Статті в журналах з теми "Macarthur family"

As America ages, policy-makers' preoccupations with the future costs of Medicare and Social Security grow. But neglected by this focus are critically important and broader societal issues such as intergenerational relations within society and the family, rising inequality and lack of opportunity, productivity in late life (work or volunteering), and human capital development (lifelong education and skills training). Equally important, there is almost no acknowledgment of the substantial benefits and potential of an aging society. The MacArthur Foundation Research Network on an Aging Society offers policy options to address these issues and enhance the transition to a cohesive, productive, secure, and equitable aging society. Such a society will not only function effectively at the societal level but will provide a context that facilitates the capacity of individuals to age successfully. This volume comprises a set of papers, many of which are authored by members of the MacArthur Network, focusing on various aspects of the opportunities and challenges facing the United States while it passes through its current demographic transformation. This essay provides a general overview of the strategy the Network has used to address the various components of this broad subject.

As the pressure mounts to reduce the public costs of supporting rapidly aging societies, responsibility for supporting elderly people will increasingly fall on their family members. This essay explores the family's capacity to respond to these growing challenges. In particular, we examine how family change and growing inequality pose special problems in developed nations, especially the United States. This essay mentions a series of studies supported by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on an Aging Society that aim to examine the future of intergenerational exchange. We focus particularly on adults who have dependent and young-adult children and who must also care for elderly parents, a fraction of the population that will grow substantially in the coming twenty-five years.

Graeme Talbot Smith was born in Adelaide on the 10th of February 1938. He spent some of his early childhood in Brisbane where his father was on the staff of General Douglas MacArthur during the latter part of the Second World War. After the war, his family moved to Melbourne where Graeme completed his secondary schooling. He then went to Melbourne University where he majored in Zoology and Geology. The only time he professionally used any of his geological skills was when he worked in the mining industry at Kalgoorlie during one of his university breaks. Graeme chose to specialize in Zoology because he felt there was more scope for employment in that discipline. His first published paper was in 1964. It was a note on a bat mandible found in a cave in Victoria.

ABSTRACTThis study examined the effects of being born very preterm on children's early language development using prospective longitudinal data from a representative regional cohort of 90 children born very preterm (gestational age <33 weeks and/or birth weight <1,500 grams) and a comparison sample of 102 children born full term (gestational age 38–41 weeks). The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Sentences (CDI-WS) was used to assess children's language development at age 2 ; 0 (corrected for gestational age at birth). Clear linear relationships were found between gestational age at birth and later language outcomes, with decreasing gestational age being associated with poorer parent-reported language skills. Specifically, children born extremely preterm (<28 weeks' gestation) tended to perform less well than those born very preterm (28–32 weeks' gestation), who in turn performed worse than children born full term (38–41 weeks' gestation). This pattern of findings was evident across a range of outcomes spanning vocabulary size and quality of word use, as well as morphological and syntactic complexity. Importantly, associations between gestational age at birth and language outcomes persisted after statistical control for child and family factors correlated with both preterm birth and language development. These findings demonstrate the presence of pervasive delays in the early language development of children born very preterm. They also highlight the importance of gestational age in predicting later language risk in this population of infants.

AbstractThe MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) are a widely used family of parent-report instruments for easy and inexpensive data-gathering about early language acquisition. CDI data have been used to explore a variety of theoretically important topics, but, with few exceptions, researchers have had to rely on data collected in their own lab. In this paper, we remedy this issue by presenting Wordbank, a structured database of CDI data combined with a browsable web interface. Wordbank archives CDI data across languages and labs, providing a resource for researchers interested in early language, as well as a platform for novel analyses. The site allows interactive exploration of patterns of vocabulary growth at the level of both individual children and particular words. We also introduce wordbankr, a software package for connecting to the database directly. Together, these tools extend the abilities of students and researchers to explore quantitative trends in vocabulary development.

The U.S. lawyers played the leading role in organization and arrangement of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) intended for trial of the main Japanese war criminals. Tribunal was established by a charter issued by the U.S. Army General Douglas MacArthur, who was appointed as a Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan. Therefore, prevalence of Anglo-Saxon legal family is evident in the practice of tribunal. One of them is the use of affidavit in the Tokyo International Military Tribunal. The article applies the method of comparative legal studies; conducts analysis of the legal norms stipulated in decrees of the tribunals. Dogmatic method is employed for interpretation of legal norms presented in the decrees. The author examines the practice of presenting and usage of affidavit in the course of judicial procedure in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. Affidavits were provided into the tribunal by prosecution witnesses, as well as by defendants themselves. The article also demonstrated the use of affidavits by the U.S. administration for political purposes. &nbsp;

A developmental-genetic model was fitted to Bayley Mental Development Index (MDI) data to address questions concerning the origins of individual differences in MDI performance and the origins of change and continuity during infancy More than 350 pairs of identical and same-sex fraternal twins were studied longitudinally at 14, 20, and 24 months of age There was substantial genetic continuity of general cognitive ability from 14 to 24 months, but significant new genetic variation also appeared at 24 months Shared family environmental influences were global across all three ages and not time-specific Finally, nonshared environmental influences did not contribute to the observed continuity of general cognitive ability, only to change

Subjective Social Status (SSS) inevitably affects the self-rated health of individuals and /or societal groups. Based on the evidence from China, this paper aims to 1) assess the influence of Objective Social Status and Subjective Social Status on differences in self-rated health in China; 2) to examine the correlations between Subjective Social Status and perceived health. The data from the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) 2010 are selected to achieve the two aims with SSS measured by Subjective Family Economic Status (SFES, using the Likert scale) and Subjective Social Class (SSC, using the MacArthur scale), and Health Status measured by a continuous ill score calculated by the standard logarithmic normal distribution index conversion of self-rated health. Advanced statistical modeling using the nested multiple robust regression model and interaction analysis is used to deal with heteroscedasticity from the CGSS data. It is found that: 1) lower SSS is associated with poor health status and SSS is a more comprehensive predictor of health status; 2) aging has more apparent influences on the health of lower SSS groups; 3) lower SSS groups have received higher health returns from their educational attainment than higher SSS groups though they tend to be in poorer health status; 4) once have a chronic disease the health of lower SFES groups will suffer more deterioration than higher ones.

Subjective Social Status (SSS) inevitably affects the self-rated health of individuals and /or societal groups. Based on the evidence from China, this paper aims to 1) assess the influence of Objective Social Status and Subjective Social Status on differences in self-rated health in China; 2) to examine the correlations between Subjective Social Status and perceived health. The data from the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) 2010 are selected to achieve the two aims with SSS measured by Subjective Family Economic Status (SFES, using the Likert scale) and Subjective Social Class (SSC, using the MacArthur scale), and Health Status measured by a continuous ill score calculated by the standard logarithmic normal distribution index conversion of self-rated health. Advanced statistical modeling using the nested multiple robust regression model and interaction analysis is used to deal with heteroscedasticity from the CGSS data. It is found that: 1) lower SSS is associated with poor health status and SSS is a more comprehensive predictor of health status; 2) aging has more apparent influences on the health of lower SSS groups; 3) lower SSS groups have received higher health returns from their educational attainment than higher SSS groups though they tend to be in poorer health status; 4) once have a chronic disease the health of lower SFES groups will suffer more deterioration than higher ones.

Among children in the third year of life, late talkers comprise from 9% to 20%. This range seems to increase when addressing preterm children. This study examined video-recorded child spontaneous speech during parent–child book sharing as well as linguistic skills reported through the MacArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI) Short Form in 61 late talkers aged 30 months old (26 low-risk preterm, 8 females; 35 full-term, 12 females). Differences between low-risk preterm and full-term late talkers in child language measures and parental speech input were tested, as were the roles of child and parent factors on child language. Low-risk preterm and full-term late talkers showed similar speech and language skills. Similarly, no differences were found in measures of parental speech between groups. Child cognitive score, chronological age, and low-risk preterm status were positively associated with lexical diversity, rate, and composition of child speech production, whereas family history for language and/or learning disorders as well as parent measures of lexical diversity, rate, and grammatical complexity were negatively associated with the above child variables. In addition, child cognitive score and low-risk preterm status were positively associated with the MB-CDI measures of word and sentence production. Findings are discussed in terms of the need of good practices when following up on low-risk preterm children and of interventions targeting parents’ input to preterm and full-term late talkers.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1980-0037.2016v18n5p591 Subjective social status comprises the perception of individuals about their social status. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between subjective social status and sociodemographic indicators (age, educational level, marital status and economic level) in athletes from Santa Catharina. A total of 593 athletes of both sexes and mean age of 21.18 (± 5.58) years, 371 men, randomly selected, practitioners of individual and collective sport modalities, federated in clubs in the western region of Santa Catarina participated in the study. Social status perception was assessed using the MacArthur scale version for young people adapted to the sports context. For the association between perceived status and sociodemographic indicators, the Chi-square and Multinomial Logistic Regression tests were used, stratified by gender and adjusted for age variables, educational level, marital status and socioeconomic status. Dissatisfaction with status was found in 85% of the sample. Moreover, 46.9% of participants perceived themselves with low family status and 46% perceived themselves with intermediate status in their clubs. The association between groups showed statistically significant differences according to sex, age, educational level and marital status. The association between sociodemographic variables and status according to sex indicated that younger men, with less education, and single were more likely to be dissatisfied with their status. There is need for greater attention by health professionals regarding younger male athletes, with lower education and single regarding their status perception.

The deleterious effects of sexual abuse (SA) are well documented, as many studies have found that SA can increase the risk for psychiatric disorders. While SA has been examined in multiple samples, no studies have examined the characteristics of SA in individuals with severe mental illnesses (SMI). This study examined the prevalence rate and characterized the nature of SA among individuals with SMI who were under psychiatric care in three different inpatient facilities. Utilizing data from the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study, 1,136 individuals with SMI were assessed for SA histories, psychiatric diagnoses, and other demographics. Nearly half of this sample ( n = 511) identified SA histories, with almost half indicating that the person was a stranger or someone outside of the family unit. One third reported SA occurred “too many times to count,” and approximately a third indicated the abuse consisted of intercourse, occurring at a mean age of 11.22 years. Results found that individuals with SA histories were often never married, Caucasian, female, had children, described themselves as psychologically unwell, and were commonly voluntary psychiatric admissions. Those with SA histories had significantly higher psychopathology and lower functioning, and were more likely to be diagnosed with depression but less likely to be substance dependent. Identifying SA characteristics in individuals with SMI is a critical component to successful treatment. Thorough screening and assessment of this common problem can help clinicians identify accompanying issues that may exacerbate SMI symptomology, and improve the prognosis for long-term outcomes.

The MacArthur Inventario del Desarrollo de Habilidades Comunicativas: Primeras Palabras y Gestos (IDHC) is a widely-used parent report measure for infant Spanish language comprehension. The IDHC was originally created for use with infants of Mexican background. According to the U.S. 2017 census, however, about 37% of U.S. Hispanics are not of Mexican origin. In Miami-Dade, a large county in South Florida, 98% of Hispanics do not identify Mexico as their country of origin. IDHC use in mixed Hispanic communities such as Miami may be problematic due to differences in dialect and object labels. This study explored whether excluding IDHC words flagged as unknown or not commonly used by adults from mixed Hispanic communities affects bilingual infants’ vocabulary size. Data were collected from Hispanic 16-month-old infants (N = 27; females = 13) from a mixture of Latin American backgrounds residing in Miami, FL, USA, and compared to archival data from the IDHC Mexican norming sample (N = 60; females = 31). Findings indicate significant differences in the rate of comprehension between the two samples with infants from mixed Latin American backgrounds demonstrating lower rates of comprehension for words flagged as unknown/uncommon. Moreover, Spanish vocabulary scores for infants from mixed Hispanic communities were significantly lower compared to the Mexican norming sample. Use of total vocabulary score (i.e., Spanish + English) attenuated these issues in administrating the IDHC to bilingual infants from mixed Hispanic communities. Results suggest that comprehension of some IDHC words is influenced by Hispanic family background. These preliminary findings highlight potential issues in IDHC administration that require further investigation in additional samples spanning the full age range of the IDHC and from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds to effectively tune how we assess infant Spanish language comprehension to cultural differences.

Purpose This study examined predictors of preschool enrollment and attendance in an inclusive, university-based lab preschool (Preschool Education Lab [PEL]) serving children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Method PEL operates as a full-day, state-licensed preschool and consists of three classrooms serving 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds (class sizes of 12, 16, and 18 children, respectively). Between July 2018 and October 2019, parents of 84 children with a prior diagnosis of ASD or parental concerns about ASD contacted PEL to seek enrollment. Parents completed several eligibility surveys, including a demographic survey and the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI). The process for determining eligibility and enrollment consisted of four steps: Step 1, review of eligibility surveys to select children for an in-person eligibility observation (EO); Step 2, completion of an in-person EO to determine program eligibility; Step 3, enrollment of eligible and interested families; and Step 4, sustained PEL attendance. Results We used logistic regression analyses to identify child or demographic characteristics that predict decisions at each step. Results show that parent-reported early gestures (MB-CDI) were the strongest predictor of PEL's decision to invite children for an EO (Step 1). Furthermore, higher parent-reported language skills (MB-CDI, Words Produced) and a younger chronological age were the strongest predictors of PEL's decision to invite families to enroll (Step 2). Whether eligible families chose to enroll (Step 3) and whether enrolled families chose to remain enrolled (Step 4) were best explained by practical family considerations such as tuition expenses, daily commute, and alternative programming options. Conclusion This research paints a complex picture of forces that influence placement decisions for children with ASD who seek enrollment in an inclusive early childhood education program. A better understanding of these forces is necessary to evaluate outcomes and increase access to inclusive preschool options for children with ASD.

Abstract Introduction: Broad neurocognitive deficits have been documented in children with sickle cell disease (SCD), even in the absence of stroke. These deficits pose significant consequences, as lower cognitive abilities are associated with lower academic achievement. However, there has been limited research examining the relationship between neurocognitive functioning and socioeconomic status (SES) in youth with SCD. Given that children with SCD experience socioeconomic disadvantage at relatively high rates, SES has been posited as one explanation for the high prevalence of neurocognitive issues in SCD; particularly in the case of patients without stroke or those with less severe phenotypes. In order to better understand the role of SES, we sought to evaluate the effects of multiple distinct measures of SES on neurocognitive outcomes in pediatric SCD. Methods: Fifty-nine children with SCD ages 7-16 (M = 10.44, SD = 2.87; 42% male) enrolled in a larger study of the feasibility and efficacy of a computerized cognitive training program. Primary caregivers reported demographic information, including the child's age, gender, and ethnicity, and rated their child's executive functioning difficulties on the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF). Scores on the BRIEF are represented as T scores, where higher scores reflect more problems. Caregivers also reported on multiple measures of SES, including the participant's health insurance type, whether the participant received free-or-reduced lunch at school, and rated the adequacy of household resources (Family Resource Scale; FRS) and their perceived community and national social status (The MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status). Children and adolescents completed the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Fifth Edition (WISC-V). Results: Multiple regression analyses were performed to examine the relationship between SES measures and performance-based and caregiver-reported neurocognitive and behavioral functioning. Controlling for age and gender, having public health insurance significantly predicted lower Full Scale IQs on the WISC-V (R2 = .158, b = -8.609, p = .021), as well as greater impairments on the BRIEF Working Memory (R2 = .219, b = -9.556, p = .014), Organization of Materials (R2 = .166, b = -7.498, p = .011), and Monitor (R2 = .137, b = -6.872, p = .038) subscales. Whereas, having private health insurance significantly predicted higher Full Scale IQs (R2 = .187, b = 10.376, p = 0.007) and fewer problems on the BRIEF Working Memory (R2 = .101, b = 7.868, p = .046), Organization of Materials (R2 = 0.209, b = 9.103, p = .003), and Monitor (R2 = .163, b = 8.231, p = .018) subscales. Additionally, receiving free-or-reduced lunch significantly predicted lower scores on a WISC-V task measuring processing speed (R2 = .316, b = -1.976, p = .006) and a composite indicator of processing speed (R2 = .226, b = -9.849, p = .011). In contrast to hypotheses, higher perceived social status within families' communities on the MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status was predictive of lower Full Scale IQs (R2 = .089, b = 1.646, p = .049) and higher perceived social status using the United States as a reference predicted greater impairments on the Plan/Organize (R2 = .169, b = 2.287 p = .011) and Initiate subscales of the BRIEF (R2 = .134, b = 1.839, p = .024). Conclusions: It is feasible to measure SES in multiple ways in clinical trials. In our study, SES significantly predicted performance-based and parent-reported neurocognitive functioning; however, each measure of SES appeared to account for a unique component of SES and demonstrated unique associations with neurocognitive outcomes. Public insurance was a significant predictor of more caregiver-rated problems with children's working memory, organizational skills, and executive functioning. Children who qualified for free-or reduced lunch also scored significantly lower on processing speed tasks. Findings support the hypothesis that SES plays an important role in determining neurocognitive and behavioral outcomes and highlights the value of conceptualizing and assessing SES as a multidimensional construct. Researchers and clinicians should routinely assess SES using various measures to enhance detection of neurocognitive difficulties and assist in crafting tailored interventions to mitigate negative consequences of low SES in children with SCD. Disclosures No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

Young children use gestures to practice communicative functions that foster their receptive and expressive linguistic skills. Studies investigating the use of gestures by late talkers are limited. This study aimed to investigate the use of gestures and gesture–word combinations and their associations with word comprehension and word and sentence production in late talkers. A further purpose was to examine whether a set of individual and environmental factors accounted for interindividual differences in late talkers’ gesture and gesture–word production. Sixty-one late talkers, including 35 full-term and 26 low-risk preterm children, participated in the study. Parents filled out the Italian short forms of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB–CDI), “Gesture and Words” and “Words and Sentences” when their children were 30-months-old, and they were then invited to participate in a book-sharing session with their child. Children’s gestures and words produced during the book-sharing session were transcribed and coded into CHAT of CHILDES and analyzed with CLAN. Types of spontaneous gestures (pointing and representational gestures) and gesture–word combinations (complementary, equivalent, and supplementary) were coded. Measures of word tokens and MLU were also computed. Correlational analyses documented that children’s use of gesture–word combinations, particularly complementary and supplementary forms, in the book-sharing session was positively associated with linguistic skills both observed during the session (word tokens and MLU) and reported by parents (word comprehension, word production, and sentence production at the MB–CDI). Concerning individual factors, male gender was negatively associated with gesture and gesture–word use, as well as with MB–CDI action/gesture production. In contrast, having a low-risk preterm condition and being later-born were positively associated with the use of gestures and pointing gestures, and having a family history of language and/or learning disorders was positively associated with the use of representational gestures. Furthermore, a low-risk preterm status and a higher cognitive score were positively associated with gesture–word combinations, particularly complementary and supplementary types. With regard to environmental factors, older parental age was negatively associated with late talkers’ use of gestures and pointing gestures. Interindividual differences in late talkers’ gesture and gesture–word production were thus related to several intertwined individual and environmental factors. Among late talkers, use of gestures and gesture–word combinations represents a point of strength promoting receptive and expressive language acquisition.

Purpose – This article is a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry engineer-turned entrepreneur regarding the evolution, commercialization and challenges of bringing a technological invention to market. Design/methodology/approach – The interviewee is Dr Yoky Matsuoka, the Vice President of Nest Labs. Matsuoka describes her career journey that led her from a semi-professional tennis player who wanted to build a robot tennis buddy, to a pioneer of neurobotics who then applied her multidisciplinary research in academia to the development of a mass-produced intelligent home automation device. Findings – Dr Matsuoka received a BS degree from the University of California, Berkeley and an MS and PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She was also a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and in Mechanical Engineering at Harvard University. Dr Matsuoka was formerly the Torode Family Endowed Career Development Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington (UW), Director of the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering and Ana Loomis McCandless Professor of Robotics and Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2010, she joined Google X as one of its three founding members. She then joined Nest as VP of Technology. Originality/value – Dr Matsuoka built advanced robotic prosthetic devices and designed complementary rehabilitation strategies that enhanced the mobility of people with manipulation disabilities. Her novel work has made significant scientific and engineering contributions in the combined fields of mechanical engineering, neuroscience, bioengineering, robotics and computer science. Dr Matsuoka was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in which she used the Genius Award money to establish a nonprofit corporation, YokyWorks, to continue developing engineering solutions for humans with physical disabilities. Other awards include the Emerging Inventor of the Year, UW Medicine; IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Academic Career Award; Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers; and numerous others. She leads the development of the learning and control technology for the Nest smoke detector and Thermostat, which has saved the USA hundreds of billions of dollars in energy expenses. Nest was sold to Google in 2013 for a record $3.2 billion dollars in cash.

The conditions of language development and preservation are the quality of its acquisition in the early childhood, in-depth usage and study in the educational process and formation of positive and responsible attitude towards language and national literary heritage. The quality of the development of child’s Latvian language is determined by several environmental factors: the language environment in the family, the language environment in preschool, basic and secondary educational institutions and the language environment in public space.In Latgale most children learn Latvian in heterogeneous sociolinguistic environment. Child’s acquisition of the Latvian language in the family occurs in one of the following ways: in the native dialect (variant of dialect), if all the family members communicate only in one of our dialects, the High Latvian dialect; in the Latvian standard language, if the family members communicate in the standard language; in the so-called “third variant”, if the communication is in the Latvian standard language with a strong dialectal influence; or bilingually (dialect – Latvian standard language, dialect – Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Belarusian or some other language, Latvian standard language – Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Belarusian or some other language).Experience acquired during the project “Latvian Language in Monolingual and Bilingual Acquisition: tools, theories and applications” (LAMBA) shows that a part of our High Latvian dialect-speaking parents found it difficult to answer MacArthur-Bate Communicative development test questions, which were formed according to the Latvian standard language system. As communication with children takes place only in their native dialect, there are differences between child’s speech and the standard language at phonological and morphological level. At the same time, parents, after consultation on how to complete the test, noted that the quality of learning Latvian at school is better than learning at home where incorrect colloquial Latvian is used. Latvian language users in other parts of Latvia faced a similar problem, but in general it did not seriously affect the performance of the test. Students emphasize that more knowledge about interrelation between the Latvian dialectal and standard language would make the Latvian language acquisition process easier and help avoid interference of the native dialect. Language learning at school takes place in a monolingual environment, but some schools offer optional courses also in the Latgalian written (standard) language and literature. Outside the classroom, communication goes on in both, standard Latvian and native dialect and other languages.Language environment of the public space is heterogeneous; children hear different High Latvian variants as well as the so-called “third variant” which causes the most harm, both to Latgalian and Latvian standard languages and other languages. Taking into consideration the fact that two traditions of the written language have historically developed in Latvia – the Latvian standard language, and the Latgalian standard language tradition – and the Latgalian standard language is a very important component of Latgale regional and cultural identity and significant cultural value of Latvia, State Language Law 3 (4) determines that “the State ensures the preservation, protection and development of the Latgalian standard language as a historical option of the Latvian language”. Language knowledge, its usage in the learning process and the knowledge of literary and cultural heritage in close connection with national values are preconditions of language development and retention. Therefore, it is important that the school curricula and literature contain both Latvian and Latgalian. This report focuses, firstly, on how the school curricula and learning standards reflect the necessity to form and develop the Latgalian standard language and literature, secondly, how these issues are revealed in the text books of the Latvian language and literature developed from 1990 to 2015 and thirdly, it deals with secondary school students’ survey results on the knowledge of the Latgalian standard language and literature. Analysis of the standards and curricula of the primary school and secondary school subject “Latvian language” and “Literature” reveals that neither the Latgalian standard language as an option of the Latvian language, nor fiction written in the Latgalian standard language are reflected in text books. The text books developed during the last 20 years deal with these thematic issues only sporadically.

Background and Aims Early intervention (EI) for young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) must be resource-efficient while remaining effective; thus, clinicians are challenged to create and implement useful methods. Clinical evidence from community-based interventions that include reliable diagnoses, individual EI programs, along with comprehensive descriptions of participants, procedures, and participant outcomes can inform practice, translational research, and local policy. Parent-mediated EI for toddlers with ASD can promote positive developmental outcomes and lifelong well-being, but evidence of successful community uptake of research-based EIs is somewhat limited. The community-based, parent-mediated, evidence-informed QuickStart EI program aims to encourage toddlers’ early social communication, social interactions, and relationship-building, in a community clinic setting. We aim to (1) describe our adaptations to the evidence-based Parent-Delivered Early Start Denver Model and (2) present promising findings for toddlers with or at risk for ASD and their families who received QuickStart. We also intend to motivate a similar study of EI in real-world situations to advance evidence-based practice and create relevant dialogue and questions for research. Methods Complete data were identified and analyzed for up to 89 toddlers diagnosed with, or at risk of, ASD. Pre- and post-intervention parent- or self-report data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and paired-sample t-tests, as appropriate. Pre-intervention measures included demographic information ( n = 89) and the Early Screening of Autism and Communication (ESAC; n = 89). Measures taken pre- and post-intervention included the Adaptive Behavior Assessment System-II ( n = 60), MacArthur-Bates Communication Development Inventories ( n = 58), and the parental sense of competence scale ( n = 62). The Measure of Processes of Care ( n = 60) was taken post-intervention. On enrollment, parents signed standard clinical agreements that included statements allowing their anonymous data to be analyzed for research. Results Using standardized parent/self-report measures, toddler gains were noted for social interaction, language, communication skills, and ASD symptoms, but not for parents’ feelings of competence. Parents identified QuickStart procedures as family centered (Measure of Processes of Care). Conclusions The QuickStart EI program, provided to toddlers and their families over 20 weeks in a community clinic, resulted in promising positive behavior and communication changes, as indicated on the parent-response measures, for a moderately large sample of toddlers. Implications This study adds to the literature by describing a new EI program with clear procedures by which clinicians can create, provide, and evaluate a readily accessible, community-based EI for toddlers with or at risk of ASD. Methodological limitations inherent to our study design that precluded a control group and necessitated a reliance on available parent-report data are carefully critiqued and discussed.

Molecular studies have shown that Molluginaceae in the traditional sense is polyphyletic. Several genera have already been separated into various families (e.g. Caryophyllaceae, Limeaceae, Lophiocarpaceae, Microteaceae), but recent studies have shown that Macarthuria and Hypertelis also make Molluginaceae polyphyletic if they remain to be included in this family. Hypertelis is biphyletic, with its type species found to belong to Molluginaceae sensu stricto, but the remainder of the genus is to be placed elsewhere. Therefore a new genus, Kewa, is proposed for the rest of Hypertelis, and two new family names are coined: Kewaceae and Macarthuriaceae, which are here morphologically characterized.

Abstract Research has shown the importance of vocabulary development in relation to other parts of language development, e.g. grammar and reading development. Cross-linguistic research has shown similar as well as dissimilar tendencies regarding content in different languages. This study examines, for the first time, the characteristics of Faroese children’s early productive vocabulary utilizing a Faroese adaptation of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI). The study participants were 415 children aged 8 to 20 months. The results provide information on the composition and characteristics of lexical development in Faroese children and demonstrate that nouns are dominant among first words, as are onomatopoetic words and words describing family relationships. Faroese children are comparable to children learning other languages with respect to rate of acquisition and composition of words, with a somewhat higher share of words describing family members as stable words in the emerging language.

Deaf children with cochlear implants (CIs) need a supportive family environment to facilitate language development. The present study was designed to assess the effects of parent training (PT) on enhancing children’s communication development. The PT was based on the “It Takes Two to Talk” model, with specific adaptations for families of deaf children. Before and after the PT, 14 participating families and matched no-treatment controls were assessed using the Parent Stress Index and Cole’s interaction checklist. The children’s language was assessed with the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventory and, after 3 years, with the Boston Naming, the Peabody, and the Test for Reception of Grammar–Version 2 (TROG-2). The families’ quality of interaction and the children’s language increased significantly more in the trained group than in controls and differences were still present after 3 years. The parents seemed to benefit from PT that focused on strategies to empower and promote communication skills in children with CIs.

Aims: Mental health problems are common among Swedish adolescents and are sometimes referred to as ‘stress-related’. The overall aim of this study is to do an analysis of subjective health complaints (SHCs) and perceived general stress among adolescents in Sweden, both their prevalence and association, by gender, migration background, family structure and socioeconomic conditions. Methods: Data from the baseline (comprising 2283 adolescents aged 13) of the STudy of Adolescence Resilience and Stress (STARS) study in Västra Götaland in Sweden were used. SHCs were measured by the Psychosomatic Problems Scale (PSP-scale) and self-reported stress was measured by Cohen’s Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10). Socioeconomic conditions were measured with the Family Affluence Scale (FAS) and the MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status (SSS). Statistical analyses included Student’s t-tests and ANOVAs of means, linear and logistic regression analyses and Pearson’s correlations. Results: Social inequalities in both SHCs and self-reported stress were found; levels were higher among girls, adolescents living with one parent or in families with less favourable socioeconomic conditions. Self-reported stress and SHCs were found to be strongly correlated ( r=0.70). Correlations with self-reported stress were stronger for psychological complaints ( r=0.71) than for somatic complaints ( r=0.52). Correlations did not vary with socioeconomic conditions of the family. Conclusions: SHCs do reflect general stress among adolescents, and it is appropriate to address the complaints as ‘stress-related’. Measures to improve adolescents’ mental health by reducing levels of SHCs should pay special attention to stressors in adolescents’ daily lives and strengthening adolescent’s coping resources and strategies.

Sociocultural influences on the development of child language skills have been widely studied, but the majority of the research findings were generated in Northern contexts. The current crosslinguistic, multisite study is the first of its kind in South Africa, considering the influence of a range of individual and sociocultural factors on expressive vocabulary size of young children. Caregivers of toddlers aged 16 to 32 months acquiring Afrikaans (n = 110), isiXhosa (n = 115), South African English (n = 105), or Xitsonga (n = 98) as home language completed a family background questionnaire and the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) about their children. Based on a revised version of Bronfenbrenner’s (1977) ecological systems theory, information was obtained from the family background questionnaire on individual factors (the child’s age and sex), microsystem-related factors (the number of other children and number of adults in the child’s household, maternal level of education, and SES), and exosystem-related factors (home language and geographic area, namely rural or urban). All sociocultural and individual factors combined explained 25% of the variance in expressive vocabulary size. Partial correlations between these sociocultural factors and the toddlers’ expressive vocabulary scores on 10 semantic domains yielded important insights into the impact of geographic area on the nature and size of children’s expressive vocabulary. Unlike in previous studies, maternal level of education and SES did not play a significant role in predicting children’s expressive vocabulary scores. These results indicate that there exists an interplay of sociocultural and individual influences on vocabulary development that requires a more complex ecological model of language development to understand the interaction between various sociocultural factors in diverse contexts.

We examined the vocabulary growth of lexical categories in 719 children (age 13–24 months) as part of a longitudinal cohort study (the STEPS Study) and found a discrepancy in how these categories were affected depending on the child’s sex. In girls, attending day care at 24 months of age predicted a positive vocabulary growth in the lexical categories sound effects, nouns, people, and games and routines, compared to girls staying at home. Firstborn girls had a greater vocabulary growth in descriptive and function words, in contrast to those born later. A boy attending day care at age 24 months was likely to have greater growth in sound effects and animal sounds, compared to boys not in day care. A family history of late onset of speech predicted less vocabulary growth in all lexical categories in boys, except for sound effects and animal sounds. Early vocabulary is of importance for later language and literacy development. Vocabulary is not an impenetrable entirety but consists of various types of words (lexical categories) developing at different tempos as they contribute to the developing language. Factors influencing early vocabulary development in boys and girls have been painstakingly studied, but fewer have examined these factors across lexical categories, let alone whether they have an equal effect in both sexes. More knowledge of what affects the variation in early vocabulary in boys and girls is needed for clinical practice and preventive purposes. Vocabulary was measured with the Finnish version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory. The effect of child and family factors on vocabulary growth in various lexical categories was analyzed separately for boys and girls using structural equational modelling. The results of the present study indicate that vocabulary development in the lexical categories is affected differently by child and parental factors in girls and boys as early as the second year of life, which gives new insights into the factors that need consideration in clinical practice and preventive work.

Very little is known about the association between objective indicators of socioeconomic position in childhood and adolescence and low subjective social status in adult life, after adjusting for adult socioeconomic position. We used baseline data (2008-2010) from the Brazilian Longitudinal Study of Adult Health (ELSA-Brasil), a multicenter cohort study of 15,105 civil servants from six Brazilian states. Subjective social status was measured using the The MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status, which represents social hierarchy in the form of a 10-rung ladder with the top rung representing the highest subjective social status. Participants who chose the bottom four rungs in the ladder were assigned to the low subjective social status category. The following socioeconomic position indicators were investigated: childhood (maternal education), adolescence (occupational social class of the household head; participant’s occupational social class of first job; nature of occupation of household head; participant’s nature of occupation of first job), and adulthood (participant’s occupational social class, nature of occupation and education). The associations between low subjective social status and socioeconomic position were determined using multiple logistic regression, after adjusting for sociodemographic factors and socioeconomic position indicators from other stages of life. After adjustments, low socioeconomic position in childhood, adolescence and adulthood remained significantly associated with low subjective social status in adulthood with dose-response gradients. The magnitude of these associations was stronger for intra-individual than for intergenerational socioeconomic positions. Results suggest that subjective social status in adulthood is the result of a complex developmental process of acquiring socioeconomic self-perception, which is intrinsic to subjective social status and includes current and past, individual and family household experiences.

While primary diagnosis is only one aspect of the presentation of a child with neurodevelopmental delay/disorder, the degree to which early expressive language reflects diagnostic divisions must be understood in order to reduce the risk of obscuring clinically important differences and similarities across diagnoses. We present original data from the New Zealand MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (NZCDI) from 88 English-speaking children aged 2;6 to 5;6 years receiving multidisciplinary intervention within a single family-centered program. The children had one of six pediatrician-assigned genetic or behaviorally determined diagnoses: Down syndrome (DS); motor disorders (cerebral palsy and developmental coordination disorder); global development delay; disorders of relating and communicating (R&amp;C); other genetically defined diagnoses; or language delay due to premature (PREM) birth. Morphological and lexical development were compared within and across diagnostic groups, using both data visualization and mixed-effects modeling. Groups varied in the amount of variation within and between them, but only prematurity reached significance, in interaction with age, as a predictor of morpho-lexical scores. Further analysis of longitudinal data available from a subset of the sample (n = 62) suggested that individual trajectories of vocabulary growth could not be reliably predicted by diagnosis. Moreover, the distribution of word types (nouns, predicates, etc.) only distinguished PREM children with language delay from those with DS and those in the R&amp;C group. There were strong similarities in early morpho-lexical development across these clinical populations, with some differences. These findings align with research and clinical approaches which accommodate individual variation within diagnosis, and broad similarities across diagnostic groups.

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)Donald Crowhurst wanted to sail around the world. Or he wanted the world to believe he had sailed around it. Whilst the rest of the competitors in the 1968-9 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race sailed their wonky crafts through treacherous seas, Crowhurst dropped anchor in the quiet waters of the South Atlantic and falsified his logs. For artist Tacita Dean, who has made a number of works about Crowhurst (Disappearance at Sea, Teignmouth Electron): Crowhurst's problem was that he had an imagination. You can't have any imagination if you are going to sail around the world, otherwise you have doubt. Crowhurst had doubt, he imagined failure ... . I think it’s crucial to art as well that you somehow imagine failure. Doubt is very important (17). ** In developing this issue of M/C Journal we were interested in two related questions about doubt. On the one hand, we hoped to gather case studies that can give some indication of where and how doubt surfaces in contemporary media, culture and politics. We have collected a diverse sample of case studies considering the role of doubt in the American political response to 9/11 (Burns), the media’s reporting of sexual assault (Waterhouse-Watson), how scientists talk about climate change (Simpson) and the philosophy of religion (Brown). However, we were also interested in attracting articles that could contribute to our thinking about doubt as a method and mode of practice. Our feature article, by Sydney based artist and writer Ryszard Dabek presents both a case study, discussing Jean Luc Godard’s doubts about cinema through selected films from his oeuvre, while also demonstrating how a methodology of doubt can produce insightful cultural criticism. Elisabeth Hanscombe writes from a perspective that seeks to hold in tension the doubts that haunt interdisciplinary research (and the researcher) with the need to produce rigorous research outcomes. David Macarthur has written a useful and accessible introduction to how doubt can be applied to this end, making an argument for the pragmatist approach to doubt as a tool for valuable, critical thinking. Gonzalo Echeverria's series of delicate black and white landscape photographs, one of which we have placed at the opening of each article, are all located within walking distance of his home in Nidé, Turkey. He deliberately avoids the 'true' blacks and whites of black and white photography which were once the holy grail of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston and with which we are now so familiar. Working with analogue equipment and on film, and printing his work in a traditional darkroom (and even mixing his own custom chemicals) Echeverria creates a range of greys which recall the early days of photography. Yet these images are undeniably rooted in the present both culturally and photographically. The recurring presence, and at times almost absence, of the minuets in the photographs asks us to consider doubt as much faith. In our formulation then, doubt has two sides. It can be a subject – like any other – which we can study and consider using the tools of scholarship founded on objectivity and the norms of knowledge production. Yet, doubt also has the potential to challenge those accepted methods. The definition of knowledge at the base of all scholarship, and by association the methods used to acquire it, has its foundations in Descartes’s formulation that what counts as knowledge is a conviction which is beyond doubt (Newman). In the method that leads to knowledge so-defined “doubt is predicated only to be ingeniously harnessed as the means of its own overcoming” (Fleissner 116). In her fascinating analysis of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder as being founded on doubt rather than obsession, Fleissner traces the extent to which the role of doubt in the project of modernity is far more complicated than this definition of knowledge and its production implies. It appears, Fleissner argues, that Descartes’s revolutionary formulation of the cogito (“I am thinking, therefore I exist”) (Baron) “depends on recasting… doubts as themselves proof of the one thing, thought, that cannot be doubted” (Fleissner 115). Indeed, the use of doubt in the methodology inaugurated by Descartes “construes sceptical doubts as the ground clearing tools of epistemic demolition” (Newman, emphasis in original). As Fleissner discusses, the perceived potential for this demolition to produce mania and madness has haunted modernity, and proved a difficult problem for psychology. Despite Descartes’s insistence that this demolition ultimately lead to construction (Newman, see also Macarthur in this issue), there is a persistent fear that once doubting has begun, it cannot be brought to an end (Fleissner 113-20). Over the years that we have discussed the possibility of a methodology of doubt with colleagues and peers, an expression of this fear has been the most consistent response. On closer inspection we can see that doubt is asked to play numerous, conflicting roles in the epistemology inaugurated by Descartes: it is a tool (or, as Newman characterisies it, a “bulldozer”) in the project of knowledge production; its presence is used as criteria for dismissing false knowledge; and its presence in the mind of the philosopher is taken as evidence of his existence. As Fleissner suggests: Indeed, what is perhaps most striking about The Meditations Concerning First Philosophy is the sense that Descartes wishes both to be rid of doubt and to preserve it; it is this combination, not the final overcoming of doubt in favour of the certainty of the mind’s powers, that the cogito might be said most strongly to install. (133) Let us now apologise if the above paragraphs offend our philosopher colleagues, for we have likely clumsily wandered through foundational arguments in the discipline that have a level of nuance and complexity to which we have not given adequate acknowledgment. However, m/c is a journal of media and culture, and for us what is interesting about the argument presented above is its potential to draw our attention to the conundrum presented by doubt and doubting in fields far removed from disciplined and technical arguments about epistemology. We are interested in how the foundational arguments presented by Descartes, and the complex status of doubt within them, have continued ramifications far beyond their original context. We are interested, in a way, in their trace in contemporary media culture and in the scholarship and creative practice that engages with it. At the end of her article, Fleissner concludes with a hope “for a doubt with a voice of its own” (134), and it is the potential for doubt to positively influence our ways of writing about our thinking that has attracted us to it. We should not hold Descartes responsible for the flow-on effects that his epistemology has had on writing in the humanities, but we do believe that the continued trace of the Cartesian method has lead to ossification of the expression of research. This part of the introduction is a perfect example of this: dense, littered with references, cautious yet authoritarian. The doubts I have had whilst writing it are silenced in order for the writing to proceed. The speaking-position required to perform the Cartesian method is, let’s be honest, not one which can often result in writing that can even hope to engage or inspire readers who do not wish to be the audience for a performance of the author’s ability to be disciplined. (And of course, as I write that sentence I consider how many readers will not make it through the proceeding paragraphs to get to this point. They’ll find the whole ‘Descartes bit’ too dry or dense.) We too want to know about how doubt might find a voice of its own, and are particularly interested in how doubt might be kept in focus in the writing of research, rather than be a point of departure that is ultimately erased. ** (The Dutch writer Gerard van't Reve once began an autobiographical piece with the words: “I was born stupid, as my father used to say”. My father never said this — and in fact I rather suffered from the inverse or opposite problem — but it is such a lovely opening that I would like to make use of it.) I was born stupid, but my mother was always telling people how smart I was. And like most people I just assumed that my parents always spoke the truth. Luckily, I was good at creating the impression that I was intelligent. But it took me a long time to work out that my mother was wrong and that parents are capable of saying things that are not true. For example my father was a great practical joker. He loved the idea that a child would believe anything you said. When I was five he told me that chewing gum was made from old bicycle tyres. It was not until I was about thirty years old that I suddenly realised this was not the case. It was not as if I actively continued to believe for a quarter of a century that chewing gum is actually made from old bicycle tyres. It is unlikely that I thought about what chewing gum is made of during those twenty five years at all. But my five year old self had stored this 'fact' in the part of my brain where things are stored about which there is no doubt. And when I accidentally chanced upon it there many years later, he had been dead for more than ten years. It was like the last pocket money cheque he sent which I received the day after I arrived home from his funeral, only funnier. My father loved to laugh and he loved to make other people laugh. This is why my mother fell in love with him. The problem was he also loved a drink or two and my mother didn't drink, neither did my grandmother, or anyone else in her family. This would later turn into a problem for everyone. But his alcoholism was still in its early stages when he married my mother, and it is easy to hide your drinking from people who don't drink: it is just not within their realm of possibilities that you would go to a bar after you kiss them goodbye at the end of the evening instead of going home to go to bed and sleep. I think it was because my mother desperately wanted an intelligent child that she was always telling people how smart I was. I think all of my family on my mother’s side spent their lives wishing they were just a little bit more intelligent, and pretending that they were. So this is where I got my gift. I just did what everyone else did. This stood me in good stead when I moved to an English speaking country where, when I had no idea what was being said, I just tried to look intelligent and pretended to understand. And generally that worked pretty well. Not many people are game to challenge other people's understanding. If it seems like you do (or should) understand, most people assume that you do. In places where you would expect people’s understanding to be challenged, such as universities, this now results in negative student feedback which academics have to explain at their performance management meetings. In today’s universities academics are expected to be dispensers of information who only utter absolute truths. The job of a student is to put the received information into that part of the brain where things are stored about which there is no doubt. And in Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid society, "where the individual must act, plan actions and calculate the likely gains and losses of acting (or failing to act) under conditions of endemic uncertainty" (4), the ability to conceal your doubt is your most crucial weapon. ** In her mythologising of Donald Crowhurst, Tacita Dean unwittingly animates the key terms of any consideration of doubt: fear, imagination and denial. For many, doubt cannot be disconnected from these properties that can be energised by its presence. Doubt always carries with it the potential to turn on those who acknowledge it and seek to apply it, to ricochet off the subject of doubt and create a doubting subject. Doubt is seen as the trigger for uncontrollable fantasies of failure. This issue attempts to untie this association. And we look forward to the companion issue of m/c, on failure, that will hopefully appear in the journal’s future. We would like to thank: the authors, Gonzalo Echeverria, Stephen Hetherington, and our peer reviewers for their willingness to assist us in developing this issue. We also thank Axel Bruns for his support. References Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. Fleissner, Jennifer L. “Obsessional Modernity: The ‘Institutionalization of Doubt’.” Critical Inquiry 34 (Autumn 2007): 106-134. Newman, Lex. “Descartes' Epistemology”. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2010 Edition). Ed. Edward N. Zalta. ‹http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-epistemology/›. Reed, Baron. "Certainty." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition). Ed. Edward N. Zalta. ‹http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/certainty/›. Warner, Marina. “Interview with Tacita Dean.” In Jean-Christophe Royoux, Marina Warner and Germaine Greer. Tacita Dean. New York: Phaidon, 2006. 7-41.

Given that the new advances in technology in the 1980s had a major impact on the carefully constructed myth of authenticity in horror and pornography, ranging from flawless special effects at one extreme to the idea of the handheld voyeur movie at the other, it is rather ironic that the key progenitor to the erotic-grotesque form is a long-established and in some ways basic form: the pen and paper art of manga. This medium can be traced back to pillow books and the illustrated tradition in Japanese culture – a culture where even written language has evolved from drawings rather than alphabetical ciphers. Technological innovation notwithstanding, the 1980s is an extraordinary period for manga and it is perhaps here that we find the most startling hybridisation of porn and horror where, to borrow a phrase from Liz Kotz, “pathology meets pleasure, where what we most fear is what we most desire” (Kotz 188). Many of the most extreme examples of 1980s manga repeatedly confront the reader with tales that intersperse and interlink imagery and narrative sequences of sex, violence and the abject. Suehiro Maruo is in many ways a commercially marginalised but highly renowned manga artist of the erotic-grotesque. His full-length manga novel Mr Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show (1984) is a sweeping tale of carnival freaks redolent with sex and sadism, but in this article I will address his short comic strips from around the same period. The stories collected in Suehiro Maruo’s Ultra-Gash Inferno (2001) present a mortifying vision of sex and horror with stories that draw on the erotically tinged world of classical Japanese theatre and the short fiction of Edogawa Rampo but push them into the domain of extreme pornography. In “Putrid Night” (1981), an abusive man, Todoroki, subjects his teenage wife, Sayoko, to vicious cunnilingus and anal sex. In one sequence, Sayoko gives oral sex while Todoroki runs a samurai sword across her cheek. In her misery, Sayoko finds true love in the teenage boy Michio. Their illicit sexual love is tender and fulfilling and yet the imagery that intersperses it is ominous: when they have sex in a field, their conjoined bodies are juxtaposed with rotting fruit infested with ants and Michio’s erect penis is juxtaposed with a serpent in the grass. Sayoko and Michio plot to murder Todoroki. The result is disastrous, with Todoroki cutting off the arms of his wife and her lover through the elbows, and lancing their eyeballs. In the carnage, Todoroki has sex with Sayoko. The young lovers do not die, and Todoroki keeps them alive in a cell as “pets” (19). In a grotesque triumph of true love, Todoroki, to his horror, spies on his two victims and sees them, their eye sockets and arm stumps pouring blood, tenderly making love. In “Shit Soup” (1982), Maruo produces a comic strip with no story as such and is therefore a highly simplistic pornographic narrative. We witness a menage a trois with a young woman and her two male lovers and the comic presents their various exploits. In their opening bout, the woman squeezes a cow’s eyeball into her vagina and one man sucks it out of her while the other licks her beneath the eyelid. Later, the three excrete onto dinner plates and dine upon their mixed shit. The story ends with the three laughing deliriously as they fall from a cliff, an emblem of their joyful abandon and the intersection of love and death. As epilogue, Maruo describes the taste of excrement and invites us to taste our own. This ending is an ingenious narrative decision, as it turns on the reader and strives to deny us – the viewer/voyeur – any comfortable distance: we are invited, as it were, to eat shit literally and if we refuse, we can eat shit metaphorically. Suehiro Maruo’s work can also be subtle: in what looks like a realistic image at the opening of “A Season in Hell” (1981), a dead teenage girl lies, covered in “gore and faeces” (45), on a grassy path which resembles the hairy opening to female sexual organs. The surrounding field is like a pudenda and the double arch of the nearby bridge resembles breasts. Maruo can thus outwit the censorship tradition in which pubic hair is generally forbidden (it does appear in some of Maruo’s comic strips), although erections, ejaculations and hairless openings and organs would seem to be always graphically permissible. Probably the most excessive vision in Ultra-Gash Inferno is “The Great Masturbator” (1982). In this, Suehiro Maruo presents a family in which the father repeatedly dresses his daughter up as a schoolgirl in order to rape her, even cutting a vagina-sized hole into her abdomen. Eventually, he slices her with numerous openings so that he can penetrate her with his fists as well as his penis. Meanwhile, her brother embarks on an incestuous relationship with his ancient aunt. After her death, he acquires her false teeth and uses them to masturbate. He ejaculates onto her grave, splitting his head open on the tombstone. The excess and debauchery make it a shocking tale, a kind of violent manga reworking of Robert Crumb’s cartoon “The family that lays together, stays together” (91) from Snatch 2 (January 1969). Like Crumb, we could argue that Maruo employs explicit sexual imagery and an ethos of sexual taboo with the same purpose of transgressing and provoking the jargon of particular social norms. The political dimension to Maruo’s work finds its most blatant treatment in “Planet of the Jap” (1985), anthologised in Comics Underground Japan (1996). This manga strip is a devastating historical-political work presented as a history lesson in which Japan won the Second World War, having dropped atomic bombs on Los Angeles and San Francisco. The comic is full of startling iconic imagery such as the Japanese flag being hoisted over the shell-pocked Statue of Liberty and the public execution of General MacArthur. Of course, this being Maruo, there is a pornographic sequence. In a lengthy and graphic episode, an American mother is raped by Japanese soldiers while her son is murdered. As these horrors are committed, the lyrics of a patriotic song about present-day Japan, written by the Ministry of Education, form the textual narrative. Although the story could be seen as a comment on the subjection of Japan at the end of the Second World War – a sustained ironic inversion of history – it seems more likely to be a condemnation of the phase of Japanese history when, tragically, a minority of “atavistic, chauvinistic, racist warmongers” secured for themselves a position of “ideological legitimacy and power” (Lehmann 213). However, Maruo is being deliberately provocative to his contemporary reader: he writes this story in the mid-1980s, the peak of Japan’s post-war prosperity. As Joy Hendry says, Japan’s “tremendous economic success” in this period is not just important for Japan but marks an “important element of world history” (Hendry 18). Maruo ends “Planet of the Jap” with a haunting international message: “Don’t be fooled. Japan is by no means a defeated nation. Japan is still the strongest country in the world” (124). The porn-horror creator Suehiro Maruo follows in the tradition of figures like Octave Mirbeau, Georges Bataille and Robert Crumb who have used explicit pornography and sexual taboo as a forum for political provocation. The sexual horror of Maruo’s erotic-grotesque manga may terrify some readers and titillate others. It may even terrify and titillate at the same time in a disturbing fusion which has social and political implications: all the Maruo works in this essay were produced in the early to mid-1980s, the peak of Japanese economic success. They also coincide with the boom years of the Japanese sex industry, which Akira Suei argues was terminated by the repressive legislation of the New Amusement Business Control and Improvement Act of 1985 (Suei, 10). Suei’s account of the period paints one of frivolity and inventiveness embodied in the phenomenon of “no-panties coffee shops” (10) and the numerous sex clubs which offered extraordinary “role-playing opportunities” (13). The mood is one of triumph for the sexual expression of the customers but also for the extremely well-paid sex workers. Maruo’s stories contemporaneous with this have their own freedom of sexual expression, creating a vision where sexually explicit images comment upon a wide variety of subjects, from the family, scatological taboos, through to national history and Japan’s economic success. At the same time as presenting explicit sex as a feature in his films, Maruo always closely weaves it in with the taboo of death. Martin Heidegger interprets human existence as Sein-zum-Tode (being-towards-death) (Kearney 35): in Maruo’s vision, existence is evidently one of sexual-being-towards-death. Like Suehiro Maruo’s hideously maimed and blind lovers, humanity always returns to the impulse of its sexuality and the desire/will to orgasm: what Maruo calls “the cosmic gash” of physical love, a gash which also reveals, in a Heideggerian sense, the non-being that is the only certainty of existence. And we should remember that even when love is blind, someone will always be watching. References Crumb, Robert. The Complete Crumb, Volume 5: Happy Hippy Comix. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1990. Hendry, Joy. Understanding Japanese Society. London: Routledge, 1987. Kearney, Richard. Modern Movements in European Philosophy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986. Kotz, Liz. “Complicity: Women Artists Investigating Masculinity” in Paula Church Gibson (ed.) More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power (Second Edition). London, BFI, 2004, 188-203. Lehmann, Jean-Pierre. The Roots of Modern Japan. London: Macmillan, 1982. Maruo, Suehiro. “Planet of the Jap” in Quigley, Kevin (ed.). Comics Underground Japan. New York: Blast Books, 1992. —-. Mr Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show. New York: Blast, 1992. —-. Ultra-Gash Inferno. London: Creation, 2001 Mizuki, Shigeru. Youkai Gadan. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1992. Rampo, Edogawa. Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination. New York: Tuttle, 1956. Suei, Akira “The Lucky Hole as the Black Hole” in Nobuyoshi Araki. Araki: Tokyo Lucky Hole. Köln: Taschen, 1997, 10-15. MLA Style Hand, Richard J. "Dissecting the Gash: Sexual Horror in the 1980s and the Manga of Suehiro Maruo." M/C Journal 7.4 (2004). 10 October 2004 <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0410/05_horror.php>. APA Style Hand, R. (2004 Oct 11). Dissecting the Gash: Sexual Horror in the 1980s and the Manga of Suehiro Maruo, M/C Journal, 7(4). Retrieved Oct 10 2004 from <http://www.media-culture.org.au/05_horror.php>

I'll grow up some time then you'll be mine I want to screw you down whilst my mind is on the ground I want to move your switch make you go squish my desiring machine -- Sonic Youth A small story: the other saturday night, having just completed my saturday ritual of visiting the video shop and the beer shop, I was sitting at a bus-stop. And it just so happens that on this saturday evening, the bus-stop I was sitting at was opposite a catholic church in the middle of the mass. Now, its been many years since I was a catholic -- I am in fact happily pagan -- however, I strongly identify with that well-known atheist and socialist (and co-incidentally, British Minister of Overseas Development) Clare Short, who nonetheless describes herself as 'culturally catholic' (as they say, 'once a catholic always a catholic'). And so, as I was sitting at this bus-stop, I found myself having the usual internal conversation I seem to have whenever I pass a catholic mass, in which I imagine I'm having to justify just why I'm not in there as well and why I think their beliefs are theoretically unsustainable and politically regressive. During this internal dialogue however, I realised that what the micks were doing in their mass -- that is, expressing a desire to connect with something outside of themselves -- was the same thing I did whenever I witnessed a sabbat or esbat, or visited a stone circle, fairy mound or burial barrow. Admittedly, whereas I achieve this experience of being with something outside myself through the earth, the sun, the moon, the passing of time, and my relationships with my friends and lovers, they did it through a submissive appeal to a fetishised figure of an alien God. And that this wasn't much different from or any worse than the mindless commodity fetishism practiced by so many materialists within our advanced industrialised economy. And all of this led me to speculate on just what the nature of desire is: that perhaps desire is the self's experience, within the self, of something outside of (or greater than) the self -- desire as theology, that is. If I can be a bit clearer: that perhaps desire is a recognition, not of a lack, but of the necessary and perpetual circulation across the threshold of the self -- if i can put it that way -- of the array of subjectless individuations that collectively constitute us as 'human'. This is not at all to suggest that desire is what makes us 'better', or that it is solely a positive thing -- and not simply because I refuse the implication that desiring to be with the Christian God can ever be positive. In formulating desire as a circulation of affects across the boundary of the self, I am explicitly refusing the narrative of original sin of the self, either in its Christian 'guilt' or psychoanalytic 'lack' manifestations that desire is often framed in. What I am suggesting here is that 'desire' is the name for that perpetual and spontaneous process of 'becoming' through which the self is continuously constructed and reconstructed, and that this process is by definition circulatory. The obvious analogy here is with meteorological phenomena, in particular frontal systems. The cold front that brings rain with it, and usually marked on the evening television weather forecasts with a thick, identifiable line, is in fact a fictional construct. It marks, in practice, a perpetual and spontaneous exchange of heat, through a thermodynamic process, between a relatively warmer body of air and a relatively colder one behind it. The front, so lively on the weather map, marching across the continent with martial purpose, in fact moves only as it is drawn by pressure differentials, by the rotation of the earth, and by the very process of heat exchange that it signifies. As a line, an interface, a boundary, the front is permeable, unstable, fractal and undefinable; an effect that becomes a metonym for the process it represents. Similarly, the thing we call 'the self' -- myself, yourself, themselves -- is an effect, an ever-shifting, fluid and variable effect of a circulation of affect that is called desire. This is not at all to suggest that desire is what makes us 'better', or that it is solely a positive thing -- and not simply because I refuse the implication that desiring to be with the Christian God can ever be positive. In formulating desire as a circulation of affects across the boundary of the self, I am explicitly refusing the narrative of original sin of the self, either in its Christian 'guilt' or psychoanalytic 'lack' manifestations that desire is often framed in. What I am suggesting here is that 'desire' is the name for that perpetual and spontaneous process of 'becoming' through which the self is continuously constructed and reconstructed, and that this process is by definition circulatory. The obvious analogy here is with meteorological phenomena, in particular frontal systems. The cold front that brings rain with it, and usually marked on the evening television weather forecasts with a thick, identifiable line, is in fact a fictional construct. It marks, in practice, a perpetual and spontaneous exchange of heat, through a thermodynamic process, between a relatively warmer body of air and a relatively colder one behind it. The front, so lively on the weather map, marching across the continent with martial purpose, in fact moves only as it is drawn by pressure differentials, by the rotation of the earth, and by the very process of heat exchange that it signifies. As a line, an interface, a boundary, the front is permeable, unstable, fractal and undefinable; an effect that becomes a metonym for the process it represents. Similarly, the thing we call 'the self' -- myself, yourself, themselves -- is an effect, an ever-shifting, fluid and variable effect of a circulation of affect that is called desire. In one sense this definition is almost a truism, because as Deleuze & Guattari make explicitly clear in A Thousand Plateaus, almost all formations can be described in some sense as fasiscular, and even the most rhizomatic formation can have aborescent knots. That is, the distinction between rhizomatic and aborescent schemas is not dualistic, there is "no ontological dualism between here and there, no axiological dualism between good and bad"; rather their relationship is processual: The important point is that the root-tree and canal-rhizome are not two opposed models: the first operates as a transcendent model and tracing, even if it engenders its own escapes; the second operates as an immanent process that overturns the model and outlines a map, even if it constitutes its own hierarchies, even if it gives rise to a despotic channel. ... No, this is not a new or different dualism. (Deleuze & Guattari 20) Thus, as Deleuze & Guattari are at pains to explain, what they call rhizomatic formations are neither better or worse than arborescent formations, nor are they two mutually exclusive, they are two different ways of organising and doing things which can each lead to the other or contain the other. In this sense, Probyn is not suggesting anything new to say that desire can be considered as rhizomatic, as engendering an uncountable array of unruly connections, because the possibility that anything might be thusly considered is contained within the princples of 'the rhizome' that Deleuze & Guattari provide. What I am suggesting however, is that desire is more than simply an excellent example of this processual movement between and across rhizomes and arborescences. For whilst the arborescent knots, the despotic formations of desire are readily apparent -- who isn't familiar with the disappointment that is an inevitable and integral part of commodity fetishism; the desolation of unrequited loves or the destructive capacity of satiated desires -- I am suggesting that desire is solely and strictly rhizomatic, and that as a rhizome that subverts, subtends and extends the self, it processually defines 'the human'. In his insightful commentary upon deleuzoguattarian philosophy entitled A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Brian Massumi states that desire, "in its widest connotation" is the plane of consistency as multiple cocausal becoming ... on the human level, it is never a strictly personal affair, but a tension between sub- and superpersonal tendencies that intersect in the person as an empty signifier. (82) For Massumi then, desire is a profoundly anti-human, or more accurately nonhuman, process, whose operation has the effect of causing what he calls 'the person' to be precipitated. Desire is, therefore, the definition of the machinic auto-poiesis -- the immanent and pragmatic functioning of the process of becoming -- that generates each of us as human subjects. Contra Massumi however, I would suggest that the resultant effect of desire -- that is, the instantiation of the person -- is far from being an empty signifier, a precipitious by-product. Even the most inchoate desire, the most mute and directionless 'I want', articulates a connection beyond the self that carries within it an implicit enunciation of what the self might be. As Michel Foucault argued in a somewhat different context, the trangressing of a boundary by a productive process -- such as desire -- does not ipso facto circumvent that boundary or render it devoid of meaning, although it might have that effect; the function of crossing or trangressing a limit is to liminalise it, to re-inscribe it (for two differing examples, see Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1 45, and Foucault, "Revolutionary Action: Until Now" 226). For although 'the person' does not pre-figure desire, and is in fact constituted and re-constituted through the operation of desire, it is neither an empty signifier nor a level playing field. "The word religion", says the French philosopher Michel Serres, could have two origins. According to the first, it would come from the Latin verb religare, to attach. Does religion bind us together, does it assure the bond of this world to another? According to the second ... it would mean to assemble, gather, lift up, traverse or read. (47) But, observes Serres, we are rarely told what sublime word our language opposes to the religious, in order to deny it: negligence. Whoever has no religion should not be called an atheist or unbeliever, but negligent. (48) The process, perpetual and spontaneous, of attachment to things, subjects, objects-multiplicities-outside of ourselves, whether it is to an unseeing God, the earth, one's friends, family and lovers or that funky new consumer durable, that we call desire, is what defines us as human. "Without love", says Serres "there are no ties or alliances" (49). Thus, the rhizomatic functioning of desire as a process of becoming continually produces, in a transversal fashion, the articulation of the self: we are each the product of desire. Desire, as a thermodynamic process, is thus the engine of 'the human', of a form of contingent humanism -- although a humanism that isn't simply limited to people: a becoming that liminalises the self through its incorporation of subjectless individuations beyond the self, within the self, through which the self is processually experienced and embodied. Whether it is the desire for the reified God, the becoming-another of the carnal and corporeal, the longing for the fetishised commodity or the 'I want to believe' of the search for extra-terrestrials, desire is the motive force that defines us as human, our raison d'être, our theology. And all this from sitting at a bus-stop. References Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. With foreword by Brian Massumi. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. London: Penguin, 1978. Foucault, Michel. "Revolutionary Action: Until Now." Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault. Ed. Donald Bouchard. New York: Cornell UP, 1977. Massumi, Brian. A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. A Swerve Edition. Cambridge, MA.: MIT P, 1992. Probyn, Elspeth. Outside Belongings. New York and London: Routledge, 1996. Serres, Michel. The Natural Contract. Trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995. Sonic Youth. "Female Mechanic on Duty." A Thousand Leaves. Compact Disc. Geffen, GEFD-25203, 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Sean Aylward Smith. "[ t o b e a n d t o h a v e ]." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.5 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/be.php>. Chicago style: Sean Aylward Smith, "[ t o b e a n d t o h a v e ]," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 5 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/be.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Sean Aylward Smith. (1999) [ t o b e a n d t o h a v e ]. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/be.php> ([your date of access]).

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. 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