on its wheels and that Forrester was dead when the police arrived (Queensland Police, ‘Fatal Traffic Incident’). More complex memorials recollect both single and multiple deaths. One, set on both sides of the road, maps the physical trajectory of the fatal smash. This memorial comprises white crosses on both sides of road, attached to a tree on one side, and a number of ancillary sites including damaged tyres with crosses placed inside them on both sides of the road. Simple inscriptions relay the inability of such words to express real grief: “Gary (Gazza) Stevens / Sadly missed” and “Gary (Gazza) Stevens / Sadly missed / Forever in our hearts.” The oldest and most complex memorial on the route, commemorating the death of four individuals on 18 June 1999, is also situated on both sides of the road, marking the collision of two vehicles travelling in opposite directions. One memorial to a 62-year-old man comprises a cross with flowers, personal and automotive relics, and a plaque set inside a wooden fence and simply inscribed “John Henry Keenan / 23-11-1936–18-06-1999”. The second memorial contains three white crosses set side-by-side, together with flowers and relics, and reveals that members of three generations of the same family died at this location: “Raymond Campbell ‘Butch’ / 26-3-67–18-6-99” (32 years of age), “Lorraine Margaret Campbell ‘Lloydie’ / 29-11-46–18-6-99” (53 years), and “Raymond Jon Campbell RJ / 28-1-86–18-6-99” (13 years). The final memorial on this stretch of highway is dedicated to Jason John Zupp of Toowoomba who died two weeks before Christmas 2005. This consists of a white cross, decorated with flowers and inscribed: “Jason John Zupp / Loved & missed by all”—a phrase echoed in his newspaper obituary. The police media statement noted that, “at 11.24pm a prime mover carrying four empty trailers [stacked two high] has rolled on the Leichhardt Highway 17km north of Taroom” (Queensland Police, ‘Fatal Truck Accident’). The roadside memorial was placed alongside a ditch on a straight stretch of road where the body was found. The coroner’s report adds the following chilling information: “Mr Zupp was thrown out of the cabin and his body was found near the cabin. There is no evidence whatsoever that he had applied the brakes or in any way tried to prevent the crash … Jason was not wearing his seatbelt” (Cornack 5, 6). Cornack also remarked the truck was over length, the brakes had not been properly adjusted, and the trip that Zupp had undertaken could not been lawfully completed according to fatigue management regulations then in place (8). Although poignant and highly visible due to these memorials, these deaths form a small part of Australia’s road toll, and underscore our ambivalent relationship with the automobile, where road death is accepted as a necessary side-effect of the freedom of movement the technology offers (Ladd). These memorials thus animate highways as Gothic landscapes due to the “multifaceted” (Haider 56) nature of the fear, terror and horror their acknowledgement can bring. Since 1981, there have been, for instance, between some 1,600 and 3,300 road deaths each year in Australia and, while there is evidence of a long term downward trend, the number of deaths per annum has not changed markedly since 1991 (DITRDLG 1, 2), and has risen in some years since then. The U.S.A. marked its millionth road death in 1951 (Ladd) along the way to over 3,000,000 during the 20th century (Advocates). These deaths are far reaching, with U.K. research suggesting that each death there leaves an average of 6 people significantly affected, and that there are some 10 to 20 per cent of mourners who experience more complicated grief and longer term negative affects during this difficult time (‘Pathways Through Grief’). As the placing of roadside memorials has become a common occurrence the world over (Klaassens, Groote, and Vanclay; Grider; Cohen), these are now considered, in MacConville’s opinion, not only “an appropriate, but also an expected response to tragedy”. Hockey and Draper have explored the therapeutic value of the maintenance of “‘continuing bonds’ between the living and the dead” (3). This is, however, only one explanation for the reasons that individuals erect roadside memorials with research suggesting roadside memorials perform two main purposes in their linking of the past with the present—as not only sites of grieving and remembrance, but also of warning (Hartig, and Dunn; Everett; Excell, Roadside Memorials; MacConville). Clark adds that by “localis[ing] and personalis[ing] the road dead,” roadside memorials raise the profile of road trauma by connecting the emotionless statistics of road death directly to individual tragedy. They, thus, transform the highway into not only into a site of past horror, but one in which pain and terror could still happen, and happen at any moment. Despite their increasing commonality and their recognition as cultural artefacts, these memorials thus occupy “an uncomfortable place” both in terms of public policy and for some individuals (Lowe). While in some states of the U.S.A. and in Ireland the erection of such memorials is facilitated by local authorities as components of road safety campaigns, in the U.K. there appears to be “a growing official opposition to the erection of memorials” (MacConville). Criticism has focused on the dangers (of distraction and obstruction) these structures pose to passing traffic and pedestrians, while others protest their erection on aesthetic grounds and even claim memorials can lower property values (Everett). While many ascertain a sense of hope and purpose in the physical act of creating such shrines (see, for instance, Grider; Davies), they form an uncanny presence along the highway and can provide dangerous psychological territory for the viewer (Brien). Alongside the townships, tourist sites, motels, and petrol stations vying to attract customers, they stain the roadway with the unmistakable sign that a violent death has happened—bringing death, and the dead, to the fore as a component of these journeys, and destabilising prominent cultural narratives of technological progress and safety (Richter, Barach, Ben-Michael, and Berman).Conclusion This investigation has followed Goddu who proposes that a Gothic text “registers its culture’s contradictions” (3) and, in profiling these memorials as “intimately connected to the culture that produces them” (Goddu 3) has proposed memorials as Gothic artefacts that can both disturb and reveal. Roadside memorials are, indeed, so loaded with emotional content that their close contemplation can be traumatising (Brien), yet they are inescapable while navigating the roadway. Part of their power resides in their ability to re-animate those persons killed in these violent in the minds of those viewing these memorials. In this way, these individuals are reincarnated as ghostly presences along the highway, forming channels via which the traveller can not only make human contact with the dead, but also come to recognise and ponder their own sense of mortality. While roadside memorials are thus like civic war memorials in bringing untimely death to the forefront of public view, roadside memorials provide a much more raw expression of the chaotic, anarchic and traumatic moment that separates the world of the living from that of the dead. While traditional memorials—such as those dedicated by, and to, Leichhardt—moreover, pay homage to the vitality of the lives of those they commemorate, roadside memorials not only acknowledge the alarming circumstances of unexpected death but also stand testament to the power of the paradox of the incontrovertibility of sudden death versus our lack of ability to postpone it. In this way, further research into these and other examples of Gothic memorialising practice has much to offer various areas of cultural study in Australia.ReferencesAdams, Brian. Sidney Nolan: Such Is Life. Hawthorn, Vic.: Hutchinson, 1987. Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. “Motor Vehicle Traffic Fatalities & Fatality Rate: 1899-2003.” 2004. Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973. Bisceglio, Paul. “How Social Media Is Changing the Way We Approach Death.” The Atlantic 20 Aug. 2013. Botting, Fred. Gothic: The New Critical Idiom. 2nd edition. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014. Brien, Donna Lee. “Looking at Death with Writers’ Eyes: Developing Protocols for Utilising Roadside Memorials in Creative Writing Classes.” Roadside Memorials. Ed. Jennifer Clark. Armidale, NSW: EMU Press, 2006. 208–216. Campbell, Elaine. “Public Sphere as Assemblage: The Cultural Politics of Roadside Memorialization.” The British Journal of Sociology 64.3 (2013): 526–547. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero. 43 BC. Trans. C. D. Yonge. London: George Bell & Sons, 1903. Clark, Jennifer. “But Statistics Don’t Ride Skateboards, They Don’t Have Nicknames Like ‘Champ’: Personalising the Road Dead with Roadside Memorials.” 7th International Conference on the Social Context of Death, Dying and Disposal. Bath, UK: University of Bath, 2005. Cohen, Erik. “Roadside Memorials in Northeastern Thailand.” OMEGA: Journal of Death and Dying 66.4 (2012–13): 343–363. Connolly, John F., Anne Cullen, and Orfhlaith McTigue. “Single Road Traffic Deaths: Accident or Suicide?” Crisis: The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention 16.2 (1995): 85–89. Cornack [Coroner]. Transcript of Proceedings. In The Matter of an Inquest into the Cause and Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Jason John Zupp. Towoomba, Qld.: Coroners Court. 12 Oct. 2007. Davies, Douglas. “Locating Hope: The Dynamics of Memorial Sites.” 6th International Conference on the Social Context of Death, Dying and Disposal. York, UK: University of York, 2002. Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government [DITRDLG]. Road Deaths Australia: 2007 Statistical Summary. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2008. Duwe, Grant. “Body-count Journalism: The Presentation of Mass Murder in the News Media.” Homicide Studies 4 (2000): 364–399. Elder, Bruce. Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of Aboriginal Australians since 1788. Sydney: New Holland, 1998. Erdos, Renee. “Leichhardt, Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig (1813-1848).” Australian Dictionary of Biography Online Edition. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1967. Everett, Holly. Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial Culture. Austin: Texas UP, 2002. Excell, Gerri. “Roadside Memorials in the UK.” Unpublished MA thesis. Reading: University of Reading, 2004. ———. “Contemporary Deathscapes: A Comparative Analysis of the Material Culture of Roadside Memorials in the US, Australia and the UK.” 7th International Conference on the Social Context of Death, Dying and Disposal. Bath, UK: University of Bath, 2005. Goddu, Teresa A. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. Gorer, Geoffrey. “The Pornography of Death.” Encounter V.4 (1955): 49–52. Grider, Sylvia. “Spontaneous Shrines: A Modern Response to Tragedy and Disaster.” New Directions in Folklore (5 Oct. 2001). Haider, Amna. “War Trauma and Gothic Landscapes of Dispossession and Dislocation in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy.” Gothic Studies 14.2 (2012): 55–73. Hall, Stephen S. Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2003. Hartig, Kate V., and Kevin M. Dunn. “Roadside Memorials: Interpreting New Deathscapes in Newcastle, New South Wales.” Australian Geographical Studies 36 (1998): 5–20. Hockey, Jenny, and Janet Draper. “Beyond the Womb and the Tomb: Identity, (Dis)embodiment and the Life Course.” Body & Society 11.2 (2005): 41–57. Online version: 1–25. Jones, Ian, and Kaye McColl. (2006) “Highway Tragedy.” Goondiwindi Argus 9 Jun. 2006. Kiernan, Stephen P. “The Transformation of Death in America.” Final Acts: Death, Dying, and the Choices We Make. Eds. Nan Bauer-Maglin, and Donna Perry. Rutgers University: Rutgers UP, 2010. 163–182. Klaassens, M., P.D. Groote, and F.M. Vanclay. “Expressions of Private Mourning in Public Space: The Evolving Structure of Spontaneous and Permanent Roadside Memorials in the Netherlands.” Death Studies 37.2 (2013): 145–171. Ladd, Brian. Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Leichhardt, Ludwig. Journal of an Overland Expedition of Australia from Moreton Bay to Port Essington, A Distance of Upwards of 3000 Miles during the Years 1844–1845. London, T & W Boone, 1847. Facsimile ed. Sydney: Macarthur Press, n.d. Lowe, Tim. “Roadside Memorials in South Eastern Australia.” 7th International Conference on the Social Context of Death, Dying and Disposal. Bath, UK: University of Bath, 2005. MacConville, Una. “Roadside Memorials.” Bath, UK: Centre for Death & Society, Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath, 2007. Macintyre, Stuart. “The Making of the Australian Working Class: An Historiographical Survey.” Historical Studies 18.71 (1978): 233–253. 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Lyubchenko, Irina. "NFTs and Digital Art". M/C Journal 25, n.º 2 (25 de abril de 2022). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2891.
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Introduction This article is concerned with the recent rise in popularity of crypto art, the term given to digital artworks whose ownership and provenance are confirmed with a non-fungible token (NFT), making it possible to sell these works within decentralised cryptocurrency art markets. The goal of this analysis is to trace a genealogy of crypto art to Dada, an avant-garde movement that originated in the early twentieth century. My claim is that Dadaism in crypto art appears in its exhausted form that is a result of its revival in the 1950s and 1960s by the Neo Dada that reached the current age through Pop Art. Dada’s anti-art project of rejecting beauty and aesthetics has transformed into commercial success in the Neo Dada Pop Art movement. In turn, Pop Art produced its crypto version that explores not only the question of what art is and is not, but also when art becomes money. In what follows, I will provide a brief overview of NFT art and its three categories that could generally be found within crypto marketplaces: native crypto art, non-digital art, and digital distributed-creativity art. Throughout, I will foreground the presence of Dadaism in these artworks and provide art historical context. NFTs: Brief Overview A major technological component that made NFTs possible was developed in 1991, when cryptographers Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta proposed a method for time-stamping data contained in digital documents shared within a distributed network of users (99). This work laid the foundation for what became known as blockchain and was further implemented in the development of Bitcoin, a digital currency invented by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. The original non-fungible tokens, Coloured Coins, were created in 2012. By “colouring” or differentiating bitcoins, Coloured Coins were assigned special properties and had a value independent of the underlying Bitcoin, allowing their use as commodity certificates, alternative currencies, and other financial instruments (Assia et al.). In 2014, fuelled by a motivation to protect digital artists from unsanctioned distribution of their work while also enabling digital art sales, media artist Kevin McCoy and tech entrepreneur Anil Dash saw the potential of blockchain to satisfy their goals and developed what became to be known as NFTs. This overnight invention was a result of McCoy and Dash’s participation in the Seven on Seven annual New York City event, a one-day creative collaboration that challenged seven pairs of artists and engineers to “make something” (Rhizome). McCoy and Dash did not patent their invention, nor were they able to popularise it, mentally archiving it as a “footnote in internet history”. Ironically, just a couple of years later NFTs exploded into a billion-dollar market, living up to an ironic name of “monetized graphics” that the pair gave to their invention. Crypto art became an international sensation in March 2021, when a digital artist Mike Winklemann, known as Beeple, sold his digital collage titled Everydays: The First 5000 Days for US$69.3 million, prompting Noah Davis, a curator who assisted with the sale at the Christie’s auction house, to proclaim: “he showed us this collage, and that was my eureka moment when I knew this was going to be extremely important. It was just so monumental and so indicative of what NFTs can do” (Kastrenakes). As a technology, a non-fungible token can create digital scarcity in an otherwise infinitely replicable digital space. Contrary to fungible tokens, which are easily interchangeable due to having an equal value, non-fungible tokens represent unique items for which one cannot find an equivalent. That is why we rely on the fungibility of money to exchange non-fungible unique goods, such as art. Employing non-fungible tokens allows owning and exchanging digital items outside of the context in which they originated. Now, one can prove one’s possession of a digital skin from a videogame, for example, and sell it on digital markets using crypto currency (“Bible”). Behind the technology of NFTs lies the use of a cryptographic hash function, which converts a digital artwork of any file size into a fixed-length hash, called message digest (Dooley 179). It is impossible to revert the process and arrive at the original image, a quality of non-reversibility that makes the hash function a perfect tool for creating a digital representation of an artwork proofed from data tampering. The issued or minted NFT enters a blockchain, a distributed database that too relies on cryptographic properties to guarantee fidelity and security of data stored. Once the NFT becomes a part of the blockchain, its transaction history is permanently recorded and publicly available. Thus, the NFT simultaneously serves as a unique representation of the artwork and a digital proof of ownership. NFTs are traded in digital marketplaces, such as SuperRare, KnownOrigin, OpenSea, and Rarible, which rely on a blockchain to sustain their operations. An analysis of these markets’ inventory can be summarised by the following list of roughly grouped types of artistic works available for purchase: native crypto art, non-digital art, distributed creativity art. Native Crypto Art In this category, I include projects that motivated the creation of NFT protocols. Among these projects are the aforementioned Colored Coins, created in 2012. These were followed by issuing other visual creations native to the crypto-world, such as LarvaLabs’s CryptoPunks, a series of 10,000 algorithmically generated 8-bit-style pixelated digital avatars originally available for free to anyone with an Ethereum blockchain account, gaining a cult status among the collectors when they became rare sought-after items. On 13 February 2022, CryptoPunk #5822 was sold for roughly $24 million in Ethereum, beating the previous record for such an NFT, CryptoPunk #3100, sold for $7.58 million. CryptoPunks laid the foundation for other collectible personal profile projects, such Bored Ape Yacht Club and Cool Cats. One of the ultimate collections of crypto art that demonstrates the exhaustion of original Dada motivations is titled Monas, an NFT project made up of 5,000 programmatically generated versions of a pixelated Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1503-1506). Each Monas, according to the creators, is “a mix of Art, history, and references from iconic NFTs” (“Monas”). Monas are a potpourri of meme and pop culture, infused with inside jokes and utmost silliness. Monas invariably bring to mind the historic Dadaist gesture of challenging bourgeois tastes through defacing iconic art historical works, such as Marcel Duchamp’s treatment of Mona Lisa in L.H.O.O.Q. In 1919, Duchamp drew a moustache and a goatee on a reproduction of La Joconde, as the French called the painting, and inscribed “L.H.O.O.Q.” that when pronounced sounds like “Elle a chaud au cul”, a vulgar expression indicating sexual arousal of the subject. At the time of its creation, this Dada act was met with the utmost public contempt, as Mona Lisa was considered a sacred work of art and a patron of the arts, an almost religious symbol (Elger and Grosenick 82). Needless to say, the effect of Monas on public consciousness is far from causing disgust and, on the contrary, brings childish joy and giggles. As an NFT artist, Mankind, explains in his YouTube video on personal profile projects: “PFPs are built around what people enjoy. People enjoy memes, people enjoy status, people enjoy being a part of something bigger than themselves, the basic primary desire to mix digital with social and belong to a community”. Somehow, “being bigger than themselves” has come to involve collecting defaced images of Mona Lisa. Turning our attention to historical analysis will help trace this transformation of the Dada insult into a collectible NFT object. Dada and Its Legacy in Crypto Art Dada was founded in 1916 in Zurich, by Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Hans Richter, and other artists who fled their homelands during the First World War (Hapgood and Rittner 63). One of Dada’s primary aspirations was to challenge the dominance of reason that brought about the tragedy of the First World War through attacking the postulates of culture this form of reason produced. Already in 1921, such artists as André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Max Ernst were becoming exhausted by Dada’s nihilist tendencies and rejection of all programmes for the arts, except for the one that called for the total freedom of expression. The movement was pronounced dead about May 1921, leaving no sense of regret since, in the words of Breton, “its omnipotence and its tyranny had made it intolerable” (205). An important event associated with Dada’s revival and the birth of the Neo Dada movement was the publication of The Dada Painters and Poets in 1951. This volume, the first collection of Dada writings in English and the most comprehensive anthology in any language, was introduced to the young artists at the New School by John Cage, who revived Tristan Tzara’s concept that “life is far more interesting” than art (Hapgood and Rittner 64). The 1950s were marked by a renewed interest in Dadaism that can also be evidenced in galleries and museums organising numerous exhibitions on the movement, such as Dada 1916 –1923 curated by Marcel Duchamp at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1953. By the end of the decade, such artists as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg began exploring materials and techniques that can be attributed to Dadaism, which prompted the title of Neo Dada to describe this thematic return (Hapgood and Rittner 64). Among the artistic approaches that Neo Dada borrowed from Dada are Duchampian readymades that question the status of the art object, Kurt Schwitters’s collage technique of incorporating often banal scraps and pieces of the everyday, and the use of chance operations as a compositional device (Hapgood and Rittner 63–64). These approaches comprise the toolbox of crypto artists as well. Monas, CryptoPunks, and Bored Ape Yacht Club are digital collages made of scraps of pop culture and the everyday Internet life assembled into compositional configurations through chance operation made possible by the application of algorithmic generation of the images in each series. Art historian Helen Molesworth sees the strategies of montage, the readymade, and chance not only as “mechanisms for making art objects” but also as “abdications of traditional forms of artistic labor” (178). Molesworth argues that Duchamp’s invention of the readymade “substituted the act of (artistic) production with consumption” and “profoundly questioned the role, stability, nature, and necessity of the artist’s labor” (179). Together with questioning the need for artistic labour, Neo Dadaists inherited what an American art historian Jack D. Flam terms the “anything goes” attitude: Dada’s liberating destruction of rules and derision of art historical canon allowed anything and everything to be considered art (xii). The “anything goes” approach can also be traced to the contemporary crypto artists, such as Beeple, whose Everydays: The First 5000 Days was a result of assembling into a collage the first 5,000 of his daily training sketches created while teaching himself new digital tools (Kastrenakes). When asked whether he genuinely liked any of his images, Beeple explained that most digital art was created by teams of people working over the course of days or even weeks. When he “is pooping something out in 45 minutes”, it “is probably not gonna look that great comparatively” (Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg). At the core of Dada was a spirit of absurdism that drove an attack on the social, political, artistic, and philosophical norms, constituting a radical movement against the Establishment (Flam xii). In Dada Art and Anti-Art, Hans Richter’s personal historical account of the Dada movement, the artist describes the basic principle of Dada as guided by a motivation “to outrage public opinion” (66). Richter’s writings also point out a desensitisation towards Dada provocations that the public experienced as a result of Dada’s repetitive assaults, demanding an invention of new methods to disgrace the public taste. Richter recounts: our exhibitions were not enough. Not everyone in Zurich came to look at our pictures, attending our meetings, read our poems and manifestos. The devising and raising of public hell was an essential function of any Dada movement, whether its goal was pro-art, non-art or anti-art. And the public (like insects or bacteria) had developed immunity to one of kind poison, we had to think of another. (66) Richter’s account paints a cultural environment in which new artistic provocations mutate into accepted norms in a quick succession, forming a public body that is immune to anti-art “poisons”. In the foreword to Dada Painters and Poets, Flam outlines a trajectory of acceptance and subjugation of the Dadaist spirit by the subsequent revival of the movement’s core values in the Neo Dada of the 1950s and 1960s. When Dadaism was rediscovered by the writers and artists in the 1950s, the Dada spirit characterised by absurdist irony, self-parody, and deadpan realism was becoming a part of everyday life, as if art entered life and transformed it in its own image. The Neo Dada artists, such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol, existed in a culturally pluralistic space where the project of a rejection of the Establishment was quickly absorbed into the mainstream, mutating into the high culture it was supposedly criticising and bringing commercial success of which the original Dada artists would have been deeply ashamed (Flam xiii). Raoul Hausmann states: “Dada fell like a raindrop from heaven. The Neo-Dadaists have learnt to imitate the fall, but not the raindrop” (as quoted in Craft 129). With a similar sentiment, Richard Huelsenbeck writes: “Neo-Dada has turned the weapons used by Dada, and later by Surrealism, into popular ploughshares with which to till the fertile soil of sensation-hungry galleries eager for business” (as quoted in Craft 130). Marcel Duchamp, the forefather of the avant-garde, comments on the loss of Dada’s original intent: this Neo-Dada, which they call New Realism, Pop Art, Assemblage, etc., is an easy way out, and lives on what Dada did. When I discovered ready-mades I thought to discourage aesthetics. In Neo-Dada they have taken my ready-mades and found aesthetic beauty in them. I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty. (Flam xiii) In Neo Dada, the original anti-art impulse of Dadaism was converted into its opposite, becoming an artistic stance and a form of aesthetics. Flam notes that these gradual transformations resulted in the shifts in public consciousness, which it was becoming more difficult to insult. Artists, among them Roy Lichtenstein, complained that it was becoming impossible to make anything despicable: even a dirty rug could be admired (Flam xiii). The audience lost their ability to understand when they were being mocked, attacked, or challenged. Writing in 1981, Flam proclaimed that “Dada spirit has become an inescapable condition of modern life” (xiv). I contend that the current crypto art thrives on the Dada spirit of absurdism, irony, and self-parody and continues to question the border between art and non-art, while fully subscribing to the “anything goes” approach. In the current iteration of Dada in the crypto world, the original subversive narrative can be mostly found in the liberating rhetoric promoted by the proponents of the decentralised economic system. While Neo Dada understood the futility of shocking the public and questioning their tastes, crypto art is ignorant of the original Dada as a form of outrage, a revolutionary movement ignited by a social passion. In crypto art, the ambiguous relationship that Pop Art, one of the Neo Dada movements, had with commercial success is transformed into the content of the artworks. As Tristan Tzara laconically explained, the Dada project was to “assassinate beauty” and with it all the infrastructure of the art market (as quoted in Danto 39). Ironically, crypto artists, the descendants of Dada, erected the monument to Value artificially created through scarcity made possible by blockchain technology in place of the denigrated Venus demolished by the Dadaists. After all, it is the astronomical prices for crypto art that are lauded the most. If in the pre-NFT age, artistic works were evaluated based on their creative merit that included considering the prominence of the artist within art historical canon, current crypto art is evaluated based on its rareness, to which the titles of the crypto art markets SuperRare and Rarible unambiguously refer (Finucane 28–29). In crypto art, the anti-art and anti-commercialism of Dada has fully transformed into its opposite. Another evidence for considering crypto art to be a descendant of Dada is the NFT artists’ concern for the question of what art is and is not, brought to the table by the original Dada artists. This concern is expressed in the manifesto-like mission statement of the first Museum of Crypto Art: at its core, the Museum of Crypto Art (M○C△) challenges, creates conflict, provokes. M○C△ puts forward a broad representation of perspectives meant to upend our sense of who we are. It poses two questions: “what is art?” and “who decides?” We aim to resolve these questions through a multi-stakeholder decentralized platform of art curation and exhibition. (The Museum of Crypto Art) In the past, the question regarding the definition of art was overtaken by the proponent of the institutional approach to art definition, George Dickie, who besides excluding aesthetics from playing a part in differentiating art from non-art famously pronounced that an artwork created by a monkey is art if it is displayed in an art institution, and non-art if it is displayed elsewhere (Dickie 256). This development might explain why decentralisation of the art market achieved through the use of blockchain technology still relies on the endorsing of the art being sold by the widely acclaimed art auction houses: with their stamp of approval, the work is christened as legitimate art, resulting in astronomical sales. Non-Digital Art It is not surprising that an NFT marketplace is an inviting arena for the investigation of questions of commercialisation tackled in the works of Neo Dada Pop artists, who made their names in the traditional art world. This brings us to a discussion of the second type of artworks found in NFT marketplaces: non-digital art sold as NFT and created by trained visual artists, such as Damien Hirst. In his recent NFT project titled Currency, Hirst explores “the boundaries of art and currency—when art changes and becomes a currency, and when currency becomes art” (“The Currency”). The project consists of 10,000 artworks on A4 paper covered in small, coloured dots, a continuation of the so-called “spot-paintings” series that Hirst and his assistants have been producing since the 1980s. Each artwork is painted on a hand-made paper that bears the watermark of the artist’s bust, adorned with a microdot that serves as a unique identification, and is made to look very similar to the others—visual devices used to highlight the ambiguous state of these artworks that simultaneously function as Hirst-issued currency. For Hirst, this project is an experiment: after the purchase of NFTs, buyers are given an opportunity to exchange the NFT for the original art, safely stored in a UK vault; the unexchanged artworks will be burned. Is art going to fully transform into currency? Will you save it? In Hirst’s project, the transformation of physical art into crypto value becomes the ultimate act of Dada nihilism, except for one big difference: if Dada wanted to destroy art as a way to invent it anew, Hirst destroys art to affirm its death and dissolution in currency. In an ironic gesture, the gif NFT artist Nino Arteiro, as if in agreement with Hirst, attempts to sell his work titled Art Is Not Synonymous of Profit, which contains a crudely written text “ART ≠ PROFIT!” for 0.13 Ether or US$350. Buying this art will negate its own statement and affirm its analogy with money. Distributed-Creativity Art When browsing through crypto art advertised in the crypto markets, one inevitably encounters works that stand out in their emphasis on aesthetic and formal qualities. More often than not, these works are created with the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). To a viewer bombarded with creations unconcerned with the concept of beauty, these AI works may serve as a sensory aesthetic refuge. Among the most prominent artists working in this realm is Refik Anadol, whose Synthetic Dreams series at a first glance may appear as carefully composed works of a landscape painter. However, at a closer look nodal connections between points in rendered space provide a hint at the use of algorithmic processes. These attractive landscapes are quantum AI data paintings created from a data set consisting of 200 million raw images of landscapes from around the world, with each image having been computed with a unique quantum bit string (“Synthetic Dreams”). Upon further contemplation, Anadol’s work begins to remind of the sublime Romantic landscapes, revamped through the application of AI that turned fascination with nature’s unboundedness into awe in the face of the unfathomable amounts of data used in creation of Anadol’s works. These creations can be seen as a reaction against the crypto art I call exhausted Dada, or a marketing approach that targets a different audience. In either case, Anadol revives aesthetic concern and aligns himself with the history of sublimity in art that dates back to the writings of Longinus, becoming of prime importance in the nineteenth-century Romantic painting, and finding new expressions in what is considered the technological sublime, which, according to David E. Nye. concentrates “on the triumph of machines… over space and time” (as quoted in Butler et al. 8). In relation to his Nature Dreams project, Anadol writes: “the exhibition’s eponymous, sublime AI Data Sculpture, Nature Dreams utilizes over 300 million publicly available photographs of nature collected between 2018- 2021 at Refik Anadol Studio” (“Machine Hallucinations Nature Dreams”). From this short description it is evident that Anadol’s primary focus is on the sublimity of large sets of data. There is an issue with that approach: since experiencing the sublime involves loss of rational thinking (Longinus 1.4), these artworks cease the viewer’s ability to interrogate cultural adaptation of AI technology and stay within the realm of decorative ornamentations, demanding an intervention akin to that brought about by the historical avant-garde. Conclusions I hope that this brief analysis demonstrates the mechanisms by which the strains of Dada entered the vocabulary of crypto artists. It is probably also noticeable that I equate the nihilist project of the exhausted Dada found in such works as Hirst’s Cryptocurrency with a dead end similar to so many other dead ends in art history—one only needs to remember that the death of painting was announced a myriad of times, and yet it is still alive. Each announcement of its death was followed by its radiant return. It could be that using art as a visual package for monetary value, a death statement to art’s capacity to affect human lives, will ignite artists to affirm art’s power to challenge, inspire, and enrich. References Assia, Yoni et al. “Colored Coins Whitepaper.” 2012-13. <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AnkP_cVZTCMLIzw4DvsW6M8Q2JC0lIzrTLuoWu2z1BE/edit>. Breton, André. “Three Dada Manifestoes, before 1924.” The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, Ed. Robert Motherwell, Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1989. 197–206. Butler, Rebecca P., and Benjamin J. Butler. “Examples of the American Technological Sublime.” TechTrends 57.1 (2013): 9–10. Craft, Catherine Anne. Constellations of Past and Present: (Neo-) Dada, the Avant- Garde, and the New York Art World, 1951-1965. 1996. PhD dissertation. University of Texas at Austin. Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg, Kasia. “Creativity Is Hustle: Make Something Every Day.” The Atlantic, 7 Oct. 2011. 12 July 2021 <https://www.theatlantic.com/video/archive/2011/10/creativity-is-hustle-make-something-every-day/246377/#slide15>. Danto, Arthur Coleman. The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art. Chicago, Ill: Open Court, 2006. Dash, Anil. “NFTs Weren’t Supposed to End like This.” The Atlantic, 2 Apr. 2021. 16 Apr. 2022 <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/nfts-werent-supposed-end-like/618488/>. Dickie, George. “Defining Art.” American Philosophical Quarterly 6.3 (1969): 253–256. Dooley, John F. History of Cryptography and Cryptanalysis: Codes, Ciphers, and Their Algorithms. Cham: Springer, 2018. Elder, R. Bruce. Dada, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect. Waterloo: Wilfried Laurier UP, 2015. Elger, Dietmar, and Uta Grosenick. Dadaism. Köln: Taschen, 2004. Flam, Jack. “Foreword”. The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology. Ed. Robert Motherwell. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1989. xi–xiv. Finucane, B.P. Creating with Blockchain Technology: The ‘Provably Rare’ Possibilities of Crypto Art. 2018. Master’s thesis. University of British Columbia. Haber, Stuart, and W. Scott Stornetta. “How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document.” Journal of Cryptology 3.2 (1991): 99–111. Hapgood, Susan, and Jennifer Rittner. “Neo-Dada: Redefining Art, 1958-1962.” Performing Arts Journal 17.1 (1995): 63–70. Kastrenakes, Jacob. “Beeple Sold an NFT for $69 million: Through a First-of-Its-Kind Auction at Christie’s.” The Verge, 11 Mar. 2021. 14 July 2021 <https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/11/22325054/beeple-christies-nft-sale-cost-everydays-69-million>. Longinus. On the Sublime. Lewiston/Queenston: Edwin Mellen, 1987. Mankind, “What Are PFP NFTs”. YouTube. 2 Feb. 2022 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Drh_fAV4XNM>. “Machine Hallucinations.” Refik Anadol. 20 Jan. 2022 <https://refikanadol.com/works/machine-hallucination/>. “Machine Hallucinations Nature Dreams.” Refik Anadol. 18 Apr. 2022 <https://refikanadol.com/works/machine-hallucinations-nature-dreams/>. Molesworth, Helen. “From Dada to Neo-Dada and Back Again.” October 105 (2003): 177–181. “Monas”. OpenSea. 17 Feb. 2022 <https://opensea.io/collection/monas>. Museum of Crypto Art. 23 Jan. 2022 <https://museumofcryptoart.com/>. Nakamoto, Satoshi. “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” 2008. <https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf>. Richter, Hans. Dada: Art and Anti-Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 2016. Rhizome. “Seven on Seven 2019.” rhizome.org, 26 Mar. 2019. 16 Apr. 2022 <https://rhizome.org/editorial/2019/mar/26/announcing-seven-on-seven-2019-participants-details/>. “Synthetic Dreams.” OpenSea. 23 Jan. 2022 <https://opensea.io/collection/synthetic-dreams>. “The Currency.” OpenSea. 15 Feb. 2022 <https://opensea.io/collection/thecurrency>. “The Non-Fungible Token Bible: Everything You Need to Know about NFTs.” OpenSea Blog, 10 Jan. 2020. 10 June 2021 <https://blog.opensea.io/guides/non-fungible-tokens/>.
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Lewis, Tania, Annette Markham e Indigo Holcombe-James. "Embracing Liminality and "Staying with the Trouble" on (and off) Screen". M/C Journal 24, n.º 3 (21 de junho de 2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2781.
Texto completo da fonteResumo:
Setting the Mood Weirdly, everything feels the same. There’s absolutely no distinction for me between news, work, walking, gaming, Netflix, rock collecting, scrolling, messaging. I don’t know how this happened, but everything has simply blurred together. There’s a dreadful and yet soothing sameness to it, scrolling through images on Instagram, scrolling Netflix, walking the dog, scrolling the news, time scrolling by as I watch face after face appear or disappear on my screen, all saying something, yet saying nothing. Is this the rhythm of crisis in a slow apocalypse? Really, would it be possible for humans to just bore themselves into oblivion? Because in the middle of a pandemic, boredom feels in my body the same as doom ... just another swell that passes, like my chest as it rises and falls with my breath. This opening anecdote comes from combining narratives in two studies we conducted online during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020: a global study, Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking: Autoethnographic Accounts of Lived Experience in Times of Global Trauma; and an Australian project, The Shut-In Worker: Working from Home and Digitally-Enabled Labour Practices. The Shut-In Worker project aimed to investigate the thoughts, beliefs, and experiences of Australian knowledge workers working from home during lockdown. From June to October 2020, we recruited twelve households across two Australian states. While the sample included households with diverse incomes and living arrangements—from metropolitan single person apartment dwellers to regional families in free standing households—the majority were relatively privileged. The households included in this study were predominantly Anglo-Australian and highly educated. Critically, unlike many during COVID-19, these householders had maintained their salaried work. Participating households took part in an initial interview via Zoom or Microsoft Teams during which they took us on workplace tours, showing us where and how the domestic had been requisitioned for salaried labour. Householders subsequently kept digital diaries of their working days ahead of follow up interviews in which we got them to reflect on their past few weeks working from home with reference to the textual and photographic diaries they had shared with us. In contrast to the tight geographic focus of The Shut-In Worker project and its fairly conventional methodology, the Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking project was envisaged as a global project and driven by an experimental participant-led approach. Involving more than 150 people from 26 countries during 2020, the project was grounded in autoethnography practice and critical pedagogy. Over 21 days, we offered self-guided prompts for ourselves and the other participants—a wide range of creative practitioners, scholar activists, and researchers—to explore their own lived experience. Participants with varying degrees of experience with qualitative methods and/or autoethnography started working with the research questions we had posed in our call; some independently, some in collaboration. The autoethnographic lens used in our study encouraged contributors to document their experience from and through their bodies, their situated daily routines, and their relations with embedded, embodied, and ubiquitous digital technologies. The lens enabled deep exploration and evocation of many of the complexities, profound paradoxes, fears, and hopes that characterise the human and machinic entanglements that bring us together and separate the planetary “us” in this moment (Markham et al. 2020). In this essay we draw on anecdotes and narratives from both studies that speak to the “Zoom experience” during COVID-19. That is, we use Zoom as a socio-technical pivot point to think about how the experience of liminality—of being on/off screen and ambiently in between—is operating to shift both our micro practices and macro structures as we experience and struggle within the rupture, “event”, and conjuncture that marks the global pandemic. What we will see is that many of those narratives depict disjointed, blurry, or confusing experiences, atmospheres, and affects. These liminal experiences are entangled in complex ways with the distinctive forms of commercial infrastructure and software that scaffold video conferencing platforms such as Zoom. Part of what is both enabling and troubling about the key proprietary platforms that increasingly host “public” participation and conversation online (and that came to play a dominant role during COVID19) in the context of what Tarleton Gillespie calls “the internet of platforms” is a sense of the hidden logics behind such platforms. The constant sense of potential dis/connection—with home computers becoming ambient portals to external others—also saw a wider experience of boundarylessness evoked by participants. Across our studies there was a sense of a complete breakdown between many pre-existing boundaries (or at least dotted lines) around work, school, play, leisure and fitness, public and media engagement, and home life. At the same time, the vocabulary of confinement and lockdown emerged from the imposition of physical boundaries or distancing between the self and others, between home and the outside world. During the “connected confinement” of COVID-19, study participants commonly expressed an affective sensation of dysphoria, with this new state of in betweenness or disorientation on and off screen, in and out of Zoom meetings, that characterises the COVID-19 experience seen by many as a temporary, unpleasant disruption to sociality as usual. Our contention is that, as disturbing as many of our experiences are and have been during lockdown, there is an important, ethically and politically generative dimension to our global experiences of liminality, and we should hold on to this state of de-normalisation. Much ink has been spilled on the generalised, global experience of videoconferencing during the COVID-19 pandemic. A line of argument within this commentary speaks to the mental challenge and exhaustion—or zoom fatigue as it is now popularly termed—that many have been experiencing in attempting to work, learn, and live collectively via interactive screen technologies. We suggest zoom fatigue stands in for a much larger set of global social challenges—a complex conjuncture of microscopic ruptures, decisions within many critical junctures or turning points, and slow shifts in how we see and make sense of the world around us. If culture is habit writ large, what should we make of the new habits we are building, or the revelations that our prior ways of being in the world might not suit our present planetary needs, and maybe never did? Thus, we counter the current dominant narrative that people, regions, and countries should move on, pivot, or do whatever else it takes to transition to a “new normal”. Instead, drawing on the work of Haraway and others interested in more than human, post-anthropocenic thinking about the future, this essay contends that—on a dying planet facing major global challenges—we need to be embracing liminality and “staying with the trouble” if we are to hope to work together to imagine and create better worlds. This is not necessarily an easy step but we explore liminality and the affective components of Zoom fatigue here to challenge the assumption that stability and certainty is what we now need as a global community. If the comfort experienced by a chosen few in pre-COVID-19 times was bought at the cost of many “others” (human and more than human), how can we use the discomfort of liminality to imagine global futures that have radically transformative possibilities? On Liminality Because liminality is deeply affective and experienced both individually and collectively, it is a difficult feeling or state to put into words, much less generalised terms. It marks the uncanny or unstable experience of existing between. Being in a liminal state is marked by a profound disruption of one’s sense of self, one’s phenomenological being in the world, and in relation to others. Zoom, in and of itself, provokes a liminal experience. As this participant says: Zoom is so disorienting. I mean this literally; in that I cannot find a solid orientation toward other people. What’s worse is that I realize everyone has a different view, so we can’t even be sure of what other people might be seeing on their screen. In a real room this would not be an issue at all. The concept of liminality originally came out of attempts to capture the sense of flux and transition, rather than stasis, that shapes culture and community, exemplified during rites of passage. First developed in the early twentieth century by ethnographer and folklorist Arnold van Gennep, it was later taken up and expanded upon by British anthropologist Victor Turner. Turner, best known for his work on cultural rituals and rites of passage, describes liminality as the sense of “in betweenness” experienced as one moves from one status (say that of a child) to another (formal recognition of adulthood). For Turner, community life and the formation of societies more broadly involves periods of transition, threshold moments in which both structures and anti-structures become apparent. Bringing liminality into the contemporary digital moment, Zizi Papacharissi discusses the concept in collective terms as pertaining to the affective states of networked publics, particularly visible in the development of new social and political formations through wide scale social media responses to the Arab Spring. Liminality in this context describes the “not yet”, a state of “pre-emergence” or “emergence” of unformed potentiality. In this usage, Papacharissi builds on Turner’s description of liminality as “a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise” (97). The pandemic has sparked another moment of liminality. Here, we conceptualise liminality as a continuous dialectical process of being pushed and pulled in various directions, which does not necessarily resolve into a stable state or position. Shifting one’s entire lifeworld into and onto computer screens and the micro screens of Zoom, as experienced by many around the world, collapses the usual functioning norms that maintain some degree of distinction between the social, intimate, political, and work spheres of everyday life. But this shift also creates new boundaries and new rules of engagement. As a result, people in our studies often talked about experiencing competing realities about “where” they are, and/or a feeling of being tugged by contradictory or competing forces that, because they cannot be easily resolved, keep us in an unsettled, uncomfortable state of being in the world. Here the dysphoric experiences associated not just with digital liminality but with the broader COVID-19 epidemiological-socio-political conjuncture are illustrated by Sianne Ngai’s work on the politics of affect and “ugly feelings” in the context of capitalism’s relentlessly affirmative culture. Rather than dismissing the vague feelings of unease that, for many of us, go hand in hand with late modern life, Ngai suggests that such generalised and dispersed affective states are important markers of and guides to the big social and cultural problems of our time—the injustices, inequalities, and alienating effects of late capitalism. While critical attention tends to be paid to more powerful emotions such as anger and fear, Ngai argues that softer and more nebulous forms of negative affect—from envy and anxiety to paranoia—can tell us much about the structures, institutions, and practices that frame social action. These enabling and constraining processes occur at different and intersecting levels. At the micro level of the screen interface, jarring experiences can set us to wondering about where we are (on or off screen, in place and space), how we appear to others, and whether or not we should showcase and highlight our “presence”. We have been struck by how people in our studies expressed the sense of being handled or managed by the interfaces of Zoom or Microsoft Teams, which frame people in grid layouts, yet can shift and alter these frames in unanticipated ways. I hate Zoom. Everything about it. Sometimes I see a giant person, shoved to the front of the meeting in “speaker view” to appear larger than anyone else on the screen. People constantly appear and disappear, popping in and out. Sometimes, Zoom just rearranges people seemingly randomly. People commonly experience themselves or others being resized, frozen, or “glitched”, muted, accidentally unmuted, suddenly disconnected, or relegated to the second or third “page” of attendees. Those of us who attend many meetings as a part of work or education may enjoy the anonymity of appearing at a meeting without our faces or bodies, only appearing to others as a nearly blank square or circle, perhaps with a notation of our name and whether or not we are muted. Being on the third page of participants means we are out of sight, for better or worse. For some, being less visible is a choice, even a tactic. For others, it is not a choice, but based on lack of access to a fast or stable Internet connection. The experience and impact of these micro elements of presence within the digital moment differs, depending on where you appear to others in the interface, how much power you have over the shape or flow of the interaction or interface settings, or what your role is. Moving beyond the experience of the interface and turning to the middle range between micro and macro worlds, participants speak of attempting to manage blurred or completely collapsed boundaries between “here” and “there”. Being neither completely at work or school nor completely at home means finding new ways of negotiating the intimate and the formal, the domestic and the public. This delineation is for many not a matter of carving out specific times or spaces for each, but rather a process of shifting back and forth between makeshift boundaries that may be temporal or spatial, depending on various aspects of one’s situation. Many of us most likely could see the traces of this continuous shifting back and forth via what Susan Leigh Star called “boundary objects”. While she may not have intended this concept in such concrete terms, we could see these literally, in the often humorous but significantly disruptive introduction of various domestic actants during school or work, such as pets, children, partners, laundry baskets, beds, distinctive home decor, ambient noise, etc. Other trends highlight the difficulty of maintaining zones of work and school when these overlap with the rest of the physical household. One might place Post-it Notes on the kitchen wall saying “I’m in a Zoom meeting so don’t come into the living room” or blur one’s screen background to obscure one’s domestic location. These are all strategies of maintaining ontological security in an otherwise chaotic process of being both here and there, and neither here nor there. Yet even with these strategies, there is a constant dialectical liminality at play. In none of these examples do participants feel like they are either at home or at work; instead, they are constantly shifting in between, trying to balance, or straddling physical and virtual, public and private, in terms of social “roles” and “locations”. These negotiations highlight the “ongoingness” of and the labour involved in maintaining some semblance of balance within what is inherently an unbalanced dialectical process. Participants talked about and showed in their diaries and pictures developed for the research projects the ways they act through, work with, or sometimes just try to ignore these opposing states. The rise of home-based videoconferencing and associated boundary management practices have also highlighted what has been marginalised or forgotten and conversely, prioritised or valorised in prior sociotechnical assemblages that were simply taken for granted. Take for example the everyday practices of being in a work versus domestic lifeworld; deciding how to handle the labor of cleaning cups and dishes used by the “employees” and “students” in the family throughout the day, the tasks of enforcing school attendance by children attending classes in the family home etc. This increased consciousness—at both a household and more public level—of a previously often invisible and feminised care economy speaks to larger questions raised by the lockdown experience. At the same time as people in our studies were negotiating the glitches of screen presence and the weird boundarylessness of home-leisure-domestic-school-work life, many expressed an awareness of a troubling bigger picture. First, we had just the COVID lockdowns, you know, that time where many of us were seemingly “all together” in this, at home watching Tiger King, putting neighborly messages in our windows, or sharing sourdough recipes on social media. Then Black Lives Matters movements happened. Suddenly attention is shifted to the fact that we’re not all in this together. In Melbourne, people in social housing towers got abruptly locked down without even the chance to go to the store for food first, and yet somehow the wealthy or celebrity types are not under this heavy surveillance; they can just skip the mandatory quarantine. ... We can’t just go on with things as usual ... there are so many considerations now. Narratives like these suggest that while 2020 might have begun with the pandemic, the year raised multiple other issues. As many things have been destabilised, the nature or practice of everyday life is shifting under our feet. Around the world, people are learning how to remain more distanced from each other, and the rhythms of temporal and geographic movement are adapting to an era of the pandemic. Simultaneously, many people talk about an endlessly arriving (but never quite here) moment when things will be back to normal, implying not only that this feeling of uncertainty will fade, but also that the zone of comfort is in what was known and experienced previously, rather than in a state of something radically different. This sentiment is strong despite the general agreement that “we will never [be able to] go back to how it was, but [must] proceed to some ‘new normal’”. Still, as the participant above suggests, the pandemic has also offered a much broader challenge to wider, taken-for-granted social, political, and economic structures that underpin late capitalist nations in particular. The question then becomes: How do we imagine “moving on” from the pandemic, while learning from the disruptive yet critical moment it has offered us as a global community? Learning from Liminality I don’t want us to go back to “normal”, if that means we are just all commuting in our carbon spitting cars to work and back or traveling endlessly and without a care for the planet. COVID has made my life better. Not having to drive an hour each way to work every day—that’s a massive benefit. While it’s been a struggle, the tradeoff is spending more time with loved ones—it’s a better quality of life, we have to rethink the place of work. I can’t believe how much more I’ve been involved in huge discussions about politics and society and the planet. None of this would have been on my radar pre-COVID. What would it mean then to live with as well as learn from the reflexive sense of being and experience associated with the dis-comforts of living on and off screen, a Zoom liminality, if you will? These statements from participants speak precisely to the budding consciousness of new potential ways of being in a post-COVID-19 world. They come from a place of discomfort and represent dialectic tensions that perhaps should not be shrugged off or too easily resolved. Indeed, how might we consider this as the preferred state, rather than being simply a “rite of passage” that implies some pathway toward more stable identities and structured ways of being? The varied concepts of “becoming”, “not quite yet”, “boundary work”, or “staying with the trouble”, elaborated by Karen Barad, Andrew Pickering, Susan Leigh Star, and Donna Haraway respectively, all point to ways of being, acting, and thinking through and with liminality. All these thinkers are linked by their championing of murky and mangled conceptions of experience and more than human relations. Challenging notions of the bounded individual of rational humanism, these post-human scholars offer an often-uncomfortable picture of being in and through multiplicity, of modes of agency born out of a slippage between the one and the many. While, as we noted above, this experience of in betweenness and entanglement is often linked to emotions we perceive as negative, “ugly feelings”, for Barad et al., such liminal moments offer fundamentally productive and experimental modalities that enable possibilities for new configurations of being and doing the social in the anthropocene. Further, liminality as a concept potentially becomes radically progressive when it is seen as both critically appraising the constructed and conventional nature of prior patterns of living and offering a range of reflexive alternatives. People in our studies spoke of the pandemic moment as offering tantalizing glimpses of what kinder, more caring, and egalitarian futures might look like. At the same time, many were also surprised by (and skeptical of) the banality and randomness of the rise of commercial platforms like Zoom as a “choice” for being with others in this current lifeworld, emerging as it did as an ad hoc, quick solution that met the demands of the moment. Zoom fatigue then also suggests a discomfort about somehow being expected to fully incorporate proprietary platforms like Zoom and their algorithmic logics as a core way of living and being in the post-COVID-19 world. In this sense the fact that a specific platform has become a branded eponym for the experience of online public communicative fatigue is telling indeed. The unease around the centrality of video conferencing to everyday life during COVID-19 can in part be seen as a marker of anxieties about the growing role of decentralized, private platforms in “replacing or merging with public infrastructure, [thereby] creating new social effects” (Lee). Further, jokes and off-hand comments by study participants about their messy domestic interiors being publicized via social media or their boss monitoring when they are on and offline speak to larger concerns around surveillance and privacy in online spaces, particularly communicative environments where unregulated private platforms rather than public infrastructures are becoming the default norm. But just as people are both accepting of and troubled by a growing sense of inevitability about Zoom, we also saw them experimenting with a range of other ways of being with others, from online cocktail parties to experimenting with more playful and creative apps and platforms. What these participants have shown us is the need to “stay with the trouble” or remain in this liminal space as long as possible. While we do not have the space to discuss this possibility in this short provocation, Haraway sees this experimental mode of being as involving multiple actants, human and nonhuman, and as constituting important work in terms of speculating and figuring with various “what if” scenarios to generate new possible futures. As Haraway puts it, this process of speculative figuring is one of giving and receiving patterns, dropping threads, and so mostly failing but sometimes finding something that works, something consequential and maybe even beautiful, that wasn’t there before, of relaying connections that matter, of telling stories in hand upon hand, digit upon digit, attachment site upon attachment site, to craft conditions for flourishing in terran worlding. This struggle of course takes us far beyond decisions about Zoom, specifically. This deliberately troubling liminality is a process of recognizing old habits, building new ones, doing the hard work of reconsidering broader social formations in a future that promises more trouble. Governments, institutions, corporate entities, and even social movements like Transition Towns or #BuildBackBetter all seem to be calling for getting out of this liminal zone, whether this is to “bounce back” by returning to hyper-consumerist, wasteful, profit-driven modes of life or the opposite, to “bounce forward” to radically rethink globalization and build intensely localized personal and social formations. Perhaps a third alternative is to embrace this very transitional experience itself and consider whether life on a troubled, perhaps dying planet might require our discomfort, unease, and in-betweenness, including acknowledging and sometimes embracing “glitches” and failures (Nunes). Transitionality, or more broadly liminality, has the potential to enhance our understanding of who and what “we” are, or perhaps more crucially who “we” might become, by encompassing a kind of dialectic in relation to the experiences of others, both intimate and distant. As many critical commentators before us have suggested, this necessarily involves working in conjunction with a rich ecology of planetary agents from First People’s actors and knowledge systems--a range of social agents who already know what it is to be liminal to landscapes and other species--through and with the enabling affordances of digital technologies. This is an important, and exhausting, process of change. And perhaps this trouble is something to hang on to as long as possible, as it preoccupies us with wondering about what is happening in the lines between our faces, the lines of the technologies underpinning our interactions, the taken for granted structures on and off screen that have been visibilized. We are fatigued, not by the time we spend online, although there is that, too, but by the recognition that the world is changing. References Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke UP, 2006. Gillespie, Tarleton. Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. Yale UP 2018. Haraway, Donna J. “SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far.” Ada New Media 3 (2013). <http://adanewmedia.org/2013/11/issue3-haraway>. Lee, Ashlin. “In the Shadow of Platforms: Challenges and Opportunities for the Shadow of Hierarchy in the Age of Platforms and Datafication.” M/C Journal 24.2 (2021). <http://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2750>. Markham, Annette N., et al. “Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking during COVID-19 Times.” Qualitative Inquiry Oct. 2020. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800420962477>. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard UP, 2005. Nunes, Mark. 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